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“Do not forget,” Luís Obrador told his wife, “that if I should not return our children are not to be raised Christian.”
“I will not.”
Luís Obrador left the house of his grandfather and made his way to the dented up Chevy pick-up truck that had a seat saved for him in the bed of the truck. He looked back at his wife before jumping into the bed. She was lovely but older then he remembered. Her mocha colored skin had a hue to it that had certainly not been there last night as they lay awake in the heat of the night after making furious love. He smiled and waved to her and then took his place beside Manuel and Lupe for the ride north.
“Did you hear about the girl who fell into the sky Luís?”
“No,” Luís replied tiredly. Manuel always tried to spin stories on these treks north. He seemed to take personal pride in bending the truth and adding a fantastic element to the stories. Luís tired of his friends tall tales but did not have the heart to tell him what everyone thought – that Manuel was better at being a field hand then storyteller.
“Maurice the Frenchman's daughter was running with her dog on the beach the other day and she found a shard of glass in the sand. She picked it up and it broke into two pieces. She tried to put them back together with chewing gum but when she tried to weld them together with the sugar gum, it caused an explosion. The mirror became a doorway and she fell through it into the sky.
“Maurice the Frenchman then ran out looking for her all day and then found her hair clip on the beach on top of an unbroken mirror. They say he went mad with his grief and tore out chunks of his hair. The police showed up and took him to the funny house.”
“We are all in the nuthouse,” Lola stated calmly, “some of us just don't know it yet.” Luís took no offense that she pointedly looked in his direction as his eyes were shut and he was thinking of his wife's skin.
Ten years ago, when he was fifteen, Luís Obrador met his future wife at a dance. What he remembered most was Alejandra's skin. The sun hit it and it reminded him to the time he worked on a cocoa farm. It was a chilly day and her skin grew goosebumps that furthered his belief that Alejandra was in fact a Cocoa Goddess.
Luís walked up to her and told her his vision, that they dance and marry and have cocoa colored children together who would have his charm and her beautiful skin and they could start a new revolution.
Alejandra laughed and it sounded as if she were happily sighing. Later that night Luís lifted up her skirt to find that she was not wearing anything underneath and they made love in a field sprinkled with grapevines and peach and orange trees.
“If you marry me I will own my own fruit farm and we will never go hungry as we will just need to pluck from the earth. We won't have to wear anything or answer to anyone, we will be free.”
“If you marry me,” Alejandra said smartly, “I will never wear anything again so that you may always look upon that which gives you so much inspiration so that I will never have to worry about the dangers of life.”
The vehicle jerked to a stop in the middle of a truck stop in La Ventana. It was time to switch. This was the worst part of the journey north as many more Mexican workers from all over the country met at La Ventana to pile in to a semi-truck to finish the journey.
“Did you hear me Luís?”
“No.”
“Standing room only,” Lola said with a frown on her face.
“It did not used to be this way. You used to be able to freely get into the States to work. Now we have to sneak in like thieves just to live.”
Luís knew that she frequently went to the States. She had spoken openly of not coming back on her next trip. Luís knew that there was always a chance to make money in the States but Alejandra told him last night that if he left her for something as trivial as money she would drown herself but not before burning down the house so that her creamy skin scent would be replaced with sorrowful ash. Luís loved his wife and knew that she meant every word.
Luís fell in behind Lola and Manuel who were now bickering over another story, this one also involved a girl and the sky, only this time the girl flew away from Mexico into the US by chewing an enormous amount of bubble gum and blew a bubble the size of a hot air balloon.
“All right you wetbacks,” yelled a good looking white man in English, “This is how it is going to go. This is a NAFTA truck. You'll be dumped in Oklahoma City, about an eleven hour ride. You need to pay me a hundred American dollars each to get on, if you don't have it see my friend Jake here and we'll see what we can do.”
Luís cursed out load among the angry whispers and tide of frustration among the gathered people looking for passage north. He had two hundred American but he needed that to purchase some much needed supplies for when he met up with his second cousin who was now a naturalized American. His cousin was less then forthcoming with financial help.
Luís's second cousin, Isidora, changed his name to “Rick” in order to be more gringo then Mexican. Luís pitied him for that but cherished that he was given work in order to send money back home to Alejandra and his daughters. Luís refused to call his second cousin Rick and it became a point of contest between the two men on the last job the two worked together.
“Where's your money wetback?”
Luís dug into his pocket and produced five twenty dollar bills. Unfortunately he had to peel them off of the other five and the man's surprisingly crisp blue eyes focused in on the extra money.
“You're a big shot spic huh? Well if you want on this truck you'll give me that other hundred as the price is going up for big men like you.”
“Go fuck your white mother,” Luís replied in Spanish. The man just looked at him for a moment. While the language barrier kept him from knowing just what Luís Obrador had just said, he picked up on the idea.
The man smiled at Luís and waved his hand as if to excuse his rude behavior. Luís turned to walk away and began pocketing the remainder of his money when the knife shoved through Luís' left set of ribs.
“I think it is you that needs to go fuck yourself,” the man whispered. He then spit a gob of tobacco on Luís's forehead after turning him around and holding him in a hug reminiscent of Luís and Alejandra's first dance together. The brown mucus mixed with Skoal trailed down Luís' forehead and started to dip into the well of his left eye socket.
Gently, almost with a lover's touch, and with soft coos, the man laid Luís Obrador's body to rest on the ground. Luís didn't feel cold, like Manuel's stories always claimed about the dying, but of course Luís was distracted by the fact that as he lay struggling for air the man unzipped his pants and dug out his small cock and began pissing off the tobacco-spit mixture from Luís Obrador's face.
Luís knew that he would never again inhale his wife's skin or play with her unshaven pubic hair in the lazy morning Saturday sun after their lovemaking. Nor would he see his children or his fruit farm. All of this mattered to Luís Obrador but what mattered most of all in his last gasps of breath was proving to this white gringo that his cock was bigger, but time ran out as he tried to move his hands to his zipper.
“There's a saying you should know spic,” the man laughed as he finished up, “in the world of blind men the one eyed man is king.”
Many weeks later when Alejandra found out she shaved off all the hair on her body and slit her wrists. She, true to her word, had raised her children with her husband, in a world outside the parameters of shame. She was to her mother and father an exhibitionist, but to her and her husband they were naturalists. In her grief she purchased a black wool dress with a matching black hat and veil. She refused to allow the world a glimpse at her late husband's treasure.
When she wept her tears turned to ashes. Many years later, as her daughter Erendira would write in her famous memoirs, her mother's room was filled with gray soot . The air fell down upon them and viciously played with their lungs. As Erendira wrote, “It was reminiscent of the tombs found after Vesuvius, only the artifacts were not rich prizes to any but my sister and I.”
Alejandra was true to her husband's wishes and their children were not raised Christian under her watch, however Alejandra's children were taken from her by her zealot Catholic parents after they found out what their daughter did to make a living.
“You will be cursed in hell and the devil will use you as his personal whore. He will torment your womanly parts with his pitchfork,” Alejandra's mother screamed at her.
Alejandra simply looked at her mother and small, inconspicuous ashes escaped from her eyes.
“You are a sick perverted woman, and no daughter of mine,” her father told her. “We are taking the children, they do not need to grow up in this filth. I have half a mind to salvage what is left of the fruit trees—”
“You will remove nothing from my husband's land! Take the children,” Alejandra screamed at her parents, “but you will get nothing else!”
“Fool, you uselessly cling to the past when the best thing that happened for you is his death, you could have married a rich man with your skin, yet you threw it away to be a whore.” These were the last words Alejandra ever heard her mother speak and the last time she ever faced her two daughters alive.
Alejandra had no parting words of sage advice to give her daughters, she had no fourth generation Luís Obrador to cling onto. She had her men and her body and skin the world no longer had privilege to view.
Alejandra may have sold her womanly charms, to be sure she had very little left offer underneath her wool black skirt and her matching hat and veil, but people remembered Luís Obrador's passion for his wife's mocha colored skin and the men paid well to have her sit on them with her dress spreading out like a blanket, the hem tucking up just underneath their chins.
On the tenth anniversary of her husband's death Alejandra decided that she had had enough of living without him. Taking off her dress, veil, and hat, Alejandra looked in the mirror at her skin for the last time. Looking at herself naked in the mirror she remembered the first time she made love to Luís and cried.
She cried ashes of every size and shape. She broke the mirror with her fists, her room was slowly sinking in ash and her color depressed world was filling up again with splashes of color. Red sprinkles of oxygenated blood fell as she continued to beat on the mirror. Small specs of glass landed in her eyes. She lost her sight after three more beatings on the frame that used to hold a mirror.
Still sobbing she bumped and tripped her way across her room and found her bed . Willing herself to stop breathing, Alejandra listened to her heartbeat thumping in her ears as it slowed down and the staccato beat of a few moments ago subsided into a monotonous thump followed by whole note rests between beats followed by measures of rests followed by silence.
Years later when her daughters defied their grandparents, found fame and fortune, and both agreed that they wanted to return to their father's fruit farm and find their mother they found her naked body had not aged a day past her thirty-fifth year. Their mother's skin was a creamy complexion of fresh coffee mixed with just a delicate amount of cream to make for a color that both provoked feelings of fascination and envy. |
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