Like Son (12 page)
For real? Yes, for real. I half-expected the director to call, “Cut!” But nobody did. So I continued on. And we were off on our thrilling madcap adventure! Well, sort of. It wasn’t like the soundtrack’s tempo pumped loud and everything turned quick camera shifts and accelerated speed. In fact, Nathalie was slow. I thought she was trying to torture me with expectation. She walked the entire way to my apartment like an old man on a Sunday drive—long full stops at intersections, deliberately looking both ways before crossing. Granted, I imagine walking fast in her stiltlike shoes wouldn’t be the easiest trick in the world, but I later learned she always walked slowly. No matter the situation. Even when barefoot. Still, that night she was extra slow and careful. She was thinking things through. As it turned out, she was map planning, deciding our entire future. I knew this because once we finally made it to my apartment, she claimed the right side of my bed as her own. For keeps.
Look, we were young. Things happen fast. Without hesitation. Or too much foresight.
So, yes,
duh
, it made little sense that she basically moved in the night we met, but logic to hell, being together felt more right than anything either of us had ever known. And so, happy brick by brick, we built a fantasy fort to live in together. Our fort had invisible walls. We were absolutely everything in our fort. We needed nothing else.
A week after she’d moved in, Nathalie woke up one morning and walked over to the windowsill. She picked up the retablo of Nahui, still the only photo in the apartment.
“I’ve been meaning to ask, where’d you get this?”
“It belonged to my father’s mother.”
I went to the closet and retrieved the briefcase from the top shelf. I got Nahui’s book and handed it to Nathalie.
“That portrait is from the same year this was published.”
“Cool,” she said, carefully turning a few of the book’s pages before handing it back to me. She watched as I returned the book to the briefcase. “What’s all that other stuff?” she asked, pointing toward the briefcase.
“Just some things I took from my dad’s house when he died.”
“Oh.”
And that was that. I put the closed briefcase up on the shelf and joined Nathalie back in bed for a lazy morning.
21 February 1996.
N
athalie came home from what I thought was just another day of work and declared: “Tonight, we repent.”
“Excuse me?”
“It’s Ash Wednesday. We’re going to play a game,” she said.
“Gin rummy? Scrabble?”
Mischievous smile, she replied: “I get to be Nahui.”
Did she say … And repent? … What … ?
“Wait, I don’t get it.”
“I know every fact about Nahui Olin. I’ve seen every photograph of her. I’ve studied her paintings, her poems, everything.”
I’d never even heard her say Nahui’s name before, and now she was an expert?
“
Nahui Olin
? Her?” Incredulous, I pointed to the cardboard retablo still propped up on what had become its dusty and permanent spot on the windowsill. Best I could figure, Nathalie had convinced herself that she somehow
knew
Nahui just by looking at her portrait. I couldn’t blame her, I mean the eyes and—
“Frank, I unequivocally know everything about her that there is to know.
Everything
.”
Damn, the implications. Was this about my father’s mother? What? And then it occurred to me to ask: “Nat,
how
do you know about her?”
“
A dix ans sur mon pupitre
and interlibrary loan. Duh.”
Duh was right. Why hadn’t I thought of that?
“Frank, did you realize she wrote
four
books?”
No, I hadn’t realized.
“Anyway,” she continued, “the library had only this one biography someone published in Mexico a few years ago. But I swear, some of the stories about her are so totally scandalous—”
Wait …
“Was the biography in Spanish?” I interrupted, preoccupied by my confusion.
“Yeah, so?”
“And you read Spanish?”
“Spanish, French, German, and a smidgen of Portuguese.”
“You never told me that.”
“Darling, you never asked.”
Nathalie could have told me she was a secret operative for the CIA, and I would have believed her. I mean, I could tell she wasn’t bullshitting. She was being absolutely serious and honest. I’ll be the first to admit how totally turned on I was by the sudden disclosures. I mean, really, here was the woman I’d adored for months, drop-dead gorgeous in her vintage dress with her foxy little pin-up girl face, but, and I’m embarrassed to admit this, I’d never really thought of her as a brain. (Not that I thought of myself as one either, mind you.) I mean, from day one when we met, Nathalie was witty as all hell; she had a sharp and quick tongue, we could blather on and on about movies and music and random stuff, but I’d never seen her read anything other than glossy magazines and maybe the Fashion and Style section of the Sunday paper. And now to learn suddenly the true range of her nerd abilities? Holy crap. She was perfect. I just sat there with this stupid puppy-got-a-squirrel grin.
“Go get ready,” she said very sternly.
Get ready? To melt outright from the thrill of her proximity? What? How exactly could I prepare for that?
“Shower. Dress extra nice. Go. Now,” she commanded.
And I obeyed.
I went to the closet and, sending a silent thanks to my father for his classy taste in clothes, carefully gathered a few choice items. Behind a closed and locked bathroom door, I undressed and showered. Hot water turned the room a soapy fog. Once I was thoroughly scrubbed clean, I dried off, wrapped a towel around my waist, and stood at the sink. Way more toothpaste on the brush than usual, I brushed my teeth. Twice. I wiped mist off the sink mirror and combed my hair as tidily as my scraggly cut allowed. And then I dressed in the clothes I’d let steam in the bathroom with me—my father’s best suit: natty dark brown fine wool tweed slacks and jacket, matching silk tie and pocket square, a brown straw fedora, the one with the black band. The suit was sort of slouchy around the ankles and a little short on the arms, but it mostly fit okay. As I put on the fedora, I noticed the inside shone from years of oily pomade rubbed in. A little of my dad’s warm skin clean scent could be detected in the damp air around me.
I tipped the fedora just so, straightened my tie, and refolded the pocket square. But, try as I did, my true self showed through. The good-luck Pogues T-shirt I’d put on as an undershirt—the
Peace and Love
tour shirt, the one with the crumbling silkscreen of a boxer dude on it—remained slightly visible under my father’s best white dress shirt. And even though I was wearing my least thrashed pair of shoes, they were still Vans (granted, the super-sweet charcoal suede slip-ons). I couldn’t pull the look together totally perfectly, but when I checked myself out in the full-length mirror on the bathroom door, I was passably dandy, in a punk sort of way. Finally, ready as best I knew how to be, I opened the bathroom door to join Nathalie again.
Burnt-sienna organza silk cocktail dress gracing fishnet calves, gold platform heels cleaned of their usual mud, hair pinned in a twist—Nathalie sat at the kitchen table. She’d lit a tall glass cheapie Virgin Mary candle from the corner bodega. The Holy One looked superhero on that votive label, laser beams shooting out from her downward-turned palms. And Nathalie, for her part, had laser beams too. Fully aware that anticipation is half the fun, she ignored me and continued to stare through the candle flame at the kitchen wall, intently burning pinholes through bricks, drywall, and studs. I sat next to her. And even then she didn’t look at me. I waited.
The kitchen chair’s back was too short and it angled too far backward. Its seat edge hit my leg mid-thigh and cut off circulation. My lower back cramped. Five minutes, maybe seven minutes passed, my entire spine ached, and I couldn’t wait any longer.
On your marks. Get set. We had our roles. Go.
“Nahui?”
“Buenas noches, amor,”
Nathalie said, and turned to look me square in the eye. Her voice turned extra gravel deep. And those eyes. Nahui’s stare was looking directly at me.
She told her life to me:
Nahui Olin. Poet. Artist. Genius thinker. Wonder star of the Mexican 1920s avant-garde. Favorite muse of boys and girls alike.
(No wonder my father’s mother had blushed as she did.)
Nahui Olin. Name meaning: Earthquake Sun—the final epoch on the Aztec calendar wheel, the destroyer of all human existence. Four Suns—Jaguar, Wind, Rain, and Floods—preceded Nahui Olin. We live in Nahui Olin. But according to ancient wisdom, nothing, absolutely nothing, will remain in her wake.
Earthquake. Sun. Nahui. Olin.
Born Carmen Mondragón on 8 July 1893, the daughter of a famous general, her daddy invented a cannon that won the revolution. And when Huerta made her father Secretary of War, her already good life turned golden Mexico City and Paris extravagance. Private school nuns taught her to paint, to write, to think big thoughts. Star young student, under the proud supervision of the sisters, she wrote what would eventually become
A dix ans sur mon pupitre
.
Ten years later, at twenty years of age, she fell hard for a cadet. Manuel Rodríguez Lozano, a handsome boy of good upbringing. Daddy approved. Her nuptial ceremonies were the event of the year. The wedding portrait showed her seriouseyed and Manuel so pretty. It wasn’t long until she learned that Manuel admired the male form as passionately as she did herself. They continued on together, but Manuel soon found opportunity to escape. Nahui’s parents wouldn’t allow a divorce, but she proceeded as if one had been granted.
She took lovers. Many lovers. One, an artist big shot, Dr. Atl—“Doctor Water,” his slumming-it-bohemian Aztec chosen name—was the grandfather of modern Mexican muralism. It was he who suggested she take the Aztec name of Nahui Olin. Proud blasphemous creatures, Nahui and Atl lived together out of wedlock … in
el ex Convento de la Merced
—Dr. Atl had converted the capital city’s former Mercy Convent, located just blocks from the central zócolo, into their sprawling home. Nuns covered their eyes and gripped their rosaries when they passed by on the street. The ungodly feuds of their household were legendary.
Once Nahui was reading on the rooftop patio when she caught sight of Dr. Atl talking to a pretty blonde on the sidewalk below.
“Beware, the sky is falling!” Nahui screamed, as she threw well-aimed roof tiles at the flirting pair.
The blonde ran for cover, but Dr. Atl only laughed in response.
“You are making a fool of yourself, Carmen Mondragón!” he called up to the rooftop. And then, smiling, the play on words occurred to him. He said quietly to himself: “Mondragón—
mon dragon
, indeed.”
The pun-turned-lover-pet-name stuck.
Devoted admirer of Nahui’s spitfire tantrums, it was Dr. Atl who convinced her to make public the precocious poetic musings she had written as an adolescent. At age thirtyone, the year 1924, Nahui assembled and published
A dix ans sur mon pupitre (From My Desk, at Age Ten)
to the delight of her artist friends. Soon thereafter, she published two collections of poems,
Óptica cerebral, poemas dinámicos (Cerebral Perspective, Dynamic Poems)
and
Calinement je suis dedans (I Am Tender Inside)
.
And the parties Dr. Atl and Nahui gave in honor of those books … damn, the parties they threw. Sweet mercy, the winks and smiles and kisses and big talk about politics and art and grand strikes and leftist global overthrow, clusters of costumed revelers wandering off to tangle tongues and fists and opinions in the halls, everyone drinking one cognac sidecar after another. No matter how many cocktails they drank, there wasn’t ever sugar rim enough in the world to snuff the Molotov burn of those parties. Blue haze smoke air and mariachis kept them alive to well past sunrise as they brought the world to its pretty little knees and made it their begging love. Comrades to the end, they promised upon their lives to disavow wealth and privilege for the cause. But pledges the flimsy contracts they were, it was always Nahui who owned the party.
Nahui Olin. The Earthquake Sun.
Yes, those were crazy glorious earthquake days.
“Nahui, forgive me,” I said to Nathalie/Nahui, “but if all of this is true, how come nobody knows about you anymore?”
She explained:
Unlike that peasant-faker Frida Kahlo with her hair in braids—that poor little injured bird, that martyr mild wild girl—unlike her, Nahui was the real thing. She was serious dynamite. Frida’s husband Diego told Nahui as much himself. As did Edward Weston when he took her portrait. Pained eyes. Lips turned downward. She was so beautiful it hurt to look at her. It was too dangerous to take something so explosive, to try to bottle it as iconography. Far easier and safer was to try and pretend Nahui never existed at all.
But she did. Did she ever.
Nahui Olin:
Communist. Radical feminist. Fucked whomever she wanted to. Here, there, and everywhere. Scandalized her barrio. And then slipped into obscurity by middle age. Few people even realized she published a fourth book,
Energía c
ó
smica (Cosmic Energy)
, at age forty-three. By that point she could often be found in the zócolo, packed in one of her tight vixen curve dresses, staring at the sun. Outsize green eyes bloodshot and dilated from the heat and lack of blink, passerby sophisticates—those who didn’t heed the local rumors that cast Nahui as a witch who could turn herself into a bat and others into dust—would call out “
Fuego, fuego
” in admiration.
Sizzle, sizzle
, she remained hot as fire. As response, Nahui would only adjust her gaze eastward in unison with the shifting sun. Years and years of this and then, 23 January 1978, eighty-five years of age, Nahui died. In her own bed. While sleeping. Her last breath was peaceful. And, although ancient Aztecs had prophesied that the end of Nahui Olin the Earthquake Sun would be the death of all humanity, the universe continued on in her wake.
