by Arturo Islas
“Why did you swim with all your clothes on? How many times, Antony, have I told you not to go in deep water unless there is someone on the shore?”
After awhile, an angel stood beside him. It asked him in a familiar voice why he did not weep. He thought it a strange question from a creature he had been taught had no emotions. He would ask Nina about it; she would be able to explain it to him. He turned to look at the angel. When he took its hand, it vanished and he saw his sister-in-law Juanita.
The two of them sat side by side on the sand like children, knees drawn up to their chests until the first stars appeared. They astonished him. He was seeing them as if for the first time. A few moments later, he and Juanita got up and went into the house through the kitchen. Ernesto began to weep when he saw the chiles on the stove. Their smell filled the house and he went from room to room opening all the windows.
Compadres and Comadres
On their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary, which Juanita insisted on celebrating in the company of the entire family with a repetition of the wedding vows at the cathedral, Miguel Grande was already in love with her best friend Lola. The late August day was hot, the kind of dry heat that oppresses but does not stifle human activity, and Juanita asked the musicians to set themselves up on the patio of the dream house she and Miguel Grande had at last been able to afford. The affair was to last several years before her husband found the courage to tell her. Until that moment, Juanita did not and would not believe anyone else.
On the day of the celebration, only Miguel Grande and Lola knew about it and Juanita was able to live out and share her fantasy of a stable, if not perfect, marriage that had lasted for a quarter of a century. All of the family was present: Mama Chona, in grey rather than black; the compadres and comadres, the close family friends, Mexican and Anglo, their children and grandchildren. As many people attended this gathering as had attended their wedding in the smaller church on the south side of town closer to the border.
Miguel Grande, a zombie out of duty and habit when forced to be a part of family occasions like this, walked through the ceremony and collaborated in his wife’s view of their marriage. Having balked at every preparatory moment, he, not Juanita, looked like the skittish bride at the altar when they repeated the wedding vows. No one present guessed at the truth of his behavior in those weeks before the party. Everyone, especially his own brothers and sisters, knew that he was antisocial and that Juanita was the force who kept him in touch with them. They knew they could rely on him in times of trouble, but they also knew that for reasons of his own, he preferred more and more to maintain a life apart from the family.
Juanita got what she wanted that day and it was to be the last time for many years. After the church service, family and friends were invited to the new house for a dinner dance in the early evening. Juanita wore a pale blue silk dress and her prematurely and completely grey hair gleamed in the rays of light that slanted through the mimosa trees onto the patio. Miguel Grande was wearing the dark blue suit she insisted he buy for the occasion because he had refused to rent the white dinner jacket she thought more appropriate. The first bottle of champagne was opened. It was pink and sweet and purchased by the case more cheaply across the river. Felix gave the toast, paying tribute to the splendid pair whose marriage, he said, was an example to them all, particularly to the younger generation. After applause and a few hoots, Felix—overcome by emotion both feigned and genuine, for he knew his brother well and was at the same time a great sentimentalist—dropped the bottle, recovered it, then served the happy couple their glassful as Juanita handed her small bouquet of garnet red roses to Lola. Lola’s tawny hair seemed even brighter because of the dark green chiffon dress she was wearing. She was standing behind Juanita a little to one side so that Miguel Grande could see them both as he drank his wine. The anniversary waltz began to play and Miguel Chico’s mother and father danced together while the rest, struck with delight, looked on just as the older generation among them, weeping with emotion, had watched the couple dance twenty-five years earlier, for the greatest sentimental moment in Mexican culture is the coming together of a man and woman in holy matrimony. The waltz ended.
Juanita insisted that Miguel Grande dance with Lola next. El Compa, her husband, had died earlier that summer and Juanita was feeling great sympathy for her. Miguel Chico watched the three of them from the other side of the patio. The sun was behind the foothills and had turned the mountain behind them into a rose-colored stone garden. The trees and shrubs his father had planted in the back and side yards were beginning to freshen the air with their scent, and the crickets, lizards, and sparrows could be heard above the blaring of the mariachi trumpets. Twilight was an hour away.
Miguel Chico watched his mother place his father’s hand in Lola’s. She kissed them both and went to see about the serving of the dinner. Miguel Chico also noticed that Lola looked at his father as if he were a stranger before he took her in his arms for the next dance. Standing beside Miguel Chico, his eyes snapping into focus through the many cups of wine he had already drunk, his uncle Felix nudged him and said, “Will you look at that?” In another part of the patio, Nina put down her glass, walked toward them, and said to Felix, “Why don’t you cut in? They’ve danced long enough.”
Juanita came out of the house. The desert was now the color and texture of her dress and candles were being placed all over the patio and garden according to her instructions. She was very happy and before Felix could reach Lola and Miguel Grande, Juanita intercepted and began dancing with him. Miguel Chico looked at them and at his godmother. Her jaw was locked into place.
“What’s wrong, Nina?”
“Never mind,” she said quietly, and then, as if on guard against the inevitable, she added harshly, “Nothing. Why don’t you go ask Lola to dance with you?” Instinctively Miguel Chico obeyed, and making his way through the dancers toward his father and Lola he saw them with the eyes of his uncle and godmother. His certainty was fixed when he heard the tone of voice in which Lola called his father a sinverguenza as he relinquished her to his son. The word is untranslatable; literally, it means “without shame” and can be used as a noun. It was one of Miguel Chico’s favorite expressions from childhood. Lola said it darkly, the way lovers would in an embrace. Twirling her about he saw his mother’s romantic dreams for herself vanish into the desert evening.
The affair began when El Compa was fixing the roof of his house on a Sunday afternoon in early June. The heat was so unbearable that even the sparrows stopped their racket. As his hands reached for the pain in his chest, El Compa heard only the buzzing of a lone cicada sending out its love signal in the distance toward the poor people’s cemetery.
He had decided to make the repairs that day in spite of the heat. His back was better, and he did not want to hear Lola tell him again (as she had every weekend for the past year) that her kitchen would soon be buried under the desert sands if he did not do something about that hole.
“But it’s only a little hole, Lolita,” he had said to her from the beginning.
“There shouldn’t be any holes in this house. God knows we paid enough for it.”
She was right. They had paid too much for it, but it was in a good neighborhood, more and more lower class Mexican people like them were moving into it, and everyone knew everyone else just like in the old barrio. Had they waited another six months they would have gotten a better deal, but El Compa wanted to show off and be the first to buy a three bedroom, two bathroom house on that street. He was in his early fifties, and though he had been born on the north side of the river and had taken his stepfather’s Anglo surname, El Compa still thought of himself as Mexican. This house was a symbol of his success.
“America is the best goddamned country there is, and don’t you forget it,” he said to Miguel Chico. They were not related, but El Compa had been in school with his parents and was their closest and most beloved friend.
“You sound just like my father,” Miguel Chi
co said. They were sitting in the den of the newly purchased house watching the news on television. A few months later, the first Catholic president in the history of the country would be assassinated. From the kitchen, Lola informed them that she had just discovered a hole in the ceiling. The men laughed.
“Don’t worry, honey. I’ll fix it,” El Compa said.
“You’d better,” she answered. “I’m not about to clean this kitchen every day.”
El Compa made a silly face at Miguel Chico. He loved it when women exaggerated; he saw it as their finest weakness. The two of them were still laughing when Lola came into the room, tv dinners in hand.
“Go ahead and laugh, idiots. You’ll stop when you find dirt in your food.”
“Dirt’s not going to get into frozen dinners, sweetheart.” El Compa smiled warmly in her direction. Lola turned to Miguel Chico and gave him a dirty look. He stopped laughing and saw why El Compa’s son by his first wife did not like Lola and visited only on special occasions. “You know I can’t stand for my hands to smell like food. And I’m no servant. I won’t live on my hands and knees mopping up dirty floors because you’re too lazy to patch up that hole. Pretty soon, we’ll have birds flying in and out of the house. Is that what you want?”
El Compa laughed with delight at everything she said, hugged her closely, and winked at Miguel Chico over her shoulder. He loved to spoil her and, after her long fidelity to him, felt it her right to have things the way she wanted them. She made love to him better than any woman he had known, so he did not mind her unhousewifely ways. She was woman where it mattered and refused to become like every other married woman she knew. How many times had he heard that tirade? It did not matter.
El Compa and Lola had met in their teens. He paid her no attention then because he was in love with Sara Cruz and wanted to marry her. Even then, however, all his buddies teased him about being a ladies’ man, and several of them, with sly looks on their faces, mentioned Lola’s crush on him. She was their favorite, and anyone who could get her attention was on his way to manhood.
El Compa did not care to prove his manhood with her. Sara would be his wife and the mother of his children. It did not even occur to him to take advantage of Lola’s beauty in those years. Without being prudish about it, he felt a certain pride in his indifference toward the cool and confident manner in which Lola made them all aware of her creamy breasts and legs. Among the girls, only Sara and her best friend Juanita del Valle did not criticize or label Lola a bad woman.
“What wonderful skin she has,” Sara said.
“And that smile,” Juanita answered without envy. They admired Lola for being as gorgeous as the movie stars they worshipped every Saturday afternoon at the Colon or Plaza theaters.
El Compa married Sara when he was nineteen. She was a year younger. Two years later—three months after he had started his job on the police force—she bore him a son. His partner and friend, Miguel Angel, married Juanita, and the four of them had good times together. He and Miguel were making steady money and building good reputations for themselves as the first Mexican officers on the force. In Spain, home of some of their ancestors, a civil war was going on. They barely noticed. They were Americans now, even if privately and among themselves they still called each other chicanitos. Their great, great grandfathers had long since left Castile to conquer and mix their blood with the natives of Mexico, and death in Madrid meant nothing to them.
On weekends the four of them went to nightclubs across the border, danced all night, and acted like the rich gringos who lived on the hill. At the end of every month the money they spent so lavishly was gone, and they were content to go to each others’ houses and play casino after the evening supper of beans and tortillas.
Life was good for El Compa, everything was as he had planned and expected. Both he and Miguel, whose first child was also a boy, gained weight and grew moustaches. At the end of those five years, Sara died of spinal meningitis.
It struck her down without warning, and El Compa felt that his own life had ended. Sara was in the hospital for only a week and Juanita was with her when she died. She phoned the station to inform them. Miguel and El Compa were in the police car when the call came through. They drove to the hospital. In shock, El Compa did not hear the siren Miguel turned on immediately after the call.
“Did she say anything?” El Compa asked Juanita.
“No.”
“Did she wake up?”
“Yes, but she just looked at me, Compa. All I could do was cry like a big baby and tell her that everything was all right. What are we going to do without her? Oh, Compa, I’m so sorry.”
She put her arms around him and held him like a brother. El Compa loved his comadre Juanita and often chided Miguel for taking advantage of her naivete. He, unlike his compadre, did not sleep with any woman who gave him the chance. Sara and Juanita knew their men and trusted them anyway. When Sara died, they lost a necessary balance.
Lola, who had remained in the background during these years, had also borne a child. She married its father in order to give her son a name but divorced him a year later. Only Juanita had met him. She was able to keep up with Lola after Sara’s death because they were both working part-time in the same office downtown. Juanita sensed immediately that Lola’s passion for El Compa was not spent, that instead it had grown during the time of his greatest happiness with Sara. Later, Lola confided in Juanita that she had imagined El Compa in all her lovers and pretended that her son was his. She had named him after El Compa.
“Do you mean that he slept with you?” Juanita asked, at once shocked and fascinated.
“No, comadre. It means that I wish he had.”
Juanita did not reply. Lola’s beauty captivated her. She was one of those rare Mexican women with green eyes and dark blonde hair. Her light olive complexion was lovelier than ever, and into her fifties her figure would remain taut and fine. Lola moved with a grace that others found irresistible, even if they did not like her. Before her, Juanita felt in the presence of a mystery, awesome and worthy of respect. She accepted Lola as her friend and, after Sara’s death, began to confide in her about everything. Lola reciprocated, though she kept some things about her life to herself. Nina and Miguel Grande watched them carefully for different reasons.
Juanita had many friends, for her unselfconscious charity extended to all. Lola had only one friend, and it amazed her how much she could love another woman. Usually, given the choice, she preferred the company of men, but Lola saw in Juanita an innocence she had never possessed. Lola did not covet it, but she stroked and fed it faithfully.
For the first twenty-five years of their marriage, Miguel Grande was content with Juanita’s lack of worldly wisdom and the ease with which he could sleep with other women. His only self-imposed rule was not to spend the entire night with them, but to return home to his wife and his sons feeling refreshed and independent.
After they buried Sara, El Compa went to Mexico City by himself. He left his son Frank Jr. with Sara’s mother and spent his two-week vacation wandering from hotel to hotel and drinking too much. Every night he went to the Plaza Garibaldi, bottle in hand, and made his way through the crowds of musicians and lovers who sang their praises to mythical heroes or their laments for lost loves. When the glare of the lights became too much for him, he went into El Tenampa and drank until dawn, listening to the mariachis and weeping quietly to himself, disturbed by no one. Once, an ugly woman approached him. She was a part-time cook there who left something for him to eat on the counter after watching him go through the same ritual seven nights in a row. The music of the mariachis, which he ordinarily disliked because of its self-pity, now gripped him and would not let go. Through it, he regained his spontaneous feelings for life and began to laugh without bitterness once again.
He returned to the desert, left his son with Sara’s mother, who loved him as her own and brought him up properly, and lived by himself in an apartment not far from where he and Sara had been happ
y. Gradually, he became absorbed in his job, slept with casual women now and then, visited his son often, and marked time. Sara came to him in dreams and invited him to dance or make love. “My beautiful Compa,” she said to him in a dream voice, and he awakened startled and feeling that she was alive. He never asked himself why she had died, but when he interrogated a suspect he sometimes found himself acting from a rage that elated and terrified him. Fifteen years passed. He married a young girl, divorced her two years later, and called up Lola one night to invite her for a drink.
“Juanita, what shall I do?”
“Go with him. It’s only for a drink.”
“But why? After all these years. His marriage to that little idiot was the limit. What does he want with me now?”
“Don’t go then.” It was difficult for Juanita to say this, for she was a romantic and wanted El Compa and Lola to be together. Vicarious pleasure in unrequited love was Juanita’s weakness. She liked the soap operas on television.
Lola went, showed El Compa what he had been missing, and married him three months later. For Juanita, it was as if the past had returned, only better because now they had more time and money to enjoy themselves. They were together every weekend, and Juanita’s other friends were becoming jealous of her time with El Compa and her new comadre.
When Miguel Chico, home from the university for the first time since their marriage, walked into the kitchen on Sunday nights, his parents, El Compa, and Lola sat arguing and laughing over the cards.
“Hello, sweetheart,” El Compa said to him. “Where have you been? We’ve missed you. Come over here and sit down next to your old Compa. Bring me some luck. These sinverguenzas are beating my ass.”
