Once in the land of los nopales, before all the dogs were named after Woodrow Wilson, during that epoch when people still danced el chotís, el cancán, and el vals to a violín, violoncelo, and salterio, at the nose of a hill where a goddess appeared to an Indian, in that city founded when a serpent-devouring eagle perched on a cactus, beyond the twin volcanoes that were once prince and princess, under the sky and on the earth lived the woman Soledad and the man Narciso.
The woman Soledad is my Awful Grandmother. The man Narciso, my Little Grandfather. But as we begin this story they are simply themselves. They haven’t bought the house on Destiny Street, number 12, yet. Nor have their sons been born and moved up north to that horrible country with its barbarian ways. Later, after my grandfather dies, my grandmother will come up north to live with us, until she suffers a terrible seizure that freezes her. Then she’s left without words, except to stick the tip of her tongue between thin lips and sputter a frothy sentence of spit. So much left unsaid.
But this story is from the time of before. Before my Awful Grandmother became awful, before she became my father’s mother. Once she had been a young woman who men looked at and women listened to. And before that she had been a girl.
Is there anyone alive who remembers the Awful Grandmother when she was a child? Is there anyone left in the world who once heard her call out “Mamá?” It was such a long, long time ago.
¡Qué exagerada eres! It wasn’t that long ago!
I have to exaggerate. It’s just for the sake of the story. I need details. You never tell me anything.
And if I told you everything, what would there be for you to do, eh? I tell you just enough …
But not too much. Well, let me go on with the story, then.
And who’s stopping you?
Soledad Reyes was a girl of good family, albeit humble, the daughter of famed reboceros from Santa María del Río, San Luis Potosí, where the finest shawls in all the republic come from, rebozos so light and thin they can be pulled through a wedding ring.
Her father, my great-grandfather Ambrosio Reyes, was a man who stank like a shipyard and whose fingernails were permanently stained blue. To tell the truth, the stink was not his fault. It was due to his expertise as a maker of black shawls, because black is the most difficult color to dye. The cloth must be soaked over and over in water where rusty skillets, pipes, nails, horseshoes, bed rails, chains, and wagon wheels have been left to dissolve.
Careful! Just enough, but not too much …
… Otherwise the cloth disintegrates and all the work is for nothing. So prized was the black rebozo de olor, it was said when the crazed ex-empress Carlota* was presented with one in her prison-castle in Belgium, she sniffed the cloth and joyously announced, —Today we leave for Mexico.
Just enough, but not too much.
Everyone in the world agreed Ambrosio Reyes’ black shawls were the most exquisite anyone had ever seen, as black as Coyotepec pottery, as black as huitlacoche, the corn mushroom, as true-black as an olla of fresh-cooked black beans. But it was his wife Guillermina’s fingers that gave the shawls their high value because of the fringe knotted into elaborate designs.
The art of las empuntadoras is so old, no one remembers whether it arrived from the east, from the macramé of Arabia through Spain, or from the west from the blue-sky bay of Acapulco where galleons bobbed weighted down with the fine porcelain, lacquerware, and expensive silk of Manila and China. Perhaps, as is often the case with things Mexican, it came from neither and both.† Guillermina’s signature design, with its intricate knots looped into interlocking figure eights, took one hundred and forty-six hours to complete, but if you asked her how she did it, she’d say, —How should I know? It’s my hands that know, not my head.
Guillermina’s mother had taught her the empuntadora’s art of counting and dividing the silk strands, of braiding and knotting them into fastidious rosettes, arcs, stars, diamonds, names, dates, and even dedications, and before her, her mother taught her as her own mother had learned it, so it was as if all the mothers and daughters were at work, all one thread interlocking and double-looping, each woman learning from the woman before, but adding a flourish that became her signature, then passing it on.
—Not like that, daughter, like this. It’s just like braiding hair. Did you wash your hands?
—See this little spider design here, pay attention. The widow Elpidia will tell you different, but it was I who invented that.
—Hortensia, that shawl you sold the day before yesterday. Policarpa knotted the fringe, am I right? You can always tell Policarpa’s work … it looks like she made it with her feet.
—¡Puro cuento! What a mitotera you are, Guillermina! You know I did that myself. You like weaving stories just to make trouble.
And so my grandmother as a newborn baby was wrapped within one of these famous rebozos of Santa María del Río, the shawls a Mexican painter claimed could serve as the national flag, the very same shawls wealthy wives coveted and stored in inlaid cedar boxes scented with apples and quinces. When my grandmother’s face was still a fat clover-leaf, she was seated on a wooden crate beneath these precious rebozos and taught the names given each because of their color or design.
Watermelon, lantern, pearl. Rain, see, not to be confused with drizzle. Snow, dove-gray columbino, coral jamoncillo. Brown trimmed with white coyote, the rainbow tornasoles, red quemado, and the golden-yellow maravilla. See! I still remember!
Women across the republic, rich or poor, plain or beautiful, ancient or young, in the times of my grandmother all owned rebozos—the ones of real Chinese silk sold for prices so precious one asked for them as dowry and took them to the grave as one’s burial shroud, as well as the cheap everyday variety made of cotton and bought at the market. Silk rebozos worn with the best dress—de gala, as they say. Cotton rebozos to carry a child, or to shoo away the flies. Devout rebozos to cover one’s head with when entering church. Showy rebozos twisted and knotted in the hair with flowers and silver hair ornaments. The oldest, softest rebozo worn to bed. A rebozo as cradle, as umbrella or parasol, as basket when going to market, or modestly covering the blue-veined breast giving suck.
That world with its customs my grandmother witnessed.
Exactly!
It is only right, then, that she should have been a knotter of fringe as well, but when Soledad was still too little to braid her own hair, her mother died and left her without the language of knots and rosettes, of silk and artisela, of cotton and ikat-dyed secrets. There was no mother to take her hands and pass them over a dry snakeskin so her fingers would remember the patterns of diamonds.
When Guillermina departed from this world into that, she left behind an unfinished rebozo, the design so complex no other woman was able to finish it without undoing the threads and starting over.
—Compadrito, I’m sorry, I tried, but I can’t. Just to undo a few inches nearly cost me my eyesight.
—Leave it like that, Ambrosio said. —Unfinished like her life.
Even with half its fringe hanging unbraided like mermaid’s hair, it was an exquisite rebozo of five tiras, the cloth a beautiful blend of toffee, licorice, and vanilla stripes flecked with black and white, which is why they call this design a caramelo. The shawl was slippery-soft, of an excellent quality and weight, with astonishing fringe work resembling a cascade of fireworks on a field of sunflowers, but completely unsellable because of the unfinished rapacejo. Eventually it was forgotten, and Soledad was allowed to claim it as a plaything.
After Guillermina’s sudden death, Ambrosio felt the urge to remarry. He had a child, a business, and his life ahead of him. He tied the knot with the baker’s widow. But it must have been the years of black dye that seeped into Ambrosio Reyes’ heart. How else to explain his dark ways? It was his new wife, a bitter woman who kneaded dough into ginger pigs, sugar shells, and buttery horns, who stole all his sweetness.
Because, to tell the truth, soon after remarrying, Ambrosio Reyes lost interest in his daughter the way one sometimes remembers the taste of a sweet but no longer longs for it. The memory was enough to satisfy him. He forgot he had once loved his Soledad, how he had enjoyed sitting with her in the doorway in a patch of sun, and how the top of her head smelled like warm chamomile tea, and this smell had made him happy. How he used to kiss a heart-shaped mole on the palm of her left hand and say, —This little mole is mine, right? How when she would ask for some centavos for a chuchuluco, he’d answer, —You are my chuchuluco, and pretend to gobble her up. But what most broke Soledad’s heart was that he no longer asked her, —Who’s my queen?
He no longer remembered—could it be? It was like the fairy tale “The Snow Queen,” a bit of evil glass no bigger than a sliver had entered into his eye and heart, a tender pain that hurt when he thought about his daughter. If only he had chosen to think about her more often and dissolve that evil with tears. But Ambrosio Reyes behaved as most people do when it comes to painful thoughts. He chose not to think. And by not thinking, he allowed the memory to grow infected and more tender. How short is life and how long regret! Nothing could be done about it.
Poor Soledad. Her childhood without a childhood. She would never know what it was to have a father hold her again. There was no one to advise her, caress her, call her sweet names, soothe her, or save her. No one would touch her again with a mother’s love. No soft hair across her cheek, only the soft fringe of the unfinished shawl, and now Soledad’s fingers took to combing this, plaiting, unplaiting, plaiting, over and over, the language of the nervous hands. —Stop that, her stepmother would shout, but her hands never quit, even when she was sleeping.
She was thirty-three kilos of grief the day her father gave her away to his cousin in Mexico City. —It’s for your own good, her father said. —You should be grateful. Of this his new wife had him convinced.
—Don’t cry, Soledad. Your father is only thinking of your future. In the capital you’ll have more opportunities, an education, a chance to meet a better category of people, you’ll see.
So this part of the story if it were a fotonovela or telenovela could be called Solamente Soledad or Sola en el mundo, or I’m Not to Blame, or What an Historia I’ve Lived.
The unfinished caramelo rebozo, two dresses, and a pair of crooked shoes. This was what she was given when her father said, —Good-bye and may the Lord take care of you, and let her go to his cousin Fina’s in the capital.
Soledad would remember her father’s words. Just enough, but not too much. And though they were instructions on how to dye the black rebozos black, who would’ve guessed they would instruct her on how to live her life.
* The doomed empress Charlotte was the daughter of King Leopold of Belgium and wife to the well-meaning but foolish Austrian, the Archduke Maximilian of Hapsburg. Emperor Maximiliano and Empress Carlota were installed as rulers of Mexico in 1864 by disgruntled Mexican conservatives and clergy who believed foreign intervention would stabilize Mexico after the disastrous years of Santa Anna, who, as we recall, gave away half of Mexico to the United States. The puppet monarchs ruled for a few years, convinced that the Mexican people wanted them as their rulers—until the natives grew restless and France withdrew its troops.
Carlota left for Europe to seek Napoleon III’s assistance, since he had promised to support them, but France had enough problems. He refused to see her. Abandoned and delirious, Carlota suffered a mental collapse and began to suspect everyone of trying to poison her. In desperation, she tried to enlist the aid of Pope Pius IX, and is the only woman “on record” to have spent the night at the Vatican, refusing to leave because she insisted it was the only safe refuge from Napoleon’s assassins.
Meanwhile, back in Mexico, Maximiliano was executed by firing squad outside of Querétaro in 1866. Carlota was finally persuaded to return to her family in Belgium, where she lived exiled in a moated castle until her death in 1927 at the age of eighty-six.
I forgot to mention, Maximiliano was ousted by none other than Benito Juárez, the only pure-blooded Indian to rule Mexico. For a Hollywood version of the aforementioned, see Juarez, John Huston’s 1939 film with the inestimable Bette Davis playing—who else—the madwoman.
† The rebozo was born in Mexico, but like all mestizos, it came from everywhere. It evolved from the cloths Indian women used to carry their babies, borrowed its knotted fringe from Spanish shawls, and was influenced by the silk embroideries from the imperial court of China exported to Manila, then Acapulco, via the Spanish galleons. During the colonial period, mestizo women were prohibited by statutes dictated by the Spanish Crown to dress like Indians, and since they had no means to buy clothing like the Spaniards’, they began to weave cloth on the indigenous looms creating a long and narrow shawl that slowly was shaped by foreign influences. The quintessential Mexican rebozo is the rebozo de bolita, whose spotted design imitates a snakeskin, an animal venerated by the Indians in pre-Columbian times.