Eleno Diaz was boldly, if shakily, perched at the peak of my teja-and-carrizo roof, and in a satirical voice reviewing the local chismes from his pueblo. (Non-Spanish speakers: chisme means gossip.
But today when Mexicans greet one another with an early “Buenos dias,” asking, “Hay chismes hoy?”, it’s assumed they’re inquiring if there is news about some outage straight from a police blotter of earlier times — deaths occasioned by breaking and entering, robberies, kidnappings, and the night’s unadorned mindless killings, etc.) However, “Leno” was speaking with rural cynicism of purely political behavior, often so outrageous as to appear clownish — and maybe dangerous — to campesinos.
Though his cousin had recently helped me repair a wind-struck corner of the roof, the fact that Leno had heard that a tormenta hit Zacatecas Sunday-Monday, plus two overcast days here, prompted him to show up determined that I commence preparing my roof for the coming rainy season. Leno is a good friend, but once he gets his mind set on something it takes more than gringo reasoning (usually flawed, he believes) to change his course. He’d seen the remains of tlacuache (opossum) the dogs had caught last night. Tlacuaches are easy targets for any dog that hasn’t had his hunting instincts bred or petted out of him. And oddly tlacuaches are amazingly clumsy, especially for noctambulating creatures. They’re always falling off of walls they try to sneakily traverse. (In the United States, opossum has been a favorite food of country folks in the South, particularly swamp-area folks.) Holding up the much-gnawed-on opossum carcass by its naked tail, Leno said my dogs were too finicky, or they would have eaten it all, including the bones. He thinks foreigners he’s seen are excessively finicky, too.
I’ve already told him that it’s too early to set a new tile. But he just shakes his head. “You can do now what you can’t do in storm,” he counters. “We’ll fix it, then you take a hose and soak it down. That way you can see where there are any leaks and easily fix them.”Teja (clay-tiled) and carrizo (reed-ceilinged) roofs can be victims of severe winds and pelting downpours of the coming season. They’re also vulnerable to stomping human weight, accounting for Leno’s swaying posture as he tiptoed, carefully crouching to throw off broken red tile, the nests birds and mice have left behind. From a ladder, I tossed him sets of three replacement tile. From there we could see that the Zacatecas tormenta report had prompted at least a few low-landers to begin working on their roofs to with late stand rainy season downpours. Rains traditionally begin full-force in June (theoretically on San Juan’s “Day,” June 24), though presently certainty is in scarce supply.
Leno was getting to a corner, below which an aggressive frangi-pani tree grew — too much for a ladder. I hoisted my self up on to a tile-clear area above a wooden roof beam to hand him a another set of three. This height gave a fine view. Our long pasture, and the mountains soaring high behind our house, their stiff-backed palisades and dark caves far above the small forest that is our wild-growing backyard. A down-hill neighbor’s horses and milk cows were grazing in the shade of a row of wild mezquite trees in the pasture he rented from me. Our down-dropping dirt road curved around a huge, ancient tabachin tree and then on its way to a nearly invisible pueblo. Up here the morning’s gentle breeze was still refreshing, the renewed view of familiar topography and dried, but not dead, brush and trees awaiting the changes of June.
Soon, Leno climbed down to go seek a store-bought comida in the pueblo’s popular corner abarrote. I stayed and rousted out the homes of birds and pests, along the way killing viudas negras (black widows) and fiesty tail-up alacranes (scorpions) that had taken their places. Advancing slowly, I readjusted some out-of-place tejas and heavy tar-paper sheets lamina that fitted beneath them to cover the carrizo of the ceiling below. That view and the quiet, easy work seemed to be exactly the right thing to be doing that day. In the United States, legislators labored noisily to simultaneously eviscerate the nation and impoverish its population, encircling both with pronouncements that bright high school children laughed at. In Mexico, a new administration was trying to recreate a sleekly coiffured version of its largely shameful, authoritarian past. That’s what many Mexicans were suggesting. Leno said, “None of those folks know that a mountainside of clay, rainwater and a stack of lamina don’t equal a well-laid roof. Where’s the knowledge and skill in that,” he wondered, “the brushing away of alacranes and viudas negras?”
Well, just then, a mountainside rooftop seemed a good place to sit out gangly politicians doing their minuets. “There is a certain clarity on a high roof,” someone had written. A “singleness” of purpose and certainty about the job, the materials and the fact that you couldn’t keep dry under a roof repaired with chicanery. And the black widows and scorpions waiting in the smallest shadow spiced your desire to be completely engaged. Today, when you cut a sheet of lamina that was expensive enough for a campesino to do so very carefully, you automatically abided by ancient cliches, such as “measure twice, cut once.” Such simple — and obvious — sayings were cliches because they were truths. Then there was the unconscious knowledge that you were performing something not only economically valuable, but psychically nourishing. Gifts which would not need to be attended by hyped drama or, indeed, any drama at all. And of course that was true of much of the work performed by, say, a campesino whose labor (most of it hand and back labor) on his own land was not really drudgery because it “secures for that worker some stable, rewarding connection” to the property he was working. When Leno and I finished with this task, he would assure himself at that moment he’d performed a good job to help a friend. And that same work for me would mean that when the driving wind and rain of a cloudburst poured off my roof, drenching surrounding plants — wild and otherwise — it revealed a secure roof, and the echoes of my work and my pleasure would remain inseparable. That verified the care and persistence Leno and I invested in these simple but essential moments; moments surrounded by soaring mountains, the vastness of Mexico’s largest natural lake, the amazing mixture of orchestral voices of migrating flocks of birds, and, of course, the comradeship we shared in doing a necessary job well, and in good company.
When we finished this day, I would tell Leno this — in a simpler manner probably. And he would grin behind a callused hand that, out of habit on such occasions, would tug his graying mustache. Then he would slap me on the shoulder and leave, hurling over his shoulder an exceedingly vivid insult. The kind and flavor that someone once said was the “index of trust.”