Crux Page 10

  On the third night, Papi crept upstairs. My mother, who had told him he could stay with us so long as he remained downstairs, heard his footsteps. She hadn’t slept since his arrival. She got up and tiptoed to her door. Papi was staring into Michelle’s room, his face contorted in terror. My mother stepped into the hallway. In the calmest, most reassuring voice she could manage, she said: Marco. There’s nobody there. Come, sleep beside me. I’ll stay awake. Nobody is going to harm anyone under my roof. Papi followed my mother into bed. For the first time in years, Marco Antonio lay at Jeannette’s side. His breathing slowed. He slept. Jeannette stayed awake all night. When the sun rose, she called Abuela Carolina. He’s your son, she said. I can’t help him anymore. My grandmother arrived in her golden Lexus with her chin up, designer sunglasses shading her eyes. She took her first son to live with her at her house. My mother told me my father no longer existed. I had to stop talking about him. And then, in synchrony with our silence, Papi vanished.

  FERTILITY

  Her neighbors call her La Señora de los Mil Pájaros. The Woman of the Thousand Birds. When I visit her these days, my grandmother leads me outside to gaze at her more than a hundred lovebirds, which emerged from a single pair, like our childhood cockatiels. They flit around in a large wire-mesh cage Papi built in her backyard. Their feathers carpet and color the cage floor: yellow, blue, pink, black, green. Their songs are audible through the suburbs.

  Nearing eighty, Carolina looks fifty. Her skin is luminous and smooth. Her hair is muted scarlet. She wears clothes of vineyard colors. Her nails are always manicured. Strangers often breathe words like bella when they meet her. Her mouth is still like the mouth of Michelangelo’s Delphic Sibyl, conveying mourning in repose.

  Her lovebirds are homicidal, like our childhood cockatiels. When a tumor the size of a golf ball erupted on a blue bird, its relatives butchered it to death. My uncle Alejandro, a recovering crystal meth addict who lives in Carolina’s guest bedroom, scooped up its corpse and brought it into the kitchen. Carolina placed a hand on her chest and shook her head with a somber expression. Let’s store it in the freezer, she said. I want to know what the tumor is made of. We can dissect it later.

  The deformed lovebird remains in the freezer as I write this. Nobody has had time to dissect it. My grandmother still works full-time. While eating cantaloupe at her house, I ask her if she isn’t repulsed by the carcass’s proximity to her food. She stares at me with confusion. Why would I be? She walks to a nearby cupboard and reaches inside. From between wineglasses, she pulls out the carcass of a lizard. She says: Mira. She cradles it in her palm. Its eyes are missing. Its reptilian skin peels away like paper, exposing its stringy skeleton. She inspects it with both hands, then places it beside her plate of fruit. I have several dead creatures, she says. I collect them.

  I look inside the cupboard. Two other crispy lizards repose by a tiny round nest of plant fibers sheltering a dead hummingbird. Back at the table, Carolina grabs a slice of cantaloupe with the bare hand she just used to touch the carcass. She places the fruit on her tongue. I realize then: nothing can make my grandmother unclean.

  * * *

  •

  In the early 1990s, Carolina told Jeannette about a rape and a kidnapping—secrets she had never told anyone. My mother, with half-formed whispers, told me without telling me: my father was the child of those events.

  I knew I had to ask Abuela for those details. My father’s origins could help me understand why he ran away for so many years. My American education had taught me this: Behavior can be traced to biology or experience. Nature or nurture. Surely, Carolina’s memories held the key to my father’s mystery. But the prospect of interfering with my grandmother’s composure paralyzed me with fear. She seemed so polished and impenetrable, in spite of her warmth. I procrastinated. My phone rang one day when I was writing in Mexico.

  The caller ID said: Abuelita. I answered the phone. “Bueno?”

  “I hear you’re writing a book about the family,” my grandmother said in Spanish. “You know how your father gets when he’s drunk—he talks too much. He says you’re afraid to ask me questions because you think I’m a private person. I’m just calling to tell you I have no secrets anymore. I am no longer afraid of the truth.”

  * * *

  •

  My grandmother holds her chin up, hands crossed in her lap as she sits on a chenille couch in her house in San Diego. She wears a flower-print blouse that shows more skin than usual—beneath her neck, around her clavicle, her skin looks smooth as silk. Behind her, on a plush pillow, a black-and-white miniature Chihuahua, Panda, watches me suspiciously, baring needle-sharp teeth.

  I turn on my recorder.

  “What do you want to know?” she asks.

  “Everything,” I say.

  “There is so much,” she says, sighing.

  She looks up at a multitiered glass shelf of family photos. She has eighteen grandchildren and fifteen great-grandchildren. Most speak only English. She can converse with only a few, including me.

  “Tell me about your first crossing,” I say.

  When she begins, her voice is immersed in the shrill songs of her mil pájaros, which sound like an endless shattering of glass.

  * * *

  •

  The barbed wire between two steel posts lay trampled on the earth. Her father, Antonio, pointed at the mangled border fence. He wore an elegant beige suit and tie. Allá, he said, golden eyes squinting against the sun. Beyond alfalfa silage and maize fields lay the town of San Ysidro.

  Carolina, fourteen years old, lifted her white skirt and swung one leg, then another, into los Estados Unidos. She followed her father and brother down a dirt path to the bus station, passing buildings in neat rows of congruous colors. The roads were flat and smooth, the sidewalks clean. Even the clouds seemed to hang higher here.

  In a Los Angeles factory called Mission Pak, Carolina arranged fruit into baskets, which she decorated with red ribbon. Her father had told her she could keep her earnings. Her hands felt the buzz of a new magic as they moved on the apples, oranges and pears—somewhere invisible, these gestures were creating cash. The power was exhilarating. It was a welcome change from her domestic chores, which had no payoff save her mother’s pride.

  The Valenzuelas’ fairer skin meant they could blend in with Americans, so long as they kept their lips sealed. But one day, immigration officials stopped all of the laborers as they left the factory and asked to see documents. Dozens, including the Valenzuelas, were corralled into buses for deportation.

  Back in Mexico, Carolina felt giddy. All her life, her father had been disappearing to los Estados Unidos. That country was his unyielding obsession and sickness; it was why he was always absent. For the first time, Carolina felt she understood her father. She had gotten a taste of El Norte herself.

  * * *

  •

  Carolina was a devout, introverted girl with that paradoxical beauty of mixed blood. Through generations, Spanish conquistadores had passed on arched eyebrows, cacahuate skin and an Audrey Hepburn nose. From her indigenous abuelas, she had inherited thick black eyelashes, dramatic earthy curves and a sensuous mouth. I look at photographs from back then. She strikes me as the most beautiful girl—the kind men go insane about, the kind artists immortalize.

  Antonio wanted to keep her far and hidden from the lascivious eyes of Tijuaneros. One of her classmates, Ramiro, had recently had the audacity to knock on the front door, requesting permission to court Carolina. Antonio had chased him down the street, wielding an empty bottle of whiskey. He pulled Carolina out of school. Women in Mexico had acquired the right to vote that decade, but many people still considered their education a waste of money.

  Generally, Antonio was an agreeable drunk, showering his children with compliments, coins, candy. He hired mariachis to serenade his wife. (Great, now he’s drunk again, that man, said Ma
ria de Jesus each time “Jesusita en Chihuahua” wafted in through the walls.) But the predatory lust of young men for his daughter provoked Antonio’s murderous side.

  Almost every summer since the onset of puberty, Carolina’s parents had sent her to a ranch in Unión de Guadalupe, her mother’s birthplace. Her tías wrapped lengthy pieces of cloth around her chest, flattening her breasts, and took her to church every day to recite catechisms. Carolina clutched her rosary, praying to the sinless woman with the sorrowful smile, La Virgen de Guadalupe. She loved the quiet, idyllic life in el campo. The town was accessible only by mule, and she looked forward to the daylong rides up the Sierra del Tigre. When it rained, she wore a thick cape of hule. She loved the pattering sounds of the skies on the material, the canciones of the insects.

  Nearly everyone in Unión de Guadalupe was related to Carolina. Her older cousins bathed her in cold water from a bucket, making her scream, then giggled and spoiled her afterward, braiding her hair and telling her stories. Once, as her uncle saddled a mule to take her back to the city, she ran into the wilderness and hid behind the large blue leaves of a maguey plant, desperate to remain in el campo.

  Other times, her parents sent her to Tlaltenango de Sánchez Román, where her father grew up. She stayed with Abuelita Juanita, a clairvoyant curandera who wore long white dresses. In the living room of her adobe house, her grandmother sat in a chair surrounded by candles, eyes shut, communing with espíritus. The townspeople formed filas at her door to buy healing potions and converse with their loved ones. Juanita was known as La Adivina. Listening to the voices of spirits, she located lost livestock and buried money. During her free time, she played songs of the revolution on her guitar.

  In Tijuana, Carolina’s classmates ganged up on her. They clawed at her arms and tore out her hair. Carolina wept timidly. When Carolina’s little sister, Irma, witnessed an attack, she lunged like a lioness, scratching and sinking her teeth into flesh. Don’t worry, hermana, she said. They’re just jealous of you. Carolina was confused. She had felt envious of only one person in her life—her sister. Irma was the obvious favorite of their father. Antonio thought Irma was plain, and was charmed by this. My poor daughter! Nobody is going to love this ugly thing, he said, scooping her up. Irma had the ideal life, in Carolina’s eyes. Irma had a playmate: an upper-middle-class neighbor who shared her tricycle, muñecas and other toys. Meanwhile, Carolina cooked and cleaned all day. She was in charge of the handkerchiefs and socks, which her mother loathed to touch. Her father’s handkerchiefs were covered in viscous, clotted mucus, often so stuck to the fabric that she had to use a stick to remove it. Carolina fought her gag reflex for her mother’s sake, scrubbing against the stone washboard.

  Unlike Irma, Carolina had no friends except the girl in the mirror. When she was alone, she spoke to her reflection. Of course, she knew the girl in the mirror wasn’t really a friend. But she liked to pretend. She called her friend Pandora, a name she had heard somewhere and liked.

  * * *

  •

  Carolina’s mother was born in Unión de Guadalupe in 1911, when the roads outside were red with revolutionaries’ blood. Maria de Jesus clung to images of La Virgen that her parents promised would protect her. When she was a teenager, Plutarco Elías Calles, a black-eyed, fanatically anti-Catholic man with arched eyebrows and a cropped mustache, became president. He threw priests into jail and cut off their heads. In 1926, Cristero rebels in Jalisco launched a violent uprising in defense of the Church. The army came to Unión de Guadalupe on the Sierra del Tigre, a strategic base against the rebels because of its altitude. Maria de Jesus and her sisters were smuggled out of town by mule, curled up in corn baskets. Their father, Cidonio Arroyo, rode back a few days later to feed the cattle. He was shot and killed—among tens of thousands of victims of the Cristero War. His murder fueled the flames of Maria de Jesus’s faith. She regarded La Virgen as the ideal role model for her daughters. If immaculate conception had been an option, she would have recommended it without hesitation. She decided to keep her girls ignorant of sex and reproduction for as long as possible. When Carolina began bleeding between her legs, Maria de Jesus wiped her tears away and assured her she was not going to die. It was a symptom of becoming a woman, that’s all.

  * * *

  •

  My grandmother neither smiles nor frowns as she recalls the past. She maintains her poise, as if posing for a painting. But the words that spill from her mouth are salty with tears and sweat and blood. Her voice quivers. It’s not difficult for me to imagine her as a little girl getting her first period. She seems so young even now. But Doña Carolina no longer bleeds. She is a woman at her crux, the matriarch of a six-tentacled Mexican-American tribe. Her pubescent self couldn’t have imagined her power. I think of what happened when Doña Caro’s favorite Chihuahua, Habibi, went missing in the 1990s. She deployed all of her resources to recover the female dog. Her employees, children, grandchildren, nieces and nephews stalked all of the potential kidnappers—neighbors, other employees, friends of employees, relatives of employees, relatives of neighbors, friends of friends. They found Habibi at the house of Carolina’s neighbor’s maid’s daughter, one of the suspects. A much larger dog had mated with Habibi repeatedly; she was pregnant and traumatized. Doña Carolina wept upon recovering the creature. It squirmed in her arms, whining as it licked her face. My grandmother did not bother to call the police. She did not threaten the kidnappers. She merely wiped her tears, raised her chin and wished them luck in Hell. A few weeks later, Habibi gave birth to one lopsided puppy. Abuela called it Mía.

  * * *

  •

  Carolina was not yet twelve when she encountered a skinny girl with a shocking mutation: a gargantuan spherical tumor on her stomach, contrasting with gawky limbs. The sight disturbed Carolina. She was even more confused when, months later, she saw the girl again, slim as Carolina herself, cradling a bundled infant. The experience clicked only when a classmate confided that babies don’t really come from la cigūeña, but rather from human stomachs. Suddenly, the mutation made sense: the girl’s stomach was big because of the baby inside, and returned to normal once the baby was born. How the baby had emerged or entered the stomach, however, remained a mystery.

  After Carolina had been pulled out of school, she regularly crossed the border with her father to work in San Diego and Los Angeles. She sewed dresses in an American woman’s basement and swept the floors of an upper-class family. Her father merely wanted to keep her tucked out of sight—in factories, in offices, in the houses of elderly people—so she would be safe from teenage boys. But she worked happily. She loved the thrill of earning money at her father’s side. When the United States launched Operation Wetback in 1954, work opportunities vanished there. Antonio found her a job in Tijuana, first calculating sums with a pencil for an accountant, then tying knots on chorizo for two Spanish-Mexicans who paid Antonio a commission to sell their meat.

  The entrepreneurs, Mateo and Mario Perez, were born of Spanish immigrants in Mexico City. Mateo lived with his wife and three children in Tijuana. Mario was a restless widower, having married a fifteen-year-old when he was twenty-two and watched her die less than two years later of tuberculosis. In 1955, at age thirty-seven, he had green eyes, dark brown hair and a brooding, mysterious aspect. When he looked at Carolina—and he looked at her often—he seemed to be sharing a secret with her. She felt a strange, nervous feeling in her stomach.

  One afternoon in Carolina’s seventeenth year, Beatriz, Mateo’s wife, knocked on her door to invite her to a family gathering. Maria de Jesus decided to give her daughter a break from domestic servitude. She knew the Perez family and trusted them. At the party, Carolina was received warmly, offered a chair and a cup of Coca-Cola with liquor in it. Mario Perez stood in a corner of the room, his eyes fixed on Carolina. She found herself blushing. For the first time, she became tipsy.

  Mr. Perez approached her. It was t
oo loud inside to talk. He asked her to follow him. They walked into the backyard. He helped her into the back seat of a car parked under a tree. He leaned forward, turned on the radio and spun the volume dial clockwise all the way. Then he threw himself on Carolina. At first, she kissed him back. The alcohol made her feel uninhibited, free, capable of being swept away by any current. But then the lightness dissipated like a dream. His embrace became aggressive, greedy. It startled her awake. She realized he was undressing himself. He pulled something from his pants that was terrifying to her because she had never seen anything like it. She had seen her little brothers nude, but their private parts were flaccid, small, inoffensive. This limb was alien and protuberant. She tried pushing Mr. Perez away. He pinned her down. She begged him to stop, but nobody heard her.

  * * *

  •

  When Mario finished, Carolina sobbed. Her private parts hurt. She felt obliterating shame. Her instincts told her this was precisely what her parents had always wanted to protect her from. Now it had happened, and she felt it was her fault. The experience had planted in her a seed of knowledge, which expanded like a nuclear explosion. She saw, suddenly, how the mysteries of life were interconnected: the woman with the mutation, the symptoms of being a woman, rivers of blood pouring down her mother’s legs as Maria de Jesus wept about a lost bebé. So that was how babies ended up in stomachs. That was how they emerged. Any minute now, her stomach would start to swell.

  Mario told her she had to keep their deed a secret. What they had done was illegal, he said, because she was a minor and they weren’t married. Carolina believed she had not only betrayed God and her family but also broken the law. I can’t go back to my house, she thought, weeping. I can’t look my mother in the face.