The Pot Thief Who Studied Einstein (5 page)

Martin Seepu was standing in front of my shop with a pot in his hand when Susannah dropped me off.

I said, “I hope your uncle’s not in dire need of money, because I can’t afford to buy that pot right now.”

“That’s what these tourists have been telling me all afternoon.”

“They don’t even know your uncle.”

“I meant the ‘can’t afford to buy that pot’ part.” He shook his head in mock disgust. “There was a time in this country when white people had money.”

Martin Seepu’s uncle is a gifted potter who occasionally sends Martin to me with a pot he wants to sell. His works are traditional for his pueblo which is why I buy them. I don’t like contemporary adaptations and experiments. New Mexico’s potters are free to use iridescent glazes and decorate their pots with embedded casino chips if they want to, but I don’t have to buy and sell the stuff.

Another reason I buy Martin’s uncle’s works is they always sell within a few months. Some people know quality when they see it. The only reason his pots don’t bring even more is he isn’t famous. He could be if he promoted himself or allowed an agent to do so. A book about him or a TV special would quadruple what he can get for a pot, but he doesn’t want that. Martin respects that. So do I, but I grimace when someone walks off with one his pots for three or four thousand even after I mark it up.

“So you’ve been taking advantage of my absence to hawk your wares on my doorstep,” I said.

“You can see how well that worked. I did get one offer. A fat five-year-old offered to trade his ice cream cone for my pot.”

“Probably figured he could snooker an Indian.”

“I have to admit I was tempted. An ice cream would have tasted good on a hot day like this. But he’d already licked it.”

“I don’t have any ice cream, but I do have some cold beer.”

“You got Tecate?”

“You gonna turn me down if I don’t have the right brand?”

“A man’s got to have standards.”

We went through the store to my living area in the back. While Martin pulled a couple of Tecates from the fridge along with a bowl of salsa, I looked up Cantú’s number and dialed it. A recorded voice told me the number was no longer in service, as if it had been discharged from the military.

I dumped chips into a bowl, and we took everything out to my patio, a ten by fifteen space on the east side of my building surrounded by an eight foot adobe wall. The building shades the patio in the afternoon, so the air was already twenty degrees cooler than the noon high of ninety-seven. The twin cottonwoods swayed ever so slightly, their leaves alternating between lime green and silver.

I tutored Martin in math when he was a kid and I was an undergraduate. I think the aim of the program that oversaw placing university students in the pueblos was for us to function something like the Big Brothers program. Martin already had a big brother and a big sister as well. He also had two parents who provided him all the guidance he needed and more than he wanted. So I taught him math just to feel like I was doing something useful. He evidently harbors no grudge about that because he comes to visit me frequently. He’s always civil, but sometimes you have to work to see it.

I told Martin about Segundo Cantú. He listened attentively with that blank expression he wears. After I finished, he took another sip of his beer. He likes it straight from the can. I always pour mine into a glass.

After a few minutes, he said, “People who collect old pots are strange.”

“Including me?”

“Especially you. Of course you got some reason to do it – this trading post.”

I chuckled at him calling my shop a trading post, but I guess it is in a way.

“My people believe the four elements are earth, air, fire, and water.”

“Just like the ancient Greeks,” I noted.

“We made a little progress since them. We divide each of those into four subcategories.” The leaves rustled and he tilted his head skyward.

“And those subcategories are?”

“The four kinds of earth are sand, clay, rock, and another word that I guess would translate as soil. It’s what you can grow things in.” He ate a chip – no salsa – and sipped some beer.

“I just know there’s a reason you’re telling me this.”

“There are also four types of clay,” he continued. “My uncle taught me. White clay, changing clay, shrinking clay, and hot-fire clay. Even though you’re a yellow-haired devil, you probably know this stuff.”

“Correction. I’m a brown-haired devil.”

“Yellow-haired has a better ring to it.”

“It does,” I agreed. “The white clay is kaolin, no doubt about that one. The ‘changing clay’ is probably what we call fire clay because its plasticity can change like crazy. Shrinking clay would be ball clay because that shrinks a lot during firing, and-hot fire clay is probably plain old earthenware clay because it does require a high temperature to fire properly, although so does kaolin. Why are we talking about this?”

“I’m making a point about pot collectors.”

“I think I missed it.”

“That’s because I haven’t made it yet.”

“Ah,” I said and drank some Tecate.

“Pot collectors don’t know anything about clay. They don’t know about firing. They don’t know the true meanings of the designs. Why do they want the pots?”

“Because as Shelly said, ‘A thing of beauty is a joy forever’.”

“That was Keats,” he corrected.

“I was just testing you.”

“I don’t think they collect pots because they’re beautiful. I think they collect them because they’re rare.”

“Actually, I agree. The rarer your collection the better. Look at the most desired collectibles of all time – the 1943 copper penny, the 1918 stamp with the plane upside-down – the thing they have in common is not their beauty or historical significance or anything like that. It’s just that they are rare.”

“One of those ‘inverted jenny’ stamps sold for over half a million a couple of years ago,” he noted.

“So you’re saying that pot collectors are weird because they buy pots just because there aren’t many of them to be bought.”

“I guess the same could be said of all collectors.”

It was right after he made that statement that the dog fell out of the sky.

The next morning I drove down the South Valley along old Highway 85, avoiding the Interstate. Friday had been a scorcher, ninety-eight degrees, but I’d slept with a light blanket. The dry air cools quickly when the sun goes down, and you feel the effects of being a mile above sea level.

I wore chinos and a hyphenated shirt – light-blue, button-down, and long-sleeved. The sky was cerulean blue, lit indirectly by the sun which had not yet cleared the Sandias. The Bronco filled with the scent of alfalfa.

I turned west on an unnamed dirt road alongside an irrigation canal lined with cottonwoods and followed it to the modest adobe that Emilio and Consuela Sanchez call home.

It’s like home to me as well. Consuela was my nanny, arriving at the tender age of sixteen when I was born. My mother was a wonderful woman who never quite felt at home in what she regarded as the rather untamed wilderness to which her husband had brought her shortly after their marriage. But she used to say you have to “bloom where you’re planted,” and she set about improving Albuquerque by organizing garden clubs, civic beautification drives, and ladies auxiliaries. What the ladies were auxiliary to I never knew.

She taught me by word and deed the meaning of decorum and propriety. Despite her sober upbringing and somewhat rigid values, she was a warm and affectionate person, but it was Consuela who attended to the small things in the life of a child that contribute mightily to the man he becomes.

She was an older sister and a second mother. She taught me Spanish the old-fashioned way, by talking to me in that tongue from the day I came home from the hospital. My mother taught her how to make leg of lamb with mint sauce and
boeuf-en-croute
, but at lunch, Consuela fed me
caldillo, chile con carne, carne adovada, posole,
and
sopapillas
. For vegetables we had
frijoles, calabazitas, arroz con chile verde, flan de maiz mezclado,
and
verdolagas
that she gathered wild. Her cooking molded my palate. I’m as likely today to go to a French, Italian, or Japanese restaurant as I am to take up skateboarding.

We left my parents’ home the same year, she to get married, me to enroll as a freshman at the University.

Emilio changed Consuela’s name from Saenz to Sanchez. A year later they had Ninfa who turned out to be an only child like me, and when she married and moved to California, it broke her mother’s heart. Consuela has lived since with two hopes, that Ninfa will give them a grandchild and that she will come back to live in New Mexico.

Emilio came to the United States in 1953, twelve years old but concealing his youth in order to enter the
Bracero
Program.

“I walked all day from San Diego de Alcalá to Chihuahua,” he had told me years ago. “I was surprised when I arrived,
amigo
. There were more people at the
Trocadero
than in my village.”

“What was the
Trocadero
?”

“I don’t know from where comes this word, but it was a building
near the railroad station. There I stood in line with the others to see the Americans who would choose those to become
Braceros
.”

He was sitting that day, as he always does, with his back perfectly straight, his shoulders squared, his head held high. Working for fifty years with a short-handled hoe gave him sinewy muscles and leathery skin, but it never broke his spirit nor bowed his head.

“How did they choose?”

“First you have…How do you say
entrevista
?”

“Interview.”

“Yes. First, you have interview with one of the gringos.” He looked at me and smiled. “If he likes what you tell him, he send you to a second American. He takes your hand and rubs it to see if you have worked. I feel embarrassed by this gringo holding my hand, but everyone must do the same, so I do it. They like what I say and they like my hands because I work hard in my village, so I get a paper. The third gringo say for me to make my
equi
on the card, but I tell him I know how to write, and I write my name very carefully on the card. I am very proud to have this card.”

“What happened after you got the card? How did you get to the U.S.?”

“The next day, we ride in a cattle train to Ciudad Juarez. There we wait in a park for two days until the
migras
sign our papers. Then we walk across the bridge to El Paso. I remember, Huberto, when I show my card to the American on the El Paso side. He smile at me and move his arm to tell me keep walking. I think in my head that America let me come in, and it was the happiest day of my life.”

He paused for a moment. “The Americans in the
Trocadero
never smile. But I always remember that guard on the bridge. After passing the bridge, they put us in the back of farm trucks and take us to a large building in a small village in New Mexico called Hatch. There they spray white powder on us to kill lice. I know I have no lice, but I say nothing. I just close my mouth and eyes and hold my nose because the spray is strong. They give us
chile con carne
to eat, and we sleep on the ground.”

“The next morning the farmers come and choose which of us they want. I am surprised, Huberto, because some of them are Mexican, and I think in my head that America must surely be heaven where someone from Mexico may own a farm. I do not know that these men who look like me and speak Spanish are not from Mexico. I was a young and foolish boy, and I think I will work hard and save my money, and I will buy a farm in Hatch and marry an American woman.”

“And you did all those things,” I pointed out in admiration.

“Yes, Consuela is American, and so I am also as her husband. And we both work hard and buy together this small piece of land and build this house with our hands. But it is not a farm.”

“You grow everything you need.”

“
Tienes razón
. Consuela has the green thumb.”

“And you are here instead of Hatch, and perhaps that is also good.”

“Yes, because we are close to you and our other friends.”

He sat for a moment in reverie. “The first man I work for in Hatch is not a Mexican. He is a gringo. I never know his name; we call him only
Patron
. I pick chiles for one dollar for each one hundred pounds. I make almost twenty dollars the first week, and I think I will become rich. But the picking is not the only work. I must also do the irrigation at night, and for this I do not receive money. I ask the other
Braceros
if I must say something to the
Patron
, and they tell me to say nothing, for if I make a complaint, I will be sent back to Mexico, and perhaps they will be sent back as well. So I work both day and night six days each week.”

“On Saturday after work, we can go to the store. The other
Braceros
buy cigarettes, but I save my money. On Sunday we go to mass, and some Sundays we do not work after mass. We play baseball and make
barbacoa
. The
Patron
is a very cold man, but he pay me each week, and when I return to Mexico, I have almost five hundred American dollars, more than my father make in his life.”

I thought about that story as I saw Emilio come around from the back of the house, a wide grin on his face. He removed his sweat-stained hat and gave me a strong
abrazo
.

“Welcome, amigo. I hope you have brought a large hunger, for there is much to eat.”

“I could smell your
barbacoa
all the way from Albuquerque. It’s pork today.”

He laughed and his dark eyes smiled. “Consuela always say you have the best nose. But let us not stand here alone and thirsty. Come, come.”

We circled to the back where a dozen of his neighbors had gathered, and he introduced me to two I didn’t know, a nephew and niece of the Calderón family who own the land on which Emilio and Consuela’s house sits.

At least according to the records in the Bernalillo County Courthouse. In fact, Emilio and Consuela bought the small plot many years ago, but county ordinances prohibit subdividing land in this area, so no legal transfer can take place. It doesn’t matter. In this small community, agreements among neighbors are more binding than papers in a courthouse.

Jesús Calderón stood over a fifty-five gallon steel barrel that had been cut in half long ways and made into a
barilla
with welded-on legs, twenty pounds of charcoal under the grate, and fifty pounds of meat on top. The smoke made my empty stomach churn with anticipation,

Jesús gave me an
abrazo
as I stepped close to admire his handiwork. Manny Chapa put one hand on my shoulder and slipped me a cold can of Tecate with the other. I offered up a small prayer of thanks for being born in New Mexico.