The Hummingbird's Daughter_ A Novel - Luis Alberto Urrea [58]
After a while, when the land had become silent, Teresita picked up the reins and nudged him with her heels. He reluctantly pulled his lips away from the weeds and shuffled down the trail, his head nodding as he walked. “I’ll show them,” she promised. “I’ll show everybody.”
A coyote in the hedionda bushes yipped and yodeled.
Panfilo started to trot.
Ahead, at least six miles away from Teresita and Panfilo, Tomás rode beside the Engineer Aguirre.
“Tell me,” said the patrón, “you who are a world traveler.”
Aguirre pushed off this epithet with a sound like Pah! “Texas,” he interjected, “and Mexico City are hardly the world!”
“It’s enough of the world for our purposes,” said Tomás. “What I’m curious about is the differences between Sinaloa and the north. Have you an opinion, my dear hijo de puta?”
“I have a certain fame for my repertoire of opinion.”
Tomás smiled. “Although it is true that you are insufferable and irritating, and rightly famed for your endless posturing and platitudinous pontificating —”
“Bastard!”
“—I still would like to ask you: in your experience, what are some of the differences between ourselves and the blasted north?”
“Ah,” said Aguirre, as if this were too vast a subject to broach. “Differences.” He raised his hands in a symbolic surrender. “Where could I begin?”
“Anywhere.”
Aguirre regarded him.
“Have you noticed, my dear Urrea,” he said, “that you Sinaloans are provincial rubes?”
“No.”
“Oh well, you are bumpkins. And here is an example, since you asked. In Sinaloa, you might have noticed, you have the habit of adding the prefix ‘el’ or ‘la’ to people’s names. For example, you call your dear bride ‘La Loreto.’”
“So?”
“El Lauro,” said Aguirre, touching his own chest.
“So?”
“La Huila, El Segundo. That peculiar little girl—La Teresita.”
“So?”
“So it is wrong. Incorrect. Bizarre, in fact. It’s as if all of you give yourselves some royal singularity. The Tomás Urrea has arrived. The Lauro Aguirre is here.”
“Doesn’t everybody talk like that?”
Aguirre shook his head.
“Have you not read a book?” he asked.
“Books are one thing,” Tomás sniffed. “Talking is another. Books don’t ever say ‘chingado,’ for example. Aguirre chingado.”
“Just wait, you imbecile. They will when the minds of the population are freed. But they will never refer to anyone as ‘The Tomás.’ Pendejo.”
Tomás clopped along for a while, thinking.
“That’s interesting,” he said.
“I thought so,” Don Lauro replied.
Clop clop cloppa clop.
“Whereas the North Americans,” Aguirre announced, “have no gender in their language.”
Aghast, Tomás let out a small puff of air.
“No ‘el’?” he said. “No ‘la’?”
Aguirre, quite satisfied with his latest astonishment, said: “No. They have the following word: the.”
“As in tea?”
“Not té! The!”
“No male, no female?”
“The!”
“C’est bizarre, mon ami!”
“Los gringos,” Aguirre lamented, “are hermaphrodites.”
They had noticed, over the last few miles, columns of biblical smoke rising over the hills before them.
“What do you suppose that is?” Tomás asked.
They stopped and unfolded their small maps and studied the horizon.
“Volcano?”
“Not on the map,” Aguirre said. “Perhaps a grass fire.”
Now, as they moved ahead, the smoke columns grew darker and more solid. Segundo, who had seen these columns miles before anyone else, trotted up to them and tipped his hat.
“Gents,” he said.
“Good old Eye of the Buzzard,” said Tomás. “What have you to report?”
“Looking at that smoke,” Segundo said.
“What do you see?”
“Smoke.”
“You are a fountain of information,” Aguirre said. He stopped his nag and pulled the heavy big map out of his bag. The other two reined in beside him, and