More Matamoros

In July of 1967 father came to visit and he took us to the beach on the

Mexican side of the Rio grand, just a few miles from South Padre. We brought a watermelon and shot seeds at each other by squeezing them between two fingers. By then, dad was driving a 1958 Chevy station wagon with manual shift on the steering column; i think it was a Yeoman; he still had it 4 or 5 years later when my sister wanted to learn to drive and she said it was a challenge to operate.

The other memory of dad coming to visit, i can't remember if it was before or after the beach visit, i just remember what happened. Lalo, an older neighbor boy, had climbed on top of the bathroom building to steal guayavas off the neighbor's tree and got me to stand below and catch the loot. Next thing i know mom calls me in and said my dad wanted to talk to me: were you stealing the guayavas? yeah, but...; were you stealing the guayabas? yeah, but...Lalo...

I don't remember ever gettting a whipping before this, and the worst part wasn't watching him take off his belt or making me bend over a chair, it was the actual whipping, this was a genuine, old fashion, hillbilly whipping.

I didn't even like guayavas.

A block away from las casas de don Santos, they had built one of those typical Mexican indoor markets that rent stalls and my parents were the first merchants to set up shop in the mercado Trevino Zapata. It was dad's idea that my mom open a general merchandise store there; one might think that dad was ahead of his time by putting his wife to work, but i'll offer a better explination in a later post. Dad also had a stall there where he'd set up a shoe repair shop and had his friend, whom we only knew as El Zapatero, to operate and manage it.

The stalls were two walls and the space were probably 10 feet by 25; this market had--i would guess--40 spaces. Besides my parent's stalls, there was

a butcher with a mustache and a booming voice; the rest was empty and i ran around screaming to hear the echos, usually in just some tighty whities. The white-whiskered night watchman, who everyone called El Velador, would pay me a twenty-cent coin to go buy him a pack of cigarrettes from my mom's store.

When she started the business, mom had 2 women working for her, but she found out they were stealing from her. She then started writing to her brother, Manuel, in Durango, Mexico, asking him to let their sister Carmen come to Matamoros to work in the store with her, but he wouldn't allow it.

When my mom was 18 and Carmen was 5 their mother died of cancer; their father died about 10 years later of a mysterious ailment. My mother's family had a farm near a village 70 miles north of Durango, Mexico, which is about 500 miles southwest of Matamoros. Since mom was the oldest she kinda took on the role of mother to little Carmen, but Manuel, being a man, and having gone to school and gotten an "office job" in the Durango postal system (Correos de Mexico) seemed to have also reached the position of patriarch in the family; she couldn't pull rank on him even though she was older, so she did the next best thing: she kept sending letters petitioning for her little sister until he gave in.

So, middle of September 1967, hurricane Beuhla is picking up steam in the Gulf and my mother is getting nervous; my little sister was 2 then, but mom was always "nervous", my aunt would say; so, mom wanted us all to go stay with Manuel in Durango until the storm blew over. But, aunt Carmen had just started seeing some new beau and would tell mom to calm down; it was that and probably that business was good that she put off leaving town. And she wasn't about to show up at her brother's house without their baby sister, leaving her to fend for herself if the storm hit Matamoros.

There were shelves all along the walls with detergents, corn flakes, canned foods, and sundry items. In front of the counter were the fruit crates and slanted vegetable bins; on the counter sat, prominently, the large scale with it's sliding weight, oval metal bowl, and scoop. Dangling on the end, opposite the bowl, there was a metal rod with a catch on the bottom for the hockey puck shaped weights that were notched out to slide onto the rod. Beans, rice, sugar, and some candy were sold by the kilo and gram. One of the items i remember clearly in mom's store is the estropajo, the loofahs; probably because they felt like sandpaper on my skin.

Finally, when they were practically out of stock and she was hearing the weather predictions on the radio, mom told my aunt to pack a bag, they were going to Durango, like it or not. We all got on a bus and my older sister who was 12 at time, said Beuhla had hit as we were leaving, but my aunt told me it was just raining. We spent a week sleeping on my uncle Manuel's floor; aunt Carmen wanted to go back sooner to make sure her new beau was alright, but there was a bridge out, no buses were getting to Matamoros.

It was a catagory 5 storm with 160mph winds, spawning 115 twisters in Texas, and killed 58 people. The name Beuhla was retired after that hurricane. It was night time when we got back into the city; my aunt said we waded through knee deep water on the streets to get home, i don't remember that, but i remember inside the house, seeing by candlelight because there was still no power, there was 2 or 3 inches of water.
A bit anticlimatic, i suppose, but even if i had been in that hurricane, i doubt that i would remember much.
One last bit of trivia: while i was sleeping on my uncle Manuel's floor in Durango, about 6 blocks away, an 8 week old Patricia was giving her mother a hard time as usual. We would meet 20 years later.