The Five Acts of Diego Leon (2 page)

One such Saturday, his mother mounted the burro, and Elva led them out of town toward Pátzcuaro. It was past eight, and they would likely reach the city by noon. From where he sat behind his mother, Diego could see the glistening skin of the lake. The fishermen were out, their wooden canoes bobbing up and down as they drifted toward the middle of the water. They raised their nets, the long arms extending like the wings of a magnificent bird, and dipped them in then out. To Diego, it looked like a dance, the way they all moved together.

They soon came into a field dotted with prickly pear cacti, their wide green paddles reaching up into the sky like hands in supplication. Diego thought about the cochinilla, the insects that arrived in the spring and attached themselves to the paddles. Elva once told him that the females liked to feast on the cactus fiber. He watched the old woman press her fingers across the white clusters, crushing the insects. They released a bright crimson tint, which she dabbed on her mouth, then leaned in to kiss the back of his hands and arms, leaving faint impressions of her lips behind. They lasted the rest of the day, fading away little by little.

Elva held the burro’s saddle with her hand as she guided them, singing in P’urhépecha. More than once, Diego had heard Elva speaking the language to herself while she worked, mixing the words with Spanish. They were so strange, so different, and Diego liked their sound. He asked her to teach him, but his mother didn’t approve. He had some of their blood, she said, but he wasn’t one of them. He was different, she insisted. He could grow up to be whatever, whoever, he wanted.

They arrived in Pátzcuaro and followed the main avenue into town and toward the marketplace. It was teeming with vendors selling fruits, vegetables, spices, and flowers whose fragrant buds mixed with the scent of fresh tilapia the fishermen had caught that morning. They passed the ice vendor, the large square blocks dripping water, dampening the walkway where customers shuffled about.
Under a blue tarp, his mother purchased strips of fabric, a lace handkerchief, and a new pair of shoes and knitted socks for Diego.

“Aren’t they nice?” she asked, bending down to show him the shoes.

Elva reached out and felt them. “Very nice,” said the old woman. “And expensive, no doubt.”

“Nothing is too much for my son,” she said. “We have to make sure you have nice things for when your father returns. Come along. We’ll get you a bag of candy.”

His mother led them through the maze of stalls, past bundles of herbs drying in the sun, wicker baskets full of baked bread, and slabs of meat hanging from iron hooks where children with smoke-stained faces swatted flies away and shouted prices.

On their way out of the market, they passed the rail station. His mother pointed to the train that had just arrived. The engine hissed steam into the air as a whistle blew and a crowd of people climbed out from the wooden cars and onto the station’s planks.

“Look,” his mother told Diego. “That train there. You see it?”

Diego nodded, chewing on a piece of guava candy.

“It’s coming from Morelia,” she said. “We should board it. Take it into the city.”

“What about my father?” Diego asked, looking at her now.

But his mother didn’t answer.

I
N LATE
M
AY, A TROOP OF REVOLUTIONARIES RODE INTO TOWN
, toting treinta-treinta rifles. Their shirts were dirty, their trousers rags, their leather sandals thin and worn away. They were in shambles, their wide-brimmed hats filthy with the dust and grit of other fields and chaparrals extending far beyond San Antonio de la Fe and Pátzcuaro and Michoacán. One was injured, his leg covered in bandages caked in blood. He was carried into town on a cot and laid to rest inside the church; in case he died, they said, he would be near God.

The men were hungry, and the women, including his mother, gathered together what they had to feed them: a few eggs here and there, a stack of tortillas, beans, chiles, pieces of bread, enough coffee to make one pot. As the men ate, they talked about the battles they had fought, the mayhem and the slaughter, the fatigue and filth. It was hard to outrun the federal troops with their new weaponry, their faster horses, their better supplies, information and conditions. After eating, they gathered around a fire near the zócalo, drinking tequila and telling stories well into the night. Diego followed his mother to a group off to the side who were quietly cleaning their guns and smoking cigarettes.

“Excuse me,” she said.

One of them removed his hat and bowed his head. “Antonio Felipe Méndez at your service, señora.” The man strapped a gun to his holster. “And how old are you, son?” he asked Diego.

“Seven,” Diego said.

“Seven.” The man whistled. “You’re nearly old enough to join us, eh?” He gripped his holster.

“My husband—” his mother cut in. “The boy’s father … his name is Gabriel León. He followed some of the others out. We haven’t heard anything from him in two years. Can you—”

“I’m sorry, ma’am, but we’re scattered. It’s a real mess out there. I wish I had news of him.”

“Of course.” His mother thanked the soldier and said to Diego, “Come. Let’s go back inside. It’ll be dark soon.”

A few of the men had removed their hats and placed them on some of the boys, the brims falling over and covering their eyes as they chased each other around the fire pit. Diego wanted to join them, wanted to pretend to be a fighter protecting his village and his family.

“Can I stay?” he asked his mother. “Please? I want to play, too.”

“Not now,” his mother insisted. “We’re going home.”

Early the next morning, they rode off, on to Guanajuato to join another group of insurgents from Jalisco. Diego heard that the injured man had lived through the night, but his leg still bled. Elva said he would be lucky if he lived to see another day.

A week later, Diego’s mother told him to stay away from the other children. When he asked why, she said they were sick.

“How many of them, Mama?”

She hunched over the mortar and pestle, grinding cloves of garlic. “Enough to make me worry.” She turned to him now. “Promise me you’ll be careful. I don’t know what I’d do if you got sick.”

“I’ll be careful,” Diego said.

“Of course you will.” She reached out and stroked his face; her fingers carried the scent of garlic and onion. “I never have to worry about you.”

Diego did as she said and stayed away from the other children. He kept close to her side. But the next day, he began to cough, and that night, he woke shivering, his teeth chattering so loudly that
the sound woke his mother. She covered him with blankets and lay close to him, blowing on his hands and feet with her breath, but nothing helped. He was so cold. By morning, his forehead burned, and it hurt his eyes when she carried him out into the bright sunlight of the cookhouse. Elva insisted she had seen this before. She shook her head and sighed. Those men, she said. The troops who were just here. They reeked of disease. No doubt they brought this.

“I tried keeping the children away from them,” she explained. “But no one listened. They think an old lady doesn’t know anything.”

Some said it was the mosquitoes that swarmed around the nearby lakeshore, especially during the warmer months. Smudge pots had been brought in and placed around the perimeter of the church grounds to keep the bugs away. Still, by the end of the week, more children fell ill, and the sickness spread to some of the adults. By then, the rash had appeared on Diego’s chest and soon it covered his arms and his legs.

The fever was so high that it caused him to sweat and see things, strange shadows lurking in the corners of the house and outside in the meadows, crouching behind trees and bushes, circling about in the cornfield. Hands passed over his body. He saw threads of white smoke. He caught the scent of burning herbs. A red feather brushed across his hands, eyes, and the back of his head. He could hear his mother’s voice, far off, distant, her cool lips against his forehead when she kissed him. Then her voice faded and fell away and the sound was like a pebble cascading down the side of a well, the tapping growing fainter and fainter until it was no more, until it was only Elva’s voice that he heard, breaking through the wall of the fever, as she placed damp cloths on his forehead.

“Listen to my voice,” she said. “Stay here with me. Listen to my voice. Please.”

There was nothing else to do but lie there, drenched in sweat, his head throbbing from pain, his body aching at the slightest move or twinge. When Elva tried lifting his arms up to towel his back, he
cried out. When she placed cloths soaked in alcohol and marijuana on his stomach, he writhed. She stayed with him. Day and night. Elva never left Diego’s side. He watched her shadowed face. The wrinkles and folds etched into her skin appeared as if they’d been carved from stone.

“Can you hear me?” she asked. “Diego? Can you hear me?”

He nodded, tried speaking, tried looking up at her, but everything spun. The ground rocked and quivered. He watched the shadows grow and move across the walls. They took the shapes of jaguars, snakes, eagles in flight.

“Look,” he said to Elva, pointing. “A toad. There. On the wall.”

“And a monkey,” said the old woman, smiling. “Swinging from a branch. Look at his long ch’éti.”

“Ch’éti?”

“Tail,” said Elva. “Ch’éti is tail in P’urhépecha. The language of your ancestors.”

Because they were P’urhépecha, it was in their blood to tell and to recall, Elva told him, to see and to imagine things beyond, past that and into eternity. In between sleep and waking, she told him stories full of magic, of battles, of spirits that robbed people’s souls, of animals that could speak. There were brave warriors and wise priests with the ability to see into the future, to look to the stars and predict tremors and eclipses and droughts. There were noble kings who ruled the lands from large temples, their stone steps leading up to the heavens where the gods lived. There were marketplaces under vast blue skies, and everywhere there was peace and no one ever went hungry. Everyone had what they needed. She told of Curicaueri, the god of fire, how he and his brother gods settled along the shores of Lake Pátzcuaro, how the P’urhépecha were the descendants of these spirits who taught them how to shape clay, how to weave, how to carve wood, and when to plant and harvest. These, she said, were his people, his kin.

And he saw them come to life. In his fevered dreams, his ancestors were men with scaled skin, eyes yellow as corn, wearing robes adorned with bright feathers and shells, with jewelry made of iron and brass and gold on their necks and arms and fingers. They were
beautiful and, as Elva spoke, he watched them form a circle around his bed and dance and chant, and they called him “son” and “brother” and blessed Diego and swore to protect him.

“Here,” Diego said, pointing. “They’re here. I can see them. Standing near you, Elva.”

“Yes,” she said, soothing him, her hand pressed on his forehead. “The spirits are here. They want you to see them. They want you to know they will be with you. Always.”

She talked on well into the night, as his fever climbed higher and higher, his skin grew hotter, his eyes peering into that world of the spirits, of the ghosts of his past. Elva held a candle up to her face. She told of the fierce P’urhépecha warriors who were so strong they fought back and beat the Aztecs, the most hated of all the tribes in the years before the Europeans arrived. She told of Cortez and the Spaniards, who came on ships, destroying everything, laying waste to the great cities. She told of Eréndira, the young princess and daughter to the last ruler of the P’urhépecha, who trained an army of men to ride horses and fight against the invaders.

“This is what you’re made of,” Elva said just as he felt the fever consume him. He saw flames surrounding his bed, and the spirits stood watch, whispering, pointing at Diego, beckoning him to come, to join them in the darkness.

“Your blood is the blood of the gods,” he heard Elva’s voice say as he drifted away, further and further.

He was many things, she said. So many wonderful things. Then her voice faded away, and he heard only the roar of the unseen fires.

The fever broke a few days later and didn’t return. When Diego was strong enough to lift his head, he asked for his mother.

“She fell ill right after you did,” Elva explained. “You were too sick to notice, and even if I had told you, you wouldn’t have understood. Your fever was so high. You were hallucinating. Seeing spirits.”

“But where is she?” he asked, glancing around.

“It was terrible. So many people … Your mother …” she said, pressing his head to her chest, gripping his hand. “She’s gone. She died.”

He didn’t understand. How could this happen? Diego wanted to scream and cry and shout out her name, but he still felt very weak and tired. Instead he closed his eyes and let Elva hold him in her arms and rock him back to sleep.

A few days later, when Diego was stronger, Elva told him to get dressed. He wore the socks and shoes his mother had bought him the last day they went to the marketplace in Pátzcuaro even though he had already outgrown them. Elva bundled him in blankets and led him by the hand to the cemetery. A handful of crooked crosses jutted up from the ground as they made their way to a fresh mound of earth adorned with bouquets of carnations and lilies. A marker was staked in the ground, and his mother’s name was carved into the wood. What would become of him now that there was nothing and no one to root his spirit to the earth? he wondered. Elva said not to worry, that he would see his mother again, in one form or another, and he tried very hard to believe her.

She would be his caretaker, Elva explained to Diego. Until his father returned. When she spoke of him, of his coming back, Elva would point vaguely toward the distant mountains. And Diego imagined his father there, just beyond the craggy ridges, down below, in a wide valley where wildflowers and grass grew, sheep and oxen grazing freely and uninterrupted.

“What if he never comes back?” he asked Elva. “What will become of me then?”