Arcadio by William Goyen Page A

tienes? Que tienes? Shhhh, she’d whisper, shhhh, as though I was the one to be quietened, and gently rock me. Why did I cry when she rocked me, why did I cry upon that breast of my mother that I’d sought all these years in so many places, cursing her with my vile tongue—that breast that smelled of my mother’s smell which had been captured in my nose for my lifetime, only my mother had that smell in her breast that’s what I’d been waiting for, madre sagrada, madre diabólica, madre mia .
    Anyway, my mother Chupa told me that Joe Schwartzman had sold his last dishpan the day he met her, though he did not yet know this—nor did she. For on that very midnight she found him making love to a local housewife, standing up, in the corner of a parking lot and stabbed him in the back on his forward movement, said the reflex of his muscles went on after she sunk into his lung the blade of a knife she carried against treachery and his cry of death was his cry of love, two stabbings one of love and one of death; and the housewife fell over onto his face-up body still hunching and wriggling and my wicked mother Chupa said to him, better get it quick it’s goin to be your last one and said the housewife leapt up and went crazed and ran around the parking lot howling in the dark. My mother confessed this killing to me and her teeth gnashed white in the darkness with an old vicious jealousy, but her tears dropped hot on me when she told that she was never apprehended by the authorities, but God apprehended me, she told me, God caught me and only He knows my debt, God knows; and she my mother Chupa was a heaving vessel of mixed feelings and sank into her lightless fringe like a musty hen, both wanting my sympathy and daring me to give it to her. I let my mother alone until she struggled through the tempest of her feelings. After which she chanted a long bunch of words in the Mescan speech of her forefathers and which translated told me that I had a half brother in this world somewhere, given her by Joe Schwartzman’s wild loving on the only day she knew him and born of her, under evil airs of murder and guilt and suffering, nine months later in a jail in Missoura where she had been locked up seven months pregnant not for the crime of killing but for stealing the green-fringed, diamond-tipped dress that hid her seven-months child; under a swaddle cover of soft fringe and silver shiners this child swelled up his mother and mine until he burst out of her in her cell of the Missoura jail—she never told what town—to the surprise of the jailer and the judge, an old drunken fool with a harelip but he let her go free, she said; mi madre brought this bursting child out of her with her own hands, in secret in the night. The name of my brother that my mother gave him when he was born was Tomasso. She left Tomasso in the Missoura jailhouse for adoption and he was brought up in a Missoura jailhouse in an unnamed town adopted by the jailer and his wife. My God, I called, I have somewhere a brother. And you have a dead Jewish stepfather, stop grieving over completely lost things she told me, stop taking everything I tell you so hard, I want to forget it all. But my half-brother Tomasso is not lost, I said, and for God’s sake who are you to tell me to stop taking everything so hard. And besides I am not taking it so hard I am only listening attentively as I have been accustomed to for years in the Show. But now I will have to begin to wonder how to find Tomasso. Why don’t you look in Missoura? Chupa asked me. Because I am sure he has excaped by now, I says to her. And anyways, where is Missoura? Don’t ask me, Chupa said. I was only in jail in it. How do you know that Tomasso is not dead like his Jewish father and besides how many can you look for, father, half brother, mother? Well, I found you, I told my crazy mother. Who answered I found you . In a Sideshow. It was my home, I spat back;