B0061QB04W EBOK (5 page)

That night was long and restless. I wanted to scratch, scratch, scratch. But could not. The overwhelming smell of the kerosene made it almost impossible to breathe. I reached for my towel and pulled on it, not able to bear the pain and the dizziness any longer.

“Leave it alone,” Mago said.

“It hurts so much,” I said. “I need to scratch. I really need to.”

“My scalp feels as if it’s on fire!” Carlos said. “I can’t take it anymore.”

“Don’t do it,” Mago said. “We’ll get our hair chopped off if you ruin it now.”

“I don’t care!” With one swoop of his hand, Carlos pulled off the towel.

Shortly thereafter, when I reached my limit, I did the same.

Abuela Evila was true to her word. The next afternoon, when my grandfather came home from work, she had him take out his razor blade and scissors. Carlos didn’t put up much of a fuss because he was always trying to please my grandfather. His hair was completely
shaved off. We ran our hands over his bald head, feeling the stubble tickle our palms. When she saw him, Élida said, “You look like a skeleton.” She was always making fun of him because Carlos was really skinny, except for his bloated abdomen, and now with his head completely bald, he did look like a skeleton. Élida started to sing a song, “La calaca, tilica y flaca. La calaca, tilica y flaca.” I laughed because it was a funny song, and I could picture a skeleton dancing along to it.

“Regina, it’s your turn,” Abuela Evila said.

“Please, Abuelita, no!” I yelled as my grandmother dragged me to the chair. My grandfather hit me on the head with his hand and ordered me to sit still.

“Allá tú si te quieres mover,” he said when I wouldn’t stop. I jerked around, crying and yelling for Mami to come. I hated myself for being so weak the night before when I tore the towel off. My scalp still burned and my head hurt, but it had all been for nothing. I cried for my hair. It was the only beautiful thing I had. Curls so thick, women in the street would stop and touch it and tell Mami, “Qué bonito pelo tiene su hija. She looks like a doll.” Mami would smile with pride.

“Don’t move, Nena, he’s doing a really bad job!” Mago said. But I didn’t listen, and the scissors hissed near my ear. I squirmed even more at watching my curls land on the ground and on my lap, falling one by one like the petals of a flower. Then my grandmother’s chickens came clucking to see what was happening, and they picked up my curls and shook them around, and when they realized they weren’t food, they stepped all over them and dragged them with their feet across the dirt.

In the end, when Abuelo Augurio was done, I ran to my aunt’s dresser mirror and gasped. My hair was as short as a boy’s, and it was so uneven it looked as if one of the cows from the dairy farm down the road had nibbled on it. I looked at Papi’s photo hanging on the wall, right below the small window. I’d seen myself in the mirror enough times to know that his slanted eyes were just like mine. We both had small foreheads, wide cheeks, and a wide nose. And now, we both had short black hair.

“When are you coming back?” I asked the Man Behind the Glass.

I wished we had a picture of Mami. I wanted to tell her that I missed being with her. I missed watching her getting the dirty clothes
ready, putting them inside a blanket and tying the corners to make a sack, then throwing the sack on her head. “Vámonos,” she would say, and I walked alongside her to the canal. There I would sit on the washing stone while she scrubbed the clothes and told me stories. If the water was low, she would let me get in. I would chase after the soap bubbles as she dunked the clothes into the water to rinse.

I missed watching her go through her pretty Avon merchandise—smelling the perfumes, trying on the lotions that smelled of springtime—and seeing her face glow with pride after each sale.

I missed going with her to visit Abuelita Chinta, and taking a nap on Abuelita’s bed while they talked. I would fall asleep listening to Mami’s voice and the cooing of Abuelita Chinta’s doves. And at night, I missed snuggling with her on the bed she had slept in with Papi before he left. Mago and I had tried to keep Mami warm so she wouldn’t miss him so much.

Mago came in to tell me it was dinnertime, and I looked at her and hated her because she didn’t get her hair chopped off. She dealt with the stupid itching all night long. Even though her scalp was irritated and blistered, the lice were all dead. She washed her hair twenty times with Tía Emperatriz’s shampoo that smelled of roses, but it still reeked of kerosene. But at least she didn’t look like a boy.

“Leave me alone,” I said.

“Come on, Nena, come and eat.”

My stomach didn’t care that my hair got butchered. It groaned with hunger, and I had no choice but to go out into the kitchen where everyone could see me. Tía Emperatriz, who was at work when the hair cutting took place, gasped at seeing me and said, “Ay, Amá, what did you do to this poor girl?”

Élida said, “What girl? Isn’t that Carlos?” When I glared at her, she laughed and said, “Oops, I thought you were your brother.”

That night, I had a dream about Mami. In my dream she was washing my hair with lemon water and scrubbing it so gently my body shuddered with pleasure. I awoke with such longing that I felt like weeping. And then I realized that Carlos had wet the bed.

4

B
Y
J
UNE OF
1980, we had been at Abuela Evila’s house for six months. During the time Carlos, Mago, and I lived there with her, we were never taken anywhere, like to el zócalo downtown, the plaza with a monument to the Mexican flag and stone tablets explaining the role Iguala played in Mexico’s War of Independence; the beautiful San Francisco church built in the nineteenth century and surrounded by thirty-two tamarind trees; the bus station, el mercado, or the city’s popular train station that connected Iguala to Cuernavaca and Mexico City to the north, and the state capital, Chilpancingo, to the south.

The city of Iguala de la Independencia is actually the third-largest city in the state of Guerrero, the two others being Chilpancingo and Acapulco. My grandmother’s house was in a neighborhood known as La Guadalupe, on the outskirts of the city, although no one would call it the outskirts anymore. Whenever I can’t resist the pull of my
birthplace, I visit Iguala, and I have seen it grow to more than 110,000 inhabitants. The neighborhood where I grew up is no longer the undeveloped part of the city. It’s the new neighborhoods encroaching upon the foothills where the poorest people now live. Most of the streets of La Guadalupe have been paved and electricity is fairly stable, although running water is still not readily available.

Back then, Carlos, Mago, and I had mostly stayed on my grandmother’s property. We only ventured outside when my grandmother and Élida left for el centro on Saturday mornings. We would rush to the huge vacant lot near her house. There was an abandoned car there and we liked to play in it, but first we had to check for snakes. The car was rusty and the seats were full of holes. It had no tires, but the steering wheel worked just fine. I didn’t know how long that rusty car had been there, but I liked to believe Papi had played in it as a child. But since he stared working when he was nine, I don’t think he really had much of a childhood.

“Where are we off to today?” Carlos asked, taking his turn at the wheel. He made noises like the revving of an engine and turned the wheel to the left and to the right.

“To El Otro Lado,” I said.

“Here we go,” Carlos said.

The noises got louder. The car went faster. Carlos said, “Hold on tight for the jump!” He was a big fan of
The Dukes of Hazzard
, and his favorite character was the blond guy named Bo. In the evenings, Carlos would sneak out of the house and run to the baker’s to watch TV with his kids. He would get a piece of sweet bread because he didn’t mind being called a little orphan as long as he got a treat. While he was gone, Mago and I had to keep Abuela Evila from finding out where he was, although usually we didn’t need to say anything. Abuela Evila, Élida, and Tía Emperatriz would be sitting in the living room watching a telenovela and wouldn’t pay much attention to our whereabouts.

“Yeee-haa!” Carlos said. As he drove, I looked at the Mountain That Has a Headache and was sure El Otro Lado was over there. Mago said El Otro Lado was really far away, and back then nothing seemed farther away than an unknown town on the other side of the mountain.

“Head that way,” I told him. “That’s where Mami and Papi are.”

Carlos started the noises again. The engine revved and soon we were off. “Yeee-haa!”

Because I’d decided that my parents must be on the other side of the Mountain That Has a Headache, I got in the habit of looking at it each night and wishing my parents a buenas noches. In the morning, I wished them a buenos días. Carlos and Mago would do it as well, even though Élida would laugh and tell us we were a bunch of pendejos to believe our parents were that close.

“We aren’t idiots,” I would say to Élida. “My mami and papi are as close as I want them to be.”

At first, I hadn’t really known where to find Papi. All I had was his photo and the rich brown color of Mago’s skin, which was the color of rain-soaked earth, like his. But one day, as we were walking to the store, Mago stopped outside a house to listen to “Escuché las Golondrinas,” which was playing on the radio, and said, “Papi loved that song.” That is how I learned I could find him in the voice of Vicente Fernández. Another time, as we were walking to the tortilla mill, a man passed by us on his bicycle and we caught a whiff of something spicy, like cinnamon, and Mago said, “That’s how Papi smelled!” So
I would find him in the empty bottle of Old Spice we were lucky enough to discover in a trash heap.