Since we didn’t hear shots, I assumed the matter had been settled without murder.
That was the rung of Mexican society occupied by the women of the políticos.
But that was not the world that the kept woman of Augusto de Leon occupied, as I would learn only later because the future still waited to illuminate the present, and I was hoarding the pieces of a puzzle that I would try to fit subsequently into my life, when memories would assume whatever meaning they would ever assume.
The kept woman of Augusto de Leon existed in the tradition of the great mistresses—du Barry, Pompadour, Barbara Palmer, Emma Hamilton before the fall. She was not ostracized by Mexican society; nor did she live in secrecy—her keeper was much too powerful and aristocratic to permit that.
Although she would not attend state dinners at which the powerful man was in dutiful attendance with his wife, she lived not far from them—the two women exchanged greetings now and then, slight nods, even a faint smile—in a mansion almost as grand as theirs. Her uniformed chauffeur snapped to rigid attention at her appearance. A generous income allowed her the most stylish clothes from New York and Paris, cities she periodically visited with her mentor. Bejeweled at the theater, she sat in honored seats and greeted others who solicited her recognition. In restaurants she was a figure for display and admiration.
My sister Olga’s wedding reception was held in the house of a relative in El Paso, a house like a relic, large enough, but lacking furniture, so that one room looked like another. It had two stories—as I had noted with delight on entering. To me that was a manifestation of elegance, no matter how drab both stories might be. Several dozen guests were gathering noisily, all as well dressed as was possible during extending tough times: the men in proper suits and ties, a few with hats exhumed for the occasion and properly removed before entering the house; the women in dresses retained for such an occasion, many also wearing hats. I detected the medicinal odor of mothballs when a breeze whispered into the house. There was all the usual brouhaha of Mexican weddings that occurred even in this higher, but poor, echelon of Mexican immigrant society.
Discarding my awkward jacket on a chair somewhere, I slunk around winding in and out of people grouping to discuss how beautiful the wedding had been, the women dabbing at tears of memory, the sad happiness of such an occasion. My sister and her husband had walked in through showers of rice and congratulations, rushing past greeters toward the largest room, where the cake that looked to me like a castle was waiting on a table. My mother stood nearby to greet my sister with a dozen little blessings, sighed aloud and echoed by celebratory outbursts that seemed to emanate from the center of the cake surrounded by circles of guests in this noisy tearful ritual. My sister Blanca, with her rigid German husband, Gus, beside her, stood with a polished knife for slicing into the mounds of sugar.
For me, it all passed in fast motion, the shrieks and applause when my sister daintily removed the strange sugar figures, like tiny featureless puppets, on the highest tier of the snowy cake; the actual cutting of the cake, my sister and … her husband? … together cutting into it for the first slice and intensified applause; the deliberately loud popping of corks as bottles of “champagne”—sparkling wine, the best affordable—were opened, poured into paper cups, and passed around. At least one gentleman, and surely one or two more, had managed to sneak a beer, instead, into his cup. Mounting toasts! Loud applause! Joyful tears at evoked memories!
I stood glaring at my unfaithful sister.
Very soon—too soon—it would be time for the couple to leave on a honeymoon, to Mesita, in New Mexico (where Billy the Kid was said to have lingered and Bonnie and Clyde might have made a visit in honor of his memory). The small town was just a few miles outside El Paso, but that economical honeymoon seemed to me then like a trip to Paris.
I ran about the rooms of the house, trying to find a hiding place where I might be discovered, with difficulty, when my sister would begin frantically looking for me, leaving me for the last in her abundant farewells amid drenching tears, jubilant and sad salutes, good wishes, and blessings. Then she would take me aside to deliver a special farewell, an acknowledgment of our enduring closeness, and a promise to clarify this baffling event, a promise that once this silly stuff was over, she would come back and be my cherished partner, without that odd man in a tuxedo. She would not say “good-bye”—we had figured out that that had unwanted finality to it—no, she would say:
“So long, little brother. I’ll be back in a few days.”
As I roamed the house that was becoming vaster and emptier for me—though people mingled about, trying to locate a place to sit, balancing paper cups of “champagne” with pieces of cake that crumbled on paper plates—I dodged into one room propitious for hiding. A doorless closet ahead would be perfect. Before I could head for it, I was almost knocked down by an older man and his wife looking startled out of their primness as they hurried away from that one room, although it was not occupied—
Except by one person.
Alone, slowly smoking a cigarette.
She sat on a drab couch out of which tufts of cotton had begun to protrude. It had to be her. No one else would look like that, not in El Paso, not in the world that I knew. There was no doubt that there sat the kept woman of Augusto de Leon.
Remaining now at the edge of the door, and hiding behind the frame, I stared at her in stunned awe. It was as if the room had been vacated for her, except for a scrappy framed drawing of a countryside, on a wall whose paint was peeling and a lamp whose shade had been patched. Nothing more was needed, because the kept woman challenged the drabness of the room, splashed it with a grandeur it had never possessed, not even when new. The ragged couch she sat on was her throne.
She wore a gray dress that caressed her body. The few creases that dared to appear on it when she moved, breathing, were instantly transformed into silvery-gray streaks, the exact color of her shoes. In a hint of elegant decorum, her breasts did not peek out of the top of her dress; they were only outlined as if hands were molding them and then sliding down along the curves of her body. She wore the hat she had worn in church, wide-brimmed, a paler shade of gray, slanting to the right so that a portion of her face was shaded. Even under the breath of a veil, sprinkled with velvet dots, her lips were a bold slash of crimson, stark on her creamy skin—no, her skin was the color of cream into which only a touch of chocolate had been blended. Her eyebrows arched—didn’t hover—over her eyes, which were—
From where I stood, I could not tell what color; I hoped amber, a favorite shade, the color of fall leaves that I had once printed in watercolors. I didn’t have to see them to know that she had long, curled eyelashes.
Not until she shifted on the couch—and they glistened—did I notice that she wore tiny earrings, specks of diamonds, I was sure. Her hair was dark brown, but strands that caught a gleam of light from the window against which she sat burnished it umber. Although later I would discover that she was not tall, as she sat on the converted throne her legs looked long, her stockings so sheer—no woman, not even a kept woman, would dare shock with bare legs in El Paso—that they disappeared.
There was about her an aura of sublime aloofness—or welcome isolation. I was sure then that never again would I glimpse a creation as spectacular as the one my eyes, dry from staring, remained fixed on.
I must have been holding my breath, because when I released it, it came out as a sigh louder than I had expected, which made me pull back against the door frame so that, if she located the origin of the awed sound, she would not retreat from my sight.
Whether because she had become aware of my presence or whether at some private thought evoked by the sounds of congratulation rising now distantly about the wedding couple in another room, her lips tilted, the inception of a vague smile.
As if deciding not to complete the smile, or because the memory aroused had turned bitter, her scarlet lips parted, instead, to receive the cigarette she brought—almost thought
fully—to her lips. She held it there at the exact verge of brushing her lips before she allowed it to touch in a movement that occurred without transition, and she inhaled imperceptibly—no sound even of her breath, the barest rise and fall of her breasts the only indication. A slender streak of smoke arose, lingered about her before it evaporated. The cigarette remained touching her lips as if reluctant to separate. Then her free hand rose and rested lightly on the elbow of the arm whose Wngers held the cigarette, and she completed an intricately graceful choreography of slight movements as she withdrew the cigarette from her lips but kept it close, as if considering whether to inhale from it again, a moment of suspense. The hand with the cigarette drifted away from her face, was lowered, and she touched the tip of the cigarette so lightly to an ashtray that the ashes merely vanished.
She rested the cigarette on the ashtray and allowed one of her sheer legs to slide over the other, simultaneously adjusting the hem of her dress, which had risen, barely, above one knee. Her hands soothed the silvery rivulets sent scurrying about the dress.
As she reached again for the cigarette on the ashtray, she looked up and smiled, definitely smiled, this time—
At me!
No, it wasn’t at me that she was smiling.
She was smiling at—
In the moments that I allowed my eyes to stray from her to locate any other possible direction of her smile, I saw a girl my age stationed at another doorway watching the kept woman as raptly as I had been. In those brief moments, I saw the girl raise one hand tentatively, on its way to her lips with what was, surely, an invisible cigarette. Catching me watching her, she pulled back out of my sight.
Was it at her that the woman had smiled?—as if bequeathing to her a glorious blessing? Or at me, bequeathing—What? At both of us …? Bequeathing …
A harsh-looking woman invaded the room; the kept woman rose from the drab couch, smoothing her dress to banish any wrinkle that might linger; the sounds of the wedding party rose, laughter and snatches of songs and congratulations mixing; the harsh woman spoke, “Who—?” and the kept woman removed the veil from her face, she said, “I—” The wedding party was moving outside; I had to hurry—I heard curt words in the tense room, I heard soft words, words I thought I understood, words I didn’t understand, words carried away by the sounds of the wedding party in the adjoining room, all occurring in a confusion of impressions, words that seemed to pursue me.
4
Cheers! Bravos! Applause!
Oh, but not, as it seemed to me for a moment, for the grand woman—no, the cheers were following the wedding couple on their way to their honeymoon.
I had to leave this room. My sister would now be desperately looking for me, her incongruous veil tangling—and even ripping, I hoped—on a chair, making her search for me even more difficult. I tore myself away from the awesome presence of Marisa Guzman.
My sister! There she was, so pretty—yes, she was very pretty now—so young. As I withdrew to find another hiding place, a closet away from the spellbound room, I knew that my sister would be asking, “Where’s Johnny? I want to say so long to him—not good-bye—assure him I’ll be back tomorrow—”
I slid into the deep shadows of an empty closet. Let her work to find me! Let everyone start wondering where she had rushed off to, abandoning them all, abandoning her … husband … and—
No urgent footsteps neared my hiding place. No approaching anxious voice, no words of panic at my absence. I left my place and looked out the nearest window.
With her handsome husband, my playmate had already entered the car amid a rain of rice, and they were gone.
* * *
I finally faced the fact that my sister would never again be the tomboy who played with me when she and her husband returned from their brief honeymoon and rented two rooms in a boardinghouse nearby, and I went determinedly to visit her, to reclaim my special place in her life. I knocked on the door. Sounds inside stopped. I knocked insistently. Nothing. I jumped, high, trying to reach the slightly open transom to see whether she was there, asleep in her bedroom. I fell with a thud. Did I hear giggles? I waited long, longer at the door. When the noises resumed, I left bitterly.
Señor died soon after the wedding.
His wife astonished us by appearing to convey the news calmly. She wore a new hat with a flower and had put on a few pounds. “Yes, he’s gone. No more curses.” She tilted her hat. “May God and the Holy Mother be kind to his soul.” She either sneezed or tittered as she tugged at her hat to slant it at a flattering angle.
Soon after, a rumor ran through the community of exiled immigrants that a mysterious woman drapped in black veiling had been seen at Señor’s last rites, which—I heard to my surprise—were widely attended. Immediately after the funeral, the mysterious woman had hurried into a limousine and left.
I never again saw the kept woman of Augusto de Leon.
Gossip about her, cruel, malicious, persisted as a favorite topic, especially from my mother’s two monstrous sisters, who knew of and took every opportunity to bring up our connection to Marisa Guzman by way of my sister’s marriage to her brother. Previously, when they had visited my mother—usually to carry some talk that they felt somehow implicated her—I would avoid them. They were, at best, very plain, and, I couldn’t help noticing, their eyelashes seemed about to slant downward. Everything about my mother irked them, mostly, I was sure, that she was the pretty one.
I had heard them make several pointed references to my Scottish father’s “strange, foreign ways.” “And how can you tolerate them, Lupe?” they would accuse without identifying his strange ways. Though I might have agreed with them had they identified my father’s strange ways, there were times when I hoped my father would walk in on them because, no doubt, he would pursue them out of the house in a rage, even push them out; but they avoided him, always. I once saw them—they were always together—under the shade of a tree, fanning each other as if they were merely cooling off, waiting until my father walked past them, either not seeing them or ignoring them. Then they rushed to knock at our door with fresh judgments.
Now here they were in our house, having announced their presence as always with a shrill, “Aqui estamos!”—“Here we are!”—as if their presence were to be celebrated; I considered their cry an alert that allowed me to flee.
But not today. I situated myself in a neighboring room, the door open. I was certain that the subject of the kept woman would come up.
This is how it went on that hot Texas day when gray storm clouds threatened rain, saturating heat with sticky humidity and hurling bolts of lightning rumbling over the desert.
The homelier of the two sisters—although that designation shifted, depending on which of the two was saying what—addressed my mother sternly: “Esa mujer que tu conoces bien—pues es parte de tu familia, esa mujer, no? (“That woman whom you know—well, she’s a part of your family, that woman, no?”) is being properly discarded by her keeper, that philanderer de Leon, now that she’s thirty, old and homely. I read about it in the newspaper.”
“I never thought she was beautiful, with that atrocious painted face, and I’m sure she’s older,” the second aunt said—and now she was the homelier of the two. “I’m sure she is older! When she dared to come back to affront Señor, didn’t you see those dark circles under her eyes?”
“From her perdition,” the now uglier of the sisters said. “However old she is, she’s been moved into another house by that de Leon.”
“A lesser house? No?” my mother protested.
“The newspaper said it was a larger one,” the other aunt sulked, certainly the uglier of the two, “but no doubt only to mollify her, but it’s farther away from the one he shared with his legitimate Catholic wife in the best neighborhood.”
“That appeared in a newspaper—?” my mother began to ask.
“Yes, in El Alacrán,” one aunt said. El Alacrán—The Scorpion— was a notorious Mexican tabloid published in Juarez that c
arried only salacious stories, constantly disproved.
“—with their names? Really,” my mother persisted.
“Don Raynaldo doesn’t use names,” one aunt said in an indignant tone, as if the mere mention of the tabloid’s columnist proved the story’s authenticity, his morality, and his commitment to the Catholic church. “But he doesn’t have to. Everyone knows who he’s talking about, always.”
“Who else could he mean, Guadalupe? He referred to a powerful man and his kept woman? Who else would be involved in such a sordid story but de Leon and that woman? Who else?” piped up the other aunt.
“Hundreds of rich políticos,” my mother offered with a chuckle. “Including our brothers.”
From such occasional references—including my father’s that he thrust out in judgment of my mother’s family—I had pieced together that the two rich uncles in Juárez, one of whom we had visited the day of the women’s duel, were involved in shady political trafficking—large sums of money and favors.
“Guadalupe!” the aunts gasped indignantly in unison.
“How can you speak that way about your own brothers?” The uglier one dabbed at invisible tears. With renewed venom she said: “That woman is a whore!”
“And why are you defending such a woman?” said the other.
“Yes, why?” the second sister demanded.
“Because she’s courageous,” my mother said.
Was it possible that my mother had once been involved in a romantic scandal? Is that what accounted for her ardent defense of the kept woman?
She had been a beautiful young woman, my mother. Long before the events surrounding my sister’s wedding and during the years of the deepening Depression in the country, Tía Ana, my great-aunt, my mother’s aunt, had enthralled me with a loving depiction of my mother as a young woman—green eyes (“like emeralds”), brownish hair (“lighter in the sun”), a flawless fair complexion (“like buttermilk”), and long eyelashes (“curled, of course, of course”). I had accepted as unassailable Tía Ana’s account of my mother’s having been so lovely that Pancho Villa, the marauder of the countryside during the Mexican revolution, had been swept away by her after a single glance and had sent one of his trusted lieutenants to kidnap her, forcing the family to flee to Juárez.