Across the Wire (20 page)

It was dark. The floor was indistinguishable from the mud that slopped in the yard. Gaps in the slats of the walls wider than a finger let the breeze cut through the room. Three ducks wandered through, commenting on the scene. The apparently ubiquitous pit bull delivered kisses to everyone who came near. Negra’s one bed had been scrounged out of the
trash. We sat on it together, the little ones happy and shiny-eyed.

Nayeli had scabies marks on her belly. Negra’s sister had come back for a short visit from her new life in the U.S.—she’d brought them a small artificial Christmas tree. It stood on some papers beside the scavenged stove, on which two frying pans of cold fried rice gave up their perfume. There was one small gift for each of them under the tree, wrapped in jolly Woolworth paper. Negra’s sister had gotten across the wire, and she’d managed to marry. She had things like Christmas trees and a house with a floor, with windows, bathrooms.

Negra sat beside me holding my hand. She was still wrapped in my blanket. I don’t think I got scabies, though something crawled up under my shirt and gave me a fierce bite, and the itch soon spread into my armpits and across my ribs.

Negra said nothing much. She wanted a picture of my wife and me together. She told me she was suffering very much. “We’re getting her tubes tied after this one,” her mother said. “It’s killing her.” Negra’s man, Jaime, didn’t come home that night.

Elsa, Negra’s littlest girl, stepped to the tree and stared at it, transported. She suddenly pointed at it and cried, as loudly as she could, “We have so many toys!”

During the Christmas season, some fourteen people died of the cold in Tijuana. Eight babies died of exposure on Christmas Eve alone. A man in a Tijuana hotel room died from breathing the fumes of a brazier of coals he had lit for heat. Life continued. A desperate twenty-four-year-old prostitute, faced with a newborn baby she couldn’t care for, wrapped it up, put it in a
box, and stuffed the box in a trash can near the Tijuana bus terminal. Fortunately for the baby, someone heard it crying and lifted the lid of the can. The woman was condemned to prison for three years.

Workers in the garbage dump told me of the babies they’d been finding dead in the trash—deaths not reported by the newspapers. Recently, they were startled to find a mayonnaise jar with a human hand sticking out of it. One woman told me it was clearly intended as a message, but nobody could figure out what the message was supposed to mean.

Most recently, a street girl with mental problems lay down on Revolución and gave birth on the sidewalk. One can only imagine the horrified tourists with their arms full of
serapes
freezing on the sidewalk, not sure what to do.

A couple of times a week, I was lucky enough to go to my Negra’s shack and sit on the bed with her. She had no chairs. I took her food and clothes, slipped her small things. She said, “I dream about how your house must be. It must be big. It has trees. I think they’re fruit trees.” The baby was coming any day now. Negra’s navel, stretched wide by the baby, felt like a soft cup through her sweater. She was terrified that she’d have to deliver the child in her own bed with no medical help. When I asked her how much it would cost to go down the hill to the clinic, she hid her face and started to cry, a desperate silent moment of pure terror. She said, “Seven hundred thousand pesos,” and clutched the blankets. Later, at Tacos El Paisano, the taco-masters figured it out for me on their adding machine: approximately $237.28.

She had Elsa, the last baby, at the Red Cross clinic downtown. The medical student attending her attempted to do an episiotomy, where they slit open the bottom end of the vaginal
opening to facilitate the birth. However, he made a mistake, and Negra was sliced deeply, the cut going through her perineum. She nearly bled to death on the delivery table, the student trying to stanch the flow of blood with his hand as he called desperately for a doctor. They pumped blood from her family members into her to keep her alive.

With help from friends, we managed to come up with the money. She had the baby—a girl named Silvia—in February of 1991. The clinic attempted to make her stay an extra night to rest, but Negra insisted on returning home to take care of Nayeli and Elsa. Victor drove.

I often took Negra food for the week. She liked to cook for us, so Victor and I braved the intestinal danger and sat in her small cooking alcove and ate fried beans, salsa, tortillas, and butchered backyard chickens. We had the good fortune to show up at Nayeli’s fifth birthday—they had nothing to give her, so we bought her a fancy cake. The neighborhood children came over for a party.

The mothers of those children pooled what they had together and gave Negra a baby shower.
“Un chowerr”
they called it. They gave her: one bottle of baby shampoo, one can of baby powder, one baby jumpsuit, one set of booties. She still keeps them in a plastic bag hanging from a nail on the wall.

One of the extra benefits of the “91X X-Mas” drive was a load of garage doors donated to Von by a company called AllPro, in San Diego. Von was in a bind, though—he didn’t have the papers to transport the doors, Aubrey was too busy to use them, and the Baptist church was not amused that Victor and I
had somehow constructed two six-foot-tall towers of five-hundred-pound doors in their parking lot.

In early spring, we secured papers and loaded the doors onto a flatbed on loan from a
gringo
who lived in Tijuana, teaching Mexican boys perfect English. At Negra’s, four
barrio
men rushed to our assistance, and together we unloaded the doors and stacked them in her yard.

Negra’s man, Jaime, then built them a new house on a raised cement foundation, where they live to this day.

Negra asked my wife and me to be the new child’s godparents—
compadres
, in Spanish. Quite literally, “co-parents.” “This time,” she said to me, “you and I can finally be related.”

“It’s an honor,” I said. I put my face to her hair. The top of her head barely cleared my chin.

“Do you think of me as a sister?” she said.

“Yes.”

“Your little sister?”

“Yes.”

“That’s how you love me,” she said.

There was nothing else to say. It wasn’t really a question.

There is not much you can do, but you do what you can, and you dare to hope after all. Heartbreak and hope—business as usual in Tijuana.

Luis Alberto Urrea is the author of
Across the Wire
and
By the Lake of the Sleeping Children
, both non-fiction books about the U.S.–Mexico border; several novels, including
Into the Beautiful North
and
The Hummingbird’s Daughter
; and several collections of poetry. He is a professor of creative writing at University of Illinois at Chicago.

Nonfiction

The Devil’s Highway: A True Story

Nobody’s Son: Notes from

Across the Wire: Life and Hard Times on the Mexican Border

By the Lake of the Sleeping Children: The Secret Life of the Mexican Border

Nobody’s Son: Notes from an American Life

Wandering Time

Fiction

Into the Beautiful North

The Hummingbird’s Daughter

In Search of Snow

Six Kinds of Sky

Poetry

The Fever of Being

Ghost Sickness

Vatos