Malas, p.1
Malas, page 1
VIKING
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Copyright © 2024 by Marcela Fuentes
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Fuentes, Marcela (Fiction writer), author.
Title: Malas : a novel / Marcela Fuentes.
Description: New York : Viking, 2024. |
Identifiers: LCCN 2023029868 | ISBN 9780593655788 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780593655795 (ebook)
Subjects: LCGFT: Novels.
Classification: LCC PS3606.U38 M35 2023 | DDC 813/.6—dc23/eng/20231003
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023029868
Ebook ISBN 9780593655795
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Cover design: Kelly Winton
Cover images: (woman, detail) Maples Images / Shutterstock; (azaleas) Louis Prang & Company Collection / Boston Public Library; (lasso) Yeti Studio / Shutterstock; (paper cutting) RedKoala / Shutterstock
Designed by Cassandra Garruzzo Mueller, adapted for ebook by Estelle Malmed
pid_prh_7.0_147192869_c0_r0
Contents
Dedication
el paso de la muerte
Chapter One: A Happy Time
Chapter Two: La Muertita
my name
Chapter Three: Witch Luck
Chapter Four: The Funeral
Chapter Five: La Llorona In Levis
Chapter Six: Amachada
Chapter Seven: El Último Hijo
Chapter Eight: Skip-Outs
Chapter Nine: Jangly Guitar Rock
Chapter Ten: Young Coyotes
Chapter Eleven: Vandals
down by the river
Chapter Twelve: Black Cats
Chapter Thirteen: Gritonazo
Chapter Fourteen: Gato Negro
Chapter Fifteen: Fallaste Corazón
Chapter Sixteen: Selena Forever
Chapter Seventeen: Mala Yerba Nunca Muere
Acknowledgments
About the Author
_147192869_
For Roberto and Lety
and
For my grandmothers
el paso de la muerte
After children, you can never be whole again. Después de dar a luz, your body comes back incomplete. You’re alone inside yourself, like you never were before your man took you, made you a mother.
Once there was a girl, just fifteen. A girl at a charreada, a rodeo in another place and time. A girl standing on a metal staircase, a glass of lemonade sweating in her hand. She lost her heart to a young charro. Oh, he made the dust fly for her.
Invisible girl, snatching at her father’s affection. She was a quince, but a secret, pecadillo de Papá, her birthday this clandestine weekend away. You know you’re my favorite, Papá said, bought her a slew of pretty dresses, a dawn mariachi serenade, tickets for the two of them to the charreada. Let her wander among the vendors and peddlers in the stockyard, said, Buy anything you want.
La quince was buying the lemonade when the charro crossed her path.
The charro was not like her papá. Not of the landed class. Young and swarthy, he was a horseman, a vaquero, born and raised on the range, campfires in his blood, his whole life the lariat and saddle, wind and open sky. He wore no charro short jacket, just a white shirt with modest stitching. His leather chaps were oiled but scarred. He was bareheaded and the afternoon light made his black hair glow.
She felt him beside her, quiet as the warm sun. He wanted her to look at him. She kept her eyes down; she was a good girl. When the vendor turned away to make change, the charro leaned in and whispered, “The next suerte is for you.”
La quince pulled away, but he was gone, already weaving his way through the crowd.
She stopped at the top of the staircase on her way back to her seat. There was the charro, standing in the arena, the reins of an unsaddled bay in his hand. She could not see his face beneath his sombrero, only the brief glint of his teeth. She didn’t smile back. She was a good girl. But she stayed. She watched. His ride was for her.
The charro held up his hand, three fingers spread, at the spectators in the grandstand, at the other competitors sitting on the chutes. Three broncs charged through the stock gate, into the arena.
The young charro sprang onto his horse from the ground. It was a light movement, as though someone had tossed him up. His thighs against the horse’s hide were lean and hard. The girl stood, rooted to the landing, the glass of lemonade cold in her hand.
He pulled his mount alongside the broncs, setting his horse at pace with the lead mare. The other charros drove the animals hard, round and round the arena, lifting thunderheads of dust. Hooves rumbled against the earth, riatas hissed, the charros called low and fierce, driving them faster. The young charro rode past, one leg cocked beneath him, ready to spring.
She felt the rush of air as he galloped by. His horse’s harsh breath flecked the hem of her new dress with spittle. Her heart flew away quick as quick, a golondrina startled from its nest, never to return.
The young charro leaped bare back to bare back, body half-curled, shadowy in the dusty air. And then he was across, fists full of sorrel mane, fighting to keep his seat as the wild horse twisted beneath him. His sombrero tumbled off, swept away beneath the onslaught of hooves. He rode the bronco the circuit twice through.
His teammates lifted their voices in triumphant gritos—“A-ha-haaaaayyy! José Alfredo!”
He was a proud one. But she was prouder. Didn’t they see what he’d done for her? Didn’t they know?
* * *
• • •
Looking for that girl is like looking backward through a telescope. She’s far away and so tiny I can cover her with the tip of my finger, like blotting out the sun. I can still feel her radiating. But I don’t know where she has gone.
Chapter One
A Happy Time
PILAR AGUIRRE, 1951
Swollen feet, Pilar decided as she set hers into the bucket of cool water, were the most ridiculous indignity of pregnancy. Worse than acid reflux or the spasmodic belly twitches of a baby hiccuping in the womb. Worse than a flare of acne or even sudden flatulence attacks, which at least she could repress through sheer force of will. Fat feet and fat ankles. They were the worst.
La de la mala suerte siempre soy yo, she thought. Of course this would happen now. José Alfredo had invited her to the quinceañera of Dulce Ramirez. He was not given to socializing and the girl was not a relation. As such, the invitation was a great concession. An overture, really. He had asked Pilar as a peace offering after months of her unspoken grievances. That suited her very well. Everyone in the Caimanes neighborhood would see that, though Pilar was eight months pregnant with their second child, her husband yet treated her as a lover.
Only, the quince was the third Saturday in August. Pilar woke the morning of the dance with feet gone puffy as fresh biscuits.
Now, she sat on the front steps of her comadre Romi Muñoz’s house, pouring Epsom salt into the bucket while her five-year-old son Joselito zinged pecans into the street. Half the neighborhood was probably watching her, but what could she do? Romi was cooking beans for the evening festivities, so the house was like a sauna.
“Leave them in for at least thirty minutes,” Romi said from behind the kitchen screen door. “If it doesn’t work, I’ll lend you a pair of mine.”
“All right,” Pilar agreed, a little queasy from the heavy pork fat scent of the simmering beans. “But get out of the kitchen or I’ll have to do your hair all over again.”
“Ya mero.” Romi disappeared into the kitchen again.
Pilar rolled her eyes. It wouldn’t be a minute, she knew. She’d arranged Romi’s hair in pin curls, carefully wrapped the hairdo in a kerchief, but it would be flat by the time the party started. Romi, so clever at organizing and problem-solving, siempre era descuidada about her appearance. Romi simply didn’t care about how she looked. True, she was forty-seven, two decades older than Pilar. Maybe you stopped caring in middle age. Maybe it happened along with a thickening waist and canas. Still, Pilar couldn’t imagine not caring about her looks at any age.
Pilar flexed her toes in the water, willing them back to normal size. Romi’s shoes were likely serviceable rather than elegant, but what else was there? None of Pilar’s own shoes fit, except her battered old guaraches. The idea of wearing them to the dance appalled her. She’d put together a smart outfit for tonight: a dark blouse patterned with tiny yellow daisies and an oversized gold collar bow. A pair of trim black cotton trousers. She’d sewn an elastic panel into the waist just for this party. She’d wear her hair loose, parted in the middle, with rosette curls at each side of her forehead, just like Mar ía Félix.
Joselito darted her way, plunging a handful of pecans between her puffy feet. Water splashed them both in the face. He chortled, hair plastered to his forehead, a damp stain across the front of his shirt like a bib.
“No, no, mijo,” she scolded, but without conviction. Her head was tender in the oppressive heat, and her own voice sharpened the pain. Joselito grabbed a fold of her cotton dress and punched the water again.
“Joselito,” she murmured, trying to pull his fingers loose. “Be good for Mami.”
She should stay home tonight. She was that tired already. Why would anyone want to have a celebration in the full zenith of la canícula, the scorched-earth misery of the hottest weeks of the year? Every day so wretched that the neighborhood dogs crept beneath houses to pant out their misery. The sky so eye-wateringly brilliant it wasn’t even blue, but a fierce yellow white. No, she must go or José Alfredo would not invite her again. He would say, I asked. You said no.
Hay que contentarme, she thought, though she was far from contented. She grabbed at Joselito’s wrists, trying to push him away. Joselito didn’t budge. He knew she could not defeat him. He was quick and she was so slow, so heavy. So hot.
It was to be an outdoor gathering, but the night would not make it bearable. After sundown the ground emitted its collected heat, so that it clung to the air, even at midnight. There was no relief.
If it had only been the heat, she could have told José Alfredo. He would have, well, not understood—what man could understand pregnancy?—but he would have sympathized with her, sympathized precisely because it was some feminine mystery beyond him. And, because her suffering was a compliment for himself. After all, she bore this discomfort because of him. Yes, she thought, he was proud of it. Probably proud of her, her love for him, bearing these things for his sake.
Yes, he would have been sympathetic. He would have. Except that José Alfredo had bought a house on Loma Negra, the hill at the end of Romi’s street. Pilar hated the house.
The new house, Pilar’s silently blooming resentment. She missed the apartment they had rented in Barrio Caimanes. It was small, but clean and well maintained by their landlords, Chuy and Romi Muñoz. She had liked that it was set behind the Muñoz home, away from the street. She had liked living near Romi.
When she’d told José Alfredo about the new baby, he said he was tired of renting. The family was growing. They must have their own home. A few weeks later, he purchased a small house on a parcel of uncultivated land at the edge of the neighborhood. Loma Negra was a very low hill, a knoll really, overlooking Barrio Caimanes. Pilar herself had been enthusiastic, until she saw the house.
There was no way around the fact that their new home was distinctly something more like the shacks in las colonias—the shantytowns outside the city limits. It was a wood-slatted shotgun house, narrow as the path of a bullet. If you stood in the front doorway, you could see out the back door. Two bedrooms, true, and José Alfredo liked the wraparound porch and the big pecan trees in the yard. Pilar pointed out that it had no running water. There was a well and a pump, and an outhouse.
“But it’s ours,” José Alfredo had said. “I’ll put in the plumbing. I’ll be done before the baby comes.”
Pilar could not argue that this was unreasonable, and he had finished most of the plumbing, but still. It was a fifteen-minute walk down to the neighborhood. Not far, but far enough. In Caimanes, there were real streets with streetlights. Playmates for Joselito. Other wives with whom she exchanged news, lent and borrowed. Had her own share in the collective vigilance of the Caimanes mothers over their children as they wandered the neighborhood.
There was no one near this lonesome spot. There was not even a good road, other than the one José Alfredo had cleared for his truck. Many nights she would awaken to the wailing of coyotes in the dark. José Alfredo, used to ranch life, hardly stirred. For him, the new home was a respite from el hormiguero, he called it. The ant colony of the neighborhood. While he slept, Pilar would sit at the bedroom window and peer out at the darkness, listening to the rustle of the uncleared brush, not knowing whether it was the wind or something else. The moonlight, spectral and remote. The low whistles of hunting owls frightened her most.
She could not say this to him. He had purchased a home for her. He would finish it. He would make it comfortable. And he was doing that—working in the evenings and every weekend on the house. He was working all the time, she reminded herself. It had not gone well when she had asked him to put up a fence in front of the house to keep Joselito from straying out of the yard.
“I’m afraid of the coyotes,” she had said. “Joselito always wants to be outside.”
She didn’t mention owls. José Alfredo thought her fear of them absurd. He’d been a vaquero all his life, spent nights sleeping in the open during the corridas when they drove the cattle down from the sierra. Owls were just birds.
“Coyotes won’t come during the day,” José Alfredo scoffed. “I’ll get a fence up, be patient. I’m doing it by myself.”
“I do what I can too,” she had said. She had not said, Maybe you should have waited to buy a house. Maybe you should have chosen a different one.
She had not said those things. Her words lingered, hot and still as the summer air, unsaid in her mouth. No, she had not said anything to him. But her silence was enough.
Finishing the house was taking longer than he’d thought it would. He knew he had made a wrong decision. He had not said he was sorry. But a week ago, he had come home with their mail, still delivered at their post office box on Main Street, with the invitation in his hand. Would she like to go to the quinceañera? He would like to take her. This was his apology. He knew very well what would bend her to forgiveness.
Pilar relished neighborhood celebrations with the avidity of one denied the flourishes of debutante and bride. Six years before, the train had fetched her north, from the clustered ranchitos of San Carlos in the Mexican state of Coahuila to the town of La Cienega, just across the border in Texas.
She had carried José Alfredo’s engagement gift, a pair of gold filigree arracada earrings, sewn into the lining of her rosary pouch, in her lap all the way to the border. Her train had arrived on a Friday, at three in the afternoon. By quarter to four she had married José Alfredo Aguirre, married him in her traveling dress, but with the earrings brushing her neck. She’d been all of nineteen years old.
They had spent the wedding night on the Mexican side of the border, in Ciudad Bravo, at the Hotel Paradiso. They ate dinner in the fancy dining room, waited upon by servers in trim jackets, danced to the in-house band, boleros and American standards. Pilar felt the earrings, the weight of them, swaying with her movements. She had felt beautiful. But it had not been a celebration. It had not been a gala.
I’ll wear the arracadas tonight, Pilar thought as she shifted on the front steps, trying to stay shaded under the wide green leaves of the banana tree. Behind that thought was another, one she certainly would not have owned, though it was an annoyance that crept traitorously to vanity: the quinceañera could have waited for October. Everyone said so. Pilar herself would have been over her confinement, her body her own again, and she, ready to dance.
Behind the house, she could hear Yolanda, Romi’s daughter, singing as she shelled pecans on the back porch. She had a sweet voice. She sang unabashedly, in the manner of small children who believe they are alone when they cannot see anyone around them. Pilar sighed. She wished Joselito would help Yolanda with the pecan shelling, but he would not settle to the task. Oh well, when Romi finished with the beans, maybe they would take the children for a walk, swollen feet or no.
“Is this the home of José Alfredo Aguirre?”
An old woman stood in the middle of the street in front of the house. She wore a dark high-collared dress and a black lace mantilla over her hair, which was white and pinned in a low bun. She carried a tattered pocketbook tucked in the crook of her arm. She was small, brittle in the way of slight women in their twilight years. Pilar guessed her to be in her seventies.
