And on the coat of arms I read the inscription:
Charlotte, Kaiserin von Mexiko
Mother’s Day
For Teodoro Cesarman
Every morning Grandfather vigorously stirs his cup of instant coffee. He grasps the spoon as in other times my dear-departed grandmother Clotilde had grasped the pestle, or he himself, General Vicente Vergara, had grasped the pommel of the saddle now hanging on his bedroom wall. Then he uncorks the bottle of tequila and tilts it to fill half the cup. He refrains from mixing the tequila and the Nescafé. Let the clear alcohol settle by itself. He looks at the bottle of tequila and it reminds him how red was the spilled blood, how clear the liquor that set the blood boiling, inflaming it before the great encounters, Chihuahua and Torreón, Celaya and Paso de Gavilanes, when men were men and there was no way to distinguish between the exhilaration of drunkenness and the recklessness of combat, sí, señor, how could fear creep in when a man’s pleasure was battle and the battle was his pleasure?
He almost spoke aloud, between sips of the spiked coffee. Nobody knew how to make a café de olla any more, the little jug of coffee tasting of clay and brown sugar, no, nobody, not even the pair of servants he’d brought from the sugar plantation in Morelos. Even they drank Nescafé, invented in Switzerland, the cleanest and most orderly nation in the world. General Vergara had a vision of snowcapped mountains and belled cows, but he said nothing, his false teeth still lay at the bottom of the glass before him. This was his favorite hour: peace, daydreams, memories, fantasies, and no one to gainsay them. Strange, he sighed, that he’d lived such a full life and now memory should come back to him like a sweet lie. He sat and thought about the years of the Revolution and the battles that had forged modern Mexico. Then he spit out the mouthful of liquid he’d been swishing between his lizard tongue and his toughened gums.
* * *
Later that morning I saw my grandfather in the distance, shuffling along in his carpet slippers as he always did, down the marble halls, wiping with a large kerchief the bleariness and involuntary tears from his cactus-colored eyes. Seeing him from that distance, almost motionless, I thought he looked like a desert plant. Green, rubbery, dry as the plains of the north, a deceptive ancient cactus harboring the sparse rains in its entrails from one summer to the next, fermenting them: moisture seeped from his eyes but never reached the white tufts on his head, wisps of dried corn silk. In his photographs, on horseback, he loomed tall. As he scuffed along, purposeless and old, through the marble rooms of the huge house in Pedregal, he looked tiny, lean, pure bone, the skin clinging desperately to his skeleton, a taut, creaky little old man. But not bowed, no sir, I’d like to see the man who dared …
Once again I was beset by the same uneasiness I felt every morning, the anguish of a cornered rat, the feeling that seized me every time I saw General Vergara purposelessly wandering the rooms and halls and corridors that Nicomedes and Engracia scrubbed on their knees, rooms that at this hour of the morning smelled of soapy scrub brushes. The servants refused to use electric appliances. They said no with great humility and dignity, in the hope that it would be noticed. Grandfather thought they were right; he loved the smell of soapy scrub brushes, and that’s why, every morning, Nicomedes and Engracia scrubbed meters and meters of Zacatecan marble, Mexican marble, even if the honorable Agustín Vergara, my father, did say, with his finger to his lips, that it had been imported from Carrara—don’t tell anyone, it’s against the law, they’ll hit me with an ad valorem, you can’t even give a decent party any more, if you do, you end up on the society page and then you pay for it, nowadays a man has to live the austere life, even feel ashamed to have worked hard all his life to give his family the things …
I ran out of the house, shrugging into my Eisenhower jacket. In the garage I climbed into my red Thunderbird and started the motor, the door rising automatically at the sound, and gunned out blindly. Something, a flicker of caution, told me that Nicomedes might be there on the driveway between the garage and the massive door in the wall surrounding our property, moving the garden hose, manicuring the artificial-seeming grass between the flagstones. I imagined the gardener flying skyward, torn apart by the impact of the car, and I accelerated. The cedar entrance door, faded by summer rains, swollen and creaking, also opened automatically as the Thunderbird passed the twin electric eyes embedded in the rock and zoomed out; the tires squealed as I swerved to the right. I thought I saw the snowy peak of Popocatepetl, but it was a mirage. I accelerated. It was a cold morning, and the natural fog of the high plateau was rising to meet the blanket of smog imprisoned by the ring of mountains and the pressure of the high cold air.
I kept accelerating until I reached the access to the ring road around the city. I breathed deeply, and drove calmly now. There was nothing to worry about: I could circle the city once, twice, a hundred times, as many times as I wanted, driving thousands of kilometers with a sensation of never moving, of being simultaneously at the point of departure and the destination, seeing the same cement horizon, the same beer ads, billboards for the electric vacuum cleaners Nicomedes and Engracia detested, for soaps and television sets; the same squat, greenish, miserable buildings, barred windows, protective steel curtains, the same paint shops, repair shops, small refreshment stands with the box at the entrance filled with ice and carbonated drinks, corrugated tin roofs, and, occasionally, the dome of a colonial church lost among a thousand rooftop water-storage tanks, a smiling, stellar cast of prosperous characters, rosy and freshly painted, Santa Claus, the Blond Queen of Beers, Coca-Cola’s little white-haired elf with his bottle-cap crown, Donald Duck, and, below, a cast of millions, extras, vendors of balloons and gum and lottery tickets, young men in T-shirts and short-sleeved shirts gathered around jukeboxes, chewing, smoking, loafing, smart-assing; building-supply trucks, armadas of Volkswagens, a collision at the exit to Fray Servando, motorcycle policemen in cinnamon-colored uniforms, putting on the bite, one-upping, horns, insults. Again I burned rubber, feeling free, the second trip identical, the same run, the water tanks, Plutarco, gas trucks, milk trucks, squealing brakes, milk cans tipping over, rolling, bursting on the asphalt, against the safety barriers, on the red Thunderbird, a sea of milk. Plutarco’s white windshield. Plutarco in the fog. Plutarco blinded by limitless whiteness, the blinding liquid invisible to him, making him invisible, milk bath, sour milk, watered milk, your mother’s milk, Plutarco.
Sure, my name lent itself to jokes, what would you expect from a name that sounded like Prick? In school I’d heard all that—Whaaaa? Did I hear…? Say that again? Two, four, six, eight, there’s a Verga t’appreciate, Verga, Verga, rah, rah, rah! And when they called the roll, there was always some joker waiting to answer, Vergara, Plutarco, present and primed, or present but spent, or Pee-Wee Vergara here. Then there’d be blows at recess. And when I began reading novels, at fifteen, I discovered there was an Italian author named Giovanni Verga, almost like my name, but that would never make any impression on a gang of ruffians like those shits at the National Prep. I hadn’t gone to parochial school—first, because Grandfather had said never, what did we think the Revolution had been about, and then my old man, the lawyer, agreed, there were too damn many people who were fiercely anti-clerical in public but good little Catholics at home, better for the image. But I wished I could have been like my grandfather Don Vicente, when someone’d made a joke about his name he’d had the joker castrated. You’re all smoke and no fire, no lead in your pencil, no powder in your cannon, the prisoner had said, and General Vergara cut off his balls, and I mean yesterday! From that time on, they’d called him General Balls, Old Balls and Guts, when he’s around hang on to your nuts, and similar refrains had circulated all during Pancho Villa’s long campaign against the Federales, when Vicente Vergara, still a young man but already forged in the fire of battle, had fought alongside the Centaur of the North, before going over to the ranks of Obregón when he saw the cause was lost in Celaya.
“I know what they say. Beat
the shit out of anyone who tells you your grandfather was a turncoat.”
“But no one’s ever said that to me.”
“Listen to me, boy, it was one thing when Villa came out of nothing, out of the Durango mountains, when he alone banded together all the malcontents and organized the Northern Division, which polished off the dictatorship of that drunk Huerta and his Federales. But when he set himself against Carranza and decent law-abiding folk, that was another thing altogether. He wanted to keep on fighting, anything that came along, because he’d gone past the point where he could stop. After Obregón defeated him at Celaya, Villa’s army evaporated and all his men went back to their corn patches and their woods. Villa went and searched them out, one by one, to convince them they had to keep fighting, and they said no, look, General, they’d come back home, they were back with their women and kids again. Then the poor bastards would hear shots, turn around and see their houses up in flames and their families dead. ‘You don’t have any house or woman or kids now,’ Villa would say. ‘You may as well come along with me.’”
“Maybe he truly loved his men, Grandfather.”
“Don’t ever let anyone tell you I was a turncoat.”
“No one says that. Everyone’s forgotten all that stuff.”
* * *
I thought a lot about what he’d said. Pancho Villa truly loved his men; he couldn’t imagine that the soldiers didn’t feel the same about him. In his bedroom, General Vergara had a lot of yellowed snapshots, some just newspaper clippings. You could see him there with all the leaders of the Revolution, he’d been with them all, served them all, in turn. As the leaders changed, so did Vicente Vergara’s attire—peering through the crowd engulfing Don Panchito Madero the day of his famous entrance into the capital, the small and fragile and ingenuous and miraculous apostle of the Revolution who with a book had overthrown the all-powerful Don Porfirio in a land of illiterates, don’t tell me it wasn’t a miracle, and there was young “Chente” Vergara in his narrow-brimmed, ribbonless felt hat and his old-fashioned shirt without the stiff collar, one more downtrodden wretch, perched on the equestrian statue of Carlos IV, that day when even the earth trembled, as it had the day Our Lord Jesus Christ had died, as if the apotheosis of Madero were already his Calvary.
“After our love for the Virgin and our hatred of the gringos, nothing binds us together more than a treacherous crime, I tell you, and all the people rose up against Victoriano Huerta for murdering Don Panchito Madero.”
And then Vicente Vergara, captain of the Dorados, Pancho Villa’s personal guard, his chest crisscrossed with cartridge belts, in a sombrero and white pants, eating a taco with Pancho Villa alongside a train billowing smoke, and then the constitutionalist Colonel Vergara, very young and proper in his Stetson and his khaki uniform, sheltered by the patriarchal and aloof figure of Venustiano Carranza, the principal leader of the Revolution, inscrutable behind smoked lenses and a beard that came to the buttons of his tunic, this snapshot looked almost like a family photograph, a just but severe father and a respectful and well-motivated son, not the same Vicente Vergara as the Obregonist colonel who in Agua Prieta took part in the pronunciamento against Carranza’s abuse of power, liberated now from the tutelage of the father figure riddled by gunfire as he slept in his bedroll in Tlax-calantongo.
“They all died so young! Madero never reached forty, and Villa was forty-five, Zapata thirty-nine, even Carranza, who seemed like an old man, was barely sixty-one, and General Obregón, forty-eight. What would have happened, tell me, boy, if I hadn’t survived out of sheer luck, what if it’d been my destiny to die young, it’s just chance that I’m not buried somewhere out there in some little town overgrown with buzzards and marigolds, and you, you’d never have been born.”
And this Colonel Vergara sitting between General Alvaro Obregón and the philosopher José Vasconcelos at a dinner, this Colonel Vergara with his Kaiser mustache and dark, high-collared uniform rich with military braid.
“A Catholic fanatic killed our General Obregón, my boy. Ahhhhh. I went to all their funerals, every one of ’em you see here, they all died a violent death, except I didn’t get to Zapata’s funeral, they buried him in secret so they could say he was still alive.”
And a different General Vicente Vergara, now dressed in civilian clothes, about to bid farewell to his youth, very neat, very spit-and-polish, in his light gabardine suit and pearl stickpin, very serious, very solemn, because only such a man could be offering his hand to the man with a granite face and the eyes of a jaguar, the Maximum Leader of the Revolution, Plutarco Elías Calles …
“That was a man, my boy, a humble schoolteacher who rose to be President. There wasn’t a man could look him in the eye, not one, not even men who’d survived the awful test of a fake firing squad, believing their hour had come and not blinking an eye, not even them. Your godfather, Plutarco. Yes, boy, your godfather. Look at him, and look at you there in his arms. There we all are, the day you were baptized, the day of national unity when General Calles returned from exile.”
“But why did he have me baptized? Didn’t he persecute the Church mercilessly?”
“What does one thing have to do with the other? Were we going to leave you nameless?”
“No, Grandfather, but you also say that the Virgin unites all us Mexicans, how can you explain that?”
“The Virgin of Guadalupe is a revolutionary Virgin; she appeared on Hidalgo’s banners during the War of Independence, and on Zapata’s in the Revolution, she’s the best bitchin’ Virgin ever.”
“But, Grandfather, it was because of you I didn’t go to parochial school.”
“The Church is good for only two things, to be born right and to die right, you understand? But between the cradle and the grave they don’t have any business sticking their noses in what doesn’t concern them, let them stick to baptizing brats and praying for souls.”
The three of us who lived in the big house in Pedregal only saw each other at supper, which was still whatever my grandfather the General wished. Soup, rice, fried beans, sugary rolls, and cocoa-flavored gruel. My father, the Honorable Don Agustín Vergara, got his own back for these ranch-style suppers by dining from three to five at the Jena or the Rivoli, where he could order steak Diane and crepes suzette. One revolting thing about the suppers was a peculiar habit of Grandfather’s. After we finished eating, the old man would remove his false teeth and drop them into a half glass of warm water. Then he would add a half glass of cold water. He’d wait a minute and pour half this glass into a third. Then again he’d add a portion of warm water to the first glass, pour half of it into the third, and fill the first with warm water from the second. Then he would remove the teeth from the first of the three turbid mixtures swimming with particles of stew and tortilla, steep them in the second and the third, and, having obtained the desired temperature, place the teeth in his mouth and clamp them shut the way you snap a padlock.
“Nice and warm,” he’d say, “sonofabitch, a set of teeth like a lion’s.”
“It’s disgusting,” my father the lawyer Agustín said one night, wiping his lips with his napkin and tossing it disdainfully on the tablecloth.
I looked at my father in astonishment. He’d never said a word all the years my grandfather had been performing the denture ceremony. The Honorable Agustín had to hold back the nausea the General’s patient alchemy aroused. As for me, my grandfather could do no wrong.
“You ought to be ashamed. That’s disgusting,” the lawyer repeated.
“Hoo, hoo, hoo!” The General looked at him with scorn. “Since when can’t I do what I bloody well please in my own house? My house, I said, not yours, Tín, nor that of any of those fancy-dancy friends of yours.”
“I’ll never be able to invite them here, at least not unless I hide you under lock and key.”
“So my teeth make you vomit, but not my dough? By the way, how’re things going…?”
“Bad, really really bad…” my father said, shaking his
head with a melancholy we’d never seen in him before. He wasn’t a grave man, only a little pompous, even in his frivolities. This sadness, however, dissipated almost immediately, and he stared at Grandfather with icy defiance and a hint of mockery we couldn’t understand.
Later Grandfather and I avoided comment on all this when we went to his bedroom, which was so different from the rest of the house. My father, the Honorable Agustín, had entrusted the details of the decor to a professional decorator, who’d filled the big house with Chippendale furniture, giant chandeliers, and fake Rubenses, for which he’d charged us as if they were real. General Vergara said he didn’t give a fig for all that stuff, and he reserved the right to furnish his room with the things he and his dead Doña Clotilde had used when they built their first house in the Roma district back there in the twenties. The bed was brass, and although the room had a modern closet, the General closed it off by installing an ancient, heavy mahogany mirrored wardrobe in front of the closet door.
He gazed at his ancient wardrobe with affection. “When I open it, I still smell the smell of my Clotilde’s clothes, so hard-working, the sheets all ironed, everything stiff with starch.”
In that room, there are all kinds of things that no one ever uses any more, like a marble-topped washstand with a porcelain washbasin, and tall pitchers filled with water. A copper spittoon and a wicker rocking chair. The General has always bathed in the evening, and I guess, because of my father’s mysterious behavior, Grandfather asked me to come with him that night. The two of us went together to the bathroom, the General carrying his gourd dipper with its hand-painted flowers and ducklings and his castile soap, because he despised the perfumed soaps with unpronounceable names that everyone was using then; after all, he wasn’t a film star or a pansy. I helped him with his bathrobe, his pajamas, and his fleece-lined slippers. After lowering himself into the tub of warm water, he soaped up his fiber brush and began to scrub himself vigorously. He told me it was good for the circulation of the blood. I told him I preferred a shower, and he replied that showers were for horses. Then, without his even asking, I rinsed him with his gourd dipper, pouring water over his shoulders.
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