Plaza Requiem

by Martha Bátiz

“Why don’t we go talk about this somewhere else?” he says.

  She detects fear in his voice.

  “No. I don’t want to go anywhere with you. Last time I did, I lost my identity and my childhood.” She’s crying now, and hating herself for it.

  “You didn’t lose your childhood. We gave you a wonderful childhood. You were loved, and we took really good care of you.”

  “Yes. But you’re forgetting a small detail: I was not yours.”

  He can’t stay beside her. The weight of her words forces him to return to the bench. It’s windy. He feels out of breath. His heart is pounding, his back covered in sweat.

  “I’m old,” he tells her from the bench. “I don’t feel well.”

  A little girl who was blowing soap bubbles is not blowing bubbles anymore but standing still, staring at them. The girl’s mother is keeping guard close to her child, probably wondering if she should intervene, or call the police. Paula picks up her purse from the ground and returns to the bench, trying to feign normalcy. The conversation is not over yet.

  “Why did you take me?” she asks, wiping her eyes with the back of her hands, again placing her purse as a small wall between them.

  “I earned you,” he says quietly.

  “You what?” She turns to face him completely, in disbelief.

  “I thought I had earned you,” he corrects himself, avoiding her eyes.

  “You earned me?” Paula makes an enormous effort to remain calm.

  “You have to understand. Ana María and I had waited for so long to have a child, so long! And then I heard you crying and there was no one there. Those bastards had done…what they did, and you were next door, in your room, eyes wide open, crying.” His voice is breaking, but he goes on. “You, with those babycita asangreblue eyes I immediately adored, all alone in that room. You were barely a year old. I panicked. I didn’t know what to do, there was no one else, no one I could call, and I couldn’t leave you alone there, with no one to care for you! I knew of others who had taken babies, or received babies, and I thought, why not us? Why not Ana María and me? We were good people, good citizens, and we were the best parents we could be for you. We loved you so much!”

  “So I was your prize? For being loyal to a murderous regime?”

  “I already told you I never killed anyone.”

  “The hell you didn’t,” she replies, clenching her teeth, forcing herself not to yell. “My father’s mother died after he was killed. My aunt, my father’s sister, was the one who found my parents dead at home. She killed herself after that, couldn’t live with the memory. Can you blame her? It was too much for my grandmother to bear, losing both her children in less than a year. And I was nowhere to be found. She was a widow, she thought she had nothing to live for. I was told she died of sadness, and I believe it. Those deaths are on you. And my other grandmother, the one who took me with her to Canada… She was so scared of you, of your connections, and of your trying to get me back, that she couldn’t stand staying in her homeland any longer. We were forced to escape. I was forced to grow up far away from here and never tell anyone my story. Who would believe it, anyway? But who am I kidding here. You’d never understand, obviously. You’ve never had to endure such sorrow.”

  “Ana María’s sorrow doesn’t count? And my own? We couldn’t eat, we couldn’t sleep after you were gone. Ana María used to lock herself in your room for days on end, sleeping in your bed, surrounding herself with your clothes, crying, screaming, and there was nothing I could do that would soothe her. We all suffered!”

  Paula has finally had enough. She stands up, and gets ready to leave. She can’t listen anymore.

  “You suffered?” she says, grabbing her purse. “Did you ever stop to think that I lost my parents not once but twice? That you took me away from my family, and then they took me away from you, and away from here, and I ended up growing up never feeling like I belonged anywhere? Did you ever stop to think about what you had done to me?”

  Paula takes off the baseball cap and shows him her balding scalp. Her head looks like an abandoned doll’s. He’s perplexed. Terrified, almost.

  “What happened to your beautiful golden hair?” he demands to know, then immediately softens his tone. “Do you have cancer?”

  Paula shakes her head.

  “I’ve been pulling it out.”

  “Why?” he asks, making an effort to seem kind, but instead the tone of his voice sounds as if he were asking, “Are you crazy?”

  “It’s Trichotillomania. Another souvenir from my time with you.”

  The man’s eyes well up again and he stretches his hand to touch her.

  “My poor baby girl!” he says. “I’m so sorry! Please forgive me!”

  She moves a couple of steps away from him, puts on the cap again, and slides one of her hands inside her purse.

  “I have a gun” she says, quietly.

  The man stares at her, not comprehending.

  “I have a gun. If you say anything or you make any suspicious movement, I’ll shoot you.”

  Paula’s voice is suddenly deeper than before. The man’s body stiffens.

  “Take off your shoes,” she says.

  “But…”

  “I said, take off your shoes.”

  The man does as he is told. His movements are slow. It’s hard for him to untie the laces. His fingers are shaking.

  “Now take off your socks.”

  The man complies while Paula looks around, making sure no one is watching. Without losing sight of him, Paula picks up the shiny shoes and socks and feeds them to the river.

  “You’ll have to dive in to get them, or walk barefoot all the way back home, where the police are probably waiting for you already. A file has been opened to investigate your role in the killing of my parents and my kidnapping. I’ll testify against you, you bastard.”

  She turns and walks away. People around her are doing what families do on Sundays at the park: playing ball, picnicking, biking, jogging, some simply enjoying the sunshine, others deep into their phones. Everyone blissfully unaware of what she has been through. Who else here, she wonders, who else was complicit with the regime during those days? Who else is walking freely around the park after taking part in the atrocities committed when she was a child?

  A woman is selling balloons. Paula buys them all and, as a present to her parents up above, releases them into the air. As she walks away, her shoulders relax. She stops, opens her purse, and takes out the small cobblestone brick, letting it fall into the long grass at the side of the path, relieved to be rid of the weight.

  In Transit

  Name: Eulalia. Middle name? Don’t have one. When I was little they called me Lalita, but no one remembers that now. Last name: Martínez de Jesús. I wanta ask him how come he don’t recognize me.

  It’s the fourth time they catch me, fourth time they ask me the same old questions. And in four times, this güero – this Blondie – has been in charge of me twice. We all look the same to him. But sure as shit I can tell them gringos apart ’cause I pay attention to who’s having a hairy beard or who’s got fuzz that almost don’t cover his pink chin or if his teeth are crooked or so straight that he can smile like he loves life on TV. Almost none of them güeros have crooked teeth. But the other ones, the ones who are brown-skinned like us but pretend not to understand what we say, those have smiles like corn cobs: yellow, uneven.

  I feel like asking Blondie here how come he don’t realize it’s the second time I’m taking a turn with him, for all this give-me-your-name shit. Haven’t slept in such a long time… I refuse to fall asleep, so I talk to myself all the time. Don’t know why people look at me funny. All I’ve got left to keep me from falling asleep is my own voice so I need to hold on to it because that other voice is just waiting for me to go quiet and close my eyes, waiting for me to let my guard down so it can come and tell me the same thing over and over again. It’s got me full up to here with sadness and depression. I wanta tell my güero all abo
ut how I feel, and what’s been going on, to see if he’ll give me a chance. Can’t. He’s already busy with someone else.

  There’s a guy with a bandage ’round his head. Dark, red stains dried up on the cloth. He must’ve tried to run. There’s a woman with a baby that won’t stop crying. Who knows how long she’s been on the move. We all walk across the border with nothing. You walk and walk and walk and keep walking till heat wrings you out like a rag. So you limp and crawl under the sun with no protection other than your will to get here. And then, this.

  “People are stubborn, man! They just don’t get it, do they?” one of them güeros says to my güero. And my güero nods big with his pink-and-yellow head. I wanta answer no, you don’t get it, but it’s no use. We’re not the same. They smell fresh. Like laundry. We smell of skank and sweat. But we don’t even talk the same.

  Take Manuel – he makes everyone call him Don Manuel as a mark of respect, but even with all that land of his he don’t speak good. He always says “people is.” My father said that, too. And me also. Until my son Andrés corrected us, that sharp little kid! He didn’t care that we was actually at Don Manuel’s house eating the sheep Don Manuel himself had just killed to celebrate his fiftieth birthday. Don Manuel said, “People is happy today” and he, Andrés, sprung up out a nowhere like a scrawny grasshopper and corrected him to his face, “You don’t say people is, you say people are. Teacher said so.” What saved him was it being the teacher who’d said what he said, ’cause no one in town woulda messed with that. We was lucky ’cause Don Manuel was already a bit drunk, so he laughed instead. “Well, you learned something all right, kiddo! Too bad it’s something useless.” Don Manuel’s gap in his front teeth looked like an open door.

  Ever since I was caught I’ve been remembering things. At least in this room there’s fans. Back home it’s never been as hot – not even on the worst day. Here, night alone shows some compassion. The air cools down and right away you’re grateful for the most generous permission you’d never heard of: permission to breathe.

  Sometimes I’m sure what happened to my son is my fault. But if I think about it I cry, and if I cry then I get tired and wanta sleep. And I don’t wanta sleep. Andrés was so stubborn! I wanted him to go to school. And he went. He went every day until I got hurt and I couldn’t work anymore. I pretend I don’t, but I do see when people stare at my hand. That’s why it’s strange my güero didn’t remember me. I don’t think many people show up here with a deformed hand like this, like mine. Of course, how can I judge? There’s way too many who come here all beaten up, dehydrated, and exhausted. Perhaps there’s many others that look even worse than me. God’s generous. He gives everyone a cross of their own.

  Andrés wasn’t born for a life like ours, farming the fields. He was nothing like his father – may God rest his soul. My son loved books. He wanted to finish high school. Even go to college. He wanted us to move to the city. But how was we going to do that? Without no money, my hand all crooked, and he so small and skinny – we had no one except each other. Where was we going to go, exactly?

  At night he spent hours on end going over his books. He looked at them words the way other boys look at girls’ tits. He read them so much that I used to ask him to stop. I was afraid his eyes was going to wear out them words. Just around then Don Manuel’s youngest, a boy named Pepe, came up with the idea of going north. Being smuggled across the border with a pollero and finding work there. My first reaction was no, no, and no. And I wouldn’t give in to him. Pepe got us together – his brothers and his father and me and Andrés – and gave us “strong arguments” (that’s how he said himself, “strong arguments”) to defend his plan. Andrés was good with numbers. Pepe was good at farming. If they left together and helped each other they’d make it for sure. “And we’d live like gringos, Mah! Can you imagine?” Andrés said. But he didn’t need to say nothing. The way his eyes was shining said it all.

  To tell you the truth, thinking about it that way, yes, it sounds really nice. But I again said no. What was they thinking? Andrés had just turned sixteen, still too young to just leave. But it was hard to make him understand. Half of the men in our town was already gone. Andrés and Pepe thought it’d be easy to do the same. “If we don’t make it on our first try, then on the second one for sure we’ll not fail, Mah. Just imagine how great things are going to be!” And he almost made me dizzy talking about all the things we would do. What we would buy with them American dollars he was going to earn? It wasn’t that I didn’t wanta have a huge TV – anyone wants a huge TV, right? And everything else. But I still said no. He must wait until he was older. Oh, but he was stubborn! Wanted to leave right away.

  For a few days we didn’t talk about nothing. I hadn’t seen him so sad ever since the day we buried his father. “And how we going to pay the pollero to take you across the border, son?” I asked him one morning. It was still dark outside. His eyes lit up and pointed at the exhausted land outside our window. That’s why I say maybe what happened was my fault, ’cause I sent him to school and then I got hurt, and he had to take over the field, and just then came the drought. Everything piled up.

  After days and days of bugging me, I finally said yes. I told him I’d had it. He could stop being so annoying. I’d sell my little patch of land so he could go. He jumped up and down with joy, hugged me, and promised he’d work very hard to earn back them American dollars. He promised he’d buy me a much better house. And because I had always wished for a cow, he even promised me a cow, even though with this hand of mine I wouldn’t ever be able to milk her. Pepe, Andrés, and a nephew of Don Manuel’s called El Bizco for his crossed eyes (but he was actually quite clever), decided to make the journey together.

  I sold my land and my house but was allowed to stay there until Andrés made it to the other side. Then I would move somewhere else. I used to pray a lot back then. Ever since Andrés got in him this idea of leaving, all I did was pray. And on the morning they actually left, me and Don Manuel took the three boys all the way to the altar to give them our blessing. We gave them their backpacks stuffed with tortillas, chiles, apples and bottled water. Andrés took what little money I put together for him. I did everything the way I was supposed to. And after I saw the bus disappear I was worried sick. Don Manuel said that for the first time in his life he was glad his wife was dead, ’cause she woulda never let Pepe go. She woulda never been able to stand the fear and anguish that was piercing his stomach, he said. I cursed Andrés’ father the entire day. If he wasn’t dead, our life would’ve stayed the same, and he would’ve never left. And if someone had been forced to leave it would’ve been him, the father of Andrés, not my son. And that woulda been easier. Or less hard.

  In the end Andrés, Pepe, and El Bizco managed to get across but they was caught by the Border Patrol. When they phoned Don Manuel they told him that la migra had sent them back. “Deported” was the word, I remember. Now I know what it means, and how much it stings. But back then I didn’t really get it, except for the money I had paid and lost.

  I remember them boys all frustrated and angry ’cause they walked a lot and they were about to reach the highway where they was going to be picked up. I wanted Andrés to return. I would find a way to buy back my place, and pretend this never happened. Andrés wouldn’t hear of it. He said they knew the way now. They knew exactly where to turn around so that the same thing didn’t happen again. And they was going to risk it one more time, the three of them alone. Just not to regret not giving it another try. Stubborn as a mule, like always.

  Before hanging up he told me the heat was fierce. Those were his words exactly. That’s how he said it: “Mah, the heat is fierce here.” He didn’t say anything about the rest: how they was chased down and beaten up when they got caught. El Bizco told me all about that later. I stare now at the guy sitting here with a bandage ’round his head and wonder if my Andrés looked like him. Or maybe even worse.

  Less than a week later, the phone rang again. It was alread
y getting dark and Don Manuel picked up right away. There we was, me and his other sons, huddled together waiting for news. As soon as we saw the expression on his face we knew something was very wrong.

  “They failed,” he said as he hung up. The only one who was okay was El Bizco. He’d been the one to call. They got lost in the desert. Pepe was in the hospital. They was going to send him back home once he was doing better.

  “What about Andrés?”

  After the Novena I quit praying. I wasn’t afraid of God’s punishments. What was He going to take away from me, anyways? I had lost my son, my house, my land. I had nothing. Don Manuel let me move into a tiny room where he kept odds and sods. I woulda stayed there had my son not come to talk to me. First I thought it was a dream. I was half asleep; it was dark. But then his voice grew stronger, saying, “Mah, I’m very thirsty, give me some water.” I shut my eyes tight and covered my head with my blanket. No use. Then I sat up on my cot. His voice was still there. I ran out of the room and into the fields. I wanted to scream. It didn’t matter where I went, I still could hear Andrés saying, “Mah, I’m very thirsty, give me some water.” When my eyes are wide open like right now and there’s people around, for example, I don’t hear him. But if I stop talking and remain quiet, his voice reaches me clearly. And I can’t find any calm. That’s why I asked El Bizco to guide me to the exact same place where they tried to get across the second time. He refused. Thought I was going mad.

  I wanta go where my güero is standing and ask him if I look mad to him. See what’s his answer. Yes, my clothes are dirty and sticking to my skin ’cause of the dust and heat. And I’m tired. But I don’t care. No. I’m not crazy. Everything hurts. My legs hurt, my back hurts. Breathing hurts. My friends didn’t believe me. They said I was imagining things. Wanted to take me to church. To church? What for?

  That’s why I had to do it on my own. May Don Manuel forgive me for taking his watch and the money in his wallet. Oh, well! Nothing to do about that now.