The heroic green-blue cypress has stood there ever since I can remember. The behemoth tree was like pure delicate crystal: forever in danger of being broken, cut down by men and women concerned more with industrial profit than the preservation of natural life. The autumn Santana winds arched the sun above and crowned the great cypress with rays of light. I looked up to the top lost in the sun. Here, next to this well-planted tree, I felt rooted in this earth. I danced by the little rivulet that meandered down to what once was my family’s home, my barrio, Simons. I returned often to stand under the cypress that had known generations of my kinfolk, the people I loved. I came back to fuel my memory.
At night, in spring, summer, autumn and winter I walked round the dancing cypress, found tranquility, closed my eyes and dreamed. Habitually, a multitude of wings or the pandemonium of the city shattered my reverie with nature, but always the cypress endured, peacefully guarding and supporting the sky. Today beneath the cypress’ constant gaze and embrace of the world, I found myself in a social position radically different from my parents, Octavio and Nana! They taught me to walk through the past to live in the present and to work for a better future.
Suddenly, as if in a dream, I had become a doctor. And just as suddenly, in a modern Orange County theater, in a crowded hall, my eyes met hers.
In her presence, the cypress spoke to me. “There is magic in her.”
I saw the world, the sea, the mountains in her legs, her arms, her face. The cosmos became her body. She smiled. I had seen her somewhere before. Transparent, I panicked and asked her name.
“Sandra,” she said.
Sandra and I walked together through a crowded gallery of sounds: wine pouring, glasses clinking, chatter. Laughter and words addressed to her. I sensed her confidence, her powerful identity, and I felt relaxed. She took a cup of coffee without paying. I placed three dollars on the counter. The host pushed it back.
“Have a great performance,” he said to her.
Comfortably we stood together. Afraid to respond, I watched her stir cream into the coffee. Her green-blue eyes saw mine.
“And your name?” she asked in a warm open tone.
I reached for my name and found it at the brink of my lips.
“I’ll see you after the performance, Gregory,” she said and disappeared into the enchanted forest of people. The lights dimmed and the corridor emptied slowly.
At my seat, I fumbled through the program to find the cast, and from a photograph she smiled at me again, Sandra Spear. She was an actress. Beneath the stage lights I listened and watched, hoping to recognize a sign in her voice, in her gestures. But only once did I feel that she actually saw me.
After the performance I waited in the gallery where I had first seen her. In minutes I was by myself. Sandra probably said that to everyone, I thought. I felt foolish, stupid, still believing in fairy tales. Life isn’t like the movies, I thought. I headed for the door.
“Gregory!”
In an instant Sandra Spear had changed my life.
The Santa Ana medical clinic was located on Staton Street, next to the Catholic church in an old Santa Ana barrio called Delhi. This barrio, like many scattered throughout Southern California, was built a long time ago to house company workers. This barrio had been founded by agricultural laborers who had toiled in the fields and in the Delhi Sugar factory.
The barrios of Southern California, the real Aztlán, the origins of my Indian past, shared in common the kind of housing built. The well-tended flower gardens, the beautiful faces marked by the history of young and old Chicanos who worked, studied, loved, hated and helped each other in times of need, and just as easily shot each other to watch a brother or sister bleed to death on the pavement. For revenge, for the reputation of my sister, for a bad drug deal, for pride, for the honor of family, for their barrio, the homeboys and homegirls would explain as they lay dying from a huge hole made by a 357 magnum bullet fired from a cruising car at eleven-thirty at night, just when the party was underway.
The results of drive-by shootings, usually gang related, unfortunately had become too common since I had started here three years ago. I could patch the physical wounds. But if the person died, I couldn’t deal with what he or she left behind. The toughest part was when I had to face the family. In their faces I saw my mother, father, brothers and sisters. Each time I left a cadaver on the slab, I felt that I had forsaken myself. I could not understand why I ached with guilt!
All night I had danced with death. But I enjoyed my job. Now at seven in the morning I waited for Sandra. She drove from her apartment, two miles away, near the Orange County Theater where a year ago we had met.
Sandra usually sensed when the night had brought bloody business. This morning she knew for sure. We had planned a late evening supper: a light, health-above-taste meal popular in narcissistic health-conscious Orange County. I was to have gotten off at ten last night, but our plans were altered when the bleeding barrio warriors began to arrive.
In a new green, twelve-cylinder Jaguar, Father’s gift to his daughter, we drove to Sandra’s apartment.
From the balcony, the San Bernardino mountains rose covered with snow. The morning was brisk, clear. As a child those mountains were so far away, unattainable. But now in a matter of two hours I could walk through forest, ski slopes and drive through their winding roads.
Sandra studied her script.
The apartment was decorated with both modern and ancient objects from North and South America. Sandra had studied in Costa Rica her junior year and traveled from Central America to Tierra del Fuego. In spite of the mortification of her parents, she visited Cuba to attend the Latin American Film Festival. Mexico was her favorite country.
“How do you feel this morning?” I asked.
She put the play down.
“Never better,” she said and flung open her arms. We kissed and nothing mattered.
I moved through the world like my vision moved over Sandra’s body, amazed that she had spoken to me after the performance, forever bewildered that she had chosen me! With Sandra next to my heart, I held the cosmos.
“With all its beautiful smiling stars wearing sombreros and cheering for Sandra Spear!”
Sandra laughed at the silly joke and stretched out relaxed before me, a feast. I wondered how she really felt. The curly pubic locks of her womb clustered upward like our favorite sunny postmodern plaza of massive glass buildings and white-walled parking structures. They formed a canvas on which the sun’s light casted forth shadows from a stone pyramid, an immense steel sun dial, a twisted iron sculpture, that demanded at least a passing thought. I loved that stone plaza of artistic monoliths and our favorite continental Mexican restaurant the way I loved her body.
For hours, Sandra and I played in the sun and at night we strolled mystified by the power the flood lights had over us. We danced, and at first made shadow sculptures with our hands, then with our bodies, and bolder yet, together, ever so close together.
Sandra pushed me away, “You’re insane.”
“And so are you for hanging around with me,” I answered and she turned toward me.
I looked down from her eyes and found her breasts like sacred shrines of memories from which I suckled the past. There were two churches that seemed to be important in my life. One was Our Lady of Mount Carmel, the Simons Church, where Father Charles attended to his “wild savages.” In that church I was baptized, made my First Communion and my Confirmation. I spent practically a fourth of my youth participating in activities organized by the Catholic Church. I think the Mother Church expected to extract from us at least one priest. To our mother’s chagrin, not one guy from Simons ever expressed interest in the priesthood. We were “hoods” and we wanted to screw girls.
Sandra kissed me. “I think you imagine all these things.”
“I’ll take you to the exact place where the church stood.”
The second important church was the United Anglican Church of Whittier. We arrived late for her uncle’s wedding. That was the first time I met her parents. They immediately made me uncomfortable. They were both blond. But Sandra’s brown naturally curly hair, where did it come from?
In our rush I sat next to her father and she took the aisle. The music began. It was not the traditional American wedding march. It sounded almost Asian. Her uncle came in from the side entrance and on his head was her brown very curly hair. Down the aisle marched a stunning Asian woman.
Sandra’s father cleared his throat. “I just don’t know about these mixed race marriages. He’s the first one on your side of the family to … ”
“Shut up and stand, Bill!” Sandra’s mother firmly ordered.
A bigot and a superwoman, I thought, and I placed my hands on Sandra’s shoulders. Without delay, Bill started to clear his throat again.
“Yes, I remember. My uncle and Sashi still live in Japan,” Sandra said.
She pushed her curly hair back and her breasts became temples where the mysteries of blood and desire resided. My gaze covered her with red flowers like a spreading bougainvillea covering the walls of a city lapped by the ocean, her body and mine: the two halves of a love. We heard the crystalline song of the fountain in the plaza, the chirping of birds just outside the window, and we embraced with the warmth of the morning sun shining through the slightly opened blinds.
I, ugly and imperfect. Sandra, perfect and beautiful. I loved her for that and for choosing me.
Sandra dressed in the color of my most decadent passion and desires. She lived in my common and guilt-ridden male thoughts. She resided naked there in my mind. I tried desperately to shake her off, but she came back and smiled before my eyes. I understood that I had succumbed to her beauty and intelligence. I washed my hands with her, I bathed my body with her, I drank her in the coolness of the cypress tree where I knew that I could not escape her. I thought this when we walked by the warm houses in Delhi.
Clemente, an ancient man that we went to see, lived in an old dilapidated house. Sandra had always wanted to meet him. He had a two hundred-pound jaguar as a pet. The portliness of the sacred cat gave it a Cheshire look. Strange as it might seem, the City of Santa Ana did not disturb this kind and gentle beast. Sandra and I watched the jaguar drink water.
“He drinks dreams,” Sandra said.
Clemente, happy that we had come to visit him, said, “Only in your eyes.”
In Clemente’s garden, as in my Mother’s, there flew hundreds of butterflies and hummingbirds. The butterflies came and landed on our clothes and the hummingbirds orbited around us like spheres of color.
As evening approached, my eyes passed over Sandra’s forehead and traced the path of the moon that rose full above the balcony of her apartment. Sandra slept on a cloud hovering over Orange County, California. I traveled easily through Sandra’s womb, as I did through her dreams, and I found that her face had been transfigured into the face of a serpent made up of two great serpents. She dressed in odd clothes that I had never seen before. She wore a singing skirt of undulating fields of corn. Her skirt became crystal and water. Although I tried, I failed to drink. Her lips, hair and desperate eyes rained all night as I lay next to Sandra Spear. That was the first night that she opened my chest and exposed my heart to her pain. But Sandra lovingly closed my eyes with her mouth and covered my opened chest with her bosom of roots, water and love. That night as I fell asleep, I saw above Sandra the green-blue cypress with its dripping roots exposed.
I passed my hand over Sandra’s figure and moved on a swift river racing by windows of memory. The victims of the holocaust saw through her bones as her body turned into a forest where we both ran on a path in the mountains. There were two other Jews in my life. Andrea, who while we had made love recalled the horrors suffered by her grandparents. Dr. Milton Flink, who had suffered the abuses against children in the Nazi concentration camps while he watched his parents wither away and die. Flink was the founder of the physician’s group to which I belonged. He had treated Sandra the first time I had to rush her to the clinic. She had cut her finger while opening a cardboard box filled with scripts to read. She was so excited at the possibility of reading several roles highly recommended by the director at the Orange County Theater that she ripped the cardboard apart and deeply slashed the palm of her left hand. Only after she had tried every possible way to stop the bleeding did she concede to go. I suspected something when she violently refused my treatment. As we drove to the clinic, I knew then what Sandra admitted to Flink later.
On that short drive, her white shorts and her “Viva La Revolución Cabrones” t-shirt were stained with blood. Sandra bled like a faucet I could not shut off. Flink carried her into the clinic as dark eyes watched in awe. She collapsed as her roots rushed blood to the gash in the dam.
Flink and I saved Sandra for her father and mother. Bill and Phyllis traded her car, with the front seat still soaked in blood, for a new Jaguar and came to cheer her up. Sandra’s parents were not surprised to find me at her apartment. First chance Bill had, he spoke his peace. He held nothing back.
“Can’t you take better care of her! What kind of a doctor are you, anyway?” He threw the fifty-five thousand dollar keys on the dining table.
Bill and I fell into an unending abyss. We both traveled through her thoughts, somehow sharpened by her physical condition. When they left, the four of us knew we loved each other like a family. Forever I hold that moment dear to my heart. For on that day Bill and Phyllis realized that Sandra and I were lovers. From that day on we were more honest with each other.
On a silent afternoon I pushed away from her white forehead as Sandra slept soundly, peacefully in her pale countenance. Finally, my breath came back and I stood against the setting sun and saw my shadow shattered on her Peruvian rug. I struggled to recapture my fragmented being, piece by piece. I proceeded without an essence. I clothed my invisible body. I kissed her and searched through dark corridors, through the infinite paths of memory, and opened the doors to one of the examining rooms in Flink’s clinic.
Upon a surgical table there rotted away a mangled female body of summer. Within her fifteen years of angelical pubis grew the jewel of her love for her homeboy who stood nearby, eager to know if she was going to make it.
A tattoo ran along her rib, “My Sacred Heart for Jimmy of Delhi,” punctuated with a red arrow pointing to her heart and an unexpected bullet puncture. Jimmy took her hand while I examined the child’s uterus and the fetus.
“About six months?”
“You better save her and the baby!” challenged Jimmy. The police guard restrained him.
Her face was pale like Sandra’s in the afternoon. Sandra’s face disappeared as I labored to save her. Blood trickled down her fingers to the floor. First a drop, then two, and suddenly Flink stepped in the puddle.
“I’m sorry, Jimmy, but her parents refuse permission,” Flink said.
“I’m the father!” Jimmy screamed.
“But you’re only sixteen.” The policeman pushed Jimmy toward the door.
“But I’m the father!” Jimmy’s screams were finally silenced by the rush of a police car engine which rapidly faded away.
“She’s gone.”
“And the baby?”
“A few hours and the fetus will die.”
Flink unfolded a sheet.
“We can save the child,” I countered.
“The parents don’t want it. Their daughter is a hopeless addict. The child is probably as damaged as she.”
Flink pulled the white sheet over the mother and placed his hand on her uterus. The similarities of the dead woman’s tattoo and the serial number branded on Flink’s forearm were unavoidable.
“Maybe less,” Flink said and walked out of the room.
A moment later, I heard the wail of a woman and before me, under a white sheet an unborn fetus wrenched in the diminishing oxygen of its dead mother’s expiring womb. For an instant the girl’s tumultuous hair caressed my hand and became a shiver of scurrying spiders over my sudden deep-felt smile. I fought off tears that night and returned to Sandra to cry with my lips upon her white forehead. She understood and her smile, like lightning, broke the perilous tempest. Her face, like glowing rain, guided me in the dark garden of modern delights. Sandra was like warm rushing water full of life at my side.
During this time in our relationship I started to write. Alone I wrote about the falling days, months. A year passed. It seemed as if Sandra had stabilized. But I lived constantly on guard, knowing that at any moment she could fall into the abyss of illness.
Our life, like a road of mirrors, reflected our broken image. We refused to look down. Our vision was forever forward. I walked with Sandra, proudly overcoming the lurking doubts, insecurities of our shadow. She and I lived in search for an instant of security.
Perhaps we found it in the birds singing in the afternoon sun, at about five in the afternoon, that time of which poets sing. Our love was tempered by the glass walls of majestic postmodern buildings among which we strolled, our love tempered by our parents, who reminded us to be careful with each other’s hearts. We did not pay attention. We grew in our passion and we conceived.
“Sandra, marry me,” I proposed.
“Yes,” Sandra whispered, “but wait till after the baby is born.”
Happiness was transformed into the precarious task of protecting Sandra’s life and the child she carried. Everything came to a halt. She stayed in bed guarding the maturing branch of our love. Four months she lay still, feeling her uterus expand with life.
Sandra wanted to sit in the balcony, look out toward the hills, the mountains, and so I helped her get out of bed. After almost five months we decided she could at least walk a few yards from our bed. It was scarcely ten minutes that Sandra had sat down to enjoy the afternoon breeze.
“I feel wet,” she said.
I looked down. The red rose within her had burst like a river. We saw our blood spread over the white tile on the balcony. Somewhere down below us the laughter of young girls embraced us at five on that autumn afternoon.
In the white space of the hospital we lost the child and the bleeding ceased. Surrounded by the beauty of Sandra’s curly hair, her transparent face greeted me. When she was out of danger I accompanied Bill and Phyllis to their car. We hugged and standing very close to one another, Bill spoke softly to me.
“Why do you insist on making her suffer?”
As they drove away, a red hue began to slide across the sky. The sun returned with the start of another day.
After the movie we went to a Mexican restaurant in Santa Ana, near the Orange County Jail. Radiant paintings of Mexican Indian motifs hung on the restaurant walls. Images of pyramids, volcanoes, sun calendars, warriors and animals. Sandra had physically recovered, and I thought I had found in her face the reflection of a Jaguar roaming the spaces of night. Her green-blue eyes fixed perfectly into my own almond-shaped brown ones. In an instant she possessed all faces, time and places, none of which were familiar to me, yet I knew them all. I remembered the cypress filled with birds, the great star dancing above, chasing away the clouds of winter. She was a priestess and she drank a cup of blood and raised a sword to the sky and violently thrust it through my soul. Her fingers had grown like roots, penetrated and entwined through my body and soul. She asked about my family. Sandra hardly knew them.
My Mother, after my father had passed away, learned to live alone. My older sister Micaela lost her husband about four years ago. My sister Flor’s husband died about six months before we met. The women in my family lived without men. Yes, my sisters had children but they lived independent lives. My brother Javier, a relatively happy man, lived with his wife. His sons and daughters kept the family growing. Sandra knew I loved my family. She also knew that I had ambiguous feelings about my oldest brother, Arturo.
“Why don’t you go see him?” Sandra asked.
“The only time he shows up is when someone dies,” I said.
“You’re being as stubborn as he.”
Arturo had dropped out of school at a very young age and had never learned to read and write nor do basic mathematics. I was convinced that he was dyslexic, but never diagnosed. He was a ladies man. He had many girlfriends: Laura, La Mimy, Tonia, etcetera. It didn’t make much difference to him what their names were.
Upon his return from Korea, he had an affair with a girl named Eloisa, whom he dated for several weeks and promised to marry. Eloisa became pregnant and Arturo abandoned her. Eloisa gave birth to a boy and named him Michael. Soon after the birth of his son, Arturo met Casilda, the girl of his dreams, and he married her. Eloisa sued Arturo. The court ordered Arturo to pay child support until Michael was eighteen years old.
Eloisa had always told her son that his father had died in Korea. Michael began to ask for photographs of his father, for evidence of his death. Finally, he understood that his father was alive and he insisted on knowing his identity. Eloisa had no choice and told her son the truth. Through a mutual friend of Arturo’s and Eloisa’s who had maintained contact with both, Michael found out the names of his grandparents and where they lived.
On a spring day, approximately twenty years later, while I was at the medical school in Guadalajara, my mother Nana and my father Octavio worked in the rose garden in front of our house, on Español Street. The Revueltas home was built on the hill that overlooked the 245 acres where Simons barrio used to be located. A young man approached my parents. Michael in search of his lost roots, his father. My father and mother did not refuse him his identity, nor their welcome. The boy returned several times until one day it so happened that Arturo arrived during one of Michael’s visits. Arturo immediately recognized Michael, but he backed away and refused to talk to his son.
Casilda accused my parents of undermining her marriage. She charged them with arranging meetings of Eloisa and Arturo. From that day, Arturo abandoned the house. He did not speak to my parents for about two years. He and Casilda gradually severed relations with everyone on the Revueltas side.
Casilda and he treated Javier, Micaela and Flor terribly. If they would call, Casilda informed them that Arturo did not want to speak to them. If they went to visit, Casilda made them feel unwanted and insulted them by never acknowledging their presence. Arturo never attempted to put a stop to her bizarre behavior. He never tried to defend himself before his family. His children were helpless. They witnessed the loss of their uncles and aunts, but worst of all, the loss of Octavio and Nana Revueltas. Casilda and Arturo had banished their children from their grandparents.
When I returned from Mexico I went to visit my brother Arturo. He was my childhood hero. I looked up to him. He bought me my first bicycle. I loved him and did not want to lose him, nor beautiful Casilda and my nephews and nieces. I arrived at their house while Arturo was washing his car. Casilda came out, recognized me and immediately went back inside. I could hear the children in the back yard; after a short while I heard one of my nephews ask, “But why, Mom?”
Silence and then I heard a door slam. Arturo spoke hurriedly. I remember he did not embrace me. I wanted to hold my brother close to my heart, for only a few seconds, the way we always had expressed our love for one another. But instead we exchanged banal words. Arturo was gone and I remained standing in the center of a black asphalt driveway.
At that moment, like now, recalling that part of our lives, I hoped for revenge, but I never could hurt Arturo. I wondered if he understood how much he had hurt our mother and father.
“Don’t be bitter,” Sandra said.
While Sandra slept, I read her face, her skin, each line, minute pore, fine hair. She had become the text I loved. I wrote about her, Arturo and my family. My writing became fire running over the crevasses of my memory, running over those I loved and those I hated. In sleep and in orgasm with her eyes closed and me desperate over and in her, wanting in some mad way to be swallowed by her. I could not help myself. I could never say no to Sandra.
There were instances when my sight caught a pursued adolescent aspect on her face. I was afraid of the beast that roamed near her, of the days that fell around us, of the walls that surrounded us, of the balcony she loved, of her name, Sandra. I was afraid of losing her.
My fear became desperate when Sandra cried alone. I never went to her. I listened and I cried. I felt a force heavy on my heart push up to my eyes. There was nothing before me, only the instant that I rescued this night, like many others that fell in our bed, sculptured with dreams and the memories that I typed onto the pages of our story. Outside, an Aztec god ascended and pierced my eyes with the gift of a pristine day.
In Orange County, late one morning, Flink sent me to the hospital to see several patients. As I signed off on the charts I was approached by Termolino N. Trompito, TNT, Director of the Hospital Administration and arch enemy to the Flink concept of indigent care in the County. He was nice enough, although through the years I learned that he was unpredictable. He practiced a convenient, power-hungry politics which in the long-run always supported his fellow cronies and above all made him look good. He was about five feet tall with a lofty superiority complex. TNT watched as I put down my last chart.
“How is the clinic progressing?”
I chuckled as I looked down at the little Hitler, who from under his precisely trimmed moustache waited impatiently for an answer.
“You should come and see for yourself, Mr. Trompito.”
As I walked out into the city of Santa Ana, the Spanish, the English, names, smells and tastes reminded me that I had promised to visit Doña Rosina. Although she lived only several houses from the Flink clinic, she was unable to walk there. Diabetes had crushed her legs. Suffering great pain, she continued her amazing patchwork art.
Doña Rosina’s house was painted to reflect her art. It probably had twenty-five different colors. The garden was manicured and the potted flowers swayed in the slight wind. I knocked. The door opened and before me there appeared the quintessence of female cholismo. Her hands were decorated with black rubber-bands woven like spider-web gloves from her fingers up to her wrists. The rubber-bands were as black as her blond-rooted, long full hair which fell freely down her back. She was an oblique specter of colors; her sharp obsidian eyes highlighted with soft shades of grey, white, brown, contrasted with the rectangular blush spot on her cheeks. She wore white baggy pants and a large, striped white and black jersey. She stood her ground until Doña Rosina called.
“Let the doctor come in, m’hija.”
Doña Rosina worked in the kitchen. She already had a cup of coffee poured and Mexican sweet bread on the table for me. She worked on a large quilt which had the image of the Virgen de Guadalupe.
“Come here, m’hija,” Doña Rosina said.
The young woman came to her side. Doña Rosina reached to her shoulder.
“Doctor Gregorio, this is my niece, Keli, from Ciudad Juárez. She is going to take care of me.”
I nodded in agreement and took out my stethoscope to examine Doña Rosina. Through the examination she kept on working. She was approximately eighty-five years and slowly dying of the complications of diabetes. Her legs were swollen and she had an infected ingrown toenail.
“No, don’t touch my toes. I won’t let you cut them off,” Doña Rosina said sternly and reached for Keli, who looked at her aunt’s feet with a grimace.
“But, tía, it’s terrible!” Keli knelt and helped put on Doña Rosina’s socks and slippers.
Doña Rosina was determined. “No. I want to die whole.” She kept working.
As I prepared to leave, Keli dropped her guard and talked to me confidentially, indicating that she would try to convince her aunt to cure that toe. She understood what the consequences might be. Nonetheless, we understood what Doña Rosina wanted.
Outside, three homeboys arrived. They came to clean and tend the yard. The three youths wore light, quilted jackets with the image of the Virgen de Guadalupe on the back. Doña Rosina not only had made the jackets for the Delhi homeboys, but for many years had taken care of them when they were in trouble. She had bailed them out of jail and tried to steer them away from drugs and violence. She had adopted and loved them as if they were her own. By her actions Doña Rosina had become the mother of Barrio Delhi.
“Here, take this to Sandra.” She handed me a jacket which was like a kaleidoscope of the Virgen on cloth. As I looked at the jacket, the multidimensional image of the Virgen emanated by the thousands from the weave.
The three young men worked in the front yard. Keli walked me to the door.
From the kitchen table, where she continued to create her magic jackets, Doña Rosina said, “Doctor, you like my colors? They are my children’s. Don’t ever forget, you are the color of the future. We are the color of tomorrow.”
The helicopter hovered over the US Embassy in Saigon. People scurried up ladders. Suddenly, the chopper pushed away, several men fell; others clung to life and freedom. This was the scene on television when the Communist forces overran South Vietnam and forced the United States to engage in an immediate evacuation of troops, civilians and Vietnamese refugees loyal to the United States and fearing for their lives. This day marked the end of two decades of military involvement in Vietnam. We had lost the war to skinny, half-naked, rat-eating Vietnamese, who had enormous hearts and guts to match. It was their country now, no question about it.
It was right about this time that Sandra’s career began to move upward. She got four important roles, one after another, that kept her working right up to about the middle of November.
The Orange County Theater debated on performing a Spanish play. The administrators were not convinced that their public would enjoy something from Spain, so they dropped the idea. On November 20, Generalissimo Francisco Franco died and the next day Sandra suggested three plays by Federico García Lorca. They selected “Blood Wedding” and Sandra was selected to perform the role of the “bride.” She brought the play home for me to read.
“Blood Wedding” was a play about people driven uncontrollably to their death by passion and love. When I finished reading the play, I did not want Sandra to play the role, but she started to rehearse and I soon felt, strangely, that she was born for the role. Long ago she had memorized the play completely and had dreamed that someday she would play the bride. She pronounced every word as naturally as if Lorca heard them. Her face expressed both peace and a deep hurt. Her body moved gracefully through the bride’s world.
“I know Lorca,” she said. “I know how he felt.”
“But will the audience?” I asked.
“Anyone can feel Lorca,” Sandra said.
In early January of 1976, two weeks before the opening night of the play, Sandra set out to demonstrate the power of Lorca’s poetry. She performed parts of the play to Don Clemente, his jaguar, Doña Rosina, Keli, Flink and the Delhi homeboys.
For an hour, no one except the jaguar, took their eyes off Sandra. She captured our minds and we saw into the world of Lorca’s bride. Toward the end of the performance she pulled a knife from underneath her blouse, danced and caressed its point, edge, width and length. She kissed the blade, she held it to her womb, to her breast, to her heart. She played with it like a fan and she recited the “Mother’s Lament,” the last words of Lorca’s play:
And it barely fits the hand
but it slides in clean
through the astonished flesh
and stops there, at the place
where trembles enmeshed
the dark root of a scream.
The Delhi audience applauded and I went quickly to her side and took the knife. I realized then how dangerously sharp it was. Everyone acknowledged Lorca’s greatness, praised Sandra’s talent with an embrace. Sandra’s performance in Barrio Delhi was one of the most eccentric experiences in my life.
But even more gratifying was opening night when Barrio Delhi politely invaded the Orange County Center. According to the subscribers of the Performer’s Club, made up of Orange County’s wealthy “ooh la las,” the Orange County Center was the most beautiful structure in the county. The Delhi homeboys, encouraged by Doña Rosina, declared a truce and invited other Orange County barrios to accompany them to Sandra’s performance. Sandra had suddenly developed an unexpected following. Cars met at Centennial Park in Santa Ana and drove to Delhi to escort Sandra, chauffered in her Jaguar, to the theater. It was a sight that caught the attention of every pedestrian and car following the caravan. I estimated there were about three hundred low-riding cars cruising to the house of Orange County culture. The Los Angeles Times had estimated about two hundred “Chicano-painted and springy” automobiles. The Orange County Register declared there were “too many baroque-colored cruisers to count.”
The Sandra Spear caravan arrived at the entrance and Sandra, Don Clemente without his jaguar, Doña Rosina, Keli and I alighted and entered. From each escorting car there came at least four or five people. For the first time in the history of the Orange County Center there was a capacity crowd of people from the Latino barrios coming to see a performance. If the Los Angeles Times was correct, there must have been close to two thousand folks who had come to spend a night at the theater. I walked proudly with Doña Rosina. We took our seats and enjoyed a captivating performance by Sandra Spear.
Sandra’s parents were there. Phyllis’ eyes confessed a mother’s pride for Sandra’s matchless performance. After the show Phyllis went backstage to embrace and kiss her. Bill stood by fidgeting, clearing his throat, obviously uncomfortable with Doña Rosina and the other people of Sandra’s entourage. He was disgusted with their dress, posture and speech.
“Who are these people?” Bill asked.
“Our friends.” I waited for his response.
“Friends, shit!”
The next morning the Orange County Register published a supportive review of “Blood Wedding,” pointing out that the performance by Sandra Spear was exceptionally sensitive and meaningful to the unusual audience. It severely criticized the disrespectful attire of the people that came from Orange County’s Hispanic community. “How can anyone enjoy a serious play sitting next to someone dressed like a hood?” asked the Register’s reviewer. Later that week several letters to the editor expressed their concern and dismay as to “the disrespect the Hispanic community had toward the Theater. These/barrio homeboys, Mexican gangsters, looked absurd and defiant sitting in the architectural dignity of the Center. They should not have attended, if only to see one performing actress—Sandra Spear.”
The Los Angeles Times was more generous. The reviewer enjoyed every “multivalent meaning of Lorca’s metaphysical and mythological play.” She went on to praise Sandra Spear as a “refreshing new actress whose political and social commitment are exemplary.” The reviewer pointed out that, “The performance was great on stage as well as outside. The presentation of the young Hispanic adults from the different barrios was electrifying. Their clothes and cars were of the choicest homeboy fashion. They looked sharp and got along great. No need for the beefed-up security that came in later. The Hispanic theater-goers were some of Orange County’s finest. It was a triumph for the Orange County Performance Center to have produced a great play, introduced a new star and attracted a substantial Hispanic audience.”
Three nights after the play opened, the Center was filled to capacity with a large portion of Latinos in attendance. Every night Sandra had an escort. Two hours before curtain time low-rider cars from throughout the county began to cruise the area. There were no problems, everyone came, young and old, to see Lorca’s tragic bride, played by Sandra Spear. However, the anti-Latino political forces in Orange County, ever fearful of being overrun and of losing their cultural spaces to the Mexicans, covertly convinced the theater administration that it was dangerous to allow such a large amount of barrio homeboys to gather in one place, and that the homeboys presence scared away the patrons.
The last performance of Lorca’s “Blood Wedding” took place six days after it opened. Sandra was not asked to leave, but from then on she was given only bit roles. The Center always cited its production of “Blood Wedding” as their outstanding example of community outreach and sensitivity to the Orange County Hispanic population. Yet the Center never again produced a play that remotely interested the barrio population, nor the Latinos living outside of the barrios. They continued to verbalize their interest and desire to respond to this audience, but they never acted. But Sandra made such an impact that other playhouses and theaters offered her many roles. Sandra always had work and she was happy.
She was happy even in the stone-cold afternoon which hid little knives that carved their way through her body as she wrote on my arms and back silent undecipherable words. My skin against hers. We kissed. I searched for water in her green-blue eyes and I found stone. Her breast, hips, thighs were sculptured marble; her mouth tasted of ash, and still I fell upon her body to quench my selfish passion. Sandra’s words carved their way through my sexual mind. One by one they brought forth memories. She called my name, which I had forgotten at that instant when I undertook to split her in two. I moaned and she petted me like a puppy dog. She reassured me that she understood and that I had not failed her. There was nothing left of me now, only Sandra survived.
There was nothing left in me. I had forgotten the names of my friends. My world was Sandra, my work and our Delhi friends. I picked up my duffle bag and watched her sleep, coiled under the sheets, and she awoke startled. Her serpent eyes hissed.
“Are you going now?”
Above Orange County, above the smog barrier to the mountains, I retreated. She decided to stay home and study new offers, read new plays. For a weekend I wrote about us, about Sandra and me. There were moments when I attempted to reconstruct her face with words and the images they conjured up, but she turned into a mass of ash, the bride’s knife in Lorca’s play, a bag of visceral fluids, dry skin hanging from her emaciated bones, and she danced in a white gown at the bottom of a pit. She danced and danced until she melted away in a red sea leaving only her desperate green-blue eyes. I reached out to her as she struggled in the red whirlpool. It was impossible to reach Sandra! Unhesitatingly, I let myself fall toward her, longing to return to life again.
I pursued other futures, other lives, others loves, but each led back to her to start again. I closed my eyes to reveal to myself where I had been, who I was, who she was, and why I desired her even now, why I loved her.
All night I made plans for us. We would take a trip. Sandra wanted to return to Mexico, to Yucatan and Guatemala, to explore the recently found archaeological sights. She once told me that anything that was found after a long time sustained for a moment intense magical waves. I laughed. These sights must possess super-magic waves, for they had been buried for more than a thousand years.
And we would go to Mexico City and stay at the María Cristina Hotel. Sandra described the room she wanted. To me, hotel rooms were all the same, but not for her. Each one that she remembered had a ritual, a way of entering, a way of allowing the room to let her share its space.
Sandra taught me rituals.
I blessed my car, my room, and when I finished writing, I blessed the pages which held the story of our time. Sandra had taught me to make them sacred. I thought I heard her voice. It was dawn, the sun broke through the dark thin line of night and began its dance slowly. I sat at the edge of the bed. Someone called my name. I must be sleeping, I thought, and fell face down on the bed. Moments later I was awakened by the weight of a gentle hand on my shoulder. Suddenly, I realized that the door was locked and no one could have entered. The hair on the nape of my neck chilled my back as fear immediately bolted me from the bed.
“¡Híjole! What is this?” I said.
Before me my grandfather Papá Damián greeted me.
I sat back on the bed, closed and opened my eyes. I heard his voice as I had heard it when I was a child. Long ago in Simons, in his room, in front of the Virgen de Guadalupe, after his death he had come to me.
“I have come to be your guide … ”
Curve after curve, I heard his voice, naming the streets and towns that we passed on the way down the mountain. Papá Damián thought he had lost me. We moved by faces in other cars, fourwheel drive vehicles, gas stations, houses, rooms, windows and doors. I rested at a park. There Papá Damián spoke to me again.
“Thank God I found you.”
On the freeway, Papá Damián sang, talked about towns, streets, houses, rooms, a room in which Sandra waited.
“Slow down, slow down. You’ll get there,” I said to myself.
“Crap! What the hell is happening to me?”
I saw my car exit the Newport Freeway and drive toward Delhi.
It had been two days that Sandra slept and still felt weak. Large bruises covered her breasts, arms and thighs. She remembered a time when her blood did not batter her body. She remembered the women in the plaza of Oaxaca. They knitted, embroidered and wove chromatic blankets, rebozos and hats. Without hesitation she bought a hat. By the church, men read the newspaper and listened to the women and children sing. A strange melodic Indian language took over the plaza. Young men walked by and stared. She could almost feel their thoughts. Sandra liked their pristine odor of earth and semen. They inhaled her through their nostrils, mouth and eyes. Sandra imagined them as loving youth. It was as if everything was sacred.
Sandra stood at the center of the world. On the first night of existence, she chose an Indian. He traversed her with his broad face, black hair, brown joyful eyes. Toward the dawn of the first day they kissed and gave birth to the earth. Sandra was with him for several days and nights.
One morning Sandra and her lover walked to town. They passed the small jail where men and women maddened by pulque cursed their keepers. By the bank she remembered that she had to cash a traveler’s check. Sandra passed the Indian huts and avoided a school of scorpions. Sandra’s lover carefully picked two large ones and dangled them from their claws. He threw the creatures toward the Red Cross shed where a nun swept the herd off the porch. Finally, they arrived at Sandra’s hotel and sat on the veranda overlooking the white ancient plaza. Sandra ordered fresh papaya, sweet bread and café de olla. She noticed that her elbows and knees were swollen, but disregarded the soreness and related it to her sudden hard lovemaking. No, she refused to allow the aches to bother her. Sandra freely shared bread, alcohol, pot, the sun, her body, her life. His smile became mine and she wondered where I was the Sunday afternoon when she could hardly move her engorged knees, ankles and elbows. Sandra’s afflicted body, bruised by the slightest confusion.
The morning after my departure, Sandra awoke with grossly swollen ankles and hands. She lay still until ten, when she felt an unbearable urge to spit. She struggled to the bath, and spit blood into the wash bowl. With bloated stomach she sat on the toilet and knew she was bleeding internally. Her clothes were at the foot of the bed. As Sandra labored to put them on, a flow of blood came from her nose. A strong chill oppressed her body.… I will be fine, Sandra thought, and refused to call the emergency number.
She shuffled to her car. Her pants were wet and smelled of blood. Her white mask of terror, tethered above her moist crimson blouse, frightened people. Several saw Sandra but were afraid to approach. In that immense time she grew monstrous. She moved into her slick Jaguar and drove toward Delhi.
“Oh, crap … ” Again a steady rush of blood issued from her nose. She opened her mouth for oxygen. Sandra grabbed a handful of tissue. In a second it was soaked. She grabbed my East Los Angeles College sweat-shirt, held it to her nose, coughed heavily and spit blood on the steering wheel. She was opening up all over. She gasped for breath. She was almost there. She was confident that they would help her, help her to die.
The Delhi homeboys had finished the garden and polished their cars while Keli dressed Doña Rosina’s infected toe. With her good foot, Doña Rosina petted Don Clemente’s jaguar. They spoke about the world and how fast things were changing. Suddenly, Sandra’s Jaguar smashed into the fence and shattered their quiet Sunday afternoon.
The homeboys rushed to her side. They found her slumped against the window.
“Dios mío,” Keli exclaimed as the homeboys carried Sandra to the porch.
“Here, wrap her in these!” Doña Rosina handed her sons several blankets.
“Put her in the back seat and take her to the hospital.” Doña Rosina made her way to Sandra’s car.
“Don Clemente, llámale a Flink … ”
Escorted by five detailed, immaculately clean Delhi lowrider cars, a homeboy drove Doña Rosina, Keli and Sandra to the nearest hospital. The driver of Sandra’s car floored the gas pedal every chance he had and arrived at the hospital in minutes. His homeboys followed close behind.
When the group carried Sandra into the emergency entrance, the nurse straightaway hit the security bottom.
“Stabbing victim in emergency, stat!”
Doña Rosina and Keli led the boys into a room with two empty examining tables. As they lay Sandra down, three security people entered and ordered the homeboys to place their hands on the table and spread eagle. They were searched for weapons. Two police officers appeared, initiated an aggressive interrogation while Sandra lay on the table, bleeding.
“Who stabbed her?” one cop asked.
“Where was she stabbed?” another pointed to Keli.
“Who was the other gang?” the cop yelled.
“¿Dónde está el doctor?” Doña Rosina called to the nurse.
“She’s gonna bleed to death!” a homeboy pleaded.
“We have to fill out insurance forms before the doctor can see her,” the nurse said.
“We don’t have insurance! Call a doctor or she’ll die!” screamed a homeboy into the face of one of the cops.
“Where did you steal the car?”
“It’s hers,” said Doña Rosina.
“You expect us to believe that your homegirl here owns a Jag?” said the cop.
The nurse chuckled, “And you don’t have insurance.”
“We don’t, but maybe she does,” said the homeboy driver.
“Send her to County, jail ward,” the woman officer ordered. “All of you are going in!” yelled her partner.
“Fuck you! You’re busting us for nothing.” A homeboy moved toward the cop. “Let me give you something to throw me in jail for!”
At that point three more cops arrived and joined the circle of anger.
“The car checks out to a Sandra Spear,” said one of the newly arrived cops.
“That’s her!” Keli shouted in a shrill.
The woman cop stared down at Sandra. “She looks bad. Let’s get her to County.”
In spite of Doña Rosina’s protests and offer to pay for the services, two orderlies placed Sandra on a cart and rolled her toward the exit. Two homeboys attempted to stop them, but the cops clubbed them down and took them away. Everyone was yelling as Sandra, ashen, was being moved to an awaiting ambulance.
A nurse with extremely short hair came in and grabbed one of the officers. “Take her back! She’s hemophiliac. Flink and Revueltas have her covered.” The nurse pushed Sandra back toward emergency.
“Set up for thrombin and blood transfusion, stat!” she called out to the first nurse.
Doña Rosina, Keli and the remaining homeboys followed behind the nurse. They stood against a wall and watched Flink and the short-haired nurse work rapidly. After twenty minutes Flink invited them outside.
“She is weak and will need blood. She’s given her permission for a blood transfusion. All of you, except for Doña Rosina, must donate. Go home and bring people from the neighborhood. I hope she’ll make it,” Flink spoke softly. “Somebody leave a note for Dr. Revueltas.”
“Hey, Flink, where’s your assistant, the other barrio doctor? I’m glad you got here in time. Thank God you saved our ass. Tell mother barrio that her boys will be out tomorrow morning.” The cop pointed to Flink and smiled goodbye.
Love had become a combat zone. We kissed and the world took flight from where we undressed and held onto each other. Sandra’s body continued to bruise. The bleeding came frequently, but we controlled it with infusions of thrombin, then with factor 8 powder mixed in water. Sandra continued to work until one day the director of the theatrical company asked her to take some time off to regain her strength. She protested and claimed discrimination because of her hemophiliac condition.
“Sandra, please understand, it’s for your own good. Look at yourself now, your arms and legs. You look as if you have been battered. You can’t work like that!” The director ended the rehearsal and walked off with his face as distorted as Sandra’s. She remained alone. It had been five months. She had lost weight and strength, but not her desire.
“I’m a hemophiliac, but I can work!” Sandra screamed into the empty theater.
She became disease-prone. She seemed never to be free of viruses or bacteria. Flink and I performed more tests to find what we suspected already. Sandra was a hemophiliac and suffered from severe aplastic anemia, which caused her infections.
Bill and Phyllis arrived unannounced and threatened to take Sandra back home with them. When I entered our bedroom, Bill was packing bags while Phyllis was trying to convince her to return home. Phyllis insisted that new doctors, specialists in blood diseases, were what Sandra needed.
“No, mother, I’m staying. Gregory and Flink are doing everything they can,” Sandra said, determined to remain.
I would not interfere. I would not keep her from her parents. I loved Sandra, but it had to be her decision to stay.
“Put those down, Dad! I’m staying here!”
Bill threw the luggage on the floor.
“Damn you! She would have been better off if she had never met you, Gregory. She’ll die if she stays with you!” Bill left the room.
“But I’ll die sooner at a sanitarium or at home! Don’t you understand that being close to you makes me sadder? Don’t you understand that when I see you, I remember the way it used to be? I can’t bear your suffering. I have to try to live. I’ll choose where I want to die.”
At the door, Phyllis embraced me. “Anything. Money, whatever it takes. Call us,” she said.
A buried groan came from Bill, as tears streamed down his face. “You brainwashed her.”
At least once a week I visited my mother. I needed a break from Sandra. I rested, saw the world from a different place, from Español Street, the last remnant of Simons Brickyard. Yet even there she still pursued me. I became Sandra Spear-prone at every thought; every movement I related to her. To find a cure for Sandra became a medical compulsion, to write about her became a fetish. Being away from her allowed me to remember the beginning. I wrote and enjoyed recreating our life together. I returned with her to where it began. I searched for Sandra’s face in the places we shared. I walked through my mind and found her journeying comfortably under an ageless sun. I was at her side as she was transfigured into a green-blue cypress and she spoke to me like a tree, a river, a seed. Suddenly she erupted and flew like a hummingbird, like a butterfly. Sandra laughed as she covered me with the sweet juice of an orange from my mother’s orchard.
There in the house of my childhood, stronger then ever before, I felt impelled to write about us, to show every moment of our anguish and of our joy.
Strangely, when Flink solemnly came into the clinic with the results of the UCLA blood test, I was glad that at last we had identified exactly the disease that was devastating her. It had a name, but we were ignorant of what it meant.
Flink read carefully to himself, and finally with his prescribed “bad tidings” medical bearing he blurted out, “you have acquired immuno-deficiency syndrome, otherwise known as AIDS.”
Her face tensed as if struck by a sharp pain.
“How could I have gotten that?” she said incredulously. “UCLA indicates that this disease might be transferred by contaminated blood,” Flink said passively, still maintaining his medical formality.
“The transfusions!” I said, terrified for her.
“We gave her several. It was either the transfusions or she would have died.” Flink faced Sandra. “You know that.”
“What does it mean?”
Flink bit his lip. “It means you’re sicker than before and it will probably get worse.”
“How much … ”
“I don’t know. You do understand that very little is known about this disease. There is nothing for it. I’ll call UCLA for more information. You also must understand that this disease is contagious. It’s transmitted by semen and blood, possibly saliva.”
A commotion interrupted from outside. Keli, Don Clemente and the homeboys carried a resistant Doña Rosina to the clinic. By the time she entered, her complaints had become quite audible.
“Finally, she’s coming in,” Sandra said with a chuckle.
“Yeah, now we have to operate,” Flink said. “If we don’t, she’ll lose her foot from gangrene.”
I had to stay. Sandra left, alone.
“No,” I said. “We’ll just have to deal with this.”
I would not let go, even though Sandra had asked me to leave. For us the world had changed and our life became important. We did everything with more intensity and sensitivity to our surroundings. A walk in the park, lying in the grass and looking up at the sky, the stars at night, the smell of trees, the difference in light, the multitudes of silence, the variety of flavors of ice-cream, the distinct spaces, the difference in our bodies, the sound of our names. Only time passed as I watched her sleep. Only then was she at peace.
One night Sandra awoke terrified. She understood that even sleep attempted to forever deny peace. I made tea and we sat up discussing what she had seen. She spoke of it as real, but I believed the dream she described was prophecy; she had journeyed on a cart pulled by a powerful entity and she sat looking back from where she came. Sandra’s journey was repeated interminably by a profusion of voices. In that place that she traveled, time was not as we knew it. As she spoke of this journey, I sensed that she had narrated this experience many times before. Advancing on this rough frustrating road, I saw myself watching her pass and always behind me there stood an older man.
“Your guardian angel … your guardian angel is always someone you loved,” I said confidently.
“I wonder who’ll be mine?” she asked and sipped her tea.
Although her dream was real, there was a confidence and warmth about Sandra gained from this knowledge that she began to possess. In her eyes there danced flame, her ears heard a careful passion, her lips tasted of soft sweet ash, her fearful tongue and touch caressed my thoughts. From that ardor of desire, Sandra began to burn on the surface of her body. She had not noticed, nor felt it yet, but on the underside of her forearm grew a reddish blotch.
A month later, when Sandra went to talk to the program director at the Orange County Theater, she had three burn areas on her arm, several on her hands, one large new sarcoma on her neck and one developing on her right cheek under her ear. She went to him to discuss scripts that she had read months ago and characters that fascinated her, that she wanted to play. She hadn’t felt weak for some time, she felt positive and wanted to work.
Although Sandra knew the director’s secretary well, the woman was cautiously formal and immediately asked her to take the furthest chair. She hurried into the director’s office and soon emerged and grabbed her purse, all the while regarding Sandra as an unpredictable, contaminated animal. Without saying a word, the secretary ran out of the reception area.
Sandra had been warned about suspicions, that people would take them as true. She expected that some people would not want to deal with her, but not to even be in the same room—this was a little drastic. She stood up when the director appeared at the doorway of his office.
“No, please, sit right down. I know you’ve been ill. Please stay right where you are.”
The “please” sounded more like a warning than a gesture of courtesy.
“What did you want to see me about?” he asked maintaining his distance.
Sandra handed him the plays and said, “Well, I came about auditioning for these parts.”
He pushed his hands palms-up toward her. “No, it’s okay, you keep them.” He continued, “Yes, I’m sure you would do an excellent job, but as of this moment, no appointments for auditions are being made.”
“Don’t give me that! There are people on stage at this very moment reading,” Sandra said.
The director took one step back into his office. “Sandra, I know, but there are rumors circulating.”
“Rumors?”
“Forgive me for being blunt. But many people believe you have AIDS and will not work with you.”
As Sandra started for the door, the director moved back into his office and prepared to close it.
“And that includes you.”
Half-hidden, the director called out, “You just don’t know about this sickness. Nobody wants to endanger their lives by working with you.” He closed the door.
As she departed, seven people were waiting outside. They talked quietly.
“AIDS,” someone whispered.
Sandra had to walk about five feet from them; as she approached, they moved even further.
“She has what?” were the last words she heard.
Sandra was transmuted into a decomposing creature, bursting with foul-smelling miasma, spilling fluids and dropping maggots in its wake, and decorated with a crown of filthy flies.
Time for me became more demanding. I had to work for Flink. He depended on me, the people who came to the clinic needed me. But I wanted to spend more time with Sandra. I needed to be there when she called for help, when she awoke at night, frightened. She refused to see her parents. But they would come late at night when she slept. Bill and Phyllis were resigned. My staying with Sandra made Bill less angry, but still he blamed me for what had happened to her.
My visits with Mother became a necessity. I looked forward to driving early Friday mornings on the Santa Ana Freeway, leaving everything behind, traveling thirty-three miles north into another world. I enjoyed sitting with her for breakfast, then taking flowers to Father at Rose Hills Cemetery. My time with Mother became a time of writing and listening. I wrote about Sandra and me and listened to Mother’s past. Mother seemed to be slipping back, constantly remembering Father, their life together, my brothers and sisters, when our house in Simons had burned down, the building of the new house, what a crazy boy I was …
Mother always remembered.
Friday mornings with Mother brought our lives into a better perspective. My staying and caring for Sandra was natural. There was no need to feel guilty.
“Octavio, when was life really ours?” Mother asked after placing a bouquet of flowers on Father’s tomb.
She was correct. It was never ours. We were not who we were, in the past, in the present, in the future. Our life, ourselves, belonged to others and those others belonged to us. I was someone else when I was myself. Fearfully, I searched for myself in my patients, friends, those whom I loved. Curiously, life was somewhere else, never in the place where I acted; life was always further away, outside me, from me, but never in my control. My face was Sandra’s face. My lonely collective face was everyone’s face.
Once I dozed off on the couch. Mother stood before me. She spoke, but what her words whispered were images which revealed her other forms. Around her danced life and death. She was virgin of the sun and moon, water and earth, fire and wind. Since birth I had been falling toward her who pushed me out to life. I yearned for her to prevent my fall and to push me out to life once more. On me she tossed seeds of corn and her hand gently pushed my hair away from my forehead.
“M’ijo, it’s getting late and the freeway will be terrible if you delay.”
Sandra had overcome her first bout with PCP, pneumocystis carinii pneumonia, and waited for the next opportunistic infection to attack. In her mind antibiotics were the chemicals that had cured the PCP. She was convinced that she should take them daily for preventive purposes. Flink and I refused to dispense the drugs that Bill and Phyllis had recommended.
“These drugs are illegal in the US,” Flink said.
“You want me to die!” Sandra screamed hysterically.
“Scream, get it all out,” I said and listened to her sobbing.
I knew how they had treated Sandra at the UCLA clinic. Several doctors and nurses absolutely refused to be in the same room with her. The doctors that treated the pneumonia talked to her by phone or through me. They considered Sandra a human scourge, a Pandora’s box filled with diseases capable of destroying humanity. Sandra was simply a research case, a human disease puzzle to be solved. The endocrinologist and the hematologist saw her as a job risk. Their complaint was that they did not get combat pay for endangering their lives with scum like her. I don’t believe any were sympathetic.
Once I took a waste basket filled with tissue paper that Sandra had used and placed it out in the hall to remind them to take it. When the nurses saw what I had done, they belligerently forced me to take the wastebasket back to the room and to wait for the janitor. The janitors never came and her room was transformed into a waste bin. She remained in the hospital for almost three weeks. Her condition got better, then deteriorated, then stabilized. Sandra’s health was a rollercoaster ride to the ends of the world, until the end of her existence here on earth. Yet she maintained confidence that she would be renewed.
The day that Flink refused Sandra the drugs, he also did not touch her. He maintained his distance. He revealed his fear and intention of not treating her further.
“I can’t do anything more for you. I can’t give you those drugs. My hands are tied. You must seek help somewhere else!” Flink was definite. “Furthermore, there are patients who have stopped coming to the clinic because they are afraid to run into you. I’m sorry, but I have to tell you the truth.” Flink gave me the syringe. I did the blood work and injected the drugs.
The night before, there had been a blizzard in the mountains, even Saddleback Mountain had a foot of snow. It was a cool February day. We sat on the apartment balcony contemplating the serene white mountains. Sandra was noticeably tired. Her arms were bruised more than usual. She had contracted another cold. She had lost twenty pounds, down to exactly ninety pounds. Her body contrasted with the white mountains, but her strength and endurance were as great.
“Gregory, I need to go to Mexico. We must go to the places of power that Doña Rosina has described,” Sandra said in deep voice.
In two days I made arrangements. Bill thought we were mad. Phyllis gave us money which Sandra refused, but I accepted. Flink gave us a two-week supply of necessary medications. Doña Rosina informed us of the places we were to go to seek help.
On the eve of our departure, Bill and Phyllis and my Mother met for the first time. That night, Flink, Doña Rosina, Don Clemente, Keli and the homeboys came to say goodbye. Present for only a short while was Papá Damián, whom I had not seen for some time, but on that day he appeared standing behind my Mother. Our old folks possessed a kind of magic, a relationship to the past that they carried in their minds and faces. His presence, more than anything else, was the sign that convinced me that our venture was correct. Papá Damián, I was sure, would be our guide.
We had a party. There was a wedding atmosphere, a celebration before the honeymoon. Keli had made a Feliz Viaje cake which Sandra and I cut. We fed each other the first slices. Bill took photographs.
From the excitement and emotion, Sandra had a severe nose bleed, but we stopped it fairly quickly. Flink warned her about the plane and the altitude of Mexico City.
“I won’t bleed,” she declared defiantly.
On a clear morning our parents and Delhi friends escorted us to the airport. In the belly of a metal bird we rose above those white mountains, above the sea and banked southward. In about three and half hours we looked down into a volcanic cradle crowned by Popocatepetl and Ixtacoatepetl, two white magical peaks, the symbols of a legendary love affair and the eternal natural sentinels of Tenochtitlan.
Enchanted by the city, we eagerly allowed our minds to be invaded by a kind of collective hypnosis. A reverie brought about by a continuous differentiation of the old and the new, and the rich and the poor, and the faces of people who represented nomadic Mesoamerican, European, African and Asian cultures. These were the Mexicans, inheritors of the world’s cultural tribes.
For the trip Sandra had draped her ninety-pound body in faded jeans, an ‘LA Rams’ sweat shirt, tennis shoes, a blue baseball cap and black sun glasses. The cab driver hurried to carry our duffel bags.
“I help la niña,” he said.
He had put the bags at the entrance of the María Cristina Hotel and there I took a photo of Sandra and the driver pointing inadvertently to the marble French foyer—one of thousands of artistic treasures taken for granted in Mexico City. We rested for an hour, then went down to the garden for a drink. Across the way, Papá Damián, sitting alone in a white wrought-iron chair, wrote about us. She was oblivious of him.
In our room after dinner, I called Doña Rosina’s friend, Señora Jane Krauze. Señora Jane had expressed her pleasure to receive us at the women’s retreat in the city of Tepotzotlan. The very next morning, precisely at ten, as she had indicated, a car arrived. After a restful night, Sandra seemed to enjoy the trip through the city and its outskirts. Her face cleansed by slumber, her eyes sparkled with curiosity. Our trip passed in silence as we began to climb above the Mexico City suburbs.
We asked several questions, but the woman driver never responded. Sandra nudged her shoulders and stopped asking questions for fear of seeming impolite.
“She can’t speak,” Sandra whispered.
The woman driver stopped in the plaza before the intricately carved massive doors of the portal of the Jesuit Seminary which was the heart of the city. She led us to the entrance of the museum. There was a small bookstore, with histories of Mexico, the Jesuits, the Indians and of the seminary of Tepotzotlan. An older man in a blue uniform pointed to a woman who handed me two tickets from under an oblique plastic window. I slipped a hundred peso bill under the opening and got forty back.
The woman led us deliberately through high white-washed corridors of small cells. She stopped at each one where inside a display of furniture, of life in the eighteenth century was contained. My mind’s eye, the scent of the old stone walls and wooden floors, and the geometry of the architecture told me that I had been here before. An absurd thought, but yet a strong and strangely comforting one. Finally we stopped at the end of a corridor under a vaulted cupola, before a carved stairway. A small brass sign read Biblioteca Religiosa.
The immense library was a treasure of leather-bound books from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. A carved reading table, two gold lamps, comfortable chairs and a small round tea table decorated the room.
“Beautiful,” Sandra said.
We had been alone for at least a half hour, browsing through the books, when our chauffer silently placed tea and bread on the table.
“Why are we here? ¿Dónde está la señora Jane?” Sandra asked the woman.
The chauffer seemed startled, yet she gestured with her fingers that it would be a little longer. She poured the tea and left us.
“Sandra, this whole section is books describing Indian medicine,” I said excitedly.
Sandra handed me a journal. “And personal journals written by Spanish doctors who lived centuries ago.”
The door opened and a young woman entered, dressed in what appeared to be an expensively tailored navy blue business suit. Tall, with curly black hair, she offered her hand genuinely. We felt reassured and confident that she had accepted us, that she knew about Sandra’s illness and that in some strange way, perhaps, she would be able to help. As she spoke we knew that this was Señora Jane. From her motion, her speech, her sight, her fragrance there emanated a strong positive force. She naturally commanded our attention.
“Life is a gift and worth living,” she said to Sandra. “I am a librarian,” she said and took the journal that I held. “This journal was written by your tocayo,” she smiled.
“His what?” Sandra asked.
“A person with the same first name,” Señora Jane said and placed the journal back on the shelf. “The Gregory of this journal was a man who also dealt with devastating illness.”
Señora Jane was a woman who seemed to be out of place in this ancient seminary. She had saved and studied thousands of volumes which at one time had been marked for destruction by the Catholic hierarchy. There was no doubt in my mind that she commanded their knowledge.
She walked us through the ancient gardens and paths of the seminary. Sandra and I pulled the weeds growing around the grave markers and read names such as Jude, Marisela, Mónica Marisela and my tocayo, Gregorio. She took us through a house that was said to be haunted by the souls of those buried in the cemetery. At the center of the house, Señora Jane explained, “the Indians say that this is holy ground, for thousands of people were cured here by the spirits that are buried in the church yard.”
“Do you believe that?” Sandra asked.
“You should,” she said.
I watched the grave stones which were now being cleaned by Papá Damián. He confirmed my madness. Señora Jane laughed and waved toward the church-yard graves.
Sandra awoke. I heard her labor to swallow. A dry deep cough told of her pain and swollen throat. I reached for the light and found her sitting up with a glass of water in hand. Drenched in sweat, she shook from icy chills. She handed me the glass and we both observed the enlarged purplish lumps beneath the skin of her arms. Sandra screamed. I embraced her. Two women with a bowl of water and towels came into our room. They took Sandra from me and calmed her.
That night I saw terror in her eyes.
Señora Jane explained that what Sandra had felt was the first grasp of death on her being.
“Don’t fear it. You must learn to accept that seizure. It will come more often. Soon you will learn to talk to that shape. It will constantly be with you, right up to your transmutation. All people fear that moment. We see it as a modification. Your body is changing rapidly now. Understand your opportunity. We are happy for you. You bring joy to those who love you. You must be proud. Do not be ashamed of your decaying body. Decay is a natural process. God and the energies of the earth are calling you to join them in their metamorphosis of all of us. I love you. I love your decay. I love your illness. I will marry you and love you to the last day. I will hold you in your putrefaction. I am your ally up to the gates through which someday all humanity will be privileged to pass. I will guide you, bathe you, clean your open sores, comfort your pain, clean your excrement, dry your urine, endure your odor, lie down with you, laugh with you, be happy with you.” Señora Jane and I prayed until daybreak.
For seven days we had been her guest at her Rancho de la Sonrisa Solar. Papá Damián prayed to a painting of the Virgen de Guadalupe. He pointed to a bag which contained Sandra’s medication.
“Give it to her now,” Señora Jane said.
“But this is not her … ” I stammered.
Papá Damián encouraged Sandra to take the medication. Sandra was over me. She whispered that she was not afraid and ingested the odd substance from the leather pouch.
“This is Nahaultzin’s nourishment,” Señora Jane said. Time lost, we awoke Sunday morning to the sounds of young women chatting. It was visiting day at the Rancho de la Sonrisa Solar, where the rich of Mexico City sent their daughters who had demonstrated in their actions a tinge of dangerous proclivities. Here they were reeducated, cleansed of those propensities.
The ranch house was an old hacienda converted into dormitories, classrooms, clinic and theater. Señora Jane and several Carmelite nuns administered the school. Sandra and I walked the grounds that day. She felt wonderful. She wore a long white skirt and a long sleeve blouse. They covered the open sores on her deformed limbs. The dark glasses hid her swollen eyelids. She walked with her mouth open; for the mucous membranes in her nasal passages hindered her breathing. Her enlarged tongue and distended lips slurred her speech. A baritone laughter called attention to her. From where we sat, we saw the families arriving to visit their daughters.
“How do you feel today?” I asked.
“Strange, this place, I mean,” Sandra whispered. “Strong, I feel strong.”
“Tomorrow we leave,” I said. “Señora Jane will take us to Tepotzotlan. Sandra, you will grow even stronger there.”
That night she slept soundly, perhaps her deepest slumber. I listened to the pleurisy in her lungs, to the thick phlegm in her throat and waited, alert, in case she needed me. Helpless, I could only make her comfortable on her voyage. The last image I remembered was Papá Damián tending to Sandra and praying to the Virgen de Guadalupe, who flew on a fiery crest above her.
We spent several days exploring the countryside surrounding the ancient town of Tepotzotlan. The Indians offered their homes and we joined in the celebration of the energy of Tepoztecatl, the rustic god of the harvest and strong drink. Accompanied by Señora Jane and her mute driver, we ate and drank in honor of the local god of Tepotzotlan. At night we observed the making of the fires encircling the sacred pyramid and joined in the rituals played out in the temple.
In those moments of joy I forgot about Sandra’s illness. I searched for her in the crowd of dark faces. She danced, she drank the liquors prepared for her. Yet, she was never intoxicated. She seemed happy and strong. The curanderas tended to her. They taught her about herbs and plants to ease her pain. The curanderas were not afraid of Papá Damián, who worked among them, and they were not afraid of Sandra’s illness. They gave it a strange name, La Mona.
“It is an ancient plague. There are records describing it. It is a disease that makes you look like a clown with black rings round your eyes, bruised, deformed arms and a white speckled tongue. Your limbs become weakened to the point where they are like the arms of a raggedy doll,” Señora Jane interpreted the nahuatl narrative of the curandera who examined Sandra’s body.
The curandera, dressed in flamboyant crimson colors, her face painted like a whore, was not what I expected. She felt, heard, smelled and scrutinized Sandra’s physique as if handling a puzzle of flesh. Her gesticulations, body gestures and tone of voice were sincere and humorous. She was funny. We laughed. All three of us: Sandra, Señora Jane and me. Señora Jane continued her simultaneous interpretation.
“There is no cure for La Mona. We can delay the natural progress of your life cycle by simple amputation.” The painted-face woman giggled and patted Sandra’s knee. “Although I laugh, I do not jest,” the garish scarlet curandera spoke in an ironically sensual manner. “Remember, you are not dying. You are experiencing a radical change accompanied by terror and pain. Now you must learn to counter those forces with laughter. Learn to laugh again. That is what you need most at this time, learn to laugh again.” The curandera sat back on her haunches.
“She has finished,” Señora Jane said.
“Please, ask how we can pay her?” Sandra said.
Señora Jane asked.
“You are a special child, a special source of energy. You have honored and blessed me, and I wish that the world outside the sacred triangle of Tepotzotlan will honor and respect you to the end of your journey.” The curandera took Señora Jane’s hand and thanked her. She embraced Sandra and kissed her forehead. Papá Damián witnessed the complete examination. He led the way out of the sacred hut.
Outside under a star-flooded sky, the eyes of a people who had lived before and who had walked these Mexican paths accompanied us through the bright night to our room in the Dominican Monastery of Natividad de Nuestra Señora. The brightness of the night revealed a row of Crosses of Alcántara, the Dominican insignia, deeply sculptured in the stone walls of the gallery that led to the long corridor to our room. The starlight transformed them into rows of dark shadows, like the purple tumors strung down Sandra’s arms, wrapped around her legs and splattered on her back. Upon passing the threshold of our room, Sandra collapsed. I undressed her, pulling her blouse away from the open boils on her body. She did not feel the pain, only the horror. She had lost more weight. A thin layer of skin covered her spine. Her shoulder blades and arms were like the wings of prehistoric birds. Her ribs were like iron grates. Sandra shivered from fever and begged for warmth as I injected her with vinblastine.
“We should try another treatment,” I said.
Kaposi’s Sarcoma ravaged her body. Moritz Kaposi described what I treated as idiopathic, multiple pigmented sarcomas of the skin in 1872, and then someone decided it should be named after him. What a way to be remembered. I don’t think he liked the suggestion. He preferred sarcoma idiopathicum multiplex hemorrhagicum. I recalled reading this in a class on rare diseases. Nothing could help us now. KS wasted no time nor opportunity to attack her.
“We need to go back home,” I said. “If we don’t, you will get worse.”
“You can’t save me. But perhaps they can.”
Sandra looked out toward the towering mountains not far from Cuernavaca. I left the windows open for her to see the mountains and countryside illuminated by stars. Strangely, for an instant, out of the sky there fell a multitude of lightning bolts. “Did you see them?” I asked.
“Yes,” Sandra said in a voice that was not hers.
Señora Jane and several Indian men and women curanderos came in the late afternoon to offer prayers, medicines and laughter to Sandra Spear. Stately and proud folk, they moved about politely and confirmed great respect for their patient. Sandra graciously accepted all gifts and joined in the laughter. There was never a dull moment. We ate and drank pulque and gave homage to Tepoztecatl.
The sun sunk to places beyond our sight. Señora Jane and the curanderos examined Sandra. They brought water and washed her ulcerated lesions. They dressed her in clothes which were many colored and expressed the Indian and modern dress. Her dress was transcultural, transhistorical. She was a comet radiating a throng of flaming tails. Surrounded by Indians who touched her in a sacred way, who sang mystic incantations, who moved around her escorting her to the posa, a vault with two semicircular arched entrances with quasi-Ionic half columns supporting the arches. At each corner, high enough for people to reach were shell-headed niches with vases filled with flowers. Crosses of Alcántara decorated the columns below the white capitals. I stood outside before the archway. The mountains rose above and merged the Dominican and Indian posa into one configuration.
The posa was built directly over a sacred point of the earth, an apex of a cosmic pyramid constructed by the energies, the gods of the cosmos. The three points of one side of the pyramid were constituted by the mountains, the monastery and the town. Here in this triangle, the gods of the cosmos rested during their internal journey through the time and space of infinity. With the gods’ presence, great natural energies amassed and all the logic of existence as known to humanity was eradicated for a moment. During this period the alien, unaccountable, miraculous might occur. Señora Jane’s thoughts floated near, but never next to me. I heard, but never saw her. Night fell onto the sacred apex and the incantations grew stronger as more people joined in the ritual. Sandra danced like energy among them. Serpents wreathed out from her punctured skin. Sandra was the god Coatlicue and I feared her.
A frenzy of music and chants engulfed the posa. Hundreds of people sang. Sandra grew stronger as the ceremony progressed. She danced faster, sang louder and embraced the Indian men and women who came near her. In the early morning, when the sky became white, there arrived a sacred drink and ancient stones of fire. Señora Jane and a curandera pulled from a leather bag twenty-five luminous rocks from the heavens. The stones were placed in a heated caldron in the middle of the posa.
“Drink this potion and swallow these stones of life,” Señora Jane offered.
A potent radiance flowed from Sandra. Scabs fell as the ulcers burned away. There was no more pain for her. The light of the sky became a sea of percussion and melodies in which Sandra and I navigated.
The homeboys wore their “Guadalupe” jackets. Since we returned their number had multiplied. Doña Rosina counseled them to continue school and to restrain from fighting. They were always present. They made up Sandra’s royal guard. They were her eyes toward the future and they gave her strength. She wanted a homeboy posted twenty-four hours at her door. They loved her when she was well and they loved her now at a high point of deterioration.
Doña Rosina suggested that Sandra stay. Keli was able to tend to her. Keli started nurse’s training with Flink, who supplied the needed medication. I held her arm as Keli inserted the syringe for the last intravenous injection of Trimethoprim-sulfamethoxazole. The PC pneumonia rapidly deprived Sandra’s body of oxygen. She labored for each mouthful of air.
“Aquí tienes más agua, hijo,” my mother said.
My mother placed a bowl of water and towels at Sandra’s side. I gave her water. I ran the cool towel over her forehead and under her neck. I cooled her seared emaciated body that gave forth a sea of salty water.
My mother had been with Doña Rosina shortly after our return. During that time Papá Damián appeared to watch over us. Sandra’s parents offered their house, but Sandra refused. She did not want to fill the house with the odor of her condition, with the living visions of her body, with her pulsating painful ache.
“Mom and Dad, remember me the way I was.”
Sandra denied them access to her room. She did not want to see them. But when she was in the morphine induced ghost-sleep, beneath a blue heavy sea, they came and sat by their only daughter. She had become their child again. Bill and Phyllis faithfully bathed and changed her clothes. They slept at her side, held and kissed her. When Sandra slept they were always there.
Flink came often. He saw Sandra once and after that he never came into her room. His reaction did not surprise me. What her body was today he saw once before as a child. He was afraid of her more now than the day he described her illness. He was afraid to see her, afraid of the memories brought back by the sight of her. He always left what we needed on the kitchen table.
Don Clemente and his jaguar kept guard, sitting with Doña Rosina on the porch of the small white house in Delhi. He was the only one of us who admitted that he kept guard against Death. He declared that he and his jaguar could see La Calaca coming. At times I wondered if he felt Papá Damián, who often accompanied him in his vigilance. He waited day and night on the porch. No matter what we said, he refused to leave.
“Aquí tienes más agua, hijo,” my mother said.
Sandra pushed the towel away and it became a sponge of memories. Objects that she touched became filled with her. The last sweater worn by her still lay across a chair. Yesterday, she thumbed through a family photo album, which I later hid. She signed legal documents prepared by Bill and Phyllis. I saved the black fountain pen and the last pencil she wrote with. Her clothes hung in the closet, her slippers waited faithfully under the bed.
The white wall of the room which Sandra attempted to clean with a wet tissue, and on which she hung pictures for Doña Rosina, saved the memory of her desire to be useful up to the last moments of her life. She struggled now to breathe. She opened her eyes once. Sandra pointed to the door.
“Your mother and father, everybody is here with you, Sandra. Do you want to see them?”
With great effort Sandra nodded a clear approval. In less than a minute we surrounded her bed. Her mother and father held her hands.
While I looked upon the faces that cared for Sandra, she gently expired. She, Sandra, who entered, changed and loved my life exactly as I loved hers, who called from deep within my soul an ancient tear that would forever taste to me like our love, the tear both of us shared at that final moment of her passage.