She was afraid, but the truth was that she had been even more fearful of living in Roberto’s house. What if new sister-in-law had disliked her? People say that sisters-in-law never agree except when somebody dies. So it was really for the best. She knew she could work in the fields somewhere, or maybe in an ice cream factory where she could eat all she wanted. Or she could become a dressmaker—why not? She knew what a pretty dress was! She wanted to make black sleeveless miniskirts and formal gowns of red velvet. Her greatest fear was that some bandits might fall upon her and rape her until she died, but she prayed to the Virgin until she heard the same humming which used to haunt her childhood back home in the canyon, and then she knew that the Virgin would protect her. The next day she got a job in a shop. The owner said that she was very honest. Then he put his hand on her ass. Beatrice smiled at him just as she had smiled at her novio: such things meant nothing. Men whistled when she walked down the street, and that was likewise without consequence; in fact, it made her feel good.
One hot day maybe six weeks after Easter, Beatrice was in Merida beneath the canopy in the Plaza de la Independencia, when a birdlike old man who sat sipping mango ice among the people in the army-green folding chairs beckoned. It was a Sunday (she remembered that because everybody was dressed for church); they were about to reenact the Mestizo Wedding. Beatrice, who was wearing new tight bluejeans and lipstick of the brightest red she could find, came and sat between the old gentleman and a woman whose arm-skin was blotched like buckwheat pancakes. Her acquaintance wore white from head to toe. His white cowboy hat cooled and shaded her. He failed in handsomeness but he achieved elegance. He asked her whether she lived unmarried, and she said yes. He asked where her Papa was and she said far away. She wanted to believe that this old man was her protector. She longed to feel proud. There she was, sitting like a real lady, recruited into those two facing armies of green chairs, one under the awning, the other against the pillared portico of the Municipal Palace! She was so happy that she couldn’t stop smiling. It was very close and crowded. Her knees engaged the buttocks of two children in the row ahead. Fat women in white blouses lifted up their babies to watch the trumpeter tune his brass proboscis. Bespectacled old widows stirred sweet slush-heaps with their straws. Ladies fanned one another with sandalwood fans from China. Out of kindness or by mistake a woman fanned Beatrice, who squealed: Thank you, señora, thank you! —A sweating vendor dressed in white lowered an immense basket of tan-colored snacks from his shoulder especially for Beatrice, while her new friend, the birdlike gentleman, bought her exactly what she wanted: a bag of salt-crisped corn! No one had ever treated her so kindly. Manuel, her novio back home, had been a very shy and dirty boy who couldn’t buy her anything. Beatrice felt prouder every second. She almost believed that wings would burst from her shoulders so that she’d rise up into the air on a surge of everyone’s applause. In the sunny street it was raining yellow butterflies.
Now, with trumpets and stridulating rattles, while the death-pale master of ceremonies stood under an arch of the Municipal Palace, expressionlessly smoking cigarettes, the children of Merida filed out and began to dance. After each dance the master of ceremonies strode into the light and shouted: Bravo! Bravissimo! Domingo, in Merida! Merida, Yucatan! Merida! until the band began to blare the next dance tune, and he bowed himself back into the shadows. Beatrice had never seen anything so grand. There came the dance when each boy balanced a bottle of beer on his head. Everybody applauded and Beatrice shrieked: Ay! She had fallen in love with all those dancing pairs of children in white, the boys wearing little white sombreros, as if they were the sons of her birdlike gentleman who now held her hand, the girls with yellow flowers in their hair and three stripes of floral embroidery down their long bleached dresses. Each pair wore red neckerchiefs, which on that day appeared to her most eminently remarkable.
Beatrice thought that she understood the way that Merida girls danced with their hands behind their backs. She wanted to dance that way, too. They all danced in the Mayan way, in mincing little steps, scarcely moving their upper bodies. The Mixteca way, Beatrice’s way, was different, but on that Sunday afternoon a sensation of almost belligerent rapture overpowered her; she believed that she could do anything. Her only fear was that Roberto might find her. And now, in tones simultaneously awed and gleeful, the master of ceremonies cried: Our Queen of the Yucatan—sweet as a pastry, hot as a candle, bright as the sun! Beatrice longed to see this personage, but never did.
In the room where the old birdlike man took her, a room in a hotel once a colonial mansion which pretended to be Spanish, Beatrice lay naked in the four-poster bed with her legs spread while the old man mounted her, and, staring over his scrawny shoulders at the canopy which heaved on its posts in harmony with his thrusts, she decided that she wanted to be a dancer in a perfect white dress with three stripes of embroidered flowers. She was very happy. She wanted the skull-faced announcer to proclaim her as bright as the sun. On the radio she heard this song: I am the King, but I have no Queen.
Rather sweetly, the old man kissed her all over. Beatrice giggled. She remembered her youngest brother’s mouth ambling miscellaneously along the pale end of an ear of boiled corn.
The old man said: I wish to thank you. You have made me more happy than I have been since before my wife died, may she rest in peace.
He gave her fifty pesos. He said that she was sweeter than a Durango melon. He said he wanted to marry her because all his children had gone away. Beatrice blushed, feeling very rich and happy and appreciated. Her private parts were a little sore, but she didn’t mind. She never wanted to work in the fields again.
She went that evening to the ancient cathedral to pray to the Virgin for forgiveness in case she had sinned with the old man, and also to pray for assistance in becoming a dancer who would be admired by the entire world. She lit a candle and whispered: Maria, darling, I want to tell you that my Mama and my Papa, they know Mixteca dances from the different parts, and they teach their children. They teach me. The Mayan people here, I think maybe they went to school, but my people, the Mixteca people, they didn’t go to school. They can’t even write in Spanish. They do a lot of things, like the Virgin of the Snows . . . But please let me try, because I know I can dance as well as they. Please, Maria, darling. You’re my best friend. —This was how she prayed to the Virgin. And high above the altar, the Virgin contemplated her Son’s crown of thorns.
While the priest was speaking words which Beatrice could not understand, the Virgin wept white chains of rain down on all the red-tiled balconies of the city, making surf-convulsed seas upon them. Cold rain smashed away the stuffy heat. Thunder came closer, as sharp and loud as gunshots, and there was a sulphur smell. The drumming of roof-gutters filled the congregation’s ears. Not even those who understood could hear the priest any longer. They gazed out in pleasure and wonder. Rain vomited itself off terraces and drainpipes, frothing onto lower roofs.
Beatrice never slipped over her head the white dress with the three stripes of Mayan embroidery, but she became famous in a kindred fashion behind the sweaty fence-bars of the dancehall with all its men standing across the street from it looking; and the muffled bass of Henry Star and of Los Big Boys weighed down the rainy sweaty light. That was how the Virgin helped her. And every morning at eleven o’clock when she woke up, Beatrice would pray with a candle and a glass of water. She believed so much in her future that she never asked any questions. The men grinned because Beatrice was already dancing.
Very late at night, after the girl in the speckled cape had finished her act, shucking herself like an ear of corn as she stroked her long hair under red light, then Beatrice majestically strode onto the stage, the disco ball brightly burning, and began to dance faster and faster, suddenly raising her hands behind her head as she unhooked her bra, which she then raised above herself in a kind of offering, and the wings of her bra glowed green like a lunar moth, and it was mystic and beautiful and so religious.
Be
atrice became the girl that everyone knew, the girl in the black tank top and black miniskirt and shiny black high heels, swinging arms with men as she went down the wet sidewalk. So she had her fame, but she was already getting plump. The Virgin told her that she had to make new efforts. Her dancing changed. First it was graceful, then it was erotic, then lewd, and finally desperate—comically desperate, I should say, for they laughed at Beatrice now when she danced.
Later she got her son and her crown of thorns. Beatrice knew that every soul is put on earth to suffer pain, so she was prepared, and of course the Virgin comforted her, because up until the very day she met the Queen she continued to pray, either in the old cathedral or in her rented room with the candle and the water. The Virgin said in her humming voice that if Beatrice suffered greatly enough, then all the angels in heaven would be proud of her and would help her. In this life, God knows, we must all be patient.
The first thing that happened was when, drunk and high on cocaine, she went home with a man in a stolen car, an anxious and flashy man with dark eyes and a dark hat who promised to give her good money and even said he loved her, which very few men said to Beatrice anymore, but when he saw the police he began to drive faster and faster until he crashed into a bus. The Dark Saint took him then. As for Beatrice, her face was scarred forever. She had to get a day job in a skirt factory. Suddenly she longed for a husband. She remembered her novio back in Oaxaca, but she knew that it was too late and she was ashamed to go home. When she lost her job, she went back to the dancehall. After that, everybody started calling her “the old whore” even though her glistening peachy shoulders proved how young she still was. She continued to resist her destiny, imploring the sad-eyed Virgin in that ancient cathedral of white-weathered and rain-greened whitestone on cool humid evenings under the softly dripping trees where they knelt singing hymns, with wet palmtrees and mosses and large-lobed tropical leaves like seashells growing around them through the open archway. Kneeling people, rising life, rising breaths and prayers, falling rain, descending ironic grace, thus everything went round and round. Beatrice’s prayers rose clacking like long beads on a necklace, then came down like hailstones on her head. After a while she believed that that was how it was supposed to be. For money she masturbated men by the thousands, in just the same way that the old ladies sitting on the concrete floors of city markets slowly knead dough into immense balls, which they then lay upon masses of the same stuff, like God creating humanity from earth, like a woman growing a baby inside her from blood, fruit, and meat. Beatrice did this well. She fed upon the diseased sperm of thousands of men, drinking it down without complaint, transubstantiating it into sacred suffering. Whenever she could, she returned to the Plaza de la Independencia on Sundays to watch the dancers’ white suits and white dresses under white light, the Mayan couples facing one another on those harsh hot afternoons and in the brilliantly lit concrete nights, the ladies tapping their heels back and forth to the steps of La Chinita, their faces expressionlessly smiling, the gentlemen keeping or sometimes not keeping one white-sleeved arm behind themselves. At the dancehall, Beatrice now worked with the same expressionless smile.
One night two drunks whom she’d blown for twenty pesos apiece beat her and slashed her. Then, joined by two other men whom they’d met in their cantina, they raped her in a parking lot. Beatrice thought that she was going to die. That night she went out of her mind and she was glad that she did. In her whole life she never wanted to give any other human being such pain as those four men gave her. When she regained her senses, her first desire was to return home to Oaxaca, but she didn’t have any money. When she made money again, she was already ashamed again. She began to feel hot and tired all the time. Her breasts ached. How could she dance, feeling like that? What was there for her to do in this world? An old bruja who knew how to burn certain flowers to make wishes come true offered to help Beatrice, but she refused the woman because witchcraft is not righteous. She gave birth to a sickly-pale child whose tripas* hung out of his stomach. As soon as she saw him, she remembered the master of ceremonies who’d cried out: Our Queen of the Yucatan on that long ago Sunday, because his face likewise resembled a death’s head. She named him Manuel after her novio. He cried day and night and could not digest her milk. She took him to the doctor to sew up his insides but the doctor said that Beatrice didn’t have enough money. In the afternoons she brought Manuel to the dancehall. She had to keep him indoors so that he wouldn’t get his intestines dirty from the dust. —You make a hole, she whispered to herself, and you put rocks and water in the top, just like Mama and Papa showed you, and you get the branches of those special trees, it’s like a shower, and it’s like if you have a baby, two or three days, you need to have one, to get the good milk from your breasts, not the bad one. It’s like a medicine, to get the women well. To get energy . . . —She prayed to the Virgin. Then she put her feet up and drank beer on credit with the other whores, who raised their hands caressingly over the child.
Bad men and evil happenings now swarmed about her like colorless rainbows of water vomiting out of wide-throated roof-pipes. They swarmed about her like all the fishes in the sea, fishes finned or beaked, so finally she ran away from Merida with her child, whom for pity then she left with some nuns because his insides were too delicate for her life. All summer she travelled half an hour by bus every night to be with him, but by the Day of the Dead she felt too exhausted. She prayed to the Virgin unceasingly. She prayed when she was selling cakes in the street, when she was renting her pussy, when she was patching her shoes, when she was painfully dancing, trying to favor her abscessed leg, when she was defecating, when she was closing her handbag leaning up at the postal window nervously counting out centavos.
She dreamed of the master of ceremonies. She dreamed that he was waiting for her, sitting with a wrapped boxed cake in the sunny street. In her dreams she heard his cry: Our Queen of the Yucatan—sweet as a pastry, hot as a candle, bright as the sun!
She went to Mexicali because a truck driver gave her a ride there. One day she became very ill with a shameful disease even though she had douched with vinegar. In the hospital they were all rude except for one old whore who told her that if she could run away across the border and hide from the American police, then money would come to her like rushing water turning the desert green. The old whore said that in American California she’d make eight or nine dollars an hour, out of which she’d have to pay the foreman only a dollar an hour to keep quiet. Beatrice lit a candle and prayed. She was afraid to go anywhere now, not excited the way she had once been when she was an ignorant young girl who had hardly even been kissed. She dreamed that she’d gone to America and seen a devil with a face of brass. She woke up screaming. But she’d also heard from other women that three months of illegal sweatshop work in Los Angeles (her legs were becoming too swollen for her to pick peaches or tomatoes, and, besides, the Americans preferred men for that) would support her for an entire year, and she was getting tired of Mexicali because some liar said she’d picked his pocket and so they wouldn’t let her inside the bar anymore, compelling poor Beatrice to stand out in the street at night thrusting out her bosom at unaccompanied men. She felt so lonely that she cried. At least nobody envied her. She had nothing anybody wanted. One hot night a man came to rape her and she said to him: Why use force? I’m indifferent. If you want it, take it. Kill me; I don’t care. —And then the man went down on his knees before her in the street, just like that, and apologized. He was drunk; he was a regular in the pulqueria.
Beatrice gathered together four hundred pesos, a blanket, a dagger, and a box of powdered sugar. Everybody laughed at her and told her to leave the sugar behind but she wouldn’t. A man named Don Chucho took her across the border by night, in exchange for certain services. And then she was in America.
The first opportunity which the Virgin sent Beatrice was to work sewing baby clothes for an angry Korean lady who paid her four dollars an hour, with no breaks for lunch or even cof
fee. The Korean lady was always yelling at her. There were forty-five women in that place, and none of them had green cards. One morning the police came and she lost everything. But that very night, with the Virgin’s help, she escaped from a window of the bus which was bringing her back to Mexico. Then she felt very free and very afraid. When she was hungry, she stole oranges from the trees. Striving to find her way without doing wickedness or suffering too much pain, she rented herself to the outcast men who lived in cardboard boxes, and they guarded her and sometimes gave her wine. Her desire to stay in America spread through her bloodstream. Someday she would certainly return to Mexico, but only because she had been born there. She could not dance anymore. Perhaps she wished to remain in America simply because the police wished to take her away, and in her experience the police never did people any good. She whispered to the Virgin, not yet knowing that it was for almost the last time.
The Royal Family Page 28