1985. Several years after my mother’s death.Tí a 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
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 anything
except about the watermelon seeds on
your clothing or shoes and the juice
that trailed down your cool white sum-
mer 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 cotton
sheet and look at the enormity of stars
out there behind the store, a coyote
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
myriad of ugly ways—a cruel manifes-
tation of our unrealized connection to
all life. I also rue the fact that one day,
in an act of sisterly retaliation and
rebellion, I placed a still hot flour tor-
tilla 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
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.
It was at my Tia Chita’s house next
to the Madrid Store on that long dusty
highway leading into the Big Bend, that
remote parallel other country, a Texas
that was more than Texas, that I came
to value books and the worlds they
spoke of, faraway Dostoyevskian
Chekhovian Shakespearian worlds,
removed from my own small, still unre-
alized trajectory. The world was sim-
ple then: a good freshly made hot tor-
tilla held whatever you wanted and it
was good. Inside or out, in the hot sun
or in the coolness of the summer night,
near that long winding almost endless
road that led to my mother’s dreams,
we knew what nourishment was: fami-
ly, a good book, a hot tortilla—but-
tered, salted, cold, hot, jammed,
cheesed, frijole’ed or just plain. ¡Ay, esas
tortillas! ¡Ay, esos tacos! Good Texas
Tacos.
Cenizo
Second Quarter 2013
11