by Robert Hough
Halfway through the day, Maria del Maíz became sniffly and admitted she was homesick. As Maria del Día looked on, struggling not to shed a tear of her own, Madam wrapped her arms around the weeping Maria and purred I know, mija, I know. Now dry your eyes. We’ll go have a pastelito.
After Madam had fed them cake and tea sweetened with piloncillo, they travelled back to Corazón, each of the new Marias now looking like a princess and behaving, of course, like an illiterate campesina. Over the next week, Madam showed them how to walk without slouching, how to look a gentleman in the eye when speaking, how to use euphemisms when referring to acts that were physical in nature. She taught them how to bathe, properly and thoroughly, and she instructed them where to dab rosewater for maximum stimulating effect. She taught them how to prevent pregnancy by using a mixture of vinegar, sotol resin, and mashed beetle shell (it was a recipe Madam had purchased, naturally enough, from Azula Mampajo, the town curandera). She taught them how to pronounce the final letter of each word, such that a phrase such as tres horas no longer came out sounding like tray hora, and she slowly rid their language of the galaxy of swear words that uneducated Mexicanos use three times per sentence. She trained them not to end each sentence with the interrogative verdad? (You are a Maria now, you don’t need to ask whether you are correct) and she extinguished their Mexican habit of starting every sentence with the imperative oye or mire (The sound of your lovely voice, my darlings, will command sufficient attention). She taught them how to apply makeup, and how to feign interest in political opinion. She taught them English phrases (Hello, how are you? My name is Maria) and the fundamentals of wine, cigars, horses, and any digestif not distilled from the pith of a maguey plant. Above all else, she taught them to appreciate themselves, mostly by standing them before a mirror in a room illuminated by candles.
— Look at yourself, Marias. Look at your eyes, your hair, the contours of your lips. You are beautiful, you are poised, you are Marias. Do you see it?
— No, Madam, peeped Maria del Día.
— I’m sorry, echoed Maria del Maíz. — My mother, she always said I was plain.
— Your mother, countered Madam, — was jealous.
Their tutoring continued. She taught them how to hold a coffee cup (pinky finger extended), how to smoke a cigarillo (in a tapered black holder as long as a zucchini), and how to toast a gentleman’s health (respectfully, subtly, voice cascading with nuance). Four days later, after a morning lesson devoted to the Mexican War of Independence, she again placed her new charges before a candlelit mirror.
— Look at yourself, she said once more. — Look at your eyes, your hair, your …
She stopped. A tear was slipping down Maria del Día’s cheek. Maria del Maíz’s lips were parted, and she looked as though nothing short of a hurricane could tear her eyes away from her flame-hued reflection.
— You see it now, Madam said.
— Sí, they each said with a sniffle.
The next morning she turned them over to Maria de la Noche, who tutored them in the myriad ways of pleasure: how to hurry a gentleman when there’s a lineup at the door, how to slow a gentleman on a quiet night when you want a big tip, how to bolster a gentleman who no longer feels he has a place in the world outside of Madam’s house. She taught them how to behave like a woman whose heart is bursting, like a woman distracted by ravenous desire, like a woman who knows nothing of men and wants nothing more than a kindly instructor. She taught them how to behave peevishly, imperiously, submissively, innocently, wantonly, and/or primly. Most importantly, she taught them how to tailor their composure to the unspoken, perhaps even unrealized, needs of each gentleman.
Finally, on a night when a cool wind was blowing in from the north and the air was fragranced with creosote, and coyotes howled in distant choirs, and the stars were so bright they fought with the sea-green corona for galactic prominence, Madam slipped Maria del Día and Maria del Maíz onto her roster of Marias. The girls, despite their rural ignorance, had learned well. Their gentlemen emerged from their respective bedrooms with expressions of almost sublime contentment, coupled with a profound reluctance to leave. Each, Madam noticed, stayed to enjoy a cigar and a jigger of cheap Venezuelan spirits, poured, quite naturally, from a bottle of Tennessee’s finest.
{ 14 }
ONE SATURDAY MORNING, FOLLOWING A NIGHT DURING which Francisco and Violeta had kissed until their lips turned as pale and rubbery as the belly of a frog, Francisco awoke and dressed for his weekly tutoring job. He had stopped giving lessons in his home, a consequence of his grandmother’s complaint that his pupils smelled of woodsmoke (they did) and that the people of the south were somehow heretical in nature (a popular opinion among elderly northerners, who could not fathom the worship that the dark-skinned Virgin of Guadalupe attracted in other parts of the country). To avoid upsetting the old woman, Francisco started giving his lessons in the depths of the ejido, where entire poverty-wracked families now crowded around him, listening to him conjugate irregular verbs. His payments, as the tower workers’ money depleted, grew less and less regular. Often at the end of his sessions, he was presented with a bowl of goat stew or a batch of homemade tortillas, or, as happened one noon hour, the recitation of a blessing that protected against epidermal boils. Francisco’s father soon suggested that his son quit — often the remunerative soups suffered from bits of bone and gristle, not to mention ingredients that were obviously reptilian in nature. Yet Francisco couldn’t. It was the delighted look on his students’ round, bronze-tinted faces every time he arrived. In him they saw the knowledge that they hoped would one day lead them out of the ejido, and Francisco didn’t have it in him to extinguish that hope.
After a breakfast of porridge and juice, Francisco left the house whistling, a habit he’d acquired since being visited by the sumptuous anointment that is love. Upon reaching the central plaza, however, he pulled up short: most of the vagrants who now lived in the square were milling around the blue wooden doors of the town hall. Francisco approached, his nose wrinkling at the scent of unwashed clothing, and tapped the shoulder of one old-timer who, upon turning, revealed himself to be missing an eye. The remaining eye, meanwhile, fell upon Francisco like the sight of a rifle.
Francisco swallowed and fought the inclination to recoil. — Excuse me, señor, he said, — but … what is happening?
— Don’t you know, joven? Sometime in the middle of the night, a huge truck showed up in the plaza. Two gringos opened the back and carried out a huge glass sphere that looked like it was filled with, of all things, balls of gum.
— Qué raro, said Francisco.
— Ay sí. They had a key to the town hall. They opened the doors and carried the thing inside. Then they locked up and drove away. One old bum had his foot run over.
— What can it all mean? Francisco asked rhetorically, a question that was running through the heads of every person in Corazón de la Fuente. This included the mayor, Miguel Orozco, who had arrived about twenty minutes earlier and was now the lone person inside the hall. Slowly he limped around the huge transparent ball, feeling puzzled. The only people who possessed a key to the building were himself and the governor of Coahuila, a reputedly flatulent hombre who had not shown his face in Corazón during Miguel’s entire decade as mayor, and who had also not responded to any of the mayor’s numerous letters requesting funding for roads, running water, electricity, reliable telephone lines, and the hiring of a dog catcher.
Yet upon finishing his second circuit around the sphere, the mayor realized with a start that there was one other hombre who had a key. In fact, Miguel had given him the key himself. This excited the mayor, and he looked around at the chipped yellow walls of the foyer, seeking confirmation. Though there was nothing save for an old revolutionary poster announcing that the peso was no longer the currency of México, it didn’t matter: only one person could have done this. The mayor limped up the steps to his second-floor office, where one of the village’s few telephones was slowly com
ing away from its spot on the peeling wall. After several attempts (the phone lines of México being what they were) he reached the Roswell Hotel, where he spoke to one of the doctor’s many assistants. In this manner he learned everything.
The mayor spent the rest of the morning in a more typical fashion: reading the newspaper and daydreaming. At noon, his secretary — an old village woman who worked about ten minutes each day — brought him a lunch of tortilla and machaca. When he was finished, he drank a cup of coffee and smoked a punche cigarette while waiting for the clamour beneath him to die down.
When the last of the townsfolk finally got bored and wandered off, the mayor rose, limped down to the foyer, and stood grinning at the sight of the immense gumball machine; the truth was, he’d never realized that Brinkley was quite so eccentric. Thankfully, his were the sort of eccentricities that were a pleasure to accommodate. He clomped over to Carlos Hernandez’s cantina, ordered a cerveza, and sat with the cantina owner and Father Alvarez.
— Goddamn it, Alvarez said. — Out with it, primo.
— Out with what?
— Why is all that gum in your office?
The mayor leaned close to his two old friends. Though he had pledged not to reveal Brinkley’s surprise, he had done so before being faced with an afternoon of drinking with his closest amigos. — Can you keep a secret?
— No, said the father. — Tell us anyway, you cagey pendejo.
The mayor rolled his eyes at the father’s cantankerousness. — This Saturday, after the lucha show, Dr. Brinkley is going to bring the machine onto the bandstand for a contest. Whoever comes closest to guessing how many gumballs are inside it will win a hundred American dollars.
— A hundred dollars! exclaimed the cantina owner.
— He may be a bit loco but he is generous, said the mayor. — He wants to help us celebrate our Día de la Independencia.
— Bah, spouted Father Alvarez. — A hundred dollars is a day’s worth of piss for a cabrón like him.
— Father, said the cantina owner. — Maybe you’d like a lemonade for the next round.
— And maybe you’d like to go to heaven. It doesn’t mean it’s going to happen. And by the way, why do you keep wriggling? You look like you’ve got a marmot in your pants.
The cantina owner reddened. — I played fútbol yesterday, and I’m a little sore.
— Gentlemen, interrupted the mayor. — Por favor. After the contest, Brinkley is going to smash the thing open with a mallet and let the kids of the town have all the gumballs they can carry away.
— That, joked the cantina owner, — could be one lucha fight worth seeing.
By the time Saturday night had rolled around, there wasn’t a soul in all of Corazón — as well as the neighbouring towns of Rosita and Piedras Negras — who didn’t know that the world-famous goat-gland doctor was going to give out a hundred dollars and a hoard of free candy on México’s Independence Day. Unlike the past several Saturdays, when attendance at the Reyes brothers’ lucha displays had dwindled to Consuela Reyes, her recently acquired suitor, and a few teenaged fans of Los Inconsolables del Norte, the entire plaza slowly filled. Francisco arrived early to save a good seat for himself and Violeta. The mayor escorted the ancient molinero and his sweetheart, Laura, who was excited about her upcoming trip to a dentist in Saltillo; they sat in reserved seats along with the cantina owner, the hacendero, and Father Alvarez. A breeze was wafting down from the sierras, taking away just enough of the day’s humidity to make the evening enjoyable.
The last two seats were reserved for Dr. Brinkley and his wife, a woman who had yet to grace the town of Corazón de la Fuente. Time and time again the mayor had to inform others that the seats were off-limits, a sentiment the molinero reinforced by holding his piñon-wood cane across the chairs and asking the uninformed parties to go to the back, por favor. Meanwhile the plaza kept filling with poor strangers arriving from parts east, west, and south. Soon there were spectators squatting on roofs, perched in the denuded palo verde trees, and jostling in the avenues leading away from the plaza. Most, the mayor noticed, were dressed in tatters.
The lucha show proceeded pretty much as usual. After circumnavigating the stage, Consuela Reyes clanged her cast-iron pan with a fritter spoon. Her oversized sons began circling one another, their arms making slow circling motions in the air. Two minutes later, Alfonso was holding his bleeding nose and Luis was running around the ring, distraught with feelings of guilt.
After the boys were led away by their mother, Los Inconsolables del Norte played for ten minutes, inspiring guffaws from those who had come from neighbouring villages and had no allegiance to the band members or their families. This angered those who had grown up with the group members, and soon came the arguments and shoving that are usually a precursor to fisticuffs. Pistols were seconds away from being drawn when, thankfully, los Inconsolables stopped playing. From their elevated position on the bandstand, the musicians had noticed that the doors to the hall were opening. The loud ensuing creak silenced the crowd, which parted to make room for the arc of the doors.
Three large Texans, each wearing the nervous expression that gringos inevitably acquired when surrounded by Mexicanos, carried the giant gumball machine to the centre of the stage. A long minute followed, during which a mixture of confusion and anticipation rippled through the crowd. Dr. Brinkley appeared in the doorway of the hall; he was wearing white pants, a blue-striped donkey jacket, and a straw boater bearing the colours of the Mexican flag. Slowly he walked to the bandstand, pausing occasionally to wave at the crowd, kiss an infant, or fold a coin into the hand of a small, dark-eyed child.
The doctor stopped next to the sphere. Motioning with his hands, he peered in every direction through his tortoiseshell glasses. His hair was so lacquered with pomade that it reflected the green light rippling through the sky above him, giving the impression that his head was made from kelp. After a practised dramatic pause, he lifted his arms and began to speak.
— Ladies and gentlemen, he announced in his exemplary Spanish. — It has been three months since the first broadcast of Radio XER, the Sunshine Station from Between the Nations. I am here today to thank each and every one of you for your hospitality, your welcome encouragement, and, perhaps most significantly, the opportunity to spend some time in this glorious little town called Corazón de la Fuente.
He paused for a moment of applause.
— It’s no secret that, in the short period in which I have become associated with your town, I have come to hold you all in only the deepest of regard, and I would like to do everything in my power to aid your restoration. As my Appalachian mother used to say, If you’re gonna sit, might as well pick a nice chair.
This time he paused for polite chortling.
— Anyhow, the other day I was dining with the good missus, and I said to her Minnie, I want to do something for the people of Corazón de la Fuente on the day of their independence. Well, to make a long story short, she pondered and then said John Romulus, do you know what people enjoy?
He paused dramatically, looking in all directions, his eyes squinting with glee.
— People enjoy a contest, she said. People love a contest. Well, I thought about this for a moment and I said to myself When the woman is right, the woman is right. A half-hour later and there I was, on the phone with a representative of the Acme Gumball Machine factory of Alton, Illinois, who was only too pleased to fabricate a customized dispensary for this evening’s festivities. And so, my good people, I am left with a single question, which I will put to you right now.
He paused, looking in every direction, his face a mask of mock seriousness. — Which of you would like to win some money?
There was an eruption of yelling and jostling and the shoving aside of old people and the stepping on of children, for though John Romulus Brinkley considered himself a man of humble origins, having been born in a tarpaper shack in the Ozark Mountains, he really wasn’t, not by Mexican standards. He had no idea wh
at it was like to live through a decade of bloody revolution or to feed his children maguey worms in a vain attempt to get a little protein into their blood, only to watch them grow up with the vacant smiles and stunted language unknown to the adequately fed. Despite being a man who felt for others and who believed he really had the capacity to help people, he had no idea what it was like to dress his children in coffee sacks with holes cut for the arms and huaraches fashioned from old bits of tire rubber. As the crowd pushed tighter and tighter against the stage, the doctor’s pleased expression faltered, and over the roar of the crowd he could be heard yelling at his assistants For the love of God, pick a few contestants! His Texans, big-armed farm boys who towered over the Mexicans, waded in and grabbed anyone who didn’t look dangerous and dragged them to the stage. By the time they were finished, Brinkley was standing amongst a half-dozen contestants, all of whom looked on with mild terror as the equally terrified farm boys struggled to keep the rest of the crowd off the stage.
Slowly the crowd simmered down. Brinkley swept a fallen lock of hair off his forehead and struggled to regain his breath. Beside him stood a couple of ejido dwellers, somebody’s grandmother, and an excited vagrant with a stump for a left hand. Finally there was Violeta Cruz, who was attracting whistles and catcalls from those men in the audience who were strangers, and didn’t understand that here, in Corazón de la Fuente, the daughters of the village were treated with courtesy and respect. Again there was hostile shoving. Francisco, his hands shaped into fists, waded towards the source of the catcalls, only partially relieved when they died down of their own volition.
— All right, said the doctor. — I am going to ask each of these fine contestants to guess how many gumballs there are in the sphere, and the one who comes closest to the correct answer, which I have ably stored in my noggin, will win one hundred dollars. I’d like to now let the contestants have a long, hard look.