Rain God

by Arturo Islas

  Maria was one of hundreds of Mexican women from across the border who worked illegally as servants and nursemaids for families on the American side. Of all ages, even as young as thirteen or fourteen, they supported their own families and helped to rear the children of strangers with the care and devotion they would have given their own relatives had they been able to live with them. One saw these women standing at the bus stops on Monday mornings and late Saturday nights. Sunday was their only day off and most of them returned to spend it on the other side of the river. In addition to giving her half of her weekly salary of twenty-five dollars, Juanita helped Maria pack leftover food, used clothing, old newspapers—anything Maria would not let her throw away—into paper bags that Maria would take to her own family. Years later, wandering the streets of New York, his own bag glued to his side, Miguel Chico saw Maria in all the old bag ladies waiting on street corners in Chelsea or walking crookedly through the Village, stopping to pick through garbage, unable to bear the waste of the more privileged.

  “Now, Maria,” Juanita said, “if the immigration officials ask you where you got these things, tell them you went to bargain stores.”

  “Si, señora.”

  “And if they ask you where you have been staying during the week, tell them you’ve been visiting friends and relatives. Only in emergencies are you to use our name and we’ll come to help you no matter what it is.”

  “Si, señora.”

  The conversation was a weekly ritual and unnecessary because Miguel Grande through his police duties was known by immigration officials, who, when it came to these domestics, looked the other way or forgot to stamp cards properly. Only during political campaigns on both sides of the river were immigration laws strictly enforced. Then Maria and all women like her took involuntary vacations without pay.

  Mama Chona did not approve of any of the Mexican women her sons and daughters hired to care for her grandchildren. They were ill educated and she thought them very bad influences, particularly when they were allowed to spend much time with her favorites. Mama Chona wanted Miguel Chico to be brought up in the best traditions of the Angel family. Juanita scoffed at those traditions. “They’ve eaten beans all their lives. They’re no better than anyone else,” she said to her sister Nina. “I’m not going to let my kids grow up to be snobs. The Angels! If they’re so great, why do I have to work to help take care of them?”

  Miguel Chico could not remember a time when Maria was not part of his family and even though Mama Chona disapproved of the way she spoke Spanish, she was happy to know that Maria was a devout Roman Catholic. She remained so the first six years of his life, taking him to daily mass and holding him in her arms throughout the services until he was four. After mass during the week and before he was old enough to be instructed by Mama Chona, Maria took him to the five-and-ten stores downtown. If she had saved money from the allowance Juanita gave her, she would buy him paper doll books. He and Maria spent long afternoons cutting out dolls and dressing them. When he got home from the police station, Miguel Grande would scold Maria for allowing his son to play with dolls. “I don’t want my son brought up like a girl,” he said to Juanita in Maria’s presence. He did not like to speak directly to the Mexican women Juanita and his sisters took on to help them with the household chores. Miguel Chico’s aunts Jesus Maria and Eduviges left notes for the “domestics” (the Spanish word criadas is harsher) and spoke to them only when they had not done their chores properly. Mama Chona had taught all her children that the Angels were better than the illiterate riffraff from across the river.

  “Maria does more good for people than all of them put together,” Juanita complained to her sister and to her favorite brother-in-law Felix, who shared her opinion of his sisters. “They’re so holier than thou. Just because they can read and write doesn’t make them saints. I’d like to see them do half the work Maria does.” Juanita knew that Jesus Maria and Eduviges considered Felix’s wife an illiterate and not worthy of their brother, who, after all, was an Angel.

  “Apologize to your father for playing with dolls,” Juanita said to Miguel Chico. He did but did not understand why he needed to say he was sorry. When his father was not there, his mother permitted him to play with them. She even laughed when Maria made him a skirt and they watched him dance to the jitterbug music on the radio. “Yitty-bog,” Maria called it. Miguel Grande had caught them at that once and made a terrible scene. Again, Miguel Chico was asked to apologize and to promise that he would never do it again. His father said nothing to him but looked at Juanita and accused her of turning their son into a joto. Miguel Chico did not find out until much later that the word meant “queer.” Maria remained silent throughout these scenes; she knew enough not to interfere.

  After Miguel Chico’s birthday, several months after his friend Leonardo “accidentally” hanged himself, Maria stopped taking him to mass. Instead, she spent the afternoons when he got home from school talking to him about God and reading to him from the Bible, always with the stipulation that he not tell his parents or Mama Chona. She especially liked to talk to him about Adam and Eve and the loss of paradise. He loved hearing about Satan’s pride and rebelliousness and secretly admired him. Before he was expelled from the heavenly kingdom, Maria told him, Satan was an angel, the most favored of God’s creatures, and his name was Bella Luz.

  “Why did he turn bad, Maria?”

  “Out of pride. He wanted to be God.”

  “Did God make pride?”

  Miguel Chico learned that when he asked Maria a difficult question she would remain silent, then choose a biblical passage that illustrated the terrible power of God the Father’s wrath. She loved to talk to him about the end of the world.

  Maria began braiding her hair and tying it up in a knot that lay flat on her neck. It gave her a severe look he did not like, and he missed those mornings when she let her hair hang loosely to her waist and brushed or dried it in the sun, with his head on her lap. She did not allow him into her room any more and asked him to leave if he opened the door and caught her with her hair still unbraided. The word “vice” occurred frequently now in her talks with him; everything, it seemed, was becoming a vice to Maria. She had become a Seventh Day Adventist.

  His mother and Maria got involved in long, loud, and tearful arguments about the nature of God and about the Catholic church as opposed to Maria’s new religion. They excluded him from these discussions and refused to let him into the kitchen where they wrangled with each other and reached no conclusions. Miguel Chico hid in his mother’s closet in order not to hear their shouting.

  “The Pope is the anti-Christ!” Maria said loudly, hoping he would hear. And before Juanita could object, Maria cited a passage from the Bible as irrefutable proof.

  “It’s not true,” Juanita said just as strongly, but she was not at ease with the holy book, and there was no priest at hand to back her up. She wept out of frustration and tried to remember what she had learned by rote in her first communion classes.

  In the closet, Miguel Chico hugged his mother’s clothes in terror. The familiar odors in the darkness kept him company and faintly reassured him. In the distance, the strident voices arguing about God continued. What would happen if he told his mother and father that Maria was sneaking him off to the Seventh Day Adventist services while they were away at work or having a good time? His father had said to his mother that he would kill Maria if she did that.

  The services—which were not so frightening as his father’s threats and the arguments between his mother and Maria—were held in a place that did not seem like a church at all it was so brightly lit up, even in the middle of the day. There were no statues and the air did not smell of incense and burning candles. The singing was in Spanish, not Latin, and it was not the sort he enjoyed because it reminded him of the music played in the newsreels about the war. The people at these services were very friendly and looked at him as if they all shared a wonderful secret. “You are saved,” they would say to him h
appily. He did not know what they meant, but he sensed that to be saved was to be special. The more he smiled, the more they smiled back; they spent most of the time smiling, though they talked about things that scared him a great deal, such as the end of the world and how sinful the flesh was. He could not rid himself of the guilt he felt for being there, as no matter how much they smiled, he knew he was betraying his mother and father and Mama Chona in some deep, incomprehensible way.

  The voices of the women he loved were farther away now, which meant they were almost finished for the time being and would soon resume their household chores. His mother had just given birth to a second son and was staying home from work to nurse him. They named him Gabriel and Miguel Chico was extremely jealous of him.

  Opening the closet door after the voices had stopped altogether, Miguelito stumbled over the clothes hamper and some of his mother’s things spilled out into the light. He saw an undergarment with a bloody stain on it. Quickly, he threw the clothes back into the basket and shoved it into the closet. He was careful not to touch the garment. Its scent held him captive.

  Maria swept him up from behind, forcing him to laugh out of surprise, and trotted him into the kitchen. Together they stood looking out into the backyard through the screen door. It was a hot day and the sun made the screen shimmer. Miguel saw his mother bending over the verbena and snapdragons that she and Maria took great pains to make grow out of the desert. The flowers were at their peak, and already he knew that the verbena, bright red, small, and close to the ground, would outlast the more exotic snapdragons he liked better. The canna lilies, which formed the border behind them, were colorful, but they had no fragrance and were interesting only when an occasional hummingbird dipped its beak into their red-orange cups. In the corner of that bed grew a small peach tree that he had planted at Maria’s suggestion from a pit he had licked clean two summers earlier. It was now a foot high and had branched. His mother was approaching it. Leaning over him and with her hand on his face directing his gaze toward the tree, Maria whispered hypnotically. “Look at the little tree,” she said very softly in Spanish so that his mother could not hear. “When it blooms and bears fruit that means that the end of the world is near. Now look at your mother. You must respect and love her because she is going to die.” In front of him, in the gauzy brightness of the screen, the red of the flowers merged with the red stain he had seen a few moments before. He believed Maria. In that instant, smelling her hair and feeling her voice of truth moist on his ear, love and death came together for Miguel Chico and he was not from then on able to think of one apart from the other.

  Two years later, in a fit of terror because he knew the world was going to end soon, he told his parents that Maria had been taking him to her church. His father threw her out of the house but allowed her to return a few weeks later on the condition that she say nothing about her religion to anyone while she lived in his house. The arguments stopped, and she no longer read to him from the Bible.

  Maria treated him nicely, but she hardly spoke to him and spent more time caring for his brother. Once or twice Miguel Chico caught her looking at him sadly and shaking her head as if he were lost to her forever. One day after school, when he was feeling bold, he said, “If God knew that Satan and Adam and Eve were going to commit a sin, why did He create them?”

  “You must not ask me such things,” she replied, “I’m not allowed to talk to you about them.”

  It was a lame answer and he knew that in some important way, he had defeated her. He hated her now and hoped that she would leave them soon and return to Mexico. When, several months later, she did go away, he stayed at Mama Chona’s house all day and did not say goodbye to her. Juanita was upset with him when he got home.

  “Maria wanted to tell you goodbye. Why didn’t you come home before she left?”

  “I don’t like her any more,” he said. “I’m glad she’s gone.” But later that night he felt an awful loneliness when he thought about her hair and eyes.

  * * *

  Long after Miguel Chico had completed his education and given up all forms of organized religion, a few years after his operation and his decision to live alone in San Francisco, his mother wrote him a long letter about Maria’s visit to the desert. It was her first and only one, for she had moved to California and joined a congregation there. Except for her hair, which was now completely white, his mother said that she looked exactly the same. Miguel Chico reread the last paragraphs of the letter while sitting at his desk, occasionally looking out to the garden. The fog had not yet burned away and the ferns and lobelia were a neon green and blue. “She took me back to the years when I was young and you were a little boy,” his mother wrote.

  She remembers all the things you did, even the long white dress she made for you and how you would dance and swirl around while she and I played your audience. She even got up and showed me how you danced! That surprised me because she still is very religious and I thought her church prohibited dancing.

  She eats raw cabbage “for her mind,” she says, carrots for her eyes, and turnips for her arthritis. She looks healthy enough to me, but according to her she has diabetes, arthritis, varicose veins, and bad eyesight.

  One afternoon while I was resting, she cleaned all my flower beds. She still loves gardening. We took her across the river where she stayed a few days with a niece. Your father and I picked her up the following Tuesday on Seventh St. where she had called from a phone booth. She had walked through the worst parts of town completely unafraid, at least three miles.

  She left on Thursday because it snowed on Wednesday, and I didn’t want to let her go. I was very sad to see her leave because I thought as I saw her get on the bus that I might never see her again.

  I hope she comes back, Mickie, so that I can take her to visit all the family. She remembered every one of the Angels but only talked to some of them and to your godmother on the phone. I wasn’t driving or getting out much. She told me it was all right because she had come to be with me anyway.

  Your brother Gabriel came over several times during her visit when he was able to get away from his duties at the parish. Would you believe that the first time he came and even though she knows he is a priest, Maria asked him when he was going to get married. I thought this was rude but I didn’t say anything. Gabriel replied quite strongly, though, “No, thanks. I’ve seen what marriage does to many people in my parish.”

  She promised to come and see us later in the year. I hope so.

  Later, on his birthday, he received a letter from Maria herself. It was written in the kind of Spanish his grandmother deplored and was sent from Los Angeles.

  My Dear Miguelito,

  With all my love I write you this letter to greet you and offer my congratulations. I have wanted for a long time to find out your address so that I might write to you. Your little mother told me that you had been very ill with a terrible sickness but that you are now well. I’m very glad.

  Your mamita is very beautiful still and I love her very much because she is very friendly and does not look down on anyone. Your father and brother were also very kind to me so that I must tell you that a week with them seemed like a day.

  In three days, you will celebrate your birthday. I am going toward old age, 79, and I plan to walk into my eighties. I wish you long life and good health. May God bless you and keep you well, so that when the Father comes in the clouds of the sky, He will take you and me with Him to live in paradise and joy in the kingdom He is preparing for those who love Him, think in His name and keep His commandments.

  I send you a hug.

  Maria L. v. de Sanchez

  Write me.

  He meant to respond to her note right away, believing himself to be free of her influence and her distortions of religion and vice. He put it off, telling himself he would write as soon as his academic duties were finished for the year. She visited him in dreams, her hair loose and white and streaming to the floor, her immense jaw frozen in a perpetual sm
ile that was alternately loving and terrifying.

  A month later, Juanita phoned him from the desert to tell him that Maria was dead. She had been knocked down by a car as she was leaving her church service in Los Angeles. The driver was drunk. A child by her side had been killed outright. Maria survived a night and a day in the hospital, surrounded by members of her congregation, talking with them until she fell into a coma. She had died on the anniversary of his operation.

  “Well, the end of the world finally came for her,” he said.

  “Oh, Mickie, don’t be so heartless,” his mother said quietly.

  “I’m not being heartless, Mother. She lived for the end of the world. Of course, it had to be some poor vice-ridden slob who caught up with her.” In trying to joke about death with Juanita, he sensed that he was only making it worse for her.

  “Well, anyway, I thought you would want to know,” she said.

  “Sure, Mom, and I’m sorry I sounded cold about it. I’m just tired of death and everything associated with it.”

  “Well, I’m going to have your brother celebrate a mass in her name. I know you don’t believe in it, but I’m going to pray for her even if she did think we were all going to hell for being Catholics.”

  “You do what you need to, Mom. I’m going to look for peach trees in Golden Gate Park for her.”

  “What are you talking about? Are you trying to be funny again?”

  “No, Mom. I’m dead serious. I’ll tell you that story sometime.”

  He did not go to the park that day and did not think very much about Maria or the family in general. He and his therapist had decided that Sundays made him even more melancholy than usual because they were “family” days and he knew that though the park would be filled with all kinds of people, he would find himself drawn to the family groups, especially if there were old people among them.