Before the End, After the Beginning

by Dagoberto Gilb

  Instead of attending the evening church service, he walked until he found what was a restaurant. He took one of the plastic chairs and ordered a water as it became fully dark. He asked the owner if he knew the taxi driver Francisco, which of course he did, because everybody knew everybody. The owner flagged down a little moto, an enclosed three-wheeler with two seats in the back, and they bounced through rutted and dug-up dirt streets. He stopped behind Francisco’s taxi. He was chewing, holding a half-eaten tortilla as he came out of the brick house.

  “We already finished dinner,” he told Ramiro. “We already ate all the beans.”

  “If you drive me back, we can stop and I’ll buy you a hamburger downtown.”

  “Downtown Oaxaca? That’s a lot of pesos, güey.”

  “That’s good, right?”

  “I’ll take you,” he said.

  Ramiro got in the back; Francisco’s wife got in the passenger’s side. She was maybe a year younger than him, eighteen at most. He took a couple of full, cloth-covered buckets of masa. Francisco drove slow on a dirt road so ungraded it was impossible to talk, a road that followed along open fields of chopped-down corn and nothing else, which eventually set them aside rock and mud walls too high to see above, through more fields and into another pueblo, where the road leveled. It was his aunt’s, where he parked to drop off the buckets to her. There was a double-hinged metal gate wide enough for two cars, and a crowd of children held one open. A black and white mutt had approached, barking.

  “Don’t be nice to that dog,” one of them told Ramiro. “He is a dirty, bad dog.”

  Even the dog seemed to understand, and squirmed both with fear and for forgiveness.

  “He only wants love,” Ramiro told the children. “Don’t you?” The dog wagged but was afraid to get too close.

  They all laughed. “That is a bad, dirty dog,” the same bigger girl said. The smaller ones laughed more.

  “I live with a bad, barking dog, too,” Ramiro told them. “My Loli also gets too dirty.”

  “Loli!” a couple of them repeated, and they laughed.

  “No,” the big girl said, serious. “He is a bad dog.”

  Francisco came back, and they took off. The highway to Oaxaca wasn’t much farther ahead, and they were soon on it.

  “I didn’t like it there,” Francisco told him. “I never liked it.”

  “Where in California?”

  “Moorpark.”

  “I know where it is,” said Ramiro. “You were working?”

  “I was learning English,” he said. “I couldn’t.”

  “In school?”

  “High school. Two years. I never liked it. I couldn’t learn.”

  “You just didn’t want to be there,” said Ramiro. “Sometimes you just want . . .”

  “It’s hard to learn another language,” said his wife.

  “Sure it is,” Ramiro said. “Did you grow up speaking Zapotec?”

  She said a word that he guessed was yes in the language.

  “Yes,” Francisco said. “That’s what she said.”

  She laughed and Ramiro laughed.

  “Tell me a word,” Ramiro said.

  “What?” she said.

  “¿Cómo estás?”

  “Shai yu,” she said.

  “Shy you,” he said back. He said it like it was in English.

  She was very pleased, smiling big. “Yes,” she told him.

  “I will remember,” he promised. “It’s like two words in English.”

  They all laughed.

  “The answer is bwen,” said Francisco, seeing him through the rearview. “It means bien.”

  “Ben,” said Ramiro. “It’s like the Spanish.”

  “No,” said his wife. “Bwen.”

  “Ben,” Ramiro said again.

  “Bwen,” she said again.

  “Ba when,” he said.

  She really thought he was hilarious.

  “Shy you,” said Ramiro. “Ba wen . . . Bwen.”

  “Yes!” she told him.

  “I think I want to learn more, but I’m afraid I can only learn a couple of words at a time.”

  “I know,” said Francisco. “And when you learn a new gringo word, you forget one you thought you had.”

  They all three laughed.

  “In other villages, they have even more, other words,” said Francisco’s wife. “Like, wenka.”

  “Wenka,” said Ramiro.

  “Yes!” she said.

  “It means fine, too,” said Francisco, practicing his English.

  “But in another village,” said his wife.

  “How are you?” said Ramiro. “Bwen, wenka, shai yu.”

  She thought that especially funny.

  “Fine, fine, fine,” said Francisco.

  They dropped Ramiro off near the zócalo.

  “Shai yu,” Ramiro said instead of good-bye.

  “Wenka, good,” said Francisco. “I have two other languages, too.”

  He didn’t live that far up the hill. He felt strong walking. He would even say he felt good. Or that if he still didn’t care anymore, this was happiness, living on, not ending.

  Benito stood from his chair outside Abarrotes as Ramiro approached. There were no customers, but it seemed he was there from morning to night. “How was the evening?” he asked.

  “Good,” Ramiro said. “Shai yu?”

  Benito would never stare, but it meant the same looking away.

  Ramiro couldn’t tell if Benito understood or didn’t or if he said it wrong, but everything between them had always been so formal. “How is this night for you?” he asked, finally.

  “Very fine,” Benito said.

  “How good, how good,” said Ramiro, smiling so much that he used Benito’s favorite doubled words.

  “Are you okay?” Benito asked.

  “I am,” he said.

  “Are you sure? Do you need some water?”

  “Yes, I do, I do really. Let me get some.”

  “You do not look well,” Benito told him.

  Benito was not trying to sell anything, but they went inside the store anyway, and Ramiro bought a big bottle and said thank you.

  It was late enough when he got into his cave departamento. As soon as he came through, Loli heard him and was crying at the bathroom window. He flipped on one bit of light on his way to her. She was so thrilled he was there, Ramiro really did think it was as much about him. She was going wild smelling him, desperate like an addict, whimpering, both sad and happy.

  “Have you been alone all day? Outside here and nobody to play with you and hold you? Poor Loli, poor poor Loli. It’s hard for you to be alone, isn’t it, Loli? I wish I could let you come in with me. I don’t think you’re dirty, and you’re a good dog. You are a good dog, my Loli.”

  Ramiro went to the table and turned on the light and decided today he would not read about Porfirio Díaz. He was always more interested in finding new words in Spanish than in the learning itself, but this time his random page was at Evolución from the old encyclopedia: “. . . el proceso en que todo cambia con el tiempo, and within a species there is always variation, causing more success of some individuals within this species and less to others.” It’s not as if he didn’t know about this concept, but the church bells were ringing. He heard someone whistling. Then came the spray and pop of fireworks. He heard a child calling out, excited. Elda? Cars out there, going and going. Like cars passing all the time, old ones to new ones. He tried to think, with scientific neutrality, of this life and death. How to take that into his own individual being, his less, his more, his here, his there, his then, his now, his next.

  When the mattress moved—way too much because he slept so soundly, and deeply
, for hours—Ramiro got up and pushed it back uphill. He said Loli’s name and she whimpered weakly, more satisfied than tormented. He woke up again in the morning rested, full of energy, though first the aim was still for coffee. He didn’t even want bread.

  “Good morning,” he told Benito.

  Benito stood, and he was about to say good morning back when a customer came up and interrupted him and he went into his store instead.

  Ramiro went to the grandmother who sold the fruta.

  “You’re early, young man!” she said. “Why are you so early?”

  “Not so early.”

  “How are you feeling?” she asked. “Are you okay? How are you?”

  “Shai yu,” he tried, smiling.

  She laughed, shaking her head. “Ahh, where did you learn that?”

  “Yesterday,” he told her, “in Teotitlán del Valle.”

  She was still laughing. “I don’t know so much.”

  “Aren’t you Zapotec?”

  “Yes, I am originally from Coyotepec, but my family didn’t teach me our language. I know words.”

  “Bwen,” he said.

  She laughed again. “Bhel,” she told him, pointing to what seemed like the peanuts. “That is meat. And ghen, that is chile.” She gave him a small bag of the nuts. “You eat.”

  “Ghen,” he said. “I already can’t remember the other!”

  “Bhel.”

  “Bhel,” he said. “And now I forgot what chile is!”

  “Ghen.” She laughed. “Ghet, that is tortilla.”

  “Stop, teacher! I can’t!”

  “I can give you more,” she told him, “and I don’t have tortillas here.”

  “More than you think, I think. With the words for meat, chile, and tortilla, what more do I need?”

  “Meat, chile, and tortilla.” She looked carefully at Ramiro. “Are you okay, young man?”

  Suddenly others arrived to buy and so he took two boxes, piña and sandia. She pulled out a plastic bag and gave him another of coco con chile y limón and also three cakes, shaped like pan dulce where he grew up, but smaller and harder. They were all she had. She looked up, smiling like a close friend, an answer to her own question to him. “You eat.”

  He decided to skip coffee altogether. He walked back to the departamento. Benito wasn’t outside Abarrotes, his chair empty. Sra. Campos’s car was gone, too. He bent his head through the archway after opening the wrought-iron gate, and he sat down at the table. He picked at the boxes of the fruit but he couldn’t eat even one. The pan dulce, yellow inside, was full of sweet black seeds. After a couple of bites, he went to the bathroom window, where Loli came, and he gave her the rest.

  His decision seemed sudden but wasn’t. It was there the moment he walked in that first day, even if he put down his bags, intending to stay to the end. He wrote a note to Sra. Campos saying that he was sorry, but as she knew, when he stood up, he didn’t fit—he kept scraping his knuckles, and it was so hard to shower, and there was the sliding bed—and so he had to leave, and he thanked her for renting to him and for the beautiful time he spent in her house. He took only a few things he brought with him, though, only enough for a day bag. He guessed that she would be mad, or upset, and he didn’t wish that for her. It was how she was. She would have to learn how to accept it, and surely she would. She had so much still, and whatever bad toward him she felt, it would pass. Would it be better for her if he stayed? Or worse? Maybe it wouldn’t matter either way. It could turn out exactly the same as it was now no matter when he left, how, or if he didn’t walk away at all. She might complain about him, him leaving these things of his, too, until maybe, with all that was good around her—her child, Elda, even Loli—she wouldn’t remember he’d ever been there.

  Benito rose from his chair. “How are you?” he asked.

  “Fine, fine,” Ramiro told him. Saying it double made him truly happy.

  “Are you okay?” Benito said in his formal manner, suspicious of Ramiro’s smiling to himself.

  “I’m leaving the señora’s place.”

  “How good, how good.”

  “I left her a note, but will you tell her I am sorry?”

  “Yes, of course.”

  “Tell her I said thank you.”

  “Surely.”

  They walked together to the corner of Tinoco y Palacios, the busy street that many cabs traveled.

  “How good, Ramiro,” Benito said. “This is right for you. It is a tomb in there.”

  He shook Benito’s hand.

  “Where will you go?” he asked Ramiro.

  A taxi stopped. Ramiro shook his hand good-bye yet again, said, “Thank you so much,” got in, and Benito walked slowly back to the chair outside his store.