by Arturo Islas
JoEl remembered mostly the way she smelled. All little old ladies, even Mama Chona, seemed to have that rancid odor, like dried-up sticks. He did not like touching his great-aunt or his grandmother. When he had to give Tia Cuca a hug at their arrival and departure, he closed his eyes and held his breath. But she always embraced him long enough for him to have to breathe again and inhale her sour acacia mustiness. Then she gave him a nickel and told him to hide it somewhere. In that way, when he needed money, he would remember it and be wonderfully surprised. He never hid them. What good would nickels do him in the future? Such gifts were a great sacrifice for her, but he did not think of that. He bought his chiclets and chewed them.
His grandmother and her sister were the oldest human beings he knew, except for his mother’s uncle Celso, who cut JoEl’s hair every three weeks and smelled of lavender and Vitalis. Mama Chona and Tia Cuca must have been seventy and sixty-five respectively when he was born, though age was another mystery and no one ever said exactly how old they were at any given time, not even at their deaths. Rumor from his mother’s side of the family calculated that Mama Chona was ninety-eight years old when she died, an estimation exaggerated to provoke Jesus Maria and Eduviges who had stopped counting after their forty-fifth birthdays. JoEl loved it when the grownups argued about their ages. As far as he was concerned, however, Mama Chona’s life had ended when she could no longer remember the names of her children, much less those of their children.
On their visits, Mama Chona always warned him not to notice Tia Cuca’s lame leg. But he loved to watch her use the black cane with the pewter handle, and later the crutches, with grandeur, as if they were extensions of herself. The two old ladies would soon settle down to talk, and their conversation, unimportant and for its own sake, after a while bored JoEl. When he grew restless he could on warm days play in the small yard within sight of the living room. On cold and windy days he was permitted to look at some of the picture books Tia Cuca had brought from Mexico. He enjoyed those books and was able to recognize some of the words Mama Chona had taught him in Spanish. Sometimes he would say them, and the two old ladies commented on his brilliance with bird-like sounds and exclamations, returning then to their conversation as if there had been no interruption.
The lunches at Tia Cuca’s were not filling, and after each visit JoEl went straight to Mama Chona’s icebox on the back porch. “I wish your father enjoyed eating here as much as you do, JoEl,” Mama Chona said. “He goes to his aunt Cuca’s more than to his own mother’s. It pains me greatly.” JoEl did not reply. He knew that his father was her favorite, and that when she called Felix a malcriado, she did so with affection.
Although they were always poor, the old ladies retained their aristocratic assumptions and remained señoras of the most pretentious sort. Their hands were never in dishwater, and cleaning house was work for the Indians, even if the old ladies could not afford to have them do it. Consequently, their homes were dusty, and his aunt Juanita or his father would do the weeks’ collection of dishes. The only time JoEl saw Mama Chona lose her composure was when his uncle Miguel Grande scolded her for letting the cockroaches lick her plates clean on the sideboard. After his uncle left, Mama Chona held the plates one by one under the faucet in such a way that her fingers did not get wet, and she cried before, during, and after the loathsome task. JoEl’s aunt Juanita, a meticulous housekeeper like his own mother, never could put up with his grandmother’s ways.
Juanita seemed more tolerant of Tia Cuca’s laziness, partly because she was lame and partly because the idea of cleaning up her place seemed hopeless, even to Juanita who would have gotten rid of the dust in the desert if she could. Until the day she died, no matter who threatened or cajoled her, Tia Cuca refused to do menial work. Her hands were small and exquisite and with great pride she said, “We may not have enough to eat, but when I go out, I put on my gloves and my hat. I am a civilized human being.” She was secretly proud of having lighter skin than Mama Chona, and she made certain that the sun never touched her face and hands, the only parts of her any of them ever saw.
The succession of increasingly decrepit places Tia Cuca and Mister Davis rented, and later the house out in the desert beyond the canyon, were filled with cats. Tia Cuca fed them all—there might be ten to fifteen at a time—spoke to them by name (she gave them Spanish names like Bella Luz, Sonrisa, Zapopan, Estrella, and JoEl’s favorite, Platano), and made certain that small entry doors at the front and back of the house were fixed to swing in both directions.
His aunt Juanita, terrified of cats, made JoEl laugh because of the way she sat at the edge of her chair when she visited. Tia Cuca murmured apologies, but the cats stayed, and he knew his aunt would be sick to her stomach when she got home. “Poor thing,” Juanita said to his father, “I feel sorry for her, Felix, but those cats! They smell terrible and they make me sick.”
JoEl and Mama Chona went regularly to the house in the desert for the first two years. But then he began to spend more time on his studies and with his friends, and his grandmother was beginning to get too old to make the trips. Only his father and his aunts Mema and Juanita continued to see Tia Cuca and after Felix died his aunts went less and less.
Following one period of two or three days when no one had been able to drive out, the mailman, at Tia Cuca’s request, phoned Angie’s house to inform the family that both old people were ill. Mema and Juanita then went every day to clean the house and change the linen, returning with stories that they shared with Angie in JoEl’s presence. They had found the two old people unable to get up from their beds (“Imagine,” said Juanita, “I always thought they slept in the same bed”), and because the desert had blocked up the cats’ entrance the stench in the place was overwhelming. There were animals and cockroaches everywhere. The sheets were filthy.
Somehow Mr. Davis, breathing heavily but still conscious and lucid, had been able to feed them both during those days when they were completely alone. Tia Cuca, by the time her relatives arrived, was in a coma, and Mema soon insisted that she be taken to the hospital where she might die more comfortably. She asked Mr. Davis if he wanted to go also, lying that she would arrange for them to be in the same room. He knew he was dying; Mema was certain of that.
“No, Mema,” he told her. “I know Dolly is going to die and I don’t want to see her dead.”
The day the ambulance made its way to what they all called “that shack” in the desert, Mema tried once again to get the old man to go along to the hospital. He refused and kept stroking Tia Cuca’s hands and calling her “Dolly” until they took her away.
“Do you think she felt him touch her?” Yerma asked. JoEl did not want to hear Mema’s answer but could not bring himself to leave the room.
“I doubt it,” Mema said.
Mr. Davis died of pneumonia several weeks later in a different ward of the same hospital. No one told him that Tia Cuca was already dead and buried and he did not ask.
* * *
On one of his vacations home from school, JoEl drove his father’s car out to the shack in the desert. He was beginning to look for touchstones that might release him from the terrible feelings he could only keep at bay with drugs. He drove into the canyon and stopped there for awhile, but he was too drunk to find his father’s secret place. In the desert, the roof of Tia Cuca’s house had been blown away and most of the windows were gone. Inside, everything was covered with sand and the ants were feeding on the carcasses of rodents. A few wild cats still roamed about, but JoEl did not touch them. Instead he sat on the back porch stairs for a long time, watching the sun set and playing a game with himself. In a notebook he always carried with him he wrote down all the names of Tia Cuca’s cats that he could remember and then began making up riddles about them in Spanish and English. The game and the whiskey he had brought helped him forget about the ants inside the house.
A few days later, JoEl visited a friend on the southeast side of town near the lake. His mother had not allowed him to drive,
so he took a bus. He got high with his friend and, not wanting to hitchhike home after dropping some acid, went to his aunt Eduviges’ house a few blocks away. He had not been invited to stay with his friend because the parents did not like him and feared his bad influence over their son. “He’s a worthless, drug-addicted Mexican, even though he has fair skin and goes to college. What a waste,” they said. His family shared that opinion.
Eduviges’ husband Sancho was away on a fishing trip and she was alone when JoEl arrived at her door at two-thirty in the morning. She had not seen her nephew for a long time and quickly noted his premature balding and his resemblance to Felix at that age.
“Is it all right if I stay here until morning?” he asked her. “I don’t have a car and the buses have stopped running.”
“Of course, JoEl, come in. Can I get you something to eat?” She was shocked at how old he looked.
“No, thank you, Tia. Please go back to bed. I’m sorry to disturb you at such an hour. I’m not sleepy. I’ll just sit here on the sofa and read.”
“No, that’s fine, JoEl. I’ll sit up with you. I’m not sleepy either.” It was not true. She wanted to go back to bed more than anything else in the world, but she was afraid to leave him alone, was afraid of the look in his eyes. They had a sheen to them she did not trust, a fixed, dead, yet wild look that she associated with alcohol and sexual indulgence. She was very frightened. Her sister Jesus Maria, who lived a few blocks from Felix’s house, had told her that JoEl had been visiting her lately and, with his head in her lap, weeping all the while, had complained that the family no longer loved him. When he wasn’t in those desperate moods, Jesus Maria told her sister, JoEl talked about love and beauty very poetically and with a serenity that impressed her very much. Eduviges saw nothing serene in his look now. She thought him a lunatic.
The two of them sat in her living room in complete silence. They both would begin talking at once and then smile stupidly at each other. Eduviges knew that Angie would be furious if she found out that JoEl was with her. She looked at her nephew and remembered being told that after Felix was killed, JoEl had not allowed anyone to help him clean up the mess in the car. It was as if her brother’s battered body were there in the house with her. She even imagined that JoEl, because of whatever drug he was on, might harm her, but because he was her brother’s son she could not refuse him shelter.
“Mama Chona was talking to my father when she died,” he said almost to himself, though loudly enough for Eduviges to hear.
She became terrified. “Sit still, JoEl, I’m going to the kitchen to heat up some menudo for us. Don’t leave, I’ll be right back.” She recalled at the moment she was most afraid that JoEl had loved his father’s cooking. Felix had taught her how to make the tripe soup.
Alone in his aunt’s living room, JoEl stared through the tunnel that led him once again to the night of his father’s death. He had not slept that night. The west wind was lifting the desert to their doorstep and March was a few weeks away. The sandstorms his father hated would begin soon. JoEl lay awake listening to the sand falling softly on the porch outside, a sound that made him think of veils sliding against each other or of the most delicate knives being sharpened—subtle, beautiful sounds which made him drowsy as he imagined each grain of sand falling.
Before going to bed he had asked Angie if Felix had taken a handkerchief with him. She did not remember. As he awaited his father’s return, a terrible certainty made him open his mouth and swallow several times. It remained in his stomach heavy as a stone.
“Mamá, what time is it?”
“Eleven o’clock. Go to sleep. Your father will be here soon.”
But his father was not coming home, and JoEl, struggling against his nightmare fears by not allowing himself to fall asleep, lay on his side and stared across the room at his father’s bed. He felt no guilt about the morning quarrel. He knew it would resolve itself as all the others had. He felt only rocks in his belly, and his mouth was as dry as the veils and knives outside. He lay without moving for several hours until the heaviness left him as suddenly as it had come. He sat up and, leaning against the wall, continued to face his father’s bed. Felix appeared to be there lying on his side, but JoEl could not see his face or hear the sound of his breathing. The wind had stopped.
In those moments, JoEl understood infinity for the first time. It was a region without dimensions which registered on one’s consciousness in the same way that deaf mutes understand what others are saying to them. It was a timeless space where one is aware of movement without consequence, of a mouth uttering sounds one grasps but does not hear. All of his fears and evil dreams merged and he had no voice to cry out against them.
When Angie came in at five o’clock in the morning to tell him that someone was knocking on their front door, she thought he was in the middle of one of his nightmares. She did not touch him. “JoEl,” she asked very gently, “are you all right?”
The sound of her voice brought him back. “Si, Mamá. Who’s at the door?” He knew the answer.
“I don’t know. Come with me.”
They made their way through the house in the darkest hour of the morning without turning on lights or waking the others. Even Berto continued his innocent sleep on the sofa, despite the pounding. Before he unlocked the door, JoEl looked at his mother’s lovely face in the growing light. He embraced her as he had after his childhood dreams. Angie felt his terror and his certainty, and as the knocking became more insistent she tried to stop JoEl from letting death come into her house.
“Who’s there?” JoEl asked, turning the knob.
“It’s Miguel. Open the door.”
“It’s Miguel. Open the door,” JoEl said out loud.
“What did you say, JoEl?” Eduviges asked from the kitchen. “The menudo is ready. Why don’t you come in here?”
Sitting down, he said matter-of-factly to her, “But it wasn’t Miguel, auntie. It was death at the door.” He was out of the tunnel and the aroma of the soup with hominy and squares of meat floating in it was a wonderland to devour.
“Of course, JoEl. Can you eat?” Eduviges asked.
Later that day, Angie phoned Mema who had just arrived home from her hospital volunteer work. JoEl was hysterical and had locked himself in the bathroom. He was ten years younger than her own son, and after Felix’s death Mema had made a vow to herself to be responsible for JoEl.
Standing in the hallway of Angie’s house, after asking Angie to leave her alone with him, Mema called to JoEl. By then, he had fallen silent and she was afraid he might have hurt himself.
“JoEl, it’s Mema, please unlock the door and let me in. Please tell me you are all right.”
He began shouting, “You’re not Mema. You’re death. Don’t lie to me.”
She was relieved. The silence had made her wonder how they would break the door down. “I can talk to a crazy man,” she told Miguel Chico later, “but not to a dead one.”
“Don’t be silly, JoEl. It’s your aunt Mema and your father wants me to talk to you.” He opened the door.
“I like it that you were a whore once,” JoEl told her. They were sitting on the floor, Mema leaning against the tub holding him. His head was on her shoulder, and she rocked him back and forth when she sensed that the drug he had taken was making him tremble.
“Well, I wasn’t exactly. Your aunts like to exaggerate other people’s mistakes.”
“But you did what you wanted and you didn’t care what they said.”
“I was very young, JoEl. And I did care what my son might think if I found him.”
“But you found him, and he’s turned into such a prude, auntie. Just like Mama Chona, judging everybody.” When on drugs, JoEl could tell the truth to everyone, even himself. “The ants are coming,” he said and began to shake uncontrollably. Mema was strong enough to keep him from hurting himself.
“JoEl, I love Ricardo and I understand him,” she said when the trembling had subsided. “Just as I love and unde
rstand you.”
“No, you don’t, Mema. No one in the family does any more, not even my mother.”
“That’s not true. The drugs make you say things like that.”
“It’s not the drugs. I don’t know what it is, but it’s not the drugs. I want,” he stopped.
“What? What do you want? Tell me.” She had been through this before with him and knew that it signaled the end of his journey.
“I want to see my father.” He began choking. “I want to tell him that I understand and that I love him.”
“He knows, JoEl.”
“I want to tell him to his face. I hate it that Mama Chona is with him. She never understood anything human.”
Mema remembered her own rage and desperation when Mama Chona initially agreed to take away her son. Time and circumstance had healed the wound, but the scar remained. “She did, JoEl, before she lost the people she loved very much. She just didn’t know what to do without them. Maybe your father is giving her lessons now.”
JoEl was nodding and could not keep his eyes open. She barely heard him ask her to stay. After a while, she called Angie and they carried him to bed.
* * *
Gradually JoEl began to speak to them only in riddles as if all the poetry once guiding him through his nightmares had itself turned into them. When Miguel Chico visited him in one of those halfway houses for the obsessed and addicted, JoEl would repeat everything his cousin said and giggle, then begin an endless monologue, his eyes daring Miguel Chico to interrupt him.
“JoEl, I have to go,” he said.
“No, you don’t. You’re afraid of me. You hate the family and it loves you. I love the family and it hates me.”
Miguel Chico stood. “No, it doesn’t, JoEl. You don’t know what you’re talking about.”
JoEl’s eyes kept Mickie from touching him. “Please stop punishing yourself for what happened, JoEl,” he said, but already JoEl had begun his litany, saying over and over again as Miguel Chico walked out of the room, “Malcriado, malcriado, malcriado, you’ve been bad, you’ve been bad, you’ve been bad.” And then, even out in the hallway, Miguel Chico could hear him laughing and weeping simultaneously, “I love my father, I love my mother, I love my father, I love my mother.”