by Oscar Lewis
After Manuel, there was another boy who died in a few months. He died because of lack of money and because of ignorance. We had no experience and didn’t struggle to save the baby. Lenore was a good person but she had a terrible temper and would get bad attacks of the heart and the bile. She always had trouble with her milk. She was not one of those affectionate mothers who pampered their children. She didn’t beat them, that I remember, she was about average there, although she would get very angry and use strong words with the children. She didn’t kiss or hug them, but they were not badly treated by her. She went out all day selling cake.
I wasn’t very affectionate with the children either. I don’t know whether it was because I didn’t get much affection in my childhood, or because I was left to take care of them alone, or because I was always worrying about money. I had to work very hard to get them food. I didn’t have time for them. I think in most homes, arguments and tragedies have an economic base because if you have fifty pesos a day expenses and you don’t have the money, it bothers you and you worry and quarrel with your wife. I think that’s what happens in most poor homes.
When Lenore was pregnant with Manuel, I began to see Lupita on the side. Lupita also worked in the La Gloria restaurant. Lenore and I had a lot of arguments and every time we did, she wanted to tear the house down. She was terribly jealous and really made a scene. When I’d come home from work I would often find her in an angry mood, any little thing upset her. She would fly into a rage and get sick. Her pulse would almost stop and she would seem to be dead. The doctor didn’t know what caused these attacks. I couldn’t take it. I wanted affection. After working all day I wanted someone to speak to, someone who would understand me, someone to whom I could pour out my troubles. You know, there are many types of people and when a poor man doesn’t get any affection at home he finds it outside the home. The doctor once said to me, “To be content, a woman needs a husband who keeps her well dressed, well fed and well screwed, and for that, he must be strong and remember her often. Do this and you will see how things are.”
Lenore had a strong temperament in that way, and I believe it was one of the reasons … well, she might have lived … but, well, a woman who is always quarreling makes her husband forget her. It’s not the right sort of thing to do, I know, but that’s when I propositioned Lupita at the restaurant. I’m not a very strong fellow but I’ve always been a little hot-blooded. That’s my nature. Before Lupita, I had gone to a whore house on Rosario Street, but I got an infection there. It was because I wasn’t careful, lack of experience, nothing else. Since that time I never went to one of those places. Today, I wouldn’t go there even if it’s free!
But in spite of my bad conduct, I have had the good luck to never have heard that any of the women who have lived with me weren’t true to me. They were all dark women and of very passionate temperament … here in Mexico we believe that blondes are less strong sexually … but even if I didn’t make use of them for a time, they didn’t go out looking for another man. An honest woman, especially if she has children, must control herself and wait. I have had five wives … there was one with whom I had a son but she married someone else. That son of mine is twenty-two years old now and I think it is time I went to gather him up and claim him. Yes, I had five women, and a few on the side, and luck still favors me, all in all. You cannot tell me it wasn’t luck when a nobody like me, an illiterate without schooling, without capital, not tall, not young, not anything, is lucky on all sides, with women.
Another man would be in jail by now! But I value my freedom and never looked for unmarried girls. No! All my women had already been married before I lived with them. Otherwise, there would be complications. If they had been virgins, I would probably have had to marry one of them in church or by civil law or I would be in jail for twenty years!
Anyway, when I began to have relations with Lupita, I didn’t go into it with the idea of having a family with her. But she became pregnant very soon. I would meet her at her room on Rosario Street where she lived with her two small daughters. They were so little they didn’t know what was going on. But later they always respected me and even called me papá. At that time I was earning very little so I couldn’t support Lupita, who continued to work at the restaurant. But for the past fifteen years I’ve paid her rent.
Here in Mexico, when a woman with a child is accepted by a man, as I accepted Lenore, she usually doesn’t feel she has a right to protest if her husband goes out. She knows she has blundered. It is different if the wife were a virgin and married by civil and church law. She would have every right to complain. But Lenore was difficult. Well, I suffered a lot with her but I never abandoned her. I was faithful to my banners. I only left the house for a few days each time we quarreled. I always came back because I loved the children.
Then one night she died, and what a blow it was. It was about seven o’clock at night, we were drinking atole and eating gorditos when she says to me very sadly, “Ay, Jesús, I’m going to die this year.” She was always complaining of headaches. Then at one o’clock in the morning she said, “Ay, ay, I’m dying, take good care of my children.” And the death rattle began. What time did I have to do anything? The doctor came and gave her an injection but it did no good. She was pregnant but the doctor said she died from the bursting of a blood vessel in her head. What I suffered during those days! I walked the street like a somnambulist. It was a good thing the grandmother was in the house. She took care of the children.
Part I
Manuel
I WAS EIGHT YEARS OLD WHEN MY MOTHER DIED. I WAS ASLEEP ON A mat on the floor next to my brother Roberto. My little sisters, Consuelo and Marta, slept on the bed with my mamá and papá. As though in a dream I heard my father calling. He called to us when he saw my mother slipping away from him, when he had a feeling she was going to die. I was always a sound sleeper and my father had to shout. This time he really yelled. “Get up, you bastards! Get up, you sons-of-bitches. Hijos de la chingada! Your mother is dying and you lying there. On your feet, cabrones.” Then I got up, very scared.
I remember my mother’s eyes and how she looked at us. She was frothing at the mouth and couldn’t speak. They sent for a doctor who lived only a block away but my mother didn’t last long. Her face became dark and she died that night. My mother died carrying inside her another brother of mine, well on his way, because I remember that mamá had a big belly. Another woman was nursing my sister; that’s why Marta remained so small.
Whether it was on account of the pregnancy or really a “congestion of the liver with the heart,” like they told me, I don’t know. But when my mother was laid out, the thing she had in her stomach, my brother, was heaving inside. It was still heaving and my father had a desperate look on his face. He did not know what to do, whether to let them cut her open and pull it out or let it stay there. My father cried a lot; he cried and went to tell all his compadres.
Her death came as a shock to everyone. She was only twenty-eight years old and oh, she was healthy, so healthy. People had seen her washing the courtyard and doing her housework in the morning. Why, that very afternoon she was still delousing my papá. My mother was sitting in the doorway and my father at her feet.
At that time we were living in a vecindad on Tenochtitlán Street. In the evening my mamá said to me, “Go out and buy some fried tortillas and corn gruel.” I went around the corner and bought the food from a woman who had a stand. I’m certain it was on a Monday because the day before was Sunday and we had been on an excursion to the Basilica with my father and mother.
That Sunday we all ate avocados and chitlings and chirimoyas, things that are very bad for the bile if you eat them before or after a fit of anger. Well, on Monday morning my mother had a real fit of anger on account of my brother Roberto. She had had a bad quarrel with a woman next door.
The whole day passed. My father came home from work and both of them were in a good mood. They were still having their supper when we children went to bed. Tha
t night my mother had her attack and there wasn’t even time for my father to call a priest to marry her before she died.
A lot of people came to the funeral, people from the tenement and from the market place. I don’t know how long you are supposed to keep a body in the house but my father didn’t want them to take her away and people began to complain because the body was already decomposing. At the cemetery, when they lowered my mother’s casket into the ground, my papá tried to jump into the grave with her. He cried as though his heart were breaking. My father cried day and night on account of her.
After she was buried, papá told us we were all he had left and we should try to be good children because he was going to be both father and mother to us. He kept his word exactly as he promised. He loved my mother a lot because it took him six years before he married again, before he married Elena.
I believe my father loved my mother very much, in spite of their many quarrels. My father was very stern and a man of action. He used to quarrel with my mother because he was always a stickler for having things very clean. If he found something where it shouldn’t be or anything that wasn’t right, he’d start a fight with her. And when I saw them in a big argument, I’d get terribly scared. Once my parents were having a hot argument and my father got excited and tried to strike my mother with a knife. I don’t know if he did it just to scare her, but anyway I stepped in between them. I didn’t even reach up to their waists. I stepped in and my father calmed down right away. I began to cry and he said, “No, son, no, we’re not fighting. Don’t get frightened.”
My papá was dead set against alcohol—he didn’t even like to smell it. Once my mamá went to celebrate the Saint’s Day of my aunt Guadalupe and they gave her quite a few drinks. So they had a big argument and I remember vaguely that my parents separated. I must have been three or four years old. At that time we lived at No. 14 on the Street of the Bakers in a vecindad—just one room with a kitchen. My mother went to live at my aunt Guadalupe’s on the same street. They asked me whether I wanted to stay with my papá or my mamá. I guess I felt more fond of my mother at that time for I decided to go with her. They were separated about two weeks.
My mother’s nature was just the opposite of my father’s. She had a happy disposition and liked to talk and chat with everybody. In the mornings, I remember, she sang while she lighted the charcoal fire and made our breakfast, she never stopped singing. She loved animals and that was the only time we had a dog. “Yoyo” used to take great care of Roberto and me. My mamá wanted lots of singing birds and plants in the house but in those days my papá was against spending money on things like that.
Mamá loved parties and did things in a big way. When she made a fiesta on my father’s Saint’s Day, or even a small celebration on our birthdays, she prepared huge casseroles of food and invited all her relatives, friends, and compadres. She even liked to take a drink or two, but only at a party. She was the type of person who would give away her own meal to anyone who needed it, and she was always letting some homeless couple sleep on the floor of our kitchen.
We were a happy family while she was alive. After she died, there were no more parties at our house and no one ever came to visit us. I never knew my father to have friends; he had compadres, but we never saw them. And as to visiting, the only homes my father ever entered were his own.
Most of the time my mother worked to help my father. He paid the rent and gave her money for food, but my aunt told me he never gave my mother money for clothing or other things. For about five years she sold cake crumbs in the neighborhood where we lived. She would buy cake trimmings and crumbs from El Granero bakery and sell little piles for five and ten centavos. After that, she got in with some people who bought and sold second-hand clothes. She used to take me to the Roma district when she bought clothes for her market stall.
It was there that something very sad occurred, about which I am the only one who knows. There was another man in my mother’s life. I don’t know, but I believe that my mother had married my father for love. They had met in the La Gloria restaurant where they both worked. But there was another woman, Lupita, who also worked there, and my mother was jealous of her. She told me once that this woman was my father’s sweetheart. Perhaps that is why my mamá began to see the second-hand-clothes man on the sly. She used to take me along, maybe to protect herself or to avoid getting intimate with him. I don’t know if they ever saw each other alone.
I was very mad about this, except that the man, like men do with children, gave me spending money when we went to the movies, or he’d buy me something. But in spite of that, I wouldn’t let go of my mother. I’d put my arms around her and wouldn’t let her talk to him. Once I threatened to tell my father. She said, “Go ahead and tell him. He’ll kill me and then you’ll see how you’ll get along without me.” Well, after that I no longer had the courage to do it. My father was always very jealous.
I don’t know how long this thing with that man lasted but we went to the movies only three times and then my mother died. He must have really loved her because he even came to the wake. When I saw him come into the house and stand there, I had a feeling of hatred for him. My father was there, how did he dare come? Later, that man took to drinking and went completely to the dogs. Within a year, he also died. Now I can excuse him, because he honestly loved my mother. I couldn’t understand things then.
My mamá was very fond of going on religious pilgrimages. Once she took Roberto and me with her to the shrine at Chalma. Chalma is the popular shrine for the poor, who, with much faith and love, walk the sixty kilometers through the hills. It is really a hard trip, a sacrifice, to go loaded with blankets and food and clothing. When we went, there were many people. It took us four days to get there and we slept in the hills or in towns at night, right outdoors on our straw mats, Roberto and I were afraid at night because we heard the women talking about the witches that sucked children’s blood. One señora said to my mother, “Be careful with your children because the witches are very active at this time. Just think, they found three children yesterday with not a drop of blood left in their bodies.”
Roberto said, “Do you hear that, brother?” And we both were filled with fear. I said, “Do you know what? We will cover up our heads with the blankets at night and they won’t know that we are children.”
Along the road were crosses which marked the spot where someone had died, and all the women believed that the spirit of the dead one was waiting to possess the children that passed by. The women, those carrying children, shouted out the name of their child every time they passed a cross, so the child’s soul would not remain there.
In the hills, we saw balls of fire going from one peak to another and people would say, “It’s a witch! A witch!” And everyone would kneel and start to pray. The mothers began covering up their children. My mamá put her arms around us under the blanket so the witch wouldn’t get us. They said the best way to catch a witch was to kneel before a pair of scissors, opened to form a cross, and pray the Magnificat. With each Our Father you must make a knot in a rebozo. When the last knot was made, the witch was supposed to fall at your feet and then be burned in a fire made with green wood.
As we walked through the mountain passes, my mamá told us some of the legends about Chalma. She showed us “The Pack Driver,” a rock which looked like a man in Indian dress, leading a burro and a dog. This teamster, they say, had killed his partner up there in the mountain, and had turned to stone. Later, we passed “The Corn-padres,” some rocks in the middle of a river. These were compadres who had sinned by fornicating right there in the river, and they, too, were turned to stone. And there was another curious rock formation that looked just like a priest, with sombrero and cape, his hand on his cheek, as though he was thinking. Who knows what sin he committed, but he too had been punished by heaven. The old people believe that these rocks turn toward the Church, once a year, and when they finally reach the Church, they will be disenchanted and transformed to their original
selves.
We saw the Penitents, people who had vowed to walk the rocky road to the shrine on their knees, or with their ankles tightly tied. They moved slowly, helped along by compadres, and arrived bleeding, with their skin worn off, and sometimes with their bones showing. That sight impressed me most.
My mamá and all her family went to Chalma regularly. They were also very devoted to the Virgin of San Juan de los Lagos, but that pilgrimage took longer; we went with my mother every year. My papá accompanied her only once; but he never went to Chalma. He didn’t like religious pilgrimages and that was another thing they quarreled about. My papá has always said about my mamá’s family, “They are very saintly, but they drink all the way to the shrine.”
It was true that my mother’s brothers, José and Alfredo and Lucio, drank a lot, in fact, they all died of drink. My aunt Guadalupe also liked to drink her daily copita. But I do not recall that my mother’s mother, my grandmother, drank. She was the kind of sprightly old lady who always walked erect, and was very, very clean. She never wore anything dirty, even her shoes were kept polished, and she dressed very severely, in a black silk blouse and long black skirt.
My grandma used to live with my aunt Guadalupe, in a room on the Street of the Painters. Grandma would come to our house every day at breakfast time, after my papá had left for work. She helped my mamá by washing our faces and necks and hands. She scrubbed us so hard with the zacate I felt like screaming. She’d say, “You grimy rascals, why do you get so filthy?”
My grandmother was steeped in religion, even more than my mamá, and she was like a godmother to us, teaching us to cross ourselves and to pray. She was devoted to the Archangel San Miguel, and taught us his prayer, and the Magnificat, which she said was the best medicine against all ills. She had an hour for prayer on all the festival days, the fiesta of the Palms, the Pentecost, the Day of the Dead … all of them. On the Day of the Dead she lit the candles, put out the glass of water, the bread of the dead, the flowers, the fruit. After she and my mother died, no one ever did that in our house. My grandmother was the only one who was rich in tradition and who tried to pass it on to us.