Tijuana Straits (13 page)

So all day long Armando worked with the glues and solvents. No one wore gloves. Armando’s work would not have been possible with them. He would not have been able to feel the leather. Nor were there masks or goggles. Everyone’s eyes burned. Their noses bled. They coughed. They passed out. Managers walked the floor, figuring quotas, flirting with the workers, most of whom were young women not yet out of their teens, encouraged by the management to dress to the nines—stiletto heels and fishnet stockings beneath blue work smocks. It made for a crazy, sex-charged atmosphere, stoned on fumes beneath leering eyes, ghetto blasters spewing sound from every table, the entire factory rocking to techno-house with a Tex-Mex beat . . .

In time, Armando was one of the best assemblymen in the plant. He could do forty wheels a day, for which he was paid two dollars and sixty-nine cents. By the end of a shift he could barely lift his arms. His hands achieved a permanently red and swollen look, the skin cracked and bleeding from constant exposure to the solvents and glues. But there was money enough to scrape by on and he believed that perhaps, in time, he would rise to the rank of manager. This was an impossible dream. Mexican universities had made
a cottage industry of turning out mid-level managers. Armando, with his fourth-grade education, his
naco
looks and manners, would never be more than an assembly-line goon.

There were days when Armando would leave the factory so high on fumes he was scarcely able to walk. Sometimes it was even funny. Then one Sunday, in a month he could no longer recall, he found out something about himself. He had gone to the home of a fellow worker to watch a football game. Other workers from the factory were there. Someone had pilfered a can of the yellow glue. It sat uncapped on the floor at their feet and before the afternoon was over, they had all gotten high on beer and glue, watching the Oakland Raiders and the New York Giants, on a stolen big-screen television perched upon an engine block in a shack made of tin and cardboard on a hillside in the Distrito de Florida, overlooking the city of Tijuana, its gargantuan national flag flapping in great undulating waves above crumbling rooftops, and it was good. That was the thing he learned, that it was good to have beer and glue. It was good to be high.

He was not alone in this discovery. In the weeks that followed he often heard his fellow workers inhaling deeply at their workstations. Days passed as in a dream. Summer settled upon the city as if to smother it. The breezes that had blown throughout the spring across the Tijuana River Valley failed and the air hung trapped among the brown hills for days at a time, unmoving. And every week or two one of the city’s great and improbable dumps would catch fire and the stench of burning waste would choke what was left of the stagnant air. In winter the factory had been freezing. Now it sizzled, a din of noise, fumes, and smoke. In the stitching area, where the women worked to sew the leather to the wheels, the accidents multiplied.

Armando had often thought of the women as so many featherless birds seeking flight, their arms rising and falling as they
performed the elaborate maneuvers necessary for securing the leather, long, hooked needles slicing the air. Body parts were pierced. Eyes were lost. Mexican law required that each factory employ a nurse. The drug of choice was aspirin. The factories took the young. When workers began to age, or became injured, they were sent to the junkyard—that part of the building where older or maimed workers were assigned the most menial of tasks before their firing, which was inevitable and irrevocable. Yet all through that summer of smoke and fumes the banda music played on—songs in praise of peasants become drug lords and of the crops that had made them wealthy:
“Me paso la vida sembrando mota . . .”
And indeed Armando would have been more than happy to spend the rest of his life tending marijuana. Unhappily his mota was in short supply. What came in its place were more steering wheels, more leather, more glue.

The work groups within the factory were referred to as cells. There was a woman in Armando’s cell by the name of Reina. On a summer night during the peak of the season she was declared the winner of the wet T-shirt contest the managers had contrived to stage in the parking lot behind the factory and when the contest was over she left with Armando. She might have gone after a manager, but in fact she and Armando had been flirting for some time in the sweltering summer heat and that night she had chosen him, in front of everyone. Armando had taken her to a restaurant in the Zona Norte where the band was loud and the fish prepared Sinaloan style. He’d blown a month’s wages in a night but they had danced on the street beneath colored lights and afterward she had taken him to her home on the southern flank of Cerro Colorado.

The home did not amount to much, situated upon a steep hillside, half a mile from the nearest water, built of wooden pallets and cardboard boxes, but the plot of land it occupied was registered in Reina’s name, which meant that not even the city itself could evict her. In time, Armando moved in. They added on to the
house—more pallets and boxes, a cast-off garage door. They cooked outside over an open fire. They used oil lamps and candles to light the house and they got their water from a truck that chugged along the highway then stored it in a fifty-gallon drum salvaged from a nearby dump.

It was not the life Armando had imagined, riding the buses that had brought him north. But it was the life he had. A woman. A house. An unbearable job. They said a teaspoon of sugar made the medicine go down. Armando had beer and glue. By the end of summer it had become apparent that Reina was with child.

They were married on a sweltering Sunday afternoon at the Church of the Purest Conception, in the shadow of the great cultural center in the Zona del Río. On Monday Reina was fired. They had known this was coming. Women at the Cline plant were expected to show used tampons to floor managers on a monthly basis and Reina had been unable to do so for some time. But she had been a good worker and they had waited until she began to show before cutting her loose. Children were frowned upon by the managers at Cline Technologies, at least until they reached the age of fourteen or fifteen and could themselves be put to work.

So while Reina worked at making a home of their shack on the hillside, Armando carried on in the factory, redoubling his efforts. He was up to fifty steering wheels a day when his wife gave birth. It was the day that changed everything. A moment of terror and wonder. The infant was a boy, with dark, liquid eyes, jet black hair, and a huge tumor that ran the length of his tiny back. In his face, Armando thought, his son looked normal, regarding the world with inquisitive eyes. But of course one couldn’t just look at his face. The condition was diagnosed as myelocele and the family remanded to the hospital in Reynosa, in the state of Sonora.

The hospital occupied the high ground along a barren and windswept plain where for days the couple waited on metal folding chairs, in gleaming corridors bathed in fluorescent light. There were five surgeries in all. Somewhere between the fourth and fifth surgeries a revelation occurred. A doctor appeared, stating that the child did not have any more blood in his veins. That was how he put it; there was no more blood in the baby’s body. He asked Armando to come down to the lab for some testing, to see if he would be able to provide blood for the coming operation. But Armando failed the test. That was the revelation. They told him that his blood was poisoned and that they could not use it. They declined to tell him how or why this had come to be, but that was their way. They were not long on explanations.

Armando wandered the blinding corridors. He met other families. He discovered than an entire wing of the hospital had been given over to children with anencephaly, that is, children born without brains, the children of factory workers. The doctors went ahead with the fifth operation. The boy died and was buried in the Pantheon of the Cypresses overlooking a truck yard. Armando and Reina stood on a small square of Astroturf as a Sister of the Immaculate Conception said a rosary, then they boarded the bus that would carry them back to Tijuana, past the factories that lined the border.

In Tijuana, in the Colonia Solidaridad, on the hillside overlooking the city, Armando and Reina were visited by the manager of human resources, an employee of Cline Technologies. The man’s name was Ramón de la Christa Cortez. He was a small, misshapen man with a humped back all his own and a thin, wispy beard that fluttered like strands of moss in a brassy afternoon wind. Armando greeted him upon the wooden pallet he used as a porch.

“You know that I have heard about your child,” Ramón de la
Christa Cortez said. “I hear that he passed away. And I am very sorry. But I don’t want you to feel that it was because of the workplace. It is not because of the thinner, the Varsol, or the solvents . . .”

“How about the glue?” Armando asked him.

The manager smiled sadly, as if he were talking to a child. “No,” he said. “Your child was born like that because, well . . . it is a part of nature.”

“I know what I know,” Armando said. “Before the factory I was in fine health. Reina also. I was in training to be a fighter.”

The manager seemed to give this some thought. “Did you know that I once trained for the priesthood?”

“How would I know that?” Armando asked.

The manager ignored Armando’s question. “I studied religion,” he said. “All kinds of religion. And the books of religion. In the Jewish religion there is a book called the Talmud. And in the Talmud there is a blessing one is to say when one sees someone deformed from birth. The blessing is this: ‘Blessed art Thou, O Lord our God, King of the Universe, who changes the creatures.’ Perhaps what happened was due to some injury. Perhaps it was hereditary. Perhaps somewhere in your family line there have been others with such problems. Perhaps it is in the genes. You will never know. It is better, when looking at the photograph of your son,” for he had seen that in fact Armando was holding a picture of the baby boy, “to recall this blessing.” And he repeated the blessing one more time, looking at the photograph in Armando’s hand, then turned to go.

Armando watched as the manager made his way back down the hillside to the dirt road that ran along the floor of the canyon, aware only of the pain in his head. He had never heard of the Talmud. He knew only that he was in need of beer and glue, and that he wanted to kill Ramón de la Christa Cortez, to work out on his head the way he had once worked out on the fence posts around the old corral where the Río Mayo made its way into the Gulf of
California, and he doubted the manager would hit back as hard as the fighters in Tijuana or be as hard to hurt. The men in Tijuana were like him. They came from hard lives. And Armando had looked once more at the photograph of his son. The boy was on his side, facing the camera, swathed in a large white bandage that allowed his arms and shoulders to be free, and he was smiling. A remarkable thing, that smile. It prompted Armando to dig a stone from the ground at his feet and throw it after the departing manager. The man was already too far away, but the stone got his attention. It caromed off a metal trash can and rolled on down the hill. The manager never looked back. He did, however, quicken his pace.