Roots

 I was born mid-autumn in a sleepy old Southern town in Mexico. My mom says I was a very quiet child. I never really cried unless my inner love of food came out. Mom said I spent days as a child just constantly looking at the stars. “Que ves mija?” (What are you looking at?) she would ask. “Nada mami, solo estoy mirando” (Nothing mom, I’m just looking) I would reply.

I developed a love for space the moment my dad held me in his arms and pointed at every star in the night sky. He would always assure me that when he was gone, he would look after me from behind the stars. In a way, it brought me comfort knowing I could always catch a glimpse of him in the starry night. My dad wasn’t the best dad. Sometimes he was, I guess. He was a coyote, the people you hear about on the news. The ones that smuggle people across the border. He also crossed the border to work in the California fields during the summer. Mom says he was always bringing back lots of goodies for my siblings. “They were always dressed in the very best!” she would say. They never had to walk around barefoot and always had the sharpest and cleanest clothes in town. This was before my brother Juan and I were born.

After Juan was born, my dad’s brother died and so began a new chapter in our lives, a life of misery for our family. My dad was unrecognizable. He began drinking, doing drugs, and even went to jail once. He went to jail for three years. All I remember after jail life are hazy shouts and broken doors. My dad committed suicide a year after that. He hung himself with a hose in our back yard.

I have a very hazy memory of him being pulled down from a well. My two older sisters who were 13 then, were crying and kept telling me to close my eyes. But all I did was stand there, confused, wondering why my dad was asleep and people were pouring what I thought was water then, alcohol on his back. And everyone was crying, why was everybody crying. After that I remember my dad being taken away in a big rectangular vehicle and never seeing him again.

I always wondered where he had gone. After the incident my brother Juan told me he remembers when I would sit on the doorsteps of our old house and just wait. “Why would I sit there?”.

He replied, “because you were waiting for dad to take you out for ice cream.”

 That is a very tragic and appalling memory to hold.

I do not remember much else from Mexico. I only remember bare feet and puddles. It rained a lot where I’m from and since there weren’t any paved roads then, it would get terribly muddy. But little wonderous me never cared about that. I enjoyed walking in the rain and jumping in every single puddle with my brother Juanito. Perhaps this is why I am a pluviophile. To me, rain is incredibly melancholic and reminds me of my childhood. My brother and I were constantly outside playing in the mud and stealing pears from my grandfather’s tree.

 My paternal grandfather was an unaccommodating and malicious man. Once, he yelled at Juan for stealing a pear. A simple pear was enough to infuriate him and come barging through my widowed mother’s home. “You need to educate those kids of yours and keep them off my property!” My mother never asked him for anything after that. It’s not like Juanito cared though. He sat on a stool at the end of the table delightfully eating his pear. I remember glancing at him and all he gave me was a tooth rotting smile. He was always smiling, and I thank God I had the chance to see that smile. A genuine smile, the one that made you smile back. When Juan was bitten by a scorpion my Grandmother didn’t think much of it. “I thought he was bit by an ant so I just took him home” she said to my furious mother. I don’t think my mom could even form proper sentences at that moment, all she could think about was which trail would take her to the hospital the fastest. My mom carried him all the way down the hill and went barging through the hospital’s door. Juan almost died that day, and I thank the universe, fate, God, or circumstance he didn’t.

My grandmother was a pretentious lady always trying to get us to act according to her rules. Of course, Juan and I never listened. Once, when she was looking after us and mom was at work, we snuck out to town to eat enchiladas at our aunt Davina’s restaurant. We were walking home when abuelita came up behind us with a metal stick in her hand. “Corre, corre” (Run, run) he repeated between laughs. To this day, I don’t think I’ve ever run as fast as we did that day. When we got to grandma’s house, we got a mouthful. Let’s just say she was not happy with our little venture.

When my grandmother found out about my brother’s death, she began to show signs of depression and lethargy. My uncle said she stopped going to work and skipped meals a lot. “It’s because of the shootings we have been having here mija, nothing serious” she would tell my mom. It was a year later after her death, that we found out she was utterly devastated by Juan’s death. Her guilt was so big that it consumed her soul.

My grandmother thought that if only she would have been nicer to us, we wouldn’t have left for the US, we would still be in Mexico, and Juan would have never wrecked in the first place. Now that I am older, I don’t resent grandma like I used to. She had her own demons to fight and didn’t deserve all the bad that she had encountered. Sometimes I catch myself thinking and fantasizing about how life would have been in Mexico. How life would be with my brother still in it. But it hurts too much to think about.