Chincherias for El Chandelier

Natalia Treviño

After Pepón Osorio’s El Chandelier, 1988, functional metal and glass chandelier with mixed media

He had left it all behind, la esposa, his daughter, el carro, la chamba, all behind so he could marry this little Americana he met on WhatsApp. He thought it would be his last chance after casi toda la vida jalando, unas pocas viejas, and his best friend Benny dead in the last cat fight. And when he arrived at her house and saw it was not in the barrio, but on a nearly soundless street, he wanted an object to remember every brave thing he had done. A kitchen magnet from when they held hands out in the open at the Tower of the Americas. He wondered how far he could see if he had the nerve to go up. He hung an old license plate that started with the letter A over his new wife’s bed because they had had sex for four hours straight on more than one occasion, and he wanted to remember it was just like driving a car—A for Aprendiendo. He was a Learner, and he liked it this time. He kept all the brochures any hotel clerk or street hawker ever gave him. He kept all of the colorful junk mail because it had his name on it, stacked on his dresser in the bedroom because these pages had things he had never seen before. Battery powered songbirds. Upside down tomato planters. Genius. He filled their house with these small objects, his memories shelved on every surface because he had to see what he had done since he could not believe it. Until there was nowhere else to hang the plastic babies they sold at the Dollar Store in the After-Christmas Bonus Dollar Sale Bin, until his new American wife yelled that there was not one crammed space left in any drawer where he could store the dominos and water guns the kids left behind from the neighbor baby’s birthday party—until he saw it at la pulga for twenty five dollars and said, ah. El chandelier. And he packed it in the backseat of his carcacha, hung it immediately when they got home. He wanted to see it dazzle. That chandelier held todo—todo lo que le dio la pinche gana. Jugetes, mugres, dolls, memories. Every crystal scallop a shining echo for every tiny new gem of his life, every transparent strand of beads, a hook for any plastic palma or pearl-rimmed bird’s nest he could find. Recuerditos, he called them. He wondered if his daughter could see this magical upside down Christmas tree, if he hung it from the top of the Tower, if he climbed it, if she could see it shine with him all the way from El Otro Lado.

Born in Mexico City and raised in San Antonio, Texas, Natalia Treviño is the author of Lavando La Dirty Laundry (Mongrel Empire Press). She is an Associate Professor of English at Northwest Vista College and a member of the Macondo Foundation. Natalia completed her Master’s degree in English at The University of Texas, and she also graduated from the University of Nebraska’s MFA program in Creative Writing. Her poems have won the Alfredo Cisneros de Moral Award, the Wendy Barker Creative Writing Award, the Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Prize, the San Antonio Artist Foundation Literary Prize, and a Bordersenses Poetry Prize. Her poems have appeared in several literary journals including Borderlands, Texas Poetry Review, Sugar House Review, burnt district, Sliver of Stone, and Voices de la Luna. She has been anthologized as a poet, fiction, and nonfiction writer, with fiction appearing in Curbstone Press’s Mirrors Beneath the Earth, and essays in Shifting Balance Sheets: Women’s Stories of Naturalized Citizens and Complex Allegiances: Constellations of Immigration. She recently completed her first novel, Drinking the Bee Water, a story about immigration and the sacrifice behind it.