Caramelo

  Ni contigo ni sin ti …

  The Reyna sisters, always loud. Making so much noise in English, so much noise with their crooked Spanish. Winking over the shoulder of this sister being taken out to dance, the others giggling, —Not if you paid me! —Want him? Te lo regalo. —Tú que sabes de amor, tú que nunca has besado un burro. —¡Un burro! Do you know what that means? —Your mind’s in the gutter. —Want that one, Zoila? I’ll give him to you after I’m through. —I’m telling you, you can have him, I don’t want him.

  Her sisters nudging Zoila when the private with eyes like little houses and a pointy mustache comes over and asks Zoila to dance, in Spanish, and how the Spanish reminds Zoila of Enrique Aragón. And how she shrugs and joins him out on the dance floor, with a couldn’t-care-less attitude. He does all the talking. —Inocencio Reyes at your orders. Mexico City is where I’m from. My family very important. My grandfather a composer who played for the president. Me, my, my, have you ever been there? I’ll take you. I have a car. Not here. Over there. And her eyes glazed over his shoulder. The language taking her back to Enrique.

  Enrique had held her face, drew it up like water, drank from it, drank from it and let it go empty as a tin cup. How she had wanted to jump out that window, like a sparrow found in the snow, wouldn’t that have been hilarious? The sisters would’ve had to gather her in a blanket and carry her home, like a fairy tale she read about. All the fractured little bones. How she wanted to jump out of that window of his flat on Hoyne Street. She would’ve liked to have jumped and bubbled in her own juices, wouldn’t that have been cute?

  But it’s this one who’s talking a mile a minute. —Do you smoke? Would you like a cigarette? Putting out one cigarette and already lighting the next. —What? ¿Qué? Yeah, I mean no, I mean I don’t know. Inocencio Reyes so close she can hardly see him. And she tired, exhausted, dragging the body around the dance floor, this body, with its nagging need of washing and feeding all its necessary hungers, this her inside the borrowed pink blouse with its stained armpits and the skirt held together with a safety pin. This human being talking and talking right in her face, she has to lean back. For sure her sisters are watching and laughing. A strange face. Mustache thin as Pedro Infante’s, those sad little eyes like if he just finished crying.

  Neither with you nor without you.

  How she’d gone back to the scene of the crime, over and over, circling that house, those rooms, those corridors, that house that haunted, that held and gripped and bit her in two. Voodoo house that hypnotized her. “I do not love you,” he’d said. Here I am again. Here I am. And I come back. Same late-night compulsion.

  The way Inocencio Reyes looks at her. More than that, the way he holds her, moves her across the dance floor. He’s not clumsy like other men her age. He dances like he knows where he’s going, like he knows what he is doing with his life. With that confidence that lets you close your eyes and you know nothing bad will happen to you ever. No matter how tangled and muddy everything else, Inocencio Reyes dances with a self-assuredness. A tug to say this way, turn that, a light nudge to direct her in the other direction.

  He’d said, “I do not love you.” I do not love you. I do not love you. And my heart opened its mouth into an “oh,” into a wound, a bullet, a circle big enough to push a finger through. “I do not love you,” Enrique said. You said. I said nothing.

  You don’t like me when I don’t talk. Of what good am I if I won’t talk. It’s not nice when I don’t talk. You might as well be alone. You might as well call a taxi and put me in it and send me home. You don’t like me when I begin. You won’t stand for this again. It’s not as if we’re married or anything. And what kind of nonsense are you muttering now? Of course, you’re not mine. It’s a new world and a new love and I don’t own you and you don’t own me and we’re free to come and go and love as we please. A modern age, right?

  Except last night, Tuesday or Thursday, or either or both, any day so long as it’s not the weekend, you call and ask me to come and visit you. And I do, but it makes it so hard to get out and travel and take the streetcar and worry when I’m waiting for it, you say come and I do, worrying at night, walking that half block from where it leaves me off to that half block to your house in the dark, not a long ways, not very, it’s no trouble, sure. Not very, but bleak and lonely and me humming so I won’t be afraid of the night. And my shoes hard against concrete, taking me to you, taking me. But I don’t talk. That is, I talk less and less. In the beginning I talked all the time, right? And you talked with me and we laughed and you opened a cognac, a good one—one you paid a lot for, because you know all about cognacs—and played the phonograph—not the kind of cheap music of the dance halls, the kind I used to like before I met you, but music like Agustín Lara and Trío Los Panchos, and Toña La Negra, “High-class music, not trash,” you said, and we danced under the soft light of a lamp with a thick carved glass that shot light up to the ceiling. Me and you dancing, that soft light of your apartment there on Hoyne. And it didn’t matter if we both had to go to work tomorrow, Enrique, right? You just had to see me. I just had to see you. We were a couple of crazies like that, right? Todo por amor. You’d telephone and say, “Zoila,” and even though I told myself I hated you, I can’t explain why I’d hop right over. I can’t explain it very well. Never mind, never mind. Only I’d hear it as “never mine.”

  We’d dance and then you’d undress me, and I didn’t mind, because what I wanted and waited for was afterward when I held you in my arms. And we’re loving each other, softly, quietly, as if we’d just invented it, as if we never had to go out into the world again, right? And I rock you, hum a little song, rock and rock you and hum, like if you were mine.

  And it’s as if love is some war. And are you brave enough to battle all the world, to defy everyone, and what the world says is right, what they think of you? Are you brave enough to sacrifice everything for love? Are you?

  He asks how a girl as young as me got to be so brave. How he knew from the first moment he saw me I was the type of woman who … “Who what?” —a little too angrily. “The type of woman who would appreciate love,” he says, and suddenly I’m as soft as snow. I’m anything he wants. Don’t let me go.

  Ni contigo ni sin ti … ni contigo porque me matas, ni sin ti porque me muero. Neither with you nor without you. Because with you, you’d kill me. Because without you, I’d die.

  —What? What’d you say? Zoila asks Inocencio, because to tell the truth, she’s been daydreaming again. Hasn’t heard a word he’s said.

  —I said you have the cleanest fingernails I have ever seen, mi reina.

  Instead of the smart-alecky reply she usually tossed, only a little sound came out of her mouth, like the sound one makes in a dream when one is trying to shout. And this little sound with its curly fluted spiral pulled all the other sounds lined together like a train, an animal braying tangled in the strands of her black-blue hair, so that at first Inocencio Reyes thought she was laughing at him. Mi reina. Those words in that language of tenderness and home. It was only until she raised her head to the light that Inocencio realized his mistake.

  Twenty-five years later he’d still be telling the story. —Because I am a gentleman I told her something nice—how pretty her hands were. That’s nice, no? Instead of saying thank you, she started howling like a baby. Like a baby, I’m not lying. She was a mystery then, and she’s a mystery to me now. That’s how she’s always been, your mother. You tell her something ugly, she just laughs. But just give her one kind word, and ¡zas!

  * Enrique Aragón was what you would call un hombre bonito. A pretty man. He had fulfilled his obligation and chosen a profession honorable to his family. That was all they asked.

  —Cualquier cosa, que no sea mesero o maricón. Anything, so long as you aren’t a waiter or a fag. This was what his grandfather Enrique Aragón had said to his son, Enrique Aragón Junior, by way of benediction before departing north to find fame and fortune in los Estados Unidos. His grandfat
her had had the good fortune of coming across President Venustiano Carranza and his party fleeing from Mexico City with all the country’s gold in their pockets and saddlebags. So much so that it was impossible for them to outrun the pursuing Obregón forces. They’d had to dump treasury bags this way and that, exchanging fortunes for their lives, and it had been the destiny of this elder Aragón to encounter on the road to Veracruz one morning, a Carranza† crony at a desperate and decisive moment. For hiding him under a clay maceta, the elder Aragón had been paid a sombrero full of gold coins. With this, he was able to flee the sleepy heat of the town of his birth and begin his enterprise as the owner of the first air-conditioned cinema house in Tampico.

  The son had heeded his father’s counsel, and with some of his father’s fortuitous fortune as capital, arrived first in Chicago, and later in Los Angeles on the same train that brought Rudolph Valentino’s corpse, in October of 1926. Chicago, Los Angeles, Los Angeles, Chicago. With several important contacts, he’d been able to open a few movie houses in the Spanish-speaking barrios. He counted among his acquaintances the young Indio Fernández, who in those days was still a mustached Hollywood extra in tight pants and sombrero, the beautiful Lolita del Río—“Just another escuincla trying to break into Hollywood,” —and the sons of Al Capone. Well, that’s what he said. It was impossible to know what was true and what not so true, because Enrique’s father had told the story so many times over he could no longer remember which truth he was telling.

  What was certain was the advice he’d been given by an aspiring Mexican filmmaker: “Art is stronger than war, Enrique. Greater than a stampede of horses. Bigger than a mauser, an airplane, all the Allied forces combined. You have no idea what a tremendous weapon the cinema is.”

  It was true. Hadn’t he fallen in love with Greta Garbo’s stand-in, a little Cuban thing named Gladys Vaughn (née Vasconcelos),‡ taken her as his wife and put her in a golden pumpkin shell in Tampico replete with enough seedlings to have caused her body to prematurely age from the shock of too many too soon births. Her eldest, Enrique, however, was her consolation, especially since her husband was never home, or often oblivious to her when he was home. It was remarkable to look at this boy’s face and see her own, those pale silver eyes the eyes of a white wolf, the high cheekbones and long, thin nose that proved without a doubt the Vasconcelos aristocratic ancestry, the transparent skin pale as an onion, the same as Greta Garbo’s. She loved Enrique Junior as she loved herself, but as soon as he was old enough, his father took him from her and had Enrique enrolled in schools in the States.

  Enrique Aragón Junior had inherited no extraordinary aptitude for anything but spending money. His father had taken it upon himself to train his son in managing the theaters. It was important, after all, that he have a career, something with which to support a family, and after a few failed attempts at acting, Enrique had learned it was important to be something, something, anything, although he hadn’t a clue what that anything was. In the meantime, he would fill in the waiting period as his father’s apprentice. —Anything, something, anything, Enrique Senior said. —So long as it isn’t a waiter or a fag.

  † How ironic is history. The cousin to this same Carranza had to flee the country as well, because he was a Carranza. He ran away to San Antonio, Texas, and there he opened a butcher shop, Carranza’s Grocery and Market, which his grandsons ran, until recently, as a restaurant under the family name. Thus, Venustiano Carranza, the butcher of the Zapatistas, would have a cousin who would become a famous butcher too, but not for skewering Zapatistas. Instead, the Carranza family of San Antonio became noteworthy for their excellent brisket and smoked sausages, which I recommended highly until a fire snuffed them out of business.

  ‡ Gladys Vasconcelos was one of the Vasconcelos sisters of Mexico City, all of them famous beauties. After her marriage to Enrique Aragón, she threatened divorce unless he installed them in a two-story Art Deco building across the street from her family’s house in Mexico City. This was in the Colonia Roma. They lived there during the time Fidel Castro had to flee Cuba and found refuge in Mexico City, and since all the Cubans in Mexico knew each other, it was easy for Fidel to be introduced to and befriended by the Vasconcelos family. It is said that the young Fidel was so in love with Gladys’s youngest child, Gladys the younger, he would beg her mother to be allowed to watch her sleep. Just that. So in the family’s good graces and confidence was he, he was allowed this tender privilege. All without Gladys the younger ever knowing this until years later. She was blond and blue-eyed and incredibly lovely, they say. I imagine the young Fidel passionately in love, bent over the sleeping Gladys like a sunflower. Supposedly he wrote her desperate love sonnets, which he published under a pseudonym and titled The Gladys Poems, but I’m afraid that nothing came of the affair, and Fidel left Mexico to write his name in Cuban history. As for young Gladys, she married a pharmaceutical king and went away to live in Pasadena, where she lived long enough to see the disastrous collapse of her beauty. In her old age, she moved in and out of Beverly Hills beauty hospitals having her face lifted more times than María Félix. My friend’s mother, who still lives in the Colonia Roma and was neighbors with the Vasconcelos family in the forties and fifties, told me this story but made me promise never to tell anyone, which is why I am certain it must be true, or, at the very least, somewhat true.

  51.

  All Parts from Mexico, Assembled in the U.S.A.

  or I Am Born

  I am the favorite child of a favorite child. I know my worth. Mother named me after a famous battle where Pancho Villa met his Waterloo.

  I am the seventh born in the Reyes family of six sons. Father named them all. Rafael, Refugio, Gustavo, Alberto, Lorenzo, and Guillermo. This he did without Mother’s consultation, claiming us like uncharted continents to honor the Reyes ancestors dead or dying.

  Then I was born. I was a disappointment. Father had expected another boy. When I was still a spiral of sleep, he’d laugh and rub Mother’s belly, bragging, —I’m going to create my own soccer team.

  But he didn’t laugh when he saw me. —¡Otra vieja! Ahora, ¿cómo la voy a cuidar?* Mother had goofed.

  —Cripes almighty! Mother said. —At least she’s healthy. Here, you hold her.

  Not exactly love at first sight, but a strange déjà vu, as if Father was looking into a well. The same silly face as his own, his mother’s. Eyes like little houses beneath the sad roof of brow.

  —Leticia. We’ll name her Leticia, Father murmured.

  —But I don’t like that name.

  —It’s a good name. Leticia Reyes. Leticia. Leticia. Leticia.

  And then he left. But when the nurse came to record my name, Mama heard herself say, —Celaya. A town where they’d once stopped for a mineral water and a torta de milanesa on a trip through Guanajuato. —Celaya, she said, surprised at her own audacity. It was the first time she disobeyed Father, but no, not the last. She reasoned the name “Leticia” belonged to some fulana, one of my father’s “histories.” —Why else would he have insisted so stubbornly?

  And so I was christened Celaya, a name Father hated until his mother declared over the telephone wires, —A name pretty enough for a telenovela. After that, he said nothing.

  Days and days, months and months. Father carried me wherever he went. I was a little fist. And then a thumb. And then I could hold my head up without letting it flop over. Father bought me crinolines, and taffeta dresses, and ribbons, and socks, and ruffled panties edged with lace, and white leather shoes soft as the ears of rabbits, and demanded I never be allowed to look raggedy. I was a cupcake. —¿Quién te quiere? Who loves you? he’d coo. When I burped up my milk, he was there to wipe my mouth with his Irish linen handkerchief and spit. When I began scratching and pulling my hair, he sewed flannel mittens for me that tied with pink ribbons at the wrist. When I sneezed, Father held me up to his face, and let me sneeze on him. He also learned to change my diapers, which he had never done for his sons.

/>   I was worn on the arm like a jewel, like a bouquet of flowers, like the Infant of Prague. —My daughter, he said to the interested and uninterested. When I began to accept the bottle, Father bought one airline ticket and took me home to meet his mother. And when the Awful Grandmother saw my Father with that crazy look of joy in his eye, she knew. She was no longer his queen.

  It was too late. Celaya, a town in Guanajuato where Pancho Villa met his nemesis. Celaya, the seventh child. Celaya, my father’s Waterloo.

  * Tr. Another dame! Now how am I going to take care of this one?†

  † Tr. of Tr. How am I going to protect her from men like me?

  PART THREE

  The Eagle and the Serpent

  or My Mother and My Father

  •

  For a long time I thought the eagle and the serpent on the Mexican flag were the United States and Mexico fighting. And then, for an even longer time afterward, I thought of the eagle and the serpent as the story of Mother and Father.

  There are lots of fights, big and little. The big ones have to do with money, the Mexicans from this side compared to the Mexicans from that side, or that trip to Acapulco.

  —But, Zoila, Father says, —it was you and the kids I drove home, remember? I left my own mother in Acapulco. Pobre mamacita. She’s still sentida over it, and who can blame her! It was you I chose. Over my own mother! No Mexican man would choose his wife over his own mother! What more do you want? Blood?

  —Yeah, blood!

  —Te encanta mortificarme, Father says to Mother. Then he adds to me when she’s out of earshot, —Tu mamá es terrible.

  —I’m talking to you, Mother continues. —Te hablo. Which sounds like the Spanish word for Devil.