The Children of Sanchez (75 page)

One night I had a wonderful dream in color. It gave me courage. I was inside a very nice house, a boarding house for students. But first it was a sort of sidewalk café, something like a boulevard where people on an excursion go on their way to swim. In that two-story café, the tables were behind me and the roof was of straw. From the roof to the railing on which I was leaning, were woven some very pretty strands of grass, with tiny heart-shaped leaves. I stood looking down at the place where, a short distance from the tree, the pool began, with its border of small stones and its clear blue water. Suddenly from somewhere there appeared several pairs of lovers, who walked along the corridor leading to the pool, arm in arm, the boys turning to look at the girls very lovingly. I watched them from above and smiled. Somebody came up to me and at once I moved away from the railing.

When I went down to where the swimming pool was, it disappeared and in its place I found myself sitting on a kind of red counter next to a bookcase which was against a brown wall. The books were an intense brown. Next to this bookstand and back a bit, was the window. A little lower was my bed, a very small one. Again there appeared several young men and girls—I don’t know where they came from. I watched them in astonishment from where I was, holding a book in my hands. They laughed and talked loudly.

Their clothes caught my eye—red trousers and yellow shirts. The boys would turn to look at their girl friends, pulling them by their hands. They jumped over my bed and disappeared through the window. One of the boys, the last one, asked me to jump out with him. “Come on, let’s go,” he said to me with a laugh. They were all quite gay. Even I, so exhausted, felt very happy. When they all disappeared, there was
silence in my room. I turned to look at the walls, and what magnificent colors I saw! A pistachio green, a ruby red, a beautiful yellow. I closed my book and set it down on the red counter. I discovered that I had long hair done up in curls; I also had on red slacks.

I went to the window and saw the young people again and a dark green hedge at some distance from the house. The grass was yellow-green. The young people were blonds, very well groomed. They kept running about and jumping over the hedge. The last one insisted that I jump too. “Come on, come on, hurry!” But from the window I shook my head no.

When they disappeared, I felt an uncontrollable desire to follow and jumped out the window. I was about halfway across the boulevard when I turned back to look at the house. It was white, such a pretty white that I felt sorry I had left it. But something told me that I could not return there, so I kept on running to try to catch up with the others. I could no longer see them. I could only hear their laughter. I tried to climb the hedge, and managed to get to the top but there I remained fast. When I woke up I was caught lying crosswise on that hedge, face down, looking at the green color of the grass and at that white, white house with its red roof.

Slowly, I lost my timidity and regained my strength. The deep circles of my spiral began to diminish and become clearer, until little by little, I emerged from it. I felt alive again, like a new Consuelo. My body felt full, not incomplete as before. I felt the strength I had when I was in school. I knew I was something once more, someone who could do things, who was worth more “than a peanut,” as my father used to say. I began to learn the true face of life.

Down deep, I felt a strong hurt and anger, but it was better than these were not aroused for I was capable of taking terrible vengeance against those who had damaged me. I really did not wish to harm anyone, least of all my father, and I would rather quietly suffer the pain that slept inside me. It was enough that I could again look with defiance at anyone who insulted or humiliated me. I felt I could assert myself and reject what did me harm. It was enough that I could face the world without fear.

I have always aspired to reach “something,” something different from what I had known, something outside of my surroundings, perhaps even outside of my possibilities. I was not resigned to remain in
one spot, the place where I had my beginnings, whether it was where I lived or where I worked. To limit myself to one job, one field of study, one activity, had no appeal. I did not want to follow any one route laid down for me by past generations. I opposed the word “destiny,” which I heard on all sides. “He who was born to be a pot, doesn’t leave the kitchen.” How many times have I heard this from my father, my aunt, friends and neighbors! At wakes or after accidents people liked to say, “It was his destiny!” and they would be satisfied. But I wasn’t. I was afraid to say it aloud, for the others would have squelched me. They would have said I was opposing the course of life, and who did I think I was to do that? My family, especially, would have said that I, who was the weakest and most foolish, was the most rebellious. They would not have understood me, so I never said my thoughts aloud. But inside me I would think of what had happened and would try to find the explanation. Never in my life did I believe it was “destiny.”

“Nothing can be done about it,” they would say. “Don’t oppose the will of God.” I couldn’t accept that and even entered a struggle with the Church and Divine precepts. More, I began to analyze the personality of my God, against whom I had never rebelled. I thought about it and studied it from corner to corner. I noticed that some people did not give in to destiny, but fought it with an unbreakable will. I knew a Spaniard who started a furniture store which failed after a few months. He didn’t give up, but borrowed money and began again. He had to start over about five times, but he finally achieved what he wanted. Then I realized it wasn’t destiny, but will power, that had made him succeed.

Among our neighbors, there were some who progressed and moved up in the world. Raúl became an accountant, another worked in the movies, another set up a business. None of these young men had followed the gang, loafing in the street in dirty clothes, speaking ungrammatically and using vile language. They were serious and learned to dress with good taste, always resisting the criticism of the others. Resisting, rejecting, not giving in to the majority—that was their secret. I didn’t know what they were against, but they always seemed to be against something. They would say, “What? it has to be this way! Not on your life!” or, “No, man! you’re a stupid jerk if you think I’ll do what you want me to!”

I would think of these things sitting on a bench outside the door or leaning against the wall. People would say I was too pensive, I was
“in the clouds,” dreaming with my eyes open. But I was watching. I saw that one needed a strong character to resist the others. One had to be indifferent to a handsome face, or a nice pair of pants or to the most popular boys. If one of these condescended to choose a girl who was younger or not as well dressed as he, she would feel flattered to be selected and would consider it a kind of triumph. At a dance, if one of these “superior” boys chose me, I would accept and then leave him standing there in the middle of the dance floor while the music was still playing. That was severe punishment for anyone. I did it to avenge myself for his cocky attitude.

I realized it was necessary not to offend others and many times I had to condescend to laugh at the jokes of my sister’s friends, even when I didn’t understand them. I never took the attitude of Rufelia, for example, who would get angry and say, “We are not equals, you idiot, for you to joke with me.” Naturally, that only earned for her the antipathy of everyone. It was very, very difficult to find exactly the right approach to resist in that environment. If I was too severe, I would be isolated, if too accessible, the others would take over.

My aspirations were different from those of the people in the circle in which I lived. Even before I studied stenography, I dreamed of studying languages. Why? Who knows? While I was a typist, I looked forward to becoming a stewardess in an airline. I didn’t get anywhere, but I wasn’t disillusioned. Sleeping in my brain, with quiet desperation, was the desire to get hold of money. I needed money to live on a different level, to become a member of another circle, to be of some worth, to have a better life.

And why did I want to have money and a better life? Not because I was interested in material things but because I thought if I could pass through the wall that closed me in, then, little by little, I could get my four nieces and nephews out too. The money would be to hire a lawyer to make me their guardian, to defend them from the others, to send them to school, to form the kind of family I did not succeed in forming with my brothers and sister. I didn’t want history to repeat itself; they must not become another Manuel, Roberto, Consuelo or Marta! I wanted to give the children everything they asked for and to see that they were well brought up, with a career, so that they could face life without fear or shame and advance with firm steps. I wanted them to love me.

I also hoped that if I could get out of my circle, my brother Roberto
might escape and rise to the surface where he could breathe freely and move without fear. And when I was older and well established, I could show my face with courage, knowing that I had not made a misery of my life and that my family, too, was worth something.

Those were the motors that impelled me out of the lethargy brought on by my illness and by circumstance. I didn’t see it so clearly then. I just directed my steps along the road that I liked, simply because I liked it, without needing any other explanation. I always had the hope that it could lead me to that “something,” not even troubling to look ahead to notice if there was a branch of a tree that might fall and knock me out.

When I felt strong enough, I looked for work and found a job in an office; the pay was little and the hours were long. While I lived with Lupita or in the Casa Grande, I didn’t have to pay rent, I had no children, no husband, not even a
novio
. I was free to do what I wanted. I would have liked to go to secondary school at night, but I was too tired and it would have taken years to graduate. For months I went from my home to my work, from my work to my home, and nothing more. Again, I felt myself sinking into the sea of family troubles. “Roberto is drunk and fighting”; “Mariquita’s eyes are infected and Manuel pays no attention”; “Marta is seeing Crispín again”; “Aunt Guadalupe needs
thirty
pesos for last month’s rent.”

I had to get away from my family and I looked for a furnished room. It took me two weeks to find one I could afford. Nowhere would they accept a single girl and finally I had to say I was a student from a different state to rent a little room for 190
pesos
a month in a
señora’s
apartment on Dr. Manzanares Street.

The
señora
had other roomers and one of them, Beatriz, became my friend. She was nice and I liked her, although the landlady warned me that she had a bad character. Beatriz would wake me in the mornings and we would eat breakfast together in the kitchen. “We are both alone, sister,” she once said, “so we need each other.” Sometimes she and I would sit in the sun on a bench outside the front door of the house. Felipe, the mailman, would stop and chat and make us laugh, or Alejandro, Beatriz’s
novio
, would join us. The landlady didn’t like this and would later insult us. “Only street women sit in the doorway like that, looking for clients. Please stay in your rooms from now on.” But our rooms were dark and cold and we paid no attention to the old hag.

But one thing led to another and she began to make trouble for us, throwing away our food or anything we left out of place, flooding the kitchen floor when we wanted to eat, or strewing garbage about. She wanted to raise my rent because I took a bath three times a week and kept my light on after ten o’clock. She forbade us to boil milk or meat or beans, for they consumed too much gas; she examined the pots on the stove to see that we obeyed.

I was getting fed up with the
señora
. I had noticed that her apartment was not registered as a rooming house, nor were there tax receipts on her wall. I figured her income from the tenants was about a thousand
pesos
a month. When I was two weeks behind in the rent and asked her to wait because I didn’t have the money, she became annoyed. The next day, the kitchen floor was flooded, with garbage floating in the water.

I was very angry and went to her room and knocked. “
Señora
, who the devil do you think you are! Do you believe that because I am quiet I will stand any abuse?”

“If you don’t like it, you can move out.”

“I will leave when I please and not before I complain to the government about your secret business here. I suppose you have paid your taxes? Where are your tax receipts then? You overcharge us for this partitioned cave and have the nerve to call us loose women. Who knows what class of insect you are! For all I know, you have a prison record.”

That woman didn’t say a word. She just stood there all in one piece. Perhaps what I said was true. Anyway she didn’t bother us again. I was relieved, for I didn’t want to move and leave Beatriz, although I was beginning to dislike her way of life. Alejandro was her lover and paid her rent and everything but she made a fool out of him by going around with other men. I was getting tired of their quarrels.

Then, five months after I had moved in, I heard Jaime’s familiar whistle. I don’t know how he learned my address (probably through my aunt) but once, at three o’clock in the morning, he rang every bell in the apartment house and got into the courtyard where he yelled my name and insults and curses for all to hear. He began to follow me home from work and spy on me. He would walk behind me without saying a word, nearly driving me out of my mind. I got into the habit of looking back every time I went out. I felt my nerves going and knew I would have to move.

I answered an ad in the newspaper and was lucky enough to find a nice room for two hundred
pesos
, in a house rented by a Cuban family. How I liked it there! It was clean, had plenty of hot water, a lovely bathroom, a parlor and a telephone. I liked my roommate, Nancy, and Emita and her husband, Lucy and Raúl, their children, and all their Cuban friends and tenants who had come to Mexico to escape Batista. Here I found true hospitality and good manners, gaiety, parties, and companionship. They invited me to play cards and joked and teased without tiring. The men flirted outrageously and tried to make love, but a few sharp words stopped them. I was happy there and would have remained forever.