The Moths and Other Stories

by Helena María Viramontes

  “I don’t know if I should be hungry or not.”

  “You’re a sad case.” Dave says it as coolly as a doctor would say you have terminal cancer. He says it to convince me that it is totally out of his hands. I panic. I picture him sitting on his side of the bed in his shorts, smoking under a dull circle of light. I know his bifocals are down to the tip of his nose.

  “Oh, Dave,” I say. “Oh, Dave.” The static gets worse.

  “Let me call you tomorrow.”

  “No. Its just a bad night.”

  “Olga,” Dave says so softly that I can almost feel his warm breath on my face. “Olga, why don’t you get some sleep?”

  The first camera I ever saw belonged to my grandfather. He won it in a cock fight. Unfortunately, he didn’t know two-bits about it, but he somehow managed to load the film. Then he brought it over to our house. He sat me on the lawn. I was only five- or six-years old, but I remember the excitement of everybody coming around to get into the picture. I can see my grandfather clearly now. I can picture him handling the camera slowly, touching the knobs and buttons to find out how the camera worked while the men began milling around him expressing their limited knowledge of the invention. I remember it all so clearly. Finally, he was able to manage the camera and he took pictures of me standing near my mother with the wives behind us.

  My grandmother was very upset. She kept pulling me out of the picture, yelling to my grandfather that he should know better, that snapshots steal the souls of the people and that she would not allow my soul to be taken. He pushed her aside and clicked the picture.

  The picture, of course, never came out. My grandfather, not knowing better, thought that all he had to do to develop the film was unroll it and expose it to the sun. After we all waited for an hour, we realized it didn’t work. My grandmother was very upset and cut a piece of my hair, probably to save me from a bad omen.

  It scares me to think that my grandmother may have been right. It scares me even more to think I don’t have a snapshot of her. If I find one, I’ll tear it up for sure.

  Neighbors

  Neighbors

  I

  Aura Rodríguez always stayed within her perimeters, both personal and otherwise, and expected the same of her neighbors. She was quite aware that the neighborhood had slowly metamorphosed into a graveyard. People of her age died off only to leave their grandchildren with little knowledge of struggle. As a result, the children gathered near her home in small groups to drink, to lose themselves in the abyss of defeat, to find temporary solace among each other. She shared the same streets and corner stores and midnights with these tough-minded young men who threw empty beer cans into her yard, but once within her own solitude, surrounded by a tall wrought-iron fence, she belonged to a different time. Like those who barricaded themselves against an incomprehensible generation, Aura had resigned herself to live with the caution and silence of an apparition, as she had lived for the past seventy-three years, asking no questions, assured of no want, no deep-hearted yearning other than to live out the remainder of her years without hurting anyone, including herself.

  And so it came as no surprise that when a woman appeared on a day much like every day, Aura continued sweeping her porch, oblivious to what her neighbors had stopped in mid-motion to watch.

  The massive woman with a vacuous hole of a mouth entered Bixby Street, a distinct scent accompanying her. She was barefooted and her feet, which were cracked, dirty, and encrusted with dry blood, were impossible to imagine once babysmall and soft. The woman carried her belongings in two soiled brown bags. Her mouth caved into a smile as the neighbors watched her black cotton wig flop to one side. They stared at her huge breasts, sagging like sacks of sand and wobbling with every limp. Mrs. García pinched her nose as the woman passed, and Toastie, washing his candied-apple red Impala, threatened to hose her down. Aura stopped sweeping her porch and leaned on her broomstick, not to stare at the woman’s badly mended dress or her wig that glistened with caked hairspray, but to watch the confident direction she took, unmoved by the taunts and stares. Aura did something she had not done in a while: she smiled. However, when the woman stopped at her gate, Aura’s smile evaporated. Haphazardly, the woman placed one bag down in order to scratch beneath her wig.

  “Doña Aura Rodríguez,” she said finally, her toothless mouth collapsing with each word, making it difficult for Aura to understand. “Where is Señor Macario Fierro de Ortega? Where is he?”

  “Macario Fierro de Ortega?” Aura repeated the name as she stepped down her porch steps hesitantly, dragging the broom behind her. Fierro had lived behind her house for nearly thirty years, but she had never known his full name. Perhaps she was not referring to her Fierro.

  “Señor Macario Fierro de Ortega?” she asked, eyeing the woman suspiciously. Aura knew of at least four ways of describing the smell of neglected flesh, but none seemed adequate to describe what stood in front of her. The woman became nervous under Aura’s scrutiny. She began rummaging through her bags like one looking for proof of birth at a border crossing, and found what she had been looking for. Pinching the corner of the matchbook cover, Aura read the barely visible scribbling: 1306 1/2 Bixby Street. It was Fierro’s address, all right. She returned the matchbook and eyed the woman, all the while debating what to do. The woman was indeed a massive presence, but although she overshadowed Aura’s small, delicate frame, the whites of her eyes were as vague as old memories. Hard years had etched her chapped and sunburnt face. It was because of this that Aura finally said: “In the back,” and she pointed to a small weather-worn house. “But he’s not home. On Tuesdays they give ten-cent lunches at the center.” The woman’s scent made it unbearable to stand near her for long, and Aura politely stepped back.

  “Who cares?” The woman laughed, crumbling the match-book and tossing it behind her shoulder. “Waiting I know how to do!” She unhinged the gate and limped into Aura’s yard, her scent following like a cloud of dust.

  Aura was confused as she returned to her house. Her memory swelled with old stories which began with similar circumstances, and she began to worry about being duped. As she opened the door to a cluttered room, one thing struck her as strange, so she drew the Venetian blinds and locked the door behind her: how did the woman know her name?

  II

  Dressed in his Saturday sharpest, Chuy finished the last of his beer behind the Paramount Theater before meeting Laura in the balcony, “the dark side.” When he threw the tall dog into a huge trash bin, three men jumped the alley wall and attacked him. As they struck at him, he managed to grab a 2 by 4 which was holding the trash lid open. But it was no match for the switchblade which ripped through his chest. Chuy was nineteen when Fierro identified the body. He slowly pried the 2 by 4 from his son’s almost womanly slender fingers and carried the blood-stained plank of wood home with him. Years and years later, as his legs grew as feeble as his mind, he took the 2 by 4 from his closet and sat on Aura’s porch, whittling a cane for himself and murmuring to his son as she watered her beloved rose bushes, chinaberry tree, and gardenias.

  The neighbors, of course, thought him crazy. Pabla from across the street insisted that talking to a dead son was an indication of senility. But others swore on their grandmother’s grave that he or she saw Chuy sitting on Aura’s porch, combing his hair “the way they used to comb it then.” Although each aired their opinion of Fierro’s son while waiting in the checkout line at the First Street Store, everyone agreed on one thing: Fierro was strangely touched. The fact that no one, not even the elderly Castillos could remember his first name, added to the mystery of the man. The butcher with the gold tooth, the priest at the Virgen de Guadalupe Church, and the clerk who collected the money for his Tuesday ten-cent lunch addressed him as Don Fierro. But behind his back everyone shook their head with pity.

  All the neighbors, that is, except Aura. Throughout the years of sharing the same front gate, a silent bond between the two sprouted and grew firmer and deeper with time. As a
result, he alone was allowed to sit on her porch swing as he whittled. With sad sagging eyes and whiskey breath, he described for hours his mother’s face and the scent of wine grapes just before harvest. He often cried afterwards and returned home in quiet shame, closing his door discreetly. Aura would continue her watering into the evening, until she saw the light in his kitchen flick on. Then she was sure that he was now sober enough to fix himself something to eat. Not until he had finished whittling the cane did he stop sitting on Aura’s porch.

  With the help of his cane, Fierro walked home from the Senior Citizen Center Luncheon. He coughed up some phlegm, then spit it out in disgust. Eating was no longer a pleasure for him; it was as distasteful as age. The pale, saltless vegetables, the crumbling beef and the warm milk were enough to make any man vomit. Whatever happened to the real food, the beans with cheese and onions and chile, the flour tortillas? Once again he did what he had done every Tuesday for the last five years: he cursed himself for having thrown away priceless time.

  He walked with great difficulty, and when he reached the freeway on-ramp crossing, he paused to catch his breath. The cars and trucks and motorcycles, in their madness to reach an unknown destination, flung past him onto the freeway, causing his green unbuttoned vest to flap open. With his free hand he held the rim of his gray fedora. Fierro slowly began his trek across the on-ramp while the truckers honked impatiently.

  “Cabrones!” he yelled, waving his cane indignantly, “I hope you live to be my age!” And he continued his walk, turning off his hearing aid so that the sounds in his head were not the sirens or motors or horns, but the sounds of a seashell pressed tightly against his ear. When he finally reached the freeway overpass, he stood there listening to the absence of sound.

  “Fierro, Don Fierro!” A young woman and her daughter stood in front of him. He saw the young child retreat behind her mother’s skirt, frightened by the ancient face. “Don Fierro, are you all right?” The woman shouted over her grocery bag and into his ear. He remembered to turn on his hearing aid, and when he did, he heard her ask, “Are you all right?!”

  “Heartaches,” he said finally, shaking his head. “Incurable. It’s a cancer that lays dormant only to surprise you when you least expect it.”

  “What could it be?” the young woman asked as she went into her bag and busted a chip of chicharrón. Loosening her grip on her mother’s apron, the child took the chicharrón and chewed loudly, sucking the fat.

  “Memories,” Fierro said.

  He heard the sirens again, the swift traffic whirling by beneath him. He was suddenly amazed how things had changed and how easy it would be to forget that there were once quiet hills here, hills that he roamed until they were flattened into vacant lots where dirt paths became streets and houses became homes. Then the government letter arrived and everyone was forced to uproot, one by one, leaving behind rows and rows of wooden houses that creaked with swollen age. He remembered, realizing as he watched the carelessness with which the company men tore into the shabby homes with clawing efficiency, that it was easy for them to demolish some twenty, thirty, forty years of memories within a matter of months. As if that weren’t enough, huge pits were dug to make sure that no roots were left. The endless freeway paved over his sacred ruins, his secrets, his graves, his fertile soil in which all memories were seeded and waiting for the right time to flower, and he could do nothing.

  He could stand right where he was standing now and say to himself, here was where the Paramount Theater stood, and over there I bought snow cones for the kids, here was where Chuy was stabbed, over there the citrus orchards grew. He knew it would never be the same again, never, and his greatest fear in life, greater than his fear of death or of not receiving his social-security check, was that he would forget so much that he would not know whether it was like that in the first place, or whether he had made it up, or whether he had made it up so well that he began to believe it was true. He looked down at the child munching on the last of the chicharrón. I remember when you were that age, he wanted to say to the woman. But he was not sure anymore, he was not sure if he did. With his swollen, blotched hands, he tipped his gray fedora, then patted her hands softly.

  “I’ll be just fine,” he reassured her, taking a last look at the child. “It’s Tuesday,” he said finally, and turning off his hearing aid once again, he prepared himself for the long walk across the ruins that still danced with Chuy’s ghost.

  III

  When she heard the gate open, Aura’s first impulse was to warn Fierro of the woman who had been sitting on his porch for the last two hours. But since she respected him too much to meddle in his affairs, she went to the back room of her house and did something else she hadn’t done in a long time: she peaked through her washroom window.

  Contrary to her expectations, Fierro was not at all bewildered or surprised. He stood there, leaning on his cane while the woman rose from the porch with difficulty. They exchanged a few words. When Aura saw Fierro dig into his pocket, it infuriated her to think that the woman had come for money. But instead of producing his wallet, he brought out his keys and opened the door. The woman entered majestically while a pigeon on his porch awning cooed at her arrival.

  IV

  There was a group of pigeons on Fierro’s awning by morning, and it was the cooing and not the knock that awoke her. Aura finally sat up, the familiar ache of her swollen feet pulsating, and with one twisted finger guided a Ben Gay-scented house slipper onto each foot. She leaned against the wall as she walked to the door, her bones, joints and the muscles of her legs and feet throbbing under the weight of her body. By the time she got to the door, no one was there. Aura retreated to her room, leaning from chair to table, from couch to wall. Her legs folded under her as she collapsed on the bed.

  By evening she had tried almost everything to rid herself of the pain, and her lips were parched with bitterness. Miserable and cornered, she began cursing her body, herself for such weakness. She slept little, rocking her head helplessly against the pillow as the pain continued to crawl up and down her body. She began to hate. She hated her body, the ticking of the hen-shaped clock which hung above the stove and the way the dogs howled at the police sirens. She hated the way her fingers distorted her hand so that she could not even grasp a glass of water. But most of all she hated the laughter and the loud music which came from the boys who stood around the candied-apple red Impala with the tape deck on full blast. They laughed and drank and threw beer cans in her yard while she burned with fever. The pain finally made her so desperate with intolerance that she struggled to her porch steps, tears moistening her eyes, and pleaded with the boys.

  “Por favor,” she said, her feeble plea easily swallowed up by the blast of an oldie. “Don’t you have homes?”

  “What?” Toastie asked, not moving from where he stood.

  “Go home,” she pleaded, leaning against a porch pillar, her legs folding under her. “Go home. Go home.”

  “We are home!” Rubén said while opening another malt liquor. The others began to laugh. She held herself up because the laughter echoed in her head and she refused to be mocked by these little men who knew nothing of life and respect. But she slipped and fell and they continued to laugh. It was their laughter at her inability to even stand on her own two feet that made her call the police.

  She raged with fever and revenge, waiting for the police to arrive. She tipped the slats of the Venetian blinds to watch the boys standing in a circle passing a joint, each savoring the sweet taste of the marihuana cigarette as they inhaled. She remembered Toastie as a child. She had even witnessed his baptism, but now he stood tall and she wondered where he had learned to laugh so cruelly. She lowered her head. The world was getting too confusing now, so that you even had to call the police in order to get some kindness from your neighbors.

  Her feeling of revenge had overcome her pain momentarily, but when the police arrived, she fully realized her mistake. The five cars zeroed in on their target, halting l
ike tanks in a cartoon. The police jumped out in military formation, ready for combat. The neighbors began emerging from behind their doors and fences to watch the red lights flashing against the policemen’s batons. When the boys were lined up, spreadeagled for the search, Toastie made a run for it, leaping over Aura’s wrought-iron fence and falling hard on a rose bush. His face scratched and bleeding, he ran towards her door, and for a moment Aura was sure he wanted to kill her. It was not until he lunged for the door that she was able to see the desperation and confusion, the fear in his eyes, and he screamed at the top of his lungs while pounding on her door, the vowels of the one word melting into a howl, he screamed to her, “Pleeeeeeease.”

  He pounded on the door. “Please!” She pressed her hands against her ears until his howl was abruptly silenced by a dull thud. When the two policemen dragged him down the porch steps, she could hear the creak of their thick leather belts rubbing against their bullets. She began to cry.

  It was not until way into the night, after she locked each window, each door, after her neighbors had retreated behind their T.V.s leaving her alone once again, that she remembered the last thing Rubén yelled as the patrol cars drove off, the last words he said as he struggled with the handcuffs.

  “We’ll get you,” he said. “You’ll see.”

  V

  For several days the brooding clouds began to form into animal and plant shapes until they finally burst, pelting her windows with rain. Fearful of her light bulbs attracting lightning, she turned them off and was content to sit in the dark next to the stove while the gas burners flickered blue and yellow fire upon the wall. She sat there quietly with a quilt over her shoulders, her shadow a wavering outline of a woman intimidated by natural forces. Aura sat and listened to the monotony of seconds, the thunderclaps, the pelting against her windows. It was only after the rain had subsided that a faint nasal melody playing against a rusty needle penetrated her darkness, and she cocked her head to listen. Aura carried her chair to the washroom window. She seated herself, pulled up the Venetian blind slats and sought the source of the music.