Confession from Bexar County Jail
by Rafael Saavedra
University of the Incarnate Word
Rafael Saavedra Gonzalez is a Mexican writer (or so he thinks!) based in San Antonio who explores the delusions and meanings of his identity. He's a senior excited to get out of here.
March 2, 1926
I, Sofía, do hereby proclaim that the spleen of a fully grown man tastes of freshly sliced guayaba, that the gallbladder bursts in your mouth like tunas rojas, that the gastric juice dribbles down your chin like pulque when you sink your teeth on the tender sugary cocoon of the stomach.
I, Sofía Magdalena, Lady of the Alamo, do hereby attest that the blood of a fully grown man smells of piñas de agave on the day of harvest, of ancient sulphur that the volcanoes exhale in the evenings, of fragrant petals of cempacúchil that carpet the roads and guide the dead from the bowels of Mictlán, the realm of the netherworld, from whence the first humans flowered.
I, Sofía Magdalena Alcázar, Duchess of San Antonio de Béjar and Queen of Tejas, protectoress of the Karankawa and the Comanche, do hereby confess that I tore open the throat of Mr. Jefferson C. Harrow outside the Empire Theater, on the corner of Houston and St. Mary’s, and I sat there on the sidewalk while the scent of the blooming huisache trees and spitfire-talking chili queens wafted over from Travis Park and the blood stained my leather shoes, hands resting primly on my lap the way Mamá told me to do. And I sat there and waited while the body of Mr. Jefferson C. Harrow cooled in a terrific pose right beside me, and the knife stuck out from his neck like the flagpost fluttering above the twin belltowers of San Fernando Cathedral.
I, Sofía Magdalena Alcázar, Princess of Tenochtitlán, who warmed the feet of General Washington during the freeze at Valley Forge, who spell-checked the Emancipation Proclamation with an ostrich feather dipped in a tub of Colorado silver, who drank mezcal from the fountains of Rome and played billiards with Tsar Alexander and Emiliano Zapata in the glittering galleries of Versailles, who did succeed in poisoning Zachary Taylor with a glass of cherries dunked in iced milk in revenge for the massacre at Buena Vista, do confess that I am sane of mind, that they keep telling lies about me.
How could I be insane, Jeff? You saw me that day. You saw me leaving the theater that crisp evening of late February, walking out into the dimming cackle of the streets that were built upon the graves of Payaya Indians cut down by Spanish lead, and I felt your massive leather hand gripping my arm. I turned around to look at you. Did I look insane to you then, Jeff? Did you look into my eyes and feel yourself getting swallowed by them, these two obsidian marbles quarried from the hills of Otumba that I borrowed from Mamá?
Oh, Jeff—they do think I’m very much demented. I overheard the two policemen say it, and the sheriff’s deputy, and also the judge, and that fat lady who screamed like a goat when I cut your throat open, and His Holiness Pope Pious XI who happened to poke his head out the window of his room at the Gunter Hotel. They all think I’ve lost my damn mind, but Jeff—oh, my sweet Jeff!—I do know exactly where it is. I never lost it. I placed it in the verses of the Popol Vuh that the Mayans recite from memory. I hid it on the broad-trunked ahuehuete—that’s a sort of cypress, Jeff—against which Cortés wept bitterly at the slaughter of his men on the bridge of Tlacopan. Last I checked, I put it inside a little tin cage hanging between those of Miguel Hidalgo and Juan Aldama from the walls of the fortress in Guanajuato, and on Fridays we chat about Ferdinand VII and James Monroe and other men like you, Jeff, the white ones—the masters of the continent and builders of empire, dear Jeff, where I am just a grasshopper, a chapulín, waiting to be fried with chorizo and spread with mashed beans. That’s where I know my head is.
Tomorrow, the judge will sign the death warrant and they will shoot me in the courtyard. I know because a monarch butterfly told me as it flew along to her yearly pilgrimage to the secret forest where they know how to die. When they do, Jeff, when they shoot me, they will know what to do with me, because I wrote it all down with Davy Crockett’s blood on the walls of the Alamo. There you shall see my last will and testament.
When I am dead, I want them to cut up my body with the sable Sam Houston raised at San Jacinto. With my skin, make leather shoes for the children and the women picking their hands raw in the pecan fields of Bexar County. My blood, may it whitewash the faces of the seven mission churches crumbling into heaps of dust. Toss my head into the murky swamps of Xochimilco so that the axolotls may swim past my eye sockets and lay their eggs on my teeth. Put my hands in a velvet box all nicely tied in a golden bow and mail it to Henry Ford, should he want some use for them. My feet belong to the Order of the Discalced Carmelites—I am told the nuns like feet. And for my entrails, twist them up into rope and give it to the voladores of Papantla. Tie me around their ankles and let them soar, headfirst to the wind, as they spin around by the grace of ancient gods they invented long before you were born, Jeff, but I was there to baptize them. I baptized them with urine from the priests of Tepeyac.
I named them Tlaloc, Tezcatlipoca, Quetzalcoatl, Coatlicue, Coyolxauhqui and her four hundred children, the bleeding stars of the obsidian firmament. And when I ran out of names, Jeff, I drank peyote and let the rabbit on the Moon whisper the rest. The gods will be born in my mind and pour out from my ears and nose and when they shoot me tomorrow they will all burst like fireworks on Christmas Eve and fill up the courtyard knee-high. And the guards will trample all over them when they go see my cooling body, secret gods that hide in parchment and prayers only I remember.
But don’t just sit there and stare at me, Jeff, that’s just rude. All blank-eyed like a dead pig waiting to be butchered. What happened to your eyes, Jeff? You can’t look at me anymore. You can’t shoot at me from across Papá’s backyard, pair of eyes like those of a coyote stalking across the Hill Country, freezing me in place and stealing the words, the thoughts, the decorum of a proper señorita beneath the shade of that old ceiba tree my brothers used to water when it was just a lanky twig, and you approached and I stood there, tender little rabbit wearing a light-blue dress from Frost Bros. on East Houston, golden pendant of Nuestra Señora de Guadalupa framing my burnt chest. You smelled of bourbon and Papá’s tequila, the fine bottles he keeps in his study for occasions just like that night exactly one month ago—a month already, Jeff!—the night of the Feast of the Presentation. Doña Cecilia served cochinita pibil wrapped up in banana leaves and steamed in a massive iron pot.
Did you try the tamales, Jeff? Did you take little sips from the crystalline blood of the agave and wash it down with aguas frescas, with Doña Paloma’s horchata that she brought in massive clay jugs that my cousins hauled and set up on the tables? Surely you wouldn’t have lingered around so late, lest the vipers talk, lest they murmur in the pews of Reverend Dennison’s church. Mr. Jefferson C. Harrow, drinking the night away with the Mexicans—and on a Catholic feast day! But the flesh called you, didn’t it, Jeff? Did you think, maybe, licking all over my cheeks and the curve of my neck with those coyote eyes that made me freeze up, that a part of me could taste like Doña Cecilia’s cochinita pibil if only you dared a bite? Bury your teeth all over me and tear me up and make me swim in your stomach, chopped up in bits, and savor the pulque that would one day paint the sidewalk of Houston Street a steaming, frothy white?
That was your mistake, Jeff, though I forgive you. You didn’t know better—how could you? No one taught you how to kiss a mountain lion, how to caress the flowering skin of a jaguar slithering down the coppery ravines of the Sierra Madre. Ah, but don’t look at me like that! Jeff, my sweetest Jeff, it wasn’t your fault. Papá gave you his blessing. I know because he told me when I ran over to him, wracked by sobs that cramped the muscles in my back, and he held me as I dissolved upon his lap.
You know what I noticed, Jeff? That my tears taste of champurrado. I think you felt that spark of cinnamon, didn’t you? You kept kissing my cheeks and my eyes. You drank from them. You drank up all of me, from everywhere and everyplace, until all of Lake Texcoco disappeared and the city swallowed up the corpse. You know what will happen, my sweetest? One day, maybe in one week or one century, but it will, the Earth will stand up and dance to a beautiful huapango, like they do in the Huastec mountains, and start its zapateo that will shake all the foundations of the mountains and the ravines and the corpse of a lake no one knew how to bury, and the city will return to the land that gave birth to it.
I really was so stupid, Jeff, and when Papá whispered into my hair that I would be such a marvelous wife, that I ought to be honored to be desired by el hombre blanco, the rich hombre blanco from Austin, I felt like the worst woman in history since that nun Sor Juana signed her soul away in blood and learned to blaspheme in Nahuatl. Of course, Jeff, you were right and I was so dumb and so womanly and utterly pathetic clutching the ragged shreds of my dress that still smelled of you, Jeff, of your spittle that I keep within the folds of my navel—for that is the center of all creation, the place where the Sun God made the world from the bones of the crocodilian she-beast Cipactli before the birth-cries of the universe.
I, Sofía Magdalena Alcázar, Mayor of San Antonio, Governor of Texas, Most Catholic Queen of Spain, Empress of Aztlán and the Holy Roman Empire, Matriarch of the Philippines, Keeper of the silver mountain of Potosí, consort to the Chieftain of the Mapuche and Governess of the Patagonia, Liberator of New Granada and Cusco, wife of the Sapa Inca, heiress of Cuauhtémoc and the plumed throne of Tenochtitlán, Mother of México and the Americas, do hereby confess.