by Arturo Islas
Instead, he did his laundry in the washeteria around the corner where he knew he would be in the company of those people who lived alone in the neighborhood. They would not disturb each other except to ask for change and would read their Sunday papers in peace and isolation like that of the islands in the Baltic he loved visiting every summer. When he got back, he put away his clothes and began to prepare supper for himself. He chopped mushrooms, onions, garlic, and tomatoes for the spaghetti sauce he had perfected over the years. His secret was to add sugar, marsala, onion soup mix, and finally, one of the red chiles from the wreath his godmother gave him every Christmas and to let the concoction simmer off and on for two or three hours. Its flavor would improve throughout the week.
While the sauce was bubbling, he put on his favorite records and went to the bathroom to change his appliance. It was a weekly ritual which took him an hour, or a little more if the skin around the piece of intestine sticking out from his right side was irritated. Without the appliance and the bags he attached to it and changed periodically throughout each day, he knew he could not live. He had forgotten what it was like to be able to hold someone, naked, without having a plastic device between them. He wanted to ask Maria if, on Judgment Day, his body would rise from the grave in its condition before or after the operation. He was still feeling bitterness toward her and all people who thought like her because they seemed so literal and simpleminded. This time, the skin around the stoma looked all right and he finished the process before all the records had played out.
After supper, he tried to read in his study and found that he kept looking at the photograph in which he and Mama Chona are walking downtown. He had no photograph of Maria. In some vastly significant way, he felt he was still the child of these women, an extension of them, the way a seed continues to be a part of a plant after it has assumed its own form which does not at all resemble its origin, but which, nevertheless, is determined by it. He had survived severe pruning and wondered if human beings, unlike plants, can water themselves.
He was also beginning to see in his day-to-day life with the bag at his side that too many false notions surrounded people like him who have been given a reprieve. He did not automatically or necessarily see life more or less positively for almost having lost it. Nor did he come bearing insights from the other side of the grave to comfort and reassure those who have not yet been threatened.
He was still seeing people, including himself, as books. He wanted to edit them, correct them, make them behave differently. And so he continued to read them as if they were invented by someone else, and he failed to take into account their separate realities, their differences from himself. When people told him of their lives, or when he thought about his own in the way that is not thinking but a kind of reverie outside time, a part of him listened with care. Another part fidgeted, thought about something else or went blank, and wondered why once again he was being offered such secrets to examine. Later he found himself retelling what he had heard, arranging various facts, adding others, reordering time schemes, putting himself in situations and places he had never been in, removing himself from conversations or moments that didn’t fit.
Most of the time his versions were happier than their “real” counterparts, and in making them so he was indulging in one of Mama Chona’s traits that as a very young child—the child who was holding her hand forever in a snapshot—he loved most. Mama Chona was never able to talk about the ugly sides of life or people, even though she was surrounded by them. For her grandchildren she dressed up the unpleasant in sugary tales and convinced them that she believed what she was saying. Later, in his adolescence and while she still retained her wits, Miguel Chico hated her for this very trait, seeing it as part of the Spanish conquistador snobbery that refused to associate itself with anything Mexican or Indian because it was somehow impure. What, Miguel Chico asked himself, did she see when she looked in the mirror? As much as she protected herself from it, the sun still darkened her complexion and no surgery could efface the Indian cheekbones, those small very dark eyes and aquiline nose. By then, his cousins and he smiled at each other when she began telling her tales of family incidents and relatives long since dead and buried. By then, in their young adulthood, they knew the “truth” and were too self-involved in their educations away from her and the family to give her credit for trying to spare them the knowledge that she, too, knew it. Slowly, she slipped into her fairy-tale world—at least outwardly. “Oh, my dear Miguelito,” she said to him just after his first year at the university, “you are going to be the best-educated member of this family.”
Sitting at his desk, gazing at the garden, fixing that old photograph forever outside of time and far from where it was taken, he knew she had not called him “dear.” Mama Chona did not use endearments with anyone in the family. How silent she had been even when she talked—silent like those pyramids he had finally seen in Teotihuacan built to pay tribute to the sun and moon. He had felt the presence of the civilizations that had constructed them and, as he climbed the steep, stone steps so conceived as to give him the impression that he was indeed walking into the sky, he had seen why those people, his ancestors, thought themselves gods and had been willing to tear out the hearts of others to maintain that belief. The feeling horrified him still.
And Mama Chona was still very much a part of him. Perhaps, he told himself, watching the first wisps of fog drift in over his garden, perhaps he had survived—albeit in an altered form, like a plant onto which has been grafted an altogether different strain of which the smelly rose at his side, that tip of gut that would always require his care and attention, was only a symbol—perhaps he had survived to tell others about Mama Chona and people like Maria. He could then go on to shape himself, if not completely free of their influence and distortions, at least with some knowledge of them. He believed in the power of knowledge.
His need to give meaning to the accidents of life had become even more intense, and he had not yet begun to laugh at that need. Years earlier, he had started out to be a brain surgeon but had found his pre-med courses lifeless and impossible. Literature had given him another way to examine the mind. He knew he was no poet like his cousin JoEl, the most sensitive member of the family. He, Miguel Chico, was the family analyst, interested in the past for psychological, not historical, reasons. Like Mama Chona, he preferred to ignore facts in favor of motives, which were always and endlessly open to question and interpretation. Yet unlike his grandmother and Maria, Miguel Chico wanted to look at motives and at people from an earthly, rather than otherworldly, point of view. He sensed he had a long way to go-
He walked out into the garden. The fog was in and thicker than usual in his part of the City. He knew that during the early hours of the day it would moisten and freshen all he had planted there. In the morning, before going to teach his classes, he would get rid of the petunias. Their purple velvet color was fading and they were now rangy and going to seed. Like a god, he would uproot them and discard them even after having loved and enjoyed them so much.
He felt Maria’s hand on his face, her hair smelling of desert sage and lightly touching the back of his neck as she whispered in his ear. Every moment is Judgment Day and to those who live on earth, humility is a given and not a virtue that will buy one’s way into heaven.
Miguel Chico left the garden, changed his bag, undressed and went to bed.
Chile
Miguel Chico’s godmother Nina was a practical woman. The otherworldly side of her came to the surface before her son’s death, and she explored it with the care and precision she used to prepare the annual income tax accounts of various business firms in town.
Money and cards fascinated her and Fortune followed her, if not abundantly, certainly with cheer. But it was not until her children were well into adolescence that she looked casually over her shoulder one day and recognized a greater power smiling at her from behind Fortune’s face. This same power that would take away her son began training her early
on to endure, rather than resign herself to, the deprivation.
Nina had always been afraid to die. The very idea of being buried in the earth filled her heart with terror. No matter that she would be dead and insensate by that time, the funeral rites passed through in a silence as complete as that of the chrysanthemums surrounding her corpse, Nina knew she would feel the desert trickling down her throat, and that knowledge was unbearable to her. At best, it made her irritable and anxious during the many ordinary activities of her busy days; at worst, it caused her unalleviated fits of depression.
“I don’t care what you say,” Nina said to her sister Juanita, “I know I’m going to feel it.”
“But how? You’ll be dead. You won’t feel anything,” Juanita replied. She was disturbed by how much Nina had been drinking lately. To Miguel Chico’s mother, more than one drink was too much. Juanita had known about Nina’s fears for a long time. When they were children sleeping in the same bed, she would get Nina a glass of water in the middle of the night and distract her by singing the latest Mexican ballads until she went back to sleep. Years later, when their children were babies, their endless and elaborate card games allayed Nina’s terror but did not get rid of it.
“Let me get another scotchito,” Nina said as Juanita dealt out another hand of five hundred rummy.
“You’re being ridiculous, Nina. Sit down and play.”
It was not until she discovered the spirit world that Nina began to recognize that death might not exist as she imagined it in her terror. At the bi-weekly seances in the basement of her friends’ Mexican food restaurant, her nose itching from the Aqua Velva they sprinkled into the air to induce serenity, Nina gradually became aware of two women waving at her from a strange and unknown region. They were about the same age and Nina saw with joy that one of the women was her sister Antonia, who had died in her late twenties. The other woman was her mother, who at twenty-nine had died giving birth to Nina. She awoke from her trance weeping, greatly relieved and peaceful, her initial skepticism about spiritualism gone forever. She did not see the women again, but the possibility that she might gave her courage and kept alive her faith in some kind of practical afterlife. “Imagine,” she said to Juanita, “the two of them at the same age. They were like sisters, not like mother and daughter.”
Juanita, more dominated by Church doctrine than was her younger sister, did not approve of these “spook” gatherings, though when she saw how effectively they helped Nina overcome her childhood fears she decided to overlook the heresy and defend her sister against the family’s ridicule. Nevertheless, Juanita staunchly refused Nina’s repeated invitations to join her in exploring the afterlife, even if she was secretly and guiltily attracted to it.
Nina’s own humor, lively and persistent even during her moments of anxiety, grew and she was able to bring happiness to everyone except her own family. Her husband Ernesto and their three children could not understand or accept her enthusiasm for the impalpable, and they were jealous of her time away from them.
Ernesto, a silent and calm man, brought up to believe in the teachings of the Church, expressed his disdain by becoming even more quiet after she returned from one of her encounters with the spirits. When Nina tried to share with him her excitement, Ernesto asked her not to talk to him about such things. She honored his request because she loved and respected him for his already serene nature, and she sensed that his soul was more highly evolved than hers.
Ernesto Garcia was a hard-working, responsible man. The children adored him with an affection they did not extend to Nina. She had married him because he was honest and because she liked the way he laughed. Like her, he could lose his temper, but unlike her, he was able to recover it quickly and not bear grudges. He was as stubborn as she, but his obstinacy showed itself in the determined way he provided for his family without allowing himself to get into debt. For a man of Mexican origin, coming of age and marrying during the Depression, that was an accomplishment. Then, too, Ernesto was different from other men she knew. He was not given to bragging or lording it over others. From the start, she had recognized his superiority.
“Come on, Neto, just go to one meeting with me.”
“No, and stop telling me about them.” He refused her invitations without anger. From that time on, when anyone phoned for her while she was at a seance, Ernesto said, “She’s with the spirits right now. But don’t worry, when she gets home, I’ll bring her back down to earth.”
In this period, Anna, their oldest child, had stopped quarreling with her mother and was too preoccupied with her school activities and boyfriends to pay much heed to Nina’s idiosyncrasies. Their youngest child, Cristina, was still too young to give her parents much trouble. But Nina and her son Antony, almost fifteen, were beginning to disagree with each other about everything in stubborn and exaggerated ways. Usually Ernesto sided with his wife in these arguments, but at times he wondered aloud if she were not living too much with her head in the clouds. When Ernesto took Tony’s part against her, Nina felt betrayed.
“I live with three rams and a crab in this house,” Nina said to Juanita, who did not understand astrology or accept it as valid. “I’m nothing but air. What can I do?” She cooked her chile jalapeño.
Only three people could eat it: their lifelong friend El Compa, her son, and herself. For the remainder of humanity, her green chile sauce was fire itself. “Ay, Nina, why do you make it so hot?” Juanita asked, exasperated. She did not like being left out, but she no longer made valiant attempts to taste the stuff. Her nose began watering the minute she walked into Nina’s kitchen on those days when she toasted the chiles. Water, tortillas, bread and butter, aspirin and other remedies had not been able to calm Juanita’s digestive tract after those times she had gamely swallowed a spoonful.
“I don’t make it hot. Do I grow the chiles? I only choose them at the market like everybody else. How can I help it if they come out tasting like that after I prepare them?”
“But how can you eat it? It’s going to kill you.”
Nina laughed at her sister. “It will prepare me for the devil.” In those days, she believed in the devil.
Juanita and Ernesto watched El Compa, Antony, and Nina eat the chile sauce as if it were chicken soup. The only evidence the two outsiders had of its power was in the tears the eaters shed without restraint as they said over and over like a rosary, “It’s so good, it’s so good.”
“You’re crazy,” Ernesto said to them and went into the living room to read the afternoon paper. But Juanita stayed to the end and participated vicariously in their ability to enjoy the extremes in life.
“Let me tell you a joke I heard about chile,” El Compa said one winter evening as they sat down to eat.
“Is it dirty?” Juanita asked.
“No, comadre, would I tell a dirty joke in front of you?”
“That’s what my husband always says before he goes ahead and tells one.”
“Leave him alone, Juanita. Go on, Compa, tell it. I love stories about chiles,” Nina said with a little girl’s smile on her face. She could be salacious without being obscene and Juanita watched her carefully because she wanted to learn that talent. Juanita’s best friend Lola, who was married to El Compa, had the same skill.
“I’m not talking about that kind of chile,” El Compa said. “I’m talking about the kind we’re eating.”
“Go on, get it over with,” Tony said, resigned to having to listen to another bad joke.
“Well, there was this gringo who was in Mexico for the first time. At a restaurant he ordered a mole poblano that was real hot. I mean hot, hotter than this.”
“Impossible,” Nina said, offended.
“Well, almost, comadre. Anyway, the poor guy sat there awhile after he ate a couple of mouthfuls, flames coming out of his ears, and when he could talk he asked the waitress to come over to his table. She saw right away from his face what was wrong, and she brought him some ice cream. ‘What good will that do?’ the guy asked he
r. ‘It’ll help take away the burn,’ she told him.”
“It never worked for me,” Juanita said.
“Well, the next day,” El Compa went on.
“Here it comes, the corny punch line,” Tony said.
“Shut up, both of you,” Nina said.
“The next day, the gringo is sitting on the toilet, and you know what he is saying?”
“No, what?” Juanita asked, taken in once again by El Compa’s charm.
“‘Come on, ice cream, come on!’”
“Ay, pelado!” Juanita said, blushing and enjoying herself immensely. Nina and Tony laughed at both of them.
Nina was the youngest child in her family. Her mother was Mexican, but her father was half French and half Mexican. Unable to accept the death of his wife, he had not forgiven Nina for destroying what he had loved most in the world. He died when Nina and Juanita were in their teens, and Nina had been secretly glad because she had resented her father’s authoritarian ways. Unfortunately for her own children, that tendency to be uncompromisingly strict survived in her methods of disciplining them.
“You hit them too much,” Juanita said to her when the children were almost adolescents. She knew she was breaking their agreement not to interfere in how they brought up their children.
“They’ve got to learn,” Nina replied, “I can’t stand spoiled brats.”
“You sound just like Papá, Nina. I can’t believe it.”
Their father’s oldest child, a brother they never knew, had died as an infant in San Francisco. Their parents had sailed north from the Mexican fishing village on the Pacific where they had met and married. Seeing his son’s death as divine retribution for his having left Mexico, their father, a cigar maker, gradually moved his family toward the homeland, settling in an obscure New Mexican town first and finally in the Texas border town where his three daughters were born.
“So you see, Miguelito,” Nina said to her godson, “that’s why you live in San Francisco. Your uncle’s spirit is still there. He would be over seventy years old now, unless of course he’s learned his lessons and progressed farther into the spirit world. Look for him in the clouds, Mickie.”
