Tomb Song

by Julián Herbert

  We arrive back home. Mónica opens the front gate, puts away the Atos, and says:

  “After lunch, if you feel up to it, come into the garden for a while to read in the sun. It’s always good news when the sun comes out.”

  I’d like to tease my wife for uttering such banalities. But I don’t have the energy. And anyway, the sun falls with palpable bliss on my cheeks, on the recently watered lawn, on the leaves of the jacaranda … I collapse onto the grass. Maruca, our dog, comes bounding out to greet me. I close my eyes. Cynicism requires rhetoric. Sitting in the sun doesn’t.

  When she was admitted through the emergency room, someone misspelled her name: Guadalupe “Charles.” That’s what they all call her in the hospital. Guadalupe Charles. Every so often, in the darkness, when I’m most afraid, I try to convince myself I’m watching over the delirium of a stranger.

  After a thousand failed attempts—Google searches, e-mails, Skype, and long-distance telephone calls to nonexistent accounts and numbers one digit short—Mónica tracks down my elder brother on a mobile phone with the area code for Yokohama, Japan. Would he call me? I answer. Solemn, without greeting me, Jorge asks:

  “Is everyone at her bedside …? You have to be there with her in these difficult days.”

  I suppose he’s lived abroad for so long he’s ended up swallowing the exotic pill of advertising via the Abuelita cocoa powder slogan: There’s-No-Greater-Love-Than-the-Love-of-the-Great-Mexican-Family. I say no. Saíd is a mess and no doubt hooked on something or other; in his state, he isn’t up to the stress of a hospital. Mónica is doing her part outside (I’d like to say “in the outside world,” but today, for me, the outside world is immeasurable: hyperspace) as Director of Communications and Logistics of My Mother’s Leukemia. Diana has two babies and can manage a shift only every other night. Adriana is lost to the world: she left home when I was seven, so I hardly even know her. I’ve seen her no more than a couple of times in my adult life. The last was in 1994.

  “For the past week, I’ve been doing thirty-six-hour shifts, dozing or writing by the bed of a dying woman,” I add melodramatically.

  What I don’t add is: Welcome to the Apache nation. Eat your children if you don’t want the Palefaces, those white trash, to corrupt them. The only Family that gets along in this country is a narcotrafficking clan in Michoacán that cuts off people’s heads. Jorge, Jorgito, hello: the Great Mexican Family came tumbling down like a pile of stones, Pedro Páramo dissolving under his illegitimate son Abundio’s knife before the startled eyes of Damiana, the Televisa model who goes on robotically repeating: Coming to you from Lake Celestún, this is XEW … Nothing: there’s nothing left but pure, shitty, cunty nothingness. In this Sweet Nation where my mother is dying, not a single sheet of papel picado is left. Not a shot of tequila uncorrupted by the perfume of marketing. Not even a speck of sadness or decency or an outcry that hasn’t been branded by the ghost of an AK-47.

  Two nights before we took Mamá to the hospital, Mónica dreamed we were constructing a swimming pool beside the fig tree in our garden. The rubble we hauled away in wheelbarrows wasn’t dirt or rocks: it was human thighs. That’s weird, I said, I wasn’t going to tell you, but I dreamed they closed down the elevated section of the Periférico beltway because a truck loaded with giant heads—like the one in that hyperrealistic self-portrait by Ron Mueck—had overturned. The eyes of the heads were open and the hair soaked in blood.

  (During breakfast, Felipe Calderón Hinojosa comes on the TV to inform the nation of the achievements of his government, whose inflated statistics he—obviously—considers to be more relevant than a hundred thousand nightmares.)

  “Have you prepared yourself …?” Jorge asks, and adds, “It’s natural. Don’t let it get you down. It’s the cycle of life.”

  As if I was in any condition for clichés. I remember a prophetic line by Juan Carlos Bautista: “Heads will rain down on Mexico.” Was he talking about the hostages executed in La Marquesa in 2008? Or Ron Mueck’s self-portrait? Was he talking about my mamá’s leukemia …? Heads will rain down on Mexico. What planet does this Japanese guy who shares my surname live on? Of course I’m prepared; did the Family leave me any other choice?

  Every household runs aground at the feet of a domestic myth. It can be anything: educational excellence or a passion for soccer. I grew up in the shadow of a turn of the screw: the pretense that mine really was a family.

  Jorge left home when I was thirteen. I have no memory of him before I was three. (It was Chesterton who said that the story of his birth had been handed down to him through oral tradition, and so could be wrong.) That leaves us a margin of ten shared years. However, Mamá wasn’t content to flit from place to place: usually one of her children (very often me; years later, my younger sister) was chosen to accompany her on her railroad orgies. Meanwhile, the others were left with family members and/or in the homes of “reliable women”: atrocious, gruff grannies who taught us to love Charles Dickens in Indian Territory. There was a Señora Amparo from Monterrey who recommended I start getting used to things because when I grew up I was going to be a faggot. She said this to rid herself, in advance, of her sense of guilt for the intrepid attempts her eldest son made to rape me. In Querétaro, there was a Doña Duve who, hoping to hang on to Saíd for good (being the best looking and youngest, he was her pet), held him hostage for four days in an attic, eating and sleeping on the floor, with one ankle shackled to a rail. Another woman, in Monclova, forced us to stop using our childhood nicknames (Coco, Cachito, Pumita) on pain of being caned on the buttocks.

  I’m sure that such mistreatment wasn’t simple cruelty. In part, it resulted from the frustration of weeks going by without Mamá managing to pay our keep.

  So I’d lived under the same roof as Jorge—this Nippon guy who embodies the most sacred paternal figure I’ll ever know—for scarcely seven years, plus the odd summer holiday. He’s over forty now. I’m nearly thirty-eight. And I’m supposed to write him a letter that begins: “Sadly, the diagnosis has been confirmed: Lupita has leukemia. I am sorry to be the bearer of this news without also being able to give you a hug.”

  (With Jorge, I always call her Lupita. Not to distance myself from her: to distance myself from him. How do you tell an almost unknown foreigner that his mother, your mother, is dying …?)

  After the initial circumlocution, I go on to ask him for money. I finish the letter and send it by e-mail. I shut down my laptop, leave the hospital with Mónica. We have an hour and a half to eat. We go to a Vips restaurant.

  “Could you tell me which dish takes the least time to prepare?” she asks.

  “Of course, señorita. We’re at your service. What can I get you?”

  “The quickest dish on the menu, please.”

  “Well … I’d suggest the grilled chicken breast. Or the marinated beefsteak with tortilla chips. We have several kinds of hamburgers, all very tasty. Or do you want a light meal? We have a lite menu. And there’s the mole assortment, four different var … No …? Of course, señorita. But while you’re waiting, can I offer you a starter? How about a spring roll? Would you like to order your dessert …?”

  The food takes forever to arrive. Two waitresses, an underling, and the baby-faced assistant manager come to our table and offer us intoxicating apologies. Can you imagine such a scene in Paris or La Habana …? Of course not. Which just goes to show, among other things, that the Mexican Revolution was a fiasco: the main aim of true revolutions is to turn waiters into bad-mannered despots.

  By the time the dishes finally appear on the table, both Mo and I are in a terrible mood. We don’t enjoy the food. We rush to finish. While I’m paying the bill, the woman at the cash register is over-the-top polite and asks us, if it isn’t too much trouble, to fill out a questionnaire, the only objective of which is to improve every day on the service the company offers, always striving, of course, for excellence. She points to two metal plaques on the wall: “Mission” and “Vision.” Once again the omni
-incompetent, ostentatious Mexican-style ISO 9000 quality-control system greeting us with an obscene eulogy to Carlos Slim, freshly washed in the dysfunctional bathrooms of fifty million undernourished people. The whole of Mexico is the territory of the cruel.

  Suddenly, I see myself clearly: I’m just the same. This restaurant service is a metaphor for the letter I’ve just written to my Japanese brother. I’m a waiter in a country of waiters. Some of my fellow workers have appeared in Forbes Magazine, while others are content to wear a tricolor sash on their chest. It makes no difference: here, all of us waiters uphold the civil code of spitting in your soup. First we waste your time with our proverbial courtesy; then we waste it with criminal stupidity.

  Welcome to the Sweet Nation.

  Tip, please.

  Mamá Calavera

  Once, on the Day of the Dead, I dreamed my mother was the skeletal figure of the calaca. We’d crossed half of Michoacán State: Uruapan, Playa Azul, Nueva Italia, Venustiano Carranza, Santa Clara, Paracho … We’d stayed in phantasmal hotels. In the uncomfortable cabin of a truck. In semiderelict houses with only an oil lamp for illumination. It wasn’t tourism, it wasn’t altruism; we were part of the fanatical fan club that followed in the wake of a glorious team in danger of extinction: the Balsas Larks. A soccer club that counted among its ranks Garras, Chaparro Mel, Eldeazul, Torre Mijares, and El Cyclón. Barmen and waiters from the brothel in the city of Lázaro Cárdenas where my mother earned her living.

  Someone told us—this was years before the engineer Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas assumed the state governorship for the PRI and ruined my childhood with the implementation of a bilious prohibition law—business was booming in that city thanks to the new highway and the peak in demand for steel, the benefits of which were pouring down on the Truchas steelworks. Hundreds of workmen, recently uprooted from the mountains of Guerrero and Oaxaca, were paying nervous visits, at all hours of the day and night, to the whorehouses: disillusioned former guerrillas, and army deserters, and fugitives from the copra or poppy harvests, who one fine day found themselves, for the first time, in possession of low-risk jobs, decent wages, and fat year-end bonuses.

  Mamá and I moved from Querétaro to Lázaro Cárdenas to check it out, provisionally leaving my siblings in the care of Señora Duve. As we didn’t have enough to pay someone to care for me, or to take a house, Mamá persuaded the manager of the brothel to let me secretly live in the small room she rented at the back of the premises. To assuage this man’s conscience, she had to promise—as if the place were not a whorehouse, but a pension for young ladies—she would never allow men in there.

  My mother kept office hours: she worked five eight-hour shifts a week. From ten at night to six in the morning. From Tuesday night to dawn on Sunday. She never earned much. Her income came from ticketing dances and drinks. She always boasted of being a prostitute with a cast-iron code, and her principal rule consisted of not having intercourse in exchange for money (“I dance,” she would say when, well and truly plastered, she’d ask our forgiveness; “I dance” and, as if we were babies incapable of understanding her words, she’d mime the movement of her hips, one hand on her belly and the other in the air, near her ear). Nowadays, I think it was an inopportune, even impractical, rule. I suppose, however, more than an exercise of morality and good manners, what underlay her ethic was the leftovers of militant unionism inherited from my grandfather Marcelino, who was active in the railways movement at the end of the fifties.

  Mamá would return to our room at dawn. Generally drunk. She’d hug me close to her chest and try to sleep for a few hours. I’d wait until I heard her snoring to slip from between her long-nailed hands, through the metal door, trying to keep it from squeaking, then dodge a scolding from the caretaker and the presence of the other shrill, heavily made-up women whose shouts and obscenities could be heard behind the series of doors leading into the fornication rooms: you frigging evil whore, balls-loving nympho born of a soft prick, the way you are you cocksucker yer only fit for washing a pussy. I’d walk along the narrow corridor running down one side of the building to the street, or rather to the vacant lot surrounded by a chain-link fence next to the brothel. A parking lot (empty of cars at that hour of the day) the barmen and waiters—black shadows under their eyes and bathed in sweat—would daily use as an improvised virtuous soccer pitch.

  At first none of them were keen to have me there as a spectator. The moment they spotted me, the players would cease hostilities to inform the manager the bastard kid of the Mary—as the women were known—was spying on them again. The manager would wake Mamá and threaten to kick us out. Mamá would take me back to the room, refusing to allow herself to cry, and no doubt feeling like slapping me. All she’d say was:

  “Child, please be good, look after me while I’m asleep. Can’t you see I’m alone …?”

  I didn’t obey her.

  Eventually, since I never interrupted the play (a soccer match with time-outs is an Asian scroll reduced to a Hallmark card), the players resigned themselves to having me as an audience. To cover up my illicit presence, the manager would end up standing beside me to watch the game. Later, some women—my mother among them—would appear now and again around the chain-link fence. It wasn’t long before the cheering-on, betting, and early-morning beers began.

  One day Chaparro Mel went to see the manager with a communal petition:

  “We’re ready, boss. We’ve done the practice, and now we want you to sponsor our application for the municipal league.”

  And so the Zombie Larks were born (Zombie was the alias of the establishment). In his role as patriarch, the manager forked out for the enrollment fee, the photos of their credentials, and a beautiful cherry-red and white uniform that came apart at the seams every game. El Ciclón sought out my mother one afternoon and explained (from the corridor, of course) that, as I was always hanging around, and was a supporter, he’d put my name forward as the team mascot. It was a pretext for getting off with her. But I didn’t care: I only remember the feverish excitement of standing in front of the mirror dressed in my first soccer uniform.

  The Larks won the municipal championship. They had what it took to steamroll their way through: strict daily practice at an early hour, an unhealthy determination to shine at something, an almost total ban on drinking in the evenings, disciplined rage, the ability to lay traps as a team … They also, of course, had the most provocative, disconcerting fan base in the competition.

  Flush with success, they exercised their right as champions (a right the local authorities attempted to retract by all possible means, offended by the idea that Lázaro Cárdenas would play against the rest of Michoacán State represented by a bunch of pickpockets, bouncers, and pimps) to enlist in the state league. And to make matters even worse, they changed their name to the Balsas Larks.

  “Well, now you don’t just represent a humble bordello,” declaimed the manager during an elegant ceremony around the dive’s bar, “but also the Balsas itself, the wide river that runs on one flank of our beloved city, alongside the largest and most prosperous steelworks in Mexico.”

  As so often happens in this country, after the best speeches of the president of the day, it was all downhill from there.

  The Larks belatedly discovered that to excel at the state level you need serious patronage: money. They had to travel twice a month to away games, which meant missing work and, therefore, lost tips. They didn’t always have to go far, but Michoacán is a big state: trips could take four or five hours. Food had to be bought and the gas and overnight accommodation paid for. It was no easy task to find lodgings for thirteen or fourteen people in some of the smaller towns. And then there were always the distrustful ranchers prepared to pull out their Magnums first and ask questions later if anyone accidentally trespassed into the clandestine areas of their property.

  Another complication had to do with transportation logistics. When they lost a match, mutual recriminations meant certain players had to be kept apart at
all costs on the way back. If they won, at least one large, easily handled vehicle with a good engine was a must since the local fans, accustomed to the “Law of the Sierra,” didn’t do things by half … Gobs of spit, water bombs, farts, and thrown bottles were never in short supply. And one spectator would inevitably feel the urge to get out his machete and feign a swipe at our center forward.

  At local tournaments, things were even worse. Without the support of the municipal league or any other of the city’s teams (after all, they had humiliated bank executives, blast furnace operators, and graduates of the Monterrey Tech on the field), the Larks often had no home field. On one occasion they even went so far as to improvise a one-off match in the parking lot where they trained, using buckets to mark the goalposts. The state sports body fined them and adjudged the game to be lost by default.

  The cash ran out. The fans evaporated. The players gradually deserted the team. Sometimes we were a man short and had to bribe the ref not to call the game. My mother and I were their most committed supporters. She understood what the team meant for me and backed me to the hilt.

  Then the final match of the year came around. We took to the pitch in Maldemillares, a community of just a few hundred inhabitants. It was a depressing, empty shell of a game; since we knew the team had already been disqualified, it was just a matter of going through the motions of playing the final fixture on the sporting calendar. Not even I had the enthusiasm to cheer or kiss the shirt of my soiled uniform. The match ended in a 3–1 defeat. Knowing our position in the standings, the locals took pity on us: we were invited to the town fiesta.