The Chicano/Latino Literary Prize (22 page)

“They won't let you sleep here. Some grenaderos will come by. They'll take you to the station and keep the pastel money which you think is so much softer than the dollar.”

The grass began to smell of manure. I got up.

On the ninth day I discovered I had contracted the gonk. That was quite a letdown. The same day the pilgrims returned to the countryside and the
grenaderos abandoned the university library with its revolutionary mural. I watched the campesinos as they trod out of the capital. The drunken revel was over and so was the holy fervor. They were tired, broke, bearing loathsome lesions on their knees that peered out of their trousers, which had worn away in their penitent sojourn in the Virgin's sanctuary. They looked like a crestfallen army in retreat. They resembled those Vietnamese multitudes on the run that we used to look at, guilt-ridden and repulsed, on the evening news.

When the last of the campesinos and their geese had moved on I could then cross the Promenade of Institutionalized Revolution to the barrio pharmacy where they were caring for me. All my money seemed to be dissipating in penicillin and in little luxuries to assuage the discomfort. Every day I walked sore and open-legged to the pharmacy and pulled down my trousers in the back room. The attendant, una celestina fea y arrugada who looked like the incarnation of gleeful disapproval, would put the needle in.

“How many cc's are you going to give me?”

“You need a million cc's this time up.”

“No chingues. You'll have the needle in my bun for over five minutes. It'll be an hour before I'll be able to move my leg.”

“¡Cómo que no chingues! That's what you should say to yourself, güerito. ¡Porque chingue y chingue y mira el resultado! O como decimos por aquí: Quien se acuesta con pulgas …”

“Spare me the dénouement. Let's get it over with. Look, why don't you just give me 500,000?”

“You want 500,000? I'll give it! You know how many machos come back here three weeks later, open-legged, and bawling because the pus is back again and dripping out of their putrid chiles?”

“God no, give me the million. Anything.”

“Here it goes, y no chilles, ¿eh? güerito valín. Porque como sabes, tú tienes la enfermedad de los meros machos.” She began to laugh with great moral gusto. As my leg turned numb I realized that in Mexico the man wasn't always in the plaza and the women only en casa.

It was just a few days before my term was up and I was to return to Califas. I bumped into Espinoso in the library.

“Hola, vate loco.”

He looked embarrassed, almost searching for a space to slink into. “Hola, vato loco. It's been some days since I've seen you.”

“Well, yes, I've been spending time at the old farmacia. I got the gonk, thanks to you and your macho ideas and your disgusting putas that you believe are sensuously perverse.”

“Well, I figured. I got it too. La mierda de gonorrea is epidemic here.”

“Well, that's the best fucking news I've heard all week!”

“You think so? You want to reenact the Alamo here in the library? Fuck it, man, be happy it's just gonk que se quita con penicilina and not what they say you get on the other side of the river, herpes. Let me tell you something, güero, and this is God's truth. Since I've been here, six years in this hostile valley, that was the first time I got laid.”

“Not enough billetiza, right?”

“Right. It wasn't a financial priority.”

“Sure, you didn't have a sufficiently dumb gringo to hustle big enough at the jai alai. Well, you must be busted by now what with shots and poultices and all. Here, let me stake you again—what the fuck, the Chicano baboso never learns.” I flipped out a pink and canary bill with the likeness of Venustiano Carranza and stuffed it in his guayabera pocket.

“I'll accept it as a wedding present on behalf of my novia and me.”

“Yeah. I was sure that you'd accept it okay, Mr. Savoir Faire.”

“I don't mean to hurt you, güero valín. But, ¿sabes lo que tú eres … en el fondo?”

“No, Mr. Maya. No idea what I am en ‘el fondo.' But I'm sure you're gonna tell me, Mr. Sabelotodo.”

“En el fondo tú eres … ¡turista!”

Time softens the sense of injury and lets the little nostalgias form the veins and lodes that make the past palatable. If I had an address to write to, I would have sent him a card or something. But there was no address, maybe the empty swimming pool, o como dijo esa noche, una nulidad sin identidad remota, and barring that I would find myself in the library, which seemed like an unsullied cavern, to sit and ponder, open the page in the art book to the Palenque man, frame ideas, sometimes talk silently to the stone head.

When you give meaningful events the profound reflection that they require, the many details that you missed in the ongoing come into relief and give a new bent to the hurt. In the labyrinthine library of my soledad I uncovered and relived the discreet portents and signs. How he envied and admired attributes that I didn't remotely realize. “Güero” he called me, though in this country I could not remotely pass for fair. And my blue jeans and knitted polo shirt were such a center of attraction, the ballpoint pen that contained three cartridges: red, black, and green. Finally, I gave it to him. The way he liked to introduce me to girls on the campus—girls, I conclude now, who were not his friendly acquaintances as I had thought at the time, but barely accorded him the minimal courtesies of fellow studenthood. He would introduce me, I realize now, with a touch of the panderer, and how they would take to the exotic Chicano, the güero valín with a rather hairy chest who maybe reminded them in his knit shirt of some phantasm image they had conjured in their head, a Robert Redford, well-heeled, privileged, and native
in Spanish. You were waiting there, Felipe, furious and sotted with envy, bridling your lust—how you must have kept so much venom under wraps—hoping that I would puncture the maiden ethics of niñas de bien, maybe score, maybe there would be a scrap of carrion in it for you. For you hadn't been laid in six years!

How you queried me, Maya, about so many things like routes and rivers, fences and sensors, coyotes and pollos. Were you trying on Chicano, my friend? Were you speculating on the North? How proud you were, como un tío paternal, when you arranged a little public trial for me at the tortería, bade me eat the chile más piquín de la tortería. And when I passed your little test and won a round of student applause, did you not say, “See, he's no gringo now, he's earned his bones.” But it was nothing! I've been eating those pequines my whole life!

Now I feel so mortified that I could have confided in you—¿qué?—after two or three days of acquaintanceship at most, such intimate yearnings as my whole carnal hope for Mexican-Chicano compañerismo. ¡Qué ingenuo! Now I know, máximo peón, that even in oppression, even if there are only two oppressed peas in a constricted pod, they will disaggregate into an oppressor and an oppressed, a siervo and a señor, a leader and a led. That is the nature of oppression and of the oppressed, the theory and the practice. That they know only what they know and act on what they know, a great chain of oppressed people, a great daisy chain of being that leads not straight to St. Thomas's sandía-hued heaven, but low, up and down picos, down and up valleys, across llanos, and even across rivers where the current runs in opposing directions. Yet, truly escarmentado that I am for having so readily and unselfconsciously confided in El Otro, that moment in the tortería, that heartfelt abrazo over tortas de lomo … How is it that two oprimidos of such divergent estirpes, of such varied formation, could have, if just for a transitory term, communed? I cherish that shared governance of perceptions even though to obtain it requires a racking sojourn into memories filled with penitence and humiliation. And I think of a passage in Hemingway where it is observed that where we are weak, there where nature surely breaks us, and if we fare with good fortune, and go on the mend, there, where we were weak, we are now the strongest. And although in the end it's all the same for nature will break us, definitively, it will not be at the junction where once we were weak and now we are strong.

Amigo, I don't quarrel with your many truths or the intensity of your motives. Of one thing, no cabe duda, I am poor like Cheech and Chong—thank God for it, bless that level of poverty that still subsidizes the notion of humorous solutions.

Well, yes, there is one perception that I quarrel with. ¡Yo no soy turista! In truth you were the tourist, amigo, as well as the tour guide and the conning
lout. A most engaging and eager one, the way you genuinely investigated my nature, but like any tourist, even an enlightened and avid one, you compared the landscape by a self-same standard. Your sense of the picturesque, the empathetic, and the offensive were all measured out in the same pastel currency. But the estranged is different from the tourist. It is his lot to wander forth, to cross rivers that flow up course, seek out his own image in the dubious landscape of the other, search for a currency that isn't there. Por supuesto, the Chicano needs to gaze into smoky mirrors that reflect no peer. Know this, venerable Maya head that has perdured for 1200 years on a coated ivory page in a slick art book in a library: I am strong where I've been broken and I'm not prepared to cave in.

Deborah Fernández Badillo

First Prize: Poetry

At the start of the day

I yelled at little Benjie for spilling his cereal,

then I pulled Gloria's hair too hard when it wouldn't

twist into an even braid

Baby Lala got on my nerves for wetting her diaper

twice before breakfast and for spitting up her rice

and milk all over my last clean dress

and let's not even think about last night

I didn't want to kiss Rudy at all this morning

because of the way he asked if there was any

fresh tortillas and could I make a better lunch today

'cuz he was getting tired of how I made his sandwiches

not to mention that the man still can't find

his own clean clothes and it's because

they are nesting under last week's calzones

And if Josie wants me to watch her little pack of

animals again I'm gonna sell 'em to the Circus Vargas

I'm gonna bite the dog too

I hate K-MART shoes

The rain is a quiet whisper in my ears tonight

si quería

I could shatter soltera and dance in the rainlight

desnuda

and tonight

when soft July slips through the tiny holes of my

window screen I will call for violin and angels

and dance with God because He is the only he

remaining

and tonight

I lower my bird self onto the thinly carpeted

floor under my bed and pedal an

invisible bicycle until I scream and curse

the He and the he because my legs no longer

fill with blood

because my heart has failed me

Tina

used to dance to the Four Tops with that shaky

little hip-step she made up one morning while we

stayed home from school and glittered our fingernails

we used to go out with the same boys

sharing them on a rotating basis

we wore gold earrings dark lipstick black heels

great for dancing

and Tina would laugh forever on account of her

joyous disposition and the night air

sometimes we had to hold our breaths for about

a month and a half before we could breathe again

but it was always worth it

I don't visit or call or in any way communicate

with Tina anymore, not since her husband

showed me the damp narrow tunnels in his eyes

he wanted me to understand something about how

a man has needs and desires that have nothing to do

with nothing at all

except no job no money no self-respect or

some such foolish thing, I saw his plan of action

and what is there to do but reject the

heroic rapist and draw yourself away from the

crocodile who cries himself a river

because you have seen the poisoned shadows in his eyes

Last time I saw Tina she wore dark glasses

that didn't cover her purple eyes or blue cheek

and there really isn't any way to hide a broken arm

she ran away from me

so after I washed my dishes all I could do was

light three candles and remember

Tina used to dance to the Four Tops with that

shaky little hip-step and laugh until forever

with the coming of the dawn.

Juan Felipe Herrera

Second Prize: Short Story

It took place in a tan two-story East L.A. Victorian. Somehow, the four of us were participants in an odd game in which all the players had to intersect at this particular cube-like dwelling.

It was a checker-piece in the center of a checkered infinity. All the houses seemed to be exactly alike, as if they had been pressed through a sharp grill in the stratosphere and softly and silently flattened into a two-tone grid in the hottest ground of Chicanoland.

Everything was patterned: veridian green lawns snipped with the grace of a ballerina, probing T.V. antennas plucking messages through the smog, and a score of plump off-white 1952 Plymouths; everything aglow beneath the perforated and hazy Plexiglas box in heaven.

Tomás Mendoza-Harrell had invited me to come over. I had met Tomás a year earlier, in 1970, at Royce Hall Quad at UCLA during the early planning stages of a raucous trip to Chiapas. He said he had a film project in mind for me.