And Eddie, sure. But Eddie and I were products of our American education. Anything tender always came off sounding like the subtitles to a Buñuel film.
But Flavio. When Flavio accidentally hammered his thumb, he never yelled “Ouch!” he said “¡Ay!” The true test of a native Spanish speaker.
¡Ay! To make love in Spanish, in a manner as intricate and devout as la Alhambra. To have a lover sigh mi vida, mi preciosa, mi chiquitita, and whisper things in that language crooned to babies, that language murmured by grandmothers, those words that smelled like your house, like flour tortillas, and the inside of your daddy’s hat, like everyone talking in the kitchen at the same time, or sleeping with the windows open, like sneaking cashews from the crumpled quarter-pound bag Mama always hid in her lingerie drawer after she went shopping with Daddy at the Sears.
That language. That sweep of palm leaves and fringed shawls. That startled fluttering, like the heart of a goldfinch or a fan. Nothing sounded dirty or hurtful or corny. How could I think of making love in English again? English with its starched r’s and g’s. English with its crisp linen syllables. English crunchy as apples, resilient and stiff as sailcloth.
But Spanish whirred like silk, rolled and puckered and hissed. I held Flavio close to me, in the mouth of my heart, inside my wrists.
Incredible happiness. A sigh unfurled of its own accord, a groan heaved out from my chest so rusty and full of dust it frightened me. I was crying. It surprised us both.
“My soul, did I hurt you?” Flavio said in that other language.
I managed to bunch my mouth into a knot and shake my head “no” just as the next wave of sobs began. Flavio rocked me, and cooed, and rocked me. Ya, ya, ya. There, there, there.
I wanted to say so many things, but all I could think of was a line I’d read in the letters of Georgia O’Keeffe years ago and had forgotten until then. Flavio … did you ever feel like flowers?
We take my van and a beer. Flavio drives. Watching Flavio’s profile, that beautiful Tarascan face of his, something that ought to be set in jade. We don’t have to say anything the whole ride and it’s fine, just take turns sharing the one beer, back and forth, back and forth, just looking at each other from the corner of the eye, just smiling from the corner of the mouth.
What’s happened to me? Flavio was just Flavio, a man I wouldn’t’ve looked at twice before. But now anyone who reminds me of him, any baby with that same cane-sugar skin, any moonfaced woman in line at the Handy Andy, or bag boy with tight hips carrying my groceries to the car, or child at the Kwik Wash with ears as delicate as the whorls of a sea mollusk, I find myself looking at, lingering over, appreciating. Henceforth and henceforth. Forever and ever. Ad infinitum.
When I was with Eddie, we’d be making love, and then out of nowhere I would think of the black-and-white label on the tube of titanium yellow paint. Or a plastic Mickey Mouse change purse I once had with crazy hypnotized eyes that blinked open/shut, open/shut when you wobbled it. Or a little scar shaped like a mitten on the chin of a boy named Eliberto Briseño whom I was madly in love with all through the fifth grade.
But with Flavio it’s just the opposite. I might be working on a charcoal sketch, chewing on a pinch of a kneaded rubber eraser I’ve absentmindedly put in my mouth, and then suddenly I’m thinking about the thickness of Flavio’s earlobes between my teeth. Or a wisp of violet smoke might rise from someone’s cigarette at the Bar America, and remind me of that twist of sinew from wrist to elbow in Flavio’s pretty arms. Or say Danny and Craig from Tienda Guadalupe Folk Art & Gifts are demonstrating how South American rain sticks work, and boom—there’s Flavio’s voice like the pull of the ocean when it drags everything with it back to its center—that kind of gravelly, charcoal and shell and glass rasp to it. Incredible.
Taco Haven was crowded the way it always is Sunday mornings, full of grandmothers and babies in their good clothes, boys with hair still wet from the morning bath, big husbands in tight shirts, and rowdy mamas slapping rude children to public decency.
Three security guards were vacating my window booth, and we grabbed it. Flavio ordered chilaquiles and I ordered breakfast tacos. We asked for quarters for the jukebox, same as always. Five songs 50 cents. I punched 132, “All My. Ex’s Live in Texas,” George Strait; 140, “Soy Infeliz,” Lola Beltrán; 233, “Polvo y Olvido,” Lucha Villa; 118, “Mal Hombre,” Lydia Mendoza; and number 167, “La Movidita,” because I knew Flavio loved Flaco Jiménez.
Flavio was no more quiet than usual, but midway through breakfast he announced, “My life, I have to go.”
“We just got here.”
“No. I mean me. I must go. To Mexico.”
“What are you talking about?”
“My mother wrote me. I have compromises to attend to.”
“But you’re coming back. Right?”
“Only destiny knows.”
A red dog with stiff fur tottered by the curb.
“What are you trying to tell me?”
The same red color as a cocoa doormat or those wooden-handled scrub brushes you buy at the Winn’s.
“I mean I have family obligations.” There was a long pause.
You could tell the dog was real sick. Big bald patches. Gummy eyes that bled like grapes.
“My mother writes that my sons—”
“Sons … How many?”
“Four. From my first. Three from my second.”
“First. Second. What? Marriages?”
“No, only one marriage. The other doesn’t count since we weren’t married in a church.”
“Christomatic.”
Really it made you sick to look at the thing, hobbling about like that in jerky steps as if it were dancing backward and had only three legs.
“But this has nothing to do with you, Lupe. Look, you love your mother and your father, don’t you?”
The dog was eating something, jaws working in spasmodic gulps. A bean-and-cheese taco, I think.
“Loving one person doesn’t take away from loving another. It’s that way with me with love. One has nothing to do with the other. In all seriousness and with all my heart I tell you this, Lupe.”
Somebody must’ve felt sorry for it and tossed it a last meal, but the kind thing would’ve been to shoot it.
“So that’s how it is.”
“There is no other remedy. La yin y el yang, you know,” Flavio said and meant it.
“Well, yeah,” I said. And then because my Torres Special felt like it wanted to rise from my belly—“I think you better go now. I gotta get my clothes out of the dryer before they get wrinkled.”
“Es cool,” Flavio said, sliding out of the booth and my life. “Ay te wacho, I guess.”
I looked for my rose-quartz crystal and visualized healing energy surrounding me. I lit copal and burned sage to purify the house. I put on a tape of Amazon flutes, Tibetan gongs, and Aztec ocarinas, tried to center on my seven chakras, and thought only positive thoughts, expressions of love, compassion, forgiveness. But after forty minutes I still had an uncontrollable desire to drive over to Flavio Munguía’s house with my grandmother’s molcajete and bash in his skull.
What kills me is your silence. So certain, so solid. Not a note, nor postcard. Not a phone call, no number I could reach you at. No address I could write to. Neither yes nor no.
Just the void. The days raw and wide as this drought-blue sky. Just this nothingness. That’s what hurts.
Nothing wants to break from the eyes. When you’re a kid, it’s easy. You take one wooden step out in the hall dark and wait. The hallways of every house we ever lived in smelling of Pine-Sol and dirty-looking no matter how many Saturdays we scrubbed it. Chipped paint and ugly nicks and craters in the walls from a century of bikes and kids’ shoes and downstairs tenants. The handrail old and never beautiful, not even the day it was new, I bet. Darkness soaked in the plaster and wood when the house was divided into apartments. Dust balls and hair in the corners where the broom didn’t reach. And now an
d then, a mouse squeaking.
How I let the sounds, dark and full of dust and hairs, out of my throat and eyes, that sound mixed with spit and coughing and hiccups and bubbles of snot. And the sea trickling out of my eyes as if I’d always carried it inside me, like a seashell waiting to be cupped to an ear.
These days we run from the sun. Cross the street quick, get under an awning. Carry an umbrella like tightrope walkers. Red-white-and-blue-flowered nylon. Beige with green and red stripes. Faded maroon with an amber handle. Bus ladies slouched and fanning themselves with a newspaper and a bandanna.
Bad news. The sky is blue again today and will be blue again tomorrow. Herd of clouds big as longhorns passing mighty and grazing low. Heat like a husband asleep beside you, like someone breathing in your ear who you just want to shove once, good and hard, and say, “Quit it.”
When I was doing collages, I bought a few “powders” from Casa Preciado Religious Articles, the Mexican voodoo shop on South Laredo. I remember I’d picked Te Tengo Amarrado y Claveteado and Regresa a Mí—just for the wrapper. But I found myself hunting around for them this morning, and when I couldn’t find them, making a special trip back to that store that smells of chamomile and black bananas.
The votive candles are arranged like so. Church-sanctioned powers on one aisle—San Martín de Porres, Santo Niño de Atocha, el Sagrado corazón, La Divina Providencia, Nuestra Señora de San Juan de los Lagos. Folk powers on another—El Gran General Pancho Villa, Ajo Macho/Garlic Macho, La Santísima Muerte/Blessed Death, Bingo Luck, Law Stay Away, Court Case Double Strength. Back to back, so as not to offend maybe. I chose a Yo Puedo Más Que Tú from the pagan side and a Virgen de Guadalupe from the Christian.
Magic oils, magic perfume and soaps, votive candles, milagritos, holy cards, magnet car-statuettes, plaster saints with eyelashes made from human hair, San Martín Caballero good-luck horseshoes, incense and copal, aloe vera bunched, blessed, bound with red string, and pinned above a door. Herbs stocked from floor to ceiling in labeled drawers.
AGUACATE, ALBAHACA, ALTAMISA, ANACAHUITE, BARBAS DE ELOTE, CEDRÓN DE CASTILLO, COYOTE, CHARRASQUILLA, CHOCOLATE DE INDIO, EUCALIPTO, FLOR DE ACOCOTILLO, FLOR DE AZAHAR, FLOR DE MIMBRE, FLOR DE TILA, FLOR DE ZEMPOAL, HIERBABUENA, HORMIGA, HUISACHE, MANZANILLA, MARRUBIO, MIRTO, NOGAL, PALO AZUL, PASMO, PATA DE VACA, PIONÍA, PIRUL, RATÓN, TEPOZÁN, VÍBORA, ZAPOTE BLANCO, ZARZAMORA.
Snake, rat, ant, coyote, cow hoof. Were there actually dead animals tucked in a drawer? A skin wrapped in tissue paper, a dried ear, a paper cone of shriveled black alphabets, a bone ground to crystals in a baby-food jar. Or were they just herbs that looked like the animal?
These candles and yerbas and stuff, do they really work? The sisters Preciado pointed to a sign above their altar to Our Lady of the Remedies. VENDEMOS, NO HACEMOS RECETAS. WE SELL, WE DON’T PRESCRIBE.
I can be brave in the day, but nights are my Gethsemane. That pinch of the dog’s teeth just as it nips. A mean South American itch somewhere I can’t reach. The little hurricane of bathwater just before it slips inside the drain.
Seems like the world is spinning smooth without a bump or squeak except when love comes in. Then the whole machine just quits like a loud load of wash on imbalance—the buzzer singing to high heaven, the danger light flashing.
Not true. The world has always turned with its trail of tin cans rattling behind it. I have always been in love with a man.
Everything’s like it was. Except for this. When I look in the mirror, I’m ugly. How come I never noticed before?
I was having sopa tarasca at El Mirador and reading Dear Abby. A letter from “Too Late,” who wrote now that his father was dead, he was sorry he had never asked his forgiveness for having hurt him, he’d never told his father “I love you.”
I pushed my bowl of soup away and blew my nose with my paper napkin. I’d never asked Flavio forgiveness for having hurt him. And yes, I’d never said “I love you.” I’d never said it, though the words rattled in my head like urracas in the bamboo.
For weeks I lived with those two regrets like twin grains of sand embedded in my oyster heart, until one night listening to Carlos Gardel sing, “Life is an absurd wound,” I realized I had it wrong. oh.
Today the Weber kettle in the backyard finally quit. Three days of thin white smoke like kite string. I’d stuffed in all of Flavio’s letters and poems and photos and cards and all the sketches and studies I’d ever done of him, then lit a match. I didn’t expect paper to take so long to burn, but it was a lot of layers. I had to keep poking it with a stick. I did save one poem, the last one he gave me before he left. Pretty in Spanish. But you’ll have to take my word for it. In English it just sounds goofy.
The smell of paint was giving me headaches. I couldn’t bring myself to look at my canvasses. I’d turn on the TV. The Galavisión channel. Told myself I was looking for old Mexican movies. María Félix, Jorge Negrete, Pedro Infante, anything, please, where somebody’s singing on a horse.
After a few days I’m watching the telenovelas. Avoiding board meetings, rushing home from work, stopping at Torres Taco Haven on the way and buying taquitos to go. Just so I could be seated in front of the screen in time to catch Rosa Salvaje with Verónica Castro as the savage Rose of the title. Or Daniela Romo in Balada por un Amor. Or Adela Noriega in Dulce Desafío. I watched them all. In the name of research.
I started dreaming of these Rosas and Briandas and Luceros. And in my dreams I’m slapping the heroine to her senses, because I want them to be women who make things happen, not women who things happen to. Not loves that are tormentosos. Not men powerful and passionate versus women either volatile and evil, or sweet and resigned. But women. Real women. The ones I’ve loved all my life. If you don’t like it lárgate, honey. Those women. The ones I’ve known everywhere except on TV, in books and magazines. Las girlfriends. Las comadres. Our mamas and tías. Passionate and powerful, tender and volatile, brave. And, above all, fierce.
“Bien pretty, your shawl. You didn’t buy it in San Antonio?” Centeno’s Mexican Supermarket. The cashier was talking to me.
“No, it’s Peruvian. Think I bought it in Santa Fe. Or New York. I don’t remember.”
“Que cute. You look real mona.”
Plastic hair combs with fringy flowers. Purple blouse crocheted out of shiny yarn, not tucked but worn over her jeans to hide a big stomach. I know—I do the same thing.
She’s my age, but looks old. Tired. Never mind the red lips, the eye makeup that just makes her look sad. Those creases from the corner of the lip to the wing of the nostril from holding in anger, or tears. Or both. She’s the one ringing up my Vanidades. “Extraordinary Issue.” “Julio Confesses He’s Looking for Love.” “Still Daddy’s Girl?—Liberate Yourself!” “15 Ways to Say I Love You with Your Eyes.” “The Incredible Wedding of Argentine Soccer Star Maradona (It Cost 3 Million U.S. Dollars!)” “Summer by the Sea, a Complete Novel by Corín Tellado.”
“Libertad Palomares,” she said, looking at the cover.
“Amar es Vivir,” I answered automatically as if it were my motto. Libertad Palomares. A big Venezuelan telenovela star. Big on crying. Every episode she weeps like a Magdalene. Not me. I couldn’t cry if my life depended on it.
“Right she works her part real good?”
“I never miss an episode.” That was the truth.
“Me neither. Si Dios quiere I’m going to get home in time today to watch it. It’s getting good.”
“Looks like it’s going to finish pretty soon.”
“Hope not. How much is this? I might buy one too. Three-fifty! Bien ’spensive.”
Maybe once. Or maybe never. Maybe each time someone asks, Wanna dance? at Club Fandango. All for a Saturday night at Hacienda Salas Party House on South Mission Road. Or Lerma’s Night Spot on Zarzamora. Making eyes at Ricky’s Poco Loco Club or El Taconazo Lounge. Or maybe, like in my case, in my garage making art.
Amar es Vivir. What it comes down to for that woman at Centeno’s
and for me. It was enough to keep us tuning in every day at six-thirty, another episode, another thrill. To relive that living when the universe ran through the blood like river water. Alive. Not the weeks spent writing grant proposals, not the forty hours standing behind a cash register shoving cans of refried beans into plastic sacks. Hell, no. This wasn’t what we were put on the planet for. Not ever.
Not Lola Beltrán sobbing “Soy infeliz” into her four cervezas. But Daniela Romo singing “Ya no. Es verdad que te adoro, pero más me adoro yo.” I love you, honey, but I love me more.
One way or another. Even if it’s only the lyrics to a stupid pop hit. We’re going to right the world and live. I mean live our lives the way lives were meant to be lived. With the throat and wrists. With rage and desire, and joy and grief, and love till it hurts, maybe. But goddamn, girl. Live.
Went back to the twin volcano painting. Got a good idea and redid the whole thing. Prince Popo and Princess Ixta trade places. After all, who’s to say the sleeping mountain isn’t the prince, and the voyeur the princess, right? So I’ve done it my way. With Prince Popocatépetl lying on his back instead of the Princess. Of course, I had to make some anatomical adjustments in order to simulate the geographical silhouettes. I think I’m going to call it El Pipi del Popo. I kind of like it.
Everywhere I go, it’s me and me. Half of me living my life, the other half watching me live it. Here it is January already. Sky wide as an ocean, shark-belly gray for days at a time, then all at once a blue so tender you can’t remember how only months before the heat split you open like a pecan shell, you can’t remember anything anymore.