Butterfly Boy: Memories of a Chicano Mariposa (Writing in Latinidad) Page 14

  “He's been through so much,” my aunt said. “His mother died. His father left him. Of course anyone would go soft in the head.”

  “And how long are you looking after him?” the neighbor asked.

  “As long as it takes,” she said. “He's my brother's child, but I owe his mother at least that.”

  But healed or not, my grandfather soon came down to get me because I didn't need a sane mind, just a good pair of hands, to work the grape harvest when summer came around.

  In the summers, my brother and I joined our grandparents in the fields, picking grapes, toiling under the same conditions that had defeated my mother. In the fields, our faces hid behind bandannas for protection from sunburn and from excessive exposure to the pesticides and sulfur. Sweaty and thick with dust, they were stripped of expression by the end of the days. And every morning I woke up at dawn with a sharp pain in my throat as I suppressed the grief of having to regress to a life under my grandfather's rule.

  But this was home, this government-subsidized cinderblock apartment of the Fred Young Farm Labor Camp, commonly referred to as “el campo.” In the 1970s it was an idyllic community since the housing was new, the lawns were fresh with watered grass, the trees were pruned to matching cookie-cutter proportions, the walls were as white and clean as canvases, and the rows of front doors alternated colors between red and blue—a patriotic display for a neighborhood of Mexican farmworkers. By the time my family moved there in the early 1980s, “el campo” had gained a reputation as a thriving nest for thieves, drug dealers, drug addicts, and gangs. Every night the sound of gunfire made holes in the sky, followed by the wailing of police cars and ambulances. Watching a knife fight in the middle of the street was an alternative spectacle to the television and my family kneeled shoulder to shoulder on the couch and peeked through the curtains, knowing our neighbors were doing the same because suddenly all the living room lights went off to help us hide like an audience in a theater.

  The apartments were also infested with cockroaches. One of the first suggestions my grandmother made when we moved in was to make sure the roaches crawled out of the cereal before we poured in the milk. The second suggestion was to sleep with cotton in our ears so that the tiny roaches didn't crawl in at night and cause an infection.

  In the late 1980s a wall was constructed that divided the land between “el campo” and a large, barren lot that had always been used as a meeting place by the young people showing off their customized cars. Not long afterward the citizenry of “el campo” heard the invasion of construction crews erecting building structures. The commotion was heard, not seen, because the cinderblock wall obstructed the view, which was really designed to spare the new neighbors a glimpse of “el campo.” That meant two things: that the buildings next door would not be low-income government-subsidized housing, and that “el campo” was there to stay, and still stands, sheltering the ever-present farmworking community of the Coachella Valley.

  By this time, at the age of fourteen, I began wearing glasses even though I had needed corrective lenses since elementary school. Somehow I got by, squinting, asking for clarification, and sitting in the front rows of the classroom. But as a freshman in high school I realized my usual tactics were useless because my vision had worsened. In algebra class, the math teacher worked out the problems on the blackboard, explaining the process step by step, and I could only see line after line of chicken scratches. She was so methodical in the way she calculated complex equations that I knew I had to speak up or risk losing the chance to witness the marvel of her multiplying and dividing letters and numbers.

  My grandparents couldn't believe I wanted glasses since only older people like themselves wore them. None of their other grand-children needed them. In fact, none of their grown-up children used them either.

  “Are you sure?” they kept asking.

  Luckily, my grandmother's insurance at the packinghouse could cover the expenses. My grandfather pulled me out of school one day to take me to the eye doctor, a balding man who made me uncomfortable each time his freckled head came near me during the examination. Each time that he adjusted the machine mask that looked like a mechanical butterfly over my face, I could hear his wheezing. I held my own breath in those instances, as if I were the prey hiding out from the predator whiffing out the trail of my scent. At the end of the exam the optometrist expressed much surprise that a person with my degree of myopia had never used glasses.

  “What have you been looking at in the mirror all this time?” he joked.

  My grandfather picked out my frames because he said he had all the experience in the matter. Indeed, the wall stared out at me like a coliseum of bespectacled invisible men. The frames he chose were alarmingly similar to the ones he himself wore, but I didn't object. I was grateful I was going to be able to see more clearly. And then he reminded me of my grandmother's suggestion to get those slightly tinted lenses that darkened when exposed to the sun, just like the ones she had.

  A week later the glasses were ready and again my grandfather drove me to the optometrist in his old pickup.

  “Maybe you shouldn't read as much,” he suggested as he entered the mall parking lot.

  Placing the glasses on my face disoriented me immediately. I had the sensation of standing at the edge of a cliff, and since I also suffered from a mild case of acrophobia, the feeling made my heart flutter. I looked around me in the mall, the lighting too bright, the people too exposed. As soon as I stepped out into natural light, the lenses began to darken. When I watched my grandfather behind the wheel of the pickup, I traced the definitions of his age and the damage of his numerous strokes on his face—wrinkles, flabby chin, the squinting right eye and its fan of deep grooves reaching out from its corner. He had been dyeing his hair, eyebrows, and mustache for years now to hide the outgrowths of white. The job was painfully obvious.

  When we drove into “el campo,” slowing down through the enclosed streets, I noticed people looking back, men especially. And for the first time I recognized the look of mutual attraction from a distance.

  My grandmother looked no different than before because she always had the habit of coming too close to my face when she whispered a secret, looking into my eyes, not my ear. This was how she looked at me when she told me that it was my grandfather who had initiated my father's alcoholism. I asked her how that could be. She told me that each day after a hard day's work in the fields, my father and my uncle came home to a can of soda until my grandfather insisted that they start drinking beer because they weren't children anymore. One week is all it took to get them hooked, and not long after that they became the men that my grandfather wanted them to be—vulnerable and under his control. When she spoke with her gaze fixed on me that way, I knew that what passed between us was the sacred truth of our family's history.

  The next morning I put on my glasses, looking forward to all of my classes, and to discovering the blackboard all over again. But before I even climbed onto the bus I was met with another surprise.

  Up to that morning, I had been getting on the bus while greeting the driver with a smile. It was an apologetic smile for her having to pick up a rowdy group of kids who pushed and shoved their way in like a cattle stampede during roundup time at the corral. Through my bad eyes, her face looked blurry, scratched out. But I knew there was a face there by the frontal view of her yellow hair. And I could sense her warm welcome.

  When my turn came to go up, I expected to see a clearer picture of what I had always imagined—a young woman with a pretty face. But my smile melted away as soon as I was greeted with an old, tired woman who bit severely into an unfriendly frown. She didn't even look at me at all. Her eyes stared right through me as if I were made of glass, as if her eyes were made of glass—the non-functional marbles in the sockets of a plastic doll.

  My four years of high school were spent locked up inside “el campo.” I became a voracious reader and television-watcher, keeping to myself at such alarming extremes that I became
invisible. My invisibility provided the perfect protection against harm of any sort. I walked to and from school past the gangsters as silently as a breeze, so disassociated from their tattoos and lingo that even they couldn't find a place for me in their lines of vision. My grandfather continued to humiliate those around him, except for me, because I didn't say a word; I simply obeyed. I spent days and nights reading in the corner of the rooms or watching television with the volume turned so low I would surprise my grandmother when she thought she was bringing the clean linen into an empty room. In the fields, even the supervisor was intrigued by me—the sullen young man who, unlike the rest of his workers, never complained or joked or laughed, but kept to his task like an after-image, elusive and quickly vanishing from sight and mind.

  “He's kind of quiet, isn't he?” I heard the supervisor comment to my grandfather.

  “He doesn't cause trouble,” my grandfather replied.

  I withdrew into books, which I collected on the bookshelf that went with me wherever I moved. It was the same bookshelf my parents had bought for me at the now-defunct Zody's. Books provided me with an escape, like an inter-dimensional porthole. I began to envision different environments and, more importantly, to imagine myself within them. They became my substitute homes. As a reader I preferred books whose descriptive pages contrasted with my real life: I sought out fictions taking place in other lands at other times, with concerns so far removed from my own that if I could have been magically transported there I would appear as a different person altogether, not the person who moved about in the shadows like a fleeting flash of light. But therein lay the problem with my connection to books. Deep down inside I suspected that I would never become that different person, and that I'd always be me no matter where I went or what I did.

  Always a resourceful man, my grandfather encouraged my brother and me to stay in school for the simple reason that we were entitled to a monthly social security check due to my mother's death. Since he became our legal guardian, the money was used for household expenses. And as long we were enrolled in school during the academic year, we could still join our family in the grape fields during the summers, generating additional income. That was the huge fallout between my brother and my grandfather when my brother dropped out of high school, just as all of our older cousins had done. He had followed the same pattern: skipping a day at first, then missing days at a time until he vanished from the school roster altogether. Angered at the loss of that regular income, my grandfather sent my brother to live with my father, finally shattering the small unit that used to be my family in our little home on top of the garage. Not long after that, my father moved his new family back to México. My brother went with him. Neither of them returned to live in the United States again, though for years they kept coming back to work the grape harvest in the summers.

  I grew closer to my grandmother during my high school years. At four-foot-eleven, she always wore her hair short and refused to wear dresses, though she appreciated costume jewelry and collected earrings with as much passion as she collected pants. She never went to church but she considered herself devoutly Catholic. When we were younger she listened to the radio service and when the preacher's voice pleaded that listeners connect with the word of God through the speakers, she did so and pressed her hands against the radio if my grandfather wasn't looking. Now she simply kept pictures of saints around the house. Her pride and joy, however, was a certificate she bought at a church in Mexicali and prominently displayed in the living room.

  “With that,” she explained as she pointed out the framed piece of paper—a large white sheet with a bad picture of the Pope presiding over an open-air mass, our family name clumsily penciled in on a designated line, “every time the Pope says mass, our entire family is remembered in his blessings.”

  My grandmother also played the harmonica skillfully, but she rarely played it. She was very private about it. In fact I had to catch her in the act of blowing a few notes into the mouthpiece when she was alone in her room. The harmonica, like my grandfather's accordion and my father's guitar, disappeared mysteriously without a trace.

  My grandmother called my grandfather Satanás, Matusalén, and Diablocrú—a favorite expression of my uncle's—behind his back. She still called me Estuche, “Tuchi” for short, a childhood nickname she had given me and which only she used. It meant “slipcase”—I was her slipcase in which she kept those precious eyes, her glasses, through which she saw the world a little better. My brother Alex was simply Beneficios, “Benny” for short, because his birth and hospital stay had been fully covered by medical benefits.

  Between the two of us, my grandmother and I learned to laugh at my grandfather's eccentricities. We could hear him coming because he announced himself through his whistling or his farting. My grandfather was aging rapidly, his health weakening from the high blood pressure and diabetes, and his attempts at asserting power and control were the stuff of comedy, as silly as the tattoo of the naked cartoon woman on his shoulder. He secured the protective gate at the front door each evening at seven, locking us in until the next morning because only he had a key. He would turn off the television when he wanted to, even if the rest of us were still watching from the couch. He turned off the ringer on the phone so that no calls were ever announced. He insisted on cutting our hair despite his failing eyesight, the sharp scissors clipping dangerously close to the tops of our ears, my sideburns cropped unevenly.

  “He might as well do it blindfolded,” my grandmother quipped.

  My grandfather also had a bizarre fascination with amputating the tails of cats. He would lure a neighborhood cat into the apartment, subduing it with affection until he could coax it onto the cutting board, and then he'd bring down the cleaver, watching the stunned animal rocket out through the front door as he stood over the severed tail in a fit of uncontrollable laughter. My grandmother was also party to this cruelty, helping him ensnare the unsuspecting felines. Two of our own cats, Maurilio and Estanilaus—“Maui” and “Tani”—also fell victims to the chopping block. They paraded around the apartment looking like a common alley cat version of the lynx. Only the orange-striped tabby my brother had jokingly named Spot, a name that stuck, was spared because he resembled a graceful tiger cub. My grandfather left him intact so that he could show him off at the swap meet as he walked him on a leash. Such respect was never granted to any other animal, however, especially if the harmless creature had wronged my grandfather.

  “Here,” he said to me one afternoon, handing me a piece of green Steno pad notepaper and a pen. “Write on it: I'm dead because I shit on people's gardens. Big letters.”

  “I don't understand,” I said, puzzled by the odd sentence.

  “You don't have to understand,” he assured me. “Just write it.”

  I did, giving him back the completed assignment. I had forgotten entirely about the note, dismissing it as one of my grandfather's eccentricities until there was a knock on the back door. One of the neighbors peered sullenly at me through the glass window. I recognized him as the man my grandparents had nicknamed “Kanguro”—kangaroo—because when he walked he lifted his knees up as if he was climbing stairs. When I swung the door open, I immediately recognized the green piece of paper in his hand. The blood rushed to my face as I expected him to demand an explanation for this note, but instead, he said to me in a calm and somber voice: “I found this on top of my cat. Some bastard killed him. And since I can't read, can you tell me what this says?”

  My grandfather did all of the cooking, yet another way to assume control. My grandmother never objected to this arrangement because she herself couldn't cook. In fact, her few attempts made me appreciate my grandfather's cooking even more. She preferred to work with soil, as a farmworker or in the garden. Afterward, she loved to enjoy her Coors, and belched with satisfaction when she threw away the empty can. While I was in “el campo,” my grandfather and I took care of the light cleaning while my grandmother went to work at the packinghouse during
the year. We all worked together at the grape harvest in the summers. My grandfather, now in his sixties, was receiving disability insurance until his retirement pension kicked in, though my grandmother said that if he had known about that earlier, he would have shot himself in the foot at twenty-one.

  My grandfather was familiar with Filipino cuisine; he didn't like Mexican food much and rarely prepared it. He had learned Filipino cooking as a young man when he lived and worked in a labor camp occupied exclusively by men. As the story goes, one day the Filipino cook fell ill, and the boss asked the men if any of them had any experience in the kitchen. My grandfather, never one to lose an opportunity to get away from hard labor, volunteered to help until the cook recuperated. Well, my grandfather turned out to be such a promising apprentice that he was kept in the kitchen for the remaining workdays of the season, absorbing the cook's culinary techniques. My grandfather respected his own skill so much that when we went grocery shopping he refused to skimp. He criticized those who rolled their carts into the economy aisle, which was a flood of canned goods with yellow labels.