Every night after she finished counting the previous day’s receipts and entering them in a ledger, along with any other task Rosa gave her, Pilar was alone in a small bedroom in one of the old wooden bungalows in the Los Arboles compound. A single bed, a chipped blond 1950s dresser, and a nonmatching bedside table were the only furniture in the room. Pretty winged fairies danced around the faded shade of a pink lamp, the only source of light in the room. As she looked at the lamp, Pilar wondered if an innocent little girl had once lain in this bed and dreamed happy thoughts about her future.
The room’s only small window faced the ten-foot wooden wall that encircled the Los Arboles compound. Iron bars across the window limited the light coming from outside. Houston was still hot and humid in late September, and there wasn’t any air-conditioning in her little room. It was miserable.
At night, while lying in bed, she could hear the noise from the cantina, especially when the men were watching a fútbol game on television. The crowd would yell the names of the players who scored goals, like “Diego!” or “Jorge!”
How I loved sitting in the stands with Alejandro when Diego’s fútbol club played, Pilar thought as the men in the cantina roared.
Concepción and Alejandro still appeared in her dreams, although they came less frequently now and their faces were less distinct. She dreamed of the three of them eating breakfast in their cozy kitchen. Concepción was pulling tortillas apart and throwing the pieces on the table. She thought that was hilarious and giggled.
She was having so much fun. How happy we once were! Or is that just a dream?
Sometimes the three of them bumped along the road leading north toward Guanajuato on a Sunday afternoon. They stopped for a lunch of tacos, fruit, and cheese. In these dreams, she rocked her baby to sleep in her arms while Alejandro sketched the landscape. She would tell him the picture was beautiful.
He kissed me and called me “my love.”
Too often, images from the filthy cubicle where she’d toiled for the last year and a half would crowd out the beautiful dreams. The faceless, stinking, crude men who had raped and beat her thousands of times marched through her thoughts like a growing cancer. She had tried to blank out her mind while enduring the despicable things they did to her or forced her to do. Oblivion was the refuge she sought. But the horrible images slithered back into her mind no matter how hard she tried to fight them.
Many girls escape the horror of this life through drugs. Death comes quicker that way. Perhaps it is the only freedom a slave can know?
The guards outside her door didn’t care how noisy they were at times. They would argue over sports or women. The door was thin, making it hard to sleep. Pilar was forced to lie awake, thinking thoughts she did not want to consider.
Pilar remembered that when she was at the men’s clubs near the Galleria, she thought nothing could be worse.
I was wrong. At least the clients were clean and did not beat us. They had to wear condoms. Some of the men were lonely or troubled and only wanted to talk to someone who could never reveal their secrets. None of them realized how small their problems were in comparison to those of the girls in whom they confided.
Before she became confined to the office with Rosa and this room, Pilar clung to the hope that somehow she would find a way to escape. Even when she’d been abused in the tiny room upstairs next to Josefina, she’d thought they could maybe get away when Esther was not watching and the bartenders downstairs took a break. Now, constantly guarded and isolated at night, with Rosa’s sharp eyes on her during the day, escape seemed impossible.
Sometimes, alone in the office they shared, before the cantina opened for customers, Rosa talked to Pilar for hours about her life, how she’d built her business, and her disappointment with her children. These conversations might give a stranger the impression that the two women were friends, but Pilar despised the old madam, and the wily woman was aware that Pilar knew enough to destroy her. She confided in Pilar because she was the only person around, and Rosa believed her secrets were safe since Pilar was her prisoner.
Years ago, when Pilar had been having her late-night conversations with Consuelo at the Jewel Box, she’d still prayed to the Virgin for help occasionally. After she experienced the living hell of Los Arboles, that changed.
God and the Virgin Mary have forgotten me, she had decided. Or maybe the loving, all-seeing God of my childhood was just a fairy tale after all. A beneficent God would not let girls suffer this way. An almighty God would destroy people like Eduardo and Rosa.
One afternoon, while Rosa was in the cantina working on inventory of the watered-down tequila they served the customers who were unlikely to notice, Pilar was sitting at her desk in the office they shared, thinking about Josefina, when Eduardo slinked into the room. Looking smug, he perched himself on the edge of Rosa’s desk, facing Pilar. Until Eduardo had abruptly removed her from the bordello and sold her to Rosa, Pilar’s maternal instinct to protect Josefina had been a sufficient reason to live: she couldn’t do anything for herself or her daughter, but she could keep Josefina from despair and away from drugs or suicide. She hadn’t seen Josefina for many months now. She wondered if the child was still alive. During a few months in this place, a girl could be beaten to death, die of disease or bad abortion, or kill herself. Teresa could well be dead.
Pilar forced herself to speak civilly to Eduardo. “How is Josefina, Eduardo? Has she recovered from her disease?”
Eduardo ignored her question. “Do you have anything to tell me, Pilar?”
Pilar asked him, “Does Josefina know I am close by?” She hoped so, but Eduardo’s silence made her fear the worst.
She hated Eduardo. He was more amoral, cruel, and brutal than she’d ever imagined a man could be. Rosa owned Pilar now, but Eduardo acted as if Pilar were still his property. He demanded that Pilar tell him the details of Rosa’s businesses and how much money she was making. He claimed Pilar owed him for all the years he had “taken care of her.” Hearing him say this, Pilar wanted to scream.
I will never tell that dog the truth. I am too valuable to Rosa for her to let him hurt me. At least I have some small power over him.
But guilt ate at Pilar. She was ashamed that she was helping Rosa to commit her crimes. She is as despicable as Eduardo, and she is a woman!
That made Pilar think of Alma, who had tricked her into being kidnapped. At the time, she couldn’t understand how a woman could take part in the enslavement of other women. Alma had told her that after working as a whore, she’d had no other choice but to do what her enslaver demanded. She did what she had to do to survive.
Is that what has happened to me? Pilar wondered. Am I no better than Alma?
“How is Alma, Eduardo?” Pilar asked.
“No idea,” Eduardo said casually, shrugging his shoulders and taking a pack of cigarettes out of his pocket. “I’ve been doing most of my business in the States in the past few years. I sold her to some guy in Mexico City. She’s probably walking the streets, or dead, or maybe she’s found another way to make herself useful to him. She was always smart and had more class than most whores.”
Pilar shivered. Alma was so beautiful.
Feeling more anger at Eduardo than she usually dared to exhibit, Pilar asked, “And how is Teresa, Eduardo?”
Eduardo lit his cigarette and slowly breathed out tobacco smoke in Pilar’s face. “I’m sure that one is dead,” he said. “She was half-dead when I sold her. I didn’t get shit for her. Damned drugged-out whore!”
Just then, Pilar saw Rosa headed for the office, shouting a loud command to Tito to sweep the cantina floor. Eduardo heard her and swiftly jumped down from her desk, turning to greet her with a smile. “I’ve been waiting impatiently to see your beautiful face, my dear Rosa,” he said.
Rosa gave him a skeptical look and sat down at her desk. Both of them then talked, ignoring Pilar as if she were a piece of furniture.
Sometimes, lying in bed, Pilar heard news from the outside world when her guard listened to the radio. But the local Spanish-language stations they listened to didn’t carry much in the way of real news. It was mainly advertisements for rodeos, dances, or Tejano concerts. To pass the time before she tried to sleep, she wrote on sheets of paper she stole from the office and hid in her room. Sometimes she wrote letters to Concepción about her happy childhood, even though she didn’t think her daughter would ever see them. She wrote about Eduardo and what she knew about his business. Other times she wrote the stories Rosa told her: how she’d built her business and even whom she had killed to become the queen of the Houston bordellos. When she was finished writing, she would stuff the pages behind a loose floorboard and push her bed over it.
Eduardo had figured out that Rosa was generally out of the office on Thursday mornings, when she made Tito drive her to a Vietnamese nail salon on Broadway. At that time, Pilar would be alone in the office. One Thursday, he stormed into the office, startling her with his angry appearance. He had found out that certain information Pilar had given him about Rosa’s business was fabricated. Pilar had tired of his constant verbal battery and made up a story one day just to get rid of him. To her horror, he threatened her with the only thing that she couldn’t ignore.
“You gave me bad information, Pilar,” Eduardo stormed. “You made a fool of me. You think now that Rosa regards you as indispensable, I can’t touch you. But you are wrong. I know your weak spot.”
“What are you talking about, Eduardo?” Pilar asked, not looking up from the work she was doing.
“I’m talking about your girlfriend—Josefina. I don’t think you want anything bad to happen to her. What if Guillermo gave her a few heroin shots to get her hooked? It wouldn’t take much. She’s a scrawny little thing.”
Pilar felt sick, but she didn’t say anything.
“I get what I want sooner or later. So start telling me the truth or Josefina will be joining the junkies walking the streets at the port. Maybe I will sell her to the Turks. They like to have a few girls in the holds of their ships when they leave port.”
Pilar was taken aback. She hadn’t counted on this. But then again, she really didn’t know if Josefina was still alive or Eduardo still owned her. After all, Eduardo had refused to answer that question every time Pilar had asked him.
She tried to seem calm when she asked, “How do I know Josefina is still alive? You haven’t done anything to convince me of that, Eduardo.”
“That scrawny bitch is right where you left her, Pilar. I may not be a trustworthy man in general, but you can trust me on that! I knew there was a reason I hadn’t moved her onto the streets by now, but I didn’t know exactly what it was. I know now. She’s my leverage with you.”
That night Pilar lay in her bed with the lights out, but she couldn’t sleep. Her mind kept considering the terrible alternatives.
Rosa knows Eduardo tries to get information about her business from me. But she feels comfortable knowing I hate Eduardo and do not help him. I am not sure if Josefina is still here or even alive. But I cannot take the chance on letting him do to Josefina any of the unspeakable things he threatens. But if Rosa finds out I am helping Eduardo, Rosa will have Tito kill me, and Eduardo will destroy Josefina anyway. I am in an impossible situation!
That night, she wrote in her journal: This is the end. We are never going to get out of this alive.