COCA COLAS MEXICANAS, ASPIRINAS Y LA ABUELA

By Juan Montoya
When Andres was small, his father would often take the entire family to visit their grandmother Petra across the Rio Grande and to the colonia where she resided with one of his brothers and a sister and her common-law husband Lalo.

The U.S. kids would come along and after they had gone to the mercado and gotten their haircut with the barber who always feigned that he had cut a part of their earlobe off and then pasted it back on using a dab of saliva with a smile at their father, they would go to visit their grandmother.
Usually, when the other uncles and aunt and their families living in Matamoros gathered, it would be a full house.

Andres always marveled at the fact that his grandmother always kept the plastic covers on the living room sofas and chairs just as they had been kept on in the muebleria showroom. On a hot day, the plastic would stick to his legs and made sticking, squeaking sounds when he moved in it. He didn't like it and told his father who would tell him to keep quiet and not say anything to his grandmother.

His grandmother had developed a habit of drinking a large bottle of Mexican Coca Cola and taking a large Bayer aspirin tablet every morning. She claimed that unless she consumed these two daily she would suffer intense headaches that would make her stay in bed writhing in pain until she had them.

Her sons on the Mexican side would provide her with the Mexican Coca Colas – large, strong, and darker than the U.S. sodas – and Andres' father would buy her large bottles of the aspirins at a farmacia when he visited. The bottles would be returned to the corner tiendita after they consumed the soda and were returnable for deposit. They were heavy, glass bottles larger than the U.S. kind.

As happens in large families, when Andres' aunts and uncles  – his fathers' brothers and sisters – visited, old family resentments would often flare up that resulted in long arguments that would drive the kids outside the house into the colonia while the grownups fought over some old issue that had happened years ago.

A prime bone of contention was Lalo, his grandmothers' common-law husband who used to eke out a living selling oranges and fruit on the streets in a hand-made pushcart. All day long he walked the dirt streets of the colonias and in downtown Matamoros selling his wares. When people bought, he had a knife and chilito that he would sprinkle on the sections. His earnings were meager, but enough to take care of their small needs.
His wiry body strained to push the wheeled cart down the dirt streets as he called out: "Naranjas con chilito a veinte! Cocos! Jicamas con chile!"

Lalo was not liked and was looked down upon by the two unmarried siblings – Andres' aunt and uncle – still living with his grandmother. To them, their mother and Lalo were living in sin and they would become righteously indignant when he trudged in after a long day in the hot, dusty streets and handed their mother his daily earnings in crumpled paper pesos, half-pesos and veintes that she used for her daily needs.

As indignant as the two siblings were of Lalo, they didn't hesitate to dip into the jar where Petra kept the money he earned to spend on what they wanted. The uncle thought he was a descendant of the Latin Romans. She was white-skinned and looked down upon Lalo with ill-concealed contempt as a loathsome creature.

Years before Petra had got together with Lalo, he had been in love with a woman in Torreon, Coahuila, where the family had lived before moving to Matamoros. One day, Lalo came home to his lover and found her cheating on him with another man. In a blind rage, he had killed her with a knife. Since then, he had been on the run. But Andres' father and his brothers and sisters had no way of knowing. All they knew was that their mother had Lalo there to help her when they weren't there and provide her – however minimally – with the things she needed.

Lalo was one of Andres' favorite people in Matamoros. In fact, he was all the kids' favorite because if they happened to be there when he came home with his cart, he would cut them oranges and sprinkle them with chilito and would refuse their veintes. The kids would all crowd around Lalo and he would revel in cutting the oranges to the small crowd of guercos around him.
"Ta rico! Ta rico!," they would shout.
Even though Lalo would not accept any payment for his oranges, Andres had caught his father discreetly pressing a few dollar bills (not pesos) into his hands when no one was watching so he could replenish his wares after they left. Lalo would protest but his father would not hear it.

They got the bad news in Brownsville one day that his grandmother Petra was seriously ill at the Matamoros Seguro Social hospital. Colonia residents rarely saw a doctor and when one of them ended up hospitalized, you knew it was serious.
Andres saw his father and mother jump into their car and head for the bridge.
When they came back, they had bad news. Their grandmother Petra was dead.
"Did she have a heart attack? Did she get bit by a snake or spider," they asked their parents.
The answer left them stunned.

One morning, after Lalo had left to sell his wares and no one was home, Petra had taken her daily aspirin and Coca Cola when she dropped the heavy bottle on the floor and it broke into pieces. A large jagged piece of the neck sliced her arm and wrist and she tried to stanch the flow of blood but could not. Neighbors tried to help to no avail and they rushed her off to a local curandera who told them there was nothing she could do and urged them to take her to the hospital at once. A neighbors' boy was sent off to find Lalo selling his oranges in the streets.

By the time word reached the family, it was too late. They arrived at the hospital to find her, her skin deathly pale in contrast to her normal Indian swarthy look. She died shortly after.

After her death – facing the cruel recriminations of the two siblings remaining at the house – Lalo decided to return to Coahuila and turn himself in to the law to face the old murder charges. He just as easily could have crossed the border and gone north. But he felt old and tired of running and there was nothing else to be done.

His parents later returned to visit old relatives there and took the time to go see him in the penitentiary. They said he was serving a long sentence but was a trustee and made a little money doing laundry and chores for other prisoners to pay for his meager needs. They say he cried when he saw them and tried to return the money Andres' father placed in his hand at the end of the visit. When they left, they saw him at the barred gates waving at them, a forlorn, tragic figure resigned to pay for that ancient moment of passion.

The doctor at the hospital said the jagged Coca Cola shard had severed one of their grandmother's veins and that her daily intake of aspirin had thinned her blood and prevented it from clotting and she had bled to death. There was nothing to be done.