The Five Acts of Diego Leon Read online

  “Not now,” his mother insisted. “We’re going home.”

  Early the next morning, they rode off, on to Guanajuato to join another group of insurgents from Jalisco. Diego heard that the injured man had lived through the night, but his leg still bled. Elva said he would be lucky if he lived to see another day.

  A week later, Diego’s mother told him to stay away from the other children. When he asked why, she said they were sick.

  “How many of them, Mama?”

  She hunched over the mortar and pestle, grinding cloves of garlic. “Enough to make me worry.” She turned to him now. “Promise me you’ll be careful. I don’t know what I’d do if you got sick.”

  “I’ll be careful,” Diego said.

  “Of course you will.” She reached out and stroked his face; her fingers carried the scent of garlic and onion. “I never have to worry about you.”

  Diego did as she said and stayed away from the other children. He kept close to her side. But the next day, he began to cough, and that night, he woke shivering, his teeth chattering so loudly that the sound woke his mother. She covered him with blankets and lay close to him, blowing on his hands and feet with her breath, but nothing helped. He was so cold. By morning, his forehead burned, and it hurt his eyes when she carried him out into the bright sunlight of the cookhouse. Elva insisted she had seen this before. She shook her head and sighed. Those men, she said. The troops who were just here. They reeked of disease. No doubt they brought this.

  “I tried keeping the children away from them,” she explained. “But no one listened. They think an old lady doesn’t know anything.”

  Some said it was the mosquitoes that swarmed around the nearby lakeshore, especially during the warmer months. Smudge pots had been brought in and placed around the perimeter of the church grounds to keep the bugs away. Still, by the end of the week, more children fell ill, and the sickness spread to some of the adults. By then, the rash had appeared on Diego’s chest and soon it covered his arms and his legs.

  The fever was so high that it caused him to sweat and see things, strange shadows lurking in the corners of the house and outside in the meadows, crouching behind trees and bushes, circling about in the cornfield. Hands passed over his body. He saw threads of white smoke. He caught the scent of burning herbs. A red feather brushed across his hands, eyes, and the back of his head. He could hear his mother’s voice, far off, distant, her cool lips against his forehead when she kissed him. Then her voice faded and fell away and the sound was like a pebble cascading down the side of a well, the tapping growing fainter and fainter until it was no more, until it was only Elva’s voice that he heard, breaking through the wall of the fever, as she placed damp cloths on his forehead.

  “Listen to my voice,” she said. “Stay here with me. Listen to my voice. Please.”

  There was nothing else to do but lie there, drenched in sweat, his head throbbing from pain, his body aching at the slightest move or twinge. When Elva tried lifting his arms up to towel his back, he cried out. When she placed cloths soaked in alcohol and marijuana on his stomach, he writhed. She stayed with him. Day and night. Elva never left Diego’s side. He watched her shadowed face. The wrinkles and folds etched into her skin appeared as if they’d been carved from stone.

  “Can you hear me?” she asked. “Diego? Can you hear me?”

  He nodded, tried speaking, tried looking up at her, but everything spun. The ground rocked and quivered. He watched the shadows grow and move across the walls. They took the shapes of jaguars, snakes, eagles in flight.

  “Look,” he said to Elva, pointing. “A toad. There. On the wall.”

  “And a monkey,” said the old woman, smiling. “Swinging from a branch. Look at his long ch’éti.”

  “Ch’éti?”

  “Tail,” said Elva. “Ch’éti is tail in P’urhépecha. The language of your ancestors.”

  Because they were P’urhépecha, it was in their blood to tell and to recall, Elva told him, to see and to imagine things beyond, past that and into eternity. In between sleep and waking, she told him stories full of magic, of battles, of spirits that robbed people’s souls, of animals that could speak. There were brave warriors and wise priests with the ability to see into the future, to look to the stars and predict tremors and eclipses and droughts. There were noble kings who ruled the lands from large temples, their stone steps leading up to the heavens where the gods lived. There were marketplaces under vast blue skies, and everywhere there was peace and no one ever went hungry. Everyone had what they needed. She told of Curicaueri, the god of fire, how he and his brother gods settled along the shores of Lake Pátzcuaro, how the P’urhépecha were the descendants of these spirits who taught them how to shape clay, how to weave, how to carve wood, and when to plant and harvest. These, she said, were his people, his kin.

  And he saw them come to life. In his fevered dreams, his ancestors were men with scaled skin, eyes yellow as corn, wearing robes adorned with bright feathers and shells, with jewelry made of iron and brass and gold on their necks and arms and fingers. They were beautiful and, as Elva spoke, he watched them form a circle around his bed and dance and chant, and they called him “son” and “brother” and blessed Diego and swore to protect him.

  “Here,” Diego said, pointing. “They’re here. I can see them. Standing near you, Elva.”

  “Yes,” she said, soothing him, her hand pressed on his forehead. “The spirits are here. They want you to see them. They want you to know they will be with you. Always.”

  She talked on well into the night, as his fever climbed higher and higher, his skin grew hotter, his eyes peering into that world of the spirits, of the ghosts of his past. Elva held a candle up to her face. She told of the fierce P’urhépecha warriors who were so strong they fought back and beat the Aztecs, the most hated of all the tribes in the years before the Europeans arrived. She told of Cortez and the Spaniards, who came on ships, destroying everything, laying waste to the great cities. She told of Eréndira, the young princess and daughter to the last ruler of the P’urhépecha, who trained an army of men to ride horses and fight against the invaders.

  “This is what you’re made of,” Elva said just as he felt the fever consume him. He saw flames surrounding his bed, and the spirits stood watch, whispering, pointing at Diego, beckoning him to come, to join them in the darkness.

  “Your blood is the blood of the gods,” he heard Elva’s voice say as he drifted away, further and further.

  He was many things, she said. So many wonderful things. Then her voice faded away, and he heard only the roar of the unseen fires.

  The fever broke a few days later and didn’t return. When Diego was strong enough to lift his head, he asked for his mother.

  “She fell ill right after you did,” Elva explained. “You were too sick to notice, and even if I had told you, you wouldn’t have understood. Your fever was so high. You were hallucinating. Seeing spirits.”

  “But where is she?” he asked, glancing around.

  “It was terrible. So many people … Your mother …” she said, pressing his head to her chest, gripping his hand. “She’s gone. She died.”

  He didn’t understand. How could this happen? Diego wanted to scream and cry and shout out her name, but he still felt very weak and tired. Instead he closed his eyes and let Elva hold him in her arms and rock him back to sleep.

  A few days later, when Diego was stronger, Elva told him to get dressed. He wore the socks and shoes his mother had bought him the last day they went to the marketplace in Pátzcuaro even though he had already outgrown them. Elva bundled him in blankets and led him by the hand to the cemetery. A handful of crooked crosses jutted up from the ground as they made their way to a fresh mound of earth adorned with bouquets of carnations and lilies. A marker was staked in the ground, and his mother’s name was carved into the wood. What would become of him now that there was nothing and no one to root his spirit to the earth? he wondered. Elva said not to worry, that h
e would see his mother again, in one form or another, and he tried very hard to believe her.

  She would be his caretaker, Elva explained to Diego. Until his father returned. When she spoke of him, of his coming back, Elva would point vaguely toward the distant mountains. And Diego imagined his father there, just beyond the craggy ridges, down below, in a wide valley where wildflowers and grass grew, sheep and oxen grazing freely and uninterrupted.

  “What if he never comes back?” he asked Elva. “What will become of me then?”

  “Hush,” Elva said. She stood over a large copper colander, boiling goat’s milk, which steamed and foamed, the warm scent making Diego hungry. “You just concentrate on your work and stop thinking about all that nonsense.”

  Elva had killed a chicken from the coop that morning. Diego watched her snap the animal’s neck then cut its head off, which she flung into the pigsty for the two sows to fight over. It was his job to pluck the feathers before taking the knife Elva kept nailed to a wall of the cookhouse and skinning the carcass. The feathers were tough, but he had managed to remove most of them. Now he placed the chicken on the wooden table, took the knife, and held it over the dead animal’s breast. Elva stood over Diego and placed her hand on his.

  “Así,” she said, guiding the point of the knife and jabbing it in until the chicken’s skin broke. “No,” Elva said when she saw Diego turn away. “You must see it. You must look. No matter how disgusting you think it is.”

  He turned back around and watched as she led his hand down, the knife making a straight incision down the chicken’s belly. Now, she said, he needed to separate the skin, slowly, patiently. Diego’s hands felt moist and sticky, and his arms were smeared with blood as he took the chicken and crouched down on a straw petate to continue his work, removing the innards.

  She finished boiling the goat’s milk. She took two clay mugs and filled them both and handed him one. Elva rolled hot tortillas from the griddle near the fire and sprinkled them with salt and told him to leave the chicken for now and to come and eat. Diego watched her chew; the bones beneath her thin and wrinkled skin still looked strong, he thought, and Diego wondered how it was that such an old woman as this could still rise each morning at five, carry heavy bundles of wet laundry on her crooked, spiny back, chop blocks of wood, splitting logs with much force, cook and clean and feed and look after him. She stood beside him, her white hair wrapped in a black rag, sweat glistening her face, breathing with her lips parted. She was missing all her front teeth, and he could see her gums, smooth and bright pink, and her mouth reminded him of that of a newborn.

  “Elva?” he asked.

  “Yes, Diego?”

  “Are you my mother now?”

  The old woman sat down, bunching the fabric of her woven skirt between her legs. She was barefoot, her toes knotted and coated with dust. “Well, no, but you’re my son for now. I must help you. I must teach you things.”

  “Teach me what?”

  She pointed to the chicken. “Well, how to skin animals, of course. When to plant. When to harvest. How to—”

  He interrupted her. “Are you going to teach me more about the P’urhépecha?” He finished his milk and tortilla.

  “I will,” Elva said.

  Sadness filled him in the days after learning of his mother’s death, a terrible loneliness. Diego wondered why she had left him. Maybe she was with his father now. Maybe they were together, living in the mountains somewhere, waiting for the war to end before coming back for him.

  But why had they abandoned him? He asked Elva this one afternoon when they were out in a wide field dotted with mesquite bushes, gathering twigs for the fire pit. He watched her, stooped over, her arms reaching down, deep between tall blades of grass and weeds and wildflowers. The gray mountains, veins of snow lacing their sides, circled them, keeping watch, cradling the whole valley. An eagle soared across the sky, and when its screech pierced the silence, Elva straightened her back and held a hand up to cover her eyes from the sun.

  “No one abandoned you, Diego,” she said. “Your father’s still out there.”

  “He could be dead. Like my mother.”

  “You father’s not dead.”

  “How do you know?”

  Elva laughed. “He’s very stubborn. He always has been. Your grandfather raised him to be a farmer like him and his father before him, but Gabriel didn’t want that life. So, he went off to the city. And now he’s gone off with the revolutionaries. Always looking for one thing or another. Always being called by something. When he left for Morelia, people thought he’d never be seen again. Well, not only did he come back, but he brought your mother back with him.”

  Elva said she didn’t think his mother would survive that first year. Such a fine lady, she said, living this life. She grew up with servants who took care of her. But she was stubborn, just like his father, she explained. And she was smart, quick to learn. Elva had taught her many things.

  “Like what?” Diego asked.

  How to grind corn for tortillas, how to milk a cow, what to do when a scorpion or snake invaded the house. Elva and the other women showed her what plants were poisonous, showed her how to make a balm out of animal fat and sprigs of mint, which rocks were the best for scrubbing the laundry, how to drape the wet clothing on the branches to prevent them from snapping. And she taught them things they never knew. She urged them to boil their water and when they asked why, she told them about small creatures, so tiny one couldn’t see them with the eye, swimming inside, carrying diseases that made people sick. She talked about wide paved avenues and trolley cars, railroads that brought the riches of the capital and, still further, the cities of the north, los Estados Unidos. She showed them magazines and newspapers advertising a hand-cranked washing machine, voyages on big ships to faraway places, women in elegant evening dresses and fancy hats.

  “I thought she was a little full of herself,” Elva said now as she gathered more twigs. “But she was brave. Strong-willed. She cared for your father.” Elva gathered the large bundle of spindly mesquite twigs, wrapped them together in a burlap sack, and tied this with a strip of twine. She heaved it onto her back and held it. With her free hand, she took Diego’s. “Come. It’ll be dark soon. We have a ways to go.”

  They traveled through a flat meadow and into a thicket of tall oak trees where the air cooled and dampened. Diego loved the vastness here, the shadows, the stones furry with bright jade moss, and the silence. It reminded him of a church, so still, so sacred.

  “And you will teach me things, right?” he asked. “Like you taught my mother?”

  “Yes,” the old woman said. “I told you already.”

  Elva taught him the P’urhépecha words for everything: fish and cotton, cinnamon and water. “Kóki,” she said when they were out washing clothes and there came, from a small rivulet, the sound of frogs croaking. “Listen to the song of the kóki.” Elva pointed to the sun. “Tsánda,” she said. “Janikua.” She showed him the thin clouds skirting the sky. “Anhatapu.” She pointed to the trees around them. She taught him to sing the pirékuas, P’urhépecha songs. His favorite was “Canel Tsïtsïki,” which he started singing now as they walked on. She hummed the tune, and he cleared his throat and raised his voice, which was high and strong:

  Tsïtsïki urápiti, xankare sesi jaxeka, ka xamare p’untsumenjaka

  Ji uerasïngani sani, ka xankeni nona mirikurhini ia …

  “Very good,” she said, smiling. “What a lovely voice you have!”

  Diego said, “I’m glad that you like it.” And he felt proud then, felt himself part of the words, which were ancient and wise, the tongue of his father, his ancestors. He imagined his voice lifting up and being carried off by the gentle winds that blew, reaching his father who was far, far away, guiding him back home.

  That November of 1914, Elva celebrated her seventy-fifth birthday. Their neighbor, Narciso Méndez, killed a goat, and the women helped his wife, Rogelia, make birria and tortillas. Everyone in San
Antonio gathered to celebrate. The men drank pulque and stood around the fire pit, and Diego remembered the revolutionaries who had passed through the year before, bringing the disease that killed his mother. He saw the church and remembered the injured man lying inside, crying out in pain all through the night as the statues of the Virgin and Christ looked on. The revolutionaries had forced the man to drink tequila. To help with the pain, they said. He got very drunk and shouted at Diego and some of the other children, many of them dead now, like his mother. Was the man still alive?

  The small church, with its two rows of pews and one candelabra, was open, and some of the women went to confess to Father Solís, who traveled on horseback to the different villages in the area to hold Mass and give Communion. Some children ate sweets and played, Diego among them, and they ran around the church, chasing one another. As night fell, everyone gathered to toast Elva.

  “My birthday wish is for Diego to sing to me. Flor de Canela,” Elva told the crowd. “Canel Tsïtsïki,” she said to Diego. “Do you remember it?”

  He nodded. He focused, sang the words to himself in his head:

  Flor de canela, I sigh, I sigh because I remember you

  I sigh, I sigh because I remember you

  Do not suffer, do not cry, for I will be waiting for you

  The other children watched him move toward the old woman who sat on a bench near the fire pit, a long rebozo woven of golden yarn wrapped around her head and shoulders. Someone had placed a fresh bouquet of flowers in Elva’s hand. She sipped pulque and smoked a cigarette rolled from marijuana leaves, which she said helped ease her stiff joints. Diego removed his hat and he took Elva’s hand. He cleared his throat. He took a deep breath and began to sing:

  Tsïtsïki urápiti, xankare sesi jaxeka, ka xamare p’untsumenjaka

  Ji uerasïngani sani, ka xankeni nona mirikurhini ia …

  Except for the occasional giggle from one of the children, the people were silent with appreciation. Elva listened intently, taking long, deep puffs from her cigarette, her eyes low and red, glowing warm and bright in the firelight. He continued to sing, watching the embers drift up into the darkening sky, and he imagined them to be his voice. This filled him with a warmth that was painful and lovely all at once. Everyone gathered around him, and Diego sang on and on: