MOST PEOPLE have regrets. Amalia knew that. She had been surrounded from birth by the sighs of Mexican women who wept often and muttered pained prayers, the same prayers, it would come to seem to her, that they sobbed at weddings, births, christenings, burials; and she remembered women who draped themselves triumphantly in mourning, celebrating the death of someone close, somber stark presences, all sinister blackness and grief and sighs; and there were the beatas who crawled on their knees to the foot of altars, shouting sorrowful gratitude for God’s infinite mercies; and—more clearly recalled as she grew older—there were the Mexican men whose forlorn cries and curses of lament were released by anger and beer, and then they, too, sighed and wept and shouted regret over some enormous loss, something they had once had—before they had “come to this”—something left unnamed, recognized only as lost; and, as if it occurred simultaneously—or so it seemed at times to Amalia when she remembered it later—over it all, over all the sighs, were romantic, sentimental ballads that poured out constantly from loud radios, the same ballads that bands of mariachis played and sang at celebrations and in bars; and even the ballads of love and good times and loyalty to God and the Holy Mother were punctuated by those long, sustained sighs that bruised the words of happiness. Later, Amalia heard those same sighs at the sewing factory she worked in, and on the buses she rode with other maids to work. And she would hear them as she stood in line outside the Hall of Justice with other women waiting to visit their sons in jail. But she heard them first, those sighs of regret, from her mother and her father. So she knew early that most people have regrets. But she, Amalia, had none.
Not that her life was so fulfilling, it was not, and God and the Holy Mother would not blame her for observing that. It was only that she could remember no missed opportunity to regret. She could not remember a time when a desirable choice had been presented to her, something she would look back on and even suspect that it might have altered the lines of her life. Nothing. Without possibility to resist what was sure to come, she moved from crisis to crisis, which, finally, formed one, her life. “Change” was an intensification of the same worries. So she lived within the boundaries of her existence, and that did not include hope, real hope. She felt that any choice she might have made would have led her to the exact place, the same situation—finally to the decaying neighborhood threatened by gangs in the fringes of Hollywood.
Amalia’s mother used to remember, or so she claimed, a time when everything was different—before Amalia was born. The old woman insisted that all these matters that Amalia faced were “new problems,” as if they had been born with her. Other times, Teresa extended these terrible changes to the fact that fewer and fewer women offered novenas to the Blessed Mother. With a horrible sigh that seemed to Amalia to last longer each time, she asserted that “those new priests” no longer encouraged them. “Next they’ll forbid the rosary,” she would predict, clutching her black beads as if this very moment they might be snatched away from her. She would go on to point out that she herself refused to eat meat on Fridays—although Amalia remembered they hardly ever could afford meat on any day—“no matter what the ‘modern’ popes say.” Then she thrust snatches of prayers at the statue of La Dolorosa, a somber Mother of Sorrows that terrified Amalia because the face was one of constant endured pain. On the statue’s black velvet robe were pinned several tiny amulets for miracles granted. Amalia would look at the amulets and wonder what kind of miracles they represented. God was capable of enormous wonders; why then tiny miracles?
During Lent, La Dolorosa was covered entirely with one more black, mournful veil. All the religious pictures were draped. The drab apartment would look even uglier, poorer.
Some memories in Amalia’s early life would only later link with the inevitability of loss. When she was a little girl, she cherished her mother’s saint’s day—Teresa had not yet become her accuser. That was the day on which her father honored his wife in the traditional Mexican way. With two or three friends, he would serenade her at the break of dawn. The men would station themselves outside her window in the tenement, a window patched with cardboard in winter, left without a pane in summer. Other men and women and children would lean out of their own windows to hear the singing of the men, and Amalia’s father’s voice would be sweetened with alcohol as he led the others in the song about King David and how he serenaded pretty girls:
Estas son las mañanitas
que cantaba el rey David,
a las muchachas bonitas
se las cantamos aquí….
In her bed, Amalia listened to that singing, grateful that the following minutes would be peaceful, there would be no rages from her father, not yet the drunken shouts and flailings of violence, still early, still only sweet.
Her mother—later Amalia would evoke this memory when Teresa’s coughing kept her awake—her mother, expecting the serenade, would make herself up carefully, lie all made up in bed, a towel under her neck, not to muss her hair, to appear resplendent at the window as the sun began to rise. Then she would leap to the window as if in surprise and lean there as if she were the most beloved woman in the world.
That is how Amalia imagined her mother felt. She herself remained in bed, wondering what it would be like to be serenaded by a beautiful young man with velvety brown skin, white teeth, curled eyelashes, eyes the color of burnt almonds.
Afterward, her mother, appearing flustered but having prepared for this, too, would invite her husband and the musicians into the two rooms full of religious pictures, to share tamales, pan de dulce, hot chocolate, coffee. Amalia’s father had reserved some beers.
There was another memory Amalia came to think her mother had only “lent” her in order to snatch it away:
“My wedding lasted two days.” Teresa would come alive, even toward the last of her life, when she narrated that. “We had mariachis and more serious music, too, the way all great weddings have, with a violin and a piano. The celebration started at my parents’ home, in Chihuahua, and then continued on to my husband’s parents’ house outside the city, and I danced until I had to take my shoes off, but I didn’t change my wedding dress because it was so beautiful, the color of pearls, and I deserved it.”
In later years Amalia would hear that and understand: And I do not deserve that and never did. Soon Teresa would add: “It’s usual that a mother save her dress for her daughter, and I did, but only briefly, because it was clear that you would never be wearing a white dress.”
Amalia lived her life on the assumption that God—very soon she added and then shifted the emphasis to the Blessed Mother—understood her motives clearly, no matter how others, including her mother, might judge her. God understood, how could He not? He was, after all, all-knowing, wasn’t He? There was no way that He could not have seen everything in her life.
Amalia was born in El Paso, Texas, in the city’s second ward, a fist of dark tenements. World War II had ended. She was Teresa’s third and last child, the first one to be born in America and not Juárez, across the border in Mexico. To the end, Teresa refused to learn English, and she retained her Mexican citizenship, renewing her passport regularly—unlike her husband, who was proud of having become a “legal American” and of having fought in the war.
Only Mexicans lived in those tenements, infested two-room units cluttered with religious pictures, effigies of Christ and of the Holy Virgin. Up to ten people—of different generations and always including a grandmother—occupied dark rooms without running water; the bathroom would be outside, frigid in winter like the rooms themselves, which were rancid with unbudging heat in summer. The small window in the room Amalia shared with her two brothers looked out on a pile of garbage. She often fell asleep and woke to the stench of rot; on cherished days, to the scent of just-washed laundry, hung outside to dry on ropes. The outer walls of the tenements were plastered with aged VOTE FOR signs and with posters advertising Mexican movies at the Colón Theater. In later years, as a girl, Amalia would grow to love those posters, especially the ones that displayed Maria Felix, the great Mexican movie star.
Whether the beautiful “la Maria” played an aristocrat or a peasant, she was always, finally, in control of any situation—a revolution, a divorce—and, if she wanted, she could destroy any man with a single arch of a perfect eyebrow; when she was older, Amalia would think she resembled the great movie star, without the aloofness. Once Teresa actually told her, “You resemble la Maria, sometimes.” Amalia rehearsed, but she was never able to achieve the disdainful look of the movie star; and she didn’t really want it.
While Amalia’s father had been in the army, there had been allotment money, and so there was food for the family. After he returned, there occurred a slide to even greater poverty. With no education, he moved from menial job to menial job, made bearable only for moments by alcohol. At those times he would remember with patriotic fervor and tears the battles he had fought in a place called Normandy. His mother, he reminded them often, had proclaimed his participation in the war by exhibiting a proud blue star on her front window; and there was his Purple Heart to prove his contribution.
Amalia remembered him as almost always in a drunken rage—threatening, striking his wife, his sons, her. A violent stranger—that is what he was to her. When his rages erupted, Amalia would huddle frozen in a corner, motionless, soundless, even holding her breath, too terrified to cry. That was the only response she knew to violence, to become quiet, passive. Seeing no way to thwart it, she would try not to know it was occurring, even while it pulled her into its center.
There were poorer people in El Paso, but especially across the border, in Juárez. “Paracaidistas”—“parachutists,” they were called—descended overnight from the interior of Mexico and squatted on barren hills. From the outskirts of El Paso, you could look across the river and see shacks made out of mud and boxes, children playing in rubble. “We should be grateful God has miraculously spared us from that,” Teresa often said.
When Amalia entered school, she spoke no English. She would have preferred to go to Catholic school because she was always religious—prayed and went to Mass regularly—and because she had seen pretty girls in pressed, clean uniforms who went there. Later, Amalia was relieved she did not go there, because she became terrified of nuns after an interlude in church when she had gone to confession.
“If you don’t go to Catholic school, you’ll go to hell,” a nun with a chalk-white face told her. She had appeared out of nowhere with her winged hat, her dark skirt hissing, hands clasped as if strangling something.
“We don’t have money,” Amalia said in Spanish.
“God doesn’t care about worldly matters, and He wants you to speak English.”
“We don’t have no money,” Amalia said in her best English.
“And God doesn’t want you to speak with a Mexican accent.”
In those early years Amalia felt warmth from her mother. They would sit on the slanting steps of the tenement, and she would lie on her mother’s lap in the hot Texas evenings—her father was at some bar somewhere. Teresa would brush Amalia’s hair until it crackled with electricity, because even then her wavy hair was lush, black, lustrous, beautiful.
“Let me look at your hair,” the Anglo teacher said to Amalia one morning. She went and stood proudly before the woman, to have her hair admired. The teacher parted it at the scalp. “I have to make sure you don’t have any lice.”
Her beautiful hair inspected for lice! And only Mexican children were being inspected, not the gringos who lived on the fringes of the poorest neighborhoods. Amalia ran home. But the next day, finding the spirit that would allow her to survive, she said to the teacher: “You couldn’t have lice in your hair because it’s so thin you can see right through to your scalp.” She ran her fingers through the richness of her own dark hair.
Amalia was not a good student; she made terrible grades and no one cared. She was not interested in the “Anglo things” they tried to teach her. At the first of the day, they had to sing “Home on the Range” for an Anglo teacher—all the teachers were Anglos—who never seemed to comb her hair and often had egg yolk on her dress but was always exhorting the Mexican students to pay extra attention to “grooming” because: “You’re a minority, have to prove your-selves.” She insisted they all change the line “where seldom is heard a discouraging word” to “where never is heard a discouraging word.” Amalia thought: If all you counted were discouragements in school, that was a lie.
She resented—deeply, deeply—that “American” students in the school were allowed an extra play period while Mexican children were herded into one room to be given “special instruction” on pronunciation, and that meant only that an angry woman would berate them for saying “shuldren” instead of “children.” “Can’t you hear the difference?” she shrieked. “Ch-ch-ch! Not sh-sh-sh!” When Amalia quickly learned to differentiate between the two sounds, she still continued to say “shuldren” during the special class. So she resisted learning, often refused even to speak English, sometimes pretending that she did not understand it. Later she would come to believe that she was much more intelligent than anyone suspected.
There were often religious processions up the Mountain of Cristo Rey, outside El Paso, near Smeltertown, a small clutch of shacks near where giant machines dug for coal.
The Rio Grande was full and dark on a day Teresa insisted Amalia climb the holy mountain with her. They walked over rocks and dirt, past railroad tracks that cut across desert and hills. At the foot of the mountain, where the procession would begin, there was a festive mood, improvised food stands, cool limonada, some men selling hidden beers among religious amulets. Amalia would have preferred to remain there, but Teresa clutched her hand tightly and informed her, “God is watching you very closely.”
Past crude, weather-beaten stations of the cross embedded along the sides of the dirt path, they climbed with crowds of people from El Paso, Ysleta, Canutillo, Juárez, making their way up, chanting prayers, led by priests and acolytes in gaudy robes and carrying effigies of sad-faced saints. During the hot climb of almost two hours, the supplicants knelt at intervals, propping beside them their placards of the Virgin. Small bands played solemnly.
At the top, Mass was said. Amalia knelt with the others on the dirt, in the stare of the sun, before a statue of a primitive Christ, fifty feet tall.
“This will make God be kind to us,” Teresa said, gasping for breath on the way down.
When they were trudging back to the bus stop on the highway, Amalia heard the sound of agitated horses’ hooves. Along the strait of the river, mounted police of the border patrol were routing a group of about ten men, women, and children who had been dashing across the water, the men with pants rolled up, the women with skirts gathered about their thighs.
“Wetbacks,” someone near Amalia identified them.
Those in the river tried to scatter. Amalia stared in terror. A little girl clinging to her mother clutched at her dress and pulled them both down into the muddy water. Amalia watched for them to come up. With ropes, the police were herding the people they had netted. Amalia continued to wait for the woman and the girl to emerge from the water. When Teresa pulled at her hand to coax her to move on, she was still staring back. The two who had sunk into the river did not appear.
Amalia was becoming quite pretty, maturing quickly. The whistles from boys much older than she, even gringos, confirmed that. She was proudly aware that her breasts were much larger than those of the other girls in school—and even those of the teachers, who were usually skinny and nervous. She learned early to sew well on Teresa’s machine; and when Teresa wasn’t looking, she converted the dresses she inherited from her into prettier ones, tighter ones. When she left for school, she would wear something loose in order to pass Teresa’s scrutiny. As soon as she was away, she would remove the loose garment to show off her splendid body.
El Paso was an army town. There were Fort Bliss and Biggs Field—and William Beaumont Hospital, for military men. Young soldiers with short-cropped hair and shiny brown shoes loitered in San Jacinto Plaza, a square in the middle of the city. Amalia liked to walk past them, cherishing the admiring remarks. She was not interested in the soldiers because most were Anglo and she did not like Anglo men. At the time, only Mexican girls went out with soldiers. Anglo girls disdained them. The soldiers viewed the Mexican girls as beautiful exotics, the kind war often makes available to them. Sometimes they even married them.
Just as she had known they would, her two brothers ran away from their father’s outbursts. Because they had been strangers who occupied the same room with her, Amalia welcomed their leaving; she would feel less crowded. But her father’s rages grew more frequent, and she and Teresa became their object. Always, Amalia would attempt to retreat from his anger, try to hide, but it was as if something clasped her body at those times, something cold that would not allow her to move, hardly allow her to breathe.
She was fourteen when, one night, her father grabbed her. She smelled the harsh liquor on his breath. When she felt his hands fondling her breasts, and then his sour mouth nuzzling them, she closed her eyes, to become invisible. The prospect of even greater violence paralyzed her. She could not move even when she saw that Teresa had walked in. Her mother did not say anything then—nor ever. She merely put her husband to bed to sleep off his drunkenness.
From that day on she turned cold to Amalia.
Amalia longed to leave school. She had always hated the teachers—and the free token that was given to the poorest students like her so they could eat in the school cafeteria but only after the others had gone through the line and only from certain foods. For her, school was a place of humiliation.
A fidgety girl called her a “spic” one day and added, “Your hair is shiny because you put hog lard on it.”
“You’re jealous because God made you skinny. If you keep pulling on your hair, you’ll be bald—unless you put hog lard on it,” Amalia answered.
During the next few days, it pleased her to see that the girl’s hair was plastered with something greasy.
Even in the tenements Christmas was a pretty season. Despite his drinking, Amalia’s father never stopped putting up a nacimiento, a manger scene. A week before Christmas, he built the boxlike structure, three feet square. He covered it with pine branches, their odor purifying the rooms. He spread a roll of cotton on the bottom, to simulate snow. Against a painted dark blue sky, a small light bulb surrounded by crinkled foil became the guiding star over the manger, which contained effigies of the Blessed Mother, Saint Joseph, and the three Wise Men—not yet the Christ Child. A wooden crib waited.
Singing the praises of the holy birth and miracles to come, Teresa brought the child in on Christmas Eve. Cupped in her hands, the tiny doll would be held to the lips of the neighbors invited. Then Teresa placed the Christ Child in the crib and, kneeling, led everyone in a rosary, her husband’s reverential voice slurred by liquor. “Dios te salve, Maria …”
Watching in wonder, Amalia thought: What would it be like to be the Blessed Mother, to know that a place in heaven was assured? And to have the love of everyone.
That marveling at so much love led her to say what she did when Salvador approached her in the alley near her tenement. She was fifteen, and she had gone out to throw that day’s trash in a bin in the alley.
“Don’t you recognize me?” the voice asked her that night, so soft and so husky.
Of course she recognized him. He was the son of her father’s drinking friend who came over often with his wife—the two women drank only to keep some of the beer away from their husbands, Amalia had overheard Teresa say. Salvador, who was about twenty, would often be summoned to carry his father home. Sometimes the son would smile, laugh, other times he would be silent, moody. But always he was handsome, with dark hair, eyes that turned black at night. When he smiled at her, Amalia smiled back, flirting. She had noticed that he had a tattoo on his hand, a cross with lines that radiated from it. That signaled tenderness to her. She began to dress especially for him when she knew he might come. She loved it that his name meant “savior.” And he was so handsome. And so romantic.
“Qué chula eres” he said to her after she had thrown the trash away that night, quickly because she thought he might be waiting for her.
She loved to hear those words: “How pretty you are”—and from this man, this Salvador, this savior with a cross on his hand.
“Can I kiss you?”
“Yes,” she said and added to herself words she couldn’t speak: If you’ll hold me, if you’ll love me.
As she waited with closed eyes for his embrace, his warm kiss, she felt a hand roughly on one shoulder, another shoved into her dress, clutching one breast painfully. She did not move—could not; did not scream—could not. He pushed her into the darkness of a rank hallway. She smelled garbage mixed with the odor of flowers someone had thrown away.
He thrust her against a wall. Her hands felt plaster disintegrate behind her. She opened her mouth, but a thousand screams froze inside her.
“You said you wanted it, putal” he shouted at her.
No! she wanted to protest. I said yes to a kiss. But she could only repeat that in her mind, over and over.
“You like this, don’t you?”
Fear even stronger than his powerful hands grasped her. She could not twist, she could not bite him, kick him, wrench away. Her body would not move! She felt his hands between her legs. Then she felt him enter her in one brutal thrust.
With a gasp that contracted his body, he pushed her away so harshly she fell. She tasted blood on her lips, saw blood between her legs. She crawled outside a few feet, and fell among spilled garbage, the remains of what might have been—or so she thought—a rancid bridal bouquet.
“You’re a puta,” Salvador said. “Any woman who lets a man fuck her in an alley is a puta. If you tell anybody about this, I’ll tell them you’re a puta, maybe I’ll kill you.” He converted his thumb and forefinger into a cross and kissed it, swearing, the hand with the tattoo of the burning cross.
After not moving for eternal minutes on the dirt, Amalia tested her hands first, then her arms, to make sure she was not actually paralyzed. She returned to the ugly—uglier now—tenement apartment.
“Salvador raped me.”
“Liar!” Teresa said.
“My friend’s son?” her father added his outrage. “What a terrible lie!”
An inspector from the public schools came to ask why Amalia was not attending. “Because she got herself pregnant,” Teresa said. The man made a note on a paper and left.
Salvador’s parents came over one night, with Salvador. Amalia stared at him with hatred when he smiled at her. Her father sent her out of the room—but she listened.
“She’s pregnant,” Teresa said.
“But Salvador didn’t—Did you, son?” the father asked.
“Of course not, you’ve seen her flirting with me. She asked me to kiss her, and then she began to—Well—”
“She does go around in those tight skirts and sweaters, mujer” Salvador’s mother said to Teresa. Mexican women call each other that—“woman”—to assert firm understanding between them.
“That’s true, but she’s young, mujer,” Teresa said.
“Well, Dios mio, there’s only one thing to do, and Salvador knows it,” the father said. “Don’t you, m’ijo? Tell my good friends what you’re willing to do. Go on, son.”
“If it’ll stop what she’s saying about me, I’ll marry her—but I’m not sure the kid’s mine.”
“Well—” That was all Teresa said.
Amalia’s stomach wrenched. Her mind screamed: You know he raped me.
“And it’s not that bad, is it? They’re both young, and, after all, we’re compadres,” the father offered.
Amalia heard the men’s laughter.
After that, Amalia moved into the flow of events that claimed her.
On the way to the courthouse, with Salvador and his parents and hers, she touched her beautiful hair. No flower! She ran, searching the neighborhood yards. You can’t be a bride without at least one flower! She found one, a small yellow one, and she put it in her hair.
She was married in a gray courtroom before an official who did not even look at her. Not a white wedding. “You can’t wear white,” Teresa had said to her that morning when she appeared in a white blouse she had washed the night before. Still, Teresa had insisted they had to be married in a church afterward. And they were, in a hushed, hurried ceremony attended only by them. Later, Salvador’s mother, a little brown bird of a woman, made a heavily decorated cake, which Amalia refused to touch.
That night, in the single room they moved into in another tenement, Salvador raped her again. He pushed her dress up and twisted her pants down, he pinioned her arms behind her with one hand and forced her legs open with one knee, and he covered her mouth with the hand that had the tattoo of the burning cross.
She came to detest that tattoo almost as much as she hated him, detested it even before she learned that it was a sign of proud membership in one of the most violent gangs in the Southwest.
With glassy eyes, his head lowered over the bare table they ate on, his voice hardly a mumble, a monotone, he tried to explain to her what it was like to be in such a famous gang. “In my ganga they all know who I am, and no one else does.” He pointed to himself, as if to identify who he was; but he could not complete the gesture—his hand fell, trembling, to the cup of coffee he was trying to drink. Then he looked up at Amalia and frowned. “Do you know who I am?”
“Yes,” she said, despising him.
His tattoo-scarred hand turned the cup of coffee over deliberately. Then he walked out.
He had money only off and on, God knows from where. Amalia took a job “helping out” in the home of a rich Mexican-American merchant. The man’s daughter, Amalia’s age, went to Radford, a wealthy all-girls’ school, and she spoke English with a southern accent. Amalia made $3 a day.
When Salvador beat her, Amalia crouched on the floor and covered herself with her hands. She would remain there, absolutely still, until he would stalk out, cursing her. One day he left and didn’t come back. She refused to return to live with her father and Teresa. So she inherited a tenement room of her own.
She came home from work one day and, crying, threw herself on the floor, over and over and over, until she bled and vomited and passed out and lost the child. Out of that painful blackness she remembered little except for moments when she was conscious and saw Teresa draped in black and heard words or prayers.
“Good,” she said when Salvador’s mother came to tell her he was in prison. He and others of the notorious street gang he had proclaimed allegiance to with his tattoo had been caught selling drugs—Salvador was by then a tecato, addicted to heroin.
“The cursed gangs!” his mother wept.
Amalia was astonished to discover that that woman, whom she had hated from the night of the meeting with her parents, was capable of pain.
A good-looking soldier stationed at Fort Bliss moved in with Amalia. He was a Mexican-American from San Antonio. She had not been with another man in the years since Salvador had left. She only tolerated sex—the soldier did not seem to notice that, or did not care—so that afterward he would hold her. She liked to wake up in the morning with his arms around her, his warm body beside her. She was glad to have someone, despite the frequent quarrels about the way other men looked at her and was it her fault.
She told him about Salvador. “He raped me.”
“A wife has to put out for her man.”
“He wasn’t my husband then.”
He smiled, shaking his head. He pretended to try to force his erect finger into his clenched fist. “That’s hard,” he laughed.
She called him a cabrón. He slapped her and walked out. Terrified, she packed his duffel bag and placed it outside. She turned off the lights and did not answer the door when he returned. The next day she moved into another ugly room.
She decorated this one, with paper flowers, a curtain she made out of string and crushed soda-bottle caps, and—this was of course not decoration, but she was so beautiful, wasn’t she?—a small statue of the Blessed Mother, her arms always outstretched in understanding. Daily, Amalia said prayers to her, and, kneeling, imagined the holy eyes benignly on her. To assure that they would be permanent, she bought shiny plastic flowers for the Sacred Mother to stand on.
Amalia could not get along by herself—by then, she worked in several households to make ends meet—because Teresa had begun to demand that she help her and her father, who was usually out of work, drunkenly remembering, more and more vividly, his glorious service to his country. Amalia met another boyfriend—that’s how she came to think of her companions. He worked in the warehouse of a large department store. They quarreled, and he left, came back, left, returned. If only handsome men would be as romantic as they looked, Amalia thought one morning when she woke and studied him asleep beside her, his arms nestling her.
He left permanently when Salvador returned from prison and threw him out.
“I’m a changed man,” Salvador said to her, and he kissed his thumb and forefinger in a vow, to prove it. To prove it further, he gave her a small crucifix, coppery; but all she could see was the despised burning cross on the web of his hand. “I’m entirely free of drogas” he told her, “and I’ve come back to live with my woman.” He brushed her breasts.
She hated him as much as ever and feared him even more than before. His eyes, which had once been so romantic, were now only black and hollow.
That night he took her violently and she could not scream.
In the following days she simply accepted that Salvador had returned after all these years to seize her life again.
The money she had saved for that month’s rent, hers and, now, Teresa’s and her father’s, was gone. She had kept it in a change purse she placed for safekeeping next to her statue of the Blessed Mother—to the wall behind it, she had added a splendid picture of Christ painted on velvet. And Salvador was able to take money under their gaze! He denied it. But she found a hidden syringe.
A few months later he was in trouble again. He had almost killed a man in a store he had robbed. A kind American lawyer whose family she worked for once a week coaxed her to get a divorce in Juárez, across the border, and she did.
The same day that she learned from Salvador’s mother—she had become a pain-racked shadow of herself—that Salvador had been returned to prison, Amalia discovered that she was pregnant by him again.
She deliberated losing this child also, but the earlier abortion had caused her so much pain, so much terror, that she decided to have it. She had to force herself daily not to think of it, too, as a child of rape. With her hand on her stomach, which would soon grow big, she prayed, kneeling, before the Holy Mother.
The child was Manny.
Manuel Gómez—she gave him her own last name, which she retained; he looked like Salvador, an angelic version of Salvador, with enormous chocolaty eyes and dark hair, which was beginning to curl. Often, Amalia would look in wonder at him and think that perhaps this was the cleansed part of Salvador, the part she had glimpsed as “savior.”
She had to go on welfare to take care of her child. She did not want another man with her now that she had this beautiful boy to care for.
In the one-bedroom government-project unit she had managed with the lawyer’s help to acquire after years on a waiting list, she lay in bed—it was still dark, just dawning—holding her child in her arms and looking at him in awe. There was a loud knock at the door.
“We’re making spot checks of welfare recipients,” a woman announced, walking in past her when she opened the door. The woman looked like the Anglo schoolteachers she had hated. “We have to make sure you’re not living with a man who’s giving you money.” The woman walked about the apartment. She peered curiously at the statue of the Blessed Mother—and then she snatched up an item from the floor. “Is this a tie?”
“It’s a scarf.”
The woman cleared a space at the kitchen table and sat down, pen poised over a form.
Amalia continued to stand, holding Manny.
“Have you ever used another name to apply for welfare?”
“No.”
“You claim one child—and he keeps you from working? Is that him?”
“Yes.” Amalia wanted to tell this woman to get out of her house, tell her she didn’t want their welfare, that she could not leave her child alone. But since her marriage to Salvador, the proud voice that had allowed her to confront those who judged her had weakened.
“Does the child have a father? I mean, are you married?”
“I was.”
“Divorced?”
“Yes.” Amalia inhaled and held Manny more tightly. “Your breasts are tiny, you could never feed a child,” she told the woman.
“What!” the woman gasped.
“I said that your breasts—”
The woman pushed the form into her purse. She looked at Amalia as if seeing her for the first time.
Amalia felt good the rest of that day, made herself up and looked beautiful again.
Her wonderful child with the large forlorn eyes filled her with amazement, and with a powerful, saddened love when she remembered he was Salvador’s and she felt the start of anger again. Then, she would hold him even tighter, as if to shelter him from any connection with that despised man. Manny cried a lot, for no reason Amalia could find—she would check his diaper, make sure there was no lump on the bed, touch his forehead for any tinge of fever. She learned how to soothe him: She would lie with him in bed, cradling his small body so that it fused with hers. If she got up and he reacted in fear—there might be a slight tremble at the awareness that she had moved away from him—she would return to him, kiss him softly on the face until she managed to elicit a smile from him, faint but beautiful. At times she pressed her face to his, sharing his tears.
Years ago, Amalia had learned the profoundest mysteries of the Catechism from a tiny twig of a nun who wore a bluish habit, not severe like that of other nuns. Patiently, Mother Mercedes had explained to baffled public-school children who could not afford parochial schools the difference between the “Immaculate Conception” and the “Virgin Birth.” The Immaculate Conception was the title awarded to Mary because she had been conceived free of original sin in her mother’s womb; it was precisely that fact that had allowed the Virgin Mary to float easily into heaven, past purgatory. With a delicate gesture of her hand, Mother Mercedes conveyed the gracious ease of the Holy Lady’s passage skyward. With even greater patience, she explained that the Virgin Birth meant that Mary had conceived Jesus, purely, in her own womb, after a discreet visit by the Holy Ghost, the Holy Spirit. Still, for Amalia, as for many other women of her faith, the Immaculate Conception was, simply, the Sacred Mother Mary, who had conceived her Holy Son immaculately.
Very old now, Mother Mercedes continued her good deeds, taking care of the children of working mothers. Off welfare and doing housework again, Amalia could leave Manny in her charge.
Mother Mercedes was truly a holy servant of God. She had converted one room in her small house on the fringes of the government projects into a shrine, with a smallish crucifix of Christ and a large statue of the Blessed Virgin. The shrine was open to anyone who wanted to light a candle, and the room blazed with small flames. Because the nun refused any actual payment, the women whose children Mother Mercedes cared for would drop a donation into a font guarded by an angel, the only brown-faced angel Amalia remembered ever having seen. A rumor had spread not long ago that a priest from the big cathedral in the city had come to verify her order and had discovered that she was not really a nun. No one in the projects cared about that. Mother Mercedes was a holy woman.
Now that Manny was no longer a baby, Amalia considered finding him a good father. Naturally it wouldn’t hurt anyone if he was handsome.
First there was a troubling matter she had to resolve. She had just blessed her Manny to Sister Mercedes’s care one morning when she felt a strong need to visit the shrine. As she knelt before the statue of the Blessed Mother resplendent in her purity, Amalia was seized by a longing to come closer to her, and to God, by partaking of Holy Communion. At the same time, she was jolted by the awareness that she was a divorciada who had lived unmarried with two men. Confession and repentance—and she would receive a severe penance from her confessor—would put her in good stead to receive Communion. It was the matter of repentance that complicated matters because now she needed another man, a good one this time. She had to face—and no one could blame her for wishing that she had simply continued not to think about any of this—that a woman living with a man who is not her husband is forbidden to receive Holy Communion. It was very complicated, how God had arrived at all this, although for Teresa, that, like everything else, was absolutely clear. She would often say to Amalia: “A divorciada is excommunicated from the Church, no matter how often she goes to Mass, and no matter what any of those modern priests say.” Amalia was sure that Teresa made up her own strictures, much sterner than the Pope’s.
As she continued to kneel before the Divine Mother for guidance, Amalia’s yearning for Communion grew. Try as she might—and God would certainly take into account her careful considerations—she saw no logic in being pushed away from Him because of situations created by a bad marriage she hadn’t wanted anyway. God never wanted His children distanced from Him. Didn’t He move in very mysterious ways to prove it? And who was she to deny Him that?
Making an elaborate sign of the cross, Amalia left Sister Mercedes’s shrine determined to invite some of God’s mysterious ways. She would do this with the help of Father Ysidro, the seventy-year-old pastor of the neighborhood church. At the same time, she would ask some questions about a movie that had baffled her recently, The Song of Bernadette.
Father Ysidro had understanding eyes and only a fringe of white hair. He took a regular leisurely walk about the neighborhood, pausing to speak to women and children and nodding to men at work. He returned for a brief rest in the vined courtyard of his small church. That is how Amalia had met him. She continued chatting with him into the courtyard and he invited her to sit with him. Amalia could tell he enjoyed her company. And why shouldn’t he like to visit with a pretty woman in her twenties? He was, after all, a man, no matter how holy; and weren’t all the angels God surrounded Himself with in church always beautiful?
Today, Amalia and the old priest sat on the circular bench about the small waterless fountain in the courtyard. The Madonna in its center was pensive. Despite his age, Father Ysidro was an ample man. He spread his cassock on the bench about the rim of the fountain. He extended his hand to Amalia. She kissed it reverently, the way she had been instructed to do from childhood, the way Teresa insisted must still be done, in the true religious manner of times past. Amalia noticed that in the sun Father Ysidro’s bald pate gleamed like a halo. Immediately she felt close to God.
“Father, I have to confess—” She had rehearsed exact words.
“M’ija, you know that confession is held properly inside the confessional in the church.” He patted her hand briefly to reassure her.
She loved to be called m’ija—“daughter”—and by this holy old priest! “I mean,” Amalia said quickly, “that I have to confess that sometimes I don’t understand God.”
“M’ija/” The old priest seemed as apprehensive of what she might say as he seemed delighted.
“Father,” she embraced the designation. “Father, I do know, of course, that He works in mysterious ways.”
“Very mysterious,” the priest agreed.
“But Bernadette—” She decided this was an easier subject than the matter of divorce. “I saw that movie about her, Father.”
“A reverential film, although I understand from Father Esteban, the new priest, that it was made by people not of our faith. God’s ways—” he acknowledged with a shrug. “Of course, it’s not in color.” He seemed to adjust something privately.
“But, Father, why does witnessing a miracle have to make a person so miserable? Bernadette even had to leave her handsome boyfriend.”
“Our Lady requires sacrifices to find us worthy, Amalia. Especially of those she honors with her divine revelations.”
“But Bernadette’s life wasn’t all that happy to begin with. Her family was poor, and she—”
“You have to earn God’s miracles, m’ija”.
“What if she really didnt see her, just thought so?”
“In her heart, Our Lady gave her the confidence to know.”
“But why in so many riddles?”
“God’s language.”
“But why didn’t everyone who went to the shrine become cured?”
The old priest formed his words precisely, as if he had arranged them carefully, spoken them often, perhaps sometimes to himself—for seconds he looked down at his clasped hands: “The real miracle is in bringing hope to the desperate, m’ija. Perhaps all they have are moments of hope out of their despair, through renewed faith. And hope provides us with the strength to continue.”
“Just that?”
“Amalia!”
“I’m sorry, Father, it’s just that miracles are—”
“—among God’s most mysterious ways,” Father Ysidro tried to end that. But he spoke aloud, as if to himself: “Why, once, the Sacred Mother asked that a chapel be built in a swamp.” He seemed, himself, bemused by that, thoughtful for seconds.
Amalia decided it was best to pretend he had not spoken that aloud. She was confused enough. She glanced toward the sacristy. She saw, at the door, the new priest, young, with a face not unlike those of the saints inside the church. Why would a handsome man like him commit himself to chastity? She curbed her thoughts, because she had also thought he looked romantic. Nearby, she saw an old woman bustling, cleaning the church steps. A beata, the kind of woman who thinks of nothing except the church, working fiercely in order to be near the holiness of priests. Did they feel that put them closer to heaven?
Amalia bowed her head because at that moment the new priest walked by. Would he be a real “savior”? Such thoughts! “Does God understand everything, Father?” she broke the old priest’s reverie.
“Everything.”
Amalia looked up at the sky and said to God: And so you’ll understand that I’m a divorced woman and I’ve lived with men I’m not married to because I need help and even more now for my child. But of course You know all that, just as Father Ysidro assured me just now, and he’s a holy man; Your priest. She made a sign of the cross and breathed easily. “Well,” she said aloud to her ally, “God wouldn’t be God if He didn’t understand everything, would He?”
“Indeed not!” Father Ysidro said and touched her hand in affirmation.
Amalia breathed even more easily. She spoke very clearly, for God to hear exactly, “It makes it all bearable to me, to know my church doesn’t turn its back on anyone.”
“No one, no one,” the old priest emphasized.
“Bless me, Father, please,” Amalia said and took a scarf she had brought for this encounter and placed it over her bowed head.
“En el nombre del padre, del hijo…” The old priest made a slow sign of the cross before the pretty young woman.
Amalia kissed his hand again. When she left the courtyard—Father Ysidro was nodding in the warm shade now—she glanced back to see whether the new priest was around. Was he looking at her? He was standing at the gate with his hands loosening his white collar.
Amalia hurried out of the courtyard.
That same week, she went to confession—at another Catholic church—and saw no reason to mention her divorce nor the men she had lived with, and certainly not that she intended soon to find a good man. All those matters had been resolved very clearly between God and the Holy Father Ysidro. When she took Communion that Sunday, at her regular church and during Mass presided over by the old priest, she was certain the Blessed Mother was watching in approval, and she was almost certain that Father Ysidro smiled when he placed the holy wafer on her tongue.
Teresa left her husband and moved in unannounced with Amalia. She brought her few clothes, her rosary, her worn missal, her endless sighs, and her weeping Mother of Sorrows. She looked at Manny and said, “He’s a pensive child, already worried.”
“He is not,” Amalia denied.
“We’ll see.”
Amalia continued to leave Manny with Mother Mercedes when she went to work.
Concepción, a neighbor, became Teresa’s instant friend. Every weekday afternoon she came over to watch “Queen for a Day.” Although hardly forty, she had cataracts growing daily She would lean toward the television, straining to be able to see the women who were paraded before an audience to tell stories of relentless deprivation and sadness. Based on applause for the greatest misery, one would be crowned Queen for a Day.
Today, the Queen, a heavy woman in a print dress, was being draped in the glittery robe, crowned with the glittery crown. Arriving home early, Amalia watched. Crowning sorrow? The weeping queen was given some electrical appliances Amalia thought, And what later? Queen for only one day.
Concepción announced, “I asked Miss Rise, the social worker, how to get on that program.”
“She told you?” Amalia’s mother expressed her own interest.
“Yes. You have to have a really horrible life,” Concepción said. She rubbed her eyes, clearing her sketchy vision. “I would tell them that my youngest son was stabbed in a gang fight and that the doctors at the clinic say I’ll lose my sight entirely before long.” She sighed. “I deserve to win.”
Only when, weeks later, Teresa returned to her husband did she accost Amalia: “I’ve known about your men, you’re divorced and living in sin.” She made an angry sign of the cross. A week or so later she was back, with her Mother of Sorrows.
“The reason things are going so wrong for me,” Teresa told Amalia one Saturday, “is that you’re arousing bad spirits—mal humores—with your life. I’ve spoken to Father Emilio, and he’s coming over.”
Amalia winced. Father Emilio was well known in the projects for his euros, his “spiritual cleansings” not sanctioned by the Church. These old curandero-priests exist, combining Catholicism and witchcraft, wherever Mexicans converge.
The priest went about the house thrusting water at everything as if this evil required extra measures. The water streaked walls and furniture.
“Spray it on her!” Praying Hail Marys, Amalia’s mother groaned to emphasize the efficacy of the spraying. “Get her to confess to you, Father Emilio.”
Water ready, the man said to Amalia: “Do you want to confess your sins before God?”
“I have no sins to confess to you. I confess only to Father Ysidro,” Amalia said. And to God and His Mother, she added.
“Is this a child of sin?” He pointed to Manny, who was watching curiously. The curandero-priest raised his bottle of water over him.
Amalia yanked Manny into her arms, away from the incensed priest. “Don’t get close to my child.”
She did not give the priest the required donation. When he left, after chanting and quivering at the door, Amalia dumped the abandoned vials of water into the toilet.
“Sacrilege!” Teresa gasped.
It was the time of another war and there were many soldiers in the city. There were demonstrations by civilians, sometimes even joined in by soldiers. There were arrests in San Jacinto Plaza. Students marched with placards. Teresa went back to her husband.
And Amalia fell in love with Gabriel. A good-looking soldier from New Mexico, he wore a dashing blue scarf, allowed by his unit; and he bloused the pants of his uniform over cordovan-waxed boots. His shirts were tailored to fit his proud body; and he had eyes that looked greener because of his brown skin. He was stationed at Fort Bliss. He laughed a lot.
On the day she met him—as they both watched one of the demonstrations in the old plaza—he told her she was beautiful and that he loved her.
She told him she loved him.
A week later she married him in a civil ceremony.
“Now you have a father,” she told Manny.
The boy sat on the floor, playing with a small car Amalia had brought him. He seemed not to want to listen to the man who was offering to be his father.
“He wants to be,” Amalia told her son, who would not look at Gabriel, kept his large eyes on her. “He really wants to be your father.” Daily her child looked more like an angel to her, like the part of Salvador she thought she had seen at first.
That year—when Gabriel returned home to visit his family—Amalia got to dress her son as an angel.
Every Christmas there occur in El Paso the Posadas, a procession that for seven nights duplicates Mary and Joseph’s hunt for an inn. Dozens of men and women, sometimes hundreds, follow the man and woman playing Joseph and Mary as the holy couple walk up to a designated home. They say, in Spanish:
“Hay lugar para que mi hijo nasca aquí?”
“No,” the person chosen to play one of the innkeepers answers, “there’s no room in this inn for your child’s birth.”
On the final night, the procession reaches another chosen dwelling.
“Yes, there is room in my manger.”
Children precede the procession, especially chosen, as a reward, for this occasion. Dressed vaguely like angels, in loose shirts that attempt to simulate robes, they carry candles. In the chilly Texas night, their faces float within the dark. Their voices waft the cold with sweetness.
Hiding him beside her, Amalia had taken Manny with her to the corner where the procession would begin. She had sewn him a beautiful costume—secretly—because she had not wanted to invite Gabriel’s reaction. She made small wings with snips of cloth. She gave him a candle. At a turn in the block, she urged him to join the chosen children. “Quickly!”
He did.
Among the hundreds of other spectators, she followed him, watching him, proud, thinking he was the most beautiful and looked the holiest. She even imagined that she had been asked to play Mary—she was certainly much prettier than the woman who was supposed to be the Holy Mother, and she would have made a truly beautiful robe, with sewn—not attached—stars; and, blue, it would have been, just like the Madonna’s in church.
When the woman playing Mary pronounced the last words of supplication—
“Give us shelter!”
—Amalia spoke them aloud, too, and she looked at her wondrous child:
“Give us shelter.”
It had all been so beautiful that she did not stay for the festivities that followed, with mariachis, buñuelos—sweet dough stretched to translucent thinness—piñatas for blindfolded children to swing at, hit, sprinkle the ground with trinkets.
Gabriel was discharged, and he moved in permanently with Amalia. Sex with him was like with the others, something expected of her; and like the others, Gabriel didn’t even notice that…Amalia loved this: Throughout the night, he held her tenderly.
He continued to try to coax Manny to play some improvised game, but he gave up soon after because the boy was constantly looking for his mother, as if afraid without her. Privately, Amalia had turned that same fear into a game between her and her son. She would pretend to hide and within full view assert that he could not possibly see her—and then he would run directly to her, delighting in having “found” her.
Often at night Gabriel would wake up in a violent sweat, screaming about the friends he had seen exploding, the people he had seen burning in Vietnam. Amalia assumed that that was what his laughter, which had diminished, had concealed.
Quickly irritated now—and drinking sporadically—he lost his job as a roofer’s helper, and then was quickly fired from a lens-grinding factory. He ignored Manny. More and more, he stayed out overnight.
A woman came to the apartment asking for him. “Who are you?” Amalia demanded.
“His girlfriend.”
“Lárgate.” Amalia ordered her away.
To tell Gabriel good news she had learned earlier one afternoon, news that would change him back into the man she had first married, Amalia put a flower in her hair and wore her lowest-cut blouse.
“I can’t afford a child,” Gabriel told her.
The next day he packed his clothes.
“You can’t leave me,” Amalia said. “You promised to be a father to Manny. Now you’ll have a child of your own.”
“You’ll find someone else,” he said.
She would miss him, she knew before he even left, miss his holding her at night. “You can’t leave,” she said.
“Mira, ‘Malia,” he sat down and said to her, “I can’t cope with the thought of a kid. It makes me—” He shook his hands, pretending to tremble. “Lose it if you want, I’ll give you the money, I’ll get it somewhere. Come on, chula, kiss me. I’ve been thinking of going to Los Angeles. I’ve got a job lined up in Torrance, airplane factory. Good money. You can join me later. Come on, kiss me.”
“You’re a cabrón, maldecido,” she cursed him. A terrible desolation was crawling over her.
Manny stood near her, watching.
“I’m sure you’re right,” Gabriel said.
Amalia was surprised to see real sadness in his look.
Gabriel went to her. “I’m not a good man, I sleep with lots of women. You’ve known that, never accused me—because you’re a good woman, better off rid of me. You’ll find someone else better. You’re one hell of a good-looking woman. Look at your breasts. Gorgeous. And your hair—beautiful.”
She touched the flower she had placed there for him.
He took it and kissed it and put it back in her hair. “If you wanted to, with your sexy looks, you could really make something of yourself,” he said.
“I’m not a puta.” She pulled out the flower.
Manny looked at it on the floor.
“I’m not the first man you’ve been to bed with.” Gabriel walked toward the door.
“No, but you’re the worst one.” She knew that would hurt him.
His face turned dark. He seemed about to move toward her. He stopped. “Maybe I’ll miss you so much I’ll come back right away.”
“Go to your putas,” she said. Soon she would not be able to speak anymore—the hint of violence had chilled her.
Gabriel sighed. “My women. Yes, I need my women.” He looked at her seriously—“Because I don’t feel complete.” He explained earnestly as if to clarify a riddle, perhaps have her answer it for him: “It’s like something was taken from me long ago, I don’t even know what—so I go looking for it in a woman, lots of women.” He seemed saddened by his own confused words. “Maybe now I wouldn’t recognize what I’m looking for even if I had found it, maybe in you, Amalia.” He frowned, and then he laughed at his own seriousness—and was silent until he walked out with his clothes.
Amalia stared at the door. Manny picked up the fallen flower. He coaxed his mother to lean down. He ran his fingers through her hair. He put the flower back in. “For my pretty ‘amita” he said, “my pretty mother.”
She held him tightly to her. “How beautiful,” she said.
He had already begun to call her “‘Amá” short for “Mamá,” but more often now he called her “’Amita,” his special word for “mamacita” little mother. She would answer, “Mi’jo”—my son. Those became such precious moments to her that sometimes, when he sat quietly intense, doing nothing, she would say, “M’ijo”—just so he would answer, “’Ama, ‘Amita.” … “My son.” “Mama, little mama.” It became a private bond between them, an expression of their special love, just theirs.
The next few days Amalia kept remembering her father. Had he sighed like Gabriel?—those cruel, drunken times when he sobbed his remorse about something unknown, lost.
Gabriel’s son was born. She named him Juan, a name she liked and that had no connection with anyone else in her life. Five years old at the time, Manny peered at the new child in his mother’s bed. Then he looked at Amalia in surprise.
With her two children, one clutched to her in the same seat so she would not have to pay an extra fare, the other held in her arms, Amalia traveled by Greyhound bus to Los Angeles—to Torrance—to find Gabriel, to show him his son so he would love him.
They traveled for miles of desert, into New Mexico, across Arizona, night and day—days and nights, it seemed to Amalia. She got off, with the two children, only when they were hungry and the bus had stopped at one of the “rest stops” along the way, coffee shops always awash in dirty yellow light.
“California immigration check!” the driver announced peremptorily as the bus pulled into one of several small, squat buildings in the desert. Amalia was aware that a Mexican man and woman who had remained in the bus throughout the long trip, eating out of a bag, seemed now to crouch, as if to become invisible.
The bus doors scooped in hot air as they opened; and a man in a green uniform appeared, an immigration official.
I don’t want my children asked about, stared at, Amalia thought. She had her American birth certificate, of course, and her children’s; but she remembered families in El Paso humiliated by men like this one, demanding papers for each child, studying the papers and the children.
She saw the official approaching. She held her breath and parted her blouse so that the full flare of her breasts would show. She prepared a wide smile that hurt. The immigration man looked at her. She pulled the painful smile wider. The man passed his hand over the headrest, touching her shoulders for seconds. Then he moved on. She heard him questioning the Mexican man and woman, who answered in Spanish. They deboarded with him, disappearing into one of the ugly gray buildings.
When the bus was moving on into California, Manny reached up and gently closed Amalia’s blouse.
She arrived at the Greyhound station near skid row in Los Angeles.
It was a day of fearful heated winds. In the distant horizon a fierce fire raged and coated the sun with a veil of smoke. The red, yellow, and green of traffic lights glowed strangely out of the film of ashes.
Hot, shrieking wind whipped into the city as Amalia stood outside the Los Angeles bus depot with her two children and wondered where Torrance was.