Crux Read online

  * * *

  •

  Carolina kept overdosing on contraceptives. She got pregnant a fifth time. Aimee, a girl, was a novelty. Carolina and Jesus kissed and cuddled her. She was the only child they both felt safe caressing. Jesus developed a remarkable capability: no matter how hungover or intoxicated, he woke up at sunrise to work. Jesus abandoned the family carnicería and launched his own in La Mesa, selling milk and canned goods in addition to meat. Jesus’s hope swelled, and with it, his ambition.

  He put Marco Antonio, age ten, in charge of the cash register. Jesus scrutinized racetrack records with a friend in the back of the store, marking up booklets with a pencil. The Agua Caliente resort was famous for its 5-10 betting option, with a prize of up to $100,000 for selecting the winning horses for the fifth through tenth races. Jesus always went for the 5-10, picking numbers on half-page slips that track employees checked by hand and stamped. One day, after the races, the two friends gaped at each other in the grandstand. They had guessed every winning horse in order. They were rich! All their problems were solved! Jesus couldn’t wait to tell Carolina. Stumbling toward the register to claim their money, the two men checked their pockets for their winning slip. Which of the two friends had it, again? Where had he put it? Neither could find it. Neither ever did.

  Marco Antonio watched as the merchandise at the carnicería dwindled. People arrived for beans; there were no beans. They wanted tortillas; the tortillas had run out. Clients stopped coming.

  Carolina started plotting a move to the United States. She wanted to earn U.S. dollars in San Diego like her brothers, the way she did as a teenage girl. She flirted with the idea of taking her children away from Jesus. She was hearing stories about successful female breadwinners. In 1967, she took the bus across the border for a job tailoring men’s suits. After a few days, she was able to hire a nanny with the money she earned. When the tailoring factory closed, she washed clothes at a laundry facility.

  Jesus continued to take his anger out on his stepsons. In the summer, Carolina bought Marco Antonio and Alejandro plane tickets to Unión de Guadalupe. She felt they would be safe there while she worked. Marco Antonio wrote her a letter in July 1968, in Spanish:

  My beloved mother,

  I am here at aunt Lydia’s house. I am well. Every day I wake up at 6 in the morning and we go to church….We came to Unión on a very long road….Alejandro sometimes pees [the bed] but he almost hasn’t anymore recently….I don’t have anything more to write to you.

  Marco Antonio who adores you.

  My grandmother keeps his letters in a royal blue chest in her closet. She shows them to me. They are perfectly preserved amid pictures and postcards. Marco informed her about his adventures in el campo, of salamanders in streams and creamy milk straight from cows’ udders. On torn fragments of paper, he included two- to three-sentence messages for his half siblings, promising bags of candy if they behaved well with nuestra mamá. His handwriting is neat, with clear curves, randomly alternating between capital and lowercase letters, expressing joy in tracing the shapes of the alphabet. His handwriting was identical to my childhood script.

  “He was so sweet back then,” my grandmother says. “He changed as a teenager.”

  “Why do you think he changed?”

  “I don’t know,” she says. “He’s always been serious. How can I say…he was different. He had brilliant ideas. I think he’s traumatized because…because he lived a false life. Because I lied to him about what kind of a family he was from. Maybe that’s why. I made a mistake.”

  “Is that what he tells you?”

  My grandmother’s lip trembles. She tells me that when she tried to hug my father a few days ago, he shrugged her off angrily and asked why she bothered to touch him now that it was too late. “No sé. No sé. No sé,” she says, her eyes filling with tears. “I feel a solitude that is so…” She stops, because she can’t continue. We return to the couch, and she begins again with the old story.

  * * *

  •

  Autumn came, and Carolina sent for Marco and Alejandro. She had saved enough money to install running water in the house. When a perfect stream first gushed from the kitchen faucet into her hands, she was so happy that she let out a shrieking laugh. She washed the dishes in ecstasy. Inspired by Carolina, Jesus started working at a carnicería in Los Angeles, then another in San Diego. He added a room to the house. For the first time, the Guerreros began to experience luxuries.

  In 1969, Carolina went to the consulate to apply for a green card. She asked the Roland-Holst family for a recommendation letter, which she included in her application. Carolina was granted legal status months after the United States became the first country to send men to the moon. The lunar landing had proved that el sueño americano had no earthly limits. She requested permanent residency for her children, taking advantage of the Immigration and Nationality Act, which allowed family reunification. Carolina and her children stood in a never-ending line in the hot sun outside the U.S. consulate in Tijuana. She had dressed them in the nicest clothes they had. Marco Antonio had a gaping hole in his sock and complained that the sidewalk’s heat was seeping through his shoe and burning his foot. Alejandro lost consciousness. His skull hit the concrete with a crack. Carolina cried out and kneeled beside him. Alejandro woke up, dusting himself off, insisting he was fine. Inside the consulate, a woman at the desk shook her head. If they wanted visas, the man of the house needed to be present.

  A few days later, Carolina found out she was pregnant again. She would now need to migrate not five children but six. Please, God, let me have this last child and no more, she prayed. Her sixth child was a boy they named Joaquin.

  * * *

  •

  Abuelita celebrates her birthdays with mariachis. Listening to the trumpets and guitars, she claps her hands and sways. A beautiful smile illuminates her face. I filmed her once, backlit by the sunset in an ocean-view Tijuana condominium she purchased, surrounded by men singing in charro outfits. She is radiant in a beige suit, wearing a pearl necklace. She has a list of songs she asks them to play: “Cielito Lindo,” “Guadalajara, Guadalajara,” et cetera. But her favorite is “La Ley del Monte” by Vicente Fernandez. The Law of the Mountain. In the song, a man describes carving a woman’s name on a maguey blade, interlaced with his own. When the woman falls out of love, she cuts off the maguey blade. The man is not disconcerted by her action. He knows something she doesn’t: the maguey plants in their desert are enchanted. “I don’t know if you’ll believe the strange things my eyes see,” Fernandez sings in Spanish. “Perhaps you’ll be amazed—the new limbs that bloom on the maguey carry the carvings of our names.”

  * * *

  •

  The teeth of Carolina’s children tell a cross-border tale. All of my father’s molars are missing. Marco was losing teeth as a teenager. Carolina couldn’t afford toothpaste back then, let alone fillings or root canals. Friends merely tore out his troublesome teeth. Alejandro and Chui are missing about half of their molars. The three youngest siblings, raised largely in the United States, have mostly healthy teeth.

  The family migrated in 1973. They escaped Mexico just as its economy suffered the blow of a global oil crisis. Carolina had decided not to leave Jesus after all. She felt her efforts to migrate alone had been thwarted by God because He did not want her to break her vows twice. She prayed Jesus would stop drinking. The Guerreros moved into subsidized housing in southern San Diego—everyone except Marco, who at the age of seventeen dreamed of becoming a surgeon in Mexico. In the United States, the family’s apartment had a boiler. Her children enjoyed the opulence of warm showers for the first time in their lives.

  Marco’s medical school dreams failed to materialize for reasons he preferred not to discuss with his mother. He followed his family across the border, moved in with them and began working in the shipyards. One night, he awoke sweatin
g and sobbing. He had had a terrible dream. He was certain, somehow, that this dream had been more than just a dream. He had seen into the future. But it was all blackness, melting blackness. It was so horrible it was inconceivable. Carolina found him in bed, shaking and weeping. He tried to put words to what he had seen: All I know is that it was the future, and that it was the worst thing, it was so traumatizing, he told her. Carolina believed in premonitions; her grandmother had peered into parallel worlds. She took her first son to a curandera in Tijuana. Carolina didn’t much trust that woman; she had read Carolina her fortune and said: I see you surrounded by piles and piles of one-hundred-dollar bills. Money, money, everywhere! Carolina had walked out laughing. Clearly, the woman was deranged. But she didn’t know of anyone else. Perhaps she could give her son a cleansing?

  The woman took one look at Marco Antonio and shuddered. He has the veil of death over his soul. I have to tear it down, but it is going to be very, very difficult. Marco Antonio refused. Her fee seemed absurdly high; he was convinced she was a con artist. He was determined to transcend the darkness on his own. He started meditating. He read Eastern philosophy books. He kept stacks of notebooks, writing thoughts and queries. He told his siblings he was shutting himself up in his room to drift to another dimension. He warned them not to disturb him and bring him back into his body. He disappeared for weeks on solo camping trips, taking a homemade survival kit into the mountains.

  In 1980, Carolina spotted a small filet-mignon supply shop for sale in downtown Chula Vista. She suggested that Jesus take a look. He purchased it, following Don Roberto’s advice. The meat came from local slaughterhouses in halved, juicy carcasses hanging from metal hooks. In red aprons, Jesus, Alejandro, Chui and Miguel chopped the bloody meat by hand. Marco Antonio was busy at the shipyard from 7:00 a.m. to 3:30 p.m., but came in the evenings and on weekends to help. Jesus prepared chorizo with the recipe he had learned as a boy. The wealth of the Robledos and the Guerreros exploded in tandem. Carolina, in charge of payroll and accounting, purchased her own car. She found herself surrounded by piles and piles of $100 bills.

  It was more money than she knew what to do with. In 1980, Carolina obtained a license from the California Social Services Department to operate a foster family for abused children. But the orders at the Butcher Block mounted so quickly that she had to start assisting with deliveries—dozens in a day, sometimes as far away as Escondido. Carolina picked up Aimee and Joaquin from school, then drove her meat-loaded car to restaurants. She was forced to give up foster care. Don Jesus continued drinking prodigiously, grasping the flask of liquor in his pocket with bloodstained hands. He was polite and attentive with customers, but it was not unusual to find him passed out on the floor after hours. One evening, Miguel—or perhaps it was Chui—kicked him as he lay drooling. Eres una desgracia, one of them said with disgust. That’s all it took: the contempt of one of his biological sons. Jesus quit drinking cold turkey.

  Marco Antonio counseled Jesus to invest in German slicing machines, which could slice in twenty seconds what hands sliced in five minutes. His brothers found it humanly impossible to finish chopping in time for the afternoon deliveries. They were taking methamphetamines to work faster in the near-freezing temperatures of the plant. When the USDA shut down the Butcher Block, Jesus asked Marco Antonio for help building the new one. My father agreed.

  The business had grown so lucrative that when Carolina drove by a home-construction site with ocean views, she stopped and asked to see the blueprints. She made an appointment to return with her husband. The houses look so beautiful, she told Jesus. But I’m sure we can’t afford them. They’re $250,000.

  The gringo real estate agent sighed when he saw the Mexican couple, who could hardly speak English. We don’t have more terrains, he told them, enunciating each word as if speaking to children. Just this one, and it’s the most expensive one: $300,000.

  Jesus, in his broken English, asked the man why that house cost more money than the others. Because of the oh-shen veeh-you! the man cried. It’s too ex-pen-sive for you, the best oh-shen veeh-you!

  Jesus turned to Carolina. If you like it, we’ll buy it. She brought her hands to her face. He turned toward the real estate agent and informed him that he could make a down payment of $100,000—he had that in the bank.

  * * *

  •

  Abuela Carolina’s lovebirds go silent in the evening. My grandmother stops talking, and we stare at each other for a while.

  “How difficult it all was,” I say, finally. “But you achieved so much.”

  She sighs slowly. “Ay mija,” she says. “I don’t know if it was worth it.”

  Carolina pauses, then continues: “It was so much working, working and working, day after day. And at the end of life you ask yourself, why? For what? What was the value of everything I did, if I did not experience my children, if I could not enjoy them?”

  Her children have not lived the happy, healthy lives she wanted for them. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, as the Butcher Block became a multimillion-dollar enterprise, allowing her to buy properties on both sides of the border, she thought for sure the American dream was real, that los Estados Unidos had made all of her sacrifices worthwhile. But most of her children struggled with vices. All divorced or remained single; each still relies on her and her husband to some extent. Doña Carolina dreams of retiring, of traveling to el campo and walking amid maguey plants, inhaling the smells of wet tierra, forgetting her troubles. But Jesus has no plans to retire—he needs to move, move, move, constantly, to avoid thoughts, to chop and package meat until he drops dead. And he needs Carolina. No one could fill her role. Jesus doesn’t trust anyone else with the Butcher Block finances.

  “I’m roped up, I’m really chained,” she says. “If I say I’m not going to work one day, the next day I have to stay double time.”

  My father tells her she has oceans of blood on her hands because of the Butcher Block. Countless slaughtered pigs and cows. My grandmother wants to be rid of the business as soon as possible. She has begged Jesus to sell it. Jesus refuses.

  “Why don’t you just retire?” I ask. “Who cares if they need you? Let them deal with it. You should be enjoying the fruits of your labor. Taking vacations.”

  Tears well up in her eyes and she begins to cry. She shakes her head. “Let’s go outside,” she says. We walk into her backyard to watch the sun dipping into the ocean. The backyard is a mess. Two years ago, Papi offered to renovate Abuela’s backyard: installing drip irrigation, a new fence, a garden and a drain in the cage of her mil pájaros to make it easier to clean. He knows how much she loves el campo and wanted to create a little piece of it in her San Diego home. Abuela could have hired a team of renovators, but she was touched by her son’s offer and agreed. He tore her backyard to shreds, digging deep holes, pulling down an old fence, creating mountains of soil. Her backyard became cluttered with tilling machines and piles of fertilizer. Papi did and undid and redid everything, unhappy with anything that was less than perfect. He succumbed to depression after depression. “That’s how he is: he progresses, then he slips backward—no sé por qué,” she says. “At least the fence ended up so beautiful, so lovely.” Solar-powered lights adorn the vinyl posts. The fence is made of tempered glass, providing a view of the Pacific Ocean, resisting the force of strengthening winter gusts.

  * * *

  •

  I receive a text message from my mother: “Carolina is going to be admitted to the Sharp hospital for chest pain I let you know more details as soon as I have them.” I call my grandmother. She is in the emergency room. She hasn’t told anyone where she is except her daughter, Aimee, and my mother. She doesn’t want to give Jesus a heart attack. I speed to the hospital. Abuelita lies in a dark room, not a strand of scarlet hair out of place. Her nails are French-manicured. Her makeup is perfect. But her lids hang low on her eyes. She smiles and grimaces when she sees me. I don�
��t let myself frown or express concern; she is almost shaking with fear.

  “Dios me dijo que me quiere,” she says, her voice a little girl’s.

  “God does love you,” I say. “You’re going to be just fine, Abuelita.”

  Suddenly, she says: “Have I ever told you about my accident?”

  “What accident?”

  “The one on the bicycle. When I was fifteen,” she says. “I think I forgot to tell you when you were interviewing me.”

  “Tell me now,” I say.

  Carolina was fifteen, riding a bicycle a neighbor had lent her. The wheel jolted against an object on the street. She found blood in her underwear when she came home. She wasn’t menstruating.

  I know why she is telling me this. “You didn’t bleed when Mario took your virginity, did you?”

  She shakes her head.

  “I didn’t bleed the first time, either,” I say. “It’s normal.” I search her eyes and am relieved to find relief. I tell her about my first time, wondering what kind of secrets the world is whispering—about mirrors and mortality, about the womb that makes the bodies coursing with blood that cycles and cycles.

  * * *

  •

  A catheterization clears up her clogged artery. My father persuades her to become a vegan with him; he has decided it’s the healthiest diet. Doña Carolina, co-owner of the Butcher Block, stops eating meat, against the protestations of some of her other children. Marco brings her powders and potions, prescribes minerals and vitamins. He makes green smoothies and cooks delicious healthy meals. Her knees, which previously hurt all the time, stop bothering her. The pain in her stomach vanishes. She becomes more beautiful still. “Your father would have been a great doctor,” she says, her skin aglow. “No sé por qué no lo hizo. No sé. No sé.”