by Obed Silva
I think of the mornings when Aarón would rest his head on our father’s chest. I’d watch them from the couch as they lay on a blanket over the living room’s concrete floor. Aarón would tap our father on the side of his face until he’d open his eyes, and when he did, he’d say, “Hijo, do you love me?” And Aarón, still with his hand on our father’s face, and with puppy eyes, would reply: “Sí.”
Someone has dressed my father. I wonder who. He has on a tacky, colorful long-sleeve button-down shirt with little light green, yellow, purple, and red squares. The jeans are old and faded, and I can’t make out if they were once purple or blue. Whatever the color, one thing is certain, they’re pants fit for a poor man, because like the shirt, they’re something you’d find at the Goodwill or Salvation Army on this side of the border. “Shit, Pops,” I say as I pull at his clothes, “in the States you’d’ve had on a suit and tie, and maybe even a crispy white handkerchief to go with it. We’d’ve made you up into a nice little lie over there, into a nice little gentleman. Not here, though. Here they’re keeping it real with you.”
Fuck the bullshit. My father had never been a gentleman, and the closest he ever came to having a white-collar job was when he drove around Chihuahua as a bill collector in an old pieced-together motorcycle and pounded on debtors’ doors. He’d always been a man from el barrio who preferred to work with his hands. They’d been his livelihood, what had always kept food on the table for his wife and kids and a plump caguama for him at his side. My father had been a yesero till the day he died: El Cerro de la Cruz’s premier plasterer. His hands said it all and his clothes told no lies. A suit would’ve been a laughing matter.
* * *
My father had been a plasterer for most of his life. He’d been good at it, too. I know this because I’ve not only seen his work, but I also had the privilege of seeing him work. As a testament to the quality of his work, his clients had often sought him over others when they needed additions or repairs done to their homes or businesses—that is, until he began to skip out on them with their down payments, at which point they blacklisted him for good.
When I was a young boy, I’d tag along with him and my tío Trini (my father’s youngest brother) on some of their jobs. Sometimes I’d help out by carrying materials or mixing yeso in a wheelbarrow, wooden crate, or bucket. For the most part, though, I’d just watch. I’d take a seat on a cinder block or plastic crate in some corner, a Coke bottle in hand, and stare out at my father and tío intently as they splattered the white goo onto a raw surface and spread it out with large blades and long two-by-fours until it was completely smooth. Soon, walls and ceilings that had once borne the dull appearance of block, brick, or concrete would take on a white semblance of perfection, and my father and tío would look like they’d been assaulted by Jackson Pollock. They’d be covered in drips and globs of yeso from head to toe, and when I’d point and laugh at the million-dollar canvases they’d become, my father, turning to my tío and then to me, would shrug his shoulders humbly, raise his hands, and say: “We’re poor, hijo. What do you expect? This is how we earn a living.”
* * *
My father had also been an artist, and not in the generic sense that he was artful as a yesero. My father could draw and paint anything on any surface. As a young man, he’d been apprentice to Chihuahua’s own Aarón Piña Mora, one of Mexico’s great painters and muralists of the latter part of the twentieth century. “Piña Mora really loved your father,” my mother always says when she tells the story about how we all once lived in one of Piña Mora’s homes on what was then the rich part of Chihuahua while he taught my father to paint. “You were not even one year old when we lived there,” she says. “You were barely learning to crawl. It was a big house, two-story. And all I had to do was take care of you. And your father, all he did was paint with Piña Mora. Piña Mora would teach him from morning all the way until sundown.”
I’m an artist, too. Ever since I can remember, I’ve enjoyed picking up a pen or pencil and letting my imagination guide my hands. In elementary school, my teachers would praise me for my drawings and other artwork (which incidentally, is all my teachers ever praised me for); and throughout my elementary and middle-school years (I dropped out of high school in the ninth grade), art was the only subject in which I ever did well. “Wow, who taught you how to draw?” my chirpy teachers would ask, and my only response would be: “Nobody.” But I was lying. Because although I never mentioned it to them, I knew that somehow, through some genetic principle, my father had taught me. Whether it was by copying a rose he’d drawn at the bottom of a letter he’d sent me on one of my birthdays, or by copying the Disney characters he’d drawn in black ink on a white handkerchief for me while he was in a Texas jail once for trafficking drugs, or by replaying some distant and vague memory in which he is sketching my portrait on a large square of whitewashed plywood, I knew that my ability to draw had come from my father, from my blood-connection to him.
Piña Mora, who died on April 19, 2009, approximately three months before my father, had been godfather to my father’s brother Trini. During his younger years, my mother has told me, the famous painter had been a good friend of my grandpa Polo, my father’s father. “Polo used to work in Piña Mora’s furniture store in Cuauhtémoc. That’s how the two met. And then, after some time, Piña Mora made Polo his personal assistant and driver. Your father was just a kid, about seven or eight years old at the time. And Piña Mora loved him. Bah! El pintor loved your father more than he loved his own godson Trini. He loved your father so much that he would give him everything. Later, when your father was a teenager and he and your abuelo Polo were living with Piña Mora in his home, Piña Mora had your father going to the best schools in Chihuahua. He paid for them and everything else having to do with your father’s education. He saw your father’s talent for painting as a gift that needed to be nurtured and guided. And that’s what he always did for your father. But did your father appreciate it or take advantage of it? No! He goofed around more than anything else, and soon he stopped going to school altogether. And even though that hurt Piña Mora, he still didn’t give up on your father. He continued to teach him how to paint and to give him everything he wanted. He always believed that your father would come around and see what a great talent he had. After I married your father and you were born and the three of us were living en la casa de las bolas [the house of the balls, the name my mother and father gave to the house in which Piña Mora let us live because of the two large glass half spheres that made up much of its roof to let in sunlight that was essential for painting], Piña Mora would always tell me to be patient, that your father would eventually change. And sometimes your father showed signs that would make us believe that he actually would. He would do what Piña Mora asked and produce beautiful paintings that showed promise. Some of the rich ladies from the neighborhood would even buy them from your father. They liked that they were done in Piña Mora’s style and that they could buy them for much less. But as you can see, son, your father never changed one bit. He was too stubborn—too stubborn and too lazy. Plus, he couldn’t stop drinking. He always preferred to drink than to paint.”
And that was that. My father gave up. He’d never learn to be a great painter, and his talent, for the most part, would remain dormant for the rest of his life. Only a few reminders of his bastardized talent remain. In my mother’s home in California, for example, a 20-by-15-inch oil painting of an arrangement of gray and blue samovars and some fruits hangs on a wall above the kitchen table. It’s signed Juan Jesús Silva, 1980. My father was nineteen when he painted it, and I was one. And for as long as I can remember, the painting has hung above the kitchen table in every house and apartment I have ever lived in—whether with both my mother and father or just my mother—that one and the portrait of me done in graphite on a large square of whitewashed plywood. That portrait is signed J. Jesús Silva Feb. 19, 1985, only sixteen days after my sixth birthday. I like to think my father painted it with my birthda
y in mind, though I can’t say with certainty. One thing I know for sure, though, is that he must’ve been happy and proud when he finally finished it. “My son,” he must’ve uttered while rubbing his black-stained fingers and looking at it from a few feet away. “That’s my son. My beautiful son.” I wish I could remember the moment when he first showed it to me all complete. But I was too young. All I manage to see in my mind are his artist’s hands moving across a white board, magically creating an image of a young boy whose deep black eyes are looking out at the face of his father: creator re-creating his creation.
* * *
It’s disheartening to know that my father had the talent to be a great artist, painter—one of the greatest even—but that he let it go to waste. In Robert De Niro’s film A Bronx Tale, Lorenzo teaches his son Calogero that “There’s nothing sadder than wasted talent.” He tells him that “a loser isn’t someone who’s stupid; he never had a chance, God made him stupid. A loser is a guy who could have made something of himself but didn’t. A loser is a guy with wasted talent.” In Don Quixote, Cervantes reminds us of this same maxim. In the marvel related by “the man conveying the arms,” a regidor who is easily mistaken for an ass for his ability to bray like one, says to another ass-like braying regidor: “And I will further assert, that there are rare gifts going to waste in this world for the reason that those who possess them do not know how to make proper use of them.” When I think of these words and those of Calogero’s father, I cry; for like the borracho ballads I listen to every time I drink, they tell the tale of my father. They paint the truth. My father had been a man who did “not know how to make proper use” of his rare gift, and as a result became the “guy who could have made something of himself but didn’t.” My father had in fact been a loser. He’d been in the dark to what the bus driver and the ass-like braying regidor both profoundly understood and prudently expressed.
When I asked my father why he’d chosen not to continue to learn to paint under the instruction of Piña Mora, the only reason he could offer was that Piña Mora had been too strict. “He always wanted me to be painting,” he said cavalierly as he stood before me outside his house holding a can of Carta Blanca. “I didn’t like that, so I just left, with you and your mother.” My eyes and face dropped, and all the blood in my brain rushed to the base of my cheeks, swelling and giving them a crimson coat from hell. He was too strict? Was my father serious? Was he really killing my day with this bullshit? I shook my head in disappointment and spit on the ground. I pushed the saliva out slowly and watched as it made its way down, as it crashed upon a parade of ants, ruining their enterprise. Where to go now that their course had been disrupted? What of their destiny? What of all the assholes in the world, the pricks who take it all for granted? Scatter, little ants! Run to safety! Find another way! I hated the sound of the crackling can in my father’s hand, and I hated the shitty boots on his feet. I wanted to spit on them, too. They were dirty, filthy and fucking ugly, like the broken ground they stood on. It can’t be, I kept telling myself. Just can’t be. There has to be another reason. Something that makes sense.
“Are you really that stupid? Is that really why you left?” I asked him. “Come on, there has to be something else you’re not telling me. Please tell me there’s something else.” But there wasn’t anything else. He assured me that that’d been the only reason: Piña Mora had been too strict. He stressed it and even showed surprise at my inability to accept it as a good reason. He smirked and shook his head in disbelief at me. How was it that I couldn’t recognize his plight?
“No, you just don’t get it,” he said to me. “You just don’t know how he was with me. He never wanted me to do anything except paint. ¡Era cabrón!” That’s all that my father could add: that Piña Mora had been an asshole. I didn’t say anything more on the topic after that. I’d got it. My father was a man who could never handle discipline or order, a man who could never adhere to the principles that guide the relationship between master and apprentice, teacher and student. He preferred to laugh at greatness, to have nothing to do with it. To him a thing like greatness was too superficial, too detached from the chaos and misery he had such an affinity to. And there was nothing the artist could show him or teach him about life, because on top of everything else, my father was also a man who thought he knew it all.
5
Two weeks after I returned home from Chihuahua, Aarón called me to give me disturbing news about Danny. “He destroyed my dad’s room,” he said. “¡Lo madrió todo! He went in and started breaking everything. He broke the windows, the television, and all the shelves. He even ripped the bed apart.”
“Why?” I asked Aarón. “Why’d he do it?”
“He was drunk. He’s been drinking a lot lately, and every time he gets drunk and comes home he goes mad and starts to yell and break things, but this time he went too far. He broke everything in the room.”
* * *
Before our father died, Danny had never displayed destructive behavior, and he’d never drunk much either. He’d always been quiet and withdrawn. “¿Qué onda, Danny?” I’d say to him in an attempt to pull him out of his silence and involve him in our discussions. “What’s with you, man, why don’t you ever talk?” My efforts, however, would go unrewarded, because all he was ever inclined to reply was: “Nothing. Nothing’s wrong with me. I’m just here, listening.” Unable to get more out of him, I’d turn to Aarón and give him a what’s-wrong-with-this-kid look, to which Aarón would say: “That’s how he is. He doesn’t like to talk much.” This being the case, I’d always thought of Danny as being like the shy kid at the school dance who tucks himself away in a corner and retreats into his own muted world, preferring to hear than be heard, to observe than be observed. So to learn that he’d put on this violent spectacle was shocking.
“What do you mean he’s been drinking a lot lately? Danny doesn’t drink like that,” I said to Aarón.
“It’s true,” he continued. “He’s been drinking almost every day for the past few days. Almost nonstop, and we don’t know what to do.”
Listening to Aarón’s revealing words, I recalled how on the day that our father died, Danny, not realizing that I’d already received the news from Aarón only minutes earlier, called me crying to tell me that our father had passed. “He loved us a lot,” he kept repeating, and all I wanted to tell him every time I heard him say those words was to shut the fuck up, because he must’ve not been talking about our father. I couldn’t respect his pain. It seemed superficial, like an empty gesture for his dead father. As the eldest after me, I’d wanted him to be strong, to hold back his tears and take leadership of the family.
Aarón went on to tell me that the weekend before, Danny had shown up to our cousin Chuy’s house, where Chuy and Aarón had been drinking with friends, and picked a fight with Aarón. “He got there drunk and began to hit me,” Aarón said. “¡Me pegó!” These words sank to the bottom of my stomach like an anchor and began to stir there. There was something absurd about them, and it made me angry.
“Danny hit you?”
“Yes,” Aarón went on. “He kept screaming at me and asking me why I’d hit my dad. He was mad because I’d hit him, and now he wanted to hit me. ‘Why did you hit him, pendejo! Why did you hit my dad!’ he kept screaming at me.”
The news was becoming more alarming at every turn. Danny had attacked Aarón, and now I was learning for the first time that Aarón had hit our father. As it turns out, on many occasions when our father would show up drunk and belligerent to the house, wanting to start a fight with their mother, Aarón would step between the two and push him away. Of course, fists would start flying.
“You’d actually hit him, and he’d actually hit you, and with closed fists?” I asked Aarón.
“Pues sí,” he said with peace in his voice, as if it were what he’d been put on this earth to do.
I didn’t feel anger toward him when he told me this; on the contrary, I felt proud of the little guy. He reminded me
of the little boy in Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment. In Raskolnikov’s dream, he attacks Mikolka and other drunk men after witnessing them horribly whip a helpless “puny mare” for thrills. Aarón, who’s no taller than our father had been and weighs no more than a hundred and twenty pounds, like a fearless little vato and budding gentleman, stood up to protect his powerless mother. He took the hits from his father and gave them back tit for tat. The safety of his mother had been all he cared about. I pictured him raising his fists to his elbows and dancing around calmly with subdued adrenaline, like a young César Chávez, and telling our father to bring it, and our father, with his ominous eyes and slimy smile, spit on his chin, cowardly, taking up the challenge. “¿Quiere darse un tiro? ¡Pues vengase!” I could hear Aarón saying, and fiercely roaring like a cub in the wild, like a boy on fire.
All I felt toward Danny, however, was anger and disgust, like when he’d wept for our father over the phone. In my eyes he’d given up, and again he’d failed to lead. Instead, he’d let our father break into him like a demonic spirit. He’d drunk the fire and turned it into thunder, and in turn, just like Daddy, had cowered into hell.
* * *
Danny had gone as far as claiming that he was a better yesero than Aarón. When I asked Aarón why, he told me that this was a jealousy Danny had been holding inside for a long time; for Danny, unlike Aarón, had rarely done work with our father. Aarón had gone with him almost every time since the age of fourteen, when he’d stopped going to school. He’d been his young apprentice, and this had planted a seed of jealousy in Danny that he’d never been able to weed out, and that was now bearing the rotten fruits of hate. Now that our father was dead it gnawed at him to know that he hadn’t been the one to accompany him. But who was he fooling? He was too late. Our father was dead, and frankly, he never would’ve given a fuck if Danny accompanied him on his jobs or not.