El Andar Award for Literary Excellence

Cubreviento

by Dora María Vergara

Papá left today. He took his bags and disappeared to her house. He left without a word, no good-bye, not even a note, nothing. He disappeared suddenly, almost as if he had evaporated in the heat. But now that he’s gone, our house stands cold and empty, so silent and still without the familiar noise of a father.

Her house is in Mexico, across the river, three blocks from the bridge, a green stone building with paint peeling in large flakes. My tía says people saw Papá there several times, leaving that woman’s house—his tie crooked and his white shirt wrinkled—when he should have been at work. I ask myself what I will do without a father, but I am too sad to think. I will expect him home tonight. I will keep a lookout in my heart. I will imagine he is with my mother. I will imagine they are no longer fighting, cursing, flinging insults at each other. I will imagine they are alone in their room that he whispers to her in the darkness: I am home. I will imagine that this emptiness is only a bad dream. But the truth is he is gone, he is with another woman.

This evening I watched Mamá as she sat in the living room, puffing on a cigarette and silently cursing Papá. Even angry, she looked beautiful with her elegant white face, dreamy bedroom eyes, and sensual red lips. I am proud of her, our own Rita Hayworth, glamorous and sexy, with her tiny waist, wide hips, shapely white legs, and copper hair that shimmers in the sun. But she frightens me. She doesn’t understand how her anger hurts my brothers and me, how it crushes us beneath the weight of its violence.

Just a few days ago she fought with Papá and broke a plate of food on his head. He went to work with pieces of bacon and egg in his hair. Later in afternoon, when she caught him talking to her, the other woman, on the phone, whispering how much he missed her, how much he loved her, she burned him with a cigarette then slapped him across the face with her shoe. Papá told her she wasn’t woman enough to hold him, that he found her as sexually exciting as a radish. Mamá swore to make him pay for all the pain and humiliation he had caused. So she cut up his shirts with a hunting knife and tossed their remains out the front door, into the dust and heat, for all the neighbors to see. He stormed out of the house like a madman, kicked the mangled scraps, then tripped and fell like a collapsing tree. The tattered pieces fluttered around him like large, ragged moths. He shouted curses at Mamá before finally taking off in his car—the 1949 green and white Willys with cracked windows—his father, Papá Inocencio gave him as a wedding gift fourteen years ago.

But I cannot think of Mamá and Papá without thinking of all the long, tense nights they spend fighting with each other, Papá guzzling beer, one after another, then going on about how cruel Mamá is, how cold and bitter and pretentious; Mamá smoking cigarettes and shrieking at Papá, about his drinking, his laziness, his stupidity, all her sacrifices. She fumes every time she talks to me about those nights: how Papá must have smiled to himself secretly because he knew what she did not yet know—that there were many women who desired him, who found him handsome despite his dark Indian looks, that there was one in particular, from Mexico, who liked him and called him the Aztec Clark Gable, whose soft eyes twinkled every time she saw him; how he must have laughed to himself like a school boy because there were so many women who pursued him and wanted to seduce him, so many except Mamá. That’s why Papá attacked her about her coldness, why she retaliated about his drinking, why the two hurled insults at each other, night after night.

Mamá says Papá is full of evil urges for alcohol and woman, the ordinary vices of borrachos and mujeriegos. She says all men are like him and she doesn’t understand their recklessness. But I do not understand Mamá or Papá.

Yesterday Mamá found her father’s gun in a closet, that famous gun she talks so much about, the one she says dangled proudly at her father’s side. Her father had been a brave, honorable man, a fearless policeman who kept the public order, who mingled with the worst and best and earned their respect; he had been a married man of virtue.

I don’t understand why she keeps the gun, why she doesn’t give it to one of her brothers. I don’t know if it is a family heirloom or a sacred relic or a memento of her great respect for her father. All I know is what she confessed today: that she planned to kill Papá with the gun yesterday evening after he came home from work; that she had wanted to get him while he was eating, catch him completely off guard, the way he caught her off guard with her, that víbora, the other woman; that she had wanted to shoot him between the eyes so the last things he saw before dying were Mamá and her father’s gun.

But my brother Tito discovered the gun in the bathroom, in the linen closet beneath the sheets and pillowcases. He said he saw a strange shiny object while searching for a towel, and when he realized it was a gun, a sharpness in his stomach like the pecking of a hundred sparrows, warned him it was meant for Papá. He picked it up by the barrel, removed the bullets, and then put it back in the closet, carefully, so as not to disturb anything and arouse Mamá’s suspicion. He had never handled a gun before, had never even seen one, so he was lucky it did not discharge. Tito is a hemophiliac; he would have bled to death.

Yesterday Mamá served dinner in silence. My brothers Tito and Junie swallowed tiny morsels of food as if they found them tasteless and did not want to eat. I felt a strange trembling in my stomach. I didn’t know why. Perhaps it was Mamá’s unusual silence or Papá’s nervous singing. Between anxious gulps of papas con huevo he sang “Adelita,” his favorite song from the Mexican Revolution.

--Si Adelita quisiera ser mi novia, si Adelita fuera mi mujer . . . .

Mamá glared at Papá. For a moment I could almost hear the words snag against the dark shadows of her elegant white face; I could almost hear them grate against the hardness of her luxurious brown eyes. Then she pulled out the shiny gun and aimed at Papá’s face, quickly and confidently, like a trained assassin. The singing stopped.

--Desgraciado, she said, a mí no me vas a tratar como mugre.

She pulled the trigger. Papá’s head jerked back; his mouth flew open; and his lips quivered with shock and surprise. I gasped; Tito flinched in his chair. And Junie screamed:

--No, Mami! Don’t kill Papí! Please!

But when Mamá realized that the gun had no bullets, that Papá remained alive and well, her somber white face flushed with rage, and she sprang towards him with the gun, ready to strike. Papá scrambled to his feet and tried to twist the gun out of her hand. They struggled, and Tito, afraid they would kill each other, rushed to pull them apart. Junie began to wail, and I shivered in the heat.

At last Papá clutched Mamá’s fist and wrestled the gun away, calling her a madwoman, a loca, a woman with a heart of stone. She punched him in the face, all that stored-up rage finding release in the crash of her fists against his flesh. Papá, a six-foot giant towering over Mamá, raised his brown, muscular arms in the air to shield himself from her exploding rage, shouting: Ya , Nieves, por el amor a Dios.

I hated to see Mamá gone mad with anger. I hated to hear the blows, watch the flesh tearing on Papá’s cheek, and see the blood. I grasped her arms and tried to pull her away from him.

--Stop it, Mamá, I pleaded, before you do something bad.

But parting the Red Sea would have been easier—she would not stop. She pushed me aside and lunged at Papá again and again, pulling his hair and scratching his face.

--¡Loca! he yelled.

She punched his arms and face as he staggered towards the living room.

--¡Cobarde! she screamed. ¡Mujeriego, bueno pa’ nada!

Papá found the keys and fought his way to the door, Mamá hanging on to his arm like a wild beast, hungry for revenge. She slipped and fell, but as he ran out, she grabbed his leg, and he dragged her with him outside onto the front porch, then down the sidewalk and into the car. Junie, Tito, and I followed.

--Stop it! we cried. Stop it!

Finally, Papá pushed Mamá out of the car with his foot, locked himself in the old Willys, and drove away.

This morning we took the bus to Mamá Grande’s house, where we stayed while Mamá went downtown to look for a job. When she returned in the late afternoon, she looked broken, like crystal that had fallen and cracked into a dozen shimmering pieces. I tried to understand what had happened, what made her look hopeless and beaten, but Mamá Grande refused to discuss such things in front of us. As they closed the door of the bedroom to talk, Mamá mumbled something about finding sinvergüenzas everywhere. When we finally returned home, Papá’s things were gone. Then my tía called to say that Papá had quit his job and was leaving for Mexico City—with the other woman. He had called my tía to tell her he never wanted to see Mamá again.

After the phone call, Mamá sat in the living room, her shaky hands struggling to light a cigarette. She did not cry, but she gave the impression she was screaming inside, clawing away at a strange darkness inside her head. When I asked if she was going to cook supper, she only puffed on her cigarette and glared at me, her beautiful dreamy eyes cold and hard as stone. I went to the kitchen to fry beans because I was dizzy from hunger. I accidentally burnt them, and the odor of burnt beans drifted towards Mamá.

She darted into the kitchen, eyes glinting.

--Can’t you do anything right? she asked, looking at me and then at the pan of beans. Can’t you fry a few beans without burning them, or do I have to do that for you, too?

I felt my body stiffen, my throat tighten. Why couldn’t Mamá just be gentle, I thought, and tell me my mistake was okay, that she understood my fear, the difficulty of everything. Why couldn’t she simply hold me and tell me not to worry? But I knew better. I never give my children affection, she often boasted to her sisters. I don’t believe in spoiling them with love.

My hands trembled as I turned off the gas flame and removed the skillet of scorched beans from the stove. My stomach hardened as I dropped the skillet of beans into the kitchen sink, turned on the hot water, and watched the skillet fill up with the steamy liquid until it overflowed and the burnt beans—thick, black, and chunky—swirled down the drain.

--¡Así no! Mamá snarled, and her sharp voice lunged through the thick, hot air like a dagger that slit my heart. You want to clog up the sink?

--I’m sorry, I mumbled as she thrust me aside, and for a moment I wished the floor would devour me.

--I should know better than to expect you to do anything right, Tati, she said. After all, you have no common sense, just like your father.

Something fierce inside me yearned to fight back, to say something harsh and cutting and cruel, but my thoughts became a dark web of confusion, and my words and feelings remained knotted in my throat.

--You’re book smart, she added, but you can’t think on your feet. You’re too slow and too tonta.

I watched her peer hard at me, her eyes full of fear and horror and anger, and I almost felt sorry for her, almost pitied her. But I knew I was helpless against her.

--Your father left us, she said. She scraped the burnt skillet hard with a spatula, her hands and face tightening as she wrapped the soggy beans in a newspaper and hurled them into the trash can. And he left us with nothing.

I stood silently, gazing at the cement floor painted a dull blue. I stared at it, my heart pounding as Mamá went on about Papá, the things he had done to her, all she had suffered, how nobody cared, not even her children; I stared at the floor until it and the fire in Mamá’s voice, the throbbing in my chest dissolved into a meaningless white blur.

--I have no job, no money, she said. And I have to support all of you.

A nauseous heat gathered in my stomach, then rose to my throat, and when I least expected it, the hot, angry words tumbled out: It’s not our fault. We didn’t ask to be born.

Mamá’s beautiful red lips trembled; her eyes flashed. Then she slapped me hard, her hand a flame against my face.

--Malagradecida. How dare you speak to me that way, after everything I do for you and everybody else in this family.

Clenching my teeth and holding back tears, I could not answer. Instead, I turned and ran.

--That’s right, she shouted. Leave! I don’t need you here, anyway! You’re useless, and you don’t appreciate anything I do for you!

I ran out of the house as fast as I could and headed for the monte, the only place in the world I feel safe. The truth is I am more afraid of Mamá than I am of spiders and rattlesnakes. And I am more afraid of a house without a father than any monte. It is frightening to live in a house where the world turns upside down every day. It is frightening to feel as if Mamá shoots me straight through the heart with her father’s gun every time she gets angry. It is frightening to know my father loves another woman, that he doesn’t care about Mamá, my brothers, or me. So when tears filled my eyes as I ran, I promised myself I would never cry again because of Papá and Mamá. I promised myself I would live like a child marooned on a deserted island and depend on no one but myself. And even if Mamá would never leave us and would always take care of us, the truth was that no matter how much we yearned for her love, it would be out of reach. This I thought as I ran in the evening sunlight, past the bougainvillea trees heavy with bright pink blossoms, past the empty clothesline next to the oleanders, and into the lingering heat of the silver-tinged, shadow-soaked monte.

But now I must get through this painful evening, this intolerable heat. I will sit here, beneath the cubreviento, the enormous tree whose thick brown roots reach deep into my heart. I will listen to the loud murmur of chicharras, count the army ants that march by in thick, red lines and refuse to think about Papá—he is dead.

But I know Michael will look for me. I know he will want to play. When he cannot find me, he will come here, my favorite spot, catch me gazing into the empty air, and know something is wrong. He will want to talk to me, remove my sadness, and he will ask if I’m in trouble. Trouble is being a child, I will say, and he will not understand. But he will laugh softly and try to make me laugh. And I will laugh too because I never want to hurt him. And we will be happy. I know its true—Michael loves me. He tells his mother he will marry me some day. He tells my brothers he thinks I am beautiful. But when we are together, we don’t talk about love. Instead, we sit on the thick branches of the cubreviento, inhale the warm darkness of night, look at the moon and stars, and dream about falling off the earth.

So I wait for Michael. And while I wait, I close my eyes and think about how much I love this monte—its starkness, its sluggishness, its crude beauty, its maze of dry brush, nopal, sunflowers, and mesquite trees stooping in the heat. Around me the chicharras drone, the sun’s hot evening light stings me, and my sadness refuses to leave. Sometimes the sorrow of children feels as heavy as the earth. I yearn to say this to Papá.

But it will be Michael, not Papá, who finally comes. I will hear him breaking through the brush and sunflowers, and I will see his smile without opening my eyes. I will see him in my thoughts—his skin golden, his body tall and strong for a twelve-year-old, soft brown eyes in a willful boy’s face, something already manly about him. I will forget the difference in race, that he’s Anglo and I’m not, that I’m brown and he’s not. And as he sits besides me, I will open my eyes and glimpse the red, orange, and pink sunset, the last traces of daylight, stretching in delicate strands across the horizon.

He will ask me if I want to play and I will say no. From that moment he will know something is wrong. Suddenly, I will want to cry because Papá has another woman, but I will refuse to cry in front of Michael. Instead, I will smile and tell him Papá was carried away by a serpent-woman hiding in a dust cloud, and now he is lost somewhere in the deserts of Mexico. I will tell him serpent women are everywhere, and I will ask if he ever noticed them, beautiful women with glassy, black eyes walking the empty streets hunting for men. He will say no, but he will know that I am telling him, in my own peculiar way, that Papá has another woman.

Then we will sit against the rugged bark of the cubreviento, look up at the disappearing blue of the evening sky, and I will wonder why the colorful flames of the sun must die in the night and why the earth must feel so lonely in the darkness.

Michael, knowing it is almost dark and that we must both go home, will lean against the trunk of the cubreviento, his face almost touching mine, and tell me what he has never told me—that he will marry me when we grow up. I will feel his warm breath on my cheek and he will look at me and I will feel peculiar. After several long, quiet moments, he will ask if we can lie on the ground and keep a lookout for stars. I will say yes, and we will stretch out on the warm floor of the monte, the grayness of dusk spilling gently on us.

Then he will ask if he can hug me the way grown-ups hug because one day we will be married. I will tell him that I will never get married because men always break women’s hearts. Michael will say he could never be that kind of man. Then he will ask if we can pretend we are grown up and married, if we can pretend that the cubreviento is our house and the ground our bed. For a long time I will not be able to answer and an odd silence will spread between us as we lie side-by-side on the ground, our hands tucked beneath our heads. Silently, I will watch the evening sky, and when a thin moon rises behind the cubreviento, I will whisper : Yes.

Suddenly I will smell the honey scent of his skin, and he will draw me towards him, gently and softly as if I were a delicate bird, and I will rest my head on his warm chest, his ragged breathing making it rise and fall irregularly under my face. I will want to cry, but instead I will tell Michael I wish I could disappear into the sky and clouds. Then I will hear him say, You’re beautiful, Tati, and I will always love you. He will caress me slowly, his fingers touching my arms and face so sweetly that the entire sky will shimmer as if a million stars had shattered across its surface. Then I will be swallowed by the splendor of the silver darkness, and I shall be glad to dissolve in its beautiful light.