“An atrocity has occurred in the world outside. Japan has attacked Pearl Harbor.”
There were gasps; many people left. I had little idea what that meant. I understood the impact soon, after when both my brothers had to go away, the younger one to the infantry, the older to the air force. My father would shed his gloom to follow closely and proudly the advance of the Allies, victories he ascribed solely to my brothers.
During those sad war years, that, however, began to end the Depression, virtually every house in El Paso displayed a proud cross indicating that a family member was “serving America.” Very often the cross was replaced with a gold one, marking yet another death. The accumulation of gold crosses signaled the passing of those turbulent years, the toll of death.
My sister Olga and I—and my gentle mother—became the objects of my father’s wrath, fueled by his extending decline. My sister escaped by making friends with girls her age, staying over at their homes as often as possible, often coaxing me to come with her; but I wouldn’t, feeling I had to protect my mother.
Toward me, my father became an enigma of contradictions. When he discovered that I had begun to write one-page stories (always titled “Long Ago” and illustrated with costumed characters, the sort I had seen in his theatrical productions), and despite his own artistic background, he disregarded them: “You’re too moody, go out and make friends.” And yet, my mother attested, to others he would brag about his “artistic son.” “You’re too pretty,” he would castigate me—although he had always cast me as the lead in his children’s skits, insisting that I look the best, to stand out. “Go out for sports like your brothers,” he demanded. “I do,” I rebutted. “I’m very good at gymnastics, and I run track fast.” That was true. I preferred activities that allowed me to perform alone, compete with myself. At school, I could do sit-ups—and show off doing them—until my stomach wrenched. I could run in record time around the playground. “Those aren’t sports,” he dismissed them; “those are substitutes!”
Just as unpredictable as his unprovoked outbursts at his own declining status, there were moments of regret. He might appear with a bunch of fresh flowers for my mother after his outbursts; flowers that assumed a despairing beauty when they entered the sad house. My mother would hold them, smiling sweetly. I waited for the flowers to wither and die so that I could throw them out. After raging at me for whatever reason he concocted—I would cover my ears, not hear—he might return, in the evening, with a present he could not afford, like, once, a pair of shiny cowboy boots I had longed for, and, another time, a small movie projector.
On her saint’s day—we did not celebrate my mother’s actual birthday, only her saint’s day, the day of the Holy Virgin of Guadalupe, after whom she had been named—he appeared outside her window at dawn with two or three scraggly musicians playing guitars to serenade her with the romantic “Las Mañanitas.” My mother would linger by the window, greeting the serenaders with a smile. At those times, always, there was a loveliness about the morning, a loveliness that seeped into the day, hopeful interludes, very soon broken again by my father’s blind rages.
Between me and him, periods of angery silence lengthened into days, shattered without warning by his escalating anger and threats aimed at me and my mother. He became for me a despised stranger, an old man, fifty years older than I.
There were times when pity for him swept away my anger. During a broadcast by the Metropolitan Opera of Carmen, his favorite opera, which he had staged throughout the years, productions that grew more and more bravely ragged, he commanded my sister Olga, my mother, and me to sit facing the radio. As glorious music soared into the house, he stood with his back to us, and with an imaginary baton, he made passionate motions as if he were directing the orchestra himself, as he had once done. His baton sliced up and down, around, his head keeping pace with the music and the flow of his tears.
The afternoon when newspaper boys ran about the city, screaming, “Extra, Extra, the war is over!” even my mother—my father was already outside—rushed out with us to add to the crowds at San Jacinto Plaza in the center of the city amid loud and prolonged jubilation, overflowing with soldiers from Fort Bliss, grabbing, kissing and dancing with pretty Mexican girls.
Soon, my brothers would return home, safe but with memories of death and explosions.
It was on the eve of their returning home that the wedding of my sister Olga to Luis caused so much turbulence in the city, the time when I Wrst saw the kept woman of Augusto de Leon.
In the seventh month of her pregnancy (so that it was possible to claim a premature birth, to my mother’s sighed relief, despite the child’s nine full pounds and the virulent aunts’ persistent inquiries about the exact date of birth), my sister bore a boy, whom I gleefully proclaimed to be ugly, although my sister, my mother, and everyone else who saw it—him—thought otherwise.
Although other families in El Paso had struggled out of extreme poverty to moderate poverty during the war, ours seemed entrenched. Soon after his triumph over Señor’s threats to stop my sister’s wedding—and the added triumph of playing his music during the ceremony—my father’s musical pupils abandoned him. He had to accept menial jobs, finally as a caretaker in a park.
Back home now from the army, my brother Robert quickly married but continued to help support the family. He got a job in a lens-grinding factory, soon becoming its foreman—and, for me, much more of a father than my real, aging father. Every payday, my brother bought pastries, which he spread out before me, still a boy.
Yvan returned to college under the GI Bill.
My brothers had always been popular athletes. Now they extended that popularity in school and city leagues, continuing to fulfill my father’s expectations. On one of those strange El Paso nights when the horizon seemed on fire—the sun spreading an orange glow against the purplish horizon—and when the wind only threatened to rise, spurts that shoved everything into motion for seconds and then abandoned debris on the streets, only to stir it up again, my mother, my sisters Olga and Blanca (their husbands had night jobs) and I traipsed across the city to watch the final playoff of the City League basketball season.
My father, excited, was already at the site of the game. Often, when my brothers made what he considered an error, he would march onto the court ready to shout at them, only to be rebuffed by the referee, to whom he would then turn his wrath. When another player interfered with my brothers’ moves, my father would shove ahead and threaten him, fists preparing to punch, while the players and the referee—and my brother Robert—kept him away and my face burned with embarrassment.
The game was over, a cliff-hanger. My brother Robert had, in a succession of moves, shot three baskets—one from a long distance away, winning the game by seconds. My mother wept, thanking the Holy Mother. I could see my father hopping onto the court, probably to lecture my brother on what he might have done even better. My brother, sweating, elated, kept looking up at us and waving, especially—I was sure—to me.
I jumped up and ran down to congratulate him. He and the other players, exhilarated, sweating, exchanging camaraderie, had already headed for the showers.
I walked down the corridor where they had disappeared, to the right. The door had been left open. I walked in. I reeled.
All around were naked men, some dripping with water; others were still in the showers, water running down their bodies. Some had begun to dress, slipping on their shorts; others were still in jockstraps. A few sat on benches conversing and drying themselves; some had their backs to me.
I stared at the naked flesh about me, the patches of hair between the legs matted with water or sweat.
My brother saw me. I had forgotten why I was there.
“Johnny!” my brother called. His middle was wrapped in a towel. “What are you doing here, little brother?”
“I—” I remembered. “I came to congratulate you, brother. You won the game.”
He placed his hand on my shoulder, thanking me.
I turned away and ran out of the steamy room.
By then, my belief in God—and it had been ingrained in me that God was Catholic—was waning. Still, I went to church, usually with my mother and, when she decided at the last moment to join us, my sister Olga with her baby. During Mass I found my mind wandering over inconsistencies in what the priests demanded that we believe. Although I found the figure of Christ crucified gory and cruel, the almost naked body was beautiful, and sexual. Didn’t all those folks, men and women, who knelt before him see that? That he had a body that made him look as if he worked out regularly, did dozens of crunches to get carved obliques? All the men depicted in the stations of the cross, especially the Roman soldiers, were muscular and good-looking. Yes, and the women were beautiful, but they were always covered, every inch of them. Only their hands, clasped in prayer or wrenched in pain—and their faces painted like those of movie stars, with rosy cheeks and curled eyelashes—revealed flesh. Under their cowls and dresses, what? I imagined it often. The legs would be curved just slightly, and right at the intersection, the V—What? It would be different from what I had seen that day in the showers after my brother’s basketball victory. In my imagination, I had to stop at the point when my mind wondered during Mass and I imagined lifting the skirts of the glamorous saintly ladies.
I had entered the limbo of thirteen. I became gangly. Looking through one of my sister’s movie magazines left behind—I think it was Screen Romances—I saw a photograph of Burt Lancaster without a shirt, muscular chest oiled. I rushed to the mirror and studied myself without a shirt. A wave of despair swept me away from the mirror. What had become of the boy who was constantly being complimented for his good looks?
Once I had accompanied my mother to church when she was performing a novena; nine consecutive days of reciting the rosary before the Holy Mother Mary. I had been able to endure only one day of what seemed endless torture. Today, after school, I knelt before the statue of the lofty lady in the Immaculate Conception Church. Her face was gorgeous, soulful and strong at the same time. Her eyes were brilliant, her features perfect, sublime, gleaming marbles of whatever color filtered through the stained-glass windows. Although her body was clothed in shimmering azure, she was surely well shaped; the folds of her dress indicated wonderful curves—I forced myself not to imagine lifting her skirt. Today she resembled … No, not the kept woman; she was not that sensational. No, she resembled Magda Holer—the actress who had played the Holy Mother, my mother, in El Monje Blanco.
For long afternoons, I knelt praying before the beautiful image. There were usually one or two beatas about, old shawled women who spent most of their time in church beating their breasts and confessing to nonexistent sins, fussily tending to the altar, kneeling dozens of times as they navigated back and forth, thrusting signs of the cross at the altar each time. An occasional nun, not sweet like Mother Mercedes, would float by soundlessly in her full winged habit, standing over me for whatever purpose and startling me because I hadn’t heard her approach. Then she would drift away like a cumbersome specter.
I did not trust silent communication, even with the Mother of God. Making sure that no one was near me, I whispered aloud the words of my petition, the purpose of my devout novena, quietly but with grave devotion and resurrected belief:
“Please, Blessed Mother Mary, make me handsome again.”
One day I was fourteen, then quickly fifteen and very handsome. I now had pubic hair like the men I had seen naked in the basketball players’ showers long ago.
And I was now able to confront my father’s rages by disconnecting myself entirely from him, even at the dinner table. Both of us were encased by silence that extended into days.
6
A pretty girl by the name of Isabel Franklin transferred out of Bowie High School; gossip immediately sprang up in my high school about why she had transferred—and how she had been able to enroll in the “rich school.”
Bowie High was known as the “Mexican” school, where the poorest children from South El Paso went. The demarcation between the South Side and the North Side was emphasized starkly by railroad tracks that cut off one side of the city from the other. My family lived just one block into the North Side. By that slim coincidence I, and a few other Mexicans, were enrolled in the “American school,” where the students were predominantly the children who lived “up the hill,” in Kern Place, the rich people’s neighborhood.
Isabel Franklin’s complexion, although lighter than dark, might have exposed her to vague suspicions that she was a “light Mexican.” But that deduction was clouded seriously by her last name and predominantly Anglo features.
She spoke to few of the other students—only cursorily when necessary. She walked haughtily by herself from room to room, although she often smiled, even when the smile was not being directed at anyone specifically, as if she was practicing a smile in order not to arouse malicious antagonism. She drew admiring looks from both Mexican and Anglo boys—and snippy looks from most of the girls—both of which reactions she rebuffed with an enigmatic smile.
Because I was developing my own defensive arrogance, I would pass her as silently as she passed me. I assumed we shared the arrogance of the outsider who is nonetheless admired physically, as we both were.
My “Anglo” coloring contributed to allowing me to become a “popular student” at El Paso High School, a position I sought aggressively, becoming, eventually, president of several clubs, a student council representative, and, at the time of Isabel’s arrival, editor of the school paper, The Tattler. Still, my ambiguous identity as a guerro exiled me doubly. Other Mexican students were cool. Among “rich Anglos” who did not know I was Mexican, I felt like a trespasser. I had begun to gravitate toward those students exiled as geeks, unattractive boys and girls, who were often the smartest. Even among them, I was looked at with suspicion. Daily, I surrendered my compromised popularity when classes were over.
Two teachers I would cherish forever provided respite from those conflicts. Maude Isaacks, a prim, smart lady, encouraged me, proclaiming me “definitely a future writer of note.” Fanny Foster, a flamboyant onetime actress who demanded attention by aiming her cane at any student who lapsed in concentration, introduced me to Shakespeare while acting out scenes with dyed spools on a huge dictionary atop her desk—Hamlet was a dark brown spool, Ophelia was pink, Queen Gertrude was scarlet. Othelo was very black, and Desdemona was white. “And you, young man, will one day stand out,” she prophesied, searching through her colored spools as if to find one for me.
In school, students who could not afford to eat the hot meals offered in the cafeteria might apply for a “free token,” granted, after a detailed interview about the extent of their poverty, by a staff counselor. All the students who applied were Mexicans. With the token, such students might choose only from the sandwich counter; they had to stand in a separate line from the Anglos. I chose not to apply for the free token. I ran home for lunch during the midday break. I returned breathlessly before the bell rang signaling the resumption of classes.
It was not only because of lunch that I ran home from school. I did so also when school was over for the day so that no one would know where I lived—our house remained dingy, although my mother relentlessly cleaned it, ordering everything in it, the few pieces of furniture we had.
On one rare occasion, I impulsively accepted an invitation to go to the movies with two popular Anglo boys from school. I gave a wrong address to be picked up at, one that corresponded to a pretty two-story house two blocks away from where I lived, three blocks from the telltale railroad tracks. When the time neared for the two to pick me up, I rushed to meet them at the fake address.
That had been so from my earliest years. When I was only six, I would get up early, to the consternation of my brothers and sisters. Those mornings at dawn, I would wander over to Montana Street, which, then, was lined with beautiful two-story houses—two stories would always remain, for me, “special.” One hou
se rested, by itself, alone, aloof, on one whole square block, green with perfect grass. There was no necessity for gates then. The lawn edged onto the public sidewalk. The house had four white columns, and a tall entry door that led, I imagined, up twin flights of stairs under a huge chandelier.
Those twilit mornings, I would sit on steps that led from the street to the lawn of that grand house. I would pretend indifference, imagining that those driving by would look at me and sigh and think, “Look at that lucky boy, so rich, living in that beautiful house he takes for granted.” (Many years later, as an adult, I would learn that my haughty grandmother, my father’s mother, had once owned property on that very street, and had, “out of spite”—in my sister Blanca’s indictment of the woman who had humiliated her because of her darker color—let the property go so that my father, and more importantly my mother, would not inherit it.)
I became sure—as I was sure she was sure—that we, Isabel Franklin and I, were aware of each other as vague conspirators in exile, looking as if we “belonged” but not belonging, or perhaps really even wanting to belong. That would surely enhance her interest in me.
It was a crucial time of adolescent confusion, and everything seemed to conspire to aggravate it. My journalism teacher, who supervised the school paper, often stayed in her classroom to plan the next week’s edition with me.
I was reading a lot by then, whatever the librarian at the public library recommended—Hawthorne, Poe, Melville, Emily Brontë, all instant favorites—and I had begun to write. At this point in my “career,” my stories were loose retellings—this allowed me to think of them as “original”—of movies I had seen (Marie Antoinette, in my version, was saved from the guillotine at the last moment by Tyrone Power)—and of operas my father had staged. In one of the latter—I want to believe I was no older than ten then—Madama Butterfly said to Pinkerton, “You know what, American sea captain? I am going to have your baby.”