The Death of My Father the Pope
Page 3
I drank and sang along to corridos like “Cruz de Madera” and “Dos Monedas” by Ramón Ayala, both of which had been sung by a triste pair of guitar-strumming compadres at my father’s funeral, and both of which, in a sad and twisted way, aptly portray the way in which my father had lived and died: like a pitiful alcoholic nobody.
“Cruz de Madera,” for example, is sung through the perspective of a poor man whose only wish when he dies is to have a lowly wooden cross mark his grave. He doesn’t want any luxuries, or a mausoleum, or a coffin “que valga millones.” Instead, he wants his mourners to sing him songs; he wants “la muerte de un pobre” to be turned into a celebration. And in keeping with the true spirit of the poor Mexican wino, midway through the song, el cool cantante asks that instead of holy water, tequila be poured over all four corners of his sepulcher:
Cuando ya mi cuerpo esté cerca a la tumba
Lo único que pido como despedida,
En las cuatro esquinas de mi sepultura
Como agua bendita que riegen tequila.
¡Vaya! What a way to go for this proud Mexican wino with an imaginary crown on his head, a beer in his hand, and not a peso in his pockets. Even in death he’s king—rey! Even in death his delusions make him see glory in a bottle. Still, he’s unable to let go of the show, of the character, of the bullshit macho identity he dragged through town for so long, scaring the mierda out of every woman and child who crossed his path to nowhere; pobre diablo with nothing more to hold on to than this dreadful image. But he needs to be justified, absolved of meaninglessness. He cannot have lived for nothing—and so he sings and lives in the words of a timeless ballad.
“Dos Monedas” is slightly different, though it, too, is driven by Mexico’s other holy trinity of Drink, Poverty, and Death. Also sung from the perspective of a poor borracho, the song is a dark, melancholy tale of alcoholism and tragedy. Beginning with el borracho—the singer—modestly describing himself as el hombre “más desdichado en el mundo,” or “the most unfortunate of fathers,” as Herod said after murdering his own sons. The song quickly moves into the unforeseen and unforgiving, into the deepest and blackest crevice in every drunk’s heart. El borracho begins to delineate in detail the story of when and how he lost his son. On a rainy night, he sings, while drunk inside his home, his son arrives, cold and empty-handed, from begging in the street, and pleads with his father not to torment him about it. But being completely swallowed by the booze and fiending for more, the father ignores the pleas of the son and instead beats him “hasta casi matarlo.” He sends the child back into the street to do more begging while informing him that he will have neither a home nor a father if he returns with no money. And after the son leaves, the father continues to drink until eventually passing out. In the morning when he wakes up and notices that his son is not home, he opens the front door to find him curled up on the ground “muerto de hambre y de frío.” In one of the dead boy’s hands are “dos monedas,” which he had brought home to give to his father so that his father could continue drinking: blessed be the heart of the child who loves his father and also fears him. And with the same modesty he expresses at the beginning of the song, el borracho—now the forsaken piece-of-shit father who’s to blame for the death of his own son—feeling the nails of his sin, urges other soon-to-be-piece-of-shit fathers to not harm their own sons, to not do what he has done. He sings:
Yo le quiero pedir a los padres
Que no le hagan un mal a sus hijos,
Tal vez Dios me mandó este castigo
Por tirarme a la senda de vicio.
The song is terrifyingly sad, yet beautiful, and is the anthem of many a poor wino in Mexico. And when you sing along to it, you feel the imprisonment of the son and the sick desperation of the father; a battle between good and evil. And what do you do when it all becomes too much and your inebriated heart cannot bear being any longer? Well, you drink more, of course! Evil always wins, and you always will be. Bottle in hand, you surrender to the spirits. “Till the end, drunk man! Till the end!” You have seen it all play out in front of you one and a thousand times over, and you have come to realize how much more beautiful the story is when you sing like a karaoke singer with fleeting pathos. And so I kept drinking and I kept singing, pouring myself a cupful between songs, just like my father would do. This is how the child of the dead alcoholic grieves: like the father lived.
The crippled mess of me sitting on a La-Z-Boy at the threshold of my garage with my lifeless legs propped up on a wheelchair singing along to borracho ballads about alcohol and death while chugging beer from a glass, a curious spectacle to the handful of neighborhood children who’d gathered on my driveway in their dirty rags and with their crusty noses to watch me sing. This is it, kids, this is the future for many of you; if you have a father or if you don’t, this is where you’ll be some years from now. In my haze I looked out at their astounded little faces, amused and silent. I wanted to cheer with them, to toast with them, to cry with them. I wanted to tell them to always love their fathers no matter what. Be a son and love him. I wanted to pour the words into their little hearts: be a son and never forsake him.
I’d end up taking a trip for a second caguama, and eventually, at a bar with a few of my cousins getting more shit-faced than shit-faced, rolling up to complete strangers and telling them about my tragic loss. In my best shit-faced speech I’d say to them, “My father’s dead, he died a few days ago, won’t you cheer with me?” And they, being kind and shit-faced drunks themselves, would say, “My friend, I do not know you, but I’m sorry to hear that your father is dead.” And most times, whether man or woman, they’d either put their arm around me or offer me a hug and say, “Here, please, let me buy you a beer.” And without being too modest, I’d tell them that it wasn’t necessary; that although I appreciated the gesture very much, they didn’t have to. “No, no,” I’d say, wagging a finger, “it’s cool, really, my father was an asshole. He drank himself to death. Please, you don’t have to.” But asshole or not, they’d insist and the beer would eventually reach my hands, and I’d eventually take it down with a boundless appreciation. “You’re too kind, really … what?… cheer for my dead father again?… well, if you insist.” Bottoms up. Bottoms down.
The next morning I woke up shirtless and with the sun in my face on a dirty-ass couch with ants and spiders crawling all over it and me on the back porch of one of my cousins’ apartments. “¡Que mierda!” I cursed the sun, and with shame shook my head and uttered: “My father’s dead, and I have a fucking headache!”
* * *
The closer I get to the casket, the more difficult it becomes for me to keep pushing. My arms become heavy and my heart begins to race. What the fuck—go, he’s right there. But I can’t. I can’t make it all the way to the coffin. I stop about three feet short from the damn thing and turn my back to it. “What the fuck are you all staring at?” I say beneath my breath to all the sour eyes hovering at the door. I hate that they’re still there doing nothing more than gawking my way as if I were about to do something miraculous, like bring the dead man back to life. Run along now, you scoundrels, there’s nothing to see here, and miracles are for suckers. I turn back toward the casket, and this time I catch a glimpse of my father’s shiny nose and forehead. I can’t hold back any longer. I have to see all of it: the complete silence of the storm. Bracing myself for the inevitable, I push forward with the frail fortitude of a condemned man. I become steel in one breath and the dried-up petals of a daisy in another. The lifeless presence of the man I’d loved unconditionally as a child and had come to hate as a man is stirring in me a whirl of emotions I can’t control. So much is dead there, forty-eight years of memories. The man in front of me had been my father, and the reality that he was now dead, which I’d been suppressing since the moment I first learned of his passing, is finally coming into being. The death was real. The masses had been telling the truth all along—my father was a corpse. He was dead. My father was dead. A flush of warmth rushes
through me, and I feel a wave of tears wanting to break through the windows of my eyes. It’s as though they’d been checked at the depths of my entrails and are now trying to make a break for it and there is nothing I can do to stop them. Fuck, Pops! Why’d you have to go and die for? What about the fish and all the sodas? Didn’t you care anymore? I pinch my nose at the tip and wipe the tears away. I have to stop them. I can’t give in. I can’t let anybody see. The madness. The hell. What love can become. And just like that, I do. I seal the dam and stop the torrent. It’s a new day. It’s a new day. Remember the monster. Remember the fury. I bring my head up, shake off the fear, move closer to the coffin, stretch my neck out and glance at the corpse inside. There, stretched out in front of me, is a lovely and solemn image of silence. I take a deep breath and let out a long sigh. A smile comes over my face.
“So this is what you look like dead, eh, Pops?” I say to the body in the box as I place my hands over the plexiglass. “You look good, better than I thought you would.”
But my father doesn’t look good. I’m lying. Unlike the dead Ivan Ilyich’s more pleasing countenance, of which Tolstoy writes, “as with all dead men, his face was more handsome, and most importantly, more significant than it had been on the living man,” my father’s face is a gross sight, terribly the same as the one he’d been lugging around long before his death. Aside from it now being bloodless and petrified, benumbed of life, the living man and the dead man share the same sickly face: a face that had aged too fast, a face that had already begun to rot while its cheeks still blushed. It was a century-old face, deeply brutalized through the years, trashed and corrupted. A scar for every battle and a wrinkle for every tormenting minute that had marked his life carries the tune, the shrills and grunts to its muted swan song. The crooked smile beneath the smashed and crooked nose that even in death reveals the one-inch gap where teeth eight and nine once were, is now testament to the unfavorable reality my father had put his face through. What is left of the hair on the head, like the mustache on the face, is mostly gray and sparse. He’d stopped dyeing them both. He’d stopped reviving those features that had once helped produce a handsome man and he’d settled with the degenerative jokes they’d become. The little bit of gray hair, the smashed nose and crooked smile, the missing teeth, the scars and wrinkles—Fuck ’em all, my father must’ve thought with delirium, what do I care for vanity when the high is much more wonderful! Fuck ’em all, indeed.
* * *
“What happened to your teeth?” I asked my father when I first noticed his top two front teeth were missing. And he told me he’d lost them as a result of eating too many sunflower seeds while working. “You have to break the shell to get to the seed, and after doing it so many times it eventually takes a toll on your teeth.” But I knew better. He’d lost them as a result of the drinking and cocaine. And one after the other, the teeth came out.
“Shit,” I told him, “those seeds must’ve been hard as rocks, and not the kind you smoke.” He laughed and gave me his you-think-you-know-everything-mister-I-come-from-Washinton [translation: Washington] look. Commenting on my own teeth, he made the remark that the reason they were so white and straight was because I lived in the United States and had the money to buy toothpaste and see a dentist regularly. This explanation was laughable, though he had a point about me being able to see a dentist regularly while he could not. In Chihuahua, going to the dentist is a luxury that only a few have; as a result, it’s not uncommon in that big city and state to see a young man or woman not even twenty years old with ugly brown teeth looking like they’ve been eating shit. Regardless of this unfortunate fact about the desert state, and perhaps about all of Mexico, I knew that my father was using it only because he was incapable of telling the truth. “It’s this fucked-up country and this fucked-up poverty,” he’d say, rather than admit he was mostly at fault. But having been around junkies enough on this side of the border, I’d seen first-hand what cocaine can do to a person’s teeth, which are usually the first things to go. It’d been the combination of cocaine, alcohol, and constant disregard for proper hygiene that had caused my father’s teeth to fall out, because even if my father had had the luxury and inclination to see a dentist regularly, he wouldn’t have taken the dentist’s advice to quit the cocaine and alcohol and to brush daily. He would’ve laughed at this little gem of wisdom, and as soon as he was out of that dentist’s office would’ve been stomping his feet on the pavement, heading straight to the store for a caguama, and after that to the connect for a blast. This is the nature of the junkie: to disregard wise advice. And whether in Mexico or the United States of America, the junkie is the same. Always the same principles apply. His livelihood is only relative to his addiction. Everything else is inconsequential. Borders and boundaries are elusive concepts and life itself is one fleeting moment after another; the body’s only a compressed clump of molecules and atoms driven by the fiend inside—the ailing soul. To the junkie, the outer appearance of the body means little to nothing, its maintenance nothing more than a trivial formality he’d rather not bother with, or be bothered by. Like the child who throws away his marbles when he feels he’s outgrown them, when the junkie loses his teeth he tosses them to the wind and continues forward with his irrepressible march into the abyss of despair—straight into the hands of Hades. This is what my father had become. At full tilt had he marched into his own casket.
* * *
My father hadn’t always been indifferent to his appearance. Even in his early forties, he had still made the effort to look presentable. He often dyed his hair and mustache jet-black and brushed his teeth daily. In a black-and-white photo I took of him in September of ’04, this is strikingly apparent. Sitting on a concrete bench in front of his home and leaning casually against a wall, he looks stocky and strong, full of life. His chest and stomach are thick and taut under his dark blue workman’s T-shirt and his veins protrude up and down his forearms like lines on a map. His wide neck looks solid. But nothing is more telling than his face. It is round and glowing, pleasant to look at. His hair, thick, full, and combed carelessly back, along with his dense mustache, are the blackest things in the picture—them and the black of his eyes, which stare out at you coquettishly like those of a man in love. Careful not to reveal too much, his smile is closed and slightly curved. And somewhere behind it, I daresay, though perhaps not in the best condition, is still a full set of teeth. At forty-two, my father looks like a healthy man who still has decades of life ahead of him. Nothing about it reveals the alcoholic that he was, or the dope fiend he’d soon become. Nothing about it speaks of death.
There is something else, however, that this picture does reveal, at least to me. A memory I’m compelled to relay in consequence of my own guilt. Two days before I took this picture, I arrived in Chihuahua only months after the last time I’d been there and found my father with an almost-full head of gray hair. Astonished by the sight, and true to my impetuous nature, I said, “¿Qué onda, jefe? You got old on me!” I didn’t know it then, but these words would be enough to send my father into a midlife frenzy. So, later in the evening, when I returned to the house after having spent the day in el centro with my brothers, I found him sitting on a chair in the center of the living room with Cokis standing behind him coloring his hair black. My father let up a big grin when he saw me come through the door, as if he already knew I was going to say something hurtful, which again, I was quick to do.
“¡No mames, jefe!” I said to him with a saucy smirk on my face. “You’re actually dyeing your hair? Only old women do that.”
Here was my father, feeling the afflictions of old age as a result of my impulsively cruel nature, pitifully attempting to fight off time by buying himself a couple of years with cheap hair dye, and I was making a mockery of the whole situation with more distasteful and stinging comments. Certainly my father had only wanted to look his best for me, a fact I now recognize.
My father laughed and didn’t say a word. Just looked at me with de
jected eyes and laughed. I still love you, son, those eyes said, and I always will.
* * *
I remove the plexiglass and, in doing so, cut my thumb. “Why the fuck would anybody put this here!” I quietly curse. I also note that the person who’d placed it there hadn’t done a good job of gluing it to the coffin. It comes right off and I can see the clumps of yellow glue on the inner edges of the coffin’s lining. “What a shitty job,” I continue to say to myself while holding the glass above my father. “Only in fucking Mexico!” And after recalling a line from Octavio Paz’s The Labyrinth of Solitude, where he separates the “carelessness” and the “negligence” of Mexico from the “precision and efficiency” of the other “North American world,” I place it upright on the floor, lean it against the coffin, and begin to suck the blood from my thumb.
“Damn it, Pops,” I say quietly. “Even in death you’re fucking me up. No, I’ll give you that, viejo. You never hit me. You never once raised a hand to me—I’ll give you that. But look, now you’re cutting my shit up, and all I want to do is touch you and run my hand over your beautiful face.” I lean in, hang my arms over the edge of the coffin, and place my right hand on the left side of his left cheek. It feels cold and solid, and somewhat oily. Slowly, I begin to run my hand down to the bottom of his chin and then back up to the top of his cheek, softly, and then harder. “Wake up, viejo! Levántate,” I say to him as I playfully tap both sides of his face. “Mira que ya amaneció,” I sing to him. But he isn’t waking up. He’s a stiff and as stiff as a figure at Madame Tussauds wax museum. Yet, I feel that he’s enjoying my game and silently laughing at my antics. I hear him say, “Stop fucking around, hijo! Can’t you see I’m dead?” And I tap him again just to hear him again. “All right, hijo! I’m going to get up now, if that’s what you want. Here I go.”