La Mordida: Francesco Pays the Price to Spare His Son

Friday, April 27, 1923, Pivámoc, Jalisco

Francesco stood outside his store inspecting a delivery when Diego Cordoba appeared down the road astride a horse. A man followed behind him at a slow walk–Joaquin, stumbling drunkenly and tied to a rope that was looped around Cordoba’s saddle horn. When they were closer, however, Francesco was both relieved and disgusted to see that the rope was not tied about Joaquin’s wrists as he’d thought. The boy held willingly to a knot at the end, his eyes closed, one of them swollen shut, with a bawdy smile on his sweat-slick face.

“Un momento, Luis,” growled Francesco, leaving the dairy farmer with his mule-driven milk cart.

A passel of children scampered along behind Joaquin, laughing and jeering. They took turns poking at the drunken man with sticks. Francesco’s neighbors watched from their doorways or peeked hungrily from the small square windows of their homes.

Cordoba dismounted when Francesco reached him. “Brawling again, jefe,” the lanky lawman said. He wore a gun on his hip that was comically large for his famished frame, but he walked with the certainty that others found it impressive.

Francesco didn’t reply but grabbed his son by the collar and took the boy’s jaw in his hand, inspecting the injuries. A swollen eye, broken lip, dried blood spattering the linen of his blouse. Joaquin bore the treatment in good humor, squinting at his father with his good eye.

“Where is my mamá?” he asked, grinning. “Tell her I’ll be needing a bath! Ay!”

One of the children swatted at his calf with a broken branch. Francesco shooed them all back with a hiss. To Joaquin he growled close to his ear, “You are unworthy of the name you bear, drunkard! You shame us all.”

Joaquin resisted his father’s grip, crumpling to the road.

“Did you have to parade him here for all to see?” Francesco barked to Cordoba. “Bring him inside!”

The lawman scowled at both the rebuke and command and brought his hand to rest on the butt of his weapon. “You should be thanking me he is not drooling in a cell, jefe, criminal that he is.”

Joaquin laughed into the dirt. “Criminal! Apá, I am a hero!” He struggled to stand, swatting at the pestering children as though they were horse flies, but the effort unbalanced him and he toppled once more. The children laughed, as did Cordoba.

“Si, a true caballero,” he scoffed. “Attacking two señores for the honor of a piruja.” To Francesco, Cordoba explained, “Arnolfo’s girl, the Indian puta at the cantina.”

Francesco said nothing, hearing an insult to his wife in the way Cordoba said Indian. But he was angrier to hear of his son in that abominable place again, let alone in the middle of a workday. But before he could respond, his son had thrown himself with a roar at Cordoba’s legs. The lawman was quick to jump back and even quicker to pull his pistol from his belt and fire twice into the sky.

The children scattered screaming and the neighbors ducked inside. Francesco dropped like a stone to cover the head of his eldest son with his body. Despite his ringing ears, he heard Joaquin shouting, “You’re as Indian as the rest of us, you–”

Francesco smothered the boy’s mouth and curved his arm about his neck to hold him still. Reminding Diego of anything but the Spanish in him was a sure way to provoke him into firing his gun again. Cordoba had a decidedly Cora look about him, the Indians that hailed from the fringes of Jalisco, and there was no mistaking the Indian in his children especially, though his wife was a sallow-skinned mestiza whose mother, Cordoba claimed, was descended from the original Spanish conquistadores.

Gradually, Joaquin calmed and Francesco thanked the Lord that Cordoba had not heard him over the children’s screams. Lea emerged from the store and cried out to her husband and son. Francesco looked up to see Cordoba ruddy with anger, holstering the gun.

“Now you must truly count yourself lucky I don’t lock him up. Control your son, Arriaga. I cannot protect him forever even from himself.” Cordoba spat in the dirt as Lea arrived breathless, holding her stomach. Then he tarried, which meant he was waiting for la mordida, payment for keeping Joaquin out of jail. Francesco’s face was hot as he stood, this time helping his son to his feet to be embraced by his crying mother.

“Come inside then,” he said. “My neighbors have seen enough as it is.”

Joaquin put his other arm about his mother’s shoulders for support, but Francesco bore the brunt of his son’s stumbling weight to spare his pregnant wife.

Luis stood wide-eyed back at the store, holding the reins of his mule in a tight fist.

“Unload here,” Francesco instructed as they passed into the store.

Once inside, Francesco deposited Joaquin on a stool near the door and then put a wad of bills from his pocket into Cordoba’s hand, wanting to see the detestable man gone as quickly as possible.

“You know how things work around here, jefe,” said Cordoba in a low voice, approvingly. He flipped through the bills as though he could actually count them. “Your boy has a mean punch, I tell you that much. A fighter. And that Citla–who can blame those muchachos for wanting a handful, hey?”

Francesco wanted to sneer. Cordoba meant to ingratiate himself, perhaps in apology for firing his gun, but Francesco didn’t want to hear it. It sickened him. “Thank you, Cordoba,” he muttered. “As always. Now let me attend to my family.”

Lea called for Tresa to bring wet rags as Cordoba was leaving and Francesco didn’t miss the look she gave the lawman. Luckily, Cordoba did. She hadn’t said a word to him, or he to her.

“You know how things work around here, jefe,” said Cordoba in a low voice, approvingly.

“Who were they?” she asked Joaquin. “Why?”

“I don’t know, amá,” said their son. “Never saw them before, but they look much worse than me, I promise you.”

He laughed and Francesco, pacing before the counter, wanted to strike him–for the humiliation, for the fear he’d felt of Cordoba out there in the street, and for being too much as he had been at his age: utterly unfit for the holy cloth.

“Oh, mijo,” breathed Lea with her eyes closed. Tresa was already there, soaking up the scene. Lea took the rags from her daughter and began to clean her son’s face. “And over a woman again, no doubt,” she muttered. It was the Arriaga in him, she thought. It drove his appetite for spoiled fruits, just as Mamá Arriaga would say. But she didn’t say it aloud, sensing Francesco’s agitated presence behind her. “Why can’t you behave? Your brother and sister are learning from you.”

Tresa hovered at Lea’s elbow, inspecting her brother’s injuries with a puckered brow. “Does it hurt, Joaquin?”

He hissed when Lea dabbed at his eyebrow. “What do you think?” he snapped. Tresa reached out and pinched his arm as hard as she could.

“Ay!” Joaquin yelped and Tresa darted to the back of the store, her older brother grimacing after her. “Worry about that one, amá,” he complained.

“Where do you think she’s learned it?” Lea slapped his cheek with the wet cloth, lightly enough but he hissed again. Francesco snorted. He thought about announcing where their son had been, but his heart was too sick and his wife too burdened already. Besides, he could see on her face that she was not ignorant of where Joaquin disappeared to. Francesco was only glad that Dina was not present to observe the state of his eldest son, and to judge him for it.

“I didn’t start the fight, amá,” Joaquin protested.

Lea ignored that; she didn’t want to hear any more about it. “Tell him how much you gave Cordoba, Francesco. Tell him what his sins are costing us.”

“Enough to fatten his wife and children,” grumbled Francesco.

“His boy is Alejandro, apá,” called Tresa, peeking in from the back room. “He’s too big already and mean as a dog.”

“Such a man should not be permitted to breed,” said Francesco. He lifted a gunny sack full of maize and a few grains spilled to the floor from a mouse-chewed hole.

“And you’re making him rich,” Lea said to Joaquin. Joaquin only chuckled like a baboso and Francesco announced that he’d spent his last peso on keeping him out of a jail cell. The next time the boy wanted to play valiant for the loose women he dallied with, Francesco would let him feel the weight of Cordoba’s law on him. Meanwhile, he’d focus his hopes for the priesthood on the most innocent and promising of all his children: the one yet to be born.

***

Excerpt from The Music of Pedro.