“In this part of Jalisco” — meaning the ample area around Guadalajara/Lake Chapala — “las aguas begin on the day of San Antonio.” That what everyone said when my wife and I arrived in Ajijic in 1963. Though often it didn’t occur quite as promptly as that declaration claimed. But sure enough, the first full-fledged rain arrived this year – with truenos y relampagos (thunder and lightning) — the night of June 12-13, the 13th being the feast day of San Antonio de Padua. And folks out late marking that saint’s day got soaked, as they expected.
Some while later, I began helping campesino friends clear and re-fence and then plant their milpas with Mexico’s ancient agricultural trinity — maize, frijol, calabaza. The celestial furnace of late May, early June — still air, silence, unrelenting heat — prompted us into inventive celebration. We ripped off swear-soaked shirts, whooped, swore, danced, thanked the clouds with salvos from ancient firearms.
This year, I and a younger friend helped Mica Garcia with her milpa. Her husband Chucho had disappeared during a New Year’s celebration last year. Some people think he was kidnapped. But Mica believes he ran off to gringolandia. He has relatives in Oklahoma, and always had an eye for what Mica called “those blondies.” But when she arranged a telephone call — she’s one of the few people I know who doesn’t have cell phone now — they said they hadn’t seen or heard from him. She believed they were lying.
Mica is what country people — ranchers I grew up with — would call a throwback. She lives at the edge of a modest-sized pueblo that thinks it’s a real town, and cultivates sueños that it’s suddenly become middle class. This is principally because folks who are said to be dabbling in the drug trade — often in minor ways — and those of the overlarge staff of the ayuntamiento suddenly can afford new pickups. Mica Garcia quite definitely does not drive a hulking double-cab shinny white Silverado. For one thing, she doesn’t know how to drive. And the cost of one of those gas-hogs is beyond her wanting to know about.
In her corral at the edge of the pueblo, she illegally raises chickens, rabbits, a burro, a cow and two horses. In May she finally settled with a skimping landowner on “renting” a nearby plot of land where she is planting a milpa. The rent she had to pay, after long wrangling, was the traditional fifth of the crop.
The landowner had wanted to be paid in pesos, some now, some at the end of the harvest in October. Mica wasn’t bargaining with him when she said she didn’t have enough pesos to give him any how. She had to buy insecticide for the crop, and new rejas – plow shares. That would more than use up her thin savings. Neto Ruiz and I talked to the man, telling him that if Mica needed it, we’d help her. “If there’s any rain at all this temporada de las aguas she’ll have a good crop,” we both told him. That gave her time to get ready for planting.Mica was once a slim buxom woman well-known for her becoming looks. But she’s entered her fifties now, and since her husband disappeared, and her children wandered off, she does all the chores around her place by herself. A full time, hard-work job. Thus, while she’s still buxom, she’s also energetic and has become well-muscled. At the plaza during Easter fiestas, some stranger, not knowing any better, presumed to treat her casually, probably drawn into that accident by her still handsome, if somewhat lined features. She knocked him down, then kicked him in the ribs. People applauded. The police told her not to kick the man anymore and offered to take him to a doctor who helps with such casualties.
But Mica tends to take better care of her livestock than she does of her house. It’s an old home that her parents had built when they were young. The roof is made of tejas (red clay tiles) and tarpaper laid over rows of beam-supported fajillas. This is good old-time building, but with wind and rain storms and sheer time, it needs to be looked after, just as everything does: machinery, livestock and human beings. But despite her admirable self-reliance, Mica doesn’t fancy heights. She can drive a team of plow horses all day long, but she hates to climb a ladder and get on a house roof.
Heights don’t bother me, but a slew of wrecks with ornery horses, cattle and life’s other “incidents” have made those spots where there’s been an overload of dings slow down my agility. So with Neto doing the high-wire climbing and swinging, and me doing the toting and lifting stuff up the indoor ladder, we had her roof in pretty sound shape when a heavy wind storm came up one afternoon. There were clouds whipping across the sky, but not a drop of rain. The next day, Neto and I were back working on Mica’s roof, replacing skewed tile.
The parcel Mica is tilling hadn’t been used for two years when she started. The earth, which has as much clay in it as it does rock washed down by mountainside run off, was about as easy to work as a broken up slab of cement. Just keeping the plow blade in the ground was hard arm-wrenching, to say nothing of trying to turn a proper furrow. I know that field well because I often pass it. And the first day she brought her horses and plow over to break the soil, I stopped to show her where some of bigger keg-sized boulders were and point out where, in the weeds, the old furrows were hidden.
Mica cut a couple of hard, jerking, arm-twisting furrows and stopped and shook her head. “El arado won’t even stay in this ground.” She scowled at the plow.
A pickup pulled up on the rough road behind us. “You planting ‘Nando’s parcela? asked a man in his late forties, early fifties He had a grin and what looked like dyed black hair. He shook his glistening head. “Soil there isn’t worth plowing. Besides if you plant and get any elotes, the people around here will steal most of your crop.”
Neither of us said anything. Mica, in a pair of blue jeans, a checkered shirt and an old pair of her husband’s boots, walked down the furrow she’d just plowed and threw out two large rocks. Her clothes made her look younger than she is. Good for her, I think. For she acts younger than most campo women her age.
“Your husband,” the man nodded at me, “should be doing that, not you.”
“I do my own plowing. And he isn’t my husband. And I’ve had all I want with men,” Mica said sharply.
“Pos, that’s because you just haven’t met the right one, mujer,” He turned and started to slowly, smilingly get out of his vehicle. Mica dipped beneath the top strand of the of the barbed wire fence and leaned against the door of the pickup. “You can help us by getting all those piedras grandes out of the milpa.”
“That’s not the kind of help I have to offer, or the kind you need.” The big smile and the shiny hair made him look like a politician. I wondered if Mica was going to get us into trouble. Overhead, there was the slight rumble of thunder, but the sun was out where we stood.
The man pushed on the door, then banged it open with his shoulder. “You should have more respect,” he said. “A lot more respect.”
Before he could get out, Mica stepped back and kicked the door against his hand. He yelled and swore.
“You better go get that fixed,” I said, guiding the horses around to the open milpa gate. It was beginning to rain lightly.
“Who do you think you are, puta!” He snarled at her, holding his hand.
“Mary Magdalene,” Mica told him, as the rain increased.
The man put his car into reverse and swung away.
“The rains have begun for sure,” I said, and Mica laughed.