Los Angeles-October 1989.
Arturo found a job changing tires in an auto shop and, soon after, he and Luz moved into a small apartment. She began to earn her living by cleaning houses during the week, but on Saturday and Sunday she helped out in the church kitchen, preparing food for the new arrivals. Over the years Luz became an essential part of Casa Andrade. Her contagious laughter echoed in the hallways, and her words of consolation and encouragement often helped to dispel the anxieties of the growing number of refugees who knocked at the doors of Saint Turibius.
One late evening, as the sun’s waning rays filtered through the west windows of their apartment, Luz and Arturo were conversing about their work at Casa Andrade. The sounds of cars and pedestrians had quieted down, and the white curtains listlessly floated back and forth in the breeze of the early night. Without a warning, the front door suddenly crashed open, and five men burst into the apartment. They rushed to where Luz and Arturo were sitting. Two of them had handkerchiefs over their faces. The others wore Halloween masks, rubbery, grotesque visages.
It happened so quickly that Luz and Arturo were stunned. They froze in their seats, paralyzed with fear. Seconds seemed an eternity, and Luz’s eyes bulged with terror and incomprehension, while her lips quivered in an attempt to utter words that stuck in her throat. Sickened by the masked faces, she began to vomit. White liquid squeezed out the sides of her mouth. Arturo grasped what was happening sooner than Luz. Springing forward, he attempted to resist the attack by thrusting his body, arms outstretched, towards the intruders. But it was useless. The men grabbed his arms and legs, twisting and pulling at each limb. Luz heard the crunch of bones and moaning that spilled from Arturo’s lips, but the shouting of his attackers was drowning out his cries.
“¡Hijo de tu puta madre!”
“¡Que te joda el diablo!”
Their hoarse insults and screams were soon drowned out by the blasts of rapid gunfire. The explosions filling the air canceled out everything for Luz. They erased thought, destroyed feeling, killed all hope. It took only seconds, and in that brief interval, Luz understood the speed of smoke and fire. Her eyes relayed to her brain the efficiency with which a gun can kill. She was blinded by the flames jetting out of the assassins’ weapons as they pumped death into Arturo’s body. For Luz, the shots that spilled from those guns were the split tongues of snakes, lethal and poisonous, and their spewing was devouring Arturo, taking him from her. She witnessed Arturo being butchered as if he were a pig or a rabid dog.
Then the detonations stopped, and as abruptly as they had appeared, the intruders abandoned the apartment. When the grayish smoke lifted to the ceiling, Luz found herself alone. She sat on the floor, her legs stretched forward, rigidly spread apart as she held Arturo’s body in her arms. Her elbows dripped with blood, and she moaned and wept, as she rocked back and forth on her haunches. Momentarily stunned out of her mind, Luz let out a lament, a mournful cradle song for a dead son. As she hummed, she stared straight ahead, her blank eyes riveted on the bloody hand print tattooed on the white wall.
When the police entered Luz’s apartment, it was difficult for them to process what had taken place. Rounds of machine gun bullets were extracted from the walls, ceiling and floor but the investigators were unable to come up with logical reasons for the brutality or to understand why the man had been senselessly slaughtered while the woman had gone unharmed. Their questions remained unanswered, and the police had only Luz’s mute stare and slouched body with which to contend because she was unable to speak. The police were left to decipher the evidence on their own: a room ripped to shreds by gun fire, the body of a young man nearly dismembered, and the enigma of a bloody hand print plastered on the wall.
“Tell us who did it.”
“Señora, we can help if you tell us what you know.”
“How many were they?”
“What did they look like?”
“Did they take anything of value?”
Luz responded to this question only. “They took my son Arturo.”
When the news of Arturo’s death hit Saint Turibius, the priests and several volunteers rushed to the police station to help Luz. The police explained that she had said very little. Since they were unable to extract any information from her beyond the name of her son, the investigators concluded that she had undergone a stroke, or perhaps a mental break-down, and she was taken to the County Hospital. Insofar as the crime was concerned, the report stated that the department was unwilling to accept the bloody hand print found at the scene as evidence. It was construed as a trick meant to mislead the investigation. The crime was officially recorded as gang related and designated to be pursued by normal channels.
During the hospital examination, Luz remained silent even though the police resumed their interrogation.
“Do the priests and those other people know who might have done this to your son?”
“Why are they insisting that your son’s death was not gang related? What makes them say that, Señora?”
“If it wasn’t the punks, then who in the Hell was it? And why?”
“Was your son on drugs? Did he peddle junk?”
“Your friends want to take you back to the church, but you understand that we can’t allow that, don’t you?”
Luz’s general examination failed to disclose evidence of physical injuries or of a mental break-down, and she was released. Meanwhile, the police gave up on using her as a resource, so her case was turned over to the immigration authorities who submitted her to further questioning. She failed to answer the officials’ questions regarding her documentation, and she was unable to provide proof of legal residency and was declared an illegal alien subject to immediate deportation.
Luz didn’t care about what was happening to her because she had plummeted deep into a solitary world. After the police finished interrogating her, and the nurses and doctors finished probing her body, her soul fled. By the time the immigration agents asked for her papers, Luz’s spirit had taken shelter in a niche that no one could find. Only she could hear herself speak.
“Bernabé, where are you, my son?”she kept asking. “Was it Arturo they killed, or was it you? And why is everything around me in ruins? Everything is black.”
The priests of Casa Andrade and the staff did everything possible to have Luz released. They spent hours on the telephone, calling supporters who were influential with city officials and business people but nothing worked. Luz was indeed to be deported. She was taken to the detention center on a gray November day. Just before she boarded the bus that would take her to Tijuana, one of the Casa Andrade workers handed her a wad of dollar bills. “Buena suerte, Doña Luz. I hope our paths cross one day soon,” he said.
As the bus sped southbound on the freeway, Luz was weeping, and mumbling under her breath. “I’ll never return to this place of death,” she swore to herself. “Never! Never! Arturo, my son, why did they kill you? Will they now be able to get away with your death?”
Luz paused, then went on, “And Bernabé, where are you? I swear I’ll find you, my son. I will! And when I have you in my arms once more, we’ll never, ever be separated again!”