Thirteen Senses by Victor Villaseñor
Salvador had to smile. His mother couldn’t have maneuvered him about anymore tactfully. “I hope you’re right,” he said.
“You know I am,” she added.
He laughed. Then it was their turn to be asked questions by the border patrolman. The man looked tired and sweaty and in an awful mood.
Quickly, instinctively, Salvador prepared himself for battle.
But what did Lupe do, why, she just leaned across in front of Salvador, taking the lead, and said in a happy, bird-like, cheerful voice, “Officer, you must be burning up in this hot weather! Be sure to have your wife make you a big, tall glass of lemonade when you get home tonight!”
“Thank you,” he said. “Pass right on through. Good to have you back!”
And that was that. The patrolman hadn’t even noticed that they were Mexicans or that they were driving a beat-up, old truck. He’d just seen them as good people, and that was all there was to it, and they were back in the United States.
“Lemonade?” said Salvador.
“Yes,” said Lupe, “I saw it in a movie, lemonade is very American, that and apple pie.”
Salvador couldn’t stop laughing, every time he’d glance at Lupe. She’d been so quick and ready!
“Do you know what day this is?” asked Lupe when they came into the outskirts of Tucson, Arizona.
“No,” said Salvador, “I don’t.”
“It’s my birthday,” said Lupe. “It’s May 30, 1932, and I’m twenty-one years old today!”
“Really, it’s your birthday?”
“Yes, and I want us to go to the movies tonight, then afterward sleep underneath the Stars.”
“Anything else? God, you’re getting wild again, Lupe!”
“Yes, I’d like warm apple pie for dinner with vanilla ice cream and nothing else.”
“All right, you got it!”
And so that Holy Night they had hot apple pie with vanilla ice cream and they went to the movies in Tucson, Arizona, and it was a wonderful, talking movie with music and dancing.
Then they slept under a million Stars, and when they made Love, Lupe and Salvador just Knew they were in Heaven Here on Earth—the happiest, richest couple in the Universe, GOD’S ONE SONG, ONE SYMPHONY!—OUR DREAM!
Afterword
YES, DOMINGO DID FIND the gold mine just outside of Navojoa, Sonora, Mexico, and he became very rich for about fifteen years. Then he sold the mine for a lot of money and started drinking himself to death, leaving women and children all over the place.
I remember meeting my uncle once when I was about eleven years old in Nogales, Mexico. He was a big, rawbone-looking man with a gorgeous smile. He reminded me a lot of the famous actor of the day, Burt Lancaster. My father and mother loaned him some money so he could go to the doctor, but instead he used the money to drink some more and he died a few months later. My father cried when he got word of his brother’s death.
“Mi hijito,” he said, taking me aside, “if it wasn’t for your mother’s guts, I, too, would most likely be dead, just like my brother. We got wild with all of our ideas of the gold mine. But your mother forced me to give up the mine, quit my bootlegging and become law-abiding. A woman, I tell you, is hard to listen to at times, but she can be a man’s salvation.”
My mother told me that the day after they left Tucson, Arizona, they immediately began to have problems with their little truck, but they didn’t panic. They just knew that everything would somehow work out for the best, if they just kept faith and kept going.
When they got to Santa Ana, my mother told me, that they found out that her father had died. He’d died of pneumonia in the hospital three weeks before, when he’d dirtied himself in bed because he was too weak to get himself to the bathroom. The head nurse had gotten so angry that she’d put him in a cold concrete room where he’d quickly developed pneumonia and died.
My mother told me that she felt absolutely terrible that she hadn’t been home for her father.
My father told me that he and my mother went through some very hard times for about a year and a half when they returned to California, but then he told me that Franklin Delano Roosevelt—who everyone in the barrio thought was half Mexican because of his middle name—changed the whole country overnight. He closed the banks, then ninety-nine days later reopened them with good money, ended Prohibition, and suddenly everyone had jobs. There was nothing to fear but fear itself, my father told me were the words that President Roosevelt made famous—words that his own mother, Doña Margarita, had lived by all of her life.
Archie sold my father and mother the poolhall he’d built in the barrio of Carlsbad on credit and my parents became legitimate businesspeople. But my father knew nothing about bookkeeping and so it was my mother who took over the handling of the monies and going to the bank. The whole country began to prosper and my parents were on their way, too.
But, coming back to our original question:
Was it love?
Had it ever really been love between my parents, or had it just been two people surviving through the good times and hard times of life, la vida?
My father always told us children that it was love, no doubt about it, just as he’d stated on their fiftieth anniversary. But mi mama, I’m sorry to say, could never quite say this, for she always seemed to keep some resentments toward our father deep inside of herself.
In fact, it wasn’t until 1990—a couple of years after mi papa had passed over to the Other Side and I found my mother crying by the huge, old pepper tree in our front yard—that this matter finally started to be addressed.
“What is it, mama” I asked my mother. “Why are you crying?”
“I miss your father so much,” she said to me, gripping her chest.
“I do, too,” I said.
“Yes,” she said, “but I’m the one who could never bring myself to tell him that I loved him.” She was in agony.
“You mean that you never once told papa that you loved him, mama?”
“When we first married I did, of course, but then as the years passed”—she shrugged her shoulders—“I never did anymore, because, well, of all the things I’d grown to not like about him. And now . . . it’s those very same things he used to do that annoyed me so much, that I miss the most,” she added.
“Oh, mama,” I said, “I’m so sorry. I didn’t know. This is terrible.”
“Desgraciadamente, this is the tragedy of life that so many of us do with our loved ones, mi hijito.” She gasped, taking in a big breath. “We let life’s ups and downs separate us from our love. I loved your father very much,” she added with tears running down her face, “but only now that he’s dead and gone can I say this without resentments.”
“Oh, mama,” I said, “you must feel awful.”
“I do,” she said, “but what can I say, this is what women have been trained to do,” she added, “to be afraid of giving all of our love completely, because once we marry, we think that everything is now suddenly supposed to be perfect, and so we then refuse to accept each other’s imperfections. Oh, dear God,” she added, “please jurame, mi hijito, promise me that you will never let a day pass by that you don’t let your children and wife know how much you love them.”
“I promise, mama,” I said to her.
“Good, because I really did love him, mi hijito. I can now see this so clearly without any doubt, that I loved your father with all my heart and soul, but I just wouldn’t let myself know this until he was gone—God forgive me.”
I took my mother in my arms and she cried, sobbing like a child. Truly, this, I could now see, had been haunting her for years. “Please, mama. don’t be too hard on yourself,” I said, tears streaming down my own face. “Papa knew you loved him.”
“Did he?”
“Yes, mama, he always told us you did, but you just didn’t know how to say it in words.”
“Gracias, mi hijito,” she said to me. “Your father was a good man, a very good man, and I now see that this is our worst
I didn’t know what else to say. My mother’s truthfulness was causing me to take a deeper look at my own situation with my wife and kids. But, then, in the spring of the year 2000, my mother, God Bless her Soul, took me into an even deeper level of understanding Love. It was midmorning and she was on the back patio whistling to her canaries. It had been a long time since I’d seen her enjoying her canaries with such happiness.
“How are you, mama?” I said. “You look so happy.”
“I am,” she said, singing to her birds.
“Why? What happened?”
“I’ve finally forgiven myself, mi hijito.”
“You’ve forgiven yourself of what, mama?”
“Oh, EVERYTHING!” she said with gusto. “Of your brother Joseph’s death”—(I’d had an older brother who’d died of an internal injury because of football at the age of sixteen)—“of my not being there when my own father passed over, and, well, especially of not telling your father that I loved him.”
“And this feels good, eh?” I said, smiling.
“Forgiving feels WONDERFUL!” she shouted with joy. “Especially when you finally even forgive yourself!”
I laughed. It felt so good to see mi mama being so happy after so many years mourning. I invited her to breakfast and she accepted and we ate together—huevos rancheros, her favorite. “I tell you, mi hijito,” she said to me as we ate, “I’m finally beginning to understand that it really does take a lot of living—as your father’s mother always used to say—before we humans finally open up our eyes and begin to see. Why, only now that I approach ninety, do I see that so many of the things that I detested about your father—or I thought that they were of the Devil—were actually Blessings in disguise straight from God!”
Her eyes filled with tears again. But no, these were not tears of sorrow. These were tears of wisdom and joy—of insight. “For instance, all these years I’ve thought how disgusting it was for that woman Socorro—there at the border when we’d been returning to Mexico—to go to Domingo’s arms all full of love after he’d beaten her and accept his apology. But now I can see that she did right. We all need to forgive each other our trespasses and quickly, too, or else our hearts harden and we lose our ability to love.
“Oh, if only I’d known how to forgive your father for all the things he did while he was alive, what a different life we could’ve had. I was stingy with my love, mi hijito. But don’t think that I’ve suddenly come to all this, mi hijito, because I’m some saintly woman,” she said, laughing. “No, I’m just a very practical woman who doesn’t want to go to Hell. And I can now see so clearly that if I don’t find it in my heart to forgive everyone, including your father, then how can I expect God to forgive me?”
She smiled. “Do you understand, mi hijito, it’s as simple as that and it’s all in Our Lord’s Prayer: ‘forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who’ve trespassed against us.’ But it’s taken me all these years for me to finally drop my pride and open my eyes to see that it had always been me, myself, who saw all these things as wrongs in life. Your father and I had a wonderful life, but I just couldn’t see it because I was so full of ideas of how a man should really be.” She breathed. “I loved your father so much. Now, I can hardly wait to die, mi hijito, so I can meet him up in Heaven and tell him so. ‘I love you, Salvador,’ I will tell your father, ‘I love you with all my Heart and Soul for All Eternity, mi esposo de mi corazón!”
I was now crying, too.
It was love!
It had always been love!
And that was all there really was, nada, nada, nothing but AMOR Here on Earth as it is in Heaven once people finally opened their Eyes to See with Clarity del Corazón!
I hugged mi mama close and we cried together. And she, nuestra madre, died three weeks later, June 2, 2000, and she was . . . smiling. She’d done it! She’d found Peace and Love and Harmony with God before passing over!
Victor E. Villaseñor
Rancho Villaseñor
Oceanside, California
Spring 2001
P.S.:
Now about our Thirteen Senses, yes, I deliberately didn’t list them anywhere in the text, because if I had, then people wouldn’t have experienced the book. Instead, they would have been checking to see if here, at this point, the Tenth was being used or the Eleventh or whatever.
You see, it was no accident that we were reduced to five senses during the last three or four thousand years. The five senses are the perfect “trap” to keep us going around in circles inside of our brain computer. It’s only when we get out of our head and go into our heart and soul computers that we find freedom and begin to glimpse the wonderful world of abundance and infinite possibilities that we have all around us.
And to activate the Heart Computer, the Sixth and Seventh Senses need to be acknowledged, and these two are, of course, Balance and Intuition. Then to activate the Soul Computer we need to go into the Eighth and Ninth Senses, which are Music (being in Harmony, being Interconnected with all existence, which is then Alive and Breathing and Vibrating) and Psychic (being able to See the Future with utter Clarity). Then once these are activated, Balance, Intuition, Music, and Psychic, we burst into Tenth, Eleventh, Twelfth, and Thirteenth, which are Flying (space swimming/sailing), Form Shifting (all indigenous languaging that I know of have this one), Hall of Records (collective memory or consciousness—Carl Jung was barking up the right tree) and Being. The first six, of course, all men still automatically do. The first seven all women still automatically do. And the last one, Being, we all do every day of our lives or we’d go crazy.
You see, the question was never to be or not to be. To Be or not to Be is the Answer. For when we just relax after a hard day and breathe in easy, having no thoughts or ideas, we are utilizing the Thirteenth, of simply Being.
God, remember, originally was never called God in the Bible. He was called the Supreme Being, and we are human beings, and so when we utilize the Thirteenth, we are then of God with our every Breath.
There are no accidents in languaging. Language is the growing, changing, evolving process of our conscious development in the art-form of verbal communications. And who taught me this? It was my father and mother, and especially mi mama once my father had passed over and she was forced to come out of her head and into her Heart and Soul.
Now here you have all of the Thirteen and you can look back in the book and see where they were all used again and again—effortlessly. Why, because all Thirteen were a natural part of our daily living for hundreds of thousands of years, a time when the Garden of Eden was understood not to be “a” location, but our Breathing, Living, Relationship with the Holy Creator. Thank you, and please don’t tell anyone what the Thirteen Senses are. Let each person experience the book first. Gracias, from mi familia to your familia.
Remember, we are all WONDERFUL, meaning Beings who are Full-of-Wonder. Life on this planet is just Awakening. And we are so incredibly Good and full of Love, Heart, and Soul—Reflections of GOD in CO-CREATION are WE!
Acknowledgments
First, I’d like to thank my agent, Margret McBride, who read this work in so many different forms for the last six years. Poor Margret, I almost drove you crazy when Thirteen Senses was entitled Father Sun, Mother Moon and To The Sky. Thank you, Margret, for not losing your enthusiasm. I’d like to also thank Margret’s staff, who have been real troopers—Kris, Sangeeta, Donna, and Jessica.
Next, I’d like to thank my friend Bill Cartwright, whom I met in the early ‘6os and we were both going to be writers. Thank you, Bill, for hiking into la Lluvia de Oro with me when I had a broken arm and I was writing Rain of Gold. Thank you and Dennis Avery when we traveled to los Altos de Jalisco for researching Wild Steps of Heaven. And biggest thanks of all, Bill, for reading Thirteen Senses in its many forms and drafts over the last six years. You and Helen and Rob and Barbara wer
Thanks to Jackie, who runs my office and knows more about me than anyone will ever know, thank you, Jackie, thank you, Jackie, thank you, Jackie and I also thank your wonderful husband, Roland, that great attorney that you found in the yellow pages, brought him into our office, then married him to make sure that he stayed with us. Thanks, Roland, too.
Hal, my running partner with the sore neck, thank you for sticking with me on an almost daily basis, not only reading the different drafts again and again but also listening to me when I was jumping up and down, screaming, “Hal, I now see the Sixth! Hal, I now understand the Seventh! Hal, last night papa came to me with his mama and a dozen angels and now I finally see the Ninth, the Tenth and the Eleventh.” Hal, thank you for not forsaking me. It was a long, marvelous experiencing of Good-Goding-God.
Thank you, David, my son, for being the wise solid rock that you are and keeping the rancho together even in the midst of great financial worry and mind-expanding times. You always manage to say the most reassuring words. And congratulations on your acceptance to med school.
Thank you, my son Joseph, and for being the bearer of light. You caused your mother, Barbara, and me to travel to India on a moment’s notice and we got to participate in your Siddhartha experience of illumination—which no doubt one day you will put to pen or simply teach. No greater sons could parents ever hope to have than you, Joe, and your brother, David.
Thank you, Barbara, mother of our children, for your support and love that continues even now that we are no longer husband and wife but good friends and . . . family forever.
And I’d like to thank my sister Linda, whom I grew up with and have not had a close relationship with for almost twenty-five years but now, since mama passed away on June 2, 2000, we have been closer together than ever. For the last six months you, Linda, are the one that saved this book by typing with me, working with me, literally from six in the morning to late at night as I reworked the book over and over, sometimes one page, one paragraph for a week—stretching not just our minds but our languaging from the five senses into the Thirteen.