The Hot Country

25

Diego led me to a tiny, cobbled-together hovel — once fully adobe but now el Norte-ravaged and patched with smears of cement, a panel of scrounged wood, a rusted sheet of tin. I could hear a woman’s voice — a sweetly wavery woman’s voice — singing within. I looked at Diego, who heard this too, and he shot me a brow-furrowed glance. His mother. He was embarrassed.

“It’s good,” I said, meaning something that Diego surely didn’t get. This neighborhood of hovels was piled everywhere with great heaps of long-rotting garbage. The smell was a different kind of putrid but just about as intense as the next-afternoon smell of untouched carnage on a Nicaraguan battlefield, and the slop beneath our feet had run straight from the waste buckets of these households. But she sang. I was instantly sure that some of the good I saw in Diego was due to his mother singing in the midst of all this, and my little chulo callejero didn’t get it. Maybe he would someday.

She sang that her lover should not give the mole next to his lip to anyone’s mouth but hers and she moved into the refrain: Ay, ay, ay, ay, Canta y no llores, Porque cantando se alegran, Cielito lindo, los corazónes. Sing and don’t cry, was the message. Singing gladdens the heart.

Diego flung up the palm of his hand at me and darted ahead through his door and out of sight. I stopped and waited. All right. Not quite the verse of the song he might have liked me to hear from his mother. There was singing and there was singing. And I thought of my mother singing in Storyville, and I preferred to just take a deep breath of this neighborhood and clear my head of that.

The singing stopped. The hut was quiet. Diego appeared in the doorway and motioned for me to enter. It struck me now: He never questioned that he would bring me along to where he lived. We didn’t say a word about it, but after he and I, together, lived through the moment when he was to be knifed to death as a child, after we caught that particle of time and deflected it elsewhere, this was where we needed to go. Together.

I moved to the door and I stepped in. His mother was sitting cross-legged on a rush mat in the center of the floor, a dark shirt I recognized as Diego’s crumpled in her lap, a needle and thread placed upon it so she could receive me. The walls of the one room were bare and there were half a dozen sleeping mats around the edges of the floor, one with about a six-year-old girl, cornstalk-thin, asleep on her side, one with a half-naked toddler boy who looked like he was on the verge of tears but did not make a sound, one with a chicken picking at it, having wandered in through the open back door, where I could see other dwellings like this one arranged around a common ground with a stone washtub and pump in the middle.

Diego wasn’t clean. Never had been. He was smudged and he was ragged around the edges, but he always looked better than this place. He hadn’t prepared me for this.

His mother was probably not much past thirty but looked to be fifty. She was mixed dark, Aztec but with some evident Spanish blood in her from randy hacienda owners having their way with various generations of her grandmothers. She wore a faded green sleeveless dress. A brown scapular on a cord hung around her neck.

She lifted her round face to me — I could see Diego there — and she smiled. “You are good to my boy,” she said.

“He is a good boy,” I said.

And she straightened at this, lifted her eyebrows.

I felt Diego rustling next to me. I wondered if it was at my praise or at his mother’s resistance to it.

“He is a thief,” she said.

“He does what he needs to do,” I said.

And now she sank a little into herself, her eyebrows fell, her eyes went dark. Yes, she was thinking. And is that not my fault?

“He would have it another way,” I said. I looked at Diego, who startled me slightly in his face already being lifted to mine, as if it had been there all along, and he had that intense attention of his focused on me. I said, “Isn’t that right, Diego Cordero Medina y Espinoza?”

“Yes sir,” he said.

“I was married to his father,” his mother said.

I knew that from Diego’s two last names. Most couples among the urban poor of Mexico did not formally marry. The State required both civil and religious ceremonies, and the custom when they went through these formalities was for the children to take the surnames of both parents. But the formal marriages were too expensive for the poor. And when the man and woman didn’t marry, their children could take only the father’s name. Diego’s parents somehow managed to have the ceremony. If they had not, he would simply have been Diego Cordero Espinoza.

“I understand,” I said. “You both have done what you need to do.”

She smiled at me. “You will drink with us? Some pulque? And there is some fruit.”

“Yes,” I said, “thank you.” And I sat on the floor before her, and Diego sat beside me, and we ate figs and bananas, and the mother looked at her son when she served the figs and she said “These are stolen,” and I said nothing, but Diego stirred beside me and I knew he was looking at me and I thanked his mother for the fruit and then we drank pulque together, Diego and his mother and I. And though I knew I hated the stuff and though the air around me stank from the way of life in this place, I touched her tin cup and Diego’s and I drank, and the pulque tasted okay. The pulque tasted pretty damn good.