by Oscar Lewis
“Look,” I say, “take me to the creditor, the owner of the cloth, and let’s see if I can convince him to let me pay it off little by little. I’ll give you guys something too. You don’t work for free.”
“We can’t make deals like that,” says he.
Then I thought of Abram, my father’s compadre, who worked in the Police Station. I began to talk about him to the cops, hoping it would do some good. I was terrified because never in my life had I been in a jail. They said I would have to go in for a while. When we got there, the guard asked me if I had any dough. I had 1,800 pesos in my pocket but I wasn’t going to give it to those bastards.
“Look,” says the guard, “inside they’re going too shake you down and take everything you’ve got.”
“Sure, sure, but I haven’t a thing, not a thing.” I was well dressed, see? I had on my gabardine pants, a good shirt and a windbreaker. Well, they opened the door of the cage and inside I went, scared to death. There was a bunch of evil-looking characters there, the worst collection of faces I had ever seen. “Madre Santísima!” I thought, “how am I going to take care of these bastards? Let’s see if I can impress them …”
I came in, angry, real angry. Inside I was shaking but I looked mean. They had to think I was real wild. I see this guy sitting on the floor, and wham! I give him a kick in the pants.
“Move over, son-of-a-bitch!”
“Hey, you bastard … what …”
“Shut up!” I give him another kick. “Shut your trap, you bastard. Didn’t you hear me … move over.” He moved over and the others made room for me. I was saying, “Cowards! Fags! Stoolies!” Pas! I punched the wall, and kicked, see? I punched the door. I looked furious.
“Hey, what’s eating you?” one of the guys asked.
“What the hell do you care? Am I asking you? Bastard!”
“Cool off. Maybe I can help you, give you advice, see? I’m an old guest here. I know all their tricks.”
I kept acting real angry. I take out a cigarette and light it, and I notice another guy who looked even meaner than I. I saw I was getting on his nerves, so I said to him, “Hey, friend, you want to smoke? Have a cigarette.” I passed them around. The ice was broken, and I felt safer.
Then a guy comes over, a powerful-looking fellow, and says, “Hey, friend. Why did they bring you here?”
“Look,” I say, cranking myself up, putting it on thick, because they have their class distinctions too. “I had fifty sewing-machine heads, I had liquifiers, television sets, radios, everything … And that son-of-a-bitch, the one who sold them to me, turned me in. They just took everything, brother, and I’m out a hundred thousand pesos.” I had to give myself class because they have more respect for you that way.
I noticed a guy there, lying face up, with his legs spread, like a compass. His balls were all swollen from the beatings the cops had given him. Every little while he’d say, “Please, boys, face down.” Then ten minutes later, “Turn me over again, please.” Face up or face down, he couldn’t bear it. His face was all split and he had marks from the pistol butt they hit him with. Really heartbreaking, that poor guy.
Then one guy said, “You know, I was in ‘The Well’ for two weeks, pal.” That’s a prison called El Pozito, the little well. All you have to do is say El Pozito to the pickpockets around here and they cry. You know what they do there? They tie their hands behind their back, tie up their feet, and say, “Was it you or wasn’t it?” and wham! a punch in the stomach, but hard, to knock out your breath. Then they throw them into a well of filthy water, full of horse urine, and when they’re half drowned, half dead, they take them out and do it again.
This guy who said he was in “The Well,” went on: “That’s how they kept me there. For ten days I didn’t eat or drink a thing. The bastards didn’t even give me water! You know why? I buy stolen cattle, pigs, any kind of animal they bring me. But why should I give these bastards money? They’ve screwed me plenty already. Why should I? They’ll have to work to get me to talk! But I won’t! I won’t talk! I’ve been here fifteen days and every night those god-damned bastards take me out.”
You know, I admired that guy. He really wears pants! He had that Mexican courage that I think doesn’t exist any more. I was there fifteen minutes when they came to take him out. Just as the door closed, we could hear them hitting him. He came back looking yellow. “Not a frigging thing, pal,” he said, “and they’ll kill me but they’ll get nothing from me.” And the poor boy with the swollen testicles, they dragged him out like a dog. Imagine the state he was in and they still took him out and beat him.
All this time I was wondering when my turn would come. When I heard my name I was really scared. But there was my friend Abram talking for me. I finally offered the cop a thousand pesos to let me go, otherwise I’d get myself a lawyer. Well, that got him, I had him checked. Because if he didn’t take the thousand, it would go to the lawyer. So he said, “O.K., just because of Abram and all that. Let’s go and get the money.” I had the money in my pocket but they didn’t know, see?
So he drove me to the café, and I asked Gilberto to lend me five hundred pesos. I dropped my roll behind the counter, so he could see it, and right away he took the five hundred from his pocket and gave it to the cop. He was to get the rest the next day.
“O.K., Manuelito, let’s go.” He was real friendly. He even took me out for some tacos before he locked me up for the night. I spent the night in jail, listening to all the pickpockets tell of their adventures. I really enjoyed being there with them.
Well, I kept going to Gilberto’s café. It was practically my home. I ate all my meals there, and sometimes I slept on the floor at night. My papá moved Delila and my kids to a room on the Street of the Lost Child. Meanwhile, he bought a lot on the edge of the city and began to build another house. A week or two would pass without me going to see my children, and that bothered me a lot, although I hid it even from myself. I don’t know why, but when I don’t see them every day, little by little my love for them quiets down, gets paralyzed, and I avoid thinking of them. I have asked myself why I am that way with my children, but the truth is, I am afraid to analyze it. I am afraid to answer my own question, because I feel I will hate myself if I do.
I didn’t attend my children the way I should because I was trying to live the kind of life I couldn’t really afford. I was like a trapped beast, looking for a way out for myself alone. I felt like a heel. I couldn’t sleep at night. I always thought of my children just as I sat down to eat, and then the food didn’t go down easily any more. It is paradoxical, but I didn’t go to see them as a kind of punishment to myself. And when my father or Consuelo came to the café and shouted insults at me in front of my friends, I felt more justified. I felt I had paid for my behavior with my humiliation.
Gilberto and his wife Carolina were my closet friends. He was a first-class printer and a union member, and she ran the café. I tried to get him to work in Tepito, but he preferred his wage of fifty pesos a day, Social Security and a pension later.
It was Gilberto who introduced me to the horse races and to jai-alai and frontón, which were my ruination. I even gambled on boxing matches and cockfights. Yes, the vice of gambling took hold of me more than ever. Card playing was small stuff, compared to this. I always had the hope of hitting the jackpot, which would pay three, four, five thousand pesos. I dreamed of the satisfaction it would give me if I could say, “Look, papá, take this. Take the whole lump.” Because, por Dios, I didn’t want the money for myself. I swear if I had ever hit the jackpot, I would have given it all to my father and my children. I don’t love money!
One day, Gilberto took me to the race track and it was my misfortune to buy a lucky ticket for ten pesos. The bet paid off 786 pesos and right away I said, “What am I wasting my time working for, when I can make a killing here?” From that moment to this, I loved the horses. I learned to read the racing forms and studied up on weights, times, mounts, distances, and all that. I knew so much,
I became scientific about it. Maybe that was my undoing. I should have stuck to hunches and dreams, like Gilberto did.
I lost a lot of money there at the Hipódromo. I was doing well at Tepito, sometimes earning at least one hundred pesos a day, but all of it, all of it, went on the horses. Once, I arrived with 1,200 pesos in my pocket and left with only thirty centavos for the bus. That day I didn’t even eat … I’d rather bet than eat … and at night I bought my supper on credit at the café. I won only twice … a mere 1,300 pesos in all. It is unbelievable, but sometimes my losses amounted to a thousand pesos a month, if not more. The money I should have used as capital in the market, went down the drain. I could have been well off if I hadn’t had the bug of gambling.
Don’t think I bet for fun! For me, it was a business, a job … the fastest way I had of really getting ahead. I was always full of hope. When I lost all the money I had on me and couldn’t place any more bets, I felt my body collapse. I’d go into a cold sweat. I reproached myself for being a fool … for having picked the wrong number … for not following Gilberto’s hunch … for misinterpreting a dream … for my bad luck. A thousand and one times, I advised myself to quit, but no sooner did I make a good business deal, when I ran to the race track with my money. The next morning, I went to the market without a centavo, to look for a friend with capital who would go into partnership with me for the day.
And to make matters worse, a partner of mine went off with about five thousand pesos’ worth of goods, leaving me to pay the creditors. I still owe about 1,200 pesos on that deal.
My compadre Alberto had stayed in the United States for another season, until Immigration grabbed him and threw him out. I saw a good deal of him when he came back, but we were not so close any more. At first he spoke to me like he always did, but then I noticed that he was drawing further and further away. There was a certain coldness in his tone, see? A certain something. This went on for about three years. Then one day, he showed up with his aunt at Gilberto’s café, dead drunk.
I was baking bread for Carolina that morning, and refused to have a drink with him. He sat down and kept staring at me while I worked. He moved his head from side to side, sadly, with his eye on me. “What’s eating this guy?” I wondered. He raised his glass and said to his aunt: “Salud, to the best and most treacherous of friends.” Then he looked at me, see?
He did it a second time and I couldn’t ignore it. So I went over to him and said, “Listen, compadre, there was never any crap between us. Why do you say that to me?”
“Look,” he says, “if it weren’t for my children, I swear I would have killed you by now, compadre.”
“Wait a minute,” I say. “What’s on your mind, cabrón? Are you crazy?”
“Isn’t it true that you sang on the buttocks of my woman?”
“Who told you that?” I was furious. I felt a volcano boiling inside me.
“Juanita, my wife, told me. Isn’t it true that you got into her when you found her in the cabaret?”
I began to understand what it was all about. A short time after I got back from the United States, I met a friend who said, “Say, Chino, whose woman is working at El Casino, yours or Alberto’s?”
I didn’t like to hear that because El Casino was a cheap cabaret in the neighborhood, a real dive. So I say to the guy, “Well, my compadre was a chaser, he had lots of women. Who knows which of the bunch you are talking about, brother.”
“Maybe so,” he says, “but listen, this one knows you and she let on that she has children with Alberto.”
“Go on, you’re not trying to tell me it’s his wife. He’s legally married to her. It couldn’t be Juanita!” Suddenly, a feeling hit me. I had a feeling it was Juanita, but I acted as though it didn’t mean a thing, so as not to make my compadre look bad.
That evening I went to El Casino, to have a look around. As it is dark in those places, I couldn’t see a thing at first. I had to take a leak and on my way to the toilet I passed a woman in a clinch with some guy. When I came out, I saw her face and sure enough it was Alberto’s wife. I felt horrible, as bad as if she were my own wife. So I grabbed her, using rough language.
“What is this!” I say, and I pulled her away, see? “What the frigging hell are you doing here? You whore!”
She pulled away, saying I had no right to interfere, that she wasn’t doing anything …
“Not anything? Slut! What do you mean I have no right! You’re getting out of here this minute or I’ll drag you out.”
“It’s that the baby was sick and Alberto didn’t send me money. Was I going to let my baby die? I had to … that’s why I did it.”
“You’re lying through your teeth, señora. Only five days ago I myself wrote Alberto’s check for fifty-five dollars and sent it to you … I, personally.”
Then she began to cry and I came to my senses. After all, she wasn’t my wife.
So I calmed down and told her, “Look, señora, there’s no reason for you to work here. If you need money, if Alberto doesn’t send enough, I can let you have some until he comes back. I’m going to start work soon. When Alberto comes, he can pay me.”
I paid the bartender twenty pesos to let her leave, and another ten to the cop at the door, and I sent her home, feeling I had done right by my compadre.
So when Alberto accused me I felt very bad.
“Look, compadre,” I said, “I don’t like gossip. Let’s not beat around the bush. Get up and let’s go to your house.”
We took a taxi and got there fast. Alberto and his wife were janitors in an apartment building and we went through the courtyard to their room in the back. Juanita was surprised to see me, and looked uneasy. Then we had it out with her.
“No,” she says, “I don’t understand how Alberto could have taken it like that. I told him you had offered to lend me money to live on, not to sleep with you.”
Alberto just stood there glaring at her. Then he clouted her a couple. I let him, because she deserved it, pulling that stuff. He might have killed me, or I him … and for what? So I let him slug her a few. But when he kept on beating her, I tried to stop him. He was like crazy … as if in a fit, yelling, “Slut! Slut!” That was all he could say. Finally I got him to bed.
He comes round to see me now, but it is not the same between us. Knowing me a lifetime and us caring about each other the way we did, well, he should never have doubted me. It wounded me. I didn’t show it, but at bottom, it made me feel cheated. It even had something to do with lessening my faith in religion.
But I really admire my compadre. He has a will of iron. When he makes up his mind to do something, he does it. He drives a taxi, his sons are going to school, he has his little television set … a gas stove … and is even talking about building a house. His big dream is to drive one of those huge sightseeing buses, and I don’t have the slightest doubt that he will.
He has always advised me to settle down and stop living according to my whim. He says I’m more intelligent than he, and can be even more successful. I don’t know where he gets his will and perseverance … maybe because he can’t read there is nothing to distract his mind. Maybe it helps him focus more clearly on practical things, right?
Well, I was a widower and still in my twenties. I was really a free man. I got up at noon, spent the afternoon and evening at the market, on the streets, at the racetrack, or some other place where I could gamble. I had plenty of friends, but I felt lonely for a woman. Three times I went to whore houses, but left without doing anything. I can’t stand those women.
Then I met María, Carolina’s goddaughter, at the café. She was just a kid of seventeen when I first saw her. Her mother had been killed by her stepfather a few years before, and she had lived from pillar to post with her grandmother and her three kid brothers and a sister. They used to sleep in a stall in the old market, before it was torn down. When I met her, they all slept on a little balcony in Carolina’s and Gilberto’s room.
I recognized Maria’s faults from the be
ginning. She was sloppy and lazy. But she was a well-built girl, pretty and young. The thing was, I had a very strong desire for her. I thought, “With patience, with tenderness, she’ll change. She had a miserable life, but little by little, I’ll make her change.”
It was not that I loved María, for I didn’t. My capacity for love had been killed. I knew this because when I saw Graciela in the street every once in a while, I didn’t even have a slight stir of feeling for her. No, my motive in going after María was strictly convenience.
So I invited María to go to Chalma with me and a friend. I had intended to fulfill my wife’s vow to walk on her knees from the Cruz del Perdón to the Sanctuary of the “Little Saint,” but when they gave María permission to go, I forgot about the vow.
All the way there, I kept trying to make her, you know what I mean? and in the bus she had already given in … she said she would. When the pilgrimage on foot began, we spent our first night together. We slept on a petate out in a field, but it turned out to be very upsetting.
Imagine, the moment arrived … she was already beginning to have regrets … and I couldn’t do a thing. I couldn’t get a reaction. She resisted just a tiny bit and I got nervous and couldn’t … I just couldn’t. I got a terrible attack of nerves. I acted like I was sore at her, to cover up. We slept on the same mat for three days, but that is as far as it went.
From that time on, I’ve had a whole string of upsets like that. I kept going after it, and when I had it all set up, I couldn’t again. All I had was a horrible pain in my testicles and I spent the night in rage and disappointment. I had always been virile, but since my wife died I haven’t been the same. I think the moral depression I felt, piled up on me.
I thought, “Well, who knows? Maybe God didn’t want her touched by me.” Then another boy began to go after her and before I knew it they were novios. I wasn’t going to let that rascal beat me out! After all, I had slept next to her. I knew her body, so how could I let him get her?