1985. Several years after my mother’s death.Tía Chita and I are in the living room of her house in El Polvo.You can’t see my face.Es propio. My aunt is a Queen, I, merely a handmaiden.
Otra vez, es propio. Usually very shy and self-effacing, she agreed, out of love, to wear a mantilla for the photo. Photo: Daniel Zolinsky
tried to avoid watching her eat. She
was an old lady with few teeth who
liked her wine and chewed heartily
with her mouth open. Everyone loved
a good hamburger, which is another
kind of taco when you think about it. A
little Sanka on the side was good, or an
orange Fanta or a limonada, no, not a
lemonade, but a limonada, made with
lots of limes. Water was fine as well,
what my mother called “Good Texas
water.”
Our meals, as haphazard as they
were, were still joyful. No fanfare but
important. Really important. A truly
spectacular event was the occasional
cabrito that my Tío Enrique would
roast in a homemade barbeque pit to
left side of the store on the road to the
Big Bend. You could smell the goat
roasting as you sat on your metal cot
behind the back of the store near the
piled-up Coke bottle boxes eating
sandía and not worrying about any-
thing except about the watermelon
seeds on your clothing or shoes and the
juice that trailed down your cool white
summer blouse to the ground where a
growing formation of ants enjoyed
your leftovers.
In the hot summer evenings we
would curl up with a single cool cot-
ton sheet and look at the enormity of
stars out there behind the store, a coy-
ote howling in the distance. There
might be a breeze by then and there
was a peace and joy in knowing you
were safe.
There was never any boredom in
this world. We did become restless, but
that was another thing altogether.
Once this innate state of unconscious-
ness took its perverse form in cruelty, as
one summer, during an infestation of
earthworms, my sister Margo and I
killed hundreds of earthworms in a
number of myriad and ugly ways – a
cruel manifestation of our unrealized
connection to all life. I also rue the fact
that one day, in an act of sisterly retali-
ation and rebellion, I placed a still hot
flour tortilla on my sleeping sister’s face.
She jumped up sputtering and crying
from Tía Chita’s living room couch, full
of fear and sudden surprise. What pos-
sessed me to place a hot tortilla on her
face? I will never know. I am ashamed
Cenizo
of this childish prank and don’t advise
anyone who loves tortillas or their sister
to try it.
Inside my aunt’s house were many
book cases filled with books. The walls
were lined with art and the house was
full of rock specimens, old metates,
Mexican folk art and more. You never
knew what you were going to find
tucked into corners or just laying out
there on the living room table, and in
what language. Old maps, photogra-
phy books of the Big Bend, a dried
snake skin. Everyone read voraciously
and books were sacred and prized in
any form.
13
continued on page 25
Second Quarter 2009