In Mexico at the time, among Mexican gamblers, politicians, businessmen, gangsters—a tentative “upper class” collectively called “los políticos”—mistresses seemed to be required. A few of the mistresses might surface from the streets and alleys along which they strolled like painted phantoms in and out of the smoky light that squeezed out of bars. Some of the mistresses might come from houses, a stratum a few steps higher than that of the alleys. The lucky ones, not many, graduated to become madams, and, chosen, lived in the peripheries of their keepers’ lives. A very few, the most fortunate, became wives, but they could erase only some of the stain of scandal; they were never accepted in the desirable echelons of Mexican high society. Their practiced veneer of sophistication did not camouflage the tough, rough women they were as they battled to retain their positions before a young mistress might shove them out of their relatively comfortable lives in miniature mansions, gaudy imitations of the homes populated by the most powerful men and their wives.
My mother’s brother, Carlos, who had accrued some amount of wealth from sources unknown and who still lived in Juárez, had such a woman. According to gossip, she had been a house prostitute who had worked her way up to being a madam. Now she was married to my uncle, set up in a flimsily opulent home, with Indian maids in constant attendance.
I had gone to Juárez with my mother once, to buy papaya that I had learned was good for developing muscles, which I wanted badly before my ten-year-old body made that possible. My mother decided to drop in on my uncle. That’s what we did then, dropped in—not everyone had a telephone, and we could not afford one.
We were led into the large house by an Indian maid, a silent woman who seemed to be in a defensive trance. My uncle was not in. But our presence was announced. We were abandoned inside a hall glittering with several—yes, several—glassy chandeliers, now tinkling mysteriously.
We followed loud voices into another room, voices so loud that they must have accounted for the nervous chandeliers. There sat Carmen, my uncle’s wife, at a round table, playing poker, with four other hefty women who resembled her remarkably, all dressed like her in expensive clothes that still looked tawdry, altered to create deep cleavage to display abundant breasts, which one or another of the women occasionally hoisted, a formidable shove upward to expose more haughty flesh.
A large bottle of whiskey ruled the middle of the table, a bottle lifted frequently by each of the women for yet another long shot into their glasses, or, hurriedly, into their mouths. From Carmen’s lips, a cigarette dangled. All the other women were smoking, puffing relentlessly after swallows of the liquor and between noisy epithets at the vagaries of luck. The stench of smoke filled the air. The Indian woman waited against a wall to be summoned for any urgent necessity—more liquor.
Carmen only glanced at us and nodded in acknowledgement of our presence, an attempted smile thwarted by the precariousness of her cigarette. Involved in a tense moment in the game of poker, she dropped a card with such a triumphant thud that it stilled the other voices. “There!”
Another woman dropped her own card, even more triumphantly. “I win!” she said and reached for the pile of pesos.
Carmen glowered at the exposed cards. “I say you cheated, cabrona,” she accused.
“I say you’re a liar,” spat the offended woman, “and you’re the cabrona, a bitch—and worse, a sore loser.” She stood up to leave, wobbling, with the spoils of the game.
Carmen’s body shot up, just as shakily—both women propped themselves up by holding onto the table—and out came a small revolver that Carmen had hidden somewhere out of sight, perhaps in her lap. She pointed it at the other women.
The women at the table prepared to dodge, since the pointed gun was wavering dizzily in Carmen’s hand and her eyes squinted as if to verify her aim. The Indian maid fled.
“Put that gun down and I’ll take you on, mano a mano,” the accused woman bargained. “We’ll settle this with our fists.”
My uncle’s wife narrowed her squint to the point that her eyes closed, and she seemed about to fall asleep standing; still, her lips clung to the mere butt of a cigarette that was making its way into her mouth. Her eyes shot wide open.
“Sit down, desgraciada,” she commanded the other woman, and underscored her order by firming the revolver with the aid of her other hand.
“Estás judida, maldita,” the other woman held her ground, claiming that Carmen was fucked and cursed.
“Well, then—” Carmen cocked her revolver with a loud click, and pointed it somewhat unequivocally.
“Well, then!” the other woman echoed. She fished into her purse, and out came her own revolver.
The dueling revolvers were pointed so unsteadily that the other women ducked under the table, sending the offending cards cascading to the floor.
My mother hurried us out of the house, pushing me along because I kept looking back, hoping to see a scene that would rival the ones I saw in old movies during Revival Week at the Texas Grand Theater.
Since we didn’t hear shots, I assumed the matter had been settled without murder.
That was the rung of Mexican society occupied by the women of the políticos.
But that was not the world that the kept woman of Augusto de Leon occupied, as I would learn only later because the future still waited to illuminate the present, and I was hoarding the pieces of a puzzle that I would try to fit subsequently into my life, when memories would assume whatever meaning they would ever assume.
The kept woman of Augusto de Leon existed in the tradition of the great mistresses—du Barry, Pompadour, Barbara Palmer, Emma Hamilton before the fall. She was not ostracized by Mexican society; nor did she live in secrecy—her keeper was much too powerful and aristocratic to permit that.
Although she would not attend state dinners at which the powerful man was in dutiful attendance with his wife, she lived not far from them—the two women exchanged greetings now and then, slight nods, even a faint smile—in a mansion almost as grand as theirs. Her uniformed chauffeur snapped to rigid attention at her appearance. A generous income allowed her the most stylish clothes from New York and Paris, cities she periodically visited with her mentor. Bejeweled at the theater, she sat in honored seats and greeted others who solicited her recognition. In restaurants she was a figure for display and admiration.
My sister Olga’s wedding reception was held in the house of a relative in El Paso, a house like a relic, large enough, but lacking furniture, so that one room looked like another. It had two stories—as I had noted with delight on entering. To me that was a manifestation of elegance, no matter how drab both stories might be. Several dozen guests were gathering noisily, all as well dressed as was possible during extending tough times: the men in proper suits and ties, a few with hats exhumed for the occasion and properly removed before entering the house; the women in dresses retained for such an occasion, many also wearing hats. I detected the medicinal odor of mothballs when a breeze whispered into the house. There was all the usual brouhaha of Mexican weddings that occurred even in this higher, but poor, echelon of Mexican immigrant society.
Discarding my awkward jacket on a chair somewhere, I slunk around winding in and out of people grouping to discuss how beautiful the wedding had been, the women dabbing at tears of memory, the sad happiness of such an occasion. My sister and her husband had walked in through showers of rice and congratulations, rushing past greeters toward the largest room, where the cake that looked to me like a castle was waiting on a table. My mother stood nearby to greet my sister with a dozen little blessings, sighed aloud and echoed by celebratory outbursts that seemed to emanate from the center of the cake surrounded by circles of guests in this noisy tearful ritual. My sister Blanca, with her rigid German husband, Gus, beside her, stood with a polished knife for slicing into the mounds of sugar.
For me, it all passed in fast motion, the shrieks and applause when my sister daintily removed the strange sugar figures, like tiny featureless puppets, on the highest tier of the snowy cake; the actual cutting of the cake, my sister and … her husband? … together cutting into it for the first slice and intensified applause; the deliberately loud popping of corks as bottles of “champagne”—sparkling wine, the best affordable—were opened, poured into paper cups, and passed around. At least one gentleman, and surely one or two more, had managed to sneak a beer, instead, into his cup. Mounting toasts! Loud applause! Joyful tears at evoked memories!
I stood glaring at my unfaithful sister.
Very soon—too soon—it would be time for the couple to leave on a honeymoon, to Mesita, in New Mexico (where Billy the Kid was said to have lingered and Bonnie and Clyde might have made a visit in honor of his memory). The small town was just a few miles outside El Paso, but that economical honeymoon seemed to me then like a trip to Paris.
I ran about the rooms of the house, trying to find a hiding place where I might be discovered, with difficulty, when my sister would begin frantically looking for me, leaving me for the last in her abundant farewells amid drenching tears, jubilant and sad salutes, good wishes, and blessings. Then she would take me aside to deliver a special farewell, an acknowledgment of our enduring closeness, and a promise to clarify this baffling event, a promise that once this silly stuff was over, she would come back and be my cherished partner, without that odd man in a tuxedo. She would not say “good-bye”—we had figured out that that had unwanted finality to it—no, she would say:
“So long, little brother. I’ll be back in a few days.”
As I roamed the house that was becoming vaster and emptier for me—though people mingled about, trying to locate a place to sit, balancing paper cups of “champagne” with pieces of cake that crumbled on paper plates—I dodged into one room propitious for hiding. A doorless closet ahead would be perfect. Before I could head for it, I was almost knocked down by an older man and his wife looking startled out of their primness as they hurried away from that one room, although it was not occupied—
Except by one person.
Alone, slowly smoking a cigarette.
She sat on a drab couch out of which tufts of cotton had begun to protrude. It had to be her. No one else would look like that, not in El Paso, not in the world that I knew. There was no doubt that there sat the kept woman of Augusto de Leon.
Remaining now at the edge of the door, and hiding behind the frame, I stared at her in stunned awe. It was as if the room had been vacated for her, except for a scrappy framed drawing of a countryside, on a wall whose paint was peeling and a lamp whose shade had been patched. Nothing more was needed, because the kept woman challenged the drabness of the room, splashed it with a grandeur it had never possessed, not even when new. The ragged couch she sat on was her throne.
She wore a gray dress that caressed her body. The few creases that dared to appear on it when she moved, breathing, were instantly transformed into silvery-gray streaks, the exact color of her shoes. In a hint of elegant decorum, her breasts did not peek out of the top of her dress; they were only outlined as if hands were molding them and then sliding down along the curves of her body. She wore the hat she had worn in church, wide-brimmed, a paler shade of gray, slanting to the right so that a portion of her face was shaded. Even under the breath of a veil, sprinkled with velvet dots, her lips were a bold slash of crimson, stark on her creamy skin—no, her skin was the color of cream into which only a touch of chocolate had been blended. Her eyebrows arched—didn’t hover—over her eyes, which were—
From where I stood, I could not tell what color; I hoped amber, a favorite shade, the color of fall leaves that I had once printed in watercolors. I didn’t have to see them to know that she had long, curled eyelashes.
Not until she shifted on the couch—and they glistened—did I notice that she wore tiny earrings, specks of diamonds, I was sure. Her hair was dark brown, but strands that caught a gleam of light from the window against which she sat burnished it umber. Although later I would discover that she was not tall, as she sat on the converted throne her legs looked long, her stockings so sheer—no woman, not even a kept woman, would dare shock with bare legs in El Paso—that they disappeared.
There was about her an aura of sublime aloofness—or welcome isolation. I was sure then that never again would I glimpse a creation as spectacular as the one my eyes, dry from staring, remained fixed on.
I must have been holding my breath, because when I released it, it came out as a sigh louder than I had expected, which made me pull back against the door frame so that, if she located the origin of the awed sound, she would not retreat from my sight.
Whether because she had become aware of my presence or whether at some private thought evoked by the sounds of congratulation rising now distantly about the wedding couple in another room, her lips tilted, the inception of a vague smile.
As if deciding not to complete the smile, or because the memory aroused had turned bitter, her scarlet lips parted, instead, to receive the cigarette she brought—almost thoughtfully—to her lips. She held it there at the exact verge of brushing her lips before she allowed it to touch in a movement that occurred without transition, and she inhaled imperceptibly—no sound even of her breath, the barest rise and fall of her breasts the only indication. A slender streak of smoke arose, lingered about her before it evaporated. The cigarette remained touching her lips as if reluctant to separate. Then her free hand rose and rested lightly on the elbow of the arm whose Wngers held the cigarette, and she completed an intricately graceful choreography of slight movements as she withdrew the cigarette from her lips but kept it close, as if considering whether to inhale from it again, a moment of suspense. The hand with the cigarette drifted away from her face, was lowered, and she touched the tip of the cigarette so lightly to an ashtray that the ashes merely vanished.
She rested the cigarette on the ashtray and allowed one of her sheer legs to slide over the other, simultaneously adjusting the hem of her dress, which had risen, barely, above one knee. Her hands soothed the silvery rivulets sent scurrying about the dress.
As she reached again for the cigarette on the ashtray, she looked up and smiled, definitely smiled, this time—
At me!
No, it wasn’t at me that she was smiling.
She was smiling at—
In the moments that I allowed my eyes to stray from her to locate any other possible direction of her smile, I saw a girl my age stationed at another doorway watching the kept woman as raptly as I had been. In those brief moments, I saw the girl raise one hand tentatively, on its way to her lips with what was, surely, an invisible cigarette. Catching me watching her, she pulled back out of my sight.
Was it at her that the woman had smiled?—as if bequeathing to her a glorious blessing? Or at me, bequeathing—What? At both of us …? Bequeathing …
A harsh-looking woman invaded the room; the kept woman rose from the drab couch, smoothing her dress to banish any wrinkle that might linger; the sounds of the wedding party rose, laughter and snatches of songs and congratulations mixing; the harsh woman spoke, “Who—?” and the kept woman removed the veil from her face, she said, “I—” The wedding party was moving outside; I had to hurry—I heard curt words in the tense room, I heard soft words, words I thought I understood, words I didn’t understand, words carried away by the sounds of the wedding party in the adjoining room, all occurring in a confusion of impressions, words that seemed to pursue me.