The mother of Teodota sat in the doorway with a bowl of meat in her lap. Her greasy black dress wrinkled latitudinally about her shapeless figure. Her countenance was smooth, blank, and oily. As she cut the meat into bits for the tamales, an impotent dribble of monologue flowed from her flabby, pendulous lips. While awake, talking was a function as natural and continuous as respiration or digestion, and was interrupted only when her present husband exerted himself to beat or kick her into a brief interval of sniffling repression. On this particular afternoon Señor Garcia was not interested in damming the sluggish but endless current of his wife’s conversation, for he lay in drunken sleep on a filthy blanket in a corner of the rough board pen, a Mexican Caliban, swart, lowbrowed, bestial.
Teodota knelt behind the metate grinding corn to be mixed with chile in the pungent tamales. She had dragged the clumsy stone implement to a position where she could see that her stepfather still slept, notwithstanding his frightful inarticulate gulps and growls. A thin, flat-chested slip of a girl was Teodota, with great, piteous brown eyes, high cheek bones, small, pointed chin, and a complexion of tan satin. She was not beautiful; rather was she an intaglio of beauty with hollows where there should have been roundness. Her untidy black braids had been slept on many times since they had known a comb; the scant, tattered calico gown fell away from the upturned leathery soles of her bare feet. She guided the heavy stone roller with languid, perfunctory movements, while some clockwork in her brain prompted the periodical “Si, madre,” that fully satisfied her mother’s conversational requirements.
The real Teodota was back in Old Mexico. Certainly she was not driven thither by any lack of familiar environment in the Mexican quarter of Los Angeles. Nor would it seem necessary for Teodota to keep tryst in Mexico with a lover who had not preceded her to the United States, but they had not found each other yet and she could meet her Pablo only at the plaza fountain in Texcoco.
Suddenly into the dream, but not of it, a white folded paper fluttered through the open window and lay on the floor beside the metate. The girl examined it curiously.
“What is it, daughter?” inquired the elder woman.
“I do not know, mother. It looks like drawing; I am sure it isn’t writing.”
“I can use it to light my cigarette.”
“No, mamacita, I want it.”
“For what?”