I take Abuelito’s hand, fat and dimpled in the center like a valentine, and we walk past the basilica, where each Sunday the Abuela lights the candles for the soul of Abuelito. Past the very same spot where long ago Juan Diego brought down from the cerro the miracle that has drawn everyone, except my Abuelito, on their knees, down the avenue one block past the bright lights of the sastrería of Señor Guzmán who is still at work at his sewing machine, past the candy store where I buy my milk-and-raisin gelatins, past La Providencia tortillería where every afternoon Luz María and I are sent for the basket of lunchtime tortillas, past the house of the widow Márquez whose husband died last winter of a tumor the size of her little white fist, past La Muñeca’s mother watering her famous dahlias with a pink rubber hose and a skinny string of water, to the house on La Fortuna, number 12, that has always been our house. Green iron gates that arabesque and scroll like the initials of my name, familiar whine and clang, familiar lace-work of ivy growing over and between except for one small clean square for the hand of the postman whose face I have never seen, up the twenty-two steps we count out loud together—uno, dos, tres—to the supper of sopa de fideo and carne guisada—cuatro, cinco, seis—the glass of café con leche—siete, ocho, nueve—shut the door against the mad parrot voice of the Abuela—diez, once, doce—fall asleep as we always do, with the television mumbling—trece, catorce, quince—the Abuelito snoring—dieciséis, diecisiete, dieciocho—the grandchild, the one who will leave soon for that borrowed country—diecinueve, veinte, veintiuno—the one he will not remember, the one he is least familiar with—veintidós, veintitrés, veinticuatro—years later when the house on La Fortuna, number 12, is sold, when the tlapalería, corner of Misterios and Cinco de Mayo, changes owners, when the courtyard gate of arabesques and scrolls is taken off its hinges and replaced with a corrugated sheet metal door instead, when the widow Márquez and La Muñeca’s mother move away, when Abuelito falls asleep one last time—Veinticinco, veintiséis, veintisiete—years afterward when I return to the shop on the corner of Misterios and Cinco de Mayo, repainted and redone as a pharmacy, to the basilica that is crumbling and closed, to the plaza photographers, the balloon vendors and shoeshine thrones, the women whose faces I do not recognize serving lunch in the wooden booths, to the house on La Fortuna, number 12, smaller and darker than when we lived there, with the rooms boarded shut and rented to strangers, the street suddenly dizzy with automobiles and diesel fumes, the house fronts scuffed and the gardens frayed, the children who played kickball all grown and moved away.
Who would’ve guessed, after all this time, it is me who will remember when everything else is forgotten, you who took with you to your stone bed something irretrievable, without a name.
Me importas tú, y tú, y tú
y nadie más que tú
—“Piel Canela”
interpretada por MARÍA VICTORIA
(BOBY CAPÓ, autor)
One Holy Night
About the truth, if you give it to a person, then he has power over you. And if someone gives it to you, then they have made themselves your slave. It is a strong magic. You can never take it back.
—CHAQ UXMAL PALOQUÍN
He said his name was Chaq. Chaq Uxmal Paloquín. That’s what he told me. He was of an ancient line of Mayan kings. Here, he said, making a map with the heel of his boot, this is where I come from, the Yucatán, the ancient cities. This is what Boy Baby said.
It’s been eighteen weeks since Abuelita chased him away with the broom, and what I’m telling you I never told nobody, except Rachel and Lourdes, who know everything. He said he would love me like a revolution, like a religion. Abuelita burned the pushcart and sent me here, miles from home, in this town of dust, with one wrinkled witch woman who rubs my belly with jade, and sixteen nosy cousins.
I don’t know how many girls have gone bad from selling cucumbers. I know I’m not the first. My mother took the crooked walk too, I’m told, and I’m sure my Abuelita has her own story, but it’s not my place to ask.
Abuelita says it’s Uncle Lalo’s fault because he’s the man of the family and if he had come home on time like he was supposed to and worked the pushcart on the days he was told to and watched over his goddaughter, who is too foolish to look after herself, nothing would’ve happened, and I wouldn’t have to be sent to Mexico. But Uncle Lalo says if they had never left Mexico in the first place, shame enough would have kept a girl from doing devil things.
I’m not saying I’m not bad. I’m not saying I’m special. But I’m not like the Allport Street girls, who stand in doorways and go with men into alleys.
All I know is I didn’t want it like that. Not against the bricks or hunkering in somebody’s car. I wanted it come undone like gold thread, like a tent full of birds. The way it’s supposed to be, the way I knew it would be when I met Boy Baby.
But you must know, I was no girl back then. And Boy Baby was no boy. Chaq Uxmal Paloquín. Boy Baby was a man. When I asked him how old he was he said he didn’t know. The past and the future are the same thing. So he seemed boy and baby and man all at once, and the way he looked at me, how do I explain?
I’d park the pushcart in front of the Jewel food store Saturdays. He bought a mango on a stick the first time. Paid for it with a new twenty. Next Saturday he was back. Two mangoes, lime juice, and chili powder, keep the change. The third Saturday he asked for a cucumber spear and ate it slow. I didn’t see him after that till the day he brought me Kool-Aid in a plastic cup. Then I knew what I felt for him.
Maybe you wouldn’t like him. To you he might be a bum. Maybe he looked it. Maybe. He had broken thumbs and burnt fingers. He had thick greasy fingernails he never cut and dusty hair. And all his bones were strong ones like a man’s. I waited every Saturday in my same blue dress. I sold all the mango and cucumber, and then Boy Baby would come finally.
What I knew of Chaq was only what he told me, because nobody seemed to know where he came from. Only that he could speak a strange language that no one could understand, said his name translated into boy, or boy-child, and so it was the street people nicknamed him Boy Baby.
I never asked about his past. He said it was all the same and didn’t matter, past and the future all the same to his people. But the truth has a strange way of following you, of coming up to you and making you listen to what it has to say.
Night time. Boy Baby brushes my hair and talks to me in his strange language because I like to hear it. What I like to hear him tell is how he is Chaq, Chaq of the people of the sun, Chaq of the temples, and what he says sounds sometimes like broken clay, and at other times like hollow sticks, or like the swish of old feathers crumbling into dust.
He lived behind Esparza & Sons Auto Repair in a little room that used to be a closet—pink plastic curtains on a narrow window, a dirty cot covered with newspapers, and a cardboard box filled with socks and rusty tools. It was there, under one bald bulb, in the back room of the Esparza garage, in the single room with pink curtains, that he showed me the guns—twenty-four in all. Rifles and pistols, one rusty musket, a machine gun, and several tiny weapons with mother-of-pearl handles that looked like toys. So you’ll see who I am, he said, laying them all out on the bed of newspapers. So you’ll understand. But I didn’t want to know.
The stars foretell everything, he said. My birth. My son’s. The boy-child who will bring back the grandeur of my people from those who have broken the arrows, from those who have pushed the ancient stones off their pedestals.
Then he told how he had prayed in the Temple of the Magician years ago as a child when his father had made him promise to bring back the ancient ways. Boy Baby had cried in the temple dark that only the bats made holy. Boy Baby who was man and child among the great and dusty guns lay down on the newspaper bed and wept for a thousand years. When I touched him, he looked at me with the sadness of stone.
You must not tell anyone what I am going to do, he said. And what I remember next is how the moon, the pale moon with its one y
ellow eye, the moon of Tikal, and Tulum, and Chichén, stared through the pink plastic curtains. Then something inside bit me, and I gave out a cry as if the other, the one I wouldn’t be anymore, leapt out.
So I was initiated beneath an ancient sky by a great and mighty heir—Chaq Uxmal Paloquín. I, Ixchel, his queen.
The truth is, it wasn’t a big deal. It wasn’t any deal at all. I put my bloody panties inside my T-shirt and ran home hugging myself. I thought about a lot of things on the way home. I thought about all the world and how suddenly I became a part of history and wondered if everyone on the street, the sewing machine lady and the panadería saleswomen and the woman with two kids sitting on the bus bench didn’t all know. Did I look any different? Could they tell? We were all the same somehow, laughing behind our hands, waiting the way all women wait, and when we find out, we wonder why the world and a million years made such a big deal over nothing.
I know I was supposed to feel ashamed, but I wasn’t ashamed. I wanted to stand on top of the highest building, the top-top floor, and yell, I know.
Then I understood why Abuelita didn’t let me sleep over at Lourdes’s house full of too many brothers, and why the Roman girl in the movies always runs away from the soldier, and what happens when the scenes in love stories begin to fade, and why brides blush, and how it is that sex isn’t simply a box you check M or F on in the test we get at school.
I was wise. The corner girls were still jumping into their stupid little hopscotch squares. I laughed inside and climbed the wooden stairs two by two to the second floor rear where me and Abuelita and Uncle Lalo live. I was still laughing when I opened the door and Abuelita asked, Where’s the pushcart?
And then I didn’t know what to do.
It’s a good thing we live in a bad neighborhood. There are always plenty of bums to blame for your sins. If it didn’t happen the way I told it, it really could’ve. We looked and looked all over for the kids who stole my pushcart. The story wasn’t the best, but since I had to make it up right then and there with Abuelita staring a hole through my heart, it wasn’t too bad.
For two weeks I had to stay home. Abuelita was afraid the street kids who had stolen the cart would be after me again. Then I thought I might go over to the Esparza garage and take the pushcart out and leave it in some alley for the police to find, but I was never allowed to leave the house alone. Bit by bit the truth started to seep out like a dangerous gasoline.
First the nosy woman who lives upstairs from the laundromat told my Abuelita she thought something was fishy, the pushcart wheeled into Esparza & Sons every Saturday after dark, how a man, the same dark Indian one, the one who never talks to anybody, walked with me when the sun went down and pushed the cart into the garage, that one there, and yes we went inside, there where the fat lady named Concha, whose hair is dyed a hard black, pointed a fat finger.
I prayed that we would not meet Boy Baby, and since the gods listen and are mostly good, Esparza said yes, a man like that had lived there but was gone, had packed a few things and left the pushcart in a corner to pay for his last week’s rent.
We had to pay $20 before he would give us our pushcart back. Then Abuelita made me tell the real story of how the cart had disappeared, all of which I told this time, except for that one night, which I would have to tell anyway, weeks later, when I prayed for the moon of my cycle to come back, but it would not.
When Abuelita found out I was going to dar a luz, she cried until her eyes were little, and blamed Uncle Lalo, and Uncle Lalo blamed this country, and Abuelita blamed the infamy of men. That is when she burned the cucumber pushcart and called me a sinvergüenza because I am without shame.
Then I cried too—Boy Baby was lost from me—until my head was hot with headaches and I fell asleep. When I woke up, the cucumber pushcart was dust and Abuelita was sprinkling holy water on my head.
Abuelita woke up early every day and went to the Esparza garage to see if news about that demonio had been found, had Chaq Uxmal Paloquín sent any letters, any, and when the other mechanics heard that name they laughed, and asked if we had made it up, that we could have some letters that had come for Boy Baby, no forwarding address, since he had gone in such a hurry.
There were three. The first, addressed “Occupant,” demanded immediate payment for a four-month-old electric bill. The second was one I recognized right away—a brown envelope fat with cake-mix coupons and fabric-softener samples—because we’d gotten one just like it. The third was addressed in a spidery Spanish to a Señor C. Cruz, on paper so thin you could read it unopened by the light of the sky. The return address a convent in Tampico.
This was to whom my Abuelita wrote in hopes of finding the man who could correct my ruined life, to ask if the good nuns might know the whereabouts of a certain Boy Baby—and if they were hiding him it would be of no use because God’s eyes see through all souls.
We heard nothing for a long time. Abuelita took me out of school when my uniform got tight around the belly and said it was a shame I wouldn’t be able to graduate with the other eighth graders.
Except for Lourdes and Rachel, my grandma and Uncle Lalo, nobody knew about my past. I would sleep in the big bed I share with Abuelita same as always. I could hear Abuelita and Uncle Lalo talking in low voices in the kitchen as if they were praying the rosary, how they were going to send me to Mexico, to San Dionisio de Tlaltepango, where I have cousins and where I was conceived and would’ve been born had my grandma not thought it wise to send my mother here to the United States so that neighbors in San Dionisio de Tlaltepango wouldn’t ask why her belly was suddenly big.
I was happy. I liked staying home. Abuelita was teaching me to crochet the way she had learned in Mexico. And just when I had mastered the tricky rosette stitch, the letter came from the convent which gave the truth about Boy Baby—however much we didn’t want to hear.
He was born on a street with no name in a town called Miseria. His father, Eusebio, is a knife sharpener. His mother, Refugia, stacks apricots into pyramids and sells them on a cloth in the market. There are brothers. Sisters too of which I know little. The youngest, a Carmelite, writes me all this and prays for my soul, which is why I know it’s all true.
Boy Baby is thirty-seven years old. His name is Chato which means fat-face. There is no Mayan blood.
I don’t think they understand how it is to be a girl. I don’t think they know how it is to have to wait your whole life. I count the months for the baby to be born, and it’s like a ring of water inside me reaching out and out until one day it will tear from me with its own teeth.
Already I can feel the animal inside me stirring in his own uneven sleep. The witch woman says it’s the dreams of weasels that make my child sleep the way he sleeps. She makes me eat white bread blessed by the priest, but I know it’s the ghost of him inside me that circles and circles, and will not let me rest.
Abuelita said they sent me here just in time, because a little later Boy Baby came back to our house looking for me, and she had to chase him away with the broom. The next thing we hear, he’s in the newspaper clippings his sister sends. A picture of him looking very much like stone, police hooked on either arm … on the road to Las Grutas de Xtacumbilxuna, the Caves of the Hidden Girl … eleven female bodies … the last seven years …
Then I couldn’t read but only stare at the little black-and-white dots that make up the face I am in love with.
All my girl cousins here either don’t talk to me, or those who do, ask questions they’re too young to know not to ask. What they want to know really is how it is to have a man, because they’re too ashamed to ask their married sisters.
They don’t know what it is to lay so still until his sleep breathing is heavy, for the eyes in the dim dark to look and look without worry at the man-bones and the neck, the man-wrist and man-jaw thick and strong, all the salty dips and hollows, the stiff hair of the brow and sour swirl of sideburns, to lick the fat earlobes that taste of smoke, and stare at how perfect is a man. r />
I tell them, “It’s a bad joke. When you find out you’ll be sorry.”
I’m going to have five children. Five. Two girls. Two boys. And one baby.
The girls will be called Lisette and Maritza. The boys I’ll name Pablo and Sandro.
And my baby. My baby will be named Alegre, because life will always be hard.
Rachel says that love is like a big black piano being pushed off the top of a three-story building and you’re waiting on the bottom to catch it. But Lourdes says it’s not that way at all. It’s like a top, like all the colors in the world are spinning so fast they’re not colors anymore and all that’s left is a white hum.
There was a man, a crazy who lived upstairs from us when we lived on South Loomis. He couldn’t talk, just walked around all day with this harmonica in his mouth. Didn’t play it. Just sort of breathed through it, all day long, wheezing, in and out, in and out.
This is how it is with me. Love I mean.
My Tocaya
Have you seen this girl? You must’ve seen her in the papers. Or then again at Father & Son’s Taco Palace No. 2 on Nogalitos. Patricia Bernadette Benavídez, my tocaya, five feet, 115 pounds, thirteen years old.
Not that we were friends or anything like that. Sure we talked. But that was before she died and came back from the dead. Maybe you read about it or saw her on TV. She was on all the news channels. They interviewed anyone who knew her. Even the p.e. teacher who had to say nice things—She was full of energy, a good kid, sweet. Sweet as could be, considering she was a freak. Now why didn’t anyone ask me?