Let Their Spirits Dance

by Stella Pope Duarte

  “That’s a lie!” Irene said. “Doña Mariana died long before she was put in a cradle.”

  “Listen, the both of you,” I tell them. “Who cares about Doña Mariana…she’s gone, you’re still alive. Make the best of it.”

  “That’s the way it is with the young,” Irene says. “They think they will live forever, but you’ll see, Teresa. Someday you’ll look in the mirror, and an old woman will be staring back at you.” I look into the van’s side mirror and see part of my sunglasses reflected back, a wavy, distant image. I wonder what my face will look like in twenty years.

  I’m glad to see Chris’s house as we turn into Los Griegos, his barrio. I wonder why they named the area Los Griegos, the Greeks. Chris’s house is a framed adobe structure with a white picket fence circling the front yard. A stone flower pot extends the length of a large plate glass window. Wildflowers, purple, pink, and yellow catch my mother’s eye. Huge shade trees dot the whole neighborhood and oblong strips of canals choked with grass and weeds run parallel to the streets. Mailboxes balanced on wooden poles line the dusty sidewalks.

  “This looks like El Cielito,” Manuel says. “If we weren’t in New Mexico, I’d swear we were back home.”

  “It’s greener out here,” I tell him.

  Chris comes out as soon as we drive up. He’s shorter than I remember. His dark hair has turned gray at the temples. His face is still chiseled to perfection even though it’s fuller. He’s wearing sweats, a T-shirt, and a red bandana around his forehead.

  “Why’s he wearing that red bandana?” Manuel asks. “Is that the style around here?”

  “I doubt it.”

  I’m out of the van and in Chris’s arms before I know what’s happening. The smell of his cologne mixes in with sweat and the sweet smell of newly cut grass.

  “You made it! You made it! Oh, God, God it’s so good to see you.” He stands me at arms’ length. “Look at you…more beautiful than ever!” He presses me up close again and we hug, swaying together. Both of us are crying. Instinctively, we wipe each other’s tears away. “More beautiful than all the dreams I’ve had of you,” he whispers. Hugging him is like touching Jesse again. I can’t let go. The pressure of his hands releases energy I’ve stored in my body since I last saw him.

  “Can I get a hug?” Priscilla is standing next to us. Chris is still staring at me. We’re clinging to each other. “He—llo! Can I get in on the action?”

  “Yes! Sorry, I’m dazzled by all this beauty.” He gives Priscilla a big hug, lifting her up and turning her around. “Jesse’s kid sister…all grown up!”

  Manuel is standing behind me. He mimics my steps, moving just at the right time, to avoid my stepping on him.

  “You remember Manuel, don’t you, Chris?”

  “Hey, sure…how’s it going?” He shakes Manuel’s hand.

  “Sorry about the headband,” he says, taking it off, “I was cutting the grass, trying to keep the sweat off my face.”

  “Hey, there’s Gates and Willy!” The three men shake hands and pound each other’s backs. “We’re not old, are we, guys?”

  “There ain’t nothin’ old about me!” Gates says.

  “I should ask your wife,” Chris says.

  “Which one?” Gates asks. They both laugh.

  Chris looks at Willy and Susie. “Are you running your dad’s store?”

  “Yep. Me and Susie, here. Just what I said I’d never do. But you know Mom and Dad. I’m the oldest. They’d die if I didn’t do things the traditional Chinese way.”

  “Man, this is great, to see you all again!” Chris shakes his head, as if he can’t believe it’s really happening. “At ease, men, at ease,” he says, laughing.

  Mom is out of the van now, and Chris leaps to her side. “Doña Ramirez! How are you? How was the trip. Look…no wonder your daughters are so beautiful, you look like a queen!” He bends down and gently holds her to his chest. My mother is crying, her body shuddering with each sob.

  “Ay mijito, all I can think of is Jesse when I see you! My poor mijito…how I miss him!”

  “Yes, Doña, we all miss him—to this day!”

  Mom introduces Irene to Chris. Irene is crying, too. Chris gives her a hug.

  “Did you know my son, Faustino Lara?”

  “I remember him when I lived in El Cielito. A great man, your son. Jesse said he was a good friend to him.”

  “My son is on the Vietnam Wall, too.”

  “Lo siento, I’m sorry,” Chris says. He holds Mom and Irene, tenderly, one on each arm, and soothes them. Then he looks up at all of us, smiling. “Wow, what a mix! Jesse would have loved this! Hey, you guys are making big news! We saw you last night on TV. Who’s the smart kid who started your web page?”

  “That’s Michael,” I tell him, “Paul’s son.”

  “Paul? Little Paul has a son?” He turns around and looks at Paul. He takes a step, then stops, stares, and shakes his head. “Man, your face. You got the look of Jesse in your eyes.” He walks over, claps both hands on Paul’s shoulders, and tousles his hair, “Jesse would have been proud of you! He talked about you a lot in Nam.”

  “He did?” Paul searches Chris’s face. “What did he say?”

  “What didn’t he say? He remembered all the jokes he played on you, and what a good sport you were. The best, he used to say, mi carnalito, he’s got some guts, gonna be a great man some day. So, are you?”

  “Am I what?”

  “A great man?”

  “I’ve done some detours, but I’m working on it. Right, Donna? This is my girlfriend,” he says.

  “Good name, Donna. Isn’t that the name of one of Richie Valens’ songs? Nothing like a good woman to back up a man. And your son, Paul? Where’s the whiz kid?”

  Paul calls Michael over. “Mijo, get over here. Chris wants to meet you.”

  “Mijo?” Priscilla asks. “Did I hear right? That’s a first!”

  Michael gets off the van, minus the laptop. He stands next to Paul, smiling. Paul circles one arm around his neck. “What do you think, huh? Ramirez brains! My son could get us to Mars and back. He’s got the right stuff!”

  “Smart like your Tío Jesse,” Chris says. “Man, Jesse would be strutting right now. Proud. Remember when he’d get into the ring, and do that little dance before a fight? He’d be dancing big time right now! Seriously now, Michael, you gonna get us to Mars and back? We’ll be the first Chicano astronauts on the red planet. All we’ll need to add is white and green, and we got the Mexican flag up there. What do you think?”

  “Yeah, we’ll do it!” Michael says.

  “What about the web site? You getting lots of responses?”

  “I’ve got over a hundred already, and we just started. Dad’s been helping out, now that he knows how to send e-mails.”

  “Maybe I can help, too. I probably know some of the guys.”

  Chris’s mother walks slowly out the door, a duplicate of the Guadalupanas, in a plaid dress and slip-ons. Following behind her, two heads taller, is her daughter, Queta. By now, everyone else is in the front yard, and there are handshakes and hugs all around. My mother and Doña Hermina are the same height, When they hug, their foreheads touch. Doña Hermina invites us into the house. I pinch myself to make myself believe we’re not back home. Pictures of La Virgen, the Sacred Heart of Jesus, and St. Michael with his foot on the devil’s neck remind me of Mom’s house. There is a big pot of cocido, hearty beef and vegetable soup, simmering on the stove. In one corner of the kitchen is an old wood stove, a remnant of early Spanish days. I smell the aroma of freshly cooked tortillas and pause to think that Doña Hermina and her daughter Queta probably make them every day. It makes me feel guilty when I think of all the instant soups my kids eat. Both women are perfectly genteel, smiling, inviting us in. We just ate an hour ago, but there is no question that we will eat again, refusing to do so would be a slap in the face. The old women from Phoenix acquired the title Doña as soon as we crossed the state line. Now it’s Doña
this and Doña that. We’re in New Mexico, where families follow strict traditions, and the way of our ancestors, los antepasados, rules.

  Chris tells me Queta’s never been married. She’s broad and sturdy with bushy eyebrows and the handshake of a wrestler. She’d be a good ally in a fistfight. I’d like to set her up against Sandra in the near future. Queta motions toward Gates with her eyes. She whispers in my ear, “He’s sooo cute!” I think of her and Erica and know they would be equally matched in a fight. I’m hoping Gates doesn’t fall for Queta. She’s already serving him a huge bowl of cocido and setting out hot corn tortillas for him.

  I’m amazed at the chile in New Mexico. Tata O’Brien would have already put some of the pods in his pocket to dry for seeds. Two wooden dining-room tables are set with an assortment of chile and chile sauces in ceramic bowls. A platter piled high with sopaipillas, soft, doughy bread, is centered at each table. Tata often talked about New Mexico chile, examining chile pods and cutting slits into them to examine their interiors. If the chiles were hot enough he’d keep his hands out of his eyes for days.

  “Try them at your own risk,” Queta says, laughing. “Really the hottest are probably the serranos and the chipotles. No, Mama?”

  Doña Hermina nods. “Chile de arbol is hot, too, and sometimes jalapeños, depending on the crop.”

  “The rest of them won’t put you into shock,” Queta says. “They’ll just make you sweat.” She looks over at Gates, and he looks back at her.

  “I like that!” he says. They both smile at each other.

  “Good for your sinuses,” Chris adds quickly.

  “My doctor says not to eat chile—what do you think about that?” asks Irene.

  “Don’t listen to him,” Doña Hermina tells her. “Los doctores told me I was going to die last year. Imagine! Talking to me like they were God!”

  We all sit at the tables. Manuel pulls a chair out for Priscilla, and I move one chair over, and sit next to Chris. The last thing I want to do is eat. I want to move. I want to chase la manda across America before my mother’s strength gives out. Chris’s hand is within inches of my own. I have to fight the urge to slip my hand into his. I can’t believe he’s next to me. My mind is playing games with me. It’s ’68, and Jesse will walk into the room any minute now. This is their going-away party. There’s a part of me holding onto the fantasy every time I look at Chris. Then when I stare across the table at Mom, the fantasy dissolves, only to gain strength when I see Chris again. Chris and I reach for the same bowl of sauce at the same time.

  “You first, Teresa.” He serves the sauce for me. “Here, take a sopaipilla. Mom made them this morning.”

  I notice the kids using their spoons to pick out tender chunks of meat and potatoes in their bowls of cocido, bypassing the onions and cabbage. Michael and Angelo set aside their corn on the cob to saturate separately with butter and salt.

  “Ni lo pienses,” says Doña Hermina. “Don’t even think of leaving tonight! I already have the beds ready, and the kids can sleep on blankets on the floor. There’s the cuartito out in the back yard too, the one my father used when he was still alive. We’ve got two beds in there for los muchachos. The women and kids can sleep in the house.”

  “We’ve already got the rooms,” Manuel says. “What are we supposed to do, cancel out now?”

  “Yep, exactly,” says Chris. “There’s no way my mom will let these ladies go. It would be totally disrespectful to her.”

  My mom looks so tired, I’m glad for Doña Hermina’s offer. I don’t think she can climb back into the van for the trip to the motel. We’re all tired, except the kids. They’re already making plans to go back to Old Town to listen to music in the park and go through the souvenir shops.

  “What do you think, Mom? Should we stay?” Mom looks at Doña Hermina and sighs.

  “You’re lucky, Hermina,” she tells her. “Lucky that your husband was so religious and never went out with other women. Mine? Well, you remember Pablo Jesús!”

  “How could I forget?” The three old women exchange glances. Doña Hermina holds onto the edge of the table and stands up. “But he loved you, Alicia. He always loved you.”

  Mom surprises everybody by laughing out loud. Laughter explodes from her stomach, and makes her gasp for breath. “Love? What does any man know about love?” Irene and Doña Hermina start laughing, too.

  “Well said, Alicia,” Doña Hermina says. “I never thought they understood a thing.”

  Mom holds one hand over her chest. “Ay, but we outlived them all, didn’t we?”

  “And we got the last laugh, too,” Irene adds.

  “We’ll stay, Teresa,” Mom says. “It will be good for my health.”

  After dinner, Chris tells me he’ll take the kids over to Old Town if I go with him. I’m rushing again, but this time it’s to get my mother and Irene settled for the night so I can dress up and go with Chris.

  Penitentes ·

  Albuquerque is a spin-off of an ancient world still under exploration. I see the Spaniards in my mind, soldiers in crested headdresses, searching for the Seven Cities of Gold in a land of stark beauty, pushing the borders of Aztlán for Chicanos like me who would come after them centuries later. I could have told them that the light bouncing off the sheer cliffs of the Manzano and Sandia Mountains is far more precious than gold. They could never capture the splendor of that light and take it back to Spain in a box. Maybe that’s why they stayed. They saw how futile it was to want gold when beauty was priceless. I want to think that, even though I know they were greedy and wanted to own everything, like the white men from Pittsburgh. The Indians had their own wars, one village against another, but they never wanted to own everything. There’s a difference in arguing over a blanket, and in thinking the sheep who grew the wool for the blanket, and the pastures and streams they live in all belong to you. Ownership, deeds, land titles, old names, lots of things in Albuquerque belong to somebody who died a long time ago, and now nobody’s sure what belongs to whom. Family members fought each other for land, and the enemies of one generation became family in the next. Everything moves in cycles and seasons like Indian tom-toms beating slow and deliberate, making things happen whether we want to or not.

  Chris tells me his family has owned the plot of land in Los Griegos for over a century. “El Camino Real used to go through here,” he says, “right through Old Town. There were old families all over the Southwest Valley, we call it El Watche, big familias with a hundred kids who traced their bloodline all the way back to the Spanish crown. There was respeto, forced respeto for the Spaniards, los patrones who made the poor their servants. We had so much respeto, we didn’t know we should have slit their throats. Los patrones ruled back then, then los gringos came, and you know them, they thought they owned the world.”

  We walk through the campus at the University of New Mexico in the moonlight. The buildings slope into each other, blending into a perfect Southwest symmetry. Chris’s hand curves over mine, smoothly, his fingers lock into mine. We’re replicas of the ’60s, a movie that’s been on pause for thirty years. God forgot us and now He’s remembering us again. It’s hard to find the words to say to each other when the only script we knew was buried with Jesse. There’s a volume between us, The History of the Vietnam War. We’re casualties. Our photos should be in the book with captions, “Survivors of the Chicano Bloodbath in Nam,” words that would tell people we had our own holocaust in Vietnam. The volume is open between Chris and me, not by our own hands, but by la manda, my mother’s magic.

  “Remember el cochito, Teresa?”

  “How could I forget. We stalled the plane to Vietnam.”

  “All the guys were looking out the windows trying to figure out what was happening. Nobody was saying a thing. It was like we were at a funeral. Any one of us could come back as a corpse. Then the stewardess came in and called out Jesse’s name. ‘I’ve got a little pig for you, Sergeant,’ she said. Jesse looked at her like she was speaking Chinese. ‘A
what?’ he said. ‘A pig, from your mother.’ All the guys were looking at him, then he opened the napkin. He saw the cookie and said, ‘Hijola, I can’t believe my mom!’ It was funny, everybody started laughing, and that’s the way we took off for Nam with the whole damn plane laughing their heads off over el cochito. I think they were really laughing off their fear. It was 1968, we were getting the shit beat out of us over there. Nobody knew if they would ever see their mothers again. We were happy in those few minutes. It was like your mom had touched us all.”

  “I wondered what was happening in there. I was the one who gave the stewardess el cochito. My mom was ready to faint. She did faint after the plane took off. It’s been hard for her all these years. She blames herself for Jesse leaving, because my dad and him were always fighting. You remember my dad’s lover, Consuelo? Jesse hated her, hated her son Ignacio, too. Jesse stuck up for Mom all the time, but she never divorced my dad.”

  “That’s the way it was in the old days, people didn’t divorce each other, not like now. I’m a three-time loser myself, never thought I would be. Margie was my first wife. I don’t know if you remember when we sent you a wedding invitation. We had two daughters, my girls Elizabeth and Lucia. Now they’re married and on their own. Man, my head was messed up back then! But I loved Margie. You know how that goes. Loved her, and hurt her, loved her, and hurt her. I sure didn’t take after my dad, he was a penitente.”

  “What’s a penitente?”

  “The penitentes are a religious cult. They’re people who take religion to the extreme. They build moradas in small villages, like churches, except priests don’t say mass in them. They can be masochists about some of their practices, sometimes wearing wreaths made of cactus thorns. They tap the wreaths with a stick to cause more pain, and according to them, no blood appears. They wear hoods on their heads right before Easter during La Semana Santa and carry real wooden crosses with splinters sticking out of them on their backs. Some of them tow la carretera de la muerte around. That’s a real wooden cart with a figure of a skeleton representing death sitting in it, San Sebastina herself. Death has an arrow, ready to shoot the man should the purpose of his heart not be true. My dad’s morada didn’t haul la carretera de la muerte around, but they did all kinds of other weird things, like blacken all the windows of the morada during tiñeblas and carry on long hours of prayer. Who knows what else they did.”