The Aprons
The list went up on the door of the community centre on the twenty-fourth of April, two days after the Front closed the roads. It was in Spanish, and underneath in Iradi, in Mateo’s mother’s handwriting, because she had been asked to translate it and had sat up half the night at the kitchen table doing it, crossing out and starting again.
SuKarne will provide air transport for the wives and children of company employees. Departures from Talas Air Base, aprons 3 and 4. Bring passports. One suitcase per person.
Below that were the names. Mateo found his own a third of the way down: Ortiz Alymkulov, Mateo, 11. His mother’s name was above it. His father’s name was not there, because it was not a list for fathers.
He read it three times, with the other children pushing round him. Then he ran home to tell his mother, who already knew, because she had written it.
The planes were Iradiya planes, white, with the airline’s name in blue along the side. They flew from the air base, a few kilometres west, where the Americans had been until December and where a few of them, people said, still were. From the roof of their block in Semiz you could see them come in low over the cattle yards, one every two or three hours, and go out again higher, heading south and west, toward Tashkent and then Istanbul and then, eventually, Mexico City and Culiacán.
His mother would not go.
“They’re asking for women and children,” said his father. “You’re a woman. He’s a child. What is there to discuss?”
“I’m a woman from here,” said his mother. “This is my city. I’m not a Mexican wife.”
“You are my wife, and I am Mexican.”
“Then you get on the plane.”
They argued in Spanish, which they did when it mattered, because his mother’s Spanish was worse than his father’s Iradi and she said it made her choose her words. Mateo sat on the stairs outside the kitchen door and listened. He was trilingual, like every child in the Colonia, and Russian besides, so there was nowhere they could hide from him.
“Rosa’s going,” said his father. “Lupita’s going. Don Ramiro is sending Paty and the girls.”
“Don Ramiro is from Durango.”
“What does that have to do with it?”
“Everything,” said his mother. “They have somewhere to go.”
He went with his father to the air base on the twenty-sixth to see off the Hernández girls, who were his friends, and Paty, Don Ramiro’s wife, who gave him tortillas when his mother was at school. A SuKarne bus took them from the community centre, past the police post on the Trans-Talas Highway, where policemen or soldiers or someone looked in at the windows, through the base gate, and right out onto the concrete among the aeroplanes.
That was where Mateo learned the word apron.
It was a strange word for it, he thought, and he thought about it for a long time afterwards. An apron was what his grandmother wore in Culiacán when she made tamales. It was what his Iradi grandmother wore over her dress when she made boorsok. It was a thing women wore at the front of themselves to keep the mess off. Here it meant a huge field of grey concrete, flat to the mountains, with white lines painted on it and the aeroplanes standing in rows and the wind coming straight down off the Alatau. And here too it was full of women.
There were hundreds of them. Mexican women, and some Iradi women married to Mexicans, and some American women married to Mexican-Americans from Colorado, and their children, all standing in lines on the concrete with one suitcase each, being counted by men in SuKarne jackets with clipboards. The men who were not leaving stood behind a rope and watched. Nobody was crying very much. It was too windy, and too cold, and too strange.
Don Ramiro stood next to Mateo’s father behind the rope. He was a big man with a grey moustache, who maintained the cold-store compressors at the plant and who kept a bay horse, Lucero, in a shed behind his house. Lucero was the only horse in the Colonia that was not a cattle horse. On Sundays Don Ramiro rode him round the edge of the feedlot fields, very slowly, in a hat, and the Iradi boys from the old blocks shouted Kovboy! at him, and he raised his hat to them as if they had cheered.
When Paty and the girls reached the steps of the plane, Paty turned round at the top and waved, and Don Ramiro took off his hat and held it against his chest and did not wave back.
“Why didn’t you wave?” Mateo asked him in the bus.
“In Durango,” said Don Ramiro, “if you wave at someone leaving, they don’t come back.”
“That’s an Iradi thing,” said Mateo. “My grandmother says that. About looking back.”
Don Ramiro thought about this. “Then it’s true twice,” he said.
His mother stayed. Mateo stayed with her, because she held his hand on the morning the last plane went and said, in Iradi, “You’re mine too,” and his father did not argue any more after that.
Four hundred men stayed in Semiz, and perhaps six hundred women and children who had not gone, or had nowhere to go, or were Iradi or Russian or Korean and had always lived there. In May the bread ran short in the city, then the petrol, then everything. SuKarne opened the cold stores and gave the beef away, on trucks, along the western road, to anyone who came. Old women who crossed the road rather than pass a cow ate that beef and did not say so.
At night the men of the Colonia walked the edges of the district in fours, with flashlights and sticks, and a few with the rifles that the plant security office had quietly unlocked. Mateo’s father walked on Tuesdays and Fridays. Don Ramiro walked every night, on Lucero, slowly, round the outside of the fours, with his hat on.
“Why does he ride?” Mateo asked.
“Because from up there,” said his father, “he can see over the walls.”
On the night of the fourth of June the Front came into Talas, and people came out of the city to loot.
They came west along the highway in cars and on foot, past Semiz, toward the stores and the warehouses of the economic zone. Some of them turned off into the Colonia. The men of the night watch met them at the bottom of the main street, under the water tower, with their flashlights and their sticks. Mateo watched from the roof, which he had been forbidden to go onto, with his mother, who had forbidden it.
There was a lot of shouting. There were two shots, from somewhere, from the dark beyond the water tower. Nobody ever knew whose. The looters went back to the highway. The watch did not chase them.
In the morning they found Don Ramiro by the cattle-yard fence with a hole in his chest, and Lucero standing next to him, very still, with his reins hanging down and his saddle on.
The Talas Herald listed him later, in the autumn, when it printed the names: three residents of Semiz, one of them a Mexican maintenance engineer. Mateo cut out the list and kept it.
Paty did not come back. Most of the other women came back, after the ceasefire, on the same white planes, onto the same concrete. The girls came back, a year later, to sell the house. They gave Lucero to Mateo’s father, because there was no one else, and because Mateo had been feeding him every day since June.
In November 2008 the parish of St. Yusup the Worker decided that the Day of the Dead would be done properly that year, for the ones from 2007.
Mateo’s mother was on the committee. So was Father Ignacio, the priest from Culiacán, and an old Iradi woman from the blocks named Apa Saliya, who had never had anything to do with the parish but came to every meeting and sat by the stove. It was Apa Saliya who said they should have a horse.
“For an Iradi rider who has died,” she said, “the horse goes in front of the coffin, with no one on it, and the saddle turned backwards. So he can’t ride it any more, and everyone can see that he can’t.”
“We don’t have a coffin,” said Father Ignacio. “It’s a year later.”
“You have a dead rider,” said Apa Saliya. “And you have his horse.”
So on the evening of the second of November Mateo walked at the front of the procession from St. Yusup to the cemetery, holding Lucero’s bridle. Lucero had his saddle on backwards, the stirrups crossed over the seat. White ribbons were tied in his mane, which was the Iradi way, and orange marigolds from seeds sent from Sinaloa were plaited into his tail, which was not. Behind came the candles, and the photographs, and the priest, and the parish, and half the old blocks, and a good number of Iradis from the city who had read about it in the Herald. At the cemetery the Iradi wives of Mexican men poured milk on the graves alongside the tequila, and nobody told them not to.
Mateo did not look back at the procession. He kept his eyes on the road in front of him and on Lucero’s empty saddle. But he could hear it behind him, all the way through the dark, singing in two languages, which is not the same thing as singing in neither.
At the cemetery gate Lucero stopped of his own accord and would not go further. Mateo stood with him. Father Ignacio said the prayers. When they were over, Mateo reached up and turned the saddle round the right way and tightened the girth.
“What are you doing?” said his mother.
“Taking him home,” said Mateo. “It’s finished.”
Then he put his foot in the stirrup, as Don Ramiro had shown him on Sundays round the feedlot fields, and got up, and rode the bay horse slowly back down the road into the Colonia, past the water tower, under the lit windows of the blocks. He did not wave. Nobody waved at him. In Durango and in Talas, it is true twice.