That great accordion player who was also a busboy, Abelardo Relámpago Salazar, rolled over in bed one May morning in 1946 shortly after sunrise in Hornet, Texas, and sensed that he was dying, perhaps even dead. (A few years later when he was truly dying and in this same bed, he felt violently alive.) The sensation was not unpleasant, though mixed with regret. Through his eyelashes he saw bedposts of solid gold, a diaphanous wing quivering at the window. Celestial music washed over him, a voice of a melting quality he had never heard while he was alive.
Listening, he returned to life and recognized the sun as the source of the gilded bedposts, knew the seraphic wing was a wavering curtain. The music was coming from his accordion, not the four-stop, three-row button Majestic in white pearl with his initials, AR, set out in tiny cut-glass gems, but the special one, the little nineteen-button green accordion with its rare voice. Not to be touched by anyone but him! Still, he listened, despite the disagreeable sensation of a swollen bladder, the stoking oven of the coming day. It was the voice of his overgrown, lanky daughter, a voice that he never heard, except thick humming as she drizzled and drabbed around the house. He had not even known she could play the accordion beyond a few strung-together chords, although she had been his child for fourteen years, although he had seen her a hundred times fooling with her brothers’ small Lido model. When was he ever home long enough to know his children? It was the sons who were the musicians. His anger burned because perhaps it was the daughter who was exceptional. That wonderful voice coming from the high part of the nose, plaintive and quavering, all the ache of life in it. And he thought of his oldest son, Crescencio, poor dead Chencho, without wit or musical sense, like a timid dog that was afraid to come forward. What a total waste! It must have been the devil, not God, who sent that music into his dream. The same devil who deceived men over the age of the earth by concealing fossils in perverse places. He was furious as well because she was mauling the treasure of his life.
He shouted from the bed, “Félida. Come in here!” Put the pillow over the top of his head so she might not see his hair undone. Heard the scrabbling and the huff of the accordion. She came into the room with her head turned away. Her hands empty.
“Where is the green accordion now?”
“In the case. In the front room.”
“Never touch it again. Never open that case. Do you hear me?”
“Yes.” She turned her sullen face away, slouched to the kitchen.
“I don’t like your look!” he shouted.
He considered his daughter’s music. How well she sang! He had heard her but he had not heard her. Well, and how had she learned the accordion? No doubt from watching, from listening to him, from admiration of her father. It might be a novelty to let her come with him to one of his engagements, introduce his daughter, let them see how the whole Relámpago family—except Chencho, of course—had been richly gifted by God. But even as he imagined the handsome picture it would make, himself in his dark pants and jacket, the white shirt and white shoes, and Félida in the beautiful lace-edged pink dress Adina was sewing for the girl’s quinceañera—ay, how much that would cost!—and how he would let Félida step forward and release her astonishingly beautiful voice, move over Lydia Mendoza, here comes another gloria de Tejas, the future was crouching at a dark side road on the path of events.
A bus went by and filled the room with a roar like a bomb blast echoing in a sewer. He got up, lit a cigarette, felt a pain in his right thigh, held his hair up with his right hand, squinting. How could he run back and forth all day at work and then stand half the night playing music? And the usual business with his agringada wife. It seemed to him that few people had to bear what he did. Or could bear it as bravely.
But he was up now, and, as always, the music started in his mind, a kind of bitter, lopsided polka that resembled “La Bella Italiana” the way Bruno Villareal played it. All his life he had enjoyed this private music, sometimes sad little phrases that belonged to no known ranchera or waltz, sometimes note-for-note repetitions of huapangos or polkas he himself played or had heard another play. Sometimes fresh inventions, new music never heard before, an inner musician working all night as he slept.
His little dressing table behind the door held the apparatus for the elaborate arrangement of the long hanks of hair to disguise the bald top. The back and sides were very long, and now, in the mirror of the early morning, he looked like an ancient prophet with the mange. He swept up the long locks with a wooden comb, placing each strand artfully, secured them with bobby pins. Working on his hair quieted his nerves and he sang, “Can this be you, my little moon, who walks past my door …” He achieved a hirsute look but a stranger glancing at the upsweep sometimes—for a moment—took him for a woman. And strangers did see him, for he worked in a restaurant, the Blue Dove—never a waiter, always the one who carried the dishes. The Blue Dove was in Boogie, the town to the south where they once had lived in the ancient house of the Relámpagos. In his own kitchen he heard the clink of the pan as Félida heated the milk for his café con leche, from the radio the last chorus of “Route 66,” Bobby Troup, and the newscaster saying something about the coal mine strike and federal troops, something about Communists, the same old song, and he was glad when Félida shut it off. He had to hurry now.
He was short, with a full-jawed, fleshy face. Small eyes sunk deep in the sockets, sooty eyebrows arched (he smoothed them with a little spit on his finger), and above them like a panel, the broad forehead the color of fruitwood. The shortness of his neck destroyed any hope of elegance. His arms were muscular and thick, the better, he said, to clasp his accordion close; his hands ended in powerful but tapering fingers that moved swiftly. His trunk was not slender, the legs short and heavy, thickly furred, as was his broad chest. Weight came to Adina’s mind at the sight of his naked thighs.
A restless man, emphatic, his face changing with every sentence, ideas and thoughts bursting from him. Because he had no past he invented one. He made the most common events into stories, minor incidents swelling with drama as his voice pumped them up. Dios, said the waiters and his embarrassed children, he talks too much, they must have vaccinated him with a Victrola needle when he was a baby.
Yet he had never been able to describe certain moments in his life: the feeling when two voices paired like a set of birds twisting in close flight and the listener shuddered with pleasure. Or when music jetted from the instruments as blood from an arterial wound, blood in which the dancers stamped while grasping partners’ slippery hands, shouting from raw throats.
His own voice pitched excitedly from highs to lows with strong pauses for effects, sound effects. He sang when he wasn’t talking, making up music and words on the spot: “My beautiful Adina sleeping, black hair on the white pillow, the moon’s silver cords binding you to my bed.” Although his feet were not small, he liked smart shoes and bought them whenever he could, but always the cheap ones that hardly lasted a month before the leather cracked and the heels fell off. When he drank he felt hopeless, he was cast with his music into caves of bat guano and bones gnawed by wild animals.
Abandoned at birth,
Alone in this world without mother or father,
I labored to live.
I wished for beauty
but found only ugliness and scorn—
His job was a stupid job and for that reason he liked it, took a morbid pleasure in unobtrusively sliding the white plates smeared with sauces and cheese off the tablecloth and into the Bakelite tub, bearing away bowls of stained lettuce leaves floating in juices, cigarette butts crushed into fat.
At night he entered his other world and, accordion against his breast and his powerful voice controlling the movements and thoughts of two hundred people, he was invincible; at the restaurant he was subservient, not only to the demands of the occupation but to some cringing inner self. His day began at seven in the morning with empty coffee cups and the crumbs of sweet cakes and ended at six after the first wave of dinner plates. He knew all the day waiters; there were seven. All but one of them respected his dual nature, perhaps cursing him in the passageway to the kitchen where he shoved the tubs of dirty dishes through a window to the sinks, mocking his slowness, clumsiness, stupidity; but in the evenings and on the weekends the same men screamed with joy as they stood in the cascade of his music, touched his sleeve and spoke his name as if he were a saint. They would kiss his feet if they knew what made his music so vigorous, if they knew the green accordion’s secret—or perhaps would shove him into the great hot oven in envy.
Before the war, before they moved to Hornet in 1936, the family had lived in a certain adobe house near the river. There were a dozen straggling houses, poor and isolated. The train tracks curved in from the west and disappeared. The sons spent their first years playing with tires, dirt, sticks, crushed cans, bottles. Relámpagos had been in this place centuries before there was Texas. They had been American citizens since 1848 and still the Anglo Texans said “Mexicans.”
“Blood is thicker than river water,” said Abelardo.
In the generation before, Abelardo’s mother—not really his mother for he had been an abandoned child, a naked baby wrapped in a soiled shirt and left on the church floor in 1906—was a wordless bent woman of children and tortillas and soil, weeding her chickpeas and squash, tomatillos, chiles, beans and corn.
The old man—not really his father—was a field-worker, always far away, in the Rio Grande valley, in Colorado, Indiana, California, Oregon, and in the Texas cotton. An invisible man (as Abelardo himself became invisible to his children), working, working, away in the north, sending small amounts of money home, sometimes returning for a few months, a crooked-backed man with great scarred hands and a drawn, toothless mouth. That poor man a machine for working, the bruised hands crooked for seizing and pulling, for lifting boxes and baskets, for grasping. The arms hung uncomfortably when work stopped. He was made for work, eyes squinted shut, the face empty of the luxury of reflection, mouth a hole, stubbled cheeks, a filthy baseball cap, wearing a cast-off shirt until it rotted away. If he had beauty in his life, no one knew it.
One day this secondhand father disappeared. The woman heard a long time later that he had drowned in a town to the north, swept away with others in a wall of water that filled streets nine feet deep with yellow liquid, a flood that would have frightened Noah, the cataclysmic result of the most ferocious cascade of rain ever known to fall—thirty-six inches in a single thunderous night.
Abelardo’s early life was bound by the music he made with sticks, dried chickpeas in a can, a bit of sheet metal and his own reedy voice; and by the small river that flowed, when it held water, away to the Rio Grande, deep and full with distant runoff, or nothing more than a silty film on the gravel, bordered by cottonwoods and willows thick with spring-loaded birds, huge flights of white-winged doves jamming and fanning the air in September and the guns going off all around, POUM, poum; and in the spring, going north, going to the shuddering north, the upwelling broad-winged hawks. He dimly remembered standing beside someone, a man, not his father, in the tangled fragrance of guajillo, black mimosa, huisache, in the cedar elms and the ebonies, watching a dark blue snake twine among the tiny leaves. He had almost seen the dappled ocelot the man was pointing at, as though a piece of earth cast with spots of light had pulled itself up and flowed into the thicket. In the damp soil of the riverbank he once found the imprint of an entire bird but for the head, the wings pressed down and out, the individual feathers of the flattened tail distinct, an impression as clear as the cast of an archaeopteryx in ancient mud. Some larger bird had stood on this bird’s back, gripping the head with secateur beak, and at last had carried it away.
He was not a Relámpago by birth or heritage or blood but by informal adoption, yet he became heir to all the Relámpagos had owned, for the eleven other children died early or disappeared. Water was their fate. He saw Elena drown. They were getting water from the river, three or four of the true Relámpagos striving and pushing on the crumbling bank, then a splash and a cry. He saw her flailing hands, her streaming head rise above the muddy current for a moment and then truly disappear. He ran home behind the others, the water sloshing out of the can against his bare leg, the wire bail cutting into his hand.
Victor was the last of the true Relámpagos, and he died at age nineteen in an irrigation ditch, the water rosy with his blood. And the brutal joke was repeated: yes, it is well known that all-Texas Rangers have Mexican blood. On their boots.
The inheritance was more or less nothing, a crumbling adobe house of three rooms and a patch of yard the size of a blanket. Yet they lived in it until somehow it was proved the property of a big cotton grower, an American who felt compassion for Abelardo and gave him fifty dollars to erase any notions that he might own the fingernail of land.
Pairs of bulldozers arrived, dragging chains between them, plunging into the branchy maze, macerating the tiny leaves and the white wood of cracked limbs, scraping the thicket into mounds for the burning, life burned, sending up smoke for days. Afterward long, flat fields of cotton, the only relieving color the hooped backs of laborers and the overseer’s yellow truck, the air saturated with the smell of chemical fertilizers and insecticides. Yet for the rest of his life he woke in the morning expecting the smell of the river, and from beyond it the imagined perfume of that beautiful and tragic country where perhaps he had been born.
He met Adina Rojas in 1924 at a dance. He was eighteen, ragged, his single possession the little green accordion he had bought a month earlier in a Texas cotton town after staring at it for weeks through a barbershop window seeing how the color of the bellows was fading in the strong sun and the broken thumb strap curled. It needed many repairs. He bought it for five dollars without hearing a note from it. Something about the instrument appealed to him through the fly-spotted glass and even then he was impetuous. A button stuck, the corner blocks under the bass grille had fallen off, the wax was cracked so that the reed plates rattled, the leather check valves were dry and curled, the gaskets had shrunk. He took the instrument apart carefully, learned to repair it by observation and by asking others. So he discovered the correct mixture of beeswax and rosin, where to purchase fine kidskin for new valves, and worked on it until it was sound and he could join his voice to its distinctive, bitter music.
Adina was five years older than he and dark, strong and willful, still unmarried. In later life he had only to draw out the first chord of “Mi Querida Reynosa” to evoke again the evening of that dance, although it was not at Reynosa but in Crash Creek. Adina’s face was powdered white, the white dots of her navy rayon dress shifting giddily as she moved with him, and he for once not playing; he had put his accordion in Beltrán Dinger’s hands, for Beltrán played well, and he came straight to Adina and danced a polka in the new style, with his weight back on his heels, stiff-legged, each step as if it were necessary to free the foot from the floor, strong and manly movement—none of that Czech hopping, that exhausting de brinquito jump step—and the room of dancers circling counterclockwise, circling the rough floor, the smell of perfume and hair oil, Adina’s wet hands glued to his. After that one dance he returned to the musicians but watched the polka-dot dress jealously. He sang the wrenching “Destino, Destino” directly to her, his fingers flying over the buttons, carrying the dancers through the intricate music, making them shout “ye-ye-ye-JAI!” Even two drunks fighting outside the door came in to listen.
Adina remembered the dance well enough but regarded it as the beginning of her troubles. Later she preferred to tell her daughter lugubrious stories of how she had made her own soap and washed clothes in an outdoor kettle when they lived in the house of the Relámpagos. Because they could not afford a clothesline, she hung the clothes on the barbwire fence, old barbwire, oxidized deep red, a tangle of mends and wrappings and metal thorns, so their garments were marked with bars of rust though Abelardo always had enough money for cigarette papers and tobacco.
“In the Depression it was a dangerous time,” she told her daughter. “The Americans deported thousands of people to Mexico, not only los mojados but many born here, American citizens, yet they were arrested and forced to go, no matter how they protested, no matter what documents they waved. So we held our breaths. We could listen in that time to Pedro González, very early in the morning, what wonderful music, Los Madrugadores, from Los Angeles. I was half in love with him—what a wonderful voice that man had. And he fought injustice. He would speak out through a corrido of his own composition when Mexican Americans were treated in an evil manner by the americanos. And they arrested him one day on some false excuse that he had raped a woman singer. He sat in the courtroom smoking a cigar and smiling and that was his downfall, that smile, which they saw as insolent. They sent him to prison, to San Quentin, for many years and never was his voice heard again.”
“Not true,” said Abelardo from the other room. “They deported him when the war started. He broadcasts to this day from Mexico. He lives in Tijuana. If you were not so passionately addicted to American soap operas you could hear him any day you wished.”
She paid no attention. “And during the war we heard La Hora de Victoria and La Hora del Soldado, two very patriotic programs.”
“I played on both many times. ‘Anchors Aweigh,’ everything like that. Doing the taco circuit. And there was that crazy German used to hang around the studios; he was everywhere we went, trying to get on the air to sing ‘God Bless America’ in German.”
“Yes,” she said. “I remember you wanted to be a fingerprint man then, not an accordion player. You cut a coupon in a magazine and sent away for a kit, you studied strange facts, the number of hairs on a brunette woman’s head, you’d say some big figure.”
“Correct. One hundred and ten thousand. Blond ones got one hundred fifty thousand hairs. That’s counting the whole body, even on the arms and face. That old German! ‘Herr scheutz Amerika! Land something-something.’ How’s that for a memory?”
During those years in the Relámpago house she had cooked on an outdoor fire, stumbling over hundreds of broken clay pigeons, she told Félida in a ferocious voice. Nearby lived a crazy Anglo with six fingers on each hand who practiced shooting his .22 pistol every day, his targets old roller-skating trophies—suggestively formed couples whose nakedness showed through their chrome garments. The heads and arms were the first parts shot away. Every day she had the fear of being wounded or her children killed by this crazy man’s bullets. It was she, she said, who had smoothed the mud each year when they replastered the adobe house, the side of her bare, callused hand sweeping the roughness to a fine matte finish, and on one memorable occasion a bullet had struck the wall a fraction of an inch from the tip of her longest finger.
“We were very scared. But what could we do? Somehow we lived, but it was a miracle none of us was killed. Or wounded. When the war started he went and we never saw him again. And for a year I saved up pennies and nickels to buy a nice aluminum teakettle with a whistle, for four dollars and something, but at the store they told me there was no more aluminum left to make kettles, all went to airplanes. All we had was a radio, and how we listened to it!”
“You listened to it,” Abelardo said. “I would not listen to that junk, those fortune-tellers, Abra and Dad Rango, and that Texas tap dancer you thought was so good, somebody went to the station one time, they wanted to see how he could do those things, those fancy steps, and all it was was a drummer tapping on the rim of his drum with the sticks.”
She whispered to her daughter that she did not much care for Abelardo’s music, preferred the more elegant sounds of the orquesta if she had a choice. Always she presented herself as struggling along a churned road carrying an enormous sack of problems like steel boxes that cut into her back while Abelardo capered ahead playing his accordion.
The finest thing about her was the thick, glossy hair, luxuriant and rich, and her mouth, very full and beautifully cut. She kept from her face every expression except fatigue and bitterness. When she was miserable she had a habit of grasping her hair in both hands and pulling, the raven waves shifting, releasing her warm woman’s scent. She was humorless; to her, life was difficult and demanding. The great dark eyes were often remote. She was tall, taller than Abelardo, her ankles and feet slender. All of the children had small feet except poor Crescencio who might have been born from a knot of bloody feathers instead of her flesh. After the birth of Félida her body expanded, great sheets of fat thickened her thighs and belly. The bed sagged on her side, and Abelardo rolled helplessly into the trough. Both his arms could not encircle her enormous waist. She wore dresses without sleeves, loose rayon tents manufactured of orange, electric blue or pink cloth sewn with such weak thread the seams opened in the first washing.
And what of the old house of the Relámpagos? She had hated that house and all it stood for, longed to leave it for San Antonio and the famous opportunities. In later years Félida asked many times, ‘tell about the casa of the Relámpagos,’ for Adina made it like a story of a dangerous place from which they had barely escaped.
There had been, she said in her serrated voice, a living room with brown walls, and the floor covered with an old manure-colored rug. There was the outhouse, which smelled very bad. Of course, a shrine in the corner with statues and pictures of lesser saints—Santa Escolástica who protects children from convulsions, San Peregrino who looks after those with cancer. On a table with turned legs the color of dried blood, a lace cloth worked by some dead Relámpago whose delirious fancies took the form of triangles, a photograph of an unknown wearing dark pants and vest, and an improbable pair of cowboy boots. The frame of this picture was decorated with glued-on toothpicks. There was a box of kitchen matches, a tall bottle of medicinal elixir and two brass ashtrays. On the wall, a net bag for letters and postcards, a calendar showing a Swiss village in the snow. There was a chromo of blood-dappled Jesus in a stamped metal frame that formed a cross at every corner.
Félida wanted to go find the old adobe house, to see the place everyone but she remembered. Abelardo shook his head, said sternly that the house was gone, swallowed up by the valley irrigation project, the whittled plot of land absorbed into Anglo cotton fields. In short, nothing of the Relámpagos remained except their name, carried by people not of their blood.
Two of the three sons, Chris and Baby, were as close as fingernails and flesh. Chris rushed at life, greedy for food and opportunity. Baby’s blood ran hot, his body temperature, his hands, hotter than anyone’s, as if he ran a perpetual fever. To touch him was to sweat. The oldest son, Chencho, was amiable but withdrawn, as if he were measuring the distances between the planets. Félida, that little something, was the youngest. Looking at her only living daughter, Adina said, “you poor little thing, without a sister for a friend. I will have to be your friend.” She tried to make the child her special confidante, warned her against the traps of life and the fate of women.
Hornet was never her goal. After the house of the Relámpagos was bulldozed, they started out for San Antonio where Adina believed there were better chances. The borrowed truck traveled six dusty miles north through mesquite, which showed through the dirty windshield like scratches on the landscape, and into the outskirts of Hornet where it broke down. Abelardo and the boys—Crescencio who was eleven then and almost as strong as a man, and Baby and Chris—all pushed it to the garage, Adina carrying Félida in her arms and walking alongside. Inside the garage were two musicians Abelardo knew, a guitar and a bajo sexto, standing near the pay phone, swearing a little, telling him they had been waiting for the accordion player, had just learned that hijo de la chingada, that fool had fallen from the rail of the bridge and broken his pelvis on the dry stones of the riverbed. No one knew why he had been walking on the rail.
“Borracho,” said the bajo sexto.
“Loco,” added the guitar, already working out a line or two of a corrido about the idiot.
As soon as Abelardo dug his accordion out from the boxes of cooking pots and sheets—it was not the Majestic that he played in those days, but the little green two-row—as soon as Adina found his good shoes and rubbed them to a gloss, as soon as he changed into his blue gabardine trousers and a white shirt, they left for the engagement, an anniversary barbecue to the north of Hornet. At noon the next day when Abelardo reentered the garage, hung over and filthy from sleeping under a bush, he discovered that his wife had moved into an old trailer on the edge of the barrio. The trip to San Antonio was canceled.
“How is it you make this enormous decision without consulting your husband? Have you grown a set of balls overnight, is that it? Let me see,” reaching for the hem of her dress.
“Get away! Who makes the decisions when you’re away at work, gone for months and months, or nights in a row? You think I hold my breath? When the boy was hurt in the tire you were in Michigan, there was no one but me to take the responsibility. You leave me sitting in a broken car while you go to a fiesta, what should I do, hold my breath and die?”
He tried to get his job back at the Blue Dove (though it would mean traveling six miles back and forth) but the wife of the Anglo manager told him to get his ass out of there. No job for somebody who quits one day and comes back two days later. And so, because he had children who had to eat, and because there were no jobs, he went into the fields again for the next two years, up to the Lubbock onion fields, his red eyes tearing constantly, the reek of onions fixed in his clothes and skin, and across his knuckles ingrained lines of dirt like a map of starbursts; his mind, like a man turning a coin in his pocket, never stopped working over the injustice of a musician ruining his hands with field labor.
“Look around,” said Adina harshly, “it’s all women raising the families. The men are far away playing the accordion.”
What a relief and pleasure when the Blue Dove changed hands in 1938 and the new owner personally requested his services again.
That trailer Adina had found in Hornet was at the southwest edge of the barrio on a dirt street. To the east the barrio thickened into a maze, to the south lay an immense pasture containing seventy paint horses in powerful colors, to the west, the dirty copper smelter and, beyond, low, gullied hills, ash-colored sagebrush alive with ticks, a vague long sky like a cloth, and, all around, billions of small stones. Although the trailer was at the end of the street, it was connected to the sewer line, not like the oozing and stinking colonia to the east where people lived in packing crates and scrap-metal lean-tos.
It was a worn trailer but larger than the old Relámpago house, with three cubby bedrooms, a living room, the kitchen; on the front, a set of foldout steps, a pair of propane tanks like double bombs. Just beyond the trailer was the bus turnaround, a bulldozed circle where the drivers got out and relieved themselves against the tires. Why was it, asked Félida, that both men and dogs had to piss against something? And got a slap for the immodest question. The black exhaust of twenty buses a day billowed against the front of the trailer, accompanied by the squeal of brakes, shifting gears.
Abelardo made up a little song:
O you filthy bus,
I was dreaming of love and riches,
I was dreaming of happiness
When you brrrt! like ten elephants,
Like a smokestack blowing up,
When you gnashed your gears
And destroyed my fragile reverie.
The sons added sound effects, squirting air through their lips until their mouths were numb. Adina said she was disgusted. But for years this song made them laugh and it was the first song Baby and Chris learned.
Down the street stood a wreck of an old tamale stand, the remnant of a failed franchise from the 1920s in the shape of a giant tamale, the stucco sloughing off, faded signs drooping: HAMBURGERS AS YOU LIKE’M. TAMALE PIE. But in a year the old tamale stand was gone, replaced with a little store and in the back a barber’s chair where Señor García cut the hair of men and boys, and all around them the space was filled with houses and trailers. The city flooded around them like water coming over the riverbank.
In this trailer in Hornet, Adina stood with her hands on her hips and told her children, “find a way to better yourselves. Get a control over your own life. Not be like—you know, only working, drinking, working, drinking—and playing the accordion.” But Abelardo, resting on the bed, heard her.
“You disgust me,” he shouted but did not get up. To himself he muttered, “here comes the business of the money.” Adina turned the radio knob to an American-language station and said, “¿por qué you kids don’t talk American? No more Spanish. From now on American at home too, not just school. If you talk Spanish you’ll end up in the fields. Talk American and get an education you get a good job. You’re Americans, no? Then be an American and get some money.” For her part, she had given them a start with American names: Baby, Chris, Betty. All except the bewildered, smiling Crescencio, named after his drowned grandfather, Crescencio, already defeated by his name, and poor little Roselia who had died in her crib, only a week old.
“How stupid,” Abelardo had muttered at each birth, insisting on other names as well, Rogelio, Tomás and Félida. The daughter went by two names, answering to Betty from the mother’s mouth, Félida from the father’s.
“Yes,” said his wife, “what a spiteful man. Why not names of Indians, then? Why not do them a favor? Go ahead, put them as low as you can get! Make their lives truly easy!”
The irony was that she looked more indio than anyone, looked a real oaxaqueña. Yet her family had come into the Rio Grande valley hundreds of years before, owned land along the same calm river as had the vanished Relámpagos.
“Yes, my family of important landowners.” Bitterly. When she was a child her family still visited relatives in Mexico. She remembered two long journeys to Oaxaca but believed it didn’t matter, that was in her childhood, the abandoned past that everyone knows and loses and tries to forget. That cloying, smothering family of hers with its fits and hysteric tantrums and her mother’s morbid belief in dreams.
Most sharply she retained a memory of great distances, being crowded into bus seats with her younger sisters, very strict in keeping them quiet and well behaved. When she thought of Mexico at all, she thought of it as the country of the senses, of moving colors, even the dust saturated with aromas and flavors. How drab and yellow Texas seemed when they returned, abandoning once more the vanilla beans, the musty olive-colored river, mineral dust and horses, the sanguinary and intestined odor of butchered pigs, the tiny drops of oil that stood on the surface of epazote leaves. She saw herself clenching stems, the green violence of cilantro on her hands. The sadness of the musky soil under the squash leaves where the cat slept, the smell of white cotton garments drying in the sun, of candles and kerosene and incense, of rotting oranges and sugar and frying oil and crushed sage, the roasting coffee beans and the deep little pots of chocolate, the cinnamon-and-almond scent of the female relatives, the odor of corn ground against the stone.
But over the years the visits became infrequent. The Mexican relatives commented unpleasantly about the Texas children’s debased Spanish and impolite ways; they held an image of these little norteños running as mongrel dog packs up in Tejas. When Adina married Abelardo she turned her back on her Mexican relatives. “They don’t mean nothing to me now because I am tejana, my children are Texans also, Americans.” But that deep past was caught unconsciously in her cooking, in the food she prepared and the smoky, sweet dishes she relished: pasilla chiles, Oaxacan mole coloradito, the spicy pork picadillo, the seven moles, the black and the deep red and the green—dark in flavor, slightly charred, faintly sweet. Ancient flavors and tastes. Not forgotten.
Almost the very week they moved into the trailer Adina’s headaches and fevers began. She had always been healthy but now she became something of an invalid. The fevers would come again and again at any time of the year, oppress her for months, then mysteriously disappear. Although she went to the clinic many times, the annoyed doctors said there was nothing wrong with her. She lay curled up, grey and hot, great circles under her eyes, unable to sleep, ears ringing, consumed by thirst.
“I have not had a night’s sleep since we came here,” she wept to Félida. “I have the luck of a dancing dog.” There was a high-pitched ringing in her ears, a dizziness and deafness to the affairs of the world that was almost like happiness. In the turnaround the buses roared like beasts; she could smell the exhaust, the dust and hot metal. The heat of the air, of her body. Her eyes swam in tears, she could not see well. When she looked up at night the moon seemed covered in thick foam. The walls, the faces of her husband and children, were distorted. She was consumed by fatigue. And lying there in the dozy world of fever, she could not escape the sounds of the accordion.
On and on it played, as though it played Abelardo, as though it were the animate force and he the instrument. Sometimes there were other accordions in the hands of his conjunto friends, she could hear a strong voice calling out “¡sí, señor!” in the midst of the music. Abelardo knew a thousand songs and he played them all during her fevers. Against her, she thought, against her. That voice, so sad and quavering in public song, so hard and dictatorial in the home.
From the time of the flood when old Relámpago disappeared, Abelardo had worked. In his life he spent three months at school. He learned to read as a grown man during the war from closely watching his own children struggle with their American schoolwork. Chencho turned eighteen in 1943 and was drafted at once, sent to the Pacific. Abelardo, sick with worry for this clumsy son, needed to know. He practiced on billboards and road signs and posters, then newspapers, not letting his wife know until he was fluent and then brought home week-old copies of La Opinión and the Los Angeles Times. He sat at the kitchen table with his legs crossed and took up the Times, read a few paragraphs aloud, then snapped open La Opinión and, in a very easy voice, read a few sentences about Frank Sinatra whose “música ha invadido el mundo en estos últimos años—like a tidal wave, no?” When Adina exclaimed in astonishment, he replied, “it is not entirely difficult. I am a cornucopia of brains.” His interest extended beyond the war news to miscellany, such things as the workings of the human digestive system, mysterious tides, the habits of kangaroos.
Somewhere he found a large anatomical chart showing the structure of the ear and this he taped onto the kitchen wall near the photographs of great accordion players. So there loomed over every meal the pale orange pinna resembling some extinct mollusk, the curving tunnel of the auditory canal, the eardrum shaped like a Japanese fan, and beyond it the curious tiny bones of the middle ear, the hammer, the anvil and the stirrup. The eye swept along, unable to escape, to the snail of the cochlea—a whirlpool, a hurricane seen from a cloud, a jelly roll, spinning tops, a fallen strip of orange peel. Not on the chart were the interlacing pathways connecting the music to the cerebral cortex.
Abelardo had hundreds of records, his own recordings of the 1930s, a few with Decca, then with Stella, then with Bell, then Decca again. “In those days I sang in Spanish; those men with the record company said to me, ‘we can’t tell what you are singing, so don’t sing anything dirty.’ So of course I sang all the filthy ones.”
There was a photograph showing him in a strained position, his right leg stretched out behind him, the left bent slightly at the knee, his torso rearing sharply back and the accordion stretched across his chest like a radiator grille. He was handsome and young, his hair thick.
“You know how much we got paid for those sessions? I thought I was lucky if I got ten dollars. Who can guess how much money the record companies made off us? Hundreds of thousands of millions of dollars.” He had old recordings of Lydia Mendoza, of the great accordion players, the records of Bruno Villareal, half blind, a little tin cup wired to the side of his accordion, playing in 1928, “the first recording with the accordion as the star,” Pedro Rocha and Lupe Martínez, Los Hermanos San Miguel, dozens of Santiago Jiménez discs. He made a ceremony of putting on the records, made his children sit respectfully.
“Listen, listen, there’s the tololoche that you don’t hardly hear no more. And you get how flowing the accordion notes are, the music very smooth and flowing, like water. That is Sonny playing. How smooth, even though he was a drunk, he drank so much his liver rotted off and there was only the hook where it used to hang inside him. But so smooth. Now it’s different, ¿no? Now everybody plays very staccato. That started with the war. You should have seen me then when I started out, I was a crazy man getting people to look in the paper for me, to see if any advertisements for recording sessions was in there. Or go by Señor Chávez’s farmacia. Señor Chávez made little miniature models of accordions, not to play, but for toys for his grandchildren. He was a kind of talent scout for one of the companies. They put an ad in the paper and you went up to a hotel room or something. Somebody listens to you and if they like you, tell you to come at such and such a time to a place where they had a studio set up at. Ten or twenty people standing in the hall waiting for a turn. Just one take, that was it. It was raw. They gave you maybe a dollar or five dollars. Nothing else, not even when a thousand people bought that record.”
He would make them listen to all those old labels: Okeh, Vocalion, Bluebird, Decca, Ideal, Falcon, Azteca, especially the Ideals made in the garage of Armando Marroquín up in Alice. He had played on many of the recordings of the Hernández sisters, Carmen y Laura, sitting in Carmen’s kitchen in the tangle of wires and microphones. “Here’s one—oh Dios, what a nightmare! 1931 and what do we sing? ‘The Star-Spangle Banner,’ to show we are American, the Congress just made this song the national anthem. Is there anybody alive who can sing this awful song?” The children swung their legs.
Between the music and the crops he had done all right, he said, but when the Depression started, everything became impossible and it was then that his possession of the Relámpago place was disproved, and soon after they had moved to Hornet.
He was crazy about the movies, and years later could still frighten his children with the plot of White Zombie, which he had watched seven times.
“Movies! You know those old movies—old silent movies—always had Mexicans for the bad guys? The Mexican wears everything black, he has a big hat, he has very dark skin and bulging white eyes. He rages, he is uncontrollable, cruel, he smiles as he stabs, he is attracted to gambling and murder. Then they finally make a movie with a Mexican for the good guy and who do you think they get to play the good Mexican? Paul Muni, all covered with makeup!”
After they arrived in Hornet, for a month he had a job sweeping up hair on the floor of a barbershop; everyone was on relief and there was only a little work in the cotton when you could get it. One day he amused himself by making a strange siren from a pierced metal disk that rotated when he turned a crank and worked a pump with his foot so that it jetted air against the whirling plate. The contrivance made a loud moaning call, but in a few days it broke. Really, said Adina, he had too many children to indulge in such fantastic play.
Each year Adina bought colored school photographs of the sons. Parents chose the sizes they wanted or could afford—a strip of tiny faces the size of postage stamps, or a life-size portrait in a cardboard mat. Adina always chose the small—but not the smallest—wallet size. The Hornet school was segregated, a school for “Mexicans,” no matter how many generations you had been in Texas. The Relámpago boys hated the stinking place. The teachers were Anglos, most of them from the north at their first jobs. The lessons were in American. There was an expensive rule: a penny fine for every Spanish word uttered.
“You are in the United States where we speak English,” said the principal in morning assembly, stepping to the edge of the stage to lead them in the Pledge of Allegiance.
“I don’t got no penny,” Chris whispered to his teacher.
“Ten years old, still in the third grade and you talk like a baby. You must say ‘I do not have a penny,’” said Miss Raider. “So, since you cannot pay the fine your punishment will be to write on the board five hundred times. ‘I will speak English.’”
Baby kept his mouth closed, listened. When he finally said something the American words came out clearly enough.
Everyone had to sit straight up when Miss Raider entered the room and say in dragging unison “Good morning, Miss Raider.” The crimes of whispering, lateness, coughing or sneezing, foot scuffling, sighing, fidgeting, were punished with “jail”—sheets of black paper taped to the floor on which miscreants stood at attention for one, two hours, forbidden to move or speak. A failure to produce homework, a sullen manner, brought smarting whacks with a folded leather strap.
“Hold out your hand,” said Miss Raider before striking.
Crescencio cut his name in the top of his desk, a great curling C and fine flourishes like a bower around the entire name. Mrs. Pervil cried, “under the desk,” her voice a flail of barbwire. She pointed.
Crescencio went slowly to the front of the room and stood near the desk.
“Get in under there!” He crouched, crept into the dark kneehole. At the bottom of the front panel there was a gap of five inches and in that space the class could see the heels of the crouching Crescencio, his torn sneakers.
“The rest of you open your histories to page forty-one and read the selection ‘The Brave Men of the Alamo.’” Mrs. Pervil sat down and drew her chair forward. Her knees filled the space, pressed against Crescencio’s forehead. Her pointed shoes jabbed his knees. Her legs and thighs blocked out the light, invested the kneehole with a horrible intimacy. Suddenly the knees sprang outward, the thighs opened with a faint fleshy sound. The cheesy stench of Mrs. Pervil’s unwashed private parts filled the dark space. Crescencio experienced humiliation, claustrophobia, burning rage, sexual excitement, impotence, feelings of injustice, subservience and powerlessness.
The next day he looked for work, found it in an umbrella factory jamming ferrules onto shafts and never returned to school. On Sunday morning Mrs. Pervil’s husband discovered all the tires on his new Chevrolet sedan stabbed flat. It happened time and again despite a locked garage and a diabolical arrangement of rigged trip wires and bells, happened until the husband had used up his ration stamps and was forced to buy inferior tires at astronomical prices on the black market. Mr. Pervil blamed “the goddamn Bullsheviks.” No one suspected chubby Crescencio, shambling, sadly smiling Chencho with his defeated shoulders. The slashings stopped when he was drafted in 1943 and sent to the Solomon Islands with his squad of Mexican Americans from Texas. One or two of them made it back home. Abelardo ordered and paid for an elaborate stone memorial, but the fateful name “Crescencio” cut in the top of his old desk preserved his memory for Baby and Chris.
The two younger brothers were so similar in appearance and manner no one outside the family could tell them apart when they were little children. They seemed to be twins, although Baby was a year older. After the accident with the tire, they were so different they did not even resemble brothers. It happened when they were very young, when they still lived at the house of the Relámpagos.
Baby told Chris to climb inside the old truck tire he strained to hold upright. Chris was small and his body curved to fit the hollow inside the tire. Before he had even settled into place Baby pushed the tire down the rubbled hillside with a railroad track at the bottom. He saw the mistake at once. He had expected it to roll smoothly, a wonderful ride, but the tire leaped, sprang into the air every time it hit a rock, Baby running far behind, hands out and arms trying to extend a hundred feet. Beyond the railroad tracks the tire wearied, spun around like a half-dollar on a bar and collapsed.
Baby ran up to the tire, panting, crying. Chris spilled out. He looked dead. With a scream of despair Adina heard at the house Baby picked up a rock and bashed it against his own forehead. And again. So both of them went to the hospital.
Chris had a strange laugh after his recovery, the laugh of a large man enjoying a funny movie, a laugh he had copied from an X-ray technician with a circle of hair like a brown beret. This technician came to see him in the hospital ward on Saturdays bringing a chocolate bar which he broke into small pieces, inserting them into Chris’s mouth with his right hand while his left hand frisked under the covers, plucking and rubbing at flesh not covered by bandages and plaster. When Chris walked again he walked differently, one leg slightly shorter than the other and he disguised it by rising on the balls of his feet with each step, a buoyant, agile walk that seemed to seek shortcut paths.
He was destined for injury. When he was fourteen and leaning against the passenger door of a borrowed car on the way to a dance with his father and four others, all of them singing Valerio Longoria’s ranchera “El Rosalito,” a tremendous song of the time, the wonderful nueva onda sound, rough and exciting, the worn-out door latch gave way and the door opened. He fell out at fifty miles an hour, the flesh scraped away to the bone, suffered a broken shoulder and arm, a concussion, those things. But once again he recovered.
The best thing to come from this accident was the visit of Valerio Longoria himself—the smooth pompadour, the crouching eyebrows—to Chris in the hospital, joking but serious—“since you were singing my song when it happened I feel a responsibility—”
“That Valerio,” said Abelardo admiringly, “he’s the real thing, la gran cosa.”
At the school in Hornet there was a teacher, Miss Wing, from Chicago, who spoke with great precision and smiled at everything. “Many people have hobbies. Tomorrow I want everyone to bring samples of their hobbies to class. Each boy or girl will tell about their hobby, such as stamp collecting or matchbook collecting. My brother collected matchbooks, which is a very, very interesting hobby.”
Most children brought a single matchbook the next day. Angelita brought a lone wooden match, the blue and red tip grimed from her pocket. Even this Miss Wing praised.
The Relámpago brothers brought their accordions. They played the bus song (without singing the words), waited for the teacher to smile. Her white face dipped in disgust.
“The accordion is not a good instrument. It is a rather stupid instrument. Polacks play it. Tomorrow I’ll bring in some good music for you to listen to.”
At recess they whispered, what is a polack? Angelita knew.
“A white bear that lives on the ice.”
Baby imagined white bears in a row playing their silvery accordions. And the mystery deepened when, on the radio one night, he heard “I’m a polack, you pretty little poppy …”
“What is a polack? Is it a white bear?”
“Amapola! Amapola! The name of a beautiful young girl!”
Miss Wing brought a record player in a beige case, set it on her desk, pulled at the black cord that was too short to reach the outlet. The big boys had to push her desk toward the wall, the metal-shod legs shrieking over the floorboards. The felt-covered turntable went around and around. She slid a black lustrous disc from its paper sleeve, held it by the edges, and placed it on the moving turntable. Just watching it go around felt good. She lowered the arm. The room was filled with the Boston Pops Orchestra playing “The Syncopated Clock.”
But this good music had no effect on the Relámpago boys. In the Relámpago house the accordion was everything. In 1942, at fourteen and fifteen, playing matching accordions in the style associated with their father and singing in harmony two of their father’s best-known compositions, the polka “La Enchilada Completa” and the ranchera “Es un Pájaro,” they won a talent contest in McAllen. Already they were playing with Abelardo for dances. They sang searing duets of remarkable feeling. There is no harmony like the matched voices that escape from the throats of those who are blood relatives, the shape and structure of the vocal apparatus similar, like two accordion reeds filed to sound almost the same yet fractionally different. The prize was two hundred dollars and an appearance on a border station beaming its programs as far away as Canada.
Abelardo was elated. “Now you’ll see, they’ll come, the record companies, wanting to record you. It’ll begin for you.” Abelardo’s waiter friend Berto drove them in his fourthhand Ford. They crossed the border and arrived at the station an hour before the scheduled time of noon. The boys sat silent, clutching their instruments while Abelardo buttonholed everyone—the man with a tray of coffee, a technician festooned with odd tools, an engineer on his way down the hall, a cowboy singer, half drunk and with his fly unzipped, coming from the men’s room.
“Look,” the American manager said a little insolently, “we’ve got a little reschedule change here. Go out, get some lunch, come back with the kids at two o’clock this afternoon. We moved the talent program to two o’clock.”
In the room beyond, Baby heard a stuttering male voice say to someone, “wha-wha-wha-wha-wha-wha-what’s the difference between a Mexican and a bucket of shit?”
Outside, the wind gusted hard and the sky was green-black in the south. Papers and tumbleweed rolled in streamers of dust. They went to the car.
“He said come back at two,” Abelardo explained to Berto. “They changed the time.”
“But I have to be at the restaurant at two. My shift starts at two. You know this.”
“All right. Drop us downtown, we’ll swallow something, get a taxi back here and then we will wait in the town until your shift is over.”
“It’s over at eleven, you know this, and an hour to get here, you’ll be sitting around for a long, long time.”
“Ah, we’ll make friends, play some music, have a good time, see a movie.”
“Only one of my headlights work.” A gust of wind swept dust into the car. “All right, get in, get in.”
As Berto backed to turn around in the gravel parking lot, wind rocked the car and the first drops of rain hit the windshield, large and far apart. There was a tremendous crack and a groaning sound. Baby said, the tower’s falling. It was falling, the immense, two-hundred-foot tower was gathering speed as it descended on the station and parking lot. Berto gunned the accelerator and they zigzagged crazily backward, watching the tower hit, the roof of the station buckle, the top twenty feet of the tower smash down on the parked cars and the space they had occupied only seconds earlier. Flying shingles and bits of wood were hitting the ground, the big plywood letter W crashed and bounced.
“Let’s get out of here,” said Berto.
“Go,” said Abelardo. “If we stay they will blame it on us.”
After that, nothing happened for Baby and Chris. Their fame was confined to the Hornet barrio—“los dos hermanos Relámpago who won the contest.” There was nothing to do but keep playing with Abelardo at the weekend dances and fiestas and quinceañeras, their little moons reflecting his brilliant glare. They had no style of their own.
After the move to Hornet, Adina had stopped going to mass and confession. In a year or two she was putting plates of food in front of two Yahweh’s Wonder missionaries, listening to their stories of doom and salvation, their descriptions of the wilderness of the soul, and later rephrasing these accounts for Abelardo and the children. This religious husband and wife, Darren and Clarice Leak, both blond with white lips and transparent eyes, brought their children with them when they visited (Clarice descended from Rudman Snorl, a member of the missionary party sent to wean the Cayuse Indians from their addiction to breeding and racing fine horseflesh, dying there in the antimissionary uprising of the infuriated Cayuse). The children sat obediently in the hot old car parked close to the trailer for the strip of shade, the windows rolled down to give a little air. They were forbidden to get out, talk to or even look at the Relámpago children. Lorraine was the youngest, then Lassie, and Lana the oldest, an albino child who covered her weeping eyes with her hand against the strong light. They sat very still with their faces to the front of the car, yet their eyes devoured every movement of the Relámpagos who moved about in their line of vision, showing how well they could run or wrestle. Chris stood directly in front of the car and moved his arms and legs in humorous positions, rewarded sometimes by rigid smiles.
A hot day, the parents inside praying with Adina, and in the car Lorraine whined and rocked back and forth.
“No sir!” hissed Lana. “You can’t, you have to wait!” But at last they opened the car door a crack on the side away from the trailer, allowed the child to slip out, pull down her ragged underpants and squat. Chris stared at the jetting water, had to pull out his own instrument and piss before them as if to show that the Relámpagos, at least this one, could make a more pronounced display.
Abelardo despised the Leaks, thought them stupid, fanatic and dangerous. He pointed out to Adina that Clarice, listening to the ever-on radio while Darren droned about the Lord this and the Lord that, had written down the name of the station offering “an autographed painting of Jesus Christ, framed in hand-tooled gold-tone finish, for only five dollars.”
Abelardo wanted his sons to die for the accordion. He played to each of them when they were still babies, choosing the last hour of light for the most impressionable time, for who has not heard music at the end of the day, the quarter-light infused by somber harmonies that say everything that has ever been said? A listening child never forgets the scent of the uprushing darkness, the gleam of a white shirt as someone approaches.
He bought each of his sons two-row diatonic models similar in style to the old green accordion. “I don’t bother with those little ten-button ones,” he said. “Let the kids start out right.” But, rushed and pressed, he was impatient in teaching them, made them sit on the wooden chairs under the signed photographs of his accordionist friends, Narcisco Martínez, Ramón Ayala, Rubén Naranjo, Juan Villareal, Valerio Longoria, in a row on the wall. Crescencio had no interest in the accordion. Abelardo said to his face, very sadly, “Crescencio, you are stupid, truly stupid.” He gave up on him and concentrated on the younger sons. (Yet Chencho was a wonderful dancer—not to this music, but to big-band swing on the radio, a real jitterbug, spinning and twirling the girl and lifting her up above his head.)
“The accordion is an important instrument. It can even save lives. Last spring a man played the accordion to calm the frightened passengers in a shipwreck in the fog in New York. Now listen and see, this is how I play this,” he would say. “Now you try it,” executing a quivering bellows shake, fast arpeggios, tricky dissonances, but he had no time to show them slowly and carefully. He was out of the house again, working or playing for a dance. After a few months the lessons stopped. They would have to find their own way.
One day a man came into the Blue Dove. He returned many times. He always ordered the same thing, the specialty of the restaurant and the reason many came there, attracted by the odor of fat juices dripping on the charcoal fire in the back courtyard, the cabrito al pastor and the plates of machitos, tender pieces of goat liver roasted in lengths of intestine. These delicacies persisted on a pedestrian menu of steak, eggs and burritos.
This man sat always at the tiny corner table, a table also favored by lovers, who failed to notice the sway of the chairs, the unsteady table when the folded matchbook beneath the wall leg was disturbed. Nor did the man notice these things. He placed his folded newspaper on the empty chair and gestured for the waiter.
Standing up he was unpleasantly tall, but in a chair, and his long legs folded beneath it, he faded, distinguished only by a heavy nose and a mustache of excruciating thinness. He had a trick of looking slyly around from under lowered eyelids, never staring boldly, never letting his eyes flash. His hair was sleek and receding from his caramel-colored forehead. He came from a northern city, one could hear it in his voice. He sat quietly, his hands loosely collapsed, filling the table, as he waited for the platter of meat to come. When he was finished with the meal he placed his knife and fork on the plate in the form of a cross, lit a cigarette, holding it between forefinger and thumb of his left hand, and leaned back in the creaking chair. If he caught Abelardo’s eye he would gesture with the second finger of his right hand as a sign he wished the dirty plates carried away. One evening he made this gesture and as Abelardo grasped the edge of the soiled platter the man spoke to him in a low voice, asked Abelardo to meet him across the street—he named a bar—at six-thirty. Below the cigarette smoke Abelardo could smell a pungent herb oil, a primitive and superstitious odor.
The man sat at the end of the bar, seemed very cold and dangerous away from the lovers’ table. He crooked his second finger at the barman, the familiar gesture, and a glass of whiskey came to Abelardo.
“I represent another,” said the man softly. His newspaper lay folded on the bar showing a photograph of Mussolini at an accordion festival. He blew smoke from both nostrils like a bull on a cold plateau. “I offer you a certain opportunity.” There was a long silence. At last Abelardo asked, what is this opportunity? He said the word “opportunity” in a light, sneering voice, no longer the busboy clearing away the man’s filth.
“The opportunity is a large one. A very pleasant opportunity for the right one. I think you are that one.” There was another long silence. Abelardo finished the whiskey, the finger moved and a second glass came at once. The man lit a second cigarette, let the smoke drift out of his stretched mouth in quivering rings.
“This opportunity,” he said, “involves one or two simple actions. From time to time I will bring a package into the Blue Dove and place it on the empty chair, behind the tablecloth. I say to you as you are clearing away the dishes a few words, such as ‘white Buick with a rosary on the rearview.’ You slip the package under a dirty dish in your tub and go toward the kitchen. I have noticed the side door that goes outside to the garbage cans where the waiters smoke. It is easy to go around the corner to the parking lot.” The word “smoke” sent the man’s fingers to his shirt pocket.
“In the passageway you take the package from the tub and go out the side door. You say you are going out for a smoke if anyone notices you. But this all happens very quickly; no one will even look. In the parking lot you glance at the cars and put the package on the back seat of the white Buick with the rosary. Or whatever car I have described to you. The Buick may be a Chevrolet or a De Soto. There may not be a rosary. There may be ten packages in a year or a hundred. On the first day of every month, I will leave one of these for you under my plate.”
The man opened his left hand a little and in the dim light Abelardo saw a folded bill. He thought at first it was a ten, then a hundred, but finally saw clearly that it was a thousand. A thousand-dollar bill. A steaming flush rose up his right side, the side closest to the money.
The first package appeared four days later. It was, as the man had said, all very simple. It was the money that was difficult. So large a bill could not be real money. It was abstract, a thing of ferocious value, not to be showed and not to be spent. He got a can of shellac and a small brush, creased the first bill lengthwise, shellacked it lightly on one side, removed the bass end of the green accordion and glued the bill into an interior fold of the bellows. It was entirely invisible, could not be discovered except by knowing fingers, could not be seen, even if someone removed the ends and looked into the bellows. The man came into the Blue Dove with his secret packages and secret thousand-dollar bills for one year and two months. Then he stopped coming.
Abelardo went to the bar across the street several times but the man was never there. He asked the bartender if he knew when the man was coming back. That one whispered it was better not to inquire. He himself knew nothing but had heard that a fine new suit had been delivered to someone, a beautiful grey sharkskin suit in a white box, but when that person put it on, the heat from his body activated volatile chemicals secreted in the seams and the suit had exploded and the man with it.
In the bellows of the green accordion were fourteen bills of the thousand denomination.
In 1945 they had the news of Crescencio’s death and a letter from some lieutenant that began: “I only met Crisco, as everyone called him, a few days before he was killed …” For the first time they learned that his death was not from bullets but from a cinder-block wall which had collapsed and fallen on him when he kicked it. He had been jitterbugging with another soldier and in a wild breakaway had spun around and made a flying kick at the wall, which yielded. Adina put a gold star in the window.
The two sons Chris and Baby, nearly grown and becoming insolent and willful, played every weekend with Abelardo.
Abelardo would play the first set, then often go off to drink Bulldog beer in the clubs and bars, listen to the Padilla sisters’ voices coming out of the sinfonola, leaving the rest of the night to the sons. (Adina always had menudo, the fiery tripe soup, on hand for his hangovers.) From those intervals when he left the music to them, changes began to develop in the sons’ playing; they made a shorter, staccato music, like a knife stabbing. The older dancers complained they couldn’t dance properly to the sons’ music, with its choppier, faster beat and a kind of sprung rhythm that disturbed, but the younger ones loved them, screaming and cheering, especially at Chris, “¡Viva tu música!” when he stepped up in his red jacket, Baby in the black jacket with white piping on the lapels. Then, to Adina’s heartbreak—she blamed Abelardo and the easy Saturday night money—both of them dropped out of school.
What was the point? All paths went nowhere. ¡Ándale!
Acne scarred Chris’s face, a hardening face as he tried for jobs and did not get them. Weekend music wouldn’t keep a chicken alive. He had a taste for stylish shirts and wristwatches, gold chains. His ambition was to own un carro nuevo. He grew a mustache as soon as he could, to draw attention from the acne and to make himself look older. This black mustache curved down. He wore a pair of dark glasses and began to run with a bunch of cholos, especially with a rough called “Venas,” a black mole on his left nostril, someone who poured money into his white Buick with the crushed velvet upholstery, whose father, Paco Robelo, the whole Robelo family, were rumored to be connected with narcotraficantes.
In a year or two Chris had his own car, a secondhand Chevrolet repainted silver, with painted flames licking along the sides and on the hood a portrait of himself playing the accordion in a fiery circle that made the old women say it prefigured a trip to hell.
Baby seemed to suffer. Everything affected him—the smell of burned food, thunder and hail, girls whispering, the shine of the stellate scar on his forehead. The old women said he had a steel plate in his head. Abelardo shouted, “snap out of it—we got a dance to play tonight. You sit up there, look like your best friend just died. You see how Chris always got a smile? The audience wanna see you having a good time.”
Adina would put her hand against his forehead, worry that his heated blood might somehow be cooking his brains. But he was composing his first songs, struggling with words and music. It was all coming out in American.
Mr. More’s voice in the remedial mathematics class droned on and on about topological vertices, but Félida kept her head down, feeling him looking at her. He was walking up and down the rows and talking about it.
“Call the front of the room line AB, call the back of the room CD, if I walk BD, if I then cut across to A, do we have odd or even vertices where I stop? Hands?” There were no answers. Now he was walking up her row, slowing, standing beside her desk. She could smell the wool and chalk smell, see, from the corners of her eyes, the dusty brown shoes.
“Félida.”
She didn’t know. “Even?”
“As a matter of fact it is, but I think you guessed at it. Would you like to come up and draw the diagram on the board?”
The bell wouldn’t ring! She went up to the blackboard, took the chalk. What had he said, where had he walked? Across the front of the room. She drew a horizontal line. Down the row. Then up her row.
He laughed. “What I said was, if I cut across to A. I didn’t actually cut across to A because I can’t walk through desks. Look.” Beside her again, taking the chalk from her, his cold chalky fingers touching hers. He spoke very softly, not a whisper, but a low voice. “Come back here after school for a few minutes. I want to talk to you.” He raised his voice, raised his hand with the eraser, rubbing out her lines and replacing them with his own. She went back to her desk feeling nothing. Nothing at all.
When she came to the room after three o’clock he was standing by the window watching the school buses pull out.
“You know how many years I’ve been doing this? Nineteen; fourteen of them here in Hornet. I came down here from Massachusetts. I had some dream about living in the southwest. I just thought it would be different than it is. You have to eat. Teaching, and in Texas, for Christ sake. After a few years you’re in too far to get out. So here I am. And there you are. Come here.” Moving to the side of the window.
And it was the same thing, the chalky cold fingers going up her neck and into her hair, pushing it up against the grain, which she hated, and then he pulled her up against him and the bony hands came up to her breasts and felt them, down her ribs to her waist, her hips, then up under her skirt and the cold chalky finger digging under the elastic of her panties and into her as he ground against her thigh. Hopping adroitly back when someone in the hall laughed and the clack of heels, some woman teacher, rattled past. She thought maybe it was his wife, Mrs. More, who taught typing and business math.
“Listen,” he mumbled. “She’s going to a meeting in Austin. I want you to come to the house. Tomorrow around five o’clock. I’ve got this.” He pulled something from his pocket, paper, unfolding it, showing it. A five-dollar bill. “For you. You can play your accordion for me.” He smiled faintly.
The accordion had started it. She had gone to his office the year before because he was the school guidance counselor on Wednesday afternoons, told him she wanted to be a musician but the problem was her father, well known, a famous accordion player, and her brothers who also played the accordion and were admired and demanded all through the valley, while she was invisible even within the house. Her father had a strong prejudice, she said, against women in music unless they sang; it was all right if they sang. But she had been singing all her life and he had never noticed. She had taught herself to play the accordion but had no confidence. She already knew thirty rancheras. What should she do?
“A beautiful young girl like you shouldn’t be worrying about a career,” Mr. More said. “But I’d like to hear you play. Maybe I can offer you some suggestions. I once had a dream of playing the classical tuba.” He had patted her arm, two slow pats, the tips of his fingers just grazing the down on her arm and making her shudder.
When he woke from his little nap in the red Saturday evening a few weeks before Félida’s quinceañera there was no one in the trailer. Abelardo dashed water on his face, patted himself dry, sprinkled talcum powder into his groin, slapped his face and neck and shoulders and belly with Sea Breeze. Now the careful arrangement and spraying of his hair. The pressed trousers, the new black socks of some smooth silklike fiber, white shirt and a pale blue tie, a pale blue polyester jacket to pick up the color. Last, the gleaming shoes. In the mirror a good-looking man of deep health and intelligence. He went for the green accordion, for he was playing for Bruno tonight, a man who appreciated the plaintive voice and the hoarse crying of the old instrument. It was not in the closet, not under the bed, not in the living room nor the kitchen. His heart beat with fear. He raged into his sons’ room and for a moment thought he had found it, but it was only the old Italian Luna Nuova that he had given to Baby years before. One of the bastards had his green accordion and he had no time to run around the town looking for the dirty little thieves. In the end he had to take the Majestic, but the tone was wrong for this music and he played so angrily and powerfully on it that he broke a reed tongue and the buttons jammed.
Long after midnight he returned, drunk and still furious, but the green accordion stood on the shelf in the closet again. He opened the instrument, his fingers probed the creases of the bellows. The money was undisturbed. The shreds of fear solidified to fury. He strode to his sons’ room, ready to denounce and tear them. The beds were empty. It was inconceivable, but Adina must have had it.
“Get up!”
“What is it?” Bolting up in fright, wide awake and trying to recognize the danger.
“Why did you take the green accordion? Where did you go?”
“I? The accordion? I took nothing. You’ve gone crazy.” He raised his arm as if to strike her in the face with the flat of his hand, left her weeping on the pillow. Ah, now it comes out! she thought. Brutal man! While he went to the refrigerator and groped for the ice water. He thought, Félida! And rushed to hammer on her door. Shocked by the burst of defiance from the other side.
“YES, I TOOK IT. I was invited to play for a teacher!” It was too late for any kind of truths. For she had not even opened the case before the teacher was on top of her, grinding her into his dusty carpet where she could see forlorn strings hanging from the underside of the sagging sofa.
“Not even the most criminal son would speak to his father this way! You slap my face with insolent words!” Rage swallowed everything. He felt interior stormy chords as if madmen were pummeling the timpani of his guts. He shouted.
“A woman cannot play the accordion. It is a man’s instrument. A woman cannot get other musicians to play with her, nobody will hire you, your voice is not strong enough. Your character is bad, you are disobedient, you have no future in the musical field.” He was almost crying. “After all the money we intend to spend on your quinceañera.” And kept it up until Baby came in, calmed him, until at two in the morning it was silent. Chris was still out under the moon somewhere, driving his taxi, was often out all night taking drunken soldiers back to the base.
In the earliest morning Adina heard the door close. The outside steps creaked. In the window the margin of the moon was dark silver as though tarnished. A deep and ominous silence. Abelardo breathing thickly beside her. She touched the side of her face lightly with her fingertips. Where he might have struck her, where he almost had struck her. In a few minutes she got up and went into the kitchen, felt sand under her bare feet, no, it was sugar. Sugar and salt spilled across the floor. Heard the hissing gas before she smelled it. Dios, they could die! She turned off the gas burners that were pouring the noxious stuff into the house, opened the door gagging and coughing at the stink of the gas. She stood on the porch in her nightdress looking down the wet dirt street. Somewhere a rooster was crowing, a maniac of a rooster. The street was entirely empty. Betty/Félida was gone.
Trembling, she stepped back into the kitchen and saw the green accordion on the table. A knife protruded from the bellows. It was a message that the daughter wished to stab her father to the heart.
“Never mention her in this house again,” Abelardo mumbled, weeping. “I have no daughter.” Yet before he spoke he drew the knife out of the instrument and examined the bellows slowly, carefully, for signs of other invasive cuts and slices and he spent the afternoon behind a locked door repairing the damage by gluing a thin piece of pigskin over the tear inside the bellows and working a rich leather preservative into the outside to keep it supple and willing.
After the war the minutes flew by, the hours, the weeks and years and there was no word from the daughter. Adina became very religious (“Lord, I cannot bear these burdens alone”), going out with the Leaks to knock on doors and persuade others to become Yahweh’s Wonders. Chris and Baby continued to play music with Abelardo, but an animosity was growing between them, a dislike of each other’s music. Nor did the weekend playing bring in enough money to live. The traditional music was not so popular now; it was all swing and big bands.
When he was twenty-three, twenty-four, around 1950, Baby got the idea to grow chiles, to do some throwback thing, associated with a regard for the agricultural laborer, passionate rhetoric that flowed from union organizers who came to the region after the war, and his thoughts of his unknown grandfather whom he wished to believe a hero. The idea was vague. He had to lease land, had to learn how to grow chiles from the agricultural experiment station agent, an Anglo who pressed him to specialize in a thick-bodied cultivar named S-394, developed at the University of Texas, and not the old local chile, la bisagra, the hinge, for its crooked shape. The timed application of chemical fertilizers and irrigation were the key procedures. He found this boring, lost interest as soon as the plants started to grow. The chile-growing he had imagined, had heard described by older men, was a complex thing of crossbreeding for drought resistance and special flavors, of virtuoso weather readings, of gauging the soil’s temper, of prayer and fate. He thought he wanted to understand these things, be a part of that life, but only discovered he had no talent for agriculture.
While he had the land, Abelardo was drawn to it, came out as often as he could get away to see how the plants were coming along, talk a little, now increasingly about his life in the past.
His drowned father had played the guitar, vingi, vingi, vingi.
“So there was a little music in the family,” said Abelardo, squatting on the red soil at the end of a row, smoking his cigarette and watching the irrigation water trickle into the ditch. He said it was a sour, hard music that forced the ears until he, Abelardo, came along and stunned everyone with his fabulous playing.
“I learned to play in the fields, from Narcisco. Narcisco Martínez, el Huracán del Valle, started it, started the conjunto music. Look, before World War Two there wasn’t truly nothing, just guys playing together, all the old Mexican bullshit stuff, mariachi … Then Narcisco, then I came, and pretty soon, after the war, there were four or five good conjuntos—me, Narcisco, Pedro Ayala, José Rodríguez, Santiago Jiménez, Jesús Casiano. I loved that music. At first it was just a little one-row accordion, maybe another instrument, whatever was there; then we got the two-rows and added the bajo sexto, and just those two instruments made a lot of good music for dances. I had a man, we called him Charro because he had this Stetson he always wore, played bajo sexto with me before Crescencio, poor Chencho, was born, an older man, very strict in his ways. Well, he couldn’t really feel the music I was trying to play and we broke up because in those days I drank a lot. Then I got a tololoche—ay Dios, what a beautiful sound that instrument makes with the accordion.”
“I rather have the electric bass. Makes them dance. Drums, too, get them moving.”
“Yes, now you younger ones make fun of how we played, but you got to think back who this music was for then, where it come from. It come out of poor people, didn’t have money for fancy drums and the electric instruments—even if they were invented then, you got to have electricity to play them. Who had electricity in the thirties? So we played the left hand, played the bass. Narcisco said ‘conjunto era pa’la gente pobre,’ and he knew what he was talking about. And he knew about being poor; he drove a truck, worked in the fields most of his life. That’s where it happened, this music, in the fields. And of course you know there were plenty of them that looked down on the conjunto—your mother, for one.”
No, he said when Baby asked, he had never cared to take up the piano accordion with its forbidding-looking row of keys like teeth—an instrument that breathed and had teeth, that had a way of showing the human hand as a small trampling animal.
Baby looked up the rows of the chile plants, the curved first small pods curling in under the leaves and the white blossoms enticing the bees. Why did the old man talk so much?
“Now it’s getting popular, this music, our music, and you know why? Tejanos carried it through the cotton fields, all over the country, up in the beet fields, Oregon and wherever—sí, they danced on Saturday night, maybe just for the chance to stand up straight. I remember those dances very well. We all played the taco circuit. Most of us worked all week in the fields too. You had to tie a bandanna over your mouth and nose the dust was so bad, the dancers jumping around made plenty of dust. Narcisco made a polka, ‘La Polvareda,’ about this dust cloud. I got it on the old record; you heard it. The accordion was so natural, a little friend. Easy and small to carry, easy to play, and loud, and can play bass rhythm and melody. Just the accordion and nothing else and you’ve got a dance. It’s the best instrument for dancing in the world, the best for the human voice. This music, this instrument—your mother”—he spat—“your mother wants to make you into imitation bolillo, an ass-licking Anglo doughball. You’ll never be one of them. You can’t. Learn a million American words and so what? They’ll still kick you in the face with their big salty feet.” He grabbed Baby’s right hand, stretched his sweaty arm out, the brown skin taut over the muscles. Skin brown as though varnished with strong tea. “But don’t expect to make a living with music, with playing the accordion. It cannot be done, even if you play nothing but American music. That’s the tragedy of my life.” He held out his own hands, fingers splayed.
The son Baby, this lagging chile grower by day, this part-time accordion player at night, drifted along. On the weekends he played for dances with Chris, mostly rancheras and polkas; they sang in the classic two-part harmony, primera y segunda, Baby’s voice a raspy tenor that could soar to a quivering and incandescent falsetto, Chris’s voice with a thick nasality that gave the sound substance and richness. Their big days were in October, especially El Día de la Raza. They split off from Abelardo because there were too many dances to waste three accordions on one place. The dances were exhausting, the strain of playing and the lights, the sweat and heat and thirst, the noise like pouring rain, and always a table of roughs waiting for Chris, youths opening in el grito, “Ah-jai-JAI!” when Chris stepped up to sing.
Though so many turned to the big-band sound and the strange hybrid fusion of jazz, rumba and swing, would rather listen to “Marijuana Boogie,” the Los Angeles Latin sound, than “La Barca de Oro,” there was an audience that liked their music, who found value in it. These new ones, many of them veterans back from the Korean War, some of them university students, embraced conjunto, and this music was not for dancing but for listening. It had a meaning beyond itself.
“They listen,” said Chris, “not because we’re good, though we are good, but because we are theirs. They are not just jumping around in the dirt until they drop.” But the zoot-suiters booed them off the stage, went crazy for the Mexican-Latin stuff, música tropical, a kind of hot, tripping swing.
Chris was in small troubles constantly, half hiding behind Baby while they played because someone was looking for him; he was always fooling around with somebody’s woman out in the parking lot and when the break was over he didn’t come in too many times and Baby had to start without him, got used to being the only accordion and started to play one or two of his own songs. “Your Old Truck and My New Car” was well known, and “I Never Knew About the Front Door.”
Chris drank. Got into fights. He was arrested, three, five times. Beaten in jail or on the way there. Stories went around. He had a gun in his pocket. He was mixed up with the Robelos. Then his friend Veins was found clubbed to death in the folds of a dirty carpet.
With two sons like that, what kind of path could they find through the world? Chris had a job driving a taxi and was out all night, night after night, working or not working. Half the time he didn’t show up on the night they had to play.
The change was sudden. In 1952 Chris accepted the contorted religion of Yahweh’s Wonder in order to marry Lorraine Leak, the daughter of the missionary couple who had come for many years to the Relámpagos, spooling out “and the Lord said” and “Jesus tells us.” Chris was twenty-four. The missionary daughter, Lorraine, a pious washed-out blond with a thick face, spoke in tiny, inaudible words. Her parents, grizzled and unhappy, but caught in the trap of their own preaching about brotherhood (never dreamed it could boomerang like this), stood silently during the ceremony and did not come to the fiesta Abelardo and Adina arranged. It was just as well because Abelardo drank enough to make a public speech to Adina.
“You see, you joined their religion long ago, now Chris does the same thing, so you are of the same religion as Señor Leak, no? But he holds himself above you, him and his wife and their rabbit-eyed daughters. What can come of this marriage?”
Chris shaved off his mustache, ordered his hair cut short, dropped his old friends. He quit drinking and smoking, and was often seen to clasp his hands, bow his head and let his lips move silently.
The thing that did not change was his great hollow laugh. Chris and Lorraine came to visit on Sunday afternoons, Lorraine sitting dumbly on the sofa watching the Sears Roebuck television with its skinny rabbit ears and suckling the child. What a stick, thought Adina.
Chris sat on the porch railing, one leg swinging, the other foot touching the porch floor. Looked over at Baby, who still lived at home, in the sly way he had when he was getting ready to duck out of something.
Baby said,. “what? Something on your mind. You got a girlfriend on the side and you want me to tell Lorraine you got to go out of town?”
Chris was fatter now, his shaven face ballooned up, and because he always felt the urge, he said, for a cigarette, he ate fast food when he could get it, burritos, tacos, hamburgers, Pepsis. Driving a cab made you hungry but you didn’t get any exercise. The front seat crackled with his paper bags and candy bar wrappers.
“You don’t change, still got a dirty mouth on you. No, no girlfriend. It’s I can’t play at the clubs and dances no more. It’s against my religion, now, and it’s making hard feelings with my in-laws. So, I’m like switching over to the organ, play at services, you know, hymns? Religious music. I mean, I know Jesus now, and that’s where I’m aiming my music. I used to be wild, but I’m tryin to do better. Guess you and the old man got to keep it going for the Relámpagos.” They could hear the baby crying inside.
“You not going to do the recording deal with me and him? That’s set up for months. He won’t like it. We’ll prob’ly lose the contract—suppose to do the two Bernal songs with three-part.”
“He’ll have to accept that my life has changed.”
“Well, you do what you have to do. Still driving the fucking taxi?”
Yes, Chris answered, he was still driving the taxi.
“Must be a good job, you got that new camper van.” Nodding at the street where the beige van gleamed.
“What you trying to say? You saying something?” He drew his face into a turtle’s expression.
“No, man, nothing. Just a fucking idle question, y’know?”
“Nothing is right. So fuck off.”
So he knew Chris was lying about Jesus and that something was as crooked as the river.
The chile-growing fiasco was behind Baby. He’d come out of it with no idea of what to do next except junk jobs, pick up a little money on the weekends, playing anything, mambo, cha-cha-cha, Tex-Mex, polkas, Cuban danzones, yeah, swing. He applied for a job as a bus driver. Sometimes it looked like a great job, that big bus, the nice uniform, fresh air when you wanted it, the chance to look over hundreds of girls. Bus drivers were famous for wolfing around. But there wasn’t a chance. The company hired only Anglos. He’d never go back to school, and he hated the ones who came home from college looking around like they smelled something bad, making it a short visit because they couldn’t wait to get back to the world they were trying so hard to enter, putting up with the little jokes behind their backs. He remembered private thoughts when he was a kid about being an architect, wondering how to begin, how did you become someone whose ideas turned into buildings? He didn’t regret leaving school.
He painted a kind of mural on the front wall of the trailer, trying to get all the great old accordion players into it, painting from his father’s photographs, with Abelardo in the central position, Narcisco Martínez smiling over his shoulder. The disconnected heads with fixed mouths and glaring eyes floated in the air, some high like gas-filled balloons, some near the ground.
He seemed immune to the lasting power of love, specialized in brief infatuations, a day or two, then he lost interest. After these little breakups he played like a demon, speeded up the music as if he was trying to outdistance the other players. At these times he was attracted to angry dissonances. The women were always after him, whispered among themselves that he had certain powers, that his body was like a heated iron drawn from the coals. “Ay, Dios, my mouth was burned, he left a scar down my whole front, breast and arm, belly and leg!” Smothered laughing and questions about more intimate regions. He could have anyone he wanted and he didn’t want any particular one. Although he never lost his temper he was feared. It was remembered that as a child his hands were always hot, his touch feverish. It was said that if he slapped someone in anger the skin of the abused adhered to his fingers.
Then, like a traveler who suddenly notices the sun moving down the west, the daylight condensing into an hour or two of dimming light, he decided to marry, quickly chose one of the first women to come near him, Rita Sánchez, a graduate of the university up at Austin, a teacher, busy with community actions and the new politics, already known as a strong woman who fought to get sewer lines into the colonia southeast of Hornet, a nightmare place where the residents were mostly poor mojados who had crossed the river in danger and now suffered bizarre diseases—leprosy, bubonic plague, tuberculosis—and were reputed to live on roadkills the women picked up on the highway, darting into traffic for the crushed flesh.
He made her pregnant on their wedding night, and his life slipped into the ancient human groove of procreation, work, cooking, children’s sicknesses and their little talents and possibilities. For the first time he saw he was no different than anyone else. Their daughter was born with birthmarks like red arrowheads in her groin and armpit and on her neck. The next year, a boy was born the day after Stalin died (the newspapers all read in thick inky letters “José Stalin ha muerto”), whom they named Narcisco in honor of the friend of Abelardo’s youth. Rita began to put aside her community work, resigned from the committees one by one. Her children ate her up.
For some reason, after his marriage Baby’s musical abilities increased tremendously.
“Ah, that’s because you don’t waste your energy wondering where you’re going to get it,” said Abelardo. He came often to Baby’s house, at all hours, enjoyed his morning cup of coffee under clouds the color of salmon eggs, walking around and criticizing Rita’s basil, full of little beetles, the smell of yesterday’s heat still in the dead air. In the back they had made a tiny patio. Rita planted a tree, watered it, and already it was large enough to cast a little shade. Its roots were pushing up the adobe tiles and the children fell often when they ran there.
“You could be very good, you know. Famous. You have the stuff.”
“Yeah? And change my name, like Andrés Rábago to Andy Russell? And Danny Flores to Chuck Rio? Like Richard Valenzuela to Ritchie Valens? Na, na, na.”
Now Baby understood his father’s greatness without jealousy or envy. Saw his inventiveness, his place in the history of the music. When they sang together now, he felt his voice embrace that of his father, a kind of sexless marrying like two streams of water coming together. Together they were in a closeness not even lovers could know, as the shadows of two birds at different altitudes cross the ground touching.
The accordion, too, he truly embraced, holding it against his breast so that its breathing commanded his own, its resonance made his flesh vibrate. He had many accordions; they seemed to come to his hand like lost dogs. In a strange city someone would come backstage, hold out an old instrument and offer it for sale, sometimes give it to him. Going back to Texas, there was always a strange accordion with them. And at home he’d take it up, play it, discover its little secrets, hold it near the sensitive skin under his chin to discover air leaks, learn its voice and individual ways, retune it to his taste. Abelardo never allowed him to play the old green accordion.
“Two eyes in one head,” they called the father and son. Now came audiences smothering them in admiration, rolling them over and over, the waves of applause breaking and subsiding only when they stepped forward together, their breasts glittering with the instruments, only when they opened their mouths and sang “Yo soy dueño de mi corazón…”
Abelardo felt nothing in his sleep. The spider had bitten him and he slept on, his swollen feet enjoying the ease. But woke in the morning in the shallow silver light that precedes the coming day, with a sense of doom. Beside him, his wife breathed and her heat drew him to her as a shuddering wave swept down his spine. There was a tickling scurry in his groin and his hand went down. The spider bit again. Now he leaped up and threw down the covers, exposing his wife’s body in her faded pink gown, her jackknifed legs and folded arms. He saw the brown recluse rush over the sheet, over his wife’s leg and down into the darkness beneath the bed.
His heart was hammering. His neck itched, his groin. He wanted badly to be asleep, to be comfortable against his warm wife in the silver morning, tingling now with blue.
“What,” murmured Adina.
“Araña. Spider. Spider bit me. Went under the bed.”
She was up and in the doorway, her hair pressed down on one side, roached up wildly on the other.
“The brown spider?”
“I think so.” He turned away, peered into his groin, his foolish long hair trailing onto his shoulders. He felt his neck.
“It got me twice, I think. I don’t know how you’re going to find it, but it’s down there under the bed.”
She went to the kitchen, down under the sink for the poison spray.
“Don’t do that now,” he commanded. “Get me some coffee. ¡Ai, ai! That this should happen.” Pulling on his clothes, shaking them first in case of other spiders.
Sat on the kitchen chair drinking the coffee. The nausea began, very strong.
All day he vomited, all day diarrhea poured from him in a green burning stream, a consuming fever came on mixed with the scent of insect spray, his teeth crashed together, he was freezing. He wanted badly to lie down on his bed and sleep but feared the spider. Anyway it was better to lie on the couch to be near the bathroom. Thank god there was a bathroom and not like at the old Relámpago place or in the stinking colonias where the ground festered. He was glad he did not have to run through the mud to the little house, with griping bowels and heaving stomach. The buses roared.
At noon his wife called for a taxi to take them to the clinic.
“They will give you something,” she murmured. He was too wretched to argue. In that place they sat side by side on torn plastic chairs. Adina filled out the complicated forms. The room was crowded with people, wailing, coughing children, an old woman who kept passing her hand across her brow as though to stroke away some pain that lay near the surface, an emaciated boy. More people pressed in, leaning against the wall, squatting or sitting on the floor.
“We’re lucky we got chairs,” said Adina. Abelardo said nothing, leaned his head against the wall, but twice had to stagger into the toilet with the plywood door. In the waiting room they could hear him retching. When he came out his hair straggled down, and even in his sickness he tried to push it into place.
They waited two hours. Although more people came, no one seemed to leave. Finally Adina made her way to the smeared glass partition and rapped on it until the Anglo receptionist looked up, her eyes pale and furious.
“Will it be much longer? My husband is very sick.”
“Yes, it could be a long time. The doctor is at the hospital for a meeting. If you people would make appointments instead of just crowding in like this, instead of just coming in without an appointment.”
She went back to Abelardo. A dull-eyed woman with a limp child was sitting in her chair. Adina leaned over and whispered to him.
“The doctor isn’t here yet. She says it could be a long time.”
“Get me home.”
He lay ill on the sofa, eyes closed against the droning television. He could swallow nothing. Adina talked with a neighbor or two, to old María bent and deeply wrinkled but still strong, who said, “I’m disgusted. You should have taken him over the river to the Mexican doctors. They are very good over there, their courteous manner makes one feel better. You don’t have to sit waiting until you are a thousand years old. And the best is that they charge you only twenty dollars for a visit. At the clinic it is eighty. The drugs, the same drugs you buy on this side, the same packages, everything, over there you pay only five or six dollars for what costs a hundred here. My son’s wife taught me all this. We all go across the river when we are ill, and I advise you to take him there at once.”
Mara, who worked in the Community Action office, a university graduate who dressed in a long skirt, a rebozo dangling and catching in doors, her bare feet in sandals, the yellow, unvarnished nails showing, reproached her as well. “You should have had the curandera, Doña Ochoa—I’ve seen her help people who were truly sick that the doctors couldn’t touch. There’s something to it, you know.”
She called Chris but Lorraine said he was gone, she didn’t know where, maybe he would be gone for another week, she didn’t know. It sounded like she had a sore throat, her voice strained. In the background Adina heard Mrs. Leak’s raw voice say, who is it—is it him?
That night the convulsions started. Each attack was prefaced with an ominous sensation of something dark and heavy as a locomotive rushing toward him. He sat up, tried to withstand the hurling sensations, sat through the night alone, his wife lying on the bed in a stench of insect-killing spray.
A tightness began in the lower part of his back. His legs began to tremble, then danced up and down despite his will. His jaw clenched. Fine tremors like a tuning fork’s vibration set him quivering. Stronger and stronger he vibrated, the quake radiating from the clenched back, until he felt his body sounding, a dull, low note. His lower jaw clacked faster than any castanets. He seemed to be in a red darkness and fell to the floor, legs jerking. In a minute it subsided and he got back up, panting, sat again on the couch.
Again and again the attacks came, each preceded by flutters of dread. His chest tightened, it was difficult to breathe. He was burning up, his stomach clenched down to the size of an apple.
But on the second morning he was a little better, although his face was the filthy color of old coffee mixed with skim milk. He tottered up from the couch for the little bowl of rice Adina cooked for him. Its cloying odor repulsed him and the nausea seized him again, his body hooped in painful dry heaves.
“You get in the bed, Abelardo. I’ve sprayed and sprayed in there, all the slats and joints of the bed, and aired it all out. No spider could live through that. If I could sleep in the bed last night you can lie in it now. You need to rest.”
Staggering, panting, he let himself be steered into the bedroom. The long hairs straggled wildly and he did not notice. She took off his stained bathrobe, sponged him with warm water and scented soap. How grateful his crusted burning body was for the wet cloth. Adina was frightened at the weight he’d lost in two days. A modest man, he held the towel over his inflamed groin, but she glimpsed the red, oozing swelling there and on his neck. She took his nightshirt from the hook behind the door, got him up, drew it over his head. She turned back the covers. He swayed forward and half fell onto the white sheet. His wife left the room.
The room seemed hot and filled with burning light, then chill and swept by strong wind. His eyes hurt. He moved his trembling legs, half rolled on his side, and the persecuted brown recluse in the sleeve of his nightshirt, squeezed by the taut cloth, bit again.
“Juan,” he said clearly. “Juan Villareal! I will play ‘Pícame Araña’ as no one has ever played it. You see, it is no joke. It must be played cruelly!” And struggled to get up, to get his accordion. He stood swaying beside the bed. The damaged spider dropped from his nightshirt, limped into a floor crack.
For a moment he felt very well, full of a young man’s energy and joy. He sang in his mind. “Hoy me siento vivo, me siento importante…” He was not surprised to discover one did not need to have an accordion to play it. The amusing huapango of the dancing spider filled his mind, but he played the notes very, very fast, vicious, mordant stabs of sound. Before he reached the part where the accordion fell silent for the guitar solo, he dropped to the floor and that was more or less the end.
There were hundreds at the funeral. It was necessary to rent a black funeral accordion, although Baby had to go to Houston to find it, El Diablo written across it in silver. He played on and on at the graveside, all the songs and tunes his father had made. The afternoon wore on, people became restless, shifting on their feet, thinking, after all, not everyone should die along with the corpse. Still he played on, redovas, rancheras, polkas, waltzes, canciones, displaying the treasures that his father had fashioned from his life. Yet he played with joy, for it was as if a certain heaviness had gone out of his own life.
After El Diablo was returned to the music store, the clerk (who later invented the slogan The Accordion—A Music Education in a Box) noticed that the buttons appeared scorched.
(A generation later, an Air Force jet crashed in the cemetery killing the six people aboard and the elderly maintenance man who mowed the plots. The crash demolished more than nine hundred headstones, among them the red granite of Abelardo Relámpago, “Un gran artista,” his hand-tinted photograph broken from its enclosing circle of glass.)
It was good, Adina said, that Abelardo had died, that he had not lived to see the stories in the paper headed “Conjunto Musician’s Son Seized in Drug Raid,” and the photograph on the front page where Chris resembled a furious tortoise in handcuffs.
He was arrested in the stupidest way, as he came over the bridge and through the border checkpoint at Weevil at ten in the morning, driving the camper van, Lorraine beside him, the kids in the back. The checkpoint was busy, probably what he’d counted on, thought Baby, the line moving slowly past the landscaped island of bright flowers where a Latino woman watered plants with a green hose.
The U.S. Customs Service agent, a young Anglo with short red hair, pimple-spatched face and eyes like bottle glass, his white t-shirt showing at the neck of his shirt, walked around the van, looked at Lorraine, at Chris. He spoke to Lorraine.
“Your relationship to the driver?”
“My husband.”
“He’s your husband. Are those your children?”
“Yes.”
“He’s the father and you’re the mother, right?”
“Yes.”
A muscle jumping in Chris’s jaw, but his hands casual, loose on the wheel. The agent walked around the van again, stooped, looked underneath. He rapped his knuckles on the propane tanks at the rear. Again. Turned the valve. Gas hissed as it escaped. He closed the valve again, came up to the driver’s side.
“You understand English, buddy?”
“Of course.” Trying not to lose it. It was going to be close.
“See that inspection bay over there? Just pull over there, I want to take a look in the back, see your luggage.”
He breathed a little. Maybe it would be all right.
But agents were all around them, herding them out of the van and toward the door of the inspection station and from the way that pair was going straight for the propane tanks he knew it was finished. It was stupid but he tried to run, leaped over the flowers, his feet sinking into soft soil. The woman with the hose looped it, flung it around him, bringing him down into the plants, a faceful of dirt, lassoed by a garden hose.
It was the beginning. Seven months later on the first day of the trial, in the hallway of the courthouse, a bizarre figure rushed from the men’s room and down the corridor, the emaciated and trembling Darren Leak, gripping the .38 that Chris had carried under the seat of his taxi. Bullets whined and ricocheted off marble walls, echoes pounding, multiplying into a deafening barrage.
A man in a phone booth at the end of the hall shrieked. Chris’s lawyer sprawled on the filthy marble floor, one middle-aged leg moving like that of a dreaming dog, glasses rucked up into his hair, a fan of papers around his head, the edges absorbing blood. A man struggled with the courtroom door as though holding up a great weight. Chris crouched against the wall, one knee up, strained eyes looking at his father-in-law.
“You dirty Mexican nigger!” Darren Leak screamed. “We took you into our church and our family! You went unto our daughter and Knew her! You mixed your dirty blood with ours! You lied, you concealed your evil drug trafficking behind the name of Jesus! Your every action was a lie and a curse in the face of god!” He began to bellow wordless words like a rutting bull in spring, guttural roars that shot up into squeals, then he pointed the gun at Chris and shot, the bullet tearing jaw, tongue and spinal column, lacerating the brain with needle fragments of his shattered teeth. Leak said, “Our Father,” pressed the muzzle to his breast and exploded his own heart.
Baby Relámpago y su conjunto. Better known as Baby Lightning. His voice was passionate in color, his falsetto as weightless as the ascent of a hawk in an updraft. His face smiled out of posters. He was well known in the southwest, had played in Chicago, Canada, New York. He always said New York although it had been only Albany, with an unresponsive Irish audience. “In Concert,” the posters said. He had played at the Democratic National Convention, had made more than twenty records. “Los Ilegales” was selling strongly in San Diego. He played—what?—seventy, eighty gigs a year, always for sitting audiences (there were no more dances), endured the touring life until he was exhausted and went home to San Antonio where he lived now.
He wouldn’t fly because of a dream. He had dreamed of himself hurtling naked down the sky toward a field of stones. In this field, workers who were filling baskets with tiny stones straightened up and looked toward the sky at the sound of his voice. An accordion was still in his hands, the little green accordion of his father, the buttons worn and shaped by the old man’s fingers, and the wind pressing powerfully through the torn bellows made an extraordinary sound, vast ropes of discordant music which he could see, writhing through the clouds in black and purple strands like handfuls of glue-covered horsehair. The workers began to run toward the horizon and he understood that they did not wish to be dirtied by the fragments of his body when he hit.
It was 1955 and they had a date in Minneapolis, a concert for something called Mardi Gras Up North. He had a bad feeling about the venue. The small audience responded only to stupid songs like “La Cucaracha” and “The Mexican Hat Dance.”
(Forty years later in the same theater a swaying crowd packed the auditorium, shouted and whistled for Sonora Dinamita, the boiling cumbia group from Colombia, Gilberto Gil, Flaco and Santiago Jiménez, Jr., Esteban Jordan, Fred Zimmerle at the Hispanic Cultural Heritage Concert in aid of Latino victims of el SIDA.)
After the show, in the dirty dressing room, they could hear the audience filing out, a diminishing babble as though a horde fell through a funnel, and somewhere someone whistling “Three Coins in the Fountain,” getting it wrong; they could smell hair spray and moth flakes and hot lights and electrical connections. Isidro and Michael did not say much, packed the instruments. He knew they were hoping they could stay the night, not have to start the thousand-mile drive against blinding truck lights back to Texas, cramped in the car, burning eyes, yawning and stopping for coffee, Isidro saying “two hours and forty minutes, hombre, we’d be on the ground.”
They were in the dressing room. The promoter, a heavy woman in a blue rayon dress, hadn’t brought them their check. He was ready; both accordions—he used Abelardo’s old green accordion for some of the traditional music—were cased; he’d changed into slacks and a knit golf shirt to be comfortable on the long drive. The bajo sexto drained a Coke. The blue dress was in the doorway and he looked up smiling, happy for the check, to be getting away.
“Hello, Baby,” she said.
He was confused. The voice, he knew the voice, but where was the check? It wasn’t the right woman.
“It’s Betty. Félida. Your sister.” She stretched out her long blue arms.
He remembered; it was the voice, the impatience of tone like Adina’s voice. His sister. He looked at her, still very young but not beautiful, broad through the hips, the black hair elaborately braided and twisted into a crown, the glasses with plastic frames tinted flesh color, the full-skirted dress, a flashy band of gold down the front, the high heels and big clumsy patent-leather purse.
She was already fat.
“Félida?”
“You didn’t get my message?”
He shook his head. Did not know whether to embrace her or not. Her arms slowly descended and she folded them across her breasts. They stood awkwardly.
“I left a message at the box office to say I’d be here. To invite you to dinner, meet my husband. He’s in the music business too. We got a lot to catch up on.”
He could not refuse. He told Isidro to wait for the woman with the check, get hotel rooms. He gave him some money. They had to stay now.
Their apartment was small, the furniture covered with multicolored throws and fringed covers. There was a crucifix on the living room wall and a blown-up photograph of the Bay of Naples. The husband, Tony, at least fifteen years older than Félida, heaved himself out of a tan recliner and offered a beer. Baby wished for Scotch and water. Tony was a bandleader, on the club-date circuit; he had met Félida at a Polish wedding. He nodded his square flat head, the blue-black hair combed straight back, the heavy eyebrows cresting over deep sockets, and above the eyebrows the arsenic-white forehead. The eyes showed no glint of light, so recessed were they. He held himself stiffly. Baby thought he looked like a criminal destined for the electric chair.
“She’s a good player, your sister. She can fake anything, she’s very good at the ethnic stuff. We do a lot of ethnic stuff. Weddings, anniversary parties. They don’t want to hear American tunes. Italian dates, heavy Greek stuff, Hasidic jobs we get, polacks, Hungarians, Swedes—they all want something ethnic. You try to give them American they won’t give you the money; I even had a guy throw dinner rolls at me when we played ‘My Blue Heaven.’ No sir, they won’t even take Alexander’s Ragtime Band.’”
The dinner was lukewarm meat loaf, white fat congealing on the plate, a salad of grated carrots and raisins, bread sticks that cracked in their teeth like rifle shots, and a bottle of red wine that made the interior of his nose swell with the first swallow. They ate at a glass-topped table. Baby could not keep from staring through it at their thighs.
“Have some more meat loaf, Baby.”
The husband poured wine, slopped it on the table.
It was disturbing to hear his sister’s remembered but deepened voice coming from this woman. There was something of their mother’s voice there, a sarcastic edge, the way the sentences ended with despair.
The husband, Tony, interrupted every sentence she uttered. “So you play the accordion. I know the accordion like I know my mother. I play accordion myself. I got a beautiful Stradella. You want a good accordion, it’s going to be Italian. Best in the world.”
Baby ate the meat loaf, wondered how soon he could get out of here. But the husband kept on. He had pushed his plate away, was smoking now and dropping the ashes on his plate. He couldn’t tell Félida about Chris or their father, this loudmouth would keep on talking.
“So what you play? Jazz? I couldn’t make the concert.” The husband.
“Conjunto. Tex-Mex.”
“Folk music, eh? Ethnic! I’m telling you, it’s something you gotta know. But if you wanna hear beautiful accordion music, you listen to Italian. The best in the world. Jazz, classical, popular, anything you want to name. It’s the best. OK, now, listen to this.” He went to a cabinet in the living room, threw open the doors of the cheap entertainment center, Sears, thought Baby, and the husband turned on his components, the tuner, the turntable, adjusted the high-fidelity speakers, put on disc after disc introducing the music of Peppino, Beltrani, Marini.
When he went to the bathroom, leaving the door a little open so he wouldn’t lose a note of the music, Baby looked at Félida.
“A wop. An old guy, too.” He could be open with his disgust; after all, she was his sister.
“What do you know! He’s a nice man. He grew up with nothing! He’s proud of the record player.”
“We had everything, I suppose. You were young, it was better when you were growing up. You don’t remember the dirt floor … no, you had it better.”
That started it. He was too connected to her painful childhood, that enemy of her true self. The toilet was flushing. She wanted to refute his condemnation of her husband. She wanted him to leave. She was sorry she’d gone to him. A slab of meat loaf lay on his plate, a small piece gone from the corner, the rest uneaten. Yellow liquid leached from his salad.
“You haven’t said one word about the family. I suppose that’s a bad sign. You might as well tell me who’s dead. Is it our mother?”
“I haven’t been able to say anything, your husband there telling me about the ethnic music. No. She’s alive. She’s sick, she’s got something, they don’t know what it is, we’re worried about cancer, but she’s alive. She’s the only one, her and you and me. You should have written to her. A lot of trouble, a lot of pain for her. You know about Chencho? Yes, of course. That was before you ran away.”
It took only a minute, the way he told of the deaths of the father and brother: a spider, a crazy man with a gun.
For her it hardly mattered. They had all been dead for her since she was fourteen. What was disturbing was the living brother on the sofa, his mouth moving, the yellowed fingers tapping his knees, the ostentatious wincing at the billowing Italian music. She felt a meanness, a necessity to wound him.
“You know, your music hasn’t changed. You play what our father played, or at least what you and Chris played years and years ago, just that same stuff, the old conjunto. Don’t you get bored with it? Don’t you want to get into the new stuff? I mean, try something different for a change? Chuck Rio’s doing norteño rock—you must have heard his ‘Corrido Rock’? There’s R and B. Latin jazz? You ever get to L.A.? That’s where the real música is happening. You’re stuck.”
He was insulted and furious, but he smiled. Hadn’t she always been unpleasant, an awkward blunderer? He could barely speak, he was so angry. But only shrugged. “That’s my music. My music, that’s what they want to hear and what I play. Tex-Mex, tejano with more snap, more country in it, and the traditional conjunto our father played, that is my music.” The recording of the Italian accordion music filled the room with tremolo. “There’s plenty musicians try new stuff. But they come back to the old stuff too, they come to the well with their pitchers.” His coffee cup was empty. He waited for Félida to notice, refill it. His hand shook. She looked across the room at the husband coming out of the bathroom, zipping up his fly. The room seemed filled with bitterness and the quivering Italian music. Baby’s glance focused on his accordion case near the door, the corners scuffed, the festival stickers peeling. He pushed out of the rump-sprung chair and got the accordion, walked deliberately to the entertainment center and turned off the Italian. They didn’t know what to do. They were glaring at him, frowning.
He had a feel for silence, for leading to an unsounded note the listener yearned for and finally had to supply from his mind, the stopped phrases like a held breath, the faded ending or scantily echoed notes, the thin line of a beginning like a colorless trickle down a rock in the woods but growing to standing waves, a waterfall, a whirlpool, undertow and riptide. This hostile silence he attacked with powerful and rapid fingering from the beginning, too fast to make sense, a kind of anger bursting from the instrument. He played without stopping for about ten minutes, jumping around through twenty songs, a phrase or a line, intros and transitions, broken octaves, sliding his fingers over the buttons for the difficult but beautiful glissandi effect. He raised his head now and then to look across the room at his sister and her husband, and stopped abruptly.
“How about you,” he sneered. “You used to play. Our father said you were the true musician in the family, the one with the real Mexican soul. But that was before he cursed you, before you left in the night like a criminal, before you broke your mother’s heart and turned your back on your family and your people. Before you learned to be an Italian. Can you still play your own people’s music? Or is it just the olive oil crap?” He extended his accordion, held it out in courteous fury.
“How dare you,” she said. “Oh yes, I should have stayed, played the chile queen until I married some Chicano fruit picker, had fifteen kids and made tortillas three times a day by hand, keep my head down, watch for the evil eye and wear out my knees on the stone church floor. You hold out the accordion to me? I’m surprised. Surely you believe, as our father believed, that it is a man’s instrument. Well, I think it is the instrument of unsuccessful men, of poor immigrants and failures. I was only a child but I saw that years ago. I saw that before I left, our father the busboy and his precious green accordion—that one right there—and the way he stood, all hot and sweaty, and that ridiculous hair, and came in drunk, a drunk Mexican, a busboy with an accordion, his moment of glory, and he would let the accordion hang down, the bellows open, just let one end go, and I saw that big moldy thing hanging down and I hated him, and that’s when I knew the accordion was a man’s instrument and men play it like they fuck. As you have just played it. I decided to play it as a musical instrument. And it is true, I can play anything. I am not stuck with conjunto. Anything! I do not bother with the button accordion, a nasty toy for amateurs and drunks. I play the piano accordion and I am a professional musician in a way you will never understand, a responsible musician.”
He felt a kind of horror. “What a bitch you’ve turned into!” he cried.
“Don’t you speak to Betty—” The husband put his hands on the arms of his chair.
“Shut up.” He turned to Félida. “The piano accordion makes a stupid, domineering sound—it is a clown’s instrument—yes, I can see you toddling out on Saturday nights with Mr. Baton to some Jew birthday party, you and a bunch of old hacks who can’t play the scale, ‘Happy Polack Birthday to You—’” he sang in a whiny sneer. “Corny band playing stale oldies. ‘Happy You, Happy Me, Happy Fuckups in a Tree.’”
“You bastard! You don’t know anything about it. I spent years playing with fine musicians, I worked hard, I was just a kid, learning the instrument, I played many years in four-piece bands, drums, accordion, trumpet, somebody who could double on clarinet and saxophone, and we were good enough to sound like ten instruments. I’d like to see you do it, cover standards and Latin and ethnic and pop, yes, and swing and hot jazz, even hillbilly and semiclassical, you see how long you’d last. You’d be tossed on your tail in five minutes with your lousy, dinky squeezebox.” As she shouted she was pulling an enormous case from the hall closet, a heavy black case, and from it she took a large chromed accordion—it looked to him as though it were made from the front end of a Buick.
“You bastard,” she panted. “You don’t even know I can replace an entire sax section. You do not even know that although I married, I continued my music!” She passed her arms through the straps and hoisted the huge instrument. Glaring at Baby she played. He thought she might do some show-off medley, some bell-ringing patchwork full of squeals and whistles, a showstopper that dumped “Little Brown Jug” into “Tickle Tickle Hee Hee Hee” and ended with “Bill Bailey, Won’t You Please Come Home” or a show tune, but she surprised him. She stared at the ceiling, said, “por Chencho, Tomás, por Papá Abelardo,” then sang the heart-wrenching “Se Me Fue Mi Amor,” which Carmen y Laura had recorded in the last year of the war. Her bellows control technique was extraordinary, with dramatic swells and choking, sforzati explosive effects. She scratched and rubbed and struck the keys, ran the back of her nails across the folds of the bellows. The accordion gave the perfect illusion that a bajo sexto and a bass as well as a highly original percussion player supported the accordion, and from it came the melting harmony of the missing sister’s voice to twine and burn with the sweet, smoldering fire of Félida’s sad voice.
“It is the most beautiful music in the world,” she said and went into the bathroom where her sobs echoed off the tiles.
“You ought to hear her play ‘Flight of the Bumblebee,’ she’s fantastic,” said the husband.
Baby put Abelardo’s green accordion in the case, looked at the stupid Italian and walked out, leaving the door ajar like Richard Widmark, heard it slam as he punched the elevator button.
In the street Baby walked toward the lake, shivering in the evening damp. Two men walked ahead of him under the lights, but they turned off and entered a building. There was a faraway guitar, a blues line, the but-tut-tut of drums, escaping from an open door. He walked toward the black lake, heard the liquid suffering of the water. He thought of ships backing slowly out from their docks. After a while he began to yawn. How tired he was. And chilled. He walked away from the water and when he saw a taxi gliding toward him, its roof light yellow and warm in the northern street, he raised his hand, ran toward it.
“Fortune Hotel.” Ay, what a beautiful, beautiful voice she had, wasted on an Italian club-band man, trampled by that large, overbearing accordion. Tears flooded his eyes.
In the hotel lobby he realized he had left the green accordion on the floor of the cab. He rushed to the street but the taxi was gone. He made call after call, no, he did not notice the cabbie’s number or name; no, he did not know what cab line it was, he remembered nothing except the yellow light on top and it could not be recovered.
In the apartment the agitated husband walked back and forth.
“What a yo-yo,” he said. He scratched his arms. “I smell something burning,” he said finally.
“It’s him. He always stank of old cigarettes and burned wood.” She began to cry and when the old husband came toward her with his arms out to comfort, she pushed him away. An Italian!