Chapter 4
4
‘I’ll show you to your seat inside.’
‘I don’t know why you didn’t marry in Spain,’ says Tia Teresa, her voice even gruffer than her sister Mari-Carmen’s. With a wobble on a thick ankle, she concedes to take Hector’s arm.
Alejandro, smaller than his grandson but as solid as an ox, stabilises Teresa by her other arm.
‘I’ll take Dona Teresa inside, mijo ,’ his grandfather says quietly. Alejandro is a man of few words, but he is astute and perceptive, and he can see the lingering look of sadness in Hector’s eyes.
Alejandro and Teresa pass Sister Miriam as she comes out of the cathedral, searching for Hector from behind tiny spectacles.
‘Ah, there you are! The children are all settled and can’t wait to see you, Hectorcito,’ says the tiny woman in a grey and white habit as she rubs her wrinkled palms together.
‘Thank you, Sister,’ Hector says warmly, taking her hands in his. Sister Miriam’s face wears the first bit of real cheer Hector has seen all morning, and it lifts his sallow shadow a little .
Sister Miriam looks around to check they are alone amid the traffic noise, cheers and chaos of a Xalapa morning.
‘You know, Hector, I understand this must be a bittersweet time for you . It must be hard doing this on your own.’
‘I’m not on my own, Sister. I have Abuelo, and you, and the children…’ Hector squeezes Sister Miriam’s hands tighter. ‘And now I have a new mum and dad from Spain!’ he says, with a roll of his eyes.
Sister Miriam gives a cheeky smile back. She couldn’t help but notice the grandiose women with big hats and big hair, and Hector sees the mischievous sparkle behind Sister Miriam’s glasses before her eyes become sombre.
‘Your mother and father would have been very proud of you, Hector,’ she says.
‘Thank you,’ Hector mumbles, looking down at the floor.
‘You have become a fine man. A fine man with lots of friends and people who care about you. Look at how many people are inside there rooting for you. The children haven’t slept properly all week, they’ve been so excited about today.’ Sister Miriam releases a hand from his to wipe a faint smear of red lipstick from the collar of Hector’s shirt, but it won’t come off. ‘Thank you for inviting them.’
‘They’re my family,’ Hector says as he looks beyond Sister Miriam’s spectacles, then down at his shoes with a smile. He wears brown lace-ups that look as if they are as old as Hector, even though he’s only worn them twice.
‘And you are theirs,’ she says, looking up at him. ‘You give them hope, Hector.’
A wave of nausea washes over him again and he feels terrible. He inhales a deep breath and then takes, and kisses, Miriam’s remaining hand to release her. Amid the beeping horns and shaky engines, the faint sound of unabashed, uncontrollable child laughter trickles out of the cathedral.
‘I had better get back to them…’ Sister Miriam smiles warmly, then she turns on her heel. ‘Oh, Hector, please don’t be a stranger to them after you’re married. They’ve missed you these past months.’
Wretched guilt that was fizzing away in Hector’s stomach since he woke now rises like bile in his throat.
‘Sorry, Sister, it’s been a busy time planning all this.’ Hector gestures his hands towards the cathedral. ‘I’ll come visit next week when we’re back from the coast.’
‘Do. And bring your paintbrushes. Your mural needs a bit of work. The children can help you this time.’
Hector smiles and remembers the summer spent breaking his back, painting the entire facade and ceiling of Sister Miriam’s orphanage; the smell of the thick syrupy cacao Sister Juana made for his rest breaks; the mousy English girl who came out to volunteer and help with the refurbishment but ended up unwittingly changing Hector’s life; the unusual eerie silence in the old hacienda as the kids were shipped off to stay at an orphanage in Coatepec for the summer; the tales they told Hector about lazy days at the waterfall when they came back.
It must have been ten years ago already. No, twenty.
Hector smiles to his shoes again, thinking about how, at eighteen, he was painting walls, frescoes, ceilings – his canvas and his imagination had no limits. Now he is a political cartoonist for the local newspaper, La Voz de Xalapa , his art limited to a 10cm x 5cm box. He’s pressurised into being witty and sardonic about the day’s news before the sun goes down and the paper goes to print; before Hector can relax and go out to a cantina, or to find Pilar in a bar.
‘Good luck, compadre !’ yells a thick, deep voice that makes Hector’s heart sink and the contents of his stomach curdle. It’s a voice that travels up Hector’s spine and climbs inside his brain, and each time he hears it he wishes it were the last. He looks out onto the street but can’t see sinister eyes smiling back at him; he can’t see the sun beaming off a gold tooth. He scans the park opposite for a bare arm, slashed and scarred, giving a jovial, menacing wave from the tight constraints of a black leather waistcoat. He puts his hand to his brow to look towards the brightness of the day but can’t see the figure he’s looking for, and hiding from. The voice comes again, accompanied by a frantic wave of an arm. This time, the voice seems softer. Less menacing. Hector exhales a sigh of relief. He sees a newspaper seller standing on the corner, leaning on the exterior wall of a colonial arch of the Palacio de Gobierno, shouting and waving again. ‘ Suerte! ’
‘ Gracias, Chava! ’ Hector shouts back, flushed with relief that distracts him from the heaviness of what’s ahead. It’s Salvador Mendoza, Chava to his friends. Hector remembers everyone’s name in Xalapa, from all the women who work in Lazaro’s to the tellers at the Post Office, to the boy who gets the coffees for their editor at work, to the guy who sells the newspaper on the street corner. And they all know Hector.
He looks out at the view from the cathedral steps. In the distance, beyond the stalls selling candy floss, churros and plastic toys in the tree-lined terrace of Parque Juárez, he sees the Pico de Orizaba, snow-capped and mighty, looking back at him with a look of disapproval.
Hector glances back down towards his hands and sees the Spanish flag rubberised in a band on his wrist. A gesture of love for Pilar and the culture he’s marrying into. Or was it just because her football team was better than his? Hector can’t even remember the night he put it on, but the blood-red stripes that encase a golden centre remind him of the sangre Pilar promised she would shed for Hector were he to let her down. He puts his hands in his pockets.
‘Always the extranjera, always the foreign girl, cabrón !’ is what Hector’s friend Ricky said when Hector told him he had met a cool schoolteacher who had come over from Spain. It stuck in his mind so much that he remembers the off-the-cuff comment from six years ago. But Ricky was right. Hector fell in love with foreigners very easily; perhaps it felt safer if things were lost in translation, and it was mostly easy to find a reason to end it when the time came.
There was the quiet English girl at the orphanage that summer, who he’s surprised he sometimes thinks about; the long-limbed Australian who was in town for a year learning Spanish at the university; the sincere American who managed to get Hector to visit her in Oregon; her best friend who he fell for on his first – and last – visit there; Pilar all the way from Spain…
At least his romances seemed to finally be getting closer to his culture – he and Pilar did speak the same language after all, even if her Gallega lisp made their friends laugh. And Pilar is the only woman to match Hector drink for drink and laugh for laugh, which he marvels about every time he looks at her. But five minutes from the altar and looking back up at Orizaba’s disdain, Hector thinks of the one girl he’s tried to forget about, but can’t, for the past few months – the past five years. The strangest extranjera of them all because he can’t imagine anything about her snowy life on top of the world, even though he thinks she could have been his soulmate.
If I climbed that mountain, would it bring us closer?
A woman with crisp orange curls hurries up the steps of the cathedral, almost late.
‘Ay, what a handsome groom!’ she says appreciatively, holding her hand to her chest before opening her arms out. The woman wears a grey jacket and matching pencil skirt, the uniform from Lazaro’s department store from where she’s ducked out for an hour to see Lupe’s boy wed. ‘You know your mother would have been very proud of you today, Hectorcito,’ the woman says, embracing him.
Hector feigns a grateful smile. ‘Thank you, Cintia. I’m glad you could come, it means a lot.’
‘I wouldn’t miss this for the world!’ Cintia puts a hand on each of Hector’s upper arms and breathes out a sigh of admiration. They both know what she’s thinking as she lingers over his face – how much Hector looks like his mother. ‘Now, come inside, Hector, I thought I was late. She’ll be here any minute!’
Hector hugs Cintia tight, accidentally tasting hairspray from a crunchy lock.
‘I’m just getting some air, guapa , I’ll be a little second, you go,’ Hector says with a reassuring wave before he puts his hands back in his pockets.
‘OK, don’t run off now!’ Cintia says with a wink as she rushes up the stairs in the hope of getting a decent seat, her tight grey skirt testing the seam that runs down her squashed bottom.
Alejandro walks out of the cathedral, looking for his grandson. His straight hair is white and neat, like a frame around his head.
‘Everything OK, mijo ?’ he asks as he puts a hand on Hector’s shoulder from the step above.
I miss her.
‘Sure thing, Abuelito.’
I will never touch her.
‘It’s time to go. Pilar will be here any minute.’
‘I know.’ Hector takes his hands out of his pockets and opens his arms wide up towards his grandfather .
‘I’m very proud of you, you know, Hector,’ he says, falling into Hector’s embrace and patting his back with a liver-spotted hand.
Hector smiles and lifts Alejandro off his step a little and both men laugh, very differently. Hector’s is wholehearted; when he laughs, his thick straight brows rise in the middle and he shakes all the way down to his shoulders. His grandfather’s laugh is sedate, just a little lift of his eyebrows and the flash of a playful flicker in his eye.
Beeps and cheers in the distance signal Leonel and Pilar approaching in the bridal car.
It is time.
‘You know your mother and father would have been very proud of you today,’ Alejandro says sombrely.
Hector gives a wry laugh. He wouldn’t be sick of hearing it if he thought it were true.
‘No, they wouldn’t.’ He smiles, kindly, as he pats his grandfather on the back to usher them both up the steps.
Hector doesn’t really remember his mother or father. He remembers the noise of metal being punched by branches and bracken; he remembers last gasps and young cries of despair. But when Hector tries to remember what his mother and father looked like from memory, he only sees them with blank faces. He filled in the blanks from the few photos of them his grandfather gave him. His favourite is pressed to his heart on the inside pocket of his suit jacket right now. It isn’t their wedding photo; it’s the photo of a young Victor Herrera, his hair straight and neat like his father’s, his arm draped around a woman with beautiful soft waves that tumble around her bare shoulders. Behind her ear sits a pink hibiscus flower, its petals yellow at the edges, the colour bursting out from behind Lupe’s black curls, even though the photo is faded. Hector imagines his father had recently picked the flower for his mother and gallantly placed it behind her ear. She gazes, almost flirtatiously, at the camera. Victor’s slightly serious face is imbued with pride, and it always struck Hector that the face could have been cut and pasted from a photo from the nineteenth century, not the 1980s. His look is timeless.
As Hector walks the stone steps to the cathedral door, he wonders how Victor and Lupe might have felt on their wedding day. He wishes he could time travel, to escape here, to be a guest at their wedding, in the same cathedral, almost forty years ago. Just to witness a snapshot in their lives, to be able to sketch in the blank faces in real life. To look at his father and gauge what face a groom ought to have on his wedding day. To see movement and laughter and tenderness and contentment, to see more than the wedding photo pinned to the wall above his desk at home, or the photo hugging his chest from the inside pocket of his jacket. To hear their voices. For their stories and their laughter to be so much richer than the anecdotes told by the older ladies who still work in Lazaro’s. Hector imagines his mother’s laughter as infectious.
As Alejandro and Hector enter the cathedral, a hundred faces turn towards them in excitement. Best men Ricky and Elias stand at the front, seeming relieved by the groom’s arrival. Elias gestures to his wristwatch and gives Hector a nagging look. To his right, a curve of chubby hands wave at him in excitement and unison. Hector swallows the rising bile and smiles back at little faces, his eyes creasing playfully at the corners, glad at least that his wedding has brought joy and excitement to the children of the Villa Infantil De Nuestra Senora.