December 2024 Volume 14 No 12

Dead reckoning in 6/8 time

by

Sabrina Vourvoulias

Señores, venga el aviso.                                                    Good people, here’s the notice.

In my thirty-third year, this Spanglish-speaking, feet-in-two-worlds, gringa Latina realized it was time to go to Mexico and save my mother.

To be clear, my mother had died shortly after I turned thirty-one, in our house in Pennsylvania, long removed from the land of her upbringing. But you know how it is with some mothers — nothing slows their roll, not even death.

A month after she died, as I was making coffee in the kitchen we had shared, complaining to myself about the loose ends she had left me to tie up, my mother’s favorite cooking pot inched off its hanger and fell on my head.

Later, maybe a year into her absence, she appeared while I was watching TV, her face momentarily overlaid on the talking head onscreen. Just long enough, really, for me to attend to what was emerging from the twinned set of lips.

"Maybe my fairytale has a different ending," Kim Kardasian and my mother said. That got to me, deep, where marrow and belief are one.

When my mother was eighteen and living in Saltabarranca, Veracruz, she got on the platform that is set up for dancers at every community fandango where son jarocho is played and danced with the Devil.

In most Anglo tales, when the protagonist pits themselves against this particular antagonist, they emerge wiser, wilier, maybe even a little damaged — but victorious. Latin American folktales aren’t so generous. My mother was a good bailadora, better than good, maybe the best ever to come out of Veracruz. The Devil must have had to pull out all the stops to defeat her, but defeat her he did.

And for the remaining years of her life — some of them admittedly already a kind of hell on earth — she knew the worst was yet to come.

~~~

Señores, pido licencia.                                                            Good people, I ask permission.

Let me tell you about María Luisa as she was in the 1950s — the full moon of her face; the straight black hair; the shapely legs leading to tiny feet tucked into the high-heel Mary Janes all serious bailadoras eventually pony up for. She dyed her shoes Mexican-Pink because that suited her spirit better than the usual black or white

And even though the photos I have of her from that time are not in color, those shoes — damn — they’re lit. 

She could dance with a full glass of water balanced on her head and never lose a drop.

She could tie a bow with her feet and never miss a step. 

She could answer every call and never skip a beat. 

Her first husband, Pepín, was dazzled. How could he not be? She moved like the dazzle of sunlight on water.

In an attempt to woo her, Pepín — reportedly a gawky man with a sparse mustache and too-long hair tucked behind his ears —  taught himself to be that most sophisticated of jaraneros: a versador repentista, a singer-improviser.

In son jarocho, where the performance of one familiar song can go on for an hour or more, those who improvise on the traditional verses are perhaps the most admired members of the full cohort that includes musicians, singers and dancers. 

How many years did they set the platform on fire with their combined talents? Who knows, but long enough that my mother’s body transformed from their combined heat. Until her last day, you needed only to step into my mother’s orbit to feel the draft of 87° F air radiating from her — even in the middle of winter.

Still … Pepín was the versador repentista the night my mother and the Devil danced. As much as he loved and idolized La Marilú, and as deep as he plumbed his legendary well of talent, he was unable to improvise her salvation.

Some say it was shame and guilt that caused his fatal heart attack three months later. Others blame the Devil, saying he’d do anything to keep that pair of remarkable talents from challenging him to a rematch.

I have no memory of my own father, Fito — La Marilú’s decidedly unmusical second husband. My mother didn’t speak much about him, except to tell me that I owe my US citizenship to the fact that he was determined to shake the dust of Veracruz off his feet.

The word my mother always used to describe both my father and me — inconforme — means dissatisfied and noncompliant. I think about that whenever I leaf through my mother’s photo album and come across the newspaper clipping about his shooting death outside a local bar, three months before I was born. During our worst rows, my mother would always accuse me of being my father’s daughter.

The life my mother led in the United States might have been different if my parents had settled in Los Angeles or Chicago instead of Pennsylvania. Surely in one of those cities, with their thriving Mexican immigrant communities, my mother would have found a group of jaraneros to be part of. But back in those days, the semi-rural area outside of Philadelphia we called home had no Mexican community to speak of. Our only Spanish-speaking neighbor was a chatty, old-school Boricua who refused to listen to any music that didn’t carry the Fania label.

My mother wrapped her Mexican-Pink Mary Janes in sheets of a newspaper she couldn’t yet read and hid them so expertly, I wouldn’t find them until she was dead and I was clearing out her things.

But back to changing the outcome of her fairytale…

After she started haunting me, I spent a lot of time online, researching. Eventually I started plotting a trip to Saltabarranca, where I envisioned myself dancing on the same platform she had danced across. I would dance in her steps — only better — and wrest her afterlife back from the Devil.

I began corresponding with a renowned folklorist whose specialty was the story-rich sones from the Sotavento, but whose teaching post at the UNAM kept him in Mexico City. This was convenient, as I’d have to fly into the city and from there set out for the east coast of Mexico. 

The first thing Don Arcadio had me do after our first video call was to scan in all the photos from the batch my mother had always told me were taken on the night of her fateful contest. "I can tell from the sheer number of photos of her that the Saltabarranqueños adored your mother," he said during the next call. "It’s not surprising, really, since son jarocho is the region’s proudest inheritance and its most talented performers are celebrities."

"Too bad whoever was taking photos that night didn’t get a candid of the Devil," I joked, "so I’d have an idea of what I’ll be facing when I challenge him."

"Oh, but they did," he said, rifling through the papers on his desk, then holding up to his computer’s camera the printout of a photo I had sent him. The image was of a mounted rider, but framed in such a way that it cut him off at the shoulders, with no face visible. The boot caught in the stirrup was buffed to brilliance, its heel strapped with a fancy spur. A double line of chased silver buttons marched up the seam of the trouser leg. His hands held the reins short on a glowingly white horse.

"He looks like a charro from one of those old movies, not a Saltabarranqueño at all," I said. "I always imagined that photo was of a foreigner who had happened upon the fandango by chance that night…." 

"In our tales, the Devil is always foreign and traveling through," Don Arcadio said, "though never by chance."

"Well, then, this foreigner will just have to knock that foreigner on his ass when I get to Saltabarranca," I said.

Uno propone y Dios dispone. Man plans and God laughs. 

Shortly after that conversation, the subprime mortgage crisis blew up. My savings disappeared and I nearly lost the little house my mother had worked her whole life to own. My job at one of Philadelphia’s newspapers disappeared. When I finally secured a job again, it was a low-wage-no-benefit one, in retail. I got a housemate, or rather, a string of them, until I finally lucked into one who was not only reliably employed, but also a decent person. But even with that, after covering my basic expenses, I had only just enough to keep my internet connection going.

"If you can’t come here to challenge the Devil," Don Arcadio told me via video call, "find some local jaraneros and throw a fandango there."

"What am I going to do — throw one in an empty VFW hall and dance alone to my son jarocho playlist?" I said. "I don’t know any jaraneros, Don Arcadio."

There was a long silence, long enough that I thought the internet had crapped out mid-conversation. "You’ll come up with something," he said. "You are La Marilú's and Fito’s daughter and, for good or ill, the Sotavento is in your blood. There’s magic in that."

"I don’t believe in magic. I believe in practice."

But when I got off the call with him, I dug out the newspaper-wrapped bundle buried under a pile of old blankets and pillows in the farthest corner of my closet. The paper was so yellowed and brittle, it came away in flakes. Inside were my mother’s Mexican-Pink Mary Janes, their leather as supple as if they had been oiled yesterday.

Unfinished business doesn’t care about the number of years it has been stored away in thrall.

It doesn’t care about lack of time, lack of money, or lack of community.

Unfinished business doesn’t care about anything, except seeing itself finished.

~~~

Mucho cuidado, señores.                                                          Take care, good people.

"Beware of el buscapiés," my mother used to say as she threw one jumping jack firecracker after another at my feet on our short driveway in Pennsylvania. She wasn’t looking to hurt me, though one of our neighbors once reported her to Children and Youth Services for it. 

My mother taught herself to play Pepín’s jarana, then bent her considerable will into making me as fine a bailadora as she had been. She would shout at me, directing and correcting my steps as she threw the firecrackers — so I would understand the rhythm of the zapateado, as one must, from sole to soul.

Later, "beware of el buscapiés" would become her refrain whenever I embarked on anything that seemed foolhardy to her. But like so many children of immigrants, I didn’t understand what my mother really meant by her words until she was gone. 

It was Don Arcadio who told me that el buscapiés wasn’t only the name of the familiar firecracker that scurried along the ground threatening to blow off my toes, but also the name of the son jarocho the Devil likes best.

To sing "El Buscapiés" is to call him to the dance.

"I never liked singing it," Doña Gloria confessed to me when I sought her out at a farmer’s market in Kennett Square, about a half-hour away from my home. Before she left Boca del Rio, Veracruz, she had been a celebrated singer.

Looking at the eighty-four-year-old woman quickly making change from bills as she sold her son’s vegetables, I marveled at the fact that every jaranero I had managed to find — from Lancaster to Reading, South Philadelphia to Coatesville — recommended I recruit her to sing at my fandango. She seemed spry but frail, and I wondered if her voice would be that too.

"Any time I did sing El Buscapiés, I’d make sure to throw in the verse that petitions Our Lady for protection," Doña Gloria continued. "But in this age of disbelief, a lot of jaraneros don’t bother — and when the Devil shows up — ¡zas! — another soul is lost forever."

"Yeah, well, I need him to show up."

"You know what to do, then," she said. When I shook my head, her voice rang out in a verse from "La Iguana":

Mueva las patitas

Como zapatea

Y las caderitas

Como zarandea

Mueva la manita

Como requintea

Mueva la boquita      

Como que versea

Move those little feet

As if dancing

and those little hips

as if jiggling

move that little hand

as if strumming

move that little mouth

as if improvising

The people at the adjacent food stands burst into a round of applause as her surprisingly strong contralto faded back under the noise of street and shoppers.

"Will you join my group of jaraneros?" I asked.

Doña Gloria gave me an unpleasantly keen look. "Are you good enough for me to bother to come out of retirement?"

"I am," I said.

"Ah, arrogance is good. What about magic? Do you have any of that?"

"I’ve got my mother’s shoes to dance in, and she used to tell me that she was the best bailadora of her generation, so that’s magic, right?"

The old woman didn’t need to know that my mother’s shoes were nearly two sizes smaller than my own and no way was I using them in my contest with the Devil.

"That arrogance thing runs in your family, does it?" she said, but was clearly more tickled than judgmental. "Tell me which fandango you are performing at next and I’ll come check you out. If you are half as good a bailadora as you believe you are, I’ll be happy to sing with your group."

"I haven’t danced in public yet, but I practice every night in my garage. You’re welcome to drop in and see for yourself."

"Aiieee, mija, son jarocho’s magic is communal, it doesn’t work solitary. You should be going to every fandango in the tri-state area. Watch the other bailadoras. And really watch if they play El Buscapiés." Then she filled a plastic bag with homegrown poblano peppers and waved me away.

I handed the bag over to my housemate as soon as I got back home. Linn was in her late twenties and had a trace of Charleston in her voice. She had come to Philadelphia for culinary school, and when she ran out of money, had gotten a job with a caterer who supplied pretty but bland food for the business conferences and conventions held in the suburbs.

"These poblanos are so nice — they merit a full-on chiles en nogada," she said after peeking into the bag.

"Courtesy of Doña Gloria," I said, dropping into one of our half-painted kitchen chairs. "Who doesn’t think my practicing in the garage is good enough and says I should find a fandango somewhere to do a dry run. As if anyone would think to hold a fandango in Pennsatucky." 

"You are."

"Yeah, but I’m an idiot."

Linn snorted.

Maybe even a damned idiot, I thought. A warm breeze wrapped me in its embrace. It was my mother’s ghost, of course, hoping to comfort me and nudge me at once.

My housemate noticed the sudden temperature shift, and the way my hair caught on a gust of wind that should not have been there. She looked at me expectantly. For a moment I considered introducing Linn to the ghost of my mother — but then I’d have to explain the real reason I wanted to throw a fandango and its ridiculously fairytale supernatural stakes.

Maybe Linn would hear that and think I was crazy. Good housemates are a rare thing. Good housemates who become friends, even rarer.

Linn crossed her arms as she watched all of these thoughts play out on my face. "Evil or just restless?"

"What?"

"The haint whose existence you are debating telling me about — evil or restless?"

"Neither," I said after a moment. "Loving, but damned."

She didn’t uncross her arms until I started the telling.

~~~

Señores, ¿qué son es este?                                        Good people, what son is this?

Hearing a group of jaraneros playing son jarocho live, in a crowd that knows what’s happening, is like nothing you can imagine. The night I attended my first real fandango, the performers clustered around the platform called a tarima, and the sayer and improviser on opposite short ends throwing verses of the son back and forth at each other.

The other musicians crowded along the remaining sides playing their requintos, jaranas, donkey jawbones and tambourine-like panderos while the onlookers pushed and shoved and tried to worm their way to the edge of the tarima too. 

All of the bailadores came from the crowd. They took turns, tapping the shoulder of the dancer they wanted to replace on the platform, and driving the percussion of the music with heel and toe. I stood in the crowd, stunned by the communal intimacy of it. Doña Gloria was right — no way had the childhood lessons from my mother, or my solo practice, prepared me.

The early June night was sultry, so I was eventually lured away from the music by the thought of a cold drink. I walked over to the food stands set up along the perimeter of the community center parking lot where this Camden fandango was being held. These, too, were mobbed with people clamoring for picadas and molotes.

I easily spotted Linn — she was at least a head taller than most of the other attendees--but since she was busy sampling all the food in professional reconnaissance-and-research mode, I didn’t bother her. I hit the stand with the ice-cold agua frescas. 

"So, how do you like our block party?" 

The voice that delayed my first swallow belonged to a very handsome white guy in his early thirties, dressed in a style that screamed professional creative.

"Last block party I went to was all Taylor Swift all the time," I said. 

"Ooof, then you’re either from hell or the suburbs," he answered with a grin, and stuck his hand out. "I’m Nicholas, Nico to most of my coworkers."

"Adriana. No nickname that I know of," I answered as I shook his hand and stepped away from the table. We walked back to stand near the platform and watch the dancers because, as Nico told me on the way over, he was scouting talent for a bicoastal dance troupe looking to add folklórico to its repertoire.

"Check out that footwork," he said, pointing. "Spectacular." 

"What is he, like ten?" I said.

"Yeah, well, some people just have the zapateado in their blood. But I happen to know that the bailadora he’s up on the platform with is his sister, and she moves like a cow, so who can say, really, about the strength of blood?" 

"My mother used to say ‘de la panza sale la danza’," I said, "and that girl has no belly at all for the dance to come from."

I saw his eyes drop to my thick middle. "Formidable, just so you know," I said after I overcame an uncharacteristic twinge of shame.

He gave me a high-wattage smile. "Should we try our luck on the platform, then?"

"They’re all dressed in their Sunday best," I said, after a moment. "I think I’ll pass." But then, because I could never resist showing off, I performed a quick set-step: left foot, right foot, left foot, ending with the single heel strike known as el gatillo — the trigger.  As smooth and skillful as could be expected from someone dancing in the wrong shoes (slides).

Nico gave a delighted whoop and looked to be gearing up to replicate my footwork when Linn’s hand fell on his shoulder. "Hey there," she said. "Sorry to interrupt, but I need to steal Adriana."

He flashed another of his big smiles. "Turns out I really have to leave just about now anyway." He doffed an imaginary hat at me.

We watched him disappear into the crowd, then Linn gave me a look. "Are you paying any attention at all?"

"Of course," I said. "I’ve been observing every single person who gets up on the platform to dance. Including some really ancient women who can barely walk but somehow manage to be impressive as all get out during the zapateado."

She reached over and shook me. "Listen, damn it."

The improviser’s tenor sailed over the noisy footwork:

Ave María, Dios te salve

Dios te salve, Ave María

Así gritaban las Viejas

cuando el Diablo aparecía.

Mary, God save you

God save you, Hail Mary 

That’s what the old women shouted

when the Devil made his appearance.

The rest of El Buscapiés followed as I stood there, mouth gaping. "But he was wearing Chucks," I managed finally.

"So?

"So if that white boy really is the Devil, I think I’m golden when I finally get my fandango together to challenge him."

"Your mama sure did raise a fool," she said. "You think the Devil shows up in his real form? He’s scouting you, just like you’re scouting him."

"Actually, he was scouting that little kid dancing on the tarima. You think I should go warn him?" The words just made Linn glare at me more.

"Somebody was looking out for that child and knew to throw that verse in the song," she said finally. "It’s already real for them. It’s only you who’s playing."

Then she shook her head and walked away, heading to where we had parked the car. A sudden gust of desert-hot wind pushed me to follow.

~~~  

No me negarán, señores.                                                 I will not be denied, good people.

Doña Gloria told me about a fandango in Avondale, held on the grounds of San Roque Church where — she assured me — the Devil wouldn’t dare show up, so I’d get a full night’s practice live and in public.

This time I wore a skirt and my black Mary-Janes. Nobody played El Buscapiés, and I danced to every son. While Linn scored family recipes from the people who had brought food to sell at the event, I scored a couple of new members for my son jarocho group: Gil, a 30-year-old auto mechanic who played jarana like he was born to it, and Yuyo, a teen whiz at improvising verses in both Spanish and English.

Son Revoltijo, I named us, because we were nothing if not a confused jumble…but then Doña Gloria announced that she was coming out of retirement to join us, and before I knew what had happened, she took over. She set the date for my fandango, put Linn in charge of booking the venue and lining up food vendors, and talked to Yuyo’s mother — a professor of musicology at West Chester University — about the possibility of bringing Don Arcadio up for a guest lecture.

Then, when the deposit of the venue came due, Doña Gloria roped every Mexican small business owner — including her son — to pitch in a few bucks to cover it. She even shamed the pastor at San Roque into lending us the church minivan (fully gassed) to get to each fandango we attended in advance of ours.

Two weeks before our fandango, I tried on my mother’s shoes. Nothing magical happened. My practice session was as it always was — thorough, skillful, arduous. My toes cramped painfully and my heels quickly developed raised, angry welts.

Still, I didn’t take them off. I wanted to dance in them, not practice — dance.

The younger members of Son Revoltijo had decided to get out from under the thumb of their elders and play at a restaurant opening in Allentown, so I caught a ride in the church minivan with them.

"Do you think you’ll play El Buscapiés tonight?" I asked Yuyo who was seated beside me in the final row of seats.

He shrugged. "You know it’s not my favorite, right? But if the audience calls for it, which more than likely they will..."

"Because they don’t know it summons the Devil," I said.

"No, because it does. They hear us sing about flying without wings and making bells ring from afar, and all our sones about witches and animals with powers… Witchcraft and magic is the tool of the oppressed, and they want it to be real as much as we do."

After a moment, he added, "My mom says the Spanish Inquisition tried to ban son jarocho soon after proclaiming the jarana ‘the Devil’s rib-bone,’ so maybe we’re all already damned. I’m not really improvising when I perform, you know, I’m casting spells. Woo woo!" Then he dissolved into a particularly teenaged sort of snickering. 

Gil turned to look at us from the seat in front of ours. "Don’t worry about the Devil, we’ve got your back, maestra."

He had never before called me maestra and it made me feel old. And like an impostor.

"Don’t call me that," I said.

"Pos mira nomás …those are the shoes of a maestra," Gil said, motioning with his head. He was right, of course, only not about me.

An hour into the opening at El Caracol, I stepped onto the small tarima when the jaraneros launched into La Bamba — still my favorite son jarocho — and maybe there really was some magic in my mother’s shoes because I’ve never danced better. My steps were quick, the heel strikes fierce, my transitions liquid.

I was so transfixed by the power emanating from my feet, I ignored three taps on my shoulder from other people wanting to dance, and might have ignored the fourth if I hadn’t already been flirting with inexcusable rudeness. 

Gil gave me a slight bow as I stepped off the platform, and the people at the tables clapped and nodded. The breeze that was my mother’s ghost enveloped me in maternal pride.

My feet — which had been fine as long as I was doing the zapateado — flared hot and painful as I walked over to the Caracol’s bar. I bought a Paloma made with decent, but definitely not top shelf, tequila, and after a few friendly words with the bartender, hobbled outside to a park across the street.

I don’t know how long I had been sitting on a bench there when I saw a pyrotechnic flash out of the corner of my eye. Thinking the proprietor of the restaurant had gotten fireworks to celebrate the opening, I half turned my body to watch. 

But there were no fireworks, only Nico walking toward my bench in out-of-the-box-new white Chucks and a hoodie that looked to be cashmere.

What a dipshit.

"You put me in mind of a bailadora I saw many years ago," he said when our eyes met. "Only she was much more strong-willed than you. Isn’t that what your mother would say when you both rehearsed for the middle school talent shows she forced you to perform in?"

"I’ve never needed to be forced to dance," I said.

"Ha! That doesn’t bear even a passing resemblance to the truth." 

As he spoke, the bones under his skin shifted a little. His brow receded, his jaw jutted forth, and his lips grew taut over teeth pushing forward and out. I could hear bones cracking and the squelch of tissue tearing. But then he smiled — a flash of impossibly long, needle-thin teeth — and everything shifted back to normal again.

Except his eyes, which stayed venomous yellow-green and glittered as they watched me.

"Props on your poker face," he said. "Let’s see how well you do with this."

He snapped his fingers. Almost certainly it was a summons and, yes, at the sound I felt my mother’s ghost blow by me. She became a five-foot-tall dust devil spinning in place in front of me.

Nico’s poker face wasn’t as good as mine, and I could tell he was surprised at where she had landed.

After a small shake of his head, he slipped into a quick series of aggressive mudanza steps, moving toward her. Despite the rubber soles of his sneakers, each of his heel strikes resounded with the click of hoof, or horn, or some other hardened keratin. My mother’s dust devil hopped and whirled in echo of his steps, always interposing itself between him and me.

I have no idea what it requires to be under the Devil’s dominion but still rise up in defiance. I suppose it calls for unfathomable hubris. And love.

They remained equally matched for some five minutes of this odd dance. Then Nico brought both heels down at once in a gatillo so forceful it wasn’t of this world. I heard a loud crack — like the sound of a whip — and the dust devil that was my mother’s ghost dispersed in a puff.

It left a spatter of what looked like blood on the ground.

"That probably didn’t hurt her. Much," he said, coming to sit beside me on the bench. "But then, as you know, I’ve got all eternity to hurt her. Pace, cadence, rhythm — it’s as important in subjugation as it is in dance." 

He crossed one long leg over the other and clasped his hands behind his head as he studied me.  "Feet hurt?" he asked after a moment. 

"Nope."

"Hah. You’ve got some big little shoes to fill when we dance in a few weeks, and I wouldn’t want you, you know, to be crippled," he said.

"Don’t worry your pretty little head about it."

"It is pretty, isn’t it? So Harry Stiles. But here’s my puzzlement. I make sure, from the start, to appear as a challenger’s favored type. Your mother, for example, she was very fond of those old-time charro singers from Jalisco," he sighed, pretending to pout. "But I seem to have miscalculated with you. You’re neither fangirling nor beguiled."

"Not even a little bit," I said.

"Then perhaps I’ll dance with you in my true guise."

"Whatever shape you take will make no difference."

"Even I don’t like it when you lie to yourself, Adriana."

Yuyo’s voice, carrying loud and clear from within the restaurant, announced: "Señores, El Buscapiés."

"Gotta go," Nico said.

I made my way back to the restaurant slowly, and then I didn’t go in, but observed from the door.

Nico’s steps on the wooden platform laid down a compelling rhythm. The person who was matching it, step-for-step, was one hell of a dancer. The footwork was so precise, I suspected some professional training in the not-completely-unrelated Flamenco style of dance. For a few seconds I believed wholeheartedly in the Anglo fairytale and thought Nico would leave tonight without a soul in thrall. 

But then Devil’s zapateado changed. The sequence became a long run-on sentence — with subordinate clauses, shifting cadences and poetic digressions — something no human could possibly match.

I signaled Yuyo from where I stood, and when I caught his eye, I mimed crossing myself so he’d know it was time to throw the Hail Mary verse into the song. But either he didn’t understand me at all, or was too entranced by his own improvised rhymes to want to stop.

My eyes filled with tears for the dancer, and, let’s be honest, for me too. I pulled off my mother’s shoes, walked barefoot to the church minivan, and spent the remaining hours listening to Taylor Swift playing on a succession of AM radio stations.

~~~

Señores, el buscapiés.                                                Good people, the fireworks.

If, as Doña Gloria claimed, son jarocho is an act of communal magic, the preparations for the fandango are its ceremonial evocation. 

Before dawn, the members of five different Mexican communities from five different counties in Pennsylvania brought the fireworks armature, the tarima and multiple vendor tables they had collaborated in making, to the large outdoor basketball court in the public park where the fandango would take place.

They arrived hours before the municipal officials and park supervisors were scheduled to show up to approve the final set-up, but no matter — mi gente were there to greet the sun as it rose on this auspicious day. (And to unofficially party in the adjacent pavilions until the official party started at sundown).

Doña Gloria and her sixty-three-year-old beautician daughter, Paulina, came looking for me at home at the crack of dawn too.

After a convivial coffee and pan dulce, they sat me down in the front room to begin the preparations. By my watch it was 6:05, but they were already complaining about how late we were running. They had brought several bags filled with loaner jarocha dresses — voluminous white organza and lace skirts, shoulder-baring white blouses in sizes from tiny to enormous and a few of the brightly embroidered aprons that completed the outfit — with them.

"No way am I dancing in any of those," I told Doña Gloria. The old woman ignored me and kept laying each of them out on the hardwood floor before me.

"That was a hard ‘no’, Doña Gloria. You’ve seen me dance, you know I don’t need all the trappings."

"Tan gringa," she said, shaking her head. "There’s more to the dance than the steps."

I rolled my eyes, but when she wouldn’t stop glaring, I caved. "One of the skirts, then. That’s it. Not one thing more."

She held up each skirt for me to consider. I chose the least elaborate — the one, it turns out, that belonged to Doña Gloria’s best friend.

"This is good," she said approvingly. "Concha was as fine a bailadora in her day as she is a skillful seamstress now. Trust me, there is magic in every stitch of this skirt. Just as there is in your mother’s shoes."

Paulina, too, was offering me magic, I was told, as she yanked and stretched and tortured my hair in ways I had never before experienced. Two hours later, ribbon-bedecked braids coiled around my head. She stood back and admired the hairstyle. "Does it feel tight?"

"Enough to give me a headache."

"Good. That’s the beauty of it, it won’t budge until you want it to. Now, watch. This is what I want you to do when you feel like you cannot take one more step without dying." She reached above my forehead where the ribbons came cunningly together in a bow, and pulled one end. "Now shake your head."

When I did, the whole up-do came undone by itself. Some sort of fine particulate matter rained down with the hair, hanging around my head in a nimbus. I unintentionally inhaled the stuff and the uprush of energy that followed knocked me back in my chair. But my heart beat stayed leisured and steady.

"‘Despacio que voy de prisa’ is what I call that herbal mix," Paulina said. "Slowly because I’m in a hurry. I’ll tell you a secret. People think it was only the audacity of my letting down my hair mid-promenade that won me the Miss Veracruz title when I was young — but it was really my ‘Al saber le llaman suerte’ mix that did the trick."

"Umm," I said while she beamed, "didn’t we just squander the effect, though, hours before it was needed?"

"Oh no, hermana," she said, "that was just the practice run. Now we start on the real thing. This time we’ll add flowers."

More hair-pulling, more gaudy embellishments, more Paulina-special witchy speed sprinkled in.

Hours later, as the women packed up their things, they confided in me that during the week he had been in town lecturing at Yuyo’s mom’s classes, Don Arcadio and La Monica had also been preparing something special for my performance.

I felt relief wash over me as I closed the door behind them. I had had my fill of Jarocho glamor and desperately needed a shot of US realism. Plus caffeine.

"All of your people are throwing down for you," Linn said when I went into the kitchen, where she had already started prepping the food she’d be selling at the fandango.

"Yeah," I said, "I’m starting to think people are stacking the deck because they think I’m a really bad gamble."

"Well, you’re something..." She stepped away from the prep table and wiped her hands on her apron before pulling an item from the pocket of her jeans. "Are you going to wear hose with your get-up tonight?" 

"Do you even know me? Of course not. And I may not even shave my legs." 

"Right. Well, so, back in the day, my nana used to lay tricks and such. I never put much stock in it, but I picked up some stuff anyway, you know? So I made this for you."

She showed me a small silver coin threaded on a strand of red string in her hand. I picked it up: the coin was a U.S. dime from the early 20th century, with a wing-browed profile where FDR’s would normally be. Linn reclaimed the bracelet and I stuck my arm out for her to tie it on, but she squatted and tied it around my ankle instead.

"Some people say mercury dimes will take a hit for you. I don’t know about that, but I’ll vouch for the fact they bring you luck when you’re gambling."

As she stood up, I said, "I’m grateful, you know I am, but … you all are making me nervous as hell."

"As you should be," she said. "But solidarity is its own form of magic. So’s friendship. So suck it up, buttercup."

I wandered out to our tiny backyard with my steaming cup of coffee and waited for my mother’s ghost to gust to my side. I needed her to show up, to wrap me in her warm haunting. I looked hopefully at three leaves on the ground tumbling over themselves in circles, but ever since that night at El Caracol when her dust-devil vanished in a splatter of blood, my mother’s ghost hadn’t manifested around me.

I missed her, and it struck me then that if I were to be successful tonight and managed to reclaim for her the right of eternal rest, her presence would be gone for good. If I lost? Well, at least I’d be with her in our shared torment.

When we arrived at the park, I delayed the inevitable by helping Linn set up her food stand. She didn’t comment on my shapeless white tank top, nor the elastic belt with which I had shortened the borrowed jarocha skirt, but told me I was looking a little green and handed me a 7-Up from one of her coolers. 

The platform had been set up in the center of the basketball court, and the other members of Son Revoltijo had already taken up their designated spots around it. Doña Gloria, smoking a cigar and looking inches taller thanks to one of her daughter’s elaborate hairdos, took her place on the short end of the tarima closest to the basketball hoop; Yuyo stood at the opposite one.

I was set to dance just one son tonight — El Buscapiés — but the rest of the crowd had come prepared to dance to every scrap of music — be it the music blaring out from one of the parked cars or Doña Gloria’s run-through of El Pájaro Carpintero, a capella, to warm up her voice.

I don’t know when mundane time ended, and magical time began. 

Maybe it was when Monica and Don Arcadio led a procession of college students holding 10-foot-tall PVC pipes topped with papier mâché animal heads in a circumnavigation of the basketball court. Deer and black bears, copperheads and bog turtles, coyotes and turkey vultures swayed and loomed high above every head.

Or maybe it was as the music started in earnest, with a spirited version of La Bamba, and people surged to the sides of the altar that is the tarima. 

Or maybe it was when I spied a pair of unnaturally bright, white Chucks in the crowd.

When we came face to face, the guise Nico had chosen for this night of contest made me catch my breath. "Oh, unfair," I said to the doppelganger that faced me. Except for the Chucks, the Devil had chosen to look exactly like one of the photos of my mother in her youth that I had scanned for Don Arcadio, back when I believed I’d be dancing this challenge in Saltabarranca.

My mother/Nico/the Devil laughed, then spoke to me in my mother’s voice. "Fairness has no part in son jarocho, Adriana."

But the semblance the Devil had chosen wasn’t going to work the way he imagined. The version of my mother in front of me was a stranger glimpsed only from second-hand memory and anecdote. Would this young beauty have thrown firecrackers at her daughter’s feet to teach her to dance? Would she have dropped a pot on her daughter’s head to get her attention?

Never.

This version of my mother hadn’t yet experienced the bone-deep link between mother and daughter that outlasts everything: unsaid words, bad choices, death. 

"See you when they play El Buscapiés," I said, hurrying away before my mother/Nico/the Devil could read the relief on my face. 

I don’t know how long I had to wait for the damned song. 

Long enough for Linn to find me in the crowd and feed me some tamales because she guessed I hadn’t had anything but coffee all day. 

Long enough for Doña Gloria, Paulina and Don Arcadio to each seek me out and put their hands on my head in blessings that seemed both movingly silly and deeply powerful.

Long enough for the towering puppets to array themselves around the court like sentinels of some preternatural otherworld. 

Then, finally, Doña Gloria’s voice rang out: 

Señores, venga el aviso

Que ahora acabo de llegar

Que ahora acabo de llegar

Señores, venga el aviso

Solo traigo un compromise

Venirlos a saludar

Señores, con su permiso

Voy a empezar a cantar...

Good people, here’s notification

That I’ve now arrived

That I’ve now arrived

Good people, here’s notification

I have only one obligation

Which is to offer you my regards

Good people, with your permission

Some singing is in the cards...

My mother/Nico/the Devil was suddenly on the platform, and then I was there too. 

"This bargain is for my mother," I said to the Devil. "I’ll match you, step-for-step, until the last word is sung, and then you set her free."

"Agreed," he said, "But to save your own soul, you must match me even beyond the last word. Do we have a deal?"

"We do."

Chucks vs. Mary Janes. Redobles vs. mudanzas. Clicks vs. taps. The magic in my mother’s shoes did what it was supposed to do, and my steps flawlessly replicated the Devil’s.

Then, about fifteen minutes in, the Devil doubled his pace. I doubled mine. When he redoubled it again, and my heart threatened to dance faster than my feet, I pulled the ribbon-end of the bow on my forehead and shook my hair out. 

The hairdo came down less gracefully than it had the first time, but the flowers fell onto the tarima in the pattern my feet must make, and the magical dust rained down in thick waves. I inhaled deeply, several times, and after that, both heart and feet worked the new pace as if this dance were no more strenuous than standing still.

My mother/Nico/the Devil’s eyes narrowed, and my mother’s voice fit words of command between the words of the song.

I saw the first fireball blazing toward me, low to the ground. I didn’t even have to think, my firecracker-trained feet did their thing out of conditioning, and I sidestepped without losing the beat. It went on like that for a while, until he threw a fireball I couldn’t avoid.

It hit my right ankle — the ankle with Linn’s Mercury dime — and when the flame came in contact with the silver, it sizzled and winked out. What fell to the platform was a charred, grapefruit-sized imp. The blackened dime laid beside it on the tarima and the smoldering vestige of cord. As another blazing fire imp hurtled toward me, the old jarocha skirt — held wide and high like bat wings at my sides — moved by itself to fan it away. 

Despite all the loaner magic and my own efforts, about half of what the Devil threw hit me, badly scorching the skirt and glancing off the toebox of my shoes.

At 45 minutes, the Devil pressed forward, driving me backward across the tarima at a pace that made me rush to match his step. My midriff heaved from rapid breathing, and the elastic belt that held the skirt a few inches off the floor, popped and fell away. One of my heels caught on the hem of the skirt as I took my next step backward, and had the Devil taken another step forward at that moment I would have certainly lost my balance.

But an impossibly tall shadow fell on the platform between us, and my mother/Nico/the Devil looked up instead of driving forward. 

I looked up too. Looming over us were all of the papier mâché puppets moving as one. Or maybe they weren’t puppets, because I seemed to see wispy versions of the animals lunging at the Devil: the coyote snapping at his Achilles tendon, the turkey buzzard advancing with fully unfurled wings, the deer catching his side with an antler.

The Devil stumbled backward in makeshift steps — easily replicated — all the way to the edge of the tarima. He threw his hands up in a gesture both imperious and warding. I heard a thunk and then muffled cries as the towering puppets went down and landed on some of the crowd of spectators gathered around the tarima.

As the Devil brought his arms down, the semblance of my mother dropped away and his face changed the way it had threatened to at the Caracol restaurant opening — receding brow, jutting jaw, spiky anglerfish teeth cutting through his lips until the skin hung in shreds around and between the spikes.

His body changed too, growing taller than the puppets, his feet shedding the white Chucks and revealing themselves to be scaled and spurred, with the claw-tipped digits of an enormous chicken.

The Devil moved those chicken feet into a redoubled zapateado as he called out names.

As each name dropped, a member of the audience gasped, recognizing their own kin in the dust devils that rose up in front of the Devil and raced across the platform toward me.

Three beats. 

One: Gil gave the command that one of the singers throw the Hail Mary verse. Like. Right. This. Second.

Two: Yuyo ignored him, and kept to whatever spell he was improvising. 

Three: I felt a tendril of warm air as the first dust devil reached me.

My mother’s ghost spun, hopping and darting madly in front of me, pitting herself against a sea of other dust devils.  Rightfully was my mother known as the best bailadora to ever come out of Veracruz — the one outdanced the many, until they were nothing but a fine, greenish yellow powder coating the tarima.

For a few glorious moments we danced together — mother and daughter, ghost and living being, Veracruz and Pennsylvania — and the Devil struggled to keep up.

My mother’s dust devil spun faster and faster, so fast that she ignited, turning into a whirling column of fire. Sparks flew off her, sizzling as they hit the trails of yellow-green powder where she had danced the other dust devils into brimstone.

When she finally came to a stop — at the same time as the Devil and I took our last dance steps — half the tarima was on fire.

The Devil changed back into Nico as he nodded acceptance of his defeat. He turned his head in the direction of my mother’s ghost, there was the sound of a bottle being uncorked, and she was gone.

"Congratulations," he said to me. "Now we vie for your soul."

The Mexican-pink shoes had turned dark from the blood from my tortured toes, my dress hung in tatters, sweat dripped off the ends of my hair. My feet would not move and I was completely out of loaner magic. As I opened my mouth to admit I could not take one more step, Yuyo’s voice rang out: "Señores, viene el amanecer."

Good people, dawn is coming.

Except it wasn’t. It couldn’t be. We had danced long, but not that long.

But Yuyo was grinning, and unmistakably, past the fences that enclosed the park’s distant tennis courts, an orangey-pink glow was beating back the dark of night.

"Told you, maestra," Yuyo called to me from his end of the platform. "There’s no difference between improvising and spellcasting."

Doña Gloria lit a match, held it to the end of her cigar and took a puff. "This fandango is over," she said to the Devil, "not one more soul for you." Then she walked over to the conical fireworks framework that had been erected at the edge of the court earlier in the day, lit the starter fuse with her cigar and stepped back as the firecrackers went off in a noisy, flashing ruckus.

The Devil looked me in the eye as the last firecracker fizzled and the sun climbed over the horizon, and let out a colossal fart.

Those in attendance at the fandango would ever after swear that he disappeared in the blindingly epic sulfur cloud that followed.  

~~~

Ya me despido, señores.                              I bid farewell, good people.

I endlessly replay the memories. In the years after the fandango:

● Paulina did the hair of an American Idol contestant who made it all the way to the final round.

● Don Arcadio moved to Saltabarranca, where Monica takes a cohort of students to visit him every summer.

● Son Revoltijo played one of NPR’s tiny desk concerts.

● Gil opened his own auto repair shop.

● Yuyo graduated summa cum laude from UPenn.

● Doña Gloria became a TikTok sensation.

● Linn bought the house we shared, and is using it as collateral for the loan that will enable her to finally open her own restaurant.

In the evenings, after dinner, she sits in her favorite chair in our little backyard and tracks the growth in her tidy garden of fish peppers, okra and sea island red peas.

At the end of every night, she leaves a Paloma — pale pink from the fresh ruby grapefruits she squeezes to mix with the tequila — on the wide arm of her haint-blue chair. One day, maybe, she’ll come back into our unnaturally warm yard and find that the contents of the glass remain there, untouched.

Someday. But for now, I turn the liquid into a spout that spins and spins and spins. I do this until it hops out of the glass, dances for a while and then disappears.

It leaves nothing in its wake but a faint and belated whiff of sulfur.

___

Copyright 2024 Sabrina Vourvoulias

Sabrina Vourvoulias is an award-winning Latina news editor and a speculative fiction writer. She is the author of Ink, a near-future, immigration-centered dystopia (Rosarium Publishing, 2018), and of short fiction published at Tor.com, Apex, Strange Horizons, Uncanny, and in multiple anthologies. She lives in Pennsylvania.

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Giganotosaurus is published monthly and is edited by LaShawn M. Wanak.

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