Tomb Song

by Julián Herbert

  It was November 2, the Day of the Dead. Despite the fact that it was in Michoacán, the festivity didn’t resemble any of those braggadocio, schizofolkloric affairs you’re saddled with in state schools: no mortuary altars, candles, plates of tamales, or little salt crucifixes. Instead of all that, it was children with Chicano accents trick-or-treating between the maize fields and the stables, old women saying the rosary with their faces covered with black rebozos and Avon cosmetics, and men in Ramblers smoking reefer or drinking cane sugar liquor to the sound of Led Zeppelin or Los Cadetes de Linares …

  I don’t remember having seen the sugar skulls with names on their foreheads before, but they really were amazing. El Ciclón, creep that he was, brought my mother one that said “Mary.” I got jealous. As a consolation, Mamá treated me to one of the sugar candies. Spurred on by a little rage and a little more greed, I popped the whole thing in my mouth and pulverized it with two chomps. It tasted awful. Like an injection. I mean: like the smell of alcohol on the gauze they used to wipe across my buttocks before vaccinations.

  We returned to Lázaro that night, flopped in the back of a pickup. Some of the Larks were quietly singing a song by Rigo Tovar: wherever you’ve gone, woman, you won’t find another love like this.

  The murmur of their voices lulled me to sleep.

  I dreamed I was one of them. I dreamed my mother kissed me on the lips. She smoothed my hair and said, “Go to sleep now.” She caressed me with her slender hands, with the tips of her long dark-purple nails, with her phosphorus-white hands, her hands that drew sparks from the darkness. I ran my fingers up her arm until I reached her shoulder, her neck, her face: all soft, all pale, all bone. Mamá was a hard, white calavera, smelling of vaccinations. A Halloween ghost, a sugar skeleton with hair.

  I woke with a start, crying among the singers. Mamá wanted to give me a hug, but even with my eyes open, I could still see the face of death in her face. I tried to pull away from her and jump out of the pickup. Marisela clasped both arms around me and pressed me to her chest. She calmed me. She reminded me who she was. Repeated it several times:

  “It’s me, Cachito. I’m your mommy.”

  Alerted by the other passengers, the driver braked. We stopped for a while at a bend in the road, and I gradually managed to calm down. I asked Marisela to let me see her face clearly, to check she wasn’t the skeletal figure of La Huesuda. We were in the shadows, so one of the players took out his lighter and lit up her face with the flame.

  “See?” she said in a calming voice. “It’s me. Same as usual: with my flesh, and my ears, and my hair.”

  I gave a sigh of relief and hugged her waist. We restarted our journey; the travelers began to sing again. This time it was a song by Camilo Sesto: living is dying of love, from love my soul is wounded.

  That was the last match the Balsas Larks ever played.

  When we got back to the Zombie, Mamá pulled back the covers of the bed, bathed and cradled me. Then she took a shower and began to put on her makeup to go to work, if only for a short while. I spied on her, my eyes half closed, pretending to be asleep. I wondered if her skin might not be just one more layer of paint, powder, cream, and the other unguents she was now applying to her eyelids, cheeks, and lips. Just like in The Invaders, the TV show in which aliens disguise themselves as earthlings: “David Vincent has seen them …” I wondered if my mother, under all those products, might not be death herself: the calavera of my dreams.

  Mamá Retórica

  What I’m writing is a work of suspense. Not in its technique: in its poetics. Not for you, but for me. What will become of these pages if my mother doesn’t die?

  I’ve endeavored to draw a freehand portrait of my leukemic mother. A portrait garnished with childhood reminiscence, biographical detail, and the occasional dash of fiction. It’s a portrait (a portrayal) cognizant of her medical situation, without completely succumbing to the usual banalities: doctors and tears, the boundless fortitude of the patient, human solidarity, the purification of the mind through pain … No, thanks. Waiter: please take away these Patch Adams leftovers.

  I’m going both with and against the grain of a lesson from Oscar Wilde: beauty is more important than existence. Beauty is real life.

  In contrast to Wilde, who believed that real-life testimonies are inane, and that to transcend this inanity we must embellish our perception of the real by filling our surroundings with sublime objects, I find ornamentation (even the sublime runs the risk of becoming an ornament) a form of nouveauricheism, of obscenity. Transforming a collection of anecdotes into structure, on the other hand, offers the challenge of conquering a certain level of beauty: achieving a rhythm despite the soundproofed vulgarity that is life. Wilde thought writing autobiographically diminished the aesthetic experience. I don’t agree: only the proximity and impurity of the two zones can produce meaning, and that is precisely what The Ballad of Reading Gaol—the only work signed with the immortal C.3.3.—is about. To formalize in syntax what happens to oneself (or rather, what one thinks happens) in the light of a neighboring body is (can become) something more than narcissism or psychotherapy: an art of the fugue. For this reason, De Profundis continues to be a beautiful, atypical, and difficult text. Of course, I’m not even the nail of Oscar Wilde’s little finger. Yet I possess a very slight pragmatic advantage over him (in addition, naturally, to having relative freedom of movement, my forced labor is mental, and I use a computer; I’m a dandy): I do not “blame myself terribly” for not being able to write. Quite the contrary: even if the addict’s love I feel for my mother were eventually to destroy my career (or anything else it might destroy), it will still be a love encoded in words. The hospital lechery that kidnaps and debases my energy and attention is, to some extent, sexually dead time. Anima sola. Time in which, in addition to a black hole, excellent working schedules come into being. My bankruptcy, my gaol, and my encyclical are one and the same impulse.

  I write in order to transform the perceptible. I write to give voice to suffering. But I also write to make this hospital chair less uncomfortable and ordinary. To be a man capable of being inhabited (if only by ghosts) and, therefore, of being passed through: someone useful to Mamá. So long as I have the will, I can go out, negotiate friendships, ask for plain speech, buy things at the drugstore, and carefully count the change. So long as I can type, I can give form to what I don’t know and, in that way, be more human. Because I write to return to her body: I write to return to the language that birthed me.

  I want to learn to watch her die. Not here: in an ink-black reflection: like Perseus glimpsing, on the surface of his mirror, the flection cutting off the head of Medusa.

  And if Mamá doesn’t die? Will so many sleepless hours at her bedside, the rigorous exercise of memory, not a little imagination, a certain grammatical decorum all be worth the effort? Will this Word file be worth the effort if my mother survives leukemia …? Just asking that question makes me the worst of whores.

  Mamá would be proud to know it, since she gave me my first, soundest lessons in style. She taught me, for instance, that a work of fiction is honest only when it maintains its logic in the materiality of discourse: Mamá, lying to the neighbors about her origins and profession with an exquisite vocabulary, impossible to compare with that of the other women in the barrio, impossible to imagine in the voice of a prostitute who completed only two years of elementary school. During my teenage years, she made me read Carreño’s manual on urbanity and good manners and, immediately afterward, The Executioner’s Song. In the latter, she’d underlined a passage describing a convict whose curious talent consisted of bending his neck and head forward over his torso with great agility to suck his own cock.

  She permitted me the intuition that profound feelings don’t allow for strict distinctions between sublime and banal foundations, and that the uneasy condition of beauty would be always cynically taken in usufruct by the dilettantes and bureaucrats of pleasure: it’s easy to manipulate middle-class peopl
e with a smattering of learning by the use of a couple of famished iambs, but, in contrast, we are all ashamed of ignorance, that heartrending dark night of language. Once, when I was walking along the Coyuca Sand Bar near Acapulco, she squeezed my hand so tightly it was painful, and crooned commonplaces made popular by the then-fashionable singer Lorenzo Santamaría: so you never forget me, not even for a moment, and we live together in memories, so you never forget me. Then, crying, she stopped, knelt beside me, and said:

  “You and I both know that song isn’t going to get played on the radio forever.”

  A few weeks before Mamá fell ill, Heriberto Yépez wrote to me from Tijuana to tell me he’d met some of the famous L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets during a trip to Chicago and New York.

  The Language poets seem to me very intelligent, but 90 percent of the time they leave me cold. Meeting them in the flesh, I realized what was happening: they’re typical intelligent gringos, but soulless. One day, Bruce Andrews, perhaps the most important of them, said, like he was asking for a glass of water, “I don’t fuckin’ care about spirituality.” Hey, I want to go on believing he said that because he’d had three beers. I can’t conceive of a poet without a spiritual vein. Without spirituality, there’s no poetry.

  I was on the verge of answering: of course. Because at that moment it seemed to me beyond question. But later, the leukemia came along, with its bottles of chemicals and its manual of demented exercises. Now I’m in the dark at my mother’s bedside, it’s night again, and the auditory blip of the hospital sometimes acts like a lie detector. Guadalupe “Charles” lies hooked up to the infusion pump of her sixth round of chemotherapy. Her blood pressure is low. Her gums are sore. She hasn’t vomited, but she’s been constipated for five days. The doctor prescribed Metamucil and lots of water, so Guadalupe’s drinking six pints a day. She still isn’t shitting, but she has to piss every twenty minutes. As she’s hooked up to the black mask—my mother’s nickname for the double entrance chemo catheter—I have to fetch the bedpan and place it under her buttocks, remove it when the sound stops, wipe her pussy with a Kleenex, and then pour the piss into the toilet bowl. A while ago, she wet the bed, and I had to call two ward auxiliaries to change the sheets. My antiseptic routine represents a more or less arduous task that—added to the coming and going of the doctors and nurses, the shift changes, the mealtimes, and the paying of bills and prescriptions—interrupts my writing. Could this be spirituality: being able to go from writing this sentence to undertaking my daily responsibilities without any silent space of perception intervening between the two? Could it be a profound horror of the void that makes me solicitous when it comes to cultivating excretions? If not, is it my blustering certainty that true redemption consists of (finally) looking the excrement in the eye just as I’m doing now: sitting comfortably in an armchair, without a god, without shoes? Is it a more subtle, mocking demon: this temptation or itch to repeat three times, à la Beetlejuice, without quite believing them, the words of Bruce Andrews: “I don’t fuckin’ care about spirituality / I don’t fuckin’ care …”?

  And if Mamá gets better?

  The day after tomorrow, they’re going to hit her with the seventh round of chemicals. They’re going to put more blood in and a new load of platelets. Then she’ll be under observation for ten to fourteen days, which will include taking a new bone marrow sample (I can already hear the screams). And then maybe she’ll be ready to go home.

  When the possibility that she might recover occurs to me, my breathing becomes uneven; I stop being able to write with any ease. I have a material vision of what this is: a text. A structure. A structure, I should add, into which I’ve breathed a certain tragic air.

  And if Mamá doesn’t die? Will it be fair to you, reader (as nineteenth-century egomaniacs called this vein of anguish), if I lead you along false trails through a piece of writing with no daggers: a plasma discourse …? Remember I’m a whore: I have a grant, the Mexican government pays me month after month to write a book. But just how can I progress with this task if the lyrical leukemia of my main character is brought to its knees by a science I lack …?

  This thing I write is a work of suspense. Not in its poetics; through its technique. Not for me, but for you.

  Mamá Madrastra

  Dear, sweet, good, human, social …

  Eros Alesi

  That at thirty-three, the age when Christ died, I formed a rock band and called it Madrastras, the Stepmothers. That—and I’ve never explained this before—I did so to mock my mother, the cadger, the tyrant, the abused sluttish daughter of a bitch I secretly called my stepmother because I was a princess and she was a meddlesome witch ruining my life—the best, the most ordinary—stealing a gold chain from my second wife, or telling me the correct way—her way—to change my first baby’s diapers.

  That she was always knocking at my door like God in a sonnet by Félix Lope de Vega y Carpio to remind me I’m half-caste trash, that all those diplomas and newspaper clippings singing my praises are nothing, that I sneaked into the middle class by the service entrance with holes in my sweater. That she’d call to me from the street. That I’d creep silently to my bedroom, close the door, snort one two eight lines of cocaine and she’d be down there shouting open up son and I know you’re there I know you’re in a real bad way I’m worried I’m sitting here without a cent to my name I haven’t eaten all day I’m sick open up why are you like this why did you change into a mad dog and then another howl open up son please and another line for me.

  That I said to myself: we’ll open the door tomorrow, only to answer the same the next day.

  That I stopped seeing her for years because her mere presence made me wretched. That a voice repeated in my head: it’s her fault you’re white trash. That she again mocked: but you’re not white, you’re a barefoot Indian a darkskin with a foreign name a biological joke a dirty mestizo and yes, yes: a piece of trash. That I prevented her from seeing my children so she wouldn’t infect them. That for fear of infecting them (and because I’m not what they call a good person) I walked out on them. That I enjoyed life had orgasms more beautiful than an opium high. That I drank swallowed snorted smoked slept with ingenuous women sordid oral anal iconic drunken agile weak mental women true artists frigid passionate women companions in arms bastards of the House of Bourbon without ridding myself of this piercing in the limbo of my ear called two children contaminated by me. That I’m no longer a princess I’m a papá padrastro a stone in the shoe of their ruined adolescence.

  That one night I told her she was fucking up my life. That she asked me for money. That she’d suffer days of depression about her lost beauty: slouched in an armchair wasting away at the expense of my risible salary in front of awful Mexican movies from the seventies on a freeview channel. That she blamed me for blaming her for everything. That she said if you’re going to go just do it you great son of a whore but you’re no longer my son for me you’re just a mad dog. That I hated her from September 1992 to December 1999. That during those years I religiously set aside a moment for hating her every day with the same devotion others employ in saying the rosary. That I hated her again a few times in the following decade but unsystematically just out of habit: without a fixed timetable. That I’ve always loved her with the unbroken light of the morning she taught me to write my name.

  That once when I was a kid someone attacked me in the street and Mamá took me to the police station to make a complaint but the blow hadn’t left a trace. That to exaggerate the injury and ensure the perpetrator was punished she gave me a second kick on the ankle.

  Mamá Leucemia

  She phoned us early one Saturday. An exhibition of Mónica’s artwork was about to open in Aguascalientes, so we were busy wrapping paintings and packing our bags.

  She spoke to my wife for a while. Then to me. She mentioned her granddaughters, complained about the trucks passing by her door “making an infernal racket,” criticized Paty Chapoy’s Buddhism, praised Barack Obama … Her tone on
the other end of the line was all wrong. She sounded like a little old woman.

  “I need something,” she said before hanging up. “I need you to buy me a walker. I’m so tired.”

  I said I would, and hung up.

  Mónica thought it could be something serious.

  “It’s her way of blackmailing me for not having been to see her,” I replied.

  We stop by her house one night before taking to the road.

  I don’t like her house. The front is painted royal blue and has round windows with white frames. There are only about five feet between the roof and the turn in the stair leading to the second floor. Almost none of the electrical switches work: the light-bulbs are connected by frayed wires to sockets hidden behind a picture or an opening in the wall or a pile of old clothes, supposedly for sale. All the rooms are full of clutter: rickety chairs in eternal hope of repair; Frankenstein bedside tables assembled from pieces of other people’s cast-off furniture found in the trash; magazines about medicine, or pseudoscientific enigmas from the nineties, with the damp stains of at least four rainy seasons; broken sewing machines; broken domestic appliances; fragments of Fisher-Price, Lili Ledy, and Mattel toys; schmaltzy phrases printed on shellac or colored and/or moldy acrylic; dishes, vases, pots, mainly plastic.

  Opposite the front door are two large mirrors, a desk, a modern chrome chair, and a table covered in hairdressing equipment. This is La Estética: the business my mother and sister have been struggling to keep afloat for four years.

  She doesn’t come down to welcome us. Diana opens the door and escorts us up to Mamá’s bedroom.

  She is lying in bed with her eyes closed. The brown-paper tinge of her complexion seems diluted, sallow, as if covered by a layer of nixtamal. She tells us she’s had a bad intestinal infection. That she couldn’t work for four days, but lately has managed to go to the bathroom and is feeling better. Now, she says, she’s just weak. She hasn’t been eating properly. She promises to rectify that straightaway. She doesn’t seem low.