Before the End, After the Beginning

by Dagoberto Gilb

  Before he finally went back to his new home, he saw a white stand lit up especially bright in the blackest night with virtually no other light competing. While one of the black-haired women made balls of masa and pressed them into tortillas, the other, beside a coved iron disk, hot from beneath the red embers at the top of a barrel drum, dropped cheese and spooned a sauce of tomato and folded. There was a TV on a welded rack of the stand—showing a novela from Mexico City—and Ramiro sat on one of the plastic white stools beside a family. When he asked what they offered, the younger woman gave more names he didn’t know. What goes inside? There were options of cheese or beans or chicken—no tasajo this night, no beef—with yerba santa or flor de calabaza. He pointed to one warming that he had seen her assemble—like that one. He ate her tlayuda—what he would’ve called a quesadilla—as if he were hungry, though calmly and slow, because it was how they all were, even as they talked.

  He smacked his head on the low arch that fit around the wrought-iron gate to his new home. He lay down on what was not much of a bed. Maybe the smallest he’d ever tried to sleep on, and a mattress that seemed thinner than a seat cushion. The pillow was even thinner. He finally took out a warm coat and rolled that up for his head. Because the floor of his basement departamento had the incline of the hill, the mattress slid whenever he moved. He was determined to stay as patient as one of the zapotecos he’d been encountering since he had arrived. And this felt just right, too, wordless spiritual advice. The test was when a dog started barking and whining, sometimes very close, sometimes a little farther away, and though he slept, he slept poorly.

  The morning came chilled and there was only a little light drawn in. He scraped his knuckles on the ceiling changing out of an extra sweater he’d put on to keep warm. The ceiling was only an inch above his head, and plywood lines that made little concrete ridges caught one knuckle and it bled. He went into the bathroom. It was small, too, a few inches wider than the commode. The shower, he found, had the same inch or two on either side of his shoulders, as it did in height. He went out, ducking the low arch, out his pasaje toward the street, when he was stopped by a small, dark man with a chair outside a store whose name seemed to be only Abarrotes.

  “Good morning,” he said, standing up slowly, formally in style and intent.

  “Good morning,” Ramiro said.

  “Aren’t you the American living in her home?”

  “Yes,” he said, “in the home of la señora Campos.”

  “How good, how good,” he said. “You know, I’ve been to the United States. Two times.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes. The first time, Fresno, California. The other, Minnesota. The fields. Cold, it was very cold there. I didn’t like Minnesota.”

  “I can imagine.”

  “My family is from Zimatlán, and it gets cold, but not cold like that. Now I live here.”

  “A business owner.”

  “And you?”

  “My family started in El Paso, but most of my life in Pico Rivera, Los Angeles.”

  “How good, Los Angeles. How good.”

  “Yes and no. It’s more beautiful here in your country.”

  “I have family who have children born in the United States.”

  “Really?”

  “You are not like the tourists who visit. You come to see home.”

  “Yes and no. I’ve never seen Oaxaca before now.”

  “You fit?” He was looking back at the departamento, away from the street. “You are large for the space, aren’t you? More like an American.”

  “Seems so. Maybe.”

  “I have seen it. Good for one my size, but you . . .”

  “Ramiro,” he offered.

  “I’m Benito,” he said.

  “Like the president.”

  “Juárez, too, yes.”

  “That’s beautiful.”

  “I’m here all the time. You can come into my store.”

  “Very generous. When I need something.”

  “At your service. You only have to tell me.”

  “Thank you, Benito.”

  Ramiro walked until he found a place for coffee on Morelos that he especially liked. It offered everything from molletes with beans to bagels with cream cheese and this time, the first time, he ordered a mollete, because he loved French bread, though he really only wanted some coffee. He would read as well as he could the newspaper that was sitting there. And then he would walk in the warming sun until many of the city streets and buildings looked familiar to him because they were like the others.

  When he got back that first morning, Sra. Campos was at her car, about to leave.

  “Hi, Ramiro!” said Elda, inside, in the back, excited.

  “Everything’s fine?” Sra. Campos asked. “Do you need anything?”

  “Nothing. Well. There is a dog. That barks.”

  “It’s Loli.”

  “Loli!” cheered Elda. “Mi loo-lii, mi loo-lii. . . .”

  “Elda, please! Settle down! Loli only . . . needs to know you . . . that you are living here.”

  “Then, it’s your dog.”

  “Yes,” she said, still upset with her daughter. “She won’t bother you,” she told him.

  “She won’t?” he said.

  “She only needs to know you, then she will be as always.”

  It was, in his way of deciding to come here, better that there wasn’t much inside the departamento to keep him in the mildew must, without much light. By late morning, the bright sun became too warm, and Ramiro learned to walk the sidewalks on the shady side, stepping around the women in the red dresses of the triquis, or the mixtecos, or zapotecos in their bland aprons and long skirts, arms lifting necklaces or rebozos or spoons, selling like beggars, or quickly passing with baskets balanced on their heads. Or the men with those narrow-brim, round straw hats, their eyes making the pitch, showing paintings or hammocks or shirts. In the zócalo, away from restaurant tables and chairs under the colonnades, Ramiro walked around the laid-out tourist crafts and pottery, around the stands of fresh corn and burgers and fries—elotes or esquites, hamburguesas and papas—and popcorn and chicharrón, dodging and bumping women and men and children and cars near the mercado with fruit, piles of scissors, toys, or grasshoppers in chile or natural, nopales, radishes, flowers of every kind and color. Musicians played the accordion, the violin, the marimba, the guitar. A man pushed a cart of live chickens; another, candies. Away from the church, a demonstration: ¿Por qué los Lopecinos y los Hernández no? Beside the church, they gathered around a clown this day and around a mime painted silver another. Ramiro was invisible passing the American, French, English, and German students in their shorts, sandals, headsets, and packs.

  He found an inexpensive full-menu comida corrida for an afternoon meal. He picked at it. If he was hungry later in the evening, he went to the stand for a tlayuda or mamela. But he began to always stop where one lady sat, a few blocks from the Templo de Santo Domingo. She would sell fruit in a plastic box that in the States would be for a take-out sandwich. She had much, and at first he’d so often get the coco con chile y limón, that that’s what she, from then on, said to him first, after she smiled so happy that he came to her again.

  “Hello!” she said, and she reached for the box with coco. “Coconut with chile and lime, I have it right here for you.”

  “How good, thank you, but today maybe I will try the papaya.”

  “Get them both, young man,” she said, squeezing lime on the fruit. “You can.” She looked at him. “You should.”

  She was probably not so much older, though any would call her a grandmother, and she could be very old. It was hard for him to know with these zapotecos. She’d told him she had been orphaned at seven and worked thirty-eight years at a puesto a few blocks away, but once she hur
t her leg and couldn’t stand all day anymore, a year ago, she started selling her fruit at this corner, closer to where she lived, sitting at this corner.

  “Maybe tomorrow,” Ramiro said. “Today, only the one.” Some days he would buy two, but since he didn’t have a refrigerator, he would throw what would be one away. Since it was only a few pesos, sometimes he bought the unnecessary box just to please her. It was almost as if she were his only friend here.

  “How are you today?” he would ask about everyday.

  “My body hurts,” she said once. “I had to get up at three in the morning.”

  “That is early,” Ramiro told her.

  “I had to get water. I had to bathe myself.”

  “So early?”

  “Yes, and the water was cold.” She tightened the blue and yellow shawl she had around her. “I am still cold.”

  “Maybe you should set up on the sunny side,” he said.

  “But I have to care for the fruit,” she explained.

  That was a day he bought two, and she gave him a small bag of peanuts with chile on them as a bonus.

  When he reached the pasaje to his new home, Benito was there to greet him. His store was where he bought his water and toilet paper and sometimes a newspaper to take inside with him to read in the yellow lamplight at the table.

  “How are you, Ramiro?” Benito would say, standing up from his chair. “How was your day?”

  “All fine,” he would tell him. “Thank you so much.”

  “How good, how good.”

  There had been one bad day. For some reason, he couldn’t open the padlock at his gate. He was tired because he’d walked for so many hours that hot day. His feet hurt and his legs ached. He needed to go to the bathroom. He was sweaty, and it was becoming as dark out as it would be there inside. He felt unnaturally confused, could almost convince himself that the key had been changed somehow, or it wasn’t maybe the same lock. Like time itself was off and wrong. He had stopped taking that pill weeks before he’d gotten here. He’d been told that this could be how it would come at him, that it would get harder and harder, he would tire, and he would want only to sleep very deeply. Not knowing what else to do, he went for Benito, who came back there with him.

  “I’m afraid I’ll break the key,” Ramiro told him.

  “It’s dry, the lock,” Benito said when it clicked. “I’ll spray some oil in it.”

  “Thank you, Benito. Thank you so much. I’m sorry I had to bother you.”

  “Are you all right?” he asked.

  “I think so, yes.”

  “I don’t think so,” he said. “In there, it doesn’t fit you.”

  So much had improved since then, though. Just as he would learn to sit down when he was changing his shirt to not bang his knuckles on the ceiling, he adapted to his home in other ways. His eyes, with the light of his memory, began to see more and more in an amp of bulbs no stronger than candles, and he showered with an especially careful calisthenics for washing his feet or hair. At first it was only the newspaper he bought to read at the table. But in a dimmest corner, where he couldn’t help but finally look, on a limb of storage shelves, he had dusted off old, oversize books, weathered and smelling, too, with fortified bindings stamped and gilded, built like trunks shipping out for a king or queen. There was a 1940’s atlas, with both topographical and political maps, even with streets and monuments of certain cities in Europe, North and South America, and an ornately typeset La Historia de México: Conquista y Revolución, and several odd-lettered volumes of an encyclopedia of science. Best of all were several photo albums: the oldest photos, golden and gray, professional and from a studio, certainly of Sra. Campos’s family, all set on pages with gummed corner holders; the newer, Kodak black-and-whites, of more recent years, many with deckle edges, of her as a baby, as a child Elda’s age, and then as a serious-minded teenager, and then with the young man who she probably had married and then moved with here to Coyoacán until . . . their lives changed somehow, why Ramiro would never know, because he only waved hello and goodbye and paid another rent.

  The barking had ceased after only a couple of days. He had learned that whenever it became time for Sra. Campos and Elda to go to sleep, their retriever was put outside. And Loli came right to his bathroom window and slept against it because there was a smoothed, rock surface, not dirt, for her to lie on. And it was true that she cried when she heard him, but it had become a whimper for him to open that window. “Loli, Loli, Loli,” he would sing. She would wiggle, squirm, and squeal about seeing him, pushing her head between the wrought-iron bars, sniffing his hair, trying to learn whatever he’d done wherever, while he patted and cuddled her head and snout. Unless the night was too cold, he left it open for her to see him on the bed and so he could see her, too. And many times in the middle of the night, after the bed had slid too far and he had to get up to push it back, he would say her name, Loli, so that she would whine just a little for him—and this would even help him sleep.

  “Good morning,” Benito said, standing from his chair. He did have customers, even if Ramiro never saw any himself. “How’d you sleep?”

  “Good, thank you.”

  “How good, how good,” he said. He looked at Ramiro like he wanted to say more.

  The air was clean, the sky as blue as a painted wall. Much time had passed and he felt fine. Like he was fine. Like he was even better. Which, as he understood it, wasn’t supposed to happen. So before he stopped for coffee, out of curiosity, he visited a pharmacy. It wasn’t that he wanted it. He was not going to take it anymore, ever. He only wondered if. He waited by the glass cases for one of the women in the white smocks, and when it was his turn, he gave her the name of the drug. She looked it up. No, she told him, it was not available. No, she had never heard of it. Possibly he had the name incorrect. She even offered to let him look through the pages of their pill index book.

  And so he walked on. He stopped for coffee, pan tostado, and he read the daily news. He felt he was getting better at that, too. It was a Sunday. He left the café, and, as always, he walked to get tired. He walked east past the Periférico, the boulevard that circled the city, and then, when it ran out of sidewalk and just about street, he turned back. A little tired, he was glad to rest at a light at the Periférico, where a bus was also stopped. He decided to get on. He stepped up the bus stairs, not sure where exactly it would be going, but this pleased him, too. The driver told him he’d collect later. And so he drove. Most of the bus curtains were closed, so it was hard to see out, though they were traveling east, the northern mountains alongside the road. Few talked, though those who did were quiet about it. It filled with more small, dark men carrying day bags and straw hats, and small, dark women with pink nylon shopping bags and shawls and little kids, smiling, curious about everyone. When the conductor came for the money, Ramiro didn’t know where his stop was. The man laughed like Ramiro only got the name wrong and said he owed six pesos. When he decided to get off where many others were, both the conductor and the driver shook their head no. The crossing he wanted was ahead, each assured him. And when they got there, they told him, and he got out. It was a concrete overpass and a road leading north toward the mountains. He started walking until a taxi stopped him. It was full of a family—two children, a grandmother, a grandfather, a young mother—but the young driver made room for him in the front passenger’s side. He had stylish hair, pomaded so it was wild in all directions on the top.

  “Five pesos,” he told him.

  “Does it come with beans and tortilla for dinner?” Ramiro asked.

  They all laughed. “If you want,” the driver said, “we can serve you black beans, not the brown ones you eat up there, and my family can make you much more.”

  From the backseat, they all smiled and agreed.

  “We have good food, honest,” the driver said. “But you probably c
ame for the blankets.”

  “Blankets?”

  “It’s why everyone comes here.”

  “Here?”

  “Teotitlán.”

  “I didn’t know,” Ramiro told him. “I was on the bus, and then I got off. I thought I was in California.”

  They all laughed. It made them all happy, like they would tell the story later.

  They drove up the road and wound around some well-made village streets and then he stopped.

  “Here it is,” the driver said. “But if you want to eat . . .”

  Ramiro wanted to, but that seemed like too much. “Maybe later?” he said. “Where do I go?”

  “It’s only a few blocks up.”

  “What’s your name?”

  “Francisco,” he said. “Frankie, in English. I was in California.”

  Ramiro told him his name and thanked him.

  “Ask for me,” he said, “if you need a ride back, or if you want to stay.”

  It was going dark. He passed a couple booths still open for their dyed and woven blankets and almost passed under the high entrance gate of the churchyard, hesitated, and instead went on where he saw people. It was a basketball game, full court, on what might have been the razed and cleaned foundation floor of an ancient, large building. Each team had modern uniforms, and there was a referee in stripes with a whistle, and the few people along the sides cheered, not loud, when a basket was finally made. Church bells began ringing. He looked behind and saw a young man pulling the rope from the backside of one of the towers. In the sky over the church was the moon in crescent, with two stars hung beneath it, and the sun, setting, was decorating the sky like it was one of their blankets.