Alfonzo took solace in Mitchell. Mitchell walked the same path with lighter steps. Mitchell’s mother yearned for grandchildren to treat more lovingly than she’d ever treated Mitchell. Mitchell’s mother was the only one in her mahjong circle without fluffy grandbaby photos. But Mitchell shrugged off the pressure.
Luis regarded his son over his newspaper. Alfonzo had his mother’s tendency to brood. Luis loved his son but felt it was wrong to hum those particular feelings.
“Shall I order us some alfalfa?”
“Sure,” Alfonzo hummed.
“I miss your mother,” Luis said.
“Me too, Pop.”
* * *
After breakfast and a goodbye headbutt, Alfonzo left his father to his Saturday afternoon of baseball on the radio. The train came right away, and Alfonzo folded himself into a corner seat. It wasn’t as if he needed his father to remind him of his mother or Vivi. He thought of them plenty. His father could not let subtext go unspoken. The train rattled through its black tunnel.
Both his mother and Viviana had come from the mountain heights of South America, where alpacas truly belonged and Alfonzo had never been. He could not help but think of his mother as a storybook character. Her life had a folktale quality and death made her even more mythological.
Eugenia “Gina” Abastoflor was born in a village where her ancestors had lived since the ancient camelids crossed over the land bridge, forever ago. Alfonzo himself would have been born there, too, if not for the troubles. His grandparents Selestino and Naira had never dreamed of leaving the mountain, had never wanted New York, when they welcomed their baby daughter one gleaming April morning.
The young family was innocent. Alfonzo could not imagine the story otherwise. They were far from the capital. Their village was a speck in the Technicolor expanse of the altiplano, and they were happy in it. But their joy was to be shattered. A civil war, fomented by American interests, was brewing. It had to do with oil, mineral resources, ideology, fruit growing, land control. Government-backed militias swarmed across the mountains. The llamas and alpacas of the village hummed together in fear. A neighbor’s cousin planted the image of New York in his grandfather’s head. In America they could be safe.
A band of guerrillas slaughtered animals in the next village. They didn’t eat them but left the corpses lying in the fields or draped over fences. The government denied involvement. Selestino and Naira made their decision to leave. They did not want to die without meaning. They did not want their daughter to die, ever. They filled their packs, set out down the mountain, and headed north on foot.
Alfonzo ached when he pictured his mother as she would have been, a kid with skinny legs and honey-colored wool, donning a little backpack and toddling off down the mountain behind her parents.
This odyssey took them across each America: South, Central, and North. His grandmother told stories of the humid streets of Panama City, where her bag of precious mementos was stolen by a spider monkey. Many times, his grandmother had wanted to stop. She loved the palms and cacti of Coatzacoalcos and warmth of the locals. She would have liked to settle there but could not convince Alfonzo’s grandfather to let go of his northern vision.
All that way, his mother as a little alpaca walked along without complaint or tears. His grandmother, though, suffered. She was sick by the time they reached the town of Flower Mound. His grandfather gave almost all their money to get them a ride in the back of a hauling truck from Texas to New York, the destination his grandfather had decided on because of a neighbor’s cousin.
New York, the cousin had said, was big and safe. And in a sense, it was that for Alfonzo’s grandparents. They were able to disappear into the herd of Peruvian immigrants. They met a network of guinea pigs and llamas and tapirs who stuck together and who empathized with and protected the newly arrived. They found a place for themselves in the woolly underbelly. New York absorbed the Abastoflors into itself, and for that Alfonzo would always love the city.
They’d arrived when New York was in a period of crisis, but because they’d left a greater crisis, in which heaps of bodies were left to rot, they took the city’s crumbling in stride. They sent Gina to school and pushed her to succeed. She was a model student. She was even valedictorian of her class at St. Dunwen High School for Girls. She went on to start a degree in animal psychology at Brooklyn College, but then she met Luis.
Alfonzo’s dad had been handsome in his day, and he had a fast way of talking that charmed this serious immigrant alpaca. They got married pretty quick, and his mom left school. Alfonzo knew it was because his mother got pregnant with him.
Later, once Alfonzo was safely in grade school, his mother enrolled in a program at LaGuardia Community College to become a dental hygienist. Alfonzo could sense, without anyone ever coming out with it, that his grandparents were devastated their daughter hadn’t finished her four-year degree.
Alfonzo going away to college awakened something long dormant in his mother. Out of the blue she enrolled in some continuing-ed classes, then decided that was insufficient and leapt into a full-degree program. She finished the same time Alfonzo did. Much to the family’s surprise, she kept on. She enrolled in a master’s program to become a therapist. All of a sudden, his mother wanted to share ideas about what she was reading. She told Alfonzo about the theory of learned helplessness, about Harlow’s experiments, and the mirror stage. She grew her wool full and fluffy in a Peruvian style. She started wearing bold colors and silk scarves with flowers and fruits. Gina had an adorable mom-style. All his friends thought so.
A cancer diagnosis would have been shattering no matter what his mother had been doing. He would have mourned and raged no matter what. But somehow the illness felt more cruel because it attacked just as Gina was in the midst of self-transformation. She had been so happy and free.
The doctors explained lymphoma and its stages.
Alfonzo was never curious about the cancer. He had lived life as a model student, but when it came to this illness he turned dull. He refused to study it because no matter what he learned, the cancer would still kill her. He had felt sure of this. The doctors explained palliative care. Alfonzo plucked strands of grass from his wool and arranged them in a pile on the desk.
Luis, in contrast, became Gina’s self-appointed specialist and spoke of disseminated lymphoma, carcinomas, and total nodal irradiation over dinner to his silent wife and son. He made Gina stop wearing her signature perfume, and he threw out the throw rugs lest the dust hurt her immune system. He cut and added foods to her diet: corn was out; beets were in. He saved a folder of articles about antioxidants and free radicals and the benefits of green tea. He prepared chopped salads with lemon. Gina pushed her plate away and cried. She didn’t have an appetite; everything tasted like sand. She only wanted ice cream, green-tea flavor if possible.
For a while the disease was invisible, until she began losing wool. She became skinny except for her stomach, which swelled and hurt. The skin above her knees sagged, and she bruised easily. Her cancer was ever changing; in phone calls, Luis spoke in numbers. Alfonzo just hummed along. Numbers up was bad; thus down was good. Not like the stock market, like a debt. But whom did Gina owe? She seemed to be making payments with her hair and her fat, with her saliva and her ability to stay awake.
Alfonzo accompanied her to the grocery store, where she studied packages.