by John Rechy
Although I would learn later that the same claim was made by other Mexican women of the time—and Villa had been a reprobate—I was sure that the true version was Tía Ana’s, about my mother, a version that had subsequently incited the claims by others.
So it was that from my earliest years, I imbued my mother with an aura of sad romance, a woman whom my father, an old, angry, dejected man of fifty when I was born, did not deserve. Out of that belief had sprung my longing for her to have a lover—although at the time I would not have known that word. The thought, perhaps undefined then, had occurred to me when I was about six.
At that time in El Paso, freight trains that rumbled only one block away from our house carried, hidden, shabby men and women—not derelicts, no, but people displaced by the Depression, most often on their way to California.
In frequent raids, uniformed police would slide the train doors open—creating a loud, terrible, metallic bang. They flailed their batons at the bodies that spilled out in terror, men and women stumbling out to escape, some caught and handcuffed, others left to bleed from the blows, some escaping into nearby neighborhoods, hiding until they felt relatively safe. Several would turn up at houses nearby for sustenance.
Lean men and women, often handsome but dirtied, tattered wanderers, would appear at our back door. My mother always kept rice and beans to be served on tin plates, and steaming coffee in tin cups, for those who turned up. They would sit on the rickety steps. Often, when there were several, my mother would entrust me with bringing out the plates of food, the coffee.
There was a particular transient who came to our backyard. He had appeared alone, and he was handsome. I observed that because although like others he was sullied by days of hidden travel, he had stopped at the outside faucet in our backyard to wash his face and hands.
My mother brought him the usual plate of rice and beans and the cup of hot coffee. He smiled at her and she smiled back as he took the food. I saw this as I stood near the remains of a garage filled with debris.
When he was through, he stood and extended one hand toward my mother. He waited. Slowly she extended her hand to him. He brought it to his lips and kissed it.
The memory of that man kissing my mother’s hand lingered with its hint of kind romance.
There had been another hinted possibility to explain my mother’s defense of Marisa Guzman.
During those same years, a nun who might have been a spry eighty years old officiated over her own chapel, actually a small house she had converted into a chapel a block away from where we lived, another one in a row of desolate houses occupied by Mexicans.
Within that house, Mother Mercedes had erected an altar, decorated with broken pieces of bottles, a medley of shiny colors, an improvised altar that one of her neighbors had helped her with. He was the same man who planted her garden—a difficult feat, since what constituted the “lawns” in our neighborhood was only dirt, a grainy residue left by seasonal winds to be scorched by hot summer suns. Nothing grew there, except scattered patches of ugly weeds.
The nun’s “lawn” did grow—overnight. Her helper had imported rich soil from outlying farms; he had also brought clumps of grass and flowers, transplanted for her. Several people had gathered to watch Mother Mercedes bless the lawn, lush amid the depleted blocks.
Men and women in the neighborhood contributed to the chapel: too many crucifixes, which found their place in the small chapel, and pictures of the Holy Mother, most in her appearance as the Virgin of Guadalupe. A young woman drew stations of the cross on sturdy cardboard. Her husband mounted them and nailed them, tight against each other, on the close walls of the chapel.
In the daytime, Mother Mercedes took in the children of women who worked; they paid her a pittance, if at all, often in candles, which were always lit so that there was, in the small chapel, a rubyish glow that illuminated the altar where she had placed Christ in a robe, arms outstretched, a welcome sight to me since I always winced at the crucified figure.
On a spring day when even scraggly trees were blooming with bright-green buds auguring leaves, and the seasonal winds I despised had become a kind breeze that would soon be smothered by fierce summer heat scorching the leaves of trees prematurely, I was idling on my way home from school when I saw my mother sitting on the porch of the chapel—a single step before the front door—with Mother Mercedes. My father was away, as he often was now, on some temporary work he took under the Works Progress Administration, formed to alleviate the poverty and joblessness of the Depression.
My mother and the nun were so engrossed in some intimate conversation—which even from my distance seemed whispered—that I was able to watch them secretly for several moments. My mother bowed her head, and Mother Mercedes blessed her slowly, mouthing some words. Then my mother, smiling, her hand on the nun as if to share the view, looked up at the sky, which had been swept azure by the spring breeze.
When she noticed me, my mother stood up hurriedly, came to me, held my hand. We both waved back at the nun, who now stood up watching us as we headed back to our decrepit house along the blocks.
I was sure my mother had been confessing to Mother Mercedes. But confessing to what? Perhaps—I grasped for this—she had confessed a happy transgression, forbidden by the church but allowed and blessed by the nun. I longed to give to my mother even brief times of romantic happiness.
Whatever those moments might have actually been, they established a powerful bond between my mother and the nun. That was why, I was sure, she once defended Mother Mecedes with fierce courage.
“Guadalupe, Guadalupe!” One of our neighbors had come knocking at our door. “They’re going to arrest Mother Mercedes!”
“What! Who?” my mother demanded.
The quivering messenger wrung her hands; tears streaked her face. “The bishop!”
“The bishop is going to arrest Mother Mercedes?” My mother’s indignation turned her face livid. She was not often enraged, not even at my father after his violent rants. She had already grabbed her purse and was rushing out of the house. I ran along with her.
When we reached the nun’s chapel, others had gathered. Perhaps seven women—the men would be away at whatever jobs were available—were kneeling on the imported grass, and they were taking turns kissing the hand of a heavy man in a cassock, his starched white collar so stark and ringed with gray perspiration that it seemed to be holding his head up. I doubted that he was the bishop; probably he was just a parish priest.
“Where is Mother Mercedes?” my mother asked, softly, in Spanish after she had barely but dutifully kissed the priest’s hand. That’s what we were taught to do, kiss the hands of priests. I hated that, especially when I saw bristly hairs on their fingers. I would pretend to kiss the outstretched hand. With a moistened finger, I would bend my head and touch the waiting hand, to create, I hoped, the feeling of a kiss. Once a priest had grabbed my own hand and kissed it, leaving saliva.
Now, in practiced Spanish, the Anglo priest said: “The woman you call Mother Mercedes is inside doing penance for her grave sins.”
The women, still kneeling, began to pray, “Hail Mary, full of Grace …”
My mother faced the priest. “Forgive me, Father, but may I ask you: What grave sin could a holy woman like her, a nun, commit?”
My devout mother questioning a priest!
“She’s not a nun!” the bishop said.
Gasps, including one from my mother, interrupted the prayers.
I saw Mother Mercedes, her face framed by her habit as she peered out the window.
“She claims to be a member of an order that doesn’t exist,” the priest sneered. “She commits a mortal sin each time she dares to hear confession and even—even—!” He could hardly finish: “—say Mass!”
My mother had recovered from whatever surprise the priest’s accusation of the nun had created. I watched her intently, admiring the courage it took for a Catholic woman to continue to face a priest. I was sure now that a confession
had occurred that other spring afternoon, a confession that had caused my mother to smile up at the sky.
“Father, please, I don’t mean to be disrespectful of your sacred office, but doesn’t God listen to a holy woman’s prayers?”
“Señora! You must watch whom you defend!” Impossible as it had seemed, the priest’s face had grown redder, the white, smeared collar seeming to choke him. “The sacraments are allowed only to an ordained priest, a legitimate priest, who has taken vows, not a ridiculous old woman who claims to be a nun.”
More gasps at the priest’s harsh denunciation. The women there, standing now, stared at my mother as if waiting for guidance as to whom to support—the priest or the nun who had ministered to their children, provided comfort without reward, and said Mass at odd times when work kept them from going to a large church.
The cleric, breathing fiercely, also seemed to be waiting for what my mother might say next. In irritation, he pulled his hand away from an old man who had just hobbled up and was attempting to kiss it.
My mother said: “Forgive me for asking this, Reverend Father: How can the kindness of an old nun offend so?”
“She’s pretending, a fraud!”
“Father, she’s confided this to me. It’s true her order no longer exists. That’s because she’s the last survivor of it. She is a nun.”
The priest turned his back on the improvised chapel. With a harsh bellow of air, he said, “Enough of this! Know, all of you, that you are gaining no favor with God by supporting this sinful charade, nor are you fulfilling any of His sacraments! You are all, every one of you, in danger of excommunication.”
His skirted cassock hissing, he stalked away. A driver awaited him by a black car.
Everyone became aware of a flutter at the door of the chapel.
“Mother Mercedes,” my mother greeted the nun, holding her hand, helping her out.
Mother Mercedes stepped forward. She stood at the open door and raised her hand.
Everyone knelt as she completed her blessing and then invited everyone to participate in early Mass.
I had sought connections to explain the excitement I felt at my mother’s defense of the kept woman, the possibility of a romantic scandal, the defiance. But was that all that explained my growing fascination with the kept woman, beyond the obvious allure she would hold for a boy attempting to seize whatever was exceptional out of the drab horizon of life in El Paso?
5
That’s how I viewed my life then, a bleak landscape.
From the beginning of my memories, I felt myself an outsider formed by contradictions. I was poor but with inherited memories of gentility. Of “mixed blood”—Mexican and Scottish—I was considered a guero, a Mexican who didn’t look Mexican by entrenched standards. My complexion was fair; my hair was almost blond in summer; my eyes were blue like my father’s, although I often insisted they were green, like my mother’s. Though I was constantly told that I was very good-looking, it was difficult for me to make friends—I didn’t want to make friends—among other Mexican children in our neighborhood, who, at times, stared at me. One boy, two years older than I, followed me around. I asked him: “Why are you always staring at me?”
I thought he would run away, perhaps having thought I had not noticed him, perhaps not wanting to answer. I waited; he waited. “You’re like a ghost boy,” he said. “You don’t talk to anyone. You seem to be studying others around you, judging others. You act as if you’re not where we are.”
A ghost boy. I remembered those words when I saw a photograph of my father’s children’s troupe—sometimes he wrote brief skits that I performed in. In the picture I was wearing white pants, a white shirt. I looked as if I were part of another picture. Although for a brief time it pleased me to appear separated, I soon tried to abandon the aura of a ghost boy, especially because, looking at another photograph, of my father’s dead son from a first marriage—the boy had died at the age of eight—a photograph taken during the boy’s first communion, when he was dressed in angelic white, I saw how much we looked alike: twins, the dead boy and I.
As I grew up, I came more and more to view El Paso as a desolate desert city swept by relentless winds that lasted from early February, a violent beginning, and sometimes into May, even early June, winds that howled and thrust sheaths of dust against the city as if in vengeance, gathering tumbleweeds into tangled spiny giants clawing their way into the city, urgent winds thrusting needles of dirt at our faces as we made our way from school, pushing against the windy current.
As a child of five, I had seen hurtling toward me a tumbleweed growing larger, huge, as it raged along the blocks collecting splinters loosed from other dry weeds. I dodged, the tumbleweed dodged too, I dashed away from its path, it dashed toward me, I ran to one side and then another, it pursued me until it crashed against me. Trying to break away from it, I flailed at it, but it pushed against me, finally capturing me within its cage of dried twigs, shredding my skin bloody. Trapped inside the tangle of dead weeds, I pushed and pushed, until I had disemboweled it. In nests of seared weeds, it spun away, tumbling across the horizon, gathering its shed parts, racing across the city, and, finally, back into the hellish desert.
That feeling of being entrapped outlasted the nightmarish experience, trapped in the ubiquitous poverty of the Depression, trapped in an atmosphere of potential violence as my father’s depressive moods festered dangerously.
In winter, the windstorms abated; icy nights replaced them. Our whole house—four rooms with scant furniture—was heated with a coal-burning stove, a big-bellied iron contraption that glowed with embers and dark crumbling cinders. The panes of several windows were broken, and eventually cracked and fell in shards to the bare floor. We patched them with cardboard from boxes gathered outside grocery stores. The cardboard, attached with tacks to the frames of the windows, had to be replaced often; especially, rain or snow made it soggy.
My two brothers slept in one bed. I slept on the floor, on a slender pile of blankets—only when my brothers left for the army would I inherit a bed of my own. My mother slept in what would have been a living room, with my two sisters—the older, Blanca, would marry young. My father slept alone in the front room, the door closed. Very early in my life I became afraid of his flaring temper. I slept uneasily, sitting up at any sound that might precede his footsteps.
I detested poverty. When the cardboard on the windows was new, I would paint pictures on it, birds, flowers. The rain would eventually streak them into colored tears. When my mother was away shopping for groceries, I would try to rearrange the house, covering a scraggly sofa with a towel, rolling up a blanket to place at the head of my mother’s bed so that it might look like the satiny rolled pillows of movie stars’ beds. I wanted to surprise her with something pretty.
I watched her outside in the barren yard washing our clothes in a tin container propped up on bricks, the water heated by burning wooden boards underneath the tub. Angry that that was required of her, I stood on a box and helped her hang the clothes to dry on a line, breathing in the scent of fresh clothes washed by her.
There was a fearful time when I was hardly a boy. My mother’s mother, who lived in Juárez across the border, was dying. My mother rushed to her side and remained until she died soon after. It was only when she was not allowed to return to the United States that I learned—and not even then; I understood it later—that my mother had crossed the border illegally from Mexico into the United States years ago. Now she was being detained by the immigration authorities. When she didn’t come home for what seemed to be weeks but was probably only a few days, I was despondent. Finally, my father, through his lingering contacts among the powerful, was able to arrange for her return to Texas, to El Paso, to me.
Cold, dark winter nights in El Paso required expensive electricity, no matter how early families might attempt to go to bed.
There was a device known as “El Diablo,” the devil, a two-pronged wire that was attached to the light meter
located inside our house and that short-circuited the meter, keeping it from recording the amount of electricity we were to be charged for.
Inspectors from the electric company roamed poor neighborhoods, paying surprise visits. When an unfamiliar car was spotted cruising the streets, out would go the lights, not only in our house, but along whole blocks of houses, presaging a rapid disconnection of El Diablo. Then the lights would come back, house by house.
As my father’s ability to support our family continued to diminish, Robert, the older of my two brothers, dropped out of high school to work as a professional pool player to help out. The younger of the two brothers, Yvan, continued in school, as did I and my sister Olga, still children. My my sister Blanca at seventeen married a solidly built German man named Gus, to escape, I sometimes thought, our dour household.
On a cold December day when I was ten, my mother wrapped me and Olga in every sweater she could find to take us to the movies, at the Colón theater, the only Mexican theater in El Paso. Along with the usual Mexican melodrama about a wayward son abandoning his mother—typically to become a bullfighter, and living to regret his unnatural cruelty when his mother is at death’s door and his sister begs him to return to ask forgiveness—a famous Mexican magician, Paco Miller, would be performing on stage.
As we watched the magic in fascination, Paco Miller pulled an enormous eagle from his cape and held it, flapping until—An incongruous man in a suit rushed onto the stage and whispered something to him.
Part of the act, of course. No. Paco Miller, putting the eagle back into a cage, stepped forth to announce:
