Читать книгу Dusk & Dust - Esteban Rodríguez - Страница 12

TELENOVELA

I was born to a line of housewives obsessed with living more dramatically, devoted mothers immersed in Mexican telenovelas, those afternoon marathons built on the same basic plot: handsome Latin Boy falls for gorgeous Latin Girl, jealous ex-lovers scheme to break them apart. Their struggle aggravated by conniving aunts and uncles, pregnant maids and mistresses, rich and misleading step-fathers usurping everyone’s camera time, eager to push their way into frame when the scene shifts to a shirtless farmhand, slowly pans across his young and hairless chest; those polished blots of sweat dilating my mother’s eyes with subplots of haystack sex. To sit and watch her sit and watch another episode was an episode in and of itself: the rising action of her middle-aged and plus-sized body rising to adjust the foil-wrapped antenna, to smack the hiccup static from the box, catch the out-of-wedlock drama, it’s sharp and sudden orchestra coupled with another Julio, tu eres el papá! Because every twist fed her confidence, she’d nudge me to lift my shoes off the couch, mimicking every multitasking mother who controlled the show, women she imagined herself to be, as I imagined her inner-monologue saying she wanted out, courage to break the spell of having a household to clean, of cooking for a husband whose sun-branded skin secreted wet cement, filled the kitchen with a scent she tried to kill with Pine-Sol and potpourri. I could see her taking mental notes on how to fake a death, on the latest ways to use mascara, comb her knotted hair, hold back the waterworks when Boy was losing Girl, or when again a novela was about to end. And she’d turn to me as if I were the boy cast solely for his smile, to provide some sort of cute and comic relief, or comments so innocently profound they’d linger beyond the screen, beyond the shadows of the kitchen table where she helped me master English with her broken English, reading story after story like lines off a script, and rehearsing every scene where the mother sighs, hugs her son, accepts the role she knows she has to play.