I was seventeen.
One of the two local newspapers, the El Paso Times, gave me a scholarship, fifty dollars for tuition to attend the small college that adjoined the vast desert surrounding the city. It was called Texas College of Mines and Metallurgy. Although it had a few liberal arts departments, it specialized in courses for engineers. Its rugged campus—we had to climb stony hills to get to the classrooms—appeared at times to be taken over by lanky cowboys from the interior of Texas, and by their blond girlfriends, who, it seemed to me, had come only to join one of the several sororities there.
Still, there were some good professors, most of whom had chosen the warm climate because of lingering illnesses; a few came here to die.
Dr. Sonnichsen, the head of the English department, was a graduate of Harvard. I never found out what had brought him here to this cowboyish college; perhaps it was his lusty Mexican wife. In his strict classes, I was introduced to a gallery of classical writers who would influence me in various ways: Milton, Pope, Dryden, Donne, Swift, and, eventually, James Joyce. Those led me by circuitous routes to others: Rimbaud, Verlaine, Djuna Barnes, Robinson Jeffers, Gertrude Stein. Concurrently I punctuated my literary explorations by reading, and enormously enjoying, famous best sellers: Kings Row, Gone with the Wind, The Strange Woman, Leave Her to Heaven, The Foxes of Harrow—those books, with their splashes of Technicolor prose, also influenced me.
For Dr. Sonnichsen, I wrote a paper upholding that Milton was on the side of the rebellious angels. I received, reputedly, the only A he had ever awarded. Eventually he would encourage me to take, long before it was ordinarily expected, just before the granting of a degree, the comprehensive English literature examination he had established as a requirement. I passed it easily when I was a sophomore.
I did not, however, fare as well with Dr. Ponsford, a woman with a face like a mask framed in dyed black hair; she was unbelievably white, and her one expression, etched disdain, seemed never to change. She forbade me to write a term paper about Marie Antoinette—“too vast a topic.” In an earlier lecture she had informed us that we could narrow a subject by introducing it with “On.” I wrote the paper about Marie Antoinette and titled it: “On Marie Antoinette.” With her usual sneer, Dr. Ponsford surprised me by granting me an A.
As part of my journalism scholarship, I would be employed at the city newspaper as copyboy after school, sometimes on the late shift, until midnight, alternating with another college student. That allowed me to leave the laundry call office and avoid Mr. and Mrs. David Kippan, who had continued to lurk around me.
My father hardly ever worked now, having secured some kind of meager “pension.” He continued to drum his fingers on his desk to unheard music, still venting his anger in curses, muttered and shouted, against me and my mother.
Neither the scholarship nor what I would earn at the newspaper, fifteen dollars a week, was enough to pay for all the college requirements, or even for the used textbooks I intended to buy. Although by now he had a wife and son to support, my brother Robert, was determined that I, as “the smart one,” must attend college; he would pay whatever I could not afford.
Even with what I earned and what my brother Robert continued to contribute, we could not afford the monthly rent for the run-down house just barely on the “good” side of El Paso. There was nothing to do but apply for a unit in the government projects on the South Side of the city. Because in El Paso many Mexican families were just making do, all the units were occupied. It was through my popular brother’s contacts that we were able to move in.
Now I lived in the Second Ward, the section of the city identified as the “poor Mexican section.”
The units were identical, boxlike, glued to each other. In front of each there was a concrete block, a mockery of a tiny porch. Grass had died from a lack of expensive water; weeds patched the dirt. Even in summer, trees there bore few leaves; their trunks and branches were grayish-brown. Garbage spilled out of inadequate cans that were quickly filled, secured with chains to a wire enclosure.
The few pieces of furniture we owned were lugged in by me and my brothers. My father’s large, once grand desk did not fit in our unit. My brother took it with him to “store” … somewhere.
When we were moved into a “family unit” of two floors, I stood in the room upstairs that would be mine and I looked outside through the window, studying the desolation of the doggedly identical units. Instead of coming closer to the house on Montana Street that I had sat in front of, pretending to be rich, we had moved downward. The only next step would have been the tenements just blocks away, flimsy, sweaty structures propped on stilts, tired walls pasted over with tattered posters of movies that played at the Teatro Colón, the only Mexican movie house.
With intact dignity, my mother settled into the projects. She continued to dress impeccably, altering her clothes as they became old, adding something here, taking something off there as she pumped at the pedal of her ancient sewing machine. Even just to go to the corner store that specialized in Mexican goods, she wore a hat and gloves, which she kept immaculate, drying them flat on a shelf. She became a beloved figure among the neighbors, all Mexicans, like a benevolent queen, always smiling. The neighbors never addressed her in the familiar form, tu; it was always usted—and it was always as Señora Rechy, never by a first name, as they addressed each other.
Knowing how deeply the move into the government projects, a defeat, had affected me, my mother tried to cheer me up. She pointed out that the government units were equipped with a washing machine, hot water, and other improvements we could otherwise not afford. She decorated the rooms as best as she could—with curtains she made, a tablecloth she had embroidered—making them a grand setting for a poor queen. Young “gangy” Mexicans—whose older forebears had been called pachucos—looked at me skeptically, as if wondering what I was doing in their territory. They, as well as the other residents of the projects, assumed that I was Anglo, like my father, and that he and I were the only “Americans” in the whole neighborhood.
Especially now, I told no one from my “other life”—at work, at school—where I lived. I now gave as my own the address of my older sister, Blanca, who lived with her husband in an attractive white house near Grandview Park. A pretty vine flowered over the front porch, which was edged by grass, trimmed.
I didn’t want to take the bus to college; that seemed like a further decline. Whether my brother Robert understood this or not, he offered me his car. He would come by early in the morning and I would drive him to work at the lens-grinding factory and then drive on to college. Sometimes I would pick him up later; most of the time he drove home with a coworker. When he couldn’t come by for me, I would run across town, across the railroad tracks that separated the city, into the section we had moved from. Halfway up the hill that I had walked to go to high school, I would hitchhike to the college, getting a ride easily from other students.
At night I lay in bed, hot from the intense heat of the airless day, and I knew I had to move my mother out of the projects. I would buy her a house of her own, out of the neighborhood that branded us as poor Mexicans.
Today my brother needed his car.
After classes, I hitchhiked from the college to the center of the city, running across the tracks, to the projects. It was not a particularly hot day, but when I reached our unit—always an assault, the brick cracker box we now lived in, in line with all the others, blocks and blocks of them—I was perspiring and hot, my shirt open and moist.
I walked in. There they were, the malicious aunts. I considered walking out. But my mother had already greeted me and the aunts were leaning expectantly toward me, smiles slashed across their haggard faces. No doubt about it, one was just as ugly as the other. How the same parents who had produced them had produced my lovely mother was a mystery to me.
“Hijo! Son!” they addressed me. I winced; it annoyed me that they were related to me even as aunts.
“Hi.” I started to walk up to the second level, to take a bath—there were no showers, just a clean bathtub.
“We were just remarking to Lupe,” one of them said in a tone steeped in artificial caring, “how wonderful it is of El Paso to provide such nice shelter for the poor.”
I inhaled, all that I was capable of doing at that moment.
“Yes,” said the other aunt, “and, Lupe, you’ve done so much to make it pretty—different from all the other units that look exactly the same from the outside, and, we suppose, inside.”
“Thank you,” my mother said, her eyes steady on me. I had not moved. Perspiration was turning cold on my body.
“What do the neighbors think about your American husband?” one asked my mother, but her smile was aimed, knifing, at me.
“I suppose—no es así?—that he’s the only … americano … in the projects.”
“We wonder how he feels about that?” the other one fired, and drew her smile away from my mother and on to me in judgment.
I wanted to rebut, to answer her hateful questions with something cruel. For once, I wished that my father would appear, that he would shout them away for judging him when he had already been judged so harshly by circumstances.
Sweating even more from the rage I felt, my breathing harsh, I was finally able to say to them: “You’ve always been jealous of my mother because you’re so damned ugly and she’s beautiful.” Not enough yet, not enough. “Y no se aperescan aquí jamás. Don’t ever come back again!” Not yet enough. “Cabronas!” I hurled the harshest word I could think of in Spanish, a word blunt beyond its actual meaning—something like bastards, damned bitches, but much, much more.
“Guadalupe!” one screamed over at my mother. She dabbed at tears, which were not flowing.
“Did you hear what your son called us?” the other asked. They were both sobbing extravagantly now.
“He called you cabronas,” my mother said softly, “and that’s what you are. Know this: We Rechys carry our pride with us wherever we live.” She turned her head and looked at me. “Don’t we, m’ijo?” she said.
When at the checkout desk of the college library, I asked for a play by García Lorca, whom Dr. Sonnichsen had mentioned, the librarian, Baxter Polk, introduced himself to me, offering to order whatever was not then available. He was a tall, slender man with mesmerizing eyes.
One afternoon, he told me that he wanted to show me a collection of foreign plays he had just acquired for the library, some books that might interest me. We stepped down laddered steps to the bowels of the building.
From a sparsely filled shelf, he pulled out a book and held it out to me. I took it. I saw a photograph of two excessively handsome men, both blond, about to kiss each other, their hands touching. Twins. No, not twins, or even two men. The photograph was of one man facing a mirror, as if about to kiss himself.
I looked away from the photograph. Mr. Polk’s eyes were so intent on me that I pulled back.
“He’s very beautiful, isn’t he, John?” he asked me. His gaze held, unblinking.
I had never before heard a man referred to as “beautiful.” “He’s handsome, yes,” I said. “But I don’t see—” I wasn’t sure what I had been about to say.
“His name is Jean Marais,” Mr. Polk said. “I thought you would be interested.”
“I’ve never heard of him, and I’m not interested in him,” I said. I thrust the book back at him, thrust away the image of the blond man.
Mr. Polk took the book and held it close to himself, as if to warm his heart with it. “Oh, I didn’t mean that, oh, no, no, not that at all, I meant you might be interested in the play, the writer of it,” he said with a sly look at me, his gaze probing. “It’s Cocteau’s Orphée. Marais is the star of the film. I’ve noticed the books you’ve been checking out—”
“Mostly Lorca,” I said.
“—and I thought you might want to broaden your … literary … horizons.”
“I’d like to read the play,” I said.
Mr. Polk held the book out to me again, like a precious gift not to be rejected; but instead of surrendering it to me, he put his hand on my shoulder. I pretended to reach out for another book on a nearby shelf so I could move away.
“I must introduce you to a girl you must meet,” Mr. Polk said.
I met Barbara in Mr. Polk’s office a few days later, a very pretty girl, about my age, perhaps slightly older, eighteen.
“Barbara, this is Johnny, Johnny, this is Barbara.” Mr. Polk bowed individually before each of us.
I assumed that his referring to me as “Johnny” was meant to indicate fondness, although, increasingly, I disliked the boyish name.
“Hello, Johnny,” Barbara said.
She said the name so immediately fondly that I didn’t mind it from her. Mr. Polk stood back, as if reeling from the spectacle of both of us. “My God!” He touched his cheek in posed amazement. “You two aren’t only enamored of the same writer—”
“Lorca?” Barbara asked me.
With an especially intricate configuration of gestures that seemed to be outlining our forms and bringing them together, Mr. Polk finished his propped exclamation, “You even look alike.”
I recognized the girl then. She had aroused talk around the campus by having resigned from one of the college’s most popular sororities, whose members were attractive and well-off girls.
Barbara and I now met often on campus, by conscious coincidence. We would go to the student union building at a certain time between classes. We would sit at one of the many plastic tables, a checkerboard of shiny colors, and drink coffee and talk exuberantly about Lorca. We agreed that we would translate Lorca’s Bodas de Sangre (Blood Wedding) from its original Spanish into English, finding all other translations—we had each read one—“inadequate.”
To seal the agreement, we shook hands, and then I elaborately kissed one of her hands, feeling immediately silly—but welcoming the memory of the transient who had long ago kissed my mother’s hand.
“Wait now,” Barbara said. “Do you know Spanish?”
“My mother is Mexican,” I said.
As we began our translation in the college library before I would go off to my job at the newspaper, I soon noticed this about her: One moment she was exuberant, joyful; and then without warning, a look of sadness shaded her face. Her words trailing off, she seemed to withdraw into a private place of her own. When that happened, I would simply wait for the excited pretty girl to come back, as she always did within moments of the fleeting mood.
At times, when I was with her, the memory of Isabel Franklin would return. Why? There was no point of reconciliation between her and Barbara that I could find. In disappearing from El Paso, why had Isabel Franklin not diminished in importance in my life?
Because of my scholarship, I was eventually appointed by the journalism faculty to the staff of the college magazine, which was called, appropriately, El Burro, The Donkey. It was a paying job—twenty-five dollars a month. That and my job as copyboy augmented the money I contributed at home.
The editor of the college publication was a young man whose face was a field of pimples and who seemed always to be laughing hysterically at some new joke or cartoon he was clipping out to borrow from another college publication. Borrowed jokes filled the several pages of the glossy magazine. “Listen to this one! It’s the best,” he praised each joke.
Besides me and him, there were five others on the staff: a girl who seemed to have a permanent cold and, as far as I could see, did nothing; a “writer,” a sullen young man who wrote funny captions; a photographer, who took photographs only of sports events and fraternity and sorority parties; and two “reporters,” both males, who wrote flat captions to accompany the photographs.
At the end of the semester, the clowning editor left the college. I was appointed by the faculty board—Mr. Polk was a member—as editor. That position would pay more, thirty dollars a month. Despite my job at the newspaper—and the ongoing translation of Lorca with Barbara—I accepted this new job gladly. I was determined to convert the magazine into something much better when I published my first edition, the previous editor having completed an issue yet to appear featuring “Best Jokes and Cartoons from El Burro.”
My announced position as editor immediately gave me a certain prominence on the campus. It must have contributed to my becoming friends with two very popular young men at the college.
I was working out on the parallel bars in the gym, thinking I was alone because it was early in the morning, when I noticed another young man entering. He worked out briefly with a couple of dumbbells. When I was leaving, he introduced himself.
“Scott.”
He was blond, with a gymnast’s body, and he was good-looking. We left the gym to go to the student union building “for coffee.” Nervously, not knowing why, I hoped Barbara wouldn’t be there. Scott introduced me to his best friend, who was waiting there for him. “Ross, this is John. John—Ross.”
Ross was a school wrestler, compactly built, a fact he emphasized by twisting his head as if to unwind from some intense activity, rubbing his muscles as if to obviate any new soreness. When he walked, he kept his arms a few inches from his torso, to emphasize his wide lats. Both he and Scott were in what was considered the “best” fraternity on the campus—and the most exclusive.
As the three of us were sitting in the student union building, Barbara walked in. She saw me and I saw her. Pretending—I was sure of this—that she had just remembered something, she walked out.
“What were you doing with those guys?” she asked me bluntly as we sat in the library during our next meeting to discuss whether we would emphasize life or death in our definitive translation of Blood Wedding—and pondering what to do with the “moon” imagery.
“They’re my friends,” I said, ready to be defensive but realizing how unlikely the friendship might seem.
“Have they asked you to join their fraternity?”
We had never discussed her dropping out of her sorority; the cause was still a subject of speculation. The suspected reasons I had heard ranged from her being crazy to her being pregnant. I saw no evidence of either.
“No,” I said, “they haven’t.” It was a ridiculous thought; I could certainly not afford what participating in a fraternity, especially that fraternity, would entail; joining didn’t interest me at all.
“I wonder why they might want you,” Barbara asked.
“What the hell does that mean?” I stood up.
“That you’re too smart for that kind of bullshit,” she said. I couldn’t think of anything to rebut; I was searching for something that had to do with her having been in a sorority, but I could find nothing because she had, notoriously, left it.
“Do they know you’re Mexican?” she asked.
Struggling to contain my anger at her, I sat down again and returned my attention to Lorca and the moon imagery.
Since they had seen me and Barbara in the student union building, Scott and Ross suggested we all go out together on a date on Saturday.
“No doubt about it, man, she’s beautiful, a little strange,” Scott said about Barbara.
“Yes,” I agreed, “she’s beautiful, and very smart.”
“Smart don’t matter,” Ross laughed. “Dumb and pretty, that’s my choice.”
With trepidation I asked Barbara to go out with me and my two new friends and their girlfriends, certain she would say no; that way I could back out of the plan. She surprised me by saying yes. I felt trapped into going.
My new friends agreed to pick me up in Scott’s father’s car, a roomy Lincoln. I gave them my sister Blanca’s address as my own. I took the bus there earlier. My sister was surprised by my unexpected visit, but she welcomed it. I told her some friends were picking me up there because they lived nearby; did she mind? I know she suspected nothing else—unlike my sister Olga, who would have immediately been on to what I was doing. I sat on the flowery-vined front porch and waited.
Scott and Ross had already picked up their girlfriends; just as I had expected, both of the girls were cheery and giggly and pretty. Whether they were smart or not, the vapid conversation would not reveal. We drove to pick up Barbara. I was in a good mood at the prospect of extending my relationship with her in this way; we would be allies, even saboteurs of the girls’ inanity, almost predetermined.
Barbara’s mother was watering the lawn of a two-story, recently painted house. She was a drawn, thin, woman, unsmiling when she saw me get out of the car. I thought of Virginia Taylor’s mother, and my aborted date with her daughter; I considered pulling back.
“Is Barbara home, ma’am?”—of course she would be; I just wanted to acknowledge the presence of the harsh woman, and for her to acknowledge mine.
Not possible! The water spouting from her hose was nearing where I was standing. There was no way that she would be directing the water at me. A spray wet my shoes. I dodged back uncertainly, not wanting her to think I suspected she might be attempting to wet me. But she was—there was no question of her intent as the water came closer. I pulled back far beyond the water’s reach. The arcing water swirled before me.
I shouted into the house, “Barbara! I’m here!”
The woman jerked the water hose away, turning her back on me. Barbara ran out. She did not look at her mother. Wordlessly, she got into the car. Scott and his girlfriend were in front; Barbara, Ross and his girlfriend, and I attempted to squeeze into the back, Ross emphasizing his impressive size by turning sideways, front again, sideways—“I’m just too big,” he kept saying—until his girlfriend volunteered to sit in front.
After I had introduced Barbara—“Hello,” “Hi,” “How’reya, Barbara?”—Ross’s girlfriend said to Barbara, “Aren’t you—?”
“Yes,” Barbara said, smiling, very pleasantly “I am.”
“Oh.”
I wanted to laugh. Whatever the girl had been about to ask her, Barbara had defused the question, obviating any unpleasant possibility.
But not entirely. Scott’s girl seemed to clarify: “We’re Chi Omega.” she said—that was the other highly desirable sorority on campus.
“Oh.” Barbara said.
It was a relief to be in the movie theater, where we didn’t have to say anything; we saw a musical with Betty Grable and John Payne. Later, at a popular coffee shop, the two sorority girls talked between themselves about nothing. I tried to make conversation with Barbara—I don’t even remember about what. She was withdrawing from all of us, so that I wondered, Why the hell did she agree to come? Ross and Scott were talking about weightlifting—“How much do you press now?”—and suggesting that I take it up soon with them.
The disastrous evening ended when we drove Barbara home. I got out with her. Her mother stood like a guard at the door. Barbara and I said good night. I considered kissing her, but she had already walked into the house, past her mother, as silently as she had left.
Had she agreed to go out with all of us only to get away from her mother?—and to persuade me to split away from Ross and Scott and their cheerful banalities?
When I returned to the car, Ross and Scott were kissing their girlfriends hotly. I considered walking back to my sister’s house where they had picked me up.