by Oscar Lewis
There I was, saying, “O.K., go ahead. Next. Next.” Then I said, “Nothing doing. You’re not going to leave me behind. It’s my turn now.” We entered the hole, head first, face down, and arms forward, to be able to pass under the wall. I got in all right, but went with my arms down and got stuck midway. There I was, struggling, when I felt someone grab my foot. “Ay, dear God, they’ve found us out!” But no, it was a comrade who put his head against my feet and pushed up. I never knew who it was, but if it hadn’t been for him, I would not have gotten out, nor would he.
On the other side, we were faced with a gigantic door. We fumbled with the lock, until an expert lockpicker among us opened it. We had agreed that we would walk out as if nothing was happening. But a lot of good it did. As soon as the door was open, it was as though they’d heard the starting bugle at the race track. They went out like a bunch of horses, and I wasn’t far behind. The bombardment began when I was only two blocks away. What a racket they raised, shooting and blowing whistles. Then a bullet went by me. I said, “Now run, compadres, otherwise we’re done for.”
One prisoner shouted, “Ay, they’ve given it to me! They got me,” and he fell. Me, the hero, I go back. It wasn’t my intention to be a hero, but I went back to pick him up. “No, Otelo. Keep going. Don’t be a jerk! I can’t go any more.” The bullet hit him in the back and that boy died in my arms. “Well, may you rest in peace and forgive me,” and I took off again. The prisoner in front of me fell. I turned a corner and Moisés, the prison barber, grabbed me and put his scissors against my throat. “Wait up, Moisés,” and I held his hand.
“Ay, Otelo. A bit more and I would have killed you. I thought you were a cop.”
“No, compadre, let’s get going.”
We ran through the night, past the railroad tracks and to the mountains. That was our salvation. Up we went, with police and guards all over the place, and lights going from one side to another. We ran into a briar patch, ay, my God! did we get full of thorns! We had to get out on hands and knees, clearing a path with a stick. When we were through and way ahead, we stopped to pull the thorns out of one another.
We walked through the whole state of Veracruz, for several days and nights. It was the rainy season and there was a downpour, of the kind that only happens around there, really torrential. We gathered sugar-cane leaves to make raincoats, but they were of no use at all. So we curled up back to back, shivering with cold.
We kept from starving by eating fruit along the road. There were lots of mango trees, and bananas, guayaba, oranges, lemons, malta, all kinds of fruit. Moisés had four or five pesos on him and in the first town we hit, we bought a drink. After that, we walked day and night.
At the entrance of one town, we stopped to make ourselves some huaraches out of a strip of rubber tire. Our feet were swollen and bleeding, and were the part of us that had suffered most. I was sitting with my back to the town, and Moisés was facing it, so that he could see who was leaving and I could see who was coming in.
We were cutting the thongs when all at once Moisés said, “This is it, boy. Don’t move or turn, but be ready for anything.” He passed me his scissors and he held his razor, on guard, see? “It looks like they got us. Here come the police.”
Out of the corner of my eye I could see two cops and two armed civilians coming. They passed right by, saying, “Good afternoon, señores.” We answered, “Good afternoon, señores.” “Adiós … adiós.” We lost sight of them around a curve in the road. A few minutes later, I heard the sound of a carbine being cocked.
“Be careful,” I said. “They are going to ambush us. We’d better get out of here.” As we started, we heard the first shot. But the shots weren’t meant for us. The men were just target shooting at a tree. Ay! How were we to know? My heart went back to its normal place, because, to tell the truth, I was really scared.
We walked all the way to Oaxaca, where Moisés had a friend whom he had once worked for. We found him shucking corn on a machine and he gave both of us jobs … and, what I liked more, plenty of food. I had shucked corn before, but there I learned to plant pineapple. I was soon planting eight hundred to a thousand plants a day and they paid nine pesos per thousand plants.
I meant to stay until I had enough money to go back to Mexico City, but it didn’t work out like that, because of the heat and the mosquitoes. Those damned mosquitoes gave me such a beating that I had to surrender. I was like a cobblestone street, with bites all over my body. I just worked two weeks and then I said to myself, “It’s time for you to go to Mexico City now, Roberto.”
To do that, I went back to Veracruz. Well, when you drink you meet all kinds of people. Your tongue loosens with the ones you should least speak to. I was drinking with a boy I didn’t know and we began to talk about our exploits. Since I was as much of an adventurer as he, and without money, he invited me to help him on a little job he was planning. He had studied the house and knew where the money was, and how to get in, and everything. All I had to do was follow instructions … he did the stealing, I was the lookout.
He got thirty thousand pesos in cash, some watches, some rings and a pistol. We divided it on the beach … my share was 14,700 … and then we each went our way. I heard later that they caught him and were looking for me because he sang to the police. I boarded a freighter which took me to Guatemala.
We arrived in Chetumal, on the border, and right off, I got a job on a coffee plantation. I worked during the day, and in the evenings I invited everyone I knew to go with me to the cabarets. For a month I went to bordellos and cabarets, treating half the world to drinks and women. And even though I always went to cabarets of the lowest category, I spent over a thousand pesos in one night. The women would charge fifty, one hundred, seventy-five pesos, and I treated everybody.
That was the way all my money went … well, not my money but the money I took from others. I’ve left thousands in places like that. I give you my word as a man and as a bum, that there have been some years in which I’ve thrown away fifteen or twenty thousand pesos.
When I was down to my last five thousand pesos, I took a boat back to Veracruz. I had my doubts about that old boat and, as a matter of fact, it sank a short time ago and there were several deaths. From Veracruz to Mexico City, the easiest way is by train. Although I was a magnate with plenty of money in my pocket, I went my usual way for only fifty centavos.
What I always do is buy a thirty-centavo ticket for the first-class bus to the train station. Then, I buy a platform ticket for twenty centavos, so that I can get in where the trains are. I board the train and mix with the passengers. Once the train starts, I know they will check the tickets, so I go to the door of the coach and get between the cars and climb up to the roof.
To avoid suffering from the cold I go along the roofs until I get to the locomotive, which has a warm ventilator on top. It is safe and no one bothers you. Ask the man who knows, right? But sometimes I travel underneath the freight trains. They have rods down below, especially made for tramps, if you know what I mean. With a board across the rods, you can travel comfortably. That was how I went back that time.
I arrived in Mexico City at about seven in the morning and spent the whole day in the house waiting for my papá. Manuel and my sisters kept asking me questions, but I didn’t tell them anything until my father came home. He walked in, looking very serious.
“I’m back, papá.”
“When did you come?”
“Just today.”
“How did you go free?”
“Well, they found out it wasn’t my fault.” I told a lie, see, because I was never able to talk frankly to my father. “They decided it wasn’t my fault and they let me go.”
“Let’s see if you go to work now. You’re a grown-up man and you have to work seriously, not just a month or two and then rest for three.”
Unfortunately, that’s the way I have been. I worked at a job until I had some money in my pocket, and then I quit. That time, I didn’t even begin to l
ook for work until I had spent my five thousand pesos with my friends. Then I went back to glass cutting, in a place that made fancy candelabras.
We did all the work by hand, cutting the crystal, shaping it and polishing. I was good enough to be a maestro, but I never wanted to be anything but a worker, so as not to be over people or to have responsibility. I just wanted to do what I was told and to have a definite salary per week, and that would be the end of it. One of the good things about being a humble worker is having a clear conscience, being able to eat and sleep in tranquillity, with no one and nothing to bother you and no reason to reproach yourself for your behavior. And perhaps, because one is humble, one doesn’t get ambitious and covetous. One is satisfied with the hope that some day, through honest and productive labor, one can get out of the hole one is in.
It might have been possible to have started my own business and to improve economically, but by the time I got around to thinking of it, fine candelabra work had declined and the things were being mass produced. Besides, I lost my job because I got into a fight.
I was pretty drunk the day of the fight because it was the New Year. I don’t care for alcoholic drinks; whatever I drink, I don’t like, but there I am, hoisting them. Don’t ask! I have drunk everything. Well, from time immemorial, there has been a feud between the boys of the Casa Grande and the guys from the Street of the Bakers. When the fight broke out, three of them ganged up on me. I was putting up a good struggle when somebody slugged me from behind, one of the worst blows I’d ever gotten. I fell and got kicked in the ribs and legs. No matter how much I tried, I couldn’t defend myself.
What made me madder than anything was that my Whole gang saw what was going on, and left me there to die. It is not an obligation, but lots of times I have mixed into fights to defend them. But not those guys! I was beaten up so badly in front of the boys and girls of the vecindad, that I couldn’t get over the shame of it. And by guys who were not known to be fighters!
Those boys were terribly worried, as they knew I always took revenge. Why, once I looked for a guy six months because he punched me when I was too drunk to fight back. He hid and sent his wife and mother-in-law to see where I was before he would step out of the house. He missed more than one day of work because I was waiting for him on the street corner. I had almost forgotten about him, when I met him at a saint’s day fiesta. When José saw me, he hugged the wall, trying to hide in a corner. Later he told me, “Ay, Negrito, when I saw you come in, I tell you man-to-man, they shrank up on me!”
He swore that if he had known who I was, he never would have dared punch me. To show me how sorry he was, he offered me a Johnson lighter his wife had given him on his Saint’s Day. Then his wife and her whole family, people I have known since I was a kid, came and talked to me, and the upshot of it was that we were soon drinking beer with our arms around each other.
But it didn’t work out that way with the boys from the Street of the Bakers. After they had beaten me up, I didn’t drink anything but Alka-Seltzers and went to bed for a week to recover my strength so I could call them to account. Well, I did, and one of them got cut with my knife. It was an accident, because it really didn’t call for anything as drastic as that. It was just a scratch, but it was more the fuss he made. His whole family came at me and called the police.
Never in my life have I turned my back to an enemy but since I had had experience with the police, I took it on the lam. I thought, “Fights are also won by running.” That time I ended up in Texas, where I spent a few weeks.
By the time I learned that Antonia, my great love, was living with Francisco and had two kids with him, I didn’t care any more, My feeling for her had calmed down, though when I saw her at the Casa Grande once in a while, it still gave me great pleasure. Francisco was a no-good character who ran around with other women and who didn’t even give her daily expense money. My sister deserved something better.
But what hurt my soul and heart was to learn that Consuelo had taken a misstep and had left home. I had four sisters and not one of them has given me the joy and honor of seeing her married in a white dress. It is true that my father threw Consuelo out of the house, but my sister was intelligent enough to know that, as a woman, she should never have used that as an excuse to go off with … what’s-his-name. She wasn’t the only one my father had thrown out, because he did it to me, and especially to Manuel. But being a woman, she should have borne more and spoken to my father in a nice way, more like to a friend than to a father, and I believe he would have listened to her. So she had no right to blame him for what happened to her.
That was another search for me … I looked for Consuelo and Mario everywhere. I even went to the airport where they said he worked. God be blessed that I didn’t find him, because I would have dragged him from the airport to my father’s house, to account for his actions. Later, when it was all over, Consuelo told me she didn’t love him but had gone out of desperation. “Ay, brother,” she said, “without doubt I treated the poor skinny little thing badly. I put on my dramatics for him all the time, and I realize I was unjust to him.”
Really, my sister is very honest, because she admits her faults, though a bit late. Think of it! I didn’t know about that drunk, Jaime, being her novio, until after she went with Mario, who was the better of the two. He even left a good job and all his things, because of my sister. I believe if they had continued together, they would have amounted to something.
Marta had had a fight with Consuelo and had gone off to Acapulco with a man, Baltasar, who, you might say, was my new brother-in-law. I didn’t know about this until my return home, when we received a letter from her. As soon as my father knew Marta’s address, he sent me to Acapulco with some of her things. That time I went as a paying passenger because I carried a large tub full of dishes and clothing. I left on the night bus and arrived there in the morning.
With the tub in a cart, I started up the hill to the street where my sister lived. There she was, coming down, carrying her market basket. I was about to whistle, but no sooner did I take a deep breath when I noticed that she was pregnant. All the air went out of me and I just stood there. But I was so glad to see my little sister again that nothing else mattered.
“Sis, how are you?”
“My little brother! What a miracle! When did you come?”
We greeted each other and she took me home to meet Baltasar.
Frankly, he looked lousy to me. He resembled the many people I have had to fight with. He didn’t look exactly fierce, but rather aggressive and ready for any contingency that might come up between us. He was barefoot and his shirt was open to show his chest. He had a small gold earring in one ear lobe, which must have caused him a lot of trouble with Mexican men. He explained that he wore it because of a vow he had made to the Virgin.
Baltasar’s shack had a dirt floor, a tin roof and walls loosely made of boards. The kitchen was smaller than a closet and the kerosene stove was very dirty. Everything really looked very poor.
Well, I asked Baltasar for an accounting and he explained that he had known my sister in Mexico City, where he worked in a bakery, and that he knew about her daughters when he asked her to go with him to Acapulco. He had told Marta to write to my father but she wouldn’t until a month had passed, because she was afraid we, her brothers, would go after Baltasar with knives.
“No,” I said, “you have nothing to worry about. I am not a knifer, but any brother would get angry at this, don’t you think?”
When I heard Baltasar was a butcher, I thought to myself, “Ah, you bastard, I did well to bring my knife.” I hadn’t come looking for a fight, but I was armed and ready to measure him with the same stick he measured me. He was peaceful and so I was, too. He told me about his family … a big family, with two mothers and two fathers, but he didn’t have much to do with them. He said, “I don’t want to bother my people. After all, they give me nothing and I have nothing to give them.”
My sister and her children seemed calm and
content there with Baltasar. Though he drank, Marta was sure of daily expense money because he sent her to collect his pay, and every day he brought home meat from the slaughterhouse. Marta took care of the money and it was something new for me to see a Mexican asking his wife for bus fare, or for centavos for a smoke or a drink. But at the same time, I realized it was a good thing.
Above all, I had to admit that Baltasar had shown nobility in accepting Marta with three children, though I believed I was capable of doing the same tiling. It would have been absolutely nothing for me to support a wife and children in the style he did. I was not afraid of women or of marriage, but I didn’t feel like tying myself down.
My family kept telling me I ought to get married, but I knew that I was a first-class avoider of obligations and that I wouldn’t make a woman happy. I wasn’t enough of a beast to make a woman live with me, nor had I met a woman worthy of marrying. If I had been a heel, I could have had the use of two or three young ladies, but I never did anything to them, or even with my novias. I’ve been only with prostitutes, also with two or three married women who were separated from their husbands. They satisfied my sexual desires. I’ve never had any children, not that I know about, because I picked only sterile women.
I’ve been a mean sort of fellow, but when it came to love, I’ve always been a man. Like we say here, I’ve always been able to give them a good hard screw, although they would sometimes wear me out. I’m an ugly fellow, but women preferred me. I’ve made two or three girls unhappy, but I preferred to wound them with a disappointment than to be hurting them all their lives. I don’t like to hurt anybody in these matters because I couldn’t take it when it was done to me.
If there was one thing I hated, it was for novios to be deceiving each other. Look at the contradiction! I was a first-class liar and when it came to doing the wrong thing there was no one who could beat me. I’ve been a bad egg, a hopeless case, and nothing good had come out of me. Well, that was not altogether true because if I had been 100 percent bad, why, man alive, it would have been better for them to shoot me. That type of person simply does not deserve to live. Yet, when it came to love, I just couldn’t bear to deceive or to be deceived. And love was the thing where lies and deceit were most used.