My Heart Lies South: The Story of My Mexican Marriage - Softcover

Borton De Trevino, Elizabeth

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1883937515 ISBN 13: 9781883937515

Publisher: Bethlehem Books, 2000

Synopsis

What happens when a thoroughly twentieth-century American lady journalist becomes a Mexican señora in nineteen-thirties' provincial Monterrey? She finds hersel—sometimes hilariously—coping with servants, daily food allowances, bargaining, and dramatic Latin emotions. In this vivid autobiography, Newbery Award-winning author Elizabeth Borton de Treviño brings to life her experiences with the culture and the faith of a civilization so close to the United States, but rarely appreciated or understood. This special young people's edition presents the humor and the insights of a remarkable woman and her contact with an era which is now past, but not to be forgotten.

Mexico, 1930s
RL7.4
Of read-aloud interest ages 12-up

About this title

About the Author

Elizabeth Borton de Treviño (1904-2001) was born in Bakersfield, California. After graduating from Stanford University, Elizabeth journeyed to Boston to study the violin. There, however, she ended up as a journalist for The Boston Herald where her music background and her fluency in Spanish established her as an interviewer of international celebrity. It was on one of her assignments for the paper that she went to Monterrey, Mexico and met her future husband, Luis de Trevino. The story of her courtship and marriage and her life in Monterrey is told in the best-selling memoir, My Heart Lies South. Throughout her lifetime Elizabeth grew in her love of the Mexican culture and in the faith she had adopted upon her marriage.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

“MISS BORTON!” bawled my city editor. I hurried up to his desk.
“You’re always yammering about going to Mexico,” he said. “Here’s a bunch of due bills. Airplanes, trains, hotels. . . . Take ’em and see how far you get. When you run out of money, write something for us.”
I got as far as San Antonio, and there I called on a man whose name the city editor had given me.
“Look up this man,” my editor had said. “He loves every inch of the highway from Laredo to Mexico City. He’s always lecturing about it. If you can get as far as San Antonio, he can probably get you the rest of the way.”
The name was William Harrison Furlong.
Kindly big Bill Furlong took me under his wing, and personally drove me to Laredo, where, in answer to his insistent wire, the Monterrey Chamber of Commerce had dispatched its young public relations man to receive me, waft me across the border, and conduct me to Monterrey with the dignity due the newspaper I represented.
Accordingly I sat in a hotel lobby in Laredo with Mrs. Furlong and Bill when the emissary from Monterrey arrived. It was very hot and the young Mexican who hurried into the lobby mopping his brow, only one hour late, was dressed in a short-coated white linen suit and carried a jipi-japa, which is the south-of-the-border version of the boater.
This was my first glimpse of my husband.
Tall and spare, with large sad black eyes, black curly hair, a fine beak of a nose, a small Spanish mouth outlined by a sparse black mustache, he is, he says, “the villain type.” He was tired and hot and he looked at the lady who was to be his charge with scant interest, politely bowing.
“Hello Luis!” said Bill. “This is Miss Borton. When you get to Vallecillo, buy her an ice-cold beer.”
Luis laughed nervously. There is nothing he likes better than a cold beer, but the lady he had taken across the border for the Chamber of Commerce two weeks before had resisted the beer with desperation as if it might be the first step in a seduction, and the lady last week had been Dorothy Dix, who was even then rather tired from pushing seventy or so and inclined to be tart with young men eager to waste her time in taverns.
Luis spoke excellent English. The revolution had driven the Treviños with many other families to take refuge in the United States when Luis, the fifth son, was about eight. He had gone to school in Texas and Indiana, where he eventually dominated English in all but two particulars. The little confusion persists to this day: he cuffs when he has a cold on his chest, and due to the criminal negligence of his wife, the coughs of his shirts are frequently frayed.
We bade the Furlongs farewell. I was turned over to the vaccination, immigration, and customs authorities, and at last, in a car which had been provided by the Chamber of Commerce, complete with chauffeur, we set out for Monterrey. I had my hair tied up in a scarf and I was wearing a large black hat as well as sun glasses. Now the sun began to go down and long violet shadows crept across the plain. I took off my hat.
“Ah,” breathed Luis.
I undid the scarf.
“So?” remarked Luis.
I took off the black glasses.
“Wonderful,” he decided, aloud. He leaned toward me and looked at me soulfully.
“Shall I sing you a song about love?” he asked.
“Why yes,” I agreed, thinking this must be a gag.
But he launched into “Palm Trees Drunk with the Sun,” went on to “The Sea Gulls,” and then sang “The Green Eyes,” in a light baritone voice.
“Very nice,” commented the chauffeur from the front seat. “Now sing ‘Farolito.’ ”
He sang it. After our beer in Vallecillo, Luis sang other songs. He sang all the way to Monterrey.
I didn’t realize it, but I was being courted.
On a high place, before we dropped down into another valley, we could see the far-off lights of Monterrey. “That’s it! There’s Monterrey!” breathed Luis. “Isn’t it beautiful?”
Like most Mexicans, he is passionately devoted to his patria chica, his tierra, the place where he was born.
As the days went by and I was busy gathering material for articles, Luis, acting for the Chamber of Commerce, arranged my interviews for me and when necessary interpreted for me. I had studied Spanish, and Mexicans are extraordinarily kind and patient with anyone who is trying to speak their language. I suspect that I needed the interpreter more than I knew. But through all this Luis frequently made me stop and admire the Saddle Mountain, which dominates the town with its curious, almost grotesque shape. The Saddle Mountain is beloved of the Monterrey people; when far from it they dream of it, but always they speak of it with deep sentiment. Luis wanted to arouse this devotion to his mountain in me. I should have realized that his interest was more than the routine politeness of the public-relations expert. It would have been clear to anyone but a candid American, when he made a detour to show me the ranchito of his father and mother, their summer and week-end place, a lovely rustic spot with a swimming pool under the pecan trees.
“What’s that?” I asked, pointing to a field which glistened white as snow and moved softly in the breeze.
“Those are the margaritas (daisies) of Mamacita,” smiled Luis. “She loves this flower, so when Papacito bought the ranch, he planted an acre of them for her, and when they were high, he brought her here to see them.”
I was touched.
“You will meet Mamacita tonight,” he told me.
This was tantamount to a proposal, but again, I didn’t know the customs and I didn’t realize that showing me to Mamacita was crucial.
I had finished my work in Monterrey and Luis had invited me to go out dancing. I accepted with alacrity, thinking this to be one more polite gesture from the public-relations department. But when he called for me at my hotel he was nervous; he mopped his forehead, he passed a long brown forefinger around the inside of his collar. He looked me over very carefully. I was wearing a long cotton dancing dress, with a neck and sleeves. This was fortunate; Luis sighed with relief. Rather pale with the pallor of the South Spanish type, the pallor described by Garcia Lorca as “olive and jasmin kneaded together,” he led me out to where a lady sat in a car. She was, I thought, in early middle age; there was not one silver thread in the dark curling hair piled high on her head. In truth, she had just turned sixty. She was very plump and firm in a dark voile dress, and an incredibly small fat hand like a baby’s manipulated her fan. Around her shoulders was a dark lace scarf. She smiled, showing tiny even white teeth.
“Mamacita,” said Luis in slow English, “this is Eleesabet.”
Very large eyes, wise and sparkling, looked me over, a dimple popped in and out. She had a great sense of fun, and she enjoyed teasing, a strong Mexican characteristic. She was teasing Luis, for she knew he hung on her judgment.
“I do not spik Eengleesh,” she offered at last in a deep contralto.
In my careful Spanish I said that I was delighted to meet her, and her black brows arched with surprise and pleasure. She turned on Luis and gave him a short thorough tongue lashing, fanning very fast. Evidently he hadn’t told her that the “mees” knew Spanish. She then made a place for me in the car at once and asked me in rapid succession my father’s name and age, my mother’s name and age, where I had studied Spanish and if it were true that Chile Tem-play (Shirley Temple) was really a dwarf.
We deposited Mamacita at a cine, or movie, where a small nephew was awaiting her, and then we went to collect another pareja or couple.
They proved to be special friends of Luis, a young lawyer who knew English well enough to have acted a season of Shakespeare in the States, and a slim girl with dead black hair and a camelia-fair complexion, who had been to schools in San Antonio. They were Alejandro and Mercedes, and they were engaged.
We went to the Jardines de Terpsicore. These were gardens in very truth. A paved space was arranged for dancing among the trees. A fountain splashed at one end of the dancing pavilion, near the bandstand, and dozens of large crystal parasols shattered the moonlight into rainbow colors.
Luis is a wonderful dancer and I have always been an enthusiastic one. Only already well into the evening did it occur to me to wonder why we never exchanged dances with Alejandro and Mercedes. But we didn’t. Alejandro and Mercedes gyrated past us; we swooped around them. All evening. Between dances we drank the clean bright-tasting Monterrey beer. We had a sandwich. At half-past eleven Mercedes revealed that her Mamacita had given permission only until this hour, and we must go at once. We took her home, and waited until the big gate had swung inward to receive her. She disappeared into the flower-filled patio, and we heard her call in Spanish. “It is I, Mamacita! I am home!”
I was left at my hotel. But a sort of die had been cast. Luis had cast it and with his eyes open. He had taken a strange woman to dance. Just any strange woman, and the incident might have been passed over as a wild oat on the part of the fifth Treviño. But he had taken the strange woman in company with a pareja of his best friends, an engaged couple! Two plus two equals four. Dancing with one girl all evening, with an engaged pareja to make up the party, means something serious! Phones rang in Monterrey; the news went round. Only I was in the dark.
Formally on the afternoon of the next day, I was taken to call on Mamacita. While we sat in the sala, Luis disappeared, to return with a tray on which sat Mamacita’s best small silver liqueur glasses. In each was a thimbleful of sweet vermouth. On a plate were some little yellow cakes that melted into a puff of flavor when bitten. These were Mamacitas famous polvorones de maizena (cornstarch puff cookies), the engagement cake. Angelita, now married to Ernesto, had tasted these; they had been served the night Roberto asked for Adela’s hand; they had been baked and sent to the family of Leonor when she became engaged to Ricardo. They were a kind of symbol. All unknowing I ate the engagement cakes and tasted the engagement vermouth.
Later Luis brought me a small yellow-striped kitten and dropped it into my lap.
“Oh, the darling! I wish I could have him,” I cried. “But I am leaving tomorrow for Mexico City and I have lots of work to do. I won’t be home in California for weeks.”
Mamacita said calmly, “Galatea has kittens like these every four months. You will have a kitten.”
Paling visibly, Luis scooped up the kitten and left. I wondered what had happened, but it seemed he had only recognized his mother’s acceptance of me. Mamacita had decided that I was to come to Monterrey, marry Luis, and receive a kitten from the fecund Galatea. He had been working toward this, but it was serious and it sobered him to realize that he was practically a married man.
He came back to the sala, a formal somber room, with dark furniture upholstered in violet velvet, and sat down at the piano where he began to sing and play.
Mamacita listened a while and then confided to me, softly, so that he couldn’t hear, “He is good. Noble. I never had any problems with Luis. Just the piano, to sing with, this is his vice.”
I made my farewells and went back to my hotel to pack. That evening Luis called on me accompanied by his older brother Ernesto. There seemed to be little to say. But it was part of the pattern Luis followed faithfully, though I did not know it. In the absence of Papacito, who was out of town, Ernesto, oldest brother, must meet Eleesabet.
Next day at noon I took the train for Mexico City. Luis, in white pants, a dark blue coat, and the jipi-japa, saw me off. He was speechless. I got aboard the train and wondered why I felt so sad. I sat down and dropped a tear for pleasant friends I would not see again for a long time. The train started.
About fifteen minutes later the train slowed down and stopped for a moment and suddenly Luis burst into the Pullman coach like a tornado. He seized me and kissed me thoroughly, and I thought in the midst of a turmoil of emotion, “Why it’s impossible! I’ve only known him a week!”
Luis got off the train, still having said nothing to me, but he looked very happy as he waved goodbye. He had driven madly and flagged the train to a stop. I still didn’t know it, but I was an engaged woman.
Luis made this clear to me in his letters which followed me faithfully to every stop I made in the next year’s wanderings, to California, across the country, and back to California again.
How many times I was to dance under the crystal parasols, how often I would tell Mamacita the true age of the stars of the screen, and learn from her wondrous recipes, written down by Doña Dolores, Mamacita’s own grandmother’s mother! How often we served the sweet vermouth, and polvorones I had learned to bake, never as good as Mamacita’s!
Just how does a place, at first new and strange, come to take on a beloved familiarity? Living in another country, with people of another upbringing, under new sets of traditions, speaking another language, at what moment does one suddenly feel that he has fallen into place and is no longer alien?
It happens imperceptibly.
There comes a time when unconsciously one slips into thinking in the language so painfully learned from books, when the pattern of one’s thoughts grows naturally from the first strange but dutifully accepted premise, into a new design. There is a moment when suddenly all that was outlandish, quaint, and exotic, is restored to strangeness only by the amazed comments of visitors from afar.
The somber sala came to be as dear to me as the water-green walls of the living room of my childhood, and the houses flush with the street as familiar as the tree-bordered lawns of the town where I grew up.
Galatea had only four more sets of yellow tiger kittens before she produced the batch from which I, a bride of days, selected Policarpo, most beloved of all the cats I ever owned. And long before Galatea had been gathered to her fathers, all that once had been so excitingly different and maddening and fascinating and queer, had become simply “home.”

Edition details

• Publisher: Bethlehem Books
• Publication date: 2000
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1883937515
• ISBN 13: 9781883937515
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 228