by Tina McCain Mattei
“Benito, hijo de Benito, le decían ‘Tito’
El mayor de seis trabajando desde chamaquito
Guiando camiones como el pa y el abuelo
Aunque su sueño siempre fue ser ingeniero.”
Benito Martinez Ocasio, “LA MuDANZA”
San Patricio: post-hurricane, pre-hurricane. Another one will always come. The in-between can be nebulous, a time of middling. We do not discuss our bookends, but idly find ways to kill time between tragedies.
It is a familiar block of colorful one-story concrete houses with flat roofs. A bar on the street corner, a grocery store behind our house, and the whole of the neighborhood flanked by the neverending jungle, which pulsates with bug rhythms, the smack of bird wings as a flock flees some perceived danger, and the rustle of creatures patrolling the underbrush. The jungle mumble composes the score of life in San Patricio: the crescendos of late nights on the streets, the subdued syncopation of dawn when the bats emerge from their burrows to flit here and there. The last storm had whisked away the palm fronds and the power lines, leaving the trunks of trees bare and the line poles awkwardly empty.
Many of the women who live on the block have invested in a whimsical mailbox to adorn their stake on the streetside. There are statuettes of Spanish colonial forts with mailslots next to their portholes, a real coconut messily modified into a mailbox, a large plastic cheeseburger, a palm tree, a seashell, a big plantain.
But none in the neighborhood were able to outdo Miriam, whose mail must be inserted into the buttcrack of a pasty American tourist whose pants have fallen to his ankles as he leans over to pick up his hot pink beach bag. When the grandchildren come in droves from America in the summer months and holidays, they howl and clap their hands and fill Miriam’s mailbox full of leaves and nonsensical notes and condoms from the teenagers. Miriam doesn’t mind the junk mail, as it proves her victory over the other abuelitas.
Reclusive Doña Soto lives all the way at the end of the block, her casita pressing up against the jungle. The women of San Patricio noticed she joined the tournament when a parrot shaped mailbox showed up beside her house, poking askew out of the mass of untrimmed greenery of her yard. The bird appeared to be at a horizontal dive, a gigantic beak pointed into the street with a smaller, torpedo-shaped body following.
When Primo, the mailman, first encountered this avian shaped receptacle, he was unsure how to proceed. All of the other boxes had a self-evidence to them that was not replicated here. His eye caught Doña Soto, staring out at him from her window, grey hair all a mess. She was laughing, pointing to her mouth.
Primo reached for the parrot’s bottom jaw and it swung down to expose its innards. In order to make the appropriate amount of space, the jaw appeared to have completely unhinged itself. The parrot laid there with its mouth agape. A bird with the mouth of a serpent, like an abyss, a divine absence. Inside the parrot’s mouth was so dark, Primo couldn’t make out if the box was a pocket or a cavern. Primo stuck the couple of letters in its mouth, half expecting the parrot’s jaw to snap shut around his wrist. But it remained inanimate and unhinged. Doña Soto was still laughing at her window, delighted by Primo’s confusion and repulsion. Primo hurried away without shutting the mailbox. The parrot remained wide-mouthed.
At the jungle’s edge, I rest my forearm against Doña Soto’s mailbox. The beak is hanging open, letters spilling out of its mouth. It is choking on Doña Soto’s negligence of her own correspondence, on her flippant ignorance of the past due bills and Christmas cards and grocery store coupons.
I watch the women down the block gather and gaggle. They’re hissing secrets in each other’s ears. They’re beautiful and crass. I study them through the palm frond in front of my face. I’m covered head to toe in a sticky thick mud that obscures me from their vision. My body blends with the foliage and I peek half of my muddied face inside the bar on the corner.
Ediberto, Monkey, and Ramón sit in a row facing away from me. Just the back of their heads is a familiar sight to my senses. I grew up spending my summers in San Patricio, clutching my grandfather’s leg and sitting on the asphalt while he played dominoes with his friends. Ediberto, Monkey, and Ramón taught me how to fetch their beers from the bar and how to shuffle the dominoes, and I loved them for it. Once I grew older, Ediberto would on occasion pull me close, his breath reeking of scotch, and tell me how much I reminded him of my mother, how beautiful and prude she used to be. I would laugh and smile and stroke his ego until he released me.
All the way on the other side of the bar room, under the fluorescent lights, Dolores stands suddenly in bright white priestly robes, clutching a bible. My mother’s voice is all fire and brimstone, plagues and natural disasters, but I can’t make out the individual words. Her voice smacks of onomatopoeia and it ruminates with such ferocity that I almost turn away. Ediberto, Monkey, and Ramón thoughtfully nod their heads in front of her, engrossed in her ferocious speech in tongues.
I quickly put a hand up to shield myself from the harsh spotlight so that I can see the sudden audience. Ediberto, Monkey, and Ramón grin back at me. They’re dressed in sharp suits in this seedy, dark club, drinking Medallas and eating oysters. They’re cheering for me, so I will put on a good show. I notice Doña Soto, sitting alone in the back corner of the room near the seemingly unaffected bartender who is slowly constructing martini after martini. Doña Soto is in her pajamas and fuzzy lavender robe, focused on the book of beginner crosswords in front of her. She’s muttering to herself, scribbling furiously in the margins.
The music starts. It’s a down tempo jazz number; sultry, slow. The men have fixed their eyes on me, raking my body up and down, imagining me this way and that. I pull the finger tip of my silk glove to reveal a glistening, perfectly manicured, unmuddied hand. It sends them into an uproar. Their eyes bore holes into my skin. They singe me.
The other glove comes off, and they sing my praises.
I turn slowly, in time with the thumping rhythm of the upright bass, and touch my toes. I shoot up, and shimmy off my dress. They’re throwing wads of cash at my ass. I turn back around and they’re yelling my name, drunkenly spilling beer in their laps. The ground around them is full of unshelled, squirming oysters. As I trace the ground, I notice that none of them have shoes on. That’s normal for Monkey, at least. Their bare toes mingle with the oysters’ undulating flesh.
My hands float upward to my chest. They are rapt, eyes wide, kneeling at the foot of the stage. Their pupils are cocaine pinpricks, in unison following my hands as they graze my chest. I grab my breasts and press them together, squeeze them hard enough that it hurts and bruises blossom under my fingers, and their hungry stares turn ravenous. I wait there a moment: me squeezing, them holding their breath.
Doña Soto suddenly cries out, “ITALIA!” At last, she’s figured out an answer to her crossword and is joyously writing it down, completely unaware of me crushing my own boobs for her entertainment.
The bass player nods at me and plays a loud, low, purring note, and I unhook my bra.
I let one tit out. It unfurls from my chest, tubular, so long that my nipple smacks the floor in front of my feet. The tit is veined by bright red stretch marks. My nipple flops to the side, staring up at me. It starts to pulse…no, beat! My heart beats erratically in my nipple on the floor.
I look up, and the men are cheering. Flinging the beer around, rubbing their cocks through their dress pants. They love my beating nipple and my grotesque cylindrical tit. I reach up and let the other tit splat out on the ground. Jazz hands. They love me and they’re weeping, singing to la Virgencita.
In the back corner of the room, I notice Dolores clutching her bible, naked. Her breasts sag sadly off her body. Her rump is bumpy and misshapen. Her stomach bulges around either side of the long scar that stretches from her sternum to her belly-button, a demarcation from when her appendix unceremoniously exploded and created a septic whirlwind in her gut. Her face is contorted into a wide-mouthed scream, her jaw unhinged, but she’s making no sound. Her fingers are pressed so hard into her bible that they are popping through the hard cover, drilling holes straight through the rolling paper pages. I stare at her, horrified, with my tits on the ground.
I’m covered in mud again, and San Patricio is empty. Giant posters are plastered on the sides of all the casitas, hanging on fences. A billboard sits on top of the bar. In this town that has no stoplights, there is suddenly a billboard.
I move closer to the giant sign to get a better look. My muddy tits drag on the ground behind me, scooping up the ground detritus like a deepsea bottom-feeder. The ground’s ornaments decorate my tits. Cigarettes, condoms, fake nails, and cat shit adorn my nipples. My boobs track mud in a paintbrush flourish behind my pace. The novelty mailboxes stand a silent guard in front of their respective abodes. I cast a glance into Miriam’s house, past the ass of the plastic bent-over-American. I see her eyes peering out through the window. When our gazes meet, she draws the curtain and disappears.
I approach the billboard. A line of text,“Who Killed Baby Duce?” stretches menacingly across the top of the sign in bright red letters. Under this inquisition there is a black and white picture of a baby with a toothless smile, in the middle of clapping his pudgy baby hands together. He’s grasping a raw clove of garlic in one paw. The baby’s name is displayed next to his portrait: “Benito Mussolini”. Under the photo, the sign reads, “He was Destined for Greatness. Million Dollar Reward for this Innocent Child’s Ruthless Killer.”
I stare at the billboard for a while, before turning to behold the signs paper pasted on the casitas behind me. They’re all duplicates of the same sign. Mussolini’s greyscale grin is plastered on all of the exterior walls of the neighborhood. The baby Benitos are looking straight at me, an army in mid-laugh. They seem to ask, “who could kill a baby?” or maybe “who could think to alter the natural cadence of history?” or even “haven’t you watched The Butterfly Effect, you stupid girl?” The sky starts to broil, grey clouds collecting menacingly above my head.
When I look at my hands, they’re no longer muddied—they’re covered in blood.
______
Tina McCain Mattei writes about crisis ordinaries and slow violence. Learn more at 222tinamm.neocities.org.
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