The Death of My Father the Pope

by Obed Silva

  Axcel had also been a victim of Danny’s drunken tantrum that night. When she arrived at the house, Danny, still fuming after having fought with Aarón, pulled her out from the passenger seat by the hair and began to pummel her with his fists.

  “He beat her up, too,” Aarón told me. “He dragged her out of the car by the hair and beat her in the middle of the street. Me and Chuy had to pull him off her.”

  * * *

  I’ve tried to come up with a reason for why Danny acted out in this way, and every time I go back to those moments when I’d try to get him to talk and he wouldn’t. There had to have been something behind those dreary eyes and that half-ass smile I’d mistaken for shyness that said he was suffering, that said he’d one day explode into a whirl of violence. There was, I suppose. Because knowing what I know now—about our father, and all the terror he created—I realize that it had more to do with the observation Victor Hugo makes in Les Misérables when describing Cosette’s laconic personality. When Hugo wrote the line “nothing habituates children to silence like misfortune,” he could easily have had Danny in mind. Like Cosette, who “had suffered so much that she was afraid of everything, even to speak, even to breathe,” Danny had been afraid to open his mouth lest he open his soul for more suffering at the will of our father. Danny had seen too much. Countless times he’d seen the endless tears that spilled from his mother’s eyes when they were met with the power of his father’s fists; countless times he’d seen the lumps and bruises, and the blood that dripped onto the soiled floor from the head and face attached to the curled-up body against the wall; countless times he’d seen the way a scream materializes when the Devil appears holding hell in a bottle. This had been a recurring scene in my brother’s home from the day he was born, and he’d been there to see it play out every time. Danny had continually been witness to the madness and the horror that accompanied our father when he’d come home. He knew the truth and could never bring himself to participate in a lie; he’d rather be silent than pretend that certain things hadn’t happened and were sure to happen again. For him, moments of happiness had become ephemeral. He knew that they could never last forever, and because of that he could not allow himself to fully exist in them. Our father’s will had been all he could ever count on as everlasting, and our father’s will had always been violence. Violence: the only constant—the only sure bet. And with our father gone, that sure bet was gone, too, and Danny was having trouble living without it. For once a constant is gone, we tend to replace it with another. This is what Danny was trying to do. He was trying to bring that violence back.

  * * *

  A drop of blood from my finger falls onto my father’s face and lands on his cheek just below his right eye. “Oh, shit! Sorry, viejo,” I say, laughing, to the dead man. I put my thumb to my mouth and suck on the cut. With my other hand, I rub the drop of blood from his face and, after looking over my shoulder, wipe it on the sleeve of his shirt. “Fuck it,” I whisper to him, “where you’re going, this shit ain’t gonna matter no more.” I then tap his chest with the same hand and remember the tattoo on his left breast. I undo two buttons and spread the shirt open and there they are, tattooed in crooked cursive over his quieted heart. The years have faded away much of the cheap ink, but one can still make out the names: my mother’s name, Marcela, on top, the Spanish conjunction y in the middle, and my name, Obed, on the bottom: Marcela y Obed. My father would say the tattoo had been his way of keeping us close to his heart “¡para siempre!” And every time he’d say this I’d think of the abhorrence that must’ve come over my mother’s face when he first showed it to her. He: the pathetic lover. She: the disparaged woman who could only see in him the brutal beatings he was commonly inclined to give her. A tattoo of her and her son’s names over his heart meant nothing.

  I take my thumb away from my mouth, hang it over the tattoo, and let it bleed until a couple of drops fall onto it. Then, with the index finger of my other hand, I softly dab at the two drops on his chest, blend them together like oil paints, and begin to spell out my name under the tattoo. As I do this, I quietly utter: “You were my father, and I am of your blood. I am your son. I am your son. Take it, Daddy, take your blood with you,” and I finish with these words from Dostoevsky: “Tomorrow I will bury you. I have spoken.”

  * * *

  I feel relieved when I finally leave my father and roll out of the parlor, like something big and dreadful has been done with, something like arriving at the final period in Joyce’s Ulysses, like I could finally put this fucking book away forever. Life is a beautiful thing, and this is how it eventually plays out: every horror has its end. “Bye, bye, Daddy-O!” I say to my father before finally moving away from the coffin, without placing the plexiglass back over him. “I hope life’s kinder to you on the other side, and you … are kinder to it.” A rush of joy moves through me as I make my way out the doors and through the crowd. I could be rolling out of hell it feels so good.

  The next time I’d come back into the parlor to see my father—which would be a few hours later—I’d be completely drunk, shit-faced, but happy, fully happy.

  6

  There’s still light outside, enough for me to make out people’s faces, though I hardly recognize any of them. Cokis, Danny, and Axcel are the first to meet me when I come out. They greet me with huge smiles, though Danny’s quickly turns to a clump of shyness. Cokis and Axcel hug me and ask how I feel. “Fine” is all I say. I can sense they want me to say more by the way their smiles half disappear and their eyes open up when I don’t. But I don’t care. That’s all I have. Besides, my tíos and tías and other people whom I don’t know quickly move in and surround us. Like a thief, I want to sneak away to a tight corner where I can’t be seen. I want to take a break and gently breathe in the sunset before it slips away behind the horizon. But no, such an escape is not happening. Because before I know it, I find myself again in the center of a circle of palpitating bodies lurching over my suffocating skin. The Silva scent is everywhere and there’s nothing I can do to shake it. It’s everything that I breathe. “Just be one with it,” a voice in my head says to me. “Be one with it and bask in its stench—Silvas are beautiful, too! Remember that, and love the misery as it loves you!”

  * * *

  My father had been the sixth of nine brothers and sisters, nine Silva-Sánchezes, children to the great Apolonio Silva-Díaz and Guadalupe Sánchez-Chávez, both of whom have long passed. The eldest of my father’s brothers and sisters is my tío Victorio (b. 1949); next in line is my tía María (b. 1951); after her comes my tío José-Manuel, who was born many months later the same year my tía María was born; after him comes my tío Remundo (b. 1956); then my tío Apolonio (b. 1957); then my father (b. 1961); then my tía Guadalupe (b. 1962); then my tío Rumaldo (b. 1964); and, finally, my tío Trinidad (b. 1965). Of these nine original Silva-Sanchez children, only six survive; like my father today, two have been dead for some years now. My tío Rumaldo died in 1979 (the year I was born) at the young age of fifteen; and at the age of thirty-nine, in 1990, my tío José-Manuel died, too. But while my tío Rumaldo died after having been tragically struck and run over by a car, my tío José-Manuel died of the same disease as my father: cirrhosis, or better yet, alcoholism. My tío José-Manuel was the first to go from the disease and my father the second.

  Of the six of my father’s brothers and sisters who are still around, there are only two I know well: my tía Lupe (Guadalupe) and my tío Trini (Trinidad). Unlike the rest, they are the only ones who, like my father had, call Chihuahua their home. They’ve never lived anywhere else. Both have their families there. My tía Lupe is mother to a son close to my age and has been married to the same man for many years. They have a home and small candy store in El Cerro de la Cruz only a block away from where my father’s house is. I love my tía Lupe, and I care much for her son and husband. My tía has always been good to me, a real sweetheart. She’s plump and has white skin that is soft and always looks fresh. She smiles and la
ughs a lot, too. She also loves to hug me and pinch my cheeks every time she sees me in the same way fat aunts often do to the cheeks of their nieces and nephews in Hollywood movies. “¡Que chulo, mijo!” she says to me with a big smile on her moon face. “You are so handsome.” I rejoice in her sentiments. But what makes my tía Lupe stand out from the rest of the Silvas is that she doesn’t drink, at least not to the point of getting drunk. She’ll have the occasional beer at the occasional party, but nothing more.

  My tío Trini, however, is more like the rest of the Silva siblings.

  “Let’s go visit your tío Trini at his new home,” my father would say to me when I was a kid on account that my tío Trini never lived in the same place for long. We’d always have to go for a ride in one of the many beat-up cars my father had owned throughout his life, or on one of Chihuahua’s ever-polluting and sardine-packed piñata buses with the long snouts, rides that, though bumpy and long, I enjoyed because I was always right next to my father. Whether standing or sitting on the plastic seats, I was always holding on tightly to one of my father’s legs, and he always had an arm wrapped around my shoulder, and every time the bus jerked when taking off he’d tighten his arm around me and I’d pinch hard on his pants. Once the bus caught rhythm and the jerking stopped, it was all good. I’d look up at my father, and he’d look down and smile, and I’d smile back, and then I’d look around at the people on the bus with all their belongings and worries. I was part of them, and they were part of me. We were all of the same class that needed this type of public transportation: undoubtedly bad for the lungs, but good for the spirit—because no matter how bad anybody had it, or where one might have been going, we were all in this loud and lurching beast together, moving through this small but dense city with our eyes wide open, taking all of it in. There were always many stops from El Cerro de la Cruz to El Centro. Buses in Chihuahua don’t travel like the ones in the States. Where, in the States, buses tend to follow a linear trajectory, like a boulevard or main highway, in Chihuahua the buses travel in and out of almost every barrio, squeezing themselves through tight streets and stretching themselves around sharp corners like serpents. All the while, the passengers grip the ends of their seats lest they slide off, or hold on tightly to the rails along the ceiling if they’re standing. And on Chihuahua buses there is no maximum capacity—the drivers keep letting people on even when they’re being squeezed out the windows and doors. Often there are two or three men or boys hanging out of the open back door, fully exposed to the elements and balancing themselves on one foot on the door’s step. I admired these desperate riders, and would watch them closely through the small gaps between the standing bodies, waiting for one of them to meet a tragic end. And as the bus moved down the road or made long turns they would jeer and shout and howl like wolves, with the thick air and smoke from the other cars and buses crashing hard against their dirty faces. I wanted to be like them, but I didn’t really because I was too young to be so brave, too young to be so independent and wild and away from my father. But I enjoyed these bus rides nonetheless, even if I wasn’t one of the ones hanging madly out of the bus, because Chihuahua meant so much to me, and it always had something for my eyes, which became a cinema screen of fleeting moments. Chihuahua is not famous for its architecture, by any means. There is nothing impressive about its downtown buildings. Most are similar in design: square and straight up. But it’s not the buildings that matter, it’s the people, the life that is always happening, just like in every other city of the world at every instant of time. Chihuahua moves, even if slowly. And it shines, even if roughly. And it always shone in my eyes. From La Vialidad to La 20 de Noviembre to La Libertad in El Centro. I’d be hypnotized by everything and everyone there was to see: from the people of all shapes and sizes, all more Mexican than I could ever imagine, walking down sidewalks along the rows of low-ceiling adobe houses and the big building structures closer to downtown. And the cerros were never too far away; you could see them from every direction lining the desert-valley town, from El Cerro Coronel to El Cerro Grande and every cerro in between. They, with the dense clouds, were always in the background of every barrio and every colonia we passed. It wasn’t until we’d make it into El Centro, swallowed up by the high-rise buildings, that they’d all of a sudden disappear from my eyes. In just one turn they’d be gone, and we’d be in the belly of the city, where everything seemed to move fast, too fast for the young boy who held on for dear life to his all-knowing and protector father, who, once the bus had come to a stop, would say, “We’re here, hijo,” and take him by the hand and walk him off the bus and pull him through the masses of people doing what people do in big cities: speed up dying. And soon we’d be at my tío Trini’s front doorstep.

  * * *

  My tío Trini also worked with my father as a yesero. Before Danny and Aarón grew physically capable of doing it as well, it had been only my father and my tío Trini slinging the white goo. For work they were always together, and for drinking they were always together, too. They did both at the same time.

  I have to say something important here about my tío Trini. He’s been clean since the last time I was in Chihuahua in 2007. It was then that he got out of a detox center and started singing his praises to Jesus Christ his Lord and Savior. I know this because at the time my father was singing his praises to Jesus Christ, too, and joining my tío Trini at a local Christian home, where on certain nights of the week drug addicts and alcoholics gathered to support each other in their sobriety. Only problem, though: Every night after those meetings, when I’d pick up my father to bring him home, the first thing he’d want to do was get a beer. And though I wasn’t surprised anymore, I still had to ask: “¿Para qué güey? Why go to the meetings if you’re just going to keep drinking? Why waste your time?” And my father would say: “Well, to support your tío Trini, of course, why else?” Why else? Of course why else, my mistake, what was I thinking asking such a ridiculous question when it was obvious to see that my father, with his kind heart, was only sacrificing a bit of himself to save his brother—how naive of me. And now the Good Samaritan is dead while my tío Trini’s still singing his tunes to Jesus Christ his Lord and Savior.

  So here are my tío Trini and my tía Lupe alongside each other, welcoming me with sweet words and big hugs, the first two to step forward from the circle and embrace their little dark-skinned nephew from el otro lado.

  * * *

  My tío Polo, on the other hand, who is also in the circle and steps forward to embrace me after my tía Lupe and my tío Trini step aside, looks like a man who still drinks heavily on a daily basis and also indulges in other mind-altering substances. He has the tired and weary face of the alcoholic and the fiendish look of the junkie. And sadly, in this, he reminds me of my father. Looks just like him the way he’s standing before me in his white tank top and dusty blue jeans staring at me with his sunken yellow eyes and breathing his dragon breath onto me. He’s no slice of heaven, no pretty cloud.

  “Yo soy tu tío Polo,” he says, extending his arms out to hug me. “Did you know about me?”

  I welcome the hug, but because I hadn’t been expecting him to ask me this question, I stammer in my response: “Ah … sí, sí … oh … of course.” Truth is though, I knew short of nothing about the guy. Only thing I knew about my tío Polo at the time was that he and his son had both been shot at one night a few years back while standing outside of their home in Albuquerque, New Mexico. His son had been hit in the stomach and was in serious condition for a while. My sister Cecilia had called me about it when it happened. I remember growing curious about my tío Polo and wanting to learn more about who he was after that. Must be a crazy motherfucker doing crazy shit if people are looking to kill him, I thought at the time. Shit, must be a little like me. I’d wanted to meet him ever since. And now, here he is in front of me, standing as a man who, aside from being slightly taller, resembles my father in almost every unfortunate way, including in the fact that he too is missing his two up
per front teeth. “¡Que loco!” I say to myself when he smiles and I notice the hole in his mouth. “I hope that shit ain’t genetic.” And putting my index and middle fingers up to my own two upper front teeth, I pray to God for them, for Him to keep them safe and forever where they belong—in my mouth.

  My tía María and my tío Victorio are the next of my father’s siblings that I have never met to greet me now. Both, like my tío Polo, resemble my father in many ways. My tío Victorio, I note the moment I see him, is like an aged version of my father, what he might have looked like had he lived another ten or more years, from the stocky frame of his body to every protruding bone on his face. Surprisingly, though, unlike my father and my tío Polo, my tío Victorio has all of his teeth. There’s hope after all, I think when I peer into his mouth. I search for signs of alcoholism and drug use on him, too, but I can’t find any. The man speaks clearly and appears to be in considerably good health. He gives me a hug and tells me, as the others had, that he’s glad to see me after so many years, and that he’s happy I’ve come to say goodbye to my father. As he speaks I notice his hands and fingers; they’re thick and heavily scarred. I engrave the image of them in my mind and recall it years later, in early 2017, while speaking to his son Víctor-Manuel over the phone. He’s telling me that his father had been a badass when he was younger, that the scars on his hands and fingers are the result of cracking human skulls with them. “Era chingón para pelear mi jefe,” Víctor-Manuel says proudly. “Le gustaban los putasos.” According to him, my tío Victorio had never lost a fight in his life, and he’d been in many, too many to count. Though I’m surprised by the undefeated element of it all, I’m not surprised about the violence. Violence is in our blood. And just as this thought crosses my mind, Víctor-Manuel says, “I guess that’s where I got it from. I used to fight a lot too when I was younger.” “Really?” I say. “Yes,” he continues. “Where do you think I got this scar on my face, the big one across my forehead? Some dude hit me with a two-by-four because he couldn’t beat me with his fists. I was on the verge of killing him.” And then he laughs loudly, and I follow suit. Víctor-Manuel has a gift for telling stories and for making every one of them, no matter how sad or tragic, funny. We’re having this conversation because my tío Victorio is in a convalescent home and wants Víctor-Manuel to take him out of it and back to Chihuahua. At this time, my tío Victorio is in Belen, New Mexico, Víctor-Manuel is in Las Vegas, Nevada, and I’m in Buena Park, California. My tío had had a stroke and was now recovering as best he could, but because he didn’t like the young nurses cleaning his shit, he wanted to be taken to Chihuahua where family could care for him and not young nurses, which Víctor-Manuel is telling me over the phone is what he’d want one day: to have a young white nurse wipe his ass and feed him in bed. He laughs every time he brings this up. I laugh, too, especially since I already know what it’s like to have a young white nurse wipe your ass and feed you in bed; it’s not all it’s cracked up to be. Takes away all your dignity and pride, so I can see where my tío Victorio is coming from. When I ask what may have caused my tío Victorio to have a stroke, he tells me that it most likely was a result of his drinking. “Really?” I say. “I didn’t think my tío drank.”