3 Page Essay based on 3 short stories

A N C E L E S M A S T R E T T A

f r o m B i g - E y e d W o m e n

Aunt Natalia Esparza

One day Natalia Esparza, she of the short legs and round ti$, fell in love

with the sea. She didn't know for sure at what moment that pressing

wish to know the remote and legendary ocean came to her, but it came

with such force that she had to abandon her piano school and take up

the search for the Caribbean, because it was to the Caribbean that her

ancestors had come a century before, and it was from there that what

she'd named the missing piece of her conscience was calling to her with-

out respite. The call of the sea gave her such strength that her own mother could

not convince her to wait even half an hour. It didn't matter how much

her mother begged her to calm her craziness until the almonds were ripe

for making nougat, until the tablecloth that they were embroidering

with cherries for her sistert wedding was frnished, until her father under-

stood that it wasn't prostitution, or idleness, or an incurable mental ill.

ness that had suddenly made her so determined to leave.

Aunt Natalia grew up in the shadow of the volcanoes, scrutinizing

them day and night. She knew by heart the creases in the breast of the

Sleeping \foman and the daring slope that capped Popocat6petl.* She

had always lived in a land of darkness and cold skies, baking candies

over a slow 6.re and cooking meats hidden beneath the colours of overly

elaborate sauces. She ate offofdecorated plates, drank from crystal gob-

*Popocat6petl: volcanic peak near Mexico City

o

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lets, and spent hours seated before the rain, listening to her mother's prayers and her grandfather's rales of dragons and winged horses. But she Ieamed of the sea on the aftemoon when some uncles from Campeche passed through during her snack ofbread and chocolare, before resum. ing their joumey to the walled city surrounded by an implacable ocean of colours.

Seven kinds of blue, three greens, one gold, everything fit in the sea. The silver that no one could take out of the country: whole under a cloudy sky. Night challenging rhe courage of the ships, the tranquil con- sciences of those who govemed. The moming like a crystal dream, mid- day brilliant as desire.

There, she thought, even the men must be different. Those who lived near the sea which she'd been imagining without respite since Thursday snack time would not be factory owners or rice salesmen or millers or plantation owners or anyone who could keep still under the same light his whole life long. Her uncle and father had spoken so much of the pirates of yesteryear and those of today, of Don Lorenzo Patifio, her mother's grandfather, whom they nicknamed Lorencillo between gibes when she told them that he had arrived at Campeche in his own brig. So much had been said of the calloused hands and prodigal bodies that required that sun and that breeze, so fed up was she with the tablecloth and the piano, that she took off after the uncles without a single regret. She would live with her uncles, her mother hoped. Alone, like a crazed she-goat, guessed her father.

She didn't even know the way, only that she wanted ro go ro the sea. And at the sea she arrived, after a long joumey to M6rida and a terrible long trek behind the fishermen she met in the market of that famous white city.

They were an old man and a young one. The old man, a talkative pot smoker; the youth, who considered all of this madness. How would they retum to Holbox with this nosy, well-built woman? How could they leave her?

"You like her, too," the old man had told him, "and she wants to come. Don't you see how she wants to come?"

Aunt Natalia had spent the entire moming seated in the frsh stalls of the market, watching the arrival of one man after another who'd accept anything in exchange for their smooth crearures of white flesh and bone,

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their strange creatures, as smelly and beautiful as the sea itself must be. She lingered upon rhe shoulders and gait, the insulted voice of one who didn't want to "just give away" his conch.

"lt's this much or I'll take it back," he had said. "This much or I'll take it back," and Natalia's eyes followed him. The first day they walked.without stopping, Natalia asking and ask-

ing if the sand of the seashore was really white as sugar, and the nights as hot as alcohol. Sometimes she paused to rub her feet and they took advantage ofthe chance ro leave her behind. Then she pur on her shoes and set off running, repeating the curses of the old man.

They arrived on the following afremoon. Aunt Natalia couldn't believe it. She ran to rhe water, propelled forward by her last remaining strength, and she began to add her tears to the salty water. Her feet; her knees, her muscles were aching. Her face and shoulders stung from sunbum. Her wishes, heart and hair were aching. \7hy was she crying? !(/asn't sinking down here the only thing she wanted?

Slowly, it grew dark. Alone on the endless beach, she touched her legs and found that they had nor yet become a mermaidt tail. A brisk wind was blowing, pushing the waves ro rhe shore. She walked the beach, startling some tiny mosquitoes that feasted on her arms. Close by was the old man, his eyes lost on her.

She threw herself down in her wet clothes on rhe white bed of sand and felt the old man come nearer, put his fingers in her matted hair and explain to her that if she wanted ro stay, it had to be with him because all the others already had women.

"I'll stay with you," she said, and she fell asleep. No one knew how Aunt Natalia's life was in Holbox. She retumed to

Puebla six months later and ren years older, calling herself the widow of UcYam.

Her skin was brown and wrinkled, her hands calloused, and she exuded a strange air of self-confidence. She never married yer never wanted for a man; she learned to paint and the blue of her paintings made her famous in Paris and New York.

Nevertheless, her home remained in Puebla, however much, some aftemoons, while watching the volcanoes, her dreams would wander out to sea.

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"One belongs where one is from," she would say, painting with her old-lady hands and child's eyes. "Because like it or not, wherever you go, they send you back home."

Aunt Leonor

Aunt Leonor had the world's most perfect belly butron: a small dot hid. den exactly in the middle of her flat, flat belly. She had a freckled back and round, firm hips, like the pitchers of water she drank from as a child. Her shoulders were raised slightly; she walked slowly, as if on a high wire. Those who saw them tell that her legs were long and golden, that her pubes were a tuft of arrogant, reddish down, that it was impossible to look upon her waist without desiring all of her.

At age seventeen she followed her head and married a man who was exactly the kind one would choose, with the head, to accompany one through life. Alberto Palacios, a wealthy, stringent norary public, had fifteen years, thirty centimetres of height, and a proportionate amount of experience on her. He had been the longtime boyfriend of various boring women who became even more tiresome when they discovered that the good notary had only a long-rerm plan for considering marriage.

Desdny would have it that Aunt Leonor enrered the notary office one aftemoon accompanied by her mother to process a supposedly easy inheritance which, for them, tumed out to be extremely complicated, owing to the fact that Aunt Leonor's recently deceased father had never permitted his wife to think for even half an hour in her lifetime. He did everything for her except go grocery shopping and cook. He summarized the news in the newspaper for her and told her how she should think about it; he gave her an always sufficient allowance which he never asked to see how she spent; he even told her what was happening in the movies they went to see together: "See, Luisita, this boy fell in love with the young lady. Look how they're gazing at each other-you see? Now he wants to caress her; he's caressing her now. Now he's going to ask her to marry him and in a little while he's going to be abandoning her."

The result of this patemalism was that poor Aunt Luisita found the sudden loss of the exemplary man who was always Aunt Leonor's daddy

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not only distressing but also exrremely complicated. With this sorrow and this complication they entered the notary's office in search of assis- tance. They found him to be so solicitous and efficacious rhar Aunt Leonor, still in mourning, married notary Palacios a year and a half later.

Her life was never again as easy as it was back then. In the sole criti- cal moment, she had followed her mother's advice: shut your eyes and say an Ave Maria. In truth, many Ave Marias, because at times her immoderate husband could take as long as ten mysteries of the rosary before arriving at the series of moans and gasps culminating the circus which inevitably began when, for some reason, foreseen or not, he placed his hand on Leonor's short, delicate waist.

Aunt Leonor lacked for nothing a woman under twenty-five should want: hats, veils, French shoes, German tableware, a diamond ring, a necklace of unmatched pearls, turquoise, coral and filigree earrings. Everything, from underdrawers embroidered by Tiinitarian nuns to a tiara like Princess Margaret's. She had whatever she chanced ro want, including her husband's devotion, in that little by little he began to real- ize that life without exactly this woman would be intolerable.

From out of the affectionate circus that the notary mounted at least three times a week, first a girl then two boys materialized in Aunt Leonor's belly. And as only happens in the movies, Aunt Leonor's body inflated and deflated all three times without apparent damage. The notary would have liked to draw up a certificate bearing testimony to such a miracle, but he limited himself to merely enjoying it, helped along as he was by the polite and placid diligence which time ani curiosity had bestowed upon his wife. The circus improved so much that Leonor stopped getting through it with the rosary in her hands and even began to thank him for it, falling asleep afterwards with a smile that lasted all day.

Life couldn't have been better for this family. People always spoke well of them; they were a model couple. The neighbour women could not 6nd a better example of kindness and companionship than that offered by Mr. Palacios to the lucky Leonor, and their men, when they were angriest, evoked the peaceful smile of Mrs. Palacios while their wives strung together a litany of laments.

Perhaps everything would have gone on the same way if it hadn't occurred to Aunt Leonor to buv medlar fruit one Sundav. Her Sundav

trips to market had become a happy, solimry rite. First she looked the

whole place over, without trying to discem exactly from which fruit

came which colour, mixing the tomato stands with those that sold

lemons. She walked without pausing until she reached an immense

woman fashioning fat blue tacos, her one hundred years showing on her

face. Leonorcita picked out one filled with pot cheese from the clay tor-

tilla plate, carefully put a bit of red sauce on it, and ate it slowly while

making her purchases.

Medlars are small fruit with intensely yellow, velvet'like skin. Some

are bitter and others sweet. They grow together on the branches ofa tree

with large, dark leaves. Many aftemoons when she was a girl with braids

and agile as a cat, Aunt Leonor climbed the medlar tree at her grand-

parents' house. There she sat to eat quickly: three bitter ones, a sweet

one, seven bitter, two sweet-until the search for and mixture of

flavours became a delicious game. Girls were prohibited from climbing

the tree, but her cousin Sergio, a boy ofprecocious eyes, thin lips and a

determined voice, induced her into unheard-of, secret adventures.

Climbing the tree was among the easiest of them.

She saw the medlars in the market, and they seemed strange; far from

the tree yet not completely apart from it, for medlars are cut still on the

most delicate, full-leafed branches.

She took them home, showed them to her children, and sat the kids

down to eat, meanwhile telling them stories of her grandfather's strong

legs and her grandmother's snub nose. ln a little while, her mouth was

brimming with slippery pits and velvety peelings. Then suddenly, being

ten years old came back, his avid hands, her forgotten desire for Sergio,

up in the tree, winking at her.

Only then did she realize that something had been tom out of her the

day they told her that cousins couldn't marry each other, because God

would punish them with children that seemed like drunkards. And then

she could no longer retum to the days past. The afternoons ofher happi-

ness were muted from then on by this unspeakable, sudden nostalgia'

No one else would have dared to ask for more: to add-to her full

tranquilliry when her children were floating paper boats in the rain, and

to the unhesitating affection of her generous and hardworking

husband-the certainty in her entire body that the cousin who had

made her perfect navel tremble was not prohibited, and that she

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5O2l A N G E T E S M A S T R E T T A .

deserved him for all reasons and forever. No one, that is, but the outra. geous Leonor.

One aftemoon she ran into Sergio walking down Cinco de Mayo' Street. She was walking out of the church of Santo Domingo holding a child by each hand. She'd taken them to make a floral offering, as on every aftemoon that month: the girl in a long dress of lace and white organdy, a little garland of straw and an enonnous, impetuous veil. Like a five-year-old bride. The boy, with a girlish acolyte's cosrume that made him even at seven feel embarrassed.

i'If you hadn't run away from our grandparents' house that Saturday, this pair would be mine," said Sergio, kissing her.

"l live with that regreg" Aunt Leonor answered: That response startled one of the most eligible bachelors in the city.

At twenty-seven, recently retumed from Spain, where it was said he had leamed the best techniques for cultivating olives, Cousin Sergio was heir to a ranch in Veracruz, another in San Mart(n, and one more in nearby Asalan.

Aunt Lebnor noticed the confusion in his eyes and in the tongue with which tre wet his lips, and later she heard him answer:

"If everyghing were like climbing the rree again." Grandmbther's house was on 11 Sur Street; it was huge and full of

nooks and crannies. It had a basement with five doors in which Grand- father spenthours doing experiments that often soiled his face and made him forget for a while about the first-floor rooms, occupying himself instead playing billiards with friends in the salon construcred on the rooftop. Grandmother's house had a breakfast room that gave on to the garden and the ash tree, a jai-alai court that they'd always used for roller- skating, a rose-coloured front room with a grand piano and a drained aquarium, a bedroom for Grandfather and one for Grandmother; and the rooms that had once been the children's were various sitting rooms that had come to be known by the colours of their walls. Grandmother, sound of mind but palsied, had settled herself in to paint in the blue room. There they found her drawing lines with a pencil on the envelopes of the old wedding invitations she'd always liked to save. She offered them a glass of sweet wine, then fresh cheese, then stale choco- lates. Everything was the same at Grandmother's house. After a while, the old woman noticed the only thing that was different:

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"l haven't seen you two together in years."

"Not since you told me that cousins who marry each other have idiot

children," Aunt Leonor aruwered.

Grandmother smiled, poised above the paper on which she was

sketching an infinite flower, petals upon petals without respite.

"Not since you nearly killed yourself getting down from the, medlar

tree," said Sergio.

"You two were good at cutting medlars. Now I can't find anyone who

can do it right." "We're still good," said Aunt Leonor, bending her perfect waist.

They left the blue room, just about to peel off their clothes, and went

down to the garden as if drawn by a spell. They retumed three hours

later with peace in their bodies and three branches of medlars' '"We're

out of practise," Aunt Leonor said.

"Get it back, get it back, because time is short,l' answered Grand-

mother, with a mouth full of medlar pits.

Aunt Jose

Aunt Jose Rivadeneira had a daughter with eyes like two moons, as big

as wishes. The first time she was placed in her mother's arms, still damp

and unsteady, the child opened her eyes and something in the corner of

her mouth looked like a question.

"'What do you want to know?" Aunt Jose asked het pretending to

understand that gesture.

Like all mothers, Aunt Jose thought there had never in the world

been a creature as beautiful as her daughter. AuntJose was dazzled by the

colour of her skin, the length of her eyelashes and the serenity of her

sleep. She trembled with pride imagining what her daughter would do

with the blood and chimeras that pulsed through her body.

Aunt Jose devoted herself to contemplating the girl with pride and

joy for more than three weeks. Then unassailable fate caused the child

to fall ill with a malady that within frve hours had tumed her extraordi-

nary liveliness into a weak and distant dream that seemed to be sending

her back towards death.

When all of her own curative talents failed to make the child any

3 0 4 A N G E L E S M A S T R E T T A

better, Aunt Jose, pale with terror, took her to the hospital, There they tore her from Aunt Jose's arms and a dozen doctors and nurses fussed over the child with agitation and confusion. Aunt Jose watched heir child disappear behind a door barred to her, and she let herself sink to the floor, unable to control herself or bear that pain like a steep hill.

Her husband, a prudent, sensible man (as most men pretend to be), found her there. He helped her up and scolded her for her lack of hope and good sense. Her husband had faith in medical science and spoke of it the way others speak of God. He was disturbed by the state of ioolish- ness inro which his wife had settled, unable to do anything but cry and curse fate.

They isolated the child in intensive care. A clean white place which the mothers could only enter for half an hour daily. So it 6iled up with prayers and pleas. All the women made the sign of the cross over their children's faces, they covered their little bodies with prayer cards and holy water, they begged God to let them live. All Aunt Jose could do was make it to the crib where her daughter lay, barely breathing, and beg: "Dcfn'g die." Afterwards she cried and cried without drying ho.y", or moving an inch until the nurses told her to leave.

Thenrshe'd sit down again on the benches near the door, her head in her hands, without appetite or voice, angry and surly, fervent and des. perate. what could she do? !7hy should her daughter live? \7hat could she ever offer her tiny body full of needles and catheters that might interest t-rer enough to sray in this world? what could she say ,o .orr- vince her it would be worthwhile to make the effort, instead of die?

One moming, without knowing why, enlightened only by the ghosts in her heart, she went up to the child and began to tell her tales about her ancesrors. who they had been, which women wove their lives together with which men before she and her daughter were united at mouth and navel. What they were made of, what sort of work they had done, what sorrows and frolics the child now carried as her inheritance. Who sowed, with intrepidity and fantasies, the life it was up to her to extend.

For many days she remembered, imagined, invented. Every minute of every available hour Aunt Jose spoke ceaselessly into the ear of her daughter. Finally, at dawn one Thursday, while she was implacably

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telling one ofthese stories, the child opened her eyes and looked at her

intently, as she would for the rest of her long life.

Aunt Jose's husband thanked the doctors, the doctors thanked the

advances in medical science, Aunt Jose hugged her daughter and left the

hospital without saying a word. Only she knew who to thank for the life

of her daughter. Only. she knew that no science was capable of doing as

much as that element hidden in the rough and subtle discoveries of

other women with big eyes.

Aunt Concha Esparza

Near the end of her life she cultivated violets. She had a bright room

that she filled with flowers. She leamed how to grow the most extrava-

gant strains, and she liked to give them as gifts so that everybody had in

their houses the inescapable aroma of Concha Esparza.

She died surrounded by inconsolable relatives, reposing in her bril-

liant blue silk robe, with painted lips and with an enormous disappoint-

ment because life didn't want to grant her more than eighty-five years.

No one knew why she hadn't tired of living; she had worked like a

mule driver for almost all of her life. But those earlier generations had

something that made them able to withstand more. Like all earlier

things, like the cars, the watches, the lamps, the chairs, the plates and

pots of yesteryear.

Concepci6n Bparza had, like all her sisters, thin legs, huge breasts

and a hard smile, absolute disbelief in the plaster saints, and blind faith

in spirits and their clownish jokes.

She was the daughter of a physician who participated in the Revolu-

tion of Tuxtepec, who was a federal deputy in 1882, and who joined the

anti-reelection movement of 1908. A wise and fascinating man who

filled life with his taste for music and lost causes.

However, as fate likes to even the score, Concha had more than

enough father but less than enough husband. She married a man named

Hiniesta whose only defect was that he was so much like his children

that she had to treat him just like another one of them. He wasn't much

good at eaming money, and the idea that men support their families, so

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common in the thirties, didn't govem his existence. To put food on the table, keep house and buy coverlets for the beds, to pay for the children's schooling, clothe them and take care of other such trifles, was always up to his wife, Concha. He, meanwhile, schemed up big business deals which he never pulled off. To close one of these deals, he had the bright idea of writing a cheque on insufficient funds for a sum so large that an order was given for his arrest and the police arrived looking for him at his home.

r0Uhen Concha found out what it was all abour, she said the first thine that popped into her mind:

"Whatt happened is that this man is crazy. Totally nuts, he is." r0Uith this line of reasoning, she accompanied him to his trial, with

this line of reasoning she kept him from mounting his own defence, which might have really done him in, and with this line of reasoning she kept him from being thrown in jail. Instead of that honible fate, with the same argument Concha Esparza arranged for her husband to be put in an insane asylum near the pyramid of Cholula. It was a tranquil place, run by friars, at the foot of the hills.

Grateful for the medical visits of Conchat father, the friars agreed that Mr. Hiniesta could stay there until the incident of the cheque was forgotten. Of course, Concha had to pay for the monthly mainrenance of that sane man within the impregnable walls of the asylum.

For six monrhs she made an effion to pay for his stay. \07hen her finances could allow no more, she decided to retrieve her husband. after first having henelf declared his legal guardian.

One Sunday she went to get him in Cholula. She found him break. fasting among the friars, entertaining them with a tale about a sailor who had a mermaid tattooed on his bald spot.

"One wouldn't look bad on you, Father," he was saying to the friar with the biggest smile.

While Mr. Hiniesta was talking, he watched his wife coming down the corridor to the refectory. He kept talking and laughing for the whole time it took Aunt Concha to arrive at the table ar which he and the fri- ars were talking with that childish joy that men only seem ro have when they know they're among themselves.

As if unaware of the rules of a gathering such as this, Concha Esparza

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walked around the table in the clickety-clacking high heels she wore on

occasions she considered important. \Uhen she was in front of her hus-

band, she greeted the group with a smile.

"And you, what are you doing here?" Mr. Hiniesta asked her, more

uncomfortable than surprised.

"I came to get you," Aunt Concha told him, speaking as she did to

her children when she met them at school, pretending to trade them the

treasure of their freedom in exchange for a hug.

"\Uhy?" said Hiniesta, annoyed. "I'm safe here. It's not right for me to

leave here. What's more, I'm having a good time. There's an atmosphere

of gardens and peace here that does wonders for my spirit."

"$7hat?" asked Concha Esparza. "What I'm telling you is that for now I'm fine right where I am. Don't

worry. I have some good friends among those who are sane, and I don't

get along badly with the loonies. Some of them have moments of excep-

tional inspiration, others are excellent speakers. The rest has done me

good, because in this place even the screamers make less noise than your

kids," he said, as though he'd had nothing to do with the existence of

those children.

"Hiniesta, what am I going to do with you?" Concha Esparza

enquired of the empty air. Then she turned and walked towards the exit

with its iron grille.

"Please, Father," she said to the friar accompanying her. "You explain

to him that his vacations cost money, and I'm not going to pay for one

day more."

One can only guess what the father told Mr. Hiniesta, but in fact that

Monday moming the latch on Aunt Concha's front door made a slow

sound, the same leisurely noise it used to make when her husband

pushed it open. "l came home, Motheq" Hiniesta said, with a moumer's sadness.

"That's good, Son," answered his wife without showing any surprise'

"Mr. Benitez is waiting to see you."

"To offer me a business deal," he said, and his voice recovered some live'

liness. "You'll see. You'll see what a deal, Concha. This time you'll see."

"And that's the way this man was," Aunt commented many years

later. "All his life he was like thar."

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By then Aunt Concha's guesthouse had been a success, and had pro'

vided her with eamings that she used to open a restaurant, which she

closed some time later to get into real estate, and which even gave her

the opportunity to buy some land in Polanco* and some more in Aca-

pulco.

When her children were grown' and after Mr. Hiniesta's death, she

learned how to paint the waves at "La Quebrada," and how to communi-

cate with the spirit of her father. Few people have been as happy as she

was then. That is why life really infuriated her, leaving her just when she was

beginning to enjoy it.

Tr anslated by Amy Schildholse

F E R N A N D O A M P U E R O

Toxi Driver, Minus Robert De Niro o

That night the little motor driving the wipers wasn't working properly, so the windscreen was smeared with drizzle. But I could see, or imagine, what was going on. It was more or less the same old story I knewso well. The two drunks were standing in the middle of the street, oblivious to the traf6c. Great hugs of affection, staggering about, with occasional clashes of heads that made them seem like two bulls about to lock homs in combat. Yet instead of fighting, these poor guys-dressed up like office workers, probably bank clerks--did nothing more than roar with laughter and gesticulate like opera singers.

And all the while I was parked by the side of the road, silently wait. ing. \Uith my lights off, my hand on the ignition. And once again, I had doubrc about it. It was hard to decide whether or not ro go on with this dirty business.

My most recent experiences hadn't exactly been good ones. Prof- itable, yes, but not good by any stretch of the imagination. And that was precisely my problem. I needed to eam a lot more money. My youngest boy, Raulito, was bom with one of those freak illnesses that occur once in every hundred thousand-weak neck muscles that keep him from holding his head straight, which means he constantly needs treatmenr and medicines. If I'd still been in the law practice, like a year ago, things wouldn't have been so bad. My job as legal assisrant could be profitable. But now I was out of a job-the legal hounds in the labour division couldn't find any work, because the present govemment couldn't give a damn about strikes or labour stability. So since then I've been going flat out with the taxi, and doing the drunks at weekends.*Polanco: an expensive district in Mexico City