A moment later she scooped up Isabella and began to breast-feed. Isabella rolled her head, opened her mouth, and began happily sucking on Mommy’s booby. It was time for lunch.
Maria cradled her daughter and relaxed, enjoying the soft wind against her uncovered body. She looked like some kind of Latina goddess.
I finished up washing the last of my clothes. Suddenly I heard a splash in the river next to me. It was a bottle of shampoo.
“Bathe, pocha… then we’ll eat.”
I hesitated. I had never bathed in a river before. What if someone came along?
I looked around. A lot of things could be said about where we were, but heavily populated was not one of them. We hadn’t seen another person all morning.
Maria stared at me. I was sure it was a test to see if I thought I was too good to bathe in a river. Her, she’d probably bathed this way for years. Me, I’d always had a tub and a bath mat and a door to close.
Maybe I was a pocha?
I stripped off my top. Screw her, I thought. Even if I was a pocha, I wasn’t going to admit it.
I got naked, dunked my tits, and took my first river bath. It was awkward, but I did my best to pretend it was no big deal. Maria occasionally looked over to check my progress, and I acted as if I had been bathing this way my whole life. At one point I even whistled like I was on a relaxing vacation.
Just another day for me, I pretended. River baths and before-dawn egg therapy. Yep, scrub-a-dub-dub…just another regular old day for me.
Finally I finished and climbed to the shore. Maybe I had bathed in the river, but sitting nude on a blanket while eating lunch next to my naked cousin was way too ancient Maya for me. Surprisingly, Maria reached into her bag and tossed me a shirt and pair of pants. The top was thin and white, the pants tan and lightweight. It was typical of what most people in this part of the country wear on a warm day. I guess Maria had thought ahead to bring a dry outfit for me.
I looked at the clothing.
“Gracias,” I said.
She didn’t answer. Instead she took Isabella off her breast, burped her, and then reached into a basket and laid out tortillas, roasted peppers, cheese, beans, and fruits.
“Eat,” she said, taking a bite of an apple. “Time to eat.”
I reached for a pepper. It was delicious, the best pepper I’d ever had. The flavor lit up my mouth as if I were eating a piece of sunshine.
On the one hand I kind of wanted to talk to mi prima, but on the other hand I didn’t. I wasn’t sure what I had done to make Maria so angry and rude to me. Really, I was just being who I just naturally was.
Then I realized, so was she. I took a small bite of an orange. We ate in silence, both of us hardheaded and stubborn, like mules refusing to speak to one another. Finally, when the food was done and our meal was finished, we packed our things and returned to la casa de Abuelita.
Minutes after we walked onto the front porch, I heard a crash of thunder. Then the rain began.
chapter veinte
We put the laundry on a clothesline underneath the back porch to dry to avoid the rain. Then Isabella took a nap. So did Maria. Siestas in Mexico are still a tradition, and considering how early I had gotten up, I thought it seemed like a good idea for me to take a nap too.
Only thing was, I couldn’t sleep.
I lay in bed tossing and turning, with wild, scary thoughts running through my brain. My mind was like a hyped-up monkey leaping from branch to branch. Deaf babies, ignorant village girls, crazy grandmothers, stupid eggs, and people at home I didn’t want to think about kept popping into my mind. I got out of bed, needing something to distract me.
Unfortunately, there was no TV, no computer, no anything in this house. Just a couple of books. How in the world did these people function, I thought. I walked out to the front porch, sat down in one of the rocking chairs, and stared out at the mountains.
Bo-ring.
I went back inside.
Where is Abuelita? I thought. Aw, with her, who knew? Maybe she had walked to the moon for some cheese.
I went to the kitchen but wasn’t really hungry, so I went back outside. A person was approaching the property. Good, I thought. Some company. Then I realized I must be getting desperate. Was I really excited to see Rodrigo?
“Where’ve you been?” I asked when he stepped onto the porch, wet from the rain.
“You mean, ‘Who’ve I been in?'” he replied with a smirk. “I love Mexico. The bitches down here think I’m a rock star.”
A rock star? Dios mío.
It turns out that Rodrigo had gone down to a local bar to meet the stewardess and watch the Mexican national fútbol team play El Salvador. Mexico and El Salvador were fierce rivals, and the game had gone into double overtime. Rodrigo had drunk until he could hardly see, sung the Mexican national anthem with forty or fifty new friends, had his drinks paid for all night by people he had never met, and then, after Mexico won on a header goal off a corner kick in the 107th minute, my brother was taken home by some fake blonde—nope, not the stewardess—whose name he didn’t even know.
“She banged my brains out, fed me breakfast, then banged me again,” he said with a smile.
“This is more than I want to know,” I told him.
“Then she made me leave before her husband got home. He works the night shift at some factory.”
“You slept with a married woman?”
“And there were at least six other females I could have hooked up with last night,” he said. “Did I mention how much I love this country?”
I stared at him in disbelief.
“What?” he asked.
“You’re a pig,” I said.
Rodrigo snorted, not caring one bit what I thought. “Any more of that cake around?”
“You better watch it, Rigo” I told him. “Hombres find out you are messing with their wives, they get crazy down here.”
“Bah,” he said. “Time for siesta. Gotta rest up for tonight.” He stretched his arms and yawned.
“Hey, you wanna come? You know, see the town?” he asked. “Oh wait, I forgot. No Lame-os.”
Rodrigo chuckled, walked to his room, and flopped onto his bed without even taking off his wet T-shirt.
“Wake me when there’s food,” he said. A few minutes later he was snoring.
For the next five days, Rodrigo followed the same pattern, and with any luck—at least in his mind—he was going to spend his entire summer this way: drinking, sleeping with local girls, and watching fútbol at the bar. Abuelita’s house was the perfect training ground for him to turn into the man of his dreams: a jobless, brown-skinned, puta-chasing boozer.
As for me, I was quickly being turned into a typical, young Mexican girl. Every morning I was up bright and early for chores: dishes, dusting, sweeping, and cleaning. Keeping a neat house was very important to Abuelita, and since I was spending the summer, I had to do my fair share of the work in the a.m. hours. I guess it was okay to expect me to help, even though Rodrigo didn’t have to do a damn thing. The whole boy/girl unfair culture thing was total BS, but I didn’t say a word. At least the chores gave me something to do. Other than that, Mexico was incredibly boring. My afternoons were totally free.
Maria, on the other hand, was always in motion, morning, noon, and night. Isabella might have napped the first day I was in town, but after that, she was all squiggles and squirms and motoring around to explore the universe without hardly any napping at all. And Isabella not napping meant that Maria practically never had a chance to sit down. Diapers, washing spit-up, changing clothes, monitoring Isabella while she tried to put everything she touched into her mouth. Watching Maria made me realize just how much hard work it was having a child, especially with no help. Once, as the baby played with an old deck of cards, I saw Maria fall asleep while leaning against a wall. I really thought mi prima was going to fall over and bonk her head, but she caught herself before she fell. Every day she looked more and more exhausted.
M
aria caught me witnessing this side of her and I could tell she felt embarrassed. Mi prima was turning into an old maid right before my eyes.
I finally stopped even trying to lay my head down for afternoon naps because incredibly unsettling thoughts about all the things wrong in the world would race through my mind, and they bothered me way too much to sleep. One afternoon, looking for something to do, anything to distract me, I walked over to the bookshelf. Much to my surprise, I got lucky and found something of interest: a big thick wedding album.
I have always been a sucker for weddings, so I put the album under my arm and went to look at it on the front porch. It’d be cool to see my grandfather, I thought. And Abuelita as a young girl. I bet she had teeth back then. I opened the first page to see what Abuelita had looked like before her 250th birthday.
Page one shocked me. I’d expected to find a young bride with a handsome groom standing at the altar of an old church. And that’s what I did find. Except Abuelita wasn’t the bride.
Maria was.
I turned the page. The groom was very handsome. As I flipped through more of the wedding album, I saw people dressed in nice clothing, smiling and obviously having a wonderful time. Mexican weddings were always incredible fiestas, but Maria’s wedding looked like something out of a fairy tale. There was food and flowers and cake and relatives and dancing and music and a whole lot of love oozing off of the page. It was clear that this event had been a magnificent occasion. They were a gorgeous couple, too, Maria and her groom, like a match made in heaven.
But if Maria was married, I thought, where was . ..
“Es bonita, sí?” said a voice, interrupting my train of thought.
I looked up. “Si, verdaderamente,” I said, it was pretty. “But, Abuelita, if Maria is married, where is her husband?”
I paused then answered my own question. “¿El Norte?”
Abuelita didn’t answer right away. Instead, she sat down in the rocking chair next to me.
“Sí y no,” she answered. “Sí y no.”
“No comprendo,” I replied. What did she mean, ‘yes and no’?
Abuelita then proceeded to tell me Maria’s story.
Maria’s husband, the groom in the pictures, was named Juan Carlos. His plan had been to become a civil engineer. Though he had graduated high school and was offered a special scholarship to go to college in America, Juan Carlos had chosen to enroll at the prestigious Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México in Mexico City.
“If all our best leave,” he had said, “who will be left to stay?”
Juan Carlos loved Mexico. And he was very proud of his country. Sure, there were things wrong with it, but there were things wrong with every country, he’d said. He had no desire to go north.
Especially because he was madly in love.
From the moment he’d met Maria, Juan Carlos had known she was the one and only true love of his life. His parents, however, disliked the idea of their marriage very much.
“There are plenty of fish in the sea,” they’d told him. “You have the chance to become something. Something great. Love can wait.”
It was true that Juan Carlos could have had his choice of many, many girls. He was handsome, at the top of his class, and quite clearly he had a bright future. His parents couldn’t understand why he wanted to marry a pobrecita like Maria when he so easily could have spent his life with the daughter of someone wealthy and important.
Abuelita reached across the table and poured herself a glass of tea.
“¿Quieres?” she asked.
The drink looked good.
“Si,” I replied. Abuelita poured me a glass of tea, and I reclined in the rocking chair.
Hey, I thought, this is kinda comfortable. I rocked back and forth a few times and sipped the tea, which had been sweetened with some sort of flower—hibiscus, maybe. It tasted nice.
“Gracias,” I replied.
“De nada,” my grandmother answered. A moment later she continued her story.
Juan Carlos, she explained, didn’t care about status. Or his family’s wishes. Or their high hopes for him as their only child. All he cared about was the beautiful little village girl who had stolen his heart. They were married one and a half years after they’d met.
Abuelita told me that it wasn’t Maria his parents didn’t like; it was her family tree they didn’t approve of. They even said that the only reason Maria’s parents liked Juan Carlos so much was because he would one day become their meal ticket.
“You mean, his parents told Maria’s parents that they were gold diggers?” I asked.
“Sí, the day after the wedding,” replied Abuelita. “And Maria’s father, my son, is a very proud man. So proud that he soon left for El Norte to make a better life for his remaining kids and wife. After Juan Carlos’s parents accused him of being money hungry, he felt he had no choice.”
Too much pride, I thought.
“Yes, too much pride,” said Abuelita, as if she had read my mind. She looked at me with wise, glowing eyes. A moment later, after another sip of tea, she continued.
“Juan Carlos told his parents that if he had to choose between his new family and his old, his new family would win every time, and he vowed not to speak to them until they apologized to Maria and her parents.
“Did they?” I asked.
“Of course not. Soon Isabella was born. Then the baby got sick.”
“Was she immunized?” I asked.
Abuelita stared at me long and hard. “We may be poor, but stupid we are not.”
I lowered my eyes and felt bad. It was a pocha question.
What the baby needed, Abuelita explained, was medicine. Expensive medicine. The sickness went beyond anything that Abuelita as a curandera could heal and Juan Carlos refused to ask his parents for even a peso. Finally, with the baby growing more and more ill, Juan Carlos did the only thing he could—he headed for the border to make some quick money in Los Estados Unidos. In Mexico, Juan Carlos could make about two dollars a day for his labor, but in America he could make over fifteen dollars—and that was just for one hour. Plus, Juan Carlos spoke English and had a very good head on his shoulders. With a little luck, he could be in and out of El Norte in two weeks, with five hundred dollars in his pocket—more than enough to buy his daughter what she needed. It was a sum that would have taken him months to earn in Mexico.
“And months his baby did not have,” said Abuelita. It was an easy decision. Juan Carlos kissed his wife and baby good-bye. “After that,” she said, “well, only rumors are known.”
Abuelita stopped. It was the end of her story. She took another sip of her tea, rocked in her chair, and looked out on the hills.
I waited.
“The rain will not be back for a while,” she said thoughtfully.
“What rumors, Abuelita?” I demanded. “What is it they think happened to Maria’s husband?”
Slowly she turned.
“Something not good,” she answered. “Something not good.”
Supposedly, a fight with the policía had ensued in the desert. Juan Carlos had refused to hire coyotes for his journey because he was a single man in good physical shape who only needed to carry a small pack on his back. Wasting precious money on hiring illegal guides to escort him across the border made little sense to him.
But coyotes do more than just act as guides. They also prearrange for the policía to be bribed, and when the federates caught Juan Carlos on the Mexican side of the border about to sneak across into El Norte, they demanded a bribery payment. They weren’t enforcing any laws, they were simply trying to fill their own corrupt pockets.
“And Juan Carlos refused to pay?” I asked.
“Of course,” she answered.
Years ago, Abuelita explained, the policía might have let a single man like Juan Carlos through without too much of a problem, but with the recent crackdowns from America, bribing the policía had become much more necessary.
The policía knew that if they le
t one person get through without paying, soon two would get through. Then three. And before anyone realized it, one hundred would be getting through without paying, and the policía had families to feed.
“And tequila habits too,” Abuelita added.
Supposedly, Juan Carlos had argued with the policía about “exploiting their own” and about how Mexico needed to rise up above the corruption so that it could move forward as a nation and change for the better. Juan Carlos was a smart, proud man who gave a very noble speech, it was said.
Five weeks later his body was found in a dry river gulch by the Arizona border. Isabella survived the illness but ended up going deaf. The parents of Juan Carlos said they wanted nothing to do with the bastard child and blamed Maria for their son’s death. Maria, of course, refuses to take Isabella to El Norte to be reunited with her own parents, because Juan Carlos would have wanted her to stay in Mexico and raise her daughter here, in a way that would one day make society proud.
Abuelita paused. It seemed that even the wind had stopped blowing.
“All he wanted was to make some money for his sick baby and then return home. Now,” she said, “he’s just another dead vato, another brown-skin who died in the desert with a story no one will ever hear.”
I felt a lump in my throat.
“And Maria and her baby,” Abuelita said, “for now they live with me.”
chapter veintiuno
The next afternoon was warm, with scattered clouds.
“I could watch her,” I said.
Maria didn’t turn around.
“Serious,” I offered. “I’d like to. Maybe you could, you know…tomar una siesta.”
Maria was folding a pile of baby clothes that Isabella had just playfully unfolded. For the first time, I saw a look in my cousin’s eye that made her seem, I don’t know…vulnerable.
Isabella covered her face with a pair of tiny pants and played peekaboo with me. When I grinned, she smiled.
“Really, I want to,” I said as I crossed the room and scooped up the baby without asking permission. “Your daughter, she’s smart and so beautiful.”
The Secret Story of Sonia Rodriguez Page 11
