His little dressing table behind the door held the apparatus for the elaborate arrangement of the long hanks of hair to disguise the bald top. The back and sides were very long, and now, in the mirror of the early morning, he looked like an ancient prophet with the mange. He swept up the long locks with a wooden comb, placing each strand artfully, secured them with bobby pins. Working on his hair quieted his nerves and he sang, “Can this be you, my little moon, who walks past my door …” He achieved a hirsute look but a stranger glancing at the upsweep sometimes—for a moment—took him for a woman. And strangers did see him, for he worked in a restaurant, the Blue Dove—never a waiter, always the one who carried the dishes. The Blue Dove was in Boogie, the town to the south where they once had lived in the ancient house of the Relámpagos. In his own kitchen he heard the clink of the pan as Félida heated the milk for his café con leche, from the radio the last chorus of “Route 66,” Bobby Troup, and the newscaster saying something about the coal mine strike and federal troops, something about Communists, the same old song, and he was glad when Félida shut it off. He had to hurry now.
He was short, with a full-jawed, fleshy face. Small eyes sunk deep in the sockets, sooty eyebrows arched (he smoothed them with a little spit on his finger), and above them like a panel, the broad forehead the color of fruitwood. The shortness of his neck destroyed any hope of elegance. His arms were muscular and thick, the better, he said, to clasp his accordion close; his hands ended in powerful but tapering fingers that moved swiftly. His trunk was not slender, the legs short and heavy, thickly furred, as was his broad chest. Weight came to Adina’s mind at the sight of his naked thighs.
A restless man, emphatic, his face changing with every sentence, ideas and thoughts bursting from him. Because he had no past he invented one. He made the most common events into stories, minor incidents swelling with drama as his voice pumped them up. Dios, said the waiters and his embarrassed children, he talks too much, they must have vaccinated him with a Victrola needle when he was a baby.
Yet he had never been able to describe certain moments in his life: the feeling when two voices paired like a set of birds twisting in close flight and the listener shuddered with pleasure. Or when music jetted from the instruments as blood from an arterial wound, blood in which the dancers stamped while grasping partners’ slippery hands, shouting from raw throats.
His own voice pitched excitedly from highs to lows with strong pauses for effects, sound effects. He sang when he wasn’t talking, making up music and words on the spot: “My beautiful Adina sleeping, black hair on the white pillow, the moon’s silver cords binding you to my bed.” Although his feet were not small, he liked smart shoes and bought them whenever he could, but always the cheap ones that hardly lasted a month before the leather cracked and the heels fell off. When he drank he felt hopeless, he was cast with his music into caves of bat guano and bones gnawed by wild animals.
Abandoned at birth,
Alone in this world without mother or father,
I labored to live.
I wished for beauty
but found only ugliness and scorn—
His job was a stupid job and for that reason he liked it, took a morbid pleasure in unobtrusively sliding the white plates smeared with sauces and cheese off the tablecloth and into the Bakelite tub, bearing away bowls of stained lettuce leaves floating in juices, cigarette butts crushed into fat.
At night he entered his other world and, accordion against his breast and his powerful voice controlling the movements and thoughts of two hundred people, he was invincible; at the restaurant he was subservient, not only to the demands of the occupation but to some cringing inner self. His day began at seven in the morning with empty coffee cups and the crumbs of sweet cakes and ended at six after the first wave of dinner plates. He knew all the day waiters; there were seven. All but one of them respected his dual nature, perhaps cursing him in the passageway to the kitchen where he shoved the tubs of dirty dishes through a window to the sinks, mocking his slowness, clumsiness, stupidity; but in the evenings and on the weekends the same men screamed with joy as they stood in the cascade of his music, touched his sleeve and spoke his name as if he were a saint. They would kiss his feet if they knew what made his music so vigorous, if they knew the green accordion’s secret—or perhaps would shove him into the great hot oven in envy.
The Relámpagos
Before the war, before they moved to Hornet in 1936, the family had lived in a certain adobe house near the river. There were a dozen straggling houses, poor and isolated. The train tracks curved in from the west and disappeared. The sons spent their first years playing with tires, dirt, sticks, crushed cans, bottles. Relámpagos had been in this place centuries before there was Texas. They had been American citizens since 1848 and still the Anglo Texans said “Mexicans.”
“Blood is thicker than river water,” said Abelardo.
In the generation before, Abelardo’s mother—not really his mother for he had been an abandoned child, a naked baby wrapped in a soiled shirt and left on the church floor in 1906—was a wordless bent woman of children and tortillas and soil, weeding her chickpeas and squash, tomatillos, chiles, beans and corn.
The old man—not really his father—was a field-worker, always far away, in the Rio Grande valley, in Colorado, Indiana, California, Oregon, and in the Texas cotton. An invisible man (as Abelardo himself became invisible to his children), working, working, away in the north, sending small amounts of money home, sometimes returning for a few months, a crooked-backed man with great scarred hands and a drawn, toothless mouth. That poor man a machine for working, the bruised hands crooked for seizing and pulling, for lifting boxes and baskets, for grasping. The arms hung uncomfortably when work stopped. He was made for work, eyes squinted shut, the face empty of the luxury of reflection, mouth a hole, stubbled cheeks, a filthy baseball cap, wearing a cast-off shirt until it rotted away. If he had beauty in his life, no one knew it.
One day this secondhand father disappeared. The woman heard a long time later that he had drowned in a town to the north, swept away with others in a wall of water that filled streets nine feet deep with yellow liquid, a flood that would have frightened Noah, the cataclysmic result of the most ferocious cascade of rain ever known to fall—thirty-six inches in a single thunderous night.
Abelardo’s early life was bound by the music he made with sticks, dried chickpeas in a can, a bit of sheet metal and his own reedy voice; and by the small river that flowed, when it held water, away to the Rio Grande, deep and full with distant runoff, or nothing more than a silty film on the gravel, bordered by cottonwoods and willows thick with spring-loaded birds, huge flights of white-winged doves jamming and fanning the air in September and the guns going off all around, POUM, poum; and in the spring, going north, going to the shuddering north, the upwelling broad-winged hawks. He dimly remembered standing beside someone, a man, not his father, in the tangled fragrance of guajillo, black mimosa, huisache, in the cedar elms and the ebonies, watching a dark blue snake twine among the tiny leaves. He had almost seen the dappled ocelot the man was pointing at, as though a piece of earth cast with spots of light had pulled itself up and flowed into the thicket. In the damp soil of the riverbank he once found the imprint of an entire bird but for the head, the wings pressed down and out, the individual feathers of the flattened tail distinct, an impression as clear as the cast of an archaeopteryx in ancient mud. Some larger bird had stood on this bird’s back, gripping the head with secateur beak, and at last had carried it away.
He was not a Relámpago by birth or heritage or blood but by informal adoption, yet he became heir to all the Relámpagos had owned, for the eleven other children died early or disappeared. Water was their fate. He saw Elena drown. They were getting water from the river, three or four of the true Relámpagos striving and pushing on the crumbling bank, then a splash and a cry. He saw her flailing hands, her streaming head rise above the muddy current for a moment and then truly disappear.
He ran home behind the others, the water sloshing out of the can against his bare leg, the wire bail cutting into his hand.
Victor was the last of the true Relámpagos, and he died at age nineteen in an irrigation ditch, the water rosy with his blood. And the brutal joke was repeated: yes, it is well known that all-Texas Rangers have Mexican blood. On their boots.
The inheritance was more or less nothing, a crumbling adobe house of three rooms and a patch of yard the size of a blanket. Yet they lived in it until somehow it was proved the property of a big cotton grower, an American who felt compassion for Abelardo and gave him fifty dollars to erase any notions that he might own the fingernail of land.
Pairs of bulldozers arrived, dragging chains between them, plunging into the branchy maze, macerating the tiny leaves and the white wood of cracked limbs, scraping the thicket into mounds for the burning, life burned, sending up smoke for days. Afterward long, flat fields of cotton, the only relieving color the hooped backs of laborers and the overseer’s yellow truck, the air saturated with the smell of chemical fertilizers and insecticides. Yet for the rest of his life he woke in the morning expecting the smell of the river, and from beyond it the imagined perfume of that beautiful and tragic country where perhaps he had been born.
The Crash Creek dance
He met Adina Rojas in 1924 at a dance. He was eighteen, ragged, his single possession the little green accordion he had bought a month earlier in a Texas cotton town after staring at it for weeks through a barbershop window seeing how the color of the bellows was fading in the strong sun and the broken thumb strap curled. It needed many repairs. He bought it for five dollars without hearing a note from it. Something about the instrument appealed to him through the fly-spotted glass and even then he was impetuous. A button stuck, the corner blocks under the bass grille had fallen off, the wax was cracked so that the reed plates rattled, the leather check valves were dry and curled, the gaskets had shrunk. He took the instrument apart carefully, learned to repair it by observation and by asking others. So he discovered the correct mixture of beeswax and rosin, where to purchase fine kidskin for new valves, and worked on it until it was sound and he could join his voice to its distinctive, bitter music.
Adina was five years older than he and dark, strong and willful, still unmarried. In later life he had only to draw out the first chord of “Mi Querida Reynosa” to evoke again the evening of that dance, although it was not at Reynosa but in Crash Creek. Adina’s face was powdered white, the white dots of her navy rayon dress shifting giddily as she moved with him, and he for once not playing; he had put his accordion in Beltrán Dinger’s hands, for Beltrán played well, and he came straight to Adina and danced a polka in the new style, with his weight back on his heels, stiff-legged, each step as if it were necessary to free the foot from the floor, strong and manly movement—none of that Czech hopping, that exhausting de brinquito jump step—and the room of dancers circling counterclockwise, circling the rough floor, the smell of perfume and hair oil, Adina’s wet hands glued to his. After that one dance he returned to the musicians but watched the polka-dot dress jealously. He sang the wrenching “Destino, Destino” directly to her, his fingers flying over the buttons, carrying the dancers through the intricate music, making them shout “ye-ye-ye-JAI!” Even two drunks fighting outside the door came in to listen.
Adina remembered the dance well enough but regarded it as the beginning of her troubles. Later she preferred to tell her daughter lugubrious stories of how she had made her own soap and washed clothes in an outdoor kettle when they lived in the house of the Relámpagos. Because they could not afford a clothesline, she hung the clothes on the barbwire fence, old barbwire, oxidized deep red, a tangle of mends and wrappings and metal thorns, so their garments were marked with bars of rust though Abelardo always had enough money for cigarette papers and tobacco.
“In the Depression it was a dangerous time,” she told her daughter. “The Americans deported thousands of people to Mexico, not only los mojados but many born here, American citizens, yet they were arrested and forced to go, no matter how they protested, no matter what documents they waved. So we held our breaths. We could listen in that time to Pedro González, very early in the morning, what wonderful music, Los Madrugadores, from Los Angeles. I was half in love with him—what a wonderful voice that man had. And he fought injustice. He would speak out through a corrido of his own composition when Mexican Americans were treated in an evil manner by the americanos. And they arrested him one day on some false excuse that he had raped a woman singer. He sat in the courtroom smoking a cigar and smiling and that was his downfall, that smile, which they saw as insolent. They sent him to prison, to San Quentin, for many years and never was his voice heard again.”
“Not true,” said Abelardo from the other room. “They deported him when the war started. He broadcasts to this day from Mexico. He lives in Tijuana. If you were not so passionately addicted to American soap operas you could hear him any day you wished.”
She paid no attention. “And during the war we heard La Hora de Victoria and La Hora del Soldado, two very patriotic programs.”
“I played on both many times. ‘Anchors Aweigh,’ everything like that. Doing the taco circuit. And there was that crazy German used to hang around the studios; he was everywhere we went, trying to get on the air to sing ‘God Bless America’ in German.”
“Yes,” she said. “I remember you wanted to be a fingerprint man then, not an accordion player. You cut a coupon in a magazine and sent away for a kit, you studied strange facts, the number of hairs on a brunette woman’s head, you’d say some big figure.”
“Correct. One hundred and ten thousand. Blond ones got one hundred fifty thousand hairs. That’s counting the whole body, even on the arms and face. That old German! ‘Herr scheutz Amerika! Land something-something.’ How’s that for a memory?”
During those years in the Relámpago house she had cooked on an outdoor fire, stumbling over hundreds of broken clay pigeons, she told Félida in a ferocious voice. Nearby lived a crazy Anglo with six fingers on each hand who practiced shooting his .22 pistol every day, his targets old roller-skating trophies—suggestively formed couples whose nakedness showed through their chrome garments. The heads and arms were the first parts shot away. Every day she had the fear of being wounded or her children killed by this crazy man’s bullets. It was she, she said, who had smoothed the mud each year when they replastered the adobe house, the side of her bare, callused hand sweeping the roughness to a fine matte finish, and on one memorable occasion a bullet had struck the wall a fraction of an inch from the tip of her longest finger.
“We were very scared. But what could we do? Somehow we lived, but it was a miracle none of us was killed. Or wounded. When the war started he went and we never saw him again. And for a year I saved up pennies and nickels to buy a nice aluminum teakettle with a whistle, for four dollars and something, but at the store they told me there was no more aluminum left to make kettles, all went to airplanes. All we had was a radio, and how we listened to it!”
“You listened to it,” Abelardo said. “I would not listen to that junk, those fortune-tellers, Abra and Dad Rango, and that Texas tap dancer you thought was so good, somebody went to the station one time, they wanted to see how he could do those things, those fancy steps, and all it was was a drummer tapping on the rim of his drum with the sticks.”
She whispered to her daughter that she did not much care for Abelardo’s music, preferred the more elegant sounds of the orquesta if she had a choice. Always she presented herself as struggling along a churned road carrying an enormous sack of problems like steel boxes that cut into her back while Abelardo capered ahead playing his accordion.
The finest thing about her was the thick, glossy hair, luxuriant and rich, and her mouth, very full and beautifully cut. She kept from her face every expression except fatigue and bitterness. When she was miserable she had a habit of grasping her hair in both hands and pulling, the raven wave
s shifting, releasing her warm woman’s scent. She was humorless; to her, life was difficult and demanding. The great dark eyes were often remote. She was tall, taller than Abelardo, her ankles and feet slender. All of the children had small feet except poor Crescencio who might have been born from a knot of bloody feathers instead of her flesh. After the birth of Félida her body expanded, great sheets of fat thickened her thighs and belly. The bed sagged on her side, and Abelardo rolled helplessly into the trough. Both his arms could not encircle her enormous waist. She wore dresses without sleeves, loose rayon tents manufactured of orange, electric blue or pink cloth sewn with such weak thread the seams opened in the first washing.
And what of the old house of the Relámpagos? She had hated that house and all it stood for, longed to leave it for San Antonio and the famous opportunities. In later years Félida asked many times, ‘tell about the casa of the Relámpagos,’ for Adina made it like a story of a dangerous place from which they had barely escaped.
There had been, she said in her serrated voice, a living room with brown walls, and the floor covered with an old manure-colored rug. There was the outhouse, which smelled very bad. Of course, a shrine in the corner with statues and pictures of lesser saints—Santa Escolástica who protects children from convulsions, San Peregrino who looks after those with cancer. On a table with turned legs the color of dried blood, a lace cloth worked by some dead Relámpago whose delirious fancies took the form of triangles, a photograph of an unknown wearing dark pants and vest, and an improbable pair of cowboy boots. The frame of this picture was decorated with glued-on toothpicks. There was a box of kitchen matches, a tall bottle of medicinal elixir and two brass ashtrays. On the wall, a net bag for letters and postcards, a calendar showing a Swiss village in the snow. There was a chromo of blood-dappled Jesus in a stamped metal frame that formed a cross at every corner.