Woman Hollering Creek (18 page)

I remember how your skin burned to the touch. How you smelled of lemongrass and smoke. I balanced that thin boy’s body of yours on mine.

Something undid itself—gently, like a braid of hair unraveling. And I said,
Ay, mi chulito, mi chulito, mi chulito
, over and over.

Mornings and nights I think your scent is still in the blankets, wake remembering you are tangled somewhere between the sleeping and the waking. The scent of your skin, the mole above the broom of your thick mustache, how you fit in my hands.

Would it be right to tell you, each night you sleep here, after your cognac and cigar, when I’m certain you are finally sleeping, I sniff your skin. Your fingers sweet with the scent of tobacco. The
fluted collarbones, the purple knot of the nipple, the deep, plum color of your sex, the thin legs and long, thin feet.

I examine at my leisure your black trousers with the silver buttons, the lovely shirt, the embroidered sombrero, the fine braid stitching on the border of your
charro
jacket, admire the workmanship, the spurs, leggings, the handsome black boots.

And when you are gone, I re-create you from memory. Rub warmth into your fingertips. Take that dimpled chin of yours between my teeth. All the parts are there except your belly. I want to rub my face in its color, say no, no, no. Ay. Feel its warmth from my left cheek to the right. Run my tongue from the hollow in your throat, between the smooth stones of your chest, across the trail of down below the navel, lose myself in the dark scent of your sex. To look at you as you sleep, the color of your skin. How in the half-light of moon you cast your own light, as if you are a man made of amber.

Are you my general? Or only my Milianito? I think, I don’t know what you say, you don’t belong to me nor to that woman from Villa de Ayala. You don’t belong to anyone, no? Except the land.
La madre tierra que nos mantiene y cuida
. Every one of us.

I rise high and higher, the house shutting itself like an eye. I fly farther than I’ve ever flown before, farther than the clouds, farther than our Lord Sun, husband of the moon. Till all at once I look beneath me and see our lives, clear and still, far away and near.

And I see our future and our past, Miliano, one single thread already lived and nothing to be done about it. And I see the face of the man who will betray you. The place and the hour. The gift of a horse the color of gold dust. A breakfast of warm beer swirling in your belly. The hacienda gates opening. The pretty bugles doing the honors.
TirriLEE tirREE
. Bullets like a sudden shower of
stones. And in that instant, a feeling of relief almost. And loneliness, just like that other loneliness of being born.

And I see my clean
huipil
and my silk Sunday shawl. My rosary placed between my hands and a palm cross that has been blessed. Eight days people arriving to pray. And on the ninth day, the cross of lime and sand raised, and my name called out—Inés Alfaro. The twisted neck of a rooster. Pork tamales wrapped in corn leaves. The masqueraders dancing, the men dressed as women, the women as men. Violins, guitars, one loud drum.

And I see other faces and other lives. My mother in a field of cempoaxúchitl flowers with a man who is not my father. Her
rebozo de bolita
spread beneath them. The smell of crushed grass and garlic. How, at a signal from her lover, the others descend. The clouds scurrying away. A machete-sharp cane stake greased with lard and driven into the earth. How the men gather my mother like a bundle of corn. Her sharp cry against the infinity of sky when the cane stake pierces her. How each waiting his turn grunts words like hail that splits open the skin, just as before they’d whispered words of love.

The star of her sex open to the sky. Clouds moving soundlessly, and the sky changing colors. Hours. Eyes still fixed on the clouds the morning they find her—braids undone, a man’s sombrero tipped on her head, a cigar in her mouth, as if to say, this is what we do to women who try to act like men.

The small black bundle that is my mother delivered to my father’s door. My father without a “who” or “how.” He knows as well as everyone.

How the sky let go a storm of stones. The corn harvest ruined. And how we move from Tetelcingo to my Tía Chucha’s in Cuautla.

And I see our children. Malenita with her twins, who will never marry, two brave
solteronas
living out their lives selling herbs in La Merced in Mexico City.

And our Nicolás, a grown man, the grief and shame Nicolás will
bring to the Zapata name when he kicks up a fuss about the parcel of land the government gives him, how it isn’t enough, how it’s never enough, how the son of a great man should not live like a peasant. The older Anenecuilcans shaking their heads when he sells the Zapata name to the PRI campaign.

And I see the ancient land titles the smoky morning they are drawn up in Náhuatl and recorded on tree-bark paper—
conceded to our pueblo the 25th of September of 1607 by the Viceroy of New Spain
—the land grants that prove the land has always been our land.

And I see that dappled afternoon in Anenecuilco when the government has begun to look for you. And I see you unearth the strong box buried under the main altar of the village church, and hand it to Chico Franco—
If you lose this, I’ll have you dangling from the tallest tree
, compadre.
Not before they fill me with bullets
, Chico said and laughed.

And the evening, already as an old man, in the Canyon of the Wolves, Chico Franco running and running, old wolf, old cunning, the government men Nicolás sent shouting behind him, his sons Vírulo and Julián, young, crumpled on the cool courtyard tiles like bougainvillea blossoms, and how useless it all is, because the deeds are buried under the floorboards of a
pulquería
named La Providencia, and no one knowing where they are after the bullets pierce Chico’s body. Nothing better or worse than before, and nothing the same or different.

And I see rivers of stars and the wide sea with its sad voice, and emerald fish fluttering on the sea bottom, glad to be themselves. And bell towers and blue forests, and a store window filled with hats. A burnt foot like the inside of a plum. A lice comb with two nits. The lace hem of a woman’s dress. The violet smoke from a cigarette. A boy urinating into a tin. The milky eyes of a blind man. The chipped finger of a San Isidro statue. The tawny bellies of dark women giving life.

And more lives and more blood, those being born as well as those dying, the ones who ask questions and the ones who keep quiet, the days of grief and all the flower colors of joy.

Ay papacito, cielito de mi corazón
, now the burros are complaining. The rooster beginning his cries. Morning already? Wait, I want to remember everything before you leave me.

How you looked at me in the San Lázaro plaza. How you kissed me under my father’s avocado tree. Nights you loved me with a pleasure close to sobbing, how I stilled the trembling in your chest and held you, held you. Miliano, Milianito.

My sky, my life, my eyes. Let me look at you. Before you open those eyes of yours. The days to come, the days gone by. Before we go back to what we’ll always be.

Anguiano Religious Articles
Rosaries Statues Medals
Incense Candles Talismans
Perfumes Oils Herbs
 

You know that religious store on Soledad across from Sanitary Tortillas? Next to El Divorcio Lounge. Don’t go in there. The man who owns it is a crab ass. I’m not the only one who says it. He’s famous for being a crab ass.

I know all about him, but I stopped in anyway. Because I needed a Virgen de Guadalupe and the Preciado sisters on South Laredo didn’t have nothing that didn’t look as if someone made it with their feet.

A statue is what I was thinking, or maybe those pretty 3-D pictures, the ones made from strips of cardboard that you look at sideways and you see the Santo Niño de Atocha, and you look at it straight and it’s La Virgen, and you look at it from the other side and it’s Saint Lucy with her eyes on a plate or maybe San Martín Caballero cutting his Roman cape in half with a sword and giving it to a beggar, only I want to know how come he didn’t give that beggar
all
of his cape if he’s so saintly, right?

Well, that’s what I was looking for. One of those framed pictures with a silver strip of aluminum foil on the bottom and top, the wooden frame painted a happy pink or turquoise. You can buy them cheaper on the other side, but I didn’t have time to go to Nuevo
Laredo ’cause I only found out about Tencha Tuesday. They put her right in Santa Rosa Hospital. I had to take a half-day off work and the bus, well, what was I going to do? It’s either Anguiano Religious Articles or Sisters Preciado Botánica.

Then after I walk all the way from Santa Rosa in the heat, guess what? Anguiano’s is closed even though I could see him sitting in there in the dark. I’m knocking and knocking, knocking and knocking on the glass with a quarter. Know what he does before unlocking? Looks me up and down like if I’m one of those ladies from the Cactus Hotel or the Court House Pawnshop or the Western Wear come to rob him.

I was thinking about those framed holy pictures with glitter in the window. But then I saw some Virgen de Guadalupe statues with real hair eyelashes. Well, not real hair, but some stiff black stuff like brushes, only I didn’t like how La Virgen looked with furry eyelashes—
bien
mean, like
los amores de la calle
. That’s not right.

I looked at all the Virgen de Guadalupes he had. The statues, the framed pictures, the holy cards, and candles. Because I only got $10. And by then, there was other people had come in. But you know what he says to me—you won’t believe it—he says, I can see you’re not going to buy anything. Loud and in Spanish. I can see you’re not going to buy anything.

Oh, but I am, I says, I just need a little more time to think.

Well, if it’s thinking you want, you just go across the street to the church to think—you’re just wasting my time and yours thinking here.

Honest to God. Real ugly is how he talked to me. Well, go across the street to San Fernando if you want to think—you’re just wasting my time and yours thinking here.

I should’ve told him, You go to hell. But what for? He’s already headed there.

Little Miracles,
Kept Promises