Amalia’s mother used to remember, or so she claimed, a time when everything was different—before Amalia was born. The old woman insisted that all these matters that Amalia faced were “new problems,” as if they had been born with her. Other times, Teresa extended these terrible changes to the fact that fewer and fewer women offered novenas to the Blessed Mother. With a horrible sigh that seemed to Amalia to last longer each time, she asserted that “those new priests” no longer encouraged them. “Next they’ll forbid the rosary,” she would predict, clutching her black beads as if this very moment they might be snatched away from her. She would go on to point out that she herself refused to eat meat on Fridays—although Amalia remembered they hardly ever could afford meat on any day—“no matter what the ‘modern’ popes say.” Then she thrust snatches of prayers at the statue of La Dolorosa, a somber Mother of Sorrows that terrified Amalia because the face was one of constant endured pain. On the statue’s black velvet robe were pinned several tiny amulets for miracles granted. Amalia would look at the amulets and wonder what kind of miracles they represented. God was capable of enormous wonders; why then tiny miracles?
During Lent, La Dolorosa was covered entirely with one more black, mournful veil. All the religious pictures were draped. The drab apartment would look even uglier, poorer.
Some memories in Amalia’s early life would only later link with the inevitability of loss. When she was a little girl, she cherished her mother’s saint’s day—Teresa had not yet become her accuser. That was the day on which her father honored his wife in the traditional Mexican way. With two or three friends, he would serenade her at the break of dawn. The men would station themselves outside her window in the tenement, a window patched with cardboard in winter, left without a pane in summer. Other men and women and children would lean out of their own windows to hear the singing of the men, and Amalia’s father’s voice would be sweetened with alcohol as he led the others in the song about King David and how he serenaded pretty girls:
Estas son las mañanitas
que cantaba el rey David,
a las muchachas bonitas
se las cantamos aquí….
In her bed, Amalia listened to that singing, grateful that the following minutes would be peaceful, there would be no rages from her father, not yet the drunken shouts and flailings of violence, still early, still only sweet.
Her mother—later Amalia would evoke this memory when Teresa’s coughing kept her awake—her mother, expecting the serenade, would make herself up carefully, lie all made up in bed, a towel under her neck, not to muss her hair, to appear resplendent at the window as the sun began to rise. Then she would leap to the window as if in surprise and lean there as if she were the most beloved woman in the world.
That is how Amalia imagined her mother felt. She herself remained in bed, wondering what it would be like to be serenaded by a beautiful young man with velvety brown skin, white teeth, curled eyelashes, eyes the color of burnt almonds.
Afterward, her mother, appearing flustered but having prepared for this, too, would invite her husband and the musicians into the two rooms full of religious pictures, to share tamales, pan de dulce, hot chocolate, coffee. Amalia’s father had reserved some beers.
There was another memory Amalia came to think her mother had only “lent” her in order to snatch it away:
“My wedding lasted two days.” Teresa would come alive, even toward the last of her life, when she narrated that. “We had mariachis and more serious music, too, the way all great weddings have, with a violin and a piano. The celebration started at my parents’ home, in Chihuahua, and then continued on to my husband’s parents’ house outside the city, and I danced until I had to take my shoes off, but I didn’t change my wedding dress because it was so beautiful, the color of pearls, and I deserved it.”
In later years Amalia would hear that and understand: And I do not deserve that and never did. Soon Teresa would add: “It’s usual that a mother save her dress for her daughter, and I did, but only briefly, because it was clear that you would never be wearing a white dress.”
Amalia lived her life on the assumption that God—very soon she added and then shifted the emphasis to the Blessed Mother—understood her motives clearly, no matter how others, including her mother, might judge her. God understood, how could He not? He was, after all, all-knowing, wasn’t He? There was no way that He could not have seen everything in her life.
Amalia was born in El Paso, Texas, in the city’s second ward, a fist of dark tenements. World War II had ended. She was Teresa’s third and last child, the first one to be born in America and not Juárez, across the border in Mexico. To the end, Teresa refused to learn English, and she retained her Mexican citizenship, renewing her passport regularly—unlike her husband, who was proud of having become a “legal American” and of having fought in the war.
Only Mexicans lived in those tenements, infested two-room units cluttered with religious pictures, effigies of Christ and of the Holy Virgin. Up to ten people—of different generations and always including a grandmother—occupied dark rooms without running water; the bathroom would be outside, frigid in winter like the rooms themselves, which were rancid with unbudging heat in summer. The small window in the room Amalia shared with her two brothers looked out on a pile of garbage. She often fell asleep and woke to the stench of rot; on cherished days, to the scent of just-washed laundry, hung outside to dry on ropes. The outer walls of the tenements were plastered with aged VOTE FOR signs and with posters advertising Mexican movies at the Colón Theater. In later years, as a girl, Amalia would grow to love those posters, especially the ones that displayed Maria Felix, the great Mexican movie star.
Whether the beautiful “la Maria” played an aristocrat or a peasant, she was always, finally, in control of any situation—a revolution, a divorce—and, if she wanted, she could destroy any man with a single arch of a perfect eyebrow; when she was older, Amalia would think she resembled the great movie star, without the aloofness. Once Teresa actually told her, “You resemble la Maria, sometimes.” Amalia rehearsed, but she was never able to achieve the disdainful look of the movie star; and she didn’t really want it.
While Amalia’s father had been in the army, there had been allotment money, and so there was food for the family. After he returned, there occurred a slide to even greater poverty. With no education, he moved from menial job to menial job, made bearable only for moments by alcohol. At those times he would remember with patriotic fervor and tears the battles he had fought in a place called Normandy. His mother, he reminded them often, had proclaimed his participation in the war by exhibiting a proud blue star on her front window; and there was his Purple Heart to prove his contribution.
Amalia remembered him as almost always in a drunken rage—threatening, striking his wife, his sons, her. A violent stranger—that is what he was to her. When his rages erupted, Amalia would huddle frozen in a corner, motionless, soundless, even holding her breath, too terrified to cry. That was the only response she knew to violence, to become quiet, passive. Seeing no way to thwart it, she would try not to know it was occurring, even while it pulled her into its center.
There were poorer people in El Paso, but especially across the border, in Juárez. “Paracaidistas”—“parachutists,” they were called—descended overnight from the interior of Mexico and squatted on barren hills. From the outskirts of El Paso, you could look across the river and see shacks made out of mud and boxes, children playing in rubble. “We should be grateful God has miraculously spared us from that,” Teresa often said.
When Amalia entered school, she spoke no English. She would have preferred to go to Catholic school because she was always religious—prayed and went to Mass regularly—and because she had seen pretty girls in pressed, clean uniforms who went there. Later, Amalia was relieved she did not go there, because she became terrified of nuns after an interlude in church when she had gone to confession.
“If you don’t go to Cath
olic school, you’ll go to hell,” a nun with a chalk-white face told her. She had appeared out of nowhere with her winged hat, her dark skirt hissing, hands clasped as if strangling something.
“We don’t have money,” Amalia said in Spanish.
“God doesn’t care about worldly matters, and He wants you to speak English.”
“We don’t have no money,” Amalia said in her best English.
“And God doesn’t want you to speak with a Mexican accent.”
In those early years Amalia felt warmth from her mother. They would sit on the slanting steps of the tenement, and she would lie on her mother’s lap in the hot Texas evenings—her father was at some bar somewhere. Teresa would brush Amalia’s hair until it crackled with electricity, because even then her wavy hair was lush, black, lustrous, beautiful.
“Let me look at your hair,” the Anglo teacher said to Amalia one morning. She went and stood proudly before the woman, to have her hair admired. The teacher parted it at the scalp. “I have to make sure you don’t have any lice.”
Her beautiful hair inspected for lice! And only Mexican children were being inspected, not the gringos who lived on the fringes of the poorest neighborhoods. Amalia ran home. But the next day, finding the spirit that would allow her to survive, she said to the teacher: “You couldn’t have lice in your hair because it’s so thin you can see right through to your scalp.” She ran her fingers through the richness of her own dark hair.
Amalia was not a good student; she made terrible grades and no one cared. She was not interested in the “Anglo things” they tried to teach her. At the first of the day, they had to sing “Home on the Range” for an Anglo teacher—all the teachers were Anglos—who never seemed to comb her hair and often had egg yolk on her dress but was always exhorting the Mexican students to pay extra attention to “grooming” because: “You’re a minority, have to prove your-selves.” She insisted they all change the line “where seldom is heard a discouraging word” to “where never is heard a discouraging word.” Amalia thought: If all you counted were discouragements in school, that was a lie.
She resented—deeply, deeply—that “American” students in the school were allowed an extra play period while Mexican children were herded into one room to be given “special instruction” on pronunciation, and that meant only that an angry woman would berate them for saying “shuldren” instead of “children.” “Can’t you hear the difference?” she shrieked. “Ch-ch-ch! Not sh-sh-sh!” When Amalia quickly learned to differentiate between the two sounds, she still continued to say “shuldren” during the special class. So she resisted learning, often refused even to speak English, sometimes pretending that she did not understand it. Later she would come to believe that she was much more intelligent than anyone suspected.
There were often religious processions up the Mountain of Cristo Rey, outside El Paso, near Smeltertown, a small clutch of shacks near where giant machines dug for coal.
The Rio Grande was full and dark on a day Teresa insisted Amalia climb the holy mountain with her. They walked over rocks and dirt, past railroad tracks that cut across desert and hills. At the foot of the mountain, where the procession would begin, there was a festive mood, improvised food stands, cool limonada, some men selling hidden beers among religious amulets. Amalia would have preferred to remain there, but Teresa clutched her hand tightly and informed her, “God is watching you very closely.”
Past crude, weather-beaten stations of the cross embedded along the sides of the dirt path, they climbed with crowds of people from El Paso, Ysleta, Canutillo, Juárez, making their way up, chanting prayers, led by priests and acolytes in gaudy robes and carrying effigies of sad-faced saints. During the hot climb of almost two hours, the supplicants knelt at intervals, propping beside them their placards of the Virgin. Small bands played solemnly.
At the top, Mass was said. Amalia knelt with the others on the dirt, in the stare of the sun, before a statue of a primitive Christ, fifty feet tall.
“This will make God be kind to us,” Teresa said, gasping for breath on the way down.
When they were trudging back to the bus stop on the highway, Amalia heard the sound of agitated horses’ hooves. Along the strait of the river, mounted police of the border patrol were routing a group of about ten men, women, and children who had been dashing across the water, the men with pants rolled up, the women with skirts gathered about their thighs.
“Wetbacks,” someone near Amalia identified them.
Those in the river tried to scatter. Amalia stared in terror. A little girl clinging to her mother clutched at her dress and pulled them both down into the muddy water. Amalia watched for them to come up. With ropes, the police were herding the people they had netted. Amalia continued to wait for the woman and the girl to emerge from the water. When Teresa pulled at her hand to coax her to move on, she was still staring back. The two who had sunk into the river did not appear.
Amalia was becoming quite pretty, maturing quickly. The whistles from boys much older than she, even gringos, confirmed that. She was proudly aware that her breasts were much larger than those of the other girls in school—and even those of the teachers, who were usually skinny and nervous. She learned early to sew well on Teresa’s machine; and when Teresa wasn’t looking, she converted the dresses she inherited from her into prettier ones, tighter ones. When she left for school, she would wear something loose in order to pass Teresa’s scrutiny. As soon as she was away, she would remove the loose garment to show off her splendid body.
El Paso was an army town. There were Fort Bliss and Biggs Field—and William Beaumont Hospital, for military men. Young soldiers with short-cropped hair and shiny brown shoes loitered in San Jacinto Plaza, a square in the middle of the city. Amalia liked to walk past them, cherishing the admiring remarks. She was not interested in the soldiers because most were Anglo and she did not like Anglo men. At the time, only Mexican girls went out with soldiers. Anglo girls disdained them. The soldiers viewed the Mexican girls as beautiful exotics, the kind war often makes available to them. Sometimes they even married them.
Just as she had known they would, her two brothers ran away from their father’s outbursts. Because they had been strangers who occupied the same room with her, Amalia welcomed their leaving; she would feel less crowded. But her father’s rages grew more frequent, and she and Teresa became their object. Always, Amalia would attempt to retreat from his anger, try to hide, but it was as if something clasped her body at those times, something cold that would not allow her to move, hardly allow her to breathe.
She was fourteen when, one night, her father grabbed her. She smelled the harsh liquor on his breath. When she felt his hands fondling her breasts, and then his sour mouth nuzzling them, she closed her eyes, to become invisible. The prospect of even greater violence paralyzed her. She could not move even when she saw that Teresa had walked in. Her mother did not say anything then—nor ever. She merely put her husband to bed to sleep off his drunkenness.
From that day on she turned cold to Amalia.
Amalia longed to leave school. She had always hated the teachers—and the free token that was given to the poorest students like her so they could eat in the school cafeteria but only after the others had gone through the line and only from certain foods. For her, school was a place of humiliation.
A fidgety girl called her a “spic” one day and added, “Your hair is shiny because you put hog lard on it.”
“You’re jealous because God made you skinny. If you keep pulling on your hair, you’ll be bald—unless you put hog lard on it,” Amalia answered.
During the next few days, it pleased her to see that the girl’s hair was plastered with something greasy.
Even in the tenements Christmas was a pretty season. Despite his drinking, Amalia’s father never stopped putting up a nacimiento, a manger scene. A week before Christmas, he built the boxlike structure, three feet square. He covered it with pine branches, their odor purifying the rooms. He sp
read a roll of cotton on the bottom, to simulate snow. Against a painted dark blue sky, a small light bulb surrounded by crinkled foil became the guiding star over the manger, which contained effigies of the Blessed Mother, Saint Joseph, and the three Wise Men—not yet the Christ Child. A wooden crib waited.
Singing the praises of the holy birth and miracles to come, Teresa brought the child in on Christmas Eve. Cupped in her hands, the tiny doll would be held to the lips of the neighbors invited. Then Teresa placed the Christ Child in the crib and, kneeling, led everyone in a rosary, her husband’s reverential voice slurred by liquor. “Dios te salve, Maria …”
Watching in wonder, Amalia thought: What would it be like to be the Blessed Mother, to know that a place in heaven was assured? And to have the love of everyone.
That marveling at so much love led her to say what she did when Salvador approached her in the alley near her tenement. She was fifteen, and she had gone out to throw that day’s trash in a bin in the alley.
“Don’t you recognize me?” the voice asked her that night, so soft and so husky.
Of course she recognized him. He was the son of her father’s drinking friend who came over often with his wife—the two women drank only to keep some of the beer away from their husbands, Amalia had overheard Teresa say. Salvador, who was about twenty, would often be summoned to carry his father home. Sometimes the son would smile, laugh, other times he would be silent, moody. But always he was handsome, with dark hair, eyes that turned black at night. When he smiled at her, Amalia smiled back, flirting. She had noticed that he had a tattoo on his hand, a cross with lines that radiated from it. That signaled tenderness to her. She began to dress especially for him when she knew he might come. She loved it that his name meant “savior.” And he was so handsome. And so romantic.