The Children of Sanchez (51 page)

The fathers being indifferent toward their wives and children, spent their money on drink or on mistresses who might even live right there in the same
vecindad
. If a wife complained, she was likely to be beaten or driven out of the home, because it was her duty to protect her husband from embarrassment in his love affairs. The men spent most of their free time in saloons, and at night the wives might have to hunt them up and half carry them home.

At my aunt’s house we ate only two meals a day, like everyone else in the
vecindad
. I would get up in the morning, pick up my “bed” from the floor, sweep or straighten up the room a little. Then I would bring a basin of water from the faucet in the courtyard, so that I could wash myself in the room. This settlement had no door or fence and if I washed outside, the way the other tenants did, people in the street could see me. I didn’t have enough money to go to the public baths. While I was doing all this, my aunt, “my little old lady” as I always called her, would go to the market to get things for the first meal, while my uncle Ignacio either stayed in bed a little longer or got up and went for his morning
pulque
.

I would sit down in the large chair, the only one my aunt had, to a meal of black coffee or tea, leftover rice or beans and, at times,
tortilla
fried with cheese and chile. My aunt insisted on giving me the chair to show that she and my uncle were glad to have me staying in their home. She took good care of it and had had it for many years. Their meal was the same as mine, but they drank
pulque
instead of coffee. They ate a fiery sauce, and also strips of green chile fried with onions in oil. They told me I ought to eat what they did because it would build up my blood and improve my appetite. But since I
wasn’t used to it, I refused. My uncle would say I wasn’t a Mexican, that I would soon be a blueblood. He was always joking.

After the meal, Ignacio would get water to wet his hair, wash himself, and straighten his mustache. Then he would cross himself and make his offering of alfalfa to San Martín Caballero, so that many people would buy the newspapers—
La Prensa, Las Ultimas Noticias, El Este
—which he sold to earn the pittance he brought home to my aunt. My aunt would go to wash clothes for others, or to work in the kitchen of a lunch stand called Lonchería Morelos, opposite the Morelos movie theatre. When she worked as a kitchen helper, she was gone from eight o’clock in the morning until eight or nine at night and would bring home a few leftover crumbs for me. When she was taking in washing, she would wash at the tubs in the courtyard from eleven in the morning until about three or four o’clock in the afternoon, rest for a while, then continue until she was finished at about seven in the evening.

She almost never ate until my uncle Ignacio came home, bringing her a few
pesos
to buy the food. Supper consisted of noodle soup if he gave her only two
pesos;
when he gave her four or five
pesos
, she would buy a little bread and milk for me, and I would also eat the soup. All I would usually have to drink was black coffee; they had their beans and, of course, their
pulque
. They might go without food but never without
pulque
.

My uncle had another woman, and my aunt often fought with him about her. When they were a little drunk, my aunt would say to him, “I’m not going to kill you this time, Shorty, just because I don’t want to be scared by your dead body!” I was terrified the first few times they quarreled. Almost in tears, I screamed at them not to fight and when they saw I was frightened, they calmed down.

Later, when I understood them better, their quarrels made me laugh. Although they drank
pulque
with their evening meal and then
chinchól
(a drink made of alcohol, the fruit of the hawthorn tree and of some other plant), and might be quite intoxicated, they never harmed each other. The same thing went on night after night until about eleven o’clock, when they got tired or passed out from the alcohol. Then I would turn back the bed, and they would go to sleep.

In my father’s house nothing of this sort had ever happened. I never saw my father drink with anybody. Dinner was at a regular hour and there was everything on the table—milk, bread, butter, and eggs or
some dish one of us might have a taste for, chicken heads fried in oil, salad, refried beans covered with grated cheese, or toasted
tortillas
. Compared to my aunt’s place, our house was prosperous and peaceful, at least until that devil Delila came along.

At “my little old lady’s,” many of their friends would arrive while we were eating supper. They would sit in the threshold or wherever they could find a place and wait for my uncle to tell them jokes and funny stories about his life, and for my aunt to offer them a
taco
. I don’t know how they understood each other, for some would be talking about one thing and the rest about something else. By the time supper was over my head would be spinning and I would be nauseated from the cigarette smoke, the smell of
chinchól
or
pulque
, and the awful hubbub they raised.

Late in the evening, I would get my “bed” ready. I would lay a piece of mat and some cardboard on the cement floor and cover them with a sheet or an old quilt. They gave me a pillow and another quilt, somewhat better, and an old coat of my aunt’s to cover myself with. Later on, I slept in their bed and they slept on the floor because I was thin-blooded and suffered terribly from the cold. Sometimes I felt bad about taking their bed, but they wanted me to and it didn’t seem to bother them at all. On the contrary, they really seemed to love me like a daughter.

Once my aunt set me to grinding the chile for the
mole
sauce she was going to make for my uncle’s Saint’s Day. I tried, but couldn’t. My aunt said, “
Ay
, child, what are you going to do when you are married? What if you get a husband who is very demanding, like my first one? I had to get up at three in the morning to grind five
cuartillos
of corn to make
tortillas
for his breakfast. And when at first I couldn’t do it, he would beat me to make me learn.”

My aunt made my uncle’s birthday a family affair. She didn’t invite the neighbor ladies because I had been nagging her not to. I finally made her realize they weren’t good neighbors; whenever they needed food or assistance, my aunt would help them out, but when we needed help of some kind, they refused. They borrowed things that they never returned. So the only ones at the meal were my sister Marta, my brother Roberto, and two very close friends of my uncle. For this modest
fiesta
my aunt managed to buy a carton of beer and some
pulque
.

In my aunt’s house I learned more about the religious festivals.
When Lent began, on Dolorous Friday, she covered the table that held the Virgin of Sorrow, first with a white cloth, then with a layer of purple India paper. On either side of the image she put three flowerpots with sprouted wheat, then flowers, and, most important, a candle. At night she prayed to the Virgin with great devotion. My uncle took good care of the altar. He would get very angry if someone thoughtlessly left a pencil or anything on it.

During Lent we abstained from meat on Fridays and the Holy Days—Holy Thursday, Good Friday, and the Saturday of Glory. On Wednesday and Thursday my aunt cleaned the room, and all the special foods were prepared beforehand. On Holy Thursday, if my aunt had the ingredients, she made
romeritos
(a stew made of prickly pears),
charales
(tiny fish) and potatoes in chile gravy or
pipián
(a cucumber-like squash).

On Good Friday we did no chores. She didn’t even light the fire; we ate the food cold. That day we went to church at eight in the morning and remained there to witness the “Three Falls” of Our Lord Jesus Christ. At this time my aunt said, “Look, child, how beautifully they present the sufferings of Our Lord. See how well He bore all that, and we are able to bear so little.” She meant that I should not be so angry and rebellious with my father. I saw I was at fault and promised not to behave that way any more.

My aunt was devoted to the Lord of Chalma and liked to tell me about the pilgrimages she made year after year. I was the only one in the family who had never, never gone to Chalma. My aunt would say, “This year you are going with me, child, and you will see how nice, how pretty, the Sanctuary is. But you musn’t try to turn back or the Lord will get angry and punish you.” With that she only made me less eager to go, but I liked to look at the relics and ribbons and tidbits she always brought home from Chalma.

In May, when Mother’s Day came, I had a job and I bought a present for my aunt. On her part, she lit a candle for my grandmother and my mother, and placed their pictures on the table, with flowers next to them. We wanted to go to the cemetery that day, but since we didn’t have any money left and I had to work, we didn’t go. I had noticed that on the Day of the Dead, my aunt always put out a large offering of food for my dead mother. At home, my father never put more than a candle and a glass of water.

On Father’s Day, June 15, my aunt advised me to go see my father,
but the visit turned out to be a bitter disappointment. Delila was there and my father hardly spoke to me. This made me angry, and I left the house without even saying good-bye. At that time I still visited my father because I wanted him to acknowledge that he had a daughter. My aunt usually told me not to go. “Why go only to have him make you cry?” My uncle very seldom said anything, but they both were angry with that witch, Delila, and all her family.

After I got a job, our situation improved a little; we had money to buy food and were getting caught up on the rent. But all this time I suffered because I really didn’t like to live there. If I neglected the housework, my uncle would scold me and say I seemed to be a doll on a shelf only good for display (well, he used other words). He wouldn’t say these things when my aunt was within earshot. If she heard him, my aunt would say, “Don’t be bothering her, you damn tub; leave her alone or you and I are going to have things out.” I was really in the wrong, however, because I hardly knew how to do anything.

One day my uncle told her to have me wash the clothes. I thought she would joke about it, but, sad to say, she gave me the black soap, the lye, the bucket, and the scrub board, and said, “Get going, lazy, and get the clothes clean, because if you don’t, I’ll make you do it over.” This order displeased me, not because I was unwilling to work, but because everyone, both inside the settlement and outside in the street, would see me.

While I was squatting on the ground, washing the clothes, I realized the neighbor girls were tossing jibes at me. “Oh, you’re washing already!” Leonora said to another girl. “It’s high time, sister!” Another one said, “The thing is that I’m not living in a rich house. My father cut me off.” I said nothing. I knew they wouldn’t pay any attention to me and besides I already felt low and to answer them would have meant lowering myself further.

At the end of June, I got sick. I had become very thin and my nerves were bad. Instead of asking for a few days off from work as my aunt suggested, I just stayed home and lost the job. The fast began again for us because it was impossible to live well on what my uncle made. Some days I ate only lunch, and they had little but their
pulque
or
chinchól
at night. I ate their hot sauce but never the
pulque
, even though they said it would strengthen my lungs and cure my bile trouble.
When my stomach hurt after an emotional upset, my aunt made me absinthe or camomile tea.

I suffered all the more because I wasn’t used to this kind of care when I was sick. In my father’s house he would bring the doctor home and they’d put me to bed and give me medicines. But in this place people treated illnesses lightly. Even when people would be seriously injured in an accident, it wouldn’t occur to them to call a doctor. Everyone, including the family of the injured one, would stand around casually chatting about it. And no one would remember the incident the next day.

My cold and fever turned into bronchopneumonia; I had a pain in my lungs and couldn’t breathe. My aunt didn’t know what was wrong with me, but she tried to cure me with a water bath and alcohol rub and on my head she placed two leaves of a plant they call “The Shameless One.” The water bath consisted of emptying hot water into a basin and adding ashes; then I kept my feet in it until it got cool. After the alcohol rub she covered me up until I started to sweat; my aunt explained that this way the body threw off all the sickness. Unbelievable as it may seem, my temperature went down, although the respiratory pain remained. Then I sent for my friend, Angélica, to come and give me a shot of penicillin. I got enough relief from that to be able to get up and go to a doctor who cured me. My aunt pawned my coat for the money and my father didn’t find out a thing.

During the months I lived with my aunt, Jaime kept coming there. They never dared chase him out even though I begged them to. Jaime knew how to win their affection and confidence and he took advantage of them. He had complete liberty to enter their house at any hour, in whatever condition he might be and with any friends he wished. There were many times when he arrived drunk at dawn and I had to stretch out on the cement with only my coat to cover me so that he could sleep off his drunkenness on the bed.

The truth is that my aunt was becoming annoyed with me because I had no job and no money. I noticed how she served my breakfast, with a sour, serious expression, not the way she used to at the beginning. But I was hungry. I looked for work everywhere. Angélica helped me with bus fare and encouraging words. I thought that it would be best to leave Mexico City. But how? With what money? I didn’t have the fare, nor the price of a suitcase.

My uncle began to scold me harshly, saying words he had never
used before. In the mornings, seeing me put on make-up, he would say, “You are no different from the dummies in the shop windows, just standing there with paint on. Get organized, bring in some money, I don’t care how. The thing is we need it—anything at all. You have to bring money into the house.” At other times he would say, “The day you get married, what are you going to give your husband to eat if you’re no good for anything? Is he going to want you just for bed? Let’s get going. You’ve got to get moving in life. It doesn’t matter where the money comes from—you can see your aunt needs it. I can’t help her much.”