D e s e r t E x p o s u r e
February 2010
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The Light That Confuses Me
Story and photos by Victoria Tester |
Editor's note: Over a decade ago, Victoria Tester began to visit and photograph the Mexican border town of Palomas, and to keep journals as a candid record of her experiences there. In this series, Tester offers us, through her private journals and photographic images of Palomas, a retrospective of her journeys there.
"I'm afraid," I say. "I want to cross the border, but I'm afraid."
This was early on.
"That," my photography teacher who is a Famous Landscape Photographer, tells me calmly, "is because you're hesitating. Don't give yourself that time to be afraid."
So I go.
First Holy Communion is over.
I'm ushered into the parish kitchen, and discover that my son J— and I are going to have lunch with Father Elias and the Bishop of Chihuahua.
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A boy named Jesus wanders lonely near the stove. Father Elias calls him to share in the two platters of simple fruit on the table.
The Bishop grumbles about sweets for children. I notice his big stomach, which I don't like. And his big face, which I like.
My son begins to eat without the blessing, and we all forgetfully follow suit, chastised when the Bishop, frustrated, recites a prayer.
Then Father Elias is flying around us as we eat, disappearing mysteriously, returning to say merrily, "Señor Obispo, ustd sabe como son estas cosas!" ("Mr. Bishop, sir, you know how these things are!") in a confidential, elfish manner. Then Elias plays cassettes, famous Lola and ranchero music for us, though the Bishop is grumbling.
"With music we won't be able to eat. We'll lose our appetites."
Then somehow Elias has the Bishop smiling and explaining all of the lyrics to us in a scholarly way.
The table is alive. The jar of silverware on the middle of the cloth, the stucco walls the color of egg yolk.
Going around the table: the four young men who study with the priest; then J— who played the guitar; and my son, 13, sitting across from the Bishop; and little Jesus like a shy thief at my left side; and to my right Father Elias, who appears and disappears with a liveliness and grace.
To his right the Bishop, center of all boredom and respect, and to the Bishop's right a man who introduced himself with a Renaissance sweetness and dignity as S—, companion to the Bishop.
I leap to photograph J— who is a saint at the stove. Thank God I was born without manners.
Elias nods, smiling. "Te entiendo, Victoria." ("I understand you.") They are the kind of words you can take around the world with you.
Thank you, Elias.
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I keep looking at the Bishop's fork, glowing as if it is solid silver, and back to ours, which are plain. I inspect mine and it is clearly stainless steel.
The Bishop carries around a silver fork?
Then I realize it's the light.
It's the light in Palomas that confuses me, and gives a fork of sterling silver to the Bishop of Chihuahua.
I'm at the little seafood restaurant, the one with a blue wall and a painted dove that looks like a window into the Annunciation when the sun is shining on it right.
Now the sun's out in the street, and the wall looks more like a tourist's postcard.
I order the breaded shrimp and a cup of Nescafé I forget to drink before it's cold.
The only other customer and I watch a Spanish soap opera together: Morelia, a dark-haired domestic princess, turns back her bed cover to reveal a giant tarantula placed there by the turbaned villainess. Morelia screams and screams while the customer and I laugh, dipping our fried tortillas into hot sauce.
I want to spend the rest of the daylight hours, or even the rest of the week, watching Mexican soap operas.
Where good and evil are plainly distinguished. Good is rewarded, evil punished.
A huge Spanish galleon floats through the dusty street, carried by two men out of a curio shop.
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I go in. The galleon has sailed away from a discontented continent: large ceramic figures of indigenous peoples, men dignified in wolfskins and feathers, women in rebozos, their faces frozen in outrage, sorrow or plain disbelief. I look into their faces and understand these things. I stand among them, crowded by smug cherubs, pleading saints and howling coyotes, growling bears and, best of all, two black jaguars who bare their teeth to protect a Christ child whose bright arms flail.
Then a little boy—a real, living little boy with a soul—steps forward among all this.
He has a secret.
I'm glad when he leans on the head of a fierce jaguar, his eyes luminous.
C— comes in to R—'s tiny café and disturbs our tired talk about gallbladders and fallen arches. It must be eight o'clock. He's finished his shift and walked the few blocks to us, his face pale as a candle. All his color's in his burning eyes and hair.
He sits down at the table like a prince and L— begins serving her son.
Everything is ready and before him like magic. Then he's superciliously calling his mother to hand him a fork. I look at the few feet between his chair and the fork jar.
"You may sit down with me, Victoria," he commands in English, in tones so rich you can stir them into coffee.
But I stay standing, leaning against the counter with the other tired women.
L— pushes me over to the table and pulls up a chair for herself, too, looking worried. Or simply sad?
"When I told my mother," C— looks at us sweetly, "that a funeral would have been cheaper than her doctor bill, she got angry. The man who runs the funeral home told me so." He's laughing, and L— looks disturbed, though she knows little English.
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"Well," I say, "she would have suffered less."
I know C— is miserable over his wife's abandoning him to go work in Bayard, and his little son has gone to live with his ex-wife's mother here in Palomas. Then C— sold his car and even his bicycle to pay for his mother's gallbladder operation.
C— is angelic, but for some mysterious reason L— openly favors her other son. The younger one who cusses, doesn't work, and spends most of the day sleeping with a cantina worker. The one time I met that son he jumped out a window and ran away. Because he was so shy, L— explained.
C— goes on, "I asked the funeral director, what if I got a few women to mourn over the body, wailing and pulling their hair out? Would you deduct 500 pesos for that? 'Yes,' said the man. So then I said, 'What if I myself carried the body there, and to the cemetery?' He said, 'Well, I'd have to take off at least a thousand pesos for that.' 'What about the coffin?' I said. 'My mother's really small. She'll need only a small box, maybe half of a normal person's size.' Right there he took off another thousand!" C— laughs as he finishes his burrito.
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He flirts. "You're really young," I say, in my best Protestant wooden-clogged manner. "How old are you? Very young."
"Not too young," he answers. I look into his beautiful, worn face and burning eyes and see it clear as any film:
I'm nonstop cleaning in the little adobe house that L— keeps piling with used clothes. I can't find the forks. If I find a fork, I give it to the neighbors.
All I want in the whole world is to find my precious Olympus camera, but it's lost. Swallowed in L—'s sea of bright polyesters.
C—'s beautiful young ex-wife visits, staying in the cinderblock house their divorce gave her, only a few yards away.
Nights, C— is getting out of our bed and sneaking over to see her, tripping over the chicken coop and the trash in the yard.
The ruts in the cemetery road are deeper. Maybe there has been a lot of rain this spring. I walk through the cemetery in Palomas, alone.
The first time I saw the cemetery, three years ago on the Day of the Dead, L— pointed at it from the highway. I thought it was a carnival, all pink and blue and yellow canopies above busy families.
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I had to look again and again before I could see the cold white stones.
Perhaps because of the emptiness of the cemetery, the new spring graves stand out more brightly, their flowers not yet faded by sun and rain.
The new graves haven't yet sunk into the ground. Their mounds of earth are three or four feet high. It's as if the newly dead aren't completely dead. They have to finish dying here.
I walk the square border of the cemetery. On three sides it is surrounded by fence, drooping barbed wire and chain. At its borders the wooden crosses and marble Jesuses and saints and bright iron cages give way to the leftover celebrations of death.
Soggy wreaths whose newspaper insides are now illegible. Broken wooden crosses. Torn boxes marked "fragile." Empty milk cartons. Pine cleaner bottles. Paint cans and drained Tecates.
There's more garbage than I've see here before, and more mesquite.
I wander among the graves, photographing the Jesuses, one headless, who preside over the cemetery and the vast Palomas sky.
A startled jackrabbit runs from me. Don't you know you own scared kin? I wish he'd stayed.
Lizards rest in the cool shade of the stone crosses. I know they'll rest in the shadows of my photographs.
I drop to my knees to use the camera, or else I tilt the lens and look up startled into what I see, like a child.
I'm frightened.
How long will it be before the creosote and the mesquite invade the cemetery?
Before the people of Palomas are too tired to bring even the paper and plastic flowers anymore?
Before they can no longer take care of the dead, it is so hard just to take care of the living?
Victoria Tester is an award-winning poet and playwright,
the author of Miracles of Sainted Earth (University of New Mexico Press).
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