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Marina was about eight years older than my sister Tencha, so this made her about eighteen years older than me. She was presently a reporter for the New York Times. When she was in high school, she'd won the Underwood Typewriter typing contest, doing well over a hundred words a minute without a single mistake, setting a national record. She attributed her fast hands to her cotton-picking days as a young girl in Scottsdale, Arizona.
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I still wanted to tell our teacher about how the Indian people who'd worked on the ranch for us had explained to me that Shep, who'd always loved my brother more than life itself, had disappeared, because he'd run off to the highest hilltop to intercept my brother's soul so he could lead my brother's soul back to heaven.
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YOU'VE GOT RAGE. THEN YOU RETURN TO THE STATES WITH THAT RAGE! YOU DON'T RUN AWAY! You saw bad, terrible things happen to you and other Mexican kids in school, then YOU DON'T CHICKENSHIT OUT! No, you go back, and you do something with that rage that will MAKE A DIFFERENCE for all those kids! That's the beauty of the United States! Even the little guy can fight back!
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Here, a man and woman unite for life, but they include in their union all the loves they will live through in their lifetime. But over there, it's all about changing wives and changing husbands, searching for that one perfect amor.
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My mother, a woman, told me this, and I'll tell you, mijo, that you will learn who you are and who you aren't in the next four or five years, because not to learn who you are and who you aren't in the next few years, my mother said, is to be missing the most important part of your whole life.
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Then I was almost thirty years old when I wrote Macho!, and finally got published after 265 rejections. Immediately, I returned to this book you're reading, thinking I could now pull it off, but I was wrong.
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I liked him. He seemed a lot more animal to me than human, which was good, of course, because my grandmother, Doña Guadalupe, had always explained to me that all humans were born with an animal-spirit to help guide them through life, and so the humans who realized this would always seem more animal than human, and this was wonderful. It kept us closer to God.
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A whole bunch of people towards the back of the room were now getting up to leave. But these teachers were not going to intimidate me. I wasn't my father's and mother's son for nada-nothing. I wasn't my two indigenous grandmothers' grandson for nada-nothing either. I came from a long line of people…who'd lived through starvation, revolutions, and massacre. AND YOU! I yelled into the microphone. Over there in the back…who are getting up to leave…I'M GLAD THAT YOU'RE LEAVING!
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No, my dad had well explained to me that a real man didn't get offended if other men ridiculed him for staying close to the women of his familia. That a real hombre was proud of being close and loving with the women of his life.
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Mexican kids were now speaking quite a bit of English. Even Ramón. But he was a changed kid. There was a darkness in his eyes like a horse that had just been beaten one too many times.
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It was the greatest learning summer of my whole life, but then came the fall, and I was told that I'd have to go back to school again. NO WAY, JOSÉ! I screamed, because I now knew that at school they were trying to break us, not amanzar us.
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You know, we've got to be careful about what we believe that this Church tells us, said my dad. Remember, she's the one who stole all the best lands de México for herself and enslaved all the Indians that she didn't kill off.
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His name was Howard, but by the way he said it, none of us were able to figure out what his name was for the first few days. Still, I liked him, so one day I tackled him out on the playground and we started wrestling on the grass.
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Papa always explained to me that there is no such thing as a kids' game. That there are only games with which kids are learning the facts of life, but it's the parents that are so tapados—so blind and constipated that they can't see what these games are really all about.
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When my brother, Joseph, was sick and in the hospital, you got in bed with me when I was asleep and you kept trying to touch me! All these years I'd thought that maybe it was all a dream, but it wasn't! You son of a bitch. I was eight years old, crazy with grief for my brother, Joseph, and you—how could you?!
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Marina, I said, I don't know how to explain this, but … well, everything I say or do or even think just doesn't seem to work out for me. Except when I'm totally alone. I almost added, Totally alone with God, but I didn't because I knew how crazyloco this might sound, especially since I wasn't a priest or a monk.
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No, teaching could be done as fast as a lightning bolt. He'd cut across the valleys of my deepest doubts, giving light to the darkest crevices of my beaten-down, inhibited mind, accessing a natural storytelling ability within me that was utterly profound!
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My grandmother—God bless her soul—a Yaqui Indian from northern Mexico, was the greatest teacher I'd ever had! And do you know what she taught me, she taught me that each and every day is un milagro given to us by God, and that work, that planting corn and squash with our two hands is holy. She taught me all this with kindness and invitation. Not with ridicule and looking down her nose at me and making me feel like less than human when I didn't get it at first.
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Sex and love were driving the whole world and me crazyloco! I just couldn't stand it anymore! I was going to have to kill myself.
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In the last three months I hadn't lost one single game of chess. It was crazyloco, but sometimes I thought that I was so brilliant because I could see what other people couldn't see or understand even after I'd explain it to them. Playing chess wasn't about making single moves. It was about seeing patterns, then backing up inside your mind and seeing the last five and six moves of your opponent, then flashing forward real fast. And bingo, the whole chessboard became alive in living patterns.
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I talked for hours, and for the first time in my life, I could see that I'd lived two very different lives ever since I'd started school. On the ranch I'd lived a life full of love and work and warm, good feelings. At school I'd been treated with so much … physical and mental abuse that I was still filled with so much rage; it was hard for me to even think about it.
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It was truly a good thing that I'd found writing as my outlet or I was sure I would have become a mass murderer, killing all those heartless, racist teachers who'd beat us Mexican kids down since kindergarten
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Suddenly I remembered Jeannie Windflow, who'd taught me how to kiss when we were kids. At the age of seventeen, she'd run off with a Mexican guy from Pozole Town who was nineteen years old, had a job, and was one of the handsomest guys I'd ever seen. He was a semi-professional boxer and real dark. She was a track star, a straight-A student, and real blonde.
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Someone finally understood all the hell that I'd been through since a child when I'd first tried to understand language. And yet in other forms of communications, like painting, sculpture, music, math, problem-solving, and chess, I'd been very good. In fact, in high school, once I learned how to play chess, I'd play lightning-fast, intuitively seeing all these different possibilities at the same time, and I'd won well over a hundred chess games without losing a single game. And that included beating some of our faculty members who thought that they were very good at chess.
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My father's mother, a pure-blooded Indian from Oaxaca, had been a gifted fifteen-year-old when Benito Juárez won Mexico's independence from France. They'd taken her to the Academy of blah-blah-blah in Mexico City, and she'd astonished her European professors by learning French in six weeks.
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Quote of the day
Chaos is a name for any order that produces confusion in our minds.
George Santayana
Victor Villaseñor
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Born:
May 11, 1940
(age 83)
Bio:
Victor Villaseñor is a Mexican-American writer, best known for the national bestselling book Rain of Gold. Villaseñor's works are often taught in American schools. He went on to write Thirteen Senses: A Memoir, a continuation of Rain of Gold.
Known for:
Rain of Gold (1991)
Burro genius (2004)
CrazyLoco love (2007)
Beyond Rain of Gold (2011)
Lluvia de oro (1991)
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god
chess
people
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man
time
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parents
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