Butterfly Boy: Memories of a Chicano Mariposa (Writing in Latinidad) Page 13

  She walked back into her house, robot-like, leaving my brother and me speechless and numb with shock. But we did what we were told. We spat-combed our hair, washed our hands and faces with the hose behind the garage, and then knocked timidly on the back door of the landlord's house. I was surprised at the size of the house. The dining room alone was larger than our entire home, and this made me feel smaller still. While we nibbled on the bland sandwiches, none of the landlord's children came to eat with us, and then the landlord's wife went on and on about her own misfortune with a broken pinky and the brief episode at the hospital that followed her traumatic incident.

  “How my children cried for me,” she said. “And there I was in my hospital bed, crying out for them as well. The whole family was in tears. The whole world, it seemed. But I'm so pleased to see there isn't any of that theater here.”

  Between bites I cursed her. And then I cursed my father for entrusting this sow with our care. And then I cursed the rest of the family for leaving us with the sow longer than we could possibly bear. Alex and I sat in those clean chairs, eating off those clean plates, refusing to let the sow see us dirty our clean faces.

  Not long after her hospitalization, my mother underwent open-heart surgery to replace a defective valve. This was a long-overdue operation. An artificial valve was inserted, and it made a loud ticking noise like a clock each time it opened and closed to let the blood flush through. The thin scar of the incision trailed up between her breasts. For weeks the incessant ticking kept us from a good night's sleep in our little home on top of the garage. The sound kept my mother awake even longer. My maternal grandmother received a special visitor's visa to stay with us for a month. Up until then my older female cousin had been coming over to cook and clean for us.

  As part of her therapy, my mother was given a plastic apparatus to strengthen her breathing. She blew into a small tube that sent three plastic spheres spiraling up inside a clear container. The other recommendation was exercise, and since my maternal grandmother's stay had come and gone, it was now me who guided my mother into the school grounds across the street each morning. School was out for the summer, so we paced slowly around the grassy field undisturbed, her weight on my shoulder as she leaned heavily when she stepped on her left foot. The stroke had permanently damaged one side of her body. Her left arm and leg muscles had stiffened, and the left side of her face drooped. To compensate for the spittle that spilled out of her mouth, which she couldn't close entirely, she carried a white, feminine hanky to wipe herself off each time she remembered.

  And though her speech was also impaired, she insisted on these long conversations during our walks, revealing to me everything I had to know now that I was grown up enough to hear and understand them. I had just turned twelve.

  “Your hateful grandfather,” she said one time, “once put a gun to my head back in Bakersfield. I want you to find that gun and put it to his head.”

  “I made your father quit that band,” she said on another occasion, “because of those women. They gave him pictures of themselves in the nude. I tore them all up and threw the pieces on his dinner.”

  “I was named after my father's first love,” she told me. “She died when she was young, and your grandmother placed a curse on that name. I too will die young.”

  Always these confessions were followed by a long string of in-coherent ramblings. I simply listened to her, collecting these odd pronouncements—what little I could comprehend through her slurred speech—like riddles to unravel in my head as I was sinking into dreams guided by the ticking of my mother's heart. I treasured them as gifts, but not as truths. I knew better since I had heard my grandmother confide in my father that my mother would slip into these trance-induced murmurings on their walks as well.

  “The things she says, you,” she whispered from the kitchen table. In our little home on top of the garage, everything was audible. “Does she know what she's saying?”

  “The doctor said that even her brain has been affected,” my father replied. “Half the time she doesn't know what's coming out of her mouth.”

  The surgery would only extend her life by a few months, and my father knew this, so he allowed my mother to travel back to Michoacán to be with her parents in Zacapu for the last time. Alex and I went with her.

  We moved into our grandparents' house in Colonia Obrera before the end of the summer of 1982. We traveled by airplane because my mother couldn't possibly withstand the journey by bus. It was the first time any of us had been on a plane and the flight was swift and uneventful. The expense, however, had to be covered by pulling together whatever was left after the costly surgery once the Medicare had been exhausted. My father sold most of our belongings and moved in with my uncle and his family. My mother pawned her wedding ring and borrowed money from my aunts, offering up her best clothes as collateral. They even tapped into my piggy bank, using my stash of quarters to buy an old brown leather suitcase from the Goodwill Thrift Store.

  When summer ended, it was clear we were not going to be returning to the United States, so by fall my mother enrolled my brother and me in the primary school Vasco de Quiroga, named after that great missionary advocate of the Purépecha. We were held back a grade because, as the director of the school explain edit, American education was not as advanced as the Mexican system. Indeed, during math my classmates were already doing fractions and I had never been exposed to them before. But the director took a liking to me immediately because I was the son of a band member of Dinastía. Six years ago, the band had held a fundraising concert at the school. With some of the money raised, the director bought a small sound system and microphone—the same ones he still used to shout out marching instructions at the student body as we prepared for the annual Independence Day parade in September. He also liked showing off his English in front of the other kids. Each time I strained to understand what he was trying to say, but his pantomiming was helpful.

  The director may have been impressed by our presence at his school, but not the other kids. We had only been away from México a few years and already we were considered foreigners—gringos, pochos, gavachos—Americanos. During recess my brother immediately gravitated toward me, hiding behind me from the taunting of his peers. The last time he did that was when he was diagnosed with an allergy to airborne pollen back in Thermal. The doctor suggested that he wear sunglasses for a few weeks, and my mother picked out an outrageous green-tinted pair at Goodwill. He was fine at first until one of the teachers saw him and called him Joe Cool. After that he came directly toward me at recess to stand inside my shadow. I felt just as helpless then as I did at Vasco de Quiroga in general, unable to offer him a word of comfort, not when I could have used one for myself—I, too, was designated the school freak. But our days in Zacapu were numbered. While my brother and I practiced the marching drills in the afternoons, my mother's health kept deteriorating. At night, her groans filled the house with an anxiety that gave every-one nightmares.

  My mother died in Zacapu on September 12, at the age of thirty-one. She died sitting between her parents in a car en route to the hospital in Morelia, the state capital, after complaining of intolerable chest and stomach pains. I remember my grandmother saying one morning after the funeral that she had dreamed she was having a long conversation with my mother.

  “What did you talk about?” I asked, hoping to latch on to some last word or phrase that could fill the void of her having gone without a good-bye.

  “What does it matter now?” my grandmother replied. “She's gone. Dreamed words are empty words.”

  I didn't press her any further; my mind filled with the image of my grief-stricken grandmother at the church and at the cemetery, drunk and crying the sorrow of a thousand lungs—a spine-tingling shrill that still makes me shudder whenever I remember that solemn day. In fact, my grandmother had been such a distracting presence during the whole of the funeral that people kept quiet about the priest. Not until after the wake did people began to murmur, and ev
en then they kept their voices low. When we had arrived at the church with my mother's coffin for the last rites, the priest was nowhere to be found. After much waiting, the congregation growing uncomfortably restless, my father and the other pallbearers broke into the adjacent building, a small cottage, where the priest was found in a deep sleep. People said that my father throttled the priest out of bed and had to be held back. When the priest finally came up to the altar, his hair uncombed and his frock unkempt, he delivered the service under the pressure of my father's threat that if he screwed up he would kill him. Everyone in church that morning saw that the priest was hung over.

  During the wake was also the only time I ever saw my maternal grandfather cry. My grandfather had always been a giant to me: tall, strong, and slim, he had worked as a bracero for many years until he married. After the birth of his first child, my mother, he settled down in Zacapu, where he eventually found a job at the mercado bringing in cargo—a job he kept well into his old age. He was a quiet, unassuming, and gentle man whom my brother and I loved dearly because he was nothing like our father's father. Our mother's mother, in contrast, was nothing like our beloved grandmother back in California. Our Purépecha grandmother was gentile and soft-spoken, with an incomparable sense of humor. During the wake my brother and I hid away from the rest of the mourners by going up on the roof, where my grandparents always kept chickens we were forbidden to name because they would each end up in the cooking pot. There we cried privately. My brother kept repeating, “We came here so she could die.” I couldn't contradict his statement. Suddenly we heard someone climb the cement steps. We were standing behind the chicken coop so our grandfather didn't see us. He looked out toward the highest peak in the mountains, “el cerro del Tecolote,” as he burst into tears, blowing his nose into a handkerchief before going down into the house again. My brother and I looked at each other and cried again. My little brother Alex was only ten years old.

  My father, my uncle and my Purépecha grandmother flew down from California in time for the funeral. It was the first and only time any of them had been on a plane as well. I would hear many years later how my grandmother had to sit with a towel around her head because she didn't want to look out the window. And when she had to use the bathroom, she got down on all fours, expecting to crawl to the back of the plane.

  “I was so embarrassed, you,” my uncle told us. “But then the flight attendant came and guided her to the bathroom and back. But she still wouldn't take the towel off her head.”

  “She looked like a hijacking hostage,” my father added.

  We stayed through the novena, the nine days of prayer after the burial. My father was kind to us, embracing and kissing us frequently. I enjoyed that attention. So it wasn't hard for my brother and me to make up our minds to return with him to the United States.

  My mother's family was furious. They didn't want us to return to that monster back in California. My mother had told them how he used to beat us and how he had threatened to strike her. But my father insisted.

  “They're my sons,” he told them firmly.

  He told us the same thing when we slept together in the same bed the night before our return, my brother and I lying on either side of him. In a surprising gesture, he opened up a large Bible and showed us the illustrations of heaven and hell.

  “Your mother is here now,” he said as he pointed to a drawing of cottony clouds inhabited by pale-faced, golden-haired angels with white wings. God was depicted sitting on a throne. His gigantic body dwarfed the angels to the size of pigeons, and instead of a head, a yellow ball of light was perched on his neck, as if his face had caught on fire.

  “You're my sons,” he said to us. “It's the three of us now. We have to stay together forever.”

  When we left Zacapu, we left our mother buried at the panteón, but we also left Vasco de Quiroga, where we didn't fit in, and we left the corrugated tin roof of our room in our grandparents' house, where raindrops sounded like marbles dropping. We took the train back to Mexicali. The journey was long, but it was more relaxing than the bus. As I tried to sleep on my seat, I kept getting nervous whenever the train passed through a series of mountain tunnels in Jalisco. I kept my eyes fixed on my father as he vanished for seconds at each blackout, each time expecting him not to reappear when the cabin came to light.

  Within days of returning to California, we went to live with our paternal grandparents in Indio since my father concluded that he could not raise his sons alone. But very soon after that, he decided it was time to find another wife. The adults in the family supported my father's decision. He was a man, after all, and he needed some-one to care for him; he was falling to pieces without a wife, they said, pointing out that in the few months that my mother was gone his drinking had worsened. Once he was even arrested for brawling on the streets. The phone rang the morning after my father didn't come home after going out with friends. My grandfather answered it.

  “You're where?” my grandfather gasped. “And why?”

  After a lengthy silence, my grandfather yelled into the phone: “Then walk your ass home!”

  My father walked through the desert all the way from the detention center. When he arrived he looked hungover, filthy, and bloody. He showered and refused to talk about what had happened, though my grandfather more than gladly filled in the details for us, as a warning against drinking and rowdy behavior.

  “What kind of example is that for your sons, you?” my grandfather declared self-righteously.

  It pained me to see my father lectured in front of me, his head down like a shamed child, but I began to speak to him with my grandfather's tone as well because it seemed to be the only way to make him listen.

  The next time my father was out drinking late and the phone rang, I answered.

  “I need you to pick me up,” my father said.

  “Are you in jail again?” I asked, furiously.

  My father chuckled. “No,” he said. “I'm at Ilario's in Coachella. Come pick me up, son.”

  I took the car keys and drove to Ilario's house just a short distance away. Ilario was one of my father's best friends and a former musician as well. I was still learning how to drive, but I reasoned this was an emergency, and the fact that I could take the back roads where there was very little traffic gave me courage. My hands trembled on the steering wheel. I drove up, greeted Ilario, picked up my father, and then drove back. On the way home my father was quiet, and I would have kept my mouth shut as well but then he spoke up in that sentimental way that he talks when he's drunk.

  “I've always looked forward to this moment,” he said.

  I ignored him.

  “I've always looked forward to the moment,” he repeated, “when my son would be grown up enough to pick me up in a car.”

  I started crying. “What kind of pleasure does this give you, calling in the middle of the night because you're drunk?” I said. I didn't look at him during the long silence that followed.

  Every week it was the same story: my father got drunk, my grandfather threw fits, and my brother and I had to listen to the scolding from our beds, pretending to be asleep when our father stumbled into the room because watching him cry was intolerable. Behind the safety of my eyelids I cursed my father, wishing it had been he who had died, and not my mother.

  The helplessness of adolescence was maddening. I began to wish that I were dead, released from this anxiety that kept me up at nights. Once, when an earthquake shook the rest of the household awake, I thought that my own rage had caused it. Since I now slept in the living room, no longer willing to share a room with my father, I was acquiring these special gifts: the gift of becoming as still and breathless as the couch, the gift of finding holes in the shadows that opened up into distant worlds, and the gift of breaking the earth apart with the destructive energy of my heavy thoughts. And there, beneath the dining table, was my grandfather's shotgun secured to the underside of the wood. I also had the gift of floating my animus through the dark to sen
d back reports of the shapes in the weapon—the flatness of the heel, the curve of the trigger, the journey of the shaft, and the curious ring of the barrel.

  For everyone else, escape came easily. A brief and devastating period followed in which people walked away to live their own lives, leaving my brother and me behind to bear our orphan status like identification labels on unclaimed luggage.

  Our recently divorced uncle left us, fleeing to México to avoid paying child support. Our oldest cousin took his place, but then he left us, off to elope with his beloved. Even our grandparents' bachelor son, who we all thought would never marry, finally did. He left us, vanishing with his new bride into the anonymous streets of the Coachella Valley. He became more of a rumor, and it was something of a novelty, like sightings of Elvis, if any one of us ever saw him. And then our father left us.

  When I left Indio, it was to convalesce in Mexicali after my nervous breakdown, after weeks of missing school and weeks of trying to convince my grandfather that I wasn't well. Couldn't he see it in my eyes, cracked like glass? Couldn't he see it on my skin, yellow and tough like dirty wax? In Mexicali I stayed in my aunt's old house, raking the leaves in the mornings, watering the plants in the afternoon. She kept an eye on me through the window. I once overheard her talking through the fence to a neighbor who was curious about my sudden appearance.