The Jaguar's Children (17 page)

Before I could ask if this was why he was hiding, he said, “Imagine some pendejo finds your sister alone in the milpa and rapes her and she has a kid—”

Maybe it's the beer, but before I know it I am thinking of my sister Vera and I start to choke up, which is strange because I hardly see her now, but something César said reminded me of when I was fourteen, just before I left for secondary school, and my father slapped her for something—right to the floor. I was so angry and frightened, but I could only watch because I didn't want him to do it to me. Now I am sitting here trying to keep my shoulders still, trying to hide this from César, but it is hitting me hard that I am really leaving and I wonder if I will ever see Vera again, or my parents, and all I want in that moment is to go back, to go home. I start to stand up then because I have to walk, but César pulls me down and looks into my eyes, and I realize now that he thinks the tears he sees in there are for the corn and he keeps talking.

“—so now that kid is part rapist, but he's still your sister's baby, right? He's your blood too. So what are you going to do? You can't cut the kid in half and throw away the part you don't like. It's all of it or none of it and that's a problem when it's your family. But if SantaMaize can prove with science—by looking at gene markers and sequencing—that you're using their product, that your corn is part their corn, well, what are you going to do about that? Call your lawyer? SantaMaize got a thousand lawyers. They eat you like pollo.”

This is what César is saying while I'm wiping my eyes and trying not to choke on my beer because I want to be hard, but it's hard to be hard, especially when someone's telling you the world that made you is being killed in front of your eyes and what can you do but wait for some men you don't know and don't trust to take your life in their hands and drive you someplace you never been before where all you have is your uncle's phone number and with this you're supposed to make some new kind of life because the old one is broken and you don't know how to fix it except to do what everyone else is doing and go somewhere far away with bad food, cold weather and people who hate you.

You know what I'm saying?

What would you do?

Fri Apr 6—20:48

 

So cold. No one speaks now because they can't—only the terrible sound of breathing. I should share his water, but with who? It will be gone in a minute. In the pueblo, in the hard times, people join together, but in here there is no history and no connection, only the thirst which has no conscience. So I guard his water like César guarded his phone because the only way to live is to be still and quiet—to wait longer. To wait until you come.

If the Spanish Church taught us one thing, it is patience.

 

Fri Apr 6—20:57

 

In the afternoon so many memories came to me disguised as dreams and this one felt so real—in the café on the Zócalo with Sofía from my Customer Service class. I was there, but I was not myself, I was el Valiente. Maybe you know him from la lotería—those bingo cards were famous with the tourists. Of them all, el Valiente es mi favorito—un hombre serioso como Benicio del Toro only taller with a bloody machete in one hand and a sarape wrapped around the other. On the card they show him with a sombrero at his feet. Maybe it just rolled off a dead man's head, or maybe his enemy threw it down in surrender—you cannot be sure.

We were sitting under the arcade, Sofía and me, alone for the first time, and I was trying to order two cold beers, but I couldn't get the waiter's attention. How I missed seeing Odiseo I don't know. Of course the café was crowded and my eyes were on Sofía, but even in a dream our governor is hard to miss—that sagging-mustache face and bad skin. I should have known there was a problem because we were dying of thirst and no one was coming. All the waiters were serving Odiseo and his posse, and I couldn't believe it was really him, the Matador of Oaxaca.

Around his table is a barricade of men in suits and leather jackets and from the outside they look like vultures on a kill, heads down, dark shoulders pushing for position. On the table is a plan of the city, because right now Odiseo is tearing it out from under our feet and the traffic is hopeless. His brother is in the cement business and of course all those gutted streets must be filled with something. Mexico is a democracy and Odiseo has only a short time left in office so he must get busy—many pockets to fill, people to kill and BMWs to buy. Because of him there are crosses now around el centro.

In the dream it is December so all the flower beds are planted with nochebuena por la Navidad, but with Odiseo so near those bright red leaves only make the Zócalo look like it's bleeding again. Thirty meters from our table is the municipal palace that Odiseo was forced to abandon because the people hate him so much, and out by the fountains under the laurel trees are the common people who cannot afford a beer in a nice café with tourists and matadors. Between us and them Odiseo's indio bodyguards orbit like dark moons, hands in their coats, eyes flashing here and there, searching for anything that can put the planet at risk. They are matadors too, and the city is their killing floor. Men like them have been captured on film in the heart of our city shooting people down like dogs.

One of those people was my cousin Paquito, the son of my Tío Martín. They killed him last October in the strike. He was my age, but we never saw that part of the family much after Papá and me were deported. I went to the funeral, but I never saw Tío Martín. On the same day Paquito was killed, I saw a photo taken by a cameraman at the very moment the cameraman himself was shot. That day, the flame tree blossoms were falling in the street so heavy you could hear them hitting the pavement and from a distance they looked like seashells on fire. I was with some other students at the barricade across the big intersection by the Panteón General, and there had been a warning by phone that the paras were coming—not police but assassins with no uniforms and their own guns. These were campesinos who looked just like us and this made everything harder. I didn't see it myself, but I could hear the shooting and it was chaos—all of us running. I can tell you, the sound of a gun in the street is different from in the forest. There is only one animal who is hunted in the street.

I saw the photo after. It was posted on the Internet. There were three of them—all Zapotecos. The one who shot the cameraman looked a lot like our water guy—the same fat face with small eyes far apart and a big panza, only there's a smoking barrel staring right in your face. The cameraman died for that picture—right there in the daylight, in front of everybody with the flame tree blossoms all around him. But here is the Mexican part—the man accused of killing this cameraman? He is one of the protesters the matadors were sent to kill. I think he's still in jail.

Here, in the café on the Zócalo, the man who ordered those killings is sitting right behind me like nothing happened, our elbows almost touching. I could turn around and offer him advice. I could whisper “Asesino” in his ear. Jesucristo, I could kill him myself. But I'm as chickenshit as the rest of them, sitting there pretending this is only normal—just like at home when the father beats the mother and everyone sits down to la comida like nothing happened, and the son hates himself for only eating, for doing nothing to defend the one who feeds him.

Odiseo doesn't notice. None of those chingados notice, and it's hard to be told like that—right to your face with no words at all—that you have no power, that all you have is the fork in your hand and what are you going to do with that? Poke him to death? Ask him, please pass the salsa? And you know everyone else is feeling the same except for the Spanish café owners, the same ones who were saying last fall when buses were burning and business was bad, “What we need now es una
masacre
.” Those ones are glad to see Odiseo and his compas at the table drinking micheladas because it means there is order again, that the army has gone home and that the people have one more time been broken—and now that this is done maybe the tourists will come back.

In the end, I was not el Valiente. I was el Cobarde, and there is no lotería card for him. No sombreros rolled on the Zócalo, we never got our beer, and Odiseo lived to kill another day.

Can it be possible for a whole city to have la esquizofrenia?

 

Without putting a hand on me, the matadors killed something in me that day—by not seeing me even though I was close enough to grab their balls. They were a wall of backs and attitude, their table a compound. But that's Oaxaca for you—a city of walls. Getting inside can take a lifetime or a ladder. Getting out takes a coyote or a miracle.

 

Fri Apr 6—21:15

 

The battery is under half and César's water is going too fast. It takes all my strength not to drink it. I think it's the only good water left in here. I tried to give some to César, but I don't want anyone to see when I do this with my finger—make it wet and touch his lips, hold them open so some drops go in. His breath now is only a quick, thin scraping sound and his heart is beating too fast. Without him I can't bear the cold. I can hear someone's teeth rattling.

Death is in here with us now, cold and heavy. The only reason I am still functioning—besides César and his water—is because I am in the back and this is where the pipes are for pumping the water out. They are down near the bottom of the tank and one is closed, the one that damaged César, but the other is open. A child can put his hand through it, but a man cannot. Just outside the tank, this pipe makes a turn so you cannot see out, but some light comes in there. It looks to the west, I think, because the pipe goes orange at the end of the day and then it is not so long until the cold. Here, the air is fresh and even at midday it blows a cool breeze when you compare it to the breathless heat inside the tank. With my face by this small opening as big around as my own mouth, I feel sometimes as if I am bathing in the air and I can forget this hot wet stink all around me.

 

Last year, before the strike, I was taking classes at the university and I had some hope for my life in Oaxaca. Even then I had to borrow money and work for my father who was filling the holes made by Odiseo and saying over and over, “Remember Tío Martín and his truck? You can have that too, so what are you doing here pissing your life away?”

Even with that voice in my ear I wanted to stay. Back then, I could silence it if I got far enough away—in class, in the Sierra with Abuelo, at the Milenio Cross up the hill from our house in el centro. You can see this cross from everywhere and some believe it is a good place for a sacrifice because that hill is shaped like a pyramid and the view is incredible, like you are an eagle flying over everything. Down below is the great Valley of Oaxaca, and in the summer you can watch the storms coming in from the ancient places—Yagul, Dainzú, Mitla—moving across the land like dark curtains, sometimes two or three at once from different directions, and if you want, you can imagine it is you calling them in.

The last time I went up there was in August. I was with Sofía and a couple of friends from the university, and we had three liters of Negra and a bag of chicharrones. That day, we found a dead turkey and the head of a goat lying at the foot of the cross in a circle of candles all burned down. Sofía didn't like this and we sat away from them on a rock, but they weren't smelling yet so Carlo and Dani sat next to them on the cement which was better for the bottles and no ants biting. I don't know if the pope would be so happy to know that indios are sacrificing animals and drinking beer under the biggest cross outside of D.F., but maybe if he came here and sat for a while he would understand. The hill comes to a sharp point up there and the air was blowing around us in a circle. Far above was a hawk turning the same way as the wind like he was the one making it blow. The flowers up there were finished already, but for some reason this little turning wind was filled with butterflies flying around and around us. Sitting there with Sofía and the view with the beer still cold and all those butterflies I was thinking I never want to leave. Dani, with a liter of beer in him, took out his big graffiti marker and tagged a rock with “CHPT”—Chingón Para Todo. This motherfucker's ready for anything.

On that day I was feeling the same way.

Then the strike came and for months it was like a small war here. I went with the others to the barricades, but after Paquito and that cameraman were killed and all those others taken, tortured or disappeared, I lost my heart for the protests, not only from fear but because that anger—it is a kind of poison, you know, and it stays in the body. What did I learn from the strike? Nothing but how fast I can run and that Coke is good for washing tear gas from your eyes. This is why, just before el Día de los Muertos and all the soldiers coming with the armored cars, I left the city and went back to the pueblo to be with Abuelo. By then he was close to dying and it was a kind of silent bargain we made—I took care of his body and he did the same to my soul, telling me of all the changes he saw and how he made it through.

He also reminded me of something Mexicanos are being taught to forget, and that is how to live without money. One day, he said to me, “M'hijo, everyone knows life for the Zapoteco is hard, but we are lucky too and we are forgetting this. Who else can grow all their food—sweets and spices, herbs and medicines, corn and beans and squash, even oil for the hair—on one hectare on the side of a mountain? Everything you need is right here—the sun, the seed, the forest, the water. If you can read and grow your own food then your mind will be free, your stomach will be full, and you can survive no matter how the wind is blowing.”

I could not help thinking of my father and how for him the milpa has become a kind of enemy, those rows of corn a wall between him and what he wants for himself and for us. For so many years I thought Papá's anger—with Abuelo, with his life—was from being deported. It wasn't until I went to stay with him that last time that Abuelo told me about Zeferina and the Jaguar Man.