Into the Beautiful North (5 page)

Irma stood. She smacked the sand off her legs.

“I have one word for the men,” she said as she stomped away. “Traitors!”

Nobody wanted to go home after their day at the beach, so they gathered at Tía Irma’s house on the corner of 22 de Diciembre and Madero streets to watch her color television. La Osa set the TV in the window, facing the street, and the guests all hauled chairs out onto the cobbles so they could feel the breeze. They watched a telenovela featuring savage love among hacienda owners in Brazil. Then they watched a telenovela that featured savage love among cattle ranchers in Durango. It grew dark. Cicadas knocked themselves senseless against the television screen. Bats twirled above them like leaves flying in a windstorm. Passersby called, “¡Adios!” and all the watchers politely called back, “¡Adios!”

When a car came down the street, they all rose and moved their chairs up onto the curb so the car could pass. They didn’t notice that one of the cars was the big narco LTD. “¡Adios!” they called, then moved their chairs back into the narrow street. Nayeli watched everybody on the curb. She looked very carefully. And she realized Tacho was right. There was nobody left in town but women, old men, and little children.

Adios.

Chapter Five

A
lthough the Mexican government didn’t seem to know where Tres Camarones was, its citizens knew in their hearts that they were Sinaloans. They listened to Sinaloan radio from XEHW in Rosario; they did their shopping in Villaunión; and when they went to the big city, as Irma and the girlfriends had done this morning, it was the long jaunt by dirt track and two-lane highway to Mazatlán.

Irma had maneuvered her apocalyptic 1959 Cadillac through the murky verdure surrounding Tres Camarones and hit the main road by 9:00 AM. The notorious girlfriends had snored and snuffled in the big backseat as she drove. Vampi had not been allowed to wear black clothes or black makeup, so she had miserably reported to Irma’s house clad in an orange jumper. “¡Así se viste una señorita!” La Osa had enthused, brusquely turning her back and forth, and grabbing her chin to inspect her freshly scrubbed face. She approved: that was the way young ladies dressed.

“You’re not even half ugly,” she had added.

They’d cut through the great green lowlands—white birds exploded from the fields. The highway to the Durango mountains whipped by, and Irma had told them for the hundredth time that there were waterfalls up there, and one day, when she wasn’t so busy, she’d drive them up there for some roasted goat. They’d love the waterfalls—very fresh and chilly. “I went there once,” she intoned, “with Chava Chavarín!”

“Who?” Vampi said.

The girlfriends no longer listened to these empty promises. They nodded off to the relentless hum and rattle of the Caddie.

Irma barely saw the oldest cowboy in Mexico trotting along the road on his ancient pony. He lifted his hat to her. She waved with one finger.

Irma lit a cigarette, jabbed on the radio, and heard Agustín Lara. Ah, real music! Not this idiotic ass-twitching noise the girlfriends listened to. Or worse, that norteño crap with the accordions, rube music for cocaine smugglers. La Osa tipped down the rearview mirror and checked her teeth for lipstick and tobacco shreds. She watched the girlfriends leaning against each other’s shoulders, sleeping with their mouths open.

“My black-eyed girls,” she said.

Tía Irma turned to the vegetable seller in his booth and said, “What the hell is happening to these beans!”

“Excuse me?” he said, pausing in his inventory, holding the stub of a pencil above the wilting pink pages of an order pad. “There is something happening to my beans?”

“How dare you charge so much for beans!”

“Charge?” he said. He looked at the hand-lettered tag he’d magic-markered onto a fragment of manila folder two days ago. “No,” he said, “this is the rate.”

“
¡Es una infamia!”
she said.
“¡Es un robo!”

“No, no, señora,” he said—not knowing he’d just made her even angrier because she’d never been married and didn’t intend to have the slave’s moniker of “Mrs.” applied to her under any circumstances. “This is the correct price.”

“First, tortillas,” she complained. “Now this. What’s next, water? Will you charge us for water? Ha! What are the poor people supposed to eat?”

He looked at her with wide eyes and shrugged.

“The poor?” he said. The poor did not shop at the fruit market—they sold lizards and birds and corn husk dolls on the highway. They ate armadillos. He didn’t have time for the poor.

Beyond the fruit market rose the green Mazatlán hills and the white cliffs of the gringo tourist hotels. They could hear joyous voices and splashing from the hotel pools. They could smell the salt of the sea among the odors of cut sugarcane and fish and crushed mangos and oranges. Music and radios and trumpets and whistling and laughter and shouts and truck engines and some idiot’s “La Cucaracha” car horn. Seagulls fighting over pieces of bread. Oyster shells.

“Forget the poor!” Irma shouted. “What about the good working people of Mexico!”

“Go, Tía,” Nayeli said.

“We are Mexicans,” Irma informed the fruit seller—needlessly, he felt. “Mexicans eat corn and beans. Did you notice? The Aztec culture gave corn to the world, you little man. We invented it! Mexicans grow beans. How is it, then, that Mexicans cannot afford to buy and eat the corn and beans they grow?”

He would have kicked her out of his stall, but he had manners—his mother would have been deeply offended if he had tossed out this old battle-ax.

He smiled falsely.

“Look here,” he said, pointing to the burlap sacks full of 100 pounds each of pinto beans. “These beans come from California.”

“What!”

He actually flinched away from her.

La Osa took her reading glasses out of her voluminous black purse, and the girls crowded around her. They read the fine print. California, all right. Right there on the bag.

“¡Chinga’o!” she said.

“These beans are grown here in Sinaloa,” he said proudly. “The best frijoles in the world! Right near Culiacán. Then they’re sold to the United States. Then they sell them back to us.” He shrugged at the mysterious ways of the world. “It gets expensive.”

Tía Irma took a long time to replace the glasses in the purse.

“That,” she finally proclaimed, “is the stupidest thing anyone has ever said to me.”

He smiled, hoping she would not strike him with that purse.

“NAFTA,” he said.

Irma stormed out of the stall and spied a Guatemalan woman picking through the spoiled fruit.

“What are you doing?” she snapped.

“Provisions. For the journey north,” the woman replied. She made the mistake of extending her hand and saying, “I have come so far, but I have so far to go. Alms, señora. Have mercy.”

“Go back where you came from!” Irma bellowed. “Mexico is for Mexicans.”

The girlfriends were appalled.

“Do you think anyone ever showed mercy to me?”

As the girlfriends followed Aunt Irma, she told them, “These illegals come to Mexico expecting a free ride! Don’t tell me you didn’t have Salvadorans and Hondurans in your school, getting the best education in the world! They take our jobs, too.” She muttered on in her own steamy cloud of indignation. They tuned her out as they marched to the candy seller’s. “What we need is a wall on our southern border.” At least, she continued, the goopy sweet potato and cactus and guava and dulce de leche Mexican candies were made by Mexicans in Mexico and could still be bought by Mexicans in Mexico!

Irma bought mesh bags full of onions, garlic, potatoes. She bought a kilo of dribbly white goat cheese. She scoffed at the coconut milk sellers with their straws poked into cold coconuts. If she wanted a goddamned coconut, she’d hire Tacho to climb a tree! She purchased some candies and melons and limp bunches of cilantro. To hell with Mazatlán’s tortillas—Tía Irma would buy good, hot, fresh tortillas right in Camarones, patted into being by the trusted hands of her comadre Doña Petra. These damned city slickers used machines to press out tortillas, anyway. Ha! Robot food!

“Can I drive?” Nayeli asked when they had reached the car.

“Oh, God,” Tía Irma grumbled, but she gave her the keys.

I’m lonely, Tía,” Nayeli announced.

Yolo and Vero were asleep again.

The She-Bear scoffed.

“Lonely?” she said. “How can you be lonely with good friends, and… and a good book to read!”

“That’s Yolo,” Nayeli said. “She’s the reader.” She passed a lopsided Ford truck overloaded with cucumbers.

“Blinker,” Irma reminded her. Cucumbers fell from the truck like small green bombs, and the Cadillac slid a little on them as she changed lanes. For a moment, the road smelled like a fresh salad.

“Who will touch my face?” Nayeli asked.

Three children chased white chickens before a small house with an open door.

“Who will bring me flowers?”

“Hmm,” Tía Irma responded.

“I want to see the lights of a city at night.”

“Mazatlán,” La Osa patiently lectured, “is a major city, my dear.”

“I’ve never seen it at night. Only by day. Only to buy groceries.”

“Oh,” said Irma.

“Did no one sing you a serenade when you were young?” asked Nayeli.

“Of course!” Irma replied. “I was gorgeous as hell!”

“Did no one say dashing things to you on the plazuela on Saturday night?”

Tía Irma smiled.

“Well!” she said. “I suppose. El Guero Astengo was quite dapper…. But it was Chavarín, Chava the Magnificent. Well!
That
was the definition of dashing!”

She trailed off. Stared out the window. Nayeli thought she heard the impossible: Irma sighed.

“Who will do that for me?” Nayeli asked. “There are no serenades in Camarones. Who will dance with me?”

Irma could not answer her.

Chapter Six

T
he election was mere days away. Some of the women, it must be said, had not yet accepted the idea that a woman could be Municipal President. They had been told that they were moody and flighty and illogical and incapable for so long that they believed these things. It took much cajoling and cursing on Irma’s part to shock them out of their ruts. Nayeli was a driving force among the young of the village—all twenty of them. Nine of the youngsters could vote, and all of these girls were voting for Irma. Those ineligible signed as best they could a statement pledging moral support for Irma’s candidacy, and promised to argue the case to their mothers and grandmothers. As for Irma, she had an argument of her own.

The legendary Garcí a-García, owner of the theater, Aunt Irma’s distant cousin, and the sole rich man of the town, had spent days on the telephone, fighting bad connections and tropical ennui, calling to far Culiacán and Los Mochis, even all the way to Tecuala, searching for a fresh projectionist, his last one having departed to Michigan to pick apples. Apparently, the trade was a dying concern, and he could find no available takers, so Garcí a-García himself was forced to suffer in the sauna-hot booth, tying a rag around his head to keep the sweat out of his eyes and stuffing toilet paper into his ears so the rattling whine of the machines didn’t make him deaf.

At the age of sixty-five, Garcí a-García was feeling spent. Tired. And he was so worried about money that he had his wife shut off the air-conditioning unit in his cement-block home across the town square from the theater. She was so appalled by this descent into barbarity that she took his Impala and drove herself to Mazatlán to stay with her cousin.

The Cine Pedro Infante took the place of television for most people in town, so it was Garcí a-García’s endless challenge to maintain a steady flow of double features. He couldn’t afford to let a movie run for a week—in two days’ time, everyone who could pay to see it would have passed through his doors. The movies were an essential lure so he could collect inflated prices for beer, soda, and ham-and-chile tortas at the little stand behind the screen. So what if it turned out the films were of poor quality, whole reels mysteriously spliced out, Chinese subtitles, cat-scratched frames, and underwater sound tracks—a fresh set of titles on the theater marquee meant a lucrative night at the torta stand.

Garcí a-García had a big white house at the end of Avenida Bernal Díaz del Castillo, and its tall metal door—also painted white—boomed like thunder as Irma pounded on it. La Osa fingered a lock of hair behind Nayeli’s ear. “Posture,” she said. Nayeli stood up straighter. The cinema was visible down the way and across the street, dark and melancholy as a haunted house, its steel shutters down and padlocked.

One of García’s five housekeepers answered the door.

“Yes?” she said.

“I am here to see El Señor,” said Irma.

“One moment.”

She slammed the door.

The door opened.

“He will see you now.”

“Gracias.” Irma swept in and tipped her head slightly to the young woman, who then looked Nayeli’s body up and down, judging her and finding her lacking.

Irma stepped in and Nayeli followed and they were at Garcí a-García’s desk.

“Ah,” he said, putting his cigarette in an ashtray. “My cousin the champion.”

“We are tired of this shit,” Irma informed him.

Nayeli wasn’t sure what was happening; for a moment, she believed Irma was talking about the missing men.

“What shit is that, Irma?” Garcí a-García asked. His Spanish made even that inane comment sound elegant.
“¿A cual mierda te refieres, Irma?”

“Movies,” she explained.

“Movies?”

“Movies!”

“Ah, movies.”

He spread his hands and leaned back in his chair. Nayeli noticed he had very important looking papers scattered on his desk. Behind his chair, there was a French poster for the movie
Bullitt,
Estip McQueen with a face like a monkey.

“I am here with my campaign manager, Nayeli Cervantes.”

His eyebrows went up.

“Campaign manager,” he replied, leaning forward and offering his hand. “It is an honor to meet you, Nayeli.”

“Sir.”

“Am I your uncle?”

“Perhaps.”

“Hmm. I must add you to my Christmas list in that case.”

She shook his hand and smiled. She was always smiling. His eyes dropped to her chest—fluttered there as nervously as a moth. His eyes sparkled brightly when he looked back up at her. He tugged her hand a little, and for a brief moment, she thought he’d pull her over the desk.

Oh no,
she thought,
eso sí que no:
That absolutely won’t happen.

“Mucho gusto, señor,” she said, getting her hand back.

“Smiley girl,” he said to Aunt Irma.

“She is a
karateka,
” La Osa replied. “Nayeli could karate-kick you to death where you sit.”

“That’s hardly feminine.” He sniffed.

“Perhaps,” Nayeli suggested, “it is time for a new kind of femininity.”

La Osa beamed: that’s my girl!

“After the election,” Irma warned, “I will expect certain employment opportunities for the women of this town.”

“Employment!” He snickered. He laughed out loud. They didn’t. “I already hire women,” Garcí a-García offered lamely.

“Women sell sandwiches and popcorn,” Irma said. “Women take tickets and mop out your toilets. But that’s not where the real money is.”

“Well,” Garcí a-García explained, “the real money goes to management, to the projectionist—”

Irma nodded, smiling benevolently.

“No, wait,” Garcí a-García said.

“
You
wait,” she replied.

“You must be kidding.”

“
You
must be kidding.”

“Get out!” he cried.

“
You
get out!”

“This is my house!”

“This is my city!”

Nayeli was thrilled: politics in action!

Irma said, “It could be good for you when I’m in power.”

Garcí a-García took a meditative puff of his cigarette.

“What does this—this—problem have to do with me?”

“We demand, at the very least, a good job
as projectionist
.”

“I am the projectionist!” he said.

“Train a woman!”

He stared at her.

Aunt Irma leaned over the desk and said, “Don’t be an idiot.”

“Excuse me?” he cried.

“Someday I will be President,” Irma said. “It would be wise for you to get with our program and attend to the needs of the women who now rule this municipality.”

She audaciously grabbed his pack of cigarettes and shook one out for herself and then posed, waiting for him to light it.

Es la Bette Davis,
Nayeli thought, having seen this very scene on Irma’s television.

Garcí a-García lit the cigarette.

Irma said, “Do you want to make money or not? Do you wish to benefit from good relations with City Hall?”

The Great Man stared over their heads, calculating. He smoked and thought. He slowly nodded.

It was all over in short order. Irma had already spoken to Nayeli’s mother, and she was ready to be trained for the job of Projectionist of the Pedro Infante. Nayeli watched, amazed, as the two negotiators shook hands.

“One last thing,” Irma said. “As a favor to me.”

“Name it, Champion.”

“I would like to see the cinema reborn with a film festival of my favorite Mexican superstar.”

“Oh, no,” Garcí a-García said, raising his hands as if to deflect a blow.

“This is nonnegotiable. I need the inspiration in these trying times of seeing Mexico’s greatest film star, Yul Brynner!”

“I have told you one hundred times that Yul Brynner is not a Mexican!” García-García cried.

“Are you crazy?” Irma snapped. “I was the bowling champion! I bowled in Mexicali! I bowled in Puerto Vallarta—and I saw his house! Right there in the jungle! On a hill!
¡Es Mexicano, Yul Brynner!
”

“No, no, no —”

“Besides,” Irma announced, “I saw
Taras Bulba,
and Yul Brynner spoke perfect Spanish.”

Garcí a-García shook his head.

“It was dubbed.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Irma said. “Come, Nayeli!” she snapped.

Garcí a-García stared at Nayeli.

“She’s impossible,” he said.

“I am counting on you,” Irma called.

Nayeli waved her fingers at him and walked out.

Election Day dawned brightly—no clouds in the sky at all. Everyone voted, even Garcí a-Garcí a—he shoved his ballot marked in favor of Ernesto James, the old mayor, into the box with manly force, then strode out, lit cigar in his mouth, showing his determination before mounting his bike to wobble home. Election monitors from Escuinapa manned the booths in the Secu Carlos Hubbard school assembly hall. Tacho cooked free ham tortas for all voters, and Nayeli busied herself running sodas to all the eaters. Tacho, no fool, put extra chipotle salsa on the ham and charged elevated prices for the cold drinks. The Fallen Hand made a killing.

It was a parade: María, the projectionist-in-training, accepted a round of applause when she swept into the polling place; Sensei Grey wore his fedora; Aunt Irma voted for herself; Tacho took a quick break from his grill to vote, then spelled Nayeli so she could do her civic duty. Yoloxochitl and La Vampira slouched in, acting bored. Tacho kept his eye on two outside agitators, El Guasas and El Pato, who lurked behind the whitewashed trees in the square. The ubiquitous narco LTD oozed past, followed by a black Cherokee with darkened windows.

It was all over by ten o’clock. The ballots were counted in La Mano Caída. As predicted, Aunt Irma won by a landslide.

Outgoing mayor Ernesto James noted darkly to Garcí a-García that it was women who counted the ballots, but there were not enough men to force a recount. Despairing, he looked at the female rabble gathered in the square and threw up his hands.

Aunt Irma took the podium in the plaza and announced, “What did I tell you!”

Firecrackers. Bottle rockets. Free burro rides for the children. A ninety-eight-year-old soldier from the last battle of the Revolution broke out a bugle and skronked like a dying elephant. Tacho turned up his stereo really loud and played records by El Tri and Café Tacuba.

Irma, the conquering heroine of Tres Camarones, threw her arm around Nayeli’s shoulders. She said, “A new age dawns.”