The Book of Unknown Americans: A novel (10 page)

By evening, everyone’s front doors were open and people were roaming in and out of each other’s units, watching each other’s televisions as if a different set would deliver different news, checking to see if anyone had heard anything new, getting tedious translations. Benny Quinto led prayer circles in his living room and offered to smoke with anyone who needed to calm their nerves. “Weed,” Enrique told me when he heard Benny talking about it. “Nice.” Micho Alvarez paced up and
down the balcony, talking on his cell phone and jotting things in his notebook. Gustavo Milhojas, who was half-Mexican and half-Guatemalan, wrote a letter to the army telling them that as of that day he was 100 percent American and that he was ready to serve the country and kill the cowards who had murdered his fellow paisanos. At the end he wrote, “And here is a list of people who are willing to join me.” He drew a few blank lines and spent the afternoon trying to recruit everyone in the building. When my mom saw what it was, she said, “More killing? That’s what you want?
More?
” And Gustavo said, “Not killing. Justice.”

That year around the holidays we were all miserable. Holidays were always bad—my mom in particular got homesick sometimes like it was a genuine illness—but that Christmas was the worst. We were depressed and on edge, still shaken up about September 11, and then re-shaken when someone tried to blow up another plane by hiding a bomb in his shoes two days before Christmas Eve.

My aunt called, which cheered my mom up for a while, but once that wore off, she was more down than ever, shuffling around the house in her slippers, no makeup, her hair a disaster. She carried tissues in the pocket of her bathrobe and made a big show of dabbing her nose with them every so often. Eventually, my dad came up with an idea. “You want Panamá?” he said. “A beach is the closest thing you’re going to get.” He hustled us out the door and down the street, where we took a chain of buses for an hour and a half to Cape Henlopen in southern Delaware. It was snowing when we arrived—Enrique kept complaining that the snow was going to mess up his beloved Adidas sneakers—and everything was so colorless and barren that it looked like the moon. I had to hand it to my dad, though. With the water
and the sand, my mom said it almost
was
like a little piece of Panamá. The waves roared in toward us and then silently pulled back again, slipping over the shore. Even with the falling snow, the air had the sting of salt water, and we crunched broken sea-shells under our shoes. But one beach isn’t every beach. And one home isn’t every home. And I think we all sensed, standing there, just how far we were from where we had come, in ways both good and bad. “It’s beautiful,” my mom said, staring out at the ocean. She sighed and shook her head. “This country.”

My name is Gustavo Milhojas. I was born in Chinique, El Quiché, Guatemala, in 1960, the year hell came to that country. I arrived in the United States on November 14, 2000. Before that, I resided in México.

My mother is of Guatemalan descent, while my father’s bloodlines run through México. However, my father was not part of my life. My mother raised my three brothers and me by herself in Guatemala. She did her best, working two jobs and attempting to teach us right from wrong, but there were forces beyond her control.

The military in Guatemala at that time became too powerful, and the people revolted. The army began kidnapping citizens who they suspected were against them. They were burying people alive. They were raping women thirty times a day. They were laying babies on the ground and crushing their skulls with their boots. How could a baby be against them? Perhaps it was a way to torture the parents.

I couldn’t take it anymore. When I was twenty, I decided to leave. I attempted to persuade my mother and my brothers to go to México. I made the argument that because of my father, we had a claim to it. But my mother was stubborn. She said if I didn’t like the way things were, I shouldn’t run away. I should stay there and commit myself to fixing them. But that’s what the guerrillas had been trying to do for decades and I saw no progress. “No,” I told her. “I need to go somewhere else.”

I went to México on my own. I believed it would be easy for me to make a new home there, but no one in México wanted anything to do with a Guatemalan. The Mexicans look down on us. They believe Guatemalans are stupid. To tell them I was half-Mexican only made things worse. They were offended to think that any Mexican man would have stooped so low as to be with a Guatemalan woman to create me.

I was living in Córdoba. Things were terrible for me there—I couldn’t find a job unless I was willing to let myself be taken advantage of, working sometimes for only a few pesos a day—until I met a woman named Isabel, who changed everything for me. She was Mexican, from Veracruz, and her parents disapproved of me. But we fell in love and decided we would be together no matter what anybody said.

We married in 1982 and had two children—first a boy and then a girl. We were so happy. I was still treated poorly sometimes, but I had gained a different sort of confidence since being with Isabel, and the poor treatment didn’t bother me as much.

Seventeen years after we married, Isabel passed away. She had cancer of the breast. Here, I find that everyone knows about this cancer. Last fall, there were pink ribbons in the movie theaters and in all the stores, and someone told me it was for this type of cancer. But at that time we lived in a small village called Tehuipango where the medical care was very basic. We found a doctor who told us what she had, but he could not tell us how to fix it. He said, “She needs to rest. She will die soon.” I did my best to take care of her. By the time we found out, she was already very weak. I put bags of ice on her chest to help numb the pain. I gave her aspirin to ease the aches. Nothing helped. Three months later, she was gone.

The children were very upset. They were both in high school
at that time. Isabel and I were so proud of them. They studied hard. They wanted to go to college. My son wants to become a businessman and my daughter wants to become a nurse.

After Isabel died I didn’t know how I would make this happen. Isabel was a cook. She made desserts for everyone in our village—dulce de camote con piña, empanadas de guayaba, palanquetas de cacahuate. When someone wanted a birthday cake, they came to her. When someone was throwing a party, they came to her. Every day, she sold fresh soups straight out of the pots on our stove. I worked, too, harvesting maize and fava beans. But the money she made from cooking helped support us. Without it, we didn’t have much.

I came to the United States to earn more money for my children. They are living with a family friend now while I’m here. I did not think of it so much as a choice as an obligation. It is my obligation to provide a good life for them. My son is in college now, and my daughter will start college next year at Universidad Veracruzana in Orizaba. This makes me happy because I believe it means they will both get to do what they want to do. There are not many people who can say that.

I thought it would be very difficult to cross. It was after September 11 and the security was supposed to be high. I crowded with a group of men into the back of a van with tinted windows. We were all on the floor, under a heavy black burlap blanket and, on top of that, a lot of empty cardboard boxes that were meant to look like freight. We drove right up to the checkpoint. A guard examined the driver’s papers, which were legitimate. The guard did not know we were in the back of the van. He did not even look. The driver simply told him he was transporting construction supplies for a job in El Paso. There was a long pause. All of us in the back held our breath, waiting to be discovered. And
then the guard let the driver through. That was it. It was almost unbelievable to me.

I found a job as soon as I could and began sending money back to my children. I started off in a mattress warehouse, dragging mattresses down metal ramps at the back of the store and loading them onto delivery trucks. When a mattress was defective, sometimes one of the employees kept it. The bed I have today is from that job.

For a while, I worked at a canning factory where we packaged chiles and salsa. It wasn’t very clean. There were maggots everywhere. The owners blamed the conditions on the workers. Besides that, I didn’t like standing in one place for ten hours. We got only one break for fifteen minutes.

Now I have two jobs. Five mornings a week I work at the Newark Shopping Center movie theater, cleaning the bathrooms and the theaters. I make sure there’s toilet paper in the stalls. I mop the floors. I have a wire brush I use to clean the sinks. In the evenings I work at the Movies 10 movie theater in Stanton. That job is harder because there are so many theaters. If too many movies finish all at once, it’s a challenge to clean the theaters before the next group of people comes in. I have been reprimanded for leaving an empty cup in the seat arm. Usually I don’t have time to go home between my shifts, so many times I eat popcorn and soda for dinner.

But I am very grateful for these jobs. They allow me to send money to my children to pay for their schooling. When both of them graduate, I would like to go back to México to be with them. My wish is that they’ll do something worthwhile with their lives, something more important than sweeping popcorn. I have done what I can for them. I would like to see them give something back.

Arturo came home from work each day tired and hungry, the crevices of his skin caked with dirt. He went straight to the shower and stood under the spray of the warm water until I knocked on the door and told him that dinner was ready. When we started seeing each other, one of the traits that had attracted me to Arturo was how serious he could be, the way that he furrowed his eyebrows when I used to watch him on a job, the intensity of focus and the pride he took in doing the job well. I was stubborn, but I had never been as solemn as him, and I admired the strength that his solemnity seemed to represent. Of course, in time I learned his soft spots, like bruises on a piece of fruit. He was compassionate and kind, and hearing of others’ hardships affected him so much that usually he couldn’t stop himself from doing something to help. Once, when a young girl in our town lost her sight after a propane tank exploded in her face, Arturo built a birdhouse and put it on a stake in the girl’s backyard so that when she opened her bedroom window, she would hear the songs of warblers and mockingbirds. But he could also be uncompromising and hard on himself. And since the accident, those traits that I loved had given way to something darker—seriousness had become gravity, sensitivity had transformed into melancholy. I didn’t always see it. Arturo fought to preserve his better nature. But occasionally his despair came through.

I found him one Sunday morning in the kitchen on his hands
and knees, his head inside a cabinet. I had just gotten dressed, and I went up behind him and kicked him lightly. “Hey!” he shouted, curling his head out.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

“I’m looking for a bowl.”

“Why?”

“Maribel wanted pineapple.”

“I would have gotten it for her.”

“I thought we had a glass bowl,” he said.

“We didn’t bring it with us.”

“Why not?”

“We have a metal bowl.” I started toward the cabinet where I’d stored it.

“I don’t want a metal bowl,” he said.

“It’s a perfectly good bowl.”

“When I eat something out of a metal bowl, it tastes different afterwards.”

“What are you talking about?”

“It tastes like I mixed in a handful of coins.”

I smiled.

“You know what I’m saying, don’t you?”

“Yes, I know what you’re saying.”

“I wish we had brought that glass bowl,” he said.

I looked at him and understood that we weren’t just talking about bowls anymore. I smoothed my hand over his thick hair, cupping the back of his neck. Arturo wrapped his arms around my legs like a child.

“We’ll see it again,” I said.

And I imagined it, that glass bowl with the flat bottom and the broad rim, nestled in the lower kitchen cabinet whose door creaked when it opened, nestled among the pots and pans, in
the room nestled among other rooms—the bathroom where Maribel had hung a calendar to mark when to expect her next period, the bedroom where the nightgowns and socks and collared shirts that we had left behind were piled on top of the quilt my mother had sewn and given to us as a wedding gift, the sala with the bone-inlaid picture frames housing black-and-white photographs of our grandparents, who had passed, and of our great-grandparents, whom we had never known—all of which were nestled between the backyard with our old rope hammock and the stone half wall that was crumbling at one corner and the front yard, which was hardly a yard at all, just pebbles and aloe plants and a space where Arturo parked the pickup truck that he and I used to sit in together while we looked up at the stars. And all of that nestled in the town where the three of us had been born and had grown up, the town where my parents still lived and where Arturo’s parents had died, the town where we’d shared meals and drinks and late nights filled with laughter with our lifelong friends. All of it waiting so patiently. All of it so far away.

FOR A WHILE
I made the meals we used to eat in Pátzcuaro—sopa tarasca and huachinango and corundas con churipo—but eating foods from home in a place that wasn’t our home only made things worse. Besides, the imported chiles and guajillo were expensive, and already we were living on so little. We had some money saved, but Arturo and I had both agreed not to touch it unless there was an emergency, which meant unless we had to take Maribel to a doctor or rush her to the hospital. For now we were getting by on Arturo’s paycheck week to week, which was just enough to cover rent and bus fare and food.

Eventually I stopped shopping at Gigante because it drove
me crazy to see all the things we couldn’t afford to buy. All those crates of nopalitos and epazote and tender corn, all those shelves of pickled red onions and tequesquite and coriander taunting me. I started buying food at the Dollar Tree instead. Food in cans, food in boxes. Add water and heat.