Enrique's Journey (28 page)

She feels snubbed. It feels as though the phone calls have become a one-way street. She stops calling Enrique as well. Both are stuck in their pride. He hasn't hired a smuggler because she hasn't asked for one; she hasn't said yes to coming because he hasn't hired a smuggler. They are drifting apart.

She has tired of spending Sunday morning, her sole day off, downtown at the storefront Internet store dialing Enrique. The manager types the number into one of the gray computers; $3 buys fifteen minutes.

“Hello, my beautiful girl,” he coos at María Isabel.

“Hello, how are you?”

He asks how Jasmín is. “I love you. Do you have another boyfriend there?” he asks. “No,” María Isabel answers. Enrique wishes she could be more affectionate on the telephone. María Isabel knows he wants her to say she loves him, but she can't; she has always been painfully shy. She feels inhibited in the Internet store.

When she first moved back into Eva's, María Isabel went to call Enrique every other week. Now they go two months without speaking. She brushes it off as a scheduling problem. Or she rationalizes, “I call him when he calls me.”

Enrique no longer talks of returning to Honduras. He tells her he likes the comforts of the United States. He hints that he wants her to come north soon. Yet the more attached María Isabel becomes to Jasmín, the more she resists leaving her.

UNITED STATES

After a few weeks, Mirian reaches the United States and settles in with Lourdes. She buys fake identification papers and quickly lands a restaurant job making biscuits. She nets $245 a week.

She tells Lourdes that she will be there three years, no more. She doesn't buy any furniture. She won't let herself adjust to the comforts of life in the United States such as hot water. She takes cold showers. She constantly reminds herself of the things she dislikes about the United States: children live confined indoors. Diana spends her afternoons and evenings chatting with friends on the Internet or watching television. In Honduras, Mirian's children play outside and come indoors only when they get hungry.

U.S. immigration agents raid Wal-Marts around the country for illegal immigrants. Mirian frets about being deported. She doesn't like the way people from North Carolina look at her in public sometimes. As if she were inferior, different. On her days off, she stays in.

In Honduras, each Sunday after church, Enrique's family takes Mirian's children to the airport, where they call their mother from a computer telephone.

“Study a lot. Don't fight. Be good to your grandma,” Mirian tells them. Junior tells her he often feels like crying. He tells her he cannot sleep well at night. Quick-minded and chatty, he also tells Mirian about his excellent report card. Then he asks her to send him a bicycle.

Mirian says she's sending Nike shoes and Spider-Man, Hulk, Batman, and Barbie dolls. “I've bought beautiful things to send you.”

Mirian's youngest is frightened when she hears her mother's voice on the telephone. For the first month, she pushes the telephone away. She hears her cousins call Mirian “Auntie” on the telephone. When she finally talks to her mother, she starts calling her mother “Auntie,” too.

“I'm not your aunt. I'm your mother,” Mirian corrects her.

“No, you're my auntie,” the girl insists.

Enrique shares the trailer with two Mexican couples. They have four young children. They are a constant reminder of Jasmín.

Inside his bedroom, Enrique tapes two pictures of his daughter to his armoire mirror, one of her in a blue-and-white dress, another in a red-and-white dress. Two more framed pictures of her are on the shelf by his bed.

He didn't like school. He worries: Will she be the same?

Enrique loves sweets; whenever he buys some, he thinks of buying candy for Jasmín. Nearly every day, he sees things she might like. He tells himself he would buy them for her if she were there. He talks about her constantly to his friends.

His happiest moments are when photographs arrive. Or when María Isabel puts Jasmín on the line.
“Te quiero, papi,”
Jasmín says. “I love you, Daddy.” He knows María Isabel prompts Jasmín to say nice things to him. He doesn't care. In the end, she'll understand what's what.

“I'm your daddy. Do you love your daddy?” Enrique asks.

“Yes, I love you.”

She asks him to send things. “
Papi,
I want a piñata! One with candy inside!”

“I think she'll love me when she sees me,” he tells himself.

He pictures how their lives together will be. Everyone in Lourdes's house eats dinner at different hours, whenever they get home from work.
His
family will eat dinner together.

HONDURAS

As Jasmín turns three, she is inseparable from her mother. At night, they sleep in the same bed. In the morning, before she readies herself for work, María Isabel bathes her daughter with buckets of water and plaits her hair into two braids.

When María Isabel heads off to work, Jasmín is in tears.
“Mami! Mami!”
she cries.

Barefoot, she scrambles down the ravine after her mother. Her grandmother dashes after her and grabs her.

“
Ya vuelvo.
I'll be right back,” María Isabel calls up the hill as she walks away.

At night, when María Isabel climbs back up the hill, Jasmín runs to her. She sits on her lap, her hands draped around her mother's neck. They rub noses. They play patty-cake. María Isabel asks Jasmín to count to ten. With each number, she hoists her girl up in the air, then down. “Oh, you're getting so heavy!” Jasmín grabs her mother's hair, her ears. She squeals with delight.

“What did you do today?” María Isabel asks. “Did you take a nap today?” In a sweet, squeaky voice, Jasmín answers each of her mother's questions.

On María Isabel's day off, Jasmín is always at her side. María Isabel takes her daughter by the hand. They go downtown or to visit Gloria. She walks her down the sidewalk by Pizza Hut, crowded with carts piled with potatoes, plantains, and avocados. It is where Lourdes once sold gum and candy from a little box with Enrique at her side.

She carries Jasmín in her arms to the city's central plaza, where children beg with outstretched arms. She takes her into the cathedral, up to the gilded altar. She prays. She asks that Jasmín not get sick, that Enrique stay away from drugs. Then she takes Jasmín for a scoop of ice cream.

Today, Sunday, she readies Jasmín for a friend's birthday party. She dresses her in a pink-and-white outfit and the gold hoop earrings, bracelet, and pendant of Jesus her father sent.

As they walk across the heart of Tegucigalpa, Jasmín is a chatterbox. At the party, at the corrugated tin shack of María Isabel's cousin, Jasmín eats chicken, tries to blow up a red balloon, and borrows a pink bike with training wheels. But after a short while, she climbs into her mother's lap. María Isabel bounces her on her knees. Jasmín strokes her mother's hair and whispers into her ear. María Isabel straightens Jasmín's braids. She rocks her in her arms. Jasmín kisses her mother lightly. Jasmín finds a bougainvillea branch blooming with red flowers and brings it to her mother.

When it is Jasmín's turn to swat at the pink, dog-shaped piñata with a wooden stick, María Isabel cheers her on: “Hit it hard, hard!”

She helps her get a piece of cake, then lines her up for her bag of party favors. She shows her how to blow a whistle, one of the gifts.

At dusk they take a bus home, Jasmín in María Isabel's arms. Lights twinkle on the hills of Tegucigalpa. María Isabel undresses Jasmín and slips on her white nightgown. Jasmín dumps her bag of party favors on the floor, eager to see what is inside. There are two butterfly hairpins. María Isabel puts them in Jasmín's hair. Jasmín dances to the music from the family's small television, twizzling her hips, her hands in the air.

At 7:30
P.M
., María Isabel climbs into bed with her daughter. Jasmín holds a bottle of milk with her left hand. With the right hand, she rubs her mother's belly. It is a ritual. She cannot fall asleep without stroking her mother's belly. Slowly, as she sucks on the milk, Jasmín loses her grip on the bottle. Her eyes flutter. María Isabel rolls her over and rubs Jasmín's back until the girl falls asleep.

She can no longer imagine leaving her daughter. She has to tell Enrique.

At most, she might leave Jasmín when she is old enough to understand what is happening. “She would have to be at least five years old for me to leave her. Then, at least, I could try to explain it to her,” María Isabel tells her family. Not a day before, she says firmly. It is the same age Enrique was when his mother left.

Some of her friends tell her she would be a fool not to follow Enrique to the United States. She is young and can find work now, but women over the age of twenty-five or twenty-eight are no longer considered for many jobs in Honduras, something made clear in newspaper employment ads.

One factory, S. J. Mariol, hires only women ages eighteen to twenty-five, says Leydi Karina López, head of human resources at the company. In the large brick building in Tegucigalpa, young women sit in rows behind sewing machines, furiously stitching medical scrubs for export to the United States. One woman sews a triangle at the bottom of the neck. She does it 2,520 times a day, forty-four hours a week, for $110 a month.

“We look at the work, and it requires a lot of energy and dedication. At thirty, they might have back problems or eye problems or arthritis. We want to avoid that,” López says. Without high productivity, she says, the work will move to lower-wage countries such as China.

The children's store María Isabel works at won't hire women older than twenty-three. Middle-aged women have three options, says Argentina “Norma” Valeriano, María Isabel's neighbor: washing and ironing clothes, cleaning houses, or making tortillas at home, jobs that pay $50 to $90 a month. A family needs $350 a month minimum, says a social worker, Francis Jeanett Gómez Irias, with the Instituto Hondureño de la Niñez y la Familia.

In 1998, Hurricane Mitch caused many Honduran businesses to go under. Unemployment and subemployment combined now affect 43 percent of Hondurans. Government jobs go to people in certain families or with good connections, says Norma. Most of María Isabel's neighbors, including twenty-five on her block, have no work, she adds. They survive only because someone in the family has gone north and sends back money. The children of single mothers suffer most, she says.

María Isabel wouldn't be the first in her family to go to the United States and leave children behind. Her aunt, Eva's sister Tina, left four children in Honduras to go to Los Angeles in the early 1980s. María Isabel's eldest sister, Olga, went to Houston in 1990. She left José, one and a half years old, and Dennis Alexander, three, with her mother, Eva. For eight years, Olga sent Eva $50 or $100 a month to help her raise the boys. In 1998, Eva's other sister, Laura, left two children behind.

Eventually, the three women were able to bring their children to the United States, some legally, others with smugglers.

When María Isabel sees couples walking down the street with their children, it saddens her. If she went to the United States, would it allow Jasmín to have both her parents at her side more quickly? Jasmín, she knows, needs her father.

Jasmín has taken to calling the only man in Eva's house, her twenty-seven-year-old uncle Miguel,
papi.
With Enrique, Jasmín has to be coached to talk. With Miguel, words of affection come naturally.

One evening, Jasmín returns from a friend's birthday party. She runs to Miguel with a bag full of candy, a party treat.
“Papi!”
Jasmín says, handing him pieces of the candy. “
Papi, tenga.
Here, Daddy.” She doesn't normally share her candy; with Miguel, she is generous. She gives him a full report of the day: how she hit the piñata, ate rice and cake, drank soda, how people took pictures. Jasmín runs and flops on his bed. Miguel chases her, tickling her ribs.

Many afternoons, when María Isabel is away at work, Jasmín eludes her grandmother and wanders next door, where Miguel is constructing the family's new house. She climbs the ladder to the second floor. There, she serves as Miguel's little assistant. As he lays floor tiles, Miguel points to the sponge; Jasmín brings it. He points to a flat spatula. She brings that, too. “Pass me the hammer,” he says in his gentle voice.

When Miguel heads down the hill at dusk to play soccer, he says, “
Me voy, Jasmín.
I'm off, Jasmín.” She quickly answers, “
Vamos, papi!
Let's go, Daddy!”

Enrique senses that his daughter has begun to identify someone else as her father. Late in the year, as Christmas approaches, he promises her he'll come visit.

María Isabel sees even more reasons to stay in Honduras with her daughter. A yearlong government advertising campaign has highlighted the dangers of the journey. Newspapers carry a stream of accounts of people injured or killed during the trek north.

María Isabel's sister Irma tried to make it to the United States but ran out of money in Mexico and had to turn back. So did one of her brothers. María Isabel asks one of her sisters about her trip. She tells her she was often hungry. María Isabel asks if she was raped. The sister doesn't answer.

What if she doesn't make it? What would become of her daughter?

She'd have to live illegally in the United States, always fearful of being caught and deported. There is racism; she would be treated as inferior. Her mother emphasizes that the United States is a cold place, where neighbors barely know one another.

She doesn't want to miss all the important moments in Jasmín's life. She thinks about everything Enrique has already missed. Soon, Jasmín will attend her first day of kindergarten.

María Isabel has heard how mothers who leave lose the love of their children.