The Last Moment in Mexico

by Lisa Marie Basile

“Most of the lanterns were broked in the stampede,” Cooch says, and he lifts a candle to his face.

Take these, a terrible voice demanded, brushing past the back of my stool. The hands dropped a plastic pearl strand into my lap and lingered against my waist. You will use them tonight. The men like them.

Cooch noticed too, and his eyes were bright white and he had sandy dark skin, like the phantoms that chased me in my sleep. So I looked away.

I was still dreaming of going home. Maybe I could get home by 1925, dios mio. But Vaudeville was dying, and I had no true home.

Cooch kept talking, and his heavy breath blew against my face powder. “You gon’ do that snake dance tonight, hm? Why, you looked like a serpent made of stars.”

“Si, I am going to,” I said. “Cooch, could you bring me a candle?”

In Mexico I would be with Mama reading Sor Juana Ines De La Cruz under the trees where Papa slept. He worked hard, and his face often looked sad and tired and awaiting Mama to die. I think he knew she would.

Mama’s funeral was on a day of rain. It hadn’t rained in two years, and finally — we stood there praying to Quetzalcoatl or Jesus or anyone for the little mercy that should have been given. My hair was darker than black that day, and Papa said I reminded him of her and to get away.

He called me every name I never heard and every word I never said. He threw at me an avocado and told me to ‘eat up’ and get fat and show the white men what a Mexican cunt looked like.

Papa spent the next day digging up Mama from the grave. I remember like a painting, Papa bringing a wooden box up from down the calle. The sky was still shaking off the black, and I went to the old Iglesia on the hill, and I huddled under a window in the church with Padre Lazaro praying for me at the altar. I smelled like my mother too, the thick smell of sadness.

He said I filled the whole church with the perfect stench of youth and sorrow. My body was sweating and my nose had been running and stopping and running and stopping, filled with the tears of my whole lifetime.

Papa was there on that long calle, with a thick rope in his hands, pulling the coffin from the cementerio. I did not know the man outside the window. But was painted there forever. The sky was shivering behind him. A solitary tree stood to his left, its trunk straight where his back was hunched. His hands were a gruesome, dirty red.

I could hear Mama awake from her sleep, and every shadow I had ever known was swirling around her, el diablos caving in from the walls of the world.

In my sadness, I saw no sky. I saw no ground. The Lazaro gasped. The church doors fluttered, opened. I heard the speaking of Spanish curses and prayers, all at once.

The Holy Mary flew toward my father, straight through my eyes to stop him from dragging her in that box, and when she escaped past my lashes, I cried into the window and fell against the adobe.

Lazaro and the other priests wrestled my father from the body of my beautiful mother, and stood in the distance with that tree to their left and the man, who made me, clinging to their robes and bloodying their clean feet.

And Cooch’s sandy brown skin appeared as the men whose Mexican summer color brought my father from his madness. I felt at home with him and I felt unease with him. It was all the same.

***

I placed the pearls around my neck. And when I did, I knew there was woman somewhere far in el cielo asking for me to take them off, go back to the desert and clean myself off in with the waters of the prickly pear.

Here in America, we were the exotic burlesque girls and we got tin basins. I shared mine with three of them: Emiliana, the blacked haired Sicilian girl, Gracie the skinny Jew and Laney, the girl who looked black enough to dance with us but white enough so the minstrel show-goers could get hard looking at her. We were the dirty girls. We couldn’t dance with the pretty ones like Gypsy Rose or Bettie.

We traveled by train across some parts of the country to Chicago, to Philadelphia, to Jersey from New York where we all had come.

Emiliana weeped. I knew she wasn’t happy here. Gracie stayed up at night comforting her between her big breasts, and finally, after the show was over and a semblance of quiet came, I saw Mexico in my sleep as they fell asleep with their red lips still on and their feathers framing their bodies.

These were the women Rivera would paint, the Catrinas of America. They were beautiful and admired and dying just like the genteel men and the scoundrels that came to trace our hips during the night.

Cooch came back and put on my red lipstick. He came from the Caribbean sometime ago off of a boat with other foreign men dressed like ladies. Here in America, they wore pantaloons and feathers and jewels.

The Variety was the only home for them, these men. They pretended to play pretend, and even when America laughed, he was still a derelict. And I was still a broken, dirty immigrant, una estupida Mexicana.

Cooch placed the candle under my chin. “Lights up my Sofia’s eyes something wild!” he said and then straightened up and watched me.

His face had pocks under the makeup.

“Why do we call you Cooch?” I asked.

“Because I ain’t got one, don’t want one, ain’t never seen one.”

I told him, “In Mexico, we call that ironico.”

In America, he tells me, “It ain’t no irony. It’s the way fo’ everyone to make a joke outta the freaks. That’s why we’s here, and everyone else is comin’ late at night,” Cooch tells me. “Why don’t you go back home?”

I put the red stick on my lips, on each middle finger tip, and in two blossoms on my cheek. In my head I spoke in Spanish about the colors of the flowers Mama used to plant.

Lazaro sent me a letter in the post, to the room Emiliana and Gracie and Lane and me stayed in back in New York. I almost didn’t get it because all the drunks tear the mail open hoping for money. But Emiliana saw it come, and took it straight away and said to me, “Here it is, here it is, a letter for you from home,” in her red-colored Italian, and I understood.

Here, Lazaro said, all the flowers have died. Do you remember the poinsettias?

Cooch stared into me from the mirror. His lips were the red flowers I saw melt into the darkness of the last day in Mexico.

***

I went through the desert on a crate carried by animals through the night. We were left somewhere in Texas in a little town run by men in giant hats with guns.

The mountains were tall in the distance, as if when I stood looking South, God had her back turned on me. My mother lay murdered even after her own death. She rested in Mexico, now a graveyard. America was just another sickness.

All the world, a sadness.

Lazaro said, There is a goodness that is now lost in the valley. The avocados have gone uneaten in your father’s plantation. The mangos used to look like little suns cut open. Now, the farm is dead and the sun does not rise but to mock us. The sun is sending its own impostor.

***

Cooch said I had the saddest face of all the girls that danced. “But you got a Mexican smile, all big and proud and wet,” he said.

I was looking in the mirror when he said this, covering my eyes in black, long trails like the Egyptian women who men used to love.

Was this beautiful?

Lazaro wrote, I have not seen su padre; he has not come out of the house at all. Your mother is now sleeping again. He put her back to bed. You have her eyes, and her mouth, and you look as beautiful as the day she walked into the church and asked me to bless you.

Cooch whispered into my ear about the boys who came to the show: “They are damn beautiful boys. They have Irish eyes, English eyes. And they got wifes at home and they got babies crying. Sofia, the Dyonisus of the Americas.”

The black smeared into the little holes in my skin. I was a dancer, a cat, an immigrant, a leper. I was being called to the stage, the smell of the lanterns burning, the rush of feet and laughter. Men roared.

Emiliana came in with her black hair in a blaze atop her head. She had little red pantaloons on, and a hoola in her hand. She winked at me.

“Ojala, Sofia, I hope that we live tonight,” she said with the accent that sounds like crashing water. I could see the Mediterranean in her. She was as soft as its beauty and as strong as its history. Her skin was white, her eyes darker than my own. I knew why men loved her, I understood.

Her face said she came from nightmares.

Lazaro said, I wrote to tell you not to worry, she is home now.

The men waited down the stairs and through a back room, staring up at the stage. Their voices were crude, and louder than the band to the left of the stage.

My waist wore black lace, my body was an ofrenda, and the men worshipped me as I writhed. I was delicately draped in mescal sweat, between slices of fruit and pan de muerto rising in heat as my body sliced through the wet, sticky air.

Here, I could hear Lazaro praying for me:

En nombre del padre. . .

And my father, still digging his hands into the ground, defacing the earth and the wishes of my mother. My father, the malady of Mexican love.

The band wasn’t gentle. They crushed the bodies in the room against the walls. Clunky brass notes shook the whiskey glasses, piano slinked up on stage, snaking up our ankles, tickling into our pink insides.

We shook it off, one glove coming down, falling to our feet, where we smirked and winked and picked it up.

Emiliana moved like an Italian girl. She had wide hips and a soft, smooth stomach that appeared to be drawn by God herself. She’d close his eyes and wave his hand; instead of the Apennine range — her, naked, breathing all of man’s weakness down through the nostrils of the drunkards and the other terrible American men.

Would Dionysus dance for monsters?

Perhaps she would have went home to Juarez, to shake into the sands of the desert and forget these broken cities.

But here we were in a den where our hearts were bleeding, and Dionysus was not here.

Lane and Gracie danced quietly, poking one another, their faces painted in red by the few lanterns that still lit the place.

The evening before, the saloon lay in pieces. Men became storms. They ran from the stage toward the single back door. Rum painted sticky into the floors, the curtains still singed from small fires, the whole place licked up by the Devil’s laughing tongue.

Some people thought it was the Prohibitionist party or a bar-brawl. Some of the others, dancers, were raped.

During the stampede, I waited behind the red curtain, daydreaming in Spanish about the tale Mama used to tell me about Pepita, the girl who could not offer a thing to the Christ child.

And she sadly brought him weeds she had stolen from the desert, Sofia.

I thought of offering my thighs, my arms, my cunt.

And when she did, she gave the weeds with love.

My smile was a liar; my body was a liar. I gave no dance with love.

And the weeds became poinsettias, Sofita.

The poinsettias were everywhere in my head, and when I told Emiliana, she said to me, “si si si si, Sofia, si.”

It was the last act, and in the smell of hot bodies and drinks, and in the darkness of the few lanterns left over, I heard my mother say to me, Only offer what can be loved from your own heart.

These were not Christ childs, these gaudy American gringos.

Emiliana prayed to herself in Italiano, Mio dios, mio dios, mio dios. She tells me she loves me, Ti amo, Sofia, she says. She cried with strength.

I know she has come from a bad place in Sicily, and I know her heart has been broken, but I know she is stronger than me, and in her I find the blood and the fire and bones we needed to construct life again.

These stages were not the altars for a faithless country of men.

***

I took the pistols from the men in Texas who had fallen asleep at the bar where I bent over, my tits in rags, to serve them their last drinks.

Sleeping, they did their only good for me.

I came by train across the South and into New York and then to the circuses and to the tents and to the parlors where I kept my pistols wrapped in red satin: the color of sensuality and the color of blood.

***

In sorrow I arrived, and in sorrow I will go home, I thought, as the blue eyes of men watched.

Emiliana and I smothered the room, our bodies making music louder than the band.

Jacks, the saloon owner, stood smirking. We wore his plastic pearls, and he took home most of the money we made.

I watched Cooch on the side stage, shaking into his sequins. His eyes were tired.

The crowd hollered. When the band came crashing into its final notes, Emiliana and I turned from the crowd, bent straight down to touch the floor, and slowly parted our legs.

Our asses out, we took the Texan pistols from our garters and shot straight between our legs, into the room. The blood blossomed into poinsettias through the dark. Dead eyes watched the last of the lanterns fall and snuff themselves out.

Mama cried from heaven. Her tears were loud, blooming and Mexican. I showed the men what a Spanish cunt looked like, Papa. Now, I was finished.

Emiliana and I ran from behind the curtain down the back alley and into the cold night, watching the America break into the distance.

Somewhere far off, as she and I split ways, I saw an ofrenda I could finally make, and a grave I could finally visit.

I would give Mama tequila, but she would never get whiskey.

I thought of all the beautiful girls. Their America was heaven. Emiliana thought she had found freedom, and Cooch thought he had found God in wearing his lips in red.

And even if America was heaven, it was not my home.

Lisa Marie Basile is a writer, living in New York, and Editor-in-Chief of Caper Literary Journal . She has had work published in CommonLine, Aphros Literary Magazine, Vox Poetica, and The Medulla Review, among others. She studied English Language and Literature at Pace University in Manhattan, where she received 1st place in PU’s Annual Writing Contest for poetry and fiction. Her web site is www.lisamariebasile.com and www.caperjournal.com.