by Roger Bruner
Alejandro laughed gently and smiled at me. “At the very least, he might have asked questions you wouldn’t want to answer.” He stepped back into the crowd and disappeared again.
I wasn’t familiar with priests, Mexican or otherwise. “Tomás,—?”
“Hush!” He pulled me to an area where other people were filling in various types of forms. “We must finish this and return you to the apartment. People with big money are waiting for my merchandise.”
The harder he concentrated on the form he was struggling to complete, the redder his face grew.
Ah? You can barely read and write? Is that why you want to keep me ignorant? What a sin to live in America and remain uneducated.
Tomás forged my signature by writing with his left hand. If he intended for it to look entirely different from his own handwriting, he succeeded well. He had barely finished when I heard Alejandro’s familiar voice. “Señor del Mundo, Señorita Sin-Nombre, come this way. We must finish before the bakery closes for lunch.”
Tomás followed Alejandro to a more isolated spot, and I trudged slowly behind. The press of the crowd had worn me out. Tomás wasn’t the only person anxious to get me back to the apartment.
“You are now legally licensed to become husband and wife. Congratulations. Your appointment with the Justice of the Peace is Thursday at noon. Do you need me to write that information down for you?”
Tomás shook his head.
Alejandro took my hand and kissed it. No one had ever done that before, and—unaware what it signified—I felt my face start to burn. Ignoring my discomfort, he handed Tomás several official-looking documents.
Tomás and I managed to smile shyly and thank him, and Tomás slipped an envelope out of his pocket and let it fall to the floor. While looking elsewhere, Alejandro pretended to drop something and stooped to pick it up. He slipped Tomás’s unopened envelope into the breast pocket of his suit coat, the one he had placed the unflattering photograph in earlier.
“Come! We’re running late.” Tomás barked as irritably as if I had done something wrong. He grabbed my right wrist and practically dragged me to the parking lot. People seeing us must have wondered whether my water had broken…and he was rushing me to the hospital to deliver Alazne. That would happen soon. Hopefully not today.
On the drive back to the apartment, I didn’t need Nikki’s scarf. Tomás didn’t bother to open the convertible top again. He was too busy cursing angrily at whoever had purposely put a tiny nick in the back of his car and failed to leave a note.
10
Tomás let me into the building. “You’ve been in and out of here enough to find your way to the apartment. Knock on the door. Nikki will let you in.”
He rushed off before I could protest that this trip had only been my second time outside the apartment. Fortunately, I was a good observer, and I’d memorized the way when I returned from shopping with Nikki the day before.
My arrival seemed to delight her. She must have been watching for my return, and the apartment felt more like home than before. I would never feel at home with my soon-to-be husband-in-name-only, though.
If I had known anything about God or prayer, I would’ve thanked Him for giving me Nikki’s love and friendship. I wondered whether having a sister was anything like this.
She fixed a simple lunch of baloney sandwiches and potato chips, and we ate quietly at the kitchen table. Although I lay down to rest after that, I couldn’t convince my mind to settle down.
Alazne would soon put in an undeniable request to exit from my tummy and enter the world I lived in, and I was more frightened than ever of the pain involved. I had learned—too late—how a girl becomes pregnant. Yet I still didn’t know the first thing about the birth process.
I couldn’t forget my vivid memories of the horrible, painful screams I used to hear when one of the village women delivered a baby. She sounded like someone struggling to awaken from a nightmare, except it sounded far worse.
Although the screaming eventually stopped, the pain must have seemed endless to the miserable mother. I didn’t have much concept of time, but the sounds of suffering lasted far too long for my comfort as a distant, squeamish observer.
When I got up from napping, Nikki was watching television. The program was in English, and she seemed deeply engrossed in it. If she saw me enter the living room, she didn’t say anything or offer to switch to a Spanish channel.
I wouldn’t have expected her to. I wasn’t accustomed to having anyone cater to me and my likes and dislikes, and I wouldn’t have wanted to disrupt her daily routine any more than necessary.
During the first of many commercials—it didn’t take long for me to figure out what they were—she welcomed me back and began fiddling with the remote. She turned the closed captioning on. In Spanish, I assumed.
Although her good deed didn’t help, I smiled at her for being so thoughtful.
I had the choice of watching the story, unable to understand the dialog, or of trying to follow the Spanish words as they scrolled beneath the picture and feeling frustrated because I couldn’t read them. I decided to ignore the captioning and watch the program.
Nikki began observing me. A short time later, she clicked off the closed captioning, apparently to see my reaction. At first I felt a bit strange having her watch me that way. Was I doing something wrong? Then I quit fretting about it. Something about her attentiveness made me feel good.
The concern in her voice was unmistakable when she spoke up several minutes later. “Why, you poor thing. I was concerned about teaching you to speak, read, and write inglés without provoking Tomás, but you can’t even read español, can you?”
As if needing to verify her conclusion—I had no idea what she’d said—she handed me a clipboard with a legal pad and a pen from the mug on the mantel. She could tell immediately that I didn’t know how to hold a writing implement, for I took it in my left hand even though she had observed that I was right-handed.
Her test apparently had another part. She took the pen from me and put it in my right hand. I relaxed my fingers as much as I could while she guided them into position around the bottom part of the pen.
She would not have to teach me that again, for I was smarter than most people had given me credit for. I learned quickly, and I rarely forgot what I learned.
“¿Rosa, como se llama?” she said slowly, using one of the tidbits of Spanish she had picked up over the years. “What’s your name?”
“Rosa,” I responded aloud, slightly frustrated. “You know my name is Rosa. You just called me by name. Why did you ask?”
“Can you write your name?” she answered as if she had understood me. She pointed to the ink pen.
Then I understood what she wanted me to do. I couldn’t form a single letter of my name. I hoped she understood now that I couldn’t read or write.
Her exasperation showed when she shook her head and said, “To think that any sixteen-year-old in North America is completely illiterate.”
If I had understood her, I would’ve explained that no one in Santa María could read or write, either. The other villagers were as impoverished as I was. In that way and that way alone, we had been equals.
“Rosa, I’m going to do something about your illiteracy if it kills me.”
She laughed before continuing. “You’ll learn to read and write in your own language before we dream of teaching you English. We need to figure out how to keep this project from Tomás. He would be furious if he found out. Of course, he’s never forbidden you to read or write Spanish. He would if he thought you might, however.
“He will be your master as long as he keeps you illiterate.”
~*~
What a comic trio we must have appeared to everyone who saw us.
Tomás had hit a new low in thoughtlessness. He had insisted on driving the three of us to the wedding in his red sports car. The same one he, Alazne, and I had barely fit in earlier that week.
“Tomás,” Nikki said,
“you can’t drive a very pregnant woman to her wedding with your beloved girlfriend stuck in the tiny back seat. Why not just put me in the trunk?”
He chuckled. “Silly Nikki. The trunk isn’t big enough.”
“We should be in the van. Everyone will be miserable. And, no! Surely you don’t intend to put the top down?”
“If I don’t, I’ll have to cut a hole in the roof for your head.”
I could recognize sarcasm, even though I couldn’t understand what he had just said. He broke out laughing.
She followed us into the small wedding chapel where the formalities would take place at noon. Would she cry for me during the wedding or for herself? After all, she should have been the bride, not me. Just as she should have been pregnant with Tomás’s daughter.
Nikki seemed to love and understand Tomás in spite of his shortcomings. This marriage wouldn’t affect their relationship, although I was afraid it might remind her daily that she must not have been able to bear Tomás a baby. Or did he simply refuse to let her become pregnant? That question was one of many I was dying to ask.
All negative emotions aside, however, she would be a great help in rearing Alazne. And she would doubtless love my daughter as much as she loved me. Almost as much as I loved Alazne.
None of us expected Alazne to arrive when she did.
11
I had heard numerous tales about pregnant women and their water breaking. In a village with dirt floors and streets, the location mattered less than in a nicely-carpeted wedding chapel, where the parents stood before a make-believe priest.
I didn’t know at first what had happened, but Nikki and I figured it out quickly. The contractions made me cry out in pain, and Tomás looked like he wanted to put his hand over my mouth.
If he had, I surely would have bit him.
Nikki told the fake priest to hurry up and finish so we could get to the hospital before he had to sign a birth certificate as well as a marriage certificate.
She helped lower me into a chair and began mopping up the fluid that had gushed from my body. Tomás handed her the camera before she finished. She barely managed a couple of shots before the ceremony ended.
Tomás grabbed the certificate almost before the mock-priest could finish signing it. Then he threw some paper money onto a nearby table while Nikki pulled me toward the door and out to the car.
“Which hospital?” she asked him. “Shouldn’t we call the rescue squad?”
“No hospital, no rescue squad,” he said in stone-faced determination. “We will have this baby at home.”
“We wha—?”
“Here is the phone number. Call the midwife who will assist. Use my cell phone.”
“If you want me to call her, fine. Does she understand English?”
Tomás thought for a minute. “Yes, but keep it simple just in case. Ask for Chalina. Then say, ‘Tomás del Mundo. Ahora! Right now!’ She has been to the apartment complex once to make certain she won’t get lost now.”
Tomás translated his conversation with Nikki. Probably to impress me with how thoughtful he had been. I discovered later that Chalina had been the thoughtful one who had insisted on a precautionary visit. Not Tomás.
Tomás had laughed at Nikki’s objections about riding in the sports car, but he wasn’t laughing now. Each time I moaned, he glanced at the sky as if to say, What did I do to deserve this?
How I wanted to laugh at him, but I was too miserable. He deserved to have a black cloud open up and flood his precious red car with rainwater.
The pain subsided for moments at a time, but then they came back stronger and more frequently and lasted longer.
I was barely conscious of the onlookers who pointed at me and laughed sympathetically. Perhaps they wanted to see a baby delivered in the front seat of a sports car that didn’t even have room for me.
A thoughtful young motorcycle policeman pulled up beside us at a red light. He spoke in broken Spanish, apparently not wanting to take a chance on whether Tomás spoke English. “Do you need a police escort to the hospital?”
“No. No thank you, officer,” Tomás responded decisively in English. “We’re almost there.”
I smiled inwardly. No matter what Tomás told the policeman, he was actually just trying to avoid being noticed or remembered. Fat chance of that with a very pregnant woman in the front seat of a small open convertible.
Nikki watched the policeman pull away. “Although Chalina will meet us there, she won’t be able to get through the gate until we arrive.”
“Phone the guard—you know the number, don’t you?—and tell him to let her through. She will have to wait outside and go upstairs with us.”
I tried to turn my attention from the pain by thinking about something else, but childbirth was the only thing on my mind. Although my body was nearly seventeen, I’d gained the little knowledge I had about the human reproductive system too late to do any good. I still knew nothing at all about doctors, hospitals, and pre-natal care.
Santa María didn’t have midwives, although an older woman—often one who had never had children—might come in from the fields to assist for a short time. If labor lasted too long, however, she had to return to work.
So childbirth—especially the first baby—was apt to be lonely and frightening. Too often the baby died at birth or shortly afterwards. Sometimes the mother died, too. The villagers considered those deaths so unavoidable that grieving families dared not cry in public. And no one offered sympathy.
Nikki barked orders to Tomás. “Drive more carefully.” She gave me gentler instructions—through Tomás, of course—about when and how to breathe. And she kept telling me not to push. She knew much more about such things than I would have expected from a woman who had never had a baby.
~*~
I learned later that Nikki had become obsessed with reading about conception, pregnancy, and childbirth in the hopes she might yet become pregnant. Tomás hadn’t been willing to undergo fertility testing. Not surprising. He was too macho to risk discovering that he couldn’t father a child.
Neither would he allow her to go for testing. Fertility on her part would equate to infertility on his. Only when I came into Nikki’s life, pregnant with Tomás’s child, could she be sure that the “fault” lay with her.
So she had given up hope and put away her books. As her affection for me grew, however, she had pulled her materials from the shelf once more, hoping to make things easier for me. But because of our inability to communicate, she hadn’t been able to share her knowledge with me.
~*~
Tomás complained loud and long about having to translate Nikki’s instructions; his failure to be in control seemed to irk him in ways I couldn’t understand. She had to ask intimate questions about my progress, and he didn’t try to hide his disgust. His disgust and his true nature—that of a selfish little boy who cared only for himself and his belongings.
Especially with comments like, “Is there blood? Don’t let any of it get on the seat cover. I had it custom-made. Replacing it would cost a fortune. Don’t touch anything. Will the fluid on your dress wash out? Don’t let it drip inside the car. Can’t you hold the baby in? Quit crying out so loudly! Nothing hurts that badly, and people are staring.”
Regardless of his words, Tomás didn’t care one bit about his car. He could replace it many times over without seeing his bank account balance dip in the least. He would probably be delighted to have an excuse to buy something newer, faster, and fancier.
But Santa María was the heart of his business. He needed to go back—soon. How much better to take with him beautiful photographs of a healthy mother and baby rather than the tragic news that one or both of us had died in childbirth.
No matter how little the villagers knew about life in San Diego, they might not readily accept the fact that infant and mother fatalities occurred here, too. Maybe he was terrified that they would punish him more severely than before if he bore bad news about Alazne and me on his next
trip.
I turned my head and looked at Nikki through pained and frightened eyes—that’s how she described them later—as if I was trying to tell her, How fortunate that I no longer love this pathetic man.
She looked back at me, her own eyes filled with tears of concern and compassion. She couldn’t hide her own feelings about Tomás. How unfortunate that I’m in love with this weak, pathetic man who doesn’t know how to love himself, much less anyone else.
~*~
The next few hours were a blur. A dizzying combination of pain and pressure, screaming, pushing when Chalina told me to, and not pushing when she told me not to. Although she was kind, gentle, and encouraging, she couldn’t calm me completely.
I finally understood firsthand the cries of women in labor—the cries that had always made me cover my ears with my hands. If I had known I was so close to my delivery date when I arrived in San Diego, I would probably have stayed awake every night worrying about it.
But it was over now. Finally.
Alazne had looked frightfully red, wrinkled, and beat up when Chalina first held her up for me to see. That terrified me. What was wrong with her?
“You would look this way, too,” Chalina explained patiently as she cleaned Alazne off, “if you had just come through a tunnel that was barely large enough for you to fit in. And so you once did. We all look like this at birth.”
Tomás took one look at Alazne and stomped off to the master bedroom muttering one disgusted curse after another.
Chalina stopped talking and worked diligently at making Alazne resemble a real baby. A healthy one.
