by John Rechy
My mother, weeping, kept looking toward the back of the church, nervously, and then fretting with her rosary so absently that her fingers did not advance along its beads.
“God protect us!” my mother exhaled loud enough to be heard by those seated several rows away. They and others, stirred by her reaction, turned to locate the object of her shock at the entrance to the church.
Agitated whispers!
Señor! He had done it. He had been carried to the church on a stretcher, and then, with all the force of his meanness, he had pushed himself up. There he stood at the entrance to the church, the morning sun carving a threatening shadow along the main aisle as he paused, ready to unleash on us all whatever horrors he had plotted.
But it wasn’t the tyrant that had cast such an imposing shadow. It was—
“The kept woman of Augusto de Leon!” my mother gasped.
2
My mother nudged me to coax my attention back to what was occurring before the altar. To ensure that she placed her hand with the rosary on my head so that the crucifix dangled before me like a warning.
But she could not yank my thoughts away from the excitement created by the kept woman. What would she look like when she emerged out of the shadows of the church?
I tried borrowing characteristics from the women in my father’s troupe of players, a lingering hint of his former life, that motley crew he recruited to play in his local productions, under the sponsorship of the parish priest, who offered him the school auditorium for his makeshift operas, which, nonetheless, my father tinted with a desperate splendor that dazzled the poverty-ridden population, some of whom, plucked by him to be his stars, learned under his tutelage to perform a pavan in the style of the court of Marie Antoinette. Their resplendent wigs were molded from the same cotton some of them picked from nearby fields, and then sprinkled with crumbled tinsel.
During my short life, I had already seen what I had once thought were beautiful women in my father’s troupe. Beautiful to me then, and dressed in what seemed to me opulent costumes, those women, recalled in subsequent memories and adjusted into their time of deprivation, were not grand at all; they wore clothes that were attempts at camouflage, costumes edged in crinkled colored paper because good material was too expensive.
Now, in the Church of the Sacred Heart, I stealthily pushed away from my eyes the crucifix dangling from my mother’s rosary, her hand firmed on my shoulder. I needed to clear away any possible intrusion from my conjuring of the kept woman.
I evoked the most beautiful woman I had ever seen—the most beautiful next to my mother and my older, married sister, Blanca, not yet Olga, silly at the altar. I had seen that most beautiful woman when I was a performer in the traveling company of the renowned Mexican actress Virginia Fabrigas, an associate of my father from his days of grandeur in Mexico. At age seven, I had played an allegorical boy Jesus in a production of El Monje Blanco, by a Catalan poet, Eduardo Marquina. It featured fine costumes, carefully kept by a wardrobe mistress. In the play, my mother was played by Magda Holler, a luminous, beautiful blond actress; and my father was the movie actor Manolin, almost as pretty as she. The climax of the drama came when I, wearing an abbreviated toga and sandals, leaned against two abandoned boards of wood, and with my arms linked over them, converted them into a cross, whereupon my father in the play lamented: “Look! He is already crucified!” I could hear the sobs of women, and men, in the audience, and that encouraged me, when my scene was over, to run out into the audience, to be kissed and hugged by the tearful spectators—until someone was put in charge of me, to make sure I didn’t court the wonderful embraces.
During the play, smitten, I would take every opportunity to situate myself close to Magda Holler, to the point that I was relocated during our scenes together after she noticeably nudged me away onstage, almost causing me to trip on my sandals.
Would the kept woman look like her? No. Remembering her nudging rejection, I dismissed her as a contender.
Always fascinated by beauty, I had even coaxed my sister Olga, then still gangly, to enter a “worldwide search” for a woman to play a modern Salome in the western Salome, Where She Danced. I posed her in what I assumed—after many false attempts—made her look glamorous, a formidable feat, since she had not yet blossomed into the girl in a wedding dress. Constantly gnawing on a strand of her dark hair, she had grumbled as I snapped the small box camera I had acquired by saving bubble-gum wrappers. I mailed the pictures to the DeCarlo studio. Yvonne DeCarlo got the role. (Despondent about the fact that my sister was not the means to get us to Hollywood and into the movies, I wrote to Shirley Temple at her studio, asking whether she wanted me as a dance partner; she never answered.)
Would the kept woman look like Yvonne DeCarlo?
No, movie stars were unreal people who existed only on a flat screen, or in black-and-white photographs.
Would she look like Gloria Garcia, who had been Madama Butterfly in my father’s staging? No, no, no, pale and wispy—and strange-looking.
Would she look like Gloria Patiño, who had played Carmen wearing a fiery dress my mother had stayed up nights to sew? Carmen’s eyes were blackened with mascara and slanted wickedly; black, black hair cascaded over her forehead; huge earrings swayed with her hips; her lips exploded with lipstick. Certainly formidable.
Carmen! Yes, she might look like Carmen!
No, no, a kept woman looking like a decorated gypsy?
Like any kind of gypsy?
That thought made me shudder so obviously that my mother strengthened her grasp on my shoulders, thinking I would once again turn toward the back of the church in an attempt to locate the forbidden presence.
Certainly the kept woman would not look like the gypsies I had seen when a ragged band of them had invaded El Paso.
They had appeared overnight and camped in a trash-littered vacant lot; their makeshift wagon-trailer was a large boxlike contraption within which they all lived. How they had hauled it there was a puzzle. I saw a run-down car nearby, propped up on bricks, but it seemed incapable of lugging the trailer. Three or four children roamed in and out, never straying from the area of the wagon or from a swarthy older man and woman. These two—she with a headband, he with a pipe whose embers gleamed on and off like disturbed spirits—sat on makeshift steps in the late evening when the Texas sun turned bloody on the desert horizon.
Pondering what, plotting what? Behind a barricade of giant tumbleweeds abandoned by a recent windstorm, I studied them, fascinated, for what seemed like hours.
They all wore beads, somewhere, about their heads, their hands, their necks, glittery beads that I recognized as powerful amulets, sinister amulets capable of … anything! Everything!
Gauzy lights from candle lamps inside the wagon cast a mothy glow within the darkened interior of the trailer, openings into the dark cavern of the gypsies’ world. That world contained all that I feared then, dangers and mysteries, all that was alien, not yet understood, just felt, just feared.
Where had they come from? Why were they in Texas—in El Paso? What did they keep hidden inside the trailer?
The busiest in their band was a little girl, about twelve, very dark brown, dressed in a skirt made out of patches, all colors. She would run around in nervous spurts. As if there was an invisible wall that the man and the woman had constructed, she would halt, not stepping beyond what I assumed was a warning circle.
Once, when she stopped at that undrawn demarcation, she stared at the pile of weeds behind which I was hiding, penetrating it, I knew, and spotting me. I ran breathlessly away—and stumbled on a rock. When a threatening haze cleared, I looked up. There she stood, the brown gypsy girl, over me.
I jumped up, to resume my escape. She grabbed me. I struggled to release myself from her grip. She held on. I fought her more. She put her spangled arms around me and clutched me tightly against her.
Her darkening face was only inches from mine, her mouth so close that I could breathe what I was sure was
an evil vapor to hold me until the others would come and trap me, take me away with them, make me a gypsy. My mother would never know where I had gone. Before the brown girl could press her lips to mine, to inject me with a foul potion—but why was she smiling?—I managed to pull away.
Then the gypsies were gone, all the secrets I had attributed to them left intact, relinquishing no answers.
That, eventually, was more than right, because now, when I was age twelve, mysteries were not about vague fears, no; I was now dealing with actual mysteries, vaster mysteries, the mysteries of the world of adults, of scandals. I was now roaming their landscape like a spy, gathering evidence for conclusions I would draw much later, all whirling, not yet shaped, about my sister’s marriage, Señor’s threats, and about the kept woman whose image still remained elusive.
In the Church of the Sacred Heart with my sister Olga and her soon-to-be husband Luis kneeling before the altar like uncomfortable children, along with bridesmaids and ushers equally uncomfortable—and my older sister, Blanca, standing in her position as matron of honor, the only adult in the wedding party—I strained away from my mother’s hold to stare back at the mysterious woman. Instead, I noticed that my two miserable aunts in the back had been thrown into a state of agitation by the kept woman, their heads swirling around. My attention filtered them out, along with any other distraction, as I saw her!
She moved slowly—glided—out of the slash of light that had created the menacing shadow, which mellowed as she moved into the clearer light of the church. A conspiracy of multi-tinted light filtered through the colored mosaic of stained windows, creating a magical light that followed her; or rather, she seemed to entice it to come along with her, to a back pew, where she sat, kneeling and performing a reverential sign of the cross.
My mother poked me with the cross on her rosary, so insistently that I thought she had pinched me—a rare occurrence, since she never menaced us in any way. When my head resisted being turned away from the kept woman, my mother’s hands directed it back to the nuptials, but not before I knew that my life had been invaded by an awesome presence.
Hearing the urgent admonitions that my mother was whispering to me—so close to the altar—my sister glanced back and saw me squirming in the floppy jacket not entirely successfully taken in by my mother for the occasion. The girl I had played baseball with, the tomboy who somehow had found her way to the altar with a white veil—did she see herself in it for the first time?—returned. Her gleeful stare still on me, she tried to suppress a giggle that I echoed, causing hers to increase into laughter.
Then the football captain turned around, saw me, heard her—and tried unsuccessfully to stifle his own giggling. At the altar, one by one as if some immediate virus was running through them, the bridesmaids became convulsed with laughter, laughter raised to an even higher level by the ushers as they all turned back into the children they still were. My sister Blanca moved futilely about, randomly shaking those who were laughing, and, then, surrendering, issued what would have been a loud guffaw if the tittering had not risen so formidably. The priest looked on in horror for only a few seconds before he turned away, to face the martyred Christ on the altar, but also—his quivering body informed us—to suppress his own choked giggles.
My father’s soaring music smothered the laughter before the contagion could spread into the congregation.
The ceremony was over.
Taking advantage of the fact that the bridal party was now marching out—the participants still like strangely attired children playing parts in a high school play—I wrenched myself away from my mother’s clutch and turned to locate the startling woman.
Where had she gone?
Had she evaporated, a vision of my imagination? Or had she come in secret to El Paso only for the ceremony—and with a changed name, fearing Señor’s threats? If so, she wasn’t courageous, as I had imagined—she had fled immediately. I felt profoundly betrayed. So I would never see her again, never see her.
The tyrant Señor did not appear. The groom’s mother had even managed to step out of the range of Señor’s radar to peek in on the ceremony and provide a secret benediction with fingers dipped in holy water at the door.
As we walked out of the church, my mother bathed in tears, my father’s music surging wondrously, I still searched forlornly for the magical presence, hoping that I was wrong, that she hadn’t fled afraid. Only the hideous aunts were there. I never could decide which of the two was the uglier; they were like homely twins. I assumed my mother had been given all the beauty allowed the daughters in the family. Now I heard them hiss loudly to each other:
“Can you believe that that woman—”
“—that immoral woman—”
“—that she would dare disgrace the holy church of God—”
“—and defy her father’s warnings!”
3
In Mexico at the time, among Mexican gamblers, politicians, businessmen, gangsters—a tentative “upper class” collectively called “los políticos”—mistresses seemed to be required. A few of the mistresses might surface from the streets and alleys along which they strolled like painted phantoms in and out of the smoky light that squeezed out of bars. Some of the mistresses might come from houses, a stratum a few steps higher than that of the alleys. The lucky ones, not many, graduated to become madams, and, chosen, lived in the peripheries of their keepers’ lives. A very few, the most fortunate, became wives, but they could erase only some of the stain of scandal; they were never accepted in the desirable echelons of Mexican high society. Their practiced veneer of sophistication did not camouflage the tough, rough women they were as they battled to retain their positions before a young mistress might shove them out of their relatively comfortable lives in miniature mansions, gaudy imitations of the homes populated by the most powerful men and their wives.
My mother’s brother, Carlos, who had accrued some amount of wealth from sources unknown and who still lived in Juárez, had such a woman. According to gossip, she had been a house prostitute who had worked her way up to being a madam. Now she was married to my uncle, set up in a flimsily opulent home, with Indian maids in constant attendance.
I had gone to Juárez with my mother once, to buy papaya that I had learned was good for developing muscles, which I wanted badly before my ten-year-old body made that possible. My mother decided to drop in on my uncle. That’s what we did then, dropped in—not everyone had a telephone, and we could not afford one.
We were led into the large house by an Indian maid, a silent woman who seemed to be in a defensive trance. My uncle was not in. But our presence was announced. We were abandoned inside a hall glittering with several—yes, several—glassy chandeliers, now tinkling mysteriously.
We followed loud voices into another room, voices so loud that they must have accounted for the nervous chandeliers. There sat Carmen, my uncle’s wife, at a round table, playing poker, with four other hefty women who resembled her remarkably, all dressed like her in expensive clothes that still looked tawdry, altered to create deep cleavage to display abundant breasts, which one or another of the women occasionally hoisted, a formidable shove upward to expose more haughty flesh.
A large bottle of whiskey ruled the middle of the table, a bottle lifted frequently by each of the women for yet another long shot into their glasses, or, hurriedly, into their mouths. From Carmen’s lips, a cigarette dangled. All the other women were smoking, puffing relentlessly after swallows of the liquor and between noisy epithets at the vagaries of luck. The stench of smoke filled the air. The Indian woman waited against a wall to be summoned for any urgent necessity—more liquor.
Carmen only glanced at us and nodded in acknowledgement of our presence, an attempted smile thwarted by the precariousness of her cigarette. Involved in a tense moment in the game of poker, she dropped a card with such a triumphant thud that it stilled the other voices. “There!”
Another woman dropped her own card, even more triumphantly. “I win!”
she said and reached for the pile of pesos.
Carmen glowered at the exposed cards. “I say you cheated, cabrona,” she accused.
“I say you’re a liar,” spat the offended woman, “and you’re the cabrona, a bitch—and worse, a sore loser.” She stood up to leave, wobbling, with the spoils of the game.
Carmen’s body shot up, just as shakily—both women propped themselves up by holding onto the table—and out came a small revolver that Carmen had hidden somewhere out of sight, perhaps in her lap. She pointed it at the other women.
The women at the table prepared to dodge, since the pointed gun was wavering dizzily in Carmen’s hand and her eyes squinted as if to verify her aim. The Indian maid fled.
“Put that gun down and I’ll take you on, mano a mano,” the accused woman bargained. “We’ll settle this with our fists.”
My uncle’s wife narrowed her squint to the point that her eyes closed, and she seemed about to fall asleep standing; still, her lips clung to the mere butt of a cigarette that was making its way into her mouth. Her eyes shot wide open.
“Sit down, desgraciada,” she commanded the other woman, and underscored her order by firming the revolver with the aid of her other hand.
“Estás judida, maldita,” the other woman held her ground, claiming that Carmen was fucked and cursed.
“Well, then—” Carmen cocked her revolver with a loud click, and pointed it somewhat unequivocally.
“Well, then!” the other woman echoed. She fished into her purse, and out came her own revolver.
The dueling revolvers were pointed so unsteadily that the other women ducked under the table, sending the offending cards cascading to the floor.
My mother hurried us out of the house, pushing me along because I kept looking back, hoping to see a scene that would rival the ones I saw in old movies during Revival Week at the Texas Grand Theater.