The Moths and Other Stories (7 page)

The perfume was the final touch. Olivia left some tacos and three dollars on the kitchen table. She never knew exactly when her sons came home nor when she herself would, so she left food and money always. It was a silent contract that they had with one another; she never played mother and they, in turn, never asked her to. Olivia blessed herself, sighed, and hurried to the saloon anticipating Tomás' laugh.

The promise of night disappeared. He would probably awaken disoriented and bewildered at the unfamiliar room, she thought. But she would assure him that nothing happened because nothing did happen. Tomás had sunk onto the cracked dance-floor tile after that last shot of José Cuervo, drunk, and she had asked his companions to take him to her place. Tomorrow he was leaving for Fresno, to go to his wife, and who knows when she would see him again. Tomás—buried beneath the blankness that liquor caused—slept soundly, unyielding to the fingers that petted and comforted him.

Olivia undressed and lay close to him, defeated but warm. The heaviness of his slow breathing and his oppressive presence held blocks against her sleep. She rested her hand against the firm folds of his breasts, crushing his unraveled curls. Her hand caught the rhythm of his breath. She heard the Sunday morning church bells summon the mourning, sleepless women with dust on their hair, and she would have to wake him before the dawn revealed her secret. Today he was returning to Fresno.

“Tomás.” She hoped to awaken him, but all he did was grunt and jerk away from her. The bells of the church rang heavy in the air. Olivia touched his shoulder.

“Tomás.” The bells faded. “Sometimes in my sleep,” she whispered to him as if speaking to a child not yet born of its senses, “…I can see the inside of me. Mesh. It looks like mesh. Pieces of bones rattling like ice in an empty glass. Those are times I wish I was an artist so I could paint a picture of
myself…” Olivia closed her eyes. “…Lime-light green, dull yellow, mixed together like vomit.” She turned away from him, facing the window. The cool awakening gray-glow dawn illuminated the room slowly.

“It's true, Tomás. It's true,” she whispered to the window. “Sometimes in your sleep, you can see the inside of you.” His snoring was like the soft hum of a bee next to her ears. She became still, almost tranquil as that morning, and her eyes bled tears, first quiet flowing tears, then hot, salty stabbing tears uncontrolled, while his snoring was like the soft hum of a bee next to her ears.

“What are you raving about? You think you're not guilty? You, a whore, a bitch! I'm not finished, stay. Before I hit you again. And again. But you won't cry in front of me, will you? You won't please me by unveiling your pain, will you? Let them hear. They're probably not mine anyway.

“The marihuana opiates, the liquor seduces. That is why nothing can hurt me, not even you. I work to live, and I hate it. I live for you, and I hate it. I have another shot of tequila—tequila is a good mistress—and two more before I ask myself, why live?

“I loved you too much. Now I have no pride, no respect for myself. I'm waiting for the breeze that will lift and carry me away from you.

“Ha. Ha. You say that I am unfaithful? In Tijuana, last week? Like the devil, you disguise yourself as a gnat to spy on me? I should have spied on you that night you let him rip the virginity out of you, the blood and slime of your innocence trailing down the sides of his mouth. You tramp. You righteous bitch. Don't I have the right to be unfaithful? Weren't you? Vete mucho a chingar a tu madre, más cabrona que la chingada…”

Martha, please pray to God to make them stop. God doesn't listen to me.

“Perra, don't rage to me about that barmaid! Answer me, vieja cabrona, ans…”

Like a drowning, hissing fire, his ghost smoldered while he lay there. Tomás' wife thought of towers crumbling and then of his intoxicants that unleash and loosen those hidden
passions that burn through the soul and float up to a smoldering belch, causing him to rage that pure rage that no one really knew of. Tomás was now an invincible cloud of the past, she thought. A coiled smoking ghost. She kneeled beside him, laying her puzzle-piece heart against his unliving one. Unliving because she had pressured the trigger tight, then tightfingered it until his chest blew up, spilling the oozing blood that stained all tomorrows. And yet he seemed more alive. No. More real than anything, anyone around her. She spoke to him with the voice of prayer. “And you? The choice was yours, Tomás. As for me, I had no choice. I had given up being a woman for you, just like you gave up your own respect and dignity when you married me. Surely now, at this moment, I feel so close to you; equally dead, but equally real.” How could she explain to him that she was so tired and wrinkled and torn by him, his God, and his word? She had tried to defy the rules by sleeping with another man, but that only left her worse off. And she could not leave him because she no longer owned herself. He owned her, her children owned her, and she needed them all to live. And she was tired of needing.

What to tell the police, what to say. Tomás's unfaithfulness. That was as real as his body on the couch. “Tomás was a trustful man, but flesh is flesh, men are men…”

The acid fumes that fiercely clawed her insides crept timidly away from her and mingled with the roaming urinal scent of the hospital cell. Her children in time would forgive her. But God? He would never understand; He was a man, too. No. She would become a cricket wailing nightly for redemption. That suited her; she would be wailing for redemption. With the strength of defiant resignation, she stared zombie-like at the name printed on the wristband.

“She moaned a lot in her sleep and sometimes she'd say things out loud that she'd never say awake. Since we slept in the same bed, she would sometimes hang onto me and call me by his name. It wasn't your father's name though; it wasn't Tomás.

“Under other circumstances, if you had asked me these questions, I would have belted you hard, as I often did to curious children who peeked through my window. I am old now,
old and with the same name, and I tell you these things because soon you will be ready for marriage and the worms will cover me completely and it'll be too late to tell you anything. How uncomfortable, these worms; today I found two of them squirming around my toes. Yesterday I found one burrowing into my thigh. I kill them, but I am losing my strength.

“I am not an evil woman, Martha, but my body has suffered much. Look at this body—twisted like tangled tree roots. Hand me that glass of water, Martita, I am dry. A little warm, but good. So you want to know about your parents? Damn fly. Flies drop dead all around this house. Just the other day, one fell into my teeth glass. For God's life, I couldn't bring myself to put on my teeth. Wretched things, these teeth.

“As you know, I am your oldest aunt. Because I was the first, our mother—not knowing how many daughters she would have—saved the beauty that was supposed to be shared among us. Since I was the first-born daughter, she gave me bad teeth, and since your mother was the last, she gave her all the beauty she denied her other daughters, including me. I remember an old boyfriend of mine. Alejandro? No, Alfredo. Alfredo was his name. He used to tell me, ‘Smile, chica, smile, so I can see my reflection.' He was a good man, that Alfredo. You know, Martha, Alfredo and I were going to get married once. I knew him for years and years and he always called me Little Rabbit because of my teeth. But once he began to notice your mother's developing breasts, and I caught her giving him that look, I told him to go far away. He was a good man, that Alfredo.

“It is already getting dark. Please light Jesucristo's candle for me. The days seem so short now. You will say a rosary with me before you go, won't you? What did you say? What was your father doing all this time? Tempting the dreams of older women, that Tomás. I had my eye out for him long before his voice even changed. But your mother gave him the look, and I had no right to tell him to go away. From the very beginning, he gave himself completely to her. And that was a mistake. Because her heart was just a seed then, she could not give him something she had not yet created. This drove Tomás crazy and I would tell her, tell her, ‘It is evil to make him suffer,' and your mother would say, ‘I can't help it if he
loves me.' He asked me to watch over your mother, that Tomás.

“Jesús mío, but it gets cold in here. My body begins to freeze at the feet and by morning I am a snow cone. Thank you for the blanket, Martita. Now where was…oh. Many weeks pass. One late night—did I tell you that we shared a bed, your mother and I? Well, one late night I hear tapping on the window. I think it's Tomás coming to get her and I act as if nothing awakes me. Your mother slips out from between the sheets like a snake shedding its skin. She opens the window and they exchange whispers. It is a man all right, but not Tomás.

“God have mercy on my soul, child, but you are a good Martita who must know the truth or else you'll never be at peace and this is why I hope I am not wrong in telling you.

“The man waited outside while your mother felt around the dark room for her robe. I burst out in loud whispers asking her where she is going and who is that man. ‘I'll return,' is all she answers. After a long while I am awakened by a cold weight smelling of soft dirt and grass. It was her, breathing as if she had run for miles. Tomás returned about three months after, and I, though years paint coats of vagueness on memories, will never forget the look on Tomás' face when your mother greeted him on the porch with a small belly. They got married a few days later.

“Do you hear the crickets? Our mother warned us against killing crickets because they are the souls of condemned people. Do you hear their wailing, Martita? They conduct the mass of the dead only at night. You will say a rosary with me tonight, won't you?”

 

They arrived in the secrecy of night, as displaced people often do, stopping over for a week, a month, eventually staying a lifetime. The plan was simple. Mother would work, too, until they saved enough to move into a finer future where the toilet was one's own and the children needn't be frightened. In the meantime, they played in the back alleys, among the broken glass, wise to the ways of the streets. Rule one: never talk to strangers, not even the neighbor who paced up and down the hallways talking to himself. Rule two: the police, or “polie” as Sonya's popi pronounced the word, was La Migra in disguise and thus should always be avoided. Rule three: keep your key with you at all times—the four walls of the apartment were the only protection against the streets until Popi returned home.

Sonya considered her key a guardian saint and she wore it around her neck as such until this afternoon. Gone was the string with the big knot. Gone was the key. She hadn't noticed its disappearance until she picked up Macky from Mrs. Avila's house and walked home. She remembered playing with it as Amá walked her to school. But lunch break came, and Lalo wrestled her down so that he could see her underwear, and it probably fell somewhere between the iron rings and sandbox. Sitting on the front steps of the apartment building, she considered how to explain the missing key without having to reveal what Lalo had seen, for she wasn't quite sure which offense carried the worse penalty.

She watched people piling in and spilling out of the buses, watched an old man asleep on the bus bench across the street. He resembled a crumbled ball of paper, huddled up in the security of a tattered coat. She became aware of their
mutual loneliness and she rested her head against her knees, blackened by the soot of the playground asphalt.

The old man eventually awoke, yawned like a lion's roar, unfolded his limbs and staggered to the alley where he urinated between two trash bins. (She wanted to peek, but it was Macky who turned to look.) He zipped up, drank from a paper bag, and she watched him until he disappeared around the corner. As time passed, buses came less frequently, and every other person seemed to resemble Popi. Macky became bored. He picked through the trash barrel; later, and to Sonya's fright, he ran into the street after a pigeon. She understood his restlessness, for waiting was as relentless as long lines to the bathroom. When a small boy walked by, licking away at a scoop of vanilla ice cream, Macky ran after him. In his haste to outrun Sonya's grasp, he fell and tore the knee of his denim jeans. He began to cry, wiping snot against his sweater sleeve.

“See?” she asked, dragging him back to the porch steps by his wrist. “See? God punished you!” It was a thing she always said because it seemed to work. Terrified by the scrawny tortured man on the cross, Macky wanted to avoid His wrath as much as possible. She sat him on the steps in one gruff jerk. Seeing his torn jeans and her own scraped knees, she wanted to join in his sorrow and cry. Instead, she snuggled so close to him she could hear his stomach growling.

“Coke,” he said. Mrs. Avila gave him an afternoon snack which usually held him over until dinner. But sometimes Macky got lost in the midst of her own six children and…

Mrs. Avila! It took Sonya a few moments to realize the depth of her idea. They could wait there, at Mrs. Avila's. And she'd probably have a stack of flour tortillas, fresh off the comal, ready to eat with butter and salt. She grabbed his hand. “Mrs. Avila has Coke.”

“Coke!” He jumped up to follow his sister. “Coke,” he cooed.

At the major intersection, Sonya quietly calculated their next move while the scores of adults hurried to their own destinations. She scratched one knee as she tried retracing her journey home in the labyrinth of her memory. Things never looked the same when backwards and she searched for familiar scenes. She looked for the newspaperman who sat in a little house with a little T.V. on and sold magazines with naked
girls holding beach balls. But he was gone. What remained was a little closet-like shed with chains and locks, and she wondered what happened to him, for she thought he lived there with the naked ladies.