Veracruz, Mexico
1937
This morning, I keep my eyes fixed on the sun glitter on the sea. My daughter Juana and her husband Eutímio have just finished visiting me for the second time this year. Her husband is the municipal president of the ward and is also the head of the longshoremen’s association. I almost never see him, except for the odd times when he appears for dinner, and even then, he takes his meals in the kitchen with Ignacia. When Juana first married him, he found me funny, as if I were a queer-looking little elf that had stowed away in the trousseau and was only to be summoned when the bedsheets needed folding. He lets me hold court in the patio, watching the warm tropical rain spatter the terracotta tiles. I deliver missives. I give commands. I sometimes say to him, ‘Get us some sweet bread from Lara’s Bakery by the big church downtown.’ I dictate how the house is to be run. Not even my daughter interferes with what I say. I watch the wind rustle the bougainvilleas against the white stucco wall that separates the house from the world and its noise. Just beyond that, the swells sweep over the hot sand of the beach. I hear the clang of bells and bosun’s whistles over the din of the restless sea. I sometimes see American warships puff off towards Nicaragua and Honduras and Costa Rica. I see banana boats. I see Mayans, ancient and dark, weave palm fronds into baskets to sell on the street. I see monkeys. I see lime vendors. I see coconut vendors. I smell Spanish verbena and Cuban tobacco and I sometimes hear a band play a danzón in the plaza in front of the Cathedral.
My husband Arturo built this house. It stands, white as a cloud, ringed with blue talavera, at the blue-green lip of the sea. Palm trees frame it. The sun and salt air and the tropical rain scrub the grime from the stucco. Skinks scatter under the fallen fronds. Our house has a toaster and a percolator and a washing machine. Juana can afford to crimp her hair in Marcel waves and her daughters do the same. When they come here during Easter and Christmas, my granddaughters arrive in a big black Packard automobile. They put on rouge and lipstick and Chanel No. 5 from the little boutiques in the capital where they buy their dresses. They put records on the Victrola and dance the foxtrot. My youngest granddaughter has just returned from her honeymoon in Spain with shawls of black lace, peinetas of mother-of-pearl, and silk drawers. I can have anything I desire, so long as it is reasonably priced. I can have Ignacia make me rice pudding with vanilla from Papantla. I can make a capirotada with French bread if I want. I can buy a Chinese parasol from the knickknacks shop near the docks. I can place an order from the Sears catalog the old American sutler keeps in his hot little kiosk in the center of town. I can have anything I want because we have something called a line of credit. I have bought tiny tea sets, spoons for tasting chocolate, a sick call crucifix, entire plans for a house, and dresses that sell for a dollar.
In the evening, I sit in a wicker rocking chair on the back porch and listen to the sea batter the jetties. Ignacia turns on the radio. We listen to the new bolero they’re singing in the capital. We have our coffee. We watch the moon rise. For thirty years, I have sat in this rocking chair, fanning off the horseflies and wading into the sea of memories my mother still lives in. Every time I turn a corner going up the stairs to my bedroom, I remember our white ship of a house in the Laguna Madre in Texas, our hillock of short grass; our bay horse and our pony who died when I was ten. I see the ghost of my mother in her white cotton dress and her thin navy blue belt of worsted wool, its tiny brass buckle whose dull reflection gleamed in the light of a hurricane lamp and which I still see gleaming in the dark of certain nights. When the midnight rains come at the end of the hot season, I open the jalousies and put out my hand and I feel her sweep past me, in a faint gust sated with the breath of the rain.
This year will mark the fifteenth in which the green parrot we kept in the patio as a pet will not sing. It will be seventh since we buried my sister Guadalupe under a pirul tree in the Carmelite convent in Jalapa. It will be two years since the death of Chula, my eldest daughter’s golden retriever. Her eldest son—my grandson—will be departing on a steamer this year bound for Yale, where he will study how to maintain oil derricks. It will be ten years since we heard that Lindbergh crossed the Atlantic, ten years since the radio told us Spanish partisans had been exiled to Mexico by Franco, ten years since we got a new refrigerator, ten years since Doña Mercedes, my across-the-street neighbor, was persuaded to live in the Capital by her good-for-nothing son, ten years since our housekeeper Ignacia accidentally broke my Chinese vase while watering the chrysanthemums, ten years since we had a big hurricane.
It will be two years since we got the new Cathedral radio I love so much—my husband used to call it ‘the wireless’ because that was what the traveling salesman insisted that it was called. It will be a year since my favorite eight o’clock novela, Amores Perfectos, ended. It will be seven years since the rest of the world went to hell.
It has been a year since my husband Arturo died. It has been a year and a few days since we buried him in the Municipal Cemetery No. 1 where the graves stand like white bricks left out in the hot morning sun, where the weeds clump together and the trees hang forbiddingly low, where the sound of the surf can be heard, where it is too hot to have lunch. It has been a year since the house he built for me at the edge of the sea no longer bustles with the activity it used to, our teenagers, our chickens, our evening serenades. Ignacia sweeping out the rain with broom made of corn straw, making small talk with the boys who sell watermelons and the man who comes to pick up the spare glass bottles.
It has been six months since my daughter Rosalinda came by to escape the tremendous heat in Guanajuato with my son-in-law Severo, a man who I believe is too ugly for her. Severo has a 1930 Ford Model A that he travels to the backlands to sell insurance policies to farmers who cannot read and ranchers who once buried Federales during the Cristiada. This year, my youngest granddaughter will marry a blond American boy and finally move to California, where she will teach the fandango to the children of vintners and movie stars.
And it will be twenty years, Mother, since you exhaled the last vivid sigh of your being, closed your eyes, and we crossed your arms. It will be twenty years since we closed your coffin, recited the prayer to the Holy Shroud for the repose of your eternal soul, and made empanadas filled with rice and beans to hand out at your wake. It will be twenty years since we parted with the tiny silver earrings mined in San Luis Potosi, twenty years since we removed your turquoise ring and tossed it into the sea so that you would forever marry yourself to it, like the Venetians did long ago; twenty years since we all wore mourning for four months, when I covered the mirrors of our house so your ghost would not become trapped in them.
How will I tell your story to your great-grandchildren? In this mind that cannot remember very much now, in these eyes that can barely see, in these old bones that creak and feel the chocolatero winds that descend across the bay from the north in the winter and shake the palm fronds loose on the promenade, the words cannot rise quickly enough. Only words and images scattered against forty years of my own life and yours, with two centuries between them both. Your beauty lives through me, my sons and daughters, in the eyes of my light-skinned grandchildren who know nothing of you except what I can muster up. How will I evoke the beauty of 1867 in you, of ’74, of the effervescence of ’85 when we took a trip in the landau to visit Doctor Jimenez, who told me I was of marriageable age? The four o’clocks in Xalapa never looked more enticing.
How horrible it was to see your coffin sinking into the soft, hot earth. I was imprisoned thereafter for months by my grief. It was a beautiful prison of love and memory. I admit I loved enshrining you in my sadness, but the pain was locked in me, under layers of black crepe and silk, behind my cameo brooch, bordered in the thick black borders of the stationery we ordered because everyone had to know you were dead. Men wrote me letters lauding your great beauty—letters I could not then read because I no longer understood English—letters that I could not personally respond to because the language of grief choked out whatever response I could give. Only Arturo could speak for me, and his writing was so terse and brittle we didn’t have any visitors for a year.
This year, the grief will rise like a swell breaking upon the shore at low tide: it will barely break and sweep across the flat sandy shore of my life, and then it will recede, and it will take with it whatever memory I had of you. I can barely remember your face now. I do remember your eyes, your hands. But there are other things that are hard to place.
My dear Arturo.
You still come to me. You sit on my bed as you used to, and you smile faintly, and you disappear. I am almost always awake—you only think I am sleeping. Sometimes the waves break hard against the seawall and I can feel the house rumble. I’ll go to the window and step out on the balcony, look at the stars reach their height against the deep dark blue of the Gulf sky. I’ll turn around and there you are, hands folded. Unlike La Llorona or the Headless Mule, you are beautiful, you cannot and do not wish to harm me. You smile faintly, you fade away, and my heart breaks again. Your memory is brilliant and beautiful. If I press my face into the pillow I can smell the brilliantine you wore and only then am I able to sleep again.
Even when the black brows of hurricanes stood you down, you never flinched. Not once. Calmly, assuredly, you’d tell Ignacia to close the shutters. And although we had plenty of rain, the house was so well built that I never lost a thing, save for a palm tree or two. And afterward—once the storm surge had finally relinquished its grip on the town and the police could discern the dead bodies from the living ones—we had coffee as we usually did. Good God, it was so hot. What business did we have asking Ignacia to make us coffee? I suspect that you learned this trait from the English.
Just the other day I thought of you, standing in the door of the house, with my little market basket in hand. In another time and place, Arturo, we’d go to market together. I’d let you pick out the panes, the limes, the pineapples, the tomatoes to make the sopas you loved to slurp loudly. Maybe in Heaven there’s a tianguis we can stroll in, anonymously, while San Pascual sells us chile verde and the Virgin of Guadalupe offers us garlands of roses, the divine delicacies of life eternal. What were you doing while I was at the market? Did you take telephone calls on the second floor? Did you place orders for the workers on the docks? Or did you long for me, for the curve of my bodice and the ruffle of my taffetas, my ribbons, my white cotton shirtwaists and my worn leather boots? I am sure you did as much as I did for you. I longed for you then as I did now. I am not saying Ignacia is terrible company. It was that, for all my life—even now, in my widowhood—I was madly in love with you. The trait that we all have in this family is that we love the men we love to the point of madness.
The crepe myrtles in my front yard nod in the dying purple twilight and the breeze sweeps along the soft cool tiles where I walk barefoot. I walk under the arches of the patio, waiting for Ignacia to come out with a tea set and her knitting bag. She’ll pull the radio from the wall and turn the dial all the way to 8 and we’ll wait for the booming voice of the announcer from XEW to finish the evening news. Did you hear that the President of the Republic wants to wean us off of Standard Oil? Did you hear that FDR finally stood up from his wheelchair before a ravished crowd of 100,000? Did you hear that Prime Minister Churchill wants to avoid a war with Germany? Did you hear that the Japanese invaded China? Did you hear that they think the world is going to end in a year or so?
But it wouldn’t end here. No. My little rocky spit will break off from Mexico and I’ll float through the Gulf until I reach the Western Paradise. If one day the Republic finally collapses, I’ll go to the top of my house and fly a white flag and we’ll sail, Ignacia and me, to Manhattan. But tonight, like the other Tuesday nights of the last year or so, we will wait by the radio to hear another episode of El Conde de Monte Cristo. And because Ignacia can neither read nor write, we will spend the next thirty minutes reviewing what we just listened to, as if we had read the novel by that man Dumás, whom the narrator eulogizes. In that moment, Arturo, you become as clear as the Count himself, clad in black leather and a real red cape—red like the cochineal dye for the vestments for the Virgin of Zapopán. It is like I have you here again, those dainty pince-nez glasses sitting on the fat bridge of your Roman nose, book in hand, taking in the world once again as my husband, to survey the quiet kingdom of plants and waves we once owned. The one thing I will miss is your grave—quiet, unassuming, a whitewashed marble plot topped with gravel and an angel quietly lamenting you, contemplating the black beauty of the letters you bore in this life. I can never stay there for too long, because like the heat, the memory of you is too much for me to endure. Would that we were twenty-seven and still good-looking, waiting for the mariachis to strum the last tin-tan from the last waltz in the last hour of our wedding. That is the moment I wish us to exist in.
Once the twilight fades and the night descends, I will embark again on the night journey toward the endless warm sea, abounding with life and dreams. My boat is small, and I carry nothing in it but myself. I don’t need to row out far enough for the current to seize me and pull back into 1886, when I stood on the platform of the train station in Mexico City, with the steam rising off a stilled locomotive. I will see your eyes, green as the jungles of Honduras, green as Chiapas and the Mayan ruins, stare back into me. I will smell the mango juice on your fingers, I will taste it on your lips. And when I have savored that instant for a moment the current will draw me onward towards dawn, where I will meet you as the morning star. The entire seno Mexicano will extend her brown naked arms to me, full of parrots and palm trees and the fort of San Juan de Ulua, and she will say goodbye. All Mexico will say goodbye to me, and all of Texas too; and once I am past the Azores and have drifted into the silent space where the prime meridian the equator meet, I will see you, and then I will know what I have missed all these years.