The Best Women's Travel Writing 2008 - True Stories from Around the World

My Ex-Novio’s Mother

by Laura Resau

Maybe she was better off without the boyfriend.

One sunny afternoon, in the flowered courtyard of my apartment in small-town Oaxaca, I was washing clothes when my elderly landlady emerged from the banana leaves, and out of the blue, exclaimed, “Laurita, did you know that some people in this world don’t believe in the mother of Jesus?!”

“I’ve heard that,” I conceded, squeezing out soap suds and wondering what had prompted her inquiry—possibly a recent Jehovah’s Witness visit despite the This home is Catholic sticker vehemently plastered on her door.

She shook her head, bewildered. “But Laurita, we must believe in the Virgin. You know why?”

“Why?”

She wagged her finger at me—a squat, apron-bedecked sage. “Because we pray to Her. And then She tells Her Son what to do. And He does it. That’s how it all works.”

She scrunched up her face and burst into nasal laughter. “Mothers have the real power. Remember that!”

Four years later, I’m sitting on a narrow bed in a raw cement room on the outskirts of the same small town in Oaxaca. After living in the U.S. for two years, I’m now renting out this tiny room as a base for my anthropological fieldwork. Apart from the bed, the room is nearly bare except for an unstained wooden desk and chair that I bought literally off the back of a carpenter.

The lack of seating is the excuse for my ex-sort-of-boyfriend, Baruc, to sit next to me on the flowered sheets. He’s careful not to wrinkle the button-down shirt and khaki pants that fit him like a model’s. I gaze at his dimpled half-smile and remember all over again how his manicured hands used to make my skin tingle.

He’s helping me form questions for my Master’s thesis interviews with Mixtec women, and over the past two hours, the space between us has grown smaller and warmer. Baruc was my first friend in Oaxaca, the one who taught me Spanish and Mixteco, the first to invite me to an indigenous festival and feed me goat in mole sauce. The fruity smell of his shampoo brings back the magical feeling of exploring a new land. Once we finish drafting the interview, I resist the urge to sink into him, and instead ask the question that could send him running from the room. “So, four years ago…why didn’t you let us get closer?”

He stares at the ceiling, uncomfortable. “I figured you’d be leaving. All the English teachers come for a year or two, then they leave for good.”

“But I might have stayed. Look at me. I can’t stay away.”

He sighs. “Now I know that. But I didn’t before. And my mother…” Another sigh.

Aha. His mother.

Back when we were sort-of boyfriend and girlfriend, he never spent the night at my place, always returning to his parents’ house by 11 P.M.—even though he was twenty-six. I’d assumed the motive was noble: to protect my already dubious reputation as a twenty-three-year-old woman living alone in small-town Mexico. The culturally appropriate place for unmarried sex was a dark alley, involving a skirt furtively pushed up, no mention of condoms, and often, a belly mysteriously swelling a few months later. But two adults spending all night in a real bed, using birth control, maybe even showering together and lounging around naked—well, that was just morally depraved.

After a long pause, he continues. “My mother was worried you’d take me to your country, and then all her sons would be there.”

His three brothers have been working as undocumented immigrants in Chicago since they were teenagers, risking desert crossings every few years to come back for visits. There seems to be an agreement that Baruc would be the one to stay. After all, he has a college degree, accounting job, and even his own car. In rural Oaxaca, grown sons traditionally live on their parents’ property with their wives and children. The exodus of young people to Mexico City and the U.S. has thrown a wrench in the custom, yet Baruc’s parents have evidently held onto these hopes for him.

“My mother says she couldn’t bear it if I left, too.”

His mother always treated me with polite reserve, never affectionately calling me Laurita, as my other local friends did. She didn’t even call me Laura. I remained a generic güera—white girl—to her. I’d chalked it up to her personality, but maybe she simply saw me as a heartless foreign creature with pale skin that might snatch her son.

After a while, I touch Baruc’s stiff sleeve, probably ironed that morning by his mother. “Seriously. I might have stayed with you.”

He strokes my arm with his perfect fingers, and then, just when I’m starting to melt, he pulls away. “Laurita, I have to go. I have to run some errands for my mother.”

I’m starting to kick myself when he says, “Let’s go out tonight. I’ll pick you up around six.”

“Really? You promise?”

“Of course.”

In the past, the pattern was familiar: he’d ask me to go out, tell me what time he’d pick me up, and then he wouldn’t show. Usually, at the university the next day, I’d stop by the accounting office and ask him what happened in a voice designed to sound as unhurt as possible. “Oh, right,” he’d say breezily. “I had to help my mother with something.” I assumed he was lying, and I tried not to care too much. I imagined his obstacle to commitment was another woman in a dark alley—but I never suspected his mother.

This time is different. I’m four years older and wiser now, and I’ve run out of patience. He will have to play by my rules. “You really, truly promise you’ll come?”

“Yes, Laurita. I promise.”

At six I’m all dressed up, watching the occasional burro pass by on the dirt road. In the yard, chickens peck at corn as the landlady’s teenage granddaughter gyrates to the song blaring from her boom box: “…un movimiento sexy, sexy, sexy…”

By seven o’clock, my stomach is rumbling and I’m cursing my gullibility.

At eight, it starts raining. I need to get food, which means finding a taxi to take me to town. I run down the dark, muddy street in the rain, soaked and pathetic. Once I plop inside the taxi, I decide that this time will be different. Indignant, I shake the water from my hair, and give the driver directions to Baruc’s parents’ house.

Fifteen minutes later, he drops me off at the roadside by their house. I stomp through mud puddles to the locked metal gate, and I ring the buzzer and pound on the metal gate, clanking the chain like a lunatic. His mother, Doña Esperanza, pokes her head out the door and squints at me through the dark rain. A shawl draped over her head, she comes outside, her wide body lumbering down the steps.

“Güera,” she says, fumbling with the keys. “White girl, what are you doing here?”

She still doesn’t know my name? No way am I pretending to be nice to this woman anymore.

I am not the type that yells. Especially not at other people’s mothers. But the words spout up like boiling lava. “WHERE IS YOUR SON?!”

What I really want to shout is WHERE IS YOUR PINCHE SON? Or better yet, WHERE IS YOUR PENDEJO OF A SON?! but I manage to hang onto a few threads of self-control.

She looks at me, stunned, and slowly opens the gate.

“WHERE IS HE?!” I screech.

“He’s running some errands.”

“Well, that—” I swallow the words hijo de puta. “Well that son of yours was supposed to pick me up at six. I’ve been waiting for TWO AND A HALF HOURS!”

She blinks, shocked. I’d never been anything but polite and gracious to her. She’d probably thought of us güeras as soulless Barbies—skinny, plastic, smiling dolls, incapable of red-hot fury.

“Come in, güera.” She ushers me into the tiny, gray cement kitchen that smells of dried chile, and sits me down at the table where her mother is seated.

Doña Elisa watches us curiously with cataract-muted eyes. A polyester skirt-suit peeks out from under a checked apron, and a ribboned white braid snakes down her back. “What’s happening?” she asks.

I’m afraid I’ll yell at this old lady, so I keep my mouth glued shut and let her daughter answer. “Baruc said he’d pick up the güera and he didn’t.” She bites her lip and the corners of her mouth turn up, suppressing laughter.

I glare. “I AM HASTA LA MADRE WITH YOUR SON!” Essentially, I’ve f-ing had it with your son.

They stare at each other for a split second, then double over, clutching their large bellies, shaking with laughter.

“Ay, güera!” the grandmother says. “You need some agua de espanto.” Fright water. “That will cure you.”

“But I don’t have fright, I have ANGER! AT YOUR GRANDSON!” And at your evil daughter, I add silently.

More laughter. “The agua de espanto works for coraje, too,” Doña Elisa assures me. “Don’t worry, güera.”

Many Mixtec people in rural Oaxaca feel that anger and fright cause illness, that these emotion-energies can harm your body or lead to your spirit being stolen. So now the important thing is to cure my anger before it causes real damage. From the top shelf, Doña Esperanza grabs an old Coke bottle, filled with clear liquid. She pours me a small glass and sets it on the flowered vinyl tablecloth.

I sniff. It’s a hard alcohol—probably mezcal locally made from fermented agave nectar and steeped with herbs and spices—strong, tingling ones like cloves and anise.

“Drink,” Doña Elisa says, smiling, wiping tears from her face.

I gulp it. For a moment, it burns, then flows through my empty stomach and seeps quickly into my bloodstream. Little by little, the coraje floats out and dissipates.

“Have another, güera,” Doña Esperanza says.

I down a second glass.

By the third, every last trace of rage has gone. Now we’re cracking jokes and telling stories. Over and over, Doña Esperanza imitates me in the rain at the gate. Screwing up her face, she fake-yells, WHERE IS YOUR SON?! And this sends Doña Elisa and me into cascades of belly-shaking giggles.

On the fourth glass, a truck pulls up and headlights flash across the wall. Quickly, I try to compose myself and smooth my rain-frizzy hair. A minute later, Baruc strides in, looking as handsome as ever, especially model-like with rain dripping from his sculpted face and his mouth parted in surprise. “Laura! What are you doing here?”

His mother and grandmother launch into the story, offering bits and pieces between giggles, and collapsing in hysterical laughter on the WHERE IS YOUR SON?! part.

Baruc stares at me, then the bottle of agua de espanto, and then back at me. “Are you drunk, Laura?”

I grin. “It’s medicine. To get rid of my coraje. To avoid killing you.” And your mother, I recall, glancing at her fondly.

He looks at us like we’re crazy. “I’m hungry, Mamá.”

She hops up and plucks some tortillas from a basket. Yes, it’s quite an arrangement they have—he follows her orders in his romantic relationships; she follows his orders in domestic tasks. A fair bargain.

One day in my apartment, years ago, Baruc told me to get him a glass of water. It had sounded like a command, so I promptly replied, “Get it yourself.” He laughed, but an uncomfortable feeling hovered in the room.

I gaze at his mother now, suddenly grateful, wondering if she ended up saving me from a life of waiting hand and foot on her son.

“I’m going to change clothes,” Baruc tells us, annoyed, and disappears to his room.

We women snicker. For a tiny moment, I imagine life with these ladies as my in-laws. It would be entertaining— but only with enough agua de espanto to keep the coraje at bay.

We chat as Doña Esperanza heats up beans and mole and chamomile tea. She sets them in front of me with a basket of steaming tortillas. “Eat,” she says warmly, with a genuine smile. “Eat.”

As I chew, she takes my hand in her pudgy one. “Oh, Laurita,” she says. “Why don’t you stay? Why don’t you stay and marry my son, Laurita?”

And just like that, something shifts. In her eyes, my anger has melted away the pale, plastic, Barbie-doll skin of a nameless güera. For the first time, she sees me, really sees me…just a little too late.

***

Colorado-based Laura Resau is an award-winning author of two young adult novels set in rural Oaxaca: What the Moon Saw and Red Glass. Her travel writing has appeared in anthologies by Travelers’ Tales and Lonely Planet, as well as numerous journals and magazines. Visit her web site at www.lauraresau.com.

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