B0061QB04W EBOK (10 page)

Back then, I didn’t know that Guerrero was the Mexican state with the most people emigrating due to the scarcity of jobs. I hadn’t known that a year before he left, my father had already been leaving home to find construction work in Acapulco, Mexico City, even
as far as Mazatlán, Sinaloa, until eventually making his way farther north.

At first, he had lived in California’s Central Valley and had slept in an abandoned car while working in the fields harvesting crops, just as he had done in his youth. Eventually he left to try his luck in Los Angeles, where he was fortunate enough to find himself a stable job as a maintenance worker at a retirement home.

Four years after my father left for the United States, and two years after my mother left, the construction of our house finally began. Back then, I interpreted this to mean one thing—Papi and Mami would soon be back!

Abuela Evila gave my father a piece of her property, which meant that our house was going to be built right next to hers. It wasn’t something Mago, Carlos, and I were happy about. Who wanted to live next to Abuela Evila? Not us. But because it would cut down on the final costs, it was the only option my parents had. Besides, as he would later tell me, my father had helped his parents pay for the mortgage on their property with the wages he had earned since he was nine years old. Really, it was only fair for him to get a piece of that land. If only he had realized he was making a mistake, building a house on a property that was not under his name.

Workers came early one morning to tear down the outhouse and the shack in which I was born. Both the shack and the outhouse were made of bamboo sticks, so it didn’t take long to get rid of them. I stood there watching, sad that my little shack was being destroyed. Mago put an arm around me and said, “Just think about what is going to be built right there on that spot.”

The workers returned the next day and the day after and the day after and began to lay the foundation, and after that, the walls. As soon as school let out, Mago, Carlos, and I would run down the hill to help out as much as we could. Abuelo Augurio handed each of us a bucket, and we carried bucketfuls of gravel and mortar. Carlos worked especially hard. He liked working side by side with Abuelo Augurio. He wanted our grandfather to be proud of him for being quick and steady, not like us girls who were too slow and clumsy with the bricks and the buckets of mortar. But Abuelo Augurio didn’t pay much attention to Carlos.

We scraped our fingers carrying bricks. At night we couldn’t sleep from being so sore, but every day we put all of our energy into building our house, and when our fingers hurt too much, or our knees wanted to buckle under the weight of the buckets of wet mortar we carried to the bricklayers, we would tell ourselves that the faster we worked, the faster we would have a family again. That thought gave us strength.

But it wasn’t long before the workers stopped coming. By the time February came to an end, and Carlos turned nine, the workers were nowhere in sight. Abuela Evila said our parents had no more money, so the house had to wait. We stood by the door every morning before going to school, hoping to see the truck that brought the construction workers bumping and jerking its way down the dirt road. Then we headed to school, where all we did was look out the window and sigh the hours away, leaning our sorrow on our elbows.

By the end of the week, Mago stopped looking down the dirt road. She pushed Carlos and me up the hill and told us that it didn’t matter anyway. She said that no matter how many bricks and buckets of mortar we helped carry to the bricklayers, the house would never be done because it was just a foolish dream, just as silly as our dream of having a real family again.

“It will get finished!” Carlos said. “They will come back!” He took off running up the hill, and by the time we got to the gate of our school, he was nowhere in sight.

When we got back from school, I went inside my grandfather’s room to look at the Man Behind the Glass. “How much longer?” I asked him. “How much longer will you be gone?” As always, there was no answer.

9

S
CORPIONS HAD ALWAYS
been a part of our lives. We were taught by Mami to check our shoes before putting them on in the morning and to search our bedcovers at night to make sure there were no scorpions in the folds. We had to shake our clothes before putting them on. We couldn’t lean against walls. We couldn’t reach into the wardrobe or drawers without fear of being stung by a scorpion hiding in the dark.

But at night, while you’re sleeping, there’s nothing you can do to keep a scorpion from crawling up onto the bed or, as in Abuelita Chinta’s case when she died in 2002, you can’t keep a scorpion from falling from the ceiling and stinging you.

So the night I woke up screaming for Mami, I recognized the pain right away from the two previous times I’d gotten stung. My right butt cheek burned as if I’d been branded by a red hot poker like
the cows at the dairy farm down the road from my grandmother’s house.

“Mami! Mami!” I yelled.

“Nena, what’s wrong?” Mago asked.

“Scorpion,” I said.

Mago ran out of the room to get help. Carlos jumped out of bed and stayed by my side but didn’t touch me, as if he were afraid the scorpion would sting him, too. My grandfather kept on snoring and didn’t wake up to help.

“Mami!” I cried out again. My mother didn’t come to my side. Instead, it was my aunt who came running into the room, asking me where it hurt.

The scorpion was hidden on the collar of my dress, and when Tía Emperatriz pulled it off, I felt another sting on my neck. The pain spread up, pulsing in waves from my neck to my shoulders and up to my face.

“Mago, go slice an onion and get the rubbing alcohol!” Tía Emperatriz said. Mago ran to the kitchen while my aunt and Carlos hunted for the scorpion because the locals believed that if you killed the scorpion that stung you, its venom wouldn’t be as powerful. But they couldn’t find it.

“What’s all the fuss about?” Abuela Evila said as she stood by the door. When Tía Emperatriz told her about the scorpion, Abuelita Evila glanced around the room. “There it is,” she said, pointing to the straw-colored scorpion crawling high up on the wall, barely visible in the weak light from the bare bulb hanging above us. Everyone gasped as it squeezed its flat body through a crevice between the adobe bricks and disappeared from sight.

Tía Emperatriz rubbed alcohol over the stung areas and then tied the onion slices on them with strips of cloth. Tears bathed my face, and I felt as if a thousand hot needles were piercing my body. My face, my hands, and my feet were becoming numb. She sent Mago back to the kitchen for an egg, which she then forced me to swallow. It felt like a big ball of mucus sliding down my throat. Tía Emperatriz said the raw egg would dilute the venom. Back then I didn’t know any better than to believe this, so I made the knot in my throat loosen so the egg could slide down.

“We need to take her to the doctor,” Mago said as she sat next to me and squeezed my hand.

“There’s no money for that,” Abuela Evila responded.

“The venom might not do much harm, now that she’s eaten the raw egg,” Tía Emperatriz said. “Besides, look at you, Mago, when you’ve been stung, it’s as if nothing happened.”

“But that’s because my blood is hot and strong,” Mago said proudly. “And I’m a Scorpio, so scorpions don’t do anything to me. But please, Tía, take Reyna to the doctor.”

“There’s no money,” Abuela Evila said again.

“I’ll keep an eye on her tonight,” Tía Emperatriz said. “If she’s still not well in the morning, I’ll take her in. ¿Está bien?” Mago nodded. “Now, go back to bed, you two.” Tía Emperatriz picked me up and took me back to the living room where she slept on a bed tucked in a corner of the room. For privacy, she’d hung a curtain from the rafters. She lay down next to me, and I eventually fell asleep in her arms.

In the morning, the whole room spun around me. I couldn’t get up, and every time I tried to, I felt like vomiting. I wondered if this was how my grandfather felt when he was drunk. Abuelo Augurio liked to drink mescal, which is made from the heart of the maguey plant. When he would come home from the fields, he would sit outside on the stone steps taking sips out of his flask while watching the people go by on horses and on foot. He would call out to his friends and ask if they wanted a drink. When the smell of chorizo and boiling beans reached his nose, he would take one more sip of the mescal and make his way to the kitchen, holding on to the wall so that he wouldn’t lose his balance.

That morning, I was moving just like my grandfather, zigzagging two steps one way, one step the other way.

Tía Emperatriz missed work to look after me. I felt as if I had a guitar inside my head. She held me tight by the waist and walked me to the outhouse, but with every step I took the guitar strummed and strummed, the vibrations sending waves of pain that bounced inside my brain.

“She needs to see the doctor, Amá,” Tía Emperatriz said to Abuela
Evila. “She’s burning up with fever. Let’s not take any chances. If anything happens to her, Natalio—”

“He and Juana chose to leave their children behind,” Abuela Evila said as she cleaned the beans. “I didn’t ask for this. Look at me. I’m seventy-one years old. Do I look like I need to be taking care of three young children on top of the one I’m already looking after?”

“They left so that they could build themselves a house, Amá,” Tía Emperatriz said.

“They won’t come back. Trust me.” Abuela Evila took her money bag out of her brassiere. “Look at María Félix. It’s been nine years, and every time Élida asks her when she’s finally coming back, she gives her excuses as to why she can’t yet. But that’s all they are. Excuses. And then it’s me who has to dry the tears, who has to find ways to lessen the pain.”

While my aunt and I waited by the dirt road for a taxi, I couldn’t stop thinking about my grandmother’s conviction that my parents were not coming back. Despite my dizziness and shivers, I was excited about the taxi ride, since I rarely got to ride in a car, or go anywhere outside of La Guadalupe. On the way to the doctor, I asked Tía Emperatriz if she thought Abuela Evila was right. “Do you think my parents won’t come back?”

“I don’t know, Reyna,” Tía Emperatriz said. “From what I’ve heard, El Otro Lado is a very beautiful place. But here …” She waved her hand for me to look outside the cab window. I know now what she had wanted me to see back then: the banks of the canal lined with trash and debris floating in the water, the crumbling adobe houses, the shacks made of sticks, the children with worm-pregnant bellies running around with bare feet, the piles of drying horse dung littering the dirt road, the flea-bitten stray dogs lying under the shade of trees, flies hovering above them. But what I saw back then I saw through the eyes of a child—a child who had never been anywhere, a child who was still innocent enough to see past the things later in life she could not. What I saw were the velvety mountains around us, the clear blue sky, the beautiful jacaranda trees covered in purple flowers, bougainvilleas crawling up fences,
their dried magenta petals whirling in the wind. I saw the cobblestone street leading up to the beautiful La Guadalupe church, papel picado of all colors waving above the street.