The Crystal Frontier (14 page)

“Why'd you bring your dad?”

“For the memories,” said Candelaria.

“Old people get in the way,” said Dinorah softly.

All these women came from other places. That's why they entertained one another with stories about their backgrounds, about their families, the things that made them all different. And yet at times they were astonished at how alike they were in many things—families, villages, relatives. All of them felt torn inside. Was it better to leave all that behind and set about making a new life here on the border? Or should they feed their souls with memories, hum along with José Alfredo Jiménez, feel the sadness of the past, agree that indifference is the death of the soul?

Sometimes they looked at one another without saying a word, all four friends, comrades—Candelaria, the one who'd worked the longest in the plants, Rosa Lupe and Dinorah, who'd come at the same time, Marina, greenest of the lot—understanding that they didn't have to use words to say these things, that they all needed love, not memories, but that even so it was impossible to separate memory from tenderness. Damned if you do, damned if you don't.

The one best at keeping track of the stories was Candelaria, and her conclusion was that all the women came from somewhere else, that none of them was from the border. She liked to ask them where they were from, but it was hard for them to talk except with Candelaria, whom they trusted and with whom they dared to link love and memory. Candelaria wanted to keep them both alive, feeling it was important they not condemn themselves to oblivion or indifference, the death of the soul. She hummed the tunes of the unforgettable José Alfredo, as the radio announcers never failed to call him.

“From the Venustiano Carranza commune.”

“From deep in the heart of Chihuahua.”

“No, not from the country. From a city smaller than Juárez.”

“Well, from Zacatecas.”

“From La Laguna.”

“My dad took charge of the whole move,” said Rosa Lupe, the woman with the aquiline profile who dressed like a Carmelite. “He said there were too many of us for the communal land. The land we could farm was getting smaller and smaller and drier and drier the more we divided it up among all my brothers. I was always active, very active. At the commune they put me in charge of keeping the streets clean and the walls painted white. I liked to make confetti for the fiestas, bring in the bands, organize the children's choruses. Dad said I was too clever to stay in the country. He brought me to the border himself when I was fifteen. My mother stayed behind with my little brothers and sisters. My father didn't beat around the bush. He told me that I was going to make ten times more money in a month than the whole family would make in a year on the commune. That I was very active. That it wasn't going to break me down. As long as he stayed here, I accepted things. He was like an extension of my life in the village. I didn't tell him I missed the land, my mother, my little brothers and sisters, the religious festivals, especially Candlemas—like Candelaria!—when we dress up the Christ Child, decorate the Holy Cross, and have these terrific scary fireworks. And Ash Wednesday, when the whole village wore charcoal crosses on their foreheads, Holy Week, when the Jews with their white beards and long noses and black overcoats come out to play tricks on Christians. All of it—pilgrimages, the Wise Men—I missed it all. Here I look up the dates on the calendar, I have to make an effort to remember them, but back there I didn't. The fiestas came along without having to be remembered, see? But my father set me up here in Juárez in a one-room house and told me, ‘Work hard and find a man. You're the cleverest one in the family.' Then he left.”

“I don't know what's better,” Candelaria said immediately. “I've already told you, I'm loaded down with responsibilities. When I came to the border, I brought my kids. Then my brothers and sisters came. Finally my parents got up enough nerve. That's a big strain with a salary like mine. Watch those jokes, Dinorah, damn you. What our men give us we deserve. What my father gives me is remembrance. As long as my father is in the house, I'll never forget. It's beautiful having things to remember.”

“That's not true,” said Dinorah. “Memories just hurt.”

“But it's a good hurt,” answered Candelaria.

“Well, I've only seen the bad hurt,” Dinorah retorted.

“That's because you don't have anything to compare it with. You don't give yourself the chance to save up your good memories of the past.”

“Piggy banks are for pigs,” said Dinorah, incensed.

Rosa Lupe was about to say something when a supervisor came over, an extremely tall woman in her forties with eyes like marbles and lips thin and long as stringbeans. She began to scold the beautiful Carmelite with the aquiline profile. Rosa Lupe was breaking the rules—who did she think she was coming to the factory dressed like a miracle worker? Didn't she know everyone had to wear the regulation smock for hygiene and safety reasons?

“But I've made a vow, ma'am,” said Rosa Lupe in a dignified tone.

“Around here there's no vow bigger than mine,” said the supervisor. “Come on, take off that getup and put on your smock.”

“Okay. I'll change in the bathroom.”

“No, dear lady, you aren't going to hold up production with your saintly act. You can change right here.”

“But I don't have anything on underneath.”

“Let's see,” said the supervisor. She grabbed Rosa Lupe by the shoulders and pulled the habit down to her waist. There were Rosa Lupe's splendid breasts. The woman with eyes like marbles, unable to contain herself, seized them and fastened her stringbean lips on the beautiful Carmelite's stiffened nipples. Rosa Lupe was so shocked she froze, but Candelaria grasped the supervisor by her permanent, cursing her and pulling her off, while Dinorah gave the pig a kick in the ass and Marina ran over to cover Rosa Lupe with her hands, feeling how hard her friend's heart was pounding, how her own nipples had stiffened involuntarily.

Another supervisor came over to separate the women, settle things down, and laugh at his colleague. Don't start taking my girlfriends away from me, Esmeralda, he said to the disheveled supervisor who was as inflamed as a fried tomato, Leave these cuties to me and go find yourself a man.

“Don't make fun of me, Herminio, you'll be sorry,” said the wretched Esmeralda, retreating with one hand on her forehead and the other on her belly.

“Don't try poaching on my territory.”

“Going to report me?”

“No, I'm just going to screw you up.”

“Okay, girls, clear out,” said Herminio the supervisor, smiling. He was hairless as a sugar cube and exactly the same color. “I'm moving up your break. Go on, go have a soda and remember what a nice guy I am.”

“Going to make us pay for the favor?” asked Dinorah.

“You all come around on your own.” Herminio smiled lasciviously now.

They bought some Pepsis and sat for a while opposite the factory's beautiful lawn—
KEEP OFF THE GRASS
—waiting for Rosa Lupe, who reappeared with Herminio. The supervisor looked very satisfied. The worker was wearing her blue smock.

“He looks like the cat who ate the canary,” said Candelaria when Herminio was gone.

“I let him watch me change. I'd just as soon you knew. I did it to thank him. I'd rather be the one who calls the shots. He promised he wouldn't bother any of us, that he'd protect us from that bitch Esmeralda.”

“Well, it didn't take much to—” Dinorah started to say, but Candelaria shut her up with a glance. The others lowered their eyes, never imagining that from the high administrative tower sheathed in opaque glass those inside could see them without themselves being seen. The Mexican owner of the business, Don Leonardo Barroso, was observing them as he recited for the benefit of his U.S. investors the line about their being blessed among women because the assembly plants employed eight of them for every man. The plants liberated women from farming, prostitution, even from machismo itself—Don Leonardo smiled broadly—because working women soon became the breadwinners in the family. Female heads of households acquired a dignity and strength that set them free, made them independent, made them modern women. And that, too, was democracy—didn't his partners from Texas agree?

Besides—Don Leonardo was used to giving these periodic pep talks to calm the Yankees and soothe their consciences—these women, like the ones you see down there sitting together by the grass drinking sodas, were becoming part of a dynamic economic growth instead of living a depressed life in the agrarian stagnation of Mexico. In 1965, under Gustavo Díaz Ordaz, there were no plants on the border, zero. Then in 1972, under President Echeverría, there were 10,000; in 1982, under López Portillo, 35,000; in 1988, under De la Madrid, 120,000; and now, in 1994, under Salinas, 135,000. And the plants generated 200,000 jobs in related fields.

“The progress of the nation can be measured by the progress of the assembly plants,” exclaimed a satisfied Mr. Barroso.

“There must be some problems,” said a Yankee drier than a corncob pipe. “There are always problems, Mr. Barroso.”

“Call me Len, Mr. Murchinson.”

“And I'm Ted.”

“Labor problems? Unions aren't allowed.”

“Problems with worker loyalty, Len. I've always tried to maintain the loyalty of my workers. Here the women last six or seven months and then move to another factory.”

“Sure, they all want to work with the Europeans because they treat them better. They fire or punish abusive supervisors, feed them fancy lunches, and God knows what else. Maybe they even send them on vacation to see the tulips in Holland … You do that and earnings will plummet, Ted.”

“We don't do things that way in Michigan. The workers leave, the cost for services—water, housing—go up. Maybe those Dutch have the right idea.”

“We all change jobs,” chimed in Barroso merrily. “Even you. If we enforce work-safety rules, they move on. If we're strict about applying the Federal Labor Law, they move on. If there's a boom in the defense industry, they move on. You talk to me about job rotation? That's the law of labor. If the Europeans prefer quality of life to profits, that's their decision. Let the European Community subsidize them.”

“You still haven't answered my question, Len. What about the loyalty factor?”

“Anyone who wants to hold onto a loyal labor force should do what I do. I offer bonuses to workers so they'll stay. But the demand for labor is huge, the girls get bored, they don't move up, so they move sideways, and that way they fool themselves into thinking they're better off for changing. That does generate some costs, Ted, you're right, but it avoids other costs. Nothing's perfect. The plant isn't a zero-sum situation. It's a sum-sum one. We all end up making money.”

They laughed a little, and a man with graying long hair pulled back in a ponytail came in to serve coffee.

“No sugar for me, Villarreal,” said Don Leonardo to the servant.

“Look here, Ted,” Barroso went on. “You're new at this game, but your partners in the States must have told you what the real business is here.”

“Running a national business that sells to one guaranteed buyer doesn't seem like a bad idea to me. We don't have that in the States.”

Barroso asked Murchinson to look outside, beyond the little group of workers drinking Pepsis, to look at the horizon. Yankee businessmen have always been men of vision, he said, not provincial chile counters the way they are in Mexico. It's a huge horizon you see from here, right? Texas is the size of France; Mexico, which looks so small next to the U.S. of A., is six times larger than Spain—all that space, all that horizon, what inspiration! Barroso almost sighed.

“Ted, the real business here isn't the plants. It's land speculation. The location of the plants. The subdivisions. The industrial park. Did you see my house over in Campazas? People laugh at it. They call it Disneyland. But I'm the one laughing. I bought all those lots for five centavos per square meter. Now they're worth a thousand dollars per square meter. That's where the money is. I'm giving you good advice. Take advantage of it.”

“I'm all ears, Len.”

“The girls have to travel for more than an hour, on two buses, to get here. What we should do is set up another center due west of here. Which means we should be buying land in Bellavista. It's a dump. Shitty shacks. In five years, it'll be worth a thousand times more.”

Ted Murchinson was in favor of supplying money, with Leonardo Barroso as the front man—the Mexican constitution prohibits gringos from owning property on the border. There was talk about trusts, stocks, and percentages while Villarreal served the coffee, watered-down the way the gringos like it.

“What my husband wants is for me to leave the plant and work with him in a business. That way we'd see each other more and take turns with the kid. It's the only brave idea he's ever suggested to me, but I know that deep down he's just as big a coward as I am. The plant is a sure thing, but as long as I work here, he's tied to the house.”

Something Rosa Lupe said upset Dinorah terribly, to the point that she became violently sick and asked to go to the bathroom. Wanting to avoid any new conflict, the supervisor, Esmeralda, did not object. Sometimes she made vulgar comments when the women asked.

“What's with her?” said Candelaria. Instantly she was sorry she'd opened her mouth. It was an unwritten law among them not to probe inside one another. What was going on outside could be seen and therefore discussed, especially in a joking spirit. But the soul, what songs called the soul …

Candelaria sang, and Marina and Rosa Lupe joined in:

Your ways drove me mad,

You're so selfish, so solitary,