The Labyrinth of the Heart

"Guasamara!" Willy, the town drunkard, used to scream with a joyful inebriated laugh that would shatter the afternoon silence in a million pleasant sounds at El Cerrito de San Miguel. Willy was a retired colonel from California who had found his lost soul in booze at the shores of Lake Chapala in the eighties after having fought a nasty war in the sixties. He had come back alive from war but his spirit had been crushed somewhere in Laos while he was kept captive in a prison camp. He wasn't that old but booze made him look like a pickle.

"Guasamara!" The kids playing soccer on the cobblestone streets near the baldío would yell back at him. This, he liked. He enjoyed the voices yelling back with innocence. Nobody knew what that meant but we all understood it was some kind of greeting. It sounded much friendlier than the sanababiches or the madafakas Willy yelled at his peers while playing cards at the American Legion. Nobody knew what those meant either. Our parents didn't allow us to repeat those words as they said they meant really bad. They said nothing about "Guasamara," however, and used it to greet Willy and some of the other Americans that lived in our town.

Gay, a kid who had appeared out of nowhere, said that "guasamara" meant que pasa but we didn't believe him. Frankie was the new kid in town. He wore really cool clothes and baseball caps made in the United States we all wished we had. He talked funny but sounded very cool. Everything about him was cool. He could break dance and sing in English. He said he knew what sanababich and madafaka meant too, but he wouldn't dare tell us in fear his parents would reprehend him.

The gossip in the barrio was that Gay and his family had gotten deported from Los Angeles but we didn't really know what that meant either. All we knew was that Los Angeles was on the other side of the border, where Willy was from. We didn't know many things back then, now that I think about it. All we knew was that if we didn't come to school on time we would sit on the tile floor and by sitting on the tile floor we would be exposed to getting almorranas en la cola from sitting for many hours on the cold after coming from the outside hot sun, and piojos en la cabeza from being back to back with the other kids whose moms couldn't keep the nasty cattle of critters off their heads, even if they sprayed DDT out of despair after a guacho haircut which became the telling sign that kids had a bad case of lice.

The other thing we knew was that if we didn't pass school with good grades, our curfews would grow short not allowing us to take full advantage of all the games the day had to offer. Trompos, marbles and soccer were only some of the day games; the evening games consisted of a more challenging set of activities. Dusk had its own spark of excitement as most of the streets didn't have proper lighting, making of them the perfect setting for more enticing games such as short-story telling around a bonfire in one of the many vacant lots of the barrio, or ultimate hide-and-seek at my great grandmother's house. Her house was the biggest house in our neighborhood, and the scariest too.

My great grandmother was an old mean woman with a big old heart. Everything in her was old except her ojos zarcos, her eyes were greyish like some of the marbles my dad saved for me from the rum bottles he drank. He would save them and give them to me for Christmas. I guess he drank a lot because he would fill a large bottle with them. Other than her hazel eyes, everything was old, her skin with as many pathways as her house, her moon hair, the long dresses, and her old shoes with holes on the tips from her long nails. Her nails looked like the horns of a small beast.

Her name was Cocepción but we called Mamá Concha. They said when she was young she was beautiful and that is how she made the wealth she had. She owned half of the lots in our barrio and a small island where she had restaurants. She often described herself as a gorgeous woman when young. "I was white and beautiful like a silver peso," she used to say about herself while she drank her one beer a day. "Men often fought over me," she would say with pride. I guess vanity and age don't grow apart.