Más viejo es el aire y todavía sopla.
Much older is the wind, and it still blows.
I’m taking my mother to see Esequiel at his home in the Los Ojuelos neighborhood. We travel along the Arroyo de los Ojuelos and turn to cross the Acequia de la Cañada Ancha, which is running even now, in midwinter. We slip past the charging Rottweiler and into Esequiel’s driveway. I tap on the horn, announcing our presence.
Esequiel comes out of his house, a bit taken aback to see my mother’s shiny Nissan Infiniti in his yard as he walks over to greet us. He leans in my window to shake my hand and breaks into a grin that widens by a mile when sees Mom.
“¡Mire no más!—Will you look at this!” Esequiel exclaims, quickly following with, “Buenas tardes.”
He’s tickled to see my mother and to recognize her as Benigna’s daughter, from the “Ortegas of the Plaza.” Mom represents kin from the old days, one of the network of families of the valley who all knew each other—and were all connected to each other—in days gone by. The plática leaps up a notch in energy, because now it involves two people thoroughly versed in the names and places and stories from that fondly remembered past. A rapid-fire exchange of names of relatives and friends, mostly gone, ensues.
But Esequiel has work to do. He points to his son Lorenzo, busy loading up the back of a pickup truck. Lorenzo shouts out a greeting to us but doesn’t pause in his labor. Esequiel pulls a woolen watch cap down over his ears and zips a heavy, wool-lined leather jacket against the chilly January air, now cooling quickly as the sun sinks low. He excuses himself and asks if we’ll wait for a while, then joins Lorenzo at the idling truck.
Lorenzo dons a white hard hat backward, as if preparing for heavy steel work while keeping a kind of punk style, but the task today at hand is merely filling a blue plastic drum with water from a hose. A couple of hay bales share the bed of the truck with the large, unwieldy barrel. Esequiel, breathing hard as he shoves the slowly filling barrel deeper into the truck, explains to me they’re going up the driveway to bring water and the zacate (hay) to the horses. I offer to help, but they have the work well in hand and wave me off.
Within moments the barrel sloshes full, and Esequiel and Lorenzo climb into the cab. The well-worn but carefully maintained four-by-four GMC crawls up the driveway in granny gear, an assortment of dogs trotting behind. We follow in the Infiniti. Esequiel is anxious to finish the chore before the darkness and cold settle in. He nimbly jumps out of the truck at the corrals. The horses shift nervously, especially the edgier white one, who snorts and trots around the enclosure, tail held high. The more timid bay huddles close to the barn, eyeing us thirstily but warily.
Esequiel says he doesn’t know the horses’ names, and I’m not sure if anyone has ever ridden the skittish, half-wild white one. Esequiel explains that they belong to his son Alonzo, who comes out from Ojo Caliente to care for them but couldn’t make it today. As Esequiel maneuvers easily between strands of barbed wire and then through the horizontal poles that define the outer perimeter of the corral, he turns and pulls the wires wide to let me—thirty years his junior—through, apologizing for not having a proper gate.
Lorenzo backs the truck up to the edge of the fencing. He tips the blue barrel over until it rests on the top bar of the corral and water starts to spill out. Esequiel catches the flow in a bucket and hauls it across the corral to a water trough. After several trips back and forth, the barrel drains. Esequiel then tosses the hay out of the truck and uses a plastic snow shovel to carry it over toward the barn. He stops by our car now and then to make a polite comment to my mother, smiling broadly each time. “O, ese Esequiel es un pedazo de carne bautizada.—Oh, that Esequiel is a baptized piece of meat,” Mom remarks after one such visit, deploying a dicho reserved for an especially kind gentleman.
The corral and the rambling barns and sheds beside it are clearly on their last legs. It’s been many decades since they were built. That much is clear, but how they remain standing is a mystery. Many of the trancas (horizontal bars) of the corral hang by rusted wire or the merest threads of twine salvaged from hay bales. The two adjacent barns, built of roughhewn logs, lean drunkenly. Their weathered wood, cracked and split, has mellowed to faded tones of gray and rich orange. A sagging door made of rough lumber, held shut with a rusted chain, secures a small shed. A hodgepodge assortment of corrugated metal sheets, some rusted to a dark orange hue and others much newer and still shiny, cover the vigas and rough one-by lumber of the roofs over the rambling structures.
Inside the barn and sheds lie odds and ends and a few bales of hay. The horses can find some shelter in leaning stalls. They pace the corrals, stepping around discarded vigas, trancas, and used pallets. In one corner a junked truck sits, stripped of its motor and most parts.
Behind the barns and corral rise the barrancas that hem in the northern edge of Chimayó. Their vertical cliffs harbor raven nests and offer a roost for pigeons, who coo softly as they look down on Esequiel tending to the horses.
While Esequiel and Lorenzo work on their chores, I pick my way through the corrals, taking pictures of the structures and the animals. The white horse flits nervously, avoiding my every advance, stops, eyes me with a glare conveying a final warning—then breaks into a full gallop, kicking and tearing around the enclosure at a frightening pace, compelling me to back off.
Esequiel pitches hay quickly from the barn into the stalls, then starts to gather up discarded trancas and other scraps of wood. He explains he might as well burn these as firewood, since they’re of no use lying around the corral. He tosses a few armloads in the pickup bed. The sun slips closer to the Jémez Mountains as the truck rattles back down the driveway, dogs trailing, and we all scuttle inside Esequiel’s house. It’s warm and fragrant with piñón smoke. Esequiel puts a kettle of water on a worn woodstove to make coffee for Mom and me.
As the water warms toward a boil, we get to talking about Esequiel’s favorite subject: his tenure as the leader of the Matachines in Chimayó. He offers to show me his dance costumes.
“Pero tenemos que apurar.—But we have to hurry,” he says. “Ya mero se mete el sol.—The sun is about to set.”
“Está como dos en un zapato.—He is like two in one shoe,” Mom says, meaning that he’s anxious to get going. While she waits in the cozy kitchen, Esequiel grabs a key from a nail in the kitchen doorjamb and leads me through the sala, past an enormous drum made from a giant cottonwood trunk and rawhide (the one he promised to show me). A television glows above the drum, which serves now as a coffee table. He points with his chin and says, “Allí está el tambor.—There’s the drum,” and we hurry through the room. We exit the house through the front door, an entrance that is hardly ever used. Outside, Esequiel labors to shove aside a wooden cabinet blocking the door to a small room adjoining the porch. He’s placed the heavy cabinet there to make it difficult to break in.
Esequiel turns the key in the lock, opens the door, and beckons me into an unheated, unlighted room crammed with furniture, boxes, an old TV, and other items no longer in use. In the dim light my eyes are drawn to a dozen Matachín coronas (crowns) that emblazon the back wall with their multicolored ribbons. Their vibrancy contrasts with the dull, dusty gray of all the discarded household goods. Nearby, an American flag rolled up around a pole offers another splash of color in the drab room.
Esequiel unhooks the largest headdress and brings it toward me. For better light, we step out through the porch and then into the house, where Esequiel holds it up by the large picture window.
“Esta corona la hizo mi papá.—My father made this crown,” he says, and as he turns the piece slowly, I’m stunned by its very presence. Multicolored beads looped extravagantly around it shimmer. Ribbons dangle and twirl lightly. While he holds a Matachín palma (trident) in his left hand and the corona in his right, Esequiel talks about this, his personal headpiece, the most magnificent of the lot he keeps in the room. He was the monarca in the dances, the leader who represents Montezuma, the last Aztec king. His corona befits the role. Its glow seems to intensify as the light fades, a sacred object, made so by its antiquity, its association with such a venerable dance, and by Esequiel’s reverence and love for everything the dance represents. His presentation is all the more poignant for me because I realize that Esequiel may be the end of the line for its practitioners in Chimayó.
Esequiel again talks reverently, as he did at Magdalena’s last spring, about the many times he danced. He’s still hopeful his niece will take up the mantle and keep the dances alive in Chimayó. But he hurries as dusk falls to place the corona back with the others in the dusty storeroom. He locks the door and slides the heavy cabinet back into place, and we reenter the warmth of the house. He’s anxious about my waiting mother, who is ready to go home to Santa Fe. We’ll come back again to see the rest of the coronas when we have more time.
Esequiel Trujillo and his corona, Los Ojuelos, 2009.
Él que duerme en casa ajena, de mañana se levanta, limpiándose la lagaña y a ver pa’ dónde arranca.
He who sleeps in someone else’s home gets up early, wipes the sleep out of his eyes, and looks to see where to go. (Sleeping in a strange house leaves one disoriented and unrested.)
Él que solo se ríe, de sus maldades se acuerda.
One who is laughing to himself is remembering the mischevious things he has done.
Él que temprano se moja, tiempo tiene de secarse.
One who bathes early has time to dry himself. (Get ready early so you can have time to get to work.)
Él que todo lo quiere todo lo pierde.
One who wants all loses everything. (Said of greedy people.)
Es amigo de San Dame pero de San Toma, no.
He is a friend of Saint Give to Me but not of Saint Give to Another. (He’s stingy.)
Es como el perro del hortelano, ni deja, ni deja comer.
She is like the farmer’s dog—she neither leaves food nor lets anyone else eat. (Said of a stingy person.)
Es en contra de la corriente.
She goes against the current. (Said of a contrary person.)
Es más lo que habla que lo que dice.
He talks more than he says. (He uses many words to say little of meaning.)
Es tan vivo que todo lo que le dan se come.
She is so smart that everything they feed her she will eat. (Said of someone who thinks she is smart but is gullible.)
Es un pedazo de carne bautizado.
He is a baptized piece of meat. (Said of an especially kind person.)
Es un santito con cuernos.
He is a little saint with horns. (Said of a person who pretends to be good but isn’t.)
