The Short Sweet Dream of Eduardo Gutierrez (3 page)

Moisés had a girlfriend and was busy thinking of her. Rafael had nobody and thus became the excited messenger.

When Silvia came home from school the next day, she stopped in the store. In from the dusty street came Rafael.

“Why did you hurt Eduardo last night?”

“What?”

“You didn’t talk to him. He went home saying how much he loved you and that it is sad you wouldn’t speak to him.”

“Why didn’t he speak to me?”

“It is very hard for him. He didn’t think it would be hard for you. He wants you to be his girlfriend.”

By telling this to Rafael, whose brother confirmed the conversations, Eduardo was trying so clumsily to conform to the San Matías custom in which the boy must announce to all he knows that a particular girl is his girlfriend. This is an outgrowth of the old Spanish customs, Mayan suspicions, and the Catholic Church’s banns of marriage. Before the boy in San Matías makes such an announcement, he cannot take the girl out alone and most certainly cannot kiss her.

Silvia thought of Eduardo’s painfully shy mother walking past the store.

“Tell him to try,” she said in a prayer. “Tell him for me that I like him.”

Eduardo came back with three or four cousins, and they clustered around the video game machine. He never looked up. As they were leaving, he waited until his cousins were out the door, then stood in the doorway and gave a low whistle.

At first Silvia was irritated and dismissed this whistle with a wave of her hand. Then, deciding that she didn’t want to chase him away forever, she smiled at him and turned away, with the long locks of her hair waving. An old woman and a young girl came in to buy crayons, she recalls, and when she finished with them, Eduardo was gone. Instantly, she missed him. The next morning, going to school, she decided that she loved the store when he was in it.

One night the next week, when Eduardo and his cousins came into the store, she suddenly felt a tap on her head. It was Eduardo. He acted as if he hadn’t touched her.

“That was you,” she said to him.

“No, it wasn’t.”

“I can tell it was you,” she said.

“How could you?”

“I know who it was,” she said.

But he could only fool with her when all the cousins were there. When he came in alone, it was as if his mother’s blue scarf came out of the air and covered his face. He did not talk.

Then one night when it grew late and Eduardo had not been in, she found herself becoming anxious. She looked out the door and asked Rafael, “Is Eduardo coming?”

He shrugged.

“I thought he would come here,” she remembers saying. The next day, another cousin, Rafael, came by. “Eduardo is so happy that you love him,” he said.

“Who says that?” she said.

“That you told that to my brother Moisés last night that you love him and will die if he does not come to see you.”

“Did I say that?”

“Moisés says you did. He told that to Eduardo. Eduardo is very happy. He is proud that you are his girlfriend and that you love him. He loves you.”

“He should come and talk to me himself.”

“Eduardo said you know.”

“You tell him that I am nobody’s girlfriend until I am asked.” She sent Rafael off with that directive and also with a pang in her heart.

She remembers that so well. “I loved it when he was in the store. I felt sad when he was not,” she says.

She heard about a job in a hair salon in Cholula, whose streets begin only a walk away from her home. She went to the hair salon and was hired. The hours were from 4
P.M
. until 9
P.M
., six days a week, at 200 pesos a week, $20 a week. Come back in ten years and the hours and money are the same. She listened to the woman in charge telling everybody what to do, and she did not like it. The job put one ambition in her: She was going to get money from working in America and send it all home for a new house next to her mother’s and have her own hair salon on the first floor.

In this vision, she saw Eduardo coming home from work to this house. He climbs out of a huge truck that delivers bricks. He owns the truck and he owns the brickyard. He got the money for his business by working in the United States with her.

She rushed home at day’s end, so she wouldn’t miss Eduardo.

On one of these nights, after she had left the store, Eduardo and his cousins Rafael and Moisés came to her house. Eduardo asked Silvia’s older sister for permission to talk to Silvia.

When Silvia came out, he said, “Color our hair blond.” The town style for young men was to have a blond streak in front, a rooster streak. Eduardo and the cousins felt like outsiders without it.

“Why ask me?” she remembers saying.

“Because you know how to do it.”

She got out bleach and color and started on Eduardo first. He couldn’t wait to look like a blond rooster.

Silvia ran her fingers through his hair. He wriggled at the touch.

“I can’t do it if you don’t stay still,” she said.

He tried to brace himself. She could not resist drawing her fingertips across the nape of his neck. He shivered.

Now she started to bleach his hair. She had the coloring in a cup and she brushed it into his hair.

She ran her fingers lightly over his neck.

He made a sound.

But the most resonant sound came from the doorway where her father, Cristino, was watching with rising apprehension.

“Get me coffee,” he said.

Silvia indicated that she was working.

“I want coffee,” the father said.

Silvia had to stop and went to the small stove and heated coffee and gave it to her father, who sat on a chair like it was a guard tower.

“Why does he want his hair like this?”

“All the boys want it.”

“Why do you do it for him?”

“He asks.”

“Is he going to pay you?”

“No.”

He asked Moisés and Rafael, “You pay her?”

They were uncomfortable but said no.

“Then why should you do it?” the father said to Silvia.
“Comida.”
He wanted to eat.

She held out her hands to show the bleach and color still on them.

He waved that off.
“Comida.”

She rushed through Eduardo’s rooster streak and told the other two that she would be right out. She went to the stove, where earlier she had made chicken and vegetables for her father.

She heard him say to Eduardo, “What time do you have to be home?”

“Eleven,” Eduardo said.

“It is late now,” the father said.

Eduardo’s two cousins grunted. They would go another day without the rooster streak.

That night was the start of the father’s fifteen-minute policy.

If Silvia or any of his other daughters was outside at night for more than fifteen minutes, he called out, “What are you doing out there? What are you talking to them about? Come in here and tell me what you are saying to them.”

To Silvia, who was openly taken with Eduardo, thus drawing the father’s sharpest attention, he said, “Here, you. Come in and make me coffee.”

As she served him, she remembers him telling her, “You can talk a little while with a boy. Fifteen minutes. That is the most. Then you come in.”

What he didn’t know was that her ears were filled only with Eduardo’s silence.

Over the months, the father’s crossness waned. The desire to
have his daughters fluttering around him lessened as he considered their futures and realized what every other family in San Matías did: that while it was sad to have children go away, it still was not as painful as having them all at the dinner table with truncated futures.

Always, a coyote—a smuggler—named Manuel was around the corner like a cab driver, collecting money from somebody who wanted to go to America through the Tijuana border. There were others around, walking the streets of the run-down section and onto the narrow, crowded shop streets. There was Angel, whose connections took you through Sonora to Tucson, and Pedro, whose route was through Matamoros and into Brownsville, Texas. They had unlimited customers. Virtually none of the young in these towns around Puebla thought of any future except going to America. So many people told Silvia that a chambermaid job in America was far better than what she had.

One night, she had a dream in which she was on a bus with her uncle going to the border and America, her hand gripping the back of the seat in front of her to ease the rocking. The next night she had the same dream.

Suddenly her father said to Silvia, “I know you think of going to America.”

Of course she had thought of this, but it was for sometime ahead, and here the father was stating it as imminent. As long as he had brought it up, she would start planning. She waved a hand in the air, and it brushed against the new house she was building with the hair salon on the first floor.

Silvia’s mother said that her brother, Silvia’s uncle, had decided to go to America and if Silvia wanted to go, this would be her only chance for a long time. She would not be allowed to go on such an adventure with strangers. The uncle had arranged with the coyote Pedro to take them on his route through Matamoros and on to Brownsville. Her uncle had a brother and two nieces in College Station,
Texas, where there were many motels and fast-food restaurants that needed Mexicans.

The date was set for Sunday.

Immediately, Silvia told Rafael, the messenger of romance, that she was going to America on Sunday. When Eduardo didn’t come into the store that night, she shrugged, as if to shuck Eduardo off. She and a sister, Emilia, talked about a farewell outing on Saturday night at a dance concert in the stadium in Puebla. Silvia’s favorite group, Bryndis, was appearing. On Friday night, they were talking about this again when Eduardo walked in with his cousins. Hearing the talk about the concert, he said to Emilia, “Can I come with you?”

Emilia said to him, “Okay. You go with her,” meaning Silvia.

She never expected him on Saturday night. Her sister had set 8:30 as the time they all were to leave for the dance, and when that time came around and Eduardo was not there, she got ready to go out with her sisters.

She didn’t know that Eduardo had been outside for a half hour, walking up the block, talking to people, then coming back nervously.

Finally, he was about to knock on the door just as it opened and the sisters bumped into him.

“It is a good idea that you don’t go to the dance alone,” her father said.

Silvia remembers that she and Eduardo stood in the doorway with her father, and they were a sentence away from being officially together.

Eduardo did not say it, but it was obvious that he had nothing else on his mind.

“I wore a tiny black blouse, a white jacket over it, and white pants,” she remembers. She still can see Eduardo in black pants, a white pullover sweater, and his favorite black baseball cap.

The music the group played was slow and the lyrics romantic,
and she was surprised and elated when Eduardo, with no shyness, held her close to him as they danced. She remembers pouring her body over his.

“Are you happy that I’m dancing with you?” he asked her.

“Yes,” she murmured.

“I am happy,” he said.

Some numbers later, still dancing close, he announced with passion, “I am happy I am dancing with you.”

“And I am, too.”

She was sure that the next thing he said would be a proposal, at least to be his girlfriend. Instead he fell silent. He held her tight but said nothing. The last dance was at 2
A.M
. There was a large crowd and only one exit gate, and it took a long time to get through it. Silvia’s sister and her boyfriend and Eduardo and Silvia were up against each other in the big crowd, and now Silvia felt that this would do it—you could see that he was thrilled to be so close to her, as was she.

They got out of the park and into a cab. She sat and waited for him to suggest a stop. The cab went up to her house, next to the store. Her sister and her boyfriend got out. Silvia did not move. Of course he was going to kiss her.

When he did not move for many moments, she got out of the cab.

He waved at her as the cab pulled away.

The next morning, she stood on the street for a moment.

“What are you doing there?” her mother said. “Your uncle won’t be here for a half hour.”

“I know,” she said.

She waited in that dusty street, and when Eduardo did not come up it, she was about to break all the rules of her life and go down to that brickyard and maybe the moment he saw her he would come over and hold her, the way he had when they had
danced the night before, and he would tell her that he wanted her to be his girlfriend and then she would say to her uncle, no, you go, I am staying here because I love Eduardo.

“Are you ready?” she remembers hearing her uncle say.

This was on the morning of May 8, 1998.

CHAPTER FIVE

S
ilvia was going into a world where the two American faiths rule at once, and people like her die because they cannot tell the difference.

There is the American worship of commerce that piles money to the sky and makes all good people rich. This moves in the opposite direction of an older belief, one whose prayer books still carry the smell of cold winter seawater from the wood ships of the Puritans, who came to run the morals of a nation. All these years later, their teachings that dourness is good and laughter is bad still cause Washington to make the control of strangers of great importance. If they are not white, then they come from the devil.

There was an afternoon in the House of Representatives in Washington when Peter King watched warily as Rick Lazio walked toward him.

King, a Republican congressman from Long Island, was standing in the aisle and Lazio, then another Republican congressman from Long Island, came on an errand on behalf of the Speaker of the House of Representatives, Newt Gingrich. It was over a bill that would allow immigrants without papers to be deported, right at the
airport if found there, with no hearings. Tackle them in airports and at borders, tie them up, and send them back like packages. No hearing or evidence would be required.