Enrique's Journey (25 page)

They share hugs and kisses. That night, they watch soap operas together on the living room sofa. As they sit side by side, Lourdes can feel her son's love.

Enrique and his mother are conciliatory at last. More than that, they might be joined by María Isabel.

One day, Enrique phones Honduras. María Isabel is pregnant, as he suspected before he left. On November 2, 2000, she gives birth to their daughter.

She and Enrique name the baby Katerin Jasmín. The baby looks like him. She has his mouth, his nose, his eyes. An aunt urges María Isabel to go to the United States, alone. The aunt promises to take care of the baby.

“If I have the opportunity, I'll go,” María Isabel says. “I'll leave my baby behind.”

Enrique agrees. “We'll have to leave the baby behind.”

SEVEN

The Girl Left Behind

E
nrique knows he does not hate his mother. But with each passing day, his resentment grows. After months with his mother, he can no longer contain it. He tells Lourdes she didn't care enough about her children to stay with them in Honduras. Did she think sending money could substitute for having his mother at his side? Or quell the loneliness he felt being moved from one relative to the next? “Money doesn't solve anything,” he tells her.

He berates Lourdes for leaving him with a father she knew was irresponsible. Why didn't she put him with her own family, who cared for his sister Belky? Why didn't she send enough money, thus forcing him to sell spices from the age of ten? Why did she send Belky so much more, to cover tuition at a private school her aunt sent her to?

“Belky always got more from you,” he says. If he was destitute, he had no one nearby who could help. “How could I ask you for anything?” he asks Lourdes. “I would go a year without talking to you.”

He tells her he wanted to study, he just didn't want to have to beg his mother for the money. “Belky is going to be a professional. Look at me,” he says.

Enrique tells Lourdes her biggest mistake was getting pregnant a year after arriving in the United States. “You shouldn't have gotten pregnant until you knew your existing kids were okay,” he says.

Why did she continually promise to return for Christmas and then never show up? Once she knew he was in trouble sniffing glue, he asks her, how could she stay away? “You left me, abandoned me,” he tells her. “You forgot about me.”

Nothing, he tells her, was gained by their long separation. “People come here to prosper. You have nothing here. What have you accomplished?” If she had stayed in Honduras, he would have turned out better. “I wouldn't be this way if I had had two parents.”

A true mother, he tells Lourdes, isn't the person who carries you in her womb. It is someone who raises and nurtures you. “My mother is my grandmother María,” he tells her. He warns Lourdes that she has no right to give him advice. “You long ago lost the right to tell me what to do,” he says.

Then Enrique lands the most hurtful blow. He tells Lourdes he plans to leave her and return to Honduras in two years. “I'm not going to do the same as you—stay here all my life.”

Lourdes expected Enrique to love her like the five-year-old who clung to her in Honduras. She cries herself to sleep at night. She has been a good person, a good mother. Why is God punishing her?

She must show Enrique he is terribly mistaken. “What about the money I sent you?” she says. “I have witnesses!” Whenever he asked for something specific—a television, a soccer ball—she sent it. Belky got more money only because her aunt lobbied Lourdes for funds for Belky's school tuition. Lourdes lived through extreme poverty and humiliating circumstances to send as much as possible to her children. For the first time, she tells Enrique about the struggles she, too, endured during their years apart: “I killed myself trying to help you.”

She's not like some mothers she knows who leave Honduras and forget their children, never call, never write. That's a mother a child can resent, even hate. I called, I wrote, she says.

Blame your father, Lourdes says. He promised to take care of you while I was away.
He
abandoned you. Your father's family had equal responsibility to provide your needs. Instead, she says angrily, your grandmother María sent you to sell spices in the market, where you learned about drugs.

“You are what you are because you didn't want to study,” Lourdes says. “It's not my fault. I wanted you to study. You preferred to be on drugs.” One night, as he sits down to dinner, Lourdes tells her son that if she had sent more money, he would have blown it on drugs. He sold the bed she bought him for drug money. Enrique, silent, pushes away from the table without touching his food.

He should thank her for giving him life, Lourdes says. That alone gives her the right to give him advice and discipline.

Lourdes thinks of how her own mother couldn't provide enough food for her children, how she could hate her, too. When she was eight years old, Lourdes sought out odd jobs. A neighbor gave her clothes to wash in the river twice a week. When she was nine, her mother dispatched Lourdes and Rosa Amalia, then ten, to work for a former neighbor as live-in maids. With no money, Lourdes quit elementary school. When she was fourteen, her mother sent her to live with her eldest brother, Marco, in southern Honduras. “My mother is sacred to me. I thank her for the little she did for us,” Lourdes says.

Enrique is harboring “a silly resentment,” she tells him. She didn't forget him. Why can't she get him to reason? He's an ungrateful brat. Lourdes gives her son a dark prediction: “God is going to punish you,” she says. Someday, she tells him, your daughter will treat you the way you now treat me.

Enrique drinks more and more beer. Their fights are often sparked by Lourdes's advice: Don't drink and drive. Control your vices. Be more frugal. You can't spend $1,000 as if it were $10.

“
Mira, hijo…
Look, son…,” she begins.

Enrique cuts her off. “All you do is yap, yap, yap! You keep sticking your nose into things that are none of your business!” he tells her. She treats him as if he were still the infant she left behind. Didn't he fend for himself growing up? Didn't he hop freight trains across Mexico?

“Shut up. Leave me in peace!” he yells. Friends worry. They hear hatred in his voice.

Enrique loves to contradict his mother, to set her off, even when he knows she is right. He talks over her. He leaves his clothes and shoes strewn in the living room, empty beer cans on the front lawn. He tells Lourdes he's going out, then refuses to tell her where.

Enrique makes Lourdes mad—and guilty.

She cooks his dinners. She packs his lunch. She washes his clothes at the Laundromat. She drops off his car and insurance payments for him. She lends Enrique $20 here and there—more if he needs it. Would he have turned out different, she asks herself repeatedly, if she hadn't left him?

For Enrique, alcohol is an escape from the fights. Almost all of the men on his paint crew, depressed to be away from home, are big drinkers. Unlike in Honduras, in the United States beer is cheap. Some sip Budweiser on the job, stashing the cans in an empty paint bucket when the supervisor stops by. Most swing by a store to pick up a twelve-pack at the end of the workday.

At home, four men drink. One can chug twelve beers as Enrique drives him home from work. Enrique sucks down ten beers on weeknights, often with friends in front of the house. He goes to bed at midnight or 1
A.M
., getting up at 6
A.M
. for work. On Saturday, the drinking begins at 4
P.M
. Enrique and a housemate can down forty-eight beers together. Sometimes they drink until dawn. They head to work without sleeping.

Enrique is breaking a promise he made to leave his addictions behind once he crossed into the United States. But he feels abnormal, as if he were crawling out of his skin, if he isn't high.

At least he's not sniffing glue.

Going out to drink gets him out of the trailer, where nine people live and Enrique must sleep on the living room sofa.

It also gets him away from Lourdes.

From Thursday through Sunday, in the evenings, he goes to a local bar, a gray stucco building with plywood over the windows and a gravel parking lot. Inside, under a dark, low-slung ceiling, there are four pool tables, a long bar, and a jukebox that plays Latino music.

He frequents a discotheque with a $7 entry fee. There are iron bars over the door. Inside, the walls are painted black. Next to the dance floor a DJ plays
norteña
and
ranchera
music. Green and red lights cast a glow over the crowd. Eight women work as
ficheras—
Latinas who will sit and talk to men willing to buy them $10 beers. Six beers buys two hours of companionship, $5 a dance. A few
ficheras
provide sex for more.

Enrique and his friends splurge at a topless bar. Women dance on a platform. Men tuck dollar bills into their bikini bottoms. Twenty dollars buys an invitation to a smaller room, where a dancer brushes her breasts against the men's faces. A lap dance is more. Enrique usually spends $150 each visit. One night he invites his friends to this bar, which charges $15 each to get in, and he pays for everything. He blows $300.

When he has money for drinks and marijuana, Enrique is calm and quiet. Otherwise, he gets testy. Sometimes Enrique doesn't have enough money to pay Lourdes his share of the bills. He isn't sending as much money to his daughter as he could.

Lourdes tries to scare Enrique straight, playing on his ignorance of the United States. “If you keep this up,” she warns, “I'll have you locked up.” She tells him that parents can do that in the United States, even if children haven't committed a crime. Enrique soon learns that Lourdes is lying.

Four months after Enrique arrives in the United States, his work hours get cut. He decides to accompany a painter on his crew to find temporary jobs in South Carolina, Georgia, and Virginia.

Even on the road, living out of motel rooms, Enrique maintains one ritual. Each Sunday, he telephones his girlfriend, María Isabel, in Honduras.

She waits for his call at the home of one of Lourdes's cousins. When she answers the telephone, she is so overcome with emotion she cannot speak. Enrique talks for one or two hours. María Isabel cries and cries.

“María Isabel, say something, anything,” Enrique pleads.

“I miss you. I love you. Don't forget me,” she says.

He sends her $100 or more a month. He vows he will be back in Honduras within two years.

Eventually, María Isabel tells him of some of the problems she, too, is having. Enrique's family constantly criticizes her. “Don't pay attention to them,” he tells her. It is not that easy, she says. María Isabel lives across the street from Enrique's grandmother, sister, and three aunts. When she was eight months pregnant, one of Enrique's uncles insinuated that the baby didn't belong to Enrique.

Lourdes prepares for Enrique's return and their first Christmas together again. She has grown to dread the holiday. Year after year, she promised Enrique and Belky she would see them for Christmas. Each time she let them down. Each Christmas she cried and became more hard-hearted. She wished that Christmas would never arrive.

This year, paying Enrique's smuggler has left her strapped for money. She puts up a small plastic Christmas tree. She crowds it with ornaments.

“What an ugly tree,” Enrique says. “You put so many things on it that it looks like a piñata!” In Honduras, his aunt had a real tree. She set up a Nativity scene with hay inside her house. There were fireworks. The whole family gathered at midnight for a special meal.

On Christmas Eve, Lourdes goes to bed early. Enrique goes out drinking with friends. He comes home late and drunk. The next morning, Lourdes gives her son a shirt. Enrique doesn't have a gift for his mother.

New Year's Eve is better. Lourdes has never celebrated New Year's Eve in the United States. It brings back too many memories of Honduras, where she would run home from a party at midnight to hug her mother.

This year, she goes to a party with Enrique. At midnight, she kisses her son. Enrique hugs her back, hard. “Happy New Year. I love you,” he tells his mother. For the first time in all her years in the United States, Lourdes doesn't cry on New Year's Eve.

HONDURAS

Criticism of María Isabel by Enrique's family grows. Gloria's grandchildren play next door. They return and repeat everything they've overheard Enrique's family say about María Isabel.

Jasmín, they say, is dirty and ill cared for. The girl loves to build little houses out of mud behind Gloria's house. María Isabel changes her clothes several times a day. Still, in Gloria's disheveled home, where the back door is left open to the muddy yard, her efforts are futile.

Enrique's sister says that Jasmín is barefoot, badly dressed, her hair uncombed. She is skinny and pale and often has a cough. Why, Enrique's family asks, did María Isabel stop breast-feeding her after six months? If Enrique sends money, why doesn't María Isabel take Jasmín to a good private doctor, not the public clinic?

María Isabel cooks, cleans, and goes out on errands and purchases for Gloria's store. She walks Gloria's grandchild to kindergarten. She helps care for the four children in the house while Gloria tends to customers in her little grocery store.

Belky understands María Isabel's dilemma. She, too, has always lived as a guest in someone else's home, feeling pressure to make herself useful.

Still, concerned about Jasmín, Belky hounds María Isabel: “Why is the girl all dirty? You need to take better care of her.”