Enrique's Journey (27 page)

Still, as one of the city's oldest neighborhoods, it is a small step above where Gloria's and Enrique's families live. Water, which flowed through the tap every two weeks in Gloria's house, is available here every other day. Many wooden huts have been upgraded to small brick or cinder-block homes, some two or even three stories high. Their windows have glass panes instead of wooden shutters. Almost everyone has a refrigerator.

Most in Los Tubos are longtime residents, but María Isabel's family are relative newcomers. They bought a lot in 1980 as homes were being built farther and farther up the hill. Above María Isabel's hut, there are mostly lush green slopes where it is too steep to build even the smallest place.

María Isabel's family, among the poorest in Los Tubos, eats twice a day. They have no refrigerator. They cook on two small burners. All that has kept disaster away has been María Isabel's oldest sister, who sends money from Texas, where she lives.

Still, María Isabel's life gets better.

Six days a week, at 11
A.M
., María Isabel sets out for her new job at a children's clothing store at the Mall Multiplaza downtown.

From the back of the store, salesgirls ask María Isabel for a certain shoe and size. She fetches it. She shoves the box through a small opening in the wall. The light-filled mall, where Tegucigalpa's well-heeled citizens shop, has beige marble floors, potted indoor palms, air-conditioning, and glass elevators.

She gets home at 10
P.M
. The job pays $120 a month.

Jasmín puts on weight. Both María Isabel's mother and her younger sister care for her while María Isabel works.

Jasmín plays with her six dolls, giving them baths in an outdoor concrete trough the family uses to hold water. She brushes the dolls' hair. Afterward, she runs inside. “I bathed the baby,” she announces to her grandmother, a wiry, muscular woman with salt-and-pepper hair.

She chases her grandmother's black-and-white chicks, making them scurry across the kitchen floor. She plays dress up with a five-year-old girl next door, or
agua de limón,
where they lock hands and swing each other around in circles.

When Jasmín gets hungry, Eva scrambles her eggs with black beans. She changes her whenever she gets dirty. In the afternoon, Jasmín goes to her grandmother and demands money:
“Quiero pisto!”

Eva hands her a little change. Jasmín crawls down a steep flight of stairs to a tiny bodega below. She peers through the black iron bars on the door and points. “Those, I want those!” Jasmín says. The store owner hands her a small bag of hot pork rinds. Jasmín makes her way back up the steep slope.

Each day, the girl reminds María Isabel more and more of her father. Like Enrique, she stands slightly knock-kneed, her pelvis thrust out, her bottom tucked under. She has his deep, raspy voice. She has the same temperament as Enrique and Lourdes: she is testy, a stubborn fighter who stands her ground.

When she turns two, María Isabel takes Jasmín to talk to her father on the telephone. Jasmín loves to accompany her mother downtown on Sundays to the Axdi-Cell Internet, where they can dial Enrique more cheaply. María Isabel knows his number by heart.

She sits before the gray computer, and Jasmín stands between her legs. “Mom, pass the phone,” Jasmín demands, reaching for the computer headset. “I love you, Enrique,” she says. Then: “When are you coming here?” Jasmín returns to her grandmother's and proudly announces, “I spoke with my daddy, Enrique.”

Often, the things Jasmín tells her father are lines that María Isabel prods her to say. It doesn't matter, says her grandmother. “They are strangers,” says Eva. “But they are blood.”

Eva often shows Jasmín the eight photos Enrique has sent of himself.

Jasmín knows her father sends her things. When Enrique's aunt Rosa Amalia asks her where she got the beautiful gold-and-emerald earrings she wears, Jasmín touches them. “They are from my daddy, Enrique!” She adds, “He says he loves me a lot.”

Eva tells Jasmín that someday she will go see her father in an airplane. Jasmín figures her father must have left on an airplane, too. Several times a day, when she hears one in the sky, she stops what she is doing and races outside. She looks up, her eyes bright. She thrusts both arms up and waves madly.
“¡Adiós, papi Enrique!”
she yells.

UNITED STATES

Enrique has been living with his mother for nearly two and a half years. One evening Lourdes and her boyfriend are watching a soap opera on the living room television. Enrique and a friend are playing cards down the hallway on the kitchen table. Enrique is wound up tight. He's working at a company that pushes everyone to paint excessively fast.

Enrique and his friend throw the cards down hard on the kitchen table. Each time they slap a card down, they yell.

Lourdes walks into the kitchen. She looks cross. “What are you doing?” she demands.

“If you don't want noise, you should live alone.”

“You're an ignoramus,” she answers.

Enrique likes to goad his mother by making noise. At dinner, he burps loudly and doesn't excuse himself. He bangs his spoon on the kitchen table. He slams doors. He plays music at high volume. He yells. He thinks it is incredibly funny to see her get mad.

Lourdes goes back to the television. Enrique and his friend slap the cards down harder and harder. Lourdes stomps into the kitchen. Her boyfriend knows trouble is near. He soon follows.

“Be quiet!” she orders.

Enrique answers badly.

“You must respect me. Don't forget, I am your mother. I gave birth to you.”

“I don't love you as if you were my mother. I love my grandmother.”

“I gave birth to you.”

“That's not my fault!”

Lourdes grabs Enrique's shirt around the shoulders. Enrique pushes his chair back and bolts up. Lourdes slaps him on the mouth, hard. Enrique grabs her two hands, near her neck, to prevent further blows. Lourdes assumes that he is trying to grab her throat. “Let go of me!” she screams.

Lourdes's boyfriend pulls them apart. Then he ushers Enrique outside. Enrique is crying.

By the next day, all has returned to normal. Once, Enrique would have apologized. Today, there are no words of regret.

With others, Enrique is openly affectionate, especially with his half sister, Diana. He gives her money, drives her to the store, plays piggyback with her, caresses her cheek. He teaches her to dance. They play rhymes together. Unlike Diana, who can be selfish, Enrique is generous. “I have a secret to tell you: I love you,” he tells her.

Still, with his third New Year in the United States, Enrique resolves to change. He can no longer wallow in what happened in the past. He must live in the present—and for the future. He's not hurting Lourdes as much as he is hurting himself.

Drinking so much alcohol makes his stomach ache constantly. He's tired of going to work after spending all night out drinking. He wants to look better when María Isabel comes to the United States.

Most important, he has to be more responsible for Jasmín. He can't have her grow up worrying about money as he did. He wants her to study. He can no longer blow hundreds of dollars in a single night of partying or thousands on troubles with the police. That has been a huge waste of money.

If he doesn't change, he will repeat his mother's mistake; time will slip by, and Jasmín will grow up without him. He must save $50,000 as quickly as possible to buy a house and start a business in Honduras.

Enrique starts working seven days a week. Bit by bit, he cuts back on beer and marijuana. He used to go out three or more times a week; now, it's just once or twice a month to play pool. He drinks a few beers, then switches to Pepsi. When friends call on his cell phone, beckoning him to party, he tells them he's not interested anymore.

He stops playing his music loud and slamming doors. When he burps, he excuses himself. He eats dinner with Lourdes. On Saturday nights, they watch the Spanish-language variety show
Sábado Gigante
together, as they did when he first arrived.

He tells friends he'll quit beer and drugs altogether when María Isabel is at his side. He hopes to bring her next year, get married.

He cuts his hair really short and loses weight. He wishes he could fix all the lingering effects of his beating on the train: the scars on his forehead and his knees, the bump under the skin by his left eye, the pain in his teeth anytime he eats anything hot or cold. Maybe he can at least get caps put on his broken teeth.

HONDURAS

Lourdes's sister Mirian is in trouble. She is out of work.

Her sister Ana Lucía offers her $50 a month to take care of her youngest child. The money falls short. Only another sister, Rosa Amalia, holds hunger at bay: each Saturday, she brings Enrique's grandmother milk, cheese, butter, rice, sugar, beans, and vegetables.

Mirian can no longer buy construction paper for her children's projects at school. Many mornings, she doesn't have money for the school's midday meal. Those days, she keeps the children home. Sometimes they are absent from school three days in a row. Each of her three children owns one pair of shoes, purchased on a layaway plan.

She owes the grocery store up the block so much money, it cuts off her line of credit. She worries that her children are eating too much of the food her sister brings over for Enrique's grandmother. When Mirian walks her children down the block, they beg her to buy them a soda or an ice cream cone. She cannot.

“I can't stand this situation anymore,” Mirian tells Belky. She wants to go to the United States. She'll go just long enough to save money to fix up her mother's house and add on a room for her own beauty parlor. She'll go for a few years and return before her children miss her much. They won't feel abandoned.

Lourdes is alarmed when she hears that Mirian wants to set out for the north on her own. No way, Lourdes tells her. Lourdes's boyfriend now pays the rent, and Lourdes has recently landed a better-paying factory job. Somehow, Lourdes and her boyfriend will come up with the money for a smuggler.

One morning, three years after Enrique left Honduras, Mirian sits her three children down to say good-bye.

“I'm going to the States. You will stay with your grandma.” She tells them she is going to work and send them money, clothes, and toys. She cries. So does her oldest, nine-year-old Michelle. Junior, seven, asks when she is coming back. She cannot say.

“But are you coming back?” he presses.

“Yes.”

Mirian steps off the same porch Lourdes left from fourteen years before.

Her youngest child is two and a half years old. She still breast-feeds. The girl, used to sleeping with her mother, cries for Mirian that night. Belky takes her into her bed.

For the first time, Belky understands her own mother's choice to leave her as a young child. She has watched Mirian's plight. She has seen her grapple with the gut-wrenching decision to leave. She agrees with Mirian's decision.

Meanwhile, María Isabel's life has just gotten much better. A relative who lives in the cinder-block house next door moves out. María Isabel and her family move in temporarily. They raze their old wood hut. María Isabel's brother begins to construct a cinder-block home of their own.

The relative's home isn't a vast improvement. The tin roof is held down with large rocks. A torn sheet offers privacy in the bathroom, which has no door. Occasionally, a mouse climbs up the gray walls.

Still, it has two small bedrooms. Now María Isabel shares a full-size bed with only her mother, sister, and Jasmín. In the hallway, which doubles as a living room and kitchen, Eva celebrates how far they've come. She proudly hangs four elementary school diplomas her children have earned, including María Isabel's.

María Isabel's relationship with Enrique is coming unglued. Enrique used to send her money monthly. But in the year and a half since María Isabel has returned to live with her mother, Enrique has wired money only four times, usually between $150 and $180.

Enrique is struggling financially. Fed up with the cramped conditions in his mother's apartment and their constant fights, yearning for some scrap of privacy, he has moved out and rented a bedroom in a trailer. Rent on his share of the trailer and utilities is $280. The payments on his used pickup truck and insurance run $580 a month, plus $200 in gas. His cell phone is $50 a month, and he gives his mother $200 a month for lunch and dinner, which he has at her house each night. Fixed costs eat up more than half of the $2,400 to $2,600 a month he makes. He's had to pay two police tickets. Sometimes, when work is slow, Lourdes has to loan him money for his truck payment.

María Isabel knows none of this. She wonders if Enrique sends his daughter less money because he is spending it on another girlfriend. Enrique swears that there is no one else.

Gloria warns María Isabel: I know you adore Enrique, but don't grow old waiting for him. If he doesn't send for you or return to Honduras soon, find someone else before you lose your looks.

María Isabel has heard that Enrique drinks too much beer. “It's hard to stay away from those drugs,” she says. Before, when Enrique told her he was clean, she could ferret out the truth for herself. Now that he is far away, all she has is his word.

Right after Enrique left, she felt desperate to be with him again. Over time, she has adapted to his absence. She has not dated anyone else, she says. When a neighbor in the brick house up the hill calls down that Enrique is on the line, María Isabel sprints over. Still, when she gets on the telephone, she cries less. She has matured, changed. Now her life revolves around her daughter.

“I love him,” she says, “but not like before.”

Equally troubling: Enrique calls less frequently. Since she moved into her mother's hut, Enrique has rung at the neighbor's house only five times.