The Children of Sanchez (27 page)

About this time Tonia ran away from home. I don’t know if she had tried to do it before or not, but Roberto had had orders to keep an eye on her wherever she went. On this particular morning, Antonia told me that we were going to the baths and that she would pay for my ticket. I noticed she was putting a lot of clothes into a bag, and asked about it. She said she was going to have them fixed. We started for the Florencia baths, which were far away, but Antonia explained that the
señora
who was going to fix her dresses lived around there.

The bathhouse was very crowded because it was the day of the week when prices were lowered. We had to wait in line for our compartments. I undressed in the tiny enclosed space, hung my clothes on the hook, wrapped my self in a sheet and went into the hallway to look for Tonia. She wasn’t there, nor in the shower room where lines of naked women and children were waiting their turn. The smell was bad there and children were crying, so I went into the steam room, walking carefully over the slippery floor. I had fallen several times in the bath house … Marta had too … and was afraid of being hurt again. There were only some very fat women in the steam room, and an argument was going on because one lady wanted to lower the heat and another wanted to raise it. Tonia wasn’t in the swimming pool either, so I finished bathing and dressing and waited for her in the entrance hall.

A long time passed and Tonia didn’t come for me. I got bored and
asked the man in charge if he had seen her. He told me she had already gone. Angry, I ran home, thinking she had played a dirty trick on me. When I asked for Antonia, Roberto got so scared he jumped up from his chair. “No, she hasn’t come.” He immediately left his breakfast and went to look for her. She wasn’t at her mother’s house or in the streets. Roberto looked everywhere. I guess someone let my father know because he came home early. Roberto paid for his carelessness; my father hit him very hard.

It was night before they found her at the railroad station with some other women. My father dragged her home. She didn’t seem to be scared, but I was. I was afraid she would be beaten to within an inch of her life, and as a matter of fact, she was. After the beating, my father locked her into the room where Elena had died. We had been forbidden to enter that room before and the ban was all the more strict now. My father ordered her food to be brought to her. She was not to be allowed out for any reason. Sometimes, when my brothers and La Chata weren’t looking, I went to see her. I felt sorry for her. All she could do was poke her head out of the little opening above the door. She told me what had happened. “When I left the baths, I met two
señoras
. I told them I needed work and went with them.” What none of us knew until much later was that these women ran a house of prostitution.

That night my father had cried a lot, when he thought we were all asleep. It hurt me very much to hear him cry. I would never have given him such pain, no matter how much he shouted at me. After all, if he was mad at somebody he had to work off his anger. I wouldn’t mind if he took it out on me, so long as he didn’t get sick. Anyway, my father was right about everything. I was very foolish and inept. I wanted to wait on him always but I could never do anything well. I would just get dazed and go round and round. And it was bad that Antonia had run away, because people would look down on her. I was never going to let anyone have a bad opinion of me! How far I was then, in my imagining, from what was actually going to happen years later.

Antonia was finally permitted to come back to live with us. In spite of the fact that I would talk to her and we kidded around every once in a while, I couldn’t get to like her. She spent a lot of time with
Señora
Yolanda, who would tell me everything Antonia told her. Once Yolanda said, “Look after your father. Antonia has said she hates him and all of
you and that she is going to make you pay for everything she suffered when she was a child.” She wanted vengeance and planned to take our father away from us by getting him to move to her mother’s house.

Yolanda also told me that when we were all out of the house (Roberto and Manuel at the glass factory where they had jobs and Marta and I at school), Antonia would do witchcraft with a neighbor,
Señora
Luz. Barefoot, Antonia would put the chairs up on the bed and sweep the floor very carefully with the twig broom. Then she went to Luz, who was of a different religion, Evangelist or Spiritualist, and both of them would come back to our house carrying bottles of water, herbs and flowers under their aprons. They would lock the door and stay inside for about a half-hour.

Yolanda spied on them through a hole in her door across the way, and later, pretending to be hanging clothes, went to the roof where she could see down into our kitchen. She said she saw Antonia lighting a fire in the brazier and Luz sprinkling water from the bottles onto the walls and the floor, muttering something. When the fire was going well, Luz burned the herbs and flowers. She and Antonia stood by the blaze, watching it and saying something. When the ashes were cool, Luz scattered them about the room while Antonia made her evil wish.

Yolanda said that Luz would come out soon after that, with her paraphernalia covered up, and Antonia would lock the door after her to wait for the smoke to disappear and the water to evaporate. Later she would open the door and do her housework as though nothing had happened. I do not know whether or not this was true, but it was what Yolanda told me. Afterwards, Roberto also told me that Antonia was a sorceress and I do believe this about Antonia, because she really hated us and tried to do us harm.

I am not sure it had a connection with what Antonia did, but a little later, every week for three or four months my father went to Pachuca and returned with bottles of yellowish liquid with herbs in them. Sometimes the water was green, other times white or colorless. He put the bottles in the left corner of the kitchen and gave strict orders that no one should touch them. I never saw him drink the water or sprinkle it or anything like that, and however much I remained at home, I never knew what it was for. Perhaps he was using it as medicine to counteract the work of Antonia. Only Heaven knows. I did not understand it.

After that nothing was ever right for my father. He began saying harsher things to us: “I’m fed up with you bums! I am tired of working day after day and you lying around here like pigs, just eating and sleeping!” For me these words were like blows. I felt like running away, but I couldn’t. I just would lower my head and cry. This went on daily. Roberto very often didn’t come home for days. Just Marta, Antonia, and I remained at home.

The first time I talked back to my father (not saying anything rude, just denying something) was one afternoon when he accused me of taking chickens to give to “that witch,” my aunt. I answered, “It’s not true,
papá
. I never take anything.” I felt a smack full in the face, and I crouched in the corner of the brazier and the dish closet. Antonia was there and I was ashamed that he treated my family like that. How different it was with her family! When Elida or Isabel came, he would say, “Tonia, serve your sister coffee. Sit down, Elida, let’s have a talk. Here’s change for the bus.”

Then Antonia began to get sick. She had been having trouble with her
novio
, a boy in the Casa Grande, whom she was crazy about. He had left her for another girl because, I think, Tonia had told him she was pregnant. I say this because she became ill with a bad hemorrhage and someone later told me that she had taken some strong herbs to get rid of a baby. Tonia nearly went out of her mind when she lost her sweetheart. The doctor told my father she was the kind of girl who must have a man or else she would get sick. A little later she began to have terrible attacks.

One day I came home from work and found the house very upset. I had gotten used to seeing the house messy and sad-looking but this day it was dead! Soiled dishes and casseroles on the table and in the sink, the floor unswept, the stove very dirty. The door to the bedroom was shut and my father and brothers were sitting despondently in the dark kitchen. Chairs and things from the bedroom were piled up on the floor. I started to speak and my father shut me up. “Sh, idiot! You will wake her up!” Tonia had had her first attack, breaking and throwing things, jumping almost to the ceiling, pulling her hair, making horrible noises. She woke and did the same thing until a nurse came and injected her with something to put her to sleep. This went on for days. Then she was sent to a sanatorium, where she stayed several months.

Later, things happened as Yolanda had told me they would. When
Antonia got out of the sanatorium, she and my father went to live at Lupita’s house, leaving us alone in the Casa Grande. One afternoon my father said unexpectedly, “I’m moving to Rosario Street. That’s where I’ll be. I’ll come to see you every day. Do you want to come or stay?” I said I didn’t want to go. My pride prevented me from telling him that I would go wherever he went, that I wanted to be where he was. When I saw him carrying his blue box on his shoulder and heard him say to Roberto, “Open the door,” I felt as if I were going to fall and I supported myself on a chair. When he was gone, my brother and I looked at each other. We didn’t know what to say. Roberto went into the toilet to cry and I felt a bitter liquid rise in my throat and eyes, but not a word or a sob left my lips.

The next day my father came with Antonia and her sisters and took away the dressing table, the bedspreads, sheets, pillow cases, tablecloths, the flower vase, the curtains and even our new kerosene stove. Once again the house was stripped and left bare. We never again had curtains or pillow cases or flowers. If Marta and I attempted to fix up the house my father would tear down what we put up and order us to leave things as they were.

Nevertheless he lived up to what he had said. He came to see us every afternoon to leave expense money. But when he was offered supper, he would say, “I don’t want anything,” in a cutting tone of voice. I didn’t insist.

After my father left, I felt I needed my mother. I couldn’t control myself any more and began to cry as if my heart was going to break and until my eyes ached, turning to look at the picture of the Virgin and asking why my father was like this toward us.

He had never left us before. We were used to living with him, to seeing him every day sitting in his chair reading, washing his feet, or examining the chickens and giving orders that they be washed or their coop changed. My father’s presence was everything; it filled the house. With him there, I felt my home complete. Now I began to have a feeling that was unbearable. “Am I not my father’s daughter? Is it a sin to be an orphan, my Lord?” I kept asking. I cried for my mother and waited and waited for an answer. How horrible I felt doing this. I had never called her before with such desperation. I shouted, shouted to my mother. I wanted to be answered from the unknown, anything.

But only silence followed my words.

M
Y CHILDHOOD WAS TILE HAPPIEST ANY GIRL COULD HAVE. I FELT FREE
 … Nothing tied me down, absolutely nothing. I could do what I wanted and hardly ever got punished. If I cried, my
papá
petted me and gave me money. When he locked me indoors I escaped through the roof. I was rude and talked back to everyone because I felt that I was my father’s favorite. I gave my stepmothers and the women who worked for us a hard time. Most of them didn’t stay long; only Enoé and La Chata stuck it out for four or five years. But I made them cry, and Elena, my first stepmother, cried too.

My friends looked up to me and made me feel like their chief. When we played baseball I decided where everyone was to go; no matter what we did, they had to get my agreement first. They saw that my father gave me the best of everything, and that I had money and fruit to give out. That’s why they were always coming by for me and asking me to play. I never lacked friends and I felt “big” in my circle.

From the start, I didn’t like school and went only to please my
papá
. I couldn’t stand being shut up in a room and I cared nothing about learning to read or write or do sums. I spent three years in the first grade and another two in the second. At the end of the fifth grade, when I was fourteen years old, I quit. I never planned to be anything in life, like a nurse or a dressmaker: Tarzan was my favorite and I wanted only to be his companion.

I was a tomboy and played boys’ games … 
burro
, marbles, tops and dice, depending on the season. Those were the only toys for me and I broke the dishes and doll furniture Consuelo kept so neatly in a
box under the bed. I never played with girls, but was delighted with dressing and undressing dolls.

My
papá
treated us girls like royalty. He fed us, bought us clothes, sent us to school, and didn’t let our brothers mistreat us. He hardly paid attention to them, except when we complained. Then he would grab them and beat them without mercy.

But I was not like Consuelo. She led a quiet life and had almost no friends. She couldn’t go out like I did, because my father was always taking care of her. We argued a lot: when I came back from the bakery with an assortment of rolls, she’d always grab the kind I liked. When my father brought home fruit, I’d take the ones she wanted. She would hide the little boxes full of my things and if I knew which toy was her favorite I’d go and break it. I was always after her in a mean way. I’d tell my father when she went out, so that he would hit her. She did the same, because she didn’t want me to run around like a tomboy.

Consuelo was sad and didn’t like to go out and play. She made things worse for herself because she was always at home. When Roberto came he would pull her braids, and then Manuel would order her about and she had to obey or get hit.

It’s a funny thing, but I confided more in my half-sister Antonia, and my sister-in-law Paula, than in Consuelo. It was because she acted superior and saw things in a bad light. She didn’t know how to give positive advice. And I always thought she was stingy and selfish.