B0061QB04W EBOK (24 page)

In the evening, when we saw Mami and Tía Güera walking across the bridge, we ran to meet them. There was a man walking with them, and I thought it was my aunt’s husband. I had seen him only once or twice, but when they got closer to the house, I knew it wasn’t him.

“This is Rey,” Mami said.

I turned to look at Mago and saw that her smile had completely vanished. I tried to hold her hand, but she pulled it away.

They came into the house, and I could smell the delicious scent of the roasted chicken Mami had brought. I looked at Rey. He seemed too young for Mami, and later I would learn he was in fact fourteen years younger than she. He was going on twenty-one, and my mother was two months away from turning thirty-five. How flattered my mother must have felt to have a twenty-year-old lusting after her, a woman who had given birth to four children and whose body was not what it had once been. If she had still harbored any insecurities after
having been abandoned by my father for another woman, Rey came and helped her get rid of them once and for all.

She met him at the rotisserie where she worked a second job. Rey worked at a hardware store near the marketplace and would go in during his break to buy a meal. At the sight of him, I hated him. I wished his name wasn’t the male version of my name. I didn’t want to have anything in common with that man, and I especially didn’t want to share my mother with him. Suddenly, the chicken didn’t smell as good. Our Christmas tree was a branch, and it looked pathetic with all those eggshells. And who were we trying to fool by cleaning the house? No matter how hard we scrubbed, the floor was still made of dirt, the walls were still made of sticks and cardboard.

Abuelita Chinta said, “The children are hungry. They’ve been working hard all day. Please, let us sit at the table.” That which I had dreaded for months now had finally come to pass. I felt my eyes burn with tears, but I quickly wiped them away. I couldn’t ruin our Christmas dinner.

Mago, however, had no qualms about ruining our meal. We hadn’t been sitting for a minute before she started to cry.

“What’s the matter with you?” Mami asked.

“What’s the matter? What do you think is the matter with me?” Mago yelled. “Why did you have to bring
him
? This is our night with you. It’s Christmas. We don’t need you to bring your boyfriends home!”

“I can bring whoever I want,” Mami said.

Mago rushed at her, and for a moment, I thought she was going to hit our mother. Instead, she started kicking the chairs, pulling out her own hair, and screaming at the top of her lungs. It sent shivers down my spine. My sister had turned into a monster.

Tía Güera and Mami rushed to Mago and held her down, but Mago just screamed and screamed: “I want to die! I want to die!” They forced her onto Abuelita Chinta’s bed, and Mami and Tía Güera pinned her down while Tío Crece grabbed a rope. Rey stood by the door and didn’t say or do anything.

“I want to die. I want to die!” Mago shrieked. “¡Me quiero morir!”

“What are you doing?” Abuelita Chinta said.

Nobody listened to her. I held Betty and my cousin Lupita in my
arms because Mago was scaring them. She kicked and screamed as if she were possessed by the devil himself. I watched Mami, my aunt, and my uncle tie Mago’s ankles and wrists. Mago kicked her legs up in the air and hit Mami in the face before Tío Crece finally restrained her.

I had not noticed Rey had gone outside, but when I looked around, he wasn’t there anymore. The screaming suddenly stopped, and when I turned to look at Mago, her eyes were rolling back, then her head hung limply to the side.

“She’s fainted!” Abuelita Chinta said, making the sign of the cross. She rushed to her wardrobe where she kept her medicine and came back with a bottle of alcohol. “Look at what you’ve done, Juana! You should be ashamed of yourself.” My grandmother started to cry as she tended to my sister.

Mami’s hair was a mess. Her cheeks were stained with mascara and her hot pink lipstick was smeared across her chin. She rubbed her cheek where Mago had kicked her, and I could tell it was swelling. Mami said, “I’m leaving now. If she isn’t going to welcome Rey into this house, then I won’t stay.”

“Juana, be reasonable,” Abuelita Chinta said, drying her tears. “You shouldn’t have brought that man here. Not tonight. The children wanted to spend this special day with you. Por el amor de Dios, Juana, son tus hijos.”

“I’m sorry, Amá.” Mami didn’t look at us. She walked out the door and left. We sat on the bed, and finally Mago opened her eyes. She looked around and saw that Mami was gone.

“Come, children,” Abuelita Chinta said. “The chicken is getting cold and we must not waste the food God has so kindly provided for us.”

Carlos and I untied Mago’s wrists and ankles, but we stayed there on the bed. Mago got up and headed to the opened door. I thought she was going to go outside and run to catch up to Mami, ask her to please come back. Instead, Mago slammed the door shut.

The next day, as she listened to songs from Juan Gabriel, Mago wrote a letter to Papi. But she couldn’t find the right words, so she included
lyrics from “Querida,” which is about a woman, but the root of the feelings was the same—wishing for that loved one’s return.

Iguala, Gro. 26 of December, 1984

Papá, don’t get mad when I tell you this, but I can’t stand this anymore. I think that when you come back you are going to find me dead and buried because I can’t stand this life anymore. Papá, I don’t know why you don’t love my mom anymore if she hadn’t done anything bad. She says you tried to hurt her, but I don’t believe that, Papá.

Papá, every moment of my life I think of you. Look at my loneliness. Come. I miss you and cry still for you. Take pity on me. Tell me when you are going to return. Beloved. Come to me as I am suffering. Come to me as I am dying. In this loneliness. In this loneliness …

I love you with all my soul.

Magloria Grande Rodríguez

I took Papi’s photo down from the wall and placed it on my grandmother’s altar, next to my grandfather’s picture. There the Man Behind the Glass was surrounded by San Judas Tadeo, El Santo Niño de Atocha, San Martín de Porres, San Antonio de Padúa, La Virgen de Guadalupe, and other saints I didn’t know the names of. Maybe while we knelt at the altar to pray, the saints would
have
to deliver our words to our father, now that he was right next to Them. And really, there was only one prayer they had to deliver, only one thing we asked for—that he come back.

19

O
NE SUNNY DAY
in May of 1985, when I was four months away from turning ten, my cousin Félix showed up at Abuelita Chinta’s house and said, “Your father is going to call you in an hour. He wants to talk to you.”

He turned around and ran off, and it took us a moment to recover from the shock. By the time we could speak, Félix was already hurrying across the bridge and turning the corner to head to the main road.

“Papi is going to call?” Carlos asked, and then the question turned into something else when he shouted, “Papi is going to call!”

We laughed and danced around in a circle. “Papi is going to call. Papi is going to call.”

“But what are we doing? We don’t have much time, let’s go!” Mago said. Since Abuelita Chinta wasn’t home to give us bus money, we had no choice but to walk to Abuela Evila’s. My heart beat so hard against my chest, it hurt. I couldn’t believe Papi was going to call. I couldn’t believe that soon I would hear his voice.

Is he finally coming home?
I wondered. We walked along the pereférico, passing a mango grove and a sugarcane field. Finally, after forty-five minutes, we came to the entrance of my grandmother’s neighborhood, La Guadalupe. I glanced up the hill at the familiar church towers. We stopped to rest by Don Rubén’s house, which by then had been turned into a liquor store. The walls were white and a huge Corona bottle was painted on one side. I felt so sad to look at that little house, which was no longer a house but a place for drunks like Tío Crece.

“Come on,” Mago said. She wiped her forehead and then picked up Betty. Carlos and I ran after her. Since I didn’t want to be the last one to Abuela Evila’s house, I ran as fast as I could, but my side hurt and my throat was dry and my head was burning from too much sun. Then I thought of Papi, and I picked up my pace again. I could kiss Juan Gabriel. It seemed that the lyrics of his song had finally touched a chord in Papi. Thank goodness Mago had thought of using them in the letters she had written to him not only in December, but in the past few months as well.

Abuela Evila’s house finally came into view.

“What should we tell him?” Mago said as we stood outside our grandmother’s gate. There was so much to tell him, but how much time would we have before Abuela Evila snatched the phone from us?

“Let’s just tell him we miss him,” Carlos said. “I think he has something he wants to tell us, don’t you think? Or why would he be calling us, after all this time?”

We knocked on the gate and waited. Then Élida came out and smirked. She glanced at us and shook her head. “You could have at least changed out of those rags,” she said. “Look at you, you look like beggars.”

“So what?” Mago said. “It’s not like he’s going to see us like this.”

Then my cousin Félix poked his head out the kitchen doorway and laughed. He whispered something to Élida, and then Élida laughed, too. We walked past them and went into the living room. I wondered what could be so funny.

Nobody had to tell me who the man sitting on the couch was. I thought about the eight-by-ten-inch photo I had placed on my grandmother’s altar. He had put on weight. He wore glasses now. Instead of black-and-white, he was in color, and I could see that his skin
was
the color of rain-soaked earth. There he was, the Man Behind the Glass, in the flesh.

“Go say hello to your father.” Tía Emperatriz came up from behind us and pushed us toward him. I didn’t want to go. All I wanted was to run away, run back to Abuelita Chinta’s house, far away from him. I didn’t want to see that look on his face. All those years staring at his photo, wishing that his eyes were not looking to the left but instead were looking at me. All those years wishing to be
seen
by him. And here he was, looking at me, but not really seeing me. He couldn’t see past the tangled hair, the dirt on my face, my tattered clothes. He couldn’t see the girl who had longed so much for this moment, to finally meet her father.

I knew he was ashamed by what he saw. What a cruel joke Félix played on us by not telling us the truth! If he had, we would have bathed and changed our clothes before going to my grandmother’s house. Instead, I had to stand before the father I hadn’t seen in almost eight years, looking like a beggar. I touched my hair, and I knew it was matted and oily. When was the last time I bathed? I wondered if he could see the lice that at that very moment were running around on my scalp. I had an overwhelming urge to scratch, and I bit my lips and tried not to move.