The Children of Sanchez (13 page)

Well, my father got David a job in the La Gloria restaurant and we all got along fine. But one day, my
papá
came home and found Elena sitting on David’s knee. Now David had always impressed me as being a person completely without malice or evil. Of all my relatives, he was the one I liked best. He had retained the purity of the country and was not rotten like the people of the city. He had a clean soul. That’s why I say he wanted nothing from Elena. It was she who had gone after him, and as a result, David went back to Veracruz.

May God forgive me, but I even believe that my father was jealous of Elena and me. I really believe it, because when a person is angry,
he looks at you in a particular way, and that is how my father used to look at me. I didn’t realize it then but today I can see he was suspicious of Elena and me.

To avoid all the quarrels between Roberto and Elena, my father rented another room in the Casa Grande. We children lived in No. 64 and Elena and her mother, Santitos, lived in No. 103. Elena’s two younger brothers and her sister, Soledad, also lived in No. 64 for a while. We got along well with all of them. Santitos was very nice, very reasonable. She always treated us well, and still does to this day. And, strange thing, she never blamed us for Elena’s death, like my father did.

I was no longer sore at Elena; I began to feel a certain affection and pity for her. I went with her to the tuberculosis dispensary and saw how they gave her the
numo
(pneumothorax). They pushed a kind of tube with air right into her ribs. My father, poor fellow, was terribly worried and he took her to the best doctors he could find. He put her into the General Hospital and quite often sent me there with fruit and food for her.

I believe it was while Elena was in the hospital that my father came home with a cage full of birds. I thought, “How strange that my father bought birds.” I remembered the arguments he had had with my mother because she had wanted him to buy birds for the house. The next day he bought more birds; he kept buying more until the walls of our room were hung with cages. And what a noise when all those birds began to sing at once. It sounded nice, it made me think I was in the country or in a forest.

But my father made Roberto and me get up at six o’clock in the morning to feed them, and I hated the birds for that. I always had trouble getting up early and when I heard my father say, “Manuel! Roberto! Up!” it was terrible for me.

The first few days when my father called, I’d say “
Ay, papá
, my legs hurt. Let Roberto feed the birds.” But Roberto soon caught on and I had to get up too. We had to chop several kilos of bananas with a large
machete
, and mix the fruit with flour and some greens. Then we put the food in each cage, changed the water and cleaned up the bird’s mess.

One day my father said, “Manuel, you are going to the market to sell birds.” It felt good to help my father, I was glad he thought me worthy. But at bottom I was ashamed of the work. I carried the cages,
one on top of the other, and walked through the market trying to sell the birds.

One Wednesday, along came my father, to see how I was doing. While we were standing there, an agent of the Forestry Department came up and asked my father to show him the permit to sell animals. My
papá
didn’t have any permit and since he had never been involved in these things, he got very nervous. I think the bribe he gave the police was larger than the fine.

After that he sold birds only to neighbors and to his fellow workers; he got a lot of customers when he became the
compadre
of a big bird-dealer who lived on the Street of the Potters. I think my father went into selling birds and then pigeons, turkeys, chickens and pigs because, after being a worker for so many years, he discovered that he had a taste for business. It came late to him, but he realized he could make more money that way.

I began to get wind of the existence of my half-sisters, Antonia and Marielena, when I was about fourteen. Before that I had no idea my father had another wife and other children. But I do remember that once, when I was ten years old, my father took me to help him in La Gloria restaurant. On the way home, we came to Rosario Street and my
papá
said, “You wait here on the corner.” He left me and walked into a tenement. I wondered, “What’s my
papá
doing there, whom is he going to see?” I got a feeling something like jealousy. I even wondered whether my mother had been right in believing that my father had another woman.

Now I realize that he had been visiting Lupita. She is the mother of my half-sisters. As a child I never knew her and even later I scarcely exchanged three words with her.

Once I came home after midnight and noticed that an extra person was sleeping in my sisters’ bed. Roberto was in his usual place on the floor and my father was in his bed. I tiptoed to the girls’ bed and leaned over to see who was there. My father, who must have been watching me in the dark, said suddenly, “It’s your sister.”

“My sister?”

“Yes, your sister Antonia.”

Well, after that I didn’t say anything; I just went to bed. Nobody had ever told me about her before. I wondered, “Where does this sister
come from?” I was anxious for the morning to come so I could see my new sister.

She was not attractive as a girl although likeable and pleasant in the way she chatted. But she always had a kind of unfriendly feeling toward us, something like a grudge. From the very beginning, she hated my father and gave him trouble. She’d use swear words and talked back to him in such a way that I wanted to slap her across the mouth. Why, once my father was telling her she shouldn’t do something, and she said, “I can do as I damned well please, and what’s it to you anyway … who’s getting the raw deal, who?” That’s the way she screamed at my
papá
.

I never liked Antonia after that. I stayed away from her as much as possible, partly because I was afraid I’d see her as a woman, not as a sister. We hardly spoke to each other even though we lived in the same house.

But my brother Roberto was very much in love with her. I do not know how my father got wind of it, but he found out. I can’t tell whether Roberto loved her as a sister, or like a woman, but the fact is he was terribly fond of her.

Meanwhile, Elena wasn’t getting better in the hospital and she came home. When her condition became serious, my father sent us to my aunt Guadalupe to get the priest. The priest asked whether my father had been married before and we said no. Then he went ahead and married Elena and my father, so that her soul could rest in peace. I believe my
papá
still has the marriage ring.

One afternoon, when I got home, Marta said, “Go to Elena’s room.” I went in and she was dead. My father had been quite hopeful a few days before, because she had been gaining weight. He thought this was a sign she was getting better, and then she died. I remember the scene very well. The coffin was in the middle of the room, a lighted candle at each corner. Some people were there, and my father was standing in the doorway. When he noticed me, he said, “Look at what you’ve done, you bastards, you, you are the ones who killed her, you sons-of-bitches.”

I understood it was because of his grief, a burst of despair, but that’s the way my father has always been. I don’t know why, but no matter what happened he always said, “It’ll go bad for you and wherever you go, they’ll shut the door in your face.” He was always wishing me bad luck. That day my father made me so ashamed I hid behind the door,
and inside of me I said, “Forgive me, forgive me if I did you any harm, Elena; forgive me for any wrong I may have done you,” and that’s all I could say.

Roberto was there crying, crying over her; Consuelo was also there, and my father, grief-stricken, blaming us for her death. She was laid out just two days—not like my mother—and then we buried her in the same cemetery. My father bought a little piece of ground “in perpetuity,” and had a little brick fence put up around it. He paid a man to take care of the grave.

Well, after we buried her, my father’s attitude toward us became more bitter and gruff. His grudge against us grew bigger, he always blamed us that he couldn’t live happily with her. Life at home became worse and I spent more and more time out of the house.

Just opposite the clothing stall, where we hung out, was a restaurant, Lin’s Café, owned by a Chinese. A pretty girl, Graciela, came to work there as a waitress. She had dark curly hair and light skin. I liked her right away. “
Ay, ojón
! Really,
compadre
,” I said to Alberto, “that one has everything!
A todo dar!
Look how pretty that girl is. How much do you bet that I’ll tie her up?” I said it just like that, without meaning it seriously.

“Yeah? What do you mean, tie her up? She won’t even notice you. You don’t find bugs like that on your
petate
! That dame goes out with guys who dress well and who have
centavos
.”

In the evening we had supper there, and I saw Graciela in passing. I was a little embarrassed because I still couldn’t use a knife and fork very well … at home we never used them, we ate with
tortillas …
but I soon became expert, because from then on, I ate all my meals there, day after day. It became a big habit with me … in fact, I misspent fourteen or fifteen years of my life in that place and in other cafés.

I asked Lin for a job, but there was nothing doing for me there. He taught me how to bake bread and later he sometimes let me pay for my meals by baking for him.

Anyway, I had bet Alberto that I could get Graciela to be my sweetheart, my
novia
, and I set out to do it. It took money, so I said to my father, “Listen,
papá
, I’d like to earn a few
centavos
. I’m in school but I can work at the same time.” I spoke to Ignacio, my aunt’s husband.
He said, “Well, why not come and sell newspapers with me, what’s wrong with that?”

The next day I went out selling newspapers with Ignacio. We went over to Bucareli Street where we waited for the
Ultimas Noticias
and the
Gráfico
. Papers sold for ten or fifteen
centavos
and we would make about four and a half
centavos
a paper. I got my papers and my uncle said, “Now start running.”

I said, “Where?”

“Well, any street you want, just run and shout
Gráfico, Noticias
!” I started running, running, from the Caballito de Troya down Francisco I. Madero, then I went up Brasil all the way to Peralvillo and from there I returned, running all the way, past my house. I sold my papers and was back again in the Zócalo, As soon as I returned, I gave Ignacio the money. “That’s fine, look you made yourself two
pesos
.” I went home, washed my face, combed my hair and went to school.

At first, Graciela didn’t take to me at all, not at all. I know this because once I was eating supper in one of the booths in back and she didn’t see me. She was talking with Alberto and told him, “Don’t bring that heel, Manuel, if we go to the movies, because I don’t like him.”

That really hit me hard, “Why in hell did she say that? I never did anything to her.” So I said to myself, “Just for spite I’m going to make you my
novia
.” She told one of the other waitresses, “He’s all right but he doesn’t work, he doesn’t do a thing, wasting his time like a fool with his little books. I bet he does not even go to school. He doesn’t go to school or to work, so what good would it do me to go with him?” Ah, well, I was pleased to hear that and decided to look for a job.

The sixth-grade final exams were coming up and I was afraid I was going to fail. My teachers didn’t have a good opinion of me and wanted to expel me, but my father asked them to give me another chance and they did. I passed the exams and graduated. I was a little disappointed because no one in my family came to my graduation. I expected my father to congratulate me or give me an embrace, but he didn’t. He didn’t even do it on my fifteenth birthday, or my twenty-first, when a boy really becomes a man. He didn’t even change his tone of voice with me!

After my graduation, I told my father I was through with studying and wanted to go to work. It was the biggest mistake of my life, but I didn’t know it then. I was determined to make Graciela my
novia
and all I wanted was to get a job and earn money. My father was pretty sore because I didn’t want to study for a career. I think if he had talked it over with me like a good friend, I might have continued school. But instead, he said, “So you think you want to work? Do you think it’s so nice to have someone boss you around all your life? I’m ready to give you a chance and you throw it away. O.K., go be an idiot. If that’s what you want, go to it.”

Alberto had already gone to work in a shop where they made glass lamp fixtures. He didn’t know how to read or write, but he was smart and was making good money, anyway. Since we wanted to be together, I went to look for a job in his shop. I told the
maestro
that I knew how to work the machines and the drills, and he accepted me.

But I kept breaking the glass pieces and my finger tips were skinned and bleeding from the emery. They burned horribly and I finally confessed that I had never worked the machines before. So they set me to polishing glass, instead. Polishing was easy, but very dirty work since glass is polished with soot. Later they taught me how to shape “
cocolitos
,” pendants, on the machines. You grab a piece of glass with three fingers and told it tightly against the wheel to cut it down. I caught on to this work quickly and they kept me. Raimundo, Elena’s brother, was living with us then, and I even got him into the shop. We worked the machine together and between us, we knocked out two or three thousand “
cocolitos
” a week.

The
maestro
treated us well; on Fridays, he gave us tickets to the fights, and on the days we worked late, he blew us to our supper. But he knew how to stick us, too, the bastard. He really was sharp, and we were the suckers. He’d say to me, “
Ay! Chino
, Raimundo says he can work faster than you on the machine.”