Crux Page 11
She was drowning in panic, grasping for help. Inside, the women of the Perez family comforted her as she cried. Beatriz reached out and took Carolina’s hand. Come with us to Mexicali, she said. In two days, we’re leaving—you can head south to Mexico City with Mario, and get married. Then everything will be okay.
* * *
•
When Antonio discovered his daughter was missing, he took her picture to the police. My girl has been kidnapped, he said. I want the perpetrator castrated and imprisoned. In the 1950s, Mexican law defined rape as sexual relations with any woman younger than eighteen who is “chaste and honest.” The penalty was between one month and three years in prison, as well as a fine. But there existed a loophole: if the man managed to marry the girl, the penalty would no longer apply. The crime of kidnapping, punishable by up to six years in prison, could also be nullified by marriage.
Carolina was desperate to marry Mario. She believed that if she married him, God would forgive her transgressions. The couple sped south to Mexico City. They arrived at the cramped house of Fredesvinda Perez, Mario’s mother. She was a tiny old woman with a cane, gray hair in a tight bun. A young Spanish immigrant, Ildefonso, had seduced her while she mourned near-simultaneous deaths: her son’s, her first husband’s, her mother’s. She gave him four children: Mateo, a girl named Blanca, Mario and Mario’s twin sister, Gildarda. Animosity toward Spaniards lingered after the revolution; the capitaleños attacked her children as gachupines for their fair skin and hair, even after Mario dyed his blond hair black in shame. The couple had to pull them out of school. Ildefonso taught his children to read and write. Then he flew away to Spain and never returned.
Mario’s mother gestured at her cluttered home and informed the couple she lacked space. Mario took Carolina from stranger’s place to stranger’s place. They slept in slums, on cardboard and bare mattresses. Mario told Carolina to stay indoors—out of sight—until she turned eighteen, to avoid arrest. He disappeared for days, driving a green-and-white taxi. When he was around, he slumbered. Carolina rarely had anything to eat but bread. Her birthday came and went. Mario seemed to have forgotten about marriage. One evening, he waxed poetic about his alleged true love—a cantina owner in Veracruz who knew how to make love, compared to whom Carolina was “insipid.” Carolina could think of nothing but her hunger.
Her stomach began to protrude as if by magic. When the couple moved into the small studio of Mario’s twin sister, Gildarda, Carolina watched, ravenous, as Gildarda peeled a single banana for her three sons. She threw the peel in the trash and cut the fruit in three. Gildarda’s sons eyed them with anticipation. She served each boy a piece. Carolina fought a savage urge to lunge at the table and stuff their bananas in her mouth. She watched the boys gobble up their dinners. The next thing she knew, she was leaning over the trash can, stuffing the banana peel into her mouth and devouring it like an animal. More than fifty years later, my grandmother recalls this moment and weeps.
* * *
•
I place my hand on my grandmother’s shoulder, trying to root her back in the present. It’s hard to maintain my grip; her body quakes. “Abuelita,” I say. “Perdóname, we can stop.” My fears are unfolding; I am doing violence to Doña Carolina’s composure with my questions. But when her eyes settle on mine, they look fiercely aglow. She says: “No, I have so much more to tell you.”
* * *
•
Carolina wrote a letter to her favorite aunt in Unión de Guadalupe, informing her she was alive and in good health, about to get married, with a baby on the way. The police arrived days later. They told Mario he was under arrest for kidnapping a minor. Mario protested: I didn’t kidnap anyone! She came voluntarily! Plus, she’s eighteen now! Mario locked his eyes on Carolina. She opened her mouth and said yes, it was true, she had come of her free will and she was now an adult. The police rolled their eyes. Carolina was a chaste and honest girl and Mario had corrupted her, they declared. In vulgar terms, Mario insisted that Carolina had been plenty experienced when they met.
The police handcuffed them and took them to jail. Within hours, they were released. Gildarda either paid a bribe or convinced the police that Carolina was neither chaste nor honest when she met Mario. You have to marry the poor girl, Gildarda told her brother. I’m not going to help you next time. She accompanied the couple to the civil registry, serving as their witness as they became husband and wife. Decades later, Carolina would compare the experience to “getting a vaccine.”
* * *
•
The couple moved in with a friend of Mario’s, Samuel, who had a one-bedroom apartment behind a family panadería, or bakery. Samuel’s teenage daughter, a tomboyish girl named Timo, gave Carolina her bed. They became friends, sharing pastries and secrets. Carolina felt something akin to hope. She told Timo about her three-bedroom house in Tijuana, which sounded like a mansion to the younger girl. Timo urged Carolina to write her parents for money to travel back home. Let’s go there together, she said. Let’s leave this pigsty. But Carolina was sure her family would want nothing to do with her if they knew what she had done. She refused to send them a letter.
Mario started smoking marijuana. The drug made him paranoid. He punched and kicked Carolina, calling her a puta, accusing her of sleeping with Timo’s father. He took her to Villa de Guadalupe, the site of the legendary La Virgen apparition that inspired natives to convert to Catholicism after the Conquest. He rented a room in a house full of strangers. Rats hissed in the hallways, scampered on the ceiling. At night, terror kept Carolina awake. Mario told her an old male tenant was spying on her while she slept. One night, she heard the bedroom door creak open. She lay paralyzed beneath the covers. Was it a rabid rat? The other tenant come to force himself on her? A dark figure moved into the room. The light flicked on. It was Mario. He looked lost. She tried to yell at him, but suddenly water erupted between her legs. Contractions seized her, so painful she couldn’t breathe. She was only seven months pregnant. Mario carried her into his cab and slammed his foot on the gas pedal. As he drove aimlessly, drugged, he noticed a dingy wooden sign hanging from an apartment building, advertising a midwife: “Partera.” He parked his car and pounded on the door. A middle-aged woman with a tangled mess of black hair threw it open and invited them in. She gestured at a twin-size bed. Carolina cried as the partera pulled filthy-looking metal instruments from a dusty drawer, then inserted the tools between her legs. The partera shook her head. There’s nothing I can do, she said. She advised Mario to take her to the hospital. As they wheeled Carolina into an elevator, she lost consciousness.
* * *
•
Carolina opened her eyes. Gildarda was there. You had a baby boy, she said, gesturing at an incubator on the other side of the room. They had to use forceps to pull him out of you. Carolina tried to sit up so she could see. But the effort made blood stream out of her body. It bloomed on the white sheets, expanding like monstrous rose petals. She heard a voice call the doctor. Again, her world went black.
* * *
•
If my father had been born on time, he would have been a Sagittarius—a fire sign like his mother, an Aries, like me. But he was born a Libra, an air sign: ethereal, shapeless, transitory as the wind. I wonder out loud how much his early arrival affected his fate. Clinical studies have shown premature births are correlated with a higher risk of depression, anxiety and psychosis. “No sé,” Abuela Carolina says. “No sé, no sé, no sé,” she repeats, like a mantra meant to banish unwanted thoughts. But it would be wrong to blame my father’s future turmoil on a single early disruption. He was far too resilient.
* * *
•
Carolina survived the hemorrhaging. Nobody believed her son would live. She could hold him in her palms. In the 1950s, the chances for such a premature baby were very slim—especially in Mexico. The doctors pumped fluids and nutrients into his veins, just in
case. He fattened and elongated. Against all expectations, he grew.
Carolina called him Marco Antonio. He had his grandfather’s golden irises.
After a few days in neonatal intensive care, his right eye swelled shut. He had contracted an infection from Carolina’s birth canal. The eye was sticky with pus; the infection was spreading to his brain. The doctor explained, grimly and reluctantly, that he would have to amputate the eye—or else the boy would die. But first he would try a powerful antibiotic injection, just in case. If his eye improved immediately, he wouldn’t need to operate. Within hours, Marco Antonio’s eye cleared. He grew and grew.
The doctors let Carolina take him home. They prescribed medicine for her sexually transmitted disease, instructing her not to breast-feed until she finished the antibiotic. When Mario learned of the STD, he beat Carolina, saying it was evidence she was a whore. He claimed he had no symptoms of any STD, so it couldn’t have come from him.
Decades later, Carolina remains confused about how she contracted the disease, hypothesizing it was from the dirty tools the partera used on her. “I don’t know how else it could have happened,” she says. “It is so strange.” Her eyes are wide as she mutters these words, her mouth slightly open; she seems haunted by the mystery, as if a more sinister hypothesis has occurred to her, perhaps punishment from God for her sins. I inform her that men can have certain STDs, such as chlamydia, without symptoms. Her eyes seem lost as I say the words; she doesn’t seem to hear me. “Seriously,” I say, adding that I know from research as well as experience. My voice passes over her like the wind. It’s disturbing. I realize I’m seeing how the unknown can travel through decades, permeating a body and keeping it in its grip. In her office at the Butcher Block, Doña Carolina punches numbers into a calculator amid crisp stacks of $100 bills. She balances the books. Each of her middle-aged sons depends on her. She helps pay mortgages, health insurance, meals, drug rehabilitation. But immersed in 1956, she is a helpless little girl. A solitary man slashed her so violently, he left her enshrined in scars.
* * *
•
When Carolina tried to breast-feed her son, she discovered that her milk had dried up. She knew this did not bode well for her son: she would have to depend on Mario for milk formula. Gildarda helped with cash and gifts. One day, her sister-in-law brought an old crib. Her three boys came with her. They looked green and shriveled and made strange hacking sounds. Gildarda explained they had tosferina, whooping cough. Carolina thanked Gildarda for the crib. But she was afraid it carried tosferina. She pushed it into a corner. Within a few hours, Marco’s face reddened and swelled anyway. She cradled him and watched, panicking, as he convulsed. He coughed and coughed and tried to suck in a single breath. His features turned blue, his mouth twisting into a large O for oxygen. She sprinted to a medical center, where a doctor handed her a diagnosis, a prescription slip and a bill for the consultation. I have no money, Carolina said. I just need medicine. Please. The doctor turned beet red. She fled. She walked around the city, clutching Marco Antonio to her chest, beseeching doctor after doctor. Finally, a kind pharmacist donated antibiotics.
Gildarda came over with advice: she should sew her son a very tight shirt out of thick fabric to keep his ribs from breaking. Carolina did this. The straitjacket-like shirt held him together as he coughed. It took weeks for the medicine to kill the infection, but once more her son survived. When Mario returned from the streets, he gave Carolina some good news: they could return to the panadería, where the tomboyish Timo lived.
The two girls plotted Carolina’s escape. Your baby will die if you stay here, Timo said. You must go home. Your parents will help you. Carolina summoned the courage to write them. When Antonio read his daughter’s words, he shared the return address with his first son, Goyo, who lived in Mexico City. He asked Goyo to visit her with a message.
When Goyo arrived at the panadería, Mario had been beating Carolina. Mario had wanted to make love and she had refused. The apartment was crowded with people, and if they had gone into the bedroom, everyone would have known what they were doing. Enraged, Mario tore at her hair and pummeled her with his fists. She fled to the bathroom and locked herself inside. Trembling and crying on the toilet, she heard an employee from the panadería say through the door that her half brother was outside. She splashed water on her face, fixed her hair, straightened her skirt and went to greet Goyo with a smile. She hadn’t seen Goyo since she was a child. Look at my son, she said, holding up Marco Antonio. Isn’t he handsome? Goyo praised the baby and informed Carolina that her parents wanted her back home.
This information lifted a crippling weight off her body. She realized she was free to leave Mario. She was not only free—she had a moral obligation to leave him, to save her son’s life. Timo was right. Carolina started stealing money from Mario as he slept. She hid the money behind a curtain, and Timo added her own store of cash. The next time Mario beat her, Carolina fled to Goyo’s with her baby. But in the morning, Carolina woke up to find dozens of bedbugs feeding on her son. She slapped and swatted the critters off. Red bites swelled all over his skin. Carolina returned to the panadería, but she feared she was running out of time. Her son seemed cursed to die in the capital.
Timo showed her the total sum of their money. It was enough for a single bus ticket to Guadalajara—where Carolina’s aunt Lydia lived. From there, she could find a way to Tijuana. Early one morning when everyone else was asleep, the two girls said teary-eyed goodbyes. Carolina hopped on the bus, cradling her son. A second child was swelling her stomach. She cried as she sped away; her babies would grow up without a father. The few good memories of Mario flooded her brain, as they often do in moments of parting. Although Mario never changed a diaper or helped bathe Marco Antonio, he had often tried to teach his son what things were called. She remembered how Mario had cradled Marco Antonio in his arms, his face filled with wonder as he pointed out the moon and said its name: Luna. Allí está la luna.
MATERNITY
“Abuelita, you said Mario’s eyes were green,” I say. “Were they like mine?”
I had long puzzled over my eye color: seaweed green with yellow around the pupil. My grandmother searches my irises. I see a tremor in her mouth. She looks away.
“I don’t know,” she says. “It was so long ago. I can’t recall.”
“But they were green?” I ask.
My grandmother meets my gaze again. “Yes,” she says, and takes a deep breath. “They were like yours.”
* * *
•
Back in Tijuana, Carolina discovered that her father was sick. While Antonio was grooming horses for a wealthy family in northern San Diego County, his employers had noticed his chronic coughing, which stopped only when he took drags on his cigarettes or fainted. They persuaded him to stop working. Maria de Jesus took a job as a live-in nanny for the wealthy family’s neighbors. Carolina’s return was convenient. She adopted her mother’s role, cooking and cleaning. Not then, nor ever, would her family press her for information about Mexico City. Carolina could tuck the details into a corner of her brain and never revisit them again. And that’s exactly what she did, until half a century later when I asked her to tell me her story.
She bought meat daily; the family lacked a refrigerator. In a corner store on Calle O’Campo, she ordered steaks and chorizo at the carnicería counter. A pale young man with wavy black hair chopped the meat. He was burly, with a thick bull’s head. Standing under the fluorescent lights, his face looked almost translucent, like a ghost. He smiled at Carolina and her baby. What a cute boy, he said, and introduced himself as Jesus. He made her uncomfortable. As Carolina browsed the store’s vegetable section, Jesus followed her with his eyes. By now, she was aware of her looks, of the effect she had on men. She was careful not to encourage Jesus, responding in a flat, indifferent tone.
In December, her second son came into the world, healthy and on time. Carol
ina named him Alejandro. He looked just like his father, with the same blond tresses Mario had possessed as a child. But he was angelic, innocent, hers.
Carolina started making long, stylish dresses with an old sewing machine an aunt gave her. The neighborhood ladies brought piles of fabric and made custom orders. Carolina charged a dollar apiece and asked the women to spread the word. She was a strong girl with a solid capacity to forget, but still the world around her was a man’s world. The number of dresses she could produce while preparing meals, sweeping floors, washing dishes, doing laundry, folding clothes, dusting surfaces, shopping for produce, bathing babies and changing diapers was negligible. Alejandro started regurgitating her breast milk. She had to ask her brothers for cash to buy formula. They were often out seducing women or sleeping in late. One morning, Carolina waited anxiously for Antonio Jr. to awaken. Noon came, and she grew impatient. She shook him awake. Red-faced with uncharacteristic fury, Antonio Jr. cursed at Carolina as he seized his wallet and hurled coins in her direction. They fell with plunks to the floor. You’re a parasite, he spat. She picked the coins up off the floor, miserable and humiliated.
The December after Alejandro’s birth, Carolina stopped by the carnicería to buy steaks. Jesus asked about her New Year’s plans. She gave him the obligatory curt smile and told him, in a bored tone, that she was making dinner for her family. What about after? I have a car. We can welcome the New Year together someplace scenic. Carolina looked at him. Was he crazy? Not very smart? The last thing she wanted was more children. She learned to sew more quickly. Her toddlers waddled toward her, tugging at her skirts, longing for their mother’s touch. But as soon as she finished sewing, she had to sprint into the kitchen to make dinner. She ignored the boys, growing tenser with each cry and poke. Sometimes, she lost her temper and yelled at them. She sent them across the street to collect coins tossed into the sky during baptisms at the church. She told them to use the coins to buy candy. She had to spoil them somehow.