In “Retablos,” a chapter in Octavio Solis’ memoir by the same name, the El Paso author and playwright tells of two family canaries his sister found dead many years ago.
But the story is about something much deeper than the loss of their pet birds: It evokes a memory of his mother and father “bawling like children” over the canaries they had inherited from his grandmother.
“Then it hits me,” Solis writes about his parents. “This is how one of them will cry when the other dies.”
“Retablos: Stories from a Life Lived Along the Border,” the latest pick in the El Paso Matters Book Club, won the 2019 Southwest Book Award from the Border Regional Library Association.
Below is an excerpt of the book from the chapter titled “Retablos,” reprinted with permission by the author and City Lights Books, the book’s publisher.
“Retablos”
THIS IS ME IN MY old room, unpacking my bags on the bed I slept in more than thirty years ago, hearing my mother titter at something on the TV while my dad is stirring the caldo de pollo on the stove. He blurts out something crude in Spanish and now both of them are roaring big as life, filling the house with horsey laughter. Then it hits me. This is how one of them will cry when the other dies.
I look out the window and I’m thirteen all over again, getting ready for school. A polar front blew all the way down from Canada and locked us in an overnight freeze and didn’t even have the manners to leave us any snow. Just a chill air and ice on the power lines. But as I come down the hall for my breakfast, I see my sister standing outside the maid’s room, snarling something to herself. I ask her what happened and she says, The birds are dead. What? The birds are dead, she says again. I look in the room and I see the maid, this young Mexican girl of twenty we hired to watch the house and cook food for us while my parents are at work, I see her sitting on her bed with her face in her hands. Sobs and the words perdón, perdón are slipping through her fingers. While she wipes her snot on her sleeve, I look past her at the cage where my mom’s canaries are supposed to be perched. But they’re not there. I come closer and find them both balled up and lifeless on the newspaper floor of the cage. They were old, their yellow feathers faded white, inherited from my grandmother when she moved to Fresno, only now they are
dead. My sister says the maid left the window open and they froze. They couldn’t take the cold. She should’ve known. Now look at them, she says. I’m about to ask where Mom and Dad are, but then I hear them laughing in their room. Why would they be laughing? I cross the hall and open the door, which is weird ’cause they hardly ever close the door in the morning once they’re up, and there they are, sitting on the bed next to each other, hands on their brows, crying so boisterously it sounds like they’re busting at the seams at some practical joke. It’s unnerving. I’ve never seen them wailing like this, bent over and shaking, their mouths contorted, bawling like children. I’ve seen my mom cry a few times, but never like this, and never my dad, who’s not the kind of man inclined to such displays of emotion. For a pair of old birds, no less. There’s something ancient about the way their wails change them, even give the room a different light. I think this is a holy moment and close the door and leave them to their searing sacred laughter.
That’s how they come, these memories. Like a set of retablos, votive images painted on old beaten tin, marked with the mystery of being, with acts of transgression recorded for those who need to remember. That’s what revisiting El Paso is like for me. Like walking into a retablo with a rusty surface for a sky, and misremembered family and friends for saints and supplicants and the lost distilled moments of my border past for miracles. They come to me at the strangest times, as if to remind me that I have lived this much because of them.
You can read “Retablos: Stories from a Life Lived Along the Border” in its entirety by purchasing the book at Literarity Book Shop. Profits from sales of the book purchased from Literarity benefit El Paso Matters.
The post Read excerpt from our book club pick: ‘Retablos: Stories from a Life Lived Along the Border’ by Octavio Solis appeared first on El Paso Matters.
Read: Read More