The Couch

                                                                                 

     My mother recalled how everyone, even the grandkids, called her mother, my grandmother, Eusebia Villalobos Gonzalez, Mama. Eusebia didn’t want the kids calling her abuelita. She said it made her feel old, so the abuelita tag never took. When I took my grandson to the park, and he called out Grandpa, I instinctively said, "Anthony, call me Danny, not Grandpa. It makes me feel old." So even now, though he is in his twenties, he still calls me Danny. Is culture really that strong?

     So, for my grandmother, it was either "Mama" or "Grandma", in English, even though she spoke only Spanish, but made herself understood if she had to struggle with English.

     One time she wanted to take the bus from her home in Santa Monica to the Million Dollar theater in downtown Los Angeles, about a fifteen-mile ride up Pico boulevard through a lot of different neighborhoods. From the bus, riders had to transfer to the electric street car, at the Rimpau station. Few Mexican women travelled alone on public transportation in those days. She convinced a couple of her more daring neighbors into going with her.

     As they stepped into the bus, the driver asked her where she was headed. She answered “Los Angeles,” the way it is supposed to be pronounced. The next question was a little more complicated. “You want a transfer and a one or two-way ticket?”

     Her mind reeled as she tried to find the words, so she finally said, her Spanish accent heavy, “Gone y c’mon,” like one word.

     The driver had no idea what that meant.

     She repeated the words, louder, confidently, “Gone y c’mon.”

     Luckily the driver was patient. He thought about the words, “Gone,” as in “go” and “c’mon,’ as in “come back” or “return.” Then he said, “Ah, a roundtrip ticket.”

     The women happily boarded the bus, found their seats, transferred onto the electric car and enjoyed the performance at the theater, usually two Mexican ranchera movies and a live mariachi at intermission.

     For my grandmother, who came from a rancho in Jalisco, during the height of the Mexican Revolution, with a husband and five children in tow, all under the age of ten, the youngest, Juanito, who drowned in a swollen canal in Riverside, this was hardly a challenge. She was a Villalobos.

     Recently, a young woman, a long-lost relative researching her own Villalobos roots, contacted me to confirm our mutual family relationship. An intrepid researcher, using both the ancestry website and DNA testing, she told me historians trace Eusebia’s family roots to the founding of Aguascalientes and Los Altos de Jalisco as far back as 1730 to Cristobal Villalobos, Valladolid, Spain., and, possibly, in Mexico to Juan Lopez de Jimena, a conquistador who arrived to the new world from Cuba under Cortes’ command, and another vein to Petronilla Arias y Moctezuma, possibly the great granddaughter of the emperor Moctezuma II. I guess the heritage amounted to more than the money or land, for the Villalobos were dirt poor.

     Born in Las Palmas, a ranchito in the province of Jalostotitlan, Eusebia possessed confidence many of her friends envied. Even if she didn’t understand the essence of her rich heritage, something inside gave her the confidence to overcome obstacles that would have stopped many people cold, giving credence to the study of many scientists in the field of neuropsychology that our behavior has more to do with culture than biology, nurture over nature.

     When my mother talked about her parents’ marriage, she remembered little communication between them. They talked very little. She said, "Their relationship seemed strained, at times."

     My mother thought my grandmother never forgave my grandfather for stealing her from her family, and, some say, she spent her life making sure he didn’t forget.

     According to my aunt, Josie, the day my grandfather kidnapped my grandmother, she had been washing clothes in a stream with her sisters, her boyfriend in a tree overhead watching. My grandfather rode in on a horse accompanied by friends on horseback. He swooped her up onto the saddle and rode off, just like that, a rich boy having his way with a poor girl. She was barely fifteen.

     I always wondered why my grandmother’s father, Pablo Villalobos, never came to demand her return, to which my uncle Jesus (Chuy), my mother’s oldest brother once told me, “Viejo, Mama was from a very poor family. They barely had enough food to eat. My daddy,” he was talking about my grandfather, Nicolas, “came from a wealthy family. They sent him to Jalos to become a lawyer, but he didn’t like school. Mama’s family was relieved he kidnapped her. They knew she wouldn’t starve, and there was one less mouth to feed in her family.”

     Of course, my next question was, “Then why would a boy from a prominent family marry a poor peasant girl?” 

     In Mexico, class mattered. Men and women didn’t marry outside their class. Though my grandmother’s family was poor, financially, they were rich, culturally, and didn't see themselves as peasants, nor did the people in ranchos view them that way.

       Still, there was another explanation. It was my aunt Josie who told me, “Mama had light skin. My daddy had dark skin. His family figured if they married, the children would be light. You see. They wanted grandchildren with lighter skin. That was important to them back then.”

     Once in the North, Eusebia and Nicolas’ bought a home on 22^nd Street in Santa Monica, about 1923, for $300. It was the only house my mother and her siblings ever knew. Nicolas and Eusebia were one of the few Mexican couples in the Santa Monica barrio to buy their home. Many of his neighbors believed one day the gringos would send them all back to Mexico, and take away anything they owned, even a house. Nicolas and Eusebia knew, early on, they would not return to Mexico. To rent was to throw away money.

     My mother said, "My dad always talked about Mexico, but never about going back to live."

     Nicolas died 1940 of emphysema. He worked many years in a Santa Monica brickyard located at Cloverfield and Colorado Avenues, off Olympic boulevard, a few miles from the Pacific Ocean. Years of breathing in the fine particles killed him, a slow, painful death, tossing up little pieces of lung until there was nothing left.

     As we talked, my mother’s childhood memories came to her in no particular order. A word or a name reminded her of a different incident, time, or place, like the time she finally got to sleep in a room, all to herself, without her older sisters crowding her into a corner of the bed.

     For two nights, she got a bed to herself, except she had to share the room with her father, the night before his burial.

     They kept his body in the house for a three-day prayer vigil. The final night, after friends and relatives came to view the body, the family rolled the casket into one of the bedrooms. Nobody wanted to sleep in the room, so my mother volunteered.  She crawled into bed, her father's corpse in the casket along the wall. “My dad and I were pals," she remembered. “He was a good man.  Why wouldn't I sleep in the same room with him? He had always made me feel safe. Why would I be afraid of him?" 

     After my grandfather died, my grandmother took charge of the family, the children young adults by that time and working. My mom was about fourteen. She remembered how my grandmother saved money, it seemed, every cent, except for expenses. My mom told me the same thing her siblings had said. My grandmother's mantra: "If you earn a nickel save half of it." After what she considered an appropriate time, my grandmother tossed aside the black dress and wore whatever colored dress she desired. She wasn't going to fall into anybody's cultural vision on how a widow should look or act.

     She was the head of the household. All the children worked and contributed to the family. Everybody knew about the Great Depression and how many people lost their savings. For many years my grandmother chose to hide the family savings some place inside their home, rather than a bank.

     What my mother remembered vividly was the living room, the furniture, especially the new, colorful couch her brother Joe had bought, set atop a large area rug. Not many homes in the neighborhood were so finely decorated.

     I had heard families in those years could not afford couches or simply didn't see the need for them, or for rugs. My mother chuckled and raised her eyebrows to suggest that her family had style, and even though they did not yet have an indoor bathroom (few Mexican families in Santa Monica did), they did have a couch. My uncle was already working on giving his family one of the first indoor bathrooms in the barrio.

     My grandmother took pride in her furnishings and made sure everything was dusted and in its place. My Uncle Joe wanted to be very American. He listened to classical music and jazz. He bought Eusebia whatever new electric contraption came on the market. He wanted her to have the best, like the day a man came knocking at the door selling an electric powered vacuum cleaner.

     To demonstrate the machine's suction, the salesman reached into a bag and pulled out a handful of dirt. Confused, the family watched him. When they saw he was about to throw the dirt on to the rug, they reached to grab his arm. Before they could stop him, the dirt had splattered onto the rug. Horrified, they watched, as if by magic, the vacuum cleaner sucked the rug clean.

     Just as he was about to throw dirt on the couch, my mom said she jumped between the man and the couch, yelling, "No! No! Not on the couch."

     For the Villalobos-Gonzalez family did the couch represent more than an object of comfort? Maybe it had something to do with a mythological past none of them ever knew.