Alba
Ultimo knew people claimed they'd seen Mary Magdalene and the Virgin Mary and even Jesus Christ. But this was Alba, an ordinary girl from Ricardo Flores. She had on shorts and a pale blouse, and her face was conflicted with desire. "Let me make a fire," he said to her. "You must be cold."
Ultimo Vargas had been in Hatch, New Mexico, only six months, since March, and already he owned his own business to compete with Netflix, delivering DVDs and video games to ranchers and people who lived within 20 miles of town. He had worked out a deal with Seora Gaspar, who owned the video store, to pay him 90 percent of the delivery fee, and if he took out more than 50 videos in a week, a premium on the extras.
ultimo had a moped, which made it feasible. Gas prices were high, and delivery and pickup saved customers money. Also, it was convenient -- they didn't have to wait till they had an errand in town. Most of the customers were Mexican families who worked the land for Anglos, or Anglos who owned cattle or pecan groves. ultimo organized his schedule to avoid random trips. It was a lot of riding on the moped, but he liked the terrain -- the low hills, the bare mountains, pale blue in the day and silhouetted in the evenings, the vast sky. He liked seeing the fields of onions and chiles, the pecan trees, the alfalfa growing, the cattle grazing. He saw hawks, antelope, badgers, and deer, and learned their habits.
In a few weeks he knew most of his customers -- the Gallegos family out on Castaneda Road, who grew green chiles, the Brubakers farther on, the widow woman, Seora Obregon, who still ran the Bar SW ranch. The Michaels family was a mile east, the Garcias were on the other side of Interstate 25 -- they owned the bakery -- and Tom Martinez lived in the turquoise trailer a mile past. Many of the families grew chiles -- that's what Hatch was famous for -- and marketed them to the co-op in Albuquerque or along the town highway, pickled or fresh, in jellies or as ristras. Everyone knew ultimo, too, the chico loco on his moped.
The more people knew him, of course, the more people knew about his business. He was strong, had a good smile, and was a natural salesman. He talked to the Mexican families in Spanish, asked where their relatives came from, who was left in Hermosillo or Juarez or Oaxaca. He talked to the Anglos to improve his English and to show he was a serious businessman. He expected great things of himself one day.
Ultimo's English was passable, because he'd worked almost a year in Deming before he came to Hatch. He'd washed dishes at Si Seorita from six to two, and at four he mopped floors at the elementary school. In between he spent his off hours at the Broken Spoke, where he met people, even some women, like Brenda, who was a hairdresser, then unemployed. At eleven one night ultimo was walking home to his trailer, and Brenda stopped in her Trans Am with the muffler dragging. She gave him a ride, and one thing led to another. He fixed Brenda's muffler and relined the brakes, and she fucked him like there was no tomorrow. After a month, Brenda wanted to get married -- she was pregnant, she said -- and ultimo said why not. Two weeks after the wedding, he found out there was no baby, and Brenda ran off to California with a wine salesman.
To pay off Brenda's debts, ultimo used his meager savings and took a third job unloading freight at the train yard, though he still wasn't making enough money, or sleeping enough, either. One evening, after ultimo was threatened with eviction from Brenda's apartment, his boss at the school found him dozing at a teacher's desk, and he was finished in Deming. He walked north with his thumb out, but no one picked him up. In two days, 46 miles later, with nothing but the clothes he wore and a blanket he'd brought from home, he staggered past Las Uvas Dairy and a few broken-down adobe houses and into Hatch, where he saw a Help Wanted sign in the window of the Frontera Mercado. He went in and got a job stocking groceries.
Hatch was in the fertile cottonwood corridor along the banks of the Rio Grande River, with the interstate to the east and open country in every other direction -- ranches, pasture, rangeland. The days were getting warmer by then, and he slept in the brush along the river, shaved and washed himself there, and ate for breakfast whatever he had scavenged from the mercado the day before. If he wasn't working, he spent sunny mornings in the park and rainy ones in the library. Then Seora Gaspar hired him to work the morning shift at the video store, checking in rentals, cleaning, replenishing the stock of candy bars and popcorn. He established a more efficient check-in, organized a better window display, and built a new sign from construction waste: Gaspar's Movies, and in smaller letters, Pregunte sobre nuestro servicio de mensajeria.
"What delivery?" Seora Gaspar asked.
"Our delivery," ultimo said. "I have bought a moped from Tom Martinez."
Some of his customers ordered movies for the company ultimo gave them. Seora Obregon, 55 years old, had lost her husband and wanted someone to talk to. She reminded ultimo of his abuelita in Mexico, and he often made the ranch his last stop of the evening so he had time to sit on her porch and listen to her stories. Her husband had been killed two winters before, when, as he was feeding the cattle in a blizzard, a 1,500-pound bull slipped on a patch of ice and crushed him. They'd lost 100 head in that storm. Her children were in Wichita, Denver, and Salt Lake City, two sons and a daughter, and none of them wanted anything to do with the ranch. When he visited, Seora Obregon dressed well, as if ultimo's presence meant something, and she offered him steak and potatoes, and always leftovers to take with him afterward.
Another person who ordered movies was the Garcias' daughter, Isabel. She was 17, had bronzed skin, short black hair, and a good body. One day in June, she called the store and ordered Babel, "pronto," she said. ultimo was alone, so he put a CERRADO sign in the window and took off on his moped. Isabel came to the door in a tank top. "Let me find the money," she said. She didn't invite him in, but she paraded around the room pretending to look so ultimo could see the sunlight on her body. She found the money and came back to the door. "Come again," she said, and handed him a $5 bill &hellip;  &hellip; He might have looked for his father in California, but where? Or, of course, he could have gone home, but in Ricardo Flores he could not do the great things he expected of himself. Then, on a dark morning, he was lying in bed, dozing, waking, pondering, when Alba came again. She was in the doorway of his bedroom, embracing the wooden jamb, hiding her breasts from view. He sat up and pulled his blanket up to cover his chest and shoulders. Alba's expression was no longer conflicted, but wanton and eager. ultimo called to her softly. She wouldn't come closer, so he stood up to go to her, and she disappeared.
He interpreted this vision of Alba as a sign to stop moping, and that afternoon he asked Seor Garcia for a job in the bakery. ultimo had to go in at 4 a.m., and each day he understood his mother's desperation. How had she endured the long journey to Chihuahua to sell baskets? What had she thought, leaving her children behind?
One of the Garcias was there, Mercedes or Alfonso, and ultimo helped prepare the dough, knead it, and put it into the pans. He learned to make dulces and churros and cinnamon rolls, and at six, they opened the store. ultimo brewed the coffee. There were three tables for sitting inside.
At eleven, Mercedes or Alfonso, whoever was there, took a break for lunch and left ultimo alone for an hour. He was not allowed to sit at the tables, but he might drink coffee in the back room, from which he could watch the store. One day, as he was behind the counter gazing at the street, Isabel Garcia touched his shoulder, and he jumped. She had come in through the back door from the alley &hellip; ..
May 21, a long day. ultimo had hardly slept, because at two in the morning, something made an eerie, quavering sound in the cottonwoods. He stepped outside with a flashlight and heard the unmistakable buzzing of a rattlesnake. He found the snake in the beam of the flashlight, coiled, with its head raised, its tongue flashing. ultimo got to his knees and shone the light into the snake's eyes. "I will leave you alone," he said, "if you will leave me alone."
The snake didn't answer, but ultimo believed they had made a deal.
He heard the quavering again -- like a saw blade being played -- and he skirted the snake and walked to the arroyo. The sound came from upstream in dark billowy trees, but each time he reached the place he thought it was, it moved farther away.
The night was cool, but the stars were out, and as ultimo waited to hear the sound again, he urinated into the arroyo. Like every man in history who had done the same thing, ultimo felt the enormity of the sky, the deepness of space, and his own tiny greatness in the effort he had made in his field. Then the quavering came again from the trees nearby.
Ultimo shone his light back and forth into the leaves until he found the shining eyes of a small owl. It was 30 feet away and a little above where ultimo stood, and ultimo made a deal with the owl, too, never to die.
Ultimo lowered the light, and the bird flew deeper into the trees.
He set the water and went back to bed, but he still couldn't sleep, because he felt the air move through the house, sweet air, humid with the earth's smell. He got up when it was still dark and went to bake bread.
At nine o'clock he drove his new old truck home and cut off the pump and sat for a minute on the smooth stone he had put down as a step to his door. He was wearing the straw hat against the sun. The snake's path was carved in the dust in the direction of the arroyo, and the cottonwoods chattered in the breeze. Because he hadn't slept, ultimo felt part of everything that lived nearby. He remembered his mother and Lorena in Ricardo Flores, Marta in Buenaventura, his father in California, wherever he was, and wished they all could see him at that moment, tired and exultant.
He closed his eyes for a moment and leaned back against the door, and when he opened his eyes again, he saw tiny sprigs of green coming up through the soil. He stood up and ran into the field. The chiles were coming up, three feet apart in the rows and 18 inches one plant from another. He knelt down in a wet furrow between two rows and kissed the ground, and when he looked up again, Alba was a few feet away, gazing at him.
Though the journal continues till January 1803, the conventional narrative of the Grasmere Journal ends with the climactic and convulsively emotional account of William's marriage on 4 October 1802 which is the longest entry by far in the entire journal. Restrained and reticent to the end, Dorothy Wordsworth offers a challenge to the reader accustomed to the surfeit of twenty-first century autobiographical excess. Gertrude Stein's speculations on human nature and the human mind help illuminate the radical philosophical and aesthetic import of Wordsworth's challenge to the confessional subject.