Cry Me A Rio

Epilogue

Midtown East Epilogue

One night, in Manhattan, a few friends and I drop into a Mexican restaurant called Mama Mexico. The hostess seats us at a long table in the upper dining mezzanine. The place is so loud with talk I’m not sure anyone, including me, wants to stay. But we do—after we spot the mariachis. It is the first time that I’ve seen mariachis in a New York Mexican restaurant.

They wear short embroidered jackets and matching tight pants, with silver horseshoe-clasps running along the side of each leg, and a belt buckle with an albino scorpion set in amber. Their heads pulled back, their bellies spilling forward, as they play trumpet or let out gritos of song, the musicians look like bottom heavy S’s in silhouette. The silver buttons and sequins reflect the ceiling lights that keep changing from orange to red to yellow to green and aqua marine. (The swirl of changing colors reminds me of the movie preview announcements at the drive-inn we used to go to as kids.) A waiter, with a tri-color necktie, comes to my end of the table, kicks-open a stand and settles his tray of avocados and tomatoes and onions to make guacamole in a molcajete. This tableside guacamole service, which costs ten dollars, for the dollop they give you, is so Manhattan.

Sandra, a friend from out of town, sits next to me in her crumpled bronze dress, embroidered shawl and cowboy boots.

Jessie, sitting across from me, wearing her favorite, black guayabera—yes, she’s living in the city now, staying with me until she finds a place of her own—sees the beer prices and says, “First place I been where a Tecate costs five dollars. In Mexico they go for two bucks.” Then she gets to talking about her nights in Mexico, gigging until four o’clock in the morning, and the memory of staggering to the bathroom and smelling the lavender scent of Fabuloso.

“And now you can’t pee unless you smell Fabuloso,” Sandra says.

Jessie says no, but she does flashback to those nights after our mother got turned on to the cleanser, making forty-mile trips to buy a bottle in Nuevo Progresso, Las Flores. “Whenever I went to the bathroom at home I remembered.”

Sandra claps her hands, delighted with the story, and I kick Jessie under the table because she never tells me things like this even when I ask.

Sandra says she likes Fabuloso, too. “It’ll be three o’clock in the morning and I’ll be there in the kitchen scrubbing and my honey asks, ‘What’re you doing,’ and I tell him, ‘Smell this! Isn’t it fabulous?’”

Later, when we request the song Paloma Negra, the mariachis plucking their violin and guitarrón with such grief, the singer giving full voice to what feels like true, strangled emotion, we let out gritos, whoops and ¡ay!¡ay!¡ay’s! We sing along even as we screw up the words. Then the mariachis move to a far table where a woman sings Piensa en Mi. Sandra sits up on the banquette, to get a better look at the woman, and yells, “!Ya no llores, Lolita!” Then she drops back down, laughing her witch’s laugh.

As it gets later, the restaurant empties and, except for the talk at our table, most of the noise has died away. Only sweet violin music hangs in the air. When the mariachis next come around my sister requests La Diferencia by Juan Gabriel.

“You know that song?” Jessie asks the singer.

The mariachi takes off his sombrero, puts it over his heart, and says, “Well, there’s the song I sing, and then there’s the song that Juanga started singing after me.”

The singer turns back toward the men playing the violin and the guitarrón to tell them the song. My sister announces that this is our mother’s favorite song. What? How did she know? For years now I thought she loved Paloma Negra.

“Remember,” my sister says, leaning across the table toward me. “That night at Aunt Elvita’s house when Mom was drunk and mariachis came to sing and she made them play that song?”

Jessie says she’s never forgotten that night.

Even as the music starts, with the tearful quiver of the violin strings, the lumbering pluck of the guitarrón that makes it feel like a traveling song, I don’t remember our mother singing one drunken night with any mariachis.

As the singer fills the restaurant with this lament of unrequited love, each of us makes room in our seats for grief to sit with us for a little while, like an old love we just happened to run into tonight, years after the heartbreak.

Who was our mother singing to that night? I imagine her screwing up the words, slurring and missing the beat, and then feeling sick before getting to the end and throwing up like those other nights, which I do remember, when she came home from the dances, my father holding onto her as she bent over to kiss us. “You kids still awake?” she slurred. The bending over and righting herself back up making her more nauseous. As we fell asleep, we’d hear our mother gag and spit, the repeated flush of the toilet and her whimpers to be helped to bed.

At Mama Mexico this night, and for many nights afterward, it won’t hit me that when our mother sang this song so many years ago, she wasn’t thinking about a lost love, a man with whom she pleaded that if he didn’t love her, she understood. What could she do? She already loved him.

No. That wasn’t it.

She sang to no one else but my sisters and me. She loved us. If it turns out that we didn’t love her—as it may have seemed over the years—let her dream. Don’t wake her. Let her dream of the ways in which she hoped we would love her back. No, don’t wake her. Not now. Not ever.

No wonder she loved sleeping so much.

On the shared cab home, passing down Avenue of the Americas, in a rain that will fall heavier the later it gets, Sandra says there’s only way to explain tonight, with the thunder and lightning, the food and music. “It wasn’t real. Like something out of García Marquez,” she says. “You come back looking for the restaurant tomorrow or next week, and they’ll say, ‘What place? That never existed.’” She says it was just this one night.

Even now, so many winter months later, I keep telling myself I will go back to that eastside restaurant to hear that song, but it scares me to think that it won’t be there. So I don’t go.

I don’t know when I will be back to Mexico either. I miss Lucha. Each time I pass the post office, down the street from my apartment building in Hell’s Kitchen, I hate myself for not sending so much as a postcard. She gave me her address as “Widow of Florencio de la Paz, San Pedro Station, Nuevo Leon, Mexico.” Even without a zip code, which she didn’t know, she figured the card or the letter would get to her. It would arrive at the grocer and they would give it to her next time she stopped by. And yet I haven’t written. Some mornings I get the “presentiment,” as she did about Uncle Maximo, that she is no longer with us, and I imagine the tortilla truck blaring its horn outside her cement bunker to no response. Talking to my mother in Texas, I get reassurances that Lucha is fine. Or so she’s heard. We talk about going back on my next trip home. For three years it has been nothing but talk.