The Children of Sanchez (56 page)

I had to get the bus on the corner across the street from the butcher shop, and I saw Felipe every day. I wanted to embrace him and speak to him but my shame stopped me. When our eyes met, I saw that he still cared for me, but I’d get on the bus just the same. I had gone with him only two or three months but I couldn’t get him out of my mind.

Crispín kept going after me. The moment he’d start to move toward me, I prayed to the saints that he wouldn’t touch me.

“All you ever think of is intercourse,” I would say.

“And who did you go to bed with that you don’t?” he would answer.

He aroused me, but I could usually control myself. When I did go to a hotel with him and he pawed me in his gross manner, I would imagine I was with Felipe. With him I would have done it in any position he wanted. I would even have taken off all my clothes! But with Crispín I refused because he made me feel like an alley cat.

Crispín was always suspicious of my boss when I worked. When I had the job in the office, he would say, “Only you and that accountant
know what happens on those couches,” or, “God knows how many times you’ve gone to bed with that lawyer.” He’d say, “You certainly don’t have any difficulty finding jobs. I suppose you want me to believe that you and
Señor
Miguel don’t have your fun in the storeroom?” And when I worked in a shop: “Why shouldn’t you speak well of
Señor
Santos? After all, he pays you for your favors, doesn’t he?” It got so I couldn’t work because he was always marrying me off to the bosses. The truth is, that on every job the boss or the employees did go after me. Here, there is no respect for the woman who works.

While I worked I had money to buy clothes for the girls and myself, and we looked more presentable. I used lipstick again and had a permanent wave. I wore a sweater or a coat instead of a shawl and my shoes were never torn. I felt like a queen compared to the way I was dressed when I lived with Crispín. I met my mother-in-law in the market and she looked surprised at my neatness. I could see she thought I was running around with someone. She and my sisters-in-law had considered me a slob and they hardly ever went out with me. But then I had only three cotton dresses, even when I was pregnant, and I had to keep my sandals together with string. Crispín wanted me to satisfy him sexually but he never gave me money to buy clothes or lipstick. All he would say was that he had no money. My
papá
helped me by sending an apron to keep my dresses clean, and empty flour bags for the babies’ diapers.

Crispín would sometimes meet me after work and take me home. One day he didn’t come as he had promised, and so I went home alone. The next evening he bawled me out for not waiting. He knew he hadn’t come for me, but he scolded me all the way home on the bus. I kept quiet, for fear that he would hit me. No matter what he said, I kept my mouth shut.

“I’m talking to you,” he said. But I didn’t answer. When we got off the bus, it looked as though he was going to start something on the street. I said to myself, “If he hits me, I’m going to hit him back.”

When we reached the school, across the street from the Casa Grande, he slapped me and then I really showed my claws. I was carrying my lunch plate and jar and dropped them, along with my purse. My coat fell in the mud. I yelled, “Don’t hit me, you miserable wretch!” And I scratched and hit him so fast, he was taken by surprise. I didn’t expect that of myself either!

He socked me with his fist, and instead of warding off his blows
and crying, the way I usually did, I kicked and let loose with everything I had stored up in me. We beat each other up and cursed, while people gathered around to watch. I didn’t even feel ashamed and hoped for someone I knew to come to my defense. But I fought it out alone and from that day, he never again raised a hand to me.

The deeply painful thing about it was that I was pregnant with our third child, Trinidad. When I had told Crispín about it, he said he would take care of me and the children and stop his wanderings. The day after our fight, he told Manuel he didn’t want me to work and would give me an allowance until he could set up an apartment. The first week, he came to see me every day and gave me twenty-five
pesos
, so I quit my job. The next week, he gave me only twenty
pesos
and didn’t come to the house. By the third week, he had disappeared. I didn’t see him until the following Tuesday, when he came and offered me fifteen
pesos
. I threw them in his face and said I didn’t take alms. That was when he told me he didn’t think the child was his! I don’t know what he based it on, but anyway he used that as a pretext not to give me money any more. Consuelo found a job for me taking messages in a lawyer’s office, so I went back to work.

I had been living in the Casa Grande, but there was an argument with Delila and I moved to my aunt Guadalupe’s again, this time staying until just before Trini was born. Their place was poor and tiny, with hardly room to turn around; Concepción and Violeta had to eat sitting on the doorstep and the three of us slept on sacks on the floor. My aunt would invite me to sleep in the bed with her and Ignacio, but the bed was so narrow, how could I?

The
vecindad
was full of bedbugs, mice and other vermin, and the two outside toilets were filthy, but I was happy. I got along well with my aunt and practically ran the place, so I was well off. But my father didn’t like it there and that made me sad. When he came to see me he would arrive scolding and was impatient to leave.

The major annoyance for me was that my aunt always had many visitors. If it wasn’t a
compadre
, it would be a few
comadres
who dropped in for a
taco
to eat with their beer or
chinchól
. I couldn’t stand seeing all those drunken faces, and some of them were downright disgusting. I was angry because one of them stole a watch and some
centavos
from me.

Things were always disappearing in that
vecindad;
nothing was
safe. That’s why my uncle had a watchdog and people never left their rooms unguarded. When something was stolen, the victim would go to a seer to find out who had taken it, but I didn’t go because it would have led only to arguments.

Everyone there used vulgar language, even my uncle, who was usually amiable. If he came home and found my aunt too tipsy to prepare his supper, he would start insulting her mother and calling her “bitch” and “daughter-of-a-whore.” But they really loved each other a lot, especially after he gave up seeing his other woman, Cuca. He had had six women besides my aunt, but he always said they meant nothing, that they were just talk, and that it was my aunt who had all the keys to his house and was the boss of his
centavos
.

My uncle was respectful and correct with me, and was fond of my daughters. He would tell me about my mother, with whom he sometimes went out to sell, and how jealous Guadalupe would get when he was mistaken for my
mamas
husband. When Ignacio was drunk he would make advances to me, but I never led him on, and he didn’t insist. If he ever complained about my children yelling, or my brother coming in drunk, my aunt would defend us. The only one my uncle really fought with was Consuelo, who would come and try to be the boss.

Both Ignacio and Guadalupe were very short, gray and wrinkled, though not yet old. My uncle often said that youth had nothing to do with the number of years you have lived. What counted was how much you suffered in your life. He would say, “Do you know the age of a gray hair? No? Every gray hair has its story … its destiny and its end. They come from the knocks in life, from your failures, the many people you’ve seen die.” He called my aunt “the-young-person-who-looks-old” and believed that she had aged because of all the sacrifices she had to make for her family.

My aunt had an unbelievably hard life. When she was thirteen, she was raped by a man of thirty-two. Because she had been deflowered and “wasn’t worth anything any more,” her father beat her hard and made her go through a church marriage. Her mother-in-law hated her, so her husband beat her and took her from one aunt to another until her son was born.

Then her husband went into the army and she never saw him again. She and the baby had no place to stay and almost died of hunger; they swelled up for lack of food. She walked all the way back to
Guanajuato, and nearly drowned trying to cross a flooded river. A teamster pulled her out by her braids, otherwise she wouldn’t be alive today.

In Guanajuato, Guadalupe learned that her brother Pablo had been killed while defending a friend and that her sainted father had died of anger and grief. Her mother had gone with the rest of the children to Mexico City to seek her fortune selling hot coffee on street corners. Guadalupe’s aunt Catarina was in the capital and had advised her mother to go. So my little aunt went to look for them, carrying her child in her shawl and begging food along the way. When she arrived, she looked like a beggar and her mother didn’t even recognize her.

Guadalupe’s brothers were all ill with typhus and she caught it too. Bernardo died, but the others recovered. José and Alfredo worked in a bakery, Lucio got a job in a
pulquería
, and my aunt and my
mamá
sold cake and spiked coffee at a little stand on a street corner. Putting alcohol in the coffee was a legal offense; my aunt went to jail three times because her mother couldn’t pay the fine. Guadalupe was afraid they would send her to the Penitentiary next, so she worked as a servant, and later, in a
tortillería
as a
tortilla
maker.

My aunt had always complained that my grandma had favored my
mamá
, who was the youngest girl. She said, “I worked to support my little mother, but she was very hard on me, may she rest in peace! My little son and I would cry because she didn’t bring our lunch to the
tortillería
. She would forget all about us, but she never failed to bring a
taco
to your
mamá
, Lenore. I asked my aunt Catarina, ‘
Ay
, Auntie, am I not my mother’s daughter? Why does she love only Lenore?’ My aunt would say that I had bad luck and that I must resign myself to it.”

When Guadalupe’s son was five years old, her mother-in-law came and took him away. She told Guadalupe that the boy’s father had come to a bad end in the Revolution … he had been chopped up with
machetes
and dumped into a river. My aunt prayed to God to forgive her husband and she vowed to the Virgin of Guadalupe never to remarry. She let her mother-in-law take her son because she was having a hard time feeding him. But they turned the boy against her and taught him to be a drunkard. At eight, he was already being given
tequila
punch and he got the habit. When Guadalupe brought him a piece of cake or fruit, they shut the door in her face. He finally died of drink while still quite young and she lost him forever.

My aunt got the habit of drinking when they tried to cure her of malaria. She had gone to Veracruz as a servant and had come back sick. They gave her sugar cane and
jícama
roots; they put a mouse on her neck to startle her; they gave her green alcohol and strong coffee, then
pulque
with ground
pirú;
for seven months they tried this and that, usually with alcohol, until finally a woman cured her with nopal leaves, chile and honey.

Then a man just did my aunt “the favor” and left her, even before her son Salvador was born. When she met Ignacio, he wanted to marry her and accept her son as his own. She liked Ignacio, but refused to marry him. Ignacio’s father wanted her to have a church wedding, too, because in those days they were more strict. Now people just get together in the doorway and they think themselves married. My uncle says that God, the Father, ran things then, not God, the Son. Ignacio’s father was the law and he educated his son to have a conscience. Ignacio could never raise a hand to my aunt because his father was there with a stick to defend her.

But my aunt stubbornly refused to be married. She said, “I vowed never to marry because I suffered too much as a wife. If Ignacio wants to five with me like this, very well. God will find the way to pardon me.” And that’s the way it was.

Ignacio had been a news vendor since 1922. Before that he made good money as a varnisher in a furniture shop but he said he “left his lungs” in that place and took the first other job God offered. He and Salvador went out selling papers together, in rain or shine, and gave the little they earned to my aunt. My uncle always said he would do all right in the newspaper business if only he sold all his papers. But there were no returns allowed, and he would lose his profits because of the rains, which was the scourge of the vendors. God! all the hiking he did to earn a few
pesos!
My poor uncle will probably die walking the streets, holding on to his papers.

Ignacio was good to Salvador, but my cousin began to drink and became quarrelsome. Things got worse when Salvador married because his wife took their child and ran off with another man. Salvador hit the bottle even more and was drunk all the time.

I was only five or six years old when my cousin died. Tipsy as usual, he was standing in front of a beer parlor on the Street of the Tinsmiths, when along came his wife’s lover, Carlos. As soon as Carlos saw him, he said, “This is the way I wanted to find you, son-of-your-smutty-mother!”
And with that, he took out an ice pick and stuck it into Salvador’s belly.

Salvador held his wound with both hands and started to run. At that time, he and my aunt and uncle were living half a block away with Prudencia, my uncle Alfredo’s first wife. But instead of going there, my cousin went the other way, to the Casa Grande, with Carlos running after him. At the gate, Carlos turned back and my cousin ran into our courtyard.

We were just finishing supper when he shouted, “Uncle Jesús, let me in!” My
papá
opened the door, but thought Salvador was drunk.

“Are you here again? I told you before that I won’t let drunks in here. I don’t want any bad examples for the girls.”