The Five Acts of Diego Leon

by Alex Espinoza

  Axamu uerani, axamu k’arhancheni, nokeni jurákuakia.

  Ji uerasïngani sani, ka xangeni nona mirikurini ia

  Axamu uerani, axamu k’arhancheni, jikeni eróntakia.

  Ji uerasïngani sani, ka xangeni nona mirikurini ia.

  When he finished, they applauded. Narciso gave Diego a sip of pulque, which he drank quickly and immediately spit out. Elva threw her head back and laughed loud, and Diego felt happy that he had brought her such joy.

  Afterward, Elva said, “You were wonderful. You have a gift. Like all of the P’urhépecha. From the gods. They have blessed us, you especially. Given you the ability to sing.”

  “And my father?” he asked. “What was his gift?”

  “I don’t know,” Elva said. “You’ll have to ask him when he returns.”

  “Will he ever?” Diego barely remembered him.

  Elva responded, “We can only hope.”

  4.

  July 1915–June 1917

  FOUR YEARS. GABRIEL LEÓN WAS GONE FOUR YEARS. There had been a heavy rainstorm the night before, and the roads and the fields were badly flooded on the day when he and Luis Vara finally returned to San Antonio.

  Luis hugged Diego and kissed Elva. He had lost much weight, and he was now thin, his round belly completely gone, his trousers and shirt loose and baggy on his body. His father frightened Diego. He was like an apparition, a spirit. His hair was tangled and matted, his fingernails and toenails thick and yellowed and curved like a dog’s. He wore tattered rags, a hat woven from strips of palm fronds, and a pair of flimsy leather sandals. His hands trembled as he ate the plate of beans and tortillas Elva served. He gulped the coffee down quickly, even though it was hot. He sat hunched in the corner of the cookhouse for most of the day, watching the puddles of rain outside. There was a new scar running across his left cheek, a deep gouge splitting his skin.

  “What happened, Gabriel?” Elva asked, reaching out to touch it.

  “Nothing,” his father responded, pushing her hand away.

  “He was captured,” Luis said. “Tortured. He was found chained to …” He stopped now, glanced over at Diego. Luis cleared his throat before continuing: “I won’t say more in front of the boy, but I had to bring him back or he would have died.”

  His father remained silent for a long time, chewing his tortillas. Finally he spoke. “Where is Amalia?” he asked Elva. “Did she return to Morelia?”

  Elva took a deep breath and reached for the clay jug on the crooked wooden shelf near the washbasin. Diego knew she kept it full of pulque and took drinks from time to time when her nerves acted up. She looked over at Diego, who fixed his eyes on his father. She took a drink from the jug then walked it over to Gabriel. He took a long drink.

  “Two years after you both left, a troop of fighters came to San Antonio. Afterward, many children, including the boy, got very sick,” Elva explained. “Then some adults became ill. Amalia got it, too. The boy recovered. She didn’t.”

  Luis sighed and muttered something under his breath.

  “She’s dead?” his father asked.

  “Yes,” Elva said. “We buried her in the cemetery. Near your parents.” She reached out and took his hand. “But the boy was spared. And you’re both alive. We thought you died. It’s a miracle.”

  His father set the jug down on the table. Diego caught the scent of fermented alcohol mixing with the smell of wood smoke and toasting maize as his father charged out of the cookhouse and into the street.

  “What a tragedy,” Luis said, removing his hat and looking at Elva, then Diego. “I’m sorry, son. I’m so sorry for all of this.”

  He went with his father the next day to Mass, and after everyone left, they stayed. Gabriel lit a candle and said a prayer for Amalia. His hands trembled and he cried into the sleeve of his shirt.

  “I’m sorry,” he muttered. “I’m so sorry.”

  Diego didn’t know what to say. He wanted to reach out and pat his father on the shoulder, but something stopped him. Instead, he watched the candles flicker and burn away to nothing.

  On the fifth of February of 1917—a month after Diego’s eleventh birthday—the country rejoiced but just for a brief moment. The land, Luis told him, had a new Constitution that guaranteed many rights for workers, such as paid holidays and better wages. Things will get better, he said. The fighting will cease. But Elva knew the truth.

  “This isn’t anything to celebrate,” she said one day as Diego stood a few feet away from her, feeding the chickens. “The men are still abandoning their plows and pickaxes and still following the revolutionaries.”

  “Who’s fighting now?” Diego asked her. He wondered what was left to defend.

  Elva squinted. “Let me think. I can’t ever keep track of it.” She paused, counting with her fingers. “Madero, Villa, and Zapata against Díaz. That’s how this started. Then it was Zapata and Orozco against Madero, wasn’t it? Then Huerta turned against Madero and had him and Suárez executed, I think. Then Carranza, with Villa, Zapata, and Obregón, kicked Huerta out. Now we have Carranza’s Constitutionalist army fighting the rebels. It’s all a mess. Why are you asking?”

  Diego shrugged his shoulders.

  She glared at him. “Don’t go getting any ideas about charging off like your father did. He left, and look at him. Back now two years, and he’s still not right.”

  It was true. In the time since his return, his father had grown more and more distant. With each passing day, Diego sensed him drifting further away. Gabriel León, Elva said, had lost hope, had given up.

  “His will had been so strong before he left,” she said. “And whatever happened to him out there pulled that will from his spirit and cut it loose, and now it’s lost, wandering the earth without a purpose, without a home. It’s a very bad thing.”

  The next morning, he worked the plow alongside his father and Luis Vara. He was bored, the task exhausting, so he sang to keep his mind occupied, to ignore the fatigue and the hunger. Once in a while, Luis whistled along.

  “Diego has quite a voice,” Luis said to his father. “Don’t you think?”

  But Gabriel remained quiet as he worked, not seeming to notice.

  Xúmu, Diego thought, looking at the thick fog veiling the trees and mountains in the distance. Karichi. He watched the goats. Tsíkata. He saw a group of chickens pecking at the ground for worms. Karhasï, he remembered, was the word for worm. Kúchi. Kúchi was P’urhépecha for pig. He glanced around. Where were they? Where were the kúchi?

  The fields had gone fallow while his father was away, so there was no money, no food, and even the animals were growing desperate, hungry; many of them had simply collapsed. Tiriapu, Diego repeated to himself as he held a few kernels of corn. Seeds, like food, cost money, and there was no money, so there was little food. What measly crops they planted and harvested were sold for a few pesos to buy coffee or flour or beans. What little corn was left, they ground up for tortillas or fed to the animals.

  “Sing to us some more, Diego,” Luis urged him now.

  “No,” insisted his father. “We have to concentrate on plowing the field.”

  “Gabriel,” Luis protested. “Let the boy—”

  His father turned to Diego now. “Go to the house. Get me some tortillas. I’m hungry.”

  “Yes, Father,” Diego said, then turned and ran through the cornfields toward the house. Taati, he said to himself. Taati was full of ikiata. His father was full of anger.

  He knew why his father was mad: the land refused to yield anything beyond a few diseased ears of corn. They came from the fields tired, dirty, the handles of his hoes and sickles faded and splintered, worn not just from hard work but anger and resentment. All he did was work, and nothing came of it, he would say to Elva. They barely had enough to eat. When she told him not to lose hope, to be strong for Diego, his father merely shook his head and glared at him. What would be left of them, he wondered, as he made his way back home to fetch his father some tortillas. T’upuri. T
hat’s what would be left of them. Nothing but t’upuri.

  Nothing but dust.

  In preparation for the feast of the town’s patron saint, which would be held on June thirteenth, Father Solís announced that he would be organizing a performance of the Dance of the Old Men and needed four boys whom he would teach the steps to. Diego said he wanted to learn it, even though Elva told him he shouldn’t. His father would not approve, she insisted. But Diego ignored her and asked Father Solís if he could participate. When he said yes, Elva sighed and shook her head.

  “Stubborn child,” she said. “Just like your mother and father. Always doing what you want.”

  In the weeks before the festival, Father Solís had Diego and the rest of the boys practice for an hour each day. There were three other dancers—Ignacio Flores and the twins Mauricio and Mateo Avila—and they didn’t like Diego and took turns making fun of him when Father Solís wasn’t paying attention. They called him stupid, a bad dancer, and Ignacio pushed Diego one afternoon as they walked home, causing him to fall over a rock and scrape his knee. Then the three boys laughed and ran off together, leaving Diego lying on the ground, bleeding, angry. When Elva asked him what happened, and he told her, she called the boys rude and ill mannered and told him to quit.

  “No,” he said. “I don’t want to.”

  He didn’t care. He liked it too much. Father Solís had taught him the steps, taught him how to bend his legs and crouch and shake his arms while the violinist named Gonzalo played. The dance would start with Diego and the others walking into the center of the clearing, holding on to their canes, hunched over, their knees trembling. They would pretend to stumble and fall then form a straight line with the canes held out before them. Then came Diego’s favorite part: the heavy stomping of their feet. He found he liked the way his movements blended with the music of the violin. He felt himself part of the song, part of something ancient and meaningful. After they rehearsed, the music stayed with him the rest of the day and, at night, when his father lay snoring just a few feet away, Diego would hum quietly, would imagine dancing under the bright blue moonlight, an audience of owls and white-haired coyotes looking on from the trees or from behind bushes.

  Elva said she would use some of her money to buy his costume when Diego’s father said he had none. Then he grabbed the last bottle of pulque from the shelf and walked to the back house.

  “Aren’t you going to eat?” Elva asked.

  “I’m not hungry,” Gabriel said, and vanished.

  The old woman shook her head. She turned to Diego. “You’ll need a mask,” she said. Elva handed him a few pesos and said, “Go see José Tamez. Tell him I sent you.”

  Old José Tamez was skilled in the art of taking lumps of misshapen resin from candles or a hunk of dried and brittle wood and giving it a life, a meaning, a purpose. Diego found him outside his shop off the main avenue. José sat on a crate with a hunk of wood between his legs. A lit cigarette dangled from between his lips, and he wore a hat with a wide brim. He looked up when Diego approached and said hello.

  “You’re León’s boy, aren’t you?” José asked.

  “Yes.” Diego handed him the pesos. “I need a mask. For the dance of the old men.”

  “That’s what I’m making here,” he said, lifting the hunk of wood, splintered, its edges sharp and jagged.

  “From that?” Diego asked.

  The old man took his cigarette and placed it on the ground. “Hard to see, I know.” He laughed, and his teeth were bright white and perfectly straight. “But use your imagination.”

  Diego stood there, waiting. After a few moments, the old man spoke.

  “You young people,” he said. “No imagination.” José waved toward a set of opened doors. “Go. You’ll find something.”

  Elva said José came from a long line of wood-carvers and used tools that had been passed down from father to son over many years—knives to cut and smooth wood, gouges to scoop out the insides of hunks of wood like the flesh of a piece of fruit, chisels to form lines and wrinkles across the faces of the masks he made. In the courtyard, the old man’s bench stood like an altar, its many jars of paint and pigments and varnishes like the chalices and vessels Father Solís used at Mass. A yellow glow filled the patio, lighting the area just enough for Diego to see that, on the walls, a series of shelves and niches had been pecked out with a chisel. On each shelf was a different carving of an animal. There was a burro, a horse galloping through a field of wheat, ducks with ruffled feathers, the veins of each plume so delicately etched they looked real. A dog played with a stick, and a cat stayed busy batting a ball of yarn, one string of the yarn undone and wrapping around its tail. On another shelf there were keys of different shapes and sizes. There were crosses and Holy Spirit doves sandpapered smooth.

  And then there were the masks. Some had forked tongues sticking out of opened mouths, their heads crowned with horns or spikes. Others looked like old men, wearing wide grins, their teeth chipped or missing. In the setting sun, the shadows of his carvings danced and leapt across the walls and floor. All around him, the figures elongated, their bodies stretching and bending and contorting. The forked tongues of the masks wiggled around like those of hissing snakes. The eagle’s wings fanned out, and its beak swelled almost to the size of Diego’s head. The monkey’s arms reached out, and he imagined them wrapping around his body, its hands tightening around his neck. The tip of the rhino’s horn rested just above the doorway, swallowed it whole, trapping him inside. They circled around Diego, stalking him like prey, and he remained there, motionless, scared of making any sudden moves. He felt as if he’d fallen down a deep well, the daylight absent, only darkness and shadows, when he felt a tap on his shoulder.

  “You saw them, didn’t you?” the old man said, laughing.

  “No,” Diego said, still afraid to move. “I …” he began then looked closer now; the figures had stopped moving.

  “The masks are here,” said José, leading him to an overturned trunk strewn with more carvings of animals and birds, saints and crosses, arms and mouths. “All you have to do is pick your face. Pick the one that suits you.”

  There were five of them, all rowed neatly, one next to the other. Their noses were sharp points that appeared not human at all, but more like those of ferocious and unnamed beasts. Creases ran across their foreheads and rows of crooked teeth were set deep within twisted smiles, pulling their cheeks upward. They were painted pink, mimicking skin, and strands of yarn were glued to the tops and sides of each head. He was afraid to touch them, to run his finger over their lips and brows. Their eyes were narrow slits, without pupils, only hollow eye sockets that stared upward, looking past the straw roof and up to the sky, at something so large, so ominous that Diego recoiled.

  “Which one?” asked José. “Any of the five.”

  But Diego couldn’t decide.

  After some time, José said, “Very well. I will pick for you.” He took one, wrapped it in newspaper, and handed it to him. “Good luck, young man,” he said.

  “Thank you,” Diego said, and he tucked the mask under his arm, turned, and left.

  He had carefully laid out the outfit the night before and, on the day of the festivities, he took his time dressing, handling the outfit with gentle, delicate touches, as he fastened the cotton trousers around his waist, pulled the shirt over his head, and draped the gold and blue serape across his chest. Diego placed the mask inside the morral, which had been hand-knitted with bright yarn and fabric, and slung the bag over his left shoulder. He regarded himself now in the outfit Elva had purchased, and Diego knew that it was important for him to take good care of it, to not dirty or ruin it. He felt resplendent in the outfit, noble, like a warrior or priest. If his father came, he would notice Diego and be proud of him. The embroidered designs along the hems of the pants and cuffs of the shirt were like bright strings of sugar laced together so delicately, their patterns forming roses, hummingbirds, and butterflies. He clutched his straw hat—th
e long strips of blue, red, and yellow paper glued around its rim so that they hung down along the sides and front—and the cane Elva had fashioned from a sugar stalk, grabbed his things, and ran off to the church.

  Elva had made sure to tell his father and Luis about the festivities the day before. Luis had nodded and said he would surely make it.

  “What do you say, Gabriel?” he asked Diego’s father.

  Gabriel swatted the air with his hand.

  “Please,” Elva had insisted. “There’ll be food and music, Gabriel. The whole town will be there. It’ll cheer you up.”

  “No, Tía Elva,” he said. “Nothing can. Nothing ever will.” Gabriel sighed and looked over at Diego. “I’ll try to be there, Son.”

  The town gathered at the lake’s edge and followed the priest up San Antonio de la Fe’s single crooked street, past the houses, to the church. Diego could see the statue of San Antonio from his place in the procession. A group of men, including Luis Vara, carried the statue into the church and set it down near the altar as Father Solís began Mass. Luis stood to one side, his hat off, listening to the priest. Diego looked around, but he didn’t see his father.

  After Mass, the congregants filed out of the church. Outside, the air carried the scent of damp hay and burning wood, of boiling milk and cinnamon from the colanders of hot atole a group of women stirred with large copper spoons then poured into clay mugs for people to drink. He found Luis talking to a small group of men.

  “Where’s my father?” Diego asked him.

  Luis sighed and scratched his mustache. “He was in the field at the foot of the hill clearing out the brush when I left, son. I don’t think he’s coming, I’m sorry.”