The Guardians (11 page)

In el Padre Juan Bosco's library in his casita all he has are religious books. He said I could help myself to read anything I found interesting. He has a collection of Bibles. One is so old if you try to turn the pages the paper almost disintegrates, like dead moths’ wings between your fingers. He keeps it open to the Book of Psalms on a wooden bookstand on his desk. I had never been in a house where people owned their own books. I mean, so many. My tía Regina has a few. They are on the bookshelf next to the fireplace. I have read them all. I can stay up and read un libro entero in one night or at least by daybreak. If they are thick like Dostoyevsky's, then it takes me perhaps three nights. Afterward I must sleep. I sleep and sleep and then I start another book.

After
The Communist Manifesto
I went on to the teachings of Mao Ze-dong. My father also had
Das Kapital
and some writings by Lenin and Engels. Everywhere we went to work, following the harvest, the books came with us. El Subcomandante Marcos was a hero of mi papá for so bravely pointing out to the world that the NAFTA agreement was not going to make things better for the Mayan people but worse. If it were not for my mother who said, “No, señor,” he would have gone down to Chiapas to join los Zapatistas in their battle against the government. I was only about five years old, but I remember them arguing about it. “My mother was an indígena,” he'd say. “My own grandfather, who thought he was the last of the great hacendados, threw us off his land because he didn't want us to inherit it.”

I remember tanto, San Pío; even if I am not sixteen years old yet, sometimes I feel like I have lived many lifetimes, not just one. And not just my own. I remember my papá's stories. I remember, too, when I was left with my tía Regina when I was very little. I was so upset, being left behind. I was too small to understand how mis padrecitos were trying to spare me from working in los files. I did not think of it in terms of them having so little food or not enough wood for the stove or things like that once they got back to Chihuahua. I got into reading even more because then I would not have to think about when they were coming back for me. My tía Regina was always so good. It wasn't that. I just missed my mamá. I missed my papá, too. Like I missed how he would pick me up and carry me on his back, especially when I would get tired of working out in the pisca. I would cry like el chavalito that I was. My mother complained about everything. So she would say to me, “This is why you have to go to school, mi'jito. So you don't end up living the life of a burra, like your mamá.” That made me cry. It hurt to think of my mother as a mule. I cried a lot when my father told me she was not coming back for me. I cannot remember a time when I wasn't crying over something gone forever. But I am a man now almost, and I know that tears are useless.

Mañana I promise, Santo apreciado, no reading, only meditating on virtues of penance.

Your most undeserving discípulo

REGINA

If the barrio of Chihuahuita is not the oldest in town, then it has to be the second oldest. It is small with little houses pressed together. Casitas of adobe, cinder blocks, or stucco and gated windows and with tiny yards and big, barking dogs. I had never actually visited anyone there before. Since we settled down on this side of the border, I have always lived up in Cabuche. Miguel opened el abuelo's rusted gate and drove the Mustang right over the curb and into the front yard to a small house, media caída. The stucco and paint were cracked and red shingles were missing from the roof. Pulling out a lock and chain from the trunk, he tied it around the gate. The hood of the car was nearly on the front steps. We both carried in brown, soppy bags we'd picked up on the way. I didn't feel I knew Miguel well enough yet to tell him how I had decided recently I thought the food we grew up with could kill you.

His abuelo was sitting in the kitchen by the window. El viejito was as old as Miguel had described him. Maybe older. But he was tall for a senior, his back not too curved and with a cared-for white beard. Although his shirt was yellowed at the cuffs and collar, it was starched and his pants were pressed. He was wearing a white straw hat—the kind my own grandfather might have worn to town. “My abuelo Milton has always sent his clothes out to be cleaned and ironed, even when my abuela was still alive,” Miguel whispered. “He's real picky about his appearance.”

“No doubt dapper runs in the family,” I said, eyeing my archangel's Sunday duds.

“Ouch,” he said. I would have liked the fact that I made a man blush except that I think I was blushing, too.

There was barely enough room in la cocinita with peeling, oil-based paint for the laminated table against one wall with three chairs. A trastero with gritty glass doors showed stacks of stored mismatched kitchenware and a yellow refrigerator practically took up one wall. Miguel smashed two cockroaches with his index finger before we put anything down. He had explained to me that his grandfather insisted on living there alone. Miguel's mother had tried to move him into her new house in San Antonio, and the old man had caught a bus back to El Paso.

“IT FINALLY STOPPED RAININ’, EH?
”el abuelo called out. The window faced a narrow alley and the backs of other deteriorated houses. He was holding a hand-rolled cigarette outside the window. In the other hand, he kept a fly swatter at the ready.
“BUEN DíA, SEñORITA! ¿CóMO ESTá USTED?
”

I didn't answer him right away because he wasn't looking at me. He was shouting at a half-dead ficus in the corner next to him.

“PLEASE FORGIVE MY HUMBLE HOUSE AND ALL THE DISORDER. BUT SIT DOWN, POR FAVOR. YOU ARE IN YOUR HOME. MIKEY, HIJO, PULL A CHAIR OUT FOR THE YOUNG LADY,
”the old man shouted.

By then, I realized that he was blind or near-blind. And near-deaf, también. I got a chair out myself and sat down. Miguel hadn't mentioned that his grandfather couldn't see or hear so good but I guessed he had figured why talk about what would be immediately apparent.

Also for obvious reasons, Miguel got to washing out bowls, plates, and utensils, all the while making very loud small talk with his grandfather. They shouted back and forth about the weather and Miguel's job and then the old man asked Miguel about his family—as in
“HOW ARE THE CHILDREN?
”

“Fine, fine, Abuelo,” he answered, glancing over at me.

“AND CRUCITA? TODO BIEN AT HOME?
”the old man asked.

“Fine, fine, everybody's fine,” Miguel said, killing the conversation like a cockroach, lickety-split. It sounded like he was still married. I was confused. And not all that happy to be there suddenly, neither. Even if it had been a halfhearted lunch invitation of carryout to his decrepit abuelo in the barrio, it had still been an invitation to spend Sunday together, hadn't it?

All my life my mother had warned me about married men. They were everywhere—the butchers who flirted with us at the market, the postal carrier, managers, and neighbors. Todos big liars. “You know the good ones are already taken,” she'd say as I got older. “At least the ones your
age.” And she was right, like always. That was the problem with my mamá. She thought she was always right and she was.

Now one of the good ones was eating up everything we'd brought for his grandfather. He fixed tacos that spilled over with fried pork and heaps of pico de gallo, guacamole, and sour cream. His abuelo only pretended to eat, for the sake of having company, I figured. I pretended, too, and nibbled on a rolled-up tortilla. But I did gladly accept a cold can of Fanta out of the refrigerator and drank it down in almost one gulp. All that kept playing in my head was, Funny, no matter how old you get, you always think someone could find you a little interesting.

EL ABUELO MILTON

“I was born right here in this house.” I started my story that morning for the sake of my visita, who had never heard it before and not so much for my favorite grandson, who had—many times. Let el Mikey stop me whenever he was ready to go and had had enough of his old abuelo Milton's long-winded cuentos.

El Mikey, like we started to call him when he was playing football in high school and could eat you outta house and home, hombre. El Mikey will eat anything we used to say, kind of like in that commercial on TV. That kid hated everything. Our Mikey ate anything. What a comilón that kid was. But he needed to eat a lot—playing football like he was doing then. I went to every one of his games, too. His father was so busy with his military career and all. Who else was there for him, if not me, his grandpa?

Now, there I was that Sunday, like every Sunday, expecting my nieto, all grown up, a teacher y todo, and the only relative I've got left who gives a damn about me, when this time, without warning, he comes walking in with a goddess—una mera diosa. La Helen of Troy. Helen of Troy was not a goddess. I think she was a queen. It don't matter. This one here, like her name, smelled like una reina.

Mi nieto told me that he and his new lady friend were out looking for her missing hermano. “Ayayayay,” I said. What more could I say? But then, so they wouldn't take off so fast, I decided to tell my story. At my age, that could take a while. I geared myself up. “I know it ain't no comfort to you at this time, miss,” I said, “pero back when I was young, I don't want to tell you how bad it was around here. You might not know
this, but el Chihuahuita is one of our oldest barrios. Some years back now the neighbors got together and went to City Hall to make this one of those historic districts. They did it, too. Yes, ma'am. But plaque or no plaque, it hasn't stopped being our barrio. There's still a lot of criminal element. Pero hell, there's criminal element everywhere, from here to the state capital.”

Thinking of the corruption that politicians had always been famous for gave me a lil laugh. I think my company agreed with me because I thought I heard them laughing some, también.

“You know,” I went on, clearing my throat. Damn cigarettes are gonna kill me some day. But how I figure it, there are so few pleasures left an old blind and nearly deaf widower, it would be just as well. I'd been cheating death all my life. “When I was a chamaco, I nearly died of smallpox,” I said. “Children were always sick of all kinds of diseases around here—smallpox,” I said, “scarlet fever, diphtheria. El Río Grande was a breeding ground for mosquitoes, flies, and who knows what all. There was waste seepage … it was terrible. And those were terrible days, when I look back on them. The whole country was in despair but we here, los mejicanos, were really desperate. Too poor to afford doctors. Too poor to afford medicine. And if los americanos were going through hard times, you best believe so were all the people escaping the ravages of La Revolución, escaping battles with the Indians, suffering the results of Porfirio Díaz's days of everything for the rich. Pa’ el chicharrón todos los demás. To hell with everyone else, in other words.”

I paused because it sounded like Mikey was going to the refrigerator again. The door on my icebox rechina un poco. Then I heard him sit back down—because the chair squeaks, too. In fact, everything around here needs oiling, including me.