“Qué chula eres” he said to her after she had thrown the trash away that night, quickly because she thought he might be waiting for her.
She loved to hear those words: “How pretty you are”—and from this man, this Salvador, this savior with a cross on his hand.
“Can I kiss you?”
“Yes,” she said and added to herself words she couldn’t speak: If you’ll hold me, if you’ll love me.
As she waited with closed eyes for his embrace, his warm kiss, she felt a hand roughly on one shoulder, another shoved into her dress, clutching one breast painfully. She did not move—could not; did not scream—could not. He pushed her into the darkness of a rank hallway. She smelled garbage mixed with the odor of flowers someone had thrown away.
He thrust her against a wall. Her hands felt plaster disintegrate behind her. She opened her mouth, but a thousand screams froze inside her.
“You said you wanted it, putal” he shouted at her.
No! she wanted to protest. I said yes to a kiss. But she could only repeat that in her mind, over and over.
“You like this, don’t you?”
Fear even stronger than his powerful hands grasped her. She could not twist, she could not bite him, kick him, wrench away. Her body would not move! She felt his hands between her legs. Then she felt him enter her in one brutal thrust.
With a gasp that contracted his body, he pushed her away so harshly she fell. She tasted blood on her lips, saw blood between her legs. She crawled outside a few feet, and fell among spilled garbage, the remains of what might have been—or so she thought—a rancid bridal bouquet.
“You’re a puta,” Salvador said. “Any woman who lets a man fuck her in an alley is a puta. If you tell anybody about this, I’ll tell them you’re a puta, maybe I’ll kill you.” He converted his thumb and forefinger into a cross and kissed it, swearing, the hand with the tattoo of the burning cross.
After not moving for eternal minutes on the dirt, Amalia tested her hands first, then her arms, to make sure she was not actually paralyzed. She returned to the ugly—uglier now—tenement apartment.
“Salvador raped me.”
“Liar!” Teresa said.
“My friend’s son?” her father added his outrage. “What a terrible lie!”
An inspector from the public schools came to ask why Amalia was not attending. “Because she got herself pregnant,” Teresa said. The man made a note on a paper and left.
Salvador’s parents came over one night, with Salvador. Amalia stared at him with hatred when he smiled at her. Her father sent her out of the room—but she listened.
“She’s pregnant,” Teresa said.
“But Salvador didn’t—Did you, son?” the father asked.
“Of course not, you’ve seen her flirting with me. She asked me to kiss her, and then she began to—Well—”
“She does go around in those tight skirts and sweaters, mujer” Salvador’s mother said to Teresa. Mexican women call each other that—“woman”—to assert firm understanding between them.
“That’s true, but she’s young, mujer,” Teresa said.
“Well, Dios mio, there’s only one thing to do, and Salvador knows it,” the father said. “Don’t you, m’ijo? Tell my good friends what you’re willing to do. Go on, son.”
“If it’ll stop what she’s saying about me, I’ll marry her—but I’m not sure the kid’s mine.”
“Well—” That was all Teresa said.
Amalia’s stomach wrenched. Her mind screamed: You know he raped me.
“And it’s not that bad, is it? They’re both young, and, after all, we’re compadres,” the father offered.
Amalia heard the men’s laughter.
After that, Amalia moved into the flow of events that claimed her.
On the way to the courthouse, with Salvador and his parents and hers, she touched her beautiful hair. No flower! She ran, searching the neighborhood yards. You can’t be a bride without at least one flower! She found one, a small yellow one, and she put it in her hair.
She was married in a gray courtroom before an official who did not even look at her. Not a white wedding. “You can’t wear white,” Teresa had said to her that morning when she appeared in a white blouse she had washed the night before. Still, Teresa had insisted they had to be married in a church afterward. And they were, in a hushed, hurried ceremony attended only by them. Later, Salvador’s mother, a little brown bird of a woman, made a heavily decorated cake, which Amalia refused to touch.
That night, in the single room they moved into in another tenement, Salvador raped her again. He pushed her dress up and twisted her pants down, he pinioned her arms behind her with one hand and forced her legs open with one knee, and he covered her mouth with the hand that had the tattoo of the burning cross.
She came to detest that tattoo almost as much as she hated him, detested it even before she learned that it was a sign of proud membership in one of the most violent gangs in the Southwest.
With glassy eyes, his head lowered over the bare table they ate on, his voice hardly a mumble, a monotone, he tried to explain to her what it was like to be in such a famous gang. “In my ganga they all know who I am, and no one else does.” He pointed to himself, as if to identify who he was; but he could not complete the gesture—his hand fell, trembling, to the cup of coffee he was trying to drink. Then he looked up at Amalia and frowned. “Do you know who I am?”
“Yes,” she said, despising him.
His tattoo-scarred hand turned the cup of coffee over deliberately. Then he walked out.
He had money only off and on, God knows from where. Amalia took a job “helping out” in the home of a rich Mexican-American merchant. The man’s daughter, Amalia’s age, went to Radford, a wealthy all-girls’ school, and she spoke English with a southern accent. Amalia made $3 a day.
When Salvador beat her, Amalia crouched on the floor and covered herself with her hands. She would remain there, absolutely still, until he would stalk out, cursing her. One day he left and didn’t come back. She refused to return to live with her father and Teresa. So she inherited a tenement room of her own.
She came home from work one day and, crying, threw herself on the floor, over and over and over, until she bled and vomited and passed out and lost the child. Out of that painful blackness she remembered little except for moments when she was conscious and saw Teresa draped in black and heard words or prayers.
“Good,” she said when Salvador’s mother came to tell her he was in prison. He and others of the notorious street gang he had proclaimed allegiance to with his tattoo had been caught selling drugs—Salvador was by then a tecato, addicted to heroin.
“The cursed gangs!” his mother wept.
Amalia was astonished to discover that that woman, whom she had hated from the night of the meeting with her parents, was capable of pain.
A good-looking soldier stationed at Fort Bliss moved in with Amalia. He was a Mexican-American from San Antonio. She had not been with another man in the years since Salvador had left. She only tolerated sex—the soldier did not seem to notice that, or did not care—so that afterward he would hold her. She liked to wake up in the morning with his arms around her, his warm body beside her. She was glad to have someone, despite the frequent quarrels about the way other men looked at her and was it her fault.
She told him about Salvador. “He raped me.”
“A wife has to put out for her man.”
“He wasn’t my husband then.”
He smiled, shaking his head. He pretended to try to force his erect finger into his clenched fist. “That’s hard,” he laughed.
She called him a cabrón. He slapped her and walked out. Terrified, she packed his duffel bag and placed it outside. She turned off the lights and did not answer the door when he returned. The next day she moved into another ugly room.
She decorated this one, with paper flowers, a curtain she made out of string and crushed soda-bottle caps, and—this was
of course not decoration, but she was so beautiful, wasn’t she?—a small statue of the Blessed Mother, her arms always outstretched in understanding. Daily, Amalia said prayers to her, and, kneeling, imagined the holy eyes benignly on her. To assure that they would be permanent, she bought shiny plastic flowers for the Sacred Mother to stand on.
Amalia could not get along by herself—by then, she worked in several households to make ends meet—because Teresa had begun to demand that she help her and her father, who was usually out of work, drunkenly remembering, more and more vividly, his glorious service to his country. Amalia met another boyfriend—that’s how she came to think of her companions. He worked in the warehouse of a large department store. They quarreled, and he left, came back, left, returned. If only handsome men would be as romantic as they looked, Amalia thought one morning when she woke and studied him asleep beside her, his arms nestling her.
He left permanently when Salvador returned from prison and threw him out.
“I’m a changed man,” Salvador said to her, and he kissed his thumb and forefinger in a vow, to prove it. To prove it further, he gave her a small crucifix, coppery; but all she could see was the despised burning cross on the web of his hand. “I’m entirely free of drogas” he told her, “and I’ve come back to live with my woman.” He brushed her breasts.
She hated him as much as ever and feared him even more than before. His eyes, which had once been so romantic, were now only black and hollow.
That night he took her violently and she could not scream.
In the following days she simply accepted that Salvador had returned after all these years to seize her life again.
The money she had saved for that month’s rent, hers and, now, Teresa’s and her father’s, was gone. She had kept it in a change purse she placed for safekeeping next to her statue of the Blessed Mother—to the wall behind it, she had added a splendid picture of Christ painted on velvet. And Salvador was able to take money under their gaze! He denied it. But she found a hidden syringe.
A few months later he was in trouble again. He had almost killed a man in a store he had robbed. A kind American lawyer whose family she worked for once a week coaxed her to get a divorce in Juárez, across the border, and she did.
The same day that she learned from Salvador’s mother—she had become a pain-racked shadow of herself—that Salvador had been returned to prison, Amalia discovered that she was pregnant by him again.
She deliberated losing this child also, but the earlier abortion had caused her so much pain, so much terror, that she decided to have it. She had to force herself daily not to think of it, too, as a child of rape. With her hand on her stomach, which would soon grow big, she prayed, kneeling, before the Holy Mother.
The child was Manny.
Manuel Gómez—she gave him her own last name, which she retained; he looked like Salvador, an angelic version of Salvador, with enormous chocolaty eyes and dark hair, which was beginning to curl. Often, Amalia would look in wonder at him and think that perhaps this was the cleansed part of Salvador, the part she had glimpsed as “savior.”
She had to go on welfare to take care of her child. She did not want another man with her now that she had this beautiful boy to care for.
In the one-bedroom government-project unit she had managed with the lawyer’s help to acquire after years on a waiting list, she lay in bed—it was still dark, just dawning—holding her child in her arms and looking at him in awe. There was a loud knock at the door.
“We’re making spot checks of welfare recipients,” a woman announced, walking in past her when she opened the door. The woman looked like the Anglo schoolteachers she had hated. “We have to make sure you’re not living with a man who’s giving you money.” The woman walked about the apartment. She peered curiously at the statue of the Blessed Mother—and then she snatched up an item from the floor. “Is this a tie?”
“It’s a scarf.”
The woman cleared a space at the kitchen table and sat down, pen poised over a form.
Amalia continued to stand, holding Manny.
“Have you ever used another name to apply for welfare?”
“No.”
“You claim one child—and he keeps you from working? Is that him?”
“Yes.” Amalia wanted to tell this woman to get out of her house, tell her she didn’t want their welfare, that she could not leave her child alone. But since her marriage to Salvador, the proud voice that had allowed her to confront those who judged her had weakened.
“Does the child have a father? I mean, are you married?”
“I was.”
“Divorced?”
“Yes.” Amalia inhaled and held Manny more tightly. “Your breasts are tiny, you could never feed a child,” she told the woman.
“What!” the woman gasped.
“I said that your breasts—”
The woman pushed the form into her purse. She looked at Amalia as if seeing her for the first time.
Amalia felt good the rest of that day, made herself up and looked beautiful again.
Her wonderful child with the large forlorn eyes filled her with amazement, and with a powerful, saddened love when she remembered he was Salvador’s and she felt the start of anger again. Then, she would hold him even tighter, as if to shelter him from any connection with that despised man. Manny cried a lot, for no reason Amalia could find—she would check his diaper, make sure there was no lump on the bed, touch his forehead for any tinge of fever. She learned how to soothe him: She would lie with him in bed, cradling his small body so that it fused with hers. If she got up and he reacted in fear—there might be a slight tremble at the awareness that she had moved away from him—she would return to him, kiss him softly on the face until she managed to elicit a smile from him, faint but beautiful. At times she pressed her face to his, sharing his tears.
Years ago, Amalia had learned the profoundest mysteries of the Catechism from a tiny twig of a nun who wore a bluish habit, not severe like that of other nuns. Patiently, Mother Mercedes had explained to baffled public-school children who could not afford parochial schools the difference between the “Immaculate Conception” and the “Virgin Birth.” The Immaculate Conception was the title awarded to Mary because she had been conceived free of original sin in her mother’s womb; it was precisely that fact that had allowed the Virgin Mary to float easily into heaven, past purgatory. With a delicate gesture of her hand, Mother Mercedes conveyed the gracious ease of the Holy Lady’s passage skyward. With even greater patience, she explained that the Virgin Birth meant that Mary had conceived Jesus, purely, in her own womb, after a discreet visit by the Holy Ghost, the Holy Spirit. Still, for Amalia, as for many other women of her faith, the Immaculate Conception was, simply, the Sacred Mother Mary, who had conceived her Holy Son immaculately.
Very old now, Mother Mercedes continued her good deeds, taking care of the children of working mothers. Off welfare and doing housework again, Amalia could leave Manny in her charge.
Mother Mercedes was truly a holy servant of God. She had converted one room in her small house on the fringes of the government projects into a shrine, with a smallish crucifix of Christ and a large statue of the Blessed Virgin. The shrine was open to anyone who wanted to light a candle, and the room blazed with small flames. Because the nun refused any actual payment, the women whose children Mother Mercedes cared for would drop a donation into a font guarded by an angel, the only brown-faced angel Amalia remembered ever having seen. A rumor had spread not long ago that a priest from the big cathedral in the city had come to verify her order and had discovered that she was not really a nun. No one in the projects cared about that. Mother Mercedes was a holy woman.
Now that Manny was no longer a baby, Amalia considered finding him a good father. Naturally it wouldn’t hurt anyone if he was handsome.
First there was a troubling matter she had to resolve. She had just blessed her Manny to Sister Mercedes’s care one morning when she felt a stron
g need to visit the shrine. As she knelt before the statue of the Blessed Mother resplendent in her purity, Amalia was seized by a longing to come closer to her, and to God, by partaking of Holy Communion. At the same time, she was jolted by the awareness that she was a divorciada who had lived unmarried with two men. Confession and repentance—and she would receive a severe penance from her confessor—would put her in good stead to receive Communion. It was the matter of repentance that complicated matters because now she needed another man, a good one this time. She had to face—and no one could blame her for wishing that she had simply continued not to think about any of this—that a woman living with a man who is not her husband is forbidden to receive Holy Communion. It was very complicated, how God had arrived at all this, although for Teresa, that, like everything else, was absolutely clear. She would often say to Amalia: “A divorciada is excommunicated from the Church, no matter how often she goes to Mass, and no matter what any of those modern priests say.” Amalia was sure that Teresa made up her own strictures, much sterner than the Pope’s.
As she continued to kneel before the Divine Mother for guidance, Amalia’s yearning for Communion grew. Try as she might—and God would certainly take into account her careful considerations—she saw no logic in being pushed away from Him because of situations created by a bad marriage she hadn’t wanted anyway. God never wanted His children distanced from Him. Didn’t He move in very mysterious ways to prove it? And who was she to deny Him that?
Making an elaborate sign of the cross, Amalia left Sister Mercedes’s shrine determined to invite some of God’s mysterious ways. She would do this with the help of Father Ysidro, the seventy-year-old pastor of the neighborhood church. At the same time, she would ask some questions about a movie that had baffled her recently, The Song of Bernadette.
Father Ysidro had understanding eyes and only a fringe of white hair. He took a regular leisurely walk about the neighborhood, pausing to speak to women and children and nodding to men at work. He returned for a brief rest in the vined courtyard of his small church. That is how Amalia had met him. She continued chatting with him into the courtyard and he invited her to sit with him. Amalia could tell he enjoyed her company. And why shouldn’t he like to visit with a pretty woman in her twenties? He was, after all, a man, no matter how holy; and weren’t all the angels God surrounded Himself with in church always beautiful?