“For all men are created equal…”
“Tell, us man, tell us.”
“Oh, yes, equal. And ought to be free to vote now and then.”
“Vote, brothers, vote.”
“Amen! Forty acres of your own.”
“Nobody else!”
“Forty acres and your soul. But be nice, baby, be nice.”
It’s a litany and neither the children in the alley nor the fat storekeeper can understand, but they feel the rhythm and they listen intently. They too clap their hands and out into the alley we march, like General Booth on his way to heaven, led by a black-faced captain of saints in the costume of a charro, surrounded now by the children. Behind us, smells of licorice and cinnamon and teaberry and Mimi suckers and chlorophyllic chewing gum. We are on our way too, now, to see where our legs will take us.
Brother Thomas ends his singsong abruptly and wipes his fingers on the loose-hanging tails of his charro shirt and with one hand on my shoulder for balance tugs at his fly to piss. “Hey, man, how do you want me to do it? A cowboy there, a charro here. That’s the answer, eh?”
I offer him a pair of white gloves I have in my jacket pocket. The children level the barrels of their index fingers at Thomas and, pow-pow-pow, shoot him and then the rest of us. “Charros, charros, charros! Drop dead, you phonies! Give us a quinto, blackman! A quinto to buy a pop! Come on, don’t be like that, give us a quinto!” Brother Thomas has his fly open and calmly pisses and resumes his defense-attorney speech: “The accused claimed the right to take what he had never posssessed, neither strength nor wealth nor even life. He made his own right. The right to wipe away that old world and build a new one.”
El Güero hangs his head and surprises us with his voice: faint, hopeless, the cultivated accent of a very proper Bostonian. “No, it wasn’t like that. No. It was … destiny, I think. I was caught up in my times. And … I was used to obeying, that was my habit, more than my habit, my duty. And I didn’t want…”
The children turn and stare at him and nudge each other with their elbows. He shines a little in the darkness. His yellow hair lights up his face. He is almost iridescent. “A güero,” the children are whispering. “A gringo güero.”
“I didn’t know what was really happening. I just went on doing, being what I had always done and been. Nothing changed for me. Nothing has ever changed. I’m still today just what I was then. I swear it … I thought I was doing the right thing. Others were fighting and dying for my sake. They were heroes in my name. Maybe I felt grateful to them for letting me go on being the same as always, for allowing me to feel heroic without having to be heroic. Maybe … maybe…”
The children grin at him and form a ring around him and begin to dance.
Mistress Morgana, our honorable judge, plants her black boots in the dust. She is just out of a comic strip, but she doesn’t know it. “The accused will remain silent while the attorney for the defense tries to save his skin for him,” she pronounces rather grimly.
The small brown arms of the children rise, jabbing, pointing. “El Güero! Father Jesus! Father Jesus!”
Brother Thomas tries to interrupt them: “Yes, he had to live inside a dream. A dream of a heroic people, Volk. With heroic leaders. For if he kept himself apart from it, he would never understand it, or, above all, understand the terror…”
“Father Jesus!” yell the children, and maybe they are mocking our Bostonian blond German and maybe they are not. They grab him and he stiffens to his full height, trying to escape their small brown hands. Brother Thomas goes on like an opera basso: “… the terror and the pain of knowing something that after all can never be understood.”
“Come on, holy Jesus, touch us, let us touch you! Give us your hand! Bless us!” El Güero, ringed by the prancing, shouting children, has fallen behind us. “The accused wanted to be able to believe the last legend, to take part in the last battle of the legendary warriors, the struggle fast and last against modern mediocrity.” Brother Thomas is shaking with laughter now. He is a plantation slave defending his master. And his master, shoved off balance by the clawing hands of the children, stumbles and falls into the briars of the thick hedge, while the window of one of the adobe huts that line the alley opens and a woman shouts, “What the hell are you kids up to out there? Leave those gringos alone!” Laughing, laughing, Brother Thomas continues, “He wanted to prove that the strength of the ancient heroes is still possible, that it can be the strength of feeble modern man if he will only give up his comfortable middle-class myths, his golden life in the miserable mean, his masks of decency and decorum.”
The children have pounced on El Güero where he lies sprawled in the hedge. “Get away from me!” he yells at them. “Goddammit, don’t touch me! Don’t let them touch me! They want to hurt me!” He struggles free and stands with his face hidden behind his palms. Then his hands move away and show his eyes open very wide, his lips peeled back from his white teeth, his golden hair shining in the darkness. The children, silent, retreat one step, only to return again throwing a mocking chant into the night air like a mortal leap,
Dingaling let’s go to mass
And fuck Jesus up his ass
and Brother Thomas must raise his voice: “Give up those absurdities and have faith once again in his hidden and secret powers that for centuries have been suppressed by the faithless faithful, the chicken-shit believers and the self-satisfied unbelievers and the well-educated burghers whose credo is the dollar now and after death, an even greener reward.” El Güero, standing again, lifts his hands in a pious gesture and announces: “I forgive them. They know not what they are doing.”
“For God’s sake,” Jakob mutters. “Playing Christ isn’t in the script. Stick to your role.”
“No,” admits El Güero. “But I like it. I saw Buñuel’s Nazarín a few days ago.”
“For God’s sake,” Jakob repeats.
I notice that the kids are picking up stones and are going to throw them. I shout a warning and we are all running toward the wide avenue at the end of the alley, the swift Beltway, cold white lights of a hospital, a morgue, a mortuary. The kids race after us but stop at the end of the alley. It’s their frontier, not one more step. Brown-skinned little sons and daughters of the great whore, swollen small bellies, worm-infested blood, infection in their guts, tetany in their skinny necks, shouting after us and shaking clenched fists that hold stones they do not throw.