Accordion Crimes

  Félida wanted to go find the old adobe house, to see the place everyone but she remembered. Abelardo shook his head, said sternly that the house was gone, swallowed up by the valley irrigation project, the whittled plot of land absorbed into Anglo cotton fields. In short, nothing of the Relámpagos remained except their name, carried by people not of their blood.

  Hornet

  Two of the three sons, Chris and Baby, were as close as fingernails and flesh. Chris rushed at life, greedy for food and opportunity. Baby’s blood ran hot, his body temperature, his hands, hotter than anyone’s, as if he ran a perpetual fever. To touch him was to sweat. The oldest son, Chencho, was amiable but withdrawn, as if he were measuring the distances between the planets. Félida, that little something, was the youngest. Looking at her only living daughter, Adina said, “you poor little thing, without a sister for a friend. I will have to be your friend.” She tried to make the child her special confidante, warned her against the traps of life and the fate of women.

  Hornet was never her goal. After the house of the Relámpagos was bulldozed, they started out for San Antonio where Adina believed there were better chances. The borrowed truck traveled six dusty miles north through mesquite, which showed through the dirty windshield like scratches on the landscape, and into the outskirts of Hornet where it broke down. Abelardo and the boys—Crescencio who was eleven then and almost as strong as a man, and Baby and Chris—all pushed it to the garage, Adina carrying Félida in her arms and walking alongside. Inside the garage were two musicians Abelardo knew, a guitar and a bajo sexto, standing near the pay phone, swearing a little, telling him they had been waiting for the accordion player, had just learned that hijo de la chingada, that fool had fallen from the rail of the bridge and broken his pelvis on the dry stones of the riverbed. No one knew why he had been walking on the rail.

  “Borracho,” said the bajo sexto.

  “Loco,” added the guitar, already working out a line or two of a corrido about the idiot.

  As soon as Abelardo dug his accordion out from the boxes of cooking pots and sheets—it was not the Majestic that he played in those days, but the little green two-row—as soon as Adina found his good shoes and rubbed them to a gloss, as soon as he changed into his blue gabardine trousers and a white shirt, they left for the engagement, an anniversary barbecue to the north of Hornet. At noon the next day when Abelardo reentered the garage, hung over and filthy from sleeping under a bush, he discovered that his wife had moved into an old trailer on the edge of the barrio. The trip to San Antonio was canceled.

  “How is it you make this enormous decision without consulting your husband? Have you grown a set of balls overnight, is that it? Let me see,” reaching for the hem of her dress.

  “Get away! Who makes the decisions when you’re away at work, gone for months and months, or nights in a row? You think I hold my breath? When the boy was hurt in the tire you were in Michigan, there was no one but me to take the responsibility. You leave me sitting in a broken car while you go to a fiesta, what should I do, hold my breath and die?”

  He tried to get his job back at the Blue Dove (though it would mean traveling six miles back and forth) but the wife of the Anglo manager told him to get his ass out of there. No job for somebody who quits one day and comes back two days later. And so, because he had children who had to eat, and because there were no jobs, he went into the fields again for the next two years, up to the Lubbock onion fields, his red eyes tearing constantly, the reek of onions fixed in his clothes and skin, and across his knuckles ingrained lines of dirt like a map of starbursts; his mind, like a man turning a coin in his pocket, never stopped working over the injustice of a musician ruining his hands with field labor.

  “Look around,” said Adina harshly, “it’s all women raising the families. The men are far away playing the accordion.”

  What a relief and pleasure when the Blue Dove changed hands in 1938 and the new owner personally requested his services again.

  The trailer

  That trailer Adina had found in Hornet was at the southwest edge of the barrio on a dirt street. To the east the barrio thickened into a maze, to the south lay an immense pasture containing seventy paint horses in powerful colors, to the west, the dirty copper smelter and, beyond, low, gullied hills, ash-colored sagebrush alive with ticks, a vague long sky like a cloth, and, all around, billions of small stones. Although the trailer was at the end of the street, it was connected to the sewer line, not like the oozing and stinking colonia to the east where people lived in packing crates and scrap-metal lean-tos.

  It was a worn trailer but larger than the old Relámpago house, with three cubby bedrooms, a living room, the kitchen; on the front, a set of foldout steps, a pair of propane tanks like double bombs. Just beyond the trailer was the bus turnaround, a bulldozed circle where the drivers got out and relieved themselves against the tires. Why was it, asked Félida, that both men and dogs had to piss against something? And got a slap for the immodest question. The black exhaust of twenty buses a day billowed against the front of the trailer, accompanied by the squeal of brakes, shifting gears.

  Abelardo made up a little song:

  O you filthy bus,

  I was dreaming of love and riches,

  I was dreaming of happiness

  When you brrrt! like ten elephants,

  Like a smokestack blowing up,

  When you gnashed your gears

  And destroyed my fragile reverie.

  The sons added sound effects, squirting air through their lips until their mouths were numb. Adina said she was disgusted. But for years this song made them laugh and it was the first song Baby and Chris learned.

  Down the street stood a wreck of an old tamale stand, the remnant of a failed franchise from the 1920s in the shape of a giant tamale, the stucco sloughing off, faded signs drooping: HAMBURGERS AS YOU LIKE’M. TAMALE PIE. But in a year the old tamale stand was gone, replaced with a little store and in the back a barber’s chair where Señor García cut the hair of men and boys, and all around them the space was filled with houses and trailers. The city flooded around them like water coming over the riverbank.

  In this trailer in Hornet, Adina stood with her hands on her hips and told her children, “find a way to better yourselves. Get a control over your own life. Not be like—you know, only working, drinking, working, drinking—and playing the accordion.” But Abelardo, resting on the bed, heard her.

  “You disgust me,” he shouted but did not get up. To himself he muttered, “here comes the business of the money.” Adina turned the radio knob to an American-language station and said, “¿por qué you kids don’t talk American? No more Spanish. From now on American at home too, not just school. If you talk Spanish you’ll end up in the fields. Talk American and get an education you get a good job. You’re Americans, no? Then be an American and get some money.” For her part, she had given them a start with American names: Baby, Chris, Betty. All except the bewildered, smiling Crescencio, named after his drowned grandfather, Crescencio, already defeated by his name, and poor little Roselia who had died in her crib, only a week old.

  “How stupid,” Abelardo had muttered at each birth, insisting on other names as well, Rogelio, Tomás and Félida. The daughter went by two names, answering to Betty from the mother’s mouth, Félida from the father’s.

  “Yes,” said his wife, “what a spiteful man. Why not names of Indians, then? Why not do them a favor? Go ahead, put them as low as you can get! Make their lives truly easy!”

  The irony was that she looked more indio than anyone, looked a real oaxaqueña. Yet her family had come into the Rio Grande valley hundreds of years before, owned land along the same calm river as had the vanished Relámpagos.

  “Yes, my family of important landowners.” Bitterly. When she was a child her family still visited relatives in Mexico. She remembered two long journeys to Oaxaca but believed it didn’t matter, that was in her childhood, the abandoned past that everyone knows and loses and
tries to forget. That cloying, smothering family of hers with its fits and hysteric tantrums and her mother’s morbid belief in dreams.

  Most sharply she retained a memory of great distances, being crowded into bus seats with her younger sisters, very strict in keeping them quiet and well behaved. When she thought of Mexico at all, she thought of it as the country of the senses, of moving colors, even the dust saturated with aromas and flavors. How drab and yellow Texas seemed when they returned, abandoning once more the vanilla beans, the musty olive-colored river, mineral dust and horses, the sanguinary and intestined odor of butchered pigs, the tiny drops of oil that stood on the surface of epazote leaves. She saw herself clenching stems, the green violence of cilantro on her hands. The sadness of the musky soil under the squash leaves where the cat slept, the smell of white cotton garments drying in the sun, of candles and kerosene and incense, of rotting oranges and sugar and frying oil and crushed sage, the roasting coffee beans and the deep little pots of chocolate, the cinnamon-and-almond scent of the female relatives, the odor of corn ground against the stone.

  But over the years the visits became infrequent. The Mexican relatives commented unpleasantly about the Texas children’s debased Spanish and impolite ways; they held an image of these little norteños running as mongrel dog packs up in Tejas. When Adina married Abelardo she turned her back on her Mexican relatives. “They don’t mean nothing to me now because I am tejana, my children are Texans also, Americans.” But that deep past was caught unconsciously in her cooking, in the food she prepared and the smoky, sweet dishes she relished: pasilla chiles, Oaxacan mole coloradito, the spicy pork picadillo, the seven moles, the black and the deep red and the green—dark in flavor, slightly charred, faintly sweet. Ancient flavors and tastes. Not forgotten.

  Almost the very week they moved into the trailer Adina’s headaches and fevers began. She had always been healthy but now she became something of an invalid. The fevers would come again and again at any time of the year, oppress her for months, then mysteriously disappear. Although she went to the clinic many times, the annoyed doctors said there was nothing wrong with her. She lay curled up, grey and hot, great circles under her eyes, unable to sleep, ears ringing, consumed by thirst.

  “I have not had a night’s sleep since we came here,” she wept to Félida. “I have the luck of a dancing dog.” There was a high-pitched ringing in her ears, a dizziness and deafness to the affairs of the world that was almost like happiness. In the turnaround the buses roared like beasts; she could smell the exhaust, the dust and hot metal. The heat of the air, of her body. Her eyes swam in tears, she could not see well. When she looked up at night the moon seemed covered in thick foam. The walls, the faces of her husband and children, were distorted. She was consumed by fatigue. And lying there in the dozy world of fever, she could not escape the sounds of the accordion.

  On and on it played, as though it played Abelardo, as though it were the animate force and he the instrument. Sometimes there were other accordions in the hands of his conjunto friends, she could hear a strong voice calling out “¡sí, señor!” in the midst of the music. Abelardo knew a thousand songs and he played them all during her fevers. Against her, she thought, against her. That voice, so sad and quavering in public song, so hard and dictatorial in the home.

  Lessons

  From the time of the flood when old Relámpago disappeared, Abelardo had worked. In his life he spent three months at school. He learned to read as a grown man during the war from closely watching his own children struggle with their American schoolwork. Chencho turned eighteen in 1943 and was drafted at once, sent to the Pacific. Abelardo, sick with worry for this clumsy son, needed to know. He practiced on billboards and road signs and posters, then newspapers, not letting his wife know until he was fluent and then brought home week-old copies of La Opinión and the Los Angeles Times. He sat at the kitchen table with his legs crossed and took up the Times, read a few paragraphs aloud, then snapped open La Opinión and, in a very easy voice, read a few sentences about Frank Sinatra whose “música ha invadido el mundo en estos últimos años—like a tidal wave, no?” When Adina exclaimed in astonishment, he replied, “it is not entirely difficult. I am a cornucopia of brains.” His interest extended beyond the war news to miscellany, such things as the workings of the human digestive system, mysterious tides, the habits of kangaroos.

  Somewhere he found a large anatomical chart showing the structure of the ear and this he taped onto the kitchen wall near the photographs of great accordion players. So there loomed over every meal the pale orange pinna resembling some extinct mollusk, the curving tunnel of the auditory canal, the eardrum shaped like a Japanese fan, and beyond it the curious tiny bones of the middle ear, the hammer, the anvil and the stirrup. The eye swept along, unable to escape, to the snail of the cochlea—a whirlpool, a hurricane seen from a cloud, a jelly roll, spinning tops, a fallen strip of orange peel. Not on the chart were the interlacing pathways connecting the music to the cerebral cortex.

  Abelardo had hundreds of records, his own recordings of the 1930s, a few with Decca, then with Stella, then with Bell, then Decca again. “In those days I sang in Spanish; those men with the record company said to me, ‘we can’t tell what you are singing, so don’t sing anything dirty.’ So of course I sang all the filthy ones.”

  There was a photograph showing him in a strained position, his right leg stretched out behind him, the left bent slightly at the knee, his torso rearing sharply back and the accordion stretched across his chest like a radiator grille. He was handsome and young, his hair thick.

  “You know how much we got paid for those sessions? I thought I was lucky if I got ten dollars. Who can guess how much money the record companies made off us? Hundreds of thousands of millions of dollars.” He had old recordings of Lydia Mendoza, of the great accordion players, the records of Bruno Villareal, half blind, a little tin cup wired to the side of his accordion, playing in 1928, “the first recording with the accordion as the star,” Pedro Rocha and Lupe Martínez, Los Hermanos San Miguel, dozens of Santiago Jiménez discs. He made a ceremony of putting on the records, made his children sit respectfully.

  “Listen, listen, there’s the tololoche that you don’t hardly hear no more. And you get how flowing the accordion notes are, the music very smooth and flowing, like water. That is Sonny playing. How smooth, even though he was a drunk, he drank so much his liver rotted off and there was only the hook where it used to hang inside him. But so smooth. Now it’s different, ¿no? Now everybody plays very staccato. That started with the war. You should have seen me then when I started out, I was a crazy man getting people to look in the paper for me, to see if any advertisements for recording sessions was in there. Or go by Señor Chávez’s farmacia. Señor Chávez made little miniature models of accordions, not to play, but for toys for his grandchildren. He was a kind of talent scout for one of the companies. They put an ad in the paper and you went up to a hotel room or something. Somebody listens to you and if they like you, tell you to come at such and such a time to a place where they had a studio set up at. Ten or twenty people standing in the hall waiting for a turn. Just one take, that was it. It was raw. They gave you maybe a dollar or five dollars. Nothing else, not even when a thousand people bought that record.”

  He would make them listen to all those old labels: Okeh, Vocalion, Bluebird, Decca, Ideal, Falcon, Azteca, especially the Ideals made in the garage of Armando Marroquín up in Alice. He had played on many of the recordings of the Hernández sisters, Carmen y Laura, sitting in Carmen’s kitchen in the tangle of wires and microphones. “Here’s one—oh Dios, what a nightmare! 1931 and what do we sing? ‘The Star-Spangle Banner,’ to show we are American, the Congress just made this song the national anthem. Is there anybody alive who can sing this awful song?” The children swung their legs.

  Between the music and the crops he had done all right, he said, but when the Depression started, everything became impossible and it was then that his possession of
the Relámpago place was disproved, and soon after they had moved to Hornet.

  He was crazy about the movies, and years later could still frighten his children with the plot of White Zombie, which he had watched seven times.

  “Movies! You know those old movies—old silent movies—always had Mexicans for the bad guys? The Mexican wears everything black, he has a big hat, he has very dark skin and bulging white eyes. He rages, he is uncontrollable, cruel, he smiles as he stabs, he is attracted to gambling and murder. Then they finally make a movie with a Mexican for the good guy and who do you think they get to play the good Mexican? Paul Muni, all covered with makeup!”

  After they arrived in Hornet, for a month he had a job sweeping up hair on the floor of a barbershop; everyone was on relief and there was only a little work in the cotton when you could get it. One day he amused himself by making a strange siren from a pierced metal disk that rotated when he turned a crank and worked a pump with his foot so that it jetted air against the whirling plate. The contrivance made a loud moaning call, but in a few days it broke. Really, said Adina, he had too many children to indulge in such fantastic play.

  Each year Adina bought colored school photographs of the sons. Parents chose the sizes they wanted or could afford—a strip of tiny faces the size of postage stamps, or a life-size portrait in a cardboard mat. Adina always chose the small—but not the smallest—wallet size. The Hornet school was segregated, a school for “Mexicans,” no matter how many generations you had been in Texas. The Relámpago boys hated the stinking place. The teachers were Anglos, most of them from the north at their first jobs. The lessons were in American. There was an expensive rule: a penny fine for every Spanish word uttered.