But this story is from the time of before. Before my Awful Grandmother became awful, before she became my father’s mother. Once she had been a young woman who men looked at and women listened to. And before that she had been a girl.
Is there anyone alive who remembers the Awful Grandmother when she was a child? Is there anyone left in the world who once heard her call out “Mamá?” It was such a long, long time ago.
¡Qué exagerada eres! It wasn’t that long ago!
I have to exaggerate. It’s just for the sake of the story. I need details. You never tell me anything.
And if I told you everything, what would there be for you to do, eh? I tell you just enough …
But not too much. Well, let me go on with the story, then.
And who’s stopping you?
Soledad Reyes was a girl of good family, albeit humble, the daughter of famed reboceros from Santa María del Río, San Luis Potosí, where the finest shawls in all the republic come from, rebozos so light and thin they can be pulled through a wedding ring.
Her father, my great-grandfather Ambrosio Reyes, was a man who stank like a shipyard and whose fingernails were permanently stained blue. To tell the truth, the stink was not his fault. It was due to his expertise as a maker of black shawls, because black is the most difficult color to dye. The cloth must be soaked over and over in water where rusty skillets, pipes, nails, horseshoes, bed rails, chains, and wagon wheels have been left to dissolve.
Careful! Just enough, but not too much …
… Otherwise the cloth disintegrates and all the work is for nothing. So prized was the black rebozo de olor, it was said when the crazed ex-empress Carlota* was presented with one in her prison-castle in Belgium, she sniffed the cloth and joyously announced, —Today we leave for Mexico.
Just enough, but not too much.
Everyone in the world agreed Ambrosio Reyes’ black shawls were the most exquisite anyone had ever seen, as black as Coyotepec pottery, as black as huitlacoche, the corn mushroom, as true-black as an olla of fresh-cooked black beans. But it was his wife Guillermina’s fingers that gave the shawls their high value because of the fringe knotted into elaborate designs.
The art of las empuntadoras is so old, no one remembers whether it arrived from the east, from the macramé of Arabia through Spain, or from the west from the blue-sky bay of Acapulco where galleons bobbed weighted down with the fine porcelain, lacquerware, and expensive silk of Manila and China. Perhaps, as is often the case with things Mexican, it came from neither and both.† Guillermina’s signature design, with its intricate knots looped into interlocking figure eights, took one hundred and forty-six hours to complete, but if you asked her how she did it, she’d say, —How should I know? It’s my hands that know, not my head.
Guillermina’s mother had taught her the empuntadora’s art of counting and dividing the silk strands, of braiding and knotting them into fastidious rosettes, arcs, stars, diamonds, names, dates, and even dedications, and before her, her mother taught her as her own mother had learned it, so it was as if all the mothers and daughters were at work, all one thread interlocking and double-looping, each woman learning from the woman before, but adding a flourish that became her signature, then passing it on.
—Not like that, daughter, like this. It’s just like braiding hair. Did you wash your hands?
—See this little spider design here, pay attention. The widow Elpidia will tell you different, but it was I who invented that.
—Hortensia, that shawl you sold the day before yesterday. Policarpa knotted the fringe, am I right? You can always tell Policarpa’s work … it looks like she made it with her feet.
—¡Puro cuento! What a mitotera you are, Guillermina! You know I did that myself. You like weaving stories just to make trouble.
And so my grandmother as a newborn baby was wrapped within one of these famous rebozos of Santa María del Río, the shawls a Mexican painter claimed could serve as the national flag, the very same shawls wealthy wives coveted and stored in inlaid cedar boxes scented with apples and quinces. When my grandmother’s face was still a fat clover-leaf, she was seated on a wooden crate beneath these precious rebozos and taught the names given each because of their color or design.
Watermelon, lantern, pearl. Rain, see, not to be confused with drizzle. Snow, dove-gray columbino, coral jamoncillo. Brown trimmed with white coyote, the rainbow tornasoles, red quemado, and the golden-yellow maravilla. See! I still remember!
Women across the republic, rich or poor, plain or beautiful, ancient or young, in the times of my grandmother all owned rebozos—the ones of real Chinese silk sold for prices so precious one asked for them as dowry and took them to the grave as one’s burial shroud, as well as the cheap everyday variety made of cotton and bought at the market. Silk rebozos worn with the best dress—de gala, as they say. Cotton rebozos to carry a child, or to shoo away the flies. Devout rebozos to cover one’s head with when entering church. Showy rebozos twisted and knotted in the hair with flowers and silver hair ornaments. The oldest, softest rebozo worn to bed. A rebozo as cradle, as umbrella or parasol, as basket when going to market, or modestly covering the blue-veined breast giving suck.
That world with its customs my grandmother witnessed.
Exactly!
It is only right, then, that she should have been a knotter of fringe as well, but when Soledad was still too little to braid her own hair, her mother died and left her without the language of knots and rosettes, of silk and artisela, of cotton and ikat-dyed secrets. There was no mother to take her hands and pass them over a dry snakeskin so her fingers would remember the patterns of diamonds.
When Guillermina departed from this world into that, she left behind an unfinished rebozo, the design so complex no other woman was able to finish it without undoing the threads and starting over.
—Compadrito, I’m sorry, I tried, but I can’t. Just to undo a few inches nearly cost me my eyesight.
—Leave it like that, Ambrosio said. —Unfinished like her life.
Even with half its fringe hanging unbraided like mermaid’s hair, it was an exquisite rebozo of five tiras, the cloth a beautiful blend of toffee, licorice, and vanilla stripes flecked with black and white, which is why they call this design a caramelo. The shawl was slippery-soft, of an excellent quality and weight, with astonishing fringe work resembling a cascade of fireworks on a field of sunflowers, but completely unsellable because of the unfinished rapacejo. Eventually it was forgotten, and Soledad was allowed to claim it as a plaything.
After Guillermina’s sudden death, Ambrosio felt the urge to remarry. He had a child, a business, and his life ahead of him. He tied the knot with the baker’s widow. But it must have been the years of black dye that seeped into Ambrosio Reyes’ heart. How else to explain his dark ways? It was his new wife, a bitter woman who kneaded dough into ginger pigs, sugar shells, and buttery horns, who stole all his sweetness.
Because, to tell the truth, soon after remarrying, Ambrosio Reyes lost interest in his daughter the way one sometimes remembers the taste of a sweet but no longer longs for it. The memory was enough to satisfy him. He forgot he had once loved his Soledad, how he had enjoyed sitting with her in the doorway in a patch of sun, and how the top of her head smelled like warm chamomile tea, and this smell had made him happy. How he used to kiss a heart-shaped mole on the palm of her left hand and say, —This little mole is mine, right? How when she would ask for some centavos for a chuchuluco, he’d answer, —You are my chuchuluco, and pretend to gobble her up. But what most broke Soledad’s heart was that he no longer asked her, —Who’s my queen?
He no longer remembered—could it be? It was like the fairy tale “The Snow Queen,” a bit of evil glass no bigger than a sliver had entered into his eye and heart, a tender pain that hurt when he thought about his daughter. If only he had chosen to think about her more often and dissolve that evil with tears. But Ambrosio Reyes behaved as most people do when it comes to painful thoughts. He chose
not to think. And by not thinking, he allowed the memory to grow infected and more tender. How short is life and how long regret! Nothing could be done about it.
Poor Soledad. Her childhood without a childhood. She would never know what it was to have a father hold her again. There was no one to advise her, caress her, call her sweet names, soothe her, or save her. No one would touch her again with a mother’s love. No soft hair across her cheek, only the soft fringe of the unfinished shawl, and now Soledad’s fingers took to combing this, plaiting, unplaiting, plaiting, over and over, the language of the nervous hands. —Stop that, her stepmother would shout, but her hands never quit, even when she was sleeping.
She was thirty-three kilos of grief the day her father gave her away to his cousin in Mexico City. —It’s for your own good, her father said. —You should be grateful. Of this his new wife had him convinced.
—Don’t cry, Soledad. Your father is only thinking of your future. In the capital you’ll have more opportunities, an education, a chance to meet a better category of people, you’ll see.
So this part of the story if it were a fotonovela or telenovela could be called Solamente Soledad or Sola en el mundo, or I’m Not to Blame, or What an Historia I’ve Lived.
The unfinished caramelo rebozo, two dresses, and a pair of crooked shoes. This was what she was given when her father said, —Good-bye and may the Lord take care of you, and let her go to his cousin Fina’s in the capital.
Soledad would remember her father’s words. Just enough, but not too much. And though they were instructions on how to dye the black rebozos black, who would’ve guessed they would instruct her on how to live her life.
* The doomed empress Charlotte was the daughter of King Leopold of Belgium and wife to the well-meaning but foolish Austrian, the Archduke Maximilian of Hapsburg. Emperor Maximiliano and Empress Carlota were installed as rulers of Mexico in 1864 by disgruntled Mexican conservatives and clergy who believed foreign intervention would stabilize Mexico after the disastrous years of Santa Anna, who, as we recall, gave away half of Mexico to the United States. The puppet monarchs ruled for a few years, convinced that the Mexican people wanted them as their rulers—until the natives grew restless and France withdrew its troops.
Carlota left for Europe to seek Napoleon III’s assistance, since he had promised to support them, but France had enough problems. He refused to see her. Abandoned and delirious, Carlota suffered a mental collapse and began to suspect everyone of trying to poison her. In desperation, she tried to enlist the aid of Pope Pius IX, and is the only woman “on record” to have spent the night at the Vatican, refusing to leave because she insisted it was the only safe refuge from Napoleon’s assassins.
Meanwhile, back in Mexico, Maximiliano was executed by firing squad outside of Querétaro in 1866. Carlota was finally persuaded to return to her family in Belgium, where she lived exiled in a moated castle until her death in 1927 at the age of eighty-six.
I forgot to mention, Maximiliano was ousted by none other than Benito Juárez, the only pure-blooded Indian to rule Mexico. For a Hollywood version of the aforementioned, see Juarez, John Huston’s 1939 film with the inestimable Bette Davis playing—who else—the madwoman.
† The rebozo was born in Mexico, but like all mestizos, it came from everywhere. It evolved from the cloths Indian women used to carry their babies, borrowed its knotted fringe from Spanish shawls, and was influenced by the silk embroideries from the imperial court of China exported to Manila, then Acapulco, via the Spanish galleons. During the colonial period, mestizo women were prohibited by statutes dictated by the Spanish Crown to dress like Indians, and since they had no means to buy clothing like the Spaniards’, they began to weave cloth on the indigenous looms creating a long and narrow shawl that slowly was shaped by foreign influences. The quintessential Mexican rebozo is the rebozo de bolita, whose spotted design imitates a snakeskin, an animal venerated by the Indians in pre-Columbian times.
22.
Sin Madre, Sin Padre, Sin Perro Que Me Ladre
Aunty Fina lived in a building that would appear lovely only after demolition, surviving in a nostalgic hand-colored photograph by Manuel Ramos Sánchez, the Mexican Atget. In rosy pastels it seemed to rise like a dream of a more charming time …
It was never rosy, and it certainly wasn’t charming. It was smelly, dank, noisy, hot, and filled with vermin.
Who’s telling this story, you or me?
You.
Well, then.
Go on, go on.
It had withstood several centuries of epidemics, fires, earthquakes, floods, and families, with each age dividing its former elegance into tiny apartments crowded with ever-increasing inhabitants. No one is still alive who remembers where this building stood exactly, but let’s assume it was on the Street of the Lost Child, since that would suit our story to perfection.
Nonsense! It wasn’t like that at all. It was like this. At the back of a narrow courtyard, up a flight of stairs, in the fourth doorway of a wide hallway Aunty Fina and her children lived. To get there you first had to cross the open courtyard and pass under several archways …
… that gave the building a bit of a Moorish feeling?
That gave the building a bit of a dreary feeling.
Although the walls were damp and rust-stained, the courtyard was made cheerful with several potted bougainvillea plants, rubber trees, camellias, and caged canaries.
How you exaggerate! Where you get these ridiculous ideas from is beyond me.
Lined up along the walls were large clay water urns filled daily by the walking water carriers. And abandoned in front of a doorway or on the stairwell—that Mexican obsession, the pail and mop. The roof housed a skinny half-breed watchdog named el Lobo, several chickens, a rooster, and rows of clotheslines fluttering with bright laundry. Here on the roof, in that holy hour between light and dark, just as the stars blinked open, it was possible to find a little respite from the chaos of the world below, and here it was most often possible to find Soledad Reyes examining the horizon of the city.
Exactly! In that era, the capital was like the natives themselves, chaparrita, short and squat and hugging the earth.
Only the volcanoes and church towers rose above the low roofs like the old temples in the time of the many gods. There were no skyscrapers, and the tallest buildings did not exceed eight stories.
If you wanted to kill yourself you had to find a church.
In much the same way that victims had been sacrificed at the summit of a temple pyramid, they now sacrificed themselves by leaping from temple bell towers. At the time of Soledad’s arrival, so many women had sought out churches for this express purpose that a proclamation was signed by all the bishops in the land and an edict issued that absolutely prohibited anyone from taking their life on church property. As a result, access to bell towers was strictly prohibited, except for bell ringers, masons, and priests, but even these had to be closely watched for signs of excessive sighing and dramatic outbursts. But let us take a look at this Soledad.
It’s about time!
If this were a movie from Mexico’s Golden Age of cinema, it would be black-and-white and no doubt a musical.
Like Nosotros, los pobres.
A perfect opportunity for humor, song, and, curiously enough, cheer.
—Let children be children, Aunty Fina says from behind a huge mountain of ironing. Aunty Fina is a huge mountain too. She has the face of a Mexican geisha, tiny feet and tiny hands, and everything she does she does slowly and with grace, as if she were underwater. —Let children be children, she says, the thin, high brows of her pretty geisha face rising even higher. She remembers her own childhood, and her heart becomes wide for these pobres criaturas she has brought into this world. This is why her children are allowed to do what they desire, and why she has room in her home and heart to take in Soledad.
One of her pobres criaturas is wearing nothing but a soiled sock, one is under the table breaking eggs with a hammer, one
is lapping water from the dog’s water bowl, one, old enough to chew, is demanding and receiving teta, and all whimpering, whining, squealing, squalling like a litter of wild things. Aunty Fina doesn’t seem to notice or doesn’t mind.
—Hey hey lady.
—That’s not a lady! That’s your cousin Soledad.
—Hey, hey, you. What’s your favorite color?
—Red.
—Red! That’s the Devil’s favorite color.
This strikes them as terribly funny. A girl drinking a mug of milk spits it up from her nose and starts them on another fit of grunts. They all look the same to Soledad, these cousins, big heads, little pointy blue teeth, hair as raggedy as if they’d chewed it off themselves. At first they stand close to the wall and stare without speaking, but once they get over their shyness, they poke and pinch and spit like children raised by wolves. Soledad doesn’t want to be poked at with a finger that’s been who knows where.
—Go play, go on.
But they don’t want to leave her.
—Hey, hey, Soledad.
—Don’t you know you’re supposed to call me “aunty” before saying my name? I’m older than you.
—Hey, you, aunty. Why is it you’re so ugly?
Aunty Fina has so many children, she doesn’t know how many she has. Soledad counts twelve, but they all have the same fat face, the same rosary bead eyes; it’s difficult to tell them apart.
—But how many children do you have in all, Aunty Fina?
—Sixteen or nineteen or eighteen, I think. Sólo Dios sabe. Only God knows for certain.
—But how is it you don’t know?
—Because some were dead before they were born. And some were born angelitos. And some were never born. And some disappear until we forget about them as if they are dead. One, a boy with hair like a hurricane, sent us a postcard once from Havana, and another time, a little ship made of coral and seashells that I still have somewhere, but that was years ago. The others? Sólo Dios. Only God.