Driving down streets with buildings that remind him, he says, how charming this city is. And me remembering when I was little, a cousin’s baby who died from swallowing rat poison in a building like these.
That’s just how it is. And that’s how we drove. With all his new city memories and all my old. Him kissing me between big bites of bread.
Eyes of Zapata
I put my nose to your eyelashes. The skin of the eyelids as soft as the skin of the penis, the collarbone with its fluted wings, the purple knot of the nipple, the dark, blue-black color of your sex, the thin legs and long thin feet. For a moment I don’t want to think of your past nor your future. For now you are here, you are mine.
Would it be right to tell you what I do each night you sleep here? After your cognac and cigar, after I’m certain you’re asleep, I examine at my leisure your black trousers with the silver buttons—fifty-six pairs on each side; I’ve counted them—your embroidered sombrero with its horsehair tassel, the lovely Dutch linen shirt, the fine braid stitching on the border of your charro jacket, the-handsome black boots, your tooled gun belt and silver spurs. Are you my general? Or only that boy I met at the country fair in San Lázaro?
Hands too pretty for a man. Elegant hands, graceful hands, fingers smelling sweet as your Havanas. I had pretty hands once, remember? You used to say I had the prettiest hands of any woman in Cuautla. Exquisitas you called them, as if they were something to eat. It still makes me laugh remembering that.
Ay, but now look. Nicked and split and callused—how is it the hands get old first? The skin as coarse as the wattle of a hen. It’s from the planting in the tlacolol, from the hard man’s work I do clearing the field with the hoe and the machete, dirty work that leaves the clothes filthy, work no woman would do before the war.
But I’m not afraid of hard work or of being alone in the hills. I’m not afraid of dying or jail. I’m not afraid of the night like other women who run to the sacristy at the first call of el gobierno. I’m not other women.
Look at you. Snoring already? Pobrecito. Sleep, papacito. There, there. It’s only me—Inés. Duerme, mi trigueño, mi chulito, mi bebito. Ya, ya, ya.
You say you can’t sleep anywhere like you sleep here. So tired of always having to be el gran general Emiliano Zapata. The nervous fingers flinch, the long elegant bones shiver and twitch. Always waiting for the assassin’s bullet.
Everyone is capable of becoming a traitor, and traitors must be broken, you say. A horse to be broken. A new saddle that needs breaking in. To break a spirit. Something to whip and lasso like you did in the jaripeos years ago.
Everything bothers you these days. Any noise, any light, even the sun. You say nothing for hours, and then when you do speak, it’s an outburst, a fury. Everyone afraid of you, even your men. You hide yourself in the dark. You go days without sleep. You don’t laugh anymore.
I don’t need to ask; I’ve seen for myself. The war is not going well. I see it in your face. How it’s changed over the years, Miliano. From so much watching, the face grows that way. These wrinkles new, this furrow, the jaw clenched tight. Eyes creased from learning to see in the night.
They say the widows of sailors have eyes like that, from squinting into the line where the sky and sea dissolve. It’s the same with us from all this war. We’re all widows. The men as well as the women, even the children. All clinging to the tail of the horse of our jefe Zapata. All of us scarred from these nine years of aguantando—enduring.
Yes, it’s in your face. It’s always been there. Since before the war. Since before I knew you. Since your birth in Anenecuilco and even before then. Something hard and tender all at once in those eyes. You knew before any of us, didn’t you?
This morning the messenger arrived with the news you’d be arriving before nightfall, but I was already boiling the corn for your supper tortillas. I saw you riding in on the road from Villa de Ayala. Just as I saw you that day in Anenecuilco when the revolution had just begun and the government was everywhere looking for you. You were worried about the land titles, went back to dig them up from where you’d hidden them eighteen months earlier, under the altar in the village church—am I right?—reminding Chico Franco to keep them safe. I’m bound to die, you said, someday. But our titles stand to be guaranteed.
I wish I could rub the grief from you as if it were a smudge on the cheek. I want to gather you up in my arms as if you were Nicolás or Malena, run up to the hills. I know every cave and crevice, every back road and ravine, but I don’t know where I could hide you from yourself. You’re tired. You’re sick and lonely with this war, and I don’t want any of those things to ever touch you again, Miliano. It’s enough for now you are here. For now. Under my roof again.
Sleep, papacito. It’s only Inés circling above you, wide-eyed all night. The sound of my wings like the sound of a velvet cape crumpling. A warm breeze against your skin, the wide expanse of moon-white feathers as if I could touch all the walls of the house at one sweep. A rustling, then weightlessness, light scattered out the window until it’s the moist night wind beneath my owl wings. Whorl of stars like the filigree earrings you gave me. Your tired horse still as tin, there, where you tied it to a guamuchil tree. River singing louder than ever since the time of the rains.
I scout the hillsides, the mountains. My blue shadow over the high grass and slash of barrancas, over the ghosts of haciendas silent under the blue night. From this height, the village looks the same as before the war. As if the roofs were still intact, the walls still whitewashed, the cobbled streets swept of rubble and weeds. Nothing blistered and burnt. Our lives smooth and whole.
Round and round the blue countryside, over the scorched fields, giddy wind barely ruffling my stiff, white feathers, above the two soldiers you left guarding our door, one asleep, the other dull from a day of hard riding. But I’m awake, I’m always awake when you are here. Nothing escapes me. No coyote in the mountains, or scorpion in the sand. Everything clear. The trail you rode here. The night jasmine with its frothy scent of sweet milk. The makeshift roof of cane leaves on our adobe house. Our youngest child of five summers asleep in her hammock—What a little woman you are now, Malenita. The laughing sound of the river and canals, and the high, melancholy voice of the wind in the branches of the tall pine.
I slow-circle and glide into the house, bringing the night-wind smell with me, fold myself back into my body. I haven’t left you. I don’t leave you, not ever. Do you know why? Because when you are gone I re-create you from memory. The scent of your skin, the mole above the broom of your mustache, how you fit in my palms. Your skin dark and rich as piloncillo. This face in my hands. I miss you. I miss you even now as you lie next to me.
To look at you as you sleep, the color of your skin. How in the half-light of moon you cast your own light, as if you are all made of amber, Miliano. As if you are a little lantern, and everything in the house is golden too.
You used to be tan chistoso. Muy bonachón, muy bromista. Joking and singing off-key when you had your little drinks. Tres vicios tengo y los tengo muy arraigados; de ser borracho, jugador, y enamorado … Ay, my life, remember? Always muy enamorado, no? Are you still that boy I met at the San Lázaro country fair? Am I still that girl you kissed under the little avocado tree? It seems so far away from those days, Miliano.
We drag these bodies around with us, these bodies that have nothing at all to do with you, with me, with who we really are, these bodies that give us pleasure and pain. Though I’ve learned how to abandon mine at will, it seems to me we never free ourselves completely until we love, when we lose ourselves inside each other. Then we see a little of what is called heaven. When we can be that close that we no longer are Inés and Emiliano, but something bigger than our lives. And we can forgive, finally.
You and I, we’ve never been much for talking, have we? Poor thing, you don’t know how to talk. Instead of talking with your lips, you put one leg around me when we sleep, to let me know it’s all right. And we fall asle
ep like that, with one arm or a leg or one of those long monkey feet of yours touching mine. Your foot inside the hollow of my foot.
Does it surprise you I don’t let go little things like that? There are so many things I don’t forget even if I would do well to.
Inés, for the love I have for you. When my father pleaded, you can’t imagine how I felt. How a pain entered my heart like a current of cold water and in that current were the days to come. But I said nothing.
Well then, my father said, God help you. You’ve turned out just like the perra that bore you. Then he turned around and I had no father.
I never felt so alone as that night. I gathered my things in my rebozo and ran out into the darkness to wait for you by the jacaranda tree. For a moment, all my courage left me. I wanted to turn around, call out, ’apá, beg his forgiveness, and go back to sleeping on my petate against the cane-rush wall, waking before dawn to prepare the corn for the day’s tortillas.
Perra. That word, the way my father spat it, as if in that one word I were betraying all the love he had given me all those years, as if he were closing all the doors to his heart.
Where could I hide from my father’s anger? I could put out the eyes and stop the mouths of all the saints that wagged their tongues at me, but I could not stop my heart from hearing that word—perra. My father, my love, who would have nothing to do with me.
You don’t like me to talk about my father, do you? I know, you and he never, well … Remember that thick scar across his left eyebrow? Kicked by a mule when he was a boy. Yes, that’s how it happened. Tía Chucha said it was the reason he sometimes acted like a mule—but you’re as stubborn as he was, aren’t you, and no mule kicked you.
It’s true, he never liked you. Since the days you started buying and selling livestock all through the rancheritos. By the time you were working the stables in Mexico City there was no mentioning your name. Because you’d never slept under a thatch roof, he said. Because you were a charro, and didn’t wear the cotton whites of the campesino. Then he’d mutter, loud enough for me to hear, That one doesn’t know what it is to smell his own shit.
I always thought you and he made such perfect enemies because you were so much alike. Except, unlike you, he was useless as a soldier. I never told you how the government forced him to enlist. Up in Guanajuato is where they sent him when you were busy with the Carrancistas, and Pancho Villa’s boys were giving everyone a rough time up north. My father, who’d never been farther than Amecameca, gray-haired and broken as he was, they took him. It was during the time the dead were piled up on the street corners like stones, when it wasn’t safe for anyone, man or woman, to go out into the streets.
There was nothing to eat, Tía Chucha sick with the fever, and me taking care of us all. My father said better he should go to his brother Fulgencio’s in Tenexcapán and see if they had corn there. Take Malenita, I said. With a child they won’t bother you.
And so my father went out toward Tenexcapán dragging Malenita by the hand. But when night began to fall and they hadn’t come back, well, imagine. It was the widow Elpidia who knocked on our door with Malenita howling and with the story they’d taken the men to the railroad station. South to the work camps, or north to fight? Tía Chucha asked. If God wishes, I said, he’ll be safe.
That night Tía Chucha and I dreamt this dream. My father and my Tío Fulgencio standing against the back wall of the rice mill. Who lives? But they don’t answer, afraid to give the wrong viva. Shoot them; discuss politics later.
At the moment the soldiers are about to fire, an officer, an acquaintance of my father’s from before the war, rides by and orders them set free.
Then they took my father and my Tío Fulgencio to the train station, shuttled them into box cars with others, and didn’t let them go until they reached Guanajuato where they were each given guns and orders to shoot at the Villistas.
With the fright of the firing squad and all, my father was never the same. In Guanajuato, he had to be sent to the military hospital, where he suffered a collapsed lung. They removed three of his ribs to cure him, and when he was finally well enough to travel, they sent him back to us.
All through the dry season my father lived on like that, with a hole in the back of his chest from which he breathed. Those days I had to swab him with a sticky pitch pine and wrap him each morning in clean bandages. The opening oozed a spittle like the juice of the prickly pear, sticky and clear and with a smell both sweet and terrible like magnolia flowers rotting on the branch.
We did the best we could to nurse him, my Tía Chucha and I. Then one morning a chachalaca flew inside the house and battered against the ceiling. It took both of us with blankets and the broom to get it out. We didn’t say anything but we thought about it for a long time.
Before the next new moon, I had a dream I was in church praying a rosary. But what I held between my hands wasn’t my rosary with the glass beads, but one of human teeth. I let it drop, and the teeth bounced across the flagstones like pearls from a necklace. The dream and the bird were sign enough.
When my father called my mother’s name one last time and died, the syllables came out sucked and coughed from that other mouth, like a drowned man’s, and he expired finally in one last breath from that opening that killed him.
We buried him like that, with his three missing ribs wrapped in a handkerchief my mother had embroidered with his initials and with the hoofmark of the mule under his left eyebrow.
For eight days people arrived to pray the rosary. All the priests had long since fled, we had to pay a rezandero to say the last rites. Tía Chucha laid the cross of lime and sand, and set out flowers and a votive lamp, and on the ninth day, my tía raised the cross and called out my father’s name—Remigio Alfaro—and my father’s spirit flew away and left us.
But suppose he won’t give us his permission.
That old goat, we’ll be dead by the time he gives his permission. Better we just run off. He can’t be angry forever.
Not even on his deathbed did he forgive you. I suppose you’ve never forgiven him either for calling in the authorities. I’m sure he only meant for them to scare you a little, to remind you of your obligations to me since I was expecting your child. Who could imagine they would force you to join the cavalry.
I can’t make apologies on my father’s behalf, but, well, what were we to think, Miliano? Those months you were gone, hiding out in Puebla because of the protest signatures, the political organizing, the work in the village defense. Me as big as a boat, Nicolás waiting to be born at any moment, and you nowhere to be found, and no money sent, and not a word. I was so young, I didn’t know what else to do but abandon our house of stone and adobe and go back to my father’s. Was I wrong to do that? You tell me.
I could endure my father’s anger, but I was afraid for the child. I placed my hand on my belly and whispered—Child, be born when the moon is tender; even a tree must be pruned under the full moon so it will grow strong. And at the next full moon, I gave light, Tía Chucha holding up our handsome, strong-lunged boy.
Two planting seasons came and went, and we were preparing for the third when you came back from the cavalry and met your son for the first time. I thought you’d forgotten all about politics, and we could go on with our lives. But by the end of the year you were already behind the campaign to elect Patricio Leyva governor, as if all the troubles with the government, with my father, had meant nothing.
You gave me a pair of gold earrings as a wedding gift, remember? I never said I’d marry you, Inés. Never. Two filagree hoops with tiny flowers and fringe. I buried them when the government came, and went back for them later. But even these I had to sell when there was nothing to eat but boiled corn silk. They were the last things I sold.
Never. It made me feel a little crazy when you hurled that at me. That word with all its force.
But, Miliano, I thought …
You were foolish to have thought then.
That was years ago. We’re
all guilty of saying things we don’t mean. I never said … I know. You don’t want to hear it.
What am I to you now, Miliano? When you leave me? When you hesitate? Hover? The last time you gave a sigh that would fit into a spoon. What did you mean by that?
If I complain about these woman concerns of mine, I know you’ll tell me—Inés, these aren’t times for that—wait until later. But, Miliano, I’m tired of being told to wait.
Ay, you don’t understand. Even if you had the words, you could never tell me. You don’t know your own heart, men. Even when you are speaking with it in your hand.
I have my livestock, a little money my father left me. I’ll set up a house for us in Cuautla of stone and adobe. We can live together, and later we’ll see.
Nicolás is crazy about his two cows, La Fortuna y La Paloma. Because he’s a man now, you said, when you gave him his birthday present. When you were thirteen, you were already buying and reselling animals throughout the ranches. To see if a beast is a good worker, you must tickle it on the back, no? If it can’t bother itself to move, well then, it’s lazy and won’t be of any use. See, I’ve learned that much from you.
Remember the horse you found in Cuernavaca? Someone had hidden it in an upstairs bedroom, wild and spirited from being penned so long. She had poked her head from between the gold fringe of velvet drapery just as you rode by, just at that moment. A beauty like that making her appearance from a balcony like a woman waiting for her serenade. You laughed and joked about that and named her La Coquetona, remember? La Coquetona, yes.
When I met you at the country fair in San Lázaro, everyone knew you were the best man with horses in the state of Morelos. All the hacienda owners wanted you to work for them. Even as far as Mexico City. A charro among charros. The livestock, the horses bought and sold. Planting a bit when things were slow. Your brother Eufemio borrowing time and time again because he’d squandered every peso of his inheritance, but you’ve always prided yourself in being independent, no? You once confessed one of the happiest days of your life was the watermelon harvest that produced the 600 pesos.