Ambientes_New Queer Latino Writing

by Lazaro Lima

  “He’s dead,” responded Beatriz. Then she explained how Iris got up from her chair and put away her needles. She walked over to the bedroom and opened the door. Nonin made it to the door through a fog of shock and fear. Lying on the bed was the old man, Cangrejo. Iris continued to speak in a rush of words that sounded foreign to Nonin, who was looking at her daughter with wide-open eyes. Iris continued to speak throughout the preparation for Cangrejo’s funeral. She told the women and the men gathered in the house about her wedding night while her mother prayed in silent tears. Iris also talked about the growing baby inside her stomach. The neighbors covered their ears, trying not to let all of those words tangle inside their heads. Iris spoke about the way her tongue had dislodged and unfurled from her mouth in her first words. She explained to everyone that she had sat in the chair and gone about her chores, trying to quiet the restlessness of the freed muscle inside her mouth. She told them that she hadn’t known how to control it or if it would make any sense once sounds came out; that’s why she hadn’t shared her news earlier. Nonin stared through the entierro, not even mumbling the words of prayer that would lay the old man to rest.

  Amalia sighed and walked over to the room she slept in. She had to pass the domino game and couldn’t help looking over. Yuni was there still. There had been another change of partners during the story, and now William and two other men sat at the table while Chepo looked on behind them. Dulce was standing among that crowd. Amalia looked at Yuni; he was strong and healthy, just a little overweight, but fit for his forty-five years. She didn’t bother looking over at Dulce.

  Dulce tensed while Amalia glanced over at the game. Then she saw her walk into one of the houses behind the store. She tried to focus on the game again, but the dots came together in front of her without making sense. She left the game.

  Amalia’s room vibrated with the sound of whispered prayers. Tía Olivera, la única hija de Doña Tomasa presente durante la fiesta que no estaba en el círculo de cuentos, led some of her nieces and friends in a prayer for lost souls. None of them moved as Amalia walked in the room. They did not greet Dulce when she too entered. There were candles all over the room, and the heaviness of the shadows slumped Amalia’s shoulders. She looked at the wall. The shadows were all half her size, kneeling in reverent prayer. She noticed Dulce’s shadow, tall and still by the door. She knew Dulce wouldn’t come in, but she wished that somehow she could. She didn’t know how to continue her wish, so she stared at the shadows.

  Startled from her sleep, Ramonita jumped up to her feet and signaled to the two men in her band. She shouldn’t have let herself get so comfortable. Cochina, she mumbled to herself as she picked up the two greasy plates from the ground. She must have made a sight to the family here with her babas falling all over her chin and probably roncando. Like Virginia said, she wasn’t fit for company. This is not what she was hired for.

  The music started again. Dulce’s shadow began to pulse to the sounds that seemed to come from so far away. Amalia thought of Iris’s awful husband dead on their wedding night and shuddered. She watched Dulce’s shadow put her arms around her shadow’s shoulders. She felt comforted. She watched Dulce and Amalia on the wall sway slowly as if the candlelight were conducting them instead of the music. Ramonita’s voice flared out with its fiery force. She watched the shadows speed up their pasos. Ramonita played with anger, but the music sounded joyous and passionate. In the room with the shadows the prayers increased in volume.

  “And then she built first one wooden room behind the old concrete house, then another. I was born in the first one. Mamá converted the room into a store. She sold her crocheted quilts, clothes, manteles, sábanas. When I married your father,” here Doña Tomasa looked at Teresa, “he insisted on her retiring. He took over and sold the usual supplies of the bodegas. Mamá went to sleep in the second room that he built so she wouldn’t be bothered by the noise of people coming in to buy, trade, or gossip. Then Dagoberto died and I married your father.” Here she looked around at the grown children in front of her. “Saturnino closed the store and worked the land that we have all around us. It is small, but bountiful. When you were born,” she looked at Ana, who was nursing her smallest child, “your abuela died and your papá decided to take the store over. He thought he would be making her spirit happy, but he died. That is why I let none of you open that store again.”

  “Doña Tomasa, es su fiesta, no es tiempo de llorar por nada.”

  Ramonita’s big voice overturned the chairs and crates; the whole clan was up and dancing to the singers’ orders. Doña Tomasa faced her laughing family and tapped one foot to the music in her ears. She looked over at Yuni punishing the tables with small white rectangles and then searched the crowd for Amalia.

  “Aunque sea, hice lo que pude por ella,” Doña Tomasa said, leaned back in her chair. With her wrinkled fingers she rubbed the shawl her mother had made her that she wore now around her shoulders.

  My mother’s work is on exhibit here at this gallery.”

  “What does she do again?”

  “Muchacha, how many times do I have to remind you! She is a potter.”

  “But you said this was called something, something shadow. It was about shadows.”

  “Capturing the Flesh of Shadows. You like it? I made up the title for her.”

  “But what is it about?”

  “Where my mother is from there are these figures they make that have no faces. They are kind of nice. Dark-skinned women sit with flowers on their laps. Tall women hold buckets on their heads. But none of them have faces. Mom thinks of them as shadows.”

  “So she is imitating those figures?”

  “Right, except there’s a twist. She is capturing the shadows that have never been seen by anyone.”

  “I still don’t get what you mean.”

  “Come in and see.”

  The figures were similar in size and color to the traditional ones crafted and sold at tourist shops on the island, except all of them came in pairs. Figures supported each other; arms held waists, fingers held shoulders, or elbows. One of the figures wore a ruffled skirt and the other pants, but both had swells under the painted-on blouses.

  The centerpiece was a figurine of two shadows dancing. You could hear the fast riff of a merengue in the way the hips were placed. You could see the love in the placement of the hands and the care that the artist had taken to paint them. The title of the piece was “Dulce and Amalia.”

  Malverde

  MYRIAM GURBA

  Mom and Dad just got back from a trip to Mexico. They went because Abuelita’s not doing too good. It turns out she has dementia. It also turns out that, drumroll please, my cousin Miguelito works for the head of a Guadalajara drug cartel. He was so cracked out that he didn’t use a condom when he started getting jiggy with the jefe’s youngest daughter, and that fool got her pregnant. The Jezebel in question is barely a year past her quinceañera, brunette, and, given what her father does for a living, tastes like a dewy coca bush.

  When he found out about the baby, Miguelito proposed. Mom says his mom, Tía Ofelia, talks like this was a doomed but noble gesture. Girl, please, that choice was so not motivated by chivalry. Tsk-pssssh, as if he had a choice. And doomed he is. Very doomed. So many people want to kill Miguelito, not that that makes him special or anything; being an assassin’s target comes with the territory he snorted his way into, and this is stressful for Mom. Here’s why: Those who execute my cousin’s death warrant are going to strike when a vulnerable window reveals itself. Let’s say this occurs on a warm Saturday night, after Mass, when Miguelito and his young bride stop by his parents’ house so they can visit with their brand new granddaughter. Like a boa constrictor lying in wait, picture the fortified SUV that’s been idling on the street all afternoon. Time to pounce, and it comes crashing through the tall gate surrounding the pretty villa, skidding to a halt feet from my aunt and uncle’s front door.

  Men with guns pour out of the vehicle. The abuelos stop adm
iring the baby’s newest tooth or the baby’s curly hair or the baby’s tiny fingernails and look up. There’s not even time for Tía and Tío’s faces to contort with horror and then freeze into ugly masks. Miguelito reaches for his gun, the front door flies off its hinges, and the executioners invade the living room, which is very tastefully decorated. These cowboys don’t have silencers, they’re that brash, and Pow! A slug in Miguelito’s head. Pow! Slugs for anyone with eyeballs and a memory. Tía. Tío. Maybe my prima Marta and her boyfriend or my prima Fiona and her husband. The servants, Paco, Chema. The dog, Yudi. A miniature pinscher. Very yippy.

  Collateral damage. Mom worries about her sister winding up dead on the floor. It’s not a far-fetched possibility. I’ve considered it and there’s something else, too, something I wouldn’t ever tell Mom.

  I enjoy being related to a narcotraficante!

  Narcotraficante!

  Sexy. The word is sexy. Debonair. Gallant. When you say it, it’s like saying Pancho Villa! Nothing matches the title in English; all we have is drug dealer, and there’s a style, a narco look, that Miguelito’s got down pat. Because of its mastery, I had a jump on Mom; mi primo narcotraficante has been in my thoughts for two years now, ever since I saw him on New Year’s Eve the last time I visited Guadalajara.

  We were sitting at the dining room table having dinner. Tía Ofelia had uncorked the champagne early. She was pouring it with hours to go till the toast and the twelve grapes you eat at the stroke of midnight while you wish for good health and to win the lottery and stuff like that. I kept trying to eat my grapes early because they looked so good, but Mom kept smacking my hand away from the fancy flute glass they were sitting in.

  Miguelito smiled as I rubbed my smarting hand. He sat across from me, his expensive cologne bridging the divide between us. He was much quieter than I remembered him. Not playful or silly at all anymore. In fact, about him hung this James Dean aura, a dark, sad prettiness. He politely laughed at Dad’s jokes and smoked cigarettes using Tía’s exact same nicotine-addicted mannerisms, and after finishing his tequila, he rose and kissed us all goodbye, abandoning me to my parents and drunk aunt and uncle.

  They were making so much noise I didn’t hear Miguelito leave out the front door. When I looked up from ogling my grapes again, I saw him outside, through one of the big picture windows that looks out onto the stone veranda. Miguelito paused, posing beside a pillar. He lit a fresh cigarette. I watched him inhale and blow smoke out of his nostrils, relaxing. He did a fancy French inhale, a soupy tobacco fog curling out of his mouth, being willed up his nostrils like a snake obeying a charmer. Then, his eyes lost their calm. He quickly patted his waist. I noticed the pistol-shaped bulge under his Versace silk shirt.

  ¡Dios mío! began my silent Spanglish epiphany as I gnawed at the inside of my cheek, Miguelito looks like a narcotraficante!

  I watched him drop his cigarette and crush it with the heel of his motorcycle boot. In tight designer jeans that seemed to be cutting off some circulation, Miguelito hobble-swaggered to his boss’s BMW. That sweet car was his Cinderella excuse for bailing so early. Supposedly, he had to have it returned before midnight.

  Artists should thank God for people like Miguelito. They’re muses and they inspire the heck out of Mexican musicians who romanticize their abbreviated vidas locas in ballads called narcocorridos. These usually tell the story of some Robin Hood type who comes from goat herders, pulls himself up by his bootstraps by cultivating blow, and then gets martyred by the police the day he leaves his AK at home.

  Aside from trading in similar commodities, Miguelito’s got little in common with these rags to riches farm boys. He’s the middle-class son of a factory owner who got in over his head with nose candy and accidentally screwed his way into a crime dynasty. Still, his affiliation with the narco universe gives him panache. And he’s got a natural magnetism. Miguelito’s unique story could spawn a hit single.

  El Corrido del Tucan Tapatío?

  Sounds good to me.

  Mom hasn’t said this, but I know there’s something else stressing her out, too. It’s Tía’s newfound sobriety. She and Miguel recently started attending AA together (yes, Alcoholics Anonymous exists in Mexico), and every time Tía reads in the paper about another slain narco (which is practically every day), the bottle chirps, Drink me! Drink me! Mom is trying to be as supportive as possible of her baby sister’s struggle to stay clean, but it’s hard for her to relate to so many hours spent in meetings, the working of numerous steps, and the distribution of colorful coins.

  Mom quit. Tacitly. While I was away at college. She received neither a trophy nor a token for it. Not even a thank you. Because that would mean acknowledgment. And that’s dangerous territory for a Mexican.

  From Mom, I learned this maxim, indigenous to her homeland, very well: It’s best not to mention certain sins aloud. Think the Three Monkeys. See no evil. Hear no evil. Speak no evil. Some things you keep between you and God; the really important things, between you and the Virgin.

  I now realize the Three Monkeys have always been with me, but the first time they really came through loud and clear was when I was seventeen. Mom wove them into an object lesson as I was filling out college apps at the breakfast counter. She’d just finished loading the dishwasher and was watching me, remembering.

  “You have good grades,” she commented, sipping wine from a cheapo goblet. She sat down on a barstool beside me. “What do you think you will study?”

  “Art maybe. I dunno.”

  “My mother was very good,” she said, “is very good,” she corrected herself, “at art.” … A memory of cramped muscles, me and Ixchel spending the entire summer before seventh grade stiff, posing for Abuelita as she worked on our portraits. … She sacrificed a lot to help pay for my university. She sold some of her paintings. Took in sewing. Lots of sewing. … Picturing Abuelita at an old-fashioned sewing machine, sweat beading on her forehead and premature canas at her temples, Abuelito watching from the doorway, looking like the El Catrin card, the dandy pulled from a stack of lotería favorites. Always in a three-piece suit, shiny pocket-watch chain glimmering from his vest pocket, a showman like P. T. Barnum, like most cowards a braggart, especially about his job, Guadalajara’s leading publicist, its king of bullshit and fantasy. The best lies were the ones he told women. My grandfather, he’s the progenitor of many a bastard. I wondered, was Abuelito’s shameless squandering of pesos on the ladies the reason Abuelita busted her hump paying for Mom’s school?

  “Why did Abuelita have to help you so much?” I interrupted. “Abuelito had money. For crying out loud, he has a different pair of wing tips for each day of the week!”

  I waited, chewing on my pencil’s eraser. Anticipating. Hard. I knew where Abuelito’s money went but I wanted to hear Mom say it, to call her dad out for being a player. Since she was drinking, she wouldn’t leave out any of the good stuff; she’d leave in all the gory details, like how Abuelito dedicated his first book of poems not to Abuelita but to his mistress, the hideously named Hortencia, and how Mom’s big sister, Carmen, became his secretary after Ofelia and Abuelita brought lunch to his office one time and walked in on him in flagrante with the typist.

  After swishing her wine around, making it whirlpool for a couple of seconds, Mom said to me, “Deirdre, when I turned sixteen, I asked my father for money to go to the university. He saw that I was serious about it and he told me to sit at the kitchen table. Once I was seated, he sat across from me and said, ‘Alicia, you are a woman. This means you will never be a doctor. It is what you want; I have heard you talking about it, but it’s inappropriate. As a woman, and my daughter, you have these three choices. One, you can be a wife. Two, you can be a nun. Three, you can be a secretary. This I will pay for, for you to take classes to learn how to become a typist. I will not, however, waste one cent on a woman’s university education. That would be like throwing fistfuls of money into the sewer.’”

  I peeled my eyelids back in disbelief. To affi
rm that what she’d said was true, Mom nodded. She took another sip of wine, savored it, and mused: “My two years of university. My friends. It was me, Rebeca, Beatriz, and Diana. Some of the professors were condescending and belittled us, but there was one, Cuevas, who was kind. He helped me pay for my books my most difficult semester, and his wife would buy me lunch sometimes. Cuevas was important, a very esteemed man. The rector of the School of Chemistry. He made an enormous mistake, though. He failed a group of boys who were members of the Student Federation of Guadalajara. Do you know what the Student Federation of Guadalajara is? The SFG?”

  Clueless, I shook my head.

  “They make your father’s Chicano college clubs,” she elaborated, “look like kindergarten games. The PRI backed them. You know what the PRI is? The party that runs the government?”

  I remembered, during childhood visits to Mexico, seeing PRI and PAN stenciled to whitewashed brick walls. Abuelito wore a PRI button pinned to his lapel sometimes. I nodded.

  “Good,” Mom asserted, “Then you can guess that you weren’t supposed to tell the kids in the SFG no for anything. The SFG boys, a little army of them—and they looked like an army, and they even wore uniforms to school—ganged up on Cuevas and offered him one chance to modify their F’s. He responded to their threat by asking, ‘Why don’t you take a chance … and study?’

  “They smiled and thanked him for his suggestion and he didn’t hear from them for a week. Then, as he and his wife were leaving their house one afternoon, a Volkswagen van pulled onto his street and drove up to the curb. A machine gun opened fire and t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t, they cut the two of them in half.”