That you could have the power to rally a people when a country was born, and again during civil war, and during a farmworkers’ strike in California made me think maybe there is power in my mother’s patience, strength in my grandmother’s endurance. Because those who suffer have a special power, don’t they? The power of understanding someone else’s pain. And understanding is the beginning of healing.
When I learned your real name is Coatlaxopeuh, She Who Has Dominion over Serpents, when I recognized you as Tonantzín, and learned your names are Teteoinnan, Toci, Xochiquetzal, Tlazolteotl, Coatlicue, Chalchiuhtlicue, Coyolxauhqui, Huixtocihuatl, Chicomecoatl, Cihuacoatl, when I could see you as Nuestra Señora de la Soledad, Nuestra Señora de los Remedios, Nuestra Señora del Perpetuo Socorro, Nuestra Señora de San Juan de los Lagos, Our Lady of Lourdes, Our Lady of Mount Carmel, Our Lady of the Rosary, Our Lady of Sorrows, I wasn’t ashamed, then, to be my mother’s daughter, my grandmother’s granddaughter, my ancestors’ child.
When I could see you in all your facets, all at once the Buddha, the Tao, the true Messiah, Yahweh, Allah, the Heart of the Sky, the Heart of the Earth, the Lord of the Near and Far, the Spirit, the Light, the Universe, I could love you, and, finally, learn to love me.
Mighty Guadalupana Coatlaxopeuh Tonantzín,
What “little miracle” could I pin here? Braid of hair in its place and know that I thank you.
Rosario (Chayo) De Leon
Austin, Tejas
Los Boxers
Whoops! There goes your soda water. See. Now look. Mama, come get your little one. Watch her now, she’s barefoot and could cut herself. Guess you get to mop it up, huh? I haven’t dropped anything in a long time. Since I was a kid, I guess. I can’t remember the last time I dropped a soda water. Big Red sure is sticky, ain’t it? Gets in the clothes and don’t wash out, and leaves the kids’ mouths painted like clowns, right? She sure is pretty. You betcha. But oh kids, they’s cute when they’re little, but by the time they start turning ugly, it’s too late, you already love them.
Got to watch not to buy them soda water in a glass bottle next time. Specially not Big Red. But that’s the one they keep asking for the most, right? You betcha you can have my basket. My stuff ain’t ready yet.
When my wife died I used to go to a place over on Calaveras way bigger than this. This ain’t nothing. That place had twice as many machines. And they had dryers that was fifteen minutes for a quarter, so you didn’t have to waste an extra quarter for say polyester that dries real quick. There was only two of them, though—you had to be sharp and grab ’em soon as they was free.
Here everything’s thirty minutes for fifty cents. ’Spensive when you got to keep dropping quarters and quarters and quarters. Sometimes if you’re lucky you could maybe get a machine that’s got time on it, see. Throw in the light stuff that dries like that. Socks, washcloths, the fifty-fifty shirts maybe so they don’t get wrinkled, right?
My jeans could use more than thirty minutes, though. Thirty minutes ain’t enough, but I’d rather take them home damp and hang them on the windowsill before I drop in another fifty cents. It’s ’cause I dry them on low, see. Before I used to dry them on high, and they’d always fit me tight later on. Lady at the K mart said, You gotta dry your jeans on low, otherwise they shrink on you. She’s right. I always set them on low now, see, even though it takes longer and they’re still damp after thirty minutes. Least they fit right. I learned that much.
You know what else? When you wash, it ain’t enough to separate the clothes by temperature. You need to separate them by weight. Towels with towels. Jeans with jeans. Sheets with sheets. And always make sure you use plenty of water. That’s the secret. Even if it’s just a few things in the machine. Lots of water, got it? So’s the clothes all wash better and don’t take any wear and tear, see, and last longer. That’s another trick I picked up too.
Make sure you don’t let those clothes sit in that dryer now. You’re welcome. Gotta keep on top of them, right? Soon as they stop spinning, get ’em out of there. Otherwise it just means more work later.
My T-shirts get wrinkled even if I dry them fifteen minutes hot or cold. That’s T-shirts for you. Always get a little wrinkled one way or another. They’s funny, T-shirts.
You know how to keep a stain from setting? Guess. Ice cube. Yup. My wife taught me that one. I used to think she was crazy. Anytime I spilled something on the tablecloth, off she’d go running to the ice box. Spot my shirts with mole, ice cube. Stain a towel with blood, ice cube. Kick over a beer on the living-room rug, you got it, ice cube.
Oh boy, she was clean. Everything in the house looked new even though it was old. Towels, sheets, embroidered pillowcases, and them little table runners like doilies, them you put on chairs for your head, those, she had them white and stiff like the collar of a nun. You betcha. Starched and ironed everything. My socks, my T-shirts. Even ironed los boxers. Yup, drove me crazy with her ice cubes. But now that she’s dead, well, that’s just how life is.
There Was a Man,
There Was a Woman
There was a man and there was a woman. Every payday, every other Friday, the man went to the Friendly Spot Bar to drink and spend his money. Every payday, every other Friday, the woman went to the Friendly Spot Bar to drink and spend her money. The man was paid on the second and fourth Friday of the month. The woman was paid on the first and third Friday. Because of this the man and the woman did not know each other.
The man drank and drank with his friends and believed if he drank and drank, the words for what he was feeling would slip out more readily, but usually he simply drank and said nothing. The woman drank and drank with her friends and believed if she drank and drank, the words for what she was feeling would slip out more readily, but usually she simply drank and said nothing. Every other Friday the man drank his beer and laughed loudly. Every Friday in between the woman drank her beer and laughed loudly.
At home when the night came down and the moon appeared, the woman raised her pale eyes to the moon and cried. The man in his bed contemplated the same moon, and thought about the millions who had looked at the moon before him, those who had worshiped or loved or died before that same moon, mute and lovely. Now blue light streamed inside his window and tangled itself with the glow of the sheets. The moon, the same round O. The man looked and swallowed.
Tin Tan Tan
Me abandonaste, mujer, porque soy muy pobre
Y por tener la desgracia de ser casado.
Que voy hacer si yo soy el abandonado,
Abandonado sea por el amor de Dios.
—“El Abandonado”
Little thorn in my soul, pebble in my shoe, jewel of my life, the passionate doll who has torn my heart in two, tell me, cruel beauty that I adore, why you torment me. I have the misfortune of being both poor and without your affection. When the hope of your caresses flowered in my soul, happiness blossomed in my tomorrows. But now that you have yanked my golden dreams from me, I shiver from this chalice of pain like a tender white flower tossed in rain. Return my life to me, and end this absurd pain. If not, Rogelio Velasco will have loved in vain.
Until death do us part, said your eyes, but not your heart. All, all illusion. A caprice of your flirtatious woman’s soul. I confess I am lost between anguish and forgetting. And now if I dissolve my tears in dissipation, know, my queen, only you are to blame. My fragile heart will never be the same.
Providence knew what was in store, the day I arrived innocently at your door. Dressed in my uniform and carrying the tools of my trade, without knowing destiny waited for me, I knocked. You opened your arms, my heaven, but kept your precious heart locked.
If God wills it, perhaps these words of sentiment will convince you. Perhaps I can exterminate the pests of doubt that infest your house. Perhaps the pure love I had to offer wasn’t enough, and another now is savoring your honeyed nectar. But none will love you so honorably and true as the way Rogelio Velasco loved you.
They say of the p
oet and madman we all have a little. Even my life I would give for your exquisite treasures. But poor me. Though others may lure you with jewels and riches, all I can offer is this humble measure.
Alone, all alone in the world, sad and small like a nightingale serenading the infinite. How could a love so tender and sweet become the cross of my pain? No, no, I can’t conceive I won’t receive your precious lips again. My eyes are tired of weeping, my heart of beating. If perhaps some crystal moment before dawn or twilight you remember me, bring only a bouquet of tears to lay upon my thirsty grave.
Tan TAN
Bien Pretty
Ya me voy,
ay te dejo en San Antonio.
—FLACO JIMÉNEZ
He wasn’t pretty unless you were in love with him. Then any time you met anyone with those same monkey eyes, that burnt-sugar skin, the face wider than it was long, well, you were in for it.
His family came from Michoacán. All chaparritos, every one of them—short even by Mexican standards—but to me he was perfect.
I’m to blame. Flavio Munguía was just ordinary Flavio until he met me. I filled up his head with a million and one cariñitos. Then he was ruined forever. Walked different. Looked people in the eye when he talked. Ran his eyes across every pair of nalgas and chichis he saw. I am sorry.
Once you tell a man he’s pretty, there’s no taking it back. They think they’re pretty all the time, and I suppose, in a way, they are. It’s got to do with believing it. Just the way I used to believe I was pretty. Before Flavio Munguía wore all my prettiness away.
Don’t think I haven’t noticed my girlfriends back home who got the good-lookers. They all look twice their age now, old from all the corajes exploding inside their hearts and bellies.
Because a pretty man is like a too-fancy car or a real good stereo or a microwave oven. Late or early, sooner or later, you’re just asking for it. Know what I mean?
Flavio. He wrote poems and signed them “Rogelio Velasco.” And maybe I would still be in love with him if he wasn’t already married to two women, one in Tampico and the other in Matamoros. Well, that’s what they say.
Who knows why the universe singled me out. Lupe Arredondo, stupid art thou amongst all women. Once I was as solid as a sailor on her sea legs, the days rolling steadily beneath me, and then—Flavio Munguía arrived.
Flavio entered my life via a pink circular rolled into a tube and wedged in the front gate curlicue:
$ SPECIAL $
PROMOTION
LA CUCARACHA APACHURRADA PEST CONTROL
OVER 10 YEARS OF EXPERIENCE
If you are Tired of ROACHES and Hate them like many People do, but can’t afford to pay alot of Money $$$$ to have a house Free of ROACHES ROACHES ROACHES!!! We will treat your kitchen, behind and under your refrigerator and stove, inside your cabinets and even exterminate your living room all for only $20.00. Don’t be fooled by the price. Call now. 555–2049 or Beeper #555–5912. We also kill spiders, beetles, scorpions, ants, fleas, and many more insects.
!!So Don’t Hesitate Call Us Now!!
You’ll be glad you did call us, Thank you very much.
Your CUCARACHAS will be DEAD
(*$5.00 extra for each additional room)
A dead cockroach lying on its back followed as illustration.
It’s because of the river and the palm and pecan trees and the humidity and all that we have so many palmetto bugs, roaches so big they look Pleistocene. I’d never seen anything like them before. We don’t have bugs like that in California, at least not in the Bay. But like they say, everything’s bigger and better in Texas, and that holds especially true for bugs.
So I live near the river in one of those houses with wood floors varnished the color of Coca-Cola. It isn’t mine. It belongs to Irasema Izaura Coronado, a famous Texas poet who carries herself as if she is directly descended from Ixtaccíhuatl or something. Her husband is an honest-to-God Huichol curandero, and she’s no slouch either, with a Ph.D. from the Sorbonne.
A Fulbright whisked them to Nayarit for a year, and that’s how I got to live here in the turquoise house on East Guenther, not exactly in the heart of the historic King William district—it’s on the wrong side of South Alamo to qualify, the side where the peasantry lives—but close enough to the royal mansions that attract every hour on the hour the Pepto Bismol–pink tourist buses wearing sombreros.
I called La Cucaracha Apachurrada Pest Control the first month I house-sat Her Highness’s home. I was sharing residence with:
(8) Oaxacan black pottery pieces
signed Diego Rivera monotype
upright piano
star-shaped piñata
(5) strings of red chile lights
antique Spanish shawl
St. Jacques Majeur Haitian voodoo banner
cappuccino maker
lemonwood Olinalá table
replica of the goddess Coatlicue
life-size papier-mâché skeleton signed by the Linares family
Frida Kahlo altar
punched tin Virgen de Guadalupe chandelier
bent-twig couch with Mexican sarape cushions
seventeenth-century Spanish retablo
tree-of-life candlestick
Santa Fe plate rack
(2) identical sets of vintage Talavera Mexican dishware
eye-of-God crucifix
knotty pine armoire
pie safe
death mask of Pancho Villa with mouth slightly open
Texana chair upholstered in cowskin with longhorn horns for the arms and legs
(7) Afghan throw rugs
iron bed with a mosquito net canopy
Beneath this veneer of Southwest funk, of lace and silk and porcelain, beyond the embroidered pillows that said DUERME, MI AMOR, the Egyptian cotton sheets and eyelet bedspread, the sigh of air that barely set the gauze bedroom curtains trembling, the blue garden, the pink hydrangea, the gilt-edged tea set, the abalone-handled silver, the obsidian hair combs, the sticky, cough-medicine-and-powdered-sugar scent of magnolia blossoms, there were, as well, the roaches.
I was afraid to open drawers. I never went into the kitchen after dark. They were the same Coca-Cola color as the floors, hard to spot unless they gave themselves away in panic.
The worst thing about them wasn’t their size, nor the crunch they gave under a shoe, nor the yellow grease that oozed from their guts, nor the thin shells they shed translucent as popcorn hulls, nor the possibility they might be winged and fly into your hair, no.
What made them unbearable was this. The scuttling in the middle of the night. An ugly clubfoot grate like a dead thing being dragged across the floor, a louder-than-life munching during their cannibal rites, a nervous pitter, and then patter when they scurried across the Irish-linen table runners, leaving a trail of black droppings like coffee grounds, sticky feet rustling across the clean stack of typewriter paper in the desk drawer, my primed canvasses, the set of Wedgewood rose teacups, the lace Victorian wedding dress hanging on the bedroom wall, the dried baby’s breath, the white wicker vanity, the cutwork pillowcases, your blue raven hair scented with Tres Flores brilliantine.
Flavio, it’s true. The house charms me now as it did then. The folk art, the tangerine-colored walls, the urracas at sunset. But what would you have done if you were me? I’d driven all the way from northern California to central Texas with my past pared down to what could fit inside a van. A futon. A stainless-steel wok. My grandmother’s molcajete. A pair of flamenco shoes with crooked heels. Eleven huipiles. Two rebozos—de bolita y de seda. My Tae Kwon Do uniform. My crystals and copal. A portable boom box and all my Latin tapes—Rubén Blades, Astor Piazzolla, Gipsy Kings, Inti Illimani, Violeta Parra, Mercedes Sosa, Agustín Lara, Trio Los Panchos, Pedro Infante, Lydia Mendoza, Paco de Lucía, Lola Beltrán, Silvio Rodríguez, Celia Cruz, Juan Peña “El Lebrijano,” Los Lobos, Lucha Villa, Dr. Loco and his Original Corrido Boogie Band.
Sure, I knew I was heading for trouble the day I agr
eed to come to Texas. But not even the I Ching warned me what I was in for when Flavio Munguía drove up in the pest-control van.
“TEX-as! What are you going to do there?” Beatriz Soliz asked this, a criminal defense lawyer by day, an Aztec dance instructor by night, and my closet comadre in the world. Beatriz and I go back a long way. Back to the grape-boycott demonstrations in front of the Berkeley Safeway. And I mean the first grape strike.
“I thought I’d give Texas a year maybe. At least that. It can’t be that bad.”
“A year!!! Lupe, are you crazy? They still lynch Meskins down there. Everybody’s got chain saws and gun racks and pickups and Confederate flags. Aren’t you scared?”
“Girlfriend, you watch too many John Wayne movies.”
To tell the truth, Texas did scare the hell out of me. All I knew about Texas was it was big. It was hot. And it was bad. Added to this was my mama’s term teja-NO-te for tejano, which is sort of like “Texcessive,” in a redneck kind of way. “It was one of those teja-NO-tes that started it,” Mama would say. “You know how they are. Always looking for a fight.”
I’d said yes to an art director’s job at a community cultural center in San Antonio. Eduardo and I had split. For good. C’est finis. End of the road, buddy. Adiós y suerte. San Francisco is too small a town to go around dragging your three-legged heart. Café Pícaro was off limits because it was Eddie’s favorite. I stopped frequenting the Café Bohème too. Missed several good openings at La Galería. Not because I was afraid of running into Eddie, but because I was terrified of confronting “la otra.” My nemesis, in other words. A financial consultant for Merrill Lynch. A blonde.
Eddie, who I’d supported with waitress jobs that summer we were both struggling to pay our college loans and the rent on that tiny apartment on Balmy—big enough when we were in love, but too small when love was scarce. Eddie, who I met the year before I started teaching at the community college, the year after he gave up community organizing and worked part-time as a paralegal. Eddie, who taught me how to salsa, who lectured me night and day about human rights in Guatemala, El Salvador, Chile, Argentina, South Africa, but never said a word about the rights of Blacks in Oakland, the kids of the Tenderloin, the women who shared his bed. Eduardo. My Eddie. That Eddie. With a blonde. He didn’t even have the decency to pick a woman of color.
Woman Hollering Creek: And Other Stories Page 12