The Crystal Frontier
Page 10
“I don’t know what’s better,” Candelaria said immediately. “I’ve already told you, I’m loaded down with responsibilities. When I came to the border, I brought my kids. Then my brothers and sisters came. Finally my parents got up enough nerve. That’s a big strain with a salary like mine. Watch those jokes, Dinorah, damn you. What our men give us we deserve. What my father gives me is remembrance. As long as my father is in the house, I’ll never forget. It’s beautiful having things to remember.”
“That’s not true,” said Dinorah. “Memories just hurt.”
“But it’s a good hurt,” answered Candelaria.
“Well, I’ve only seen the bad hurt,” Dinorah retorted.
“That’s because you don’t have anything to compare it with. You don’t give yourself the chance to save up your good memories of the past.”
“Piggy banks are for pigs,” said Dinorah, incensed.
Rosa Lupe was about to say something when a supervisor came over, an extremely tall woman in her forties with eyes like marbles and lips thin and long as stringbeans. She began to scold the beautiful Carmelite with the aquiline profile. Rosa Lupe was breaking the rules—who did she think she was coming to the factory dressed like a miracle worker? Didn’t she know everyone had to wear the regulation smock for hygiene and safety reasons?
“But I’ve made a vow, ma’am,” said Rosa Lupe in a dignified tone.
“Around here there’s no vow bigger than mine,” said the supervisor. “Come on, take off that getup and put on your smock.”
“Okay. I’ll change in the bathroom.”
“No, dear lady, you aren’t going to hold up production with your saintly act. You can change right here.”
“But I don’t have anything on underneath.”
“Let’s see,” said the supervisor. She grabbed Rosa Lupe by the shoulders and pulled the habit down to her waist. There were Rosa Lupe’s splendid breasts. The woman with eyes like marbles, unable to contain herself, seized them and fastened her stringbean lips on the beautiful Carmelite’s stiffened nipples. Rosa Lupe was so shocked she froze, but Candelaria grasped the supervisor by her permanent, cursing her and pulling her off, while Dinorah gave the pig a kick in the ass and Marina ran over to cover Rosa Lupe with her hands, feeling how hard her friend’s heart was pounding, how her own nipples had stiffened involuntarily.
Another supervisor came over to separate the women, settle things down, and laugh at his colleague. Don’t start taking my girlfriends away from me, Esmeralda, he said to the disheveled supervisor who was as inflamed as a fried tomato, Leave these cuties to me and go find yourself a man.
“Don’t make fun of me, Herminio, you’ll be sorry,” said the wretched Esmeralda, retreating with one hand on her forehead and the other on her belly.
“Don’t try poaching on my territory.”
“Going to report me?”
“No, I’m just going to screw you up.”
“Okay, girls, clear out,” said Herminio the supervisor, smiling. He was hairless as a sugar cube and exactly the same color. “I’m moving up your break. Go on, go have a soda and remember what a nice guy I am.”
“Going to make us pay for the favor?” asked Dinorah.
“You all come around on your own.” Herminio smiled lasciviously now.
They bought some Pepsis and sat for a while opposite the factory’s beautiful lawn—KEEP OFF THE GRASS—waiting for Rosa Lupe, who reappeared with Herminio. The supervisor looked very satisfied. The worker was wearing her blue smock.
“He looks like the cat who ate the canary,” said Candelaria when Herminio was gone.
“I let him watch me change. I’d just as soon you knew. I did it to thank him. I’d rather be the one who calls the shots. He promised he wouldn’t bother any of us, that he’d protect us from that bitch Esmeralda.”
“Well, it didn’t take much to—” Dinorah started to say, but Candelaria shut her up with a glance. The others lowered their eyes, never imagining that from the high administrative tower sheathed in opaque glass those inside could see them without themselves being seen. The Mexican owner of the business, Don Leonardo Barroso, was observing them as he recited for the benefit of his U.S. investors the line about their being blessed among women because the assembly plants employed eight of them for every man. The plants liberated women from farming, prostitution, even from machismo itself—Don Leonardo smiled broadly—because working women soon became the breadwinners in the family. Female heads of households acquired a dignity and strength that set them free, made them independent, made them modern women. And that, too, was democracy—didn’t his partners from Texas agree?
Besides—Don Leonardo was used to giving these periodic pep talks to calm the Yankees and soothe their consciences—these women, like the ones you see down there sitting together by the grass drinking sodas, were becoming part of a dynamic economic growth instead of living a depressed life in the agrarian stagnation of Mexico. In 1965, under Gustavo Díaz Ordaz, there were no plants on the border, zero. Then in 1972, under President Echeverría, there were 10,000; in 1982, under López Portillo, 35,000; in 1988, under De la Madrid, 120,000; and now, in 1994, under Salinas, 135,000. And the plants generated 200,000 jobs in related fields.
“The progress of the nation can be measured by the progress of the assembly plants,” exclaimed a satisfied Mr. Barroso.
“There must be some problems,” said a Yankee drier than a corncob pipe. “There are always problems, Mr. Barroso.”
“Call me Len, Mr. Murchinson.”
“And I’m Ted.”
“Labor problems? Unions aren’t allowed.”
“Problems with worker loyalty, Len. I’ve always tried to maintain the loyalty of my workers. Here the women last six or seven months and then move to another factory.”
“Sure, they all want to work with the Europeans because they treat them better. They fire or punish abusive supervisors, feed them fancy lunches, and God knows what else. Maybe they even send them on vacation to see the tulips in Holland … You do that and earnings will plummet, Ted.”
“We don’t do things that way in Michigan. The workers leave, the cost for services—water, housing—go up. Maybe those Dutch have the right idea.”
“We all change jobs,” chimed in Barroso merrily. “Even you. If we enforce work-safety rules, they move on. If we’re strict about applying the Federal Labor Law, they move on. If there’s a boom in the defense industry, they move on. You talk to me about job rotation? That’s the law of labor. If the Europeans prefer quality of life to profits, that’s their decision. Let the European Community subsidize them.”
“You still haven’t answered my question, Len. What about the loyalty factor?”
“Anyone who wants to hold onto a loyal labor force should do what I do. I offer bonuses to workers so they’ll stay. But the demand for labor is huge, the girls get bored, they don’t move up, so they move sideways, and that way they fool themselves into thinking they’re better off for changing. That does generate some costs, Ted, you’re right, but it avoids other costs. Nothing’s perfect. The plant isn’t a zero-sum situation. It’s a sum-sum one. We all end up making money.”
They laughed a little, and a man with graying long hair pulled back in a ponytail came in to serve coffee.
“No sugar for me, Villarreal,” said Don Leonardo to the servant.
“Look here, Ted,” Barroso went on. “You’re new at this game, but your partners in the States must have told you what the real business is here.”
“Running a national business that sells to one guaranteed buyer doesn’t seem like a bad idea to me. We don’t have that in the States.”
Barroso asked Murchinson to look outside, beyond the little group of workers drinking Pepsis, to look at the horizon. Yankee businessmen have always been men of vision, he said, not provincial chile counters the way they are in Mexico. It’s a huge horizon you see from here, right? Texas is the size of France; Mexico, which looks so small next to
the U.S. of A., is six times larger than Spain—all that space, all that horizon, what inspiration! Barroso almost sighed.
“Ted, the real business here isn’t the plants. It’s land speculation. The location of the plants. The subdivisions. The industrial park. Did you see my house over in Campazas? People laugh at it. They call it Disneyland. But I’m the one laughing. I bought all those lots for five centavos per square meter. Now they’re worth a thousand dollars per square meter. That’s where the money is. I’m giving you good advice. Take advantage of it.”
“I’m all ears, Len.”
“The girls have to travel for more than an hour, on two buses, to get here. What we should do is set up another center due west of here. Which means we should be buying land in Bellavista. It’s a dump. Shitty shacks. In five years, it’ll be worth a thousand times more.”
Ted Murchinson was in favor of supplying money, with Leonardo Barroso as the front man—the Mexican constitution prohibits gringos from owning property on the border. There was talk about trusts, stocks, and percentages while Villarreal served the coffee, watered-down the way the gringos like it.
“What my husband wants is for me to leave the plant and work with him in a business. That way we’d see each other more and take turns with the kid. It’s the only brave idea he’s ever suggested to me, but I know that deep down he’s just as big a coward as I am. The plant is a sure thing, but as long as I work here, he’s tied to the house.”
Something Rosa Lupe said upset Dinorah terribly, to the point that she became violently sick and asked to go to the bathroom. Wanting to avoid any new conflict, the supervisor, Esmeralda, did not object. Sometimes she made vulgar comments when the women asked.
“What’s with her?” said Candelaria. Instantly she was sorry she’d opened her mouth. It was an unwritten law among them not to probe inside one another. What was going on outside could be seen and therefore discussed, especially in a joking spirit. But the soul, what songs called the soul …
Candelaria sang, and Marina and Rosa Lupe joined in:
Your ways drove me mad,
You’re so selfish, so solitary,
A jewel in the night,
While I’m so ordinary …
They laughed, then turned sad, and Marina thought about Rolando, wondering what he was up to in the streets of Juárez and El Paso, a man with one foot on that side and the other on this, a man connected to both places by his cellular phone.
“Don’t call me at my place at night. It’s better to call me in the car. Call my cellular phone,” he told Marina at the beginning. But when she asked for the number, Rolando wouldn’t give it to her. “They’ve got a tap on my cellular,” he explained. “If they pick up one of your calls, I might get you in trouble.”
“So how will we see each other?”
“You know. Every Thursday night at the courts on the other side…”
But what about Mondays, Tuesdays, and Wednesdays? We all work, Rolando said, life’s tough, it’s not a free ride. A night of love, can’t you see? Some people don’t even have that … And Saturdays and Sundays? My family, Rolando would say, weekends are for my family.
“But I don’t have one, Rolando. I’m all alone.”
“And Fridays?” he shot back with the speed of light. Rolando was fast, no one could take that away from him, and he knew that Marina would get flustered as soon as he mentioned Friday.
“No. Fridays I go out with the girls. It’s our day to be together.”
Rolando didn’t have to say another word, and Marina would anxiously wait for Thursday so she could cross the international bridge, show her green card, take a bus that left her three blocks from the motel, stop at the soda fountain for an ice-cream soda with a cherry on top (the kind they knew how to make only on the gringo side), and, fortified in her body, sleepy in her soul, fall into the arms of Rolando, her Rolando …
“Your Rolando? Yours? Every woman’s Rolando.”
The jokes the girls made echoed in her ears as she braided the black, blue, yellow, and red wires, an interior flag that announced the nationality of each television set. Made in Mexico—there’s something to be proud of. When would they put a label on the sets that said “Made by Marina, Marina Alva Martinez, Marina of the Assembly Plants”? But she didn’t have that pride in her work, that fleeting feeling she was doing something worthwhile, not useless, something that erased the jealousy Rolando made her feel, Rolando and his conquests. All the girls insinuated it, sometimes they said it: every woman’s Rolando. Well, if that was the way it was, at least she got her little piece of the action from a real star, well-dressed, with suits that were silvery like an airplane and shone even at night, nicely cut black hair (no sideburns), not like a hippy’s, a perfectly combed little moustache, an even olive-colored complexion, dreamy eyes. And his cellular phone stuck to his ear—everyone had seen him, in fancy restaurants, outside famous shops, on the bridge itself, with his phone to his ear, taking care of biznez, connecting, making deals, conquering the world. Rolando, with his Hermes tie and his jet-plane-colored suit, arranging the world, how could he afford to give more than one night a week to Marina, the new arrival, the simplest, the humblest? He, someone so lusted after, the main man?
“Come here,” he said the third time they met in the motel, when she burst into tears and made a jealous scene. “Come here and sit in front of this mirror.”
All she saw was that the tears were gathering in her thick eyelashes, the eyelashes still of a little girl.
“What do you see in the mirror?” asked Rolando, standing behind her, bending toward her face, caressing her bare shoulders with those smooth coffee-colored hands covered with rings.
“Me. I see myself, Rolando. What are you talking about?”
“That’s right, look at yourself, Marina. Look at that unbelievably beautiful girl with thick eyelashes and dark little eyes, look at the beauty of those lips, that perfect little nose, those divine dimples. Look at all that, Marina, look at that lovely girl, and then look at me when I ask myself, How can a girl that pretty be jealous, how can she think Rolando could like any other woman? Maybe she can’t see herself in the mirror, maybe she doesn’t realize how lovable she is. Doesn’t Marina have any self-confidence? Rolando Rozas will have to educate her.”
Then her tears flowed, tears of sorrow and happiness, and she threw her arms around Rolando’s neck, asking him to forgive her.
Today was Friday, but it was different. As they were leaving the assembly plant, Villarreal, the managers’ waiter, told Candelaria something that excited her, something that completely unnerved her—a woman usually so self-possessed. Rosa Lupe, though she pretended to be composed, was in a state of turmoil. She’d been sullied both by Esmeralda, who’d humiliated her, and by Herminio, who’d protected her—which of them was worse, the bestial old woman or the sex-crazed young man? Dinorah, too, was burdened, and Marina tried to recall all the day’s conversations to figure out what had upset Dinorah so much. Dinorah was a good woman, her cynicism was all pose, she was just defending herself against a life that seemed unfair to her, insane—usually she said it but now she was just insinuating it … Marina saw how sad they all looked, how preoccupied, and decided to do something unusual, something forbidden, something that would make all of them feel happy, different, free, who knows …
She took off her patent-leather stilettos, tossed them aside, and ran onto the grass barefoot, dancing over the grass, laughing, mocking the warning NO PISE EL PASTO/KEEP OFF THE GRASS, feeling a marvelous physical emotion. The lawn was so cool, so moist and well-kept, it tickled the soles of her feet; running over it barefoot was like bathing in one of those enchanted forests in the movies, where the pure maiden is surprised by the prince in shining armor, everything is shining, the water, the forest, the sword. Her bare feet, the freedom of her body, the freedom of that other thing—what is it called?—the soul. What the songs sing about—the body free, the soul free …
KEEP OFF THE GRASS
No, said Don Leonardo Barroso, laughing from behind his opaque windows. Just look, Ted, he said to the gringo who was dry as a corncob pipe. Look at the joy, the freedom of those girls, the satisfaction they take in having done their jobs. What do you think? But Murchinson looked at him skeptically, as if to say, How many times have you staged this little act?
* * *
The four women, Dinorah and Rosa Lupe, Marina and Candelaria, sat at their usual table right next to the discotheque’s dance floor. The manager knew them and reserved the table for them every Friday. It was Candelaria’s doing. The others knew it. Fridays it was extremely difficult to get a table at the Malibú, it was the great day of freedom, the death of the workweek, the resurrection of hope and hope’s companion, joy.