Reina Campoy (baptismal font name: María de los Reyes), the oldest woman, Mexican or Anglo, in the whole of the Valley, from the westernmost parts of Dellis County to Belken County’s eastern reaches on the Mexican Gulf. The Campoys came to the northern bank of the Rio Grande, this part of Texas also called Nuevo Santander (originally Nueva, with an a, Santander), in 1749, with the Escandón colonists. Reina’s great grandmother, doña Mauricia Puig was born a Spanish subject in 1814; at age ten she was a Mexican citizen; by the summer of 1836, she was a Texan. Later, in 1845, an American when Texas was annexed that December 21st; aquel día, 21 de diciembre, as the the old corrido says.
A citizen of the Confederacy in the 1860s, and an American citizen again after being duly Reconstructed to the lights and likes of General Sherman. Doña Mauricia’s son, Jaume (and that is Jaume with a u and not Jaime with an i) fought for the Union in the 1860s.
Jaume’s sister, Montserrat, married the first Rafael Buenrostro in the Campacuás Mission in the mid 1870s. (Reina, who does not like the appellation doña—an idiosyncrasy—is a memorialist.)
That piece of noise that a woman marries more than once carries no weight with me; it isn’t a novelty, in other words. I’ve buried three husbands, and the second one wasn’t even my husband because I had divorced him, and that was years before I married Julio César Campoy. But! To leave a man, to abandon and desert him, and then to tell him to-get-the-hell-out, that is something special, very special.
At my age, it’s hard to pull any kind of surprise on me. Nothing surprises me anymore; from the assassination of President McKinley when I was a child, to that bomb in Japan, or that some time ago an Anglo from Up North made himself into a capon so he could be a woman from one day to the next … Nothing. I’m old, I’m over ninety years of age, and if I’ve learned anything in the Valley, it’s that there are people around this world who are capable of anything. Sí, señor, sí, as the kids say.
And Valley people are like that, too. Valley people can work hard, get drunk, and they can die in France like my first husband, leaving me a widow at twenty-eight. That’s right: we’ve got people for everything in this place.
That the one and only daughter of Elvira Navarrete sent Young Escobar on his way—lo mandó de paseo, right?—well, all I can say is Good For Her. That she remarried, that’s just dandy, too. Life’s no better than a widowed bitch-dog. Life won’t forgive or forget; you’ll die anyhow and it’s a fool who deserves to die with his face to the bedroom wall.
Is this too fast for you? Here’s what I mean:
My father was born in 1860, and he was thirty when I was born, and then he died thirty years later on account of the Spanish influenza, something you certainly never knew about, a Dios gracias.
Now. When I became a widow in 1918, my father said something like this: See here, María de los Reyes, this damned country has already buried one husband, and now you’re thinking of marrying a Pulido. As far as I’m concerned, Odón Pulido isn’t worth the price of one cumin seed; two, tops. But that’s up to you. You’re a grown woman once married.
But, I’m still your father, and I’m saying this because I know how much you’re worth. You’ve got good blood in you, mine and Santoscoy blood on your mother’s side. The Santoscoys live for centuries, and you will too. So, you decide, María de los Reyes, if you marry, and you live a long time, is it to be with Odón Pulido? You’re what? Thirty something? Okay. Will you put yourself underground with that Odón Pulido? The world’s got more than its quota of shiftless, idling sons-of-bitches, you know.
My dad was right. Well, when my brother-in-law Macedonio Campoy first came around here from out Toluca Ranch way, he came with one purpose in mind: to marry me. I was married to Odón at the time, you follow?
Macedonio proposed to me, in person. Right in my face, as we say. And, as I said, me a married woman … Right then, right there.
Well! Poor Odón Pulido shrugged his shoulders, and adiós, Reina de mi vida. But he was a good man, Odón, and years later Macedonio and I went to his funeral by Media Luna lake. A nice, clear day …
Panic? Gossip? Noise? All and more, and then what happened? What usually happens: people conveniently forgot what they said … My family? They said it was no one’s business. Now, I had no brothers, and given the way things were then, maybe that was a good thing. But my father ruled, and chances are he would’ve told them not to be damned fools. Odón and I divorced through the Court House in Klail. Mace and I married here, in Relámpago.
To live and to learn is what people say … Well, Elvira Navarrete came running in here two years ago, hiccuping and mewling and puling and saying, “What will people say … the family” and every foolish thing she could think of in that holey head of hers.
I put a stop to that. “Sit,” I said.
I then lighted two cigarettes and handed her one of them making sure the lit part faced me, given her state of mind … After this, a jigger of mezcal with anise seed, some of that unleavened bread I’d made that morning, and I always add anise to that too. Anise is healthy for you, you know.
I was the first person in God’s own Rio Grande Valley to tell Elvira that she was making a fool of herself. Now, if there is one thing that Elvira Navarrete is afraid of in this life—I mean, that woman will face snakes and fires, okay?—if there’s anything she’s afraid of in this life is being thought of, looked on, as a fool. I said: That she was to love Becky’s kids as she always has and then I saved the best for last: that she was not going to give Becky any advice at all, today, tomorrow, next year. Elvira was to hush up.
Poor Elvira couldn’t keep her eyes off me. Three Pall Mall cigarettes later, and two more jiggers of mezcal to go with them, made the hiccups disappear. Best of all, her voice lost that hysterical squeal she’d brought with her. Not stupid, just high strung.
One has to understand Elvira Navarrete. Some common sense and a little mezcal. But before that? All week long just about everyone was agreeing with her. Not the Ortegóns, of course; others …
I’m too old not to recognize pride when I see it; Elvira also likes to play the martyr. Hasn’t had much reason to, not being married to a womanizer … All I wanted was to remind her not to listen to everyone, in fact not even to me. To listen to herself, to look at herself. Yes. What was she doing? And for whom? There are too many set phrases in Spanish and English, and they’re there ready to come out of some idiotic mouth full of teeth: a poor wife and a worse mother, to begin with. A messy housekeeper; you know the rest. I told Elvira, right here in this porch, she was always welcome, and that she’d bring flowers to my funeral, but until then, she was to cross herself every morning. And, she was to remember her own mother. That brought her up a bit, I’ll say. I then said: “We get enough caca-shit-mierda-cuacha as it is. And now? You’re piling it up and worry about what people will say. What people? Anglos? Hang ’em from a mesquite. Mexicans? Right along with them, I say. Family? What family? Those slave traders, the Leguizamóns? For you, Elvira, there are only five people that matter: Charlie and Sarah, you and Catarino, and Becky. That, Elvirita—and I called her that too—is family.”
That’s as sharply as I’ll ever speak. But Elvira is important in spite of her ridiculous ideas about family and society and such. And then; now? Becky made the right choice, the proper one: she remarried, as I did, as anyone with sense would, if she wanted to marry. She just chose to marry, that’s all.
You’re related to Jehu, I know that. But where was that boy born? On this land, here, in Relámpago. When his father died, all Jehu had was both parents dead. Try that one on, Elvira, I told her. And that’s who Becky chose, decided on.
No, I didn’t go back and say Elvira nudged Becky toward Ira, and what for? Now? Elvira wanted comfort, but she didn’t know what kind of comfort. Facts are best. No need to change them … facts and family … Sometimes the first brings disasters, and the second causes them … All the time I’m thinking of Macedonio and my father … Macedonio came here, to this house … in those days … that was no easy thing. He had no guarantee how my father would react. Esos son hombres. And that Jehu has something of that … raised differently, but gritty enough.
And that Becky … came here years ago, with the kids. They’re out playing around the house and Becky, looking straight at me says, “I gave myself to Jehu.” Married still, of course.
She looked for some sign from me. I didn’t say a word. Don’t misunderstand, it wasn’t that I didn’t care, I just wasn’t surprised, that’s all. I’m too old for surprises, remember? And I won’t condone that type of behavior, no matter how old I am. Just that I’m not surprised … one divorce, a thousand. They’re not the end of the world. We’ve got us a hurricane out in the Gulf right this minute … so? We had one hit here last year. That one dropped 23 inches of rain. The end of the world? No.
What I told Becky was this: One can’t do that, one doesn’t go to bed with just anyone. Leave your husband or stay. Don’t lie to him. Don’t lie to yourself, either. And no confessions, to him or to the Church. Choose, Becky. And she did.
Oh, that Becky … very Mexican in spite of those Anglo ways of hers … and her Spanish is a riot. What she says, though, does come from the heart, and I love her for it. And here we sat, on this porch; and I? I was looking at our family’s cemetery wondering who would sit here looking at my headstone …
I finally shook that off and told her, reminded her, really, that a divorce is just another divorce, that’s all that it was. It isn’t fatal, it is the reverse: Becky was buying her ransom. She was to be saved, rescued, and with enough love for the kids and for that new husband of hers. A new life for a new woman.
’Cause that’s what her Uncle Lionel Villa calls her: una mujer nueva. And he, Lionel Villa, he too is a good person; old Valley people those Villas. They’ve seen the sun rise out of that Mexican Gulf for many years now …
As for the Anglos, not many understand us, even now. Only way to do so is to marry us, live with us, die with us. But even then, they most likely wouldn’t understand us. No, they like to change things around, change the forms of things, and the names of things and places. They’re … they’re unstable somehow. Gente descontenta, oh, yes.
The listener, a smoker, enjoyed lighting another unfiltered Pall Mall for María de los Reyes Campoy. The listener also drank two thimblefulls of San Carlos mezcal, “The Best There Is.” The listener, from experience, remembers what Un Tal Lucas once said, “There ain’t such a thing as good mezcal.”