He went back to the house and the chickens, walked around the yard, muttering, scattering spit like seed. ‘Fuck this for a game of soldiers.’ Mam came out and ran her fingers over the scar, maybe kissed him there. They retreated to the darkroom to work on his photos. More plates of stew piled up outside the door.
After a time they sold two cameras and three dozen chickens in order to buy a clapped-out car so they could bring the eggs to neighbouring towns. My old man drummed his fist on the dashboard as the engine rattled, the panels held together with wire, the roof covered in birdshit from grackles. The car — a 1928 Model A — would fling him outwards once again. They began to save money, and the circle of their wandering moved gradually outwards. At first it was no further than a few miles, then it grew and grew, ripples reaching out, towards Jiménez, Delicias, Chihuahua and even south to Torreón. Once or twice they went all the way to Mexico City, a three-day drive, where they bought supplies of film, paper, trays, chemical fixer. I can imagine those shop clerks, with thin moustaches sliming on their lips, hair cut short, in very well ironed shirts, garters on their sleeves, giving the once-over to my father as he leaned over the counter, in clothes sometimes still faint with the smell of chickenshit.
On those nights in the city they went celebrating together — my mother told me that they were crazed and lovely evenings in the cafés and the bars, with the accordions and the guitars and the wine and the white tablecloths and the waiters and all the things that a fistful of money could bring. Those few evenings in Mexico City were pure colour to her memory — the way it rose out of its crater, the thick traffic, the rows of red-clay flowerpots, the grey sprawl, the streaked darkness of poverty, the men in blue coming out from the factories, the brown naked children outside shacks, the soldiers and police with giant loping strides underneath their hats, the lines of whores in flimsy clothes on narrow streets with eyes turned to dusklight, the hustling boys, the double-breasted suits, the smell of rotting fruit, the belch of steel — the jazz of it all — the vivid oppressive redness of a southern sky, the houses of the rich with pale blue swimming pools, the grasshoppers fried by an old woman in a market. My father took photos of Mam under bright streetlamps and flitting clouds, her eyes looking cocksure into the lens, hair thrown back like a horse’s tail. In one of the shots, down by the Palace of Fine Arts, I noticed that she carried flowers, white dog roses clutched between her fingers. On the long drive home she stayed awake in the passenger seat, passing bottles of Coke to the old man, a mesquite wind blowing through the open windows.
My grandmother had swapped some rabbits for a few bottles of wine, and she gave them to my parents in the hope that the drink would somehow spur on a grandchild. Ancient as the notion of love, my grandmother went to bed early, whispering fertility prayers. My parents drank. Mam had her own special mug — a clay one which she had cast herself years before, but the old man broke it one night in an argument, smashing it against the bathroom door when she said that he’d had too much to drink. For a while he slept outside and my grandmother was hysterical at his disappearance. It was viciously cold at night, with no clouds in the sky to hold the heat, and sometimes my father might have thought about walking forever, skimming over the arroyos and the cacti and the flowers that held water with a startling parsimony. There were plants that would bloom only once every hundred years. He went searching, but never found one of them in bloom. One evening he went wandering too far and got lost, found himself a small cave and lit a fire in it. The heat expanded the rock. A piece of it unlodged from the roof of the cave and fell down, hitting him on the shoulder. He improvised a sling with his shirt, wandered, lost. A local policeman found him — a search party had been sent out because of some bad news in town.
My grandmother had passed away. She had been sitting on the porch, waiting for his return, when her hat lifted off in a strong breeze, and she had fallen to the ground. The end of her cane had lodged itself in a gap in the porch steps, and she tripped face forward on to a sharp rock, slicing her forehead wide open, a gash the length of her eyes. It was said that a strange wind blew across her dead body, a circular whirl that carted the rabbit-foot hat around and around and around her corpse, as if in prayer, a rosary of upkicked dust.
My father found Mam at the edge of town, hysterical, with fists flailing at the sky — she thought that she had lost him too. At home, she tended to his arm and then sank into a deep long-skirted mourning for her mother. Nestling herself under the limbs of the house, she listened for church bells, watched the paint peel on green wooden chairs, remembered things. Rabbits and the way they were skinned. Curious poultices for cut knees when she was a child. The way a pudding was stirred. Blue azaleas embroidered around a pillow. In her family there was a tradition of a year’s grief after a loss, and Mam carried it to full term. My father was different — he had loved the old woman and her eccentricities, but she had been an anchor to the land, to stasis, to the unmoving moments. They were alone now, with no duty to my mother’s family left, so he suggested trips all over the world, strange exotic places the names of which she had only heard whispered in the movie theatre. My mother wouldn’t listen, pulling sable-dark clothes higher on her shoulders, refusing to move around Miguel’s maps until the mourning was finished.
It wasn’t until eighteen months later that she shed them in favour of some muted skirts, which led to colour once more, and then she began to listen to the whispers.
In early 1956 a special letter was delivered — half the town was gathered down by the post office while my father opened it. His shoulder still hadn’t recovered fully and he opened the envelope with one hand, using the nail of his little finger to reach in under the flap. It was from a magazine in San Francisco, courting him with the offer of a huge sum of money, or at least what seemed like a huge sum of money then. A weekly salary. Bylines. An explosion of his own name. It had come as a result of photos he had sent of the copper mines — he assured the townspeople that they too would be famous, their faces and thick arms would appear on news-stands in California. A party was held in his honour that night. Backs were slapped. Jugs were passed. Music coughed out around the town, and my father played the spoons — coins were dropped in his big brown hat for the going. Rolando stood up and sang ‘Las Golondrinas,’ a song of leaving, offering lodging to a lost swallow. My mother stood at the edge of that crowd with other women, watching, listening to the song. She might have wondered about the paucity of grief that my father showed for the departure, reeling his way around, singing. A wind without any definite colour must have gathered her in as she shoved her hands down deep into dress pockets.
Rolando brimmed with a toothless grin — he saw the gaps as some sort of autograph now and he chugged his way beside my father. A picture was taken of Rolando, his finger pointing at his mouth in pride, the other hand clenched in a fist, a hat askew on his head, his face a field of stubble.
But the greatest pictures were not the ones of the copper mines, or of the people in the town. They were the ones of Mam’s body. My father had taken them in their bedroom. She was nude, not flagrantly so, but her stomach was smooth and dark, it held no creases, her legs curved softly, white sheets exposed small tufts of hair. Some of the shots were hazy beneath mosquito nets, so they took on a Victorian attitude of lounge and lust, as if being peeped at through a curtain, black and white photos that never even suggested colour, a cheek propped up on a hand, the body a streambed running down from it, cavorting through bedsheets and a canyon of desire, once or twice a suggestion of quiet lechery, a tongue held out against a lip, fingers in a V around a dark nipple, a sideways shot of her by the washbasin with her hand bellied on brown, fingers spread out; a hazy portrait of her wearing panties and stepping into a long white dress, hitching up her chest into it, the eyebrows raised in an attitude of impishness. When I first saw them — years ago now — they made me sick to the stomach. I hardly even realised it was her at first, and unlike the ones of the women in Spain, I never again looked at them in the attic, never found myself part of them. I knew what they had done to her and I couldn’t understand why she had let them be taken.