Enrique's Journey (22 page)

Everything Enrique hears makes him terrified of snakes and scorpions. In the Texas desert, snakes come out to hunt at night, when it is cooler. That is when migrants are on the move. They fumble forward in the dark, afraid to use a flashlight. Some rely, instead, on superstitions: Take a pregnant woman with you, and the snakes will sleep as you pass by. Put three peppercorns under your tongue for good luck. There are copper-head snakes, coral snakes, cottonmouth snakes, and the blue indigo snake, so long and fast it can kill a rattlesnake. There is a bumper crop this year, and the drought has made them more aggressive.

Many times, when Enrique falls asleep, he has the same nightmare: A snake has bitten him in the mouth. He cannot call out for help.

El Hongo listens. Finally, he decides against going alone. “Why should I die doing this?” he asks himself. Somehow he will call his mother and ask her to hire a smuggler.

Nine rings of coyotes are said to operate in Nuevo Laredo. Each ring has at least fifty smugglers. But Enrique knows he cannot trust just anyone. Back home in Honduras, most smugglers are honest; they must uphold their reputations if they want business. Here they can rob, rape, or abandon their clients with impunity. Some take them straight to river bandits and get a cut. Only one smuggler in ten, says a nun at the Parroquia de San José, is trustworthy. Many migrants at the church return with smuggler horror stories.

Enrique has spent a lot of time around El Tiríndaro. Enrique has seen him take a number of men and boys across the river, always at night, usually one or two at a time, paddling furiously in their inner tubes. They always disappear into the United States. When El Tiríndaro takes them over, Enrique notices, they are never caught and sent back. El Tiríndaro has studied the movements of the Border Patrol so long, says fellow
patero
Juan Barajas Soto, that he knows what each agent does every eight hours, during the shift change.

Enrique makes a decision: When he calls his mother, he will ask her to hire El Tiríndaro. “I know,” he says to himself, “that he won't strand me.”

On May 18, he awakens to find that someone has stolen his right shoe. Shoes are almost as important as food and his mother's telephone number. He can think of every pair that has helped him come north. On this trip alone, there were seven. Blue shoes, white shoes, leather work boots, Nike sneakers. He has bought, borrowed, or traded for them. All have fallen apart or been stolen. But never only one.

He spots a sneaker floating near the riverbank. He snags it. It is for a left foot. Now he has two left shoes. Bucket in hand, he hobbles back to the taco stand, begging along the way. People give him a peso or two. He washes a few cars, and it starts to rain. Astonishingly, he has put together 20 pesos in all.

That is enough to trade in his 30-peso phone card for one worth 50 pesos.

He will use the 50-peso card to call his old boss at the tire store. If the boss reaches his aunt and uncle, if they know his mother's number, if his aunt or uncle will call him back…

PADRE LEO'S HELP

It is May 19. There is only one way his plan will work. Father Leonardo López Guajardo at the Parroquia de San José is known to let migrants phone from the church if they have cards. Each day, he serves as their telephone assistant. In flipflops, he pads to the door every fifteen minutes or so and summons someone for a return call. Enrique will have to trust the priest to find him if his aunt and uncle call back. He has already sensed what people in Nuevo Laredo know: when it comes to migrants, Padre Leo's heart is bigger than his collections.

The priest rarely uses his office. Most afternoons and evenings he sits by the door, behind a small wooden desk, in a room that doubles as a food pantry. The room is lined with shelves stocked with cans and boxes of food—donations to help feed migrants. There is a pile of overripe fruits and vegetables on the floor. Flies buzz around it. It stinks of rotting tomatoes and onions. Liquid has seeped from the decomposing vegetables and pooled on the floor. Here, one by one, he attends to a stream of migrants. Padre Leo takes down the migrants' information, then gives them a meal card or arranges to pick up money wired by relatives in the United States.

In Nuevo Laredo, Padre Leo is not a typical priest. When he was a boy, even his mother questioned whether he was priest material. So did his teachers at the seminary, who deemed him too playful and impatient with pomp and procedure; they delayed his ordination. It took him eleven years to graduate.

Other priests in town wear nice watches and rings and act important. Padre Leo is so disheveled that visitors sometimes mistake him for one of the poor, dirty migrants sitting outside. His clothes are always rumpled. He wears the same pants for days, stained and dirty from hauling boxes of ripe vegetables. His favorite pair has frayed cuffs and a small tear in the rear. He forgets to zip them up. The men in the congregation try to help. They point at his fly.
“Ah, ah. Sí, sí, sí,”
the priest says, hastily pulling the zipper into place.

Padre Leo emerges one night from his bedroom to say Mass. His flannel shirt is inside out and buttoned incorrectly. The church's other priest looks exasperated. “Where's your belt?” he asks. Leo shuffles back to his bedroom to take another stab at dressing himself. The only time he looks neat is when he visits his family; his mother sends him back to Nuevo Laredo perfumed with cologne and in a newly pressed shirt and pants.

Priests in town favor the latest-model Grand Marquis. Padre Leo rides everywhere on a rickety blue bicycle. People call him
el Papa en la bici.
He rides when it is cold, hot, raining. When he goes to other churches to say Mass, he carries his white floor-length robe in a small bag across the handlebars. In the evenings, Enrique watches the priest return to the church on his bicycle, loaded down with bags of donated bread.

During Mass, he doesn't read from the Bible much. He conveys his message through jokes or by spinning a lesson out of a popular movie or song. He does not stand at the altar; he paces up and down the church aisle's pink floors in his white robe, which he wears with broken-down tennis shoes. As he paces, he mops copious quantities of sweat from his balding head with a large white towel. A microphone in his left hand, the towel in his right, he preaches.

Like most in his church, secretary Alma Delia Jiménez Rentería says she has learned more from what the priest practices than what he preaches. In 1997, when she was new in her job at the church, the future mayor of the city, Horacio Garza, came to visit Padre Leo. A foul-smelling migrant with badly swollen feet also needed to talk to the priest. Alma asked the migrant to wait and started to usher in the future mayor. The priest stopped her. “No. Let the mayor wait. Let the person who is most in need see me first,” he said. Says Alma, “He isn't a padre who tells you what to do. He shows you through his actions, through his example. He doesn't pray with rosary or Bible. He loves God by doing good toward others. That's how he teaches you to love God.”

He is impatient to get things done, tackling too many things at once. He rarely sits down for a meal, living off a chunk of chocolate in one hand, a bit of bread in the other. He scoops some rice or beans out of buckets of food left in the pantry or eats from a can of food he plucks off the shelves.

He cannot sit or stand still. Often, in midconfession, his mind wanders to the next thing he must do for migrants. “
Disculpe, ahorita vuelvo.
Pardon me, I'll be right back,” he tells people, usually just as they are opening up.

He is unfailingly polite, even formal, but he can be awkward, even curt, around people. When someone gives the church money, he responds with a simple
“A. Bien.”
When he walks down the street, he is so distracted he often fails to say hello when he passes a church member. It took the arrival of two nuns in 1998 to bring some order and rules to the padre's operations.

He is humble and lives modestly. He gives his salary to the church to help it pay staff salaries. When someone gave him a nice truck, he sold it to pay church utility bills. His car, which he rarely drives to save gas and help the environment, is a tiny Mazda purchased for $400. The driver's door won't open from the outside, the vinyl dash is shredded, and the front seat has a huge hole in it.

His focus is one instilled by mentors at the seminary: “Either we are with the poor, or we are not. God teaches us to most help the poor. Any other interpretation is unacceptable.” To Padre Leo, the people most in need in Nuevo Laredo are migrants. They go for days without food, for months without resting their heads on a pillow; they are defenseless against an onslaught of abuses. He vowed to restore a bit of their dignity. “He saw that these people are the most vulnerable, the most disliked by the local population. So he gave himself to them,” says a church volunteer, Pedro Leyva.

He tells church members that they, too, were once migrants. Saint Joseph was a migrant. The Bible was written by migrants. Running off a migrant, he says, is like turning against yourself. A person must be more than spiritual, he tells them. They must act. “Some people read the Bible and fall asleep,” says Padre Leo. “For me, it was a jolt. The worst thing as a Christian is to go through life asleep.”

People knew he was special from the day he arrived. A bus and caravan of cars—sixty people—journeyed with him from his old church in Anáhuac to Nuevo Laredo to say farewell through tears. The priest knocked on every door in the neighborhood. “Good afternoon, my name is Leonardo. I'm the new priest. I'm here to serve you,” he said. In a country where the church is conservative, Padre Leo announced in a newspaper article shortly after arriving, “Jesus wasn't killed for doing miracles. It was because he defended the poor and opposed the rulers and the injustice committed by the powerful.”

Padre Leo gave up the two-bedroom priest's apartment attached to the church so that female migrants would have a place to sleep. He settled into a tiny room off the pantry, into which a narrow bed and chest of drawers just fit. His bathroom: the church's public restroom.

To help the migrants look more presentable, he brings a haircutter to the church. A doctor treats their illnesses for free. If they need blood, Padre Leo is the first to donate.

To clothe the migrants, he circumvents Mexican Customs, which inspects cars and confiscates used clothing coming into the country, in what Padre Leo believes is an attempt to protect Mexican clothing manufacturers. People crossing the border checkpoint on foot or on a bike are less likely to be inspected. Twice a week at dusk, Padre Leo grabs a large black duffel bag and pedals his bike over a bridge that spans the Rio Grande into Laredo, Texas. There, he buys used clothes for 20 cents a pound. With one strap hooked around each arm, he carries the bag stuffed with clothes across his back and balances another bag across the handlebars. In the gathering dark, he pedals back.

If the church stash is low or lacks a needed size, he gives away the few shoes and clothes he owns. Sometimes he slips the shoes off his feet and hands them to a migrant. “Padre, I don't have a shirt,” a migrant says. The priest runs to his closet and pulls one out. These clothes are usually the shirts, pants, shoes, and jackets the members of the church's eight study groups have given the priest for his birthday, to tide him over for the year. “You give it to him, he admires it, then he gives it away,” says Pedro Leyva.

To feed migrants, often more than a hundred each night, he collects food three days a week from stores in Nuevo Laredo. On Mondays and Wednesdays, he drives the church van to Laredo. At a Catholic orphanage, he hauls out leftover boxes of honeydew melon, oranges, and bread. Then he goes to a house at the end of a cul-de-sac. Rosalinda Zapata's husband works at the H.E.B. supermarket. Her hallway is lined with boxes of recently expired crackers, salsa, and potato chips. Padre Leo heads back to Mexico with the food.

As he crosses the long bridge over the Rio Grande, he begins to pray. At the Mexican side of the bridge, one in ten cars gets a red light and is pulled over for a random inspection. “God, please give me a green light.
Please.
I promise I'll be good.” He tells God he doesn't want to haul contraband, but it's the only way to help the migrants. The light flashes green. He smiles and steps on the gas. Back at the church, he shows off his haul. “
Excelente! Qué bueno fue el arriesgue!
Excellent! The risk was so worth it!” He is as gleeful as a child who has gotten away with something forbidden. He is happiest when the pantry is full and there is plenty to give away.

He is the migrants' strongest advocate in Nuevo Laredo. Each September, he leads a silent procession of people who place a cross on a fence overlooking the Rio Grande, one for each migrant who has recently died trying to cross into the United States. He finds friends who can help identify migrants who drown in the river, so their families can be contacted and their bodies shipped home.

In November, after saying Mass in the middle of the cemetery for the Day of the Dead, he leads a crowd over to a common grave in the corner of the cemetery. He leads a prayer for dead migrants who are buried here. “This is a sad place, God. We want to remember the migrants who passed this way.”

To be their champion, he has gone against the initial wishes of many in his church and faced threats from the authorities, much like Priest Salamón Lemus Lemus in Veracruz, where one in two congregants quit the church in protest at letting migrants use the parish as a dormitory. Half of Padre Leo's church members at first opposed the priest's mission to help migrants, says one church volunteer, Patricia Alemán Peña. Some thought the priest was crazy to attract what they saw as bums and delinquents to their neighborhood and objected to helping migrants at all. “This was a good neighborhood—until you brought
your
people,” they complained.