Painting Their Portraits in Winter

by Myriam Gurba

  El más pequeno de los tres

  Un cochinito lindo y cortés

  ése soñaba con trabajar

  Para ayudar a su pobre mamá

  Y asi soñando sin despertar

  Los cochinitos pueden jugar

  Ronca que ronca y vuelta a roncar

  Al país de los sueños se van a pasear.

  Perhaps this lullaby belongs to your childhood landscape, too. If you had an abuelita who painted your portrait in oils and who died with bedsores the color and consistency of key lime pies, she may have croaked it to you while she sketched your profile. If you’re gringich and have no clue what this lullaby evokes, it’s simple and stupid. Three piglets snuggle in bed. Their mother has kissed them goodnight. Snouts are snoring. Their onomatopoeia sounds like me-me-me-me-me…

  As he dreams of being king, one piglet’s mouth waters. He orders a grand minister to feed him, and he pigs out on a bazillion cakes. Wuss piglet dreams he’s stepping into a rowboat. Instead, he rolls out of bed, smacks dirt floor, and cries. The runt is Tío Miguel. Self-effacing and good. Practically a woman. He works to help his mother. He empties all the pesos from his pockets, places the on a painter’s palette, and slides it towards her. He tells Abuelita, “Use this money to buy yarn, turpentine, oils, chewing gum, papaya, and adult diapers. I will never abandon you. If needed, I will chew your food and spit it down your throat. I love you.”

  The pigs dream, and the pigs snore. Pigs frolic in the Land of Nod. The Land of Nod opens into a Mexican village you can’t get to by foot, train, or cruise ship. You’ve got to be born there. Its people are hungry.

  To nourish themselves, some of the hungry lick the walls. Others dig the dead out of their graves and boil their bones into broth. Heretics hunt and broil the sacred hummingbird. They fry tiny omelets out of its eggs. Who’s got the tiny bacon?

  In this very village, a newlywed is traveling to the well. Her skin gives off that new mother glow. She’s balancing a clay jug on her shoulder. She has left her baby in its crib. It’s screaming for her like crazy, but she knows she has to teach the baby that every time it screams, she can’t come running. She is Ferberizing the thing. She steps beyond her creature’s wails. And keeps walking.

  The lady slides one of her pompis onto the bricks. She leans. She skims her jug along the water and coolness whooshes in. Water refreshes the clay, the smell reminds the lady of when rain first touches the dirt. She hoists the container back onto her shoulder and doesn’t spill any walking back to her house.

  Good. The baby has sshhed.

  At the threshold, the lady sets down her jug beside her husband’s pickaxe. She tiptoes to reward the baby for its silence. Creeping into the room, she finds only a blanket and cradle. Where is the baby? Her titty hangs out and ready. Its two hairs stiffen like cockroach antennae.

  She glances at the window. Dark mud streaks the sill. Matching mud streaks the dirt floor as much as dirt can streak dirt. Carambas. This baby really learned its lesson. It’s so silent it vanished.

  Somewhere, a butterfly is yawning. The mother tears out of her house with that tit flopping like a fish that’ll do anything to get back into water but knows it’ll die out here with us. She wails, and her wail would terrify anyone who could hear it, but it lacks an audience. Every house the mother screams past is overgrown by greasewood. Collapsed roofs scatter across dirt floors. Doors hang open eyelidishly. Only burrowing earthworms hear the muffled wails. Have you heard this woman’s wails on certain nights? Imagine the most horrible wail a woman could release from her body. Please, really try to imagine this or maybe you don’t have to. Maybe this wail is already part of you: My baby… where is my baby?

  The mother tears through her village with that tit flopping out. She tears past the witch doctor’s hut, the rectory, the chapel, the post office that has no point (nobody writes letters anymore), the mercantile, and the tavern. Bandits’ voices carry out its windows. Five of them huddle around a table, commiserating around a clay pitcher of pulque, but they are plotting to rob gold, gold from a ghost. They have no interest in babies unless they’ve swallowed gold, so they’re not our culprits.

  The mother and her tit continue their spree. They tear past the mayor’s house and past the bordello’s pink front door, and on the house of ill repute’s whitewashed but mossiest wall, the mother sees a pile. Snoozing swine make up this heap, they’re curled into and around each other’s mauve bodies, so many potential pork chops, so much meat that can’t nourish an orthodox Hebrew. The cutest piglet is swaddled in her son’s blanket. The blankey used to be white before she went to fetch water.

  Pig’s in a red blanket. The sight drains the final drops of sanity from the mother’s mind, and she tiptoes to the animal pile and crouches near bloodstained snouts. A sow snores onto her wild nipple.

  Its hairs perk, antennas

  Baby’s breath)

  Acknowledgments

  Muchas grassy ass to RADAR PRODUCTIONS for giving me places to write and stages and places to read on, to Kevin Sampsell for being my literary jockstrap (ultra supportive), Wendy C. Ortiz for being a bomb ass lady, the Tostis for being my second family, all the ghosts who visit me and give me inspirayshuns, my pretty feminist momma and handsome feminist dad, my bro and sis yaz and dave, my gorgeous Uncle Henry, my abuelita and abuelito for indoctrinating me in art, tatiana de la tierra for being my queer elder, Thais Jones for being my white girl, Griselda Suarez por ser mi jota y guayaba, Jen Joseph for championing this weirdness, and TJ for being such a TJ.