A month hadn’t passed since I unpacked the van, but I’d already convinced myself San Antonio was a mistake. I couldn’t understand how any Spanish priest in his right mind decided to sit right down in the middle of nowhere and build a mission with no large body of water for miles. I’d always lived near the ocean. I felt landlocked and dusty. Light so white it left me dizzy, sun bleached as an onion.
In the Bay, whenever I got depressed, I always drove out to Ocean Beach. Just to sit. And, I don’t know, something about looking at water, how it just goes and goes and goes, something about that I found very soothing. As if somehow I were connected to every ripple that was sending itself out and out until it reached another shore.
But I hadn’t found anything to replace it in San Antonio. I wondered what San Antonians did.
I was putting in sixty-hour work weeks at the arts center. No time left to create art when I came home. I’d made a bad habit of crumpling into the couch after work, drinking half a Corona and eating a bag of Hawaiian potato chips for dinner. All the lights in the house blazing when I woke in the middle of the night, hair crooked as a broom, face creased into a mean origami, clothes wrinkled as the citizens of bus stations.
The day the pink circulars appeared, I woke up from one of these naps to find a bug crunching away on Hawaiian chips and another pickled inside my beer bottle. I called La Cucaracha Apachurrada the next morning.
So while you are spraying baseboards, the hose hissing, the gold pump clicking, bending into cupboards, reaching under sinks, the leather utility belt slung loose around your hips, I’m thinking. Thinking you might be the perfect Prince Popo for a painting I’ve had kicking around in my brain.
I’d always wanted to do an updated version of the Prince Popocatépetl/Princess Ixtaccíhuatl volcano myth, that tragic love story metamorphosized from classic to kitsch calendar art, like the ones you get at Carnicería Ximénez or Tortillería la Guadalupanita. Prince Popo, half-naked Indian warrior built like Johnny Weissmuller, crouched in grief beside his sleeping princess Ixtaccíhuatl, buxom as an Indian Jayne Mansfield. And behind them, echoing their silhouettes, their namesake volcanoes.
Hell, I could do better than that. It’d be fun. And you might be just the Prince Popo I’ve been waiting for with that face of a sleeping Olmec, the heavy Oriental eyes, the thick lips and wide nose, that profile carved from onyx. The more I think about it, the more I like the idea.
“Would you like to work for me as a model?”
“Excuse?”
“I mean I’m an artist. I need models. Sometimes. To model, you know. For a painting. I thought. You would be good. Because you have such a wonderful. Face.”
Flavio laughed. I laughed too. We both laughed. We laughed and then we laughed some more. And when we were through with our laughing, he packed up his ant traps, spray tank, steel wool, clicked and latched and locked trays, toolboxes, slammed van doors shut. Laughed and drove away.
There is everything but a washer and dryer at the house on East Guenther. So every Sunday morning, I stuff all my dirty clothes into pillowcases and haul them out to the van, then drive over to the Kwik Wash on South Presa. I don’t mind it, really. I almost like it, because across the street is Torres Taco Haven, “This Is Taco Country.” I can load up five washers at a time if I get up early enough, go have a coffee and a Haven Taco—potatoes, chile, and cheese. Then a little later, throw everything in the dryer, and go back for a second cup of coffee and a Torres Special—bean, cheese, guacamole, and bacon, flour tortilla, please.
But one morning, in between the wash and dry cycles, while I ran out to reload the machines, someone had bogarted my table, the window booth next to the jukebox. I was about to get mad and say so, until I realized it was the Prince.
“Remember me? Six eighteen on Guenther.”
He looked as if he couldn’t remember what he was supposed to remember—then laughed that laugh, like blackbirds startled from the corn.
“Still a good joke, but I was serious. I really am a painter.”
“And in reality I am a poet,” he said. “De poeta y loco todos tenemos un poco, ¿no? But if you asked my mother she would say I’m more loco than poeta. Unfortunately, poetry only nourishes the heart and not the belly, so I work with my uncle as a bug assassin.”
“Can I sit?”
“Please, please.”
I ordered my second coffee and a Torres Special. A wide silence.
“What’s your favorite course?”
“Art History.”
“Nono nono nono nono NO,” he said the way they do in Mexico—all the no’s overflowing quickly quickly quickly like a fountain of champagne glasses. “Horse, not course,” and whinnied.
“Oh—horse. I don’t know. Mr. Ed?” Stupid. I didn’t know any horses. But Flavio smiled anyway the way he always would when I talked, as if admiring my teeth. “So. What. Will you model? Yes? I’d pay you, of course.”
“Do I have to take off my clothes?”
“No, no. You just sit. Or stand there, or do whatever. Just pose. I have a studio in the garage. You’ll get paid just for looking like you do.”
“Well, what kind of story will I have to tell if I say no?” He wrote his name for me on a paper napkin in a tight tangle of curly black letters. “This is my uncle and aunt’s number I’m giving you. I live with them.”
“What’s your name anyway?” I said, twisting the napkin right side up.
“Flavio. Flavio Munguía Galindo,” he said, “to serve you.”
Flavio’s family was so poor, the best they hoped for their son was a job where he would keep his hands clean. How were they to know destiny would lead Flavio north to Corpus Christi as a dishwasher at a Luby’s Cafeteria.
At least it was better than the month he’d worked as a shrimper with his cousin in Port Isabel. He still couldn’t look at shrimp after that. You come home with your skin and clothes stinking of shrimp, you even start to sweat shrimp, you know. Your hands a mess from the nicks and cuts that never get a chance to heal—the salt water gets in your gloves, stinging and blistering them raw. And how working in the shrimp-processing factory is even worse—snapping those damn shrimp heads all day and the conveyor belt never ending. Your hands as soggy and swollen as ever, and your head about to split with the racket of the machinery.
Field work, he’d done that too. Cabbage, potatoes, onion. Potatoes is better than cabbage, and cabbage is better than onions. Potatoes is clean work. He liked potatoes. The fields in the spring, cool and pretty in the morning, you could think of lines of poetry as you worked, think and think and think, because they’re just paying for this, right?, showing me his stubby hands, not this, touching his heart.
But onions belong to dogs and the Devil. The sacks balloon behind you in the row you’re working, snipping and trimming whiskers and greens, and you gotta work fast to make any money, you use very sharp shears, see, and your fingers get nicked time and time again, and how dirty it all makes you feel—the taste of onions and dust in your mouth, your eyes stinging, and the click, click, clicking of the shears in the fields and in your head long after you come home and have had two beers.
That’s when Flavio remembered his mother’s parting wish—A job where your fingernails are clean, mi’jo. At least that. And he headed to Corpus and the Luby’s.
So when Flavio’s Uncle Roland asked him to come to San Antonio and help him out with his exterminating business—You can learn a trade, a skill for life. Always gonna be bugs—Flavio accepted. Even if the poisons and insecticides gave him headaches, even if he had to crawl under houses and occasionally rinse his hair with a garden hose after accidentally discovering a cat’s favorite litter spot, even if now and again he saw things he didn’t want to see—a possum, a rat, a snake—at least that was better than scraping chicken-fried steak and mashed potatoes from plates, better than having to keep your hands all day in soapy water like a woman, only he used the word vieja, which is worse.
I sent a Polaroid of the
Woolworth’s across from the Alamo to Beatriz Soliz. A self-portrait of me having the Tuesday–Chili Dog–Fries–Coke–$2.99–Special at the snakey S-shaped lunch counter. Wrote on the back of a Don’t-Mess-with-Texas postcard: HAPPY TO REPORT AM WORKING AGAIN. AS IN REAL WORK. NOT THE JOB THAT FEEDS MY HABIT—EATING. BUT THE THING THAT FEEDS THE SPIRIT. COME HOME RAGGEDY-ASSED, MEAN, BUT, DAMN, I’M PAINTING. EVERY OTHER SUNDAY. KICKING NALGA LOOKS LIKE. OR AT LEAST TRYING. CUÍDATE, GIRL. ABRAZOS, LUPE
So every other Sunday I dragged my butt out of bed and into the garage studio to try to make some worth of my life. Flavio always there before me, like if he was the one painting me.
What I liked best about working with Flavio were the stories. Sometimes while he was posing we’d have storytelling competitions. “Your Favorite Sadness.” “The Ugliest Food You Ever Ate.” “A Horrible Person.” One that I remember was for the category “At Last—Justice.” It was really his grandma’s story, but he told it well.
My grandma Chavela was from here. San Antonio I mean to say. She had five husbands, and the second one was called Fito, for Filiberto. They had my Uncle Roland who at the time of this story was nine months old. They lived by the old farmers’ market, over by Commerce and Santa Rosa, in a two-room apartment. My grandma said she had beautiful dishes, an antique cabinet, a small table, two chairs, a stove, a lantern, a cedar chest full of embroidered tablecloths and towels, and a three-piece bedroom set.
And so, one Sunday she felt like visiting her sister Eulalia, who lived on the other side of town. Her husband left a dollar and change on the table for her trolley, kissed her good-bye, and left. My grandma meant to take along a bag of sweets, because Eulalia was fond of Mexican candy—burnt-milk bars, pecan brittle, sugared pumpkin, glazed orange rind, and those pretty coconut squares dyed red, white, and green like the Mexican flag—so sweet you can never finish them.
So my grandma stopped at Mi Tierra Bakery. That’s when she looks down the street, and who does she see but her husband kissing a woman. It looked as if their bodies were ironing each other’s clothes, she said. My grandma waved at Fito. Fito waved at my grandma. Then my grandma walked back home with the baby, packed all her clothes, her set of beautiful dishes, her tablecloths and towels, and asked a neighbor to drive her to her sister Eulalia’s. Turn here. Turn there. What street are we on? It doesn’t matter—just do as I tell you.
The next day Fito came looking for her at Eulalia’s, to explain to my grandma that the woman was just an old friend, someone he hadn’t seen in a while, a long long time. Three days passed and my grandma Chavela, Eulalia, and baby Roland drove off to Cheyenne, Wyoming. They stayed there fourteen years.
Fito died in 1935 of cancer of the penis. I think it was syphilis. He used to manage a baseball team. He got hit in the crotch by a fastball.
I was explaining yin and yang. How sexual harmony put one in communion with the infinite forces of nature. The earth is yin, see, female, while heaven is male and yang. And the interaction of the two constitutes the whole shebang. You can’t have one without the other. Otherwise shit is out of balance. Inhaling, exhaling. Moon, sun. Fire, water. Man, woman. All complementary forces occur in pairs.
“Ah,” said Flavio, “like the mexicano word ‘sky-earth’ for the world.”
“Where the hell did you learn that? The Popul Vuh?”
“No,” Flavio said flatly. “My grandma Oralia.”
I said, “This is a powerful time we’re living in. We have to let go of our present way of life and search for our past, remember our destinies, so to speak. Like the I Ching says, returning to one’s roots is returning to one’s destiny.”
Flavio didn’t say anything, just stared at his beer for what seemed a long time. “You Americans have a strange way of thinking about time,” he began. Before I could object to being lumped with the northern half of America, he went on. “You think old ages end, but that’s not so. It’s ridiculous to think one age has overcome another. American time is running alongside the calendar of the sun, even if your world doesn’t know it.”
Then, to add sting to the blow, raised his beer bottle to his lips and added, “But what do I know, right? I’m just an exterminator.”
Flavio said, “I don’t know anything about this Tao business, but I believe love is always eternal. Even if eternity is only five minutes.”
Flavio Munguía was coming for supper. I made a wonderful paella with brown rice and tofu and a pitcher of fresh sangria. Gipsy Kings were on the tape player. I wore my Lycra mini, a pair of silver cowboy boots, and a fringed shawl across my Danskin like Carmen in that film by Carlos Saura.
Over dinner I talked about how I once had my aura massaged by an Oakland curandera, Afro-Brazilian dance as a means of spiritual healing, where I might find good dim sum in San Antonio, and whether a white woman had any right to claim to be an Indian shamaness. Flavio talked about how Alex El Güero from work had won a Sony boom box that morning just by being the ninth caller on 107 FM K-Suave, how his Tía Tencha makes the best tripe soup ever no lie, how before leaving Corpus he and Johnny Canales from El Show de Johnny Canales had been like this until a bet over Los Bukis left them not speaking to each other, how every Thursday night he works out at a gym on Calaveras with aims to build himself a body better than Mil Mascara’s, and is there an English equivalent for the term la fulana?
I served Jerez and played Astor Piazzolla. Flavio said he preferred “pure tango,” classic and romantic like Gardel, not this cat-howling crap. He rolled back the Afghan rug, yanked me to my feet, demonstrated la habanera, el fandango, la milonga, and explained how each had contributed to birth el tango.
Then he ran outside to his truck, the backs of his thighs grazing my knees as he edged past me and the Olinalá coffee table. I felt all the hairs on my body sway as if I were an underwater plant and a current had set me in motion. Before I could steady myself he was popping a cassette into the tape player. A soft crackling. Then sugary notes rising like a blue satin banner held aloft by doves.
“Violín, violonchelo, piano, salterio. Music from the time of my abuelos. My grandma taught me the dances—el chotis, cancán, los valses. All part of that lost epoch,” he said. “But that was long long ago, before the time all the dogs were named after Woodrow Wilson.”
“Don’t you know any indigenous dances?” I finally asked, “like el baile de los viejitos?”
Flavio rolled his eyes. That was the end of our dance lesson.
“Who dresses you?”
“Silver.”
“What’s that? A store or a horse?”
“Neither. Silver Galindo. My San Antonio cousin.”
“What kind of name is Silver?”
“It’s English,” Flavio said, “for Silvestre.”
I said, “What you are, sweetheart, is a product of American imperialism,” and plucked at the alligator on his shirt.
“I don’t have to dress in a sarape and sombrero to be Mexican,” Flavio said. “I know who I am.”
I wanted to leap across the table, throw the Oaxacan black pottery pieces across the room, swing from the punched tin chandelier, fire a pistol at his Reeboks, and force him to dance. I wanted to be Mexican at that moment, but it was true. I was not Mexican. Instead of the volley of insults I intended, all I managed to sling was a single clay pebble that dissolved on impact—perro. “Dog.” It wasn’t even the word I’d meant to hurl.
You have, how do I say it, something. Something I can’t even put my finger on. Some way of moving, of not moving, that belongs to no one but Flavio Munguía. As if your body and bones always remembered you were made by a God who loved you, the one Mama talked about in her stories.
God made men by baking them in an oven, but he forgot about the first batch, and that’s how Black people were born. And then he was so anxious about the next batch, he took them out of the oven too soon, so that’s how White people were made. But the third batch he let cook until they were golden-golden-golden, and, honey, that’s you and me
.
God made you from red clay, Flavio, with his hands. This face of yours like the little clay heads they unearth in Teotihuacán. Pinched this cheekbone, then that. Used obsidian flints for the eyes, those eyes dark as the sacrificial wells they cast virgins into. Selected hair thick as cat whiskers. Thought for a long time before deciding on this nose, elegant and wide. And the mouth, ah! Everything silent and powerful and very proud kneaded into the mouth. And then he blessed you, Flavio, with skin sweet as burnt-milk candy, smooth as river water. He made you bien pretty even if I didn’t always know it. Yes, he did.
Romelia. Forever. That’s what his arm said. Forever Romelia in ink once black that had paled to blue. Romelia. Romelia. Seven thin blue letters the color of a vein. “Romelia” said his forearm where the muscle swelled into a flat stone. “Romelia” it trembled when he held me. “Romelia” by the light of the votive lamp above the bed. But when I unbuttoned his shirt a bannered cross above his left nipple murmured “Elsa.”
I’d never made love in Spanish before. I mean not with anyone whose first language was Spanish. There was crazy Graham, the anarchist labor organizer who’d taught me to eat jalapeños and swear like a truck mechanic, but he was Welsh and had learned his Spanish running guns to Bolivia.