The Moths and Other Stories (11 page)

“You make me crazy. Get up! Look at your dress. Howling like a coyote!”

She trembled with misery as he led her into the house. The kitchen was dark except for one candle on the table which flickered their phantom images on the walls. She sat, staring into the candle while he prepared some herbs and water. Numbly, she opened her mouth slowly with each teaspoon he fed her.

“The moon's face is hidden again,” she said between teaspoons, still looking at the candle as her tears rolled down like the melted wax along the candlestick. Beads of sweat formed on his face. Why is it that he could never understand her? The moon's face is hidden? She sees it. I see it, but I find her howling like a coyote, fighting in the dirt. At what? The faceless moon? What the devil is happening to you? What is causing you so much pain?

He watched her turn into a hurricane in the darkness. She threw up the meal she could not afford to, shattered dishes, and overturned the small kitchen table. Winded, she collapsed on the floor, sobbing until her eyes were swollen.

As confused and afraid as he was when he first held a rabbit, he held her. She was carried into the next room where she was gently laid on the bed, strands of hair removed from her face, and a blanket thrown over her trembling body. She heard him fumbling through some boxes in the closet and she turned to find him holding the carousel.

“Children die like crops here,” she said. But he could not hear her, for the bells of carousel music came forth sounding like an orchestra in the silence of the night.

He watched her breasts quiver each time she wiped the small creaky tables around him, and he viewed them with slow admiration. Don Joaquín was alone, except for her, in the one-room cantina where the wooden floor planks were covered with dust, and drank mescal from a clay mug, swallowing the stinging clear liquor fast. He pounded his empty mug on the table, startling her, he enjoying her fright, her breasts quivering as she scrambled over to the bar and returned to his table, flicking her long hair over her shoulder.

The woman felt his blurry red eyes burn holes into her skin and she thought, You lonely, lonely coward; if you need a woman, marry a local, share your money. She noticed his beard speckled with grey and thought, Or drink your nights and what's left of your youth away.

At first he pictured himself feeling her bare hips, suckling those delicious breasts, but now, while she stood there pouring the mescal, he hated the woman because she was dull like worn bronze. Her hair, her face, especially her eyes, reflected the sameness of everyday, the waste—and he hated. Before, he was comforted with books, but here, people were puzzled with his words, his knowledge. Later, he turned to women. Now he was content to drink.

Don Joaquín puffed on his second cigar while playing with a splinter from a table which bit into his finger and caused blood beads. I'll be damned, he muttered, bringing his finger closer, and he wedged out the splinter with the point of his knife. With one last gulp he finished the mescal and listened, his hand still cupping the mug, to the cushioned sounds of dogs barking at the men walking home from the fields. Don't you get tired of eating the dust that belongs to someone else's land? he thought. The slow burn of the evening sun created a slab of light on the table where he sat watching the men proceed home, their shadow passing the window. His finger bled. Of going home to dull-eyed wives and filthy, ignorant children that look just like you?

“Señor,” the woman said, “your finger. It bleeds. Put this, like this, around it.” She handed him a handkerchief with her initials, and he recognized the design and touched the embroidery lightly. “Señora Márquez. She makes beautiful handkerchiefs, pillow cases, scarves, just you ask her,” the woman said, watching him, he silent. The clang of a single bell signaled the beginning of evening Mass, and soon the light slab
on the table melted into the approaching night. His legs were outstretched and crossed at the ankles, his cigar burning a dark spot on the edge of the table. The woman still watched him, from the bar now, as he gazed into the graying horizon. He is not here, she thought. Perhaps he is in the rich valleys of Zacatecas, running through the green fields as a boy. Or is this rich son in colleges up north, states united? This man, he can return to those places anytime, but why always return here, to drink and burn my tables?

As Don Joaquín got up to leave, he asked the woman her name.

“Does it matter?” she asked.

“No. I guess not,” he replied. Don Joaquín staggered to his horse, burping the liquor. The mass was over and he saw two women on the church steps talking as he heaved onto the saddle. When he reached the porch of his home, he fell. The dogs licked his face while he sat on the steps, his hand slipping several times before he was able to remove his boots. He thought he had first imagined her, but when the dogs began barking, he knew it was her and he waved for her to come. Amanda, wrapped in her rebozo, quickly walked away, disappearing—like the dreams he often had of her. As he lay down, Don Joaquín promised himself he would have to see her again.

Mouths first murmur sentences, now shout words. Liberator, they call him as he brings Don Joaquín in while the cool bursts of breeze gently dry the drooling saliva from the dying man.

Right before the dawning, the kitchen fires glowed from the window across the village. The women woke first to prepare tacos of tortillas and beans wrapped in cloth for lunch. Then the men woke, groggy, achey, quietly eating their tortilla and salt, with or without chile. Their lunch in one hand, their tools in the other, they walked to the fields, the older ones with their skin of leather and maps of age on their faces; the younger ones, like Chato, hopeful still, not yet resigned. And they talked, these vague images of men at dawn. They talked in low voices about a thing going on beyond their village, a revolution. There was a plan, a young one said, by some indio, to divide the lands and give it to landless people. Does that mean the death of the likes of Don Joaquín? asked an older one, his voice crumbling. Talk, all talk, Chato
thought. He had finally saved enough to pay down on a piece of land, and he saved every penny because he did not believe in talk, or the revolution, or for that matter, God.

The voices follow them to Chato's porch. The revolutionary, they say, the honorable liberator of the village. The mountains will be your home now.

At midday, Don Joaquín inspected the progression of work from a hill overlooking the fields. He could barely see the workers eating gathered together under a tree. He remembered the woman in the cantina. No. It really didn't matter that he knew her name, and it really didn't matter that he knew the workers' names. They were all the same. He signaled to the foreman with a whistle. Nothing really mattered much. After giving instructions, he rode off to the cantina, the foreman watching the clouds of dust carried away by the breeze.

You told him, you told him, she kept telling the dying man, holding the heavy rosary and praying for his death.

The woman swore at the misfortune of him coming through the doors of the cantina, and she handed him the mug of mescal before he went to his usual table near the window. “Señor,” she said, “you took it, my handkerchief.” And she held out her hand.

“Señorita,” he said, “where does this Señora Márquez live?”

Chato has surrendered his bed and his wife to this dying man, and he sits quietly on a crate viewing the mountains from the next room where into a blissful sleep he can see his heart smiling.

For months, Don Joaquín came to the back door after Chato left to work the fields, ready with comfort, eager to please, rusting Amanda's soul with sadness a little more each time. It numbed Amanda, this sadness, and she knew she was dying inside for her sins. She had resisted his advances at first, even refusing big sums of money for her embroidery, until one day, right before the full heat of the noon-day sun, she remembered, he ceased his elaborate romantics, the offerings, and guided her hand to his loin, hard like a stone, and he rubbed her hand against it until he eased away, and she realized she was rubbing of her own free will, without his hand and she began to die.

When Don Joaquín pulled up her skirt, she heard the music of the carousel. Chato, she sang to herself, over and over, my lovely Chato, I miss you, your warmth, your scent, your love. Damn you, damn you, forgive and get on with our life, she thought over and over. But it was over; her marriage was over; now her affair with Don Joaquín would soon be over because guilt had grown into a cancer.

Her cheeks were sunken, he noticed, her hand trembled, when she told him goodbye. “As you wish,” he replied without looking at her eyes. “But remember,” pausing, the shock so great, “a dog is meaner when his paw is crushed.” He rode off without stopping to see the progression of the workers, riding straight to the cantina where the woman waited with a mug of mescal, the dust making his eyes water with misery as he rode, his handkerchief crumbled up in his pocket, thinking Adiós, Amanda mía.

The burden laid in carrying the mountain. Whether I travel paths on foot, my callouses as thick as leather, or ride on paved streets in a dirty bus, I have never seen myself moving. Because the mountain was too big for two little hands, one closed heart, too immovable. So finally after the long, long journey, keeping a pocket radio close, the static of the mountain sizzling in my ear, my lone companion except for the handkerchief, I must listen finally to the mountain's songs and sorrows before the gravel hits my face again. I face the mountain now only to realize—such blindness in me—that the mountain was no bigger than a stone, a stone I could have thrown into the distance where the earth and sky meet, thrown it away at twenty-four, but instead waited fifty-eight years later when Amanda returned, still damned, still grieving, still loving you, on the Day of the Dead, that day when all the veins of memories are pumped with the blood of resurrection so that finally, Amanda, you have returned superior to me and helped me to cast the stone, to bury it, and we will be reconciled for eternity; you and I, our children welcoming us at the entrance of the heartland.

It was a lie; the mountain was a stone; the carousel horse with a glossy silver saddle moving but going nowhere was just
wood. Myself as a liberator was also a lie. Shortly after I left you standing on the porch, we both knew I was never returning. You stood there without a word, immovable as the mountain, watching me ride off on a borrowed cloud. Shortly after that I loved you more than when I first saw you standing in my room by the fire, and we both knew then all we ever needed to know. But our neighbors did not. They waved me like a flag of liberation, they watching me as you stood nailing my insides with your eyes, they saying to me, “if not for Pancha and the niños, I'd go fight with you.” Me riding off to a different war, a different journey that was to end here in a city up north, Tejas, California, with tubes in my nose and arms where the federales would not hang me for murder. Maybe. Maybe to escape not from them but from you and your adultery. And yet I could never forget you, Amanda. After I left you, after I left the village, I lived for fifty-eight years but never saw life again. It began when I cheated you, drained you. You, in turn, cheated Don Joaquín. He cheated me and so I killed him. Maybe we were all born cheated. There is no justice, only honor in that little world out in the desert where our house sits like decayed bones. All that can be done is what you have done, Amanda; sit on the porch and weave your threads into time.

 

It was the small things in life, I admit, that made me happy: ironing straight-arrow creases on Dave's work khakis, cashing in enough coupons to actually save some money, or having my bus halt just right, so that I don't have to jump off the curb and crack my kneecap like that poor shoe salesman I read about in Utah. Now, it's no wonder that I wake mornings and try my damndest not to mimic the movements of ironing or cutting those stupid, dotted lines or slipping into my house shoes, groping for my robe, going to Marge's room to check if she's sufficiently covered, scruffling to the kitchen, dumping out the soggy coffee grounds, refilling the pot and only later realizing that the breakfast nook has been set for three, the iron is plugged in, the bargain page is open in front of me and I don't remember, I mean I really don't remember doing any of it because I've done it for thirty years now and Marge is already married. It kills me, the small things.

Like those balls of wool on the couch. They're small and senseless, and yet, every time I see them, I want to scream. Since the divorce, Marge brings me balls and balls and balls of wool thread because she insists that I “take up a hobby,” “keep as busy as a bee,” or “make the best of things,” and all that other good-natured advice she probably hears from old folks who answer in such a way when asked how they've managed to live so long. Honestly, I wouldn't be surprised if she walked in one day with bushels of straw for me to weave into baskets. My only response to her endeavors is to give her the hardest stares I know how when she enters the living room, opens up her plastic shopping bag, and brings out another ball of bright-colored wool thread. I never move. Just sit and stare.

“Mother.”

She pronounces the words not as a truth but as an accusation.

“Please, Mother. Knit. Do something.” And then she places the new ball on top of the others on the couch, turns toward the kitchen and leaves. I give her a minute before I look out the window to see her standing on the sidewalk. I stick out my tongue, even make a face, but all she does is stand there with that horrible yellow and black plastic bag against her fat leg and wave good-bye.

Do something, she says. If I had a penny for all the things I have done, all the little details I was responsible for but which amounted to nonsense, I would be rich. But I haven't a thing to show for it. The human spider gets on prime-time television for climbing a building because its there. Me? How can people believe that I've fought against motes of dust for years or dirt attracting floors or perfected bleached-white sheets when a few hours later the motes, the dirt, the stains return to remind me of the uselessness of it all? I missed the sound of swans slicing the lake water or the fluttering wings of wild geese flying south for a warm winter or the heartbeat I could have heard if I had just held Marge a little closer.