Negrón is looking up at Eduardo, who is standing on a deck that moves when something is dropped on it.
In San Matías, Eduardo could not see himself here on this deck.
“The boss told me he wants it this way,” Eduardo says.
Negrón drops the bag from his shoulder and shoves it at Eduardo’s feet.
The floor went up and down.
“It’s going to go down,” he told Eduardo.
ACROSS THE STREET from the Benito Juárez School was an open-air tortilla store. A young woman in black stood at the end of a moving belt, and as a tortilla came off, smoking hot, she grabbed it with her right hand and snapped her wrist as if pitching a baseball, making the tortilla flip over, taking some of the heat off her fingers. She put the tortilla on a stack and immediately, continuing the motion, grabbed the next hot one from the moving belt. Every few moments another young woman took the growing stack of tortillas over to a counter, draped a towel over them, and sold them to people coming down the street.
The two jobs do not change, ever. Neither does the pay. Twenty dollars for a seventy-hour week.
Next to the tortilla store was the tiny box of a store where Silvia Tecpoyotti’s mother, Olivia, watched the group of teenagers growing into men, one of whom could be for her daughters. Olivia Tecpoyotti Daniel sat in her store on the dirt street, a crammed closet of a store. She sold socks, packs of crayons and boxes of white paste for children’s projects, sodas, and chips and tacos for the young men who came in from the street corner to play the two video game machines—among them, Tomás Eduardo Daniel Gutiérrez, eighteen. Right away, the mother’s eye picked him out for her daughter. Silvia Tecpoyotti was only fourteen, but life starts suddenly in the dust.
Olivia had seven daughters, with Silvia the third oldest. Olivia’s husband had a brickyard across the street. When Silvia was thirteen and sleeping in a room with three of her sisters, the father had a bedroom added to the house. The father and mother moved into it, and soon Silvia announced that she didn’t want to sleep with anybody anymore. She carried clothes into the vacant bedroom that was formerly her parents’, shut the door, and the room became hers. Nobody thought of complaining. Silvia was a girl who with one long glance got everything she wanted. To make it permanent, Silvia had a lock put on the door. Such luxury, a bedroom where life can be lived in privacy and thoughts can remain personal and be protected.
She put pictures on the wall of Enrique Iglesias, the singer, and her favorite movie star, Rosa Gloria Chagoyán, an actress who could sing. Silvia’s favorite movie of hers was Lola the Trucker.
Silvia remembers hearing for the first time, at age nine, the lecture mothers gave to all daughters: “The boy must come after you. You are never to go after the boy. Better the man comes to you and talks. You do not go to them and talk. Never. Remember this all your life.” This was mixed with religious instructions so that the daughters believed any act of being forward with a boy was sacrilegious.
Silvia needed no such lecture. If she had any early wild thoughts, only she would know of them and nobody else could even have the slightest notion. As for chasing a boy, that would never be her way, even if she was wounded by her stillness in the end. Who was a boy to expect her to follow him?
As the mother inspected Eduardo, Silvia was next door doing schoolwork in the small house attached to the store.
On the street corner outside Olivia’s store was a group of young men. Watching from behind her counter, Olivia could see that Eduardo was not rowdy like the others. He was tall and everybody else was short. He already had a thin mustache and brickyard arms. But he fought with nobody on the corner outside. She knew that he worked for his father in the brickyard right up the street, worked hard, and that spoke for the future more than any other quality that could be found in San Matías.
The mother didn’t talk much to Eduardo. She watched and listened. To her, there was no question that he was the best of the bunch outside the store.
She told her daughter Silvia, fourteen but almost fifteen, that Eduardo was good. Silvia was the rare one who made it to junior high school. But it was still time to tell her this. Silvia was old enough to start thinking of marrying and having children. And her bright body would bring the proudest young Mexican male crawling at her feet. Oh, she would attract many young men, the daughter would, just with her eyes alone, eyes that widened in laughter and then crinkled in joy and thrilled a boy at a glance.
Then there were moments when her look reflected wisdom so far beyond a teenager. Even the young men who would have recognized intelligence were unable to sense the wisdom, for their attention was taken up by her long, curving neck, a neck as soft as a cloud. They had to remind themselves to breathe.
Silvia had seen Eduardo before, at town dances. She danced and watched him stay against the wall as if nailed to it. At this time, Teresa Hernández was the girlfriend of José Luis Bonilla. One of her sisters married Gustavo Ramirez, who lived on the dirt street behind Eduardo in San Matías. Her other sister married Alejandro Huitzil, who wanted to be an upholsterer in Puebla. It was Gustavo who started it all by leaving his wife and child and crawling into America where there were construction jobs at the astounding pay of $6 and $7 an hour in Williamsburg, in Brooklyn, where there was a builder, Ostreicher, who was going to build many buildings on streets called Lorimer and, later, just around the corner, on Middleton.
THE CITY OF NEW YORK FIRE DEPARTMENT
1ST ALARM—PHONE (STRUCT)
02/06/96 E230 E209 L102 L119 BC 35 E216 RES
03 RC01 RS04
BOX 0341
LORIMER STREET MARCY AVENUE
STRUCTURAL BUILDING COLLAPSE
Found cause to be partial collapse of metal beams and building material at a new construction of homes from uppermost floors to cellar with two construction workers who were not injured, Henry Korl, mw39, and Thadeusz Sokilski, mw56. No further construction was permitted until arrival of Department of Buildings. Inspector Migone, Dept. of Buildings, arrived on the scene later. Richard Ostreicher of Industrial Enterprises which is constructing the buildings was on scene.
John M. Dillon, time arrived 9:01.
CHAPTER FOUR
In San Matías, Silvia Tecpoyotti and other young women, like Teresa Hernández, knew that you can get $4 an hour for scrubbing floors in Texas, and even more, as much as $5, for making up beds in a motel. How were they going to stay in San Matías? They were not. They believed in the Job. The young of San Matías lived their lives with pictures of American money in their heads.
One night in San Matías, Eduardo came to the corner by the store. He had his black baseball cap pulled down, but the corners of his eyes had the look of a hungry bird as they seized on Silvia’s face. Inside the store, she looked out.
He walked on with his face showing nothing. For his next visit, he came into the store with three or four of his cousins. He went right to one of the video game machines as if she were not in the place, and began manipulating the knobs.
It gave Silvia a chance to inspect his broad back, which came down in a V, and the arms shaped by carrying all those stacks of bricks for so long now.
He finished playing, and as he left with his cousins, she remembers, he glanced at her, his eyes licking like a camera shutter, maybe committing the sight to memory forever.
And then immediately his expression turned blank with shyness.
The following night, Eduardo’s cousin Rafael came into the store.
“Eduardo thinks you are pretty,” he said.
Silvia’s expression was impassive.
“He told us that last night when we left here,” Rafael said.
“Why doesn’t he tell me himself?”
“He is afraid,” Rafael said.
Silvia didn’t answer, and Rafael left.
Anything Eduardo earned in the brickyard was turned over to his family. He did an adult’s work and brought the money home like a kid bringing change back from going to the store. To get money for the dances
, he went through the farms on the outskirts of the dusty streets and ripped up tomatoes, apples, corn, and other plants and sold them to housewives for a few pesos. Others began calling him Chato, meaning “pug nose.” Afterward, virtually everybody drank fat beers and tequilas. Eduardo drank only a little. Then on the way home he unscrewed all the streetlight bulbs.
On another night, Eduardo was back in the store with two cousins, the brothers Moisés and Rafael. Now and then he would turn and look at Silvia and she would meet his eyes with a steady pleasant gaze but show him nothing more. He finished the game and left with his cousins.
Moisés had a girlfriend and was busy thinking of her. Rafael had nobody and thus became the excited messenger.
When Silvia came home from school the next day, she stopped in the store. In from the dusty street came Rafael.
“Why did you hurt Eduardo last night?”
“What?”
“You didn’t talk to him. He went home saying how much he loved you and that it is sad you wouldn’t speak to him.”
“Why didn’t he speak to me?”
“It is very hard for him. He didn’t think it would be hard for you. He wants you to be his girlfriend.”
By telling this to Rafael, whose brother confirmed the conversations, Eduardo was trying so clumsily to conform to the San Matías custom in which the boy must announce to all he knows that a particular girl is his girlfriend. This is an outgrowth of the old Spanish customs, Mayan suspicions, and the Catholic Church’s banns of marriage. Before the boy in San Matías makes such an announcement, he cannot take the girl out alone and most certainly cannot kiss her.
Silvia thought of Eduardo’s painfully shy mother walking past the store.
“Tell him to try,” she said in a prayer. “Tell him for me that I like him.”
Eduardo came back with three or four cousins, and they clustered around the video game machine. He never looked up. As they were leaving, he waited until his cousins were out the door, then stood in the doorway and gave a low whistle.
At first Silvia was irritated and dismissed this whistle with a wave of her hand. Then, deciding that she didn’t want to chase him away forever, she smiled at him and turned away, with the long locks of her hair waving. An old woman and a young girl came in to buy crayons, she recalls, and when she finished with them, Eduardo was gone. Instantly, she missed him. The next morning, going to school, she decided that she loved the store when he was in it.
One night the next week, when Eduardo and his cousins came into the store, she suddenly felt a tap on her head. It was Eduardo. He acted as if he hadn’t touched her.
“That was you,” she said to him.
“No, it wasn’t.”
“I can tell it was you,” she said.
“How could you?”
“I know who it was,” she said.
But he could only fool with her when all the cousins were there. When he came in alone, it was as if his mother’s blue scarf came out of the air and covered his face. He did not talk.
Then one night when it grew late and Eduardo had not been in, she found herself becoming anxious. She looked out the door and asked Rafael, “Is Eduardo coming?”
He shrugged.
“I thought he would come here,” she remembers saying. The next day, another cousin, Rafael, came by. “Eduardo is so happy that you love him,” he said.
“Who says that?” she said.
“That you told that to my brother Moisés last night that you love him and will die if he does not come to see you.”
“Did I say that?”
“Moisés says you did. He told that to Eduardo. Eduardo is very happy. He is proud that you are his girlfriend and that you love him. He loves you.”
“He should come and talk to me himself.”
“Eduardo said you know.”
“You tell him that I am nobody’s girlfriend until I am asked.” She sent Rafael off with that directive and also with a pang in her heart.
She remembers that so well. “I loved it when he was in the store. I felt sad when he was not,” she says.
She heard about a job in a hair salon in Cholula, whose streets begin only a walk away from her home. She went to the hair salon and was hired. The hours were from 4 P.M. until 9 P.M., six days a week, at 200 pesos a week, $20 a week. Come back in ten years and the hours and money are the same. She listened to the woman in charge telling everybody what to do, and she did not like it. The job put one ambition in her: She was going to get money from working in America and send it all home for a new house next to her mother’s and have her own hair salon on the first floor.
In this vision, she saw Eduardo coming home from work to this house. He climbs out of a huge truck that delivers bricks. He owns the truck and he owns the brickyard. He got the money for his business by working in the United States with her.
She rushed home at day’s end, so she wouldn’t miss Eduardo.
On one of these nights, after she had left the store, Eduardo and his cousins Rafael and Moisés came to her house. Eduardo asked Silvia’s older sister for permission to talk to Silvia.
When Silvia came out, he said, “Color our hair blond.” The town style for young men was to have a blond streak in front, a rooster streak. Eduardo and the cousins felt like outsiders without it.
“Why ask me?” she remembers saying.
“Because you know how to do it.”
She got out bleach and color and started on Eduardo first. He couldn’t wait to look like a blond rooster.
Silvia ran her fingers through his hair. He wriggled at the touch.
“I can’t do it if you don’t stay still,” she said.
He tried to brace himself. She could not resist drawing her fingertips across the nape of his neck. He shivered.
Now she started to bleach his hair. She had the coloring in a cup and she brushed it into his hair.
She ran her fingers lightly over his neck.
He made a sound.
But the most resonant sound came from the doorway where her father, Cristino, was watching with rising apprehension.
“Get me coffee,” he said.
Silvia indicated that she was working.
“I want coffee,” the father said.
Silvia had to stop and went to the small stove and heated coffee and gave it to her father, who sat on a chair like it was a guard tower.
“Why does he want his hair like this?”
“All the boys want it.”
“Why do you do it for him?”
“He asks.”
“Is he going to pay you?”
“No.”
He asked Moisés and Rafael, “You pay her?”
They were uncomfortable but said no.
“Then why should you do it?” the father said to Silvia. “Comida.” He wanted to eat.
She held out her hands to show the bleach and color still on them.
He waved that off. “Comida.”
She rushed through Eduardo’s rooster streak and told the other two that she would be right out. She went to the stove, where earlier she had made chicken and vegetables for her father.
She heard him say to Eduardo, “What time do you have to be home?”
“Eleven,” Eduardo said.
“It is late now,” the father said.
Eduardo’s two cousins grunted. They would go another day without the rooster streak.
That night was the start of the father’s fifteen-minute policy.
If Silvia or any of his other daughters was outside at night for more than fifteen minutes, he called out, “What are you doing out there? What are you talking to them about? Come in here and tell me what you are saying to them.”
To Silvia, who was openly taken with Eduardo, thus drawing the father’s sharpest attention, he said, “Here, you. Come in and make me coffee.”
As she served him, she remembers him telling her, “You can talk a little while with a boy. Fifteen minutes. That is the most. Then you come i
n.”
What he didn’t know was that her ears were filled only with Eduardo’s silence.
Over the months, the father’s crossness waned. The desire to have his daughters fluttering around him lessened as he considered their futures and realized what every other family in San Matías did: that while it was sad to have children go away, it still was not as painful as having them all at the dinner table with truncated futures.
Always, a coyote—a smuggler—named Manuel was around the corner like a cab driver, collecting money from somebody who wanted to go to America through the Tijuana border. There were others around, walking the streets of the run-down section and onto the narrow, crowded shop streets. There was Angel, whose connections took you through Sonora to Tucson, and Pedro, whose route was through Matamoros and into Brownsville, Texas. They had unlimited customers. Virtually none of the young in these towns around Puebla thought of any future except going to America. So many people told Silvia that a chambermaid job in America was far better than what she had.
One night, she had a dream in which she was on a bus with her uncle going to the border and America, her hand gripping the back of the seat in front of her to ease the rocking. The next night she had the same dream.
Suddenly her father said to Silvia, “I know you think of going to America.”
Of course she had thought of this, but it was for sometime ahead, and here the father was stating it as imminent. As long as he had brought it up, she would start planning. She waved a hand in the air, and it brushed against the new house she was building with the hair salon on the first floor.
Silvia’s mother said that her brother, Silvia’s uncle, had decided to go to America and if Silvia wanted to go, this would be her only chance for a long time. She would not be allowed to go on such an adventure with strangers. The uncle had arranged with the coyote Pedro to take them on his route through Matamoros and on to Brownsville. Her uncle had a brother and two nieces in College Station, Texas, where there were many motels and fast-food restaurants that needed Mexicans.
The date was set for Sunday.
Immediately, Silvia told Rafael, the messenger of romance, that she was going to America on Sunday. When Eduardo didn’t come into the store that night, she shrugged, as if to shuck Eduardo off. She and a sister, Emilia, talked about a farewell outing on Saturday night at a dance concert in the stadium in Puebla. Silvia’s favorite group, Bryndis, was appearing. On Friday night, they were talking about this again when Eduardo walked in with his cousins. Hearing the talk about the concert, he said to Emilia, “Can I come with you?”
The Short Sweet Dream of Eduardo Gutierrez Page 2
