B0061QB04W EBOK (2 page)

We didn’t live far from my grandmother’s adobe house, and as soon as we rounded the corner, it came into view. Abuela Evila’s house sat at the bottom of the hill. It was shaped like a box, and it had once been painted white, but by the time we came to live there the adobe peeked through where the plaster had cracked like the shell of a hard-boiled egg. It had a terra-cotta tile roof, and bougainvillea climbed up one side. The bougainvillea was in full bloom, and the vine, thick with red flowers, looked like a spreading bloodstain over the white wall of the house.

My grandmother’s property was the length of four houses and was surrounded by a corral. To the east of the house was an unpaved street that led to the church, the school, and the tortilla mill. To the west was a dirt road that led past Don Rubén’s house and curved east to the dairy farm, the canal, the highway, the cemetery, the train station, and el centro. Her house sat on the north side of the lot, my aunt’s brick house sat on the south side, and the rest of the property was a big yard with several fruit trees.

Aside from being one of the poorest states in Mexico, Guerrero is also one of the most mountainous. My hometown of Iguala de la Independencia is located in a valley. My grandmother lived on
the edge of the city, and that morning, as we walked to her house, I kept my eyes on the closest mountain. It was big and smooth, and it looked as if it were covered with a green velvety cloth. Because during the rainy season it had a ring of clouds on its peak and looked as if it had tied a white handkerchief around its head, the locals named it the Mountain That Has a Headache. Back then, I didn’t know what was on the other side of the mountain, and when I had asked Mami she said she didn’t know either. “Another town, I suppose,” she said. She pointed in one direction and said Acapulco was somewhere over there, about three hours away by bus. She pointed in the opposite direction and said Mexico City was over there—again, a three-hour bus ride.

But when you’re poor, no matter how close things are, everything is far away. And so, until that day, my twenty-nine-year-old mother had never been on the other side of the mountains.

“Listen to your grandmother,” Mami said, startling me. I hadn’t noticed how quiet we’d all been during our walk. I took my eyes off the Mountain That Has a Headache and looked at Mami as she stood before us. “Behave yourselves. Don’t give her any reason to get angry.”

“She was born angry,” Mago said under her breath.

Carlos and I giggled. Mami giggled, too, but she caught herself. “Hush, Mago. Don’t talk like that. Your abuela is doing your father and me a favor by taking you in. Listen to her and always do as she says.”

“But why do we have to stay with her?” Carlos asked. He was about to turn seven years old. Mago, at eight and a half, was four years older than me. Both of them had to miss school that day, but of course they didn’t mind. How could they think of numbers and letters when our mother was leaving us and going to a place most parents never return from?

“Why can’t we stay with Abuelita Chinta?” Mago asked.

I thought about Mami’s mother. I loved my grandmother’s gaptoothed smile and the way she smelled of almond oil. Her voice was soft like the cooing of the doves she had in cages around her shack. But even as much as I loved Abuelita Chinta, I didn’t want to stay with her or with anyone else. I wanted my mother.

Mami sighed. “Your father wants you to stay with your abuela Evila. He thinks you will be better off there—”

“But why do you have to leave, Mami?” I asked again.

“I already told you why, mija. I’m doing this for you. For all of you.”

“But why can’t I go with you?” I insisted, tears burning my eyes. “I’ll be good, I promise.”

“I can’t take you with me, Reyna. Not this time.”

“But—”

“Basta. Your father has made a decision, and we must do as he says.”

Mago, Carlos, and I slowed down our pace, and soon Mami was walking by herself while we trailed behind her. I looked at the photo in my arms and took in Papi’s black wavy hair, full lips, wide nose, and slanted eyes shifted slightly to the left. I wished, as I always did back then—as I still do now—that he were looking
at
me, and not past me. But his eyes were frozen in that position, and there was nothing I could do about it. “Why are you taking her away?” I asked the Man Behind the Glass. As always, there was no answer.

“¡Señora, ya llegamos!” Mami shouted from the gate. From across the street, the neighbor’s dog barked at us. I knew Abuela Evila was home because my eyes burned from the pungent scent of roasting guajillo chiles drifting from the kitchen.

“¡Señora, ya llegamos!” Mami called again. She put a hand on the latch of the gate but didn’t pull it open. From the start, my grandmother hadn’t liked my mother, and ten years—and three grandchildren—later, she still disapproved of my father’s choice for a wife, a woman who came from a family poorer than his own. So Mami didn’t feel comfortable walking into my grandmother’s house without permission. Instead, we waited at the gate under the scorching heat of the noon sun.

“¡Señora, soy yo, Juana!” Mami yelled, much louder this time. My grandmother was born in 1911, during the Mexican Revolution. When we came to her house, she was about to turn sixty-nine. Her long hair was silver, and she often wore it in a tight bun. She had a small hump on her back that made her body bend to the ground. As a child, she had suffered from a severe case of measles, and what remained
of her illness was a left arm that hung at an angle and a limp that made her walk as if she were drunk.

Finally, she came out of the house through the kitchen door. As she headed to the gate, she dried her hands on her apron, which was streaked with fresh red sauce.

“Ya llegamos,” Mami said.

“Ya veo,” my grandmother replied. She didn’t open the gate, and she didn’t ask us to come inside to cool ourselves under the shade of the lemon tree in the patio. The bright sun burned my scalp. I got closer to Mami and hid in the shadow of her dress.

“Thank you for letting me leave my children here under your care, señora,” Mami said. “Every week my husband and I will be sending you money for their upkeep.”

My grandmother looked at the three of us. I couldn’t tell if she was angry. Her face was in a constant frown, no matter what kind of mood she was in. “And how long will they be staying?” she asked. I waited for Mami’s answer, hoping to hear something more definite than “not too long.”

“I don’t know, señora,” Mami said. I pressed Papi’s photo against my chest because that answer was worse. “For as long as necessary,” Mami continued. “God only knows how long it’s going to take Natalio and me to earn the money for the house he wants.”

“
He
wants?” Abuela Evila asked, leaning against the gate. “Don’t you want it, too?”

Mami put her arms around us. We leaned against her. Fresh tears came out of my eyes, and I felt as if I’d swallowed one of Carlos’s marbles. I clutched at the thin material of Mami’s flowery dress and wished I could stay there forever, tucked into its folds, wrapped in the safety of my mother’s shadow.

“Of course, señora. What woman wouldn’t want a nice brick house? But the price will be great,” Mami said.

“American dollars go a long way here,” Abuela Evila said, pointing at the brick house built on the opposite side of her property. “Look at my daughter María Félix. She’s built herself a very nice house with the money she’s made in El Otro Lado.”

My aunt’s house was one of the biggest on the block. But she didn’t live in it. She hadn’t returned from El Otro Lado even though
she went there long before Papi did. She had left her six-year-old daughter behind, my cousin Élida, who—when we came to Abuela Evila’s house—was already going on fourteen and had been living with our grandmother ever since El Otro Lado had taken her mother away.

“I wasn’t referring to the money,” Mami said. She got choked up and wiped the moisture from her eyes. Abuela Evila looked away, as if embarrassed by Mami’s tears. Perhaps because she lived through the Revolution, when over a million people died and the ones who lived had to toughen up to survive, my grandmother was not prone to being emotional.

Mami turned to us and bent down to be at eye level with us. She said, “I’ll work as hard as I can. Every dollar that we earn will go to you and the house. Your father and I will both be back before you know it.”

“Why did he only send for you and not me?” Mago asked Mami, as she’d done several times already. “I want to see Papi, too.”

As the oldest, Mago was the one who remembered my father most clearly. When Mami gave us the news that she was leaving to join him in El Otro Lado, Mago had cried because Papi hadn’t sent for her as well.

“Your father couldn’t afford to send for us all. I’m only going there to help him earn money for the house,” Mami said again.

“We don’t need a house. We need Papi,” Mago said.

“We need you,” Carlos said.

Mami ran her fingers through Mago’s hair. “Your father says a man must have his own house, his own land to pass down to his children,” she said. “I’ll be gone a year. I promise that by the end of the year, I will bring your father back with me whether we have enough money for a house or not. Do you promise to take care of your hermanos for me, be their little mother?”

Mago looked at Carlos, then at me. I don’t know what my sister saw in my eyes that made her face soften. Had she realized then how much I would need her? Had she known that without her strength and unwavering love, I would not have survived what was to come? Her face was full of determination when she looked at Mami and said, “Sí, Mami. I promise. But you’ll keep your promise, right? You will come back.”

“Of course,” Mami said. She opened her arms to us, and we fell into them.

“Don’t go, Mami. Stay with us. Stay with
me
,” I said as I held on to her.

She kissed the top of my head and pushed me toward the closed gate. “You need to get out of the sun before it gives you a headache,” she said.

Abuela Evila finally opened the gate, and we were allowed inside, but we didn’t move. We stood there holding our bags, and I suddenly wanted to throw Papi’s photo against the ground so that it shattered into pieces because I hated him for taking my mother from me just because he wanted a house and a piece of land to call his own.

“Don’t leave me, Mami. Please!” I begged.

Mami gave us each a hug and kissed us goodbye. When she kissed me, I pressed my cheek against her lips painted red with Avon lipstick.

Mago held me tightly while we watched Mami walk away, pebbles dancing in and out of her sandals, her hair burning black under the sun. When I saw her blurry figure disappear where the road curved, I escaped Mago’s grip on my hand and took off running, yelling for my mother.

Through my tears, I watched a taxicab take her away, leaving a cloud of dust in its wake. I felt a hand on my shoulder and turned to see Mago standing behind me. “Come on, Nena,” she said. There were no tears in her eyes, and as we walked back to my grandmother’s house, I wondered if, when Mami asked Mago to be our little mother, it had also meant she was not allowed to cry.

Carlos was still standing by the gate, waiting for us so that we could go in together. I looked at the empty dirt road once more, realizing that there was nothing left of my mother. As we walked into my grandmother’s house, I touched my cheek and told myself there was something I still had left. The feel of her red lips.

2

M
AGO
, C
ARLOS, AND
I were given a corner of my grandfather’s bedroom. Abuelo Augurio and Abuela Evila didn’t sleep in the same room because when my cousin Élida came to live at their house my grandmother kicked him out of her bed to make space for her favorite grandchild. My grandfather’s room smelled of sweat, beer, and cigarette smoke. His bed was in the farthest corner, next to some boxes, an old wardrobe, and his gardening tools. The light that streamed through the only window was too weak to make the room less somber.

Close to the door was a twin-size box spring raised on bricks and
covered with a straw mat. The “bed” was pushed up against the wall, underneath the tiny window that looked out onto an alley.

This is where Mago, Carlos, and I slept. I was in the middle, so I wouldn’t fall off. Mago slept against the wall because if a scorpion crawled down and stung her, she would be okay. Scorpions couldn’t do anything to my hot-blooded Scorpio sister. Carlos slept on the edge because a week after Mami left he began to wet the bed. We hoped that sleeping on the edge would make it easier for him to get up in the middle of the night to use the bucket by the door.

My grandfather’s room was next to the alley. Since the window above our heads didn’t have any glass to muffle the outside noises, we could hear everything that went on in that alley. Sometimes, we heard grunting noises coming from there. Mago and Carlos got up to look, and they giggled about what they saw, but they never picked me up so that I could see for myself. Other times we heard drunken men coming from the cantina down the road. They yelled obscenities that echoed against the brick walls of the nearby houses. Sometimes we could hear them urinating on the rock fence that surrounded Abuela Evila’s property while singing borracho songs.
¡No vale nada la vida, la vida no vale nadaaaa!
I hated that song those drunks liked to sing. Life isn’t worth anything?