LA TOMA

The porch faces west.

Behind the house the Franklin Mountains rise, dry and brown in the late June heat. The front porch looks across the narrow street toward the line of elms whose leaves do not move in the windless afternoon. The cicadas in the elms are loud — the way the cicadas of any Southwestern desert summer are loud, the way the cicadas of Tejas and of Chihuahua have been loud in the afternoons of all the summers any of these families ever knew, the way they will go on being loud after the porch and the cicadas and the man in the chair and the boy at his feet are all of them gone.

The wooden boards of the porch are weathered grey but swept clean. The paint on the railings was white some years ago. There is a chair with a faded cushion in which the man sits. Beside the chair is a small folding table painted the same white the railings used to be. On the table is a glass pitcher of iced tea beading with condensation in the heat, two glasses, slices of lemon already softened to translucence in the pitcher, sugar.

From inside the house, through the open screen door behind the man, comes a smell that has been building since the morning — the slow, hours-deep smell of beef simmered in tomato and onion, the smell of bay leaf and ancho chile and cumin and garlic and a quiet whisper of canela that the grandmother adds because her own grandmother in Chihuahua used to and her grandmother's grandmother in Concordia did and her grandmother's grandmother's mother in El Paso del Norte probably did, though no one wrote it down. Carne guisada con papas. It has been on the back burner of the kitchen stove since ten o'clock in the morning. It will be brought out at six. The smell is the dish slowly cooking; it is also two and a half centuries of kitchens slowly arriving in this one kitchen on this one Florence Street afternoon.

CARLOS F. FLORES sits in the chair.

He is seventy-seven years old. Born tenth of October of nineteen hundred and three in a city across a river he has not lived in since he was nine. He wears a white short-sleeved shirt with the collar buttoned at the top, pressed grey trousers, brown leather shoes polished that morning. His hair is white and combed back. His hands rest on the arms of the chair, palms down. They are the hands of a man who has done careful work all his life and is no longer doing it.

THE BOY sits on the front step at his grandfather's feet.

He is six years old. He is — though he does not know it yet, will not know it for thirty-five years, will know it only when he begins to write the book this play belongs to — the chronicler. He is in a striped shirt and shorts. His knees are skinned in two places from a recent fall. He is drinking from his own glass of iced tea slowly, the way his grandfather has taught him to drink anything that matters. The afternoon is one-hundred-and-two degrees. The cicadas are louder than the cars on the street.

From inside the house, through the screen door: the small precise sound of a wooden spoon turning in a heavy cast-iron pot. The grandmother — MARÍA MANUELA GÓMEZ VELARDE DE FLORES — is stirring her pot. She is in her seventies, slight and quick, her hair in a single long braid down her back, her hands smelling of garlic and of orange peel and of the eggshells she crushed an hour ago into the soil at the base of her rose bushes. Cáscaras de huevo en las rosas.

THE BOY puts down his glass.

Lito.

Sí, mijo.

¿Pancho Villa era un hombre bueno o un hombre malo?

A pause. The cicadas. The pitcher of iced tea sweating. Carlos looks across the street, west, toward the river he cannot see from this porch but knows is there, toward the country he was nine years old when he last lived in. He does not answer right away. He sips his tea. He sets the glass down. He waits the length of two breaths.

Mijo. Antes de contestarte tengo que decirte quiénes éramos nosotros. Porque la respuesta es distinta según quién eras tú cuando él vino. Y tenemos que ser honestos sobre quiénes éramos.

Pause. The boy is small but he is listening.

No éramos campesinos, mijo. No éramos la gente a la cual él vino a libertar. Éramos la gente a la cual él vino a quitarles. Esto es lo primero. Es la cosa más difícil de decir y por eso la digo primero. ¿Está bien?

Está bien, Lito.

Bueno. Pues vamos a empezar en el año mil novecientos y trece. En una oficina del Palacio Municipal de Ciudad Juárez. Esa ciudad ya no existe. La que tú conoces que se llama Ciudad Juárez es la que vino después. La que yo te voy a contar fue antes. Cuando yo tenía nueve años.

Pause.

Cierra los ojos, mijo. Es de tarde aquí, sí, pero allá donde vamos es de noche. Catorce de noviembre de mil novecientos y trece. Las nueve de la noche. Hay una oficina con una silla de cuero verde. En la silla hay un niño dormido. El niño soy yo.

The boy closes his eyes. The cicadas, the smell of carne guisada, the pitcher of iced tea, all become the things they will remain in the boy's memory for the rest of his life. The grandfather begins to tell what he has been telling since the years he first had grandchildren to tell it to. The form is by now perfect. Today is one telling among many. Today is the telling that will, three and a half decades from now, become this play.

The light on the porch does not change. But the place the two of them are sitting in — for the next two hours of the telling — is no longer the porch.

It is the Palacio Municipal of Ciudad Juárez. It is the night of the fourteenth of November of nineteen hundred and thirteen. A wind comes up from the south.