The Hummingbird's Daughter (35 page)

It was so civilized!

“Adios!”

“Adios!

“And to you, adios, Iris Violeta!”

“And adios to you in return, Don Fulgencio Martinez!”

Everything was right in the world.

The girls and their escorts rotated in a counterclockwise flow until the boys appeared, cowboys and gangly ranch hands and tiny Indio chile pickers strolling forth in huaraches and boots and church shoes. All hair was slicked back: their heads glistened like coal beds. “Allí vienen los pendejos!” cried an old man, and they all laughed and hooted and stamped their feet and pounded their canes.

Upon first sight of the boys, the aunties turned stern and didn’t smile again for the entire evening. This was deep pleasure for them—watching the hands and eyes of these young dogs lest they step beyond the bounds of proper behavior and visit an outrage upon the persons of their charges. The boys went to the outside, as if by some genetic programming, and they started to stroll in a clockwise direction, constantly facing their blushing sweethearts. Always walking toward, always walking away; in passing glimpses, whole love affairs flared up, faded, and died.

Yaquis, come from no one knew where, took up positions on the outside of the circle and began fiddling away on their little violins. Doña María and Tía Cristina, two hardworking women with no time for foolishness, set up a taco stand at one end of the stroll and a torta stand at the other. Segundo moved his stash of beer to the plazuela.

Teresita would not have joined in except that several of the young girls—too young for the stroll—asked her to help them make limonada. She made it in Tomás’s kitchen with her squadron of giggling kids. They set up a stand between two benchloads of old-timers. After an hour or so, Fina Félix convinced her to step out and walk, and as soon as she did, she began to smile and fan herself with Fina’s paper fan. She flirted. She knew what to do as soon as she started walking.

Teresita was delighted and startled to hear her first romantic compliments on the stroll.

Carlos R. Hubbard, of El Real de las Minas, said: “I did not know that God allowed lilies to bloom at night!”

On the far side of the square, Antonio de la Cueva of Piedra Castillo said: “Muchachos, did you see if that angel had wings?”

César González, though he was a young Jesuit and bound for his matriculation, declaimed the following: “If I work my fingers to the bone, Teresita, I might one day write a poem as lovely as your walk.”

Fina nudged her. On her other side, pretty Emilia Zazueta laughed out loud.

“Ay qué muchachos,” she said.

“Tienes pegue,” said Fina, which of course meant: you have struck them hard.

This was an astonishment to Teresita.

For a time, every Friday and Saturday night at Cabora became a small fiesta. Huila thought it was ridiculous, or so she said. Still, she was the first to get a seat on the benches when the sun started to move west in the afternoon.

Teresita looked forward to these Friday and Saturday nights. Sometimes, she walked with Gaby, but the piropos never flew in Gaby’s direction—it would be suicide to be caught sailing a ripe piropo at the patrón’s woman! So walks with La Fina were more fun.

The Arroyo boy, who sold shoes to the women of the ranch when he wasn’t writing incendiary novels about farm boys startled by romantic feelings for each other, walked along, though he was watching the cowboys. Even he launched a semipiropo at Teresita: “If I liked girls, I would be yours!”

A young rustler visiting from Chihuahua (actually, he was hiding from the Rurales) named Doroteo Arango said: “I would trade nine horses, ten cows, and a bag of gold for one kiss of your lips!”

“Ay, tú!” chided La Fina.

Teresita called all these boys “Pancho,” for she didn’t know who some of them were, and “Pancho” seemed funny to Fina.

“Gracias, Pancho!” she called back to Doroteo Arango.

He tipped his hat.

Rudolfo Anaya the First, on a horse-buying trip from the far Llano Estacado, said: “The kachinas have blessed you, Teresa.”

She turned and walked backward and watched him circulate into the gloom.

“Gracias, Pancho.”

Fina laughed.

“What a cute boy,” Teresita said.

“They’re all cute boys!” Fina Félix enthused.

“Well, that is one Pancho I would like to see again!”

Teresita watched for Anaya as she came around the circle, but he seemed to have vanished. As she strained to find him, she came face to face with Millán. He stepped in her way so she had to stop.

“Your tits taste like sugar, don’t they?” he asked.

“Excuse me,” she replied.

She walked for a half circuit, trying to catch up to Fina, but she felt ill. She pulled out and went to Huila’s bench and sat beside her and put her head on the old woman’s shoulder.

“Piropos,” she said, “are so stupid.”

To maintain the plazuela’s integrity during the workweek, Tomás had to create a new position at the ranch: Don Teófano was named Jefe in Charge of Plazuelas.

Thirty-seven

HUILA NO LONGER ROSE EARLY. For the first time in her life, she slept through the dawn. She no longer knelt to her prayers, nor did she go out to her grove to address the Creator and the Four Directions. When Huila awoke, she would lie, sometimes for an entire hour, as if her dreams had taken too firm a grip on her and refused to let her go. When she finally did rise, she did so slowly, and in a strange trance. She had always been grouchy, but this was different. She was unapproachable now.

One morning, when Teresita was nearly done with her breakfast, Huila appeared in the kitchen. She went to Teresita and touched her cheek.

“Girl,” she said.

Then she went to the opposite end of the table and spooned three, four, five doses of sugar into her coffee, and she broke the bolillos and shoved them in the cup, and she slurped the dripping mess and let the coffee run down her chin. Teresita asked one of the kitchen girls to attend to Huila’s face. The girl stood over the old one with a cloth, and she darted in like a bird and mopped the coffee and melted bread off the old woman’s chin.

“You think I’m old,” Huila said. “The wind is old,” she huffed, “yet still it blows!”

“Yes, Huila,” they replied.

“The sea is old,” Huila said, “and it still makes waves!”

“I have not seen it yet,” Teresita said.

“Ni yo,” said Huila.

She looked as if she was falling asleep.

Teresita, still restless, decided to go outside for a walk.

Others rose early at Cabora. Tomás, though he no longer needed to greet the dawn, awoke by force of habit—now that his wildfire of lovemaking with Gaby had abated, as all fires must one day fade, just a bit, still bright, still warm, but now safer and not threatening to burn down the house. He lay in bed wondering what to do with himself. Books and ledgers were not like horses or cows. They did not need to be fed, or brushed, or watered, or milked. They did not need to be broken, or driven, or shot, or branded. The books just lay on desks and waited for his pen.

Often, he turned to the sweetness of Gabriela’s arms. He could lose himself in her as if he were riding out across the hills. The smell of her lulled him, almost enough to put him back to sleep.

The vaqueros, too, rose early. Unless it was Sunday and they were in the bed of some young harvest girl in the shacks of El Potrero, the cowboys were pulling on their boots in the diminishing dark. Aside from their need to work, and their curiosity about the day, they had no desire to lie in the smoky gloom of the bunkhouse, listening to other men groan and belch and yawn and curse, smelling the cheese stench of their stiff socks. In wooden beds, stacked three deep, no windows to speak of, and the two shuttered openings they did have kept shut to lock out biting flies and mosquitoes, they awoke and swung their legs onto the floor or into the air and pulled on their cracked old boots and clomped to the wood floor and staggered into each other and slapped each other on the back or shoved each other away with a muttered deprecation. Matches scratched, sounding like the fingernails that dragged through their chin whiskers, and they tumbled out into the dawn, ready to eat, many of them pissing in the dirt at each side of the door, half of them already looping ropes in their fists or tying on chaps. The cookhouse was a fifty-yard stagger away from their bunk room, and they wrestled through its off-kilter doorway and swarmed the long rugged tables, heads drooping over blue tin mugs of fried coffee, blue plates of beans, eggs, pork, chilaquiles, cheese, fruit. After about three tortillas each, they were awake enough to begin boasting and lying.

Millán was out of bed earlier than the rest. He prided himself on a certain element of cleanliness. He was one of the few men who dabbed cologne on himself, and it was his habit to buy a bath at one of the shacks where the old woman filled her great tin laundry tub with warm water. He didn’t mind showing his sex to the old one. He stood before her and smiled at her, watching her keep her eyes averted, but unable, finally, to avoid his dangling. It made him happy to watch her fumble. He would peel off his trousers before she had escaped the room, and he’d mildly ask her if she would launder them, holding them out to her while his member was half-hidden with one hand, though he knew and she knew he was showing her. She’d take his pants and hurry outside. On some days, her granddaughters peered at him from behind the blanket she’d hung in her shack, and he fingered himself in the water and pretended not to see them. It thrilled him to put on a show for the little ones. One of them looked to be about eleven. He had plans for her.

That morning, he had snuck out of the bunkhouse to kill cats, and he had crept near the main house to look at Gabriela Cantúa’s underthings on the clothesline. The maids had hung her unmentionables near the house, behind a fluttering wall of bedsheets, but Millán just needed a short peek to fuel his desire. He smiled, pinched himself through his trousers.

He liked the patrón’s bitch, all right. But the one he couldn’t get out of his mind was Teresita. They all called her a blonde—she wasn’t any pinche blonde. Her hair was almost as dark as his. Cabrona. Daughter of Urrea. Thought she was better than everyone. Daughter of a whore, he’d heard. His mother had always said, De tal mata tal flor.

From such a plant comes such a flower.

He tracked Teresita to the grove.

Out among the dirt and scrub and rattlers, Teresita decided to pray again. Huila had taught her many medicines. She lit her sage and smudged herself, and she lit her sweetgrass and offered the smoke to the sky, and she crumbled tobacco and other herbs and offered them as well. She prayed for Gabriela, her beloved friend who yearned for children with Tomás. She prayed for Loreto, who carried the family name alone in the city. She prayed for Tomás, that he might be cured of this terrible fever that drove him to try to cool himself with the bodies of strange women. She prayed for Huila, who was fast approaching her hour of rest. She prayed for the People, who fought for their lives and their land. She prayed for the land. She prayed for Buenaventura. She did not pray for herself. Huila had taught her: “Blessed are you when you pray for others. Shame on you when you pray out of selfishness and greed.”

Besides, what could she ask for herself? She had already asked for forgiveness once, and Huila taught her that asking for forgiveness twice was an insult to the Creator. She did not know if praying to receive a boyfriend was bad or not, and she was afraid to ask Huila. Was loneliness merely selfishness? She feared Huila might say so. She decided to pray for any lonely boy who wished someone would love him—that the Creator might allow that boy, if he was a very nice boy, and a funny boy, and a boy who could play guitar and sing and could possibly ride horses, to find a nice girl to love him back.

When she was through, she sat on a flat stone and undid her hair. She kept it tightly braided when others could see her, but here, with only the crows and the mockingbirds and the mad squirrels watching her, she let her hair fall and blow. The breeze eased through the long tresses and crept over her scalp. She shivered and thrilled to it. She pulled up her skirt and her hated petticoats and let the sun burn her bare legs.

A snake-thin creek meandered through her grove, and she put her bare feet in the water. Watched the sun form wobbling lines and triangles of light on her skin. Watched tiny clouds of silt escape from between her toes and carry down the weak current, moving over the bright gravel like small rain clouds. She dreamed she was flying with brother crow, above a June storm as it passed over the land.

She wanted to strip off her hot clothes, lie naked and let the water run over her body. This was not allowed, of course. No woman would be forgiven an act as brazen as that. Girls might bathe together in the river, in a group, with angry aunties posted on the rocks and among the trees, ready to beat spies to death with their canes. But that nakedness would have been strictly for the bathing, not for joy. A woman naked, naked for the delight of her own flesh . . . even if no one could see her, Teresita knew such a thing would remain forever unforgiven.

Ah, well. Beetles swam in the water. Wasps and bees alighted on the small black banks of the creek and nipped up daubs of mud, sipped water. Butterflies touched down on the gravel and slowly opened and closed their wings, unreeling their coiled tongues into the wet. Teresita chewed clover stems, felt the wild tang of sour juices on her tongue.

Millán watched her. Watched her back, stared at her bottom as it was made wide by the ground pushing up against it, cupping it. Watched the way her bottom formed circles, oblongs, fruit shapes as she wiggled back and forth.

Millán liked to say: “Mexican women are dogs, but Indian women are cows.”

Tomás sipped his coffee and watched Gabriela eat. She carefully sliced an orange half-moon out of her melon and took it between her lips. Her soft tongue darted out and took the cool flesh of the melon and pulled it into her mouth. He couldn’t believe she was real. She was like some dream, some story old men told youngsters. She made a fool out of him with the slightest grin or pout. She slept in his bed, not beside him, but
around
him, her aromatic legs and arms wrapped around him, her mouth against his throat, her beautiful thundercloud hair over his face, his chest. He kissed her hair. Took it in his fist and kissed it, breathed it. He held her underwear to his face and kissed it, too. When she bathed, he smelled her clothes.