by Arturo Islas
The Rain God
When Miguel Chico returned to San Francisco after visiting his cousin in the desert, JoEl’s words, like an incantation, kept waking him during the night and coloring his dreams in the greys and blacks and dark browns Mama Chona used to wear. In one of those dreams, the “monster” that had killed her said to him softly, almost kindly, “I am a nice monster. Come into my cave.” The two of them were standing on a bridge facing the incoming fog. The monster held Miguel Chico closely from behind and whispered into his ear in a relentless, singsong way, “I am the manipulator and the manipulated.” It put its velvet paw in Miguel Chico’s hand and forced him to hold it tightly against his gut right below the appliance at his side. “I am the victim and slayer,” the creature continued, “I am what you believe and what you don’t believe, I am the loved and the unloved. I approve and turn away, I am judge and advocate.” Miguel Chico wanted to escape but could not. The monster’s breath smelled of fresh blood and feces. “You are in my cave, and you will do whatever I say.” Although it moved away from him, Miguel Chico continued to feel its form pressed tightly against him, and the odor of its breath lingered, forcing him to gasp and struggle for air. The fog, he thought, would revive him and he thus kept his back to the monster and looked down and out at the sea no longer visible.
“Jump!” the monster said with exhilaration, “jump!”
Miguel Chico felt loathing and disgust for the beast. He turned to face it. Its eyes were swollen with tenderness. “All right,” he said, “but I’m taking you with me.” He clasped the monster to him—it did not struggle or complain—and threw both of them backward over the railing and into the fog. As he fell, the awful creature in his arms, Miguel Chico felt the pleasure of the avenged and an overwhelming relief.
Awakened by this dream in that silent hour before dawn when he felt the whole world was his, the sense of release was very much with him. This time he did not try to go back to sleep after changing his bag but instead sat at his desk and recorded the details of the dream. He needed very much to make peace with his dead, to prepare a feast for them so that they would stop haunting him. He would feed them words and make his candied skulls out of paper. He looked, once again, at that old photograph of himself and Mama Chona. The white daisies in her hat no longer frightened him; now that she was gone, the child in the picture held only a ghost by the hand and was free to tell the family secrets.
Before they went to the “American” schools, Mama Chona had instructed her favorite grandchildren almost daily, wanting to insure that they grew up according to her standards. Malcriado was her favorite word for a child, and to be called that by her was the worst form of censure, for it, meant that one was not only misbehaved, but that one had not been properly brought up. For a member of the Angel family, that was impossible. She taught them to love listening to and telling stories or cuentos, as she called them. When she was feeling gay, she treated them to comic book versions of the classics. Miguel Chico’s favorite was The Hunchback of Notre Dame and he would look at it every night and pretend that he could read the words. He loved Esmeralda’s name and a torture scene that featured a wooden boot, and he was simultaneously repelled and fascinated by Quasimodo.
Part of their instruction was to accompany Mama Chona on her visits to her sister and her daughters, where, she told them, they would learn proper manners. Also they would learn which buses to take and which streets were safe so that later when they were older, they might visit their aunts and cousins by themselves.
Mama Chona held Miguel Chico’s hand tightly even when they stood waiting for the next bus, and she did not let go until they were safely inside his aunts’ homes. Much of the children’s knowledge of the family’s history as well as its scandals came from those visits. Miguel Chico learned slowly that his aunts Jesus Maria and Eduviges exaggerated about the good and bad within the family chronicles, that Mama Chona preferred not to say much at all about their life in Mexico, and that only his aunt Mema told the truth. It was she who—while he was recovering from surgery—sent him the photograph of Mama Chona walking down the town’s main street with him. “I don’t know why,” she wrote, “but I thought you might like to have this. I found it while sorting out that old chest of family photos and letters you used to love when you were a child.” She also sent him a poem which she thought had been written out in longhand by the first Miguel Angel in whose memory Miguel Chico and his father were named. The handwriting was beautiful, almost like calligraphy, and the poem a kind of prayer:
All the earth is a grave and nothing escapes it; nothing is so perfect that it does not descend to its tomb.
Rivers, rivulets, fountains and waters flow, but never return to their joyful beginnings; anxiously they hasten on to the vast realms of the Rain God.
As they widen their banks, they also fashion the sad urn of their burial.
Filled are the bowels of the earth with pestilential dust once flesh and bones, once animate bodies of men who sat upon thrones, decided cases, presided in council, commanded armies, conquered provinces, possessed treasure, destroyed temples, exulted in their pride, majesty, fortune, praise and power.
Vanished are these glories, just as the fearful smoke vanishes that belches forth from the infernal fires of Popocatepetl.
Nothing recalls them but the written page.
- Netzahualcoyotl
King of Texcoco
1431—1472
From Mema he had learned that the first Miguel Angel, Mama Chona’s only child born of the love she had felt for her husband, was killed while walking down the streets of San Miguel de Allende at the beginning of the revolution that changed their lives and forced the family north from Mexico. A young and brilliant university student at the time, he was cut down by a single bullet while standing before the fountain he loved most on his way home from school. The friends who examined her son’s body could not tell if the bullet lodged in his heart came from the government arsenal or from the camp of the revolutionaries. She did not care. Mama Chona never forgave Mexico for the death of her firstborn.
After they buried him, a delegation of revolutionaries came to her home in disguise while her husband Carlos was away to tell her they considered her son a hero. She looked at them in rage and disbelief. “Keep your hero,” she said to them at the door, “give me back my son.” Soon after, a letter from the general in command of the federal forces in that region praised her son for being a true patriot on the side of honor and right. The president’s seal was affixed to it and she was encouraged to believe that he had signed it personally. Her husband kept the letter and it became the accepted version of the first Miguel Angel’s death. Mama Chona did not care which version was told. She detested the pomposity of men at war and blamed both pro- and anti-government forces for the murder of her son.
“Just remember to have respect for your parents,” Mama Chona told Miguel Chico and his cousins in her beautiful Spanish, “and everything will be all right.” She said little to them about herself; she taught and admonished them. “And be careful always when you are outside of your house and away from your family.” No harm, Mama Chona made them believe, could ever come from within one’s own home and family.
Eight years before her first child was killed, Mama Chona’s twin girls had died. They drowned in those few moments when one of the servants let down her guard. Mama Chona taught her children to be careful and they died because they would not mind her or what they were doing. In her world, there were no accidents. Every event was divine retribution or blessing. After the deaths of her first three children, Mama Chona resigned herself to Christ and His holy Mother with a fervor she would never have admitted was born of rage, and she accepted suffering in this life without question or any sense of rebellion. She renounced all joy on the day they buried Miguel. She was thirty-two.
From then on, Mama Chona bore her children out of duty to her husband and the Church. Thinking that after a stillborn child she might be barren, she was disappoi
nted when she gave birth to Felix. In her mind, she conceived him and the rest immaculately—an attitude which made some of her children think themselves divine—blotting out the act which caused her to become distended like a pig bladder full of air. Later in her life, in that time when Miguel Chico and JoEl fell under her instruction, Mama Chona denied the existence of all parts of the body below the neck, with the exception of her hands. They were her only feature that rivaled her sister Cuca’s in beauty.
“God forgive me,” she said in her grandchildren’s presence. “What beautiful hands I have,” and she extended them, palms down, so that they might admire without touching. Mama Chona was not physically affectionate. Touching other people reminded her of her own body, and she encouraged her grandchildren to develop their minds, which were infinitely more precious and closer to God. She had given up on her own children.
Felix, Jesus Maria, Eduviges, Armando, Mema, and Miguel Grande—dreamers and lechers were all she managed to produce. God was testing her, she knew, by having sent her such intractable souls to nourish alone in a desert far from the green and tropical place of her birth. Her husband died in 1916, as they traveled north toward the desert.
The first family scandal Miguel Chico was old enough to be aware of involved his aunt Mema. Before he was born, Mema had an illegitimate child and the family had decided that she must give him up. In protest, Mema went to live across the river with her man, which in her sisters’ eyes was the same as becoming a woman of the streets. Mema did not care what they thought. She considered them pious hypocrites and she was determined to bring her son back into the family.
Six years later she found him, wandering the streets of Juarez, shining shoes and begging for his living. He had run away from the home where he had been placed and he accepted Mema’s kindness at first more than her story. Her brother Felix persuaded Mama Chona to bring him back into the family legally. And so Ricardo, the bastard child, became the adopted son of his grandmother and uncle, a puzzling arrangement which the many cousins he acquired instantly were not allowed to discuss. Miguel Chico was three or four years younger than Mema’s son.
Mema knew she could not afford to keep him with her, and she wanted Ricardo to be educated and brought up on the north side of the river. Mama Chona readily assented to the adoption because she saw it as a way to get her daughter away from her sinful life and back into the family. But Mema refused to accompany her son and stubbornly remained with her man. She visited Ricardo and Mama Chona regularly and brought the boy gifts paid for by any extra money she was able to set aside.
Mama Chona’s sister Cuca defended Mema’s choice. “You don’t know anything about love,” Cuca said to her. “You never have.”
“Don’t talk to me about love. I don’t see that you’ve had any children, Cuca. What do you know about it except your romantic notions that can’t sustain and feed a family? You mean lust, Cuca. Every one of my children has been ruined by it and you have not been a good example to them.”
“I can’t talk about love to anyone who doesn’t know about it,” Cuca said and ended the discussion.
So Mema’s son Ricardo came to live with Mama Chona in a two-room casita that Miguel Grande built for them in the backyard of the two-bedroom house he and Juanita had just moved into. It was the first house they owned. Mama Chona treated Ricardo kindly, even with some affection, and she did not expect of him the kind of perfection she demanded of her own children and grandchildren. Whenever he had the slightest illness, she took care of him and fed him sugar water with canela. As she taught Miguel Chico to read in Spanish, she taught Ricardo English. In them and later in JoEl, she saw an intelligence worth cultivating.
By teaching Ricardo, she would also teach her daughter Jesus Maria a lesson. Jesus Maria had severely disappointed Mama Chona by marrying against her wishes. And from the moment she had learned of the plan to adopt the bastard child she had argued vehemently against it. “But Mamá,” Jesus Maria began in the elegant Spanish she had learned from Mama Chona, “how can you let that child live with you when you know from what sin he comes?”
Mama Chona and Miguel Chico were sitting in Jesus Maria’s dark, musty parlor. The shades were drawn in the summer to keep out the heat, and in the winter to keep it in. Mama Chona watched her daughter in silence, knowing that her indifference angered Jesus Maria and that she could in this way win every argument because she could always say, as she invariably did, that no one who was shrieking at her could possibly be in her right mind about any given subject. Jesus Maria, in tears and carried away by her own drama and the pitiable state of her life—which she never failed to describe in detail at all hours to her husband and children—would stop shouting, stunned by the injustice of having to deal with such an unsympathetic mother. Mama Chona would already be out the door and halfway to the bus stop with Miguel Chico by her side before Jesus Maria realized that once again she had been defeated. But not before she could complain about her mother’s unfairness.
“Mamá, you have never loved me, I who have been a good and dutiful daughter, except in marrying against your wishes. But at least I married before I had my children, as you and the Church taught me was not only proper but necessary to remain in a state of grace.” Jesus Maria attended mass daily. “You were right about my husband. He is uneducated, coarse, but he is a good worker and he makes enough money at a decent job to feed me and the children and keep a roof over our heads.” She had married Manuel Chavez because he was handsome and had flattered her with his attention. “Every day of their lives, I teach my children not to be like their father, but to aspire to greater things and to that perfection you and the Church have taught me is the only worthy goal in life. He is ill mannered, but my sons and daughters are not. His speech is faulty, my children speak like angels. You have never appreciated them enough, Mamá. Now you tell me that Mema’s bastard is going to live with you as your son. I cannot believe it. It was a scandal that he was born. You, you, Mamá, agreed when we first discussed it to put him up for adoption. I had to go to the agency and fill out the papers and I have never felt so humiliated in my life. But I did it because the others were too weak and sentimental to see that it had to be done if we were going to retain any pride in this family. Now I think I should have murdered him, God forgive me.”
Mama Chona shifted in her chair. Only Miguel Chico, standing next to her and leaning on its arm, felt her move like the smallest of earthquakes. “Jesus Maria,” she said, “you don’t mean that. You are in such a state that you don’t know what you are saying.” She marveled at the duplicity of her daughter, who had just returned from taking Jesus to her soul and yet spoke of slaughtering innocents.
“Yes, I do know what I’m saying and I am not in any ‘state.’ You have never loved me as much as Mema, who betrayed you much worse than I ever have or could possibly think of doing. But no, when it comes to your favorites, you have no eyes, no ears, no voice to see that they are wrong and that you must deny them what they want. You have always loved them more.” Jesus Maria patted her face delicately with her handkerchief, folded her hands, and looked at her mother with swollen eyes. “Mamá, if you let that bastard live with you, I will not enter your house. And if you bring him here, I will not open the door to you. These things are very hard for me to say because you are my mother and I must respect you above all others on earth, but I will not stand for this insult to the family, do you hear me?” Throughout her life, Jesus Maria thought of herself as an Angel, never as a Chavez.
“The way you are shouting, Jesus Maria,” Mama Chona replied calmly and firmly, “the entire neighborhood can hear you.” She paused. “I have also taught you to love your brothers and sisters as yourself and to forgive them when they do wrong. Don’t you see that it was a miracle that Mema found her son after we allowed him to be taken away from her? It is a sign from God that we must bring him back into the family. You are too proud, Jesus Maria, and God will punish you for that. I forgive you for shouting at me, your mother, an
d for going against my wishes, but how can He?”
Wrapped in her shawl, even on the hottest days, her umbrella ready for the rays of the desert sun, Mama Chona made her way to the corner to wait for the bus. She knew that Jesus Maria would agonize over having been a disobedient child. She knew also that Jesus Maria’s pride would not permit her to invite her mother to wait inside until the bus could be heard. In that way, she trapped her daughter’s objections to the adoption of Ricardo between pride and guilt. Mama Chona had learned well the lessons the nuns taught.
“I hear the bus, Mama Chona,” Miguel Chico said after they had been waiting in the sun long enough for him to see the wavy lines that made him think the whole world was underwater. Her umbrella was not large enough to shelter him and there were no trees.
“Do you want to go downtown?” she asked him in Spanish.
“Oh, yes, please.” He did not like to visit Jesus Maria’s house because his cousins made fun of his ears and accused him of being a sissy. Going downtown would help him forget their taunts. Miguel Chico took her hand and helped her into the bus.
“Gracias, Miguelito,” she said after he found a place for them to sit near the front of the bus. She had taught him to avoid the rear, which was labeled the “colored section.” Once, before he understood what such labels meant, he had rushed to a seat in the back so that they would not have to stand in the aisle. Mama Chona had wrenched him out of it, and they had stood all the way to their destination. “No one should sit there,” she told him and his cousins. “It’s an outrage.”
Mama Chona and Miguel Chico got off the bus at the downtown plaza. A small, pretentious and ugly fountain stood in the middle of the square, and the town paid hundreds of dollars a year to feed and maintain the pathetic alligators lying inert around it.