– You are too young to be so bitter.
– And you’re too old not to realize your wife is fucking strangers to stay alive.
– She’s not! She can’t. You don’t understand how it is. Her brothers would kill her.
– She’ll tell them she’s out cleaning houses. Like Latinas do in the States. Like I said, in America-
Samir refused to hear more. He shot to his feet and turned away.-I pity you. Despite all I and my family have endured, I have not despaired. I am a father, I can’t give up hope. You need to do the same. Otherwise, why not just surrender to death and the devil?
– You don’t want me to die. I die, you don’t make it to America. Like it or not, all the hope in the world won’t save you without me.
This last bit was said to Samir’s back, he’d already fled. She watched the empty doorway for a moment, then resettled herself, easing onto her side with another wincing moan, facing away from Roque.-God, I thought he’d never leave.
It was the first thing he could recall her saying to him, even during their recording session back in La Chacra. He could think of nothing to say in return, preferring instead to study the hollow of her back where her blouse rode up. Wiping the lather of sweat off his face, he glanced up at the clock: half past ten. Tío Faustino and Samir would head off soon. Several feet below the clock, the lizard had yet to budge.
– Stop looking at my ass.
He flinched at the sound of her voice.-I’m not-
The bag of ice sloshed.-Not what?
– I’m not playing this game. You want to think all men are alike, we’re nothing but dogs-eat it, fuck it or piss on it. Be my guest. But my uncle’s not like that. I’m not like that.
She huffed, glancing over her shoulder with her good eye.-What’s wrong with my ass?
He heard an unfamiliar voice coming from outside.-Excuse me, he said, getting up from the floor to head out toward the sound, leaving Lupe and the lizard to themselves.
The stranger looked nothing like Roque had imagined. He wore jeans, a rugby shirt, a denim jacket way too large, plus a Dodger’s cap, blue again, his only nod to MS-13. His name, Roque gathered from the conversation, was Humilde.
Samir slung his bag at his hip, the shoulder strap crossing his chest. Tío Faustino prepared to head off with nothing but the clothes on his back. He wrapped his arms around Roque in a farewell embrace. “We’ll see each other tomorrow. Don’t worry.” Slapping Roque’s back, he waited for the others to drift out of earshot before adding in a whisper: “I cannot live with my conscience, knowing what that girl in there has facing her at the end of this trip.” He backed away, taking Roque’s face in his hands, a shocking gesture, overly tender, except the cast of his eye was calculating, not affectionate. “We have to think of something, you and I. The problem will be El Turco.”
Nineteen
GODO WATCHED THE CLOCK, WAITING UNTIL TÍA LUCHA HAD been gone a full hour, meaning she’d be safely chained to the cash register, mid-shift, stuck till midnight, no likelihood she’d circle back home for anything. He pushed open her bedroom door, crossed to her dresser, sat on the edge of the bed. He wondered how lonely she was, not having slept with Tío Faustino for several weeks now. There was no way to know, of course. Not the kind of thing she’d discuss.
Chancing the mirror, he suffered the usual jolt, his moonscape face. Speaking of lonesome beds, he thought. Maybe, someday, I’ll find myself a blind girl.
Leaning down, he tugged open the bottom dresser drawer. Tía Lucha’s underwear trended toward the functional, boxy white panties, thick-foamed bras. He lifted the soft prim stacks one by one, moving them to the bedspread, then reached back in for the thing he wanted. Setting the worn manila envelope in his lap, he gingerly undid the clasp. Postcards and letters tumbled out, sent from El Salvador, people he’d never met writing about stuff he knew nothing about. It was the photos he wanted, the old ones, some brittle to the touch, some worn so smooth from handling they felt like cloth.
The ritual was always the same but no less intimate for that. He liked to begin with the oldest, one particular favorite-here it was-picturing Lucha with her little sister Graciela, his mother, in their school uniforms. They stood outside the family home, a modest cinder-block house with a clay tile roof in the village of San Pedro Nonualco. A man in a harlequin costume was holding a macaw for the girls to pet, the two sisters so unalike, Lucha with her pinched face, her sour wince, pigtails so tightly braided they looked like they hurt, Graciela with her candy-red cheeks and plummy eyes, her gap-toothed smile, her wooly black tangles.
In another picture they walked hand in hand in crisp white dresses down a meandering cobblestone street. Other girls and boys marched along with them, everyone dressed for First Communion, heading toward the colonial-era bell tower. Lucha dragged Graciela along, the older sister bulling ahead while the younger lagged behind, reaching out to touch the fierce red blossoms of a fire tree.
He moved on to the teenage years, when his mother dropped her baby fat, though not all of it, slimming down here, filling out there. Was he to feel ashamed or proud that his mother’s image aroused him? Again, the contrast with her older sister practically reached out to slap you, Lucha with her twiggy shoulders and knobby wrists, the gaunt face, eyes dark and deep and sullen. But Graciela’s were shiny and full and wicked. Her smile was ripe, like an orange slice. She cocked her hip just so, suggesting the hunger of a born tease. Where were they? Godo liked to imagine it the doorway to a secret lair, a place where the teenagers hid away to talk in the dark about movies, smoke, touch each other, but it was probably just the neighborhood tienda, selling bread and sodas and aspirin.
There was a gap then, seven years or so, no images with the savagery of the war for backdrop, nothing from the feverish trek to America. When his mother appeared again, she was holding her newborn son, Godofredo, swaddled in fleece, named for a maternal uncle. She looked weary, anemic, but strangely happy, or at least relieved. No pictures of the father.
Now came the snapshots he lived for. He was just a kid in them, a wolf-eyed scrap clinging to his mother’s hand or nuzzled in her arms, their cheeks pressed close, her hair cascading down both their faces. He sometimes believed he could smell the floral tang of her shampoo, the talcum scent of her skin. Worry bags darkened both eyes, her smile wan, her skin pasty. She’d put on weight again. The lonesome grind of exile-one took comfort where one could, and in America food was easy, unlike love. Still, to Godo, she resembled perfection.
Last, the pictures of her pregnant with Roque, the killer innocent, hijo del amor. Again, no snaps of a dad. She offered the camera a brave smile, hand poised on the swollen belly like a last regret. I would have saved you if I could, Godo thought, and as those words lingered in his mind Happy walked in, finding him on the bed, Tía Lucha’s underthings stacked beside him, a snapshot in his trembling hand.
To his credit, Happy declined to express surprise or disgust. Godo was too lost in grief to feel ashamed. They regarded each other guardedly, almost kindly.
Finally, Happy said, “I need to tell you something.”
That seemed fair, Godo thought, wiping his face. One secret deserves another. He tucked the pictures back into the envelope, which he then returned to its spot at the bottom of the drawer. After carefully replacing the undergarments, he said, “Let’s not talk in here,” smoothing out the bedcover as he rose to leave.