Retablos Read online

  “Octavio Solis does with words and imagery, lyricism and details, humor and heartbreak what the master craftsmen and women of the traditional retablos do with wood and paint, achieving the same results: these short luminous retablos are magical and enticing. Unpretentiously and with an unerring accuracy of tone and rhythm, Solis slowly builds what amounts to a storybook cathedral. We inhabit a border world rich in characters, lush with details, playful and poignant, a border that refutes the stereotypes and divisions smaller minds create. Solis reminds us that sometimes the most profound truths are best told with crafted fictions—and he is a master at it. His is a large, capacious, and inclusive imagination. Just as the traditional retablos are objects of beauty ultimately meant as devotional pieces, Solis’s Retablos will make devotees of his readers.”

  —Julia Alvarez is the author of numerous books, including How the García Girls Lost Their Accents, and recipient of the National Medal for the Arts

  “The murky flow of the Rio Grande River, the border patrol we call la migra, demons, a petty crime of stolen candy, street urchins, family squabbles, eccentric neighbors, and bike rides in which dust envelops a skinny kid named Octavio Solis. When he stops pedaling years later, he’ll spank the dust from his clothes, but not all of it. Some of it clings to his very soul, and will cling to us, the readers, in this tender and perceptive memoir. This is American and Mexican literature a stone’s throw from the always hustling El Paso border.”

  —Gary Soto, author of The Elements of San Joaquin

  “Octavio Solis isn’t a painter, but he ought to be. He’s not a poet, but he could be. His isn’t fiction or memoir but, like dreams, might be either. His vision of El Paso and the border is as though through an undulating haze of desert heat.”

  —Dagoberto Gilb, author of Before the End, After the Beginning: Stories

  “Solis has written beautifully about his youth on the border, never flinching from his childish blunders, nor failing to find soul in the frailties of others. These stories soar and shimmer with poetry and a playwright’s gift for dramatic compression, comedy and pathos running through them arm in arm. Retablos is deeply moving, and a joy.”

  —Elizabeth McKenzie, author of The Portable Veblen: A Novel

  “To enter into this book is like walking into a shrine, walls lined with beautiful paintings, each one colorful and visceral, depicting memories, life on the border, death and sadness and joy. This is one of the most memorable books written about the borderlands in years. Solis writes, ‘every memory we have has a patina of invention to it.’ These stories have layer upon layer of images, meaning, and grace. Each short piece, each of the ‘retablos’ is a stunning, masterful painting. Some you will want to stand in front of for a long time, and others are brilliantly uncomfortable and can make you weep if you linger too long.”

  —Daniel Chacón, author of Hotel Juárez: Stories, Rooms and Loops

  “The short-short format is often called flash fiction these days, but Octavio Solis’s stories are more like slow fiction: a moment unfolds, revealing a life, a way of life, generations. He explores the borderlands, not just the streets of El Paso where he grew up, just across the Rio Grande from Mexico, but also those liminal zones between fiction and nonfiction, childhood and adulthood, and magic and melancholy. Small but mighty, these stories will stay with you long after the moment has passed.”

  —Frances Lefkowitz, author of To Have Not: A Memoir

  “A retablo is a devotional painting, playwright Octavio Solis tells us. In this poignantly written, heart-warming comingof-age memoir, Solis pays tribute to those cornerstone moments in his life, negotiating borders at once personal and cultural, with such color that the reader is left spellbound. Astonishing, what more can I say?”

  —Greg Sarris, author of How a Mountain Was Made: Stories

  Copyright © 2018 by Octavio Solis

  All rights reserved

  Cover and book design by Linda Ronan

  Some of the stories in this book were previously printed in the following journals:

  “Retablos,” “Bad Blood,” “The Sister,” “Keening,” “The Cotton,” “Tumble-Down,” and “My Right Foot” under the single title

  “Retablos” in Zzyzzyva, Winter Issue 102.

  “Wild Kingdom” and “World Goes Away” in Zzyzzyva, Winter Issue 108.

  “The Want” and “El Segundo” in Huizache: The Magazine of Latino Literature, Issue No. 6

  “La Migra,” “Siren Songs,” “Red,” “Nothing Happens,” and “Neto” in Arroyo Literary Review, Spring 2017.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Solis, Octavio, author.

  Title: Retablos: stories from a life lived along the border / Octavio Solis.

  Other titles: Stories from a life lived along the border

  Description: San Francisco: City Lights Books, 2018. | “These retablos are true stories, but they’re filled with lies. The core events are real, they happened, but the images on the peripheries which were faint to my view have been elaborated on . . .” — Page).

  Identifiers: LCCN 2018023444 (print) | LCCN 2018029844 (ebook) | ISBN 9780872867888 | ISBN 9780872867864

  Subjects: LCSH: Solis, Octavio—Childhood and youth. | Mexican American authors—Biography. | Dramatists, American—Biography. | Authors, American—Biography. | Mexican-American Border Region—Social conditions.

  Classification: LCC PS3569.O5572 (ebook) | LCC PS3569.O5572 Z46 2018 (print)

  | DDC 812/.54 [B] —dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018023444

  City Lights Books are published at the City Lights Bookstore

  261 Columbus Avenue, San Francisco, CA 94133

  www.citylights.com

  For my father and mother, who bravely undertook the life of every immigrant family in America and by doing so, changed it.

  Contents

  ON MY “RETABLOS”

  Retablos

  The Way Over

  In the Shimmer

  Red

  Blood and Coke

  Consuelo

  Keening

  My Friend Memín

  El Judío

  El Mar

  Thieves Like Us

  My Monsters

  Ben

  Our Other House

  Saturday

  The Mexican I Needed

  La Migra

  The Little Woods

  The Cotton

  La Llorona

  Wild Kingdom

  Our Blackie

  El Mero Mero

  Nothing Happens

  El Kitty

  Locura

  Jeep in the Water

  Skinny Brown Kid Doesn’t Know Shit

  Siren Songs

  First Day

  World Goes Away

  Bad Blood

  Penitente

  The Quince

  The Sister

  Fred’s Herb

  Jesus in Our Mouths

  Cisco

  Demon

  Mexican Apology

  The Runner

  La Mariscal

  Tumble-Down

  A Wall Between

  El Segundo

  The Want

  The Runner II

  Neto

  My Right Foot

  The Runner III

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ON MY “RETABLOS”

  MEMORY IS ITS OWN MUSE. Every time we recall a specific moment in our past, we remember it differently; we embellish upon it, we turn it into a story or a fable, something that will draw a straighter line between the person we were then and who we are now. Consciously or unconsciously, we trim away the details that seem inconsequential in order to endow the things we remem
ber with greater clarity, with even more weight and significance. And we make connections we weren’t capable of noting before, so that each event in our past is seen in the context of other trials and rites and moments of insight. Sometimes, the spark of a single memory will ignite others, things we hadn’t recalled until now, like suddenly realizing that the room we thought we knew so well has an extra door we never noticed before. Open that door and there’s a new room with new its own store of memories.

  This means that every memory has a patina of invention on it. That patina thickens every time we revisit those moments in our past, until they seem more like stories and myths of our formation, more dreamlike and yet more real than what really happened to us. So where is the fact of what actually happened? It’s still there, lost inside of and enhanced by fiction.

  When my memories of the actual events of my youth began to feel more like something I’d dreamed, I knew I had to write them down. By committing them to words on paper, I was reclaiming them as my own authentic recollections. But as the act of writing is inherently a fictive one, I found that even the most authentic memory became imbued with the same strange unreality. I wondered if perhaps it wasn’t actually my perspective, but something about the place I’d grown up, Texas, the border, la frontera, that was surreal. Some years ago, a substantial amount of naturally occurring lithium was discovered in El Paso’s drinking water supply. Maybe that’s what gives this otherworldly cast to my memories of the city of my origin, but I suggest it’s more than that. I feel it’s something verging on the divine, though not the divine we are taught to believe in.

  That’s why I choose to call these stories retablos. A retablo is a devotional painting, usually laid on a small, thin plate of cheap, repurposed metal, in which a dire event is depicted — an accident, a crime, an illness, a calamity, some terrible rift in a person’s life, which they survive thanks to the intercession of the Divine. They are ex-voto, that is, “from a vow,” commissioned and created as a form of thanks. At once visual and literary, they record the crisis, the divine mediation and the offering of thanks in a single frame, thus forming a kind of flash-fiction account of an electrifying, life-altering event. I imagined the stories of this collection in this same disconnected (and yet thoroughly interconnected) way.

  I’ve found that every time I read one of the stories, the same thing happens. I change it a little, adding another patina, another layer to the memory. But this is what any writer should do in the interest of storytelling. In the end, they’re only stories. I’m not interested in autobiography. If this is a memoir, it’s a faulty one, because I have given myself leave to invent elements within it. I suppose I am using the poetic voice to convey the authentic. I am more interested in depicting the events of my life as a means to identify and limn the mythology of being brown along the US/Mexico border during a specific period in time, beyond politics, beyond polemics and rhetoric, in order to share those resonances with others who are my age and others who are experiencing similar things right now.

  One thing I have learned from writing these retablos: the shit on the border never changes. There will always be those who want to come across, and those who want to keep them where they are. The push and pull, the friction between the tectonic plates that are Mexico and the US will always create mountains of stress, dislocation and upheaval among the people who live there. Maybe this is political, after all, but I think it’s really a condition of our culture: it’s how we live now, it is our particular mythology, replete with gods and monsters, heroes and fallen angels, troubadours and exiles.

  In the end, I’m trying to figure myself out. I’m coming to terms with who I am by looking back at what I was. I wrote Retablos to see how that skinny brown kid riding his bike out there in the desert made sense of his complicated, deeply beautiful and troubled world. So that perhaps I might learn to make sense of the one I live in today.

  RETABLOS

  THIS IS ME IN MY old room, unpacking my bags on the bed I slept in more than thirty years ago, hearing my mother titter at something on the TV while my dad is stirring the caldo de pollo on the stove. He blurts out something crude in Spanish and now both of them are roaring big as life, filling the house with horsey laughter. Then it hits me. This is how one of them will cry when the other dies.

  I look out the window and I’m thirteen all over again, getting ready for school. A polar front blew all the way down from Canada and locked us in an overnight freeze and didn’t even have the manners to leave us any snow. Just a chill air and ice on the power lines. But as I come down the hall for my breakfast, I see my sister standing outside the maid’s room, snarling something to herself. I ask her what happened and she says, The birds are dead. What? The birds are dead, she says again. I look in the room and I see the maid, this young Mexican girl of twenty we hired to watch the house and cook food for us while my parents are at work, I see her sitting on her bed with her face in her hands. Sobs and the words perdón, perdón are slipping through her fingers. While she wipes her snot on her sleeve, I look past her at the cage where my mom’s canaries are supposed to be perched. But they’re not there. I come closer and find them both balled up and lifeless on the newspaper floor of the cage. They were old, their yellow feathers faded white, inherited from my grandmother when she moved to Fresno, only now they are dead. My sister says the maid left the window open and they froze. They couldn’t take the cold. She should’ve known. Now look at them, she says. I’m about to ask where Mom and Dad are, but then I hear them laughing in their room. Why would they be laughing? I cross the hall and open the door, which is weird ’cause they hardly ever close the door in the morning once they’re up, and there they are, sitting on the bed next to each other, hands on their brows, crying so boisterously it sounds like they’re busting at the seams at some practical joke. It’s unnerving. I’ve never seen them wailing like this, bent over and shaking, their mouths contorted, bawling like children. I’ve seen my mom cry a few times, but never like this, and never my dad, who’s not the kind of man inclined to such displays of emotion. For a pair of old birds, no less. There’s something ancient about the way their wails change them, even give the room a different light. I think this is a holy moment and close the door and leave them to their searing sacred laughter.

  That’s how they come, these memories. Like a set of retablos, votive images painted on old beaten tin, marked with the mystery of being, with acts of transgression recorded for those who need to remember. That’s what revisiting El Paso is like for me. Like walking into a retablo with a rusty surface for a sky, and misremembered family and friends for saints and supplicants and the lost distilled moments of my border past for miracles. They come to me at the strangest times, as if to remind me that I have lived this much because of them.

  THE WAY OVER

  Tenemos que ir, she says.

  Aquí es donde vivo. Allá no, he says.

  Pero allá es donde todos podemos vivir. Tú. Yo. Y el niño.

  El niño.

  Tenemos que pensar por el niño.

  BUT THEY ARE NIÑOS THEMSELVES. Too young to get married, according to my grandmother Mamá Concha, who despises my sullen young father. Now that her daughter of sixteen is pregnant with me, she hates him even more. She beats him with her fists and kicks him in the shins whenever he comes by. But they’re in love and the birth is near. So, what can she do? Mamá Concha gives her blessing, but on the condition that they move to el Norte. Mis nietos will be American, she says. She is newly married herself and has a room secured for them in the same tenement she lives in. So, in short order, they exchange vows and countries in an old church in El Paso.

  Thus begins our America myth: three of us, my mother, father and me, crowded in a dingy tenement room with a hot plate to cook all the food. Mamá Concha and her new man two doors down. Community bath at the end of the hall. My mother and her mother have pasaportes locales which make them resident aliens and I’m a born citizen. My father, however, has none of his papers. He w
orks in Juárez in an entry-level job in a bank, where he counts out crisp new bills of Mexican currency. When he moves to El Paso he loses the job but soon gets another selling ad space in Juárez for a radio station. Every morning he walks across the Santa Fe Bridge to work, then returns in the evening over the same span. Some months later, the officer at the checkpoint remembers him.

  I see you come and go every day. What’s going on with you?

  I live here but I work there, my father says in that gruff voice that makes the facts facts.

  Well, you can’t do that, says the officer. A man lives where he works. If you want to cross, go ahead, but you won’t be coming back in. Make up your mind where you want to live.

  My wife is here. My baby is here.

  So from now on, here is where you work. That is that.

  Now he has to find a job in a city that speaks English. But he can’t because he doesn’t. With his limited language, he is good only for menial work. He washes dishes in a greasy burger and menudo diner on the worst shift possible, the grim overnight hours before dawn. But the cook likes him, he’s good to him and teaches him how to make things on the grill because he needs someone to cover for him on the days when he will be too drunk or hungover to come to work. That’s how my father becomes a short-order cook. One of the best in the city. It’s what he will do for most of his life. For the sake and welfare of this niño and the four more who come later.

  My mother. She’s close to her Mamá Concha. With shared unspoken troubles, they work together cleaning the houses of rich people. It’s hard with the children. One of whom dies. Even I almost lose it when I drink a bottle of turpentine left uncapped in a room being painted. My father runs all the way to the hospital with me turning white in his arms. My mother prays over and over, Madre Santa, don’t make me bury another. My stomach is pumped, and I live.

  Later, Immigration men come to the door. They have reports that an illegal is living in this residence. My mother says, please don’t take my husband. I need him to watch my babies while I go to work. The men are embarrassed by their duty, and one of them gives my mother the name of an official in the INS. See him as soon as you can. He will make your man legal. Then they drive away with my father in their car. My mother rushes to the County Courthouse and finds this official after a long search. He listens to this pleading young mother with two children and one on the way and somehow grants her wish. Her husband will get his papers. This is a different time from now. A time when people know compassion. A time when kindness is haphazardly bestowed.