It had been raining most of a week. The traditionally dry month of February was living up to its ancient reputation, Febrero Loco. Unseasonably cold, with enough wind-driven rain to make it seem like the middle of the rainy season. Except that term is aimed at seasonal high winds announcing the coming of spring. It’s twined with the following month, forming the Mexican dicho, Febrero loco, Marzo mas poco.
Five o’clock Friday morning, slogging down the red mud trail from Sutano Rojas’ adobe home. I needed a can of tar mixed with rank juice that the local curer — who says he isn’t a curer — pounds out of mountain weeds. I hoped he was an early riser. ‘Tano’s best dog had a barbed-wire cut on his left hip. He kept licking off every kind of medicine I put on it. During the night he’d gnawed the wound bloody. Good dog, but self-destructive when it came to wounds. For two days I’d been taking care of ‘Tano’s property and livestock. He and his kids had taken his pregnant wife to a city doctor. She’d had a miscarriage last year and feared another.
Ahead, the trail disappeared into the sunken road where broken pieces of cerveza and tequila bottles poked through the water. I’d come along that trail the afternoon Tano left. And was rewarded with a flat tire. Tano drove out with no problem. He knew where all the broken bottles were, I guessed. Now I used the high-piled left side of that swamp to get to the pueblito called Las Guayabas. About nine tile-roofed buildings, a school and four to five stores. A single bare bulb shone on muddy stone pools in front of the school yard.
A whisper quieted a crying child as I passed a dark house. In another, snores sawed through the cracks in the door. In the lee of a canted store stood a burro. A large pale dog leapt soupy ruts of the cobbled street, trying to divide his snarling between at the burro and me. I threw a stone to turn him back. A sleepy voice called once from behind a plastic-covered window, then was silent.
Turning onto the sloshy, heroically named Calle Jesus Maria Morelos, I saw a short wide figure carrying something large on its back. Lightning, dimmed by heavy clouds, blinked, and thunder distantly grunted, promising more rain. In the flicker, Mina Vega’s rough voiced challenged me. “Quién es?”
“Hola, Mina. You out for an early swim?”“Ay, Chihuahua,” Mina coughed. “Your are one gringo loco, Señor. You’ll drown or die of plaudismo.” She coughed and put down a patched gunny sack beside her bare feet. Mina, recently turned seventy, was about five feet-five and burly, with a broad face and handsome smile.
“I’m looking for Felipe Ibarra’s house. Tano’s dog has an infected cut.”
Mina coughed and spit into the muddy street. “Andele, we’re going the same direction.” She grabbed the heavy costal.
“Let me.” The gunny sack was heavy “What’s in here, brick or gold?”
“Suddenly, you’re a real caballero, heh?” She snorted. “I got run out of my house. That costal is everything I own.”
When I asked what happened, and she swore. A distant cousin had decided the day before to make some money from the lot where Mina’s small jacal occupied one corner. He planned to build a three bedroom cement-block house and rent it. Mina had lived in that poor neighborhood thirty years, planting corn and other vegetables for sale — and supplying the cousin and his family with free produce. Her language was colorful. Her eviction had been abrupt.
I’d known Mina twenty years, but not how old she was. Then, last year, she signed up for the government’s Oportunidades program. Ancianos, people over seventy, if they could prove they were not employed and lived in poverty, received a thousand pesos every two months from this program.
Sounds simple and vaguely generous. A thousand pesos every two month is better than nothing. But of course it wasn’t simple. For many people born in 1941 — or well into the 1950s — possessing a birth certificate was not common. Though the government said it was.
Municipal government personnel outside big-city districts often were apathetic about such routine bureaucratic tasks. And parents, having lived through the 1910 Revolution, the Cristero Rebellion, and subsequent uprisings in which a lot of city halls were plundered, burned, and blown up, tended not to give much heed to government certification. Children were many and to a largely illiterate population scribbles on pieces of paper by distrusted authorities were meaningless. Besides, life was viewed a bit casually: life expectancy hovered around forty years, if you could get that far.
Just proving you’d been born was a confusing tangle to people such as Mina’s parents, who stayed as far away from, and had as little to do with “officials” as possible. In the campo (countryside), this was still true in the 1960s.
But leaving aside the clumsy red tape of proving that one has been pauperized by a series of governments notable among much of the population primarily for their surreal mix of corruption, inefficiency and exorbitant Rube Goldberg programs, the sum of one thousand pesos every two months was seen by many as an expression of contempt. Trying to living on that sum didn’t stave off hunger or anger.
Mina, in her many years of outsmarting a series of predatory local, state and federal governments, was one of the shrewdest shoppers I knew. She’d never been in a supermarket. For one thing, until recently, when a mountain trail fall had left her limping, she’d spent considerable time in the cerro (mountainside) harvesting seasonal wild plants. Wild camote, pencas (fleshy leaves) of nopal cactus as well September-born sweet nopal tunas, the pear-shaped fruit that crowns every cochineal “tree” in the mountains. She dug up guagiques, a root that looks like an onion but tastes like a sweet potato. The list of nourishing wild mountain foods for cerro folk is long.
During the rampant government thievery of the 1960s, gringos here often said that “Mexicans can live on air.” But new generations of insatiable politicians had tested this admiring view. And Mina found it wanting. The old ways of staying alive in hard times didn’t stretch cannily managed resources as they once did.
Mina’s sudden homelessness proved that. An ex-wife of one of Mina’s brothers — he disappeared across the border some time ago — had offered her free “room.” While Mina was grateful for this generosity, it stung her almost to tears to tell me of it. “Come down this callejon (alleyway),” she said. “Your curandero lives near my new apartamento.” She put a brittle edge on that last word.
Mina’s new home was made of used cement blocks stacked loosely, salesello — unjoined — they say here. The roof of hard-used tar paper leaked. No bed, not even a straw petate on the floor, no chair, no toilet.
“I’ll get some lamina (tar paper) and fix the roof this afternoon,” I said. “Some new plastic for these.” I nodded at the torn plastic on the two small windows.
Mina started to open her costal, then stopped and put a hand on my arm.
“Ay, you’re getting overwhelmed by your new palace, eh?” I teased.
Mina squinted, then cuffed my arm sharply. “Just seeing if a gringo lost in Mexico so long still had enough muscle to do a good job.”