B0061QB04W EBOK (20 page)

Abuelita Chinta tried to feed Betty bean broth, but it was painful for Betty to open her mouth, and after a spoonful or two, she pushed the bowl away from her. Abuelita Chinta held her gently and kissed the top of her head. “I’m so sorry, mi niña. I’ll never forgive myself.”

“It wasn’t your fault, Abuelita,” I said quickly.

Carlos came home with great news. He’d gone to visit Tía Emperatriz to ask if she could make Mago her flag-bearer uniform. “She said to come pick it up next week.”

“Thanks be to God,” Abuelita Chinta said, crossing herself.
Maybe Mago doesn’t have to work, after all
, I thought. But then I looked at Betty, who looked like a mummy with her face all bandaged up, and I remembered there was another reason Mago had looked for a job.

At dusk, Abuelita Chinta sent us to the train station to wait for Mago. “It will soon be dark, and it is not safe for your sister to walk home by herself,” she said.

Carlos and I put on our sandals and left. We had a competition to see who could balance on the rail the longest. Soon, we heard the rumbling of the approaching evening train, and we turned to see it snaking its way through the hills, shaking the leaves of the guamúchil trees along the tracks. The conductor blew the whistle as Carlos and I scrambled out of the way. We rushed down to the dirt path and ran alongside the train.

When we got to the station, most of the passengers had gotten off the train, and the few that were continuing on to Cuernavaca or Mexico City were boarding. We sat on a bench and watched Mago go from passenger car to passenger car carrying a tray of hot chicken
quesadillas, offering them to the people who were sitting in their seats, waiting for the train to depart. The whistle blew, the conductor yelled, “¡Váaaaamonooooos!” but Mago was still inside the train. Last-minute passengers hurried to get on. “Come out, come out,” I said under my breath. The train started to move, and Mago was nowhere in sight.

I stood up and rushed over to the train. “What are you doing?” Carlos said as he ran after me. The train slowly began to pull out of the station.

It would be so easy,
I thought,
for Mago to stay on the train. She could decide to leave this place and not come back. She could finally say that enough was enough, that she was tired of being our little mother.
My breath caught in my throat, and I found myself rushing to the moving train, walking alongside of it, searching desperately for my sister. “Mago! Mago!” I yelled, tears already streaming down my face. Then finally, Mago appeared on the landing of the last passenger car with an empty tray and jumped off just before the train sped up.

“I thought you were leaving me,” I told her reproachfully. She laughed and ruffled my hair.

“Never,” she said. We stood by the train as it rushed past us in a blur.

16

M
AMI’S SISTER, TÍA
Güera, would usually come over during the week to visit Abuelita Chinta. She and my grandmother would take two plastic chairs and sit outside the shack. I dreaded my aunt’s visits. She would call me over to delouse my hair. It was excruciating getting deloused by her. She seemed to get too much pleasure out of hunting for the little suckers, and she would pull out whole strands of hair along with the lice. At this rate, I would tell myself, I’m going to go bald!

It was also excruciating to have to listen to her talk. My aunt would do her usual complaints: “Ay, Amá, I don’t have any money to buy
food and my husband drinks his wages away.” Or “Ay, Amá, there’s a sharp pain in my stomach that won’t go away, and I think someone is doing witchcraft on me.” Or “Ay, Amá, why is my husband such a drunk? Maybe you can make him a remedy so that he can stop.” Or, “Ay, Amá, how hard life is. Why does my husband stay out all night long, saying he’s working, but then comes home smelling of some other woman’s perfume?”

“Let me make you a tea of flor de azahar,” Abuelita Chinta would say to Tía Güera once she was done listening to my aunt’s complaints. “It’s good for the nerves.” I wanted to ask Abuelita Chinta if she had anything for my poor scalp, which by then would be throbbing with pain.

But one day, just as they were about to go inside the shack, Doña Caro came out of her house and called out to my grandmother.

“Doña Jacinta,” she said as she walked over to us. “Juana called this morning, but you weren’t home.”

Mami would sometimes call us at Doña Caro’s house to tell us she had wired money so that Abuelita Chinta could go pick it up at the bank. The phone calls were rare, but nevertheless, every day we would stop by Doña Caro’s house to check if our mother had called. Abuelita warned us about annoying Doña Caro, but we couldn’t stop ourselves from inquiring about the phone call.

“I’m afraid something awful has happened,” Doña Caro said. “Juana and the wrestler got into a car accident, and he’s dead.”

“And my daughter?” Abuelita Chinta asked. I grabbed her hand and I leaned against her.

“She was in the hospital. She said to tell you she’s coming home.”

“Is Mami really hurt?” I asked Doña Caro.

“Nothing serious, child. Just a cut and some bruises,” she said, then she turned and went back to her house.

For the following days, all we could think about was our mother, and the thought that we had come so close to losing her would keep us up at night.

Years later, my mother would tell me the story of the wrestler, of how she had not meant to fall in love with him, but this is the way things
happen sometimes, especially when you’re hurting from a broken heart. He worked next door to the record shop.

He told her, “I only sell car insurance during the day. At night, and on the weekends, I’m a luchador. I dream of one day becoming a great wrestler, like the legendary El Santo.”

That’s when she began to think of him as more than just the man who worked next door. That’s when the small things he did for her—like bringing extra tacos to share with her during lunch, buying her popsicles from La Michoacana across the street, watching the record shop for her when she needed to make a quick run to the bathroom—became much bigger in her eyes. A luchador! There was more to this man, Francisco, than met the eye, after all. But a wrestler? Who would have thought?

She liked the way he stood next to her, as if ready to protect her from any harm that came her way. And being a wrestler, he could protect her from anything. Anyone. When he took her to a wrestling match and won, she decided that Francisco would be the man to save her. From what? She didn’t know. All she knew was that my father had let her go, that he had come after her with a gun, and ever since that day, she’d felt as if she were trying to stay afloat, with nothing to hold on to. Francisco would be her way out of the sorrow and fear that threatened to engulf her every waking hour. When he asked her to go with him to Acapulco, she didn’t think twice about it.

But then, as she lay with her head against the shattered windshield of his car and saw him slumped over the steering wheel, unconscious, she realized that even he, with all his strength, couldn’t save her.

During the two weeks after Mami’s return, I would wake up to the sound of crying. In the thin moonlight streaming through the gaps between the bamboo sticks, I saw her sitting in her bed, trembling as she sobbed. We hadn’t known how to comfort her or what to say, so we stayed away. She stayed away from us too, and only once did she try to hold one of us—my little sister. Yet when she reached for Betty, my sister cried and held her arms out to Mago.

“Why are you crying? I’m your mother,” Mami said. But Betty just
cried harder, and Mami had no choice but to give her back to Mago. She didn’t try to hold her again.

“You have to give her time,” Abuelita Chinta said. “You’ve been gone for many months, Juana.”

“I came back, didn’t I?” Mami said. The truth is that she had come back, but would she have done so if the wrestler hadn’t died? Would she have come back if my father hadn’t left her for someone else? We didn’t know the answers to our questions, and we were afraid to ask.

In the morning, Abuelita Chinta gave Mami a cleansing. She sent Carlos to the neighbor’s down the street to buy an egg while she gathered the rest of the items she would need: the bottle of almond oil, a bunch of epazote from her garden, a cigarette. Mami lay down on the bed. Abuelita Chinta sat next to her on the edge and began to rub Mami’s body with the almond oil. My grandmother prayed under her breath as she did this. She took the egg from Carlos and then rubbed it on Mami’s head, being careful not to touch the bandaged area on Mami’s forehead where she had gotten cut. Then she rolled the egg on her chest, arms, hands, legs, and feet so that it would absorb the impurities inside my mother’s body and soul. Mami kept her eyes closed as my grandmother gently tapped the branches of the epazote all over her body.