Even with a lifetime of experiences, life takes one by surprise. So Eleuterio Reyes was astonished not only to have died but to be alive again and to have his only child at his bedside. Here was his Narciso, a little lizard strutting about in a tight suit and patent leather shoes, a red carnation in his buttonhole. He was nothing but a baby-faced dandy, a mama’s boy, a frightened spoiled brat, a snot-nosed kid disguised as a man, crying real tears, promising on his knees, —I’ll do anything you say, Father, name it, just don’t die on me again.
What else could Eleuterio do but laugh, since any words he tried to speak came out sounding like gargling. He laughed, then—a hacking fit that frightened his relations into thinking he was having another attack. Because he no longer had a language to explain himself, Eleuterio’s laughter arrived at what appeared to be odd moments. The family thought him a little senile since his resurrection, though inside that sluggish sea of body, he was stranded on an ice floe, hopelessly alert.
Fortunately, Eleuterio Reyes retained his ability to play the piano, if only with his right hand, and this perhaps saved him from jumping off a church tower. He composed some uncomplicated, entertaining pieces, and it was here he found solace from the world that did not understand him. His music was quick, elegant, lithe, and as overly romantic as ever. It didn’t matter if he wasn’t. With the gentlemanly manners of another era, a pencil, and imagination, Eleuterio Reyes composed several waltzes that revealed, if anyone had taken the time to listen, how explicitly naive and youthful he still was. The soul never ages, the soul, ball of light tethered to that nuisance the body.
Eleuterio Reyes was trying his best to rise from the ashes of his near-death, and the Mexican nation was doing the same. So it happened that Narciso returned at a time when Mexico City was busy with balls, benefits, and fundraisers, as if reconstruction began by filling a dance card. Who could blame the citizens? Men were tired of jumping over dead bodies. Women were sick of grieving. The city, like its troops, was exhausted, sad, and dirty, disgusted with seeing ten years of things they wished they hadn’t seen, ready to forget with a fiesta.
In the decade of war, Mexico City had cheered a great confusion of leaders. The morning that Madero marched triumphantly into the city, the citizens shouted vivas. When the Ten Tragic Days ended and Huerta assumed power, the church bells rang and high masses were said in his honor. A short time later, when Huerta fled, they rang again as if to say, —Good riddance. Women stood on balconies throwing kisses and flowers to the victorious Villa and Zapata,* who marched in like caesars, and the city whooped again when it was Carranza, and just as sincerely for his rival, the one-armed Obregón. It wasn’t that they were fickle. It was peace they were welcoming, not leaders. They’d had enough of war.
For Regina the war had meant an opportunity at finding her true calling. As in all wars, those who flourish are not the best people but the most clever and hard-hearted. Regina’s little commerce not only sustained the family through difficult times, but prospered and moved them up a notch in economic status. Now their apartment was packed with enough furniture to make it look like La Ciudad de Londres department store. Narciso had to climb over brass cuspidors, musical birdcages, obscene mirrors bigger than beds, Venetian finger bowls, crystal chandeliers, candelabras, carved platters, silver tea sets, leather-bound books, past paintings of nude chubbies, and portraits of chaste teen nuns taking their vows.
All the beds served as counters for displaying linens, even the one Regina slept in; she simply made a little room for herself at the foot of it, beneath velvet antimacassars, Oriental pillows, fringed draperies of satin and chintz and brocade, towers of embroidered sheets, towels, and pillowslips with monograms of the original owners. Every room was mobbed with furniture in the popular colors of the time, royal reds and purples—a suite of Louis XVI furniture, high-back wing chairs, horsehair love seats, damask chaises, Queen Isabella carved sideboards, brass beds complete with silk curtains and canopy, caned Art Nouveau settees and Victorian chairs.
On the hour a variety of fragile clocks chimed, some with dancing figurines, some with cuckoos, some with a few notes of a popular waltz, like an aviary of noisy birds. Fringed piano shawls, carved wooden trunks, punched-tin lanterns, musical instruments, fluted glassware, engraved cigarette cases, crocheted bedspreads, hand-painted fans, plumed hats, lace parasols, dusty tapestries, ivory chessboards, gilt sconces, bronze and marble statuettes, gilded vitrines, Sèvres china chamber pots, glazed urns, silverware and crystal and porcelain, jewel inlaid boxes, lacquered Chinese screens, Aubusson carpets, zinc bathtubs, and, under glass domes, tortured saints, weepy madonnas, and pudgy baby Jesuses. More is more. It was a style of decorating that was to figure prominently in this and succeeding generations of the family Reyes.
—Look how we live now, son. Like kings!
—You mean like Hungarians, Narciso said.
—What are you saying, my life?
—I said precioso, Mother.
When Regina had instructed Narciso to take off his shoes on entering the apartment, he’d thought she meant it so as not to disturb his father, but then realized it was to save wear and tear on the carpets and furnishings.
—Be careful. Everything’s for sale, Regina said.
All day people knocked on the door to deliver items or to take them away. Indians arrived with ayates, slings strapped around the forehead and hanging on the back, and with this they were able to carry away items ten times their weight, just as Regina’s daddy had once done. Under monstrous loads, humble as worker ants, they ambled off to deliver an armoire or a couch or a bed at a given address. Regina did better business than El Monte de Piedad, the national pawnshop. The desperate came to pawn their inheritance. Quite a few left welted by an ugly lash of bad words or in the misery of tears, and some of these were men!
A great deal had changed while Narciso was gone. His mother, Regina, counted her earnings nightly and hid them in a shoe box in the walnut-wood armoire next to the red bandana housing his three ribs and the box with Santos Piedrasanta’s button. His father, Eleuterio, had turned into a half-mad invalid whose drooling speech everyone ignored except Soledad. And Soledad? The homely housegirl had grown up into a slender young woman with stingy breasts and a stingy ass, but sweet all the same to look at, really. Ah, those funny Charlie Chaplin eyebrows and the dark little eyes beneath them. She was cute, almost pretty, honest, she was sweet, he had to admit. How was it he hadn’t remembered?
Soledad had become especially talented at translating Eleuterio’s tantrums and tears to his family. —He says he has a craving for a bowl of sweet potatoes and milk. He says you’d better not even think of selling his piano, or he’ll smash everything in sight. He says you have the manners of a Pancho Villa.
—He told you all that?
—More or less.
Poor Soledad. She understood Eleuterio because she was as mute as he was, perhaps more so because she had no piano. It was best to say only what one absolutely had to, just enough but not too much, better to not get in the way if the señora was suffering her migraines. All she had was the caramelo rebozo, whose fringe she plaited and unplaited, which was a kind of language.
Poor Eleuterio. A great grief filled his heart each night, and he suffered helplessly, witnessing his son, Narciso, sneaking into the kitchen pantry after dark. Eleuterio grunted and hit the wall adjoining his wife’s room with his cane. Regina arrived with a cup of manzanilla tea.
—What is it, old man?
She had called him this as a joke when they first married because of their age difference, but now it was the truth and said out of affection.
—Thirsty, viejo? Here you go, then.
Eleuterio warbled, yelped, and whined.
—There, there, you go to sleep now. Is it because I sold your old mattress today to the postmaster’s family? No, don’t think anything of it, my fatty. I’ll get you a nice new mattress tomorrow, and you’ll sleep just like a baby, right? Pobrecito. Drink up your tea.
She gathered him squirming like a child, swaddled him tight in her rebozo, and fed him her manzanilla tea with a spoon.
—That’s my good boy. Don’t you worry, everything’s going to be just fine.
What else could Eleuterio do but swallow.
* There were many revolutions within the revolution, so that at times certain factions were patriots and at other times were dubbed rebels, hounded by the very same government they had once supported. Case in point, Emiliano Zapata, who led the indigenous forces from Morelos, the subtropical region just south of Mexico City, a group fighting for their ancient land rights. Pancho Villa was an outlaw turned rebel leader who controlled the desert border states. These two powerful chieftains, “the Attila of the South” and “the Centaur of the North,” and their followers met in a historic encounter in Mexico City midway through the war. In any good Mexican restaurant today you’ll see a sepia photo documenting the event—a cheerful Villa sitting in the presidential chair while a feral Zapata glowers suspiciously at the camera.
For a Hollywood version of the Mexican revolution, see Elia Kazan’s Viva Zapata. John Steinbeck wrote the screenplay. His choice for the lead role was none other than the Mexican movie star Pedro Armendáriz, featured in The Pearl. Armendáriz had the sexy, indigenous looks for the job, and, more importantly, the acting skills, but was unknown in the States. Kazan, however, wanted and got Marlon Brando for the part, who, in my opinion, looks ridiculous with his eyes taped slant trying to pass as Mexi-Indian.