The Children of Sanchez

by Oscar Lewis

  “Man alive, compadre,” I said, “you can see I’m just barely getting on my feet. I’ve just gotten this job with Señor Raúl. How am I going to ask him to let me off for a couple of days?”

  “Aw, come on, be a good fellow,” and he looked at me so sadly that my conscience got the better of me.

  “O.K., I’ll go; but only for two days; here’s hoping you get well soon!”

  I went to work in the restaurant. But Faustino recovered slowly and the two days stretched out and became a week, then two weeks. I earned fifteen pesos a day and of this I gave my wife only five. The rest I turned over to my compadre to pay for the doctor, medicine, rent and food. I thought, “Well, I’m lending him the money; it’s like a saving. He’ll give me back the whole amount in a lump sum and I’ll be able to pay my wife’s hospital bill.”

  Well, it didn’t turn out that way. One time, while my compadre was still sick, my godson Daniel became ill and at night I had to go every two hours to get a woman to give him penicillin injections. After that my comadre Eufemia got sick, and so there I was taking care of all three of them and paying for everything. But I would think, well, I’m actually saving my money. I imagined I was saving. The situation dragged on like that for more than a month and a half. And so I lost the job with Señor Raúl.

  Then one morning I went to work in the restaurant and was surprised when the boss stopped me and said, “You can’t work now, because Faustino is back.” He had gone back to work without telling me! Three days later Faustino burned himself very badly at the restaurant and had to quit anyway. Even then he didn’t tell me, so that I could have gone back again. He knew I didn’t have a job and that Paula’s delivery date was getting close. I went to all the shops looking for work and sometimes they’d give me a few pieces to do. I even went peddling. I’d make ten pesos, five pesos, no more.

  My wife’s older brother, Avelino, who drank a lot, came home to his mother’s house. He was in bad shape and in two weeks was dead. We all chipped in for the burial, my brother-in-law hocked his watch and one way or another we got enough together to bury him. Two days later my wife began to have labor pains. My brother-in-law had died on Thursday and on Saturday my child was born in the same room. I was very worried because they said that Paula might get cáncer or something, on account of the dead body having been there.

  On Saturday morning I ran to get the midwife. She told me to buy cotton, gauze, umbilical thread and a basin. We raised Paula from the floor to the bed and fed her white corn gruel while she was in labor because it’s supposed to have a lot of calcium. I wasn’t in the house when my child came because that same week, as though God took pity on me, I was offered a job cutting glass at twelve pesos a day.

  I asked my boss to pay me and let me have the day off so that I could be at home with my wife. But he said, “What do you want to be fucking around there for? Are you going to help her push, or what? Are you going to give birth or is she? We’ve got lots to do, so get to work.” Well, I needed the money to pay the midwife, so I stayed.

  It seemed like the longest day of my life, no? We had to clean up the whole shop and I was very filthy when I got out. That work is as dirty as a charcoal burner’s. I went to the market to buy some clothes for the child. I was running between the stalls when I met my brother. He yelled after me, “Stop running, she’s already given birth.”

  “What did she have?” I called, still running.

  “A girl,” he said.

  “Oh, well, it doesn’t matter.” Then I got home and there were my mother-in-law, Socorrito, Pancho, and everybody, looking at me, to see how I would take the news. I stood there like a jerk and just said, “I’m back, old girl.” She looked tired after her ordeal. I kissed her forehead and she showed me the baby. “Is this my baby?”

  “Yes, don’t you like her?”

  “Yes, she is pretty.” I must have made a funny face or gotten red because everyone burst out laughing. Pancho said, “What a face you made, brother-in-law! It is your first daughter, that is why you came running home. I’ll ask you how you feel when you have a few more.”

  That was how my daughter Mariquita was born. I was especially happy that day because my father, who had never set foot inside my house, came to see his granddaughter. Neither Consuelo nor Marta had come to see us, but Roberto had been to our house once or twice.

  When the baby was about three months old, we went to visit my father. I had met him on the street and he had said, “When are you coming over? When are you going to bring over the baby? You’re acting as though you don’t have a father or a family. I don’t know why you bastards are like that.” So we visited him for supper one evening. Afterwards I said, “We’re going now, papá, good night.”

  “You’re going already? Where are you going? The baby is not leaving, so scram if you want to, but the baby stays.”

  “What do you mean she’s not going, papá?”

  “No,” he said, “the baby stays here with me. Come on now, Paula, grab some space in the bed and lie down there with the girls, and, you, roll out your bed things on the floor, you bastard, and go to sleep.”

  “Are we going to stay on with you, papá?”

  “Sure you’re staying here; don’t think I’m going to let my baby leave.” So that’s how we began to live with my father.

  I was partly glad and partly angry at my father’s decision. Glad, because it was nicer and cleaner in my father’s house, and I thought my old woman would be better off. I really hated to live at my mother-in-law’s house. My heart still shrinks up when I recall the condition it was in! I took our things out of there little by little so that Cuquita would not be offended.

  But I was angry at my father for one thing. From the very first day, he separated me from my wife and would not let me sleep with her. She slept on the bed with my two sisters, and I was ordered to sleep on a burlap bag on the kitchen floor. As though there had been no change in our lives, my father made me sleep alone! Now that I have sons, if God permits me to see them married, isn’t it logical that I should let them sleep with their wives? So that they feel like men?

  My memory is so poor that I cannot remember exactly who lived in the Casa Grande at the time. There was a servant there, but I don’t remember who it was. I know Roberto was in the army because I remember a telegram from him, telling me he was in some kind of trouble. Only Marta and Consuelo were living at home. My papá might have been staying at Lupita’s house at that time.

  I began by giving my father fifty pesos a week to help with the household expenses. I kept this up for a few months, then one week my boss didn’t pay us, and so I didn’t give anything to my father. No one at home said anything. The same thing happened the next week, and then another. My boss paid me five and ten pesos at a time and before I knew it I had spent them. That way, I soon forgot my obligation at home.

  I even thought, well, my father has enough money to go around. He had always paid the rent and brought home lots of food. I also began to think that, after all, Paula kept the house clean and washed my father’s clothes and cooked, so the food he provided her was like the pay you give to a servant. And so I stopped giving Paula money, too. I didn’t have another woman at the time, but I was already neglecting my wife.

  Once again, I began to go out with my old gang in the Casa Grande. Alberto and I were working in the same shop, and we were always together. In a way he wanted to imitate me, because six months after I married, he took this girl, Juanita, to live with him. But she became jealous of the fact that Alberto preferred to go out with me instead of staying at home with her. She couldn’t stand me and was always putting ideas into his head. Later, because of her, we began to grow apart, little by little, although we were still an open book to each other.

  The only trouble with Alberto (because even though he was illiterate, he was very intelligent) was that he liked to drink. Once a week for sure he’d go on a drunk. He’d say, “Come on, compadre, let’s have a few.” I never really liked to drink.
I had gotten drunk twice and it made me sick. That was one big difference between us.

  Another difference was that he was satisfied to be a worker and I wasn’t. Even at that time, I didn’t like having a boss over me, but Alberto didn’t mind, so long as he could steal a little on the job. He would say, “If my maestro gets rich on the fruit of my labor, it is only fair that I take something from him, to equalize things.” To Alberto, the only kind of boss who wasn’t good was one you couldn’t rob.

  Alberto quit the job at the glass shop to become a bus driver. The pay was low but drivers make up for it by keeping back some of the fares. I didn’t like working in the shop without my compadre, so when Santos, my daughter’s godfather, suggested that I open up a shoe shop, I took to the idea. Santos said, “Get hold of two hundred pesos. You can make shoes and sell them at a profit of five pesos a pair.” I thought, “Suppose I make five-dozen pairs of shoes a week. That makes sixty pairs … that makes three hundred pesos profit a week. Why that’s wonderful!”

  Santos loaned me the lasts and a stitching machine, and I borrowed the two hundred pesos from my father. My papá was impressed when I told him about the profits I could make. I heard him say to another man, “Just think, the time one wastes working, when there are such good businesses. Look at what Manuel says, and here am I stuck in the La Gloria, working like an animal all these years! Maybe he will really get up in the world and accomplish something!”

  So I went into business. Santos went with me to buy the leather, and we started making shoes. But I knew nothing about shoes or business then, I worked only by God’s good will. I never made a budget, to know what my costs were. I never noticed whether my capital was growing, or going down. I never even took the precaution of figuring out how many pairs of shoes I could cut from one skin. And Santos did not do right by me, because he let me use second-grade material and some orders were canceled. For the soles, he told me to buy rubber tires, but he never mentioned that I should buy flattened out tires, so that the shoes should be presentable.

  I had a lot of expenses. I rented a little shop in the Casa Grande, and I had one man working at the machine and three men finishing. It was the custom to give a shoemaker his “chivo,” that is, ten pesos a day as an advance on his wages. Shoemakers here work all night on Fridays, and on that day I had Paula send supper for all of us.

  My father had asked me several times why I didn’t chip in something for household expenses, so I had to give him money too. I did that four or five times, but then I said, “Look, papacito, right now I don’t want to take five centavos out of the shop. I want to expand it, by God!” He agreed, and didn’t bother me for money for a while.

  I don’t remember exactly what happened … one of my finishers, Chucho, went on a binge for two or three weeks, getting drunk every day. He later died in the street, abandoned and drunk, poor thing. But I took pity on him, thinking that the workers kill themselves to earn so little, so I raised the finishers twenty centavos for each shoe, and the machinist ten centavos. I wanted to show others how a boss should treat workers. I didn’t want to exploit them the way my bosses exploited me. They were all satisfied, and no one complained of me as a boss. They were happy, but unfortunately, I was completely incompetent.

  Instead of making a profit, without knowing it, I was actually losing on each pair of shoes. Then I sent someone, I don’t remember who, to deliver twenty-five pairs of shoes, and he took off with the money. To make a long story short, my business went broke and all I had left was about two hundred pesos worth of materials. I sold it to Santos for sixty pesos. It wasn’t the first time anybody lost money in business, but I took it pretty hard.

  After my business failed, I gave up trying to plan my life and get ahead. I lost the little confidence I had in myself and lived just from day to day, like an animal. I really was ashamed to make plans because I didn’t have the will power to, well, to carry them out. I couldn’t stick to things or follow them up. I understood others better than myself, and even dared to offer suggestions to my friends about how to improve their lives. I have helped others, but I couldn’t analyze my own problems. Concerning myself, I felt null and void.

  To me, one’s destiny is controlled by a mysterious hand that moves all things. Only for the select, do things turn out as planned; to those of us who are born to be tamale eaters, heaven sends only tamales. We plan and plan and some little thing happens to wash it all away. Like once, I decided to try to save and I said to Paula, “Old girl, put away this money so that some day we’ll have a little pile.” When we had ninety pesos laid away, pum! my father got sick and I had to give all to him for doctors and medicines. It was the only time I had helped him, and the only time I had tried to save. I said to Paula, “There you are! why should we save if someone gets sick and we have to spend it all!” Sometimes I even think that saving brings on illness! That’s why I firmly believe that some of us are born to be poor and remain that way no matter how hard we struggle and pull this way and that. God gives us just enough to go on vegetating, no?

  Well, after my failure, I didn’t care about shoes any more, so I went back to job hunting. I worked on lamp fixtures again, and after work, the only thing I did was play cards, go to the movies and to baseball and soccer games with my friends. I was hardly ever at home. When my second child, my son Alanes, was born, my father paid for the midwife and everything.

  My half-sister Antonia had come back to live with us in the Casa Grande. She and Paula became close friends, closer than my sisters. Why, Antonia even confided to my wife that I looked like a man she was in love with. She said it was too bad I was her brother, because she liked me very much! Then Paula told me that Tonia had “pulled a bad one,” because she was pregnant. I couldn’t call the father to account because Antonia wouldn’t tell us his name.

  Then Tonia took some herbs to cause an abortion and got very sick. She went crazy, really crazy. She had fits and when she saw my face she got worse. She screamed, “His face, his face!” My father looked at me suspiciously after that, which hurt me a lot, because I never had evil thoughts about Antonia. She said that only because I looked like the man she had loved.

  Finally, the doctors sent Tonia to an insane asylum and, little by little, she got better. The doctor told my father that Tonia was the type of woman who couldn’t stay well mentally without a man. That’s why later, when she began to have children with Francisco, we didn’t say anything.

  Antonia must have been mentally ill, because she tried to put a hex on my father. Julia, the wife of Marta’s godfather of the first communion, warned us that Tonia was watching my father and was taking his measurements. The older people here, the common people, believe that through sorcery, or by invoking a saint, or by measuring someone with a tape, or scattering salt or dust in the house, a devil or evil spirit will get control of a person’s body and will kill him.

  I don’t believe witchcraft really exists, but when I was living at my aunt’s house, I saw a woman curing a man who had cataracts in both eyes. She took a fresh egg laid by one of her own chickens, rubbed his eyes with it and then broke it open. It was black inside so she told the man that his blindness was caused by sorcery, by his his own wife! And she gave him a counterremedy.

  I guess my father believed in these superstitions because he would scold us if we spilled salt while anyone was eating, and once he was very angry with me for bringing home a belt made of snake skin. He made me get rid of it before something bad happened to one of us. When he found out about Antonia, he went to see a witch too. She gave him water to sprinkle in the room, so that the spell would not take effect.

  But Antonia continued to be my father’s favorite. He bought her whatever she wanted, and no matter what she did or said, he’d comment, “That’s fine, that’s fine.” It always struck me as strange that my father could be so sweet, so very sweet, to others, and so hard to us. In the case of Antonia he was trying to compensate for his neglect of her and Lupita all those years. Also, because she
helped at home. Marta and Consuelo had no mother to teach them and they were useless around the house.

  One thing that had always bothered me, was that no one in my family ever treated me like an older brother. It was my duty and right, for example, to have stopped Marta when I saw her keeping company with Crispín. I really wanted to speak to that fellow, man to man, but I was afraid that Marta or my father would put me in a ridiculous position by not backing me up. Once I asked Marta to hold my daughter Mariquita, and Crispín told her not to, just as though she were his servant or something. I got mad at that and spoke up.

  “Listen, Crispín, why do you tell my sister not to hold my child? I want you to understand that I know you have struck Marta on more than one occasion. Well, let me tell you that the next time you put a hand on her you won’t be seeing her any more.”

  The logical thing to expect was for Marta to support her big brother, isn’t that so? Well, she did just the opposite. She said, “What are you mixing into my affairs for?” That’s what she came out with.

  “Look, Marta,” I said, “never, never again will I mix in, even if I see you dying. Even if you are being dragged on the floor I won’t do a thing.”

  Later, when she ran off with Crispín, my father blamed Roberto and me. He never allowed us to meddle in her affairs and then he blamed us. The same thing happened with Consuelo. From the beginning I was wise to that fellow she went with. Why shouldn’t I be, since I was the same type!

  Twice I had to fight with my brother, to teach him how to respect his elders. The first time, he called me “pinche guey,” for no reason at all. “Watch what you’re saying, you son-of-a-bitch. You are insinuating you went to bed with my wife and that you have made a fool of me. You’re offending her, and me too, imbecile!” While I was speaking, pas! he punched me in the face. He was strong, but I beat him up, right there in the courtyard.