The Universal Tone: Bringing My Story to Light Read Online Free PDF Page B

like it.
    It came to a point one afternoon when nature was taking its course and I had to go to the bathroom. I was used to toilets or an outhouse, but I didn’t see any around. So I asked my cousins. “See those bushes?” they said. “Do it right there.”
    “No—outside? Really?”
    “Yeah, right there beside those bushes. Where else?”
    “And how do you clean yourself?”
    “Leaves, of course.”
    I was like, “Uh… okay.”
    So I was over there doing my business. The next thing I knew I felt this wet, hairy thing touching my booty. I turned around and got the fright of my life—it was a pig’s snout, and he was snorting and trying to eat my stuff! I was like,
“Aaaah!!”
I ran out of there with my pants still around my knees, trying to get away from that hungry pig, and all my cousins and brothers and sisters were laughing so hard they were falling over. They didn’t warn me to be careful of the pigs and do your business fast, because that’s what pigs love to eat. It was enough to make me stop eating bacon.
    When I was seven years old, our family was as big as it was going to get, and things began to get really tough. We were seven kids—from thirteen-year-old Tony down to baby Maria, plus Chepa and a small dog that looked like a white mop and had no name. Some guy had asked my mom to hold it for him and never returnedto get it back. My dad was working harder than ever, trying to keep money coming in for food, and he started to leave for longer periods. I missed him all the time; everyone did. When he would come back home, we all wanted to be with him, especially my mother. But they would fight—about money and about women.
    Through the eyes of a child, I saw only the fighting. They would yell at each other, and I hated that, because I loved my dad and my mom. I didn’t understand the reasons behind the behavior, and I didn’t know words like
discipline
and
self-control
. Hearing them fight when I was a child was like looking at a book with words and pictures, and you get a general idea from the pictures but you can’t read what’s written to get the full meaning.
    All I knew is that they would go at it, and then my dad would leave and come back at four in the morning with a bunch of musicians, and he’d serenade my mom from the street outside. You could hear them coming, and all of us would wake up. My dad would stand right in front of our window and play the violin and start singing “Vereda Tropical.” It was their make-up anthem. Like B. B. King, my dad never sang and played at the same time, ever. He’d sing the lines—“Why did she leave? You let her go, tropical path / Make her return to me”—and then to bring it home he’d embellish the melody with the violin.
    We’d watch my mom, and if she went to the window and opened the curtains, we said to ourselves, “They’re going to be all right, thank God.” It was beautiful, and we kids felt relieved. “Okay, they’re going to keep it together.” That happened a number of times.
    Some of their loyalty to each other I think came from experience, from learning to get past the rough stuff. When they were first married my mother couldn’t cook at all. She’d been raised on a ranch with servants and cooks. When she first tried to bring him food, my dad was rough. “I work really hard. Don’t waste any more money, and don’t ever bring me this crap again. Go next door and ask the neighbor to teach you how to cook. Go ask somebody.”
    My mom did that. “I swallowed my pride,” she told me. Theneighbors said, “Don’t worry, Josefina, we’ll teach you. You put grease in here and then a little piece of tortilla, and when it turns a certain color, then you can put the chicken in.” My mom eventually became one of the greatest cooks ever.
    Still, in the first years of their marriage, sometimes my mom would take her babies and go back to Cihuatlán. This happened a few times, until my grandfather said, “Look, this is the last