Butterfly Boy: Memories of a Chicano Mariposa (Writing in Latinidad)

by Rigoberto González

  I nod indifferently. I tell him I don't want to talk about food on this winding road. He smiles. I do love my father's smile. It's the smile of someone who could get away with plenty by simply flashing his perfectly straight teeth. My brother and I inherited our mother's crooked set. I imagine my father softening my mother's heart on a number of occasions as he negotiated forgiveness. I can't imagine my mother was as tough to crack as I am.

  “Once we get to Zacapu we each go our separate ways,” I remind him, deadpan.

  “Sure, sure,” he says. “That's what we agreed.”

  “And you can't come asking me for money, either,” I say.

  My father lets out a laugh. I think about all those debts my mother had to pay off behind his back. He borrowed five dollars here, five dollars there, and eventually the lenders—my aunts and uncles—came directly to my mother to collect.

  “Look at that town over there,” my father points out. “What would it have been like to have had a steady home?” It's not a question; it's a longing.

  I look through the window at the huge valley lit up with different colors. The town is cradled by the dark mountains. From afar it looks as if nothing can get in or out, but judging by the stillness of the view it's as if the citizens have made peace with it and have settled without worry into their insular but protected haven each evening. There are people in the world, I imagine, who are born and die in the same town, maybe even in the same house, or bed. Creatures without migration: have they not lived a life because they have not moved? What of the migratory los González, moving from one place to another and marking every stopping place with angst? What kind of alternative is that? For once my father and I are thinking the same way, sharing a similar yearning for our starting points to have been different, for our final destination to be anything other than the tearful, resentful arrival it is likely to be.

  And then a random thought enters my mind: I'm the farthest I've ever been from my lover. Each second takes me farther still. There are other kinds of distances besides time—there is space, there is activity. And so much ground has been covered on this journey, and so much thought has labored in my head, that my lover's image burned into my mind has begun to age, to fade. Is that why I keep bringing him back with the memory of our game?

  “Ghost whisper.”

  “What did you say, querido?”

  “Ghost whisper. When you talk to me in the dark it's like you're not a body anymore.”

  “Then what am I?”

  “Memory. Purity. Honesty.”

  “And what does that make you, querido?”

  “The rooms in your eyes. The rooms with the lights off.”

  “And what do the rooms with the lights off want to hear?”

  “Don't touch me. Just talk to me. Ghost whisper.”

  “Ghost whisper what, querido?”

  “You decide. But make it good.”

  Yes, querido, I will stuff myself inside you so that I can squeeze out everything you hate. That is why I have made up my mind to come back to you as soon as I return to Riverside. I can't leave what I love. Not for long, anyway.

  What a fool. What a fool. What a fool.

  I nod off to sleep.

  At dawn I wake up anxious to get off the bus. The landscape has changed again into a constant spill of roadside houses covered with the haze of sleepiness that just begins to lift in the early morning hours. I recognize the textures of this waking up: a barking dog, crowing roosters, water gushing into plastic buckets, nixtamal, broom bristles, the lopsided wheel of the birria cart, old women's feet shuffling to church, their somber rebozos, freshly-baked bread, boiling milk, the crank-and-squeak of the first local bus, the compulsory “Buenos días, ¿cómo amaneció?”

  My father's already awake and he squeezes my arm when he notices my eyes are open.

  “I told you we'd be here by morning,” he says. “Just in time for a warm plate of menudo at the mercado. You're buying.”

  I feel generous all of a sudden and agree.

  When we pull off the main highway and into the streets of Zacapu, my heart begins to pound. The bell tower of the Santa Ana church (la Parroquia de Santa Ana) shoots up into view as the bus turns the corner. I stare at it until we reach the plaza with its small kiosk freshly painted for the Sunday afternoon performances. People walk the high sidewalks down to the mercado, the heart of the town, in steady strides. A pair of Purépechas with braids connected at the ends stroll side by side with rebozo sacks of corn. We have arrived.

  Mercado Morelos is already full of busy shoppers and of merchants standing tall over their fruit and vegetable stands. Farther down are the canned goods and cheeses. Samples of the creams and raisins are passed out to the discriminating buyers. I have three relatives from my mother's side, besides my grandfather, who work here but I'm not expecting to run into any of them. The entrance to the restaurant area is bursting with the smells of freshly cooked beans, pozole, steak, and chipotle sauce. Across the way, a row of butchers chops the fat off the thick chunks of raw beef. The white spaces between the counter tiles are dark with blood, and in motion with flies.

  “How about here?” my father says, pointing to an empty wooden bench. The cook hails us over. We haul our luggage forward.

  My father orders menudo, I order a plate of huevos a la Mexicana—scrambled eggs mixed with the colors of the Mexican flag: green chile, white onion, red tomato.

  “This is what I've been waiting for from the moment we climbed on the bus,” my father says with an air of sentimentality when the cook places our food on the counter. “Now we can sit down like old friends and enjoy a good meal,” he adds.

  An uneasy feeling comes over me as I take my first bite of the eggs. My father rolls his corn tortilla the true Mexican way, by placing it flat on the palm of his hand and using the heel of his other palm to curl it tightly, top to bottom.

  “I think of you as my friend more than as my son,” my father continues. He blows into a spoonful of menudo before putting it into his mouth. He has this habit of talking one sentence at a time when he eats. In installments, my brother Alex calls them.

  “Because when a boy becomes a man—”

  “Apá,” I interrupt. “What is it you want to tell me? You're starting to give me a headache.”

  “What? Me? Nothing, nothing. I'm just trying to make conversation that's all.”

  “We just spent three days and three nights on a bus together,” I said. “Let's eat in peace.”

  “Fine, then,” he says, looking hurt as he continues working on his menudo. But after a few more minutes he breaks his silence. “I did want to tell you one thing,” he says.

  “I knew it,” I said, dropping my fork on the side of the plate. “What? Do you need money? Or do you want to charge me all of those damn cartons of juice you bought me? How much do I owe you?” I take out my wallet to add some flair to my theater.

  “I don't like the way you talk to me,” he says, his expression serious. “Full of anger and disrespect. How old are you now anyway? Eighteen?”

  “I'm turning twenty in a few weeks,” I say.

  “Well, whatever, but you keep lashing out at me like you're still twelve years old. Isn't it time you let this anger go? I had my reasons for doing what I did, getting married and starting a new family. You and Alex were going to be old enough to leave home soon, and where would that leave me? With your grandfather all over again.”

  “Oh, so you left Alex and me to deal with him. You knew how he treated us all these years,” I say.

  “So you know exactly what I'm talking about,” my father says, and his comment hits me on the side of the head.

  “What are you talking about?” I ask. My face feels cold.

  “About your grandfather. He's my father,” he says, and then repeats it, softer this time, as if the phrase has become heavier on the lips. “He's my father.”

  “You mean, your burden,” I want to say, but I don't. His logic is twisted, but abusive relationship
s do that to a person, turn reason inside out. It's the type of insufferable emotional bond that sends one fleeing from the house, from the country.

  “I don't expect you to forgive me,” my father says. “ I'm not asking you for that. All I ask is that you don't forget that I'm your father and that I love you no matter what.”

  “Oh, sure, it's so easy to say that now that I don't even need you anymore,” I say. “What the fuck's the difference after all that I've been through?”

  In my mind I catalogue the times I wanted him to surprise me with a timely arrival during moments of crisis in which he never appeared. But my lip is trembling too much for me to give him my list in an orderly manner. I sputter out random instances, sounding in-coherent and confused.

  “Like that time I was sick. Like that time my mother was sick,” I say. “And you abandoned us!”

  I'm uncomfortable in the silence that surrounds us. People in the mercado make no effort to hide their curiosity as they turn their heads toward us. My father tries to lighten the mood by giving me one of his affectionate hair tussles.

  “Leave me alone,” I say. “I hate it that you can't even take anything seriously.”

  “But I know how you feel,” he says.

  “You don't know shit,” I say. I blush as I add, “You don't even know who I am. Who I've become.”

  “I know more than you think,” he says.

  “Like what? What do you know about who I am?” I dare him.

  “I know that—” but my father doesn't finish his reply. Nor do I want him to. We leave that knowledge unspoken because there are many other facts that need to be dealt with first, if ever. My lips are trembling and my father takes pity on me by looking down at his plate as he stirs the menudo a few times.

  I finish my meal, listening to my father talk with the cook. It turns out she knows somebody he does, which is not rare in Zacapu. They kid around some and in the end she throws in a pair of sweet tamales for dessert, which I only pick at.

  As we exit the mercado, the bright sun strains my eyes. I need more sleep and rest. I always surprise my grandparents with my arrival because I never tell them ahead of time that I'm coming into town. And after all these years there's always somebody at home to receive me with a warm welcome and a warm meal.

  “Well, son,” my father says. “Maybe I'll see you in the plaza some afternoon.”

  “I doubt it,” I'm about to say, but hold back in time. “Maybe,” I concede.

  “I'm within walking distance,” he says. “But I'll wait until your bus comes.”

  “What bus, you?” I say as I make my way to the taxi line, luggage in tow.

  “Are you taking a taxi?” he says. “What for? The buses are already running. Look, there's one headed for Colonia Obrera.”

  “I'm done with buses,” I say and wave him away.

  “A taxi will cost you like ten pesos,” my father calls out. “A bus not even one!”

  I give the taxi driver directions to my grandparents' house. As we drive back to the plaza we pass my father, who blends in with the crowd except for his heavy black bag. My father says something but I can't quite make it out; I only see his mouth move as his hand goes up in a gesture of farewell. I watch him until he vanishes into the bodies of people going up and down the elevated sidewalks. These are the streets of my childhood. But they are also the streets of my father's youth. And of my mother's. He has many more memories burned into Zacapu's days and Zacapu's nights. He has much more to reckon with when he enters the town of remembrance. For me it is also about forgetting.

  I challenge myself to remember the exact details of my father's tattoos: there is a three-leaf clover on his shoulder. The right one, I think. And it has a banner running across it with some illegible script. Maybe it's a date. He bears an anchor on his forearm. Small and sloppy, the flukes are not ornate at all, and the dark line going through the eye above the stock is supposed to be a rope, but it's more like a thread cut at both ends. And there's a third tattoo on his calf I can't recall. Is it a fat heart with an arrow lodged into it? I haven't seen it in years.

  When the taxi ride starts to get bumpy I know we have reached Colonia Obrera with its cobblestone streets that slow traffic down. The taxi moves forward unhindered as it shimmies and rattles, jogging everything but my memory.

  Ghost Whisper to My Lover

  I think, querido, that none of us really knows how to grieve. It's such a mystery of an emotion that we trip over ourselves trying to get through this feeling of our bodies collapsing internally. But we have to fall apart in order to piece ourselves together again. Is it any wonder we love ceremonies, or flickering lights through our unknowing and the unknown.

  When our former neighbor the hunchback died (his name was Tony, but my grandfather insisted on calling him “El Jorobado” so the rest of us called him that as well) the announcement was made at dinner one warm afternoon as the grape harvest was coming to a close. Tony and his wife lived a few doors down from us when we all lived on top of each other in Thermal, and their apartment was a favorite stop for us during Halloween because Tony was extremely generous with candy. He would step out on his front porch, dressed in a brown leather jacket with a row of fringes coming down from his shoulders to his wrists and across his hump. A matching hat with a tassel made him look elegant, even graceful. The news of his death came with a plea from his widow for contributions for the cost of the funeral.

  The conversation then turned to the expense of El Jorobado's burial plot. Cemeteries were a waste of money and land, my grandfather reasoned, because after a few years, the graves became neglected, their locations forgotten, so that in the end the plot too became a ghost. He presented his evidence: his own parents' graves, his two daughters' graves, all four lost in Zacapu's panteón. “Might as well toss the flowers to the wind,” he said, “rather than waste your time looking for the headstones.” My grandmother withdrew into daydream at the mention of the two daughters she lost in infancy. My grandfather kept on until he made his resolve.

  “If any one of us should die,” he announced to those of us gathered around the dining table. “The rest of us aren't throwing money away on any burial. Cremation and a simple sign of the cross over the ashes is the cheapest answer.”

  “Yes, of course,” my father added, always willing to add a touch of humor to a somber moment. “And if possible, we should get some permit that will let us drag the corpse out to the middle of the street to burn it. The only expense there is a sack and a gallon of gasoline.”

  In either case, my grandmother decided that we should remember El Jorobado for el Día de Muertos that November 2nd by lighting a red votive candle we bought from the Mexican foods section at Alpha Beta. The wax wasn't really red, but the glass was. The side of the glass had a sticker of la Virgen de Guadalupe with a bar code attached at the bottom, and it looked as if la Virgen were looking down curiously at the stripes.

  For the first few years after we immigrated our family didn't celebrate el Día de Muertos because we didn't have any relatives buried in U.S. soil, and neither did we have a close relative recently deceased. Most of our dead were our ancestors in Michoacán, in the brightly colored cemeteries where we cleaned the graves on the first day of November, and where we shared a meal with the spirits the following day. The mood on these occasions was usually festive, just another excuse to throw a party, sucking on sugar skeletons and munching on pan de muerto—a plump bread with a button of a skull attached on the side, and a caricature of a skeleton body drawn on the top with sugar.

  But November 1982 marked the first days of the dead after the death of my mother just two months before. One of my younger cousins pointed out that maybe we should do something to mark the occasion. I was surprised at how easily my uncle complied. He was the cynic in the family, known for his quick temper, his irreverent humor, and his foul language. There were six of us gathered in the living room: my father, my brother and I, my uncle and his wife, and their eldest daughter, who had ma
de the suggestion in the first place. We had no cemetery, no skeletons or bread, not even a marigold, the traditional Day of the Dead flower. In fact, the small garden outside my uncle's house only grew herbs—cilantro, rosemary, and thyme. The house was unpleasantly empty all of a sudden, the living room like a dumping ground for secondhand furniture: a television with an aluminum foil antenna, an old couch with sunken cushions, and a velvet landscape painting with a loose frame taped against the canvas to hold it in place.

  My uncle knelt on the floor and called us toward the center of the living room. This was such an awkward gesture for him that even his daughter thought he must have been joking.

  “What are you doing?” she asked, slightly embarrassed.

  Surprisingly, my aunt and my father joined him, kneeling down to form a triangle of bodies. My father waved the rest of us over, and we did, forming an impromptu congregation.