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Afterlife
- University of Arizona Press
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fl fl fl Afterlife When my bus pulls out, the big Mexican sky reflects in a puddle, and then trails nopal, rock fence, concrete telephone poles, cows, and cut banks. I’m headed to El Salto, Jalisco, to celebrate the eighty-second birthday of doña Marta, the matriarch, on the edge of Alzheimer’s, of a certain family—my compadre’s family—that I go back thirty-five years with. Our friendship has lasted through four divorces, the death of two fathers, and the rearing of twenty-six children; the collapse of the Mexican peso; and the relocation of six or eight million Mexicans to the United States. The stuff we re-live in each other’s company! Long heartfelt talks complete with moonlight, cobblestones, and sewer odor. With a backflip of irony, when memories converge, we lead each other around terrain too raw to acknowledge. I admit it, okay, I’m headed into thirty years of shared feelings. The feelings began in the bus depot. There I ran across Niko, my compadre’s cousin, also headed to El Salto for a visit, who bought a ticket for a seat next to mine. So, in the fifteen minutes before our bus leaves, Niko knocks back three beers and dabs his eyes at how bad his luck is. He thinks he might be depressed. He comes off as a sad, lost, wandering something-or-other. He is the son of don Silvino, a difficult, cranky, demanding widower who—Niko tells me with a shrug—nowadays lives with Lola, Niko’s unmarried, overachieving, gynecologist older sister who administers something like a branch clinic of El Hospital de la Mujer. Niko is headed back to celebrate Father’s Day. We tilt the seats back. Conversation mode. Niko reflects that you have to credit President Fox for having controlled government spending and made it possible for banks to offer a bit of credit. Some years ago—ten, maybe fifteen—Niko lost his job in a bank and invested his severance pay in commercial washers and driers. In his lavandería, year after year, he struggled with spiteful customers 58 the permit that never expires and water so filthy no filter would help, not to mention the neighbors’ ill will. Finally, he moved out and bought a stall in a deserted market behind a Volkswagen dealership on Aquaducto. Now, with his machines installed, he waits days for the lights to be turned on. The thousand pesos I lend him will go for a pipa to fill his cistern. Long divorced, Niko has one son here in town who won’t speak to him, another in San Luis who manages an occasional letter, plus a daughter—from an earlier marriage—who disappeared into Texas. Niko says he’s looking for a wife, someone to stay home and cook and clean, somebody glad that he comes home in the evening. His voice quivers. She doesn’t have to be beautiful. That would be nice, but regular is okay. Maybe I could help Niko find somebody in el norte? A lady widowed—even divorced, who cares?—who likes to live in Mexico and has some kind of small income. His father, Silvino, seventy-four, is a curandero by trade, in a barrio of auto repair shops and German-Shepherd-on-the-roof security, way up on a hill behind a subdivision of million-dollar homes. In a neighborhood of parabolic antennas and loose chickens, don Silvino conducts his practice from a kitchen chair, just inside the door of the corner store his wife runs. Where schoolkids traipse in for their afternoon sugar buzz, the afflicted beat a path to Silvino’s chair, suffering from mal de ojo and such, from infirmities brought on by the ill will of the envious, the jealous, the spiteful. Like the woman he treated the day I met him, a woman with an ulcerous place a foot long on her forearm. He passed his hands back and forth, palms down, an inch or so above the raw flesh, which, as he closed his eyes, began to wrinkle and sweat. It ridged; it clenched into a pattern. When his eyes snapped open, he nodded for her to study the patterns formed on her arm. She would probably see there the face of the person who paid for this to be done to her. Whereupon she recognized the features of a spiteful niece curdled right there on her own flesh. She...