Month: August 2014

The Dogs of Guanajuato

Posted on by sterlingbennett

A friend who is a recent resident of Guanajuato said she had needed to talk to us, to someone, anyone. She had looked over her balcony and watched an adolescent Mexican boy strangle puppies, one by one, that had been kept in a bag. She had screamed down that he should stop it. He ran away, past our house. We saw none of it. We don’t know who it was, though we have ways of finding out.

A lot of people in my town treat dogs as beloved pets when they are small and love to carry puppies through the streets as some kind of cultural statement I don’t really understand. It would be like a culture that got a kick out of carrying parrots around on its shoulders. We occasionally see that here, but it’s rare.

A lot of other people in my town place dogs on their flat concrete roofs to scare away thieves. Often there is no shelter from sun, rain, heat or cold. The dogs are prisoners; and that why Guanajuato is famous for its howling by night—prisoner dogs seeking connection—and for its crowing roosters by morning—or perhaps all day long. For us, both sounds have become white noise and we don’t hear it.

Once, a few years ago, I was looking for a place to paint behind the Olga Costa Museum beside a lovely shaded creek when I came across a large dog hanging by its neck from a tree and very dead. It had taken two people to perform the execution: one strong person to hold the dog up and another person to tie the green string around its neck. The dog must have trusted them enough to let them hold it up in the air. Then they let it down, so that its feet didn’t quite touch the ground. And then watched the results of their work while the animal struggled and died.

What do we call that? Cruelty? A perverse, sick curiosity to see an animal die of asphyxia. I think it is like a hanging. Murder by sociopaths. We know that people do this, and some of us find it horrifying. I have a piece called “The Darkness in My Stories” which addresses this elemental horror in me.

I also wrote about the dog and the green string in my novel Playing for Pancho Villa. I quote the passage below.

“Frank climbed down from the boxcar. Doña Mariana and Manuelito were coming back from their walk along the arroyo. The boy spoke to her in short bursts and kept watching her, as if expecting a response. Doña Mariana answered him, but did not look at him. She saw Frank, but gave no greeting. Frank descended the slope and helped her up to the tracks.
“We  saw  a  dog,”  said  Manuelito.  “It  smelled.”  They walked  toward  the  passenger  car.  “It  had  a  green string  around  its  neck,”  he  said.
Doña Mariana gave Frank a look. They climbed the iron steps at the front end of the car. She made a pillow out her canvas riding hat and had the boy lie down on it. She and Frank chatted a bit about the village, its poverty, the dusty paths and the possible reasons  for  the  train’s  stopping.  The  boy’s  lids  grew   heavy and soon his mouth relaxed, and he was asleep.
The  señora’s  eyes  rested  on  Frank.  “How  is  the   wounded  man?”  she  asked.
“He  needs  a  doctor.”
“I  think  he  has  one,”  she  said.
“He  needs  a  hospital.”  Then,  after  a  pause,  “You walked up the arroyo?”
She said, “Yes,” then looked out the window and said nothing else.
“And  the  green  string?”  Frank  asked.  Then  he   looked out the window toward the arroyo, as if he might see the dog.
“Farther  back,  at  the  base  of  an  old  wall,  there  are trees and shade and pools of clear standing water. I listened  for  the  train  whistle.  We  didn’t  want  to  get   left behind. The place reminded me of arroyos when I was a child. Peaceful, enchanted places, out of the hot sun, with just the barest sound of water. We always looked for pools to swim in. The perfect pool, in a spot of sun to warm us when we got out.
“When  we  started  back  toward  the  train,  we  saw   the dog. A large dog. And probably friendly, because someone had been able to lift it up and hold it while someone else tied the rope, string really, to the tree. It took two people to do it, at least one of them strong. Its rear feet were able to touch the ground. The green string tightened. The creature struggled to hold itself up, but left alone, eventually slowly choked  to  death  from  its  own  weight.”
Frank looked at her.
“There  were  two  men  watching  us  from  up  above, where the houses are. As if they were waiting for our reaction. I looked back at them longer than I would have ever done with strangers, let alone men. I wanted  to  see  if  they  were  the  killers.”
She paused again.
“I  could  not  tell.  There  was  nothing  in  their  eyes  to   indicate  whether  they  had  done  it.”  She  stopped   again, as if considering.
“That  is  what  troubled  me.  That  you  couldn’t  tell   one way or the other. All you could see was indifference. I called up to them and said there was a hanged dog and that they should bury it before it brought disease to the village. There was no reaction at  all,  as  if  that  didn’t  matter.  At  that  point,  I  did  not   want  to  be  there  any  longer,  so  we  left  quickly.”
Frank  didn’t  know  what  to  say.  Instead,  he  took  his Winchester from the corner by the window and laid it across his lap.”

Le Couleur de Chipotle Seco

Posted on by sterlingbennett

(Another attempt at translating one of my short pieces—”The Color of Dried Chipotle”—into French, as a language learning exercise, with much help from my tutor, whose name I will not mention—to protect him from scandal if the translation is just too horrible, to the extent that, if exposed, French cows would fall over dead.)

SIMIPAG c’est le nom du système d’eau dans ma ville coloniale. Cela signifie le Sistema de Agua Potable y Alcantarillado de Guanajuato—le système pour la distribution de l’eau et pour la re-distribution des eaux d’égout. Des générations de travailleurs se sont constamment précipités dans les quartiers ou l’un des fluides avait empiété sur l’autre.

Par hasard, j’ai rencontré un homme dans le café délabré où j’écris, qui avait travaillé pendant des années pour la ville et maintenant, dans sa retraite, était le seul et l’entièrement inconnu historien des sombres cours de l’eau navigable de la ville.

Luís est accro au café et à l’histoire. Son père Juan Gabriel a commencé à travailler pour la ville dans 1916 à l’âge de 17. Il portait un lourde barre pour ouvrir la chaussée et une pelle et marchait derrière son chef, les deux en répondant aux cris de cette señora ou à l’autre qui a signalé que les eaux usées coulaient dans sa maison.

Arturo n’était pas aussi intelligent que son jeune assistant Luís mais il avait la grâce de s’en remettre au jeune homme dans des matières des directions dans lesquelles coulaient des choses et dans d’autres problèmes de la physique. Peu de temps dans le milieu de la nuit—c’était le temps de leur travail—c’était Arturo qui allait chercher un sac de ciment et du sable, pendant que Luís perplexait sur l’emplacement des tuyaux et commencait à ouvrir le callejón avec sa barre de fer. Quand il soulevait le morceau de pierre sur l’endroit où il supposait qu’il avait échoué, il mettait la lanterne de plus prés et observait le mouvement autour de la fuite qui coulait au loin de la conduite et se jettait dans la maison voisine, dont la señora était à la porte qui les avait en premier lieu appelés à la catastrophe.

Elle portait son châle autour de ses épaules, en se plaignant de la fuite, la pluie, l’oscurité, la rapidité de leur progrès et des imbéciles que se propageaient la révolution dans l’état.

“On dois les pendre tous,” a dit-elle. “Il faudrait tirer sur leurs enfants et violer leurs épouses. Dieu va les brûler en enfer, vous verrez.

Luís a gardé ses opinions pour lui. Pendant sa seule nuit de repos semanal, il portait des armes à travers les ruelles, en le faisant vers l’aube quand même la police était endormis.

Pendant que la femme fulminait, il tenait la lanterne prés du tuyau cassé, où toutes les choses se déplaçaient comme il le faisait dans la nuit. En sous-sol, on peut dire. Sauf qu’elles étaient de la couleur de chipotle seco ou de sienne brûlé, comme le dit son ami le peintre—tandis que Luís était de la couleur d’un petit cheval brun. Elles avaient des antennes, probablement pour trouver leur chemin dans l’obscurité pendant qu’elles mangeaient de la merde humaine, combattant entre elles sur les meilleurs pièces qui glissaient dans le tuyau entrainées par la chute d’un seau d’eau d’un lieu plus haut ou bien par le ruissellement de la pluie.

La maison de la señora était en fait assez belle, comme son châle couteux qui brillait à la lumière de la lampe, pendant que sa bouche bougait, en disant des choses sur lui méme et Arturo, qui disait t’elle avait été là una fois avant et qui n’avait pas pris la peine de se laver et quel niveau de scolarité avait-il, Luís, jamais pris la peine d’obtenir; ou pensait-il rejoindre à la revolution et venir dans la nuit l’assassiner dans son lit, en soulévant de côté soigneusement le chat Lobo avant de plonger son couteau dans sa poitrine?

Les insectes grouillaient dans le trou en face de de lui, rouges et rapides dans la lumière de la lanterne. Il pourrait fixer des petits messages sur leur dos, qui diraient aux autres comme lui où vivait cette femme. Ou, plus important, où des armes étaient nécessaires. Des Winchesters, Springfields et Mausers. Sous la ville grouillait un millard des coursiers possibles, qui bougaient où personne ne les pouvait voir, transportant des informations sur comment pénétrer la ville pour le enfoncer l’épée dans son coeur comme dans l’arène des toros.

Il observait de prés. Les insectes haïs semblaient pulser et sautiller. Hop, hop, hop! Arturo ou quelqu’un d’autre s’approchait. Les bêtes le savaient à l’avance. Cela aussi pourrait étre utile quand la ville essayerait de se defendre contre lui même et ses confrères révolutionnaires.

Aruro a mis le ciment sur la ruelle, recouvert d’une bâche. Ils ont mélangé le ciment et le sable avec le fuide de la canalisation rompue et fait la réparation, replacé les pierres et ramassé la lanterne et ils sont repartis, pendant que la femme appelait en disant qu’ils étaient aussi inutiles que les personnes qui complotaient de prendre la ville.

“Cafards!” leur criait elle. “Cafards!”

Obligations

Posted on by sterlingbennett

My friend the newspaperman—he’s more of a distant acquaintance—asked me gently, or was it meekly, whether he could borrow….

“What?” I asked. It wasn’t clear.

“…a hundred pesos,” he repeated, speaking a little more firmly.

He stands behind his rack of magazines and newspapers. He folds the daily newspaper and hands it over the rack. You take it with one hand and give him eight pesos with the other. Behind him, there is a green metal box that houses more magazines, even some used books. He stores the rack and everything else in the box and locks it up like the Paris book stalls along the Seine.

I might have been sitting in the small restaurant opposite his stand, and he may have entered and asked for money there. I don’t remember exactly.

“It’s a loan,” I said, just to get that straight right at the beginning.

“Yes, yes,” he said, but with a voice that was less distinct. Maybe almost inaudible.

“When are you going to pay me?” I asked.

He took the 100-peso note out of my hand. I didn’t understand his reply. He tends to mumble in his natural state. I think he said tomorrow. But I could have been wrong.

I may have passed by two days later. I had given the 100 pesos readily; I expected an equally rapid and cordial repayment.

I leaned forward to hear him better. His two front teeth are missing. I thought that was perhaps why I missed what he said.

There was a problem. I listened for what it was. His dog ran away, his wife was sick, a Zeppelin crashed. I wasn’t sure which of those it was—or perhaps something entirely different. Whatever it was, you could tell by his expression that it was bad news and we would have to be patient.

The bad news lasted for a week. Each time I asked, his answers were equally indistinct, mumbled, filtered by the bland look on his face, as if he no longer knew me and wasn’t sure why I was talking to him.

One day, suddenly, he handed me fifty pesos, and I thanked him.

I asked him when I might expect the other fifty. I’m not sure what he replied other than that it had to do with time that would come, not with time that had passed.

Every few days, when I thought to or had to pass his stand, I would ask him if he had my money. I used precisely that possessive adjective – my, trying to keep the original ownership clear. Each day he became less interested in having to give me a reason for not repaying me; and each day I grew less friendly—which I think offended him, since he grew more unreachable, less diffident and felt, I think, that his financial responsibility had less standing, in fact may have ceased to exist at all.

Yesterday, I came upon a plan. I asked him whether he had a political magazine I read, politically on the left, but more importantly costing forty pesos. He could hand me the magazine over the rack, bless me with his bland face, and I would say thank you and walk away, satisfied with my trick. And he would owe me only ten pesos more.

But he said, “I’m sold out of those.”

In Spanish, it’s an impersonal construction – “Se acabó” – It has sold out.

I had no easy way of checking. I asked him for the most expensive national newspaper, La Jornada – also on the left side of the spectrum.

“Se acabó,” he said.

Whether that was true or not, my trick was not working as planned. I took the daily off his rack. Each one costs eight pesos.

“I’ll take one of these every day,” I said.

His face was pained. He was not happy. I am not sure why. Bad manners on my part? Perhaps something else. Perhaps his newspapers represented real value, whereas the fifty pesos he owed me had lost theirs.

My valued Mexican friend later told me I was behaving aggressively. He said I was more mature and more reasonable than the newspaperman; therefore it was my moral obligation to come to some sort of agreement with him that honored the poor fellow’s dignity. My friend has conducted the same kinds of negotiations with him over loans for years. I agreed with my friend. And also regretted my failing.

Today, I asked for another daily. He handed it over the rack. I took it with one hand and offered nothing with the other.

“I get four more,” I said, and started to walk away.’’

He came out from behind his rack, as if he was going to stop me.

“No,” he said.

“Yes,” I said. “That’s sixteen pesos in all. I get four more after this, at eight pesos apiece. That will make forty-eight pesos. You can keep the last two.”

“No,” he said. “The Sunday paper alone costs ten pesos.”

“Okay,” I said. “Eighteen pesos are returned.”

Whereupon he nodded halfway cordially, having found an opportunity to correct my math.

Epilog: Yesterday I passed his stand, he saw me coming, her reached for my newspaper, the AM out of León. I took it in my left hand and gave him my right, smiled and said, “Trato hecho!”—which isn’t quite the right expression, meaning more “a deal!” than “deal concluded!” Didn’t matter, he gave me a half smile, and we are back to normal.

The Color of Dried Chipotle

Posted on by sterlingbennett

SIMAPAG is the name of the water system in my colonial city. It means Sistema de Agua Potable y Alcantarillado de Guanajuato—the system for the distribution of water and the re-distribution of sewage. Generations of workers have rushed continuously to neighborhoods where one fluid has encroached upon the other.

By chance, I met a man in my dilapidated writing café who had worked for the city for years and now, in his retirement, was the sole and entirely unknown historian of the city’s darker waterways.

Luis is addicted to both coffee and history. His father Juan Gabriel began working for the city in 1916 at the age of seventeen. He carried a heavy iron pry bar and a shovel and walked along behind his boss, both of them responding to the shrieks of this señora or that who reported that sewage was pouring into her home.

Arturo was not as smart as his young helper Luís but had the grace to defer to the boy in matters of which direction things flowed in and other problems of physics. Soon, in the middle of the night—since that was when they worked—it was Arturo that went for a bag of cement and some sand, while Luís puzzled over the location of pipes and began breaking open the alley. When he lifted a chunk of stone over the area he surmised had failed, he brought the lantern closer and observed the movement around the leak that flowed away from the concrete pipe and into the neighboring house, in whose door stood the woman that had fetched them to the disaster in the first place.

She stood with her rebozo around her shoulders, complaining about the leak, the rain, the dark, the speed of their progress, and the fools that were spreading revolution through the state.

“They should hang them all,” she said. “Shoot their children and rape their wives. God will burn them in hell, you wait and see.”

Luís kept his opinions to himself. On his one night off each week, he carried weapons through the allies, always toward dawn when even the police were asleep.

As the woman ranted, he held the lantern closer to the broken pipe, where everything was moving much the way he himself did at night. Below ground, so to speak. Except that they were the color of chipotle, or burnt sienna as a painter friend said—and he Luís was as brown as a small Mexican horse. They had feelers, probably to find their way within the darkness as they ate human shit, fighting over the best pieces as those slid down the pipe, flushed by a bucket of water in a house higher up the alley or, in this case, by the runoff from the rain.

The woman’s house was actually quite fine, her rebozo expensive and glimmering in the light of the lantern, her mouth moving, saying things now about him and Arturo who she said had been there before and didn’t bother to wash, and how much education had he Luís ever bothered to acquire to advance himself. Or did he maybe think he would join the Revolution and come and murder her in her bed, carefully lifting her cat Lobo to one side before he plunged his knife into her breast.

The insects swarmed in hole in front of his eyes, red and quick in the lamplight. He could attach little messages to their backs, that would tell others like him where this lady lived. Or, more importantly, where weapons were needed. Winchesters, Springfields and Mausers. Underneath the city teemed a billion possible messengers, moving where no one could see them, carrying information on how to penetrate the city and pierce its heart like in the bullring.

He watched closely. The hated insects seemed to pulse and hop as one. Now, now and now. Arturo or someone else was approaching. The bugs knew ahead of time. That too could be useful when the city tried to defend itself against him and his fellow revolutionaries.

Arturo set down the cement, covered with a tarp against the drizzle. They mixed it with sand and fluid from the broken pipe and made the repair, replaced the stones, picked up the lantern and left—with the woman calling after them that they were as worthless as the people who were plotting to take over the city.

“Cucarachas!” she yelled after them. “Cucarachas!”

Jorge and the Santa Muerte

Posted on by sterlingbennett

First, let me tell you I am a cautious person. The boy stood at a corner, where a side street cut into the main road. Kitty-corner from the Iglesia de La Santa Muerte, the Church of Saint Death. He had been standing there since 1997, long before the church appeared. He was six or seven then. He stood facing the road. He did not register the passing cars. He was dirty, dressed in rags, and barefoot. He was a ghost, and still is. Time went by in five- or six-month intervals. I never thought about him until I was about a half mile from the corner. Then I would start to think about him, and I’d say, “I wonder if the kid is standing there.” Near an unfinished structure, cement blocks, maybe a little house or store. With never enough funds to finish it. Sprayed with a faded graffiti, in black paint that said, “Vale verga mal gobierno.” Roughly, the government isn’t worth shit.

It was November, when I passed. He was wearing a plaid jacket, buttoned askew – Good Will stuff, trucked down from the border, by the ton, illegally. He wore oversized black sneakers, without laces. No socks. For the first time in thirteen years, someone had begun to take care of him. I suspected the Iglesia de la Santa Muerte, right there in front of him.

I was returning from a trip to the big town, where the houses are adobe and whitewashed, except for the first four feet, which are painted a dark cold red. I had walked the square, eaten watery over-sugared ice cream under the portales, the arched covered walkways, and had even had a drink. Whisky. I never drink whisky. I never drink anything hard. But with all the cold red paint and the whitewash, and it being November, one small shot warmed my chest and raised my sense of brotherhood. And that is why I stopped the car and got out. And walked over to the boy. For the first time in thirteen years.

He took a step back. I respected his fear and veered away. I looked for someone I could talk to. I walked up the side street. A man approached. He was a shorter than me, trim and white-haired. His face was a little red. I suspected his chest is warmer than mine. I greeted him. He was curious about me. A gringo out of his car. What could it mean?

“Para servirle,” he said, as if I were a customer. May I help you?

I said I’d been driving past the boy for thirteen years, and I’d stopped for the first time. “He has a new coat and shoes,” I said, waving behind me, at the ghost. It was a question, poorly disguised as a statement.

“Sí, eso sí es,” he said – but that was it. A non-committal agreement.

I wanted to ask things. But a follow-up question would have crossed a boundary. Like, who bought the jacket and shoes for him, why now, why hadn’t he been taken care of before? Who did he belong to? He could have been the man’s child. The man could have been connected to the church across the road. Similar churches were springing up all over Mexico. There was a word associated with them. My wife had told me not to throw it around. You never knew who you were talking to.

He asked where I was from, and was I visiting? I said I was from the capital of the next state north. I was visiting friends, I said. And that was all I said. I didn’t want him to know who my friends were or where they lived. He didn’t pursue it.

“I’ve worried about him over the years,” I said, realizing immediately what I was saying. I was a man who worried, but not enough to stop in thirteen years. A man who recognized a metaphor – the boy as the vast neglected population of Mexico – and left it at that.

The whisky was losing its heating power. I decided it had placed myself in a weak position. The man sighed. He looked at the boy. He looked back at me. Both of us looked for clues. The man’s shoes were modest, the soles good. Mine were fancy nylon sandals, with thick treads for wading in clean rivers and getting in out of first world kayaks.

“His name is Jorge,” the man said. “He’s always been that way.”

“I’m glad someone’s helping him,” I said. “I’ve never tried to help him.”

“Yo tampoco,” says the man. Me either. He raised his considerable eye brows, as if he were telling me something of great significance I probably couldn’t understand. “Even God has not helped him.”

This was a mouthful. I looked kitty-corner to the church.

“Someone over there helped him,” he said. And then he put his palms over his eyes, spread his fingers, and peeked through. As if to say, let’s not go any farther in that direction. He was also grinning, and the humor seemed like it could be at my expense.

“Ven,” he said, using the intimate imperative. Come! And we walked back toward Jorge. The man brought out a paper-wrapped shape, folded back the paper, and lifted out a taco. Chunks of meat in a red sauce. Jorge took it, at about solar plexus level, and dropped his face to it, like a dog. His hands were more than dirty. He farted as took the first bite.

The man wrapped the empty paper together so the juices were on the inside. He took a few steps and threw it against the wall of the unfinished structure, where it dropped among other similar wrappings, just below the graffiti “Vale verga mal gobierno”. He walked back to me.

“I can show you the church,” he said. He saw my doubt. “It’s alright, no one is going to shoot you,” he caught my eye, “if you come in peace.” He had raised his eyebrows again, to emphasize seriousness. If you come in peace sounded like some kind of authority. I was also not sure how we had made the jump: Jorge, then going in the church.

I considered saying I had to get along. I took out my car keys. He glanced at them. “You care about Jorge. We are not always ready to help those we don’t know.” I decided we meant him and me. And that he was building brotherhood.

“No one is going to kidnap you,” he said, with I thought a priest-like smile. “I know you’re curious. They hide nothing. Over half of this village has left the Catholic Church to worship there.” He pointed across the street. I took in the preferred church’s double door, the gothic half-arch windows, the bumpy frosted bronzed plastic panes. The oversized brass door handles – low-end Southern California crematorium style, without the smokestack.

“People are beginning to help Jorge. You’re not the only one.” He opened one side of the double doors. He switched on the lights.

“It’s just us,” he said, turning back.

I pointed my keys at my car, to make sure it was locked. Its parking lights winked.

“Do you have a key for yourself?” he snorted. He was very agreeable. But his joke showed too much intelligence. His Spanish was too clear. I remained standing in the doorway.

“What’s your connection to the church?” I asked, needing reassurance. I used su, the formal possessive adjective. I wanted to keep my distance.

“It’s complicated,” he said. I backed up a few steps, beckoning to him to come back out and discuss it with me.

“What do you want to know?” he asked.

“Well, I’m not sure what I can ask,” I said, thinking of my wife’s warning.

“Where are you staying?” he asked. And then: “Never mind, that just feeds your suspicion. I assure you, we help more people than we kill,” he said, lifting his considerable eyebrows – straight-faced. Pulling my leg, I thought, to show me I was being paranoid.

“My name is Luís,” he said. I shook his hand. It was cold. I did not say my name.

Inside, there were ten or more rows of simple benches. There was space in front for kneeling before the Santa Muerte. She was a plastic Katrina, a skeleton, with three-dimensional bones, wrapped in see through pastel chiffon. She rose up life-size out of a sea of devotional candle that flickered red, white, Virgin Mary blue, and ecclesiastical purple. She was missing one arm. A few shriveled and forgotten Purépecha women knelt before her, fingering their rosaries and praying for what? Food? That someone would touch them? See the nineteen-year old inside?

A car crunched to a stop. The door opened. A Policía Federal stepped through, his jacket too tight for more than one button. He held a small package wrapped in white paper. He glanced at the Indian women. He looked me up and down. He said something to my host. Something quick. A question, ending with ternero. Something like: Is this the missing calf?

Luís’s answer was also quick, and equally coded. “Aún no ha pastado.” Too young to graze, still at the mother’s tit.

“This is Nacho,” said Luis, with his palm out. No one was interested in my name. Luís brought three folding chairs over from the wall, and set them up facing each other. He placed a fourth one in the middle. Nacho unfolded his package on the fourth chair. “Chivo,” he said. Goat meat. I could smell it. So could the Purépecha women. Their rebozos shadowed their faces. Their head had turned, and they were staring. They did not look away.

With a little homophobic posturing – hip cocked, hand on his elbow, finger on his lips – Luís chose a bottle, from the feet of the Saint. Jim Beam.

Nacho gestured toward the goat meat. “Tómale, güero!” He handed me a napkin. I plucked out a hunk of mutton. The meat was still warm, not too fatty. He handed me an envelope of salt. We drank out of votive glasses. Mine was Virgin blue. Nacho wore gold chain under his gun-blue shirt. He needed a shave. His eyes were brighter than I liked. My hand trembled as I lifted my glass. I steadied it with my other hand.

“Qué tal los ataques contra el gobierno?” he asked. How do you like those attacks against the government?

His eyes were bloodshot. I was expected to give an answer. My chest was warm. My heart fluttered. I saw burning buses, trailer truck infernos, their drivers lying in the street. Tiro de gracia. A bullet in the back of the head. Someone like Nacho, shaved, two buttons buttoned, dark suit, standing in front of a huge Mexican flag, the presidential sash across his chest. Three years down the line.

I started to speak.

“Thirty-three municipalities,” he smacked, his mouth full of goat “They got money for sewage treatment plants, not a single one built, casas muy chillón instead, glitzy houses, built by the mayors. Feeder springs covered over. The silted lake. The water level drops. No fish. Horses and oxen for plowing. This is the pinche twenty-first century.” Nacho licked a thumb and hairy forefinger. He glared at me as if I were the cause of it all.

I felt safe. The chatty circle. Three chairs. The Jim Beam. The Indian women had turned away, too hungry to keep their bodies twisted. Like street dogs that knew they weren’t going to be fed.

“I could make a call on my radio, and 40 armed men would be here in three-quarters of an hour. Cut off the roads in ten different places. Lanzagranadas, RPG’s, granade launchers. It takes three hours for the army to get anywhere. A hundred years lost. No jobs. Shit for education. Aguacate or mariguana? How hard a choice is that? The North pretends it’s not involved. Maybe we’ll build the goddamn treatment plants. The fish will come back. Fuck the mal gobierno. We’ll kill the people who stand in the way. Send down the drones and we’ll kill your children.” I looked at Luís. Luís raised his eyebrows. At me.

I had stopped eating. I looked back at Nacho. His eyes were bulging, as if he had come to the surface too quickly. I looked at my Virgin blue votive glass. It was empty.

Nacho said pués, he had to go. He stuck out his gun leg and pulled out his black automatic, some kind of Glock. He cocked it and pointed it at my right foot. I pulled my foot back a bit. The Glock was stuck in midair, and didn’t follow. Nacho wiped goat grease off his mouth. He re-holstered the gun. He filled my votive glass with Jim Beam. He said maybe I could write a letter of recommendation for his daughter, so she could study in Chicago. He showed me a photo. A charming young woman. I imagined myself married to her, visiting Nacho on the weekends. Her name was Maricruz. The old question floated in the air. You know, like how do you get her across?

“Tunnels,” he winked. “And friends.”

I nodded. We stood and shook hands. I bowed slightly, the way my mother taught me. To show I respected him. “Mucho gusto,” I said.

“I know where to find you,” he said. I looked at Luis. He raised his eyebrows – another warning. Or jest. I couldn’t tell which. There were a few chunks of meat left. Nacho wrapped them. He glanced over at the Indian women, decided against it, and put the meat in his pocket, for later.

He stopped at the door. “I also know how to tell others where you live.” A comment I didn’t think went well with the recommendation for Maricruz. And then he was out the door. We heard the car pull away, heading back to the town.

It was very likely he had seen my license plate. He had a radio, probably a black thing, with blinking lights. The curse of Mexico is that there’s a sophisticated microwave repeater tower on every mountain top. I calculated the ease of cross checking information. It was still late afternoon. Transito could still be open. Maybe he already knew my name and address.

Luís led me out the back door, into the sweet smell of cow. A farmyard, carpeted with shredded dried manure from various animals. In a small corral of their own, two fine oxen, for plowing. A large corral, partly covered, with a dozen grey, flop-eared, hump-backed Brahman, happy to back from their lakeside grazing. A clutch of gleaming brown hens scattered before us, heads down, making lateral escapes. Slim Ameraucanas – my favorites. Pigs I could smell and hear, but not see. Probably the same for them.

“Where are we going?” I asked. He looked at me but did not answer. A bent campesino approached us from a path that led in from the marsh. A substantial haystack walked along behind him. A burro loaded with rastrojo de maíz, dried corn stalks, to the extent that the animal was completely hidden. Even its legs. We arrived at a shed at the same time.

“This is Don Venus,” said Luis.

I nodded. Don Venus looked just past me, at one of my ears. He moved his lips. No sound came out. Luis asked him to wait a moment before unloading the rastrojo. The shed was a lean-to, open on three sides. There were still some stalks leaning up against the rear wall. Luís pulled these aside and revealed an old green plastic tarp. And out from under this, he pulled what most of us recognize as the global insurgent weapon, the Kalashnikov assault rifle, or AK-47. It was painted a marine gray, chipped and dinged. God knows how old, or from what military. He fumbled around some more and brought a cuerno de chivo, the curved thirty-round magazine, and clicked it into place, thus completing the icon. In some parts of Asia and Africa, the whole thing for twenty dollars.

“How many have you got?” I asked, before I could stop myself.

He ignored me and told Don Venus – who had seen everything – to go ahead and unload his corn stalks. “Ven,” he said, and we started off on the path into the marsh. Right away, he pulled a pint bottle out of his back pocket. More Jim Beam. I took a swig. Then he took one. Then he dropped the bottle on a tuft of soft dry grass that the Brahmans appeared to be saving for later. “We´ll pick it up on the way back,” he said. He gave me a challenging smirk, in anticipation of a discovered deficiency – in me. “Have you ever shot one of these things?” he asked. I hadn´t. And the little warrior in me thrilled.

The path was a raised dike, formed by the dredged channel to our left. We passed a drawn up dugout – a canoa, the modern version, plywood and fiberglass – that waited for its fisherman to return. The dike widened a little. We stopped where a square – maybe six feet by six feet – had been cut out of the bog.

“Do you see it?” he asked.

I saw something in the brown water, a foot down. I stepped closer. A body splayed out, with small fish, too ravenous to flee, eating away at a vague white mass. Then I realized I was looking at a hoof, and that the victim was a calf that had been split open and staked down at each hoof. And then I thought I saw a human hand floating deeper down, below it all.

I caught a movement in the corner of my eye. I turned and saw that Luís had the Kalashnikov pointed at me.

“You could donate your arm to the Saint,” he said. And then, with his brows raised, “For Jorge’s sake.” A smile formed. He thought it was funny.

He swung the gun away. “Let’s shoot it,” he said, and I jumped when he fired a single round at some grebes that were dunking and squeaking, in open water a hundred feet away. The birds fluttered across the water, turning this way and that. Some went airborne, others submerged. I felt pee cooling on my inner thigh.

“You try it,” he said. He moved a lever. “Automatic,” he said. He presented the gun with both hands, like an award. I held it at waist level and fired off a burst. At the grebes, farther away now. They panicked. One fluttered, then floated limp. My ears rang. I fired another burst. This one longer, and cut a path back back into the junco, a not too distant line of reeds. And then I fired until the cuerno de chivo was empty. On purpose. He understood what I’d done. His eyebrows were raised.

“Pasto para los chivos, cuernos para los cuervos.” He smirked, again as if he had discovered a small hypocrisy. Grass for the goats, horns for the crows. Or was the last phrase bullets for the cuernos de chivo -for the corpses the crows will pick at?

I didn’t understand. My mind was on the shredded calf, picked at by fish. I wondered it they were the same white fish that the tourists ate deep fried and cold. Plus, there was something else I couldn’t quite focus on.

On the way back, we stopped for the bottle. The whisky helped. I looked to see if you could see pee wetting through on my pants. You couldn’t. Don Venus sat on a three-legged stool. His burro dozed tied to the shed. Don Venus held a machete across his thighs. Luís handed him the Kalashnikov. Don Venus walked into the shed, to put it away. He carried the machete in his left hand, by its plastic black handle, and the AK-47 balanced in the right so the muzzle wouldn’t drag on the ground – as if it too were a campesino’s everyday tool.

We went back into the church. There were more women inside. One of them very pretty, with expensive shoes, an alligator handbag, and a thin-striped blue and black rebozo, to make her look Indian. I heard her smooth voice address the Santa Muerte: “Preciosa” –precious. Then she looked at me, curious, lingering. I recognized a woman of open complexity. At another time I might have joined the church, to be near her. Outside, I said she was muy guapa, very attractive. Luís raised his eyebrows and tickled the air with his forefinger – Mexican for yes. He said her husband was killed in a shoot out with Federal Police. I suspected Nacho immediately, but didn’t say anything. She had parked her new VW Jetta so close to the front door that we were barely able to squeeze out.

“A stunning woman,” he said. I thought I could hear suggestion in his voice. Like, you could have her, if you were with us. I wondered why her husband was in a shoot out. That brought up the word my wife didn’t want me to use. So I didn’t say it.

We shook hands. I wanted to ask things. The hand under the calf, for instance. Was he supposed to build a sewage treatment plant? Did he offer crystal meth to teenagers, then fuck them? And what’s the stuff with the calves?

Luís raised his eyebrows. “We’ll find her an arm from some other carbrón.” Perhaps because of the whisky and brotherhood, I shook his hand again. Maybe just to celebrate the arm I appeared to be getting away with. Maybe all they had was the hand and not the whole arm. I ignored the word cabrón as a license permitted between warm-chested friends.

“Don’t come back,” he said. “And don’t use the word narco. It just brings trouble.

“I understand,” I said. Although I didn’t.

“Don’t stop again,” he said. I wasn’t sure why he was emphasizing the point. As he squeezed past the Jetta to go back in, he looked at me and wagged his forefinger, Mexican for no.

Under the windshield wiper, on the driver’s side, I found the wrapping from Jorge’s taco. I was pretty sure he had put it there. Some of its juice had dripped down out of sight below the wiper. I took the paper out from under the wiper. I didn’t know where to put it. Jorge was standing across the road still. He was holding his hand out. I walk across the road. He stood firm. His hand moved a little toward me. He didn’t look at me. I put the wrapper in his hand. His head bobbed a little. He lowered his arm, still holding the paper. He continued looking at the road, and beyond to the Iglesia de la Santa Muerte. With the barest trip in my voice, I said, “Que te vaya bien, Jorge,” take care, and I returned to my car. I held my arm up and pointed with the key. The parking lights winked. And then I got in and locked the doors.

The Tumor and the Baritone

Posted on by sterlingbennett

When my Uncle Joe ate, he bent over his food, looking at a point a foot or so in front of him, and chewed in slow mortification. He also whispered when he wrote, in a high register, not too different from whistling. I have always thought, as many words were lost to the air in front of him, as were ever written down. Between fits of scribbling, he rustled pages in his small notebook, back and forth, as if it were important never to let the words hop forward, from one page to the next, but rather to hide them in different spots, like a squirrel.

Part of the problem, it seemed, was that Uncle Joe had a tumor that was pressed against certain nerves and affected his activities, including one not so easily discussed by people like me who grew up in New England and were taught to avoid the topics that fascinate us most.

He was lonely during this part of his life, and so he would suggest trips to his nieces and nephews. And since he really only had one of each, and since his niece Eleanor, my sister, was only eight, he tended to take her to the zoo and me, who was a good ten years older, to the African Niger delta or the upper reaches of the Amazon.

He preferred the Amazon, especially the area west of that river’s confluence with the Rio Negro. There, the water was clearer, deeper, the air less fetid and heavy, the mood, in short, more optimistic than among the swamplands of the Niger. In that place the mosquitoes, the billowing thunderheads, and the presence of poisonous snakes filled the air with danger to the point that there was no air left to breathe, and my Uncle Joe and I had to hyperventilate just to stay even. Exhausted by these conditions, and to counter the thirst that fear induces, I learned to drink quantities of African beer, and to glide over the muddy Niger either bent over my own food or slumped down in our leaky boat in an alcoholic stupor.

In Brazil we traveled in dugouts only, propelled by long-shafted outboards that slanted back into the water at such an angle that we were able to navigate through extremely shallow waters if we needed to find a sand bar for sleeping, or approach a village for food. My Uncle Joe chose outboards in general, because the sound of the motor drowned out the ringing in his ear from the tumor that was always the other companion on these jaunts – this two centimeter egg that nested in his brain, just inland from his left ear.

The tumor, which was to be measured and simply observed for the time being, had a profound effect on my uncle’s artistic proclivities. A fairly shy man for most of his years, he began to make up arias and ballads and sing them in a surprisingly beautiful baritone, which attracted the attention of people and some animals wherever we went.

Late one afternoon, a river steamer came up behind us, hissing an arc of water ahead of its copper bow, billowing black smoke, giving short asthmatic blasts on its whistle to say they were overtaking, but also that the passengers should assemble, there was something worth seeing. In the midst of a sudden Brazilian downpour, which came and went, and over the drum of the slowing pistons, with women in white dresses hovering just back from the dripping canopy, you heard my Uncle Joe, saw him standing in the dugout, forward toward the bow, his right arm out, palm up, addressing the steamer, singing his own version of Puccini’s O mio Babbino Caro. He could not reach the highest notes. Plus, it was Lauretta’s aria, not Rinuccio’s. But it was his favorite, and inspired by moisture, he sang in his strange spine-tingling baritone which, because of the egg, had now been bumped up to a notch or two below tenor.

And I could see them, those straining faces, unable to speak, before this apparition, a full-bellied middle-aged man standing in his drenched white linen suit, with his arms outstretched, an unshaven Lauretta, in a soggy mouse-eaten Panama, pleading for permission to marry her love, which each woman on the steamer must have secretly believed was female, and very much like herself.

The captain of the steamer, which was called the Aberdeen, drew back on the throttle and the pistons lay still. The hull, black and rusted, glided noiselessly forward. Water dripped from the faded steamer canopy. This was when I think my uncle noticed people among his audience. Their presence seemed to make his voice swell, he doffed the limp Panama – a Cubano – and held it out in salute, up and down, so as not to suggest donations, while his voice trembled out the last few lines Lauretta’s longing.

On this particular occasion, the captain of the steamer, a gallant bearded officer in blue coat and white trousers and with gold on his hat, motioned that I should stop the engine and come along side. And when we had drawn close and our motor was still, I could see the captain’s white shirt was frayed at the collar, his eyes bloodshot beneath the brim of his splendid hat, and his nose red probably from something like what my uncle and I had drunk on the Niger and continued to drink on the Amazon.

We were invited to dine with a lady, he barked, an announcement that caused a murmur among the passengers, and when we were still closer, and he had come down a ladder and placed one scuffed leather boot on our gunnel, he added – in confidence – that she was an Austrian countess, from a very old and much respected European family.

But I was the only one who seemed moved by this information. With the motor off, the ringing had begun again in my uncle’s head and he sat now in the bottom of the dugout bent forward with his hands pressed to his ears, and appeared to experience something like the same sort of distress that he displayed while eating.

I felt sorry for him, the object of so many stares from the railing of the steamer above us. The throb of insects and frogs coming from the river’s banks made me feel as if I was under water. And I imagined the sound my uncle was hearing inside his head was simply the exaggeration of that, and a much more serious thrall.

Later, at dinner, the countess, who had placed my uncle at her side and me at her other side, whispered a question to me. Was my uncle’s affliction an old one and had he received treatment, and was he, in that very moment when he appeared to be eating, in fact crying? Because, she had noticed, his shoulders rose and fell and twisted, as he tore flakes of meat away from the chicken leg and drew them into his mouth.

I told her, because of the egg, he had a very great ringing in his head that caused him various vexations, not the least of which – and I am not sure it was because of the wine or out of pity for my uncle’s loneliness – and I asked her pardon for my directness – not the least of which was a distressing over-activity of his manhood which kept him restless at night and by day subject to bouts of unpredictable shyness.

The countess, a very dignified and, I must say, strikingly beautiful woman, looked straight ahead of her and nodded slowly, with the expression of someone who is contemplating a deeply moving human truth and, in her mind, searching for what steps should be undertaken in response.

From that moment on she grew even more gentle and solicitous with my Uncle Joe. She poured him wine, lay new chicken legs on his plate for him to bend over. She praised his singing, in comparative references, to our Scottish captain and other nodding heads at the table, and to me spoke of a great surgeon in Vienna whom she knew personally and who she was sure could help my Uncle Joseph, the name I now used when I referred to him.

We continued upriver for four days, the little steamer pulling our dugout behind like a colt on a lead to its mother, and I did not see much of my uncle and the countess, except at suppers, when my uncle bent over his food, and the countess, looking tired but happy, fussed lovingly over him and said endless kind things to me about the need for continuing my education and living in a stable healthy climate and avoiding the evils of smoking and alcohol.

After breakfast, on the fifth day, we cast off from the Aberdeen. Something had changed between the countess and my Uncle Joe. The sparkle had gone out of her eyes, she looked alternately angry and hurt, stared darkly at me, then looked away. My uncle was gallant but unreachable at the end. When the moment came, he bent to kiss her hand. She restrained herself, drew in a deep breath, and overcame, I think, an urge to hit him, then held the caressed hand strangely, with her other one, like someone covering a wound. He bowed once more, in his old linen suit and turned away, straight-backed and buoyant. A bell rang, the pistons stopped, steamer hushed to a crawl. We descended a hemp ladder to our tottering places in the dugout, and then fell behind, pushed away by the thrashing of the steamer’s great brass screw. While the distance increased, and the pistons beat out their rhythm of our separation, my uncle and I sat there among the empty beer bottles and stared a little like orphans, I thought, out over the steamer’s wake, the only connection now between us. The passengers waved, at first, then gradually found reasons to move away, so that the countess could be alone at the stern. And when she was very far away, she raised her arm, held it aloft for a long moment, then let it drop, and the steamer turned a distant green curve in the river, and was gone.

The water around us, the stirred mud, the unfamiliar floating leaves, other flotsam, gradually stopped roiling. Spilled gasoline, beer, and old bilge replaced the smell of the Aberdeen’s coal smoke. And we lay that way for some time, drifting and listening to the voices of the rainforest. My uncle seemed unexpectedly content. I had thought he would stay with countess and go to Vienna and be married and never be lonely again. But I said nothing. I primed the motor, adjusted the throttle, and before pulling the starter rope turned once more to look at him.

“The ringing is gone,” he said, and beamed the long warm, lingering smile of someone who is imparting very happy news. The ringing was gone, and it had been gone for more than a day.

I was going to ask the question that occurred to me in that moment, regarding causes, but my uncle seemed to have remembered something. He leaned over the side of the dugout and pulled on the string that hung down into the water, and brought up a bottle of beer. He got out his jackknife, cut it free, popped the lid off into the stinking bilge, and handed me the bottle. It was cool to the touch. How it had survived four days of dragging along behind the steamer, I had no idea. Then, from a second line, he snaked up another bottle, and cut it free for himself. And so we drifted, and drank our beers, as the day warmed, and talked about the countess – how kind and generous she had been. And how concerned she had been about my upbringing.

I must have had the questioning look again, because he winked, took a long swig and said, respectfully enough, I thought, “Very generous!” And with a whoop, more a croak that broke midway through, and no longer with any trace of the old mio babbino caro, threw his brown empty bottle – an act of littering – with an underhand sweep, high up over our heads, into the bright Brazilian morning – while we sat grinning, first checking to see it wasn’t going to land on our heads, then holding each other’s gaze, scamps who had escaped once more, far from the Niger and Vienna, and almost everything else, holding our breath, the sun warm on our backs, waiting for the bottle to fall. Waiting for the splash.

The Best Place in Mexico

Posted on by sterlingbennett

One of my favorite places in Mexico is the local barbershop; I don’t mean a chain like Starbucks for your male mop. I mean a room tucked back behind displays of cheap jewelry, or a street corner room about 15’ by 15’ with two doors, one facing each street, at 90 degrees to each other, so everyone can look in and see who’s sitting in the Forties barber’s chair; and where you can look out and see everyone that’s looking in at you.

I go to the first one, the one behind the cheap jewelry displays, next to the bank; the one that looks down Avenida Juárez toward the Mercado Juárez, a building similar to a 1870’s train station straight out of France. The other barbershop was in another town, Compostela, in another state, Jalisco. That one was staffed by two young women who treated me as a grand curiosity and worthy of a mixture of client care and intercultural flirtation. The only problem for me was they were still women. Let me explain.

In the wake of divorces, breakups and various scalp-numbing rejections, I had been cutting my own hair for maybe thirty or forty years as a way of lessening the impact of my Delilah Complex; that is to say, getting a handle on any personal caregiving that depended on the good offices of a woman with scissors in her hand. Also—before and since then—I have scorned any haircut that cost more than five dollars or smacked of styling.

I learned to run the buzzer over my own nobby skull but could never quite get all of it and would still have to ask my love to mow the rest of it in a final coup de grass.

One day, I complimented a white-haired Canadian acquaintance that I thought had a very good close-to-the-noggin haircut. He told me where to go and told me to simply ask for the Número 2. The number refers to the depth of the fence on the front of the clipper’s blades—Número 1 being the shortest cut.

Saturday morning is good, but almost anytime you’ll find a family with a father and a couple or three boys who have come to be shorn. You walk past the cheap jewelry, past barbers One and Two, then step up onto the slightly higher level in back and look for a chair in barber Three’s domain.

He nods and says, “Soon” and then turns his attention back to the father of three boys. That man is roughly forty. The barber seems to know what he wants: short on the sides and a sort of butte on top. The boy’s mother looks on, reserving comment but clearly sweet and proud of her males.

Then comes the oldest boy, who carries a handsome thicket black hair. He’s about twelve. The barber speaks from in back of the boy’s head.

“El mismo?” The same?

The boy looks at his father, looking for what—permission, guidance, a blessing? The butte forms on the top of his head, the barber dusts around his ears; and Second Son steps up, grinning as if receiving an award.

Everyone thinks this is high fun, and barber makes all kinds of observations about the speed of the boys’ growth being slower than the growth of their hair; asks whether they want to be able see out from under their mops when he’s through; and assures them they will be able to run faster afterward.

There are other customers waiting besides me. They all smile at the barber’s commentary and grin at each other; some make comments themselves; their eyes flick over at me at times to see whether the gringo finds everything equally funny. I do and spend most of my time smiling.

The littlest boy is about three or four and sports a fine mop. The barber places a little person’s seat that spans the chair’s armrests. He lifts the boy up onto it. The boy is shy; his smile appears and disappears in reaction to the banter. The barber addresses him in the same way he had his brothers.

“El mismo?” he asks. The same?

The boy looks over at his mother. She answers, “Of course!” The father nods. The boy perches a little forward, as if ready to take flight. The barber suggests he sit back. He says it gently. The boy doesn’t react. The barber asks several different ways, each one funnier than the last, and always gently. The boy looks at his father, then at his mother. It is a communication problem with a thousand factors. Finally, the barber lifts him a little and settles him against the back of the barber’s chair—intoning a brief chant that would reassure a colt. The rich black hair comes off, the ears extend sideways, the barber holds up a mirror. There’s the butte, just like his father’s. A smile lingers. With a puff of powder, the barber dusts around the neck, then lifts him down.

It has been twenty minutes at the most for all of them. The father pays; the boys say good-bye; the mother takes the littlest’s hand. The barber folds his money and wishes them all well.

He flaps the youngest’s black hair from the cloth, looks at me and nods. When he is through, my thin white hair will lie on the floor with the boys’ grackle-black shearings.

I say, “Número dos,” sweep both hands over the top of my head and make a kind of extended zupping sound to indicate removal.

He understands and begins. We do not speak. I am feeling taken care of within his culture. He is taking care of me even though I am foreign and he doesn’t know quite what to make of me—and probably assumes I don’t speak Spanish and can’t do client-barber talk.

He’s wrong about the first one. Maybe the second one will come with time.