The Children of Sanchez (35 page)

My life became a living hell, because I couldn’t imagine going on without both of them. I wanted to have them both without either of them feeling bad about it. I was always thinking of Graciela and of my wife. I couldn’t sleep any more. All night long I kept turning and twisting, I suffered from a terrible restlessness. Once I even said to Graciela, “Look, I can’t live without you. Let’s set up house, leave your mother and let’s move into a room. We’ll manage one way or another, but I’m going to stay with you.”

But when I got home and saw my wife sleeping with my children, I felt ashamed. I hated myself. I said, “How can I be such a good-for-nothing? I’ve got to leave that other woman. Here is my poor little wife with my children; they don’t deserve this kind of treatment.”

It got to the point where I was hoping my wife would give me an excuse to leave her. I was short-tempered with her; once I beat her hard, very hard. You see, I was used to absolute obedience on her part, not forcing her with blows, but on the basis of yelling at her. Alberto had come to see me one morning, and I asked Shorty for something, I forget what. She was in the kitchen and she shouted back, “I’m busy right now! Stop bothering me.”

She had never talked back to me before. “Here is Alberto and look at the way you answer me! Will you give it to me or must I make you give it to me?”

“No, man!” she said. “You just give orders around here! How are you going to make me? Get it yourself.” I got up, not very angry yet, saying, “I’m telling you … Shorty …” and
pum
! she gave me a slap. Right in front of Alberto!

I don’t know, I was so angry that I went blind. I felt a red band over my eyes. I was so ashamed in the presence of my friend that I went after her and really beat her up. Later, Alberto said, “What a brute you are! Brother, how strong you are when you’re angry!” because with one blow, I made her fly, just as though she were a doll. He tried to stop me, but couldn’t. Her mother was there too, washing clothes. She didn’t interfere at first, but when she saw me kicking Paula, she said, “Don’t kick her, can’t you see she’s pregnant again?”

Another time I hit Shorty, was when she beat up Mariquita and left the child black and blue all over her little body. Shorty had a very strong temper, a strong spirit … she was very active and quick … and she hit the children hard. That day I got mad and said, “Look, never again! Don’t think I’m going to let you do this to my daughter. If you as her mother can do that, then you show no human qualities. You are not worth anything, and from here on our relations will end, if you hit her like that again. I’ll take her away and you’ll never see her. If she needs discipline, spank her on her behind and no place else!”

That’s how I spoke to her, see? She didn’t know any other way to bring up children, because her mother had always beaten her and her sisters that way.

I had some trouble with Graciela on account of Domingo, my third child. I had told her I didn’t get along with my wife and no longer slept with her. I had to fool her so she would keep seeing me. But Graciela saw Paula in the street and noticed that she was pregnant.

“So you don’t sleep with her, eh? I just saw her and she’s in the family way again.”

“Ah,” I said, “so you saw her? So what do you want me to do? I just touched her once and it stuck.”

Actually, I had contact with my wife almost every day. I often did it because I felt guilty. I thought, “I can’t neglect my wife to that extent. I’ve got to do my duty toward her because if I don’t provide her with satisfaction, who will?” And many times I did it without wanting to, just to do my duty. I couldn’t see Graciela every day, just every three or four days; sometimes a week went by before we slept together. I explained to her the best I could, and it seemed reasonable to her that I just couldn’t help having relations with my wife.

I acted like a real canaille to Paula. When Roberto was in jail in Córdoba, my father sent me to see him. Instead of going alone, I took Graciela with me. I had only 150
pesos
in my pocket … not enough to take her to a hotel or to good restaurants … so I took her to my cousin David’s house and sponged on my aunt. I presented Graciela as a friend I worked with, but my aunt wasn’t fooled. She was annoyed with me, and when she saw me getting into Graciela’s hammock, she made me sleep on the floor with David. That whole week, Graciela and I had to get together in the sugar-cane field.

Back in Mexico City, I spent every evening in the café. I almost never ate at home. I got so I couldn’t enjoy a meal except in the café. Once, as I was sitting there, my mother-in-law came hurrying in. “Manuel, Manuel,” she said, “Paula needs you.” Graciela was standing right by.

“What does she want me for?”

“Hurry,” she said, “she’s dying.” I got up as if a spring had been released and ran home. Paula had had a bad hemorrhage, the whole house was full of blood. I became terribly alarmed and ran for the doctor. I did what he asked me to and went and bought the medicine. That time my wife was annoyed with me for not being around when she most needed me.

But once Paula was taken care of, I returned to the café. I realized I was a heel for acting that way. I struggled against it with all my strength. I struggled as hard as I could to leave Graciela, but I couldn’t, I couldn’t. So I went back to the café. The next day Paula
had another hemorrhage and the doctor told me, “If she has one more, don’t spend money for medicine, buy a coffin.”

“Holy Mother,” I said. “Dear God, it’s not possible.” I don’t know what the cause was, maybe it was from a fit of anger. The child was pretty far along, about seven months. My wife got well and my son Domingo was born normal.

Once Paula said to me, “I’m going to get myself cured.”

I said to her, “Why? What are you going to cure? So you don’t want to bear my children any more? I don’t want to have a murderer for a wife. You have no right to take the life of a being that can’t even defend itself. It’s a bigger crime and more despicable to kill a being that can’t defend itself than to kill a man in cold blood.” And we never lost a child.

The only ideas I had about women and childbirth I learned from my married friends. My wife didn’t know much either. Neither her mother nor my father ever told us anything about such matters. Paula always nursed each of the children about a year or until she got pregnant. There were two years between Marquita and Alanes and Domingo and only one year between Domingo and our last child, Conchita. We always had sexual relations up to the day the child was born but after the birth we waited a month or so, never the required forty days.

It was close to a year after Domingo was born, that there was an incident with Consuelo, which made us leave my father’s house. Consuelo had never liked my wife and, to humiliate her, she spit on the floor just after Paula had cleaned it. It bothered my wife, and all I did was to whack Consuelo a couple of times on the arm. Then Marta grabbed the scale weight and tried to hit me with it. So I took them both by the hair and held them down on the bed, to keep them from moving, right?

But Consuelo has an enormous imagination, no? She and Marta should have been actresses. They blew it up big. Consuelo said I beat her on the lungs and whipped her like a horse, and as a result Paula and I had to leave the house where our two sons were born.

I rented a room in the Matamoros section. I bought my wife a bed, my father gave us a wardrobe, a table and a kerosene stove. Then Delila and my mother-in-law asked whether I would like us all to live together in a room in a private house. Ana, the sister of my mother-in-law’s husband, who had her own little house, was willing to rent
to us. It was a humble home, but the first private house, with a garden, I had ever lived in, and it was something very nice for me.

When I saw how other people lived … the nice homes in the movies, and magazines, and in rich neighborhoods, the luxuries that exist, I felt … well, degraded, to live the way I did. I felt unfortunate, but at the same time, it should give me incentive, no? That is when I say, “I have to rise … I must reach that level.” Because, in reality, it is humiliating, saddening, not to have a nice home and to have to live with other people all the time.

The only time in my life that I have felt fully happy, was when we lived in Ana’s house. Paula and I and the babies shared one room with Delila and her son, and my mother-in-law and her husband. We got along well together. It was the only time I can say I felt like a man, in the sense that I fulfilled my duties at home. On more than one Sunday, I stayed home and painted the table, or the chairs, and saw that my wife was comfortable.

When Alanes suffered from earaches and couldn’t sleep I cured him, the way my mother had cured me. I made a paper cone and put the point in his ear. Then I lit the paper with a match and let it burn as long as he could stand it. I did this two or three times, until the
aire
left his ear and he was able to sleep.

At that time, I did what I had always wanted to do on Sundays. I took my wife and children first to the market to buy
tortillas
, cheese, avocados and cooked pork and then to the park to eat our
tacos
. I was working again and giving my wife sixty
pesos
a week for expenses, although I was making one hundred and fifty. The rest I kept for going out with Graciela. Life was pleasant for me. I had the love of my wife and of Graciela; I needed both of them to be happy.

Ana’s house was in a
colonia
far from the center. Few people lived there at that time, and it was frightening for me to go home at two or three in the morning. There were lots of assaults and robberies, and in the morning they’d often find dead bodies in the river or in some field. But scared or not, I’d still get home very late every night.

A year later, Ana needed the room for some relative, and asked us to move. So Delila and her mother found a place for themselves and Paula and I again lived alone. Paula found a room with an outside entrance in the same section, because rents were low there. I was earning less and we were not eating well Our fourth child, Conchita, was born soon after we moved in.

Graciela was working and would never accept money or anything from me. She said her conscience hurt when I spent the money my children needed. We’d go to a restaurant for supper, and instead of being like other women and ordering a good meal, she’d just ask for coffee and milk. I got sore on account of this, but she always said, “No, I’m not hungry.” If I wanted to buy her a skirt or some little thing, she always said she didn’t need one. Why, I even bought two pairs of pants for her son, but I had to work hard to make her accept them.

Graciela told me, one day, that a certain
Señor
Rodolfo kept coming to her house and that her mother was trying to get her to hook up with this man. “What shall I do, Manuel?”

“
Mi vida
, what do you want me to say? What can I tell you? Unfortunately, you have to solve this problem alone.” Then she disappeared from the café for three days. I kept going there, as I always did. On the fourth day she returned. I was very angry but pretended to be calm.

All evening she busied herself with little things and didn’t come back to sit with me. I was convinced that something special was up. When the café closed I said, “You’re hiding something, and you’re going to come clean right now.” I grabbed her arm and took her to a hotel.

In the room, I said, “Look,
mi vida
, I want you to understand completely my love for you. For me you are God on earth, and therefore you have an obligation to be frank with me. Tell me what’s come between you and me. I love you more than anything else and I have faith in you. I know you didn’t do anything wrong. Tell me, but be frank about it.” Well, that’s the way I kept talking to her for a long time.

Graciela was sitting on the edge of the bed. She lifted her head and said, “I’m going to get married.”

I felt as if I were hit by an electric shock; everything turned black all around me. She burst into tears. “I swear to you by the life of my child, which is the most sacred thing I have in the world, that the only one I love is you. I know I’m going to suffer, but give me a chance to find a future for my son. You have your wife, unfortunately, you have your wife. Let me live, Manuel, don’t stop me.”

I felt a terrible sorrow inside me. I understood that she was absolutely right. She said, “Answer me, say something, strike me, beat
me, but don’t remain silent,” and she fell to her knees and put her arms around my legs, crying bitterly.

“Graciela, you know something, get out of here … but get out of here right now, while I have the strength to see you go. Because I swear to you if you don’t, later I won’t be able to let you go. You are absolutely right, you have a right to be happy, and all you’ve had with me is suffering, beatings at home and the contempt of people for keeping company with a good-for-nothing like myself. Get out of here, Graciela.”

“No, Manuel, don’t chase me out; I don’t want to leave you this way, Manuel, for the love of God. Look, even though this is the last night we’ll spend together in our whole lives, Manuel, I want to say good-bye to you in a different way.”

She didn’t want to leave, so we spent the night together. In the morning she said, “I’m not getting married. I won’t marry anybody. I was going to do it for my mother because I don’t want to hurt her, but I don’t care about my mother, I don’t care about anything in the world, you’re the one I love. I’m not marrying anybody.” So that’s the way it stood.

After that, I went to visit Graciela’s mother. I had always had the power to persuade people, at least those in my class, and that is why they called me “Golden Beak.” It must be true, because I was able to convince Graciela’s mother to accept me. I told her, “Look, Soledad, I can control everything in life but my feeling for your daughter. I have the blindest passion for her and she is the most beautiful thing in my life. I am poor and cannot offer her anything, but do not deprive me of her company. True, our situation is ambiguous, but I swear that your daughter is and will be the only great love of my life.” The
señora
was very sentimental, she even cried, and I won her over to my side.