Telenovela

(August 7, 2015)

1: Canciónita

Rosa Ramirez liked the summer afternoons best, after the gift shop and the lunch room had settled in, after she could relax and take up the baby, little Harmony Rose, and give her a bottle of her mother's milk and rock her and sing to her.

She sang a song that, back in Mexico, her own mother had sung to her, and that she, in turn, had sung to her daughters and her grandchildren, and now to her great granddaughter:

Los pollitos dicen,

pío, pío, pío

cuando tienen hambre

cuando tienen frío

La gallina busca,

el maíz y el trigo

les da la comida

y les presta abrigo.

Bajo sus dos alas,

acurrucaditos

duermen los pollitos

hasta el otro día.

It was only a lullaby, a little song, but babies liked it. The words meant, "The little chicks say 'peep, peep, peep' when they're hungry or when they're cold. Then the mama hen finds corn and wheat for them to eat, and she settles warm over them. Cuddled warm beneath her wings, the little chicks sleep until the next day comes."

Rocking Harmony Rose as she took her bottle—no baby was ever so serious, so grave, about drinking her milk as Harmony Rose was, though she laughed and smiled at all other times—Abuelita (for that was what everyone called her) could not help smiling herself, remembering that her grandson Soos's very first word had not been "Mama" or "Papa" or even "Abuelita," but "Peep!" He had loved the little song, too.

Doctor Pines and Dipper came through, talking earnestly. "I've seen them before," Dr. Pines was saying. "They're not ignis fatuus or—"

Abuelita said, "Shh, shh, por favor. You keep the baby awake."

"Sorry," Dr. Pines whispered. "Come on, Mason, and we'll do some research. I think I have an offprint of an article by Dr. Allenby, who pioneered this field of investigation—"

Murmuring, they went through the parlor and into the gift shop, from where they would doubtlessly open the secret door and descend into the basement. Harmony Rose had finished the bottle. "What a good chica!" Abuelita said, and she burped the baby, who gave a trademark Ramirez braaaap! Then she chuckled and gurgled.

And, good little girl that she was, within five minutes she had fallen asleep. Abuelita carefully rose up from the rocking chair and carried the child to her own nursery, laid her in the crib, and made sure the baby monitor was on. Then the old lady went to her room, the room that Soos had added to the Mystery Shack especially for her, though she had protested no, no, no, she did not need a fine room like that.

But Soos was such a good grandson! He had built it with his own hands, and he and Melody had carefully furnished it with her old bed (but a new mattress, so comfortable!) and all her family photographs on the wall, along with the crucifix, a nice round mirror so she could check her hair, and the television so she could always watch her favorite telenovelas. Above the set hung her framed certificate of naturalization.

Whenever she noticed it, Rosa remembered her girlhood days, when she had lived on a big farm and had no dreams beyond the next day. How that had changed! Smiling, Abuelita thought that her own life had been like a telenovela, one with a glad beginning, a sad middle, and a happier ending.

She had been born Rosa Alzamirano on a fine farm not far from Tepic—most people from the USA thought of Mexico as a desert kind of country, but where she came from was rainforest and lush and green, with deep, fertile soil, wonderful land for growing crops. She was the youngest of four sisters and had one younger brother.

Her father's farm had grown maize, beans, and peanuts, avocados, melons of all kinds, peppers, tomatoes—and when he had died of a heart attack, far too young, she remembered how half the people of the district had come to his funeral, so many that most of them had to stand respectfully outside the church. He had been a good man.

Then, not long after her father died, when she was really far too young, barely sixteen, she married Hernan Ramirez, the rogue, mistakenly believing him to be as good a man as her father. A businessman, she thought. And he had wanted to move to the USA and become an American citizen, so they did, first to California, when their first child, Luisa, was a girl of twelve. Strangely, though her husband had been the one who had insisted that they move from her father's farm in Mexico to the USA, Rosa and not he had become a citizen.

They lived comfortably for some years, though Hernan often took long business trips and left Rosa and their daughter lonely. Then one day when Luisa was nearly eighteen, and when Rosa was pregnant again, a surprise pregnancy that came when she was already thirty-four, they moved again, quite suddenly, to Oregon.

That should have alerted her to his true nature. Hernan had come rushing in one day and said, "Pack your clothes. We're leaving." And within the hour, they left their nice apartment and all their belongings except for four suitcases stuffed with clothes. She had been seven months along, expecting Linda then, and it was a difficult, long drive for her. They knocked around in Oregon for a month before settling in the little town of Gravity Falls, which Hernan liked because, he said, "It will be easy to spot strangers here."

Luisa, a girl with a mind of her own, married at twenty, to her father's displeasure. "He will never make any money!" Hernan had raged. Worse in his eyes, Luisa's husband was a thin, reedy, Protestant, Anglo high-school teacher. Within a year their first child, a daughter pale as her father and named Rosa Stephanie, was born and they moved to a town closer to Portland, where Luisa's husband had found a somewhat better teaching job. A couple of years after that, their second daughter was born, a dark beauty they called Serena.

Rosa saw them when she could, but she never had the real pleasure of being a grandmother and spoiling her grandchildren because they lived hours away and Hernan refused to visit them.

Time went on. Linda, a sickly child, grew to be seventeen, and then she married, a man some years older than herself, named (she thought) Jaime Lopez. Hernan approved of him, because Jaime was his apprentice in the business. Linda and Rosa never really knew what business that was. In fact, eventually Rosa learned that her husband had been, truth to say, a pícaro, a con artist who, together with Soos's father, had made his living by smuggling things—people among them, and many worse things than people—from Mexico into the United States.

When Linda's son Jesús was barely four years old, tragedy struck. Supposedly off on a "business trip," Rosa's husband ran into some bad men in Mexico City and, by report, they killed him. The very day that bad news came, Rosa's son-in-law Jaime had deserted his wife and son. That was when they learned that he, too, was a criminal.

Rosa remembered the terrible shock when policemen came to Gravity Falls bringing the report of how her husband's body had been found. Mostly, though, they came with a warrant, looking for Soos's father.

Until the police told them differently, both Rosa and her daughter Linda had believed Jaime to be Mexican. They discovered that, though he spoke flawless Spanish like a native of Tijuana, he was one hundred per cent gringo, and his true name was Jacob Finster. Rosa always believed that the anguish of that discovery and of Finster's desertion of her and toddler Soos had caused her daughter's early death.

Luisa and her husband, who would never make much money, bless them, had offered help, but they had little to give. They had three children now, with the birth of Reggie, a few months older than Soos. They gave little presents and helped when they could. They lived close enough to drive over and take Soos for a day or a weekend now and again. That was about all they could do.

In the next years, Rosa had taken a job cooking in a restaurant, and on weekends she cleaned houses to support her grandson and herself. It was a struggle, and in those days, she was always very tired. When her daughter died only months after her husband deserted her, Rosa was tired and sad. And when Soos's father, fearing arrest, would not come to the funeral, would never visit his son, not even on his birthday, she was tired, sad, and angry.

That was when she gave Soos her own last name, when he was not yet five. His father had not deserved a namesake. Somehow or other, struggling and working hard, Rosa had kept their little house and had raised Soos all on her own. It had been exhausting.

But that was in the past, and now her personal telenovela had become more joyful and life was good, because she had a good grandson and he had a good wife and two excellent children. Stretching out in her recliner, Abuelita turned on the fine big-screen television that Soos had bought for her.

Her eyesight was not so good these days, and the oversized screen made things clear. She rarely used the remote to look for programs, because the TV was always tuned to the satellite channel that brought in her telenovelas.

There was the one about the young priest who had three wild and rather dim-witted sisters and had to keep getting them out of all kinds of funny trouble. And the one about the office in Mexico City in which no one, not even the boss, knew what business they were in, so they spent their days in romantic intrigue and elaborate pranks. And, oh yes, the one about the young man and his new bride who had to move in with his grandmother when he lost his job and she was pregnant—that was Rosa's favorite dramatic program.

Abuelita yawned. Well, now, year by year approaching the great age of eighty, she had retired and her grandson was making a good living for the family. And he was more than good to her. She had never liked the cold Oregon winters, and now every December Soos sent her back home to Mexico, where her younger brother now ran the family farm and where she could visit her sisters and their children. It was a good life, being retired, and she felt younger than her years.

And the best thing about no longer having to work outside the house was that she could always take an afternoon nap. She would sleep a little right after her favorite comedy show, ¡Son sus Hermanas, Padre Pedro!

But then, to her annoyance, just as the show began, the mechones drifted in. They were, what was the word in English, wisps of light—glowing vapors, from ping-pong ball size up to the size of a béisbol. They floated in from nowhere and crowded around her and she couldn't see the television well.

"Go away!" Rosa snapped.

The floating wisps, a pale electric blue, hovered around her. Three of them this time. She could not even concentrate on Father Pedro and his discovery that his youngest sister Tina had auditioned to be a dancer, but the job turned out to be for a stripper, and she was tempted by the money but was not sure she had the confidence (she jiggled her breasts every time she said the word "confidence") to succeed.

"Ay!" Rosa said, losing the thread of the story and getting up in irritation. She opened the window and shooed the vapors out. This was getting to be a real annoyance.

"I will have to do something about these things!" she said in a determined voice. Short of breath, she settled back into the recliner. "I will watch my show and then take a nap and then I will think what to do."

That sounded like a plan. She settled in and clucked her tongue and laughed when for the fourth time, the girl on the television pouted, "I only wish I had—" jiggle, jiggle!—"more confidence!"