Authors: Sandra Cisneros
At this, some people cheer, some jeer. Some side with Mother. Some with Father. Some with the Grandmother. Some just stand there with their mouths open as if we’re the greatest show on earth.
—¡Atrevida!
You climbed up in life marrying my son, a Reyes, and don’t think I don’t know it. Now you have the nerve to talk to me like that. My son could’ve done a lot better than marrying a woman who can’t even speak a proper Spanish. You sound like you escaped from the ranch. And to make matters even more sad, you’re as dark as a slave.
The Grandmother says all this without remembering Uncle Fat-Face, who is as dark as Mother. Is that why the Grandmother loves him less than Father?
—¡Vieja cabrona!
Mother hisses.
The crowd gasps in
susto
, and in disbelief. —What a blow! —And to an elder!
—Listen, you raise-heller, Mother continues. —You’ve wanted
nothing better than to break up this marriage since day one! Well, guess what? I don’t give a good goddamn what stories you’ve got to tell me, I’m not going to give you the satisfaction, and you know why? ’Cause that’s exactly what you want, ain’t it? Comes what comes, like it or not, late or early, you’re going to have to get used to it. I’m Inocencio’s wife and the mother of his kids, you hear. I’m his legal wife. I’m a Reyes! And there’s not a damn thing you can do about it.
—¡Aprovechada!
the Grandmother counters. —Trash! Indian! I won’t stand here and be publicly insulted. Inocencio, I insist you take us home. To Mexico City! Now!
—Inocencio, if you let that cow turd in our car, you can forget about ever seeing me or your kids again. Put her on a bus with her address pinned on her slip for all I care.
—What stupidities you talk. My son would never dare to put his own mother on a bus, you little
cualquiera
. That’s how much you know!
—Well, I’m not getting in that car with you even if they tie you on the luggage rack. You’re a witch, I hate you!
—Quiet! Stop already. Both of you! Father orders.
—Do whatever the hell you want, I don’t care anymore, Mother says. —But I’m telling you, and I’m telling you only once. I’m not going
any
where again with
that vieja
!
—Nor I with
… ésa
. Never, never, never! Not even if God commanded it, the Grandmother says. —
Mijo
, you’ll have to choose … Her …
The Grandmother’s fat finger points toward Mother, who is trembling with rage.
—Or me.
Father looks at his mother. And then at our mother. The mob around us circles tighter. Father raises his head skyward as if looking for a sign from heaven. The stars rattling like a drumroll.
Then Father does something he’s never done in his life. Not before, nor since.
PART TWO
When I Was Dirt
•
W
hen I was dirt” … is how we begin a story that was before our time. Before we were born. Once we were dust and to dust we shall return. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. A cross on our forehead on Ash Wednesday to remind us this is true.
For a long time I believe my first moment of existence is when I jump over a broom. I remember a house. I remember sunlight through a window, sunlight with dust motes sparkling in the air, and someone sweeping with a corn broom. A pile of dust on the floor, and I jump over it. Feet jumping over a dust pile; that was when the world began.
When I was dirt is when these stories begin. Before my time. Here is how I heard or didn’t hear them. Here is how I imagine the stories happened, then. When I was sparkling and twirling and somersaulting happily in the air.
21.
So Here My History Begins for Your Good Understanding and My Poor Telling
O
nce in the land of
los nopales
, before all the dogs were named after Woodrow Wilson, during that epoch when people still danced
el chotís, el cancán
, and
el vals
to a
violín, violoncelo
, and
salterio
, at the nose of a hill where a goddess appeared to an Indian, in that city founded when a serpent-devouring eagle perched on a cactus, beyond the twin volcanoes that were once prince and princess, under the sky and on the earth lived the woman Soledad and the man Narciso.
The woman Soledad is my Awful Grandmother. The man Narciso, my Little Grandfather. But as we begin this story they are simply themselves. They haven’t bought the house on Destiny Street, number 12, yet. Nor have their sons been born and moved up north to that horrible country with its barbarian ways. Later, after my grandfather dies, my grandmother will come up north to live with us, until she suffers a terrible seizure that freezes her. Then she’s left without words, except to stick the tip of her tongue between thin lips and sputter a frothy sentence of spit. So much left unsaid.
But this story is from the time of before. Before my Awful Grandmother became awful, before she became my father’s mother. Once she had been a young woman who men looked at and women listened to. And before that she had been a girl.
Is there anyone alive who remembers the Awful Grandmother when
she was a child? Is there anyone left in the world who once heard her call out “Mamá?” It was such a long, long time ago.
¡Qué exagerada eres!
It wasn’t that long ago!
I have to exaggerate. It’s just for the sake of the story. I need details. You never tell me anything.
And if I told you everything, what would there be for you to do, eh? I tell you just enough …
But not too much. Well, let me go on with the story, then.
And who’s stopping you?
Soledad Reyes was a girl of good family, albeit humble, the daughter of famed
reboceros
from Santa María del Río, San Luis Potosí, where the finest shawls in all the republic come from,
rebozos
so light and thin they can be pulled through a wedding ring.
Her father, my great-grandfather Ambrosio Reyes, was a man who stank like a shipyard and whose fingernails were permanently stained blue. To tell the truth, the stink was not his fault. It was due to his expertise as a maker of black shawls, because black is the most difficult color to dye. The cloth must be soaked over and over in water where rusty skillets, pipes, nails, horseshoes, bed rails, chains, and wagon wheels have been left to dissolve.
Careful! Just enough, but not too much …
… Otherwise the cloth disintegrates and all the work is for nothing. So prized was the black
rebozo de olor
, it was said when the crazed ex-empress Carlota
*
was presented with one in her prison-castle in Belgium, she sniffed the cloth and joyously announced, —Today we leave for Mexico.
Just enough, but not too much
.
Everyone in the world agreed Ambrosio Reyes’ black shawls were the most exquisite anyone had ever seen, as black as Coyotepec pottery, as black as
huitlacoche
, the corn mushroom, as true-black as an
olla
of fresh-cooked black beans. But it was his wife Guillermina’s fingers that gave the shawls their high value because of the fringe knotted into elaborate designs.
The art of
las empuntadoras
is so old, no one remembers whether it arrived from the east, from the
macramé
of Arabia through Spain, or from the west from the blue-sky bay of Acapulco where galleons bobbed weighted down with the fine porcelain, lacquerware, and expensive silk of Manila and China. Perhaps, as is often the case with things Mexican, it
came from neither and both.
†
Guillermina’s signature design, with its intricate knots looped into interlocking figure eights, took one hundred and forty-six hours to complete, but if you asked her how she did it, she’d say, —How should I know? It’s my hands that know, not my head.
Guillermina’s mother had taught her the
empuntadora
’s art of counting and dividing the silk strands, of braiding and knotting them into fastidious rosettes, arcs, stars, diamonds, names, dates, and even dedications, and before her, her mother taught her as her own mother had learned it, so it was as if all the mothers and daughters were at work, all one thread interlocking and double-looping, each woman learning from the woman before, but adding a flourish that became her signature, then passing it on.
—Not like that, daughter, like this. It’s just like braiding hair. Did you wash your hands?
—See this little spider design here, pay attention. The widow Elpidia will tell you different, but it was I who invented that.
—Hortensia, that shawl you sold the day before yesterday. Policarpa knotted the fringe, am I right? You can always tell Policarpa’s work … it looks like she made it with her feet.
—¡Puro cuento!
What a
mitotera
you are, Guillermina! You know I did that myself. You like weaving stories just to make trouble.
And so my grandmother as a newborn baby was wrapped within one of these famous
rebozos
of Santa María del Río, the shawls a Mexican painter claimed could serve as the national flag, the very same shawls wealthy wives coveted and stored in inlaid cedar boxes scented with apples and quinces. When my grandmother’s face was still a fat clover-leaf, she was seated on a wooden crate beneath these precious
rebozos
and taught the names given each because of their color or design.
Watermelon, lantern, pearl. Rain, see, not to be confused with drizzle. Snow, dove-gray
columbino
,
coral
jamoncillo
.
Brown trimmed with white
coyote
,
the rainbow
tornasoles
,
red
quemado
,
and the golden-yellow
maravilla
.
See! I still remember!
Women across the republic, rich or poor, plain or beautiful, ancient or young, in the times of my grandmother all owned
rebozos
—the ones of real Chinese silk sold for prices so precious one asked for them as dowry and took them to the grave as one’s burial shroud, as well as the cheap everyday variety made of cotton and bought at the market. Silk
rebozos
worn with the best dress—
de gala
, as they say. Cotton
rebozos
to carry a child, or to shoo away the flies. Devout
rebozos
to cover one’s head with
when entering church. Showy
rebozos
twisted and knotted in the hair with flowers and silver hair ornaments. The oldest, softest
rebozo
worn to bed. A
rebozo
as cradle, as umbrella or parasol, as basket when going to market, or modestly covering the blue-veined breast giving suck.
That world with its customs my grandmother witnessed.
Exactly!
It is only right, then, that she should have been a knotter of fringe as well, but when Soledad was still too little to braid her own hair, her mother died and left her without the language of knots and rosettes, of silk and
artisela
, of cotton and ikat-dyed secrets. There was no mother to take her hands and pass them over a dry snakeskin so her fingers would remember the patterns of diamonds.
When Guillermina departed from this world into that, she left behind an unfinished
rebozo
, the design so complex no other woman was able to finish it without undoing the threads and starting over.
—Compadrito
, I’m sorry, I tried, but I can’t. Just to undo a few inches nearly cost me my eyesight.
—Leave it like that, Ambrosio said. —Unfinished like her life.
Even with half its fringe hanging unbraided like mermaid’s hair, it was an exquisite
rebozo
of five
tiras
, the cloth a beautiful blend of toffee, licorice, and vanilla stripes flecked with black and white, which is why they call this design a
caramelo
. The shawl was slippery-soft, of an excellent quality and weight, with astonishing fringe work resembling a cascade of fireworks on a field of sunflowers, but completely unsellable because of the unfinished
rapacejo
. Eventually it was forgotten, and Soledad was allowed to claim it as a plaything.
After Guillermina’s sudden death, Ambrosio felt the urge to remarry. He had a child, a business, and his life ahead of him. He tied the knot with the baker’s widow. But it must have been the years of black dye that seeped into Ambrosio Reyes’ heart. How else to explain his dark ways? It was his new wife, a bitter woman who kneaded dough into ginger pigs, sugar shells, and buttery horns, who stole all his sweetness.
Because, to tell the truth, soon after remarrying, Ambrosio Reyes lost interest in his daughter the way one sometimes remembers the taste of a sweet but no longer longs for it. The memory was enough to satisfy him. He forgot he had once loved his Soledad, how he had enjoyed sitting with her in the doorway in a patch of sun, and how the top of her head smelled like warm chamomile tea, and this smell had made him happy. How he
used to kiss a heart-shaped mole on the palm of her left hand and say, —This little mole is mine, right? How when she would ask for some
centavos
for a
chuchuluco
, he’d answer, —You are my
chuchuluco
, and pretend to gobble her up. But what most broke Soledad’s heart was that he no longer asked her, —Who’s my queen?
He no longer remembered—could it be? It was like the fairy tale “The Snow Queen,” a bit of evil glass no bigger than a sliver had entered into his eye and heart, a tender pain that hurt when he thought about his daughter. If only he had chosen to think about her more often and dissolve that evil with tears. But Ambrosio Reyes behaved as most people do when it comes to painful thoughts. He chose not to think. And by not thinking, he allowed the memory to grow infected and more tender. How short is life and how long regret! Nothing could be done about it.