The Children of Sanchez (83 page)

Roberto said it was his father’s house and, as my brother, he had the right to come and go as he pleased, and to eat and sleep there too, if he wished.

“Are you saying I am obliged to support you?”

“Yes,” says Roberto, “so long as I want you to.”

“Well then, you are charging me for your sister’s affection. That means you are selling her!”

“Yes? And what are you? Didn’t you come like a sharp one, to be supported and helped by my father? No one knows better than you how to get something for nothing. My father does more for you than for his own sons.”

One word led to another, and they ended up insulting their mothers and taking out knives. My aunt got her fingers cut trying to separate the two of them. Baltasar then told me he was leaving for his homeland, with me or without me, because he didn’t want to depend upon my family for anything. It took some time for me to cool him down. He said, “All right, I’ll stay, but if your brother kills me, it will be your responsibility.”

I stopped speaking to Roberto after that, and, for the first time, ordered him to keep out of my house because he came only to cause trouble. The truth is, no one wanted him around. He cried and got drunk but, thank God, he agreed to stay away, for the sake of the children.

At last, Lupita and Marielena left my father’s house in El Dorado, and we moved in. It was a humble place, but it had a high wall around it and the courtyard was for us alone. It was clean and quiet and had two bedrooms, a real kitchen, and a window in every room. Water was brought each day by a truck, but we had electricity. In short, it was the nicest house either Baltasar or I had ever lived in. I said, as a joke, we ought to put up an antenna on the roof so the neighbors would think we had a television set and were real high-class.

I wanted Baltasar to know, at last, the warmth and affection of a home. He had never had that from any of his women. They were all sluts who drank and left him and the children for other men. His life saddened me and that’s why I stuck it out with him. He was like a child who needed me. I, too, had never felt I had a home, even
though I always had a place to sleep and enough to eat and wear. I saw my brothers and sisters but we were not united. We might have worked together, like others, to make a nice home for ourselves, but instead we each went our own way. I had never envied the rich, who were above me, because there were always those who were below me, but I did envy people who had good families and nice homes.

I wanted to show Baltasar I was not like those women he had known. True, we had simple quarrels and told each other off, but it was never worse than that. The only thing we quarreled about at first, was the baby, Chucho, as we called him. I said Baltasar loved the child too much and was doing him harm. When I spanked Chucho for wetting the bed or his pants, Baltasar would get angry. He wouldn’t let me put pants on the boy after that. He would carry Chucho on his shoulders to the market, on the bus, and even to the park on Sundays, with the child dressed in no more than a shirt. When Chucho urinated on him, Baltasar would only laugh. If the baby cried for something, Baltasar would give it to him, even though it was something the girls were playing with. Though Chucho was only one year old, he seemed to know that when his
papá
was at home, I couldn’t say, “Don’t do this, don’t touch that.” Baltasar warned me that if he saw me spank Chucho, I would be given mine, and when he left the house, he would say, “Remember, let the boy do what he pleases.”

I never spoiled my children that way. Baltasar says I am hard on them. I think that because of all the things that have happened to me and the anger I have felt, I am becoming neurasthenic. I don’t have the patience to answer the children’s questions, “
Mamá
, what is that?
Mamá
, where are we going?” I shut them up right away. I am becoming more like my
papá
. If I am reading the papers or the weekly story, I don’t let them interrupt me. My poor little girls are becoming withdrawn, the way Consuelo used to be, because I don’t hold them or embrace them any more.

When I became pregnant again, I was resigned to it. Baltasar deserved at least one child from me, I thought, especially since he had married me in court even before he knew another one was on the way. My family believed Chucho was his son and I had never set them straight because it would have been embarrassing to admit that Crispín had given me another child. So I had married Baltasar even though my
papá
told me not to, because he had no faith in stepfathers, I had
heard what some stepfathers do to their stepdaughters, but that could never happen in my home so long as I was alive.

I thought Baltasar would be happy to have his own child, but he wasn’t. He said the new baby would only rob love from little Chucho and make him
chipil
, ill of jealousy. Instead of Chucho getting ill, Baltasar did. At night, he would twist and turn and complain that his heart felt heavy and that he couldn’t breathe. My aunt Guadalupe wanted to take him to the Temple of Light to be cured by the Spiritualist, but Baltasar preferred to go out and drink with his friends. That’s when he changed for the worse, when he took up with his lousy friends and left me without expense money.

He would come home tipsy and we would quarrel. I’d say, “If you don’t find happiness here in your home, if you find it with your miserable pals in the market, better leave me and go with them.”

He complained that I had changed, that before, I would at least give him a hug or a kiss. And I would answer, “Yes, frankly I am losing my affection for you. If I have changed, it is your own doing.”

“Well,” he’d say, “in that case, the day I find another pair of buttocks, I won’t stay here for anything.”

“But until you get her and while you are wondering whether you want apples or pears, don’t come bothering me. Screw the next one, because I’m not going to the dogs for you. When I met you I didn’t go around the way I do now, badly fed, badly dressed and badly treated. What would it cost me to get another man to give me things? It’s the easiest thing in the world to lead the gay life, to begin with one, then two, then with every man who came along. But I’m not like your other women who threw themselves away. While my father exists, I will never take the easy way. No, Baltasar, better pray to God that my father doesn’t die.”

I told him that even if I had a dozen children, I wouldn’t cry if he left me, that no man was worth crying over, especially a drunkard. Men like that were better dead, because then everyone lived in peace. I would rather get a job sewing in a shop, even though I’d leave my lungs in a place like that and would earn a miserable eight or nine
pesos
a day. And I warned Baltasar, that if he stayed, he would have to work. “Don’t think that I’m going to let you be a burden to my
papá
. Do you want to become like another son? It would be a thousand times better for you to leave.”

We didn’t have a single
centavo
in the house, and Baltasar had no
money to work with, so we sold the pig my father had given us, before it was fully grown. If my father knew, he would be angry and would say we couldn’t hold on to anything and were the kind who would never progress. I wanted to use fifty
pesos
of the money to go to Chalma with my aunt, but then I thought it would be better for Baltasar to work, so we stayed. After all, if we don’t have some
centavos
when my time comes, who will deliver the baby?

So Baltasar took the money and started to work again. I don’t know what happened, but he got himself a partner called the Pig, who took him to the cantinas and ended up carrying the money. I waited and waited for Baltasar to come home because I needed money for some medicine. My father didn’t like the way I looked and had sent me to Dr. Ramón, who gave me a prescription for a tonic.

Baltasar had been coming home very late, or not at all. I warned him that it was dangerous for him to be out alone when he was drunk, but he thinks it’s like in Acapulco. The other night a bunch of boys … all rebels without cause … chased him and he barely escaped. I told him that if anything happened to him, his relatives would come and blame me. They would come and chew me up alive because that’s the way his race of people is. But he doesn’t think of that. He says all I do is scold and get angry, that all I want is to keep him tied up at home.

Baltasar stayed away for two days. When he came in, I handed him the prescription. “Take this,” I said, “and ask the Pig for money to buy it because the doctor told me it was urgent.” He was surprised that I didn’t yell at him and he tried to embrace me. All I said was, “Stop bothering me. Here I am, so happy with my daughters, and you come molesting me. Who told you to come? What devil brought you? The street is your home!”

“What? Can’t I come to my home any more? I’m late because I had to deliver some merchandise.”

He was always delivering merchandise, eh? Then I noticed some lipstick on his shirt. Up to then, according to him, all his sprees were with men and didn’t include women. I wasn’t born yesterday, so I never believed that, but here was evidence.

“Is that why this is on your shirt?” I asked.

“Oh, I couldn’t help it because where I went there were rags with red paint.” Later, he told my cousin David, who by then had moved in with us, that he had gone dancing with a woman on Tintero Street,
because I wouldn’t sleep with him any more and was always angry. And he had me almost believing it was red paint! It is not that I am jealous. I realize a man can never be satisfied with just one woman, but I cannot stand being made a fool of.

Well, I sent him for the medicine and he didn’t come back until the next morning. He didn’t bring the tonic and had even lost the prescription. He was a little drunk and had the face to tell me that the Pig had invited him to Tintero Street again. “I made it clear that I couldn’t spend much, and we went around asking prices,” Baltasar explained. Think of it, the Pig even helped him choose!

“Look,” I said, very angrily. “You weren’t my first man and you won’t be my last. The thing that rubs me the wrong way is that you try to make me look stupid. Just tell me straight out that you are not coming home, so that I won’t be expecting you.” He knew that I would never go to look for him, the way I did in Acapulco. It is worse for me to run the risk of catching him with a woman. Suppose he sided with her against me? What a shame for me then! No, I don’t look for him because I don’t want to catch him in deceit.

I go to the Merced Market every day, to see my father’s face. When things go bad for him and he is sad, I am sad. Right now, he is peaceful and content and I feel better. After all, he is all worked out and cannot stand as much as a young person any more. None of us can buy life and I have to consider the fact that he may die at any time. While my father lives, I have nothing to cry about. After that, yes, the world will end for me.

At first, I covered up for Baltasar, but now I tell my father everything. “Who would believe,” I say, “that Baltasar would turn out to be such an ungrateful wretch? He doesn’t pay rent, what more does he want you to do for him? He has completely washed his hands of his obligations. He knows you won’t let me starve, so he doesn’t give me money any more.”

My
papá
is losing money on the house, because he could have rented it to someone for 250
pesos
a month. That’s why I said we should clean out the room in which the pigeons were, and rent it to my cousin David, so my
papá
would make some
centavos
. At least now he gets one hundred
pesos
a month, to help with all his expenses. None of us give him money, on the contrary, we take from him the little he has. When I see him at the market, he never lets me go without giving me
five or ten
pesos
, and one for each of the children. He looks at their shoes and clothes and if he sees they need something, he buys it the next day. If they have a sore or a cold, he scolds me for neglecting them and gives me money for medicine, as though it was his obligation. If I don’t want to take it, he says it is not hard for him to support three or four more, especially his own grandchildren. He is one man in a million! But it’s not right for him to give so much to me. What do I have Baltasar for?

Now my time is drawing near and I am afraid. Like I say to Baltasar, “Look, what good is it for us to have a place to live in, if when the baby comes, there won’t be a single
centavo
in our pocket. I have nothing prepared … no blanket, no sweater, no anything.”

“Soon,” he says, “just as soon as so-and-so comes, or such-and-such gives … You just wait.”

It makes me desperate to see that he doesn’t have confidence in himself and doesn’t hustle. This business of waiting burns me up. What am I waiting for? I’m waiting for nothing, exactly nothing!

I have never been so afraid of a birth as of this one. Trini had been difficult, and if Baltasar hadn’t helped me with Chucho, I think I wouldn’t have made it. Now, like I tell Baltasar, I feel as though I am going to die, the way my mother did. I’m not worried about myself, but about my children. If it hadn’t been for them, I would have wiped myself off the map long ago. But I know very well that they need me. Without me, they would be through, because no one would love all of them the way I do. They would be parceled out, Crispín would take Concepción, someone else Violeta, Trini elsewhere. Without the mother, everything falls apart.

Baltasar says, “Look, I am thirty-four and older than you and still I don’t want to die.”

“Yes,” I say, “because you are more or less a man. You go out, you get drunk, you have diversion and forget your worries. But I am closed up in the house and trouble weighs me down more.”

At night, when I cannot sleep, I begin to think. I say the thing that pains me most is that I broke up my home with Crispín. Lately, I even have dreams of his mother and sisters receiving me well. Perhaps, if I had waited a bit, Crispín and I might have gotten together again. I hurt myself and the children by joining up with Baltasar. I was used to being alone, so I should have remained that way. I tell Baltasar
I won’t die of grief if he leaves me. But who knows? Once I see that I am alone again … who knows?