Across the Wire (5 page)

Then there are those who are so far “out” that the mind reels. In the Tijuana
dompe,
the outcasts were located along the western edge of the settlement in shacks and lean-tos, in an area known as “the pig village.” This was where the untouchables of this society of untouchables slept, among the pigs awaiting slaughter.

I knew them all: the Serranos, the Cheese Lady, Pacha, Jesusita.

I
t was raining. It had been raining for weeks, and the weather was unremittingly cold. The early-morning van-loadings were glum; all spring and summer and even into the fall, more volunteers than we’d known what to do with joined us for the weekly trips into Mexico. One day, we had over a hundred eager American kids loaded into buses ready to go forth and change the world. Now, though, as the late-winter/early-spring rain came, the group dwindled. Sometimes we were reduced to a small core of old-timers, six to ten at most.

When we pulled into the dump, the vans slid almost sideways in the viscous, slick mud. Windchill turned the air icy;
there was no smoke to speak of that day, and the dogs were mostly hiding. Women awaiting food were lined up, covering their heads with plastic sheets. Even in this wind and wet they joked and laughed. This feature of the Mexican personality is often the cause of much misunderstanding—that if Mexicans are so cheerful, then they certainly couldn’t be hungry or ill. It leads to the myth of the quaint and jovial peasant with a lusty, Zorba-like love affair with life. Like the myth of the lazy Mexican, sleeping his life away, it’s a lie.

Perhaps the women laughed because they were simply relieved to be getting food. Perhaps they were embarrassed—Mexicans are often shamed by accepting help of any kind. When embarrassed or ashamed, they often overcompensate, becoming boisterous, seemingly carefree. Or maybe the poor don’t feel the compunction to play the humble and quiet role we assign them in our minds.

As I climbed out of the van, Doña Araceli, the Cheese Lady, bustled over to me. We called her the Cheese Lady because she had taken to coming to the dump with globs of drippy white goat cheese wrapped in cloth. She sold it to the locals, and she always pressed a lump of it into my hands as a gift. Nobody in the crew had the guts to taste it. We’d pass the cheese around for a couple of hours, then unload it at an orphanage or a
barrio
in Tijuana.

Doña Araceli was extremely agitated. She had discovered a new family—a married couple, several children, including toddlers, and one daughter with an infant—and they had no house to stay in. They were very poor, she said, and in dire need of help.

One of our projects over the years was to build homes and churches for the poor. An associate of ours named Aubrey
devised an ingeniously simple construction plan. He collected garage doors from houses being torn down or renovated; these doors, hammered to a simple wooden frame, made handy walls. Depending on how many doors were available, the new house could be as long or as wide as the builders chose. With saws and donated windows, Aubrey could modify the place and make it quite fancy. The roofs were either more garage doors, plywood, or two-by-six planks covered with plastic sheeting that was either carpet-tacked or stapled into place. Old carpets and plastic sheets were transformed into a quick floor. Once a month, we had a
dompe
workday: truckloads of youths armed with tools came in and began hammering, and in a matter of hours, they created a new building.

Doña Araceli wanted us to build this family a house right away. She said the mother was waiting to meet me. The woman’s name was Jesusita. Little Jesus.

Jesusita shook my hand and called me
“Hermano”—
“Brother.”

This is not a common Mexican greeting; it is used among Protestants as a shorthand for “fellow Christian.” A “real” Mexican would never resort to such Protestant language (though it is a habit for Mexicans to call each other “
’mano,”
which is short for “brother” but actually takes the place of “pal” or “dude.” Mexican linguistics are a delicate and confusing art:
mano
also means “hand”). The poor, however, deal with missionaries and soon learn to use the more religious term freely. It is often a manipulative thing. They are hoping you will assume they are
“Hallelujahs,”
too, and give them more goods than the rest. Consequently, Jesusita’s
“Hermano”
didn’t move me. I paid it no heed.

What really caught my eye instead was her face. She was small, a round woman with gray hair and the kind of face that retains a hint of young beauty under layers of pain and comfortless years. Her eyes, nestled in laugh lines, were a light, nutbrown color. She smiled easily. She wound her hair in twin braids and pinned it to the top of her head, framing her face. She made me feel happy, absurdly pleased, as though she were a long-lost aunt who had appeared with a plate of cookies.

Over the next year, as we got to be friends, she lavished me with bear hugs. Her head fit easily beneath my chin. On the day I met her, though, she cried.

“Hermano,”
she said,
“vinimos desde el sur, y no tenemos casa.”
(We came from the south, and we don’t have a house.)
“Somos muchos, todos mis hijos, un nietito, y mi señor
.” (There are many of us, all my children, a little grandson, and my husband.)

“Help her, Luis!” cried Doña Araceli.

Jesusita’s full name was María de Jesús. Mary of Jesus.

Requests for help were a constant; they were the rule. That Jesusita needed assistance didn’t make her special, but something about her involved me right away. I suppose it is the thing we conveniently call “chemistry.” Still, Jesusita was one face in a river of hundreds.

Everyone needed help. For example, there was the family recently arrived from near Guadalajara. They had no clothes except what they were wearing, and the children were so infected with scabies that their skin looked like old chewing gum. Scabies is a mange caused by a burrowing mite, a louse, that tunnels through your flesh, leaving eggs under your skin. You scratch and scratch, but can never quite get to the itch—the mites move in you at night. They like crotches and armpits.
Scabies victims claw themselves raw. The kids didn’t understand what was wrong with them. They all slept together, and the mites could easily move from body to body. Their beds were full of these mites; their clothes and underwear were also infested.

When we tried to explain what was causing their itch, they looked at us with disbelief and laughed.

The family was living in a shack on a hillside across the highway from the dump. It could be reached only after a long and confusing drive through crooked alleys and ridgetop dirt paths. Lean-tos thrown together by junkies and winos surrounded their shack. You could smell the booze and urine coming through the slats. There was a small goat tied to a stake in the dirt, and no lights brightened the neighborhood save for small fires and the occasional flashlight. The men’s voices were thick; they cursed and broke glass in the dark. In the shack hid Socorro, the thirteen-year-old daughter. The men wanted her. They’d come out after dark and storm the house, trying to break through the doors and walls to get to her. When I went up there one night, waving my flashlight in the dust clouds, I could hear them outside Socorro’s door, howling.

Clearly, the Guadalajarans needed a new house. Everywhere we turned, someone needed a new house. Jesusita’s family would have to wait for theirs, though we committed to giving them assistance wherever it was possible. I told Jesusita to wait for us in her place down the hill, and we’d be down as soon as we could. She cried again and put her arms around me.
“Gracias, Luis,”
she said.
“Gratias, Hermano Luis.”

T
his is a record of a small event that happened on a typical spring day near the pig village.

I was unloading one of the vans—the huge Dodge we called “the White Elephant.” Some of my friends were standing around the van with me—Doña Araceli, a Mixtec woman named Juanita, and a little girl named Negra. I noticed a woman standing in the distance, among the trash piles. I didn’t recognize her. None of the dump people seemed to know her, either. We watched her lurch back and forth, spitting and waving her arms. She would occasionally glare at me, start toward me, then stop after a few steps and curse. Her face looked like a rubber mask: white creases and a red-slash mouth.

“Is she drunk?” said Juanita. I said something, no doubt a joke, and leaned into the van. I worked the box I was looking for free by shoving one of the heavy bags of beans out of the way. When I turned around, the woman was standing right beside me, staring into my face. She snarled.

I stumbled back from her. Her hair stood straight off her scalp as though she were taking a heavy charge of electricity through her feet. She was wheezing.

One of the women said, “She’s crazy,
Hermano.”

“Fuck you,” she snapped. Her voice was deep, like a man’s voice. “
Vete a la chingada.”

She leaned toward me. “We know you,” she said. “We know who you are. We know what you’re doing.”

I laughed nervously. “What?” I said.

“You’ll pay for this.”

I put down my box. “I don’t understand,” I said.

She began to rasp obscenities in her man’s voice. “We
know
you. We’ll get you.”

She spun around and jerked away from us, very fast. She stumbled over rocks in the road, but kept moving, shouting all the time,
“¡Vas a ver!
You’ll see! We’ll get you. We’ll stop you.”

She paused in front of Pacha’s house at the top of the hill, gesturing at me and yelling her strange threats. The hair at the back of my neck began to rise.

“Is she drunk?” Juanita repeated.

The woman threw her head back and screamed.

P
acha had startling eyes. They had a kind of gold-green edge; they had yellow flecks, like the eyes of a cat. They slanted up the slightest bit. If she’d lived anywhere but the Tijuana garbage dump, her eyes would have seemed like a movie star’s.

She lived with a thin, dark man named José. He called himself her husband, though he was not the father of her children. His face was craggy and his teeth long, hidden by a thick black mustache. When he talked to you, he’d bob his head and grin. When either of them laughed, they’d cover their mouths with their hands. They were pagans when they came north, of full Indian blood, and not used to church services or ministers. Their marriage ceremony was more personal and private—José moved into Pacha’s bed. He became her mate, and he remained faithful to her. It was a simple agreement, as firm as a wolf’s.

José liked Jesus very much. When Pastor Von and his workers visited his house, José always asked Von to pray for him. We put our arms around each other and Von prayed and I translated
and José kept saying, “Thank you, Jesus, for listening to me.” He cried.

Pacha wouldn’t come to the vans to get food. She said it embarrassed her to be begging and fighting with all those other women. I made it a habit to save her out a box of goods, and after the crowds dissipated a bit, I would take it up to her.

Her home was on a slope that swept down into the dump; hers was a long, meandering shack with a low roof and uneven walls. The entire house was at an angle. José designed it this way so that the rain, when it came, would flow through the house, under their bed, and down the hill. He was very proud of his ingenuity: he had built one of the dump’s best-engineered houses. Those who built below him, on flatland or in hollows, found themselves in puddles of mud all winter.

Their floor was a conglomeration of carpet pieces and stray linoleum squares. José and Pacha pressed them into wet soil. The exterior walls were board. The interior walls were cardboard, with an occasional bit of wood—fruit crates, barrel slats. They sealed the gaps with plastic sheeting.

They did have one luxury: a bed. It was quite odd to look through a door and see a big bed with an iron bedframe and headboard. Often a bed was the only thing people in the dumps owned that was worth anything. Except for televisions.

You’d see little black and white TV sets scattered through the dump. There was no electricity, but there were wrecked cars in the
yonkes
in the valleys. The men took the car batteries and hooked the TV sets to them. Sometimes the TVs were balanced on huge oil cans—rusted Pemex, Opec barrels—which, when filled with paper and dung or twigs, served as stoves.

Pacha didn’t have a television, but she did have oil barrels: she cooked in one of them. The other she used to store water. It
was full of mosquito larvae wiggling like tiny fish. Its water was the color of blood.

Pacha’s eldest daughter offered to pay me to smuggle her across the border. She was pregnant—her husband had gone across the wire and never come back. She watched for him on a neighbor’s television. I told her I couldn’t do it.

On New Year’s morning, she had her baby in the free clinic in Tijuana. The nurse took the infant and dunked it in a tub of icy water. It had a heart attack and died. It was a girl.

Pacha got pregnant next. Her belly stuck out far and hard, like a basketball, from her small body. When we arrived at the dump, she stood in front of her house with José, pointed at me and laughed. They laughed a lot. She was furious with me if I didn’t come up the hill right away to see her kids.

José had hurt his back. He could barely stand, much less work, and the days were hard for Pacha and her kids. They all had to take the trash-picking poles and work the mounds, supporting José, who would give out after a few hours.

When I took them the food, I’d pat that huge stomach and shout, “What are you doing in there!” They would laugh, and she would scold me for waking him up. It was José’s first child with her, the seal of their marriage.

One day, when we drove over the hill, a crowd was there, milling. It was hot—the flies had hatched, and were forming clouds that swept out of the trash like black dust devils. The rain had been over for months, and the deep heat was on. I glanced at Pacha’s house—nobody in front. Then I saw an old pickup truck coming up the hill. José was in the back with a group of men. They held cloudy bottles by the necks.