Christmas in Brownsville
It wasn’t often that I made it home, so when my friend Victor invited me over to help his family make tamales from scratch, I said yes. Soon I was staring into the eyes of a 120-pound pig.
(Page 2 of 2)
“It’s got its head down.” Orly cradled the gun in both hands.
“And what, you want to ask it for permission?”
We all laughed and waited for Orly to step a little closer. When he finally raised the gun, he didn’t exactly point it at the pig’s head but more like at its floppy ear.
“Man, what are you doing?” Victor snatched the gun from him.
“Let me do it,” one of his younger brothers said.
“Nah, you stick him with the knife.”
Then Victor pointed the gun sideways, pressed the barrel against the pig’s white forehead, and pulled the trigger. The sound was short and certain; the bullet left a hole the color and size of an ink stain. The pig jolted back a foot, then buckled and fell on its left side, wrenching in the dirt. Victor’s brother dropped to his knees and plunged the twelve-inch knife into the pig’s chest—to save the meat, the heart had to be stopped immediately. The animal continued to convulse, so he stuck it a second time, but with the same results.
After the third time, Victor stepped forward. “Pendejo, it’s on the other side!”
It took us a few seconds to flip the pig over, onto its right side. He stabbed it again, and this time the pig lay still.
Three of us lifted the body onto the wooden table. We spread an old bedsheet over the bulging figure and, from a nearby cauldron, poured small pots of boiling water over the pig. Then Orly and I pulled the sheet off and used long knives to shave the body, which revealed more of its dark skin. We had barely finished when a couple of Victor’s brothers wound rope around each of the animal’s front legs and tied it to a thick mesquite branch that jutted out, parallel to the ground. The pig hung five feet off the ground, front legs spread out, back legs dangling. Its head was drooping to one side when Victor’s older brother cut it off with a hacksaw. He dropped the head into the cauldron, where it would bob until it was ready to be plucked for the tamales. Then Victor slit the pig, and blood rained into a bucket. The brothers started pulling organs from the body and hurling them into the canal, each one landing with a heavy plop. Inside the kitchen, the women were already laying out the husks and the masa for the tamales.
My mother had always bought our tamales from an old woman and her only slightly younger daughter, who lived past the airport in what most people considered the country. When the order was ready, I would drive over with an ice chest, and the woman’s daughter would load dozen after dozen of these tamales, half of them wrapped in foil and labeled in black marker with “chicken,” “beef,” or “pork” and the other half with “pollo,” “carne,” or “puerco,” as if we might taste a difference between the English and the Spanish versions. This was the one time of year when everyone ate tamales, and so what you called them wasn’t nearly as important as getting your fill. At home, my mother would stack these aluminum bricks in our freezer, where they would stay until later that night when my parents threw a Christmas Eve party for our family and friends. There was my tía Nena’s coconut punch, my mom’s famous rice, frijoles a la charra in Styrofoam cups, a rum cake from a family friend. But everyone came for the tamales.
Like most people living in the city, my family had left behind the old tradition of making tamales at home. My father, who had grown up on a farm, used to talk about his family’s killing a pig for the Christmas tamales, but this was back in the twenties. When he spoke of that time, it was as if he were speaking of a distant world, which, in a way, he was. The matanza, or slaughtering of a pig, was brought to the Americas by the Spaniards, who had been practicing the tradition as a display of Christian faith against Moorish rule, which condemned pork. By the time Cortés arrived in Mexico, the Aztecs and their predecessors had been making tamales since at least 1200 B.C.
“It’s your turn.” Victor was holding the hacksaw out to me.
“For what?”
“To cut something off, man,” he said. “You do the ribs.”
He showed me how, and I stuck my arm into the dark cavity. For the next fifteen minutes I worked with the cold air pushing me from behind and the heat of the pig’s remains rising up to my face. I tried to concentrate on what I was doing, but I kept wanting to stop. I wondered if it were somehow possible to start over, take it all back, sew the head on, remove the bullet from its skull, patch up its heart, let its hair grow back. When I felt the animal’s frame breaking into two separate parts, I knew just how crazy this idea was.
After I finished, I pulled away and wiped my hands on my jeans. I walked to the ice chest for a beer, relieved that I had finished and could say good-bye to everybody. Orly was standing with his girlfriend near the back door, showing her the pig’s heart, which he had managed to save.
I drove back to my parents’ house, hoping to take a shower and sleep the rest of the day, until the guests started showing up that evening for Christmas Eve. It was then I remembered that I had the ice chest in the backseat and was supposed to pick up the tamales for the party. I turned the car around and headed toward the airport. It was the middle of the morning, and the clouds were breaking up some. As I drove there, I thought maybe this year I’d buy an extra dozen tamales, just to take with me when I left home again.
Pages: 1 2
My Library
