Martins Voice Chapter 15 One Sunday afternoon, she gives me a cultural tour of her home. She starts in the living room with a small tin and glass cabinet hanging on the wall next to a portrait of her mom. Spanish people call tin poor mans silver. They cut it and incise it with flowers, lines, circles, triangles, hearts, every shape you can think of. They decorate furniture, picture frames and all kinds of things with it. I have a friend, Angelina Martinez, whose kitchen is adorned everywhere with it -- cabinet corners, the hood over the stove, the table, the window sill, practically everything. Its funny, she muses. Tin is hard to find now. Everything is made of aluminum. I remember a cartoon as a kid when aluminum was a new thing. The cartoon was called Munimula -- aluminum, backwards. Also on the living room wall are Byzantine-looking paintings on wood called retablos -- saints identifiable by flowers, animals, buildings, colors of their clothes. Although she is not particularly religious, retablos hang everywhere in the house. Santa Barbara in the living room has a tower with three windows behind her. (Barbs dad locked her up in one to preserve her from the outside world, Ynez explains.) Next to Moms portrait, St. Francis of Assisi is in blue robes rather than brown. And he isnt holding any squirrels. In the middle of the rooms wide window an Eye of God or ojo made of yellow and turquoise yarn hangs beneath a crucifix. The yarn is twisted into a diamond shape around two crossed sticks. My new girl says it wards off evil. I hope she is just demonstrating tradition. In the hallway, San Ysidro drives a harnessed team of horses because he is the patron saint of the harvest. On a corner of a kitchen counter by her stove stands a jolly foot-high wooden figure of a chubby monk named San Pasquale. He is the patron of the kitchen. Its an absolute fact that a meal cooked thoughtlessly or with a sour disposition will be ruined, she says. San Pasquale is in everyones kitchen to remind us to cook with love...Have you ever read Like Water with Chocolate? She goes on for some minutes about how the book is also about the barbarity of an ancient custom whereby the youngest daughter isnt allowed to marry, but must remain single to care for aging parents. Thats the premise of the book? I ask, yawning. I hope we are not entering a social issues discussion. No, stupid, sometimes I just ramble on about womens rights. She threatens me with the traditional rolling pin. Ynez wears a milagro, a tiny brass pendant engraved with a prayer. She tries to give me one, but I am funny about guys in necklaces. About like I am about guys with cats, unless they are Tige. Her home also boasts several pricey-looking hand-carved 400-year-old Spanish Colonial furniture pieces, adorned with intricate cutouts, scrolls and fans -- which are supposed to look like conchas or seashells. All the furniture, if it was made in New Mexico, is third-grade pine.Third-grade shouldnt be looked down on, she notes. It takes on a honey luster as the years go by. Darker stuff comes from Spain. She keeps a tall wooden china cabinet called a trastero in a hallway and a little chest where she keeps quilts, rugs and a century-old black and white wool poncho which belonged to a great uncle who, says she, rode with Pancho Villa. It cracks me up to hear little white kids belting out marijuana no fumor in Cucaracha, she says. The real song is about a cockroach that loses a leg, but this other is about a cucarachO. Thats a cigar, usually a White Owl, filled with mota -- marijuana. Off the hall in the bathroom is a tall terra cotta pottery vase. Sticking out are turquoise and hot pink paper flowers. They used to decorate New Mexico altars. Now, children sell them on the streets in Mexico. I hate it when I see parades in town where they toss candy to the crowds, she says. Reminds me of the poverty down South. And she gets me reading Spanish literature. I didnt know there WAS Hispanic literature. Okay. Don Quixote. But, hell, everybody and his dog has read him or at least the -- thankfully abridged -- version. We argue. The book, to my trained eye, is VOLUMINOUSLY under-edited. And this guy with the windmills is supposed to be a role model for an entire culture? No wonder the Spanish Armada went down. But shes also read and turns me onto Cervantes in Spanish, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Horatio Quiroga, Jorge Borges, Julio Cortazar, Katherine Porter and Willa Cather. The last two, she tells me, she was horrified to learn werent from Mazatlan. She is placidly uninterested in Anglo artifacts except, to my horror, Country & Western music. She actually knows the words to songs by George Jones, Porter Waggoner, Buck Owens, Tammy Wynette and other -- ahem -- geniuses of the genre. In my opinion, there should be laws preventing these people from going near microphones. Even the men sound like Alvin & the Chipmunks. Of her own jente, she likes corridos or ballads. Music is of paramount interest to me. Like the man says, its the farthest we get away from the trees. So I try to educate her on classic rock: the Beatles, the Stones, the Yardbirds, the Kinks, the Doors, Zepplin, Iron Maiden, the Troggs, Joplin, Black Sabbath. Even newer rockers: Abba, Queen, Def Leopard. Or other masters like John Lee Hooker, Blind Lemon, Billie Holiday, Pearlie Mae, Cab Calloway, Ethel Waters. The jazz greats -- Louie Armstrong, Josephine Baker. Sinatra, Nat King Cole and even Gordon Lightfoot, a Canadian for the love of Mike. Even disco, which I also despise, except for Olivia Newton-John. I try Mozart, Beethoven, Chopin. I even play her my beloved Caruso album. But to no avail. She sings La Paloma to me. It means pigeons, but its always translated as doves. Instead of converting her, SHE converts ME to music ala Espanol. And art. I attempt fruitlessly to turn her on to Monet, Renoir, Rembrandt, Gauguin -- all the usual MOMA refugees. Except for Rembrandt -- (Ala vey, I dont care who Homer was or who he is contemplating, but Ive never seen anyone do light like that!) -- she could care less. And Van Gogh. Starry Nights, in particular. I tell her the Dutch artists story, but instantly the woman sizes up Vinnie. No man cuts his ear off and sends it to his true love, she says. He was trying to blot out THE VOICES. Nor does she think much of my moments of celebrity or my inglorious parting of the ways at The New York Times. Shes practically never heard of the NYT. So she claims. Of her beliefs, the strangest is about cats. Its a fact that if you have asthma, get one. Hell cure you and develop it himself. I know this is true. My sister Mae Anna used to have asthma. She got a cat. Now her asthma is gone, but Pepper wheezes all the time. The woman scares me with stuff like that. Its a good thing were at her house, not mine, as Tige would probably call the ASPCA -- while I was on the other line calling a psychiatrist... I am continuously rankled that this girl is content with her career as the DAs secretary. I was a practicing attorney at one time, she says blandly one evening peering at me over owlish black-rimmed glasses. She is reading and I am watching Swamp Rats on TV. I am stretched out on her couch, those annoying small cushions people keep on their sofas tossed to the floor. Ynez is curled into a fat designer armchair, upholstered in nubby light green and pale yellow. I found right after I went into practice that I like the law, but I dont like lawyers. I protest. First of all, she works for a lawyer and second, I cant understand anyone who doesnt put career above all, including your grandmas heart transplant. Dont you think passing the LSATs, law school and the bar in two states should propel you to heights greater than typing briefs for Eloy Rodriguez (the DA)? Look, Tom, theres another thing I didint like about practicing law. Pregnant pause. Its too dangerous, she says. Think of it this way. I heard this story. Its about why I find the practice to be hazardous to ones health. Barbara Walters wrote an article on gender roles during the first Afghan-American War. That being the one where we were fighting alongside the rebels, the mujahadeen, against the government. Now, of course, were fighting the other way around. I sigh, hoping she will get to the point. Walters wrote that women traditionally walked five paces behind their husbands, but a few year back they began their own war for equality. But when Walters returned to Kabul recently, she noted that women again walked behind their husbands. Despite the protests against the Taliban brutes, they now seemed actually happy to maintain the old custom. Darlin, I say. What does this have to do with -- Dont interrupt. Anyway, Walters approaches one of the women and asks, Why are you so happy now with this degrading, demeaning custom you once tried so desperately to change? The woman looks the American reporter straight in the eye and answers deadpan: LAND MINES.
Posted on: Tue, 16 Sep 2014 03:44:36 +0000
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