The Children of Sanchez (15 page)

I went to speak to Graciela. “Good evening,” I said. “I was bringing you a gift, a compact I bought at Chalma … but when Andrés told me about you two I stomped on it and broke it.” I came close to her and asked, “Graciela, is it true Andrés is your
novio
? Answer me, don’t be afraid.”

She stood there looking at me very sadly. She just nodded her head, and did not speak. My first reaction was to slap her face. But I’d never fight over a woman; it would show her I loved her a lot. I controlled myself. “Ah, how nice! Let me congratulate you, Graciela, look I’m a gambler and I play it straight, win or lose. This time I lost, right? It doesn’t matter, Graciela, here is my hand, let’s remain friends, no hard feelings.”

She stood there, very angry by now, and burst out crying. “What the hell,” I said, and I turned around and left.

Well, I was very unhappy about all this. I changed my job, and went to work for some Spaniards. I started at eight
pesos
a day. They paid me for Sunday too, and so I made fifty-six
pesos
a week. Now I had a little more money and I didn’t have to turn any of it over to my father either.

About Graciela, I thought, “If she did this to me, I’ll pay her back in kind, with someone she’s close to so it’ll be real hard on her. I’ve
got to make her suffer.” Right away I decided on Shorty, and I began to court her. After that I went to the café every day to see Paula. I asked her to be my
novia
.

“But it’s not right, because you are in love with Graciela. How is it that you are talking to me this way?”

“No, really, I told you that so you’d tell her and make her think I really loved her. But I’m not in love with her. After all, didn’t I always chat with you when I came here?”

I don’t know where I got all the arguments, but the fact is it was a hard job courting Paula.

It lasted over a month and she always said, “I’ll think about it, I’ll think about it.” Finally, she said, “Well, all right.” By then she wanted to be my
novia
.

Paula had a big quarrel with Graciela on account of this. Paula said, “So what are you complaining about? You pulled the same dirty trick with Andrés, who was his friend. Besides, he wasn’t your husband, only your
novio
. Now he’s
my novio
and I love him.”

Then Graciela said, “The trouble is, Andrés really wasn’t my
novio
. I said this only to see if Manuel loved me, because Andrés told me that Manuel was just trying to make a fool of me.”

Andrés had convinced Graciela to test me; they had put on an act which I fell for. After that, I didn’t feel I loved Paula, but because of the eternal vanity, the
pendejo machismo
of the Mexican, I couldn’t humiliate myself by going back to Graciela. I loved her with all my soul and deep down I really wanted to say, “Come back to me … let’s go together seriously …” But I set my pride and my vanity above everything else. My heart told me to tell her the truth, but I was afraid that she would make fun of my sentiments. It was a play of tactics between us, and little by little, without either of us wishing it, we took different roads.

So I continued to see Paula and to take her out. I got her to quit her job at the café, and she found another, weaving children’s coats.

I once caught Paula in a lie and thought she was deceiving me. She had told me she was going to Querétaro to see her sister who was ill, but while she was away, Delila blurted out that Paula was in Veracruz, with a man and a girl friend. When Paula returned, I said, “How were things in Querétaro, Paula?”

“Well, fine.”

“And how’s your sister?”

“Well, she wasn’t very ill, but you know how people exaggerate these things.”

When she said that I slapped her in the face. “Look, don’t give me any of that crap; you didn’t go to Querétaro. Don’t pull anything on me. You took yourself a little trip to Veracruz.”

“Who told you?”

“Somebody, as you can see,” I said. “So you did go to Veracruz?” and bang! I slapped her again. I was really very angry with her and I beat her.

She began to cry, “Yes, Manuel, but I swear to you by my mother, by all I cherish most, may my mother drop dead, if I did anything bad. What happened is that my girl friend was going with this fellow and she asked me to go along to protect her.”

I was pretty sure Paula had cheated on me. “No, sir,” I told her, “I’m not taking any of that stuff from you, and if you’re that easy to get, you come with me now, we’ll go to the hotel.”

“No, Manuel.”

“No?” I said to her. “But you did go off with the other fellow, didn’t you? So if you’re a street walker come on with me and tell me how much you’re going to charge. You can’t be worth more than fifty
centavos
, not for me anyway.”

She was crying and crying. “Look, Manuel, please come with me, do me a favor, I beg you.” Well, deep down I hoped she hadn’t done anything bad. We went to her friend’s house, and the girl backed up Paula’s story.

I wasn’t entirely convinced and, whether she liked it or not, I made Paula go with me to a hotel that night.

I should explain that in Mexico, at least in my case, even if I believe that my
novia
loves me, there is always a doubt, a jealousy, no? And one day the man says, “Give me proof of your love. If you love me you will go with me.” I had never thought of going through either a civil or a church wedding, it simply never occurred to me, and that is true of most of the men and women I know. I always assumed that if the woman loves me and I love her and we wish to live together, then the legal papers and things like that are not important. If my
novia
were to demand that I marry her and set up a house for her, I would immediately act offended and would say, “Then it isn’t true that you love me! Where is your love if you set up conditions to love me?”

There is also the matter of being poor. If one begins to examine
what a marriage comes to, a poor man realizes he doesn’t have enough money for a wedding. Then he decides to live this way, without it, see? He just takes the woman, the way I did with Paula. Besides, a poor man has nothing to leave to his children so there is no need to protect them legally. If I had a million
pesos
, or a house, or a bank account or some material goods, I would have a civil marriage right away to legalize my children as my legitimate heirs. But people in my class have nothing. That is why I say, “As long as
I
know these are my children, I don’t care what the world thinks.”

A civil marriage is not costly like a church wedding, but then one rejects the legal responsibilities too. We have a saying, “The illusions of matrimony end in bed.” I couldn’t commit myself to all the legal responsibilities at the risk of suffering a failure later. We didn’t know each other profoundly and how could we know how we would react to intimacy? And the majority of women here don’t expect weddings; even they believe that the sweetheart leads a better life than the wife. What usually happens is that the woman goes with the man and it isn’t until after a honeymoon of about six months that she begins to protest and wants him to marry her. But that is just the conventionalism of women. They want to tie a man up in chains!

We have a firm belief that it is one thing to be lovers, and it is another to be man and wife. And if I ask a woman to be my wife, I feel as much responsibility toward her as I would if we were married. Marriage wouldn’t change a thing! That is the way it was with Paula and me.

We continued to go to hotels on the sly for a few months, but I was not satisfied. I think that at bottom I was looking for a way to escape my father, for a way to leave my home, once and for all, and to become a man. So one evening I said, “Take your choice, Paula. Look, I’m going this way, your house is the opposite way. From now on I don’t want you to go to your house. What do you say to that?”

“No, Manuel,” she said. “What about my mother and brothers and sisters?”

“Oh, well, then you don’t love me. Choose either of these two roads, except that if you go home, we won’t see each other any more. If you go with me, you’ll be my wife, you’ll live with me.”

Well, she made up her mind, and instead of going home, she came with me. That’s how we got married: I had just turned fifteen and she was nineteen.

I
STARTED STEALING THINGS FROM MY OWN HOUSE WHEN I WAS SMALL
. I saw something I liked and swiped it without asking anybody’s permission. Just like that. I began by stealing an egg. It wasn’t that I was starving, see? because my mother fed us well. It was just for the fun of filching it, and sharing it with my friends in the courtyard, and feeling important.

I stole twenty
centavos
from my mother when I was just a little fellow, five or six, more or less. Twenty
centavos
at that time was like ten
pesos
today. My father gave us five
centavos
every day, but all my life I’ve always wanted more, and when I saw a twenty
centavo
piece on the cupboard, well, there wasn’t anybody around and I thought I might as well take it. I bought some candy and it was my bad luck that they gave me a lot of change, all single
centavos
.

So I had a lot of money in my pocket, right? When I got home in the evening, they began to ask about the missing coin. I thought, “
Caramba
! as soon as they get the idea of fishing me they’ll find the money and I’ll get a licking I won’t forget for ten years. I’d better go to the toilet.”

The toilet, which was right inside the house, had only a half-door, so when I threw the
centavos
into the toilet bowl it made a hell of a big noise and they knew what I did. Even though I flushed the coins away forever, they knew. Now, wasn’t that something? Like I said, I was a bad egg from the time I was born. So I got a real thrashing that day. My mother, my father, and my mother’s mother, may she rest in peace, gave me my punishment so I wouldn’t do it again.

My mother took good care of us. She was loving to me, but she
loved Manuel the most. She rarely hit me, and I know she loved me a lot because she always took me with her wherever she went, me more than the others. She used to say, “Roberto, let’s go and get the cake trimmings.”

“All right,
mamá
, sure, let’s go.”

My mother and father usually got along well, except for one terrible quarrel which left a lasting impression on me. My father was hollering at my mother, may she rest in peace, and, well, he was pretty mad. My mother’s mother and my aunt Guadalupe kept him from hitting her. His key ring fell on the floor during the fight and I grabbed it and ran out. It had a razor blade on it and since my father was very quick-tempered, I thought he might want to use it on my mother.

My aunt, my granny Pachita, and the servant, Sofía, all jumped in and held him off. When I came back to the house, the fight was over. My father took me with him to the Villa where he prayed to the Virgin. I saw him cry and I cried with him. Then he quieted down and bought me a
taco
.

Every year the Three Kings came on the sixth of January and left us toys in the flowerpot stand where my mother kept her favorite plants. But one sixth of January the Three Kings were unable to come to our poor house, and I felt I was the unluckiest child in the world. We children got up early, like all children do on that day, to look for our toys. We went looking in the flowerpot stand; then we looked in the brazier to see if the Kings left something for us in the ashes and charcoal. Unfortunately they didn’t, so all that was left for us to do was to go out to the courtyard and watch our friends play with their-toys. When they asked, “What did the Kings bring you?” Manuel and I said, “They didn’t bring us anything.”

It was the last sixth of January my mother spent with us before she died. After that I cried for years.

We were living in one room on Tenochtitlán Street. My father and mother slept in one bed, Manuel, Consuelo and I slept in the other. When Marta was older she slept with us too. We slept crosswise, first Manuel, then Consuelo, then Marta, then me, always in that order.

I had a real problem. I always wet the bed, right up to the age of nine or ten. They called me the champion bed-wetter in the house. I wasn’t the only bed-wetter, because Manuel and Consuelo also did it sometimes. On account of this habit of mine, my father and mother gave me several whalings and threatened to bathe me in cold water
in the morning. Once my mother actually did. Of course, I’m not blaming her; she did it to break me of the habit, but it stayed with me for a long time.

I was about six when my mother died in my father’s arms early one morning. Her death was a shock and a torment to me all my life, because I feel I was to blame. The day before she died, we all had gone to the Basilica with my aunt and my uncles, Alfredo and José. We were very happy. My blessed mother was always celebrating our Saint’s Day and we ate pork and stuff like that, which you know are not good for you. They bring on attacks, and my mother came down with an attack on account of me.

Actually, what happened was that later that day she asked me to bring the bird cages down from the roof. My mother was very fond of birds, understand? She kept the walls covered with bird cages, just because she loved the little creatures. So I climbed on the roof and some dirt dropped over to our neighbor’s side and the woman there began to throw water on me.

“You brat, why don’t you watch what you’re doing?”

My mother ran out to defend me and had an argument with the neighbor. If she hadn’t had the argument, my
mamá
would not have died. Anyway, whether I feel guilty or not, that’s what happened.

They woke us up at about 2:00
A.M.
I didn’t want to get up because I had wet the bed and was afraid they would punish me. But we saw my father crying and we got up frightened. I knew something bad was happening because my father had my mother in his arms. We were all crying at the head of the bed when the doctor came. Our relatives tried to get us out of the house but I fought to stay.