Like Son (10 page)

He pointed to a barely visible stone gazebo structure just northwest of the park’s center.

“This used to be Little Germany,” he said. “Back in 1891, some dude built the Temperance Fountain so people would drink ice water instead of booze. Racist crap, but the fountain is sort of cool. Too many junkies there at night, but check it out sometime.”

Okay, so maybe the park wasn’t exactly the Garden of Eden, but the lit-up city was still completely ethereal and stunning to my L.A. eyes.

“So, you interested?” Ted’s buddy asked.

“Totally,” I said.

“Awesome.”

We talked money. I handed over the cash. He gave me keys. We shook hands.

“The sheets are clean,” he said. “Use the dishes, towels, whatever you want. Push stuff out of the way if you need to, no worries.”

“Cool, thanks.”

He left. And I had a New York apartment.

No matter how fantastic a view is, it’s inevitably a good idea to take a little break from admiring it after a few hours. So eventually I left the window. With how exhausted I was from the flight and everything else, I had zero desire to unpack. But I felt I should at least make an attempt. I opened my briefcase and took out the padded envelope. I leaned the retablo of Nahui Olin against the windowsill. I didn’t get much further—in fact, I barely grabbed Nahui’s book from the briefcase and kicked off my shoes before flopping down on the bed.

A dix ans sur mon pupitre. Nahui Olin. 1924.

It was so strange. I still wasn’t sure why my father had given me the book. The retablo, I totally understood. But the book was like a puzzle. And the fucking inscription on the back cover:

My love,

      “
She went through me like a pavement saw.”

                                                    
Yours as ever for the revolution,

                                                                           Nahui

Talk about cryptic. And the
revolution
? What revolution? Questions flooding my brain, my eyelids turned heavy. Fuck, I was tired. I wanted someone to tuck me in and give me a kiss on the forehead and praise me and tell me how brave I was being. Just under the layers of exhaustion from travel and the thrill at having arrived in New York, there was very tangible uncertainty. I could feel it on my tongue. It tasted metallic like a zinc tablet. It made me salivate and gag a little. Maybe I’d made the wrong decision. Maybe it was more chickenshit of me to leave California than it would have been for me to stay. I wished I could have called my dad because then he could have told me if this was how it felt when he left Mexico. There was something soothing in knowing that even though I’d left Los Angeles with crap for a plan and only a vague notion of destination, my father would have understood why I felt compelled to go and never look back. Of course, inevitably, exactly because I was trying to run forward with blinders firmly in place, I was completely preoccupied with all that existed just beyond the peripheries of what I knew. I wanted to sleep and get rested so I could wake up early in the morning and start in on my new future, but—winding, repetitive, stumbling thoughts—I found myself trying to piece together an unknown past instead.

Exactly how did my father’s mother know Nahui Olin? It made absolutely no sense to me. Just from looking at her, it was obvious Nahui had been a fancy-pants boho artist from a rich family. And from what I knew, my dad’s mom had been a simple working woman to her dying day. Day in, day out, she had worked alongside my father on their small farm until he left for Vietnam and then the States. He said she’d go into town for church on Sundays, but that was about it. And any time she wasn’t in church or the fields, she was in her little house, cooking or washing or sleeping too few hours. So where’d she meet Nahui? I found it highly unlikely that Nahui was a church friend. My father told me once that his mother had cleaned houses in town before he was born. And she did again after he headed north. Maybe that was how they knew each other? Had my father’s mother cleaned Nahui Olin’s house?

I’ll send more money
, my father told me he’d written his mother when he found out she was cleaning houses in the city.
You shouldn’t have to do that kind of work
.

I’ve done it before. It’s honest work
, she had written back and refused more of his money.

He said he’d hated thinking about her knees bruised and hands shriveled from long hours of scrubbing other people’s floors and windows. Each day she must have left exhausted and with still more work to do in her own home and neglected fields. She must have looked dead in her eyes those days, he’d said. But maybe she didn’t. Maybe everything my father thought he’d known about his mother had been wrong. Maybe, yes, she had cleaned the houses of rich people when she was young, but maybe, just maybe—my eyelids fell shut, my breathing slowed—maybe just maybe …

“Consuela, I wrote this for you,” Nahui Olin said. And startled my father’s mother out of her daze.

The year was 1943. Very pregnant and prone to such moments of being caught in daydream, my father’s mother was at the zócolo to give a final prayer at the church she’d attended each Sunday of her life. She would start for Chicago the next morning. The thought of leaving behind everything she knew filled her with dread. But there was nothing she could do. “We are going,” her husband had said. And she knew they needed to. Forty-six cents an hour for legal work up north—it was the sort of opportunity they couldn’t let slip by.

Easily tired with my father inside her, she was nonetheless still strong. And determined, same as her husband. Tall, muscular, and broad-shouldered, he’d been an obvious hire for the railroad company, but the recruiter had looked at his young wife’s protruding belly and had wanted to hire only him. Disgusted to have to play such games, she batted her eyelashes and, a convincing smile lighting up her pretty face, flexed the muscles of her right arm for show: “I promise, I am a good worker.”

She signed the paperwork along with her husband.

And cried herself to sleep that night.

Something tragic was waiting for them. There had been signs. Only hours after she’d been hired, she had seen warning in the pueblo curandera’s eyes.

“Will you please bless my babies?” she had asked when she arrived at the curandera’s home with her toddler daughter in tow.

“Of course,” the curandera had said, and invited them in. “Sit, please.” She motioned to her one chair and then to the clean-swept dirt floor beside it for the girl.

The curandera kneeled in front my father’s mother. One hand on her pregnant round stomach, the other hand on the little girl’s head, the old woman closed her eyes and breathed slowly, the deep wrinkles of her face smoothing as she concentrated. This quiet stillness continued for minutes.

And then: “No!” The curandera yanked her hands away as if she’d felt fire.

“The baby?” my father’s mother asked nervously, her hands moving in an instinctive, protective gesture to her middle.

“It is a boy,” the curandera said. And then she stared at the little girl and refused to say more.

The next morning, the curandera visited my father’s mother.

“This is for the girl,” she said, and handed over three slices of candied sweet yam. “Give her some each night before she sleeps.”

“Is she sick?” my father’s mother asked.

“And this is for you, Consuela,” the curandera continued without answering. She handed my father’s mother a powder of crushed chamomile flowers and roasted chili peppers. “Mix it with hot water. Drink one cup each morning at sunrise until the baby is born.”

“Thank you.”

“Go to church before you leave. Pray,” the curandera said.

And so, the final day before her departure, my father’s mother woke before sunrise for her visit to the church and, as was her new habit, she prepared the sour tea she’d been prescribed. Nose pinched to get the mixture down into her empty stomach without retching, she drank the tea. Cup cleaned and left to dry, she kissed her still-sleeping daughter and husband and set out on the five miles of dirt road to church.

May we all reach our destination in good health. May my son know his home even though he will be born so far from it
, she planned her prayer as she walked in the foggy morning air. Tired after only a mile, she stopped to pick up a honey-colored pebble from the dirt road. When her son was born, she thought, she would put the rock in the palm of his hand. She would tell him to reach for it whenever life brought anxiety. Over the years, the small, rough stone would turn smooth-comfort and dark-oiled from his fingertip caresses.

This pebble is your home, my love
, she could hear herself telling him, and she bristled against the sentimentality of her thoughts. She missed her usual unwavering sensibility—life was so much easier without strong emotions—but she’d come to accept that her old ways simply weren’t possible when she could feel a child squirming and kicking just below her heart. She felt possessed, this creature inside literally moving her, making her as sensitive and emotional as the original gods. Frustrated, she continued toward the church.

Once there, my father’s mother lit candles and prayed to have her overwhelming fears lifted away. Usually God warmed her to let her know she’d been heard. That day the church remained damp and chilled. She wandered out to the plaza to stand in the late-morning sun, to collect herself for her final walk home. As she sat at the plaza fountain’s edge, Nahui Olin appeared and stood directly in front of her, much too close for a simple friendly hello.

My father’s mother, the young woman who had cleaned Nahui’s dilapidated family manor for years, knew personally about Nahui’s intense flirtations, the sort that back then could only be politely referred to as
eccentricities
. Countless were the times Nahui—a woman of fifty who painted her face brightly, dressed in the manner of teenaged harlots, and who sometimes spoke as only sailors did—had made her blush and forget the task at hand. There was the day Nahui serenaded her with the mariachi song “Por un Amor” as she tried to sweep and mop and dust.
For a love/I’ve cried droplets of blood from my heart/You’ve left my soul wounded
… And then there was the afternoon Nahui insisted she choose which she thought was the prettiest dress in a fancy Parisian magazine. The next week, my father’s mother arrived to clean Nahui’s house and was presented with the dress, custom-made for her.
Please, mi amor, try it on. The color suits you so.
But my father’s mother knew instinctively—from her upbringing, from all she’d been taught at church—that such behavior was scandalous, that it was devil’s play. And so, although she was flattered and she sometimes smiled in return without intending to, she tried not to encourage Nahui. Really, all she could do when Nahui suddenly appeared with her insistent interruptions was pray that she would walk away just as abruptly. The day at the fountain, my father’s mother hoped for the mercy of such convenience. But it was not meant to be.

“Consuela, I wrote this for you,” Nahui said, tapping the book she held in her hand.

Everyone knew of course about Nahui’s artist friends and that she herself wrote poems, that she was one of the uncommon women whose name could be found printed on the front page of a book. But, like everyone else in town, my father’s mother also knew Nahui had written the particular book she held,
A dix ans sur mon pupitre
, as a ten-year-old, decades before my father’s mother had even been born. Clearly, there was no way Nahui had written the book with her in mind.

Did she really know about me before I was born?
my father’s mother wondered silently.
No
, she pushed the thought from her mind,
that simply couldn’t be
.

The explanation to Nahui’s outlandish claims had to be simple: She was surely insane. But my father’s mother, too polite, too poor, and too cautious, didn’t argue. She just sat there, blushing furiously, as Nahui, the grown daughter of wealthy and powerful parents long dead or moved to Paris or wherever it was such money and comfort settled, stared her down. And when Nahui thrust the book at her, my father’s mother took it.

“Thank you, Miss Nahui,” she said, and nearly dropped the book for how much her hands trembled.

“You’ll kill me if you go,” Nahui said then.

Sitting low on the fountain’s edge, eyes averted, desperately hoping Nahui would decide to leave and not create more of a scene, my father’s mother felt upon her chin a hand that had never done a day’s labor, a hand pale from silk gloves, a hand soft from the thick honeysuckle-scented creams she herself had dusted on vanity table silver trays. That smooth hand cupped her chin. Head tilted back gently, my father’s mother looked directly into green eyes she felt certain were owned by God himself and the devil too. In fact, though she was shocked by her own boldness, she looked into Nahui’s eyes the entire time.

The entire time Nahui kissed her.

And Nahui did kiss her. For all to see. Seriously,
everyone
saw. The whole city and all the surrounding pueblos. Those who weren’t there when it happened saw it later through busybodies’ recounted tales. Everyone saw. And talked about it. But right then there was silence. Not a single person said a word. Not even Nahui as she turned and walked away.