The Man Who Cried...

"Dicen que los hombres no deben llorar
Por una mujer que ha pagado mal
Pero yo no pude contener mi llanto
Cerrando los ojos, me puse a llorar..."
- Pedro Fernandez, Los Hombres No Deben Llorar

By DUARDO PAZ-MARTINEZ
The Paz Files

BROWNSVILLE, Texas - When he was nearing 12 years old, Salomon Zamora's grandfather sold his bicycle, promising a new one in the weeks that would follow. He never got the new bike, and, after the old man died, Salomon would walk to the cemetery and sit there at the foot of his grave and tell him he loved him, repeating, "It was just a bike, grandpa. It was just a bike."

As he grew into his teens during the late 1940s, Salomon came to love a few other things. His first car was a used Packard, a charcoal-colored beauty he struggled with mechanically, but eventually got running. Service in the U.S. Army made him stash the car in an uncle's garage. He often thought about it, even when the military dispatched him to Europe, that car forever front-center in his mind. He saved a few dollars and thought he might use the money to buy a new engine when he went back home. In the meantime, he kept writing to an older woman he'd befriended shortly after leaving for Germany.

Her name was Genoveva. Salomon thought she was the most beautiful woman of 1952, her auburn hair pulled up over the top of her head in a popular hairstyle of the times. When he would think of her, he always pictured her naked, there on her bed, those flowy clothes she wore on the floor, the boot-like shoes not far away. They had made love only three times, but Salomon could bring up any of a hundred frames from those scenes without even trying. She had been his first woman.

Things and time happened. He came home from the army to find that Genoveva had married another man, a heavyset man with a bulbous head fast going bald. His name was Baldemar and he owned the town's profitable tortilleria. Salomon had initially wondered why she hadn't said anything about the new romance in her many letters. Ultimately, he understood, however. Balde was a sucessful businessman, someone who would fill her needs, keep her warm and dry. She hadn't said much about it when they met after his return, only that she regretted not telling him. When she asked if she could keep his dozens of letters, Salomon nodded, but then said he had an appointment with owner of a car repair shop he hoped would give him a job. Genoveva looked at him with her big, brown eyes, but said nothing. As he got up from his chair in the cafe, she leaned over and kissed him on the cheek. The walk to the job interview had been tougher than any forced march he'd made in Army boot camp.

Salomon lost track of her over the years, and it wasn't until the morning he saw her face in the newspaper that he felt a huge knot in his throat. Genoveva had died. The obituary in the paper said she was 81, and that she had died after a long illness. There had been few survivors listed in the obit, only her husband, Balde, and her two brothers and a sister. No children.

It was easy for Salomon to think she'd died of a broken heart, the long illness being that life she'd lived without him, without his love and without their kids...

- 30 -