—composer, María Grever
To be accompanied by the scratchy 1927 version of “Júrame,” as recorded by José Mojica, the Mexican Valentino, who would later renounce fame, fortune, and the adulation of millions of female fans by taking vows and becoming a priest.
His life makes a wonderful story and was adapted into that unforgettable film … What was its name again?
If you’ve never heard Mojica, imagine a voice like Caruso, a voice like purple velvet with gold satin tassels, a voice like a bullfighter’s bloody jacket, a voice like a water-stained pillow bought at the Lagunilla flea market embroidered with “No Me Olvides,” smelling of chamomile, copal, and cat.
Doubt begins like a thin crack in a porcelain plate. Very fine, like a strand of hair, almost not there. Wedged in between the pages of the sports section, in the satin puckered side-pocket of his valise, next to a crumpled bag of pumpkin seeds, a sepia-colored photo pasted on thick cardboard crudely cut down the center. The smiling Narciso seated leaning toward the cut-out half.
—And this?
How many have started trouble with just these two words? If you poke under the bed expect to find dirt.
—Oh, that. It was just a joke. We took a portrait the day a traveling photographer came to town. One of the fellows and I were bored and thought it would be fun. What do you think! We only had enough money between us for just one picture, that’s why we had to cut it in half. Throw it away. I don’t even know why I kept it.
—Of course I won’t throw it away. I’d like to keep it. Especially since you’re gone so much.
—Do as you like. It’s all the same to me.
How is it my grandmother knew to know? How is it a woman knows what she knows without knowing it, I mean. So that while my grandfather Narciso was enjoying the pleasures of the woman with the iguana hat, that sweetheart from the hotlands, my grandmother Soledad was at that very second haunted by some crazy but real fears.
She would wake in the middle of the night, disoriented, a sick feeling swirling in her heart. Where was her Narciso at this moment? Perhaps loosening the lazy strap of a woman in a once-white slip? Kissing the moon of a shoulder, the instep of an arched foot, the wrist with its little flicker of life, the sticky hotlands of the palm, the soft web of the fingers? At this instant was he sucking the salt off an earlobe, or placing his hand on the valentine of a woman’s back, or maybe sliding himself off the rippled flesh of a big woman’s big hips? No, no, too terrible to think about, she couldn’t stand it when he was away. And what if he left her? Worse …
What if he stayed? A fever like this. She suffered, ay, she suffered the way only Mexican women can suffer, because she loved the way Mexicans love. In love not only with someone’s present, but haunted by their future and terrorized by their past. Of course, each time Narciso returned from the coast, Soledad attacked him with accusations, a flurry of brilliant colors like the wings of jungle macaws.
—You’re crazy!
—Júrame. Swear, swear to me it’s only me you love, my life, júrame.
—Te lo juro. I swear.
—Again!
—Only you, he said. Sólo tú.
Only you. This would satisfy her. For a little. There is a saying: Drunks and children tell the truth. One afternoon when the sky was sorrel-colored, as if the world was about to come to an abrupt end, the nosy child of the cleaning woman was visiting Soledad’s room and touching everything he could get his hands on, including the photo of Narciso, which Soledad had placed on a bedside table.
—And who’s that?
—That’s my husband.
—No, I mean who’s the lady sitting next to him?
—What are you talking about? Here, give me that, you little snot! Don’t you know better than to touch things that aren’t yours?
Soledad shooed the child out of the room and took a closer look at the bottom of the photo. She took it out to the balcony and looked again. She looked and she looked, said nothing, tucked the photo in her pocket, put her shawl on, marched over to the plaza, waited on a wrought-iron bench in front of the kiosk till the jewelry shop opened, then asked the watchmaker if she might borrow his jeweler’s eyepiece. —Just for a second, I promise I won’t drop it, of course, what do you take me for, if you would be so kind, thank you please, please give me a little privacy if you would please!
What she saw next to her husband’s boot was this. A dark shadow of flowered calico. The hem of a skirt! ¡Virgen Purísima! A long thin pin in her heart.
When she came to, there was a crowd of busybodies pressing around her screaming, —Give her water! Give her air! Put her feet up. Someone pull down her skirt! And there was mixed in as well the angry shouts of the watchmaker, who was more concerned about his jeweler’s glass than the welfare of Soledad.
But how can one live like that, with a pin in one’s heart? How? Tell me.
Soledad sought out the only person she could confide in, the anciana who sold atole and tamales on a wooden table outside the church. Inside, the priest was hearing confession and sending out the guilty with a long list of useless prayers as penance. But outside, the tamal vendor gave out only sound advice, which was so sensible as to be mistaken for foolishness.
—Help me, I’m suffering, Soledad said after explaining her story.
—Ah, poor little creature. What wife hasn’t had your troubles? It’s just jealousy. Believe me, it’s not going to kill you, though you’ll feel like you’re dying.
—But how much longer will I feel like this?
—On what?
—On how hard you love.
—Holy Mother of God!
Soledad started to cry. People often mistake women’s tears for defeat, for weakness. Hers were not tears of surrender, but tears for the injustice of the world.
—There, there, my sweetness! That’s enough. Don’t even think terrible things. It’s not good for the child in your belly. He’ll remember later when he’s born and keep you up nights with his crying.
—It’s just that … So much … Soledad managed to hiccup, —So much misery in the world.
—Sí, tanta miseria, but also so much humanity to make up for the cruelty.
—Enough, but not too much.
—Not too much, but just enough, the old woman said.
She sent Soledad home with hierba buena tea and instructions to drink a cup in the morning, a cup at night, and to bathe herself in it as often as she felt sad.
—Patience. Have a little faith in la Divina Providencia, why don’t you. The fearful are those who don’t trust God’s plans. There is, after all, one cure for jealousy, you do know that, right?
—And what would that be?
—Oh, it’s very easy. Fall in love again. Like they say, one nail drives out another.
—Yes, and the second bullet dulls the pain of the first. Thank you. I must be going.
When one is young and just beginning one’s marriage, how can one believe the wisdom of someone as dried up and ugly as a roasted chile poblano?
—God closes doors so that another may open, the woman shouted. —When you least expect it, love will arrive with its Gabriel’s trumpet. Then you’ll forget all this sorrow. You’ll see. Ánimo, ánimo.
But by now Soledad was scuttling across the cobbled churchyard toward the wings of filigreed gates, pushing her way past resilient beggars and insistent rosary vendors, beyond the hobbled bundles of humanity seated placidly on the cool stone steps still and solid as gray river stones, hurrying without pause past a chorus of chirping voices calling out to her to take a taste of their cool drinks and hot meals, shoving through the throng of the faithful and faithless clumsily tumbling in front of her to complicate her route to her room.
Ánimo, ánimo. Soledad saw nothing, no one in that rush to regain her solitude. She was lost in her own thoughts, which were not thoughts of ánimo at all but of its opposite. That ugly squashed hat—despair.