Retablos Read online

  My father spends five days and nights with other deportees in a dank, joyless pen called el corralón. They are the blackest hours of his life. He cannot sleep. The place has a foul odor. Everyone around him looks as shamed as he feels. I’m not like them, he thinks. He wonders if he will be taken back across. Once he wanted that; once he yearned to return to the life he knew. But now he yearns only for his family. His one-room tenement home.

  My mother gets him released after showing his proof of employment. They have procedures to perform to make him a resident, procedures that will allow him to live and work and pay taxes in a country that speaks English. In a way, what enables this to happen is me. My parents are legal and living in this country because of my brothers and sister and me. Decades will pass before they take a test and recite the oath of allegiance in English as fluently as anyone in this country, with their hands over their hearts as they become full, incontestable citizens.

  I am an anchor baby. Someone coined the term to impugn the motives of immigrants coming to this country. They use it to suggest that for some couples conceiving a child is not an act of love but a ploy to secure the rights of residence. But every baby is an anchor for young parents navigating the stormy waters of daily life; every baby is an anchor for those who are looking for their true north, their purpose, their identity. We give our parents hope when they drift from bad times to bad times to worse. We give them solace when they consider going back to the little they had before. I anchor them to a place and an ideal worth living for. As they anchor me.

  We have to go, dice ella.

  Here is where I live. Not there, dice él.

  But there is where we can all live. You. Me. And the child.

  The child.

  We have to think of the child.

  IN THE SHIMMER

  IN THE CLOUDED WINDOW OF my early childhood, I see my grandmother. Mamá Concha we call her. She’s undoing hair rollers and applying bright red lipstick before the bathroom mirror. I see her short stocky legs in their saggy hose slip into her shoes with the blocky heels. Her purse is redolent with the fragrance of Wrigley’s Chewing Gum and scented tissues that seem to burst from inside every time she unclasps it. She gives me half a stick of spearmint, slipping the other half in her mouth. She dresses me up in my best shirt and pants and combs my hair till it’s waxed down like Alfalfa’s from the Our Gang serials. Then we’re outside.

  She’s sitting beside me on the city bus noisily taking us downtown. I watch her nervous hands smooth the pinstripes of her blue cotton dress over and over while she smacks the gum in her mouth and stares straight ahead like a lover on her way to an assignation. The bus driver asks her something in Spanish and she answers in the old country manner.

  Ay.

  I catch his gaze through the mirror over his head, how his eyes probe and ponder over us during the whole length of the ride. She takes a tissue from her purse and with a little spit on it wipes the scuff off my shoes, which dangle just off the seat, and she tightens my laces till my feet throb. I hear the gassy exhalation of the bus heaving to a stop and the door swishing open to La Placita de los Lagartos, which is teeming with more people than I’ve ever seen in my life. The sun is high and bright. The tightness of her grip on my hand turns my fingers red as she guides us to the central fountain in the tree-lined plaza, where she lifts me up with her firm arms to her bosom and shows me the alligators basking in the radiant heat. One of them is dozing in its pond, and one has its jaws wide open, a soft-serve ice cream cone melting on its back. I count the cigarette butts and candy wrappers floating in the pond all around them. Is this what we came to see? No, not this.

  More people gather in the plaza and in the windows of the buildings around us for a view of something to come. Is it a parade? Are we here for a parade? Above me the sky is a brilliant, unsullied blue so wide and cloudless and perfect, I could fall into it. My grandmother clamps my hand in hers and pushes through the murmuring mass of people. She’s smaller than most of them, but with her purse she clears a path toward the street. Some give her the stink-eye, some jab their elbows back and sneer at me, but she doggedly charges on.

  Then I lose her. Somehow, our knotted fingers come undone and I am set loose in the tangled forest of legs, shoes and handbags and even a little weenie dog on a leash, panting with fear and heat and congestion, and I think I must have the same look as I call out for her. Mamá Concha! Mamá Concha! I feel the crowd surge in one direction and knock me down and some lady’s heel stamps on my hand and I start to cry. The sound of several cars coming to a stop somewhere nearby sets off a riotous noise that drowns out my cries. Shifting bodies pressed hard against each other toss me about like a piñata. I look straight up for even a fragment of that blue sky but now it’s a swarm of balloons and millions of tiny shreds of colored paper flitting and falling like snowflakes on everyone. This clamor of the crowd, the yelling and whistling, I feel it in my teeth, my bones, all the way down to my feet, till the ground is bellowing against the weight of all the stomping, pounding, jerking feet. The storm of people is so consuming and suffocating, and it moves with such a single anarchic mind, that I think I’ll drown in it, I think I’ll die. I scream with all my strength, MAMÁ CONCHA! But I can’t hear myself. I can’t hear anything but this crazed thunder of voices.

  Through a seam in the wall of bodies, the hands of my grandmother emerge and take me by the ribs and lift me up, up above the throng, aiming me in the direction of the Hotel Cortez across the street. I’m blinded by the glare of the sun’s reflection in the windows, rectangles of glass flashing in my eyes. Then, for just a second, through the bursts of white sunlight and a thousand hands raised in some kind of jubilation, I see a man’s epic smile under a head of blazing red hair, all teeth and red-orange hair and his hand running through it before it waves at the crowd, waves distinctly at me, too, this man with fire in his hair and eyes of Olympian blue and a smile that envelops everyone appears for just a glimpse before I lose him again in the shimmer, but I’m above the tumult now, tears glistening on my flushed cheeks, pale and hot, numb and blind, bounced along to the chants of ¡Viva Kennedy! ¡Viva Kennedy! ¡Viva Kennedy!

  RED

  HALF THE WORLD AS WE see it and half the world in red. That’s how my little carnalito, the youngest of us, must see it. He’s only five and already wearing horn-rimmed glasses, but now there is a lens of deep crimson laid over the right eye. It’s meant to correct his “lazy eye,” which is ironically the uncovered one. The effect of it makes him seem detached, his little face passive and stoic as an old man’s. He’s going to a different school, one he has to board a bus for, and the nature of that is a mystery to us. Why? Is something wrong with him? Does his indolent eye have something to do with it?

  They call him pirate, the kids on the block. Red-eye they call him. ¡Ojo rojo! They think up other comical epithets for him. They yell them from across the street. They say them to his face. He just maneuvers around the name-calling with his good eye, the red one, choosing to see what he wants in blazing red, thereby scorching to cinders all the cleverness and cruelty. My dad named him after a famous Mexican god; not a Toltec, though, but a singing idol of the fifties and sixties with a voice like brown honey who died too young after gall bladder surgery. His last words were No hay remedio. It’s no use. Something in my brother’s demeanor agrees with that.

  I see him standing on the corner for the bus. The little scab on his elbow. The part in his hair perfect all the way up to his crown. And I imagine how earth is pictured in one eye but in the other purgatory. Half the amber of the school bus, half the bright purple petals of the hydrangeas in our yard, half the desert blue of the Franklin Mountains, half the delicate orange blooms of the milkweed growing through the cracks in the gray sidewalk and half the single puff of dandelion skittering over the junipers, half the speckled blue-green of the collared lizard tasting the heat with its little pink tongue, half the faded-denim sky cottoned with clouds and half the walls of our house painted t
hat drab ugly yellow, half the summer brown of my face; and half of all visible life enflamed in a harsh, implacable, all-consuming red. Even half his own red plaid shirt is redder through his blooded eye. He’s standing in his own constant sunset. He’s been imparted some vision of the last fiery days of men. Or half a vision, anyway.

  His eye will mend. His detachment will resolve itself. And he will rejoin us in our schools. But the blood-red fires in the one lens of my carnalito burn into my own lazy eye the tenuous beauties of this world and the fears I harbor for them.

  No hay remedio.

  BLOOD AND COKE

  ORDINARY DAYS AT THE BIG 8 Grocery Store. Mom is picking up tortillas and some Folgers and soda. She’s in her pedal pushers with a bagful of Coke empties to redeem for some new ones. She’s trying to herd all four of us by herself, but it’s made more difficult by the distractions around. There’s a row of cereal boxes with Tony the Tiger and shelves at kid eye-level crammed with cookies and candies and piñatas hanging from the ceiling in colors that don’t even exist in our TV yet. I hear the clanging of shopping carts slamming into each other and cash registers ringing like someone just won a jackpot. My sister is trying to help my mom by holding my littlest brother by his belt-loop. I remember her forefinger through his pants’ belt-loop. Then we’re in line, some lady scowling at us for making all this mitote. The man at the register wears a white shirt and an apron with Big 8 emblazoned on the bib. His face is friendlier, kinder, and what hair he has left is slicked back with pomade. My mom is passing the Coke empties to the bag boy while she’s counting out some change to pay. That’s when the world cracks open and shows us what it’s like inside.

  I hear the explosive shattering of glass and my mother crying AY! All over the floor Coke bottles have broken, they’ve fallen over and broken and my mom has slipped in the syrupy soda. Just below the knee of her pedal pushers, I see the burbling of blood from one of her varicose veins choking out like water does when you first turn on the garden hose. My brothers are scared, they’re crying, and my sister is trying to be brave but the look in her eyes betrays her concern. I’m just staring like a fool at all this teeming blood mixing with the Coca Cola on the tiles, rushing all the way to my shoes. I can’t tell if that’s blood or soda spurting out of her leg.

  The checkout man knows he should help but he sounds shrill and panicky and that makes my brothers scream even louder. He and the bag boy lift my mom off the floor and place her on the counter, which to me is kinda funny because there are bananas on the counter next to her. Someone’s bananas. My mom does her best to sound reassuring, but it doesn’t do any good. All this blood on my mother, all of it being mopped in buckets and still there’s more. I can’t hear her voice, only the low hum of her carbonated blood.

  An ambulance comes with its sirens blasting and they put Mom on a gurney and now she’s embarrassed at the attention. They wheel her out and load her into the white ambulance and she says, Los veo en la casa, but we don’t believe her. For all we know, we’ll never see her again. The ambulance pulls out and drives her away. Our mom is gone. But Mrs. Beltrán who lives nearby tells us she’ll be home by tonight. She serves us empanadas and milk at her house and tells us it wasn’t that bad a cut anyway. Just a few stitches and she’ll be fine. The whole rest of the day we’re trying to imagine what our lives will be like without her. I’m trying to picture my dad with another lady, and it doesn’t work. I see nobody standing next to him except a guy wringing that black mop into a bucket.

  My mom came back, like she said she would. But the Big 8 is gone now. The man at the checkout counter is gone. The piñatas, too. Even the tiny scar on my mother’s leg is practically gone. But the memory of all the blood and Coke pulsing out of her leg, and my holy fear, it still astonishes me in my sleep from time to time.

  CONSUELO

  HER NAME IS CONSUELO AND she is our maid, our criada. She has something in her hands. A precious object. She comes down from the mountains of Mexico and takes a long bus ride to Ciudad Juárez, then walking over the Santa Fe Bridge to El Paso, boards another bus that takes her along the curve of the Lower Valley to our house. She lives with us, this lady whom everyone thinks is our abuela, because like our abuela, she commands our respect and rouses our love. Setting up her meager belongings in a small room near the kitchen, her comb, her picture of San Martín giving a piece of his cloak to a mendicant, her rosary and her small, crumbling Bible, beside the single bed that used to be my little brother’s, she puts on her simple country dress and her apron with homemade rickrack. She’s small and stout, with strong bowed legs that carry her through the house she spends all day cleaning. Her face dark and furrowed, her hair silver and tightly braided into a plait that hangs down her back like a staff, her hands rough and calloused as a man’s, she cooks all our meals and calls for us when the plates are served. Wherever we are, we hear her summons and head for home. The food is so good that Kino and Marcos and the other kids want a plate too. She feeds us, feeds the dog, feeds the canaries in their cage, then feeds herself. All we know is her name, which is Consolation, which is perfect, since that is what she brings to my parents, who bust their asses day and night to make ends meet, which they never do, these ends that barely even pass each other across the room. She grows hierbas in the backyard and makes healing soups and teas for us when we’re sick. Sometimes, when she’s alone, when a lull in her daily labors permits, she sits and watches the Canal Dos on TV, the Spanish language shows. At night, after we’ve all had our dinners and are getting ready for bed, she goes to her room with the door closed, sits on her bed with her opened Bible and prays. There are times when she goes to see her family, she says she’ll be gone two weeks, but two weeks can turn into four and then into eight because of difficulties at home or crossing-over issues. But six years of Consuelo, six years of her quiet folk singing as she hangs our clothes on the line, her sweeping the porch with that old broom, her stern admonishments to us for disrespecting our parents, six years of her practically raising us, invokes the deep mestizaje that lives in our blood, that reminds us we come from something older, simpler, and richer than the privileges we think are owed to us in this land.

  This is a retablo of Consuelo, sitting on her bed with the door ajar just enough for a nine-year-old to peer through, this old woman with her hair unbraided, loose all the way down to her lap, with a sacred object in the cradle of her hands, what can it be but the apple we threw away, which she retrieved saying, Waste nothing of God’s, and took to her room, and here it is, this sunken moldy apple, and Consuelo gingerly taking bites of it in the luminous mystery of faith.

  KEENING

  I’M ASLEEP IN MY ROOM when I hear crying. Like a baby crying. I open my eyes without moving a muscle to see if I can still hear it. Aside from the bitter, bracing wind outside, it’s dead silent. I close my eyes, hoping I’ve dispelled whatever ambiguous sorrow happened to seize my sleep. Then I hear it again. Crying so thin and high and distant, it’s almost air. And it’s not from a baby. I sit up and listen. Yes, it’s definitely coming from this house. I shift my legs out of bed as quietly as I can and open the door to my room. From down the hall, I can see the kitchen light on. The crying is more distinct now. A long thin keening that comes in through the teeth, I feel it in my teeth, that reedy cry threading its way along the thinnest part of the night and settling in my teeth, where it starts to reel me in like a doomed fish. Before I know it, I’m standing in my pajamas in the kitchen. Mom is making coffee. No, she’s stirring soup in a stewpot. Steaming hot. Sitting down behind her, that’s not my dad, but some man in an old straw cowboy hat with a fraying brim and dirty hatband. An older, darker man. Tufts of grey in his mustache. He’s sitting at our kitchen table leaning close into another person, a younger woman, bundled up in blankets and serapes. Shivering violently. This is where the crying is coming from. That faint, almost whispered wail. The man is consoling her with hoarse words I can’t make out. My mom says, What are you doing up? Go to bed. Go to bed n
ow. Who are they, I ask. Nobody, she says. Go to bed, she says. I look down at the woman’s feet and they are bare and dirty and raw and red and shivering like mad too. I see her face and my immediate impression is that she is ugly, her braided black hair framing an ugly face all red and covered in frozen snot. Her fingers all swollen and red too. They’re both shaking with cold and maybe fear and maybe something else, some sickness they contracted just by being in our house. The man is saying, Cálmate. Ya mero llegamos. Which means they’re leaving soon. My mom reaches into the stewpot with a pair of tongs and takes small towels out, and then wringing them over the sink, sets them on the table where the man places them on the woman’s hands and feet. There’s a bundle of wet clothes tied with baling wire by the back door. Also, a pair of boots, soggy tennies, and some balled-up socks. I feel my sister come in behind me, then my brother. My mother turns to us and explains that they are nice people and that they just need a little help. What kind of help, I ask. The back door opens and my dad comes in with snow flurries on his shoulders and his cap. He’s been warming up the sedan outside. His face is clenched with worry as he looks down on the huddled pair. He asks the older man something and the older man gives him a small folded-up piece of paper. The woman is still crying and shaking her head like she’s counting down a whole life’s worth of mistakes. Mom says to me, Pour them some coffee, and I get the old percolator and two cups. My hand is shaking as I pour. I put the cups on the table and the woman turns her ugly face to me and whispers in the same keening tone, Gracias. While they drink their coffee, my dad tells the man in Spanish that they picked a bad night to cross. Every night is bad, he replies. Dad looks at the paper one more time and says, We should go. They put their socks and shoes on and they try to return the blankets to my mom, but she won’t take them. Again, the woman says gracias. She stands, and I see then that she is pregnant. They pull the blankets up to their faces and start for the door. They follow my dad outside into the freezing snow. I can hear the loud motor of the car readying itself for some mission, then hear it shifting into reverse. My mom closes the door, latches it and says, Ya. Se acabó. Go to bed. We all go to bed shivering with some of their cold and some of their fear, and I fall asleep almost instantly and dream of a clay-colored woman with a figurine baby keening in the night.