I was lying on my back in bed with an ice pack on my foot when I learned that Señor López Luna had died. It was hot for August. The desert air was light, untroubled, punctuated by the peals of church bells from one of San Miguel de Allende’s dozens of churches and by the braying of Doña Teresa’s donkeys. Just beyond the balcony doors, honeybees bustled around the tiny red flowers in the clay pots, while a few hundred yards away the Peruvian pepper trees swayed their hips in the noon breeze.
I pulled the cell phone out of my jeans pocket and composed a message to Ángel, telling him that I wouldn’t be at class that night, because I’d fallen. I expected to get a concerned message back, but instead he answered, “I’m very sad, maestra. My grandfather died.”
I sat up, threw off the ice, and texted him again. I’m sorry, I tapped out, but when I read the words on the screen they looked stingy. So I added some simple questions, When did he die? Where are you? Can I call you?
Ángel, who is thirty and fast on the keypad, shot back, “About two hours ago. I’m in the funeral home. Yes, call me.”
Only yesterday, during our daily conversation in the family’s stand in the market, we had spoken about the grandfather, who’d also fallen recently. Two weeks ago, the old man had been taking sun on the patio and the chair had collapsed under him, sending him tumbling onto the concrete floor. He wouldn’t go to a doctor, but he hadn’t broken anything, or so determined the sobador who’d gone to the house to adjust his back. His daughter and his two granddaughters had been waiting on him, bringing him teas and changing his diapers. Only yesterday, Ángel had said that his grandfather was finally better and starting to get up again.
When I reached him, Ángel told me that his grandfather had died in bed, his body discovered by Consuelo, the younger sister. Ángel and his grandmother and his sister Inez were waiting for some papers. Later, the body would be taken to the grandmother’s house on La Luz. Tonight would be the wake. Ángel would let me know what time to be there.
The day had started before dawn, with a blown transformer near the Peruvian pepper trees, causing a blackout that had lasted five hours. Later I had fallen, spraining the top of my left foot and bruising my shoulder. San Miguel was known as “the city of falling ladies,” and ex-pats were always stumbling off the narrow sidewalks and into the cobblestone streets. But I had fallen in my own apartment, tripped while going up the staircase to my bedroom. Then Ángel’s eighty-five-year-old grandfather had died. It was not a usual day. This is Mexico, Ángel would say, and shrug. What did you expect?
***
I lived behind a slaughterhouse and across the street from the hull of an unfinished hotel, what the Mexicans call an obra negra. The slaughterhouse had long since closed down and consisted now of a white, low-slung building surrounded by acres of dead orchard, where Doña Teresa, newly widowed, bred burros and grazed other animals—chickens, goats, horses. But the dominant view from my bedroom window was the aborted luxury hotel, started by one Jorge Ramírez, a cash-poor rich boy from Mexico City.
When I’d come here three years ago, I’d been fascinated by milk sold unrefrigerated in boxes, and eggs sold unrefrigerated in clear plastic bags. The unpasteurized cheeses in the market, offered by the señoras from the campo, attracted me as well, until I got violent stomach cramps from eating them. Doña Teresa’s donkeys also captivated me, especially the long, thick eyelashes of their young.
I’d been concerned about where to cut and color my hair. In Houston, I’d gone to Kenney, brash, genital-rubbing Kenney, who tended to lean in a little too close. Haircutting to Kenney was a sensual experience, but I didn’t mind, since he was gay, and besides, what chance was there for a middle-aged Texas matron to get a little thrill, if not this? But then I’d met Alejandro, with mascaraed eyes and a salon adorned with Corinthian columns. Fulfilling medical needs in Mexico also befuddled me. Where would I go to the dentist? Gynecologist? I was used to seeing a doctor a minimum of seven times a year, and I was a well woman: two times to Houston Cardiac to have my blood pressure monitored and an EKG performed; once to Dr. Puffer for a full physical; ditto to the gynecologist; and twice a year to my dentist, for whitening and cleaning. I had absorbed a native mistrust of any medical thing not American. But I soon found, through ex-pat word of mouth, Dr. Elvira Ruiz, who did everything but teeth in her efficient consultorio in El Centro.
Most-important needs met, I set about creating a routine. On Sundays, along with the other ex-pats, I sought a seat under the laurel trees of the Jardín to watch the campesinos pose around the bandstand, their accordion-folded faces shaded by sombreros, their bowling-pin stances outlined in jeans and boots, and their women, immobile on the metal park benches, shoulders bound in the region’s blue-striped rebozo, ignoring the riotous delirium of their children chasing tiny plastic pull toys. Everybody was eating—tacos and menudo and ices, chicharrón in red salsa and roasted ears of corn with mayonnaise—and no one used the garbage pails furnished by Coca-Cola; every thirty minutes or so, along would come an orange-smocked municipal worker dragging a hand-fashioned twig broom. Mexicans were notorious litterbugs, but less known: They were ferocious sweeper-uppers, at least in their historic centers.
This exuberant band of life, without a doubt, had attended Sunday Mass. In contrast, I was Protestant, a participant in a dry service—preaching and singing but controlled, the men in suits, the women in suits and pantyhose. Sunday services back home were followed by dinner with my son and his wife, a staunchly childless couple, at a family-style restaurant: spongy fried chicken or a slab of ham thick as the sole of a man’s shoe or sinewy strips of steak in brown gravy, and turnip greens or black-eyed peas or yellow squash fried with bits of onion, all cooked until the life had gone out of them and served from under a heat lamp. I, fifty-six, divorced ten years, a retired school teacher, had decided to get out of Houston, and so I had come to this small Mexican town, like all the other Protestant retired divorcees, to find myself.
What I found first was weather. Weather in Houston was not a friend: In summer, it cooked your menopausal self and frizzled your texture-changing hair and made your armpits damp with crescent stains; in winter, it rained. Weather, in Houston, hung on too long. But in Mexico! Weather caressed you, softened your moods, smoothed the boundaries between indoors and out. In Mexico, nobody sweated. In summer there was sun, and the occasional chubasco that might last ten minutes or might last an hour, followed by more sun. In winter, there was also sun, and only one month of hard cold. There was no heat in any of the houses, and everybody went about in jackets, indoors and out. It was all the same, a blurring of indoors and out, until you felt you were not outside the weather, trying to survive it, but a part of it. Then, on the first day of February, spring arrived, as if somewhere in the universe a giant switch got flipped.
In Houston, I’d taught Spanish at a Catholic high school—St. Francis. In Mexico, I taught English at a secular school—Vasconselos. Upon my arrival, I’d taken refresher Spanish in a small academy with a thirtyish man, Jesús Ernesto. He was tall for a Mexican and good-looking, medium-dark, with that thick black hair of the indigenous. He possessed a lot of confidence. From the outset, we argued, good-naturedly I thought, mostly about language. About Spanish and its use of the two verbs ser and estar to express the concept of “to be.” About English and, according to Jesús Ernesto, its lack of logic. (“Why do you say, ‘Eat it up’? ‘Up’? Why ‘up’?”) On the surface, Chuy (I only called him this out of earshot) was all manners and manliness; but below that skim of formality, he loved the banter of words, so much so that in his favorite cantina, El Gato Negro, he’d come to be known as El Abogado. One day in class, I informed him that I’d taken to frequenting the same cantina—granted, only during the late afternoons, before the campesinos arrived; he gave me a long, black look, and at that moment I think he decided to befriend me. A gringa in El Gato Negro: That seemed to clinch it; soon, he introduced me to Ángel and encouraged him to study English with me.
One September afternoon, not long after coming to Mexico, the time of the fiestas patrias, I lounged on the grounds of the old hacienda where I had my apartment. I was with my eighty-year-old neighbor Lupe, who casually remarked, “Oh, look, there’s the first robin of fall.” That was when I realized I’d turned everything, absolutely everything, upside down. Protestant had become Catholic; English, Spanish; clouds and humidity, sun and aridness; lethal bored Sundays, days of movement and life. I vowed not to be like the other ex-pats, sitting outside society on a bench in the Jardín; I would live among Mexicans and assimilate. Not long afterward, I sold the family home in Houston.
***
I was to be at the grandmother’s at eight—so Ángel had texted me. At seven-thirty I pulled on a pair of white sneakers and set out from my apartment, walking with a cane I’d borrowed from Lupe. But at the intersection of La Luz and La Presa, none of the town’s green and white taxis was in sight, no traffic of any kind except the occasional lumbering urbano or erratic SUV with DF plates. I turned right onto La Luz, hobbling past the long white wall of the slaughterhouse, with its pebbled sign Rastro 1958, disfigured with political slogans. Just beyond the wall, thistles hung like tiny dried stars in the decaying apricot trees.
Even though both grandparents and Ángel had lived there, I thought of the house as the grandmother’s, because she had moved into it first, in the 1970s when she’d come from their pueblo, San Juan de los Baños, to buy the family’s first stand in the market. Her husband had followed her shortly afterward, and then a few years later Ángel, when he was six. Finally, Ángel’s mother had come to live in San Miguel with her three older children and had gotten her own house and market stand.
But everybody in the neighborhood, Mexican and foreigner, called the grandmother’s house La Casa de la Virgen. Nobody knew who painted the larger-than-life Lady of Guadalupe on its north wall fronting the alley, in unruly expressions of blue, green, and red, outlined in rays like the leaves of a flaming maguey. Over the years, the Virgin’s miraculous powers had been revealed to the residents of the street, as she hastened their recoveries from colds and stomachaches, lessened their pain in childbirth, and lightened their grief in times such as these. Every day at noon, the señoras kneeled in front of her to recite the rosary; several years ago, they’d asked permission of the grandmother to put up a simple black railing, on which they’d hung potted plants and flowers. Then this past year, a metal crown had appeared around the Virgin’s head. I knew that the crowds, and especially the fireworks they set off at dawn, annoyed Ángel, whose bedroom was located directly above the Virgin, on the second floor. But not just for the obvious reason: Ángel was an atheist, and he believed that the Mexican tendency to shoot off fireworks in celebration of anything religious to be just so much pan y circo.
I’d never once been invited inside the house. About a year into our friendship, I’d asked Ángel why; he’d replied that since the house was not his, he could not invite me, or anybody, into it. But this couldn’t be the whole answer, because to reciprocate my dinner invitations, Ángel invited me to his mother’s house in Colonia Olimpo, where his two sisters also lived, and that house wasn’t his, either. It would be Inez who cooked those nights—pork with green salsa, chicken with mole, stuffed chiles. There would be Mexican rice, mixed with carrots and peas. She was a good basic cook, Inez, and knew just where in the market to buy the best handmade tortillas. Always Ángel would invite Jesús Ernesto to these dinners; always, with him, the talk would be lively, about politics and books and movies and, of course, language. Oftentimes Ángel’s mother, Regina, sat with us, but not at the table, a few feet away, on a stool, nodding at our conversation. On Day of the Dead, with the table pushed against the kitchen wall and decorated with bread, flowers, and fruit, the grandparents would also join us, the old lady pitching in to prepare the tamales. Even Consuelo, the younger sister, would join us on that night, but never Franco, their older brother.
A small crowd, mostly elderly women, had gathered on the sidewalk in front of the house’s yellow and red painted façade. Above the double front door, Ángel had already hung the requisite black satin ribbon. I nodded to his two gay friends from San José de Iturbe, expressionless in white plastic chairs set up near the Virgin, and stepped inside.
The small coffin of Señor López Luna jutted into the dismal room. On the lower half of the steel coffin, the half closer to the door, was arranged a blanket of white lilies, chrysanthemums, and roses. More white lilies were jammed in vases and plastic buckets on the floor around the coffin, and there were four long, white candles placed at its corners. Señor López Luna lay under a pane of Plexiglas, his face barely visible. Propped over him was the image of that other Señor, with tear-studded green eyes, the crown of thorns atop light brown locks. Besides me, he was the only güero in the room.
I took a seat next to the grandmother, in a rickety folding chair at the foot of the coffin. The room was square, of unpainted concrete, with the house’s main electric wire strung overhead like a clothesline; the floor was chipped blue and white tile, the kind you see in many of the poorer Mexican houses. With us were four old ladies, maybe a little younger than the grandmother, in folding chairs to the coffin’s right; one of them, very dark-skinned, fingered a rosary. The grandmother sobbed and dabbed at her nose with a crumpled Kleenex. I didn’t know what else to do, so I took a fresh tissue out of the pocket pack I was carrying and handed it to her. She nodded.
Then I bent toward her, took her brown hands, like tiny starfish, into mine and whispered that I was sorry about her señor. She nodded vigorously, her long braid sliding up and down her back, and answered something I couldn’t understand. Ángel had told me that his grandparents were illiterate, though they spoke two languages; even the sums they performed in their business they had to do in their heads. Their other language, which they used at home, the language of their pueblo, was Mazahua. That, I thought, was what the grandmother was mumbling to me now.
Next to my chair, up two steps, a narrow hallway ran off this room. Three metal birdcages were stacked there on the floor, each with a green parrot; in a corner jog, I could make out the hot water heater. Farther up the hall, light spilled from another room, which I figured to be the kitchen. Just then Ángel came running out of it, stopping at the doorway. We hugged, and he dropped down onto the step next to me.
I’d never seen him look like this. For one thing, he always wore black sunglasses and a baseball cap, even inside—he said that his eyes were sensitive—but tonight he had on his wire-rimmed glasses, and I could see his eyes, dark and full of bright pain. He had on the baseball cap, but backwards, and tufts of his black hair, thick as hay, stuck out near his ears.
Before I could speak to him, the dark-skinned lady began to recite a rosary in voz alta, with the other señoras following along in their singsong tones. The grandmother began to cry and mumble to herself again in Mazahua. A car passed on the street, the noise of its engine gruff against the cobblestones, and an abrupt wind came up and whistled in the corners. The rosary seemed an endless, droning circle. When the last prayer was said, more señoras filed in, taking up seats in the empty folding chairs, filling the room with muted movements and muffled sounds. Ángel sprang up and rushed down the hallway.
The señoras chatted, half smiled at one another, and watched the children: Ángel’s four-year-old great-niece Erica; his brother Franco’s granddaughter, playing with her blue-caped Barbie; and another little girl on the verge of walking, whose mother sold sombreros in the market. The grandmother, tears stifled, heaved herself up and tottered down the hall to the back of the house. When she turned on the dangling bulb, I saw her small form silhouetted before a heap of merchandise draped in bright blue plastic, until she closed the door behind her.
I shifted back toward the señoras, and again we waited and watched the children. At about eleven, Ángel and Inez emerged from the kitchen, holding trays of Styrofoam cups, and offered each of us a drink: thick, hot atole. A compact silver car sped past the open front doors, opera blaring on the stereo. It was Jesús Ernesto, arrived at last. Ángel set his tray down and ran to stand in the doorway. The two friends hugged in that brusque way that Mexican men have with each other, with three hearty slaps to the back for good macho measure. But then without greeting anybody else, and without glancing at the coffin, Jesús Ernesto rushed into the kitchen, Ángel and Inez following.
The señoras continued the now-familiar vigil. Rosary, chitchat, cooing at whichever child happened to be nearby. Why didn’t the others join the wake? Where were Ángel’s mother, his sister Consuelo, and their brother Franco? Even the grandmother stayed away, behind the sealed-off door.
Finally, about midnight, I picked up my cane, the one I’d borrowed from Lupe, rose and said, “Con permiso.” I hobbled up the steps into the hall, nearly tripping on a plastic pipe in a trough. I maneuvered past the birdcages, glancing left: There was a niche behind the hot water heater, with a plastic curtain and bottles of shampoo on the concrete floor.
I had to duck to enter the kitchen, carved like a cave out of the house’s core, with a sink and a stove whose top was covered with tin foil, and a small refrigerator. Ángel’s mother sat at a narrow table pushed against the wall opposite the entrance, but everyone else was standing: Ángel and Inez near the dish-filled sink; Jesús Ernesto in front of the mother.
“Hola, Marta,” he said, pronouncing my name in Spanish. He looked angry, but he was trying to hide it.
I walked over to the mother, bent down and gave her a peck on the cheek, how I’d always greeted her in her house. As I straightened up, I noticed an open loaf of white bread on the table, the slices fanned like a deck of cards; dirty Styrofoam atole cups; and a clear plastic bag stacked with sliced ham. I also noticed Inez turn her back to me and Jesús Ernesto stoop to whisper something to her.
Ángel touched my hand, saying, “Let’s go outside, maestra, I need some air.”
He guided me past the coffin to the sidewalk, where he leaned against the wall and sighed. I wanted to ask him what had happened in the kitchen, but then a taxi stopped in front of the house, and Franco got out. Ángel’s older brother had a drunkard’s body, skinny legs, and a belly bulging over a tight leather belt. His right foot was covered by a white bandage and shoved into a black plastic sandal, and he cradled a crutch under his elbow.
Though I’d never met Franco, for months I’d heard his saga: how he’d driven drunk and hit another pickup on the road to Dolores, badly damaging it, and how though the occupants weren’t seriously hurt, they’d insisted on being hospitalized. Franco had cut his foot deeply, and he’d had to spend a week in the hospital, then three more weeks in prison while his mother tried to scrape up his bail. In the end, it had been Jesús Ernesto, with his lawyer-like bravado and his contacts, who’d gotten Franco out. Then Franco’s common-law wife had kicked him out of his house, and the affronted driver had sued, demanding a new truck. There the real-life telenovela had temporarily stalemated.
In the minute it took Franco to pay the driver his twenty pesos, Ángel pulled me the few steps into the deserted alley. We stood in front of the Virgin, so close to the wall of the house that I felt its dampness. Then he reached up and took off his baseball cap, and his lovely straight black hair, parted in the middle, turned up like butterfly wings.
He glanced back toward the street, but we were alone; Franco hadn’t seen. I followed Ángel’s gaze to the Virgin, and the script on the painting’s lower right corner. I asked him if 1994 was the date she’d been painted, and he nodded.
“When you would have been fifteen,” I said.
He looked at me. “Yes,” he said in English, and it sounded like “jes.” We always spoke English when we were alone together. It was the language of our friendship, not Spanish, which I spoke with Jesús Ernesto.
The little alley was still, the night cold beginning to fall. I continued, “Are you very sad about your grandfather?”
“Yes,” he said again.
“That’s only natural, since he was the only father you’ve ever known.”
He nodded.
“But is there something more that’s upsetting you?”
I knew that Ángel lived with his grandparents because his mother had sent him away from their pueblo when she could no longer take care of him, because she already had three children and his father had just died.
“My mother says that she is going to sue me,” he said.
“Sue you?”
“Yes. Because before he died, my grandfather signed the papers to leave me this house. Today, this house is mine, and my mother is furious.”
“But why?” I asked. “She already has a house.”
“Yes, but she wants this house for Franco.”
I thought about how Franco hadn’t had money for bail, and that now he had no place to live. How he was, after all, the first-born son. “Well, why did your grandfather leave you the house and not Franco?”
He sighed again. “Jesús Ernesto suggested that my grandfather put this house in my name. My grandparents and I went to the lawyer with him and Inez. We did this so that when this day came, there would be no fighting. But there will be fighting anyway.”
“After the funeral,” I said, “your mother will realize that it makes no sense to sue her own son. She’ll accept the wishes of her parents to give you the house. Don’t you think?”
He shook his head. “She says that I took advantage of my grandfather when he was ill.”
“But you didn’t, did you?” I asked.
Ángel pulled back the sleeve of his polo shirt to check his watch. It was nearly one. “You must go home now,” he said. “I will help you.” He walked with me as far as the rastro, rising on tiptoe to kiss me on the cheek. “Sleep well,” he said.
“What will you do?”
“Tomorrow we will take my grandfather’s body to our pueblo. The next day, after the burial, we will return here.”
“Will you call me?”
“That day we will start the novena. You will come at eight?”
“I will come at eight.”
“Good,” he said. “I will wait for you.”
Then he turned and left, holding his baseball cap in his hands. I watched him hurrying down La Luz, black hair flying, becoming smaller and smaller, until he vanished into the darkness of the street.
***
I had only to walk a few hundred yards to reach the Peruvian pepper trees, then a few hundred more to the gates of the hacienda, where Don Juan, the night watchman, would be waiting with his key. I could feel the grit from the streets and hills above, come down in rivulets in the last heavy rain. For we were still in the rainy season. The rastro wall was to my left, the top sprinkled with colored bits of broken glass, the ghost of the unfinished hotel to my right, big as a galleon with only a mangy watch dog for a mate, so old and infirm that he didn’t even lift his head as I passed.
Once, on a clear blue Saturday afternoon several months after I’d come to Mexico, I’d thought I’d heard shots fired from this hotel. I knew the sound of gunshots, from hunters in the Texas woods. Then I’d thought better of it and had gone right on preparing myself a sandwich for lunch. But Alicia, a Mexican neighbor, had telephoned, telling me that she’d double-locked the hacienda gates, and to be sure to lock my apartment door, because she’d heard on the radio that some badmen had robbed a payroll in nearby Dolores and were hiding out in the hotel. Did I not hear the shots? And of course I had, but I hadn’t been able to believe them. Soon there were helicopters overhead, here, where there were never sounds overhead except for the occasional whoosh of a hot air balloon ferrying tourists through the sky. Now I was passing at this late hour in front of that same hotel where those men had hidden and where one of them had died in a shootout with the police. The mayor had tried to keep the story quiet so as not to frighten the tourists, but it had spread until everyone who lived here knew it, or thought he knew it. There were many variations of the story, some saying that all of the men had died, some saying none.
At last, I reached the pepper trees, stilled now from swaying, and then at last our gates across from the tiny pink-painted chapel that once, centuries ago, had served the owners of the hacienda. And then Don Juan was unlocking the gate and asking me something in his unintelligible guttural Spanish, and I was nodding and pretending and hobbling across the rough stone walkway toward my apartment door.
I closed the door, the apartment dark except for the little safety light shining out on the back patio. I leaned the cane against the entry table and began to climb the stairs to my bedroom, barely raising my feet, falling into my bed, where I lay without taking off my clothes, and slept. By afternoon of the next day, I still had not gotten up.
In the evening, I managed to text Ángel to ask how he’d made the trip to his pueblo, but all I got back from him was a tiny red envelope, which wouldn’t open no matter how many buttons I pressed. So I gave up and went back to sleep. It seemed everywhere there was ugliness, mustachioed mouths with crooked teeth and lapping tongues; all bright-painted everything chipped and falling. I tasted the grit upon the roads, full of all manner of animal excrement; even the smells seemed to sour, no longer of sweet corn but of rancid twisted meat. The touch of Ángel’s fingers upon mine was dirty and foreign, and Jesús Ernesto saying to me over and again, as he had once, Why trust a Mexican? They are all thieves. And I’d laughed. Had I been wrong about everything?
***
I spent nearly another day in bed, after Lupe brought an herb tea meant to make me sleep more, which she said was the best thing for a fall.
Late afternoon, I finally got a message from Ángel, one that I could open, asking me how I was and wanting to know if I was coming to the novena. Yes, I replied, I was sick in bed, but now I was getting up. Then I had a thought—if I did not get up now, would I die, like the grandfather? What was there about a fall, even one in which you did not break anything, even hurt yourself too drastically, that made it so difficult to recover from? Was losing your equilibrium enough to kill you?
The bedcovers lay around me in disarray, bunched and sweaty. I still had no energy, but I was determined to attend the first night of the novena, the nine nights of rosary, and to see Ángel again, to reassure myself that he was the person I thought I knew. I sat up on the edge of the bed, then stood, teetering and achy, even my head. I had to feel my way to the sink, stopping to grope the surfaces, of the mattress, television table, doorway, and vanity tiles. I located Lupe’s cane where I’d left it two days ago. My left foot was stiff, and I had to throw my right hip forward as I walked, not to tip off balance.
Ángel was sitting with his grandmother and Inez in the front room, in the folding chairs that remained set up around its perimeter. He stood to greet me with a kiss on the cheek. Where Señor López Luna’s coffin had been, more flowers and candles were laid. Wearing his dark glasses, and with the brim of his Che Guevara cap pulled over his forehead, Ángel looked like himself again. As he whispered about traveling to his pueblo in the hearse with his grandfather’s coffin, because he hadn’t wanted to ride in his brother’s car with the rest of the family, I focused on his high cheeks, each with its dark mole, and on his square white teeth.
“My mother was still furious at me,” he said louder, but since he spoke in English, he wouldn’t upset the grandmother and Inez.
“But she’s bound to come around, don’t you think?” I asked.
He jutted his chin forward, and I knew he hadn’t understood.
“I mean she will accept the wishes of her parents to give you the house.”
“I don’t know….” he said. Then he added, “After my grandfather’s coffin was put into the grave, we fought.”
Now I was confused. “Fought how? You mean, you argued again?”
“When we were leaving the panteón, I went ahead with my grandmother. My mother followed with Franco. He pushed my grandmother from behind, with his hand like this, against her back. She almost fell….”
“But you were able to catch her?”
“Sí,” he said and was silent.
That first night of the novena, the dark-skinned lady came to lead us in the rosary, as she would for the subsequent nights. But the ninth night would be held in the family’s pueblo, San Juan de los Baños, because afterward they would place the crucifix on the grandfather’s grave. The mother, Regina, and her other daughter, Consuelo, had remained there; Franco’s whereabouts were unclear.
Soon the señoras from the neighborhood arrived: the lady who sold the sombreros in the market and her pretty little daughter, the lady with thick glasses who wrapped herself in her rebozo no matter what the weather, the lady who walked with a limp and had a shriveled right hand. About a dozen in all, and of course Jesús Ernesto came, too. After a few nights, I could remember the prayers in Spanish, the Hail Mary and Our Father, and even parts of the Letanía de la Virgen. Everybody, that is everybody but Jesús Ernesto, recited the rosary, even Ángel. And after each rosary, Ángel and Inez would hop up and run out to the kitchen, returning with snacks: atole and rolls, atole and tamales, plastic bottles of refrescso and ham sandwiches served with jalapeño. No one mentioned the mother or Franco; grief, assuaged by repetitive prayer and eating, began to feel like a party. By ten o’clock each night, we would be saying the litany of our goodbyes (“Hasta luego, hasta mañana, que le vaya bien”). Jesús Ernesto always used to say how much the Mexican people liked their formalities.
The last night of the novena started like the others, with the dark-skinned lady taking the rosary from her handbag promptly at eight and the latecomers drifting into their accustomed seats. That night after the prayers, Inez served pozole, which we balanced on our knees in Styrofoam bowls, while Ángel rushed around with the traditional accompaniments, radishes and shredded lettuce and cilantro and oregano. The grandmother’s mood seemed to lighten, and she played with the sombrero lady’s little girl, even tried lifting her up onto her skinny lap. Finally, everyone thanked the dark-skinned lady and she left, and then one by one the other señoras, each murmuring a special word of encouragement to the grandmother. We had shared this, and now it was over.
I was getting ready to begin my own good nights when a taxi stopped and discharged Franco. He struggled inside. He had on a net tee shirt and a chunky gold chain, and he walked dragging his bandaged foot. Then he sat down in the folding chair next to me.
Up close, Franco looked a generation older than Ángel, his skin like used sandpaper. He talked fast, a string of consonants sliding into one another, as if his words had no vowels. All the while, he drew great circles in the air with his right hand, though I watched not his hand but the coiled chest hairs poking through his open shirt. I had no idea what he was saying. Then he bent toward me and, resting his fingertips on my knee, seemed to ask me a question.
“¿Mande?” I asked. He leaned closer to me, so close that I could smell his sour yellow breath.
Again Franco consumed more ugly words, and he flung his arm around my neck, nearly pulling me off my chair. Then he began to laugh, not a well-mannered risa but carcajada, laughter like the word, rough and circling, coming back again and again on itself. With his free hand, he slapped at my leg and pointed his fingers at Ángel and Jesús Ernesto. As he heaved me toward him in the preposterous, inextricable embrace, the world tilted upside down, and I caught glimpses of the others in their folding chairs, Inez and Jesús Ernesto and Ángel sitting stiffly with arms at their sides (how could they always sit so still? I wondered), the grandmother like a doll, her feet dangling, unable to touch the blue tile floor.
She broke it up. Abruptly she stood, shaking her bony forefinger at Franco until he released me. Then she and Inez began collecting the used Styrofoam bowls; they moved quickly, piling one on top of another, sloshing the remains of the greasy soup. Her hands full, the grandmother nodded at Franco, and he lurched to his feet, stumbling after her down the hallway. I could hear him, laughing still, out in the kitchen.
Jesús Ernesto stared at the jumble of flowers and funeral candles on the floor, while Ángel began talking fast, about the long trip he’d have the next day to the pueblo for the final rosary and about the crucifix they would place on the grandfather’s grave. He went on about the Mass that would be held in the Parroquia in San Miguel to mark the month since his grandfather’s death. Finally he stopped, and silence fell around us like heavy summer rain.
I knew that I should just leave, but I didn’t know how. I searched for something to say. I turned to Jesús Ernesto, falling back on a familiar topic. In English I asked him, “Why do you use the verb estar with the past participle of to die? Doesn’t death qualify as a permanent characteristic instead of a present condition?” I forced a smile at him, believing that this time I’d caught his language in an instance of illogic.
But he only shrugged and replied, in English, “How can you call yourself a Spanish teacher, if you do not know the difference between ser and estar?”
Sharp, just like that. Even Ángel, I thought, was surprised, though it was hard to tell behind the hat and glasses.
“What do you want, that I should explain it to you now?” he continued. “I would have to charge you for a lesson.”
Then he excused himself, stretching out the buenas noches until it sounded like a reproach.
I looked at Ángel, and he looked at me, and then I reached for Lupe’s cane. As I limped past the alley, I paused to read what was written next to the Virgin of Guadalupe in large, black script, and recognized the words she’d spoken to Juan Diego: Fortunately, am I not here to be your mother? Fortunately, are you not welcomed under my protection?
Not too long after that, I was walking normally again, or nearly so. But I no longer visited the market each day to converse with Ángel. He’d stopped attending my English class; I thought that he must be busy, getting affairs settled, taking possession of his house. Then one day at noon, the sun painfully hot, I ran into Jesús Ernesto in the street outside the hacienda gates; he told me they’d held the Mass for the grandfather. Ángel, he said, had waited out in the Jardín, on a metal bench with the ex-pats, because Franco had threatened to beat him up if he’d attended.
Then it was mid-September again, and the fiestas patrias again, the costumed riders traveling on horseback from as far away as Querétaro to commemorate the fight for independence; with pomegranates in season, the finer restaurants began to serve chiles en nogada, the platillo honoring the Mexican flag with its green, white, and red. Two weeks after that, we marked the feast of St. Michael the Archangel, enjoying the Alborada, the dawn fireworks display that began when the clock next to the Parroquia struck four. I watched alone, in my bathrobe, from my upstairs terrace: the fireworks grand, the grandest I’d seen in my time here, inhabiting the sky, rising and dropping like bright lives all around me.