“Madre Mía.” He slipped into Spanish, rolling his eyes toward the heavens. The mother was sacred, and none of Carl’s bucks could pry her name out of him. “No, no, not the mother.” He shook his head and began shutting down the office, turning off lights, burying files.
“Well, then, can you at least tell me where Los Niños is?” I asked, even though I probably knew.
“Of course, at your service, in Río Lindo, near San Miguel de Allende, in Guanajuato. You can take the bus.”
It was almost dark when I got to the bus station. I took the first-class line, Tres Estrellas de Oro, Three Gold Stars. First class means there’s a bathroom on the bus, a toilet in a tiny closet with a door that swings open to release the sweet smell of disinfectant and bangs shut because the latch doesn’t work. A first-class bus is bigger—the odds are better in a collision. People don’t talk to each other in first class, they sleep. Faced with the death-defying bravado of a Mexican driver, it’s either narcolepsy or drugs. I mastered the sleeping technique, a form of self-hypnosis, when I lived here. I’d get on a bus, put my head against the back of the seat, and immediately go to sleep. I slept through skids and passes and thousand-foot precipices. I slept through the traffic in Mexico City and the mountains of Michoacán. I slept with babies crying in my ear and through pit stops with vendors pounding on the window.
It took a while to get used to the bouncing bus, the banging door, the disinfectant smell, the ai-yai-yai-yai music, but by eight we were out of Mexico City. I pressed my face into the upholstery and went to sleep. Near midnight I woke in San Miguel. Even in the middle of the night climbing out of an idling bus with diesel fumes in my face, it had charm. The gaslights lit cobblestone streets, pastel walls, carved doors. The night was so clear you could see every remote star.
I found a taxi and the driver took me to a hotel near the Paroquia, San Miguel’s gingerbread cathedral modeled on a postcard someone saw of a cathedral in Europe, but mangled in the translation. The hotel had a medieval door, heavy enough to guard a moat. I pounded until somebody woke up and let me in. As soon as I found a room my head fell onto the pillow and I went to sleep. It felt a whole lot better than Three Gold Stars’ plastic upholstery. When I woke up, it seemed like I was dreaming of Mexico, but the quality of the air, the smell of woodsmoke, the singing birds said it was the real thing, not Juárez, not Mexico City even: Mexico. I dressed in running shoes and jeans for the day’s investigation, had a bolio and fresh squeezed orange juice in the hotel’s patio, and watched a bougainvillea climb the wall. Mexico.
The hotel was only a short walk to the jardín, San Miguel’s plaza. It was an especially green plaza. The trees were clipped flat as a table on top and dense underneath. In the evening the birds fly in from the desert, turn in unison, and drop into the trees.
El teléfono is on Angulo, which means “elbow.” There is a tortillería on Angulo, a place where a machine mashes down corn and pops out tortillas, where local señoras buy them warm by the kilo wrapped in newspaper. A truck was parked in front of the tortillería unloading hundred-pound sacks of corn. The driver dropped one and it broke, spilling corn kernels all over the street.
“Puta madre,” he said. Your mother is a whore.
“It’s nothing,” the tortillería owner replied. He came out with a broom and swept it all up—the corn, the dog shit, the burro droppings, the gum wrappers and anything else that happened to be in the street—took it inside and fed it to the hungry tortilla machine. Mexico.
Elbow was a good name for the crooked street, or maybe ankle. It would have been easy to break one climbing over the cobblestones. I was glad I had my running shoes on. I saw the green and white sign, EL TELÉFONO. When I lived in Mexico a private teléfono cost five hundred dollars just to install, a year’s salary for some. If you wanted to talk to someone, you just hung out in the plaza and sooner or later they showed up. Sometimes now I’d pay five hundred dollars to get rid of mine. There were sounds you were glad you were rid of here: ringing telephones, airplanes—if an airplane flew over San Miguel it was an event; there were others you could do without: the barking dogs, the turkeys that gobbled all night.
Already gringos were lined up waiting for the phone: an older man in a lithium slump reading a dated Wall Street Journal, one of San Miguel’s population of dedicated drinkers and casualties of war; two girls dressed in huipils and huaraches from the floating population of tourists. I went right up to the desk. “Buenas días,” I said.
Two teenage boys were sitting there reading comic books and chewing Chiclets, polite as only Mexican boys can be.
“Buenas días,” they replied.
Hoping to get more information about the place, I asked them if they were the answering service for Los Niños de los Angeles. The boys looked at each other. They were the same type, wiry and amused, brothers, probably, or cousins.
“Río Lindo,” one said.
“La Iglesia,” said the other.
“La Rubia,” they both said and began to giggle.
La Rubia, the blonde, a person you see a lot of in Mexico selling beer and cigarettes. Certainly not me.
“Who is La Rubia?” I asked.
“She is… ” one began.
“La Rubia,” the other finished, and they giggled some more.
“She’s at Río Lindo?”
“Absolutely,” they replied.
12
THERE WAS ONLY one bus to Río Lindo, third class or worse, a faded blue wreck with battered fenders, fringe in the windows, and tires that were smooth as silk. Drivers in Mexico take a personal interest in their buses, decorating and embellishing them just like home. Some of them paint names on the bumper or inspiring sayings such as this one had: SOLO DIO SABE MÍ FIN, Only God Knows My End. A plastic Jesus bobbled on the dash, a fitting companion for the journey to Los Niños de los Angeles. The seats were blue plastic, with holes to let the foam rubber stuffing breathe. It had taken a deep breath and run away. The backs were yellow metal, straight up and pint-size. The only way to sleep here would be with your head dangling back like a baby’s.
A woman wearing the ubiquitous black and white rebozo sat down next to me, cradling a baby goat in her arms. A boy tried to lure his piglet through the aisle. When persuasion didn’t work he shouted “Maricón,” and gave it a good kick. Oink you, the piglet replied. Someone put a crate of squawking chickens on the roof. When we were fully loaded, we set off, radio blaring, springs squeaking, pig oinking, driver yelling, “Celaya, Ce-lay-a.” Only God knew if it was his destination.
Once we left San Miguel the countryside became desert very rapidly. At a distance the town was an oasis, green and inviting, but the country around it was as barren as the moon, except for the papers that littered the roadside, an occasional cactus, and the people walking or standing beside the road in their rebozos and plastic sombreros. The bus stopped frequently, people got off and on where there was nothing to mark the spot. The driver stopped calling out the names; maybe there were too many, maybe there were none. Finally, at one of the stops, the woman next to me leaned over and whispered, “Río Lindo.” She smiled mysteriously as if she knew all the secrets of that place, including why I was going there. “Gracias,” I said, climbing over her. She held the goat up to let me pass and it baaed sweetly.
A young girl got off with me. She was probably no more than sixteen and very pregnant. She had a lovely smile and dreamy eyes, one of those girls who glow when they are with child. The bus bounced out of sight and we were left together beside the highway. A dirt road curved around nothing and led to nowhere and a small hand lettered arrow said RÍO LINDO.
“Tú vas a Río Lindo?” I asked the girl. You are going to Río Lindo?
“Sí,” she said, smiling, her hand unconsciously rubbing her belly. She had the kind of placidity that could give you confidence in a strange place, and this place was as strange as any, a home for unwed mothers on the face of the moon. Mexican women have been raised for centuries to be helpful
, and no one does it better. The men may still have the power, but they’ve had it for too long: it’s turned them into drunkards and flakes. It’s the women who hold things together. The girl had an ethereal face, but she wore sensible shoes, clunky black loafers. She began walking with no hesitation in the direction of the arrow. I followed, glad I had on my running shoes. My cleat marks, I noticed, were not the only ones in the road.
The girl answered my questions. Her name was Mercedes, she said. She was going to the church and would be pleased to take me with her. She was polite, but it was clear she wanted to save her energy for walking, so we continued in silence, the sun directly above our heads, the dust at our feet, nagged by a black crow that circled and squawked. Everything matters, it crowed, and nothing.
The church at Río Lindo was a tiny white chapel. It looked like a mushroom that had sprung up, had its moment in the sun, and was sinking back into the ground again. It was shaded by a large tree and was not far from the banks of the mighty Río Lindo, six inches of stagnant brown water surrounded by a dry riverbed that was littered with scrap paper and Orange Fanta bottles.
As we approached I heard music drifting from the open doorway of the chapel. “Wait here,” the girl said in Spanish, smiling graciously. “The pastor will see you.” She disappeared down the dusty road. The music was an organ, sounding just like the organs I heard at church when I was a child—out of tune. A man was singing, “What a friend we have in Jesus, all our sins and griefs to bear. What a privilege to carry everything to God in prayer.” When he finished he began to speak: a sermon, I gathered. His voice was loud and self-conscious, the voice of someone who is used to not being heard but who persists anyway. At first I thought he was speaking English, but it was Spanish, more or less, to an English beat. The words had something to do with God loving children and wanting the best for them. I sat down on the steps and waited for him to finish. A skinny three-legged dog lay on the ground watching the fleas climbing its legs, too lazy even to nip. At the end of the sermon, the man said, “Jesus loves you and he loves your unborn child. God bless you.” He gave the benediction, and exit music began to play.
About fifteen girls came out of the chapel, pregnant, every one of them, embarazado, but not embarrassed. Superficially they were alike, dark skinned with shining black hair, bright as flowers in their cheap clothes, but on closer examination each one was unique. Some smiled shyly and wished me a good day, some had that placid glow that comes in the later stages of pregnancy, some were thin and hardly showed, some had the pregnant woman’s waddle. Coming upon the whole group of them in this barren place was like finding a tree in the middle of the desert dripping ripe squishy fruit. Mexico overwhelmed me once again. Endless children and animals and flowers springing from dry riverbeds and dust. It’s the country’s joy and its curse; there are not enough jobs to support this life, not enough food to feed it. One of the laws that governs human behavior is that the less people have the more they reproduce. The one way to stop overpopulation is to make everybody rich, or at least comfortable. Maybe this place was doing a service by shipping babies to Gringolandia, where there was an excess of food, a paucity of children, but it was a decision I wouldn’t want to make. Mexican women don’t give up their children lightly. There’s a long tradition to have them and keep them despite the odds. How many of them had made the decision and then wanted the child back? Eduardo’s mother could be a girl just like one of these, who wasn’t able to have any more children. Or maybe she just changed her mind.
There were a couple of metal buildings down the road from the chapel, and the girls headed in that direction. The dog pulled himself to his three feet and followed. The organ continued to play. I got up and looked inside the chapel; it was as simple as the outside, white with wooden pews, the only decoration being a plain wooden cross above the altar: no candles, no statues of virgins dripping lace and Jesuses dripping blood, no retablos celebrating miracles of divine intervention, no bunches of manzanita or mint. The walls were absolutely white. I wondered what the girls thought about practicing religion in a whitewashed chapel, but then they probably weren’t practicing religion, considering the minister’s Spanish. It was probably just a duty to perform on the way to giving up their children.
The minister had a mirror on top of the organ that focused on the doorway. I must have appeared in it, because he stopped playing suddenly and turned around. “Hello,” he said, standing up to greet me. He was medium-size with wiry gray hair, the kind of hair that’s out of control no matter what you do to it, but I didn’t think he did much. He had pale, distracted eyes and a worn, rivuleted face, the sort of I-need-you face that has a romantic appeal when you are too young to know better.
“Sometimes I stay here just to play a while,” he said shyly, embarrassed to be caught at it. “We don’t get many visitors at Río Lindo. I’m Henry.”
“Neil Hamel,” I replied. “You’re not so easy to get to.”
“That’s true.” He smiled, proving he was glad to see me, but he never looked at me as we talked, only at a point about three inches to the side of my head. A case of do-good burnout, I figured. People who spend too much time trying to help others reach a point where they don’t look or listen anymore. There’s probably a limited number of people you can care about in a lifetime, and when that number has been reached, it’s over. I’ve seen it happen in all the people professions: to social workers, teachers, nurses, even occasionally to a lawyer. The next step is usually drink, and I could see he’d taken it. A fine fuchsia network marked his cheeks, and his hand shook as he reached for mine. His breath smelled like maguey mold. We talked about the chapel and the girls and what he expected to accomplish, which was putting unwanted babies in good homes, of course. He was a very sweet shell of a man, eager to talk. He didn’t seem to care why I was there. He asked me if I’d like to take a look around the place and I accepted.
We began with the dorm, a metal building that would be hotter than Tucson in the summertime and wasn’t exactly comfortable now. There was a row of beds covered with cotton spreads on each side of the room. It looked like a barracks, except that each girl had pasted pictures and mementos above her bed. A radio on the floor was blaring something about amor. The girls were all in the commissary having lunch, and we went there next. They sat at long tables with white tablecloths eating cottage cheese and canned peaches on a bed of iceberg lettuce.
“No beans and tortillas?” I asked.
“Leona, my wife, is in charge of the menus. She’s a trained dietician,” Henry said.
A radio was blaring the same song, “Amor, amor, amor.” I guess the girls were true believers. They were girls, too, that was no euphemism, each of them was so young. Some looked up from their cottage cheese and smiled shyly at me, as if they thought I might be there to take one of their babies. I couldn’t help myself, I smiled back.
“Let’s see.” Henry wrinkled up his forehead. “What else? There’s the delivery room.” We left the girls to the diet special and he took me there next, a shiny sterile room with metal stirrups locked into place on the table.
“Who delivers the babies way out here?” I asked him.
“If we have time we get them into town; there’s a small hospital. If we don’t, Leona delivers. She’s a trained midwife.”
He showed me the nursery next. There were two babies in cribs lying on their stomachs. Their tiny black heads were slick as newborn kittens. They were too young yet to be quite human, almost too fragile to touch. They looked like lonely and mysterious voyagers, exhausted from a long journey. A teenage nurse hovered over them. “The girls all want to come and hold the babies, but Leona doesn’t allow it,” Henry said. “We send them home as soon as they are able to travel, and we try to get the babies into homes right away, too. It’s better that way.”
Our next stop was a house trailer that stood on an embankment above the Río Lindo. It was the only place there that had what might be called a vista, down to the riverbed, up to the
church. A couple of plastic lounge chairs sat beneath a blue awning. “That’s where we live,” Henry said. We stood beside the trailer and looked at the garden, a very orderly garden, beans and squash planted between the rows of corn, no weeds.
“Leona takes care of the garden too.”
I know, I was about to respond, she’s a trained horticulturist, but I didn’t get the chance because the paragon herself appeared striding across the grounds with a pile of sheets in her arms. She looked like a woman who wouldn’t walk around empty-handed if she could help it. She was about the same age as Henry, fortyish, I guessed, but she was fighting it hard. Behind the sheets she was wearing a shift printed with large flowers. It was sleeveless and came to just above her knees. La Rubia. Her fine blond hair was her best feature, possibly her only feature. The most you could say about her nose was that it was cute. Her eyes and mouth had been painted on, and their expression was perky. Her hair was bouffant, teased underneath and brushed smooth on top. It was the kind of hairdo women wore in the sixties and sprayed with sugar water to keep intact. Maybe the sixties dress and grooming were an attempt to keep time and Mexico at bay, but she was trying too hard. Beneath a facade like that, you could rot or turn to stone. No doubt the cleat marks in the road were hers. I bet she ran in a pastel jogging suit, makeup on and hair done. They were an odd match, Leona and Henry, but I could see they’d struck a balance: he was weak where she was strong, she was strong where he was weak.
Henry introduced us. She said she was pleased to meet me, but her eyes, wrapped in blue eye shadow, didn’t show it.
“We don’t get many visitors here,” she said coldly.
“I would have called first,” I replied, “but you don’t have a phone.”
“We get mail.”
I remembered the time in San Miguel that I mailed myself a postcard and it took three weeks to get from the mail slot to my box ten feet away. “I didn’t have time,” I replied.
North of the Border Page 9