by Reyna Grande
I met Mago and Carlos during recess by the jacaranda tree in the courtyard. By the entrance of the school, women were selling food. They had brought baskets filled with enchiladas, taquitos, and potato picaditas. The smell of the chile guajillo sauce, fresh cheese, and onion wafted toward us, and I asked my brother and sister why we weren’t getting in line to buy food.
Mago laughed.
“Our grandmother never gives us money,” Carlos said. “You better get used to it.”
We watched the women put the food on paper plates and hand it to the students who did bring lunch money. We weren’t the only ones drooling over the enchiladas. At least half of the children in the school were leaning against classroom walls, grabbing their empty bellies while looking at the food stands.
For the second time that day, I felt my eyes stinging with tears. “I hate school,” I said.
“Why, because you’re hungry?” Carlos asked. “I like it. At least it gets us out of our grandmother’s house. Imagine if we had to be there all day long?”
“I’ve been there all day long all this time,” I said. “Until today.”
“Then you should be happy to be here,” Mago said, but she didn’t look at me. She was looking at a boy in my class who was heading toward us eating a mango on a stick.
“The teacher hit me because I was writing with my left hand,” I said. “I think I’d rather stay home and clean Abuela Evila’s house from top to bottom than to go to school.”
“So you would rather stay home with our grandmother?” Mago asked. “I don’t believe it.”
I looked at the glass containers of agua fresca at the food stands: agua de melón, sandía, piña. From here, I could see the large cubes of ice swimming inside the glass containers. My throat was so dry I imagined that this was how the earth felt after months and months of waiting for rain. Mami used to say that the clouds go down under the mountains to drink water from the rivers, and once they’re full they come up to the sky, ready to bathe the earth. Sometimes the clouds take too long to drink water and that’s when the grass withers, the flowers die, the water in the canal narrows to a trickle and almost disappears. But sometimes the clouds drink too much water, and that’s when the floods happen. Days and days of never-ending rains that turn the gentle river waters into aguas broncas, tearing down trees and dragging everything in their path, then spilling over the banks and bursting into people’s homes.
Mago gasped, and I turned to see what she was looking at. The boy in my class had dropped his mango on the ground. He began to reach for it, but then stood up and walked away from it looking really sad. I looked at Mago and knew what she was thinking.
Every time we went out to run errands, she was always looking around to see if she could find a half-eaten fruit or a lollipop some unlucky kid had dropped. Sometimes she got lucky. Sometimes she didn’t.
Mago looked at the mango, and I knew she couldn’t resist picking it up. “Go get it,” she told Carlos as she pointed to the mango.
“You go,” Carlos said.
“Some of my classmates are over there. They’ll see me. Ándale, you get it, Nena.”
“No,” I said. Mago looked at me, and I knew that sooner or later she would make me do it. “Mago, you shouldn’t eat things from the ground. They’re bad. They’ve been kissed by the devil,” I said.
Mago waved my words away. “Those are just tales Abuela Evila likes to scare us with,” she said. Abuela Evila used to say that when food falls to the ground, the devil, who lives right below us, kisses it and taints it with evil. “Look, I don’t know if the devil exists or not, and I don’t care. I’m hungry. So go get it!”
Mago pushed me toward the mango, but I shook my head. Tales or no tales, I wasn’t going to risk it. But my mouth watered at the thought of sinking my teeth into the mango’s crunchy flesh.
The bell rang, and the kids rushed back to their classrooms. Mago and Carlos waved and disappeared from sight. I stood there under the jacaranda tree, and my feet didn’t want to move. I didn’t want to go back to the classroom. I didn’t want to go back and struggle to hold my pencil with my useless right hand. I didn’t want to see el maestro looking at me and making me feel ashamed, making me feel as if I were evil. I didn’t want him to hit me again and have my classmates jeer and laugh. But if I didn’t go back, I knew I wouldn’t learn to read and write. How could I ever write a letter to my parents and ask them to please, please, come back?
As I made my way to the classroom, I noticed the mango again. It lay on its side, its flesh yellow like the feathers of a canary. It was covered with red chili powder and dirt. And what if Mago is right? I asked myself. What if the devil doesn’t exist? If he doesn’t exist, that means the left side isn’t the side of the devil. And that would mean I am not evil for being left-handed.
I looked around, and the courtyard was now empty. I bent down and picked up the mango, flicked the dirt off, and sank my teeth into it. The chili powder burned my tongue. The burning sensation made me feel warm all over. I stood there waiting for something to happen. I waited to see if the devil was going to burst out of the earth on his horse and drag me to hell with him. The jacaranda waved in the breeze, looking beautiful with its bright purple flowers. From above the brick fence, I could see the colorful papel picado hanging in rows over the cobblestone street. The church bells started ringing, and I turned to look at the two towers at the top of the hill, the metal cross glistening under the bright noon sun.
I returned to class, and el maestro looked disapprovingly at me. I sat at my desk and looked at my pencil. From the corner of my eye, I saw el maestro making his way toward me, his ruler going up and down, up and down. I reached for my pencil and clutched it tightly in my left hand.
7
Tía Emperatriz and Mago
MAGO AND ÉLIDA were in the habit of standing by the gate every afternoon to wait for el cartero, the mail carrier who came by on his bicycle. If he had mail for you, he would ring his little bell, a soft tinkling sound that could be the most beautiful sound in the world if only the mail were for you.
Instead, the sound of the bell was a little needle that pricked my heart because he never rang the bell for us. Always, the tinkling was for Élida or the neighbors.
One day, we watched him riding clumsily down the dirt road because he wasn’t as good a rider as the baker. He had a box tied to the rack on the back of his bike, and as he neared the house, the tinkling of the bell began. But my heart was already breaking because I knew the sound wasn’t for me. Élida pushed us out of the way and smiled at el cartero, her arms ready to receive the box. Christmas was in two days. Even though in Mexico children don’t get presents on Christmas but rather on January 6, the Day of the Three Wise Men, Élida said her mother had sent her a Christmas present because that is what they do in El Otro Lado, and her mother knew all about American culture.
But the box was not for Élida! El cartero handed Mago the box and then was off to the next house.
“He made a mistake, that stupid man,” Élida said as she tried to yank the box from Mago.
“There’s no mistake,” Mago said. Carlos and I held on to the box, too, in case Élida tried to snatch it away. When she saw Mago’s name on the box, Élida stomped away and went into the house, calling out for Abuela Evila.
We quickly opened the box to see what was inside. Papi and Mami had sent Mago and me two identical dresses. The top was white and the bottom was the color of purple jacaranda flowers. The collar was trimmed with lace and in the center of it was a beautiful silk orchid. We also got shiny patent leather shoes. Carlos got a pair of jeans and a shirt.
We rushed to my grandfather’s room to put on our pretty clothes. But it was as if our parents had not realized that while they’d been gone we had grown, as if somehow in El Otro Lado time stood still and over there I hadn’t yet turned six, Mago ten, and Carlos almost nine. The shoes they sent were a size too small, and so were the dresses. The sleeves of Carlos’s shirt were two inch
es above his wrists. The skirt of my dress didn’t even graze my knees.
“What do we do now?” Carlos asked, unbuttoning his new shirt. “Maybe they should have sent us some toys.”
Mago hit him on the head.
“Ouch, what did you do that for?” Carlos asked, massaging his head.
Mago sat down on the bed. “I don’t know,” she said. She looked down at the dirt floor, and I wondered what she was thinking. Part of me was desperate to wear those shoes. They were new. They had been sent to us by our parents. They were from El Otro Lado! But then I thought about my parents, and the fact that they didn’t even know what size shoe I wore made me want to throw them in the trash.
If they don’t even know something as basic as the size of our shoes and clothes, what else don’t they know about us? And what don’t we know about them?
The question was there, but neither Carlos, Mago, nor I was courageous enough to ponder on it for long. As the oldest, it was clearer to Mago, more than to Carlos and me, that the distance between us and our parents was destroying our relationship more than any of us could have imagined. And the consequences would be great. But back then, as our little mother, Mago’s job was to take care of us and to shelter us from the reality that only she could fully grasp. I had her as a buffer, but she had no one but herself.
“Come on, Nena, let’s wash our feet,” she said. So we washed away the dirt caked on our feet and we put on the beautiful shiny shoes. “Curl your toes inward,” Mago said to me. I curled my toes and that way the shoes didn’t hurt as much.
Mago, Carlos, and I held hands and we started spinning around in a circle, turning and turning, blending into a blur of purple, pink, white, and blue. Then, without letting go, we ran out of the house, out into the street, laughing and crying at the same time.
And as we ran past Don Bartolo’s store, then cut across the vacant lot, then headed to the church, past the tortilla mill, and Don Rubén’s little house, everyone stared at our beautiful new clothes, and not once did anyone say, “Poor little orphans.” Our neighbors admired our pretty clothes and shoes from afar, not knowing that by the time we got home our feet would be covered with blisters.
8
The Man Behind the Glass
MY FATHER HAD told us about his dream house in the letters he’d sent to my mother from El Otro Lado. The house was made of brick with a shiny concrete floor and tall wide windows to let in the sunlight. The walls were painted the color of Mami’s blue eye shadow, and it had three rooms.
Papi’s dream house had a television, a stereo, a refrigerator, and a stove. It was a house with electricity, gas, and running water, and maybe even an indoor bathroom, one with a shower that made you feel as if you were standing in the rain on a sticky, hot summer day. That was the house that my father dreamed of.
Back then, I didn’t know that Guerrero was the Mexican state with the most people emigrating due to the scarcity of jobs. I hadn’t known that a year before he left, my father had already been leaving home to find construction work in Acapulco, Mexico City, even as far as Mazatlán, Sinaloa, until eventually making his way farther north.
At first, he had lived in California’s Central Valley and had slept in an abandoned car while working in the fields harvesting crops, just as he had done in his youth. Eventually he left to try his luck in Los Angeles, where he was fortunate enough to find himself a stable job as a maintenance worker at a retirement home.
Four years after my father left for the United States, and two years after my mother left, the construction of our house finally began. Back then, I interpreted this to mean one thing—Papi and Mami would soon be back!
Abuela Evila gave my father a piece of her property, which meant that our house was going to be built right next to hers. It wasn’t something Mago, Carlos, and I were happy about. Who wanted to live next to Abuela Evila? Not us. But because it would cut down on the final costs, it was the only option my parents had. Besides, as he would later tell me, my father had helped his parents pay for the mortgage on their property with the wages he had earned since he was nine years old. Really, it was only fair for him to get a piece of that land. If only he had realized he was making a mistake, building a house on a property that was not under his name.
Workers came early one morning to tear down the outhouse and the shack in which I was born. Both the shack and the outhouse were made of bamboo sticks, so it didn’t take long to get rid of them. I stood there watching, sad that my little shack was being destroyed. Mago put an arm around me and said, “Just think about what is going to be built right there on that spot.”
The workers returned the next day and the day after and the day after and began to lay the foundation, and after that, the walls. As soon as school let out, Mago, Carlos, and I would run down the hill to help out as much as we could. Abuelo Augurio handed each of us a bucket, and we carried bucketfuls of gravel and mortar. Carlos worked especially hard. He liked working side by side with Abuelo Augurio. He wanted our grandfather to be proud of him for being quick and steady, not like us girls who were too slow and clumsy with the bricks and the buckets of mortar. But Abuelo Augurio didn’t pay much attention to Carlos.
We scraped our fingers carrying bricks. At night we couldn’t sleep from being so sore, but every day we put all of our energy into building our house, and when our fingers hurt too much, or our knees wanted to buckle under the weight of the buckets of wet mortar we carried to the bricklayers, we would tell ourselves that the faster we worked, the faster we would have a family again. That thought gave us strength.
But it wasn’t long before the workers stopped coming. By the time February came to an end, and Carlos turned nine, the workers were nowhere in sight. Abuela Evila said our parents had no more money, so the house had to wait. We stood by the door every morning before going to school, hoping to see the truck that brought the construction workers bumping and jerking its way down the dirt road. Then we headed to school, where all we did was look out the window and sigh the hours away, leaning our sorrow on our elbows.
By the end of the week, Mago stopped looking down the dirt road. She pushed Carlos and me up the hill and told us that it didn’t matter anyway. She said that no matter how many bricks and buckets of mortar we helped carry to the bricklayers, the house would never be done because it was just a foolish dream, just as silly as our dream of having a real family again.
“It will get finished!” Carlos said. “They will come back!” He took off running up the hill, and by the time we got to the gate of our school, he was nowhere in sight.
When we got back from school, I went inside my grandfather’s room to look at the Man Behind the Glass. “How much longer?” I asked him. “How much longer will you be gone?” As always, there was no answer.
9
Tía Emperatriz
SCORPIONS HAD ALWAYS been a part of our lives. We were taught by Mami to check our shoes before putting them on in the morning and to search our bedcovers at night to make sure there were no scorpions in the folds. We had to shake our clothes before putting them on. We couldn’t lean against walls. We couldn’t reach into the wardrobe or drawers without fear of being stung by a scorpion hiding in the dark.
But at night, while you’re sleeping, there’s nothing you can do to keep a scorpion from crawling up onto the bed or, as in Abuelita Chinta’s case when she died in 2002, you can’t keep a scorpion from falling from the ceiling and stinging you.
So the night I woke up screaming for Mami, I recognized the pain right away from the two previous times I’d gotten stung. My right butt cheek burned as if I’d been branded by a red hot poker like the cows at the dairy farm down the road from my grandmother’s house.
“Mami! Mami!” I yelled.
“Nena, what’s wrong?” Mago asked.
“Scorpion,” I said.
Mago ran out of the room to get help. Carlos jumped out of bed and stayed by my side but didn’t touch me, as if he were afraid the scorpion would sting him,
too. My grandfather kept on snoring and didn’t wake up to help.
“Mami!” I cried out again. My mother didn’t come to my side. Instead, it was my aunt who came running into the room, asking me where it hurt.
The scorpion was hidden on the collar of my dress, and when Tía Emperatriz pulled it off, I felt another sting on my neck. The pain spread up, pulsing in waves from my neck to my shoulders and up to my face.
“Mago, go slice an onion and get the rubbing alcohol!” Tía Emperatriz said. Mago ran to the kitchen while my aunt and Carlos hunted for the scorpion because the locals believed that if you killed the scorpion that stung you, its venom wouldn’t be as powerful. But they couldn’t find it.
“What’s all the fuss about?” Abuela Evila said as she stood by the door. When Tía Emperatriz told her about the scorpion, Abuelita Evila glanced around the room. “There it is,” she said, pointing to the straw-colored scorpion crawling high up on the wall, barely visible in the weak light from the bare bulb hanging above us. Everyone gasped as it squeezed its flat body through a crevice between the adobe bricks and disappeared from sight.
Tía Emperatriz rubbed alcohol over the stung areas and then tied the onion slices on them with strips of cloth. Tears bathed my face, and I felt as if a thousand hot needles were piercing my body. My face, my hands, and my feet were becoming numb. She sent Mago back to the kitchen for an egg, which she then forced me to swallow. It felt like a big ball of mucus sliding down my throat. Tía Emperatriz said the raw egg would dilute the venom. Back then I didn’t know any better than to believe this, so I made the knot in my throat loosen so the egg could slide down.
“We need to take her to the doctor,” Mago said as she sat next to me and squeezed my hand.