by Jaime Cortez
He reaches up for his money, and through the hole of his sleeve I can see little black hairs in his underarm. When I see this, I get this embarrassed feeling, like I saw him naked, and then I feel super sorry that he’s so nice but he’s stuck on this corner where the sun is going to cook him into a raisin and he’ll still be poor. Ma pays him and then I put my hand into my pocket and all I have is American money, so I give him my shiny fifty-cents coin. Negro looks at the coin and he SMILES like it’s Christmas. I smile at him too. His eyes are color cafe with no milk.
“Thank you, seño,” he says to Ma.
“Thank you, Isidro.”
Isidro. Negro’s real name is Isidro.
* * *
At Doña Ofelia’s house, it is crowded. I see Nana Leti and my tias there already. They helped set everything up. Doña Ofelia’s family is all over the place. There are even kids up in the tree branches, looking over everything like little monkeys with wild hair sticking up. When I see all the new people I don’t know, I get shy. I wish I’d stayed home like Sylvie, reading my tia’s Spanish comics or something. But it’s too late, and now I gotta stay no matter what dumb things people say to me. Near the front gate, Doña Ofelia’s sons, the two Sasquatches, are lined up and shaking people’s hands and sometimes hugging people. I don’t like being called names, and I know it’s kind of mean to call them Sasquatches, but it’s true that they look like that. They’re tall and big, with really big heads and bushy hair, and once the Mexicali TV station started showing El Hombre Bionico with Lee Majors fighting the Sasquatch, well that’s what everyone called them. Heck, even the three sisters are Sasquatch-sized in this family.
When Ma shakes hands with Roberto, the oldest Sasquatch brother, her hand looks like a pink baby hand.
“Ay, Roberto,” she says. “Your poor madre’s gone.”
“Yeah,” he says.
“I’m sorry, Roberto. The only good thing is that she didn’t suffer. She went home in her sleep.”
“True,” says Roberto, looking at the ground.
I also shake their hands. Tavo, the number two Sasquatch, asks, “Are you Esperanza’s little boy?”
“Yeah.”
“Caramba, mi niño. You’ve grown!” He looks me up and down. “And look how fat you’ve gotten.” He grabs my stomach and says real loud to Roberto: “How many pounds of chicharrónes do you think we could get off this one?”
“Awww, Gordo is just full of life,” says Roberto. “He looks good, pretty like a pink piglet, not like those black bony monkey boys of yours. This is a healthy boy. Señora Esperanza!” he shouts to Ma. “What have you been feeding this boy? You hoping to sell him off by the pound?” He pinches my cheeks and everyone looks at me and laughs. Ma smiles and disappears into the house to join in the rosary. I pull my face away, and Roberto lets go of my cheeks. My face feels hot and my cheeks kind of hurt, but I like that he said I’m pretty, and then I don’t like it because boys are supposed to be handsome not pretty. Then I really don’t like it because he said I was like a piglet. A piglet! My God, people in Mexico will say anything.
I move through the crowd of people to see Doña Ofelia. Her coffin is a dusty-pink color. That’s a good lady color. They put the coffin on the kitchen table, under the porch. When I get closer, I can smell her flowers, then I see her face. Her face looks more puffier than usual, and she normally wears more makeup than she has on now. Is that how it is with dead bodies? Are they all familiar but different? I reach out and touch my first dead hand and it feels almost normal but a little cool and hard, like a muscle. It’s weird, because I’m touching a dead hand, and all around me the people are all talking, eating, and drinking like it was a picnic. Under her back, they put this big pink satin pillow. It is kind of creepy, because the way she’s sitting up, it looks like she’s trying to get out of the coffin. I’m glad it’s not dark and there are lots of people around.
The bottom half of the coffin is closed and covered with all kinds of chrysanthemums and palm leaves. I know chrysanthemums because my pa used to work at Monterey Nurseries back in Watsonville, and he always brung chrysanthemums home. Even though chrysanthemums leave the water smelling like caca, they are very beautiful, especially the ones that are red on the top and gold underneath. All around the coffin they have flowers. They have red carnations that spell “madre,” white gladiolus, roses with baby’s breath, and, believe it or not, some Scrooge actually brought an empty mayonnaise jar full of pink and white oleander off some bush. They tried to make it all special and shit by wrapping ’luminum foil around the jar, but it didn’t look too good.
The moms brung all kinds of food. The three Sasquatch sisters are busy behind the food table, serving everyone, shaking hands. There are beans, arroz, chili con carne, ma’s pozole, stuff to make tortas, Peñafiel sodas, hot coffee and a big hill of pan dulce. This funeral is boss, man!
I go to the table, get a nice chocolate concha, and find a quiet corner to eat. I look around at everyone, and I notice no one is crying. The Sasquatches stand there all serious and shake hands and hug. Once people go past them, they turn around and drink from their beers until the next person arrives. Some of the family and neighbors standing next to the coffin don’t even pretend to be upset. They look at her like they’re at Safeway looking at pork chops or potatoes.
Before anybody tells me to go play with the little Sasquatch kids, I look for Ma inside the house. It’s dark and empty in the first room, and I follow the sound of praying. I see her and a bunch of women and a few old guys kneeling for the rosary. The curtains are shut tight, but there are lots of candles. It is really hot in here. The room is a prayer oven. I can tell that the old lady who is the boss of the rosary has been doing it for a long time. She’s really fast. The kneeling people can barely understand her fast words. Sometimes, they don’t even realize they’re supposed to do the response part. I find a perfect chair, jammed in a corner next to a big bureau. At first, I don’t know any of the prayers, but then I join in on the part where they pray the Litany to the Holy Virgin. I even get on my knees to pray like everyone else. It’s an easy prayer, everybody just says “pray for her” after each part, so I join in like a pro.
Holy Virgin of Virgins.
Pray for her.
Mother of Christ.
Pray for her.
Mother Undefiled.
Pray for her.
Queen of the Patriarchs.
Pray for her.
Mirror of Justice.
Pray for her.
Seat of Wisdom.
Pray for her.
Tower of Ivory.
Pray for her.
House of Gold.
Pray for her.
Mystical Rose.
Pray for her.
When I hear that, I stop praying. “Mystical Rose.” That is the most beautiful thing I never heard, and I’m tripping out about how busy the Holy Mother must be if she has all those jobs, not just simple jobs like being mother of all the Mexicans and Catholics but also weird jobs like “Seat of Wisdom.” Then I sit and listen. Kneeling in the corner in the dark, I feel invisible. That makes me happy. Nobody is looking at me. Nobody is saying anything about me. I like it in this room, with the women and the old guys and the Mystical Rose.
By the time we finish, everyone is hot and tired of kneeling. Ma tells me to help some of the older people get up. Ma thanks the señora who ran the rosary. I follow her, and when we get back outside, her best friend from high school, Pati the Mouth, comes up to hug her. I’ve heard since forever that Pati the Mouth was the biggest talker ever, and I can see that it’s the truth. She sits Ma down on the sofa, gets right next to her, and immediately starts talking. The words and the spit waterfall out of her mouth.
“Hmmph. It was so unexpected,” Pati says, “the way poor Doña Ofelia died. Dr. Maclobio saw her just last month, and he said she was overweight but healthy and that she would dance the dance of the hot huarache all over our graves and would you believe what the doctor did for
his mother, which is so beautiful, he sent her on a trip to Roma and she got to see the first Easter Mass of his holiness Pope John Paul the Sixth, may God keep him, and, as if that wasn’t enough, she also got to go to the Holy Land, and she walked the twelve stations of the cross like our Señor did, but she’s always been a good walker, not like me, but I tried, you know, Chavela and I started walking, but you can’t do anything in this neighborhood without everyone trying to copy you, and pretty soon we had five or six viejas joining us every day for a walk. Hmmph. They even brought the same walking shoes as us. The only thing left was for the dogs to be wearing those same sneakers.”
She stops and wipes the corners of her mouth. “Hmmph, and speaking of dogs, you should have seen Don Antonio cry when his little mutt, Firulais, died. He did not weep for his own wife half the tears he wept for that dog. I don’t see what he was so upset about, poor creature had cataracts and terrible gas, she must have been rotting from the inside out, I’d guess, and I tried to warn him, ‘Don Antonio,’ I’d say, ‘are you feeding this dog dead rats or what?’ Hmmph. Always some kind of tragedy in the neighborhood, no? Did you hear about El Cerebro. You remember Rosita’s baby, with the really big head? Can’t remember his real name, but everyone called the baby El Cerebro or sometimes El Charlie Brown, poor thing. She had warned her old man about fixing the water boiler a thousand times, because it was making suspicious noises and shaking like Tongolele every time she got a cup of hot water, and of course, Mister No-Good Drunk didn’t fix it, and one day that rusty old boiler exploded and the poor baby thing got scalded on his big Martian head.”
I can tell Ma wants to add a word or two, but there’s no room for it. Pati describes El Cerebro’s burns, and Ma just shrinks into the sofa. I try to get Ma’s attention, and when she finally looks at me, I give her the “I wanna go home” look, but she just gives me the “there’s nothing I can do” look.
I go back into the living room and sit down to watch TV. It’s Happy Days, but it’s not. It’s in Spanish, and the voices are all weird. Mr. C. sounds really young, and the Fonz, to tell the truth, sounds like a nerd. It’s so warm that I doze off and don’t wake up till Ma shakes me. I think Pati talked at her really hard, because Ma looks like she just got off of a roller coaster.
“Are you ready to leave?” she asks me.
“Yes, Ma. I’m ready to go.” We walk back with the empty pozole pot. It is getting dark, so it is not so hot anymore. As we walk, I talk a little with Ma.
“Your friend Pati really likes to talk, doesn’t she?”
“Yes,” says Ma. “But remember that Pati is an adult, and you shouldn’t be making fun of her, even if she talks too much.”
“Okay, Ma,” I say. “You sound really tired.”
“I am. We drove all night, and now this wake, and tomorrow is the burial. We should get to bed early today.”
The next morning, everyone is busy getting dressed for the burial. I take out my number two favorite shirt and put it on. Oh no. I haven’t worn the shirt since Christmas, and now it fits really tight around my belly and my chest. The buttons look like they’re trying to escape. I try to hold my belly in, but it doesn’t help much, and besides, I can’t hold it in all day. The only thing to do is wear a sweater vest, to cover up my poppin’ fresh shirt. This really sucks, because it’s going to be hot.
We drive to Doña Ofelia’s house. When we arrive, a bunch of cars are there already. They are waiting for the funeral car. When it comes, I’m surprised. It’s Roberto the Sasquatch in a white flatbed Ford pickup. The two brothers, three sisters, and one of Roberto´s big boys help carry the coffin and put it into the back of the truck. Dang, I didn’t even know girls could carry a coffin. Roberto and Clemencia, the biggest of the sisters, put ropes through the coffin handles and tie it to the hooks on the truck bed. Then they put the flowers in. The big, red heads of the roses are hanging down like sleepy wino heads. The gladiolus aren’t looking very glad. The chrysanthemums are the worst of all. When Roberto loads them on the truck, they drop all kinds of petals. I was wrong to think the oleanders were crappy flowers, because they look fresher in their mayonnaise jar than any of the big arrangements.
The Sasquatch brothers climb into the white truck. The sisters get into cars with their husbands and kids. We all begin the trip to the cemetery. In our station wagon, we got the spot right behind the white truck, and we follow close behind so we won’t get lost. We drive for a few minutes, then I notice that we’ve passed the Cachanilla Stadium twice.
“Pa, are we lost?”
“No.”
“Well if we’re not lost, why did we pass the stadium two times?”
“Because Ofelia loved going to the stadium for wrestling matches,” says Pa. “And she always said that when she died, we should take her around three times.”
My sister and I look at each other real quick, and I look the other way, because I can tell we are about to have a laughing attack, and since it’s a funeral, Pa will for sure slap us across the head.
After the third lap, we continue down Avenida Juárez and then the white truck pulls over and everyone else does too.
“Pa, this isn’t a graveyard,” says Sylvie. “Why are we stopping here?”
“Remember Chon?”
“No.”
“He was Ofelia’s youngest son. Do you remember the redhead?”
“I think you two were still little kids when you last saw Chon,” says Ma. “You probably don’t remember him. He would take marijuana across into Calexico, and that is why he is in jail now.”
“Chon lives in that big, gray building right there,” says Pa. “It’s a jail.”
“They’re taking Ofelia’s coffin to jail?” I ask.
“No, that’s not how they do this,” says Pa. Roberto and his family untie the coffin and walk it up the stairs to the main door of the building. They open it up and walk back to their cars.
Two guards in dark green khaki shirts and pants bring Chon out. He is wearing a baggy prison suit the same gray color as the building. His hands are cuffed, and he is taking short steps because his legs are chained together. I can’t see his eyes because of his sunglasses. His reddish hair is cut super short. His droopy red mustache looks like a big, sad mouth. He sees his family and waves at them. They wave back. Chon’s eyebrows go up in the middle, and he looks sad. The guards open up the coffin for him. He looks down at her. It’s like he looked at Medusa, because his face becomes stone. The lines on his forehead. His jaw. It’s all stone. With the back of one hand, he touches her face very gently, like he’s afraid to wake her up. The guards are really nice. They stand there and don’t say nothing. Finally, he finishes looking and walks back with the guards into the building. His jail pants are all saggy in the back. His chains drag on the floor. He walks up the steps and he doesn’t look back.
Before he goes into the entrance of the jail, the last guard signals to the family that they can come for the coffin. The brothers and sisters load the coffin back in the truck and tie it down again. The caravan of cars drives out of Mexicali, and pretty soon, all I see is dusty countryside: a few houses, bushes, and cactus. We arrive at El Centinela, the cemetery, in about thirty minutes. They let the truck with the coffin into the gates, and they ask everyone else to park outside. We get out of the car and begin walking through the cemetery. I look around at the graveyard. At first, most of the graves have little wooden crosses painted white with plastic roses and daisies, but when we get to the good neighborhood of the cemetery, the graves have big crosses made of cement or rock, with their names in it. Some have nice white statues of angels, Jesus Christ, or the Virgin of Guadalupe. We pass the grave of a lady who was named Aurelia Pacheco. Her gravestone has a little window in it, with her picture under the glass. It’s a nice gravestone, except that inside her window, the glass had lots of drops of water, like tiny, tiny tears.
People are already circled around Doña Ofelia’s spot. It still feels so normal, the way people are talking to each ot
her while we wait. Tomorrow, everyone will keep doing what they always do, except they won’t see Doña Ofelia, and it probably won’t make a big difference anyway.
The priest arrives. He welcomes everyone and says he is Father Max Santamaria. The top of Father Santamaria’s head is pink and sweaty. He drinks from his water bottle and begins. “This is a sad day, for we must say farewell to our beloved sister, Ofelia Rojas. Ofelia loved wrestling matches, mariachi music, swimming in the ocean at San Felipe, and cooking family dinners. She was the mother of three sons, Roberto, Tavo, and Chon. She was the mother of three loving daughters, Anita, Teresita, and Clemencia. Ofelia had fourteen grandchildren and two great-grandchildren, and she loved them all. For Ofelia, family was everything, and we should now be happy that she has rejoined her own mother, Elpidia, and her father, Salvador, and her sister Jesusita at the side of God in a place without pain, without sadness. The only sad ones are the people assembled here, who will miss her so much. Please join me in a moment of silence before the mariachis play the music she loved best.”
Mariachi is the music of Pa drinking with his friends all night and playing the songs again and again, so usually I hate it, but today everything is different. The trumpet player lifts the trumpet to his mouth, and it cries. I feel the beginning of “Volver, Volver” cutting through my chest, and I finally understand why the drunk guys scream like women when this song comes on. It feels like you’ll never stop being sad, never stop wishing you weren’t a loser, but you are. You lose things. You lose people and you can’t get them back. It almost feels good to listen to the song and admit the sad truth, and start bawling like a baby, which is what everyone’s doing now. The Sasquatches finally get it. Tavo covers his face with his chubby fingers. Roberto’s crying face is twisted up like he’s laughing, but he’s not. He’s really sad, and he stares at the coffin. Anita and Teresita, the Sasquatch sisters, hug each other and cry. Clemencia, the oldest of them all, is the toughest. Her face shows nothing, but the tears keep coming down her cheeks. The mariachi sing the part about how much you want to go back, back, back to the one you loved. But you can’t. It’s too late to go back. It’s too late for anything but a sad song and a quick goodbye.