In Which We Clean It Use It Or Send It Away

La Casa Azul

by CARMEN AIKEN

At night in San Miguel, Bernadette drove us up the road from the Casa Azul.

The trip to Guanajuato took around four hours, long stretches of last century’s interstate, treacherous country bus stops, gossip from the front fueled with "Hijoles!" and "Que Padres!" The road to the house was gravel, swaths of scrub surrounding the expansive rancho, one side mined mountains and the other the faraway hiss of the highway.

My face was pressed to the window and my father listened to the chatter in the front, Bernadette’s window cracked open. I suspected if she had a chance she might be smoking a Marlboro, that sort of window crack. But she was a lady and she didn’t. Blue house, blue to black night.

"Oye, Carmen-" Bernie said, "Ven." She slowed the four-wheel drive and stopped in the middle of the road. No cars on the road passing and the night was barely windy. She opened the roof hatch and patted the arm rest. My pa leaned over, craned his neck, went, "Wow."

I pulled my torso out of the hatch, hands on the roof, Guanajuato about me. Bernadette started the engine, mountains at my back, face cool to the warm of the road and city, stars and sheep, fast patter over gravel. I lifted my hands into my hair. I stared hard into a night dispassionate and endless and indelible.

+

The first hotel in the Distrito Federal sat on the edge of the Zocalo. A cage elevator led to the rooms next to a gilded keep of tiny birds, blue and green and yellow. We slept there because my father’s friend Sr. Cesar recommended it. I’d like it, he said, and it was how one should stay in the City. The first afternoon my father told me again how my abuela, who I take gleaned pleasure in at being compared to, loved and kept birds. When we sat at the bar and rank Indio and Negro Modelo, which he had been bereft of since he left North America, he pointed to the massive tricolor flag flown in the square. How one early morning he saw the baby-cheeked cadets of the army at dawn, the red and green and white rippling from end to end.

My hair was still long, then, tied back in photos. I grew it out to please a boy I shouldn’t have expended the effort for, at least by then, far too many weeks past our expiration date. One photo has me leaning over the balcony of the hotel room I stayed in. The room was palatial, as hotels always are to me but especially as I lived in a walkup where the space to fit my twin mattress and desk felt assured, controlled. I leaned over the street, the assembled white-collar women in clipped skirts and heels on their way to lunch, the Volkswagen Beetles, the boys hawking bottled water. At night when my parents slept next door, I pushed through the linen drapes to watch the evening pass by, wanted a smoke to exhale into the damp escaping the buildings.

+

Jimmy was the caretaker of the Casa Azul, the Blue House. He was handsome, packed together, short and broad, inset eyes and a gap-tooth in the slow but lingering smile. He lived in the house near the gate, between the field of hens and mezcal, quick to open and close the iron when La Senora arrived.

From the taxi between airport and hotel, official, por supuesto, my father and mother talked about Jimmy (which should be read as Yi-Mee), about the caretaker in D.F. named Juan. They knew I understood how things worked, but they were right, the presence of help surprised me. At twenty-five I had not been in a house where dinner was served to me. I noted it arrived on the left, as I was taught as a waitress.

At the Casa Azul, the girl who cleaned and cut the mango and cleared the plates walked up the road from the regional bus system. She was maybe seventeen, or nineteen, or fifteen. Sra. Bernadette stood next to her to cut avocado or insisted on pouring my father more coffee. My ma, la Gringa, protested. My father deferred and quietly nodded Thanks. Stared out the window from the table next to the kitchen, watched the mountains.

+

My father spent the life I’ve known him travelling. Sr. Cesar and Sra. Bernadette came to my parents’ house when I was a girl, my memory of them fractured and hazy. My father and Cesar worked together during his tenure in Mexico, my father with his other side away from the reticence, the calm, the observation I saw him in my life as when he worked with officials and engineers who pulled out petroleum, cleaned it, used it or sent it away.

He used his technical degree, years of charm and firmness, his throat that pitched upward and headshakes in Spanish (both instinct and the U.S. Air Force gift of slight deafness). He was often in another country during my life. I knew, especially as I grew older, to call him on Fridays, when I knew he landed. For a time I could manipulate gasoline money from the company he worked for. A few months after I got my driver’s license, I hunched over my tiny car’s steering wheel in a blizzard on the way to the airport, barely miles from their house, to pick him up, daughter tax. I sometimes miss the afternoon hums of flight patterns. I skidded the ramps and almost slid out to pick him up, his small suitcase and nod at the terminal. He expensed the tips and I filled the tank.

+

We went to dinner at the house in Mexico City. Cesar filled it with antiquities: beloved Catholic pieces, 19th century furniture, paintings. I later learned he proclaimed himself an Atheist. As a child, he gave my father a painting, reminiscent of El Greco, an old man and his rooster.

"A farmer?" I asked.

"A cockfighter!” My mother frowned. The painting lived in the basement until my parents moved.

At the time I worked at a bike shop, waited to hear about graduate school. We sat and Cesar asked me my plans. I haven’t been able to stop writing since he met me. And so first he asked me when my novel would arrive. I laughed. But school? he asked.

"Urban planning," I answered. I had not completely thought this through.

"Perfecto!" Bernadette slapped her thigh.

"Como architectura?" one of the sons said. My Spanish is, and was, out of depth, and I hated and hate reverting to English. I resolved to answer only when asked. And I said, "Pues, si."

Later I found out Cesar was past 80. I should have assumed this, grown children and man’s empire, a King’s benevolence and graciousness and charm. He did not seem ancient. He asked me questions over dinner--caldo, carne, beautiful sopes in my small palm, furrowed his owl brow. A lover of books and history, he wanted to tell me of my brilliance, made no mention of my throat going from English to Spanish to both. My parents smiled at me. I can see why they like him, why he deigns to respect them. When we walked into the dark hotel, I climbed into the cold and perfect damp sheets, listened to the Zocalo.

+

People who heard about my trip before and after leaned their heads back, smiled, "Ay, San Miguel, Guanajuato!"

Bernadette took us to the center of San Miguel. As my father worked on his complexities, she walked my mother and I around. In shops she pulled skirts and tunics and dresses in blue and yellow and green linen. My mother and I objected, as is our plain- state mindset, but Senora set her tinted lips. I left with the dress, pooling skirts, stamped steel necklaces. I poked the heavy and elaborate earrings through my lobes.

As an infant, my ma held her ground and I didn’t pierce my ears until a grown up, consensually, at age 18, my first year of college. When we met my father after we left the shop, he admired their heft, teased me with their grande chola pull.

El Pipila is the monument attraction in Guanajuato. We did not go into the mining caves. On a post or prenuptial visit to my tias in Venezuela, my pa convinced my ma to go into bat caves in the jungle, bats, bugs, grime, all. But el Pipila is a giant man with a stone on his back, an anonymous hero of the Revolution. He pulled a mining slab on his back, meant to blow the Spaniards for a mile high. And he lived.

I think, now, what would this place I live be like if we erected statues like that? A giant land crossed by epics of tribes, enormous works for those who threw themselves to die because they had to. The Haymarket riots now mean increasing land value west of downtown Chicago, a small plaque, a bar named after the square that rebelling workers were murdered in daylight at serving craft beer..

+

The night before we left for San Miguel, my father and Cesar met to talk business. My mother and I left them after Cesar told me about the history of Mexico via a book by Dulles, his brows knit and enticing as any night bird.

After we stared down antiquities in the archeological museum and walked to the hotel, the noise gained around us. The April air was just warm, the cool settled in about the street lights. On the sidewalk I felt my ma stop, and behind swelled masses of men and women, mostly young. They hit drums and chanted, carried banners and giant flags. My mother flattened against the wall as she was taught in more violent countries, and I was about to leap forward. She stopped me. "Carmen Alicia," she commanded, "Cuidate!"

"Ay, ma. Come on." I pled to take pictures for my leftist friends back home. I ran forward, took terrible, blurry night shots of the young marching for better education, for Christ, anything better than what was given to them. The photos turned out full of light, young bodies. I wanted to use the flash and didn’t, knowing how that goes. The march went on for a few blocks, headed towards the Zocalo. When they passed, we waited a few moments. As we walked forward my mother said, "Don’t tell your father."

+

When I was a teenager, just able to legally drive, my Tia came to visit us. She was one of my old guard, sister to my long dead Abuela I always wanted to know because I never got to. She was the youngest of the women who I later learned were the stuff of the novels I plotted - some mean or unambitious or tired, some cunning and alcoholic. My Tia was tiny but still got around, having outlived two husbands.

Before she and I took off on an errand, my father told me in no uncertain terms to not let her see me pump gasoline, to keep my nails and hair clean. It was shorter than my lady family complimented me on, but she admired it. Later she bought me beautiful pastel sheets, the color of an ocean or the coast she lived on, where Venezuela sat just a few miles somewhere else. I, in fact, still own most of those sheets and shams.

That April I tried to pack appropriately for the trip, clean jeans, nice shirts, earrings, heels. I even bought a dress I never wore. But Bernadette bought me another one. She would not consider an alternative to her generosity. When she drove us steadfastly out to the Pyramids, she found out I, like many young women my age, had a predilection for owls. She bought clay figures of buhos from all sides, filled my backpack with ceramic surrounded in newsprint. She told me I looked hermosa in queen violet, steel, endless belts embroidered with flowers. She gasped and laughed at my stories: "Hijole!" she’d amaze. At young men in squares or selling snacks in traffic, she’d call, "Joven!" and smile, ask her questions. Until we met, I never knew the joys of a Charro Negro: tequila and Coca Cola, always ordered as Coca Dieta, and encouraged me to sip in the afternoons we took breaks from exploring, dusty and tanned, my brain amazed, my tongue happy and still.

+

The last night when we returned to the Distrito Federal we stayed in the hotel my father made his work base out of during his years in the country. The high rise Maria Isabella looked out on the Angel, the Paseo de Reforma long and cast into the city following the gaze of dead revolutionaries.

One morning I woke up and took the elevator to the lobby, stood in front to watch the stream of people on wheels careen around the circle. The sun felt far away, some stilted heat, and I wondered how to build a life to end up pedalling an old European bicycle down a street in Mexico City some Sunday morning, by myself, basket for my lunch set before me, books in my head. I had just finished Bolano's Savage Detectives, was hoping to commit the next two years of my life to the study, planning and regulation of cities. I did not know a city like Distrito Federal was the future. I just felt a pull to it. That morning I wanted to live anywhere else in the world, alone, full of risky possibilities, leering men, fruit washed in the water of curses.

When my father walked in the lobby of the hotel, the men working there beamed, grasped his hand, greeted him by name. "Welcome back, Senor," they said. They took my parents’ bags instantaneously and I followed with my pack slung between my shoulders. I don’t think I gaped, but watched carefully as they conversed in Spanish. I caught, “Suecia”, my father telling him he had moved from la Chicago, yes, the country was cold, he hoped they’d send him back there often.

"What is this?" I asked my mother. My father moved as a flexible and learned shark, assured and swift.

"What do you expect?" she replied. "He lived here, basically."

That night he crossed us over la Reforma, into the lights and designer clothes and clubs of La Zona Rosa, the lean boys holding hands, where I drank micheladas in a dark street cast with the lights of clubs and liquor signs. So much of the trip was spent in a trio, something I, as a young adult hadn’t known in twenty-something years. They speak Spanish now knowing I understand it, or at least, understand more than I did as a diminishing bilingual child. 

Then I could ask about the work done by my parents in the past, in Pinochet’s Chile, in my father’s travels in Mexico, Colombia, his life in Venezuela. How vast systems got interpreted through my parents, my family, their brains, nicknames and serious pauses, how those came through, “Carmen, you have to understand.” When I declared I’d like to live there, in Mexico City, near the Zocalo, the Zona rosa, the headshakes, the emphatic responses of, "Absolutely not."

I wouldn’t have the language, and they were and are right. All the years I tried to learn, I can still only admire poems in the subjunctive. "San Miguel," they said, "Maybe. Remember, Senor Cesar said you can live in La Casa Azul and finish your novel." Behind this came the knowledge I don’t come from nor belong there. I could be hurt or vanished,or worse, just like any other soft body with skin who falls in love like any silly gringa.

The day I flew back to Chicago, my parents went to Miami for a wedding, and I cried in the airport. I always cry in airports but I didn’t know why I did then, exactly. There was no one to miss or mourn. I would return to the States for my birthday, for a summer, for the beginning of graduate school.

+

The last morning at the Casa Azul, Bernadette and my ma urged me to wear the dress. The morning burnt off and I sat on the wood steps, stared at the mountains. I drank coffee and clicked to the collection of dogs Bernadette alternatively cooed or commanded at. Most of them were beautiful, handsome mixed shepherds. I tried to make my voice like hers, calling, "Luuuuuuula." Outdoor and dusty packed, I realized the dress would be prey to their claws, tongues, affections, and went up to the bedroom to pull on my ratty jeans.

On my way in my pa, soundlessly sipped coffee, blinked at the outside scent, the door.

"Quite la dress," he said at me. "La reina?"

"Always," I agreed.

Before we got in Bernadette’s car to drive down the vast highway, she gathered the dogs.

"Ata! Pirata! Luuuuula!" I called with her. She clapped her hands. Ven aca! Daniel, to my father, Vamonos! My father snapped the photo, blue house, tall dogs, my ponytail and shiny lobes, a squint and shrugged smile. My arms pulled their necks to me, my eyes lost in the gaze at the mountain.

Carmen Aiken is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in Chicago. You can find an archive of her writing on This Recording here. She last wrote in these pages about things she never liked explaining.

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