The Gallo Wars

“Of all these, the Belgae are the bravest, because they are furthest from the civilization and refinement of [our] province.”
- Julius Caesar, Commentarii De Bello Gallico 

The Gallo Wars
by Oso Guardiola

When I got home from work, my ceramic fighting cock was in pieces on the floor. I assumed Lisa did it because she always hated it, but it was my favorite decoration in the house. My uncle Julio made it for us, for our wedding. She thought it was tacky, but she thought it was tacky the way middle-class white people don’t like color. I’m sure if I’d ever taken her to my uncle Julio’s hometown in Chihuahua, she’d think the whole town was tacky. She wears crocs, sometimes, inside the house. Dammit. Why am I like this?

Anyway, Julio, his name was Julio César. Once, Lisa asked me how a Mexican winds up with the name Julius Caesar, and I told her, I guess the Latins told stories to the Celt Iberians who told them to the Moors who told them to the Castilians and, in a round about way, it got to my abuelo, who named my uncle after one of the people in one of these stories.

I wanted to name our son after him, Julio César. She said she didn’t want to because it was a pagan name. (She wasn’t so direct. It took a while to pry that out of her. First, she just said she didn’t want the other boys to make fun of him. But, when the names she suggested were Israel and Jedediah, I realized that wasn’t really why, and I pushed her on it, so she said, truth is, Julio César’s not a Christian name.)

We named our son Israel. She wanted a biblical name so that the little guy would grow up to be a good Christian man. I don’t know about Julio’s religion. I guess he was Catholic, but no more Catholic than anyone else. We never talked about it. He was a good man, and sometimes went to church, although mostly he didn’t go or didn’t talk about it if he did. Truth is, he would have done anything for us.

I picked up the broken pieces of the ceramic fighting cock on the floor. I set them on our coffee table, maybe my coffee table, the one in my office, and with some gorilla glue, I tried to piece it together.

When Julio was nine years old, a strange little chick hatched from an egg on my abuelo’s ranch. It hatched tiny, shriveled, purple, but he had a large red mask around his eyes. Julio asked his dad, mi abuelo, if he could have it, and mi abuelo said, llevatelo mijo, es tuyo. So, Julio took the little thing and named him Atila, after the conqueror he saw in the Camel Cigarettes commercials invading Anatolia for Turkish tobacco. Julio César and Atila were best friends. Julio once told me that Atila was his only friend.

When Atila was a chick, he would perch himself on Julio’s head and climb up and down his back and shoulders. They played tag running up and down the street. Atila seemed to understand the rules: Julio chases Atila, taps him, Atila chases Julio, returns the tap with a light peck. Julio expected Atila to grow up with him, but Atila grew into adolescence when Julio had just turned ten. Soon, with the physical maturity of adolescence but the imprudence of a chicken, Atila became pugnacious. He frequently fought the other roosters and swaggered by the hens. His morning coo became robust. Julio realized that he lost his friend when he went out to play tag with Atila, but Atila flew at him with open claws. Julio shielded himself with his forearms. When he came inside the house, he realized Atila had drawn blood.

He told mi abuelo about it and abuelo said, well, it’s a fighting cock.

No, he’s not.

His dad’s a fighting cock, so he will be, too.

You don’t raise fighting cocks.

I don’t, but when I need a rooster for the hens, I go to La Palenque, and they sell me one cheap. Sometimes free. Atila’s dad was a fighting cock, a great one. Undefeated for many weeks. He lost a fight and almost died, so I asked if I could have him. I took him home and nursed him to health. That’s why Atila is the way he is, and wants to fight. That’s why you are the way you are, and you want to take care of the little creatures.

Seeing this, Julio understood, or thought he understood, Atila wanted to fight.

Being the youngest of nine, it was easy to get away: there was always something else in the house to busy oneself. So, just before sundown, Julio took Atila to La Palenque, where the men who smelled of sotol and tejuino put metal claws like tiny swords on Atila, caged him, patted little Julio on the back and pointed to a seat. They told Julio he could watch from the front row.

Sitting on the re-purposed church pew, looking out to the middle of what was once a barn and now an altar for birdslaughter, Julio realized that Atila, although he had grown, was still small. Another cock, an experienced fighting cock everybody trusted, blustered his coos and clucks across the barn. Atila hid in his cage, but the men threw him out. Then, from another cage came a much larger bird (whose name I cannot remember but I imagine it was something like Pope Saint Leo the Great). While Atila was an adolescent black and brown cock with bright red eyes, Pope Saint Leo the Great had black eyes, and red and green feathers like a bird of paradise.

Atila tried to flee, but Pope Saint Leo the Great fell on him like the judgment of God. He sank his claws into Atila’s neck and tore through Atila’s throat like he’d been trained to do so. Atila died, but his body didn’t know. It kept fleeing, even without Atila’s soul to guide it. Julio ran onto the altar and shielded Atila with his own body. As he held dead Atila’s dancing corpse, Pope Saint Leo the Great dug his armed claws into Julio’s back, scratching and cutting him like beef or pork or poultry, like the supper of the lamb.

The men pulled Pope Saint Leo the Great off, called Julio a stupid boy, spat at him, threw metal pesos at him for loser’s earnings. Julio left, carrying Atila away. He left the pesos behind, and walked home covering Atila’s bloody throat pulsing chest. When he returned home, his mother told him to go inside. She had to tend to his wounds. Julio said no, and before he let anyone touch him, he took mi abuelo’s shovel and buried Atila behind his room. When mi abuela bathed him, he asked if she could bring her missal, and they could pray the office for the dead.

I told Lisa, this is the man Julio César was. He did that for a chicken. He did that for the littlest of Christ’s creations. Later, he did that for his father, and mother, and when I was in college, and I needed money for college, he immigrated even without papers, risking his life to work in the USA and help me pay for school. If my throat was slit, he would press down on my neck and comfort me either toward health or into my grave. If Christ was right and we are shown the mercy we show others, then Julio is a saint.

Lisa said, well, that’s a nice story, but Israel is a biblical name.

Religion, man. When religion and ethnicity coincide, things get ugly. She just didn’t get Catholicism, and because of that, she didn’t get my Mexican heritage (or, maybe it’s the other way around). We didn’t see it when we dated, but when we got married, when she was pregnant, every time, the Mexican Catholic way of doing things was wrong, and the only right way of doing things was the White Southern Baptist way. The way I saw it, if you name your child a pagan name you raise him to be a saint then the name becomes a Christian name. But no. Pagan names are for pagans. Our boy needs a Christian name.

If you ask me why we fell in love with Lisa, I don’t know. I know that before we started dating I spent a lot of time smoking mota with my friends and talking about Oscar Zeta Acosta and Jack Kerouac and pretending I was a beatnik. I wanted to be a poet. I know after we started dating my lungs and head were clear and I read more, especially my Bible, which before her I had hardly touched. But, before we got married, my blood pressure was much lower. Dealing with her racist ass parents asking if I was one of those bad hombres and if my family had gang connections… Jesus. Lisa tried to correct them, but it never helped. Years of this shit, it really weighs on a man. 

Sometimes I wonder if the relationship was never good, or if I just convinced myself it was never good. Maybe I’m such a petty man that I erased her loveliness. I thought she was lovely once. I must have. After we got married, she made me so mad when she told me Julio César was a Pagan name, and our baby needed a Christian name to be a good man, and wrote off the story of my uncle, when she called that ceramic fighting cock tacky, even though Julio gave it with so much love.

Once, when I was leaving for Mass, she said, I wish you would just read the Bible by yourself instead of relying on a priest to read it to you, and I said, I wish you weren’t so proud as to think your way is always better. She said, I say this out of Christian charity, (and maybe she did really say it out of charity but I couldn’t see that because of the last pendejada she said), but I don’t want your priests to send our child to hell.

I don’t want to say how much I yelled at her, or the awful things I said to her. All I remember is years later, in the middle of an argument about how we should baptize Israel, she told me I didn’t really love him, and that’s why I hit her when she was pregnant. I told her I never hit her. She said I did, the day we settled on the name, and I felt so guilty and ashamed that I let her name our baby Israel and not Julio César. I don’t remember hitting her, but she was right, I did feel guilty, but I thought I was just guilty for yelling at her. She was right, though. My guilt was why we settled on the name.

But she was the one who didn’t love him, not me. I think.

She loved him when he was young. When he was at the age that she could tell him how horrible hell is and that he should fear it. But, when he would turn around and tell me, daddy, I don’t wanna go to hell, after doing something innocent like making a fart joke about the Bible, I told him that’s not how it works, and he should trust God’s mercy. Hope is, after all, a virtue. Then Lisa would scold me in front of Israel for giving him permission to take the Lord’s name in vain, then say the path to hell is paved with good intentions.

I told her it’s not. The church holds that sin is only sin if it was intentional, so laughing because someone read something silly in the Bible is no damn sin. Sorry for swearing, Israel.

Lisa said, then why does the Bible say the path to hell is paved with good intentions?

I told her it never says that. That’s from Shakespeare.

She said it is in the Bible, it says it in the Psalms.

I said nowhere in the Bible does it say that. It says hell is full of good desires.

She said same damn thing, sorry for swearing Israel. You see, now you got me swearing, too.

I said no it’s not. Think of sex. Not you Israel. Lisa, sex is a good thing, but forcing someone to have sex is evil. The intention of making love is in no way a sin. The intention of rape is an evil intention.

Well why are you talking about sex in front of the boy? Lisa turned around and told Israel not to listen to daddy.

I yelled at her, why is everything evil?

She said, I’m teaching him that evil exists, what are you teaching him?

We never agreed on how to raise Israel. To be honest, this is part of the reason I continued graduate school for theology instead of history or creative writing—to refute her heresies. It was bad motivation. Every time I thought I didn’t care too much about theology, she would say some thing she found in the bible, “And call no man your father upon the earth,” and I would have to dive back into my studies. Saint Augustin's four senses of scripture. I thought I was doing something good, but, if we’re honest, without her, I wouldn’t have come back home to a clean house and dinner during my studies. She did it all. I’m very bad about that. If it were just me and Israel, we would have eaten nothing but fast-food, bad about paying attention to people. When I graduated, I got a job teaching religious studies at Texas A&M Corpus Christi, but I guess I got used to Lisa doing what she did, and I guess she got used to me doing what I did. I was less busy, but I still didn’t wash dishes or even take out the trash.

We started really fighting when Israel was in middle school. When he was thirteen, he told us he liked boys. Lisa said no you don’t, you’re thirteen. Thirteen-year-olds don’t know what liking someone is. Right, honey?

I don’t know why she got me involved. I was just trying to read my book. I forget which one I was reading then, but knowing me, it was probably a history book about Mexico. In those days, I think I was really into the Christero War.

I looked up from my book. I said I knew who I liked when I was thirteen. I didn’t tell her this, but my mom always told me that she thought Uncle Julio was gay because he never married. She told me, thank God that he’s gay, otherwise he’d have his own family and wouldn’t help us out so much.

Lisa told our son he was confused. He left the room, and she said, well, you were no help at all.

What did you want me to help with?

Why not try being a spiritual leader of the family for once? If you were a father to your son, instead of reading all the time, he would know how to be a man? Maybe pray with him?

Are you saying that to hurt me?

Her face turned red. Yes. I did. I’m sorry. She didn’t speak the rest of the night. She turned away and fell asleep next to me with the lights on. I didn’t sleep. I just read, and I don’t even remember what I read. I think I was really into Pre-Hispanic Mesoamerica. If I’m being honest, maybe I misremember everything.

We stopped talking after that. We stopped talking, because we realized, we only talked to hurt each other. I started sleeping on the chaise lounge in my office at home, and I eventually bought a twin bed. Israel grew up in a house with two parents who didn’t love each other and refused to get divorced.

We moved the ceramic fighting cock from the living room to my office. I don’t think Israel saw me and Lisa in the same room ever again, besides for dinner, because we at least agreed that if he had dinner with his parents every night then he would stay straight-laced. That wasn’t true. He sat there, knowing we didn’t love each other, addressing his questions and stories and anecdotes about high school and friends and debate tournaments and football games either to me or to his mom, whoever cared the most about the subject, but never to both of us. Whatever he wanted to do, I always gave him permission, because I knew his mother never would, and I thought, I don’t want him to be repressed. But we justify a lot of things in the moment. I wonder if parenting was like doing dishes for me.

He graduated high school with pretty good grades and went to UT. His freshman year, he called me. He told me he was piss drunk and felt funny. I drove four damn hours all the way to Lake Travis and picked him up from a party in one of the nicest neighborhoods I’d ever seen. He clearly had something else wrong with him other than being drunk, but I didn’t know what it was, because the hardest drug I’d ever tried was mota and that just chills you out. He wasn’t just chill, though. It was like he was melting, like something was melting him. Instead of driving him back to his dorm, I drove him all the way back down to Kingsville. I carried him to bed, like when he was a boy. I was real tired. Eight hours on the road, but, I thought, I didn’t drive eight hours just for him to die at home. I laid him on his side, trash can beside his head. I don’t think he was going to vomit, but just in case.

The next morning, Lisa knew something was up. I brought home a ton of menudo, which she thought smelled disgusting, but I knew was the best hangover cure. She asked me (like I expected her to ask even though we almost never talked) why Israel was home. I told her he had asked me to pick him up from college last night. She asked why he didn’t drive. I told her I didn’t know, and of course, she knew that was bullshit, but she didn’t say anything.

He got out of bed at 3 p.m. We had our menudo, and he said, just don’t tell mom.

I said, I wouldn’t, even if you didn’t ask. You don’t have to tell me anything.

He said he’d been out partying with a lot of boys. They’re trustworthy, we hang out all the time. And we’d tried drugs. Weed regularly, coke twice, acid twice, once the night that I picked him up.

Jesus Christ, I said, it’s your first semester.

Not like you didn’t do drugs while you were in college.

I did, but it took me time to. Plus, when I started dating your mom, she kept me clean.

He swallowed the menudo in his mouth. Why did you date her? He put down his spoon.

I don’t know, Mijo. I guess because she kept me clean.

Dad, you shouldn’t love people who want to change you.

Well, your mom’s been trying to change you all your life. It’s not the same for someone to try to change you by keeping you away from drugs and parties and someone wanting to change you by making you straight, I told him.

I don’t know. Ultimatums are ultimatums.

Lisa walked in, plugging her nose. She said, I can’t believe you two eat that stuff. No. That was uncharitable. She didn’t plug her nose. No, I remember now. When she said, I can’t believe you two eat that stuff, she said it like a joke, not like an insult. And when she did, she took a ladle, and put a small amount in a little bowl, and sat with us, and tried it, although Menudo is like country music. You only get it if you grew up with it.

I ignored her, and took another spoon.

What were you two talking about?

History, Israel said, then turned to me and asked, when was the Roman Republic founded?

509 BC, after Tarquin was killed, I said.

Lisa asked, why do you two always keep things from me?

Israel asked, why do you have to make everything into a fight?

I couldn’t tell if he sounded sad or just drained. A night of partying zaps you from dopamine. At his age, I wouldn’t have gotten out of bed for nothing. I thought, he must really love me, to be here, at 3 p.m., just to eat menudo. I didn’t say anything, because his mom was in the room, but I wanted to tell him, acid doesn’t knock you out the way you were last night, Mijo, I think someone rufied you, Mijo, you’re not gonna hang out with those boys again, right?

Of course, I didn’t say any of that. I drove him back to Austin in the evening. He slept the whole drive through, but at the end, I said, Israel, stay off drugs, and stay away from those boys.

He chuckled. I will, Dad.

What’s funny is, Lisa and I got along well after that. Better than ever, really. We were roommates. Good roommates. Sometimes, when I turned on Breaking Bad in the living room, she came out to watch it. We didn’t talk, but we watched it together. We shared the kitchen and living room like respectful roommates. She started a women’s bible study with members from her Southern Baptist church. We pretended like we were married in front of them. One of the women would say, that’s your husband? Lisa, you married a good-looking man. And she would say, well I ain’t looking to share, and they’d laugh, and I’d blush a bit, before I headed back to my office, my bedroom, and have a drink by myself. I was lonely, I guess, pretty lonely, but I had my books, and chance meetings with Lisa that grew more pleasant, and, if I opened the windows and turned on a fan, Lisa didn’t mind if I smoked a cigar.

It was fine for a while the way it was. I even had hope, some hope, that we might accidentally fall in love. That one night, we’d be watching Breaking Bad, and she would say, well, it’s time for me to go to bed. And I’d say, come on, we can watch another episode. And she’d say, well, if we watch another, I might sleep here. And it sounds ridiculous, but I thought, maybe she’d accidentally fall asleep with her head on my shoulder, accidentally, and maybe after a few times of that happening accidentally, it might happen on purpose. And maybe some day, we’d fall asleep in the same bed again. Then she’d say, I hate it when your mouth tastes like cigars. You need to stop smoking. And I’d stop smoking.

It almost happened. One night, sitting in front of the TV, she said, you know, everyone keeps telling me good things about Game of Thrones. Maybe we could watch it.

And I said, really? Your bible club?

And she said, yeah, Regan loves it.

I thought they would never watch something like that.

Yeah, we act like that, don’t we. But you know me.

I thought for a second, thought, but must have said out loud, do I?

Well, Lisa said, I wish you knew me.

She turned on Game of Thrones, and we sat through it, then she went to bed. Lying in my bedroom office, I kept wondering if I had dreamed that. I kept wondering if the Lisa I knew was the Lisa that Lisa was. I didn’t know what was going to happen, how we would fall in love, but I felt that we could, that we would, if I just tried to understand the Lisa I forgot, or the Lisa I never knew.

When I got home from work, my ceramic fighting cock was in pieces on the floor. The crosses on the living room wall were gone, Lisa’s crosses, leaving impressions of hidden yellow paint behind them. She left me with kitchen supplies. I guess she was being nice, in that way, considering that she could take her stuff, break my stuff, but that I might still need to cook. Her bedroom, the master bedroom, it looked like a storm had gone through it. On my desk, she left a note: Why didn’t you tell me about Israel?

It turns out Israel was arrested for possession of cocaine and heroin, which I didn’t know, but according to Lisa, to her letter, he told her on the phone to tell me, that I would know. And she said, he knows? And he said, yes, Mom. He knows.

Things were finally going well with Lisa and he ruined it by opening his mouth. That little shit. I guess he hates me. Maybe he’s right to. Maybe I deserve it, as much as he deserves being arrested.

At first, while I took the gorilla glue and tried to piece together that ceramic fighting cock, I just thought about how I wish we had named him Julio César, and how he might not have turned to drugs if he had an accepting and loving family he could turn to instead. How I was trying to protect Israel from Lisa by not telling her. Then I just thought about how she must really love us, if being with us was torture for all these years, and that her family wasn’t happy about her marrying a Mexican but she stayed with me anyway, and someone in her family must have told her not to marry a Mexican because of the drugs, and how it must feel for her now, having left her mom and dad to give herself to a loveless marriage, to hear her son was arrested for having drugs, and that her husband knew about it. And I thought of Lisa, of the mystery she was, and what she could be up to, and if there was a way for me to make things better, and finally understand her. Then I thought, Israel will be fine, we’ll get him a lawyer, we’ll send him to rehab. He better be totally quiet. Not say anything. I’ve told him a million times not to say anything if he ever gets arrested for anything. Plead the fifth, I’ve told him, tell them, I won’t talk without my lawyer present. That’s how they get us Chicanos. We say something little, and they throw us in jail.

 I wish I had told him, you’re not giving your mom credit. Yes, she makes everything into a fight, but we always make her feel attacked by not loving her. She just wanted a good Christian family, and not only did we not give that to her, we laughed in her face when she asked. Mijo, I’m so petty. I got a fucking Ph. D. in Theology just to argue with her. I yelled at her so much. I hit her, Mijo, while she was pregnant with you. How can she not be mad all the time? Why do you love me? She raised you more than I ever tried to. You shouldn’t hate your mother, Mijo. If you loved her, if I loved her, she wouldn’t fight so much. She’d still be here. You’d still be here. I wouldn’t be so alone. But, I guess, this is what I wanted.

I didn’t do anything. I didn’t track down Israel or Lisa. I didn’t find a lawyer. Not then. I just kept gluing together ceramic pieces best I could. Like a selfish fucking prick. Fixing my broken fighting cock.

When I finished, it looked like shit.

About

Oso Guardiola is a writer from Corpus Christi, Texas. He holds two MFAs from the University of Iowa, in English fiction and Spanish poetry. His work has appeared in Gulf Coast, Dappled Things, and Anarchist Fictions. He won the 2023 Gulf Coast Prize for Fiction.