She felt herself being lifted up. Just like me when she transported me in her arms to set me in singer pose on a chair. Only she wasn’t being held around the waist, but by her braids. Then she heard my grandmother’s voice (and this is the first thing my mother remembers about her mother, so how was her life not going to be fucked up?):
“You Damned Wretch, how often do I have to tell you not to touch other people’s things?”
And without an ounce of mercy, she was dragged out to the unpaved yard, where my child-mother thrashed around in the dirt, being kicked and slapped by what schmaltzy radio and television announcers describe as “the author of her days.”
She was tortured almost daily. Because she wanted to go to school. Because she didn’t want to go to school. Because one of her braids came loose. Because she didn’t fetch the bread properly. Because she forgot to gather firewood. Because one of her little brothers (half brothers, in fact) cried somewhere near her. Because she was wearing a short skirt, her knees were dusty, her throat sore. But, in particular, that woman nearly whacked the life out of my mother for liking boleros.
My grandmother Juana fell in love with my grandfather Pedro at the age of fourteen, when they met at a dance. He and her brother—my great-uncle Juan—used to play pieces by Rafael Hernández with a band called Son Borincano. My great-uncle played guitar, and my grandfather the tres. It wasn’t long before Pedro and Juana began having sexual relations, and my grandmother almost immediately became pregnant with my mother. Their respective families (neighbors and—until then—friends) made them get married. Apparently they lived together for a few months, until the fall, when Guadalupe was born. Grandmother Juana wasn’t ready to be a mother. She panicked and ran away from the rickety house my grandfather Pedro, twenty years old and a truck driver, had managed to provide for her. Her flight lasted only a few days. Then, repentant or compelled by the women of her family, she tried to get the baby back. My grandfather refused to hand his daughter over, so my grandmother went to the police and accused him of kidnapping. Pedro was sent to prison. Juana got my mother back. When he was released, they say my grandmother wanted to make things right; have another go at marriage. But Pedro was deeply embittered. He left the city. Left music.
Still a teenager, at the age of seventeen and burdened with a two-year-old, Juana married a man ten years older than herself, a mechanic at the Casa Redonda whose only patrimony consisted of being plain, calm, and kindhearted.
“He’s got just one flaw,” said the matchmakers. “He drinks. But don’t worry, child, you’ll make him stop.”
Of course, she didn’t.
They say that in the mideighties, on her deathbed, eaten away by a cancer of the uterus—poetic justice—Juana asked her youngest daughter-in-law to look in her chest of drawers for a photograph hidden under the plywood at the back. It was a studio portrait taken on the day of her marriage to Pedro Acosta. She died holding it to her breast.
My grandmother never stopped loving her first husband. That’s why she detested the very existence of my mother and music.
It took Guadalupe years to fully understand this. However, something inside her recognized the pattern linking the blows to the bolero. She knew by intuition that singing or even listening to the radio in the house could be dangerous. She resigned herself to the times grandfather Marcelino, bottle of mezcal in hand, tuned in to hear Los Montejo on W Radio: behind the blue of your eyes is a radiant flowering of pearls. Or she would eavesdrop on the neighbors’ sets and, being careful not to move her lips, imitate the voice of Bienvenido Granda in her head while washing the dishes.
When she was nearly eight, in 1950, Guadalupe discovered one of the most furious wonders childhood offers: escape. She used any pretext—going to the bread store, throwing the dirty water onto the sidewalk, delivering a message to the woman next door—to run and hide in the park in the center of San Luis Potosí, relatively close to where the family lived. She knew no one would come looking for her: in the first place, they wouldn’t miss her; and second, because her flight would give Juana an excellent excuse to beat her, not just with the flat of her hand, but armed with a stick, a frying pan, or anything else within reach.
But just in case, Guadalupe took the precaution of climbing one of the old trees and hiding among the foliage. She would stay there the whole day, putting up with the cold, the heat, hunger; especially hunger. She sang. Sang at the top of her lungs, as I saw her sing many times when she came home happy and drunk because she’d made good money in the brothel: in the sea is a palm tree with fronds reaching high in the sky where those who find no consolation go to cry poor little palm tree. Sometimes she sang solo, at others she accompanied the tunes on the station they tuned in to at the ice cream parlor by the gazebo in the park … She would sing until six or seven in the evening, when the sun went down. Then (she tells me, she tells me almost everything) she’d begin to feel a web of cramps knotting the soles of her feet. The sensation would creep to her ankles, up her calves, and, little by little, as the light dimmed, the web of cramps moved through her whole body until it became a thick, whitish, elastic lump in her throat. When she was convinced that lump was about to choke her, she could finally manage to cry. To spit the whole web out. She says what always used to set her off was a bolero that came on the radio of the ice cream parlor at sundown: “Sleepless from Love” by Trio Guayacán: I go back to sleep and I wake again.
When the song and the crying jag were done, calmer and surely cleansed of hate, Mamá would climb down from the tree and, on her way home, calculate—in the spirit of an abused wife or bad boxer—how to position her body to best absorb her mother’s blows.
6
We exited the plane into a duty-free area, where I amused myself window-shopping: I didn’t want to be arrested in front of the other members of our group. None of them were known to me personally, but I could identify them (and they me) by our uniform T-shirts; the organizers had given us ten each, and, according to the contract, we were supposed to wear them throughout our stay on the island, during working hours and transfers to and from the hotel.
My first evasive action was futile: all the members of the team were, just like me, looking around the well-stocked communist stores in the airport. Between the large shop windows full of rum and CDs and Cuban cigars was a tiny one with baseball merchandise: blue caps and shirts with a large I printed in Gothic; a small triangular banner with the inscription (also in Gothic lettering) “Industriales de La Habana.” I decided to buy a baseball shirt and change out of my work uniform in the restrooms. At least that way I wouldn’t embarrass my colleagues when they took me away. In the meantime, surrounded by tourists and police officers, I went on administering myself generous doses of liquid opium from the Afrin Lub bottle. Manic calm.
Two hours later, I managed to get through the identity screening, picked up my luggage, and joined the line leading to the exit. Directly in front of me was a very tall blond kid with impressive dreadlocks. We nodded to each other.
After half an hour, when the Rasta kid reached the door, the customs officer asked for his papers. He calmly studied them and eventually said:
“Come with me, please. Just a routine inspection.”
The two of them disappeared through a mirrored door beside the exit. For a moment there was a solemn silence among those of us still waiting our turn: we all knew the “routine inspection” involved sticking two fingers into the Rasta kid’s rectum to check for illegal substances.
By contrast, the guard who fell to me smiled without taking his eyes off my shirt. He hardly even glanced at my passport before returning it, saying:
“Three games to one, papi, three games to one. Blues on one side, Reds on the other. Thanks for choosing Industriales.”
7
Marisela Acosta’s ideology is—like that of any true citizen who has inhabited the twentieth century—a mystery.
She learned to read and write from my grandfather Marcelino. Then she did two year
s of elementary school but had to leave when my grandmother Juana needed her to help care for her younger brothers. What Marisela enjoyed most during her time at school were the numbers; even today she always has two or three notebooks with her, in which she records figures and arithmetical operations no one quite knows the meaning of.
At fourteen, she left home for good. She worked as a servant for a family from Guanajuato State, ultra-Catholics of the Cristero tradition. From there, I infer, came her passion for Saint Francis of Assisi (for years she never failed to make the pilgrimage to Real de Catorce on his feast day) and certain ingenuously aristocratic gestures and phrases:
“I’m an exquisite perfume wrapped in newspaper.”
From there also came her racism and, given that she was from Indian stock, her self-loathing. The fathers of her offspring were all white and/or had foreign names. As boys we were advised:
“Marry a light-skinned girl. But make sure she’s pretty. The species has to be improved.”
She never lost contact with her stepfather; they were very fond of each other.
Marcelino Chávez took part in the railways movement at the end of the fifties, which makes me suspect he had a political background. It’s likely that he was the source of Mamá’s earliest Marxist ideas. What’s more, Marisela initially arrived in Acapulco in the midsixties, and lived there—if intermittently—until 1977. That period included, on the one hand, the peak of imported U.S. frivolity, Acapulco rock, LSD, mansion whorehouses like La Huerta, old-fashioned porn, the first appearance of cocaine among the tourists, mirrored balls … But it was also the era in which Utopia had a shootout with the Wild West: the weekends of super-pure ’68 teenagers, the first steps toward collective farming, the revolutionaries Lucio Cabañas and Genaro Vázquez, the Dirty War … All this was part of life in those days; but to perceive the process from a bacchanalian standpoint, as a woman, and from the tables of an Acapulco brothel, was—I like to imagine—like lapping up the cream of two worlds at once. Mamá would be making out with an ideologue of the teaching profession one night, and with the paramilitary captain who’d tortured him the next. That’s why she thinks private property is a lie invented by exploiters and corrupt governments but, also, that—more recently—demonstrating in the street like Obrador’s hoards shows a lack of respect and decorum in a country of civilized, educated people. That’s why she believes Ernesto Guevara is the supreme hero of all time, but also that young people need to be taught with a firm hand, with principles, and even with blows.
She detests drugs.
“How is it possible that you, so intelligent in your own estimation, poison yourself with This?” she asked in the midnineties, when she found out about my cocaine addiction.
In my family, it’s fine to utter any kind of curse (frigging, bastard, screw, idiot), but obscenities (prick, ass, fart, whoremonger) are prohibited. Although it’s a bit late in the day for me to offer a clear explanation of the difference between the two categories, I can easily intuit which new words belong in one hemisphere and which in the other. The universal term my siblings and I employ to substitute impolite expressions is This.
When my elder brother gave me my first talk about sex, he never mentioned pricks or penises, clitorises or vaginas: it was all This, That, The Thing Up There, and The End Bit of That. To speak about her work (unless she was tipsy or furious) Mamá would say: I do This. For her, coke (C, White Lady, Fifi, the Devil’s Dandruff, Soda, Snowflake) was This: prick, ass, fart, whoremonger. It took her a decade to forgive me.
We inherited This from an Acapulco cab driver: Praxedis Albarrán, better known as Pay. Pay was, for my mother, the nearest thing to a Pygmalion. He was about twenty years her senior and his love for her was unrequited. He presented her with her first copy of Carreño’s Manual; he taught her (to some extent) table manners; got her used to going to the cinema once a week; made her read and comment on newspaper articles. He grimaced whenever she used a word incorrectly. He was a voracious reader, and each week he brought her one of the books people were crazy about in the last century: The Third Eye, The Morning of the Magicians, Curzio Malaparte’s The Skin, In Praise of Folly, The Three Sirens, In Cold Blood … Mamá read them all, and later alternated them with books she chose herself (which eventually also became my reading material): Irma “The Tigress” Serrano’s A calzón amarrado, soft-porn novellas autographed by Toni Friedman, copies of Cosmopolitan, La casa que arde de noche by Ricardo Garibay … Pay disappeared from the scene when a vaguely refined Marisela managed to seduce an extremely handsome drug trafficker: words beat looks, but gangsters beat anything that moves.
In the midseventies, two interconnected events fixed Mamá’s ideological profile. One was (and for the record, this is not a pastiche of an episode from the life of Octavio Paz) a trip to the southeast of the country, the other, Marcelino Chávez’s death.
By that time, my grandfather had become the neighborhood drunk. He lost his job for three reasons: the shame of having renounced militancy, the bitterness of years chewing over defeat, and, naturally, an excess of alcohol. He spent his life cadging drinks at the doors of cantinas. Not a week went by when someone didn’t punch him. When Marisela heard her stepfather had taken to his bed, in the final stages of cirrhosis, she ran to his side. It was as well she did: neither my grandmother nor his biological children cared a fig about the old man’s death throes. When Marcelino finally closed his eyes, Mamá took the filthy corpse, stinking of piss, to a room in the funeral parlor, stripped and washed it. She then dressed it again in the new suit she’d bought for his stay in the tomb.
The morning after the vigil, my uncle Gilberto said he wasn’t willing to spend another night sleeping under the same roof as a whore, so my mother packed her bag and left. An “on the road” gang took her through the San Luis Potosí Huasteca to the port of Veracruz. She was drinking, she says (she tells me almost everything, with an honesty few children receive from their parents: she knows she’s close to death and I’m her only apostle, the sole evangelist of her existence), any way it came: invited, out of her own pocket, ticketing in brothels, kissing men and lesbians, whipping up a Cuban danzón, at the wheel of a dented Volkswagen, getting off with strangers without being able to remember if she’d taken the pill or not …
Until one morning, while having a little hair of the dog in the café La Parroquia, crying ceaselessly behind her dark glasses, she heard someone at the next table say, “From the port of Progreso, in the Yucatán, you can see something wonderful: the glimmer of the lights of La Habana across the sea.”
Marisela inquired as to the shortest route, and immediately left for Progreso. She arrived the following day and, in the bus terminal, asked:
“Where’s the place you can see the lights of La Habana from?”
They informed her. But one old woman warned:
“It isn’t La Habana, child. Don’t believe their stories. It’s just the cruise liners.”
Mamá didn’t listen: she’d already got it all worked out.
So, she says (I no longer know if it’s the fever or my mother speaking), she rented a small room and, as soon as it began to get dark, went to the piers farthest from the crowds and streetlights. There, in the dusk, she saw the flickering of a galaxy set in two folds of velvet. She said good-night to the valiant Fidel Castro, and sang, crying very quietly: black flowers of fate separate us without mercy …
Why is it that the lives of people who listen to boleros always sound so schmaltzy? Could it be that we only suffer the psychological predisposition to spy on those we know when they’re crying, when they’re in a mood that, in our heart of hearts, makes their presence possible: Lamento-Borincano fodder to nourish the Great Latin American (Tele)Novel(a), the signature tune of AM radio, the curse of Pedro Infante …? Could it simply be that the bolero has a better narrative texture than comic music, than tough music, and therefore—to give an example—lachrymose tragic opera, corridos, the pins of Jocasta’s dress are easier to swallow th
an, let’s say, the comedy of Les Luthiers or Lautréamont …? Or could it be an alibi? That we Latin Americans like melodrama because we are, Eurocentrically speaking, still mewling children at the breast, or impulsive adolescents? But then here in Mexico it’s said euphemistically that people who cry still “have all their milk inside them”: that is, are sexually potent …
This last point must refer to me. I prefer to imagine Mamá—drunk and sniveling—singing to the sham lights of La Habana than to see her as I do today: bald, silent, yellow, breathing with greater difficulty than a chick raffled off at a charity event. For over a week now, my mother has been, biochemically speaking, incapable of crying. The ideology of pain is the most fraudulent of all. It would be more honest to say that, since she fell ill with leukemia, my mother’s political thought can be expressed only through a microscope.
8
On arrival in La Habana, I met up with the conceptual artist Bobo Lafragua, a sort of Andy Warhol (or maybe better, a provincial Willy Fadanelli) in his capacity for gathering around him a court of groupies, half-starved disciples, and girls so poor and so deeply conditioned that they take off their clothes every time someone pronounces (even referring to a brand of beer) the word modelo. My friend Lafragua (whose work was part of the artistic kit a number of Mexican cultural institutions were bringing, free of charge, to the people of Cuba: remittances sent by a brother mortified by historical guilt) had reached the port two days before me. He already had the city figured out.
Tomb Song Page 10
