by Luis Urrea
Two boys and a little girl squatted in the dark. When they saw me, they started laughing. I said, “Come out here.”
The little girl had an unusual name—Cervella (Ser-VEY-yah).
“Where’s your father?” I asked.
The eldest boy shrugged.
They all giggled.
“Where’s your mother?”
“Cagando.” (Shitting.) “She does it all the time.”
They all nodded.
“All day,” Cervella said.
Her face was covered in smudges, but under the dirt I could see dense scabs, dark as steak. I couldn’t figure out what they were; they looked like a combination of scabies and impetigo.
“What is this?” I asked, putting my finger on her cheek. She shrugged. I took her arm, turned the elbow out; there they were again. When I touched the edge of a scab, pale orange blood leaked out. “Does it hurt?”
Shrug. “Itches.” Giggle.
They all looked past me. I turned around. Mrs. Serrano had appeared in a patch of tall weeds. She scared me to death.
She was a zombie, right out of an old Boris Karloff movie. Her skin was sallow and had the texture of hide, all crisscrossed with tiny X’s in the thick flesh. Her eyes were black, but overlaid with a dullness that looked like a layer of dust—I wanted to wipe them off with my fingertips. Her mood was so flattened that it seemed agreeable and mindless; on her mouth, a loose-lipped grin and a constant exhalation of dank air. When she stood next to me, I could feel her fever radiating.
She was very pregnant.
“Are you Mrs. Serrano?” I asked.
“Serrano?” she said.
Pause.
“Where is your husband, Mrs. Serrano?”
Pause.
She moved a hand in the direction of the dump.
“What’s wrong with your daughter?”
She smiled slowly, looking at the ground. “My daughter? There is something wrong with her.” She laughed in slow motion.
I was baffled.
I put my hand on her forehead; it was dry as a skull, burning.
“I have dysentery,” she said.
Someone coughed behind me. Mr. Serrano had arrived to see who was bothering his family. He was a hearty man with a hat and a drooping mustache. He gripped my hand and pumped it.
“Good to meet you!”
I told him his wife was seriously ill.
“I know it,” he said. “Watch this.” He grabbed her arm and pinched up a section of her skin. When he let it go, it stayed elevated, like clay, or a pinch of Silly Putty. A sign of severe dehydration. They call it “tenting.”
“Está toda seca,” he said. (She’s all dry.)
“The baby?” I asked.
She laughed.
“Touch it,” Mr. Serrano said.
I put my hand on her stomach. It was hard.
I brought them supplies from the vans: water, a quart of vitamin D milk, a pound of rice, a pound of beans, a large can of tuna, a large can of peaches, a large can of fruit cocktail, one dozen flour tortillas, corn, a can of Veg-All mixed vegetables, bread, a fresh chicken, and doughnuts for the kids. I told Mr. Serrano to keep her in bed and to pour fluids down her, and I’d be back the next day with Dave and a gringo doctor.
They both laughed. He kept rubbing his hand over his face, up to the hat, down over the chin.
The next day, when Dave and I returned with the doctor, Mrs. Serrano was sitting in the sun on a broken kitchen chair.
“I’m back,” I said. “Remember I told you I’d come back?”
She didn’t respond.
The doctor crouched before her and felt her stomach. He pulled up her lids, felt her brow, and took her pulse. He shook out his thermometer and put it in her mouth. She submitted to everything.
“Tell her I need a stool sample. Tell her I need to see some stool.”
I told her. She got up and motioned for us to follow her. She led us to the south wall of the shack—the outside of the kitchen wall. The single sheet of plywood was also the wall of the pigpen. And she had been leaning against it to go; bloody ropes and spatters of feces were all over the wall. We were standing in it. Dave cracked, “There’s nothing like really getting into your work!” Our can of tuna simmered about six inches away from this mess.
“Doesn’t she know anything about hygiene?” the doctor asked.
I translated.
“What is it?” she asked.
The doctor handed me a paper cup.
“Sample,” he said.
———
He gave her Lomotil to stop the diarrhea. We gave her several jugs of Gatorade, more jugs of water, and some clothes.
Mr. Serrano, who had stood in the background during all this, came up to me and said, “Don’t leave us a prescription.”
I told him not to worry—we’d pay for it.
“No,” he said. “We can’t read. We won’t know what we’re getting.” The doctor had given him a bottle of antibiotics, and Mr. Serrano held it up to me and said, “And you’d better tell me what this says, too, eh?”
Whatever Mrs. Serrano had, it was cured within a week or two because of one donated hour and some pale capsules the doctor prescribed. Within days, her eyes brightened, her skin turned tender, and her fever vanished. They moved the pigs away from the wall and went out into the weeds beside the dump to relieve themselves. In time, she had a healthy baby.
The Curandera’s Curse
The Serranos’ accents were peculiar, and I couldn’t place them. After I had gotten to know him better, I asked Mr. Serrano.
He said they’d come from el sur (the south).
We had been trying to treat Cervella’s skin, but nothing worked. There were short periods of remission when the skin cleared, then the lumps returned. The scabs soon followed. I stood looking at her arms.
“We have a little Maya in us,” Mr. Serrano said. The day was bright. We were beside his low front door.
“You know, Hermano,” he continued, “you won’t cure Cervella.”
“Why not?”
“It’s black magic.”
In Mr. Serrano’s homeland, near Yucatán, there lived a witch named Erlinda. She often worked as a curandera (healer woman), working her spells to help those who paid for medical attention—the area possessed few doctors, no public clinics, and certainly no hospitals. One way Erlinda healed people was to roll a raw egg on their bodies, over the afflicted area. She then broke the eggs into bowls—if the stuff inside had turned black, then the disease had been “sucked out.”
Erlinda was embroiled in an unexplained feud with one of Mr. Serrano’s kin. He did not know what started the fight, but he was not personally involved. One day, she appeared at his door, demanding money—568 pesos. Serrano didn’t have it, and he told her so. She would not leave and became abusive, threatening him and his family. He physically ejected her from his plot of land, and she stood outside his little wood fence and put a curse on him.
That week, Cervella’s aunt—Mrs. Serrano’s sister—went into a swoon and died. They took her to a clinic in her last hours, but she never revived. The Serranos were terrified, unwilling to even leave their compound.
Then Cervella fell ill. It began with a fever, and the fever rose until she became delirious. She soon fell into a coma. Mr. Serrano bundled her up and carried her to the regional Red Cross station, but they couldn’t break her fever. They kept her overnight.
Mr. Serrano, not knowing what else to do, went out to his land to work. In one corner, he found a small pyramid of stones. He took it apart and discovered a bundle of Cervella’s clothes knotted up inside it. He rushed to the clinic, carried Cervella out, and took her to a missionary house in the jungle. There, he told me, they prayed over her, and she awoke.
It is possible that Mr. Serrano was telling me a whopper. However, he was crying as he told it.
“I swear to you, Luis,” he said, “she woke up. And the fever?” He brushed his hands before his chest, as
though flicking dust into the wind. “Gone.”
The Serranos so feared Erlinda after this that they fled north, running until they ran out of country to run through. The last time I saw her, Cervella’s arms were still lumpy, scabbed over, oozing blood.
Dompe workday, December: Steve Mierau and I were going to shacks in the pig village, visiting the families there. The crew was in the lower dump, hammering new houses together. We were alone. Mierau was a slim prairie liberal from Nebraska who had fallen into Mexico as if into a dream. Somehow, he had the misfortune of being promoted to second-in-command. He lived in a garage next to Von’s trailer when he wasn’t in Mexico.
Since we weren’t expected, we were free of the usual crowds of hungry people. We could take in cartons of food to each family. The Serranos were at home, and as we walked out there, we heard a commotion. Mr. Serrano was hollering and laughing, running in circles with a broom. The boys were charging around his feet, whooping, and Cervella was shrieking and clapping her hands.
“What’s this?” Steve said.
“Get him! Get him!” Cervella shouted.
Then I saw the rat.
It was a big dump rat, trapped between all of them, running in panicked circles. Everywhere it turned, a Serrano waited. Mr. Serrano repeatedly smashed the broom across its back. He finally cracked its spine, and it fell over, scrabbling in the dust. They all laughed.
The oldest boy knelt behind the rat. They crowded in.
Mr. Serrano said, “Good boy. Do it!”
The kid reached into his back pocket and withdrew a pair of wire cutters. He held the rat down with one hand and fitted the cutters over its snout. He began to cut its head off, centimeter by centimeter.
Steve and I backed away. Before we knew it, we were running for the van.
Corpses
Spring finally came, and the drive to Jesusita’s house became more easy as the hills dried out. Her husband had not been able to find work, she said, but they had covered the biggest gaps in the walls, and they had settled into the house with a certain amount of comfort. Jesusita’s husband was seldom there. “He’s looking for a place with horses,” she’d say.
He was the topic of gossip. Some people said he was a horse thief. This wasn’t any big deal, especially in the dump. A boy who lived in the pig village had a pony that he’d stolen from one of the small ranches on the outskirts of Tijuana. He used the pony to rustle cattle from the same ranches. He fed his two brothers this way—their parents had disappeared—and he was quite proud of his outlaw status. He was thirteen when he started.
Something else about Jesusita’s husband caused them all to talk. Crime wasn’t it—crime would have made him something of a celebrity. Perhaps it was that stoic silence of his. His self-possession seemed arrogant, perhaps, and Mexicans hate an arrogant man.
They said he’d been involved in a major crime down south and had turned evidence against his accomplices. The rumors said he’d fled north with his family to escape reprisals—both from the criminals and the cops. Now that he was known to the police in the region, he’d be hounded continually, forced to set people up for arrest or worse … even innocent people.
Jesusita, on the other hand, seemed genuinely popular. She took part in the dump’s church services, attended every event and Bible study. (They had their own church, and their own itinerant preacher.) She and Doña Araceli enjoyed a cordial relationship, and every time we came over the hill into the dump, the two of them barreled into me and lifted me off the ground. It became a regular practice for us to give her a ride down the canyon at the end of the day. The little boys would charge out from the house and play tag with me. One of them delighted in being captured and held upside down. They had gotten some pigs, and I was always ready to heap lavish praise on such fine hogs.
But one day, Jesusita told me she had to leave the house. They’d been fixing it up, planting some corn and expanding the little pigpen in the back. She insisted someone was making threats. We didn’t believe her.
The next week, she directed us to the home of an old woman in the valley across from her house. Jesusita told me the woman owned the house and had threatened to harm her family if they didn’t leave. Von and I went to the woman’s house and talked to her. There was no problem, she insisted. They could stay. I was confused. Was Jesusita lying?
As we left, Jesusita held me hard and cried. “I’m afraid,” she said. I would never see her again.
From the condition and location of the corpses, police pieced together this scenario: Jesusita and her husband were led up a canyon several miles from the dump (or taken by car to an abandoned stretch of road—I couldn’t get clear details). At least two men accompanied them, and a small boy, possibly Jesusita’s son—the same one who loved to be chased around the yard. The boy escaped. According to the testimony of the children, the men had appeared at the door and had seemed friendly. They told the family that there was a great deal of free lumber at a certain site. They said they knew of the family’s troubles, and they wanted to offer their help. Jesusita and her husband went with them. They took the boy for extra help, thinking there would be a heavy load to carry.
Jesusita’s husband was held by the arms, and a sawed-off shotgun was notched under his nose and fired. It blew his head to pieces, leaving only the back of his skull, with the ears attached.
This must have happened very quickly. Apparently, the shooter had his shotgun under a coat.
Jesusita and the boy ran. The child hid himself. The gunmen went after her. She was not fast—her legs were short, too short to carry her out of range. They shot her in the spine, knocking her facedown in the dirt. They must have taken their time reloading, because she managed to crawl a short distance, bleeding heavily. The shooter walked up to her, put the shotgun to the back of her head, and fired.
———
The next day, a note was stuck to the door of the house. It said: IF YOU ARE NOT GONE BY TOMORROW WE WILL COME AND KILL EACH ONE OF YOU.
The children scattered. They were gone when I got there, and they left no word about where they could be found.
Through the grapevine, I was told that if I was really interested in the shooting, one of the men would sell me the shotgun. It was going for forty dollars.
CHAPTER TWO
Negra
Negra was a tiny barefoot girl who had curly black hair and large, startling white teeth. She was so skinny that she was firm as wood; when you picked her up, you could feel her angular pelvis and the chicken-wing bones in her back. She was very dark, hence the name “Negra.” In Spanish, it means “black girl.” Her real name was Ana María.
I am not sure when I first met her. She just seemed to be there one day, moved into a shack with her mother and sister. Her father was gone; it was never completely clear where, though the obvious destination was clearly visible, about three miles to the north, being patrolled by helicopters. Like most people in the dump, she was from elsewhere—freshly arrived from Michoacán—part of an immigrant drive north that died out at the border, either from exhaustion, fear, or a sudden draining of vision and will.
It happens a hundred times a day—if you think the “illegal alien” problem is bad in San Diego, you should see what it’s doing to Tijuana. The streets and barrios are swelled with nervous strangers from Sinaloa, Oaxaca, Chiapas, Yucatán, Quintana Roo. Then there are the actual illegals—Salvadorans fleeing death squads, Guatemalans fleeing the soaring poverty and crime of their homeland, Hondurans and Nicaraguans fleeing God knows what. Tijuana is like a dam, and it’s beginning to groan before a tidal wave of human flesh.
Whenever we’d pull in, I’d look for her. Sometimes I’d hear my name being called very faintly, and I’d look up, and this kid would be hurtling through the trash, bare feet throwing up clouds of ash. Always the same dull dress, a kind of brown-gray. She’d leap into the air and fly into my arms like a bird. She usually smelled of smoke. She would be with me for the rest of the day, helping me give out food to the
women, whispering secrets in my ear: her sister had a boyfriend, her mother had been in a fight, a boy from down the hill had walked her home.…
Negra was the one who taught me to pick trash. We’d take our poles and wade into the mounds. She wanted tin cans to sell for scrap, and any unbroken bottles were small treasures. Mari, Negra’s older sister, was pregnant after a mysterious tryst with a dump-boy, and the occasional load of defective or water-damaged Pampers was a dangerously valuable find. We’d hide them under other trash on Negra’s cart and hustle back to her shed. Of all the things one could take to the dump-dwellers, Pampers made the situation the most volatile. Imagine raising an infant with no diapers, no water, no baby powder, no baby wipes, no ointment for diaper rash, no formula, no money. We learned the hard way that the best way to start massive fistfights was to show up with a few boxes of Pampers: there is nothing so desperate as a mother fighting—literally—for her baby’s ass.
They lived in a one-room shack, and in those days, there was no light. The two girls shared a bed, and their mother slept in another bed. Negra’s brother lived with them, too, though he was never there. He attended school every day.
One day, near Christmas, I found Negra sulking with a cap on her head. Her mother had shaved her head. Her scalp had been invaded by a strange white flakiness, and great patches of it would peel off, taking hair with them. None of our salves worked, so her mother took a razor to her head, to “let the sun at it.” I thought Negra would die of shame.
Negra wanted one thing in the world—a doll. “A big one,” she said, “like a real baby.”
Her mother told me, “She’s never had one.”
I had no money at the time. None. When not in Tijuana, I worked as a part-time tutor in a community college for roughly four hundred dollars a month. One of the students at the college overheard me talking about this poor girl with no Christmas, and surprised me a few days later with a thirty-dollar doll with real hair and blinking eyes. When Negra opened the package, she cried.