Look, so it happened that I, a girl of good family, though not wealthy, I, the poor relative, the Cinderella cousin of the family, one could say, because my stepmother had farmed me out just as if I was una cualquiera, an anybody, a country servant girl, oh, really, it makes me want to cry to tell you this part of the story, just as if I was a nobody nothing, my father allowed his own flesh and blood to be farmed out to service on account of his new wife, the wicked stepmother, who had him enchanted by some strong magic and who convinced him it would do me good to be in the capital, but in reality she just wanted to get me out of the way, you see, because I forgot to tell you she had her own children, this woman.
How can I tell you? Before my father remarried I lived the provincial life, yes I did, in Santa María del Río, where I studied catechism and embroidery. Well, it was a town where everyone went about smelling like horses, and so I was not at all opposed to going off to the city, you see, but how was I to know my situation would be no better than a servant’s, even if it was the kitchen of my own father’s cousin. What a barbarity! Well, here’s a broom, they said, and there you are. My life no better than that of the rooftop dog that barked all night or the clucking chickens scraping among the orange peels.
Sometimes before nightfall, after everyone was through shouting for me to do this or that or who knows what, well, there I would be, on the rooftop watching the lights of the town opening like the night sky. I don’t know, I’ve always been, well, the things I think I keep inside me. Only you have heard this story, Celaya, only you. It’s that sometimes my heart’s like a little canary in a cage, leaping back and forth, back and forth. And when that nervous canary won’t keep still, so as not to feel so alone, I talk to God.
Because I wasn’t bad, understand? I’d never been bad to anyone really. What had I done to deserve being locked up in that madhouse called a home? My Aunty Fina with her too many children, too exhausted to notice I was una señorita and well, there were things I needed to talk to someone about, and there I was living my hard times, but like the saying goes, God squeezes, but he doesn’t choke. And well, I was so young and alone in that epoch, under that foreign sky, you can’t imagine, so … how can I tell you?
Sometimes if I said I needed to confess myself, they’d let me run off to church. The coolness like the coolness inside the mouth of a mountain, like when one drives through a tunnel, understand? The stillness like the stillness before the world was born. And I remember a very odd memory that has no home and nook in which to shelf it. I was very young and sitting on someone’s lap, and someone was putting my shoe on my foot and buttoning it, because you had to have a hook in those days to put on a shoe, and this someone, buttoning me, babying me, looking after me, well, I don’t know for certain, but I think this someone was my mother. And if it was not my mother, it was God, which is the same as mother, as are all things good that happen to you, that feeling of being loved, being looked after, that feeling of absolute safety, absolute happiness, someone’s arms around me, and feeling as if no one could ever hurt me. That was Mother. And God. Of this I am convinced.
Mija, remember, when you’re most alone, God is nearby. And that time, before I met your grandfather, that was the most alone time in my memory, me a young señorita in the Paris of the New World, a city of grand balls and music and wonders to look and be looked at, but what did I know? The world ended and began at my Aunty Fina’s, where no one said my name except to give me an order.
They buried my mother in one of her famous black shawls. They say the knuckles of her fingers were still black when they placed her rosary between her hands, because the only way to lessen the dye’s hold is to soak the skin in vinegar, but my mother died on the hottest day of the year, and there was no time for formalities.
And me, all my life something of that habit of knotting and unbraiding has stayed with me, especially when I’m nervous. A rosary, or my braids, or the fringe of the tablecloth, I don’t know. The fingers never forget, isn’t that so? For several years, when I was most desperate, most alone, those years at my Aunty Fina’s and later on in life as well, I would comfort myself by rubbing vinegar in my palms, and cry and sniff and cry, the smell of vinegar, the smell of tears, one as bitter as the other, no?
Because you have no idea what it was like to live with my Aunty Fina and her sixteen creatures. You can’t imagine it. You’ve never been abandoned by your father. Your father would never do a thing like that.
Ah, but don’t think my life was all sadness. After I married your grandfather, how happy we were.
You’re getting ahead of the story, Grandmother.
Well, it was all very divertido. Like something out of a beautiful movie, you could say, even though we were never wealthy … I’m talking after the war, because in that epoch before the war, the family Reyes was considered adinerada—moneyed, that is. The men never dirtied their hands with work, and the women never had to dip their hands in soapy water except to bathe themselves. Because your great-grandfather Eleuterio was a musician, and teacher, remember. He even played the piano at the National Palace for President Porfirio Díaz and for families like los Limantour, Romero de Terreros, Rincón Gallardo, Lerdo de Tejada, las familias popoff, as they say. I remember Narciso had a box of his father’s papers with many waltzes composed in his own hand. I have some of them, but who knows where they all are now.* Are you sitting on one of them?
I married into a family of category. At first I couldn’t bring myself to eat in front of my husband. I’d eat in the kitchen. And since Mexican food requires you to wait hand and foot on the person eating, it was easy to wait until he was through. I’d say, —I’m not hungry, I already ate when I was cooking, or, —Eat, eat, before it gets cold, do you need any more tortillas? And there I’d be heating tortillas on the comal.
Which is why, in my opinion, the greatest culinary invention is the microwave oven, where one can heat tortillas a dozen at a time and sit down to eat like la gente decente instead of eating standing like horses.
Qué microwave oven, ni qué nada. You talk like a little fool. Tortillas never taste like tortillas unless they’re scorched from the comal. Tortillas and a bowl of beans in their broth with a few spoonfuls of rice stirred in, the corn tortilla rolled tighter than a cigarette. Delicious! Ay, but Narciso made such a fuss, —Rice and beans mixed together! How vulgar! Then he went on for an hour about how you were supposed to bring out each course on a separate plate, and this is how he ate, as if he didn’t think twice about who was washing the dishes. All his life Narciso would brag, —I don’t even know what color the kitchen walls are, which is to say he never went in there.
Which is to say he was a real man.
Because here is where one can most tell what class a person is. By the way one eats. And by one’s shoes. Narciso ate like the well-to-do, as if he was sure where his next meal was coming from, not gulping it all down in a hurry and not eating too much, and not picking things up with his hands, but holding his knife and fork exquisitely and cutting the food into small portions without dropping his utensils, and he didn’t talk with his mouth full, or make smacky noises, or use a toothpick at the table, and, of course, he was accustomed to each course being served on a separate plate. He did not hold his knife and fork in a fist, or scoop up his food with tortillas in place of silverware as they did at Aunty Fina’s. His manners at the table were very elegant. And his shoes? These were elegant too. Polished military boots, or lovely leather British wing tips. Well, he liked good things.
Look, I can truthfully say ours was a marriage of love. That is, Narciso and I married not as was accustomed in that epoch by arrangement, but because we fell in love. That is, I was taking care of the kitchen of the house of my Aunty Fina, who was also your grandfather’s aunty, well, we were distant cousins. And then I was invited to work for your great-grandmother. And I think your grandfather felt sorry and sad for me, because back then I was pretty. And just like in the fairy tales, he fell in love with me, even though I was
dusty from the house chores. All the same, he could see I was his love of loves. So, quick as could be, he arranged to have me stolen, and, well, we married, and there.
And because my Narciso was very clever, they gave him a little paper that certified he had been loyal to the Constitutional Government during the Ten Tragic Days of 1914 and assigned him a nice comfortable position with the National Roads Commission because of his war wound. A wound he suffered from a terrible susto. Which is why your grandfather could never bathe in the ocean when we went to Acapulco. Ah, but that story is another story, inside another story, inside a story.
Soon we shall see.
* “A Waltz Without a Name” because I lost that paper but I remember it went …†
(Composer—el Señor Eleuterio Luis Gonzaga Francisco Javier Reyes Arriaga, born in the year 1871 and baptized that year as per records found in the rectory of Saint Stephen of Seville. This document proves without a doubt the family Reyes is directly descended from Spanish blood.)
I.
Tenía tal distinción
Que era de aquel salón.
Tal distinción que verla
y amarla todo fue en mi
y amor ardiente le declaré.
II.
Ella sonrió, mi ruego oyó.
También me dijo: Te quiero yo.
Pues si me quieres, le respondí,
un beso dame y seré feliz.
Si con un beso feliz te haré
después del baile te lo daré.
III.
(This is the page that was lost but it went more or less …)
En el salón un ruido atonador se escuchó,
un tiro fugaz que en el pecho de su amada dio,
y ya no pudo cumplir su palabra y hacerlo feliz.
Tan tán
† This song was actually written by the author’s great-grandfather, Enrique Cisneros Vásquez.
26.
Some Order, Some Progress,
But Not Enough of Either
What was going through your head, Grandmother? You don’t remember or you don’t want to remember the details, and for a story to be believable you have to have details. You forgot to mention that the year of your arrival to the Reyes household was the centennial of Mexican independence, “the era of order and progress.” Then as now, the president spent huge amounts of the national treasury to impress the world with how truly “civilized” —European—Mexico had become. You could’ve said, —I remember every building, avenue, plaza, and boulevard was flooded with tiny lights like pearls that made me happy. You must’ve noticed them along the Plaza of the Constitution, the Cathedral, the National Palace. The capital hadn’t looked so splendid since the time of the emperor Maximiliano. While you slept in the kitchen pantry and ate rice soaked in bean broth, there were magnificent new public buildings under construction, the Venetian/Florentine-style post office, the opera house of Carrara marble, as ornate as wedding cakes. Guests from each “civilized” nation were invited, all expenses paid, and feted with nightly banquets where the imported champagne and the thick steaks never ended. Golden statues were commissioned and erected at prominent intersections so that future generations would always remember 1910. Each evening fireworks like a field of poppies hissed and whirled and popped above your rooftop twilights, while in the distance, plazas throbbed with sentimental waltzes and pompous military airs.
Grandmother, you always want to tell stories and then when you should tell them, you don’t tell. What about the 16th of September, the day of the Centennial celebrations? Parades, bullfights, rodeos, receptions, balls, all to celebrate Don Porfirio’s birthday as well as Mexico’s Independence Day. Indians and beggars were routed from the downtown streets where you lived so as not to spoil the view. Thousands of pairs of machine-made trousers were handed out to the poor with instructions to wear these instead of those peasant cotton-whites. The parents of the shoeless were scolded into buying their children footwear or else face terrible fines, while the little girls of the well-to-do were recruited to toss rose petals in the Centennial parade before a phalanx of Indians dressed as “Indians.”
In their finest splendor and riding the most sumptuous carriages, the invited ambassadors paid their respects escorted by a squadron of hussars in gala dress. Next, the Mexican calvary cantered by on tasseled horses as proud and handsome as the riders. You forgot the doomed Moctezuma carried in a gilt litter by sixteen sweating infelices, or the draped chariot filled with chaparrita Mexican Greek nymphs. In their hands, scrolls with wonderful words—Patria, Progreso, Industria, Ciencia—their meanings lost to most of the city’s citizenry because they could not read.
Then as now, people voted for peace, and then as now, nobody believed their votes made a bit of difference. The government, run by los Científicos, sincerely believed science would and could lead them to the solution to the Theory of Everything. But the Theory of Everything would have to wait. By the time 1911 rolled in, the little revolution began. For the next decade, brother fought against brother, governments were toppled and replaced, soldiers were patriots one day, rebels the next.
Who could believe the petty violence in the countryside would mean anything to a girl in a kitchen? Hadn’t the dictator-president, Don Porfirio, established order and progress, elected himself eight times for the good of the nation, and civilized the Mexicans so that they were the envy of other nations, so that boys like Narciso dreamed patriotic dreams of defending Mexico against U.S. invaders and dying an honorable death cloaked in the Mexican flag, like the “child heroes” of Chapultepec, young military cadets who threw themselves off the ramparts of this Mexico City castle rather than surrender to the advancing American troops in 1847. He could not know that by 1914 the Marines would again invade Mexico, and once again in 1916. By then Narciso Reyes would be involved in his own U.S. invasion by immigrating to Chicago. But now I’m getting ahead of the story.
Like the Pedro Infante movie Los tres García, let us spin the camera like a dizzy child in a piñata game and look at the story you would not, or could not tell. It happened during the Ten Tragic Days when President Madero found himself a prisoner in his own presidential palace. Some of the troops were loyal to the president, some were on the side of the rebels, and the million citizens of Mexico City found themselves caught in the crossfire. For ten days the streets were a battleground. Who would’ve thought the capital would be paralyzed? But life is always more astounding than anyone’s imagination …
27.
How Narciso Loses Three of His
Ribs During the Ten Tragic Days
—You? You wouldn’t know where to find food if your life depended on it. And your life does depend upon it!
—If you’re not satisfied with my services, señora, you can dismiss me.
—I most certainly will not. You owe me for that set of china you broke. And if you think you can walk out with a debt owed to your employer you had better light your candles to Saint Jude.
—In the name of God, leave her alone already, Regina. She’s just a child.
—A week. Over a week we’ve been locked up in here. Like rats. Worse than rats. I’m sick of hiding under mattresses. How long can this go on? Who would dream this could happen in the capital? Never in my life … Ay, my head feels like it’s struck with a machete every time that cannon goes off. How can anyone sleep in this hell? And how am I supposed to feed us with only a clove of garlic and two tomatoes in the pantry, tell me. But look how happy you two fools are. How pretty. One busy playing with the fringe of her shawl, and the other playing the piano.
Eleuterio said nothing. How could he defend himself? His wife didn’t understand about art, how by creating something you can keep yourself from dying. Regina only understood pesos, not the mathematics of the heart.
—Enough, enough, enough, Eleuterio sighed. —I’ve had it with you shaming me. I’ll go out and find us something to eat.
—Oh, no, you won’t. If you don’t know where to find food when ther
e isn’t a war, how are you going to learn now? How? Soledad, bring me a sheet. And not one of my good ones. From the rag pile.
Then Regina made them shove aside the piano they had braced against the door, and she went out into the deserted streets of Mexico City armed only with a white flag made from an embroidered pillowcase and the broom. From the shattered windows in the dining room, her husband and servant watched her marching down the center of Leandro Valle Street just as proud and as regal as if she were one of the flag bearers in last year’s Centennial parade.
On the other side of town, Narciso was loyally making his way home to the apartment on Leandro Valle. —Mamá, he hiccuped under his breath. He had run most of the way, and now his side hurt. —Mamá. Calling her made him feel safer. —Mamá, Mamá. There is nothing Mexican men revere more than their mamas; they are the most devoted of sons, perhaps because their mamas are the most devoted of mamas … when it comes to their boys.
All his life Narciso had wanted to be a hero. And now here was his opportunity, and the smell of death made him feel like vomiting. The cadets had been assigned the worst jobs. Instead of the fighting they dreamed of, defending their country against a common enemy, now they were witnessing Mexicans fighting against Mexicans.
The dictator Porfirio Díaz had been ousted and forced to flee, and like many fleeing Mexican presidents before and since, he left for Europe with a good deal of the treasury in his suitcases. Then Madero was elected president. But a military coup led by one of his own generals upset his victory. The Mexican armed forces were divided. Some backed General Huerta in his attempt to take over the government, while some remained loyal to the new president. For ten days the capital and its citizens were caught in this scramble for power.