by Oscar Lewis
He socked me with his fist, and instead of warding off his blows and crying, the way I usually did, I kicked and let loose with everything I had stored up in me. We beat each other up and cursed, while people gathered around to watch. I didn’t even feel ashamed and hoped for someone I knew to come to my defense. But I fought it out alone and from that day, he never again raised a hand to me.
The deeply painful thing about it was that I was pregnant with our third child, Trinidad. When I had told Crispín about it, he said he would take care of me and the children and stop his wanderings. The day after our fight, he told Manuel he didn’t want me to work and would give me an allowance until he could set up an apartment. The first week, he came to see me every day and gave me twenty-five pesos, so I quit my job. The next week, he gave me only twenty pesos and didn’t come to the house. By the third week, he had disappeared. I didn’t see him until the following Tuesday, when he came and offered me fifteen pesos. I threw them in his face and said I didn’t take alms. That was when he told me he didn’t think the child was his! I don’t know what he based it on, but anyway he used that as a pretext not to give me money any more. Consuelo found a job for me taking messages in a lawyer’s office, so I went back to work.
I had been living in the Casa Grande, but there was an argument with Delila and I moved to my aunt Guadalupe’s again, this time staying until just before Trini was born. Their place was poor and tiny, with hardly room to turn around; Concepción and Violeta had to eat sitting on the doorstep and the three of us slept on sacks on the floor. My aunt would invite me to sleep in the bed with her and Ignacio, but the bed was so narrow, how could I?
The vecindad was full of bedbugs, mice and other vermin, and the two outside toilets were filthy, but I was happy. I got along well with my aunt and practically ran the place, so I was well off. But my father didn’t like it there and that made me sad. When he came to see me he would arrive scolding and was impatient to leave.
The major annoyance for me was that my aunt always had many visitors. If it wasn’t a compadre, it would be a few comadres who dropped in for a taco to eat with their beer or chinchól. I couldn’t stand seeing all those drunken faces, and some of them were downright disgusting. I was angry because one of them stole a watch and some centavos from me.
Things were always disappearing in that vecindad; nothing was safe. That’s why my uncle had a watchdog and people never left their rooms unguarded. When something was stolen, the victim would go to a seer to find out who had taken it, but I didn’t go because it would have led only to arguments.
Everyone there used vulgar language, even my uncle, who was usually amiable. If he came home and found my aunt too tipsy to prepare his supper, he would start insulting her mother and calling her “bitch” and “daughter-of-a-whore.” But they really loved each other a lot, especially after he gave up seeing his other woman, Cuca. He had had six women besides my aunt, but he always said they meant nothing, that they were just talk, and that it was my aunt who had all the keys to his house and was the boss of his centavos.
My uncle was respectful and correct with me, and was fond of my daughters. He would tell me about my mother, with whom he sometimes went out to sell, and how jealous Guadalupe would get when he was mistaken for my mamas husband. When Ignacio was drunk he would make advances to me, but I never led him on, and he didn’t insist. If he ever complained about my children yelling, or my brother coming in drunk, my aunt would defend us. The only one my uncle really fought with was Consuelo, who would come and try to be the boss.
Both Ignacio and Guadalupe were very short, gray and wrinkled, though not yet old. My uncle often said that youth had nothing to do with the number of years you have lived. What counted was how much you suffered in your life. He would say, “Do you know the age of a gray hair? No? Every gray hair has its story … its destiny and its end. They come from the knocks in life, from your failures, the many people you’ve seen die.” He called my aunt “the-young-person-who-looks-old” and believed that she had aged because of all the sacrifices she had to make for her family.
My aunt had an unbelievably hard life. When she was thirteen, she was raped by a man of thirty-two. Because she had been deflowered and “wasn’t worth anything any more,” her father beat her hard and made her go through a church marriage. Her mother-in-law hated her, so her husband beat her and took her from one aunt to another until her son was born.
Then her husband went into the army and she never saw him again. She and the baby had no place to stay and almost died of hunger; they swelled up for lack of food. She walked all the way back to Guanajuato, and nearly drowned trying to cross a flooded river. A teamster pulled her out by her braids, otherwise she wouldn’t be alive today.
In Guanajuato, Guadalupe learned that her brother Pablo had been killed while defending a friend and that her sainted father had died of anger and grief. Her mother had gone with the rest of the children to Mexico City to seek her fortune selling hot coffee on street corners. Guadalupe’s aunt Catarina was in the capital and had advised her mother to go. So my little aunt went to look for them, carrying her child in her shawl and begging food along the way. When she arrived, she looked like a beggar and her mother didn’t even recognize her.
Guadalupe’s brothers were all ill with typhus and she caught it too. Bernardo died, but the others recovered. José and Alfredo worked in a bakery, Lucio got a job in a pulquería, and my aunt and my mamá sold cake and spiked coffee at a little stand on a street corner. Putting alcohol in the coffee was a legal offense; my aunt went to jail three times because her mother couldn’t pay the fine. Guadalupe was afraid they would send her to the Penitentiary next, so she worked as a servant, and later, in a tortillería as a tortilla maker.
My aunt had always complained that my grandma had favored my mamá, who was the youngest girl. She said, “I worked to support my little mother, but she was very hard on me, may she rest in peace! My little son and I would cry because she didn’t bring our lunch to the tortillería. She would forget all about us, but she never failed to bring a taco to your mamá, Lenore. I asked my aunt Catarina, ‘Ay, Auntie, am I not my mother’s daughter? Why does she love only Lenore?’ My aunt would say that I had bad luck and that I must resign myself to it.”
When Guadalupe’s son was five years old, her mother-in-law came and took him away. She told Guadalupe that the boy’s father had come to a bad end in the Revolution … he had been chopped up with machetes and dumped into a river. My aunt prayed to God to forgive her husband and she vowed to the Virgin of Guadalupe never to remarry. She let her mother-in-law take her son because she was having a hard time feeding him. But they turned the boy against her and taught him to be a drunkard. At eight, he was already being given tequila punch and he got the habit. When Guadalupe brought him a piece of cake or fruit, they shut the door in her face. He finally died of drink while still quite young and she lost him forever.
My aunt got the habit of drinking when they tried to cure her of malaria. She had gone to Veracruz as a servant and had come back sick. They gave her sugar cane and jícama roots; they put a mouse on her neck to startle her; they gave her green alcohol and strong coffee, then pulque with ground pirú; for seven months they tried this and that, usually with alcohol, until finally a woman cured her with nopal leaves, chile and honey.
Then a man just did my aunt “the favor” and left her, even before her son Salvador was born. When she met Ignacio, he wanted to marry her and accept her son as his own. She liked Ignacio, but refused to marry him. Ignacio’s father wanted her to have a church wedding, too, because in those days they were more strict. Now people just get together in the doorway and they think themselves married. My uncle says that God, the Father, ran things then, not God, the Son. Ignacio’s father was the law and he educated his son to have a conscience. Ignacio could never raise a hand to my aunt because his father was there with a stick to defend her.
But my aunt stubbornly refused to be married. She said, �
�I vowed never to marry because I suffered too much as a wife. If Ignacio wants to five with me like this, very well. God will find the way to pardon me.” And that’s the way it was.
Ignacio had been a news vendor since 1922. Before that he made good money as a varnisher in a furniture shop but he said he “left his lungs” in that place and took the first other job God offered. He and Salvador went out selling papers together, in rain or shine, and gave the little they earned to my aunt. My uncle always said he would do all right in the newspaper business if only he sold all his papers. But there were no returns allowed, and he would lose his profits because of the rains, which was the scourge of the vendors. God! all the hiking he did to earn a few pesos! My poor uncle will probably die walking the streets, holding on to his papers.
Ignacio was good to Salvador, but my cousin began to drink and became quarrelsome. Things got worse when Salvador married because his wife took their child and ran off with another man. Salvador hit the bottle even more and was drunk all the time.
I was only five or six years old when my cousin died. Tipsy as usual, he was standing in front of a beer parlor on the Street of the Tinsmiths, when along came his wife’s lover, Carlos. As soon as Carlos saw him, he said, “This is the way I wanted to find you, son-of-your-smutty-mother!” And with that, he took out an ice pick and stuck it into Salvador’s belly.
Salvador held his wound with both hands and started to run. At that time, he and my aunt and uncle were living half a block away with Prudencia, my uncle Alfredo’s first wife. But instead of going there, my cousin went the other way, to the Casa Grande, with Carlos running after him. At the gate, Carlos turned back and my cousin ran into our courtyard.
We were just finishing supper when he shouted, “Uncle Jesús, let me in!” My papá opened the door, but thought Salvador was drunk.
“Are you here again? I told you before that I won’t let drunks in here. I don’t want any bad examples for the girls.”
Salvador fell in the doorway and my papá saw that he was full of blood. He was stretched out on the kitchen floor, with his feet across the doorsill. My father unbuttoned his pants and saw the wound.
We were very frightened and I began to cry. My papá sent me to get Roberto, who was eating supper at his friend’s house. Roberto went for my aunt Guadalupe and Ignacio, who came running with Prudencia and her son. Someone sent for the Red Cross ambulance. The cut was very deep and my cousin’s intestines were coming out; my papá said he didn’t think he would last long.
The ambulance took him away. He died while they were operating on him. My poor aunt! It was the work of God that she didn’t go crazy, because she gave out tremendous screams. The old bastard who was her boss in the café wouldn’t give her permission to take that day off and she had to look for someone to stay with her dead son.
Then that Prudencia, who had always been envious and mean, said the wake could not be held in her room, though it was the only home Salvador had known. My poor little aunt told me that Prudencia had never liked Salvador, in fact, that no one had liked him and that even his grandmother would chase him off. When Guadalupe had gone begging Prudencia to let them stay in a corner of her room, she was told, “My house is yours, but there is no room for your son.”
They moved in with Prudencia anyway and had to suffer her snubs and abuse. Sometimes she would lock herself in with her children and wouldn’t open the door even if it were raining. Guadalupe, Ignacio and Salvador would cover themselves with newspaper and stand huddled in the entranceway of the vecindad until she decided to let them in. That’s why my aunt says it is awful to live off someone else and that she must have been born under an unlucky star because she suffered all her life.
When Salvador was killed, my aunt had to plead with Prudencia for permission to put the coffin and candles in the courtyard. So the wake was held outdoors. Years later, when Prudencia’s son went crazy and was put in the insane asylum, my aunt Guadalupe said, “Yes, we pay for everything we do in this life. God is slow but he doesn’t forget.”
Of all the women I know, my aunt Guadalupe was the one I most admired. She was the kind of woman who knew how to suffer! I wish I had her courage to go on, to never let trouble conquer and to be resigned to whatever happens. True, she complained a lot about money and was always worrying about paying the rent, but she was so resourceful that no matter how little she had, she managed to cook enough for everyone there. She would buy fifty centavos worth of pork, twenty centavos of bruised tomatoes, a few centavos of oil, dried up onions and garlic and make a casserole full!
She said no one ever gave her anything or helped her out, and that she had to open her own path in the world. Even though she had a mother, no one showed her the way. Perhaps that is why she was never able to give me worth-while advice or to be a true mother to me. She was so lacking in moral judgment herself I
As for helping her, only Manuel could be accused of never giving her a thing or not visiting. Roberto and Consuelo came often and would give her a few pesos whenever they were working. All the time I lived with her, I gave her money for food, so that my children would eat well. Every day I would buy one quart of milk from the CEIMSA, the government store, until they passed the rule that for every quart, we had to buy one egg. That made it difficult, because some days I had enough for the milk, but not for the egg. And who needed so many eggs, anyway? They did it just to bother people!
I got along well with everyone in that vecindad—with Julia and her husband Guillermo; Maclovio and his wife; Yolanda and her husband Rafael; Ana, the janitress; Don Quintero; and all the others. Many of them had known me since I was a baby. Yolanda and I would wash laundry at the tubs together, and go to the market. I don’t know how she stood the life she led with Rafael. He was all right for the first few years, but when his mother died he took to the bottle and stopped giving Yolanda money. All she got from him was hunger, blows and babies. She was a factory, producing one child after another. There were seven ragged ones already, and another on the way.
Yolanda’s mother, Julia, wanted to give her lemon ice with red wine to chill her matrix so that she wouldn’t conceive again, but Yolanda wouldn’t hear of it. I, too, was tired of bringing babies into the world, but I refused my aunt’s offer to cure me with water that had been boiled with a gold ring and a piece of bull’s horn. Who knows why I was afraid to be cured?
Nor have I ever tried to produce a miscarriage, although I know many remedies … strong orégano tea, vinegar, cinnamon tea, douches of permanganate. Women here make many sacrifices to have miscarriages, but for those with tough matrixes, only “a cleaning” works. For that, the midwives want 150 pesos, so few women do it. Medicines and operations are so expensive that we have to place our faith in herbs and household remedies.
In my aunt’s vecindad there was no lack of gossip. Everyone noticed who had more and who had less, especially in clothing and food. If someone bought something new there was a lot of envy and suspicion. “I wonder how he did it?” was what the neighbors would say. Anyone in that place who owned a bed, a mattress and a wardrobe was a “somebody.” When I lived there, Ana was considered on “top” because she was the janitress and both her daughters were working. She also sold pulque on the side, and all her grandchildren helped her with some piecework. Now Julia and Guillermo are on “top” because they have a television set.
Life should have been sad in that vecindad because everyone was so poor. The men drank and the wives had to feed large families on less than five pesos. If a woman bought a new rag of a dress, she would have to hide when the man came to collect the installments. But in spite of that, the people would laugh and joke. The very tragedies which some suffered, gave others something to laugh about. The men were always making love and rolling around with women. If it wasn’t some husband sleeping with a neighbor’s wife, it would be some wife running around with a neighbor’s husband.
No sooner do men know that a woman has made a misstep, when they come offering her the wor
ld. The first thing they do here is to offer to set up an apartment or to take you elsewhere to live. But I had suffered such cruel disillusionment I didn’t believe any of them. They would take me all right and then leave me in the middle of the road! In my aunt’s vecindad several men went after me, Rafael, Maclovio, Don Chucho and Don Quintero, but I rejected them all.
Of the bunch, the nicest was Don Quintero, with whom I had an innocent friendship. He was a shoemaker and we became friends when I gave him a pair of my daughter’s shoes to repair. He was about forty-two years old, had grown children, and called my girls “daughters.” He was separated from his wife and lived alone. Naturally, he did suggest a few times that we get together. He would say, “Don’t be stupid, Shorty. If you’re not happy with your husband, why stay with him?”
I felt attracted to Don Quintero because he told me he was not potent any more and that we could go to bed like brother and sister. I wanted a man who couldn’t have children and who wouldn’t be making use of me every moment. But I treated it as a joke and nothing serious developed between us.
It was Yolanda who told me that Soledad, Ana’s daughter, was angry because she thought I had an understanding with Don Quintero, who was her lover. Soledad went around calling me “hot pants” and “the slippery one” until all the neighbors thought I was going to bed with him. There was so much gossip, it got to Crispín. He went to Don Quintero and accused him of being the father of the child I was expecting. Think of it! He thought that man, who couldn’t even do it any more, was the father of Trinidad! My husband was always doubting the paternity of his daughters, even when he was the only one I went to bed with. And still I stuck to him!
That year, I went to Chalma for the first time. All my life, I had wanted to go with my aunt and would cry when my father wouldn’t allow me. He would say, “Go? What for? It’s pure foolishness! They don’t know anything about God and just go to get drunk. And they’d probably leave you there.” When I married, it was Crispín who wouldn’t let me go.