The Children of Sanchez (54 page)

Crispín sent his sister Sofía to tell me that he was going to change and would I come back. My father urged me to go back and beg my husband’s pardon. That was always hard for me to do; I went back, but I didn’t apologize. It is true I had raised a hand to him but it was to defend myself. After that he was even worse. He kept fighting on one pretext or another. He would turn up the radio so that no one could hear when he beat me. Once he gave me such a kick in the small of my back that I almost aborted. So I left him again. I went to Lupita’s on Rosario Street, where my father and Consuelo were living. Manuel and Paula were in the Casa Grande at the time.

I never told my father or brothers that Crispín beat me. They noticed it all right, but didn’t do anything because it would have been worse for me. My father only said that I could go home to live any time I wanted to. It wouldn’t have cost me a thing to tell them, but I couldn’t take such a serious responsibility because when two men start to fight
here, nothing in the world can stop them. Roberto and Manuel went mad when they fought and I was afraid of the consequences. If it were just a question or fists, I wouldn’t worry, but if they shifted to knives, then what? And what for! To go on the same way anyhow?

I was sixteen when my daughter was born. My father was with me at the sanatorium and I held on to his legs when I had bad pains. He paid for everything and Crispín didn’t even know what it cost. Nor did he ask. Crispín had wanted a boy but I could see he was pleased to have a daughter. He came every day to the sanatorium, to Lupita’s house, and then to the Casa Grande, on the pretext of seeing the baby. But I no longer had any affection for him. I hated him when I found myself with the responsibility of caring for the child. I pinched him for any little thing; he didn’t dare hit me in my father’s house.

All the time he came to see me, he never gave me a single
centavo
. My father paid for my clothes, my food, and for all the baby’s expenses. Crispín would talk to my father and apologize to him for the way things were. My father would ask him why it was so difficult for us to live together and Crispín would blame me and say the fights were all my fault, that I was a very difficult person, that I never took care of him, that I was never at home. Imagine that! With my sister-in-law and everybody spying on me I couldn’t misbehave if I wanted to!

My mother-in-law came to see the baby and finally asked me to go and live with them. I accepted, but didn’t stay more than three weeks, because of Crispín’s niece. This little girl, Lidia, was the daughter of Crispín’s dead sister, who had gone with a man who later abandoned her. I don’t know how she died, but the result was another child without a father or mother.

I was ironing one day when Lidia began to embrace Concepción and shower her with kisses in an exaggerated way. She was holding the baby too tightly and her overaffectionate manner infuriated me. I kept telling her to leave the baby alone. Talk to her, talk to the wall! My father-in-law, who was a tailor, was working at home but he wouldn’t interfere and told me not to be so touchy. He didn’t reprimand Lidia when she said, “If you don’t want me to hold the baby, shove her back where she came from.”

I was so angry, I packed my things and started to go. My father-in-law blocked my way and said, “You’re not leaving this house until my old lady gets back from the market.”

“Who are you to tell me what to do?” I asked, adding a few sharp words for good measure.

“I’m your father, you ungrateful, common woman. And you are a disgrace!”

The other daughter-in-law, Natalia, was there and she said, “Run, Martita, because when she comes it will be worse.”

And so it was. When my mother-in-law came she threw me out. I had packed only my clothes, but she made me take my dishes and my bed. She said I wasn’t fit to be the wife of their son and Concepción probably wasn’t even his child! I ran out of her house.

That night, Crispín came to look for me at my aunt Guadalupe’s house. He was angry and threw a fit. He accused me of having cursed his mother. I told him what Lidia said, but he wouldn’t believe me and hit me. That’s the way he always was. I didn’t see him for a month after that, but then he began to whistle for me outside our door.

I kept saying I didn’t love Crispín any more and my father didn’t compel me to go back to live with him. But my husband was not easy to put off. When I wasn’t near him, I didn’t have physical desires, but when he kept insisting and tempting me, I reacted strongly. Unwillingly, I began to go to hotels with him. But he wasn’t satisfied and complained that he couldn’t make use of me because I was always scowling and sullen and like a stick of wood.

He was one of those low types who wanted the worst of women. If we were alone in the house, for just a minute, that was what he wanted; if we went out, it was to go to a hotel. He just had me to relieve himself. I was useful to him because I was clean and he didn’t run the risk of getting a disease. But I didn’t satisfy him because he was exaggerated. He was always kissing and caressing me. That was all he thought of. He would have liked me to be one of those extreme women who undressed and moved a lot and was expert in every way. He wanted it two or three times a night, but I felt that I couldn’t stand so much. With my resentment and his desires, we couldn’t do much together.

When Concepción was a year old, I had to wean her because I was pregnant with Violeta. It didn’t bother Crispín at all that I was pregnant again, as though it were the most natural thing in the world. He didn’t care what my father or anyone else said. He considered himself my husband with the right to get me pregnant at any time. He said we should live together again for the sake of the babies and the neighbors. I accepted, not because I wanted to, but because of
necessity and convenience. I was having difficulties with my brothers and sister … I wanted to get away from my family.

Roberto, my brother, was making my life bitter, because of his drinking and stealing. When I was small, though I was afraid of being caught using a compact or a pair of earrings he had stolen, I never interfered with what he did and didn’t betray him to my father. Later, when he brought home pieces of bronze and iron, aluminum pipes and other things from the factory where he worked, I thought he would be caught and I told my father. But nothing stopped Roberto. He would file the pipes and sell the pieces in the Tepito Market. Sometimes he brought home tires, hub caps … he grabbed whatever he could. A woman from the Casa Grande came to complain that a tank of cooking gas had been stolen from her roof; another accused my brother of taking her turkeys. My brother had a bad reputation around here and I was getting tired of defending him.

Then there was a fight with Manuel. The trouble began between Paula and Consuelo, who had always been a bit difficult. My sister-in-law made a complaint to Manuel and he threw Domingo’s hobby horse at Consuelo, hitting her in the head and making her cry. She began to insult him and he hit her again. I felt I had to stand up for my sister, so I went into action.

It was like a man-to-man fight; I kicked and scratched and hit him with whatever I could find; Consuelo was frightened and told us to stop before the neighbors called the police. I got him down on the bed and grabbed his balls and squeezed tight. He couldn’t do a thing to me because of the pain. He begged me to let go and told Paula to make me stop, but I wouldn’t. He was the one who gave up first.

The neighbors who had crowded around our door watching the fight criticized him for hitting his younger sisters. Paula began to get her things together because she thought my father would come and raise hell. She knew he would stand up for his daughters rather than his daughter-in-law. Sure enough, my
papá
came and slapped Manuel twice and told him to get out seeing that he couldn’t get along with his sisters. He and Paula went to live with her mother and sister Delila. Consuelo and Roberto remained in the Casa Grande and I went back to my husband.

Crispín set up our second home on the Street of the Carpenters, next door to his sister. When it was time for Violeta to be born, he took me to the Maternity Division of Social Security. I suffered more
pain with Violeta than with Concepción, for in the Social Security they did not give any anesthetic. They let me suffer all the pain one is meant to suffer.

I left the hospital like an unmarried mother because Crispín was asleep drunk in his mother’s house. No one remembered that I had to leave the hospital after five days, and so, without money, or a coat, I took the baby and boarded a bus. Luckily, the hospital gave me a basket with baby clothes for Christmas, so I had something to dress the baby in. All the neighborhood shops with phones were closed for the holiday, and I couldn’t telephone to send a message to my father or to my mother-in-law. Perhaps my husband’s family didn’t come because I gave birth to another girl. Before I went into the hospital they had said, as a joke I thought, that if it wasn’t a boy they would not even come to see the baby. Crispín had always preferred boys, and was nicer to his nephews than to his own daughters.

Crispín and I began to have difficulties all over again, partly because of my sister-in-law and partly because he had taken up with a woman again. He didn’t hit me as much in that house because he knew Sofía would hear us. He hit me only when we were alone, but this time I’d hit him right back, for the sake of my daughters. Why should I let him kill me? They would be the ones to suffer.

When I asked him for money to buy the children clothes, he told me to wait. We always had to wait and finally I said I would have to go to work to provide them the things they needed. He went and told his mother he was going to leave me and she said, “All right, son. Your home is here.” She didn’t intervene in my favor, but left me to my fate. Later, she even went to my father to tell him not to take me in.

I said I wouldn’t leave the house, so Crispín took out his things. He left me only the bed and clothes closet which didn’t belong to us. He took the electric-light bulb and the cord and he left me in the dark, with the two babies. He went away and didn’t even know whether his children had enough to eat.

The next day, Roberto went with me to the Police Station to accuse Crispín. Crispín and his father were summoned and they said it was not Crispín’s fault, that he had gotten me an apartment but that I was the one who left. It was a lie, but the court officials said they could not force Crispín to do anything because we were not married.
I could get no help from the law. Violeta was just three months old when I returned to my father’s house.

By that time, my sister-in-law Paula had died, and her sister Delila had moved in to take care of Manuel’s children. Delila was only two years older than I, and she was already bearing my father’s child! I had known her before, when she lived with her mother, Cuquita, and a bunch of relatives in a “Lost City” on Piedad Street, near the Tepito Market. Paula would take me there to visit. Their room was filthy and crowded, dirty dishes everywhere, the beds unmade, garbage on the floor, children running around, and the full chamber pot in plain view while they were eating. They lived like pigs!

When Paula lived in the Casa Grande, our room was always filled with her relatives. Crispín and I once came in the middle of the day and found them all eating in the courtyard. They had plenty of food but didn’t invite us to eat. I couldn’t have eaten anyway, because Cuquita’s husband, who worked in the slaughterhouse, had brought tripe and heart for Paula to cook. That is what they always ate, tripe and heart. And Cuquita was so ugly that one look at her face and a person didn’t even want to enter the same room. She ran us all out, just with her face! That sainted
señora
was always giving Consuelo and me dirty looks and calling us lazy daughters-of-a-whore behind our backs because she thought we let her daughter Paula do all the work in the house.

When we were girls, I would often see Delila at dances. She liked to dress up and dance even more than I did. She danced so much that her legs gave way under her and she became pregnant with a child that died at birth. She married the father of her child, by church and civil law, and went to live in a room near her mother-in-law. They had another boy named Geofredo, but by that time her husband was drinking and running around with other women. He turned out to be a thief with a police record. He didn’t give her any money so she went out to work. And would you believe it? While she was working, he would take other women into her very bed! And her mother-in-law knew about it. That woman was a regular go-between for her son! I learned about it from a friend who was their neighbor.

One day Delila came home and found all her furniture and things gone. Luis, her husband, had emptied the room, leaving her to the four winds. She accused him in court and got into a bad fight with
her mother-in-law, who attacked her with a scissors. Delila wasn’t the kind to just stand there and let herself get beaten up; she threw everything she could lay her hands on. It was a real battle!

She was living with her mother when she accepted my
papá
’s offer to go and live in the Casa Grande. Her husband came after her but she threatened to call the police if he bothered her any more and because of his record he didn’t. But I heard that she met him in the market now and then and I wondered whether she was giving my father a cat for a hare by cheating on him. Lupita had told me that my
papá
couldn’t have children any more … that Marielena was his last child. So I would have given a lot to know whether or not my
papá
was able to beget a child with Delila, or whether it was really Luis’ baby. But I never told my
papá
any of the gossip, because, you know, doubt does more harm than disappointment.

So when I returned home, I found Delila was my father’s mistress, because though she didn’t want to admit it, that was what she really was. My
papá
was still free … he wasn’t tied down by any law, only by his own sentiments. If he had been different, he would have abandoned us a long time ago. But there he was, taking care of everybody, Consuelo, Delila and her son, Manuel’s four children, me and my two babies, Antonia and her little girl, Lupita and Marielena.