The Children of Sanchez (65 page)

“Go on, you’re not trying to tell me it’s his wife. He’s legally married to her. It couldn’t be Juanita!” Suddenly, a feeling hit me. I had a feeling it was Juanita, but I acted as though it didn’t mean a thing, so as not to make my
compadre
look bad.

That evening I went to El Casino, to have a look around. As it is dark in those places, I couldn’t see a thing at first. I had to take a leak and on my way to the toilet I passed a woman in a clinch with some guy. When I came out, I saw her face and sure enough it was Alberto’s wife. I felt horrible, as bad as if she were my own wife. So I grabbed her, using rough language.

“What is this!” I say, and I pulled her away, see? “What the frigging hell are you doing here? You whore!”

She pulled away, saying I had no right to interfere, that she wasn’t doing anything …

“Not anything? Slut! What do you mean I have no right! You’re getting out of here this minute or I’ll drag you out.”

“It’s that the baby was sick and Alberto didn’t send me money. Was I going to let my baby die? I had to … that’s why I did it.”

“You’re lying through your teeth,
señora
. Only five days ago I myself wrote Alberto’s check for fifty-five dollars and sent it to you … I, personally.”

Then she began to cry and I came to my senses. After all, she wasn’t
my
wife.

So I calmed down and told her, “Look,
señora
, there’s no reason for you to work here. If you need money, if Alberto doesn’t send enough, I can let you have some until he comes back. I’m going to start work soon. When Alberto comes, he can pay me.”

I paid the bartender twenty
pesos
to let her leave, and another ten to the cop at the door, and I sent her home, feeling I had done right by my
compadre
.

So when Alberto accused me I felt very bad.

“Look,
compadre
,” I said, “I don’t like gossip. Let’s not beat around the bush. Get up and let’s go to your house.”

We took a taxi and got there fast. Alberto and his wife were janitors in an apartment building and we went through the courtyard to their room in the back. Juanita was surprised to see me, and looked uneasy. Then we had it out with her.

“No,” she says, “I don’t understand how Alberto could have taken it like that. I told him you had offered to lend me money to live on, not to sleep with you.”

Alberto just stood there glaring at her. Then he clouted her a couple. I let him, because she deserved it, pulling that stuff. He might have killed me, or I him … and for what? So I let him slug her a few. But when he kept on beating her, I tried to stop him. He was like crazy … as if in a fit, yelling, “Slut! Slut!” That was all he could say. Finally I got him to bed.

He comes round to see me now, but it is not the same between us. Knowing me a lifetime and us caring about each other the way we did, well, he should never have doubted me. It wounded me. I didn’t
show it, but at bottom, it made me feel cheated. It even had something to do with lessening my faith in religion.

But I really admire my
compadre
. He has a will of iron. When he makes up his mind to do something, he does it. He drives a taxi, his sons are going to school, he has his little television set … a gas stove … and is even talking about building a house. His big dream is to drive one of those huge sightseeing buses, and I don’t have the slightest doubt that he will.

He has always advised me to settle down and stop living according to my whim. He says I’m more intelligent than he, and can be even more successful. I don’t know where he gets his will and perseverance … maybe because he can’t read there is nothing to distract his mind. Maybe it helps him focus more clearly on practical things, right?

Well, I was a widower and still in my twenties. I was really a free man. I got up at noon, spent the afternoon and evening at the market, on the streets, at the racetrack, or some other place where I could gamble. I had plenty of friends, but I felt lonely for a woman. Three times I went to whore houses, but left without doing anything. I can’t stand those women.

Then I met María, Carolina’s goddaughter, at the café. She was just a kid of seventeen when I first saw her. Her mother had been killed by her stepfather a few years before, and she had lived from pillar to post with her grandmother and her three kid brothers and a sister. They used to sleep in a stall in the old market, before it was torn down. When I met her, they all slept on a little balcony in Carolina’s and Gilberto’s room.

I recognized Maria’s faults from the beginning. She was sloppy and lazy. But she was a well-built girl, pretty and young. The thing was, I had a very strong desire for her. I thought, “With patience, with tenderness, she’ll change. She had a miserable life, but little by little, I’ll make her change.”

It was not that I loved María, for I didn’t. My capacity for love had been killed. I knew this because when I saw Graciela in the street every once in a while, I didn’t even have a slight stir of feeling for her. No, my motive in going after María was strictly convenience.

So I invited María to go to Chalma with me and a friend. I had intended to fulfill my wife’s vow to walk on her knees from the
Cruz del Perdón
to the Sanctuary of the “Little Saint,” but when they gave María permission to go, I forgot about the vow.

All the way there, I kept trying to make her, you know what I mean? and in the bus she had already given in … she said she would. When the pilgrimage on foot began, we spent our first night together. We slept on a
petate
out in a field, but it turned out to be very upsetting.

Imagine, the moment arrived … she was already beginning to have regrets … and I couldn’t do a thing. I couldn’t get a reaction. She resisted just a tiny bit and I got nervous and couldn’t … I just couldn’t. I got a terrible attack of nerves. I acted like I was sore at her, to cover up. We slept on the same mat for three days, but that is as far as it went.

From that time on, I’ve had a whole string of upsets like that. I kept going after it, and when I had it all set up, I couldn’t again. All I had was a horrible pain in my testicles and I spent the night in rage and disappointment. I had always been virile, but since my wife died I haven’t been the same. I think the moral depression I felt, piled up on me.

I thought, “Well, who knows? Maybe God didn’t want her touched by me.” Then another boy began to go after her and before I knew it they were
novios
. I wasn’t going to let that rascal beat me out! After all, I had slept next to her. I knew her body, so how could I let him get her?

So I began asking her to marry me. I promised to work hard and give her everything and all that. I reminded her that I had behaved respectfully. “See,” I said, “that’s what a person gets for behaving decent. That’s something you don’t even appreciate. I could have had you but I held back, because I had promised to respect you.”

So, you know what she said?

She said, “Why did you promise? Because you couldn’t! When it got right down to it, you couldn’t do a thing.”

I got so mad, I slapped her. “Now you throw it up to me that I held back? Is that what I get for being honorable?” And I slapped her again. Naturally, my male pride didn’t let me admit what really had happened.

After that, we didn’t speak to each other. Another woman began to go for me. She was living with a man and I didn’t want her, but she kept after me, until finally, when I least expected it, I had to give in.

Then, suddenly, one day María comes over to me and says
“Manuel, you kept asking me to marry you, didn’t you? Well, let’s do it right now.” I was completely surprised, but I took her to a hotel before she changed her mind. What had happened was that she was jealous of this other woman and wanted to show that she could take me away.

It was obvious right away that María was inexperienced. She was a virgin and completely passive. She let herself be taken and that was that. Because of my state of nerves, I had to work hard and even then just barely made it. After that, María went back to sleep on her balcony and I slept at the café. We kept living that way for several months.

I hoped that María would change. But she was always passive, the same desperate way all the time. I don’t want to sound depraved, but from my experience, a woman should reach a certain point of excitement. Well, I tried … I prepared her, but she wouldn’t react. Sometimes even while I talked to her and worked on her, she fell asleep! That would freeze up a person, no?

I scolded her about it. “Look, María, why do I always have to be the one to take the initiative? Why can’t you be the one to ask? It’s the normal thing in a marriage. How come it has never occurred to you?”
Ay
, poor me! I thought it was because she didn’t love me, but she said all along that she wouldn’t live with me if she didn’t.

She didn’t complain about my impotence, though. I wasn’t always that way and besides I could disguise it. But it tortured me! Sometimes I blamed it on my brain, which was never at rest. Even when I was in the act, I wasn’t really in it. I was always thinking, or listening to music inside my head. My mind wandered from one thing to another, entirely unconnected. I felt terrific throbbings and heavy feelings; sometimes I’d think so much my head felt it would burst open. There were times when the world stopped for me and I had no desire to do anything. The street, the noise, the movement, people … were all dead for me … the flowers had no color.

When I was with María I would forget my worries a little. I tried talking to her about the serious things in life but she got bored. I was not very cultured, but at least I liked to read, to cultivate myself a bit. But do you know what interested her? Comic books, love stories, gossip … she talked plenty with other people about things like that, but when I discussed things with her, she only answered “Yes” or “No.”

Then her sloppiness bothered me. “Fix yourself up, please, María,” I’d say. “Try to be a little cleaner. You go around looking like disappointment itself, as though you had no illusions left.” She showed no interest in life. I wondered if something was wrong with her.

I was thinking of leaving María when she became pregnant. I had no intention of abandoning her now, or of giving her a hard life. She wanted us to be married by civil law (someone had told her that a child born out of wedlock develops donkey’s ears and walks in the shadow of the cross all his life). But I wouldn’t marry her because it would be a kind of treachery toward my children and my dead wife. The children I would have with her would have all the rights before the law, and my four kids would lose theirs automatically.

It was at about this time that my
papá
told me to take back my children. “I’m fed up,” he said. “I’m sick and tired of your kids. You’ve got to get them out of here. I can’t stand them any more.”

So I brought them to the Casa Grande, where Marta and her children were living. Marta agreed to take care of them if I gave her expense money. Well, on the third day, when I went to give her the money in the evening, I found my kids abandoned, without having eaten all day. My sister had gone off with a man, her kids and all! She left without a word and my poor children looked like hungry orphans when I got there.

That’s when I brought María to live with me in the Casa Grande. I thought she would be of use to fix the children’s food, if nothing else. My father said I could have the room if I paid the rent. When he found out about María, all he said was, “So, you’ve taken on another responsibility. It’ll be just like the other one.”

I started out with lots of illusions about setting up a home at last. Then my father insisted on sending the furniture to Acapulco, where Marta was living with her man. Consuelo came to pick out stuff, then Delila, and soon we were left in an empty room, just the four walls and us.

When Consuelo came by and saw us sleeping on cardboard on the floor, she said, “Listen, brother, I am not using my big bed at Lupita’s. Why don’t you pay me fifty
pesos
for it and go over and get it.”

“But, sister,” I said, “my
papá
sleeps on it when he goes to see Lupita. How can I take it away?”

“I don’t care,” she says. “The bed is mine. After all, I paid for it. I’d rather have your children sleep on it.”

So I paid her and went and got the bed. María and I slept on it and I put the mattress on the floor for the children. When María gave birth to my little girl, Lolita, the baby slept with us on the bed. When Consuelo saw this arrangement, she began to make a fuss.

“What’s the idea? I gave you the bed for the children, not so that …”

I got mad right away, because she was always implying that I mistreated my children. Why, I had slept on the floor all my life! And Roberto and I had been much worse off, because we didn’t have a mattress or sheets like my children did.

“Consuelo, you didn’t give me the bed, you sold it to me. I give the orders in my house … I … me … not you. Don’t come here ordering us around. As soon as I have money, I’ll buy another bed.”

Well, that one kept bothering me about the bed. Finally, I said, “Look, don’t get a hemorrhage about it. Give me back the fifty
pesos
and beat it, with the bed.” But she didn’t have the money, so the bickering went on. Once, she even waited outside the movies for me, and started an argument when I came out.

“You’re nuts,” I said, and I left her screaming on the corner. I guess I made her mad, because the next day she came to the house, gave María the fifty
pesos
, and took away the bed.

Then I made a lucky deal in the market and came home with a bedroom set.

“What pretty furniture,” María said. I thought the furniture would animate her, but she was still as indifferent and careless as ever. Wherever I ran my finger, there was dust, fingerprints, filth.

“For the love of God, woman, what do you do all day?” I said to her. “Take a rag with a little oil and polish the furniture. Try to keep the house clean.”

Two weeks later, the wardrobe door was broken. I really got mad and called her everything in the book. First she blamed my brother, then my youngest son. I couldn’t get the truth out of that woman. All I could do was talk.