Dirty squares of paper tangled themselves in the palm trees, fluttered out to sea, were caught in the fishnets left out to dry, as well as in the hammocks of those taking their afternoon nap. They clogged the barrels left out to collect rainwater. Pigs ferreted them out from the brush for months and ate them. Flyers descended in droves, batting citizens on the head like a plague of locusts. One slid easily under the wide space beneath the makeshift door of the barracks of the employees of the National Roads Commission, who were overjoyed at the possibility of some new entertainment. This gave Narciso Reyes the excuse to set out toward the town square, where the very old and the very young assembled daily waiting patiently and impatiently for something to happen.
A faded tent was struggling to come to life, and in front of this confusion, Narciso waited. The lady photographer calmly set up an outdoor photo gallery and was doing excellently despite the wind that made the subjects look as if their hair were fire. When Narciso arrived, there was already a long line of people waiting their turn, almost all the town it seemed, but no Exaltación. Families with their freshly combed hair still wet from the bath arrived dressed in their good clothes, almost everyone barefoot, except for the exceptionally vain or those a little better off than most, which were only the mayor and the mayor’s godchild. Widows with their string of children and their children’s string of children lined up their tribe for intense inspection. Babies were dressed in fancy lace shirts, but with nothing covering their bare bottoms. A few citizens brought along their prize possessions—a trumpet, a baseball uniform, a piglet. One cradled in her arms her recently dead infant dressed as an angel wearing a crumpled paper crown.
And when the powder flashed, no one smiled. It’s not the custom to smile for the camera over there. The citizens of San Mateo del Mar looked directly into the lens with that same serious gaze found in tombstone portraits. Young, old, mothers, beauties, sons, husbands, wives, brothers, sisters draped in the arms of a loving sister, children, alone or in a group, all looked directly into the camera as if looking severely into a mirror. That was the way it was done, then and now.
For a backdrop, there were several choices. That new invention, the airplane, which Lindbergh was just then testing at an aviation field on the plains of Balbuena between Mexico City and Puebla; the ever-popular Virgen de Guadalupe; or a palace garden. —Look how pretty!
Narciso Reyes waited and waited, busying himself buying candied sweets—obleas, pastel wafer sandwiches filled with goat-milk caramel; tri-color coconut bars with the colors of the Mexican flag; pumpkin-seed brittle; candied oranges.
When he was almost ready to give up, his jaw aching from so much sugar, he finally saw Exaltación crossing the town square.
—Exaltación Henestrosa! Narciso shouted. He came running up to her like a child. —I bought you some chuchulucos.
It was fortunate for Narciso he had brought along the candies. There were many things Exaltación could resist, including this silly boy in front of her in his fanfarrón striped suit, but she could not resist candy.
To make small talk, Narciso reported the most recent gossip he’d gathered waiting for her. —Have you heard the scandal? It’s about the photographer and the circus singer. They say these two women are sharing a hammock.
Exaltación Henestrosa burst out laughing, covering her mouth with her hands, a habit perhaps from the days before her gold tooth with the cutout star. —Ah, is that so? she said. —Well! All I can say is I’d never do anything like that.
No sooner said than … duck! The whipped cream pie is coming! Which whipped cream pie? The whipped cream pie Divine Providence likes to throw in one’s face when we say, —Oh, I’ll never … And whatever you say “I’ll never” to, believe me, you will. Some years there are so many whipped cream pies flying about, crisscrossing each other like meteorite showers. Whoosh, whoosh! Whatever you don’t expect, ¡ahí viene! Watch out, here it comes! Right around the corner your whipped cream pie awaits you.
Narciso trailed behind Exaltación like a child and talked her into taking her portrait with him.
—Please. How about a souvenir, un recuerdo, something to remember this evening by?
—If that’s what you’d like to waste your money on, who am I to stop a fool.
They were seated on a bentwood settee and the moment before the powder flashed, Narciso bent toward Exaltación. It was a very telling gesture, like a flower growing toward the sun.
They spent the rest of the evening at the circus. Even if the Circus Garibaldi was anything but excellent, it brought to a hungry town a great deal of nourishment. The acts consisted of some forgettable skits, corny and without charm, with only the animals coming off with any grace, but the show was saved by the big finale, the singer Pánfila, who entered the empty ring with her Paracho guitar. She was dressed like a campesino in humble cotton whites, and she sang and sang, songs so simple and true it hurt your heart to hear them.
That voice. Like the quivering grief of a guitar. It might be true the woman Pánfila was often filled with evil thoughts, but when she sang she confirmed without a doubt the existence of God. I am God, if only for a glimmer of a moment. But, ah, that moment was like the heart being squeezed when one saw a school of dolphin leap up from the sea.
Everyone cried. Everyone was overjoyed. And then, weeping, the citizens of San Mateo slouched toward their homes hugging each other.
The secret was this. Pánfila sang con ganas, as they say. With feeling. It gave everything she sang authenticity, and authenticity of emotions engendered admiration, and admiration—love. Singing, she said what the public could not say, what they did not know they felt. And what she sang she sang so sincerely, with such heartfelt emotion, it wobbled even the stoic Exaltación to tears.
Narciso was overjoyed. He believed the tears were tears of emotion meant only for him. It’s just as well. It was a beautiful night, and the universe was not in any hurry to cheat him of this pleasure.
That night Narciso was invited to Exaltación’s bed. Well, that’s not precisely right. He made a pest of himself until the only way she could get rid of him was by inviting him in, servicing him haphazardly, and then getting him to leave only by promising she’d see him again tomorrow.
—Tomorrow?
—I promise.
—Do you?
—Yes, tomorrow, tomorrow, for certain. Now go away and let me be!
But when he came back the next night her house was empty. All he found was a few skinny chickens and some dogs rummaging through the trash. The children said she had left with her belongings in a big bundle.
—But how?
—She left with that woman.
—Which woman?
—You know. The one from the circus. The one who sings.
It was true. She had vanished with Pánfila Palafox.† It was as if they were spirits dissolving into air, because no one could say in which direction they’d left. The roads were as fine as talc in that dry season, and the wind so furious, they left no tracks.
A few days later, the Circus Garibaldi hobbled out of town. To make matters worse, the cardboard portrait arrived to smack him into fresh pain. The photographer was as despondent as Narciso, after all, since she too had been abandoned, and she could not bring herself to deliver it in person. She left it behind with the mayor’s godchild to deliver, which the child dutifully brought to Narciso with a great deal of babbling, as if he were bringing good news and not grief.
The photo broke Narciso’s heart. The photographer had taken the trouble to cut out the image of her rival so that only Narciso’s image remained. Narciso Reyes stared at what was left of the sepia photo. He leaned like a clock at ten to six, his head tilted toward a ghost. Ay, heaven of my heart!
* If Mexico was a Gibson girl, then the isthmus of Tehuantepec would be her hourglass waist. The locals still boast one can bathe in the Gulf of Mexico before breakfast and swim in the Pacific by sunset, but this is true only if one has a car. Before the invention of the
automobile, in the childhood times of Narciso and Soledad, trains ran as often as twenty times a day uniting the two oceans and testifying to all the world the modern nation Mexico was fast becoming. But the Panama Canal of 1906 put an end to this transcontinental efficiency, and eventually the area was lucky if even one train passed daily.
Because of love, the railroads ventured into that furious savagery called Tehuantepec. It was here, while stationed as a soldier during the French occupation, that the future dictator Porfirio Díaz met the great love of his life, Juana Romero, or Doña Cata, and became her lover until death. The railroads, thanks to this eternal passion, were built on Díaz’s orders and her request, and that is how the tracks arrived almost at the door of Doña Cata’s resplendently gaudy house. This not only helped to expedite the sweethearts’ visits, but the train whistle added a charming melancholy to their liaisons.
Since the time of Cortés, since the Spanish Viceroy Bucareli, since the German naturalist Humboldt, countless investors, conquerers, engineers, and inventors had failed to bridge the two oceans, defeated by lack of funds, insurrections, or infestations of mosquitoes. It was during the California gold rush that the Tehuantepec Railway Company of New Orleans operated a route to San Francisco even though no railway trains were involved.
Once a month passengers boarded a freighter from New Orleans to the Mexican gulf coast, then sailed lazily up the Coatzacoalcos River on a Mississippi side-wheeler named the Allegheny Belle. They feasted on fruits exotic to the typical norteamericano—plantains, papayas, mangos, guavas, star apples, and custard apples, not to mention the meat of animals they’d never seen before—monkey, iguana, and armadillo. The comforts of the Confederate steamboat ended in the town of Suchil, where passengers were packed on jolting carriages, then made to ride muleback, and finally carried on box chairs strapped on the backs of Indians before arriving gratefully to the Pacific Coast and a ship bound to San Francisco if no storm deterred them. By scrupulous accounts, 4,736 gold-seeking forty-niners made the trip to California like this, enduring malaria, dysentery, regret, and a mysterious disease that left their skin blue.
† Pánfila Palafox was a woman famous for running off with everyone’s wife. Her real name was Adela Delgadina Pulido Tovar, and she was of a familia adinerada y decente. Pánfila was raised by French nuns in the Convent of the Sacred Heart and remembered for her passionate verses written in excellent French and her watercolor miniatures painted with her own tears. But after the revolution it was no longer fashionable to be fashionable. Adela rebaptized herself under the name of the housekeeper’s daughter and took to escaping at night to those bars where the music is good and the neighborhood bad.
They say Pánfila Palafox had affairs with the most talented artists of the day—Lupe Marín, Nahui Olín, and the young Frida Kahlo—before the papers denounced Pánfila for her “libertine attitude against public decency and good customs.” Every town in Mexico, little or big, had a Pánfila Palafox story. True or not true, Pánfila sang in a mahogany vibrato, a voice that defied imitation by woman or man, and her train of scandal only made her more sought after by a curious public that was both shocked and fascinated by her bravado.
At the time of this story Pánfila Palafox was living like a muleteer, on the road with her Paracho guitar on her back and an ixtle bag containing everything she owned. She sang on corners, under stars, beneath balconies, and in bars, where the scandalized public, out of curiosity and longing, thronged to hear her. Pánfila was used to traveling across the dustiest roads of the republic living the life of the peasant artist; she came from a wealthy family and could afford to be poor. That is how it was she found herself in the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, that land of extremities, during the season of wind.
39.
Tanta Miseria
Júrame
Promise Me
Todos dicen que es mentira que Everyone says it’s a lie
te quiero I love you
porque nunca me habían visto because no one’s seen me
enamorado, in love,
yo te juro que yo mismo I swear I don’t
no comprendo understand
el por qué tu mirar me why your gaze has
ha fascinado. me so fascinated.
Cuando estoy cerca de ti When I’m close to you
y estás contenta and you’re happy
no quisiera que de nadie I don’t want you thinking of
te acordaras, anyone else,
tengo celos hasta del I’m even jealous of your
pensamiento thoughts
que pueda recordarte a otra that might remind you
persona amada. of another.
Júrame, que aunque pase Promise me though
mucho tiempo time passes
no olvidarás el momento en que yo you won’t forget the moment
te conocí, we met,
mírame, pues no hay nada look at me, there’s nothing
más profundo deeper nor
ni más grande en este mundo, que greater in this world than the love
el cariño que te di. I give you.
Bésame, con un beso enamorado, Kiss me with a lover’s kiss,
como nadie me ha besado desde el like no one’s kissed me since the
día en que nací. day I was born.
Quiéreme, quiéreme hasta Love me, love me till
la locura, madness,
y así sabrás la amargura and that’s how you’ll know
que estoy sufriendo the bitterness I’m suffering
por ti. for you.
—composer, María Grever
To be accompanied by the scratchy 1927 version of “Júrame,” as recorded by José Mojica, the Mexican Valentino, who would later renounce fame, fortune, and the adulation of millions of female fans by taking vows and becoming a priest.
His life makes a wonderful story and was adapted into that unforgettable film … What was its name again?
If you’ve never heard Mojica, imagine a voice like Caruso, a voice like purple velvet with gold satin tassels, a voice like a bullfighter’s bloody jacket, a voice like a water-stained pillow bought at the Lagunilla flea market embroidered with “No Me Olvides,” smelling of chamomile, copal, and cat.
Doubt begins like a thin crack in a porcelain plate. Very fine, like a strand of hair, almost not there. Wedged in between the pages of the sports section, in the satin puckered side-pocket of his valise, next to a crumpled bag of pumpkin seeds, a sepia-colored photo pasted on thick cardboard crudely cut down the center. The smiling Narciso seated leaning toward the cut-out half.
—And this?
How many have started trouble with just these two words? If you poke under the bed expect to find dirt.
—Oh, that. It was just a joke. We took a portrait the day a traveling photographer came to town. One of the fellows and I were bored and thought it would be fun. What do you think! We only had enough money between us for just one picture, that’s why we had to cut it in half. Throw it away. I don’t even know why I kept it.
—Of course I won’t throw it away. I’d like to keep it. Especially since you’re gone so much.
—Do as you like. It’s all the same to me.
How is it my grandmother knew to know? How is it a woman knows what she knows without knowing it, I mean. So that while my grandfather Narciso was enjoying the pleasures of the woman with the iguana hat, that sweetheart from the hotlands, my grandmother Soledad was at that very second haunted by some crazy but real fears.
She would wake in the middle of the night, disoriented, a sick feeling swirling in her heart. Where was her Narciso at this moment? Perhaps loosening the lazy strap of a woman in a once-white slip? Kissing the moon of a shoulder, the instep of an arched foot, the wrist with its little flicker of life, the sticky hotlands of the palm, the soft web of the fingers? At this instant was he sucking the salt off an earlobe, or placing his hand on the valentine of a woman’s back, or maybe sliding himself off the rippled flesh of a big woman’s big
hips? No, no, too terrible to think about, she couldn’t stand it when he was away. And what if he left her? Worse …
What if he stayed? A fever like this. She suffered, ay, she suffered the way only Mexican women can suffer, because she loved the way Mexicans love. In love not only with someone’s present, but haunted by their future and terrorized by their past. Of course, each time Narciso returned from the coast, Soledad attacked him with accusations, a flurry of brilliant colors like the wings of jungle macaws.
—You’re crazy!
—Júrame. Swear, swear to me it’s only me you love, my life, júrame.
—Te lo juro. I swear.
—Again!
—Only you, he said. Sólo tú.
Only you. This would satisfy her. For a little. There is a saying: Drunks and children tell the truth. One afternoon when the sky was sorrel-colored, as if the world was about to come to an abrupt end, the nosy child of the cleaning woman was visiting Soledad’s room and touching everything he could get his hands on, including the photo of Narciso, which Soledad had placed on a bedside table.
—And who’s that?
—That’s my husband.
—No, I mean who’s the lady sitting next to him?
—What are you talking about? Here, give me that, you little snot! Don’t you know better than to touch things that aren’t yours?
Soledad shooed the child out of the room and took a closer look at the bottom of the photo. She took it out to the balcony and looked again. She looked and she looked, said nothing, tucked the photo in her pocket, put her shawl on, marched over to the plaza, waited on a wrought-iron bench in front of the kiosk till the jewelry shop opened, then asked the watchmaker if she might borrow his jeweler’s eyepiece. —Just for a second, I promise I won’t drop it, of course, what do you take me for, if you would be so kind, thank you please, please give me a little privacy if you would please!