Into the Beautiful North(13)

Vampi’s grandmother had raised her. No mother or father in Tres Camarones would have allowed her to get away with her goth outfits, but a tired grandmother could not hope to contain her.

Nayeli wandered through her mother’s small house in the dark. The sideboard that held her father’s picture was always lit with a few votive candles standing on saucers, Do?a María’s small altar to Don Pepe.

Nayeli used the hem of her blouse to dust the standing picture frame. Her father looked so handsome in his police uniform, erect and grim—he believed no real man ever smiled in photographs, especially not in uniform. After all, aside from the mayor, Don Pepe was the sole representative of the Revolutionary Government of the Republic. A man’s man, but also a leader among men.

He used to take her down to the Baluarte River to shoot his .38. She smiled. He’d set up soda bottles, and she’d shoot six rounds at a time and miss the bottles with every shot. He never said he wished he’d had a son, though she could tell he thought it often. He’d park his police car beside the soccer field, and when she scored a goal, he’d set off the siren, sorely frightening the mothers in the stands.

But he could not make enough money to take care of them. He earned the equivalent of twenty American dollars a week. And he had to buy his own pistol and bullets.

On the day he left, there was wailing and breast-beating. He held Nayeli for a moment—she could smell his aftershave and his shaving cream and his deodorant and his breath mints. And he…

The bus…

The empty street…

She shook her head.

Don Pepe had been philosophical. He had always offered her nuggets of wisdom that he would have given his son if he had only been so blessed. And the short girl he called La Chaparra was a good kid and had listened intently to his insights. So when he told Nayeli, “The more I learn, the less I know,” she pondered it. He was a big reader, and he informed her once that all water that ever existed remained in its original form. “You drink the same water that Jesus Christ washed his feet in,” Don Pepe lectured. “Cleopatra once took a bath in your ice cube.”

His favorite saying, because it was concise, was: “Everything passes.” He had written this gnomic prophecy on his postcard from KANKAKEE, ILLINOIS, with its luridly colored picture of a mentally ill wild turkey and cornfield. “Mi Dear Chaparra—things go well here. Good boys at work. I will send funds soon. I have much luck. But… Everything Passes. Your Father, Pepe.”

Don Pepe was a Mexican man: a fatalist. He meant to impart much more than comfort. He meant that all good things would also end. All joy would crumble. And death would visit each and every one of them. He meant that regimes and ancient orders and cultures would all collapse. The world as we know it becomes a new world overnight.



The announcements were already going out: the Cine Pedro Infante was back in the film festival business. María Cervantes had taken her projectionist exams at the hand of Garcí a-García and had passed. He had put in his orders for the first films, and though it felt corrupt, he had caved in to Aunt Irma’s City Hall pressure and brought in Yul Brynner movies. Of course, Garcí a-García was Mexico’s number one Steve McQueen fan. Indeed, he would have shown Baby, the Rain Must Fall every week if he could have. Still, was not politics the art of compromise? To be sure, Irma was now mayor and crossing her an extremely unwise strategy. And yet, Garcí a-García had some things going for himself, too. He was a cineaste. He knew of Orson Welles and Bela Lugosi and Zeppo Marx, and he knew there were ways to insert Estip McQueen in a Yul Brynner film fest. There was one movie—just one—that featured both of them. “?Ese cuate sí es todo un hombre!” he announced to his housekeepers as he studied the McQueen poster on his wall. Yes, they agreed, that dude was 100 percent MAN.

For the other film of his planned double feature, Garcí a-García was faced with a choice between The King and I and Westworld. He chose to keep the western theme as pure as possible and went for the killer cowboy-robot thriller. The movie office had promised him that both films were subtitled, not dubbed. They would hear the real voices—well, German-dubbed—of the actors. He would show Aunt Irma once and for all that Yul Brynner was not a Mexican from Puerto Vallarta! The robot movie would play first; second would come the great team-up, Brynner and McQueen. Second would come The Magnificent Seven.



Many of the tropical movie houses had no roofs. Inside, they featured covered galleries along the walls, and when it started to rain, the moviegoers stood under the eaves and kept watching the films until the weather passed. The cheap theater in Culiacán was known as Las Pulgas because it was so filthy you could get fleas from going there. But Garcí a-García had put a corrugated-tin roof over his beloved Pedro Infante, leaving open only the last four feet between the tops of the cinder-block walls and the angled roof lest the overwhelming body heat condense on the tin and drop on the audience in a small salty squall. It was true that when the catastrophic summer rains hit every June sixth, the racket was so loud that the sound track couldn’t be heard, but those within remained dry. And, really, with subtitles, only the most spoiled moviegoer would claim to have lost the narrative thread.

Inside, the seats were metal, and the joke was that everybody who went to the Pedro Infante was a wetback, because the seat backs made everyone sweat. In fact, the seats were all rusted red from years of back sweat. At either side of the screen stood two huge revolving fans. The blasts of fetid air these fans shot at the crowd occasionally knocked the bats from their roosts on the ceiling, and they fell, fluttering wildly over the heads of the people. Old-timers kept a handy newspaper or cardboard fan at their seats so they could shoo the winged rodents away—which they did without ever taking their eyes off Cantinflas or John Wayne.