The white man was our quietest neighbor yet, invisible compared to a roomful of young women or a wife beater. He only spoke to his dog. “Here, Mischa,” he'd call in a high pitch.
He hadn't been living there two weeks when he took ill. I suspected something was wrong when the light didn't go on for three consecutive nights. The man was bedridden, day and night, the dog at his side. Yet I couldn't tell anyone without revealing my secret. I prayed that the man got better on his own, or that he at least got well enough to call for help. Like all previous tenants the man had no telephone. Not even mail service. Even we had to rent a post office box. I wandered outside to the back, behind the apartments, my body heavy with guilt. I sat on the wooden bench near the palo verde tree, beneath an infestation of cicadas. I was punishing myself with the constant buzzing and the droplets of fluid my cousins said was cicada piss that could cause boils. My cousins ran in and out of the apartment, slamming the door shut each time. The hollering that followed were my aunts complaining about the noise. I was struck by my ability to own a secret in a place where personal letters were read by more than one pair of eyes, and where whispering into an ear was like whispering into every ear. But I felt no satisfaction.
Only my mother detected something was wrong when she peeked out the door and saw me sitting there, my face as tense as a sock dried to a crisp on the line. She came out to sit next to me and to run her fingers through my hair.
“What are you thinking, you?” she asked.
I blushed. In that overpopulated apartment we rarely had a chance for intimate moments like that one. Any time she showed the slightest affection toward me in front of my cousins, I had to deal with it later in the ravine.
“What a good little boy he is,” one cousin would taunt to get the ball rolling.
“He's made of gold,” another said, delicately rubbing my sleeve with his index and thumb.
“He's the favorite,” my brother added. He joined in most of the time. If not, he too became fair game.
Overwhelmed by too many thoughts, and confused about how to react, I covered my face with my hands and gently nudged my mother with my shoulder.
“What was that?” she asked, letting go of my hair.
I remained silent, sweating behind my hands. I remembered the time I overheard my parents talking about moving out. They had been calculating expenses and figuring budgets on the porch. I didn't realize they were only fantasizing and I jumped to conclusions. I was so happy we were going to have our own place that I immediately went to the room and started labeling our belongings with masking tape and a black marker. When my mother walked in on me I stuttered with embarrassment, trying to explain that I was just pretending, fantasizing the way she and my father had done so on the porch, beneath the warm sun, in the odd privacy of the open air. We had invaded each other, my mother and me, and every awkward moment between us took me back to that day. I sensed I had taken her there as well, which is why she withdrew rather quickly.
“Well, when you're ready to talk to me let me know.”
I spread open my fingers and watched her disappear into the apartment. Now I really felt like a fool. A man's life was at stake and I gave up the chance to say something. But how could I reveal to my mother that I had been spying on the neighbors? I was a good boy, unlike my cousins, who got expelled from school, who threw each other down on the floor and used their weight to make each other fart. I showered every evening, I completed my homework, and I was learning English so well I was awarded certificates of merit.
I was the good boy. I vowed never to look through my peephole again. I walked into the house so full of conviction, so absolved, that the first thing I was going to do was plug the hole myself.
That night I finally found a chance to sneak in and do the job with some plaster my grandfather kept handy for all the wears and tears on the walls. We all had to learn to mix and fix because at one time or another we all punched holes, and my grandfather was fed up with making the repairs himself. As a symbolic good-bye to my voyeurism, I decided to take one last look. I lost my breath and a heartbeat when I saw my aunt cooking on the small stove next door. I had to focus repeatedly to make sure I was indeed seeing my aunt moving about in the neighbor's unit wearing her orange plastic apron from the packinghouse. She spoke to the old man in Spanish and he responded in English. The conversation made no sense because my aunt didn't know English and the old man obviously didn't understand Spanish. Yet they managed.
“Aquí está su sopita, ¿eh?”
“I'd like my tea, please.”
“¿Y para tomar? ¿Un cafecito?”
“Would you heat up some water, please?”
“¿Agüita? Bueno, pues si ya no se le ofrece nada, pues hasta mañana, ¿eh? Que se sienta mejor.”
“Gracias,” the old man said, waving his limp arm from the bed, the dog curled up beside him.
There was no way of asking questions without giving myself away. My eye simply followed my aunt into the apartment next door for the next few days. She did some light cleaning, she cooked, and then she disappeared. The dog even took a liking to her, trailing her with its tail wagging. My aunt finally petted it one day and dared to cradle it in her arms like a doll. “Chiquita, Chiquita,” my aunt baby-talked. The old man chuckled. So did my aunt.
The man became weaker. I heard my aunt mentioning this to my mother in the kitchen. When they saw me near they started whispering. More secrets. From what little I had heard, I discovered that the landlord had made this arrangement with my aunt as a favor to the old man's son.
That afternoon I saw my aunt sit on the man's bed to spoonfeed him. She displayed a tenderness I had not seen from her before, certainly not on this side of the wall. Here she argued with my grandfather and chased her sons out of the house by throwing things at them. When she was on a rampage she took no prisoners—anyone within range was a potential victim. If she caught someone doing mischief, like that time my cousin played tic-tac-toe on the table with a fork, there was always an accomplice about. Poros de toro, my grandmother called the flared nostrils that came with my aunt's uncontrollable rage.
“Which one of you did this with him?” she demanded to the crowded living room of frightened eyes. None of us wanted to tattle.
She took out a belt. “Then I'm going to beat it out of all of you!” And we all dispersed in panic. The last kids out of the room were the first to get it with the belt. My father once joked to my mother that his sister thought she was born with a pair of balls. She had a quick temper, and despite her visits next door she didn't change much.
“I don't like this kind of rice,” one of her youngest sons once complained at the dinner table.
My aunt slapped him on the back of the head. “Eat your food, cabrón! What do you think this is, a restaurant?”
My aunt's visits next door ceased as mysteriously as they had begun. The old man either died or was taken away to a more suitable place for his delicate condition. On a sunny afternoon after school my cousins and I gathered to watch a young white couple empty the unit of the steamer trunk and paintings. They offered to give us kids the bed but we all said we didn't want it, though we all slept on the floor. We watched, perched on our bikes, moving back and forth as the couple pulled out canvas after canvas of tree paintings. Those trees were nothing like the ones in the desert.
“What is that?” my oldest cousin dared to ask in his thick accent.
The white guy paused, held the painting upright for us to see and said, “Virginia.” That meant nothing to us.
The couple loaded everything into a truck except for the dog and drove off. Since we didn't have any pets we begged to keep it but my grandfather said no. It was too small to be a guard dog and it was a bitch.
“Next thing you know we got a pack of mutts to feed,” my grandfather said.
We took turns feeding the dog anyway since it refused to leave its familiar surroundings. My aunt gathered scraps and bones after every meal, though she never went outsid
e herself to cradle it in her arms or to call it “Chiquita.” Eventually we got tired of looking after it, especially because it howled all night and kept us awake. We took turns going outside to scare it away. The dog, neglected and malnourished, about-faced one day and scurried off, never to be seen again.
The apartment next door remained vacant for a long time. I had given up the task of sealing the hole with plaster since there was no incentive to look through it anymore, except when the landlords went in to show it to prospective tenants. The unit empty, it echoed with the footfalls of an intruder, which was my cue to run and see who had entered. Once more my heart skipped a beat to see my aunt. She had kept the key to the unit next door from the times she took care of the old man. She simply walked in and stood perfectly still, absorbing the silence of the room and breathing in gently, with concentration. I tried to match her breathing rhythm. Then suddenly her head jerked down and her eye landed point-blank on mine. I held my breath. I even tried not to blink but that was useless; I quickly lost the duel. She held her stance, however, and didn't speak or move. Neither did I. I felt both our bodies relax. It was as if we had agreed to share a secret, a private moment—the hard-to-come-by appreciation of a space burdened by neither touch nor sound.
Thermal, 1981–82 (Our Little Home on Top of the Garage)
In the family legends, there is one that has always been used to explain the poverty of los Carrillo, my paternal grandmother's branch of the family tree. When this story is told a date is never given but if I start mapping out the generations, this tale involves my grand-mother's great-uncle, my great-great-great uncle, who is simply referred to as tío Demetrio. And his famous exchange with el Diablo, Satan himself, most likely took place in the early twentieth century, perhaps in the midst of the Mexican Revolution, somewhere in the untamed mountains near Nahuatzen, Michoacán, where my grand-mother's family continues to maintain its roots.
As the story goes, tío Demetrio was tired of the family's lot in life. They were Purépecha Indians living high up in the rough terrains. The men worked the cornfields and kept a modest-sized livestock that supplied the meat, the dairy, and the bartering power in the plazas of the nearby towns. By this time, even the Purépecha had not escaped the influence of Catholicism. Because of their inaccessibility and their metal weapons, they had avoided the conquest of the Aztecs many centuries before, but the Catholics were more subtle invaders, coaxing their way into the hard-to-reach communities, into the humble homes of the Purépecha, and eventually into their hearts and souls, never to leave again.
The Purépecha took to the new religion just as they had taken to the language, Spanish, which was the language of commerce, of access to the modern towns beginning to thrive in the valleys. Catholicism was just another way to survive and move through the streets of the mestizos, all of them Católicos.
For tío Demetrio, Catholicism opened another door, a darker one that hid in the shadows like the swinging doors to the cantina or the cantina's backdoor to the brothel. This one was the door to hell. The church spoke about el Diablo as much as it spoke about Dios. They seemed to be forces to be reckoned with, one just as powerful as the other. And since prayer was doing very little to lift los Carrillo out of an impoverished condition, tío Demetrio decided to attempt another tactic. He would make a deal with el Diablo.
Midnight at the crossroads: tío Demetrio invokes el Diablo's name, offering his fluids as proof of the seriousness of his hailing. He bleeds on himself, urinates and defecates, spits and vomits on himself—desecrating his baptized body before the heavens. After this show of betrayal, tío Demetrio waits and sure enough he has summoned the evil spirits. A dwarfed goat-like creature appears.
Slightly impressed, the creature presents tío Demetrio with a further challenge. He must wait at the crossroads a second and a third night, meeting his visitors face to face, each one more terrifying than the next, as a type of endurance test that will prove he is indeed ready to hold counsel with el Diablo, who may or may not entertain requests. If tío Demetrio fails to stand his ground, however, his punishment for wasting hell's time will be that his family will be cursed with financial hardships and bad luck for the next five generations.
“Are you game?” asks the creature, his grin exposing a sharp set of teeth, like a crocodile's.
Tío Demetrio understands the risks of this wager, but he doesn't imagine himself losing. He has witnessed many horrors in his life—the death of a childhood friend trampled beneath the hooves of a horse, the agony of childbirth, a burst appendix, untreated ulcers and diabetes, alcohol poisoning, snake bites, and the shattering of bone that breaks through the skin. He also knows hunger. In what new ways can fear and uncertainty manifest itself to him? What do he or any of his progeny stand to lose? Tío Demetrio accepts the challenge.
Never underestimate el Diablo. At this point in the story the details become fuzzy, perhaps because not even the wildest of imaginations can envision the creatures that el Diablo sent scampering to the crossroads to meet tío Demetrio. At any rate, even before the first dreaded creature arrived at a complete stop, tío Demetrio's nerves succumbed to his fear, and he fled, forfeiting the challenge and damning the next five generations of his descendants to the ill luck and hardship of the poorhouse.
After my grandmother told me that story she warned me not to repeat it to anybody—especially my grandfather. In fact, when she told it I heard it in snippets since my grandmother immediately ceased talking when my grandfather entered the room. Once she was sewing and speaking at the same time and when he entered she slipped easily into the silence of her task as if she had been quietly pulling on the needle the entire time. And I helped in the farce, pretending I had been quietly observing, not listening. And when she handed me the final piece to the chilling story, I wove it together and saved it in my thoughts to roll around in my head at night as the key to the string of misfortunes that would soon follow. But with these challenges also came hope, because all that time I knew that my cousins and I were the fifth generation, and that this terrible fate would end with us.
On my paternal grandfather's branch of the family tree, there were also stories and legends, but I didn't know many since my grandfather dismissed them as superstitious dribble and a waste of the imagination. He didn't like to dwell in the past so he never spoke about his ancestors or even about his current living relatives. I would find out simple information with time, as I eavesdropped on dinner conversations. It was as if he had deliberately isolated our family from everyone else. Yet I felt our immediate family didn't know how to be alone or how to survive independently of each other.
Whenever a serious matter arose the grown-ups—grandparents, parents, and uncles—congregated in the privacy of a room. And sometimes, quite comically, they all retreated into the bathroom. As a child I watched jealously when these meetings took place. I knew important decisions were being made that would affect us all. I respected the sanctity of these covert meetings until one of my older cousins revealed to me the secret of the assemblies.
“There they go again,” he said as the adults converged in the bathroom. “Off to do their witchery.”
The word confounded me. “Witchery?” I asked, naively.
“Don't you know, you idiot?” he said. “They go in there to consult the spirits.”
“The spirits?” I asked, positive at this point that I was being tricked into another of my cousin's hoaxes.
My cousin leaned in and whispered the big secret in my ear. I refused to believe it.
“You're making this up,” I said, so confident in my skepticism that I started to walk away from him.
“If you don't believe me,” he said, “look in that cubbyhole above the bathroom closet. You'll see.”
Of course, my curiosity won over. No sooner had the grown-ups vacated the bathroom than I scurried in, locking the door behind me. I couldn't imagine how they all fit inside the long, narrow room at once, unless a few of them sat inside the bathtub. I stood on th
e edge of the basin but I could barely reach the cubbyhole door. I pried it open with my fingertips. It was too dark to see inside. I suspected then that my cousin was probably waiting outside to laugh at me for believing such a ridiculous lie. But I had to prove to myself it was a falsehood so I kept stretching and shoving my fingers into the corner of the cubbyhole to feel around. And then I locked my fingers on it. I tugged at the corner to slide it out. I didn't need to see the whole thing to recognize it for what it was but I needed to see enough of it. Slowly I coaxed it out a few inches into the open. I was looking up at the plain, unadorned backing. To get a good look at the face, I decided to tip it into view, and when I did, the turquoise-colored pointer of the Ouija board scuttled out like a frightened creature and plummeted to the floor.
Because it was plastic, the pointer didn't break. It was shaped like a teardrop with a see-through ring at the narrower end, where individual letters came into focus as it circulated on the board, guided by the faith of hands. I still refused to believe that this was the desperate last resort for the adults in our family. Some people went to church and prayed to the saints and to God; my family entrusted this parlor game. But unlike my cousin, I vowed not to be careless with this information. There was no need for more of us children to see through the illusion of reason and wisdom that seemed to fuel those hush-hush conferences and that produced informed conclusions.
Butterfly Boy: Memories of a Chicano Mariposa (Writing in Latinidad) Page 7
