Amigoland (6 page)

C
lose to noon, after doing the cleaning and washing, Socorro packed his shaving kit and some clean clothes into a paper bag,
then walked down the street to ask for a ride.

“The thing is that he should not be living by himself,” la señora Muñoz said as she drove. She had come out in her housecoat
and open-toed slippers.

“Some people like to be alone.” Socorro looked out the window at the palm trees along the median. They were traveling up one
of the main streets in Brownsville, the same one he’d taken to show her the barbershop where he had worked so many years.

“But he shouldn’t be one of those people, not at his age. His wife would not have wanted him to be alone — that I do know.
Don Celestino has been lucky until now.”

“And his family?” she asked, hoping it didn’t sound like the cleaning woman was asking more than she should.

“One of his daughters tried to get him to go live with her in San Antonio, but he wanted to stay here, in his own house.”
La señora slowed down for the speed bumps leading up to the hospital. “No matter how nice a man he might be, you have to remember
he is still a man and very thickheaded.”

She stood outside the entrance, watching her reflection disappear and then reappear in the sliding glass doors. Before driving
off, la señora had scribbled the hospital-room number on the back of an old receipt. Now Socorro held on to the receipt and
the paper bag filled with his clean clothes. Just beyond the sliding glass doors, a thick-necked security guard sat behind
a large desk, eating the last bit of an empanada. His dark uniform reminded her of the men and women who every morning asked
her to state her purpose for wanting to enter the country. To clean your house, she felt like saying. Why else would she be
there practically every day of the week? She waited next to the sliding doors, allowing others to walk by her. This wasn’t
like the clinics on the other side of the river, where they had taken her mother when she started complaining about the terrible
headaches and about her hands, which she could hardly open anymore. Or later after her first attack, when they had to rush
her to the hospital. At least then Socorro knew she could open her mouth, defend herself if necessary. Not that she’d ever
had any real problems coming across; she knew this, yet she hesitated as if someone would suddenly run her off, tell her she
had no business here. Even dressed nicely, she was still a cleaning woman from the other side. She could see this every time
the sliding glass doors came back together. And as if it were not already obvious, the hem of her skirt was smudged with some
dust that she had tried to wipe away. She thought about leaving and simply walking back to the house or the bridge, but then
the guard’s phone rang, and as he was cradling the receiver on his shoulder, searching through some paperwork, she had just
enough time to scuttle past the desk.

Once she arrived at the elevator, a maintenance worker explained to her how to find the room. Socorro stayed close to the
plastic railing, making herself small as she walked by the nurses’ station. When she was almost at the room, she stopped altogether.
She asked herself why she was doing this and if she shouldn’t have stayed at his house and finished the washing and cleaning,
what he paid her to do. The rest of it, what had occurred those Thursday afternoons, was between them. And all of this was
agreed to without either one of them having to say a word, as if they both understood that they had crossed some clear and
definitive line. Only it had continued to happen. And so the line between being his cleaning lady and his lover had blurred
before she realized it, and yet because no one else knew about them, the line had become more entrenched, like a moat intended
to keep them apart.

Earlier that morning on the bus, she had sat next to Tere, a girl who lived around the corner from the apartment, and she
thought about telling her everything, the meals and talks they would have at his house, the way she started finding more work
for herself so their afternoons wouldn’t end so quickly, the first time she thought he might be interested, the first time
they kissed, the first time they were really together, but mainly about all the things that worried her now. After the bus
dropped them off, she had another chance to tell her during the walk to the bridge and even during the walk to the other side,
and then again when they were both waiting for their rides on the street. She didn’t tell her for two reasons: the first was
that Tere was just a girl who lived around the corner from the apartment. They had spoken a handful of times when they happened
to be on the same schedule or they ran into each other at the little store down the street, each buying something for her
mother, but this was the extent of their friendship. Maybe she would’ve had someone to tell if she hadn’t spent all her time
either working or at home. Which was the second reason she had stopped herself from saying anything to Tere: she didn’t want
it getting back to her mother and aunt. Already she could hear them accusing her of offering herself to him. Explaining it
wasn’t like that and that things had started innocently between them would do little to help her mother understand what had
happened.

She’d learned her lesson with Rogelio. The first years were difficult because of his temper, which seemed to be set off with
the slightest disagreement. Her mother had told her to be more forgiving, that he would change once they had a family. It
would be natural for him to want to be patient with their children. And perhaps this was true, but after four years she still
wasn’t pregnant. He didn’t want to hear about her body. He didn’t want to know about her cycle or anything else that did not
directly concern him. That was for her to talk about with other women. He was not a woman — he was her husband. And no, there
was no money to go see a special doctor. If they were ever going to have a child, it would be the same way every other man
and woman did it, not with the help of some doctor. And so she prayed for God to bring them the child they had been waiting
for. The miracle happened shortly after their sixth wedding anniversary, only not for her. Rather than stay with him at his
family’s house, she moved home. Her mother tried to convince her to go back, speaking of him as though nothing had changed
and he was the same polite boy whose older brother and father had walked over to ask for her hand. The truth was she couldn’t
stop blaming herself for his wandering and finding someone else who could give him what he wanted. With a baby on the way,
he started crossing the river again to look for work. She never liked the idea of him swimming to the other side, but it had
never been in his nature to agree with her, so as usual he continued doing whatever occurred to him. As time passed she came
to accept that this baby and its mother were not going to change things: Rogelio was still her husband; she was still his
wife. After a couple of weeks away, she decided she was ready to move back. She was waiting to tell him this when his naked
body turned up, floating in the steady current beneath the bridge.

Just thinking of that time made her want to leave the hospital. She stalled by looking inside the bag, pretending to search
for some item she might have forgotten. After all this effort she knew she couldn’t leave now, not when it had taken her most
of the morning to work up the courage to ask for a ride. Perhaps she’d imagined it, but it seemed as if la señora had hesitated,
as if she might not have heard correctly —
The cleaning woman wants a ride to the hospital so she can visit the man she works for?
Socorro wrestled with the feeling that she might be stepping beyond what was considered acceptable or proper, and in this
way revealing what he had wanted to keep private. She asked herself how it would look if she went to the hospital for any
of the other people whose houses she cleaned, some for much longer periods of time, but then decided it was better to not
wait around for the answer.

She stood at the door, not wanting to interrupt what the doctor might be saying or wake the patient if he happened to be resting.
Maybe she would just leave his clothes at the nurses’ station. When she did look around the corner, it was a nurse who was
standing next to the bed and writing some notes on a metal clipboard. Don Celestino was lying back in the bed against a couple
of pillows. His disheveled white hair from earlier that morning was now combed back in the way he normally wore it, and it
looked as though he had shaved, maybe even trimmed the edges of his mustache.

“Is that you, Socorro?” he asked, squinting through his tinted glasses. “You came all this way to visit me in the hospital?”
He used both hands to adjust himself and sit up straight in the bed. “Look at how they attached all these wires to me. All
I needed was to eat a good breakfast so my sugar would be back to normal again. Now they want to run some tests, just to be
sure about my heart. Please, Socorro, tell this young man here that I have many more years left in me. Tell him Celestino
Rosales is not going anywhere.” He held his hands out for her to come closer.

She walked to the bed and kissed him on the cheek. It was a common enough gesture, one she had repeated countless times throughout
her life, though never with anyone whose house she cleaned. And as his white whiskers brushed against her cheek, she wanted
more than anything to believe that the differences in their ages and positions were gently being swept aside.

S
alinas was coughing on the other side of the curtain. The greenish glow of the monitors added the only bit of light to the
dark room. Don Celestino had briefly introduced himself when they’d brought the man in that afternoon. He might have spoken
more to him then, but the man’s wife stayed around until late in the evening, leaning back in a recliner and watching novelas
and talk shows. She wore at least one ring on almost every finger and a gold fifty-peso medallion that rested on her broad
chest like the hood ornament on an expensive car. Occasionally she talked back to the philandering men or the scantily dressed
women on the screen, but otherwise hardly any sound came from the other side of the retractable curtain. The few times he
had caught a glimpse of Salinas, the man had looked back in a tortured sort of way.

Sometime after midnight Don Celestino stepped off the bed to go relieve himself. He waved as he passed his neighbor’s bed,
but the man was turned away as if trying to fall asleep.

On his way back, he noticed him staring at the ceiling. “Trouble sleeping?”

“Already for a long time,” Salinas said. “Maybe when that old woman of mine comes in the morning.”

Don Celestino only nodded as he pulled along his IV unit and climbed into bed.

“And you,” Salinas asked, “are you married?”

“My wife died last year,” Don Celestino replied. “I’m alone now.”

After a moment Salinas cleared his throat. “Forgive me.”

Don Celestino fell in and out of sleep, for a time gazing out the window and later just lying there with his eyes shut. It
struck him that if he were to pass during the night, his family wouldn’t be there to even notice he was gone. This was the
same hospital where they had come when Dora had been feeling sick, and her doctor, after so many other tests, couldn’t figure
out why she had become so bloated. It had taken opening her up to find that the cancer had by then spread throughout most
of her stomach. One day he had been married more than half his life, and a few weeks later he was alone. And alone he had
stayed for the first couple of months, rarely leaving the house and refusing to go see his children when they pleaded with
him to at least come visit. A man who had never lived by himself and suddenly he was doing his own cooking and cleaning. It
was his own illness that finally drew him out some. His doctor urged him to attend the diabetes classes and take control of
the disease. For a few days he questioned if it might not be better to stay at home and ignore the new diet. With no one there
to watch after him, it wouldn’t take long before his health declined. Which might have happened had the doctor not arranged
for a nurse to come help him for the first couple of weeks, until he was comfortable with checking his sugar level and taking
the insulin. Then his neighbor recommended a young woman who could come clean the house for him.

Until their first afternoon together, he’d been afraid Socorro might see him only as the man who paid her $35 every week but
beyond this had little interest in him. It had started this way, as a curiosity more than anything. Was she, could she ever
be, interested in a man more than thirty years her senior? Not that he necessarily showed signs of his age (other than this
unfortunate visit to the hospital). The fact that his hair had turned completely white on him when he was still in his fifties
did little to change his overall appearance. The front still rose into what once might have been called a pompadour, though
on a mature man he believed it presented more of a distinguished look. Whether it had been because of his appearance or his
manner around her or his interest in her life outside of work, it had been enough to draw her closer to him. Since then, though,
he hadn’t been sure what he was supposed to do next. He was, after all, supposed to be mourning the loss of his wife, who
at the time had been gone only a few months.

Close to an hour had passed when he heard a slight cough from the other side of the curtain. “Still awake?”

“I thought this medicine was supposed to make you sleep,” Salinas answered. “You never know with these doctors.”

“When I was a young man, we had different ways of curing a person.”

“You see me here in this bed only because of my wife. She’s the one who has people on this side. I come from Saltillo.”

“Close to Monterrey.”

“You have come to visit the city?”

“No,” Don Celestino said, “but my family came from Nuevo León, close to the town of Linares.”

“For many years I had business in Linares.” Salinas used the control pad to adjust the bed into a reclining position. “Maybe
I met some of your family.”