Crux Read online

  Marco sold his house in Lemon Grove and made a down payment on a plot of land overlooking I-5. He called the USDA to obtain copies of their requirements. He scoured the documents, highlighting, underlining. He made phone calls, interviewing officials and architects. He obtained building permits and supervised the blueprints. He ordered the most efficient cutting machines on the market. He wanted to do a perfect job for his stepfather. He didn’t harbor any hard feelings about the past. Marco kept his eyes on the future. And the future looked great. He wondered if it might be time to start a family. He couldn’t imagine anything more fulfilling than bringing life into the world.

  One summer day after overseeing construction at the Butcher Block, he was driving to Tijuana to fix a leak in the radiator of his Cutlass and then spend a day on the Baja California coast. Suddenly, he noticed the car’s temperature gauge touching red. He pulled off I-5 onto the last U.S. exit.

  As Marco leaned over his engine at a gas station, a woman pulled in and asked him for directions. He would have thought she was a gringa, if not for her Puerto Rican accent. She was skinnier than he usually liked, noting her bony arms on the steering wheel. But the paradox of her appearance—a pale, blonde caribeña—was magnetic. Marco offered to take her to the hotel she sought. It’s too hard to explain, he lied. I need to go with you. Just bring me back here. She acquiesced, as if she saw nothing strange in his proposition. He jumped into her passenger’s seat and introduced himself. Jeannette Del Valle told him she was a doctor. For a plummeting moment, he recalled his dead dream. He quickly boasted about the Butcher Block. They were both twenty-nine years old.

  As they spoke, a strange conviction welled up inside him. This woman, he felt, was the one. He had never had such a strange idea—his fickleness had motivated at least one norteña to threaten him with black magic. But Jeannette was different. It was as if her smile had roots in her throat, and harnessed every word she spoke. She used charming hand gestures and goofy expressions. She made him feel comfortable. The hard authority of her profession, combined with her soft femininity, was unlike anything he had ever perceived. He thought: She’d be a great mother.

  * * *

  •

  The next day, he found her hotel’s phone number in the yellow pages. My mother was highlighting apartment listings in a San Diego newspaper. A little surprised but also charmed by his call, she explained she was browsing rentals in the upscale La Jolla neighborhood. Marco argued. La Jolla was thirty minutes north of her San Ysidro clinic, not counting traffic. It was needlessly expensive. He told her he knew of a new complex, Beacon Cove, only two minutes from I-805 in the city of Chula Vista. He offered to take her to see it on his motorcycle. She agreed to have a look. A real estate agent gave the two a tour of a one-bedroom that was affordable and attractive, with air-conditioning and central heating. Jeannette signed a lease the next day.

  Marco’s parents lived a few blocks from Beacon Cove. He invited Jeannette to their house, a two-story McMansion on a hill overlooking the Pacific Ocean. Jeannette met his mother, Carolina, a regal beauty with the lips of Michelangelo’s Delphic Sibyl. She and her son had the same symmetrical, attractive face, with a majesty amplified by the sadness that lingered in the corners of their mouths. How young you are, Jeannette told Carolina, who looked like she was in her thirties at the age of forty-eight. Carolina was coy and deliberate in her manner, unlike Jeannette, who was frank and casual. But the two women had a natural affinity. Carolina was impressed by Jeannette’s profession and her uncomplicated friendliness. Jeannette could see in Marco’s mother the same strength and self-possession she nurtured in herself.

  Marco regularly showed up at Jeannette’s place unannounced to make himself useful. He offered to buy furniture. He brought groceries from organic produce stores: carrot juice, wheatgrass shots, extra virgin olive oil. Often, he cooked for her. His meals were healthy and delicious, with a marine focus—sopa de mariscos, tostadas de ceviche, paella—and an immaculate presentation, topped with avocado slices and cilantro sprigs. He invited her on trips to his favorite Mexican beaches, packing meticulously, crowding his Cutlass with sleeping bags, flashlights, a gas-powered grill, toilet paper, a propane stove, fishing rods, foldable chairs, pots, pans, napkins, utensils, dishwashing soap, a heavy-duty camping tent and a rain fly.

  He was determined to impress her. And Jeannette found his unbridled resolve alluring; it was a fraternal twin to her own neurotic studiousness. Marco always wore light colors: faded blue or white jeans with gaps in the knees. He was the most resourceful man Jeannette had ever met. He saw through to the mechanics of everything. It was as if he had X-ray vision. He could make batteries, align breaks, fix broken pipes, start a fire from scratch. He knew how to cook and clean and carpenter. Whenever he found a blind spot in his vision, he worked actively to fill it, reading or observing or inquiring. He had amassed a collection of pliers, wrenches, padlocks, nuts, bolts, grips, spark plugs, rubber gloves, screwdrivers, safety glasses. Although he had no college degree, he intimidated Jeannette with his intelligence. He could recite the day’s news headlines. He retained full episodes of wildlife programming.

  Like her, he was a self-made outsider. Their native language was Spanish. He loved and respected his mother. Jeannette couldn’t help falling for this strange, determined man. His only perceivable faults: he smoked a pack of Marlboro Reds a day, and occasionally snorted a line of cocaine or smoked a joint of marijuana. But Jeannette didn’t mind. He was experimental. He could control himself. Marco courteously stepped outside each time he craved a cigarette; he knew the smoke provoked her asthma. With her permission, he moved into her Beacon Cove apartment.

  When she got pregnant, she wanted to get married. Marco didn’t believe in marriage; it seemed a pointless social construct. But he said he was willing to stomach a wedding in Unión de Guadalupe, a rural Mexico pueblo where he had family and had spent summers as a child. He bought Jeannette a diamond ring. She bought a long-sleeved beige silk dress and a white bouquet. They purchased plane tickets.

  Then Mark Anthony called. Mark Anthony, the radiologist Jeannette had almost forgotten, had decided they were soul mates. He regretted having let her go. I’m coming to see you. We’ll go to Vegas together to get married, he said. My mother laughed. You can’t be serious, she said. It’s been more than a year. It should have ended when she hung up the phone. But Marco was recording my mother’s phone calls. He had tapped her telephone line and, when she wasn’t home, pressed Play on his recording device.

  * * *

  •

  Nearly thirty years later, when I ask my mother for the first clear sign of the man my father would become—wrapping his body in aluminum foil, rambling about government tormentors—she recalls this incident and cries.

  * * *

  •

  While my mother was at work, my father climbed into their attic and found the telephone line. He cut it into a Y-connection, attaching an induction coil to another cable he maneuvered through a wall to the bathroom. He taped a recorder under the bathroom sink behind the cabinet doors. He drilled a hole in the wall, tugged on the cable from the attic and plugged it into the hidden recorder. He had two recorders, which he alternated as their batteries died. He listened to the tapes in his car.

  When I ask Papi why he did this, he says he can’t recall a specific reason. Perhaps he overheard her having a conversation he didn’t like. Perhaps it was simply a symptom of his desire to know everything. He recounts the episode with shrugs and a chuckle, as if discussing slightly embarrassing eccentricities.

  My father doesn’t remember the content of the phone conversation he heard clandestinely. He just remembers going crazy with jealousy. It confirmed his belief he had something to fear. He wondered if the baby in my mother’s womb was even his. He followed her to work, watching from across the street with binoculars. He paid a private investigator $2,000 to help spy on her. He took a pair of her di
rty panties to a laboratory for analysis. He could never prove she had cheated on him, but he could not shake his suspicion. Why was she always putting on makeup to go to work? Why was she always coming home so late? Surely Mark Anthony had come.

  How strange that these two men shared a name: Marco Antonio, Mark Anthony. I puzzle over the significance of this. Was it a joke of the cosmos? I fear my father and I were a glitch in my mother’s fate, leading her astray.

  I call Mark Anthony nearly twenty-five years later, finding his clinic’s phone number on the Internet. A picture of him on Vitals.com shows a middle-aged chubby brunette with smiling brown eyes. When I mention whose daughter I am, Mark Anthony exclaims my mother’s name. “Jeannette Del Valle…the first girl I ever proposed to,” he says, sighing. He remembers the phone call. He confirms my mother rejected him. He never saw her again after she left New York. He confides, however, that the woman he married looks like my mother. “I love her,” he says, and after he hangs up, I’m not sure whom he meant.

  Back in 1987, Marco, unwilling to admit he had been recording Jeannette’s calls, instead confronted her with the telephone bill. Who had she been speaking with in New York? She claimed she didn’t speak to anyone besides her sister. Enraged, Marco disappeared for days, leaving Jeannette uncertain about the future of her unborn child. Panic gripped her. She loved this man, why was he acting jealous, why had he vanished? She visited Carolina in despair. He’s been recording your phone conversations, Carolina said. I’m not saying I think you’ve transgressed. I just want you to be aware. Jeannette was shocked. Why would Marco tap her telephone line? Was there something wrong with him? Such a high level of paranoia struck her as sick—something a mentally ill person would do. She waited for Marco to return, hoping to allay his fears without betraying Carolina’s trust. But she wasn’t sure she wanted to be with him anymore. How could she trust a man who had tapped her telephone line? She wondered if his drug use had induced in him a level of psychosis. Days passed without a word. Jeannette felt the need to make a drastic change—anything to feel she had control. She decided to move to La Jolla. She paid a deposit on the first place she found. Then she called Carolina and confessed she was considering—though she deeply did not want this—an abortion. Through tears, she explained she could not raise a child alone in San Diego, while fulfilling her Service Corps obligations, which would not end until 1990. She still had to take the American Board of Internal Medicine’s certification exam, a notoriously difficult process that would take years.

  Carolina was horrified. She was a conservative Catholic, and vehemently opposed abortions. She also knew how difficult it was to raise children. She had struggled to feed six in Tijuana, Mexico, with the unreliable financial help of Don Jesus, who for years guzzled alcohol and abused his stepsons, Marco and Alejandro. Carolina’s two oldest children were the product of her first love—a mystery forbidden from conversation. For years she had considered leaving Jesus and crossing into the United States with her children. But she felt bound by her vows. When she finally sought permanent residency, she sought it for the entire family. Now her six children were grown, with stakes in a successful business that she helped run. She knew that anything was possible for certain kinds of women—for women like herself, women like Jeannette. She urged Jeannette to wait. Then she called her first son and persuaded him to swallow his pride.

  My father showed up as the moving truck pulled into Beacon Cove. He begged my mother to forgive him, to stay. He promised to change. I imagine my mother weighing her options. If she had turned him down, she might have lived happily ever after. She could have aborted me, moved to La Jolla, fallen in love with a wholesome gringo. But she loved Marco Antonio, in spite of everything. She relinquished her deposit on the La Jolla apartment. In September, the couple flew to Guadalajara, rented a car and drove to the rural pueblo of Unión de Guadalupe. Distant cousins of Marco’s greeted them with ceramic mugs filled with warm milk straight from a black cow. Every house along the perimeter of the church belonged to his cousins, aunts and uncles. After visiting them, the couple went to the church to set a date for the wedding. The priest shook his head. He needed their birth certificates. Jeannette had brought hers in place of a passport, which she lacked, but Marco didn’t have his. I’m sorry, but I can’t marry you, said the priest.

  In the evening, one of Marco’s cousins asked him why he wanted to marry such a skinny gringa anyway. Está muy flaca, he said. There’s so many fine mujeres here en el pueblo, with nice big tetas! Marco laughed. Jeannette’s heart sank. She had gone to the bedroom to lie down and fight an asthma attack. The men’s voices penetrated the walls. Why hadn’t Marco stood up for her? Worse, why hadn’t he argued with the priest? Why hadn’t he suggested another church? Marco was a different version of himself in Mexico: indifferent, indecent. She felt she had two options: collapse in sadness or turn her feelings to stone. She had too much pride to be crippled. If he didn’t want to marry her, she didn’t want to marry him, either. But although Marco seemed to have forgotten about the wedding, he insisted on visiting Playa Azul in the state of Michoacán, the rainforest of Uruapán, the coast of Colima. Jeannette tried to enjoy herself, purchasing souvenir shirts, a molcajete and other crafts, tasting the local food, horseback riding, posing for photographs and snapping some of Marco balancing on treetops with his machete.

  As a child, looking at these pictures from their false honeymoon—my mother with her natural, curly hair in the rainforest, eating a mango, or my father with his brown skin, splashing his face in a waterfall—I believed I was staring into an idyllic period in my parents’ relationship. I fantasized about visiting this verdant paradise with some Prince Charming of my own. But my parents have since sworn to me this trip was 100 percent miserable for them both. Today, looking at those pictures, I wonder if their memories of unhappiness are exaggerated a little. They seem so happy, in love. I know people pose for posterity. But the future can blacken the past. Is the lie in the photograph, or in tainted memory? I tell myself they experienced some moments of joy.

  * * *

  •

  In October 1987, Marco became the second man to ask Jeannette to abandon medicine. Even if I wanted to, I can’t—I am indebted to the government, she said simply. He was convinced she could abandon her duties because she was pregnant. He wrote the Service Corps on her behalf, soliciting a copy of her contract. It arrived. Marco tore it open. Scrutinized it. Sent another letter. In November, the Service Corps responded:

  Dear Dr. Del Valle,

  This is in response to your request for an estimate of your indebtedness if you breach your National Health Service Corps (NHSC) obligation. The total estimated debt as of January 1, 1988 will be $217,192.38 (principal $103,830.00 and interest $113,362.38).

  My father tossed the letter onto the kitchen table. He didn’t have that kind of money. He would just have to accept that Jeannette would keep working at the clinic, with its male surgeons: prestigious, in pristine lab coats, American. He threw himself into the Butcher Block. When my mother’s belly bulged, Papi bought a bulky Panasonic camcorder to film my budding existence. He took that camera everywhere. The videos contain clues of lingering contentment. I seek them out.

  On Saturday, January 16, 1988, my mother awoke with his camcorder in her face. The white light of a cloudy morning streamed in through the bedroom window.

  “No me molestes,” my mother said in a playful tone, pulling the sheets over her face.

  My father chuckled. “¿Cómo que no me molestes? Wake up.”

  “¿Qué hora es?”

  “It’s…ten o’ clock. You gonna make coffee for me or what?”

  My mother sighed and swung her legs over the bed. Her pregnant belly protruded beneath her white nightgown. A nebulizer lay in a corner of the room. Even the San Diego winter was rough on my mother’s lungs.

  “I’ll make it for you now,” she said, rubbing her eyes.
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  “You’re gonna do it now only because I’m makin’ a film,” he said, teasingly. “I tol’ you ten times already.” He followed her into the kitchen, where she laughed, because she found that the coffee had already been made.

  * * *

  •

  Carolina worked hard to make her nuera feel she had a family in San Diego. It was unfortunate that the Unión priest had not married the couple; she didn’t understand why her son hadn’t simply offered the man a bribe. But it didn’t surprise her. Men were never adept at matters of love. She organized a surprise baby shower for Jeannette, inviting all the women she knew. They made a tower of presents, decorated the house with pink and blue balloons and confetti, and covered a table with entradas and a cake. They turned off the lights and crowded around the front door. “Here she comes!” someone hissed. The door opened. A female chorus shouted: “Surprise!”

  My mother entered the house in a silk yellow shirt. “Oh, how lovely!” she said in Spanish, covering her face. My father strolled in, wearing a cowboy hat. (His sister, Aimee, was filming.) Carolina took Jeannette’s hands in hers. She gestured at the women. “These are my friends,” she said. Carolina seated Jeannette in a large wicker chair. She arranged everyone in a half circle in front of the chair. Then she knelt in front of Jeannette and handed her a present. My mother unwrapped it carefully, trying not to damage the paper. “Just rip it!” Carolina said impatiently, tearing it with her manicured hands. She handed her gift after gift after gift.

  * * *

  •

  Carolina taught Jeannette how to cook Mexican food for my father. One night, they made sopa de tortillas. My mother, visibly pregnant, still wore her engagement ring. She watched Carolina slice vegetables with manicured hands. Carolina was saying in Spanish: “And then you’re going to get married when the baby is born, and…with the dress and everything, and we’ll make a movie…” She detailed the recipe: “You put tomatoes in the blender, with some garlic, a piece of onion, some oregano—but fresh.” Carolina’s maid, Celi, a girl in her early twenties with black curly hair, began to confide her marital woes. She said her husband had lost all motivation to make her happy. When Celi was dating the man, he took her places, bought her things. Now he did nothing. “We have to eat standing up,” Celi said. “He hasn’t even bought a table for the house.” Carolina shook her head in disapproval. “Marco’s not so stupid,” she said, stealing nervous glances at my mother. “Quickly he bought Jeannette the machine to make tortillas, the griddle, right away he buys her things. In that, she can’t tell him twice.” Jeannette chuckled. She blew a kiss at Marco.