Caramelo by Sandra Cisneros

Author:Sandra Cisneros [Cisneros, Sandra]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9780804150866
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2013-04-29T14:00:00+00:00

* Enrique Aragón was what you would call un hombre bonito. A pretty man. He had fulfilled his obligation and chosen a profession honorable to his family. That was all they asked.

—Cualquier cosa, que no sea mesero o maricón. Anything, so long as you aren’t a waiter or a fag. This was what his grandfather Enrique Aragón had said to his son, Enrique Aragón Junior, by way of benediction before departing north to find fame and fortune in los Estados Unidos. His grandfather had had the good fortune of coming across President Venustiano Carranza and his party fleeing from Mexico City with all the country’s gold in their pockets and saddlebags. So much so that it was impossible for them to outrun the pursuing Obregón forces. They’d had to dump treasury bags this way and that, exchanging fortunes for their lives, and it had been the destiny of this elder Aragón to encounter on the road to Veracruz one morning, a Carranza† crony at a desperate and decisive moment. For hiding him under a clay maceta, the elder Aragón had been paid a sombrero full of gold coins. With this, he was able to flee the sleepy heat of the town of his birth and begin his enterprise as the owner of the first air-conditioned cinema house in Tampico.

The son had heeded his father’s counsel, and with some of his father’s fortuitous fortune as capital, arrived first in Chicago, and later in Los Angeles on the same train that brought Rudolph Valentino’s corpse, in October of 1926. Chicago, Los Angeles, Los Angeles, Chicago. With several important contacts, he’d been able to open a few movie houses in the Spanish-speaking barrios. He counted among his acquaintances the young Indio Fernández, who in those days was still a mustached Hollywood extra in tight pants and sombrero, the beautiful Lolita del Río—“Just another escuincla trying to break into Hollywood,” —and the sons of Al Capone. Well, that’s what he said. It was impossible to know what was true and what not so true, because Enrique’s father had told the story so many times over he could no longer remember which truth he was telling.

What was certain was the advice he’d been given by an aspiring Mexican filmmaker: “Art is stronger than war, Enrique. Greater than a stampede of horses. Bigger than a mauser, an airplane, all the Allied forces combined. You have no idea what a tremendous weapon the cinema is.”

It was true. Hadn’t he fallen in love with Greta Garbo’s stand-in, a little Cuban thing named Gladys Vaughn (née Vasconcelos),‡ taken her as his wife and put her in a golden pumpkin shell in Tampico replete with enough seedlings to have caused her body to prematurely age from the shock of too many too soon births. Her eldest, Enrique, however, was her consolation, especially since her husband was never home, or often oblivious to her when he was home. It was remarkable to look at this boy’s face and see her own,

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