Sixteen-year-old Concha Rosales was riding fence again. She got that hard job because when her father was attending to other chores, her cousin, Lalo, took his place.
Lalo clearly was still a bit in awe of Concha’s reputation for fearlessness, and her probing gaze seemed too forward for such a young female. Therefore his jealousy evidently won out over awe, for he always assigned her work that everyone else hated. Fixing fence, a perennial task, was shunned. It meant hard days of pulling out desiccated ramas — limbs — of spiny huisache bushes that were laced into barbed wire. That made for rows of bloody scratches down a fencer’s arms. After fixing torn apart wire and damaged posts, you had to cut green snap-back huisache ramas and carefully lace them vertically through four strands of alambre de puas. That meant thorn-grooved arms and spine-punctured hands.
But mostly, Concha’s young relatives remained gingerly curious regarding the child’s lack of traditional female humility, and wary of her abbreviated tolerance for harsh teasing and none at all for unadorned ridicule. In such circumstances, she was known to be “feisty.” That became apparent when she was just an eleven-year-old girl with a strange taste for what was conventionally called “men’s work.” Something that most males, being emphatically macho in those days, found not just brazen, but improper, even indecent.
My friends, Chema and Guadalupe Rosales, Concha’s (unofficial) parents, found her obedient, quick and complido concerning her house chores. This frustrated and stoked the poorly veiled ire of the Lalos of her world, for it undermined any macho criticism regarding her willingness and competence in performing her “women’s work.” Concha rose early and did such duties first, then headed for the corral to see what her father and her uncles were doing.
The “awe” quotient in the way many people saw Concha had to do with her run-ins with males, both young and mature, both family members and outsiders. The first of these occurred when she was about eleven. (“About eleven” because she could have been ten, nine, or even twelve. Certainly and secretly, she was an orphan, as an infant, she had been the single survivor of an air-born bus that split open as it hurtled off a sharp mountainside demolition turn.)In odd corners, she seemed to possess invisible infant survival scars. She was very bright, yet, at eleven, she was a sleep walker and a poor student, Chema and Lupe said in telling the story. Some classmates taunted Concha when she clumsily read aloud before her class. The same when she then was called to the pizarron, a broken piece of blackboard, to see if she had correctly done her mathematics homework. At recess, following those two humiliating exercises, some students jeered her, lead usually by sneering Carlos Morales. He was a year older than Concha, and as a pueblo Mexican an oafish horseman and terrible with la reata — lariat — both in the corral and out on the mountainside. But good with numbers.
Concha had a good hold on addition and subtraction, and was wrestling with beginning multiplication, when, during one mid-morning recess, the taunting of Carlos Morales and his friends bent her patience. “You stupid sow,” Carlos called her, and his friends joined him. Concha squinted at the three of them. Though Carlos Morales was muscular and the leader, he wasn’t the biggest. Measle-pocked Antonio Menez was taller, though skinnier, Flavio Ruiz was chunky but slow. Before she could decide, Carlos walked to her and jammed his notebook into her chest, saying, “Oh, please, Conchita. Por favor, help me with this multiplication problem.” His friends hooted. “You tonta, you burro.”
Concha turned and raised her hands as if shading her eyes from the sun. Taking two lunging steps, she jammed her fingers into his eyes. A rather skinny-seeming eleven-year-old trying to stick her fingers into someone’s face. Seemingly not so impressive. Yet, it paralyzed on-lookers. Concha milked cows every morning, was handy with hammer, hatchet, saw, pliers, and a carefully sharpened slim machete. Carlos shouted and fell backwards. As the strongest one, chunky Flavio Ruiz, stopped staring at Carlos on the ground and looked up, Concha kicked him between the legs. He went down with a howl. Some kids laughed. The tall one, Tonio Mendez, took step back and kicked at her head. Concha had been playing all her known life with a pack of young relatives, learning to compete with them in countless physical contests. She sidestepped the kick, grabbed the swinging leg and dumped Tonio Mendez on his butt. She hit him once in the nose, making it bleed. Then she walked past Flavio moaning and rocking back and forth on the ground. She went directly to Carlos and sat on his chest, hitting him with her small, toughed fists, until he cried. The boy’s nose, eyebrows, lips bled. A teacher tried to pull her off, but Concha elbowed the woman in the stomach. The teacher sat down hard in the rocky playground dirt. Concha’s schoolyard friend, Rogelio Barrios, plucked her up by the arm pits before she knocked Carlos unconscious. Standing, gulping huge breaths, Concha pointed at the crowd of students, all astounded by what this quiet, watchful girl had done. As she walked with Rogelio over to get the teacher to her feet, Concha still pointed at schoolmates. “I’m not an idiota,” she declared. She narrowed her eyes at the female teacher as she and Rogelio brushed her off. “Señora, I am not an idiota,” she said.
When Chema and Lupe were called to meet with the school profesora, she told them that they had to discipline Concha more. Lupe suggested that the profesora should better supervise the playground at recess instead of spending her time gossiping with passersby — usually men — and smoking Faros, then the most popular brand of cheap cigarettes.
Still, Concha’s agresividad netted her stacks of homework that kept her in the house for a week. She felt like a prisoner. But at school there were no more insults. And while Carlos and his friends, and those boys who were sympathetic to any noisily macho male who got beaten up by a girl, studied her sourly from a distance, or pretended not to notice her at all, Concha suddenly had a new group of female friends. But there was no time to spend with them. She did her extra assignments after school. In the evenings she saddled her bay mare and paused at Lalo’s house to smilingly announce that she was going to ride fence for an hour.
Jalisco mountain sunsets tend to be dramatic occasions, so much so that suddenly for some reason she sometimes didn’t believe in them. It was their brevity, she was to say much later. “They disappear so fast. They make your heart beat hard, they seem to change everything, they take away your breath. Then they’re gone.” She squinted at this ancient miracle. “My Papå and that cura — priest — who used to come up here because we don’t have a permanent padre. They talked a lot. One time I asked them about that. They agreed that it was something like life. Do you think that’s true?” she asked her listener.
He grinned at the keen workings of a sixteen-year-old “poor student’s” combination of aesthetic and mental reach. “Pos, the padre said it was certainly possible.” He handed back her perfectly completed mathematics homework.