The Miraculous Day of Amalia Gómez

by John Rechy

  A coyote! With renewed horror, Amalia remembered hearing recently about two coyotes in Texas who, in danger, fled from their trailer, leaving a dozen men and women locked inside; three old people had died from the heat. And that was the breed of man she had been with last night! “Are you sure?”

  “Ask Elidio when you see him. He was the one who told me after you left. He was too scared to say anything earlier.”

  Amalia wanted to believe that Andy was lying to her because of the old rejection. But it all fitted now, from last night. “Why is Elidio frightened?”

  “Coyotes are dangerous.”

  “I’m not in danger from him,” Amalia said, because she felt suddenly afraid.

  “Why should you be?” Andy looked at her slyly.

  “Besides,” Amalia said, and wished it had been true, “I knew he was a coyote. I knew he wasn’t from Nicaragua.” Thinking she might have revealed too much, she added, “That’s why I walked out right after he approached me.”

  She left, without eating any more. Her stomach had wrenched in disgust at what Andy had just told her. Angel had preyed on her as he did on his own people. His sorrowing eyes, his sad story about danger and loss—lies to arouse her sympathy!… Outside, she realized she had not even asked about Raynaldo…. She had been with a coyote last night! If only she could talk to Rosario, who would help her know what to think about all this…. Milagros! Yes, she would go visit Milagros. She had urged her to contact her—and it had been about Rosario. She was sure of it now, and she would go see Milagros. The gossipy woman would think nothing about her just turning up—that’s how visiting occurs among people without telephones.

  From years of riding buses, Amalia was an expert in maneuvering throughout Los Angeles. She knew the bus system, its connections, even some of its schedules, the way others in the city know the maze of freeways … She had to wait only a short time for the bus, and so she reached the MacArthur Park area in minutes.

  Years ago, she had come to this park with a possible “boyfriend.” They had looked at the glistening lake at night. Romantic couples huddled in rowboats floating on the water crowded with water lilies.

  Now the park looked like a ravaged battlefield.

  The most destitute—the wasted bodies of men and women, flesh on bones—congregated in one corner of the park, separated by tangles of rusted wire. The grass had died. Black people, brown people, white people, men, women—many young, a few with children—staggered about. Others sat on the rubble of spilled garbage, against oxidized cans, sat as immobile as still-living allows. Some lay on rags, on newspapers, on weeds. Others wandered with carts stuffed with debris. In the periphery of stirring corpses, shabby men and women sold drugs.

  Others extended their selling into an area of the park still shaded by pretty trees heavy with flowers. A car would pause for a purchase and then speed away. In that same area there were swings and slides, and children played on them, watched anxiously by their mothers.

  If a shooting occurred, would one of those children—? Amalia rushed away from the park.

  On the streets, there was the buzz of an outdoor fiesta, this early Saturday afternoon. Men and women from across the various borders lavished the blocks with life, spontaneous conversations, even an occasional song, the strumming of a guitar. They walked or lingered along blocks cluttered with outdoor shops—bright clothes resplendent in the sun, colored glass jewelry nestling among ribbons and toys in improvised trays, second-hand stores promising unheard-of bargains. From small food stands everywhere, vendors offered exotic delicacies—a drink of fermented corn, cheese turnovers, the food of the new aliens—and vied with the sellers of tamales and tacos. The air was flushed with spicy scents. Sitting on a milk crate, a woman sold her proud creations, huge mangoes peeled into flower shapes, dabbed with lemon.

  So many pretty young women in the area! Amalia noticed with pleasure; they were so new in Los Angeles that they wore little makeup, if any, dark shiny hair loose or braided, and they were still so shy, avoiding, with hidden smiles, the young men who praised them. Would the Anglo people who drove around these blocks in search of cheaply hired maids ever see how lovely these girls were? Amalia wondered…. Voices were lowered now, movement slowed—a sudden tension captured the blocks. In a slow squad car two policemen surveyed the street, as if choosing whom to question and for what. A few drugged bodies that had managed to straggle beyond the park shuffled away, that instinct still alive.

  Amalia crossed the street, to another block.

  The building whose address Milagros had given her had probably once been a stylish hotel. Its facade held on to colorful fragments of a tiled mosaic. Now, near its entrance, addicts, drunks, dealers, desolate men and women loitered. Pedestrians passed by, no longer even noticing them. For a few minutes, Amalia hesitated to enter—because she saw that it was made of bricks. All over the city brick buildings were being torn down or reinforced to resist the shaking of earthquakes. Amalia had grown used to noticing the giant bolts that indicated a building had been “anchored.” She did not see any on this building. And so it was being abandoned, to decay or to an earthquake. Did Milagros know that?

  The building’s lobby, too, hinted of another existence. It had graceful arcs, layers of paint now chipped away in violent scratches. The man who oversaw the building sat behind a barred cubicle, like a cell. When the door opened, he reached automatically for something to one side of him. When he saw Amalia, the hand withdrew. He continued to scrutinize her carefully.

  Amalia made her way past an open iron-webbed gate, up stairs cluttered with trash. Children played in dark hallways. The stench of Black Flag roach killer saturated the air despite paneless windows along the corridors. On the third floor, the door to Milagros’s room was open.

  “Amalia!” Milagros welcomed her, happily, into one room, a small room. “I’d given up hoping you’d come. It’s been so long—”

  On a bed were two children—one, about ten years old, a boy, played with a stick; the other, younger, a girl, slept. Milagros explained a window Amalia was looking at. It was partially covered with crisscrossed boards, loosely nailed: “Ay, mujer, it’s to keep the children from falling out—and the bullets from coming in—or shattering the glass—what’s left of it!—on me while I’m asleep.” She laughed. “There’re shootings every night.” She laughed more forcefully. “I never go out at night anymore.” The laughter stopped.

  She invited Amalia to sit down, clearing a place on the bed. “It’s more comfortable than those chairs.” She offered her some orchata, a delicious, cool, milky drink made from sun-dried cantaloupe seeds. Amalia savored it.

  A long piece of flowered cloth, darkened with grime and hanging over a stick, converted a corner of the room into a “kitchen.” There was a hot plate; a small sink intended as a hand basin. There were paper flowers everywhere—and rat traps ready to spring. On a table were a framed picture of the Holy Mother, a coppery crucifix, and a small television. Through flimsy walls—Amalia noticed the ominous cracks—the constant cries of children, the blare of radios, and occasional shouts assaulted the room. The day’s heat was accumulating here, entrenched. Milagros gave Amalia a pretty cardboard fan, to cool herself. Then she blurted: “Amalia, I’m terrified. My oldest son—he’s on probation now—he’s a tecato. He stole my week’s pay.”

  A heroin addict. Like Salvador. Was Milagros’s son one of those dazed young men she had seen wandering the park? Amalia let Milagros sob—what else was there to do?

  “Every time I hear a shot, I think he’s been killed, or that he killed someone. What am I going to do, tell me, mujer And my other son, Amalia, he’s only fifteen, and he drinks!” The sleeping girl woke, crying. Milagros held her, kissing her softly. “Amalia, I’m not even legal. My papers are fake. Every time la migra comes around, I want to die. That’s why I make even less money than the others, because I’m not legal and Lewis knows it.”

  Amalia studied Milagros. In her forties—weary beyond her yea
rs, permanent shadows about her eyes. Had she been pretty not long ago? And this was the woman who at the sewing sweatshop kept everyone entertained with her gossip.

  “I’ve been trying to bring my mother over, to help me with the children so I can take another job. I paid a coyote, but I haven’t heard anything more about her. I don’t even know where she is.”

  A coyote. Like Angel. “Things will get better,” Amalia tried to console.

  “But how?” Milagros pleaded.

  Yes, how? Amalia wondered. Like living with a gun pressed against your head—that’s how Rosario had described this existence.

  Milagros wiped her face. “Ay, mujer, you didn’t come here to listen to my miseries. We all have them.”

  “Yes,” Amalia said. “We all have them.”

  Milagros announced with sudden excitement: “You haven’t been around, and so I haven’t told you what’s happened in ‘Arco Iris al Cielo.’ It’s my favorite television serial now. Well! Imagine! Esteban has been deeply in love with Clara for years, from when they were both young and used to visit the local bishop—but now that Hector, Clara’s stepfather, has miraculously come out of a coma, and—”

  Amalia listened attentively, caught in the web of romantic anguish.

  “And that’s where the last installment of ‘Rainbow to Heaven’ ended. Can you believe they would leave us in such suspense?” Milagros finished.

  “Always at the worst place,” Amalia commiserated.

  “Always.” Milagros shook her head.

  Soon she would ask about Rosario. Milagros had seemed so destitute that she had not wanted to reveal her reason for being here, that it was not to visit her. “In ‘Camino al Sueño’—” Now Amalia went on to share with Milagros the details of her semanal, which, Milagros rued, she could not watch because she worked Saturday mornings cleaning the building’s office in return for lowered rent.

  “Dios mío, mujer! What can Ti’ita possibly do to save the marriage of Antonio and Lucinda, especially since God is so clear in his strictures about matrimony, mujer, and, after all, the evil man did, under God’s eyes, marry Lucinda first!”

  Amalia shook her head despondently at the complexities of the besieged Montenegro dynasty. Then she was quiet for a few minutes while Milagros tried to cool her little girl with a moistened towel. Finally, she said, “Milagros, do you know where Rosario is? I would like to find her.”

  “I’ve told you everything I know.” Milagros looked away from Amalia. “La migra would also like to know where she is. They came asking about her again. They won’t say why. But we keep hearing those rumors that she’s hiding Jorge and that he killed a coyote.” She faced Amalia. “The way the migra keeps coming around, I believe he killed one of them. They wouldn’t care about a coyote, no one does.”

  “No, no one does,” Amalia agreed. In that moment she was sure Milagros was in touch with Rosario—to inform the older woman about what she heard at the factory. But Rosario had considered Milagros only a gossipy woman—or had she, too, come to know more about her, about her life beyond her serials? Amalia dug in her purse for some coins. “Just in case you do know where she is—”

  “I told you I don’t.” Milagros’s lips tightened.

  “—or if you do hear from her—”

  Milagros accepted the change.

  “—then you can call me.” She wrote down her telephone number on a piece of paper and gave it to Milagros. Then she reminded: “Rosario and I were such good friends.”

  “You have a telephone!”

  Amalia was slightly embarrassed. “Yes.” Besides, she might not have a telephone much longer if—But Raynaldo would be home by the time she returned.

  “You’re so lucky,” Milagros said.

  Amalia promised she would visit her again soon. Then she walked along the darkened corridor pocked with smashed light bulbs, past a dark bathroom reeking of urine, down unswept stairs, past the iron-webbed gate now drawn closed in the lobby. For a short time—in the miseries of Milagros—and of Esteban and Clara and Hector and Lucinda and Antonio and Ti’ita—she had managed to lose herself.

  On the sidewalk a man was being handcuffed by two white cops. Now even more men, some women, idled outside. The stench of beer was assertive in the heat. There were angered voices. Sobs? Or was it laughter she heard? Increasingly she noticed desperate brown men like these, bewildered, all about the city. Now as she passed them on the street, she thought she heard a long, long sigh of loss.

  A shot!

  Threatened, Amalia halted. Then she realized the shot had not occurred near her. Quickly she looked up toward the third floor of the building she had just left.

  She saw Milagros leaning out through the suddenly parted boards at her window, staring down into the streets where the gunshot had erupted.

  Amalia hurried away from the shriek of sirens, as abrupt as if the street had screamed.

  She walked two extra blocks to another bus stop, to avoid MacArthur Park. When she boarded the bus, she looked closely at the few scattered riders before she sat down—not long ago there had been a man who had suddenly begun shooting at passengers. There was danger everywhere. Like living with a gun pressed to your head. Rosario’s words had followed her. If the gun was pressed there, it intended to shoot. That meant there was nothing you could do—and there never was, was there? Just the image of a gun, pressing, filled her with such fear that the day’s heat felt only pasted to her suddenly cold body.

  Now that she had found nothing more about Rosario, her need to talk to someone became urgent. Confession! She would go to confession. Thank God there was always confession, even when you didn’t really have anything to confess.

  She got off on Sunset and walked past stores with perennial SALE TODAY signs, past glossy buildings shoving them aside, another shopping center, another, and banks facing banks. She was so eager to reach the large church on Sunset that when she barely saw it, still in the distance, she made a sign of the cross. When she was there, she was immediately grateful for the green leafy welcome of its lawn, trees cluttered with huge blossoms like pale orchids.

  The church was desert-yellow. Above three elaborately carved doors at the top of two sweeps of steps were statues of two saints, a man and a woman, welcoming. To one side, three palm trees vied for attention.

  Amalia took out a lacy handkerchief. She always carried one in her purse for just this purpose. She covered her head—as Teresa had insisted must be done. She waited for the perspiration to cool, cherishing the anticipation of surcease the church would bring from this disturbing day that had begun with exhilaration. Then she was aware that a few pedestrians on the street were reacting in shock to … something … to someone … to—

  An old Mexican woman, seventy, older, draped in a heavy black shawl, dressed entirely in black, had dropped to her knees on the sidewalk outside the church. Her face was so pale it merely looked stained brown. Dark circles rendered her eyes hollow. She proceeded to walk, on her knees, toward the steps of the church. She had lowered her black stockings just enough to expose her flesh more harshly to the chafing, hot concrete. She clutched a black rosary in her twisted hands. In a chant that rose and fell she prayed aloud in Spanish:

  “Así como El Señor Jesús subií al Calvario, asó ofrezco … Just as Our Lord Jesus climbed Calvary for my sins, I offer up my pain and sorrow to your glory, O God!”

  A young man with a turban had been sitting on the sidewalk playing a flute. He looked startled at the strange, dark apparition and he moved away from the wall of the church. Other pedestrians stopped to watch. Some cars on the busy boulevard slowed down.

  Amalia had seen beatas like this performing their promised pilgrimages to the altars of churches. She had seen them in South El Paso, more in Juárez, some prostrate, crawling on hands and knees for the last few steps of their journey. Here in Hollywood, today, on this street, the mournful figure looked like something carried over dead from the past.

  The old woman draped in black
had reached the first step. She raised one knee with deliberate slowness onto the first landing, and she began her ascent. Her face contorted in pain, she ground one knee and then the other on the rough surface. She clutched her rosary in a fist, and she pounded it against her chest.

  Her firm voice rose: “En complemento de mi promesa … In fulfillment of my promise made for your mercy on me, I offer this, and my prayers…. Santa María, Madre de Dios …”

  What possible mercy had been granted for her to remain this destitute, perhaps ill, a cadaver in black, so terrifying in her display of sorrow and pain? Amalia wanted to look away from her, but she could not.

  “Dios te salve, reina y madre …”

  The old woman climbed more steps, her voice rising in incantation:

  “Madre de misericordia … O merciful Mother!”

  Still on her knees, she reached the top of the steps. Her withered body wrenched in agony as she pulled the heavy door open—

  “Bendita tu eres entre todas las mujeres … Blessed among women!”

  —and she entered the church to continue her ritual to the foot of the altar.

  Smears of blood tainted the steps behind her.

  Amalia flung her eyes up, to the top of the church, the cross there, impassive against the blue, still sky.

  9

  AMALIA STOOD under the knot of shade created by the three palm trees to one side of the church. Even there, she felt little respite from the heat. She still stared at the door behind which the veiled cadaver had disappeared. Was that what God expected, that ritual of pain, more pain? She thought of Milagros. Add this to all her miseries? Milagros yearned for less pain. She thought of Teresa’s almost-blind friend in El Paso, longing to be crowned queen for one day. Was the old woman in veils courting something more with her crawling on bloodied knees—a miracle—by displaying her endurance for greater misery?

  Miracles did seem to add pain to those who witnessed them. Amalia knew that miraculous visitations did not bring much good to the one who perceived them, not much practical good, she amended quickly—because, of course, there was the spiritual good, the rewards in heaven. But why no happiness in life? Why not less pain? Why more sadness? Wasn’t there enough? Times had changed, though. Priests admitted that—and adjusted to it. Look at the Mass sung with music by mariachis in the church near Echo Park on lower Sunset Boulevard. Look at the clothes nuns wore now. Wasn’t it possible that miracles, too, had changed? God’s mysterious ways were not predictable, anyone could see that.