at praying. Undulating, like those Jews at the Wailing Wall. That’s what I think a rosary service should be, even if I don’t believe in it. At least respecting what Apá achieved in his life, the good in those green eyes despite their meanness. And I do respect it. Abandoning Mexico for the United States, which he kind of hated, to chase his girlfriend who wanted to be an American. Creating a successful life with less than nothing, while these whiny, red-faced Anglo clowns like Lou Dobbs poisoned the air we breathed. My father loved my mother in this desert for decades. If I think about it, he was a damn good father, there at home, even if he yelled at us, even if he once kicked the hell out of my teenage ass. Yesterday at the house, Elena Martinez, my sister’s best friend from high school, whispered to me, “At least you guys had a real father. Ours was always drunk and gone.” In Ysleta, that’s a compliment.
More people coming in, sitting down. The neighborhood. What’s that noise? Underneath the casket: a little metal cube whirring, emitting a fruity scent around us. Capirotada and mangos to mask the formaldehyde? But that body is not him anymore. That’s not the man who worked two jobs, who wouldn’t accept food stamps even if we qualified for them, who worked his sons worse than wetbacks. I always figured that’s how Stalin did it, to take a country from nothing to something, through industrialization and into the Second World, with slave labor and no-excuses pain. That was my father. A crazed Mexican Vulcan, forging the meat of labor into capital. From nothing but dirt, to money in the bank. From a patch of desert a short walk from the mordidas of Narcolandia, to retiring at fifty-three and traveling to Europe with my mother, to Israel, to Egypt. My father was our Stalin-Moses: he led us through the desert into our forced industrialization, the good ol’ American Dream. Maybe there was no other way. And that’s a good Mexican family. I sure did learn how to sweat, how to bleed, how to fight back in Ysleta.
Tin-tan is here, that son of a bitch, Pablo’s jester from the ‘hood. One of the first ones, too. After all his jealousies because he had a shitty family and made stupid choices. So everything I did, my obsessions with Hinton in high school and Faulkner and Márquez in college, my leap to Boston, my making it as a prof from this desert nada, all of it because my father was “educated,” and his wasn’t? Dad went to agronomy school, for god’s sake! Never saw him pick up a book in his life. And Tin-tan always with his fake smile reminding me on San Lorenzo Avenue that he had dug as many outhouses as I did. Who the hell cares! Does that explain why he’s still a substitute teacher? Why is it that people who never left the ‘hood get pissed off when you fail and succeed, and you fail again, and finally succeed, when your success somehow makes them look bad? Humans are a selfish, petty race. Look at that asshole, kneeling in front of Dad’s casket, praying. Pray to climb out of your conceit, Tin-tan, pray for no more excuses before it’s too late. Your horse-face and pissy attitude won’t ever help you, bro.
God, here comes more of ‘em. Cousin Adriana and her husband, Julio, the narco, ex-Mexican military. Her sister Alma, the whole crowd from Chihuahua. Loudmouths. Hugging everybody. It’s not a coffee klatch! Rita, and the ‘rich’ California cousins. I think she’s at least a university administrator near LA, but look at those Kimmy-K-tight dresses and faux cowboy boots, and yelps of joy with Adriana! I mean, there’s a casket behind you. Dad the dead guy is waiting for a little respect. What’s wrong with them? What’s wrong with us? Sorry, Dad, for our family.
“Sonríe!” I hear a micro-second before two clammy hands squeeze my cheeks, and Adriana’s maroon lips and raccoon eyes float in my face like a possessed Jack-in-the-Box. What the hell is wrong with my Mexican cousin? “Por qué tan serio, David? Sonríe, hombre.” Oh, my god, she’s grabbing my face again! I want to punch her. I mean, is she mentally ill? This is a goddamn rosary, my father’s dead, and she’s telling me to lighten up? I step back from her, horrified, and she continues as if nothing’s happened, to my mother next to me, to my sister, to her daughters, holding out her hand and wishing them condolences.
I glare at Adriana as she moves down the line. Her sister Alma is not like that, but Adriana, there’s something seriously wrong with her. She’s so self-absorbed, like her own dead father, my uncle, my father’s brother. El gran macho from Chihuahua always visiting us in Ysleta, and bragging about his rancho, and piling it on in front of his little brother. Making light of anything my father accomplished, the tight fit inside the living room of our adobe house, the interminable hours at Dad’s construction jobs, El Paso and its dust storms, Ysleta and el barrio Barraca, the weed-infested irrigation canal behind our house. And what did my father say when Uncle Dago guffawed about his great rancho in Chihuahua, and how much plata he was hauling in with his government contracts and connections, and what bull he had castrated, all of it as Dago fucked bitch after bitch on both sides of the border? Aunt Esmeralda, preciosa like a matron from old Andalusia, full of pride back in Chihuahua? How exactly did my father ever respond? My father so timid, always deferring to his braggart older carnal. You know, that’s why so many women have been slaughtered in Juárez. That’s exactly why. This goddamn immortal machismo. This human corruption like la leche. This reduction of human relationships to those who can abuse and those who can be abused. You have to fight the fuck back, if you can. It’s not about reason over there: it’s about movidas and the hunger and cowardice of men, all in a sick Machiavellian fiesta. Ajuúa!
And Adriana, her father’s daughter. So into herself, with her bawdy jokes, even when no one laughs. So willing to humiliate others. I mean, what twist of nature is it when the female of the species becomes the macho? I must have been mentally ill when I had a thing for her in high school. Adriana absorbed her father’s personality, and spits on others with her “humor.” Like an actress, at the center of every conversation. Only Julio she respects, her quiet psychopath sidekick so willing to let her be the show. Man, I almost punched her. “Smile! Why aren’t you smiling at your dad’s funeral?” La Donald-Trump-Mexicana. But I would not cause a fuss, not with my father’s body a few feet away. What is wrong with her? Like she’s missing the neural net for respect. And maybe I’m too much my father’s son. Maybe I’m just another grandiloquent smile in this wasteland desert. Another sheepish Mexican. If I had any guts, I would have shoved her face away. What is she doing? Julio and Adriana in front of my father’s casket. But reaching into the casket! Rearranging my father’s hands! A flower? She’s plucked a red carnation from the arrangement on the casket and shoved it into my father’s hands! Who the—? What’s wrong with her? Some nerve! Who messes with the dead body at a rosary? I ought to just yank her hair back. Goddamn Adriana. Her little brown eyes and pale face. It’s a violation of my father. Jesus, I hate her. She’s staring at my father, with her self-satisfied Minnie-Mouse look. My father, even in death, just another toy for her.
What’s she doing now? Oh, my god! There she goes again! Anybody else seeing this? Who’s protecting my father? Adriana’s hands in the casket again, she with a slip of paper in her hand, arranging it. In my father’s suit? What the hell? She steps back. Julio too. What have they done? I know Adriana’s brother, el pinche self-satisfied Santiago, is an evangelical Christian, and has for years tried to convert my Catholic father and mother. I think Adriana and her brother are Testigos de Jehovah, or something like that. They’re the loonies in suits roaming Ysleta my mother sics our German shepherds on. What did Adriana put inside the casket? That paper? That red-carnation kitschy atrocity. It can’t stay there. It won’t.
Decades ago, when I graduated from college—in fact, the only time Mom and Dad ever visited Boston—we were at South Station, the three of us sitting on a long wooden bench. I remember it was smoky—or at least dust hung in the sun’s rays through the air. We were having a fight—or at least I was fighting with them. Commencement had been the day before, and I had accompanied them to Amtrak, because they were on their way to D.C. to make this trip a kind of vacation. Smiling in his smirky way, my father had quizzed me about what I would do now with a college degree in poli sci, when I would start work. He bragged about how he had survived alone in Juárez, after my culo grandfather had slapped twenty dollars into his palm and sent him out the door. I think my father always believed I was kind of soft, too emotional, not his kind of son, not the Mexican macho he adored in Uncle Dago, not the servant he saw in my brother Adán, not the athlete he admired in Pablo.
I was this strange