The Gift of Women

by George McWhirter

  He sings it as he crosses the aqueduct, fed by the apantle a few miles away. He loves the sound of this instant river that erupts from the earth, out of a mound heaped with epazote, cilantro, watercress and everything green that clings to a well-watered place, especially the banks and ditches that follow the apantle along the side of the cane fields until it reaches the stone aqueduct. The aqueduct sprouts thick walls on either side for the apantle, providing a narrow conduit for the water to pass through. It crosses twenty metres in the air, over a great dip in the earth to rush like applause into a hamlet on the other side.

  As a boy, Don Mateo sat in the aqueduct, holding onto the stone walls on either side with his forearms, letting the water build up behind until it reached his ears and the force shot him across the length of the aqueduct. Strong as a breaker from the ocean, smashing out of its confinement, banging him from side to side, skinning his elbows, while he closed his eyes and imagined he was in the ocean far away where the water from the apantle went.

  Walking home with his machete from his day’s work in the cane fields, he imagines he keeps the apantle company on part of its long course toward the ocean. He can hear its distant crash in the rush of the aqueduct as he crosses on one of the stone walls used for going into town. Cuautlenses pass on the other side and greet him, going out.

  He doesn’t live in Cuautla, he lives on a shrunken milpa over the other side of the Pan American Highway, where it climbs the slope out of Cuautla toward Azúcar de Matamoros and the new Panteón. There, he will be buried because the old one, which is much closer to his home, lies filled to the brim. If he turned into a cicada or a firefly, he could take up residence in the trees above the old Panteón and hurtle past his sons and grandsons, daughters and granddaughters like a green grenade, lobbed out of their family’s long history of dying in this town, which he has never left for the ocean. No, not once, although he is certain the apantle reaches it on his behalf, joining up with other comrade waters for companionship on the journey.

  He sings about the lonely rivers until he reaches the pulquería, where he stops every night after quitting the cane fields. In the pulquería, he releases his hooked machete and sets it along the side of the table. The pulquero behind the serving hatch dips his head to look and check who he is. The pulquero nods his head at the machete, turns his head to the side like a bird while pursing his lips into a beak, as if trying to work out if the machete is set there for convenience or for business.

  How many years has he looked through that hatch at Don Mateo the same way?

  If Don Mateo sat with the machete dangling at his side, it might trip someone passing, or bother him by bumping on the floor every time he moved, or knock against him on his way to the lavatory – even swing in front of his fine flow of yellow piss. No one will steal it. Not with square eyes behind the hatch keeping an eye on all the machetes laid as carefully as cutlery on the sides of the tables. Too many machetes, too confusing for a thief to take a pick.

  Fausto, a much-younger relative, shuffles in and sits down opposite Don Mateo with his back to the hatch, where he will go to order his mug of pulque and one for Don Mateo. Fausto doesn’t like to see the pulquero’s face and the look that says, ah ha, Fausto has to sit with Don Mateo whether he likes it or not.

  As a nephew, his sister’s son, with more great-nephews for Don Mateo on the way, he needs Don Mateo’s permission to add to the small building space Don Mateo has allotted him on Don Mateo’s milpa. Fausto feels crowded in his little home, crowded in the pulquería, and that is what galls him every night when, at some juncture, Don Mateo tells him about how listening to the apantle makes him feel free because it flows all the way to the sea.

  Every night, sure as the fifth mug of pulque, Don Mateo will say, “God bless the god Quetzalcoatl for inventing this pulque. Down through the ages it pours to us, just like our apantle to the sea.”

  His nephew, Fausto, knows Don Mateo has worked on this salute to pulque and to the apantle for years before he got the right words, almost as many years, months and days as Fausto has waited for permission on the extension. But Don Mateo gets drunk, forgets, falls into bed after Fausto carries him home and drops him into it. Then, when his uncle wakes up, he thinks it is the same day as the day before.

  Fausto’s aunt, Doña Celestina has begged Fausto to be in the pulquería for when he must carry Don Mateo home across the highway.

  Fausto wants to know why Don Mateo doesn’t use his mangy horse. Except Fausto would have to be there to shove him into the saddle. His uncle doesn’t let him add-on because he knows Fausto would have no call to be here at his beck and call any more, ready to heave him over his shoulder.

  “Uncle, please, let me add-on.”

  The fifth mug gavels the table as Don Mateo lands it with relish. “Quetzalcoatl will be pleased. Add-on as much as you please in his praise.”

  “Jesus,” says Fausto, “you don’t hear, do you, Tío Mateo!”

  “What don’t I hear?”

  Fausto stomps over to the hatch and buys himself the biggest mug of pulque he can get and doesn’t bring a matching one for Don Mateo.

  “To the god whoever,” says Fausto and drinks it, then goes for another, which goes down just as brazenly in front of his uncle. Then, Fausto stands and declares, “The apantle goes into a river that ends up in a lake. Didn’t you ever hear that in school?”

  “I never went to school, as you know, and I hear what the apantle tells me. The apantle tells me it goes all the way to the sea with its friends.

  “No, it does not.”

  Don Mateo stands, reaches across the table and slaps Fausto across the face.

  Fausto jumps up and before he knows what he has done, he has picked up his machete and swept the ear from the side of Don Mateo’s head.

  “See what you hear now!”

  He has just come out with a bitter oxymoron, but Fausto is much to blame for the long, long wait and his wrath because, a while ago, Fausto had a scheme for paying Don Mateo for his add-on.

  Fausto’s brother-in-law, Fidel, nearly drowned in the apantle when he was baptized by the pastor from the Baptist church. Fidel has land. The near-drowning to save his soul didn’t stop Fidel from signing up for Bible College, so he could do unto others as the pastor had done to him.

  Fidel owned one big field in particular, which Fausto could rent for a song or a hymn, which he practises with his brother-in-law, for when he fulfilled a promise to be the first soul Fidel will dunk in the apantle and save for Jesus. These watery conversions take place close by the Baptist church, shortly after the water gushes out of the aqueduct, hence the perilous footing for the baptizer and the about-to-be baptized.

  Don Mateo liked the story of Fidel very, very much.

  “I’d die to be born again as a boy in the apantle.”

  “You’d be born again as a Baptist, Tío Mateo, but I have a better way for us to follow Fidel, by planting onions and tomatoes in his big field. That’s where Fidel made his money.”

  “Tell me more, and tell me why your brother-in-law, Fidel, doesn’t want to make that money anymore.”

  “He will collect it by the bucketful when he is a pastor. I have seen it with my own eyes, big plastic buckets full of pesos every Sunday.”

  “So, how do we find the time to work Fidel’s field?”

  “We don’t cut cane for one planting and plant onions in Fidel’s field instead. The money we make will pay you for the use of your land and cover the cost of the add-on for my tiny wee house. The older kids can’t bear listening to us at night, eating, arguing, and you know what in the same room.”

  “Very well,” said Don Mateo, but he should have known better.

  The rain baptized that field continually in the season when there was supposed to be no rain. Fidel had regular irrigation from the apantle that ran on his side of town, all the water he needed and all the sunshine through the dry season. But that accursed apantle ran past the Barrio Rojo, then under the Pan American,
to Fidel’s field. It slunk between the dingy whore-huts, where the harlots of Cuautla set up business after pious President Miguel de la Madrid tossed them out of their lovely, well-lit, lively, old street behind La Paz Convent School. You could dance in the big cantinas with your choice or sit and have a tête-à-tête at a table or tit-to-tit in a booth at one of the lounge bordello bars.

  Testing the waters for his onions, Fausto tasted that godforsaken apantle, face down, lucky not to be knifed, only relieved of the money for their plantings in his loose cotton trousers, the money for the first load they were to put in.

  As if to punish Fausto for his sins, the unseasonal rains surged down on the unlucky onions, sunk to their tufted tops in mud. After which, for trying to trick God, Jesus and Fidel the Baptist brother-in-law, Don Mateo dubs Fausto a rotten onion. Did Fausto not know that John, the first in the line of the Baptists, damned the adultery and harlotry of the Hebrews?

  “It happens in the best of families,” the pulquero’s wife tells Don Mateo in the car as she takes him out onto the highway, down the slope and across the bridge over the river that the apantle flows into, not a stone’s throw from the Seguro Social Hospital.

  Don Mateo sits in the front seat, holding his ear in his hand. Every so often he holds it back up to where it belongs. He would not let them wrap it in a cotton cloth. His face wrinkles up in agony from the wound, or he is listening very profoundly to whatever he hears when he returns his ear to its original place.

  Fausto sits in the back with his head in his hands.

  “What will I tell Tía Celestina?”

  “Tell her you wanted to slap him on the shoulder, like – for a good joke, and you missed.”

  “With a machete?”

  “I’ve seen it done. Like those Ingleses make somebody a knight for a good deed, why not for a good joke.”

  The pulquero’s wife talks, believing Don Mateo can’t hear the half of it because of his mutilation. Distress also makes her silly, she can’t help it.

  Fausto can’t believe his ears.

  The one doctor surgeon on late call can’t believe that Don Mateo doesn’t want his ear sewn back on.

  “Por Dios, hombre, it will be as good as new. It’s like just a shell, it contours sound into the ear. It’s the gristly ear lug, not the actual hearing part of the ear.”

  The surgeon should have kept his mouth shut.

  “Like a shell.”

  “Yes.”

  “And shells can hear the sea?”

  “People believe you put a shell to your ear and you can hear the waves of the sea come in and out, but it is only the blood going through your head, pumped through there in waves by your heartbeats. Don Mateo.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Sterilize and put a dressing on it, Doctor. Do as Don Mateo says. Don Mateo is the owner of Don Mateo’s bits and pieces, attached or detached,” says the nurse, nodding at Fausto, who sits disconsolately in a chair. The nurse is a second cousin, Fausto’s wife is her criada and has been serving her richer side of the family since childhood.

  Months pass. Don Mateo’s ear dries into a relic of the ruction in the pulquería, but he brings it with him everywhere, and takes it out like others take a watch in the breast pocked from the end of a chain. He joins people with Doña Celestina in the Hotel Santa Cecelia where people of that watch-in-breast-pocket calibre would dine on a Sunday, if there were any left. All the men dress in guayabera and wear wrist watches. None raise them to their ear to check the tick of the chronometry.

  Don Mateo and Doña Celestina are being treated by Fausto and his wife. They note the huge graphic of Don Quijote and Sancho Panza on the inside gable end of the dining room, the knight’s raggedy body and clothing swirling up to the curved ceiling beside the bold black blob and blur of Panza.

  An architect owns the hotel and another in Acapulco. His son-in-law manages both and flits between one and the other, avoiding the tax collectors, who have been known to come with a van to remove televisions, fridges, for those unpaid. Acting like a pawnbroker until the items are redeemed for cash.

  But the architect’s son-in-law knows languages and the ocean. He speaks French, English and rumoured to spout Japanese and Chinese. He brings an informed opinion unlike his nephew, Fausto, or his wife or anyone Don Mateo has spoken to on the matter.

  When Don Mateo spots him coming in for a cursory inspection of the diners and the service, Don Mateo darts forward and pulls at the tail of his guayabera.

  “I am told you know Cuautla and you know Acapulco and the ocean very well. May I ask you a question?”

  “A customer can always ask me a question.”

  “Does our apantle that crosses the aqueduct and enters the river go to the sea?”

  “The customer is always right and in this case you are actually, yes, I’m sure of it, right.”

  “Now will you please tell me what you hear?”

  Don Mateo removes his ear from the pocket of his grey guayabera, which matches the crustaceous pallor of the ear. He puts it to his good ear, nods, then holds it out for the manager to do the same, which he does, holding it just out of contact with his own

  “What do you hear?”

  Seeing Don Mateo’s eagerness and being familiar with Acapulco and what goes on there, having heard the French-Canadian, the Anglo-Canadian and out-and-out gringo, he can understand what is required of him with this question about the sea and what he hears there.

  “I hear waves and voices.”

  “What did I tell you?” Don Mateo shouts back at the lowered heads around his table. “Waves and voices!”

  The manager puts his head to the side, like a bird, puckering his lips and his brow, appearing to hear a lot more in Don Mateo’s ear.

  “They are speaking a very funny French and a very funny English.”

  Don Mateo takes possession of his ear again and plops it back into his pocket like a watch that has told the right time of day. He has what he wants, confirmation.

  His ear proves it.

  TENNIS

  They tell me, report nothing, Gene. That how they say Jean. Report nothing or they think you the one involved, and you become the suspect. You try help this guy, broken up in some accident, and they sue you for fix him up. Like, even if you are an MD surgeon – you keep out, or else you spend your holiday in the police station, making the statement. Somebody sue the boots off your feet, and you go no place.

  Something about a bad dose of Napoleonic Law Mexicans got. We have the good recipe for it in Québec, but here, the Napoleonic Law sort of got the shits. Like from the fruit, too much heat.

  That what I think about the run-over guy. Don’t look up close. And I think, why the car not make it over his head? An auto leave a big impression on a guy’s head. Like cat you see on the highway – flat. Like pizza with the hair topping. But this head is still one piece and the res’ – neck, ches’, knee, an’ his ankle – run over.

  Damn taxi-driver stop for nothing, I think. They jus’ run him over, one after the other. Too busy to make the stop in case they miss the next fare. This too much, I tell Rose-Marie. I pull him up, I put him against the door of that Club de Tenís.

  From Adam, I don’t know this one guy. But me, I feel sad for him, and the love charm he have on his gold bracelet. I know it.

  Since we been in Acapulco, we are buying pretty heavy. We work hard for the good deal in silver or gold off the beach vendor. Make the bid, wait one day or two, see it drop. Anyway, I watch the jewellery and I ask people what price and where they buying. I remember the good jewellery, and I know it on the guy. For sure, because you know, I see his partner put that there gold bracelet on the wrist of that run-over guy.

  This late night – 11 p.m. The Shore Patrol from the Hornos base, they come, and they are stepping into the gateway and into the doorway. They go look-see, like the garbage men in Montréal. Then, the run-over guy, he say, “Vamoose,” like they do in the movie. Rose-Marie and I figure they must be two sail
or, who sneak in the Club de Tenís for some back and forth with the ball – and the bracelet, it for some bet what the one guy win.

  “Two handsome guy,” say Rose-Marie, “and that bracelet with the love charm heart look pretty good to this old bird.”

  Morning and afternoon, lotsa women go in there, to the Club de Tenís. Handsome, well-preserve’ women like Rose-Marie. When the limo leave them, they show a lot of the leg in white short. Lot of brown Mexican leg. It make you want to hit that furry ball, whip that feather birdie all day. This what one of the two sailor is twirl – white cork head of that feather birdie wit’ his finger. And while one is kissing his bracelet with the love charm heart – this other sailor is suck the cork on his birdie.

  I touch this here lucky charm that he kiss, but Rose-Marie is giving me the instruction, “Jean Rubinsky, the police,” and “Jean Rubinsky, the ambulance;” and I say, “I take no gold heart off this sailor.” I touch his lucky charm like I say sorry for you, sailor; I sure would like to know you better. An’ I wan’ tell him some thing – like I know you are one cute guy, an’ my Rose-Marie not mind to have you in her bed. But, I sure as hell glad some taxi make the pizza out of you first.

  Now, Rose-Marie, she want me to telephone. “Jean, you make the report to this Mr. Tiger. Jean, you can tell it to him in French, tell him in the English. Jean, in Mexican, like it say in the paper.’ Now, Rose-Marie read it and I read it in the Montreal Magazine, about this Hot-Dog-Eater Chief of Police. Ex-Mountie, Manitoba, then Montréal, then Acapulco. He say Montréal get too crazy with the violence, and why just be the constable or sergeant in Montréal when he qualify for Chief and get more pay for give the criminals target practice in Acapulco.

  And on top, he have family here in Acapulco, and he have this licence from the UNAM. Some guy tell me it the Mexico University, not United Nations, and I think – the Hot-Dog-Eater is educated man. He listen. He know I got no beef with this road accident. I take no bracelet. I take a look is all – jus’ make sure the guy is the one I see kissing the other guy before Hornos Shore Patrol catch them. Big Mexican abrazo – each guy suck the other up, like two Pepsi on one hot-damn day.