My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me (76 page)

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Authors: KATE BERNHEIMER

BOOK: My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me
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“I gave my fruits to la madre, La Morenita,” she says. “What else could I do?”
We can’t sleep in the haunted dormitory. “Stay out of the cellar,” Coyote says, but then he’s snoring, so where else? We find a goat in a closet with the centuries-old reposados. A devil on a three-legged stool insists the goat’s a princess, his ransom, his goddaughter, his bride-to-be.
“Pre-ci-o-so!” the devil says, showing his little gold teeth and their ivory fillings.
In the ballroom, scarred films flicker on the wall: plum-suited charros singing from horseback to the grazing herds and a hunchback burning the corpses of emaciated campesinos. The projectionist curled over his womanly machine sings along as he fondles its knobs. In matters of love, one never gets what one wants.
Out on the patio, beside a shattered staircase, a blackbird lies pierced by long shards of the broken glass. One wing’s almost off and his breast is sheared open.
The delicate bones! The Pedro Infante face! The fluttering little heart!
This is the film version of our parents’ romance.
His amante has a madwoman’s hair, dirty little virgin feet. The lap of her nightgown holds a heart-shaped bloodstain. Her three stepsisters hang by their necks from the porch beams. One redhead, one blonde, and one brunette. So peaceful, like beloved sleepers. Now we can forgive them.
“I heard them whispering,” our mother says, grabbing a pigeon and cutting its throat, draining the blood into a little clay pitcher. There are hundreds more gathering to gossip, perching on the hanging girls, in the trees, on the roof, waddling and pecking around the dry fountain. The empty halls echo with their coos and scratching nails. The sound effect is amplified to emphasize her dementia.
“It’s the only cure for his curse,” she says, cutting open another bird, spattering the fractured tiles with black constellations. Pure cinema! “What they said, yes, that’s what they said, what they said.” Our mother looks at us. No fool after all. She is an international star. “The only way you can ever be born,” she says as the camera slowly zooms in. She looks away, a defiant tear in her eye. We are in love.
“Mamá,” we sing, “your cantarito is only one-quarter full, so we’ll join in your slaughter just until we get bored.” But we work fast. Maybe carelessly. Is it our fault some of the slower kids get in the way?
We wander into the kitchen where beans are bubbling on the stove. A steaming pozole and the moon making fresh tortillas. It has a big ass and smells like canela. “Ay, niños,” it sighs, wiping its hands on its apron. “You’re so late! You need to eat. But where is Yolanda? Where is Areli? What’s happened to Pancho and Enrique?” The truth is not pretty. We are so hungry, but then the sun bursts in wearing stained underpants and throws a brick at us. A watermelon. A mango. A boot. We swear: that was for nothing. Ask the blackbird in the avocado tree, the mad amante hanging herself from the Milky Way.
 
That pack of dogs snuck up on us. They came up out of a culvert in the dark, quiet and with no eyes in their heads to reflect the moonlight. Before we could roll up the windows they’d carried off Cruz, Rosario, and Virgilio, torn open their bellies and plucked out their eyes.
“Ojos! Hijos! Huesos! Lobos!” they bark. They come at us with bloody jaws and those stolen eyes resting like pearls on their tongues. “How many of us have been blinded because of you? To prove that the order to kill you has been carried out! Mocosos! You live while we’re left to be kicked and to struggle for scraps, run off and run over! Jau! Jau! Jau!”
Coyote has the Nova in gear now and he’s swerving through the grove trying to get us back to the road.
They’re snapping at the kids in the rear bumper, barking their names like some wild Chichimec gang: Brokerib! Pinchback! Swell-foot! Droptooth!
 
Little Cuauhtémoc huddles himself around the radio, comforted by the sizzling static and the stone in his mouth shaped like a human heart.
 
Oh, now it’s rush hour, golden hour, and all the Cadillacs chauffeuring our mothers to the suburban Seven Cities Mall are backed up for a glittering mile, and we are here in the Nova making time with some fine-ass white boys and girls on the service road, passing more public storage units and strip malls, legal services and sandwich shops and blood-testing agencies and nail salons, like a never-ending, ever-repeating commercial for what we call El Norte. Ice cream, Coyote! Starbucks! Party rentals! Outback! Two for one tattoos and piercings!
He must not hear us.
You don’t believe us?
Okay, so suppose it’s just more underdeveloped Sonora sand and cactus out there, squalid shelters rigged out of cinder blocks, sticks, and plastic, and we’re tired of playing I Spy and License Plate Lotería. And the sun hurts our eyes because we lost our hats, and Coyote says there’s no extra money to buy us any. So there’s a young man on horseback, a tejano prince in a tall white hat, Coyote. And he doesn’t squint, Coyote. So he’s handsome. He’s got a million MySpace friends—mostly gay men and twelve-year-old girls—and a great big contract with Televisa. He will be our president. Si se puede! And there’s a woman in a maid’s uniform who loves him, and who doesn’t know yet that she’s pregnant, and she’s crossing the highway to dust the furniture and vacuum the floors and wash the sheets and towels and sex toys at the Yanqui-owned time-shares overlooking El Mar Vermijo. Each air-conditioned unit has tinted windows, according to the brochure, so you have no idea what those sunburned gringos are up to, do you? And the maid lady, Coyote: she’s wearing cheap sunglasses and a thong that she borrowed from her nasty prima who’s home doing her nails and getting fucked like a goat by the maid lady’s infected boyfriend who’s trying to watch the Toluca match and keeps asking: “Are we there yet? Are we there yet? Are we there yet?”
So, hey, Coyote: we’re getting a little cranky. Are we there yet?
Gol! Gol! Gol! Gol! Gooooool!
 
Francisco, the Goat-Boy of Ameca, rides round and round in our hubcap stroking the bloody left ear he sliced off Bofo’s bald head, a trophy of that championship season in Guadalajara. Cisco’s parents clean the lab where he’ll be studied in Portland. That’s what Coyote says. “CHI-VAS,” Cisco shouts every time we hit a hole. “CHI-VAS! CAM-PE-ÓN!”
 
And the girl we call La Sirena. She won’t say where she’s from. She swims so many laps around the radiator she grows flippers and a tail. She’s going to boil and turn red. When the cap blows she’ll be riding those flaming plumes of gas, oil, brake fluid, and transmission fluid right into downtown Nogales. La Princesa! La Reina! La Gloria! Wouldn’t you like to see? She will have her own apocalyptic cult. Nuestra Señora de la Nova. She is carrying the furious daughter of God.
 
Coyote’s friend Conejo is waiting outside the bus station: all las Flechas Amarillas cocked and aimed south at Celaya, Palenque, Pachuco, Querétaro, Mérida, Pátzcuaro, Potosí, Tollan, Veracruz, Aztlán.
We’re going to Gringolandia! Adiós! Adiós, pendejos, adiós! Vaya bien!
Coyote whistles and Conejo gets in, his jeans and work boots crusted with plaster from building walls on the Heights for los ricos.
God damn it’s hot.
Conejo strums his guitar. Conejo says, “Let’s get the kids some ice cream.”
Coyote drives the car.
“Let’s get the kids some ice cream,” Conejo says and Coyote says okay.
“Ay, qué rica!” Sometimes Conejo will lose his head.
They have a thousand flavors. Las viejitas hand out cups of elote, aguacate, mango, mole, cerveza, sensemilla, cacahuate, nopal, chicharrón, chorizo, lengua, frijol, and there’re tents all around selling sopes and tacos—al pastor, bistec, flor de calabaza, gusano, hormiga, chapulín—Cantinflas masks, huaraches, guayaberas, Chiapas amber, Chivas wallets, bikinis, Zapata marionettes, popguns, tops, Jaguares keychains, piggy banks, balloons, Oaxacan silver, chickens, roosters, goats. We don’t keep our hands to ourselves until they get chopped off and tossed into the cazuela.
Borrachos!
A procession of staggering Yaquis circles the square with a pig wearing a crown of cactus thorns and a Patriots “Undefeated!” T-shirt. Father Pelotas, waving a feather and a valve from the uncorrupted heart of San Caloca, conjures a bloody little Jesús to scourge them. “Infiels!” Jesús shouts. “Nihilistas! Apóstatas!” He snaps his whip against those bent Indian backs. He hopped out of a perfect little cloud. Every good dog barks fanatically.
And then one thing leads to another. The thirteenth apostle slips out of a mural and sneaks off to a motel with Concepción. Osvaldo and Elvira get sucked into an infernal sphincter. Jaime is forced to enlist with the garrison.
The concheros’ rattling chalchihuites start the ritual lucha between La Morenita and La Malinche. Our Lady clobbers the other with a chair. She’s bloody. She breaks a nail. She cracks a rib. She gets her ass beat with a cornstalk. That one’s got some cojones. Juan Diego and Cortés tag in, slapping, pulling hair, gouging eyes. The loser will be shaved.
Later, we’re cruising the Heights with Morenita cuddling her bloody little Jesús in the Nova’s backseat, tickling his beard, teasing him with his whip, the tip of it just beyond his delicate grasping fingers with their trimmed nails. He squeals and she nurses him, nurses us all with her Extremaduran rompope until we’re laid out—all except Coyote, whose shell eyes are glowing at us in the rearview mirror—drunk and happy on her magnificent jiggling lap, the map light of her countenance guiding our dreams toward board games and bunk beds. Let there be bicycles. Golden, slick banana seats and temperate, green summer.
“You won’t come to my house?” Morenita asks. Her breath stinks. We see one black curling hair on her chin.
These bright, vacant streets, lamplit and sober. Conejo sings a narco-corrido that gives everyone the creeps. A private security guard in a bulletproof vest raises his atlatl. He says, “Get the fuck out.”
“No tocar,” Conejo sings. “No tocar, no tocar, no tocar. Ay, que barbaro.”
Something smells like Fabuloso. Walls of bougainvillea that protect the beautiful sleeping families.
Conejo says: There was this kid who loved the Dodgers, see. Chávez Ravine, Fernandomania, all that shit. He had this friend who worked in them new fortress-condos in Tijuana, you know? High-rise! And they snuck past security and got up on the roof and ran him up the flagpole and he was up there. Way up. Up above the clouds! Just so he could see all the way to Los Angeles.
“José!” they started calling at him. “José! José! José!”
They got so worried. Someone’s going to kill them.
Si, le oigo! José calls down. Like a little angel, eh, kids? Fucking Angel José, huh?
And, you know, these kids call back:
“José, José ... José can you see?”
... a la lu-u-u-uz de la aurora? José is singing.
Lo que tanto aclamamos la noche al caer?
Ay ja ja! And Coyote punches Conejo right in the mouth.
That broke his last good tooth. Conejo sucks a lime.
 
She’s emerging through the static: big-titted Fronterista in chaps and mirrored sunglasses. You’ve got mother’s milk on your breath, chica. You’ve got a juicy pera, death’s-head thighs, semiautomatic eyes. You’re a shock to our guts, our inflamed rectum. We do a Mixtec boogaloo, an Otomi polka, a Yanqui tango. Now we’re setting the Nova bouncing like a madrefucking lowrider.
 
At our last stop to pee before the border, we find an empty peanut shell and a naked girl in a maguey plant. A shotgun shell and a naked girl. Sea shells. Some spent shells. Coyote has to hold Conejo back, bind his filthy mouth shut with his belt.
She looks crazy as a Huichol, the moon in her eye, the sun in her head. We shudder in the heat.
She says: “Gemelos,” and nods. As if it has never been said before. As if she is naming us. There is a busted-up Nahua keyboard in the dust, a blown-out VGA monitor, a snake or two. We walk around the saguaros, listening to the snap of Wal-Mart bags like little flags flying from the fingertips of the chollas. There is a bullet-riddled phone book. An empty zapato. There is the tall fence. And the Franciscan shelter where they hold the kids who don’t make it over. They reach out through the barred, oval windows, grasping for birds and bugs, and the hooded monks pluck them out with giant tongs. Then they send them back around again to the rear, limping misshapen forms.

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