[SIGHS]
How can Pedro-as-Pablo love anyone when he can't even
love himself?
Ay, Dios mío, the temperature inside El Colón is 90 degrees.
The main floor and the balcony are
packed with people of all ages, families hovering
close to each other, young lovers, older couples resting
like torpid flies near the water cooler.
Outside, it's hotter.
The married men wander down to the concession stand
to get a Coke and to stare hard at the young girls, chiflando,
whistling in that soft, appreciative way--
[WHISTLES]
[LAUGHTER]
[WHISTLES]
--while their wives slink down in their seats,
grateful for a little peace as they
pull down their bunched-up panties.
Somebody takes out a much-used plastic bag
full of tortas, someone else a crinkly paper bag
full of ripe mangoes.
The floor is testimony to the fierce hunger
that the darkness arouses.
Candy wrappers stick to the floor
with chewed-up stalks of sugarcane
that nobody wants to look at too closely.
Crumpled soft drink cups and popcorn boxes
are tucked underneath the seats with wads of tired gum.
Voices call out incessantly in the darkness
to the actors on the screen without any hesitation
or embarrassment, as if we knew them,
as if the audience knew them, were even friends or family.
Ay, te quiero, Pedro.
The woman is getting on my nerves.
She knows all the lines to the movie,
and she repeats them out loud.
I know all the lines, but I'm not saying them out loud.
In the darkness of El Colón, Pedro Infante could do it all,
and he did.
He sang, he rode horses, motorcycles, cars, buses,
and he walked away from tragedy, unlike anyone else.
No one strode away from all those women, those men,
their selfish attachments, like Pedro Infante in the movie La
Vida No Vale Nada.
"Oye, comadre," I whisper to Irma.
"Popcorn!"
She motions that the tub is down with Nyvia Ester.
Both of us know that we're not going
to see it for a long time, and somebody
is going to have to go down and get the refill.
And it's not going to be me.
The popcorn at El Colón is greasy and salty,
the way it should be.
Irma says that it smells of hot corn, of maíz,
of sweaty hands turning tortillas in small,
obscure villages, of present lives lived in the past tense,
of ancestral struggles, of the humid breath of small children,
of old, dying animals resting near crumbling adobes,
of too many lives struggling for a modicum of hope.
Oh, Dios mío, leave it to La Wirma to understand
the sociological and cultural meanings of popcorn.
[LAUGHTER, APPLAUSE]
Yeah, I say it's the way they do the butter.
Now, don't give me a bag of day-old popcorn
that isn't warm enough to melt butter.
There is nothing that I love more than something greasy
and salty, unless, of course, it's
something greasy and salty and hot, or fruity and crystallized
and so sweet that your teeth curl in.
Now, I have got simple tastes, ordinary needs that become
extraordinary in the darkness.
What do I know of ancestral yearnings?
And yet, this is what Irma says that we are doing here,
years after Pedro's death.
Tere, we are fulfilling the destiny set out
for us by those who came before us,
the multitudes whose black and white dreams have
allowed us to dream in color.
"Oh, whatever you say, comadre.
I am OK with that theory.
But ay, mujer, look at Pedro!
Look at that man.
I don't care how many years he's been dead.
I still want to taste him."
"Oy, don't," Irma says.
But she knows what I mean.
And I know that she knows that I know what she means.
When I watch Pedro Infante's movies,
I am watching the lives of my people past, present,
and future parade in front of me.
Pedro Infante could have been my father.
He was my father's age when he died.
He is the man we want our men to be.
He is the man we imagine ourselves
to be if we are men, the man we want our daughters to marry.
He is the beautiful part of our dreaming.
And his looks have the power to make my woman's blood heat up
like sizzling manteca in an old but faithful sartén,
a frying pan.
And just watching him on the screen
makes my little sopapilla start throbbing underneath the folds
and the tucks of cloth on the old and creaky theater seat.
Just give me some honey.
Oh, the man had a beautiful body.
He lifted weight, which most Mejicanos do not do.
He lifted weights.
When I think of Mejicanos, I hardly
ever think of them with barbells.
We are not the exercising type.
We're too we're busy working outdoors, fixing the techo,
or cleaning, or working out--
working in Los Feliz, or running after our own
or somebody else's chamacos, or planting vegetables.
But when you saw Pedro boxing or riding in a motorcycle,
you knew that he was a man ahead of his time.
He was very physically robust.
He did all of his own stunts, whether it was
fighting with Wolf Ruvinskis--
you remember that hunky actor, that Mexican actor--
or hanging on for dear life on the top
of that old bus that took him to La Capitale
and into Cruz's waiting arms.