by Olson, Toby
“No,” she said, moving up behind me and pressing her hands against the small of my back. “This house means nothing to him. He has many. It was Ana, the weeping woman, and that Calaca, a business between them I had arranged. The general had no part in it. It was a matter of honor.”
And I suppose it was honor too that kept the rhythm of our relationship so consonant. I was white as a criollo, but no Spaniard, and she was no mestizo, but pure Indian. And though I was a product of the oppressor, I was a child to her and to myself, though becoming a man through her. Neither of us was part of the franchise, though we were both making our livelihood from it.
I had money to burn, and I bought Chepa jewelry and clothing in the square. I bought small pieces of furniture, pottery, pictures for the walls and ice for the beer and wine, strapping it all into the de Havilland’s forward cockpit before I commandeered the plane each evening. Some noons I would ferry Chepa back to Tampico for grocery shopping. Then we would fly out together as the sun was setting. Though the city was hot and malarial, wind blew down from the foothills in a steady stream to cool our house. “It’s coming from where my people are,” she said. Her well was a deep one, and the water was cold and sweet on the tongue.
In the night, after dinner and brandy and cigars, Chepa would light many candles and move the screen away from the foot of the bed. We’d undress in the shadows, then pull the coverlet away and lie down beside each other on the cool white sheets. The pink Estrella would sit in a chair across from us, grinning, her red tongue lolling over her lip, Don Lupe curled like a healthy pine bough on the floor below her. Only Rata would be moving, a small piece of yellow fruit visible occasionally in candle and starlight as she sniffed at the rugs and in the corners of the room, looking for something she could never seem to find. Then Chepa would turn to me, her hair and lips brushing my shoulder and the soft flesh on the inside of her thigh crossing my knee. I’d feel her breath on my cheek, the whisper of her words so close to my ear it was as though my head was a tabernacle and her voice was inside it, disembodied, and as intimate as my own thoughts might be, were I thinking. She’d be singing, those soft, guttural Indian songs, then telling any number of stories as if they were all part of the same one.
A society woman on the streets of the Zona Rosa in Mexico City. She’s come from New York and her husband, a businessman, has given her the day for shopping. She’s done that, eaten a light lunch, and now she’s bored. The clothing and the pieces of fine jewelry she’s bought as souvenirs for friends make but a small bundle and a light one and she has only a broad shoulder purse and a sturdy shopping bag for toting. So she sets off into the back streets of the Zona, down into those byways where only Mexicans live.
The streets are empty, it’s siesta, and deep in a shadowy alley between a bookstore and an artist’s studio, she glimpses a sliver of movement as she passes. She stops, pauses, then returns to the alley’s mouth, and there, growing increasingly visible as it limps forward from the shadows, is a dog.
It’s a very small dog, short-haired, with large oval ears and a pug snout. Its color is a dirty white, and over the foreleg it holds limply above the ground, its chest is a row of bird bones, and its eyes, its protruding eyes, like those of a just-born calf, are rheumy and running, and it’s those eyes that get her.
A Chihuahua, she thinks, poor thing, and she squats down gracefully, places her shopping bag to stand alone on the broken pavement beside her, then reaches her palm and her opening fingers out toward it. The dog limps from the final shadows and to her hand, extends his snout tentatively and sniffs her fingers. Then, his mooning eyes in her eyes, protruding from his small skull as if they might pop out should he stare much longer, his salmony tongue slides through his lips and touches the tip of one of them. Her fingers curl back quickly. She’s a little startled, but she’s undeterred, and she takes the silk scarf from her neck, makes a kind of hammock out of it, then reaches down and lifts the dog, light as a single tortilla, swaddles him and stuffs him gently down into her shoulder purse, among the jewelry, cosmetics and air freshener.
This is a good woman, you can see, and unapproachable, so when she does not tell her husband about the dog, smuggles him aboard the plane, it is no wonder she is successful, given her husband, her fine clothing and demeanor. The dog leaves the bag only when the two have reached the woman’s apartment in New York City, the guest room that her husband never enters.
But the dog will not eat. The woman tries everything, and still he fails. Soon he no longer limps, though he might stand shivering beside the guest bed. And his eyes are closing, victims of an oozing infection.
Veterinary medicine? She’s tried that, pills and potions gathered from friends surreptitiously. And every imaginable hard food and liquid sustenance too. He’s sipped only at a saucer of milk, and this briefly, but that gives her the idea, mother’s milk. She’s heard it somewhere, a thing about animals, and she sets out with efficiency to find it, and she does.
The dog drinks and drinks again, and for a few days he’s limping, his eyes seem to be opening. But then he takes a turn and is failing again, even more quickly than before. No longer can he stand now, and his rheumy eyes have closed completely. He begins to resemble a premature fetus, a small dirty bladder of some kind, curled into a shallowly panting bit of wet empty flesh at the foot of the guest bed.
The woman, in desperation, calls the family doctor, who recommends a veterinarian of stature. Then she calls him and makes a special appointment for the afternoon. She goes then to the dog and lifts him, in a thin rubber pillowcase this time, and settles him gently on a bed made of dishrags deep in a cloth satchel.
They arrive at the doctor’s office on time and are ushered right into the examination room, where the woman takes great care in lifting the dog out of the bag. She places the small rubber package on the shining surgical table, then steps away, and the doctor steps forward and peels back the swaddling.
The dog has become nothing to the woman, nothing surprising that is, so when the doctor jumps back, a little shaken at the sight, she is offended. It’s only a dog, she says, though a very sick one. Ah, well, the doctor says. But did you feed it mother’s milk? I did, the woman says, and they both look down at the dog, only now recognizing that its eyes are half open and completely glazed over and that it is not breathing.
My poor, poor dog! the woman cries, her hands fluttering near her face.
Poor, yes, the doctor says, that is true. But this is no dog, Chihuahua or otherwise. This is a Mexican slum rat, numerous in those cities. Did you find it there?
The story unfolds no further, since the point has been made. It’s the weakness, cowardice, and filth of the Mexican and his representative dog, which is really a rat, or often mistaken for one and vice versa. But this has been a modern version of the story and a reversal is coming, which is not really part of the story but is suggested by it.
In the version just told, the woman is like the woman in any such story, elegant and refined, but though she is these things, and kind, she is also useless. There are no details in her life here, but for her concern with shopping, and though she is possessed of certain efficiencies she had no place to put them, but in the service of the failed resuscitation of a rat. The woman’s husband is completely absent in this version, a piece of reality and social commentary, since that’s the way it is up north.
And you might notice too a hint of the commercial quality of the fine main streets of the Zona Rosa here and how these are in contrast to those invisible byways behind it where the Mexicans live. The woman finds the dog in a dark alley and the concrete is cracked. But the alley is between two shops, one a depository of intellect, the other of art, those two crucial elements of the survival of a culture, the real Mexico here, el corazón of the healthy beating under the drumming of commerce.
And in the reversal the story has not quite ended though the point has been made, because the doctor was wrong. The thing left on the examination table was no rat at all, but a chihuahua of mi
xed strain, one who had drunk of pure mother’s milk and was not dead but was rising up in the night, his blood cleansed by that milk in the way Mexico might be cleansed, returning to the children of the Indian mother. For the pure chihuahua is an Indian, one who came down from those mountains behind us where I came from. He’s preening and turning in slow circles, his nails clicking on the slick metal, free now of the attentions of woman and doctor and the manipulations that might come from them. It’s dark in the room, and the dog shakes his bum leg and stretches, his eyes blinking, then opening wide as small saucers as he stares down over the table’s edge. He licks his lips. Then he jumps into the void of blackness below.
Her feet hit, her pads thumping on the hardwood of this floor. There she is now, returned to the female through her mother’s milk. In our candles’ light she searches the room for something she might never find. See her? She’s passing low over the carpet there. She looks like a piece of fruit. I think she must be the Indian phoenix that could rise again, redeeming a rodent and the meaning of a hue. This is why I have named my chihuahua Rata and why I have colored her yellow.
And yet this is not the story I have set out to tell, but one that begins on a windy morning in which Chepa had awakened me with the long smooth muscles of her small body and with the sun and we were active in a cool breeze on our bed. She had a way of holding me with her legs, her voice like a strange urging instrument as she fingered the base of my spine. But that is yet another story, and private, and inexpressible even now in this mind of an old man as he remembers.
Chepa stood in swirls of dust as I fired up the de Havilland. I could see the pink Estrella, her long coat feathering in the wind and brightening into cotton candy as the last shafts of sun were swallowed in the high clouds. She was trotting low, her muzzle close to the ground, heading back up the porch steps to join Don Lupe and Rata in the doorway. My goggles were sandblown and the house shimmered and I could feel grit at the cups’ edges. I glanced ahead, under the upper wing, and could see the planters rocking at the runway’s end through the prop’s whir. I looked down at Chepa. Her hand was guarding the side of her face and wind blew her loose dress against her body, revealing those large breasts that had not known mother’s milk, though I had sucked for it. She grinned up at me and I kissed my lips down at her. She wiggled as she waved me away. Our beautiful routine.
Once into the sky, the de Havilland was severely buffeted. My wings were rocking, my tail pushed to the side, and I had to cram my scarf down into the neck of my jacket to keep it from blowing across my face. Wind whistled along the leather of my flight cap where it hugged my cheek. So I took the plane higher, climbing until I was just under the clouds, no more than twenty yards below them. They were thick and almost black, and they raced over me, coming in from the sea. I felt the plane’s nose tip up toward them and had to look away, disoriented.
I was flying very high, and soon I could see the city of Tampico far below, and beyond it, ten miles off, the Gulf of Mexico. I could see the tiny shapes of a few tankers. They seemed still and untroubled by storm, but there were flashes of white in the dark blanket of water they rested upon, waves surely, and the sky was a roiling black wall where it joined the sea at horizon.
I had to fight the stick getting the plane down, and in my landing the wheels bounced and squeaked, then did it again. I parked the craft, chocked and tied it down, then struggled in the wind across the concrete to the Texas Oil office, glancing back once to see the de Havilland dancing at its moorings, its wings vibrating in gusts. I knew there’d be no flights that day, and I was already figuring how I might get back to Chepa as I opened the office door and saw Joaquín sitting at the large desk where the mail and parts chits were distributed. He was the only one there, and he looked up from the documents he’d been reading and smiled.
“¿Qué tal, hombre?”
“Well,” I said. “It’s a real pisser out there.”
“Ah, yes,” he said, and got up from the table. “A good storm. No sky riding today. How, then, is Chepa?”
“Fine,” I said. “Quite good.”
“Well, that’s good,” he said.
He’d risen in formality, and once I was in the chair across from him he sat down again. He was dressed up, in a fine cotton suit, and he wore a tie and his hair had been carefully combed and oiled. I’d already given up on the idea of getting back to Chepa, not in this weather, so when he indicated, somewhat obscurely and delicately, that he could use my help, I said fine.
“But why the suit?”
“That’s it!” Joaquín answered, lifting his hands from the papers. “It’s a meeting in Chorreras. With General Corzo.”
He must have seen something in my face, for he paused, his hands still in the air.
“Can this be a good idea?” I said. “My being there?”
“Oh, yes,” he said. “That’s right. A very good idea in fact.” He’d gathered up the papers and was rising again. “Come now. I’ll tell you about it on our way.”
Chorreras was located on the Gulf, near where the Panuco River emptied into it. It had once been a thriving fishing village, much like so many others along the sea’s gentle curve of shoreline, but the arrival of oil interests had changed things. The construction of sea terminals, spills from the tankers, both had killed fishing, and with pipelines had come a need for workers and administrators. Chorreras looked much the same as it always had, but now its ramshackled stucco buildings contained offices and apartments. Some fishermen and their families remained still, and there was an old church and a village hall too, but most of the population was foreign—American, French and British—and there were no more than fifty Mexican workers at the few national terminals, like Corona and Aguila.
The driver moved the company car slowly through the busy streets of Tampico, heading for Laguna de Carpentero and the small-gauge railroad that would take us along the bank of the Panuco and out to the sea. I sat beside Joaquín in the backseat, sniffing his subtle cologne and listening to what he had to say. Outside the car window, the streets and the wooden sidewalks were crowded with pedestrians. It was the end of October and the city had been hot, still and humid for weeks. But the cool, stormy weather had cleansed and freshened the air, blowing out the acrid refinery smoke, and the people were taking a windy pleasure in it, standing before shops, pausing to look up into the cloudy sky, their hair flicking at their ears and napes, fingers holding the brims of their hats.
We passed the mouths of crowded side streets that were decked out for fiesta, ribbons and banners flapping over makeshift archways, women turning in traditional costume under them. We came upon the Ciudad de Pekín, where I’d eaten my first Chinese food with Chepa, and saw a small orchestra of men in pigtails playing strange-looking instruments, the refined and simple sounds momentarily everything in our ears, then disappearing suddenly as we moved by. We passed a bakery, a table of small white candy bones and skulls on the sidewalk in front of it, and a man dressed like a skeleton staggered in half-dancing drunkenness into the street so that our driver had to jerk at the wheel to avoid hitting him.
“It’s not just the weather,” Joaquín said, a faint scent of mint touching my nostrils as he turned and looked out the window too. “It’s the Day of the Dead. Not the day itself, but first days of celebration.”
“And Calaca?” I said. “Will he be there too do you think?”
“Yes, well I suppose he will be there, no doubt of it.”
It was to be a formal negotiation only, Joaquín had said, talk of figures, the signing of a few documents, then a delivery of cash. Corzo, like most of the generals, required this, a way of legitimizing what was seen by the oil companies as no more than extortion. But the generals saw it as tribute, as well as a slap in the face to Obregón. Some were no more than gangsters, but Corzo was old enough to remember his legitimate power in the revolution and young enough still to have hope for the future correctives he felt he would be a part of. Joaquín wasn’t all that sure about his arm
y, the two dozen men who like Calaca had joined only after the constitution had been signed. They had been with General Corzo for three years now, though whether it was wealth or patriotism that drew them wasn’t clear.
“And why me?” I’d asked. “I’m surely not dressed for it.”
Joaquín laughed. “Well, it might be the house, I think. Surely it’s Chepa. Curiosity? Beyond that I can’t be sure. He doesn’t know you of course. But he knows of you.”
“He asked for me?”
“Yes, well, in fact he did. But it was just asking. Nothing more than that.”
“I’ll have nothing to do there then.”
“No, not that. Just to be there. It’s all very formal. You’ll see. Nothing more.”
The clack of the train’s steel wheels and the grind of the couplings made talking impossible even though the compartment was very small, like a child’s playhouse, and our shoulders were brushing. Out the window, beyond the pipeline running below the track bed, the Panuco was cooking, waves slapping at rocks along the shoreline. I saw flying fish pop out of the swells, fight for a few feet against the wind, then fold into small cigars and disappear into the river’s dark waters.
We passed agitators, warehouses, paraffin plants. Black smoke rose in solid columns from the chimneys of stillstacks, then quickly dissipated in the stormy air. We passed the Corona terminal, then the Waters-Pierce, and beyond that, where the Panuco turned, I spied that oddly virginal banking, a stand of banana palms and resida, the place where Chepa had taken me fishing.
It had been early on in our relationship, and I had still been searching for ways to be with her in those quiet moments that were unattached to loving or the times in anticipation of it or in the sweet and equalizing hours afterward. I couldn’t quite figure who I could be with her, young as I was, how take the place of a man in her presence. And I was often awkward and silent, and that made her an urging mother, which was not exactly what I wanted. At least I didn’t think I did.