In the psychologist's eyes I saw the strange hurt of empathy as she watched my grandfather drag me out of her office. I spent the next twenty-two days in Mexicali, ensconced in my aunt's house until my grandfather agreed to take me back. My father never once came to see me.
As I look into my father's pitiable face on this bus to Michoacán, I have the urge to confront him about all of this, but I can't. I wish he could read my mind to spare me the energy of having to put it into words, everything from my resentment for his having left me to the fact that I'm gay and that he has nothing to do with that. My body aches from the restraint.
“What's wrong? What is it?” my father keeps asking. I shake my head, holding back tears.
When he notices that other passengers are looking at us, my father releases a nervous laugh. He leans over to press his head against mine. I redden. He used to do this when I was a boy in Zacapu; it was his way of expressing affection.
“Let me see that smile,” he says.
I push him away. “Cut it out,” I demand. I turn my body around and fold into myself, my kneecaps on the armrest.
His eyes look down.
I skip all meals that day, munching on a bag of candied peanuts I bought during one of the brief stops. But my father keeps bringing me small cartons of juice that I accept without speaking. The emotional seizure has exhausted me, so I sleep soundly for the first time since the journey began. Because more passengers have been leaving than boarding the bus, entire rows of seats become vacant. My father moves to another pair of seats so that I can stretch out more comfortably.
When the bus pulls into a Jalisco station in the late evening hours I awaken from a dream about my mother's funeral. This happens each time I'm nearing Zacapu, where my mother died, where she's buried. I dreamed of my mother in a black coffin. Even in sleep I suspected something was off. My mother's coffin had been a deep gray.
At the actual wake, my grandmother wailed like a madwoman. She screamed all the way to church for the final blessing, and all the way to the cemetery and through the burial ceremony. Her shrieking made the whole ordeal intolerable for my brother and me; just as we would tire of crying, our grandmother's grief recharged our energy to start sobbing again.
The wake was held in my grandparents' living room. My mother's two weeping brothers had carried out every piece of furniture to the neighbor's house. In the center of the room, the coffin was on display with a candle lit at each corner. I sat to the side against the wall; I was the object of people's pity. Earlier in the afternoon, my grandmother had admonished me for participating in a game of tag with the boys in the neighborhood who had come to the wake with their mothers.
“What are you doing, you?” my grandmother yelled, yanking me by the arm. “Don't you know your mother is dead?”
A sympathetic woman came to my defense. “Leave him alone, comadre,” she said. “He's just a child.”
I was tired of sitting up in front of the hypnotic candle flames and had begun to doze off when a woman walked past me with a young boy holding on to her long black skirt.
“Is she alive?” the young boy asked.
“She's sleeping,” the woman answered softly. “Do you want to see her sleeping?”
The boy nodded and the woman lifted him up for a better view.
“She's pretty,” the boy said.
“Yes,” the woman agreed. “She's a pretty woman. She's asleep now, waiting for God.”
When the woman and child walked away I became curious. I had seen my mother lying in her coffin all afternoon, but the woman's words intrigued me. I hopped off the chair and stepped forward, standing on my toes to look inside. My mother was lying under a protective glass. She didn't look as if she were asleep at all. I became annoyed at the woman's observation—she didn't know what my mother looked like when she slept. Suddenly, a strange activity took place. Out of my mother's nostril, bubbling foam began to grow. I froze in astonishment and was quick to conclude that my mother was coming back to life.
“Look! Look!” I shouted. “She's moving!”
A few adults rushed over to see. “What is that, you?” one of them asked.
“Is she alive?” I asked, but no one heard me. In fact no one acknowledged that it had been me who had made the discovery. After a brief and subdued commotion, small pieces of white cotton had been stuffed into my mother's nostrils. I looked on in horror. Worse yet, when the glass had been temporarily removed to plug my mother's nose, a fly had snuck in. I watched it stick to the inside of the glass, its grotesque underside exposed.
Even before the bus leaves the Jalisco terminal, it breaks down. A collective groan rises from those passengers who, like my father and me, have been on this journey from the beginning. The driver acts quickly, telling us that he will get us to our destinations even if he has to give us vouchers for a different bus line. He's true to his word and within the hour, everyone mutters their quick good-byes and parts ways.
My father takes the voucher and checks for the next available bus into Michoacán while I guard the luggage. I ignore the beggars and expect I'll have to get nasty with one when a young man walks up to me and surprises me with an odd request before I have time to react.
“Did you happen to see any cans left on the bus?” he asks me.
I'm attracted to him in an instant. His hair is long and wavy, his skin smooth and golden. Still, his question catches me off guard. He looks away, perhaps embarrassed that I'm staring at him.
“I collect cans, you see,” he explains. “Not just any cans, but American cans. This bus came from the north, right? Did you happen to see any cans left inside?”
I become self-conscious of my sticky face and dirty shirt. When we used to take these treks down to Zacapu by car with my grand-parents, my grandmother used to hand-wash our clothing in motel sinks. The clothes never dried completely by the time my grandfather woke us up to continue the journey, so she stuffed our damp clothing in plastic bags and they arrived to Zacapu smelling like piss. That's what I imagine I smell like now.
I shake my head, trying to understand his idea of an American can. All the while I begin to fantasize. I'm horny for physical contact, for fierce affection with manly strength and unrestrained force—a type of violent overpowering I have learned to demand from my lovers. I endow this body before me with that sense of predatory aggression, and I'm hoping he will act on it and claim me.
My fixed stare is enough for him to shy away, and as I watch him leave I have the urge to run and tell him that everything is fine, that I understand him and his desire to collect American cans. We all have our private pleasures. Mine are books and young men like him who wait for the buses from out of town to see what hidden treasures they bring. I want to know his name and whether he feels the same sensations for me as I do for him. I want us to seek out American cans together.
When my father arrives at that moment with a pair of onion-thin tickets in his hand, I know he has skimped again and used the voucher on tickets in second class.
“So,” he says. “What's the first thing you're going to do once you get to Zacapu?”
“I never should have made this fucking trip with you!” I yell at him.
“We'll be in Michoacán by tomorrow morning,” he says. “Or noon at the latest. Maybe early afternoon. Don't worry.”
“You and your stupid second class bus!”
“What? Is it my fault this one broke down, too?”
“It's your fault we're on it!” I say. I walk away, forcing my father to pick up all the bags to follow me.
“It's the bus at the end!” he calls out. “The one with the yellow arrow!”
Adolescent Mariposa
Ghost Whisper to My Lover
Don't be surprised, querido, but you're the first Mexican I've ever known who isn't a Catholic. No wonder you're fearless. But I can't say I'm much of a Catholic myself.
The Eucharist entered my body only once, on the day of my First Communion. My brother and I went through the re
ligious ceremony one hot summer in 1984 because this was one of my mother's last wishes—that we fulfill the third of the holy Sacraments.
Usually, an entire group of children takes communion at once, after a long year of study at catechism class. But my aunt was enterprising and convinced a Sunday school teacher to make an exception for this special circumstance. The teacher squeezed the lessons into a month, after which we presented ourselves before God, the ordained priest, our chosen godfathers, and a small congregation for the symbolic mass.
The ceremony was not particularly eventful, except that the priest insisted on changing into a more colorful tunic when my aunt asked to take pictures. He stretched out a light blue robe to display the image of the Virgin Mary at prayer, white doves hovering above her as if they were about to descend on her head. Most memorable was the day before the mass, at confession. I had always known about the confessional, a large wooden box that allows the priest to listen to a sinner's most intimate admissions without the shame of meeting eye to eye. I had been coached by the catechism teacher for everything except the shock of finding no confessional when I entered the rectory. I looked around uncertainly.
“Sit down, my son,” the priest said. He was a short Mexican Indian wearing sandals, a trait of the Franciscan order.
I took a seat. He pulled out a second chair from behind the desk and positioned it in front of me. He sat down and bowed his head, asking me to proceed. I stuttered, mumbled, and cleared my throat repeatedly but managed to reveal what I needed to confess: use of offensive language, disrespect for my elders, masturbation, jealousy, envy, rage—the typical wrongdoings of a fourteen-year-old Catholic boy.
I didn't dwell on any details and neither did the priest ask for them. When I stepped out of the church that afternoon I was supposed to feel liberated, absolved, cleansed. But I felt none of those things as I was greeted by the blinding glare of the summer sun. Behind me the stone saints whispered among themselves the sacrilege that was my incomplete confession. I had not told the priest everything. How could I tell him that the holiness of prayer was powerless before my fury of desire for other males?—a sin, according to the Catholic Church.
I can trace back the moment I first got a taste of this lust: my childhood days in Zacapu. The neighbors from across the street were rigorously religious, the three daughters and two sons subject to the strictest of censures. They were not allowed to cuss or engage in any type of physical contact with another child, even in play. For the longest time I thought it was because of our susceptibility to contagious head lice. When the crowd of children gathered outside to shoot marbles or to play hopscotch, the mother or father stood like an apparition at a nearby window, keeping an eye on their charges. They remained invisible until one of the other children said something or did something they perceived as inappropriate. “Come inside,” the voice would command from behind a curtain, and the game would suffer all of a sudden because of the surprised betrayal that an adult had been present the entire time. We could hear the children being slapped or spanked, punishment for having been exposed to the vulgarity of others.
The parents were overprotective at every moment. Once, when our family went over for dinner, we were asked politely to leave after my brother, five years old at the time, pointed out that a woman on the television screen was pregnant. But that didn't stop their children from sneaking into the second floor of our house, or to the cornfield behind the house where we engaged in sexual experimentation over the years. With the youngest daughter, who was my age, I practiced penetration, and with the oldest son, being penetrated, which I enjoyed even more.
“I must fuck you because you have no second Christian name, just a gap between your first and last names, like an opened asshole,” the son would say each time, distracting me with his puzzling preamble as he pushed himself inside of me.
At the parochial school, I engaged in more child's play. During recess many of the kids hid inside an abandoned building within the school grounds, pulling underwear down to the ankles to make comparisons. This was easier for the girls, who wore regulation skirts. The boys had a belt buckle, a button, and a zipper to contend with. Our favorite game was a pissing contest, everyone standing in a row, male and female. When the boys started to dare the girls to take the small cocks into their mouths they ran out of the building. But afterward this new possibility for pleasure became my obsession, and my lover from across the street was more than willing to let me have my fill of him. Somehow these moments managed to remain untouched by the religious sovereigns who loomed above him with their codes of conduct.
Can you imagine, querido, how I'd even begin to explain to my father confessor that I was a mariposa through and through? A mariposa. You know, a homosexual.
The week before confession, the catechism teacher told us a story about a boy who took communion with an unclean soul—he had neglected to disclose the smallest of his sins, which he thought too small to merit mention to the priest. He grew up a pious Catholic, following the righteous path into adolescence, when he found his calling and became a servant for the Lord. He lived his years a respected priest, dedicated wholeheartedly to his loyal congregation. And when he died he was all but declared a saint for his devoutness and devotion. After he was buried in the sacred ground of the churchyard, his ghost began to haunt the coldest hours of the night. The new young priest was repeatedly awakened by this specter until he found the courage through the Lord to confront this abomination. He recognized the figure of the former priest and demanded that the devil behind this mockery reveal itself in its true from.
“It is I,” the ghost-priest moaned. When he opened his mouth to speak he exposed the nature of his condemnation. On his tongue, the outline of that first wafer lay branded and smoking, keeping the priest's spirit from its peace. He explained his transgression to the young priest, asking him to spread the word to the members of the congregation, to every son and daughter of God, and especially to the children, that their beloved priest must now wander for all eternity chained to this earthly purgatory—a warning to all that God forgives only that which is confessed to Him through true repentance and atonement.
I walked down the church steps, keeping my secret stitched to my tongue. After the ceremony I would have no one to answer for my yearnings but myself, even if after my death I would have to lag behind that priest until the end of days, a pair of branded souls dragging the heavy burdens of their sins, like cows roaming the foggiest dawns, the first guiding the second with its dangling rosary of a tail.
Indio, 1983–88 (“El Campo” Years)
As the story goes, my mother had been picking grapes along with her crew at one of the Freeman fields in the Coachella Valley. The harvest season had just begun, but already the day temperatures were uncomfortably warm. She became thirsty, nothing out of the ordinary, so she informed her coworkers that she was going down to the end of the field block to have a drink of water from the supervisor's water tank. Ten minutes passed and she hadn't returned. The grape packer grumbled: Was she taking a drink or a vacation? Ten more minutes went by. Did she go home? After half an hour, the coworkers became alarmed. Jesús, María y José. This absence was more than atypical; it was threatening. A quick reconnaissance confirmed that my mother was indeed missing, so the supervisor improvised a search party. When the men spread about the block in groups of threes and fours, the women huddled together in a protective circle. The foremen didn't even bother sending anyone back to work, fearing the worst when a woman disappears.
She's over here! a voice called out from the center of the sea of grapevines. She's over here! And a dead calm settled over the farm-workers as if the very air they breathed had frozen.
My mother was found wandering through the lush vines, incoherent, the victim of a stroke. She was taken to the Kennedy Memorial Hospital in Indio, and then eventually transferred to Eisenhower Medical Center in Rancho Mirage, just a short drive away. When my brother and I arrived home after school, we climbed up the wooden
steps and found ourselves locked out of our little home on top of the garage. We banged on the door, expecting one of our parents to come out at any moment to scold us for making such a racket. No response. Suddenly, the landlord's wife came out and waved us down. In the time we had been living next to her, she had never spoken to us even though her children came over quite often to invite us out to play. The softness of her voice was disconcerting, not at all what I imagined her sounding like after all those stories her children told us about how much she yelled at them.
“You must be strong, children,” she said to us. “I have some bad news to tell you.”
Her tone and diction disoriented me further. She had called us children, but she was talking to us in that polite way adults speak when they address strangers.
“Your mother has been hospitalized. Again. She suffered a small accident at work, so she won't be coming home tonight. Your father called me, and he gave me specific instructions. I will be looking after you this afternoon until one of your relatives arrives to pick you up. Please wash up before you come in.”
Butterfly Boy: Memories of a Chicano Mariposa (Writing in Latinidad) Page 12
