Other Evolutions, page 16
We skidded to a stop behind a jam of other cars and I felt bile run up my throat as children came running out into the traffic. They were children the way my tio was a man, unaccountably small, even for 167their age. They had the taut worn faces of adults and were brandishing Chiclets, offering to clean the windshield, doing juggling tricks.
I had forgotten this part of Mexico, the part where the poverty was pressed right up against my nose the way it wasn’t at home, the part that reminded me how, despite everything, my life was steeped in good fortune.
They came to the window and my tio waved them off.
In high school a girl had once brought a visiting childhood friend to a party. The friend was from a small town and she kept saying how disgusting Ottawa was, how filthy and large and frightening. I found her small-town fears deeply amusing. But here in DF I felt a wave of understanding. Here, I was the frightened one. The shivering small-town bumpkin, unsophisticated and provincial.
All around me life was flowing, millions of people hacking a living in this unforgiving city, surviving and even occasionally thriving in a way I knew that, if left to my own devices, I would simply fail at.
The lights shifted. The van lurched forward. We turned onto a wider street indicating we were in a richer colonia.
I asked tio Diego to pull to the side of the road and tried to breathe shallowly until he did. Then I opened the car door and vomited, the sour stench of stomach acid and plane food curdling on the sidewalk. Businessmen with shiny polished shoes and shellacked hair glanced at me in disgust then looked away.
I wiped my mouth.
It’s the altitude, I said between heaves. I’m not used to the altitude.
A man hawking bottled water conveniently rushed up, my sickness enough to secure a sale.
As I panted, my body wrung out from the vomiting, the euphoria of wellness rushing back into my body, I heard the snap of the water bottle being opened and then water being splashed on my face, on my neck, against my forehead.
I spat the stale water in the street, and felt ashamed.
The Road
168It wasn’t until nearly two hours later, when we made our way out of the city and hit the first of the toll highways, that tio Diego truly began to speak to me, in rapid Spanish that slipped through me like a river, impossible to fully grasp. It made me feel that the conversation was not something that was occurring between us, but something he was doing at me.
Looking back, the surreal part of this was how it was as if we had had a conversation completely in English, because my mind seized onto the language of comprehension: it translated what it needed to and erased everything else.
Tio Diego’s monologue went something like this:
God forgive me, but I always knew that your mother would do something like this. She runs off with money from that [rapist?] and she thinks she’s too good for us.
Rapist, I thought. Rapist???
I had never thought of my mother’s biological father in these terms. I had deliberately not allowed myself to. I couldn’t bring myself to say the word. I was not sure I understood correctly and was afraid to ask for a corrective.
It’s good that you’re here now, maybe you can meet a nice boy and settle down. Your mother told me you’re running around town with a [redacted, likely anti-Asian slur]. You should find a nice Catholic boy.
I tried to tell him in a cold but firm tone not to talk about Constantine that way. I think instead I may have mixed up tenses and said something 169closer to I don’t think you should talk to Constantine. Tio Diego took his eyes off the road and stared at me in some confusion.
Taking this pause as encouragement I drew breath and began to speak again.
I wanted to say that his anti-Asian sentiments were regressive and hurtful and unforgivable. Also to explain I didn’t want to marry anyone Catholic as I did not relate to or understand Catholicism in any meaningful way. I didn’t want to marry anyone at all; the only boy I had ever thought I wanted to settle down with, dead. Though if, as I knew through my lived experiences and as confirmed by those around me, he was dead, how could it be that I had seen him right before I came here? If this was all in my mind why had my fantasy provoked such a physically humiliating reaction? Had tio Diego ever urinated all over himself in a moment of extreme psychological vulnerability?
However, the linguistic complexities of trying to explain this in Spanish resulted in the following blunt statement: I’m Jewish.
This was true in my heart if nowhere else, and as I searched for the word for urination tio Diego began a new monologue.
I’ve always liked your father. The Jews are a great people. We must never forget that Jesus himself was Jewish.
I was tired of Christians reminding me that Jesus was Jewish as it usually indicated the opening foray into an attempt to convert me.
The Jews are a chosen people. I would like, one day, to go to Israel to see where Jesus himself was born.
In fact, the first time I met your father I told him he was chosen and we had a long discussion about God. Your father is a very holy person, I always think of him as a great scholar . . .
170I wondered what on Earth my father and tio Diego had actually discussed, as my father spoke and understood less Spanish than me. I could picture him nodding along amiably, his hand entwined in my mother’s, waiting for the tios to stop talking, waiting to go to his hotel, waiting to go home.
The monologue began to drift away from my father to religion again, towards Catholicism now, and how the first time my tia Maria got pregnant with my prima Maria, she had wanted an abortion and he had convinced her it was a sin from which her soul would never recover.
I suppose that I ought to have argued what I believed, that it was a woman’s right to choose and that what my tio had done was appalling and coercive, but not only did I lack the language to defend my point of view but it seemed mean-spirited to argue that my prima, who did exist, and was currently a living breathing person, should not have existed. I could recognize that this passivity was not something that existed in me in Canada when I was speaking in English or even French. But we were in Mexico now and I was already defeated.
Halfway to the farm the golden arches of a McDonald’s appeared along the highway. From my first visits to Mexico as a toddler I had been so overwhelmed by the different people, landscapes, and language that I had refused to eat anywhere but at American franchise restaurants, which were the same in Mexico as they were in Canada. The hamburger buns in Mexico even had the same white circle on the bottom as they did at home, a fact which comforted me as a child but now, as an adult, I found a little disturbing. There is nothing quite like McDonald’s french fries though, and over a Happy Meal for me and a black coffee for tio Diego, somewhere between DF and the farm where my mother was, I tried my best to communicate my thoughts on abortion, God, and the linguistic limits of communicating in a third language.
The Sainted Place
171The pueblo where my abuela lived was so small that when I was little I didn’t realize it was distinct from a slightly larger town we passed on the way over. That town had recognizable things a village might: a church, a laundromat, a grocery store, a community building that could be converted into a cinema or a dance hall as the need might be. Surrounding the centre were rings and rings of small streets made up of family homes. And then beyond that was a main arterial road surrounded by hills and shrubs. Occasionally a small dusty path jutted away from the main roadway. One such road, barely big enough for a car, widened into cobblestones and led to the pueblo where my abuela’s farm was situated.
The pueblo was named after a popular saint, a name so common it rendered the pueblo indistinguishable from thousands of other little towns and hamlets hidden in the valleys of Mexico between the great cities. Marnie had long ago nicknamed it the Sainted Place and I still thought of it that way.
If visiting DF felt like falling into a technological future as it was already being lived, visiting my abuela’s farm felt like falling back in time.
Part of my father’s mania for film extended to a reverence for the endless BBC adaptations of nineteenth-century English classics. I found in the fetishization of the pastoral an echo of what it was like to visit the farm. Here too there were cobblestones and gossip and Christianity and neighbours upon whom we forced our charity.
The pueblo had its own church, a tiny thing that could contain perhaps twenty-five people. It also had a school, right beside the church. There was also a small building formerly used for grain, where the people gathered for festivals, fairs, elections, and meetings. In every aspect they echoed the larger town we had to pass through: 172the Sainted Place was a town done up in miniature, everything scaled for a smaller group.
These buildings were all gathered around a small plaza. And whose home was among those abutting this zócalito? My abuela’s.
It was originally built as a one-story, two-room bungalow. But over the years as money was scraped together addition after clumsy addition was added till it grew into the white-painted home I was familiar with.
Like most homes in Mexico it was built in an imitation Spanish style. There was no lawn to speak of, only a deeply unfriendly whitewashed wall adorned with broken bottles on top to ward off any burglars. The sole entry point was a green metal wicket gate that, when fully opened, was just wide enough for cars. And beyond this gate was, supposedly, my mother.
We arrived at this town at night.
There was no bell so tio Diego made me get out of the car and rap on the metal door until my knuckles were raw.
But flesh is no match for metal.
Right around the time when my hand was beginning to hurt and I switched to slapping the door I started feeling really, truly annoyed. That I had come all this way and I was about to be defeated by a goddamn piece of metal. How stupid. How ridiculous. I was just about to turn around and tell tio Diego to forget the whole thing and drive me back to DF so I could at least spend some time with the primas and have a halfway decent vacation when I heard a sort of shuffling from the other side of the gate. It was too deliberate to be a loose sheep or one of those awful turkeys my abuela used to raise. My heart beat wildly, impossibly faster, and I reached to put my hand over my breast to keep my heart inside my chest.
¿Quién es?
Alma, I said. Almita, la niña de Merced.
The voice considered this answer.
Tio Diego, impatient, hammered on the horn, disrupting the quiet of the village.
173The narrow gate creaked open.
For a second, I swear, I saw my mother.
Instead I found myself face to face, or rather chest to face (my chest, his face), with a small mustachioed man, a hired hand, who took one look at me, shut the door, and then, before I even had time to feel affronted, opened the gates back up fully so that tio Diego could begin the nerve-wracking work of parking the car inside. There is an art to backing a car through the gate and there was about a centimetre of give each way. It was usually a pleasure to watch this sort of reverse birth, the impossibility of the wide car fitting through such a small space being overcome with no flair, no bravado whatsoever, only simple skill and technique.
But for once I didn’t want to stand and watch my tio perform this uniquely Mexican magic trick. I wanted my mother.
So before tio Diego could begin to back the car inside I walked through the gate, each step bringing forth a memory of my abuela’s home. It was like I had forgotten everything until suddenly there it was before me. There was the curved path that led around the house. There was the second, arched gate that led to the courtyard, another unique feature of Mexican homes that I loved so much. The floor of the courtyard was tiled over and there were plants everywhere.
From the courtyard I could see all the different parts of the house, some of them stone and some cement, for as the years changed so did building materials. There was no common interior hallway. To get from the living room to the kitchen you had to cross the courtyard. To go to the bedrooms on the second floor above the dining room you would have to leave the kitchen, cross the courtyard, and go through the dining room, where behind that room was a storeroom which also contained a series of wooden steps that led up to the second floor where the beds were.
I was beginning to wonder where to begin my search for my mother when suddenly my abuela appeared.
She was a tiny, terrifying woman. Tinier even than tio Diego.
174She had what appeared to be cataracts over her eyes now, a new development since I had last seen her, and she walked with a cane though as far as I could tell this was more for aesthetic purposes than to do with any visible limp.
She was upon me almost without my noticing, come to see who had disturbed the peace of her home.
She knew me at once.
It seems to me, she said, looking me up and down, you’re Merced’s daughter.
Then she took me by the hand and led me to the kitchen.
Abuelita
It was always strange to me to hear people talk about grandmothers who pinched their cheeks and snuck them sweets and cookies. My abuela didn’t think much of me as a granddaughter.
When she led me by the hand to the kitchen it wasn’t to be kind or to feed me or to offer me a drink. It was to get me to make her tea.
It was hard to explain that I had never lit a gas stove before and was slightly terrified that if I tried with her 1970s model with half the knobs missing and a broken grate over one of the burners I was fairly sure I would light us both on fire.
Idiota, she muttered under her breath.
I didn’t begrudge her this. By the time she was my age she had birthed all four of her children and was co-running the farm with my abuelo. She thought I was being difficult on purpose.
But this was Mexico, where the ephemeral nature of my anxieties clashed against brute reality and almost always lost.
175My abuela wanted her tea and her tea she would have, even if I killed us both in the process of making it.
From a drawer she procured a matchbox with a picture of the Virgin on it and gestured for me to light it. I made my abuela hold the box while I struck the tip over and over against it until finally a flame sprang forth. She turned the knob for the gas and held it while I was able to light the working burner. A kettle was located and I filled it with water from the tap. I was staring up at the veritable apothecary of dried herbs attached to the ceiling when tio Diego came in.
Why is this strange man in my kitchen, my abuela asked me.
I couldn’t tell if she was play-acting senility or actually experiencing it.
Tio Diego pulled her into a hug that seemed too rough for her fragile body. Leave her alone, he said, your grandchildren aren’t your servants.
He reached up, grabbed some dried leaves, and threw them in the kettle without looking.
That’s not what I wanted, my abuela began saying at the same time my tio began chastising her for turning on the stove.
Whatever you do, he said pointing at me, never leave her alone with fire.
Then he told me to go find my mother.
I went to the bedroom first. She wasn’t there. There were traces of her: half-drunk plastic water bottles; her suitcase at the edge of one of the beds full of clothes that didn’t smell like her; her gold wedding ring on the nightstand. I had rarely seen it off her finger and I slipped it on my own, for safekeeping.
Back in the courtyard my suitcase had materialized.
I can’t find Mama, I told tio Diego who was in the kitchen, heating some tortillas.
I went to the shower which was a generous name for what it actually was: a concrete room, semi-outdoors. It had plumbing but no windows, 176a half wall that looked out onto the fields. This was enough, I supposed, for my abuela and my tios when they were at the farm. Even enough for my cousins, who were so short that they were covered completely by the half wall. But for Marnie and me, showering at the farm was a choice between hunching protectively in a painful crouch or standing upright and risking that someone cutting through the field might see our breasts.
My mother wasn’t in the shower. No one was.
It felt like years since I had washed myself, and with shame I realized that I still hadn’t been able to properly bathe since that morning.
I looked out onto the fields. The limitless-seeming land did not show how, like the house, it had been bought piecemeal, with money scrimped and saved over time, money from my father and mother, money from my tios that was supposed to go towards feeding my grandparents and instead had gone to this.
Crops no longer grew there. My abuela sometimes rented it out to local farmers so that they might graze their animals but aside from the occasional donkey or stubborn shrub the land went unused.
And yet who did I see as I looked out?
My mother, lit up by the light of the moon, standing at the farthest end of the field where the clear-cut abutted the wild.
Mama
She was looking at an outcropping of trees that bordered my abuela’s estate, trees shaped exactly like giant pineapples.
I ran to her in a hurry, convinced that in the time it would take me to get to her she would disappear, a Mama vanishing act, not an Alma one. I was wearing overpriced name-brand running shoes, the kind 177that city-dwellers use to go from their homes to their offices. With each step, I could feel the stones dotting the field, the stray bits of plant stalk poking through the moisture-wicking netting, everything making me aware of how unwelcome my soft and tender feet were.
