The Death of My Father the Pope

by Obed Silva

  * * *

  “Obed, remember when your dad used to take you fishing when you were little?” Cokis, impassionedly, says to me with tears rushing down her face. She’s clinging to my arm and resting her head heavily on my shoulder, and somewhere deep down I am crying, too.

  I remember. They were some of the happiest moments I’d ever spent with my father. There’d never been a time when I visited Chihuahua as a child that my father didn’t take me fishing. He’d mostly take me to La Presa Chihuahua (the Chihuahua Dam), which is only a short drive away from El Cerro de la Cruz. Other times he’d take me to El Granero (Chihuahua’s other dam), which is much farther away but better for fishing. It was always certain that we were going to come away with dozens of fish when we went to El Granero. But because my father had never in his life owned a reliable car, one that could get us from point A to point B and then back to point A without taking a dump somewhere in between, most often we settled for La Presa, which was always fine by me. I loved it there.

  * * *

  I’m on my knees, and I have my arm elbow-deep in mud and shit. From a few feet away I can hear my father say to me, “¡A las lombrices les gustan la caca!” He, too, is on his knees and digging deep into this paradise of mud and shit for what we’ll soon be using for fish bait. “Look!” my father says to me triumphantly. I turn to look at him without pulling my arm out of this shitty earth. He’s still on his knees but now has his arms extended in front of him holding two fists full of mud and shit with earthworms squiggling out from them like snakes sprouting out of Medusa’s head. He has a brilliant smile. From where I am, I can see his teeth sparkle from the hot sun. “Let’s see! What did you get?!” he yells to me. I pull out my arm and in my little hand I’m holding my own fistful of warm mud and shit with wiggly worms squiggling out from it. There must be dozens of them in this small fistful, all of them alive and squiggling with urgency, fighting for survival. Any other time I would be disgusted by the way the slimy critters feel slithering between my fingers, but not this time. This time I’m overjoyed, thrilled even, to see so many wiggly and slimy worms squiggling out from the ball of mud and shit I’m holding in my little hand: I’m a prince in paradise, and my father my king.

  “¡Yo también!” I yell to my father. “I got a lot of worms, too!” My father laughs and I laugh with him. We’re both on our knees in a muddy brook that receives the sewage from a small rancho a couple of kilometers away from La Presa, and we couldn’t be having a happier time together: father and son loving the stench of pig and human shit meshed with warm and wet soil on a hot summer day.

  At La Presa, my father takes out a few rusted tin cans that at one point had contained fruit juice and pokes a hole on the top side of each near the mouth. He loops fishing line through the holes and mouths and then wraps a few yards of it around the cans’ cylindrical shapes. When he’s done, he hands me one and tells me to put the sinkers on.

  “Where?” I ask him. And after snatching the can back from my hands he unrolls some of the string and begins to pinch the pellet-size lead balls onto it. They look like little silver Pac-Mans that he pinches onto various points on the string, first with his teeth and then with a pair of rusted pliers he pulls out from the back pocket of his old cutoff stonewashed denim shorts with slits on the sides.

  “Like this, hijo,” he says to me. “This is how you do it. It’s really easy.”

  Mi papá knows what he’s doing. He’s probably done this a thousand times before and now he’s teaching his son how to do it, too.

  “Esto es todo, hijo—that’s it, there’s nothing to it,” he says, speaking like an expert. “You don’t need anything else, none of those fancy fishing poles they use over there en Hontinton Beesh [translation: Huntington Beach]. No, aquí no. Here, all you need are these old cans, this string, and these tiny weights and hooks, and of course the worms. Here we fish like the poor, son—como los pobres.”

  What a picture: my father, the proud poor man standing at the feet of a fiery sun that shines behind him against a blue sky like a blazing halo that has somehow gotten separated from an angel—¡vaya!

  * * *

  “Remember, Obed, and you, Mamá, when we went to the bullfights with my dad,” Axcel chimes in. She sounds like an excited little girl about to relive a memory she experienced only moments ago. But she’s not a little girl. She’s twenty-four and the memory goes back some twenty years. I stare at her as she holds a half-empty caguama in her hand and I wonder how she’s able to recall that day.

  I was ten and Axcel four. On this day Cokis and my father took us to the bullfights at La Plaza de Toros La Esperanza near El Centro. We spent most of the day in the scorching sun, watching burly men sporting sombreros and huge silver and gold belt buckles and pointy leather boots get knocked off bulls, and bullfighters in sparkly flamboyant outfits tease and taunt the raging beasts. Ranchera music singers, clowns, dwarfs, and professional charros in traditional charro attire with elaborate gold and silver trimmings who did incredible tricks with their horses were also part of the spectacle. Axcel and I sat on each side of my father on a concrete bench, and along with the other spectators, the three of us, including Cokis, shouted at the entertainers. In unison we showed our approbation of this traditional Mexican pastime. And when we weren’t shouting and cheering, we were chomping down on baked pumpkin seeds my father had bought from an elderly Tarahumara woman outside the stadium. There was a lot to remember there, and Axcel relived every moment for us with intensity. She talked about Antonio Aguilar and his majestic and tamed horses, about how silly the clowns and dwarfs were and about how the bulls were gruesomely brought down by rope handlers and matadors. But even so, it wasn’t the time we spent inside La Plaza de Toros La Esperanza that was most memorable to her, but rather the time we spent outside of it at the placita directly across the street.

  “Do you remember the fountain?” Axcel asks me.

  “Yes, I do.”

  Chihuahua is full of placitas, small oases where Chihuahuenses go to escape the drab confinements of their homes or the dreariness of their workplaces. Here, people gather to enjoy the shade from trees, or to listen to músicos sing old ballads for a few pesos, or to get their shoes shined by men who are masters at the art of conversation, or by ten-year-old boys who’ve been hungry their entire lives, or to eat an elote on a stick or in a Styrofoam cup purchased from one of the many vendors of different types of easy-to-eat finger foods (including cold treats like raspados and paletas) that fight for customers on any given day, or to simply interact and socialize with total strangers. And at the center of every placita is a concrete water fountain. And while some are bigger than others, depending on the size of the placita itself, and while some have a large bronze statue of one of Mexico’s heroes at their center while others don’t, they all make for great bathing pools, at least to Chihuahua’s undesirable children.

  “Do you remember how we bathed in it?” Axcel says.

  “I do.”

  On this day, Axcel and I became two of Chihuahua’s undesirable children, and our father one of Chihuahua’s undesirable men. We couldn’t help it. The heat had taken its toll on us and we were looking for instant relief. And the sight of the undesirable children—those boys and girls with skin the color of dirt and eyes that reflect a dying civilization, and who sell Chiclets and newspapers on the street, or who throw themselves on top of cars to clean windshields all day to make enough to eat, and those who beg for it—joyfully splashing and sinking beneath this particular placita’s fountain’s water, inspired Axcel and me to ask our father if we could jump in the fountain, too. And while Cokis was busy being firmly against it, arguing that it didn’t look right, that the other people in the placita would talk, and that perhaps the undesirables had already filled the fountain with dirt, germs, and even urine, my father was already removing his clothes and walking toward it. “I think it’s a great idea,” he said, revealing his burly torso and chest and impressively robust but short and hairy legs.
“¡Ándale!” he added, encouraging Axcel and me to do the same. Before anything more could be said, the three of us were in the fountain splashing and submerging our heads and bodies beneath its shallow water. And while some of the people who were near shot disapproving stares our way, especially at my father, who like Axcel and me was wearing only underwear, the undesirables welcomed us with splashes and explosive laughter. “¡Báñense! ¡Báñense!” the lot of them (I don’t remember how many there were, but there were a lot) said to us, handing the three of us little pieces of Ariel laundry soap to wash ourselves with, which we gladly accepted.

  “¡Ay, Juan!” Cokis complained to my father from a green cast-iron bench a few feet away from the fountain where she sat next to an elderly couple who couldn’t take their eyes off of us. “Are you really going to wash yourself with that soap in public, in this fountain, and are you really going to let the kids do it, too? Can’t you see that everyone is staring at you?”

  But Cokis could’ve complained until the sun went down or until her mouth dried up, because my father wasn’t about to change his mind and get out of the fountain for any reason. As far as he was concerned, he was a free man in a free country and could do whatever he wanted, and that included bathing with his two kids in a fountain at a public park. “¿Y qué? Who are these people to tell us anything?” my father said to Cokis as he leaned against the fountain’s round centerpiece and rubbed the small piece of Ariel soap over his face and hair. “If these kids can find joy in this fountain, then why can’t we, and besides, ¡hace un chingo de calor!”

  “¡Ay, Juan!” was all Cokis had left to say.

  With that, my father bent his body forward and dipped his soap-lathered face and hair into the water. And after one, two, three seconds, he brought it back up and shot his sight toward the sun with his hands pressingly moving from the front of his face all the way to the back of his head, wringing out as much water as he possibly could from his hair. The man could’ve been David Hasselhoff rising out of the waters of a Los Angeles beach on an episode of Baywatch the way he so casually looked around afterward, shooting every person at the park a glance and a smile, beads of water jumping off his face in every direction.

  That day, Axcel, my father, and I arrived home cleaner than we’d left it, smelling like freshly clean laundry. Cokis, on the other hand, not so much. The sun had done a terrible job on her, and much of her makeup seemed to have melted into her skin.

  * * *

  It’s Danny’s turn.

  “My father loved the water,” he quietly utters, humbly looking around at the disheveled yet lively faces surrounding him, every one of them now captivated by his quiet voice. “Remember when we’d all go to Los Balnearios on the weekends?”

  When Cokis, Axcel, Aarón, and I heard the name, we each let out a loud and cheerful yes in unison. The memories of us and our father at this place came rushing into our minds. Undoubtedly, the image of our father in his tiny cutoff stonewashed denim shorts (the same ones he’d wear when he’d go to La Presa) splashing happily in a swimming pool manifested itself in each of our minds at the same time.

  Los Balnearios Robinson, which is the official name, is a swimming park with lots of pools of various sizes, shapes, and depths. And during Chihuahua’s hot-ass summers, it’s the place to be, and we certainly were. When I was a child, my father would often take all of us there as a family to spend the day picnicking and bathing. It was one of his favorite places for a family outing and relaxation, second to La Presa and El Granero. And while Danny went on to relay what he remembered most about our father at this ambitious water park, I couldn’t help but let my mind drift into my own memory of el viejo and me at this magical place.

  “Hold on tight, son.”

  “But I’m scared.”

  “Don’t be. I’m your father and I’m not going to let anything happen to you. Do you trust your father?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then?”

  I say nothing more, just wrap my skinny dark arms around my father’s stout neck and press my face hard against the back of his head, burying it as much as I can into his heavy wet hair.

  “Relax, hijo. There’s no need to press so hard. Just close your eyes and hold your breath. That’s it. Are you ready—¿listo?”

  “Sí.”

  “¡Vámonos!”

  There’s a hop and then a pull, like something’s just sucked us into the water. My eyes are closed so I can’t see. All I can do is feel. It’s a feeling I’ve never felt before, like I’m flying, moving through clouds of gelatin. My arms are relaxed, my father’s hair like fingers teasing my face. We’re moving downward, going deep; my father’s arms and hands are digging through water, and his legs and feet are rapidly kicking and flapping. I can feel all of it, the entire movement of his body, like I’m riding on the back of a wave. In the darkness of my mind I imagine a dolphin, fish, sharks, and even gigantic whales. I feel safe, like nothing can touch me. I twist my head forward and slowly open my eyes. We’re at the base of the pool, streamlining an inch above its white concrete bottom, nothing but water all around us. I can see the movements now, and the hair reaching out to me like tentacles from an octopus. Suddenly my father turns his head to the side and I can see his profile; he’s looking at me with one eye, the only one I can see. Then there are bubbles. They’re coming from his mouth. Is he smiling at me? Yes. But he’s also saying something. His lips are moving slowly. I make sense of two syllables: “mi-jo”—son.

  “Remember how he used to flip us into the air?” I hear Aarón saying, taking the torch from Danny and bringing me out of myself. “Really high we’d go, and then into the water—splash!”

  “Bien chingón,” Danny says, fighting back the tears. “He would flip everybody, even kids he didn’t know. They would line up and he’d flip all of them as many times as they wanted. He was always happy to do it.”

  Danny was right. Whenever a boy or girl—after seeing him flip one of his own children—came to him to ask him to flip them, my father would quickly extend his hands out in front of him and say, “Well, what are you waiting for? Put your feet on my hands and hold on to my shoulders.” Then he’d bounce them once, twice, and on the third he’d push them, with all his strength, right up and over behind his head and into the air from where they’d either dive or flop into the water. And regardless of how they’d make it into the water, there was never a time when any of them came out with anything other than a laugh or a smile on his or her face. Happiness was what, at Los Balnearios, my father offered these children and us. Here he was the father every child wished for.

  * * *

  “¡Pinche Juan loco!” Víctor-Manuel loudly interjects. “He was like one big kid. He always liked playing with us in the street. Do you guys remember when he used to have water-balloon fights with all the kids in the neighborhood on el día de San Juan? ¡Se hacía un desmadre cuando salía Juanillo con sus globos!”

  I had only experienced these water-balloon fights once, but apparently, judging by the way my brothers, Cokis, and my sister Axcel reacted to Víctor-Manuel’s recollection, my father had participated in this infamous tradition every year when el día de San Juan came around.

  According to legend, on June 24, 1549, the Spanish explorer Francisco Vásquez Coronado prayed for rain while standing on the dry banks of the Santa Cruz riverbed in Arizona. And when the rain came, he marked it as the day on which the summer rains would come every year after that. Consequently, because he is the patron saint of water, San Juan (Saint John) was quickly associated with this day. And while in many parts of Mexico and even in some Mexican American communities in the United States this day is celebrated by paying homage to this saint with music, dance, and prayers, in Chihuahua it is celebrated in a manner more befitting: every Juan must get wet.

  My memory of the only día de San Juan I got to experience with my father begins with the two of us in the bathroom pouring water from the showerhead into one of my father’s yeso-blotched buckets.
I’m small and at his side, tugging hastily at his yeso-splattered pants, urging him to hurry. We’re completely soaked in water and it’s dripping from our shorts onto the floor. But we don’t care. All we care about is filling up the bucket with water and getting back into the street to join in all of the action.

  “Hold on, hijo! We have to let it fill to the top. This way we can really get them,” my father says to me as he runs his hand through my hair.

  Once the bucket is full, he lifts it up to his shoulder and tells me to shut off the water and then to follow him. We move quickly through the hallway and past the living room; our soaked shoes squish through the pools of water on the concrete floor. My heart races with excitement. I’m in on something big. I rub my hands with devilish design as I break through the home’s front door behind my father. Suddenly there is a loud roar and my father starts charging out into the street. I try hard to keep up with him but the man is out of control. Like a bull that’s just been freed from its corral, my father moves chaotically, looking for his target. But there are too many of them and they’re all scattering, trying frantically to find refuge from our offense.

  “Here he comes! Here he comes!” they’re all yelling. “Run! Run!”

  I’m a little bull myself, fierce and unafraid of the repercussions, shirtless and dark, loving the heat, the dirt, the yelling, and all the rambunctious laughter. I’m running behind the man who gives me orders, who encourages me to enjoy life the way a seven-year-old boy should. On fire! Shamelessly! Without ever having to say I’m sorry. Without ever having to cry. Only on fire! With my fists to my bare chest and my feet on terra firma!