IN HER STUCCO UNIT in Hollywood, Amalia remembered Manny’s smiling face when they had celebrated her “marriage” to Raynaldo. Who would have thought that only a short time after that day, she would sit in a courtroom and hear that very same boy—her beloved son—called a murderer!
Now, the hot stillness of this day that had begun with the impression of a silver cross in the sky—no more about that!—persisted. Still early morning, and the day was growing hotter. Would there be one of those dreaded Sant’ Anas today?
Amalia had remained for more seconds quietly watching Gloria on her pullout bed and in her slip, and Juan in his shorts and on his cot—sitting there without any embarrassment, still talking in the living room that turned into their bedroom. Had they lowered their voices when they detected her presence? Why didn’t they run to her, hug her, wish her a good morning, as they once had?
“Gloria! Juan!” She called out to them because she felt suddenly angry, suddenly alone.
Her two children turned quickly to face her.
Oh, how beautiful they are, Amalia thought, as she did often. Strange that so many people do not realize how beautiful Mexicans are. They just don’t see us, Amalia knew. Look at Juan—every sinew on his body showed, that’s how lean and strong he was, and not quite eighteen. He combed his black hair back, only a strand over his yellowish eyes now, eyes surprising with his brown complexion. He was not tall, no, but he wasn’t short, and he was so … mature, masculine. And why shouldn’t she think that of him? He was her son…. But the tinge of shame had come from the memory of Angel, last night, and that extra beer…. She turned hurriedly to bask in her daughter’s fresh prettiness. Without makeup, Gloria’s face was flushed with its own coloring. She had hazel eyes, and her skin was as smooth as tan silk. She would inherit her mother’s breasts, Amalia knew proudly. She already had a way of tossing her head to display her dark hair, the way she, Amalia, did when she was being … well… a woman. But Gloria was a girl, only fifteen.
“Hi, Mom,” Gloria said easily.
Mom! Amalia hated that word. It made her feel fat and vulgar and ugly, like some of the women she worked for. Why couldn’t Gloria call her “‘Ama,” the way Juan now often did? Sometimes he even called her “‘Amita”—and when he did, she would quickly evoke her dead son, as if to assure him that the cherished designation still belonged to him.
“‘Amá—” Juan said the word cautiously now, as if to please both her and Gloria.
Why did he feel he had to borrow his sister’s new defiance? About what? When they began to dress, Amalia moved into the kitchen—more aging furniture, more barred windows. A picture of the Blessed Mother remained shiny because it was periodically replaced, most often from religious calendars. Here, too, were the graying paper and cloth flowers with which she had gradually tried to overwhelm the house.
It had seemed prettier when she first moved in, when Raynaldo made it possible to leave East Los Angeles. Yes, and everything had seemed so right that night they had celebrated her “marriage” to him.
That night, after the cake celebration, and for a time after, she muffled the sounds of Raynaldo’s lovemaking by hanging blankets on the door of the bedroom—that’s how sensitive she was to her children—so they would accept him as the father she knew he wanted to be.
And for a time they did accept him as that—Gloria and Juan did. It had been difficult to tell with Manny because soon after he was in trouble again.
Juvenile home, county detention camp, youth authority, detention center, youth training school…. Amalia could not keep the names straight. Manny was in and out of them. She was no longer sure which one it was, even when she rode by bus to visit him. He was there for fighting, then for stealing. Even the exact charges, Amalia could not remember.
More and more she prayed, not for anything, exactly, but just to express her faith. She went to confession and confessed the usual things, anger, impatience. And, more and more, she prayed to the Holy Mother, feeling that God had created the Blessed Lady—in part only, of course—to “soften” His most mysterious and difficult ways.
Manny was “away” again—that’s how she referred to his absences. To lift her spirits, Raynaldo had begun taking her on Sunday drives in his old but pampered Ford, which he took regularly to be washed and sprayed with hot wax.
“What a beautiful neighborhood!” Amalia said as the shined car drove into Hancock Park. Unlike those in Beverly Hills, the marvelous houses here were not hidden behind walls and tall trees. There was one proud old mansion after another for anyone to admire.
“I know you like rich houses,” Raynaldo explained his choice.
Trees arched their branches over the wide streets, creating a green, leafy tunnel. It seemed that only houses and those trees claimed the area—no one was out.
“That one!” Amalia said aloud, pointing to the most beautiful house. She had been playing a game with herself, that she could choose any house she wanted. She had chosen one with marbled steps that swept toward two stories, colored panes of glass—
A gunshot!
Raynaldo dodged, Amalia crouched.
“I’ve had a blowout,” Raynaldo lamented.
The loose rattling of the ripped tire confirmed that. He drove to the curb of one of the great houses. He and Amalia got out. No one stirred to acknowledge their sudden crisis except a black maid, who peered out.
It was then that Amalia realized the origin of her earlier game. Once Manny had consoled her, after returning from a detention home: “‘Amá, I promise you I’m going to be good, I’m going to be rich, and then I’ll buy you the most beautiful house in the world. All you have to say is, ‘That one!’ and I’ll buy it for you.”
On another Sunday, Amalia saw something that disturbed her for days. They had driven to the Griffith Park Observatory, where she had thrilled to the make-believe sky. Now Raynaldo said he wanted to take her to a place one of the men he worked with had told him about, in West Los Angeles, a dance-bar where they played the romantic ballads she loved. He finally found the place, only to discover that it had been converted into a brawly cowboy club. Women with giant blonde hairdos and western shirts stared at Amalia in her velvet dress. She stared back at them.
Raynaldo drove home on Santa Monica Boulevard. It was night. Along shabby blocks, Amalia saw young men in their late teens, some perhaps younger, others in their early twenties, difficult to tell. They stood idly, alone or in small groups. Many were shirtless. They kept eyeing cars that drove by slowly and stopped on side streets. She saw one shirtless young man walk up to a car, talk briefly before the open window, then get in. The car drove away.
“They’re boys looking for men who pay them,” Raynaldo said knowledgeably.
Prostitutes—those boys? Amalia was confused and angered. She had never understood how one man could desire another. A man’s thing belonged between a woman’s legs. That’s why God had made them the way He had. It baffled her even more that those boys had not looked like maricones, the effeminate men anyone could tell were—
A screech! Brakes! Shouts!
A carload of burly young men with clubs and bottles jumped out of a car and attacked a cluster of idling younger men. Just as suddenly as they had appeared, the attackers fled, laughing, leaving two boys bleeding on the sidewalk.
“Qué horrorr Amalia screamed.
Now, often, she talked about moving away from East Los Angeles. She saw more and more of the gangs, more of their graffiti everywhere. She paused once before one wall across which was scrawled in red, bleeding paint:
Aztlàn? A fable? Where had she heard that name? Oh, an old man before a mural had told her—She could not remember, but the scrawled words continued to haunt her.
She learned increasingly about gang fights, violence, raids on the homes of rival members. Manny would be out soon. She knew how difficult it was to leave a gang, an even more brutal initiation than the pummeling required to join.
“I’ll find a house somewhere else, preciosa,” Raynaldo promised.
He had just been given a raise. Now his job required him to work overnight at times, unpacking goods for a chain of groceries in and outside the city. Amalia would have grown suspicious about that with any other man, but she trusted him, believed him immediately when he informed her that his divorce was taking longer because some complications with his wife had occurred, not serious. Amalia was surprised at how much she missed his burly arms about her the mornings he was gone.
Except for the fact that Manny was still “away,” things were much better than before. She could afford meat now and then, to make her special picadillo, and decent cheese for her favorite entomatadas, and chicken, which Gloria and Juan loved fried.
On her way from school with another girl, Gloria was walking past a small triangular park bordered by bushes with giant white blossoms when a car sped by and a gun fired out of its window at a teenage boy. He thrust himself on the ground, and the bullet grazed away from the pavement where the two girls had flung themselves. A gang shooting… For days, Gloria refused to go to school. When Juan volunteered to escort her, she insisted they walk several blocks out of the way to avoid the deadly park. Soon after, a boy was stabbed in a school corridor. A gang ambush.
Sometimes distant, like echoes or omens, now there were more gunshots heard in the neighborhood. “Las gangas” older people said, and soon began to add: “La jura,” because as police cars increased, so did the sound of bullets. In other cramped neighborhoods, too, in communities with beautiful names—Pomona, Florence, Echo Park—violence swept in, intended victims and bystanders felled by gang bullets, cop bullets. There was talk of barricading certain areas “to contain the violence, seal off drug zones.”
Like living in jail, Amalia thought. And soon Manny would return to this.
She came home from work to hear an old man who lived nearby bragging to a cluster of boys, children, that in his day “las gangas” had real “huevos”—balls, real courage. “We used to face the other vatos, bring them down with chingazos.” His wrinkled face brightened at the memory of the blows he had inflicted. “Sure we had to use weapons sometimes, I ain’t saying we didn’t, but only now and then and always one-on-one. Nowadays the vatos drive by in their cars, shoot, run away, get their courage from drogas, not huevos. That’s not the real man’s way. If you got class, you don’t shoot no babies, no women, you don’t run away.” His voice gained authority. “And we dressed, manos—pegged pants, classy hats, pocket chains.” He shook his palm, low, from the wrist, a wordless gang expression of grandness. “Everyone knew who we were.”
Amalia rejected the memory of Salvador—he had said something like that.
“When we were real chingones, the toughest, that’s when we made the gringo cops recognize us.” The old man studied the boys listening intently. “That’s one thing ain’t changed, the only time they see us.”
“And when they put you in jail,” Amalia said angrily.
The old veterano was quiet for moments, his head bowed. Then his memory of grandeur resurged: “We even took on the U.S. Navy once, manos—you know that?” he asked the rapt boys. “Ever hear about the zoot-suit riots?”
The boys nodded. One said his grandfather had been in them.
“That was us.” In a long, slow arc, the old man’s palm swept down, even lower now, the gang gesture of greatest pride. “And then some of us even joined the navy later, manosl” He laughed. Then he frowned. “But we belonged!” he said emphatically.
That night Amalia said to Raynaldo, “If we could only move away from it all.”
“We will,” he assured her, and held her hand.
A letter came:
Amalia—
Your father is dead—I am coming to live with you—there is nowhere else.
Your Mother.
Teresa arrived from El Paso with her Dolorosa. She cleared a table at the entrance on which Amalia had placed “fresh” cloth flowers to thwart what she had suspected would happen, and did: Teresa set her mournful statue there, to command the house. She handed the flowers back to Amalia.
Amalia repeated the story about her and Raynaldo getting married at the courthouse. She went on to embellish that they had even gone to a Catholic church, on their own, to exchange “sacred vows under God’s watch.”
Teresa said, “God doesn’t believe lies, and neither do I.”
“Our mother’s not lying,” Juan said firmly.
“She’s telling you the truth,” Gloria said.
That evening the old woman seemed quickly to “accept” Ray-naldo. Out of convenience, Amalia thought, and crossed herself in case there was something sinful in thinking that.
Often startling them awake with her hacking, Teresa slept on what had been Manny’s cot, in the room with Juan and Gloria.
Raynaldo found another house for them. In Hollywood! He took Amalia to see it.
It was a bungalow in another of the ubiquitous clutches of stucco courts that proliferate throughout Los Angeles. It was near Western Avenue and Fountain—and it was pretty, Amalia tried to convince herself. If not, it was certainly better than the unit in East Los Angeles, and far better than any place she had ever lived in. She was excited to learn from the only Anglo who still lived there, with his wife—but not for long, they both looked to be at least eighty to Amalia—that the court had once been inhabited by “movie people.”
“Movie stars?” Amalia was hopeful. Ava Gardner …
“No—grips and extras,” the old man said.
Amalia didn’t understand what they were, but, she reminded herself, as she would often, it was in Hollywood. It was also close to the tangle of freeways, but: “You can imagine the sound of the traffic is the sound of the ocean—someone told me that,” Raynaldo advised her. That would be difficult, since she had never been to the ocean. Her enthusiasm dampened when she saw that other houses in the neighborhood were beginning to decline, windows left broken, patched. But each unit in the court did have a small “garden”—only about two feet by four—and there was a rose bush toward the back. The unit was flanked by stubby palm trees. From one of its windows you could see—in the distant hills—the giant HOLLYWOOD sign. This disturbed her: A few blocks away, on Sunset Boulevard, along a strip of fast-food stands and seedy motels, exaggeratedly painted women paraded the streets. Still, there was this: She saw no sign whatever of gangs in the neighborhood.
They moved there.
Juan and Gloria kept joking about being “movie stars” now that they lived in Hollywood.
Raynaldo turned a small porch into a bedroom for Teresa. Amalia placed her mother’s statue on a table there—“a special table, just for her,” she told the old woman; but Teresa insisted she wanted to share La Dolorosa with everyone. She located the somber black presence again in the living room.
Amalia marveled at her mother. Despite her now constant wheezing, she still had so much energy. Perhaps too much. Soon after they had moved into the new neighborhood, she set out to investigate her surroundings. She came back indignant. “Who would have thought I would come to live so near Filipinos and Protestants.” She had discovered that several blocks away from this area that was populated mainly by Mexicans, there were pockets of other groups—Armenians, Asians, a smattering of black people. To Teresa they were all “Filipinos” because there had been some in the tenement where she had lived and they had been Protestants. “I saw stores with names written in God knows what language. Certainly not Spanish. And all those Protestant churches—one with a star instead of a crucifix.” She made an eternal sign of the cross, punctuating each movement with a stern look at Amalia.
Teresa’s hacking often wakened Amalia, especially on nights when Raynaldo was away.
Still, in this new neighborhood, Juan and Gloria were going to the good school nearby—even some Anglos went there, and there was no sign of gangs, no territorial graffiti. When Manny returned, he would be away from the dangerous former neighborhood.
It was around that time that earthquakes invaded Amalia’s fears. That was when she saw the wall split apart before her eyes. She thought the world had exploded. It had not, and what had occurred was called a “moderate earthquake.” That annoyed her—it had not seemed “moderate” to her.
Soon after, she went to visit Rosario at the sewing factory. Rosario now ate her lunch late—“to avoid listening to Milagros’s accounts of her serials,” she told Amalia. They were sitting on the stairs in the hallway of the building and eating Amalia’s homemade chiles rellenos when Milagros ran past them and into the sweatshop, blaring the news that the Mexican tabloid—in her hands—was predicting that the Big Earthquake would occur at exactly 1:34 that afternoon. It was the same earthquake that a famous astrologer had centuries ago foreseen for this very date—and a “seer” down the block had further confirmed it in the newspaper.
The Mexican women—and the Nicaraguan, Guatemalan, and Salvadoran women who now worked there—all hastily gathered their belongings, because it was 1:29, five minutes before the earth would tremble disastrously.
“Bunch of supersticiosas—still believing in witches,” Rosario chastised them. “No one can predict when the Big One will occur.”
“I’m not waiting to find out if it’s today,” said one of the women.
“Not me either,” said another. Soon they had all fled the sweaty factory. Rosario kept eating her rellenos. Amalia was torn with conflict. She wanted to believe Rosario—who was, after all, the intelligent one—and to stay with her to show she was not a supersticiosa. On the other hand—
“Are you sure it’s not going to happen?” She asked the older woman.
“No one can tell.” Rosario kept eating.
Amalia longed to stay. But at 1:32 she ran out into the street.
The news had spread. Women from the sewing factories in the garment district, Anglo secretaries from glassy office buildings, businessmen in suits, skid-row bums from Main Street—all gathered outside, looking up as if the earthquake would descend from the sky. Several tried to laugh. Amalia looked for Rosario. Nowhere.
Now it was 1:33.
Then it was 1:34.
Amalia closed her eyes and braced her feet.
It was 1:35.
Buildings—new chromy ones—were impassive in the hot day.
“Well it is earthquake weather,” said an Anglo businessman, laughing.
“Hot and still,” confirmed a secretary.
Then it was 1:40.
Someone said, “What the hell,” and went back to work. Some still checked their watches. Then everyone laughed and they went back into their buildings.
Amalia whispered to Rosario, where she had remained eating on the steps: “I didn’t believe it.”
Rosario didn’t even look at the women coming back, did not gloat.
“There won’t ever be a Big One, will there, Rosario?” Amalia asked hopefully. But when she saw the older woman about to answer after peering at her for pensive seconds, Amalia excused herself to go talk to Milagros, who greeted her with her usual “Here’s la Liz Taylor!”
At least, Amalia consoled herself about having rushed out with the other women, she had not been like so many of the new aliens who for days refused to return to their apartments and slept in parks. She felt even better on learning that many very rich people had fled the city in airplanes during that time.
“What worries you so terribly, Rosario?” Amalia asked her friend on another occasion, when the tiny woman was sitting on the familiar steps of the old building.
At first Rosario only shook her head, as if thrusting away the possibility of any answer. Then she touched Amalia. “Mira, corazón—” She spoke slowly, softly, as if to contain words that might otherwise explode out of her: “Every day hundreds—a thousand now—are arrested crossing the border—every day!—risking danger because they’re hungry, fleeing poverty, risking la migra hunting them down like animals, with horses, helicopters, brutal ambushes to keep the desperate people away—and from what? From jobs no one else would take!” Her voice had risen with anger: “Thieves rob them of their savings, women are raped, people murdered.” She breathed deeply, continued slowly as if to make sure Amalia understood her full despair. “And if they make it across? More horrors.” She shook her head in disgust. “Two men escaped a ranch in Somis—yes, escaped, corazón—through barbed wire. Beaten, their heads shaved, worked sixteen hours a day for fifty dollars a week, charged five dollars for a gallon of milk. Amalia, corazón—” Her voice almost broke. “Families end up separated in detention camps. Jorge told me of a man who sold his home to pay a coyote more than a thousand dollars to smuggle him and his wife across, and the coyote left them—his own people!—left them abandoned in a hovel in the desert, without food, water. His wife got her period—” Her voice was harsh with rage: “And those who reach the cities? Slums! The streets! Terrorized by gangas and violence and the migra always tracking them down. Illegals? Huh! How can a human being not be legal?” Her voice softened, a whisper: “Corazón, a human being has the right to eat, to have a home, work—”
“And to worship God and the Holy Mother,” Amalia added, assuring Rosario that she understood, and cared.
Rosario smiled. “Yes, that. But many times the Church—” She pulled back. “Corazón, at this very moment, Jorge’s family—” She stopped abruptly. She said quietly: “For all the destitute people, it’s like living with a loaded gun held to your head.”
A loaded gun held to your head!
Just the words terrified Amalia. A loaded gun held to your head!
When Rosario returned to work and Amalia remained at the steps for a few moments, she was astonished to see—again—how tiny and frail her friend was.
Well, Amalia thought later, despite all the miseries, there was always faith in God’s ways, although Rosario had certainly made them seem even more mysterious, hadn’t she? Amalia had often wondered—but had never wanted to ask—whether Rosario had strayed away from the Holy Church. No, she assured herself, because her name meant “rosary” and what was more Catholic than that? Whatever! God, if only through the Miraculous Mother, would be sure to extend His compassion to someone like Rosario. Of that Amalia was sure.
There was a time with Rosario that Amalia cherished especially. She often evoked it because she understood part of it and wanted to understand all of it. Rosario had said to her: “You’re a very smart woman, Amalia, perhaps smarter than you know—but what good does it do you, corazón? Amalia was flattered, then immediately puzzled. “What should I do, Rosario?” she asked. “Think,” Rosario had said. “Just think.”
Things were changing for the worse in the garment district of downtown Los Angeles. Thousands of new aliens were seeking work, any work. Men, women, boys, girls from countries south of Mexico, with no papers, worked up to sixty-four hours weekly for $50, and they did not complain because if the sweatshops closed they would have no income at all. More and more women brought their children to work with them, tucking the smallest on rolls of material stacked against walls.
Rosario informed the women at Lewis’s shop about all this, her voice furious with new indignation. Once—and Amalia increasingly adjusted her housework hours so she could see Rosario, and, too, listen to Milagros’s accounts of the romantic travails in her serials—a middle-aged Anglo woman and a young Mexican man from a group called La Familia del Pueblo—The Village Family—rushed in passing out pamphlets that spelled out in Spanish the rights of garment workers. Many of the women threw the pamphlets away nervously. Rosario picked them up and placed them assertively next to their machines.
“You got no business here,” Lewis was shouting at the invaders.
“Just information.” The Anglo woman faced him. She had bright red hair and deep-set, pained eyes.
“I run a fair shop.”
“Then there’s nothing to fear, sir,” the Mexican man said.
So handsome, with gleaming white teeth, Amalia noticed. Of course he would be a devout Catholic.
“No need for those pamphlets in a fair shop,” Lewis emphasized to the women when the invaders had left.
“Fairer” Rosario admitted, and mumbled: “Imagine what it’s like in the others.”
“The others” were unlicensed shops burgeoning in declining buildings nearby. Most often, Koreans, who spoke neither English nor Spanish, were identified as the owners, but no one was sure—the Koreans claimed they were only “managers” for invisible small contractors; and the landlords of the aged buildings and the manufacturers whose labels would be attached to the garments produced in the sweatshops claimed ignorance about the contractors.
“Those Oriental owners don’t know our fair American ways,” Lewis declared, separating himself from the unlicensed sweatshops that did not even bother to post a company name over their workrooms. “That’s why there’re so many damn inspectors now.” He avoided Rosario’s cold stare. “And who the hell can compete with those new shops?” he complained in a sullen mumble.
Soon after, women on the buses were warning about a migra agent terrorizing the garment district, demanding to see the work papers of lone women, “arresting” them, handcuffing them—and raping them and abandoning them miles from the city. That even made the television news—at least three women were known to have been attacked.
So Amalia decided to stay away for a time.
Then Manny returned, a man now. Amalia welcomed him with love and sadness.
He seemed to get along with Raynaldo, quietly—and even Teresa appeared to be growing fond of him. Once she called him “m’ijo”—and Amalia resented it. He did not complain about Teresa’s coughing, though he slept on the floor near her cot.
One night he gave Amalia money, several bills. “I don’t want you to be poor,” he told her. She longed to believe what he told her—that he had gotten a job. And he was gone all day. And not, Amalia assured herself without daring to ask, because he was going back to his old neighborhood.
Another night, when Raynaldo was gone, Manny sat on the floor laughing and playing cards with Gloria and Juan. He kept explaining the rules of the game to them, patiently; but—Amalia saw this and marveled at how wonderful it was to have all her children with her serenely—he was making sure that Gloria would win, and then Juan, and—
Two policemen burst into the house with guns drawn.
Manny stood up with his hands raised. “’Amá—” That’s all he said, a whisper.
Amalia rushed over to hold him. “M’ijo!”
A cop pushed her away roughly.
Manny strained toward her. A cop threw him to the floor, handcuffing him.
In a corner, Amalia held Gloria and Juan.
Amalia sat in a courtroom in the Hall of Justice in downtown Los Angeles and heard her son charged with attempted murder. In that courtroom she came to despise—and she went alone, did not want anyone with her—she learned—for certain, finally—that her son—who listened fascinated as if people there were talking about someone he did not know—dominated one of the toughest gangs in the city, along with Indio, his age. Both were vatos locos, the most reckless. Sometimes he and Indio led others in what seemed to Amalia to be no more than childish pranks—couldn’t they see that?—raiding an orange grove and feasting on fruit; other times they led them into pointless danger, riding a “borrowed car” to the police station, and, horn made to stick, leaving it there as the klika scattered in every direction. On roca or polvo—crack or angel dust—Manny became fearless, one terrified boy testified.
In that courtroom, Amalia discovered a whole other life that belonged to her son: After a series of pleitos with a rival gang—skirmishes that augur a major confrontation—and only minutes after the name of Manny’s gang, scrawled on a wall, was spattered with paint—a car sped by Indio’s house, a shack surrounded by sunflowers—where Manny, Indio, and another boy drank beer, smoked. “From Chuco and his boys!” Those shouted words were followed by three shots. Indio was dead. Manny went, alone, to confront the invaders on their own turf. Backed by his own home boys, the young man named “Chuco”—because a distant relative had been a famous “pachuco”—met him. At the sight of the slight young man standing before them unarmed, they heckled, laughed, taunted.
Manny said to Chuco: “Estás escamado, ése. Te rajas … Even with all your home boys, you’re scared shitless, man. I’m facing you like you couldn’t face Indio, and I don’t even have a gun. No tienes huevos.”
“I don’t have no balls, huh, ése?” Chuco brought out a knife. Lazily he cleaned his nails with it. He said very slowly: “Tu madre está chingada.”
“I’m a son of a what?”
“You heard me.”
It was then that Manny went out of control. He knocked the knife from Chuco’s hand, grabbed it, wrested him to the dirt, and held the knife over his throat.
“Say that again, cabrón, and I’ll kill you.”
When they saw the knife touching Chuco’s throat, the others didn’t move.
Chuco tried to twist away on the ground. The knife tore across his chest in an eruption of blood.
“And all the time he was crying,” the frightened boy who had told that account of the fight said about Manny.
My son was defending me! That was Amalia’s first thought as she sat in that punishing courtroom and heard of the incidents that had led her and her son here. It had happened because Chuco made that ugly insult to a mother. Amalia could not repress a moment of pride out of the pain, pride in her son’s love for her. But quickly that triumph was drowned in the reality of what was occurring in this gray room. It had been an accident. She was sure of that as she stared at her son sitting nearby, looking even younger, a boy, a child. Who could possibly think he had attempted murder?… And if the boy died it would be murder.
When that day’s eternal session was over, Amalia saw her son handcuffed and taken back to jail. He was defending me! This time the pride she was able to extract from that thought was pulled away even more quickly by an overpowering sense of helplessness and sadness, and an anger which spread out to everything.
She stood alone in the corridor outside the courtroom where her son’s life was being reduced to one violent act. It was as if nothing but that existed, not the many times of sweetness that had occurred between her and her son, nothing but the knifing of a stranger nicknamed Chuco, who had killed another stranger named Indio. Amalia was thinking that when a woman in a black-dyed dress held her hand tightly and said passionately:
“Your son was right to go after that savage, that Chuco, who murdered my son.”
Amalia faced Indio’s mother. In that moment, another woman Amalia had seen in the courtroom—a thin, dark Mexican woman with eyes full of loss—looked at them and called out:
“Las gangas, las gangas malditas.”
Amalia recognized her as Chuco’s mother.
The three women nodded, yes, the cursed gangs were to blame. Now Chuco’s mother stood with them, the three women bound by mutual grief. They held one another’s hands. Then the moment passed. They looked away from each other and separated.
Amalia needed to talk to Rosario. Who else would know what to do, what to feel?
“She’s gone,” said Milagros, at the sewing factory.
“Gone? Where?” Amalia believed the absence immediately.
“Who knows? You hear so many stories,” a woman nearby said.
“I told you what happened,” another woman asserted. “Jorge’s disappeared, too. He paid a coyote a thousand dollars to bring his daughter and her husband across the border and the coyote abandoned them, and Jorge killed the coyote, and Rosario took them all in and la migra caught her—”
“No,” a Guatemalan woman said, “Jorge killed one of the men of la migra, the one who found his daughter and her son in the desert and—”
“Whatever,” the Guatemalan woman said. “They caught Rosario.”
“Caught her—?” Amalia was grasping it all instantly, wishing she could disbelieve it, but she remembered that Rosario had told her something like that one day, about a man and woman abandoned in a hovel in the desert by a coyote, and something about Jorge—
“She’s probably in jail,” a Salvadoran woman said, “just like in my country.”
“No, she ran away before they could arrest her,” another woman offered.
“All I know is that I miss her,” Milagros said.
Amalia walked silently away from them.
Milagros followed her to the hall. “Amalia, come and see me, please. To talk.”
Then she knew more about Rosario! Amalia promised and took the address Milagros had scribbled on a piece of paper.
The public attorney appointed to represent Manny told her to get there “an hour early” when she went to visit her son in the Hall of Justice. She arrived even earlier on a sweaty afternoon to find that people were already lined up for a whole block to visit their own inmates. Almost all were women, many with children, several pregnant. Some sat on the sidewalk, on newspapers. Older children attempted to play in the street. Most of those here were Mexicans and black people. Very few were Anglos—only here did Amalia remember them looking out of place.
Along the jagged line, vendors hawked cold drinks, hot dogs, syrupy popcorn.
A slender woman stood hesitantly near her. Amalia saw a look she had come to recognize in the courtrooms on the faces of mothers whose sons were in trouble. “Your son—?”
The woman nodded. “M’ijo, si.”
There was something more in her anxiety, something added, Amalia detected. The woman seemed to want to pull away from her at the same time that she lingered. When they had reached the end of the line, the woman said hurriedly, “I hope everything will turn out right for your … son?”
“Mi’jo” Amalia confirmed.
The woman rushed away.
Only then did Amalia notice that there was another line on the opposite side of the entrance to the Hall of Justice. A younger, pregnant woman in a bright dress noticed Amalia’s confusion. “That other line is for the visitors of the maricones.”
Amalia did not know what to think. She didn’t like homosexuals any more than the next person—sometimes they disgusted her; but why should their families—their mothers, that woman she had just talked to?—be separated as if they shared contamination? “Of course, God does forbid that sternly,” she addressed her own confusion. She remembered the doubled pain on the face of the woman who had fled from her, who was here to see her son. “But that woman—”
“I wouldn’t feel that sorry for her,” the pregnant woman said. “She’s a divorciada.”
A divorced woman! But God understood that, Amalia knew. She had clarified it with Father Ysidro. Now she avoided even glancing at the separated line. She also avoided the pregnant woman, distancing herself by letting two women get ahead of her in the line.
“I’ve been here for two hours,” a black woman said to no one. Her sweat was drenching the child she cradled in her arms. “Hate that building.” She did not even look at the looming Hall of Justice. “Can’t even buy a cold drink.” Her perspiration dripped onto the child’s face, eyes, and he began to cry.
“I don’t even know why my husband is here, and he doesn’t either. We can’t understand what they’re saying,” a Mexican woman complained to everyone.
“Well, I know why mine is here—because he tried to kill me,” another joined in.
“Then why are you here, mujerT
“Who else has he got, woman?”
“My son did not—” an older black woman asserted with indignation.
“—drugs—” … “—resisting arrest—” … “What will we do now?” … “—las gangas—” … “—drogas—” … “—no job—” … “What will we do now?” … “—the police said he—” … “I don’t know why, mujer … “—the gangs—” … “drunk but he—” … “What will we do now?”
As their time in line stretched, the women looked drabber, poorer, more desperate, and their words became one terrible lament punctuated by the crying of children as Amalia waited to see her son.
The line began to move now. At the entrance to the Hall of Justice, two guards checked purses, cleared the visitors. A square-faced woman in uniform—could she be Mexican and work here? Amalia wondered—barked in English and Spanish that they were to surrender “any weapons, knives, guns, drugs” they were carrying. Amalia closed her eyes as if that would allow her to endure. She felt as if she, too, were being incarcerated.
An old rusted elevator took them to another floor. With a jangle of doors, the elevator opened into a bare room drenched in yellowish light. That room led to a larger one, where a series of partitions created small open cubicles; each contained one stool and a telephone. Behind a wall of heavy glass, inmates in blue uniforms were being marched to assigned places before their visitors. Searching urgently for her son, Amalia saw, in another section of the large room and along another row of cubicles, the woman she had spoken to first; she was sitting before a young man dressed in a prison uniform like the others, except that his was bright orange.
Amalia turned away, too overwhelmed by her own grief to deal with anything else. She saw her son. Through the glass pane, he smiled at her, his mouth moving eagerly now, forming words she could not hear through the glass. Then he picked up his telephone, and she picked up hers. How strange to be about to speak to her son through a telephone when they were sitting only inches away, how strange to see him so near and not be able to touch him, hold him, as she longed to. Even his voice had been taken away! she thought, until he spoke into the telephone and she heard on her end of the line his familiar:
“—‘Amá! ‘Amita!”
“M’ijo—”
Then they rushed assurances that they were fine, just fine.
“Everything is going to be okay, ‘Amá,” he asserted. He made motions of kissing her fingers. “I promise.” He converted the thumb and forefinger of his right hand into a cross, which he kissed, a holy vow.
Amalia stared at the place on his hand where the white scar had not entirely obliterated the tattoo of the burning cross. “It was an accident, m’ijo,” she said.
He nodded, deeply.
She was sure she had meant that the near-killing of Chuco was an accident, but she wondered—later—whether her son had been remembering the burn on his hand.
The visit was over, short minutes! The public attorney had told her she could bring a restricted amount of money to her son. She had worked an extra day to manage the maximum, $40. Before a counter in the dirty-lit room through which she had entered, she lined up again in a smaller line with others who had money for their inmates, mostly change, a dollar. She filled out a slip to indicate to whom the money would go, the amount. Behind another glass partition, the inmates had lined up.
Amalia handed her slip and the $40 to a guard. He was wearing plastic gloves! Afraid of what contamination? Amalia saw him give the bills to another guard, who dipped them in water, washing them.
“In case somebody has stuck drugs to the money,” a woman explained to Amalias startled stare.
But Amalia did not care about their reasons now because she saw her son. He was standing behind the glass pane. On a sliding metal tray the money was passed to him through a small opening. He rejected it.
No, he mimed. For you.
Then he kissed his fingertips and extended them to her and she kissed her own and blessed him with a sign of the cross.
From jail, Amalia received a letter from her son.
… I love you with all my heart… I’m goin to do right—I promise in the name of the Blesst Mother you allways comend me to & love so much & who loves you …
Amalia had to stop reading. Each word filled her with love and hurt.
Two men appeared at her house. They were not in uniform, but she recognized them. They had an official look that was cruel even when they were attempting to be kind.
“—that your son Manuel is dead.”
Amalia frowned.
“He committed suicide in his cell.”
“Liars!” Amalia screamed at both men. She felt furious at their lie, the terrible accusation about her son. Sorrow would come later with the awareness of his death, and it would come in huge waves that would inundate her. Now she was enraged.
The men led her to a chair inside the house. Then they walked out.
That night it seemed to Amalia that the world itself had died. She went into her room and did not allow anyone to enter. She pushed her head into a pillow to keep herself from screaming. She lay shivering in the coldness of her own perspiration and tears, which then turned hot. Then the crying would stop. A terrifying stillness would clasp her, the stillness she knew would exist forever in her life, the stilled voice of her son. The sobbing and the tears would convulse her again until there were only sobs without tears, exhausted. She would fall into a terrifying sleep, as if she were awake within total darkness, waking suddenly, again and again, into this terrible realization: My son is dead, I’ll never see him again.
She claimed her son’s body and buried him. She allowed no one with her. She made Raynaldo promise to stay with Gloria and Juan. She stood over the scraped earth and said softly:
“M’ijo.”
And she waited, actually waited, to hear his answer:
“’Amita.”
Then she walked away with a new presence in her life, the absence of her son.
“‘Amá, please don’t be so sad,” Gloria said. Amalia glanced at her daughter. “’Amita,” Juan said.
“Don’t call me that!” Amalia’s body had jolted. “Only my Manny called me that, that was his name for me.”
Juan retreated. Gloria stood next to him.
Amalia saw the hurt on their faces. She reached out for both of her children. Their tense bodies did not entirely surrender to her. “I do want you to call me ‘Amita,” she said, but she knew she was pleading to her dead son.
In those days it seemed to her that she could not even “see” her two other children. Oh, it wasn’t that she didn’t see them, really. It was just that she wasn’t clearly aware of them. She realized this when, suddenly arriving home from work—and she continued to work fiercely—she would see Gloria and catch her looking at her in a certain way she could not remember before. Or was it that something else was different about her? Not the added lipstick, the teased hair, the new fullness of her breasts. A look.
And Juan. She saw him across the street one day, idling, as he had begun to now that he no longer laughed as often—when had he stopped?—and she thought, What a handsome young man; why is he so sad?—before she realized he was her son.
Now there were the endless reports concerning Manny’s death. The return of the clothes. Infernal visits to the public attorney—and she insisted to Raynaldo that she did not want anyone with her.
This is what was claimed: In jail, Manny had threatened two guards who had come to quiet his screaming. When they tried to handcuff him, he pulled one bound hand away and lashed at the face of one of them, drawing blood. The city psychiatrist to whom he was taken ordered that he be placed in a “behavior observation module” because of “unstable comportment.” Instead he was put into an isolated cell.
“So they could murder him,” Amalia told the attorney. “They choked him with his shirt.” She read him Manny’s letter, portions of it. “Is that the letter of someone who’s going to kill himself?” Even those words tasted ugly to her. “They killed him.”
The attorney agreed. “It’s possible, God knows it’s happened before. And there were irregularities in the report. I’m asking for an investigation by—”
“No,” Amalia said firmly. She had come only to assert the truth, what she knew, to have it confirmed. And it had been. “I know what happened and so do you. Those men would just keep on lying, and then there would be others who would support them, and nothing would come of it. I don’t want any more lies pulling at my son’s life. I don’t want any more pain added to his memory.”
The attorney said he would write her about any “pending matters.”
“I don’t want to hear about them,” Amalia said.
Teresa shouted at her: “He let himself be killed rather than come back to you with all your men!”
“Liar!” Juan screamed at her.
“Liar!” Gloria cried.
Amalia slapped her mother.
Teresa staggered back. Then she began to chant loudly a prayer for the dead.
“Cruel liar!” Amalia yelled at her mother. “Listen to his letter to me.” She pulled out the letter she had read from over and over. “‘My dearest mamacita—’” She could read only a few more words: “‘I love you with all my heart—’” before she gasped and stopped.
Throughout, Raynaldo stood by her, but she was remote. He was gone more often on overnight hauls, perhaps to honor her repeated assertion that she must be left alone. During that period, Amalia felt dazed. Everything and everyone seemed to move before her without a sound that she could understand. She heard words Juan uttered—and Gloria—of consolation, of sadness. And cries. She heard Teresa’s whispered prayers.
Only later would she become aware that Juan was talking tough now—and any gang would welcome him because of the defiant glow they would attribute to his brother. She would realize, later, that boys came to see Gloria and she went out. She would deal with all that soon, when these darkest days would end, this eternal time saturated with Manny’s death, a time during which he died over and over in the isolated jail cell, alone.
Sometimes—she would realize this only after it happened—Juan would suddenly hug her and Gloria would rest her head on her lap. But Amalia could find nothing to say to them that would not add to her awareness that Manny was not there.
She worked frenziedly, taking extra jobs, staying late, getting up before dawn.
And she prayed to the Blessed Mother.
At dinner she realized Juan had been hiding a plate of food. He took it out. She followed him to a dilapidated garage behind the court. He was about to pry open loose boards.
“Who’s in there, Juan?”
He seemed about to turn away.
Amalia entered the dark garage. Among broken fixtures and car parts discarded there, a young man sat on a blanket spread out on the dirt. He was about seventeen, about Juan’s age, Mexican, or deeply tanned.
“The dude goes to my school,” Juan used his tough new voice. “He ran away.” The posturing voice faded. “He was sleeping in the alley, ‘Amá. I told him about this garage.”
Amalia looked at the boy. Was he a runaway?—she knew young people were sleeping in parks and in the streets now. Or was he a gang member, hiding because of something he had done? On drugs? He looked frightened.
“Give him the food,” Amalia said to Juan.
The young man took it, began eating.
“After he eats, he’ll have to leave. I don’t want any more trouble than I have,” Amalia told her son.
As if used to flight, the young man gathered a few belongings scattered on the dirt.
“Go back to your mother,” Amalia said to him, “I’m sure she misses you.”
“He doesn’t have anyone!” Juan shouted at her. “He’s from El Salvador.”
Then the boy wasn’t from school. Amalia was startled by Juan’s angered tone, his words.
The young man left the blanket on the ground. He touched Juan briefly on both shoulders. He left, glancing back once more.
“He reminded me of Manny, when he ran away, that time, remember?” Juan turned away from her quickly. He picked up the blanket from the ground.
Remember? How could she forget? She remembered everything about her dead son—and, yes, the Salvadoran boy had resembled him; he had the same look of bewildered innocence her son had never lost.
That night Amalia thought she had screamed, but it must have been a nightmare because nobody heard her.
A few days after—when Raynaldo was away for the night—she came home late from work and threw herself in bed, exhausted. She fell asleep immediately for the first time since Manny’s death.
Teresa’s coughing wakened her. Amalia screamed: “Stop it! I have to work tomorrow. Stop it!” The coughing weakened, stopped.
Amalia heard her children stirring. She walked barefoot on the cold floor, telling Gloria and Juan to go back to sleep. In the converted porch, she saw her mother propped on her pillow, the way she slept to secure her breathing, control the gasping cough. Teresa’s gauzy eyes were open. Amalia went back to bed.
In the morning she found her mother in the same position, eyes still open. Teresa was dead. Now Amalia would have to make arrangements to deal with this new death. So she was glad she had managed to fall asleep again last night, to get a full night’s peaceful rest at last.