Read Online The Noise of Infinite Longing by Luisita Lopez Torregrosa - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Luisita Lopez Torregrosa
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giant billboards with magical pictures and words, words that had colors, shades, movement, music. I was teaching myself to read, and I began to invent stories that I kept to myself about gold treasures buried under the yellow parking strips painted on sidewalk curbs, heroic adventures in which I, much bigger in my imagination than I actually was, would dig up coins, jewels, gems, and leaping into the car, grab the wheel and somehow save my family from certain death.
All along, I was listening to my mother recount from memory the
history of Chapultepec, the fortress where the Emperors Maximil- ian and Carlota saw their end in the time of the conquest, the same fort where, centuries later, six young cadets jumped to their death defending the castle against the invading American army. Mother pointed at the monument, six very tall columns, honoring Los Niños Héroes, at the entrance to the park, where on Sundays we paddled boats among gray swans.
At the museums mother took us to, stories and paintings of the Mexican Revolution celebrated the tattered armies of Zapata and Pancho Villa, peasants in wide-brimmed charro hats and bandoliers, carrying the Mexican flag—white, red, and green, a flaying serpent in the beak of an eagle standing on a wreath of cactus—the flag limp, torn by bullets.
I memorized the names of the men in the murals—Hidalgo, Juárez, Montezuma, Cuauhtémoc—names that I saw etched on mar- ble and stone on the glorietas along the avenues that crisscrossed the city, monuments towering over the rumble of people and traffic that made Mexico a chaotic, mysterious puzzle to me.
It’s sinking, my mother told me when we stepped down at the entrance to the cathedral in the Zócalo. The cathedral, dark and musty like a tomb, rose beyond my eyes into the sky, its floor stones worn down by centuries of damp. Mexico was sinking inches every year (I tried to imagine it, to feel it falling) into the thin-air swamp on which it had been built, the Tenochtitlán of the Aztecs, the Ciu- dad de Mexico of Cortés and the Spanish conquistadors.
All that blood in that place.
W
e lived on Calle Génova, in la Zona Rosa, in a third-floor walk- up, a flat of three small rooms in an ornate stone-fronted colonial building where the laundry was hung up to dry on clothes-
lines on the rooftop. The building had an open atrium, and the flats in the upper floors were arrayed along a corridor that circled it. There was nothing special about the building, but it had a tiled courtyard, splashed with light in the dry winter months and flooded in the rainy summer season.
But we liked our apartment, with the plain wooden door marked No. 23. We could see the sky from our windows, could see on fog- less days the crown of the volcano Popocatepetl, almost always in mist, and we could run down the steps and the city was right there, at our doorstep.
Buses and cars constantly blew their horns, police sirens screeched, and vendors grilled ears of corn on smoky, burning coal, steamed handmade tortillas, and filled them with stringy shards of barbecued pork and chicken.
The mercados, the farmers’ markets, opened early in the day. Tents were raised on poles, and straw mats thrown on the ground. Broad-faced, brown-skinned women squatted on their haunches with their wares, unglazed clay pots for cooking and serving, hand- made sarapes, shawls, ponchos. There were tables with carved wooden figurines of theVirgen de Guadalupe and the baby Jesus, and straw baskets sagging with loads of dusty fruit and vegetables.
Flies hung over everything, sucking the coagulated blood off plucked chickens that were strung on hooks upside down, their necks broken with a hard twist of the hand.
My mother didn’t work. She didn’t have an office or a job. She didn’t have her diplomas on a wall. The neighbors didn’t know, or care, that she was María Luisa Torregrosa, la licenciada.
Nadie me conoce aquí, she would say, a lament. No one knows me
All along, I was listening to my mother recount from memory the
history of Chapultepec, the fortress where the Emperors Maximil- ian and Carlota saw their end in the time of the conquest, the same fort where, centuries later, six young cadets jumped to their death defending the castle against the invading American army. Mother pointed at the monument, six very tall columns, honoring Los Niños Héroes, at the entrance to the park, where on Sundays we paddled boats among gray swans.
At the museums mother took us to, stories and paintings of the Mexican Revolution celebrated the tattered armies of Zapata and Pancho Villa, peasants in wide-brimmed charro hats and bandoliers, carrying the Mexican flag—white, red, and green, a flaying serpent in the beak of an eagle standing on a wreath of cactus—the flag limp, torn by bullets.
I memorized the names of the men in the murals—Hidalgo, Juárez, Montezuma, Cuauhtémoc—names that I saw etched on mar- ble and stone on the glorietas along the avenues that crisscrossed the city, monuments towering over the rumble of people and traffic that made Mexico a chaotic, mysterious puzzle to me.
It’s sinking, my mother told me when we stepped down at the entrance to the cathedral in the Zócalo. The cathedral, dark and musty like a tomb, rose beyond my eyes into the sky, its floor stones worn down by centuries of damp. Mexico was sinking inches every year (I tried to imagine it, to feel it falling) into the thin-air swamp on which it had been built, the Tenochtitlán of the Aztecs, the Ciu- dad de Mexico of Cortés and the Spanish conquistadors.
All that blood in that place.
W
e lived on Calle Génova, in la Zona Rosa, in a third-floor walk- up, a flat of three small rooms in an ornate stone-fronted colonial building where the laundry was hung up to dry on clothes-
lines on the rooftop. The building had an open atrium, and the flats in the upper floors were arrayed along a corridor that circled it. There was nothing special about the building, but it had a tiled courtyard, splashed with light in the dry winter months and flooded in the rainy summer season.
But we liked our apartment, with the plain wooden door marked No. 23. We could see the sky from our windows, could see on fog- less days the crown of the volcano Popocatepetl, almost always in mist, and we could run down the steps and the city was right there, at our doorstep.
Buses and cars constantly blew their horns, police sirens screeched, and vendors grilled ears of corn on smoky, burning coal, steamed handmade tortillas, and filled them with stringy shards of barbecued pork and chicken.
The mercados, the farmers’ markets, opened early in the day. Tents were raised on poles, and straw mats thrown on the ground. Broad-faced, brown-skinned women squatted on their haunches with their wares, unglazed clay pots for cooking and serving, hand- made sarapes, shawls, ponchos. There were tables with carved wooden figurines of theVirgen de Guadalupe and the baby Jesus, and straw baskets sagging with loads of dusty fruit and vegetables.
Flies hung over everything, sucking the coagulated blood off plucked chickens that were strung on hooks upside down, their necks broken with a hard twist of the hand.
My mother didn’t work. She didn’t have an office or a job. She didn’t have her diplomas on a wall. The neighbors didn’t know, or care, that she was María Luisa Torregrosa, la licenciada.
Nadie me conoce aquí, she would say, a lament. No one knows me
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