B0061QB04W EBOK (23 page)

Don Oscar, his wife, and their three children attended Mago’s sixth-grade graduation. They brought her three huge bouquets of flowers. She was the envy of the class because nobody else had gotten wealthy
people for godparents. Everyone else’s flower bouquets couldn’t compare to the ones Mago got.

Mago wore her white flag-bearer uniform, which was the nicest outfit she owned. We all stood up and clapped for my sister when her name was called.

The party was held at Tía Güera’s apartment building because it had a nice courtyard. To our surprise, Mami went out of her way to be nice to Mago. She even gave her a set of gold earrings that dangled from her ears. They looked too grown up on my twelve-and-a-half-year-old sister, but that was why Mago loved them—that, and because they were a gift from Mami.

That day was the first time in a long time that Mago didn’t have to be anyone’s mother. She didn’t have to clean or take care of anything or anyone. For the first time, Mago could be a girl. Mami, Abuelita Chinta, and Tía Güera took care of the guests. They served the food and drinks. While the adults talked, we were free to run around the courtyard. We were very shy around Don Oscar’s kids; even though they were our age, they belonged to a different class than us. They had beautiful clothes, they went to private schools, they spoke formal Spanish, and once in a while they giggled at the way we talked. Mago never stopped blushing when Oscar Jr. looked her way.

I didn’t know that thirteen years later, I would return to Iguala during my junior year of college, and I would be invited by Don Oscar to celebrate Christmas with his family. I would find myself wearing clothes as nice as theirs. I would find myself not gawking at their two-story brick house because by then I would have set foot in similar houses in the United States. I would find myself sitting in their living room, and having Oscar Jr. and his sisters shove lyrics of their favorite American songs at me so that I could translate them for them. I would find myself telling them about my college courses after Oscar Jr. had told me about his last year at UNAM, Mexico’s biggest public university. I would return to the U.S. more determined than ever, because even though I had drunk Bailey’s with them, dined and sang English songs with them, my cousin Lupita, Tía Güera’s daughter, was working for them as a maid. And I knew then, as I do now, that could also have been my fate.

18

A
FTER
M
AGO’S PARTY,
our relationship with our mother improved. We were like Hansel and Gretel. No matter how many times we were abandoned and left to fend for ourselves, we would always follow the crumbs back to Mami. As the months went by, she continued to visit us on Sundays, but the visits weren’t awkward anymore, and she would often take us to el zócalo where she would treat us to a churro, a cup of crushed ice with tamarind syrup, or a corn on the cob. But there were times when I was afraid that one day, the crumbs would not be there to guide us back. I would see her sitting
there on the bench at el zócalo, and instead of watching us play, she would be looking longingly at the couples strolling around hand in hand. I wasn’t old enough to understand that Mami was two people in one: a woman who wanted to be loved by a man, and a mother who wanted to do right by her children. But the look on her face was enough to alert me to the conflict inside her. When men passed by and glanced at her, sometimes even stopping to ask her for the time, it terrified me. It made me want to hide her, turn her into Rapunzel and lock her up in a tower, away from men’s prying eyes.

When the Christmas season finally arrived a few months later, las posadas took my mind off my worries. The Christmas season is something that all of us kids looked forward to, when our bellies would be stuffed like piñatas with peanuts, jicamas, candy, oranges, and sugarcane. Beginning on December 16th and ending on the 24th, churches all over Iguala did reenactments of the difficult journey Mary and Joseph took as they traveled from Nazareth to Bethlehem looking for shelter. The evening would end with a party at someone’s home, where participants would be offered hot fruit punch, tamales, buñuelos, and a goodie bag. Sometimes we would even get to break a piñata.

At dusk, Carlos, Mago, Betty, and I would hurry over to the church where everyone was meeting. There the “pilgrims” were given a candle. The procession moved out of the church gates, and we began to sing. In the front of the procession were the two boy attendants who held a wooden box with statues of Mary and Joseph. We stopped in front of a house and asked for shelter.
En el nombre del cielo os pido posada, pues no puede andar mi esposa amada.
When shelter was denied, the procession continued on to another house, where again, they wouldn’t let us in.
Aquí no es mesón sigan adelante: yo no puedo abrir no sea algún tunante.

We visited a few more houses until finally we came to the house that would give us “shelter,” and we heard the words we’d been waiting to hear since the procession first started:
¡Entren santos peregrinos, peregrinos, reciban este rincón, no de esta pobre morada sino de mi corazón!

Then we all rejoiced and put out our candles. The children clapped because finally it was time for the best part of the posada—the breaking
of the piñata and the goodie bags. We would rush home and share them with our grandmother. Then we went to sleep with our bellies full of fruit and candy.

On the last day of the posadas, Mago, Carlos, Betty, and I went to the part of the town where the wealthy people lived, where Don Oscar and his family lived. In that neighborhood, beside the goodie bags, they would be giving out toys.

Because it would be a long walk in the dark, Abuelita Chinta insisted Tío Crece go with us. Mago and I didn’t want him to come, but we also didn’t want to walk in the dark by ourselves, so we said okay. He rode his bicycle alongside us. Sometimes, he would put Betty on the handlebars because she was small and tired right away. And it turned out that Tío Crece wasn’t feeling crazy that night. Carlos told us jokes about Pepito, and Tío Crece laughed harder than any of us. He even had his own Pepito jokes, and Carlos memorized them to retell to his friends.

We walked for forty-five minutes along the dark dirt roads. By the time we got to the rich neighborhood, the posada was already starting. Our feet were tired from all the walking, but once we got in line, we felt as if we could have walked a hundred miles more for our free toys. Betty and I got a doll, Mago a porcelain tea set, and Carlos a car. We sat on the sidewalk playing with our new toys, eating the peanuts in our goodie bags and sharing them with Tío Crece, who wished he were still a kid and had gotten a goodie bag and a toy for himself.

The next day was Christmas, and Tío Crece found a large dry branch and sanded it until it was smooth. He then painted it white and filled a coffee can with wet cement and stuck the branch into it and waited until the cement hardened and the branch could stand on its own. Then he brought it into the house and told us, “Here is our Christmas tree!”

Abuelita Chinta would save the shells of the eggs she fed us all year long. She would make a little hole in the egg, empty its contents into
the frying pan, and then wash the shell and put it in a bag. When Easter came around we would paint the eggshells, stuff them with confetti, and glue a piece of tissue paper on the opening. Then Abuelita would sell most of the eggs, but she would keep a few for us to smash on one another’s heads, as is tradition.

Because we didn’t have decorations for our tree, we used our eggshells. We painted them in different colors and hung them from our tree, which in the end no longer looked like a branch but a work of art.

Mago and I spent all morning cleaning the house. I sprinkled water on the dirt floor and swept it until it was as smooth as clay. When I was done, Mago used the broom to get rid of the spiderwebs on the ceiling and the walls. We dusted the furniture, wiped the chairs and table, and even went outside to sweep the dirt road. We wanted this Christmas to be special. Mami and Tía Güera were coming over in the evening, and we hoped that if we made the house look beautiful, maybe Mami would finally decide to come back to live with us. We loved spending Sundays with Mami, but seeing our mother only once a week was not enough.