Caramelo (25 page)

Why?

Just something in the story to show how happy we were?

Nobody wants to read about happiness.

All I’m asking for is one little love scene. At least something to remind people Narciso and I loved each other. Oh, please! We really only have that vulgar love scene overheard by Eleuterio. And isn’t it important to understand that Narciso and I were in love, really, I mean before he met the so-and-so? Especially after his fling with the little tramp in Chicago
.

No! Now let me get on with the story. The world was filled with wind the day Narciso Reyes met Exaltación Henestrosa.

Ha! That shows what you know. The winds in Oaxaca arrive only in the winter
.

Well, let’s pretend it’s winter.

But you just finished saying it was the rainy season. Really!

All right. Just for poetic purposes, we’ll allow the wind to arrive in this scene. It suits the story better.

T
he world was filled with wind the day Narciso Reyes met Exaltación Henestrosa, as if it wouldn’t be satisfied until it set everything upside down, put everything on its head. The palm trees swirled, the women’s skirts, the clouds were windswept, as if someone had run a comb through them. On this day when the sand stung one’s face and the children ran chasing after the palm-tree-like figures of women with baskets of fish on their heads, on this day with its howl of church bells and yelping dogs, this day of all topsy-turvy days, Narciso’s blindness was turned into vision.

He was suffering a terrible eye infection, my grandfather. By Thursday it was so bad, they had to lead him with his eyes shut to the home of a certain Exaltación. From a clay bowl she mixed dry white powder, spat on it till it was a paste, and this she rubbed on his inner eyelid.

—What is that?

—Better you don’t know. You’ll just complain.

—What do you take me for, a woman? Tell me.

—Iguana
shit, she said.

But before he could protest, his eyes cleared themselves from their milky fog, and he saw before him the fish goddess Nohuichana. It was the woman of the
iguana
hat.

—Where did you come from? Land, sea, or heaven?

—From hell, she said. —From here, San Mateo del Mar Vivo.

As opposed to the sandy salt lagoons they call Mar Muerto.

—I mean from what half shell did you rise? Of all the creatures in all Tehuantepec, I swear, you are the most exquisite.

She gave a little shrug and sighed. —I know.

Some would say there was some witchcraft in that spit and
iguana
shit, because Exaltación was known as a crazy woman, that is, she knew of plants and herbs and other things which people did not like to say but said anyway, well, she could do things. But say what they say, it’s not true. Her magic was that she didn’t care to put a man at the center of her life, and this, for any man, is aphrodisiac enough.

—Well, now, what are you doing? Exaltación said. —Where do you think you’re going?

—Well, I suppose they still think I’m sick, said Narciso.

—Well, then, have some coffee with me. I’m afraid you’ll have to drink it cold, I can’t light a fire today, too much wind, too dangerous, she said, meaning the walls of dusty thatch.

He was a victim of the right time and place. And because she felt like it, she slept with him. Because she felt like it. And what of it?

Celaya, why are you so cruel with me? You love to make me suffer. You enjoy mortifying me, isn’t that so? Is that why you insist on showing everyone this … dirt, but refuse me one little love scene?

For crying out loud, Grandmother. If you can’t let me do my job and tell this story without your constant interruptions …

All I wanted was a little understanding, but I see I was asking for too much
.

Just trust me, will you? Let me go on with the story without your comments. Please! Now, where was I?

You were telling
cochinadas
.

I was not being filthy. And to tell the truth, you’re getting in the way of my story.

Your story? I thought you were telling
my
story?

Your story
is
my story. Now please be quiet, Grandmother, or I’ll have to ask you to leave.

Ask me to leave? Really, you make me laugh! And what kind of story will you have without me? Answer me, eh?

Well, for one thing, a story with an ending. Now calm down a little,
and let me go on with the story. We were in the home of Exaltación, remember?

Remember? After all these years, I’m still trying to forget
.

T
he woman Exaltación had chosen the Grandfather as her plaything, but she wasn’t very satisfied.

—You shouldn’t begin what you can’t finish, Exaltación said. —The problem with you pretty men is you don’t know how to make love. All you’re good for is fucking.

—Teach me, then, said Narciso.

—¡Ay!
my heaven, don’t be a fool. To make love one must use this, she said, tapping her heart —and that can’t be taught.

Love or not love, Exaltación Henestrosa
lo salpicó
. That is to say, his heart was left spattered with a million and one sand flies, like the sandy stretches of that land called San Mateo del Mar.

How was Soledad to know she held in her belly, in that being no bigger than an amaranth seed, the great love of her life. In turn, at that very same moment, Narciso held in his secret heart his own seed of love. Each beginning their furious fight for life.

38.

¡Pobre de Mí!

      A
nd then he fell in love with her.

I don’t know why people march into disasters of the heart so joyously. Somehow in the darkness before sleep, the truth must arrive with its sharp little teeth. It’s almost as if being the tragic hero is a poetic indulgence, a public penance, a luminous grief. Perhaps it was like this with Narciso Reyes and his nemesis Exaltación.

When Narciso was working in the isthmus,
^*
he felt disconnected from all the world, as if he could run away and no one would ever find him again. It was a great relief to not have to be Narciso Reyes, to let go the world’s demands and expectations. And like the tropical plants that grow in excess there without anything stopping them, a lushness, an overabundance, a luxury, he allowed his passion to grow as well, unkempt and untamed, and he knew for the first time joy.

So it was that when Narciso Reyes came to have his infected eyes cured he saw before him the brilliance that was Exaltación Henestrosa, but he could not see inside her heart.

During the winter, a northern wind snaps in, swirling dust across the isthmus for miles. Wind bending the palm trees, wind blasting the blue sky clean, wind pumping the skirts of women, wind billowing across the skin of the curly sea, the sound of the wind in your ears for months and months.

And in the summer, no wind at all; a sticky airlessness that leaves everyone in a terrible mood with
ganas
to do nothing. A silence like the maw of sorrow. Until night, when the mosquitoes arrive.

It was the wind of desire that blew the circus toward San Mateo del Mar, a sight to sting the hearts of even the deadest citizens of that dead-sea
muck of rotten fish, though it was an exaggeration to call them a circus; they were but defectors of other trades. The Circus Garibaldi consisted of a zebra-striped mule hauling an ancient oxcart overloaded with canvas backdrops of airplanes, madonnas, and invented Tibetan landscapes. The company included a lady photographer, a Mayan family of acrobatic clowns, a gypsy accordionist/percussionist, a dancing raccoon that told fortunes, and the singer Pánfila Palafox. The day they arrived you could not speak without the melodramatic accompaniment of the wind.

How many months do you expect a woman to be with child? Your father was born in the summer, remember? And here you have the story shift to winter. You take such liberties!

Indulge me. I need the wind for this part of the story.

W
ith a flourish of instruments from another age, shells, gongs,
marimbas
, bamboo flutes that smelled of smoke, and a drum made from a turtle shell, the Circus Garibaldi announced itself. The gypsy played a magnificent waltz while the raccoon clapped, Pánfila sang, the clowns dazzled the crowd with cartwheels and contortions, and the lady photographer passed out flyers announcing the next show as well as an advertisement for:
Artistic Photography, the achievement of the century!
¡Un bonito recuerdo!
Preserve a memory! A souvenir! Conserve your beauty, your strength. Allow your children to remember you in your glorious youth. Allow us to take your picture. We have splendid palaces, magnificent gardens, and modern airplanes that will serve you as background. Or select the sacred image of your patron saint if you so desire. President Obregón himself has declared our photographs “so real and lifelike they are astonishing!”

And though the Circus Garibaldi yelped and played with all their might, the wild air rushed about them rudely, swirling and swallowing them up like a frothy sea. The announcement flyers printed on cheap newsprint fluttered out of their hands, and in this way made their way over the town like a flock of pigeons. Dust devils whirled the flyers in dizzy circles in the square. Everywhere you walked you could not help but notice the circus flyers with a pyramid of clowns balanced on a magnificent painted elephant, though the Circus Garibaldi had no elephant.

Dirty squares of paper tangled themselves in the palm trees, fluttered out to sea, were caught in the fishnets left out to dry, as well as in the hammocks
of those taking their afternoon nap. They clogged the barrels left out to collect rainwater. Pigs ferreted them out from the brush for months and ate them. Flyers descended in droves, batting citizens on the head like a plague of locusts. One slid easily under the wide space beneath the makeshift door of the barracks of the employees of the National Roads Commission, who were overjoyed at the possibility of some new entertainment. This gave Narciso Reyes the excuse to set out toward the town square, where the very old and the very young assembled daily waiting patiently and impatiently for something to happen.

A faded tent was struggling to come to life, and in front of this confusion, Narciso waited. The lady photographer calmly set up an outdoor photo gallery and was doing excellently despite the wind that made the subjects look as if their hair were fire. When Narciso arrived, there was already a long line of people waiting their turn, almost all the town it seemed, but no Exaltación. Families with their freshly combed hair still wet from the bath arrived dressed in their good clothes, almost everyone barefoot, except for the exceptionally vain or those a little better off than most, which were only the mayor and the mayor’s godchild. Widows with their string of children and their children’s string of children lined up their tribe for intense inspection. Babies were dressed in fancy lace shirts, but with nothing covering their bare bottoms. A few citizens brought along their prize possessions—a trumpet, a baseball uniform, a piglet. One cradled in her arms her recently dead infant dressed as an angel wearing a crumpled paper crown.

And when the powder flashed, no one smiled. It’s not the custom to smile for the camera over there. The citizens of San Mateo del Mar looked directly into the lens with that same serious gaze found in tombstone portraits. Young, old, mothers, beauties, sons, husbands, wives, brothers, sisters draped in the arms of a loving sister, children, alone or in a group, all looked directly into the camera as if looking severely into a mirror. That was the way it was done, then and now.

For a backdrop, there were several choices. That new invention, the airplane, which Lindbergh was just then testing at an aviation field on the plains of Balbuena between Mexico City and Puebla; the ever-popular Virgen de Guadalupe; or a palace garden. —Look how pretty!

Narciso Reyes waited and waited, busying himself buying candied sweets—
obleas
, pastel wafer sandwiches filled with goat-milk caramel;
tri-color coconut bars with the colors of the Mexican flag; pumpkin-seed brittle; candied oranges.

When he was almost ready to give up, his jaw aching from so much sugar, he finally saw Exaltación crossing the town square.

—Exaltación Henestrosa! Narciso shouted. He came running up to her like a child. —I bought you some
chuchulucos
.

It was fortunate for Narciso he had brought along the candies. There were many things Exaltación could resist, including this silly boy in front of her in his
fanfarrón
striped suit, but she could not resist candy.

To make small talk, Narciso reported the most recent gossip he’d gathered waiting for her. —Have you heard the scandal? It’s about the photographer and the circus singer. They say these two women are sharing a hammock.

Exaltación Henestrosa burst out laughing, covering her mouth with her hands, a habit perhaps from the days before her gold tooth with the cutout star. —Ah, is that so? she said. —Well! All I can say is I’d never do anything like that.

No sooner said than … duck! The whipped cream pie is coming! Which whipped cream pie? The whipped cream pie Divine Providence likes to throw in one’s face when we say, —Oh, I’ll never … And whatever you say “I’ll never” to, believe me, you will. Some years there are so many whipped cream pies flying about, crisscrossing each other like meteorite showers.
Whoosh, whoosh!
Whatever you don’t expect,
¡ahí viene!
Watch out, here it comes! Right around the corner your whipped cream pie awaits you.

Narciso trailed behind Exaltación like a child and talked her into taking her portrait with him.

—Please. How about a souvenir,
un recuerdo
, something to remember this evening by?