by Laura Newman
Chuy was born Xavier Jones to a Mexican-American Catholic girl who hid her cross behind her back and uncrossed her legs for the captain of the football team in her senior year. Of college. San Diego State. It wasn’t so bad. Lola and Doug got married in 1969 and Xavier was born on January 2, 1970. Their real mistake was buying a house in Logan Heights because the price was low. Six years later Doug was shot while getting the mail out of the mailbox on his way into the house from work. Logan Heights Gang drive-by, wrong place at the wrong time, said the police. “How can the mailbox of our own home be the wrong place?” asked Lola, and the policeman held her while she cried. She kept the mail, a Sears bill and a loud flyer for a sale at a car dealership, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday Too, American flags flying in the corners. It made no sense, but all Lola could think was that she wished there had been a love letter in the mailbox, that she had sent him a letter. If Doug had had a love letter in his hand, it would have been a better death. After that, she put a note in Xavier’s lunch bag every day. Mommy loves you to the moon. But by the time he was in high school, he didn’t even read them, threw them away with the apple. Rotten to the core.
It isn’t hard for a young man to join a gang. It can start for little boys in a tree house with a wood-handled penknife and a couple drops of blood. A teenager might take the next step. A dark romance that takes place under the overpass, the sound of the cars, the art of the graffiti, the starlight of cigarettes. A gun. The heaviness of that gun. Xavier always thought the soul was the exact same weight as a Colt 45. Whiskey is a pretty color and cocaine is angel-white. Xavier was part of the Logan Heights Gang easy as ink. A tattoo to mark the event.
It was a game of Chutes and Ladders for Xavier. Thanks to Lola he had dual citizenship and the looks that could shift at the border to match the scenery of either side. People see what they want to see. He ran drugs for four years and had money to burn. But he didn’t burn it. He locked it away in a safe-deposit box along with a large portion of his morals.
On May 24, 1993, Xavier was sent with a number of the gang to the Guadalajara Airport to assassinate Joaquin Guzmán, “El Chapo,” the Mexican drug lord of the Sinaloa cartel. The Logan Heights boys were hired by the Tijuana cartel. Good money, half in advance.
No one ever really knows what happens in Mexico. The sun is too bright. The dust obscures. History is a shiftless cowboy. Juan Ocampo, archbishop of the see of Guadalajara, and a cardinal of the Roman Catholic Church, was at the airport that day. There he is in his white Mercury Grand Marquis. And he is a sort of drug lord, is he not? Opiate of the masses. Stepping out in his black cassock with a cross on his chest as large as a heart, could he be mistaken for El Chapo? At two feet away? Apparently so. The authorities said it was a case of wrong place, wrong time, mistaken identity, what with that car and all. But everyone knows Ocampo was a heavy opponent of the drug cartels.
It was a holy mess. Xavier never even knew if Ocampo or El Chapo was the real hit. He never heard so many bullets at one time, a mad staccato concerto he would feel forever on the back side of his eyelids. A sound tattooed to his soul. Six civilians died. The image he could not obliterate with all the holy water in the Guadalajara cathedral was the sight of a young woman in a blue-flowered dress, an old fashioned suitcase without wheels, the way her body blew back and folded in at the same time. The way the flowers turned as red as Flanders poppies. Six civilians died, they wrote in the paper. “Civilians?” thought Xavier. “Humans.”
While Ocampo was departing his body, and El Chapo was lighting a cigar, Xavier was running away. Everyone was running; gun tucked, it was easy to blend in. With every block the sirens faded until finally the circular wail sounded like the theme song of a cops-and-robbers show on a black-and-white TV. Xavier walked into a clothing store and bought middle-class clothes. He checked into a by-the-hour motel that did not require ID and took the longest shower of his life. Then he put on the new clothes, walked out of the motel, and hired a taxi to drive him the hour’s ride to Ajijic, the expat town on the banks of Lake Chapala. When he stepped out of the taxi, he was no longer part of the Logan Heights Gang. He ate a roasted chicken and drank a heavy beer. That night, he threw his gun far out into the flat waters of the already highly polluted Lake Chapala and made a very Mexican prayer to the goddess of the lake. And although she is a goddess of fertility, it couldn’t hurt.
Silvia and her family moved to Tijuana and her father went to work at one of the many maquiladoras, building electronic parts that would be sent back to the United States. Her father had not adequately anticipated the costs of rent in such a city, and they were forced to live in the slum at Los Laureles canyon. The houses were built onto the side of a hill, which gave it a nice terraced look from a distance. But the construction was corrugated tin, thick cardboard from discarded packing boxes, home-poured concrete. Rebar stuck up everywhere like broken bones. The garbage washed away when the rains came, or at least was buried in mud. Chickens flourished. Silvia was relieved to hear they spoke the same language as her old chickens.
But where were the monkey-faced orchids and the scent of trees? She could see the ocean in the distance, but it was flat and gray and wordless. She knew that America was on the other side of the border wall, but America was a mean aunt who made cookies, then slapped your fingers if you reached for them.
It soon became apparent that Silvia’s mother would have to work in a maquiladora as well. And so for the first time in their lives, Ana and Silvia went to a real school. Silvia’s mother sewed a pink velvet patch for Silvia to put over her eye and told Silvia to tell everyone her father was a pirate and she lost her eye to an octopus in a battle at sea. Who doesn’t like a pirate? Silvia told no one anything.
Over time her mother sewed patches from scraps of serape, embroidered Otomi, and once a large appliqué hibiscus flower, but that was disconcerting because the stamens looked like tentacles coming out of her eye. Perfect for the Day of the Dead. Every single one of the patches made Silvia silently seethe. The patches might as well have been a burqa. She had two perfectly good eyes.
Silvia grew up a private and quiet girl. Well, it was hard to read her face. On the day she graduated from high school she privately and quietly threw away all the patches. They gave her headaches and weakened her eye. Why should she suffer to make others comfortable? It was liberating. But no one would hire her. Even if she could type like a spray of bullets from an M16 and do complicated word problems with one hand tied behind her back. Even if she was kind.
Chuy, carved Jesus in the back seat of his car, arrived at the San Ysidro Point of Entry to the United States. He parked his car, hoisted Jesus, and made his way out to the many lanes packed with cars inching their way across the border, the slowest parade on earth, like elephants. Chuy joined the other entrepreneurs who sold things through the windows to the bored and captive consumers in the cars. He was looking for the girl.
Silvia was there. She positioned her tray with the crisscross straps across her back and balanced the stacks of tamarind candies, just like the kind her father used to bring her in Nayarit. She made the candy herself and painted the small white boxes by hand. Each box had a little donkey and the script said Tingalao’s Sweet Nothings. Since Silvia’s oddball was on the right side of her face, she always worked the left-hand side of the cars. She developed some knotty neck muscles from the bandolier straps of her tray and keeping her face turned out. But all in all, most people did not notice that she had one eye closer to her nose than the other until they had already reached for their wallets and by then, Silvia knew, almost no one was so rude as to retreat.
It was the boxes that sold her product. The script was in Spanish. Little boys and girls in the back seats wanted the donkeys, pink saddle blankets for the girls, red and blue stripes for the boys. Silvia would look into the back seats and see the children strapped into their protective booster seats, feet sticking straight out. TV screens. The children looked like designer
purses to her. Sometimes she felt like the Little Match Girl, peering into other people’s impossibly beautiful, air-conditioned lives. Sometimes she wanted to open the door and quietly slide herself in, go right through the wall. She knew they knew it. Because while they rolled down their windows, the doors were always locked.
But they liked her donkeys, and at the end of the day she could pay her rent and eat a couple of tacos.
About an hour into the morning she saw him. There he was again. That Jesus guy, looking at her. She wasn’t blind. And it’s hard to miss a not-bad-looking, not-too-too-much-older man carrying Jesus on his back. She could tell he had been watching her these last several days. Most men who were interested in her wanted something she was not interested in giving, so Silvia had grown wary of men. But he did have that Jesus …
Chuy saw she was coming straight toward him! He was sure of it. What was he going to say to her? Obviously she had caught on to his surveillance. Could he tell her the truth? That he wanted to know the color of her eyes. He dreamed they were paisley. That he wanted to paint her face, that he was certain she would be his Mona Lisa. Was that too much to tell, on the San Ysidro lanes, with the dusty cars, the horns and hawkers, the seagulls’ haughty laughter? Too much?
His phone rang. Truly there is something demanding about a ringing phone that makes you answer it, even when your personal muse alights. “Bueno.”
“Hola, this is Amanda Sánchez and I have your dog, Queenie?” Amanda said it like a question, but Chuy’s heart fell. For all his years of abstinence from crime, his first thought was that Queenie was being held for ransom. “I work at the Soriana Super, and there was an accident? The old man, they took him to the hospital, I think he’s dead, but I have the dog, and this is the number on her collar...?” For while Gómez never carried identification, luckily Queenie did.
Moments before Silvia reached Chuy, Chuy turned and sprinted away.
“Well, he’s not the first one to see my face and do that,” thought Silvia. She took the rest of the day off.
Chuy found Gómez at the new Scripps hospital. “Oh, Chuy,” said Gómez upon the eventual arrival of his friend. “I died.”
Obviously Gómez had not died, but Chuy chose to ignore the facts. “What’s it like?”
“No, no, I know I’m not dead now,” said Gómez. “I came back.”
“What was it like?” Chuy amended.
Gómez was thoughtful for a moment and then said, “Augusta National,” and that seemed explanation enough. “But when I came to, I didn’t know where I was.”
“The hospital?” Chuy asked. “It’s so nice here.” It was a new-fashioned hospital with healthy shades of paint and artwork of landscapes and soft abstracts. A garden with a reflection pool, a piano in the foyer.
“Too nice. The last hospital I was in when Maria died had those pea-green walls and you could be certain to die there. I woke up here and thought I made it to the next level of heaven. Sandals, All-Inclusive,” said Gómez.
“How are you feeling now?” asked Chuy.
“I could use a beer, my friend, and where is Queenie?” Chuy pulled them both from his overcoat.
It was but a few days later that Chuy made it back to San Ysidro. He had forsaken his Jesus and came alone. Silvia accepted his offer of coffee without hesitation. He carried her tray of candies. As so often happens when one is both sure and fearful at the same time, Chuy felt he had to tell her everything about his past. A confession. He felt his soul was a bucket of water in the bottom of a deep well and he had to haul it to the surface, hand over hand on a rough rope.
Xavier told her about Guadalajara and Ajijic, and how he changed his name to Chuy (Jesús) Rodriguez; it’s not hard to get a new identity in Mexico. He got ahold of his mother and had her get the money out of the safe-deposit box. He told her to take what she needed to move out of Logan Heights, something he should have done for her years ago. They set up regular trips for Lola to come to Tijuana. For years it had felt too dangerous to actually meet or for Xavier to try his passport at the border, but when she was in the line at San Ysidro, she would appear to be interested in his goods. They would exchange letters and she gave him wads of his money, until he didn’t need it anymore. They carried out a mother-and-son reunion once a month right under the watch of the U.S. government and the cartel.
When he was finished hauling up the bucket, he asked Silvia everything about her. But he never commented on her eyes.
And now, this is how things are. Silvia is the new artistic face, the new Frieda Kahlo of Mexico. Silvia’s oddball eye is as recognizable as Frieda’s mustache eyebrows. Xavier’s paintings are uncompromisingly straight on, his choice of colors startling. The backgrounds are always of Mexico. Monkey-faced orchids. Monkeys. Donkeys and tamarind trees. Also harsher things like Trump’s new section of wall, the slums of Tijuana and Guadalajara, Chiclets. But it’s all about Silvia’s asymmetrical eyes.
Silvia, her parents, Ana, Ana’s husband and children, Pepe, Lola, Gómez, Queenie and her red blanket have all moved to San Miguel de Allende, where in the summer the air remains cool as a linen sheet. Lola and Gómez got a thing going on. Silvia and Xavier have a spacious, white-walled gallery with their house on the second floor and a studio out back where the light is as golden as a Del Sol beer. They give away boxes of Tingalao’s Sweet Nothings to any child who walks in the door, and all the local children know it.
Most days Gómez makes the ten-minute walk from his house to theirs, two doors down. If the workshop is open when Gómez arrives, he joins Chuy.
“Chuy, would you like a beer?” Gómez asks, offering up a now warm Del Sol which he has brought with him.
“I do not drink, my friend, but thank you.”
“No? I did not know that or I would have brought Coca-Cola,” says Gómez.
And the two men smile small smiles, for they are the best of friends.
Epilogue
Please recall the Soriana Superstore girl who saved Queenie, Amanda Sánchez. While everyone else was shouting over the fallen woman, the apparently dead man, and the overall mess, she calmly pulled the Chihuahua from the syrup and and took the poor dog into the ladies’ room to wash her in warm soap and water. She fed the little wet dog three-milk cake. Then Amanda called the number on Queenie’s collar and returned the dog safely home.
About three weeks later Amanda was pleased to see the old man come back to the hyperstore. Of course the old man did not know who she was, but Amanda watched him as he made his way back to the syrup aisle. On the speckled linoleum, below the still out-of-reach Aunt Jemima syrup bottles, he placed a statue of Our Lady of Guadalupe and a small bouquet of glorious flowers. It was, she realized, a holy shine of thanks. Satisfied, the old man turned and left. Amanda found this beautiful. But she also knew it would only be a matter of minutes before she heard, yet again, “Limpiar en el passillo siete.”
Later that night she got an idea. It took her about two years, an unnamed financial backer, three trips to China for bottle manufacturing, and the lucky introduction to an independent Vermont syrup farmer with a sense of the absurd for Amanda to finally bring her idea to the hypermarket shelves: Our Lady of Guadalupe Wholly Syrup in a bottle shaped like the Virgin, full-body-length Mexican-style halo and all.
Our Lady of Guadalupe is outselling the Tia Jemima brand two to one.
The House of Naan and Saffron
Marigolds and smoke, hopscotching monkeys.
It is impossible to see clearly in Varanasi.
I was born in the north where my mother stirred her morning coffee with a twig of an alder branch. It was inadvisable to go out in winter without gloves. When the northern lights appeared, I knew it was the light of angels. My father said it was an effect of the solar wind but he’s an idiot, not to know an angel when he sees one. He of all people.
My parents lived in a cabin, loaned to them by the pari
sh church. They counted their blessings on my toes, their only son, Kristoffer, born in the year of Our Lord Jesus Christ 1994. Our cabin was snug with braided rugs and a large stone fireplace. My boyhood room was up a ladder to a loft with one window that looked out on the village creek and beyond to the forest, where the gunny wolf lived. I had a blanket made of rabbit fur and slippers the same. At bedtime my father would bring me a toddy of brimstone. Then my mother would come sit by me and tell me stories of the Norwegian faerie cat that could fend off the red fox and The Lad Who Went to the North Wind.
Beyond our little garden of root vegetables and marigolds is our church. Not a stave church, but a fair Norwegian structure built of pine and a whitewash of good intentions. Behind the pulpit is a large, hand-painted glass window of Jesus bearing the cross, knees buckling, crown of blood and thorns. A Jesus too tired, it seemed to me, to care so much for us. I thought it nearly obscene, a sort of snuff film, this almost-dead Jesus.
To the west of the little church is the graveyard, most markers covered in moss and tilted. To the east, a flagstone path leads out a rusty-hinged gate and down into our village of a thousand or so souls. Our village is on a mountainside, in a large meadow bowl with a silver creek that runs through, and a surrounding forest, whispering ancient tree tales into the wind.
When we moved to India, I think I missed the winters most. The smell of snow. Early winter storms hold the scent of pine. The snow is pure and lighthearted, filled with air and antiseptic. But toward the solstice all the pine needles freeze into tiny icicles and the layers of snow compact into a strata of storms. Now I can only recall enough to say it smells like winter, the death of smell. Come spring the snow melts in the day, freezing again overnight. By morning there’s a top crust, easily broken with footfall, releasing a slush of sunshine and the scent of damp earth.
