Daughter's Keeper (3 page)

Olivia blushed at Jorge's disgust. He was the first in his family to graduate from high school and had reveled in his life as a student. When his political activities had gotten him expelled from the university, he had been devastated.

“It's just different here,” Olivia said.

He looked at her and shook his head. “I know it's different. Mother of God, I know just how different it is. In Mexico I was something. A leader. Here, I'm nothing. I came here to be with you, because I love you, and I am nothing here. Just another brown man on a corner.”

Olivia stroked Jorge's face. “Oh,
mi vida
. I know how hard this is for you. I know that you are doing your best. It's not your fault,” she murmured.

He shook off her hand, got up, and walked across the floor to the bathroom. He slammed the door behind him, and the flimsy walls of the house shook.

Olivia reached for the remote and turned off the television. She leaned back on the couch and sighed. They had had this fight before. They both knew that there was one simple way to give Jorge the immigration status he needed to get off the street corner and find a legitimate job or go to school. But Olivia couldn't bring herself to do it.

When Jorge had first shown up on her doorstep, just a few months after she had met him and left him in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, she had felt a sinking in the pit of her stomach. She was sure that he expected her to marry him. After all, the man had borrowed the entire contents of his parents' bank account, paid it to a “coyote,” and crawled across the border for her. He had spent three days traversing the Arizona desert without food or water and another two in the back of a truck heading north through California to Oakland, just to be with her.

But Olivia refused to consider marriage, even a civil marriage with the acknowledged goal of getting a green card and nothing more. Perhaps it was because her mother had married her father so casually, almost blithely—they'd met and married in two months. Eight months later, Olivia was born, and by the time she could say the word
daddy
there was no one around to whom the word applied. When she was about five years old, she had suddenly understood that she was different from other children. She was the only one who didn't have even a father she saw on alternate weekends. She announced to her mother that when she got married it was going to be forever. She had meant it then, and nothing in her life up until now had convinced her to change her mind.

A marriage of convenience with Jorge was out of the question, and, although she didn't often admit this to herself and certainly never said as much to him, nothing about their relationship made her think that it was destined to be permanent. Olivia and Jorge's affair in Mexico had been intense but brief. Although she had wept when she left him at the airport, part of her had boarded that plane eagerly, glad to be going home and returning to her real life. If she imagined any continuation of their romance, it was of intense and longing letters that would gradually grow shorter and less ardent, and finally trail off completely. His would take up residence, with all the other letters and cards she'd saved from the time she was a little girl, in the fragrant cedar box she'd made in woodshop in seventh grade, and she would take them out from time to time and remember with a shiver of nostalgic pleasure the time she'd had a Mexican lover. It had never occurred to her that he would come to Oakland.

Jorge banged around in the bathroom for a few minutes, and then Olivia heard the sound of the shower running. She got up off the couch, stripped off her jeans and sweatshirt and navy blue panties with the little anchor on the side, and walked into the bathroom. She slid open the cracked glass shower door and stepped into the steam.

“
Hola
,” she said.

Jorge looked at her for a moment and then drew her close. She leaned against the ropy cable of his arm and raised her face, keeping her eyes shut against the spray of the shower. He kissed her softly and she parted her lips, teasing his tongue with hers. He laughed, and bit her gently. She leaned back against the tile wall, and raised one leg onto the side of the tub. He slipped inside her and wrapped his arms around her back.

“
Te quiero,
”
he murmured.

She leaned her head back against the tile and moaned softly, mostly just to tell him that it felt good. Then she said, “Don't come inside.”

When he was done, she soaped his body gently and rinsed him under the cooling stream. As the water poured off the flat plane of Jorge's hairless belly, Olivia pressed herself against him. For a brief moment, she allowed herself to imagine the possibility of marrying him, of making love with him like this for the rest of her life. The fantasy gave her neither pleasure nor dread, and she found it easy to push it from her mind. She kissed him once and then got out of the shower, leaving him behind in the cooling stream.

***

Olivia had planned on falling in love
with
Mexico, not
in
Mexico. Inspired by the poetry of Octavio Paz and the paintings of Rivera and Siqueiros, she had dropped out of UC Santa Cruz and caught a bus for Mexico City. Her plan had not been particularly well thought out.

At school Olivia belonged to organizations with names like Diversity NOW!, Students United for Peace, and Women Take Back the Night. She demonstrated on behalf of bilingual education, affirmative action, and an end to the death penalty. She drove up the coast with a dozen of her friends to link arms around an ancient redwood and protect it from the jagged teeth of the chain saw. It had never occurred to her to wonder if her nearly compulsive compassion for the poor and ­downtrodden had as its genesis her unfulfilled longing to be mothered herself.

Olivia had imagined that Santa Cruz would be a laboratory for her political activism. She was certain that the university, with its reputation for counterculturalism, would teach her how to harness her inchoate caring and passionate need to help someone, somewhere, and direct it into action that would profoundly change the world. Instead, she found a place where students and faculty talked endlessly about social justice in class and out, where meeting after meeting was held about Latin America's disappearing rain forest and North America's deepening racism. But, to Olivia, with her boundless energy and her desperate desire to
do
something, it all seemed like just so much talk. So, after three semesters, she packed a single small backpack and caught a bus for the border. She intended to travel to Chiapas and offer her services to the ­indigenous people's revolution. She had no idea what those services might entail, but she imagined that she would tend to the sick and the hungry, march with the outraged and the angry, and inspire the poor and the tired. Where she would live, what she would eat, even how she would contact the people she so desperately wanted to save were problems Olivia did not stop to contemplate.

She never made it to Chiapas. A pair of German backpackers who had relieved her unexpected loneliness on the bus convinced her to join them in San Miguel de Allende. The tall, gangly women with barking laughs and bright blond hair tangled on their legs fascinated Olivia. They were potters on their way to study ceramics at the
Instituto Allende
, a college of arts and language, and Olivia thought they might be lesbians. Her initial feelings of anxiety and forlornness upon leaving the United States had surprised her with their intensity, and the idea of following two cheerful artists rather than her own poorly planned agenda was too attractive to resist.

The tiny colonial city, with its cobblestone streets, thickly stuccoed houses, and Indians in
tipica
costumes of brightly embroidered fabrics, was exactly the Mexico Olivia had been looking for. While her German friends threw their pots and mixed their glazes, Olivia wandered the streets in a state of ­perpetual enchantment. Her feet slid confidently over the ­cobblestones as if they'd never felt asphalt and concrete. Her half-Jewish, entirely nonreligious soul shivered with delight whenever she ducked into one of the many churches and dropped coins in the offering baskets for
La Guadalupana
, the gentle virgin whose graceful image adorned places of worship, municipal buildings, key chains, and shopping bags throughout the city. One Sunday morning she joined a line of penitent Catholics, following their lead, kneeling when they knelt, mumbling the words of the prayers in her perfect Spanish and finally, thrillingly, accepting the flavorless body of Christ onto her tongue. In the market, Olivia chattered to the vendors and gleefully gobbled
taquitos
, fresh mangoes, and strange Mexican candies that tasted like fiery bits of paper. She bought filigreed silver earrings and crudely painted wooden turtles with bouncing heads that fit in the palm of her hand. She drank coffee in the
Jardín
, the main square, in the shade of the gazebo and watched the peddlers hawk their
churros
, balloons, and toys made from cut soda cans.

Olivia enrolled in a Spanish language and literature class at the
Instituto,
so she could make use of the school's family placement program. She moved out of her cheap hotel and into the spare room of a little house on the outskirts of the city. The young couple who the school administrator insisted on calling her “host parents” were no more than a few years older than she was. He drove a truck, and she took in sewing and cared for their three children. The family of five slept in a single room, on a long bed made of three or four cots pushed together. Olivia slept in a small, dark bedroom off the kitchen. She woke early in the morning to the sounds of the roosters living in a cage under her window, and ate a simple breakfast of eggs and tortillas served by her sleepy “mother” who refused, despite Olivia's entreaties, to join her in her meal. Olivia returned in the evenings after her classes, ate with the family, and then watched Univision, a child perched on either knee. She was absolutely content—in love with the city, with the country, and with her own sense of belonging.

One afternoon six weeks after she'd arrived in San Miguel, Olivia noticed banners hanging from the street lamps and across the busy boulevards. The signs announced the commencement of the annual
Celebración de Resistencia: Indígena y Popular
. She followed them to a soccer field in the center of town and found it teeming with students in jeans and T-shirts emblazoned with American brand names, and Indian men in straw cowboy hats, their wives and daughters wrapped in scarves and skirts made of gaily colored woven fabric. They were all gathered in front of a stage that had been assembled in front of one of the goal posts, and Olivia joined the throngs, pushing her way up to the front of the crowd. For the next three hours, she listened to speeches about the rights of indigenous peoples throughout Latin America. She applauded loudly when the others did, even when she wasn't quite sure what it was the speakers had said.

Finally, as the light began to fade, a young man took the podium. He was a handsome man, although not unusually so. His face had the sharp angles and broad planes common to the Indians, but his nose was large and hooked, not flat. He wore his black hair a little long, to his collar, and he stood taller than most of the other men on the stage. His jeans were new and pressed, and his shirt was embroidered with tiny birds. Olivia wondered who had done that for him—his mother? Sister? Wife? He didn't lecture like those who had stood before him. Instead, he raised his voice in a shout and his hand in a fist.

“
El pueblo, unido, jamás será vencido,
” he bellowed, and the crowd soon joined him. The young man swept Olivia up in the embrace of his cry, and she raised her voice along with the rest. The evening ended with them all shouting to the night that the people, united, would never be defeated. Olivia trembled with the sense that she had finally found a goal worthy of her resolve and a man worthy of her desire. She stayed on the soccer field long after the crowd had dispersed and the cool night's breeze had begun to blow. She sat, perched on the edge of the bleachers, and watched the speakers embrace one another and head off down the darkened streets. Finally, shivering, she rose to leave. She picked her way through the detritus of soda cans, paper wrappings, and banana leaves and peels that had been left by the crowd. Suddenly, she caught her foot in a rut in the field and stumbled. A hand steadied her, and she looked up into the thickly lashed eyes of the young man whose voice had inspired the crowd and had set her heart aflutter.

“Be careful,” he said, softly, in Spanish.

“Thank you,” Olivia replied in the same language and righted herself. She took a tentative step and winced as though she felt a twinge in her ankle.

“Are you hurt?” he asked.

Olivia, surprised at the ease with which she had assumed the role of damsel in distress, quickly answered, “No, no. I'm fine.”

“Are you North American?” Olivia heard the sound of laughing and only then noticed the other two young men standing behind the one whose hand still rested on hers. He leaned over and punched one of his friends in the arm. Then he whispered something in a rapid slang that Olivia couldn't understand. The other two boys laughed again and walked away, whistling over their shoulders. The young man led Olivia back to the bleachers, and she limped alongside of him, careful to continue her pantomime of injury.

“Are you a tourist?” he asked, once she'd sat down.

“No. I mean, I'm from the United States, but I'm a student. At the
Instituto
.”

“You speak Spanish well. Your accent is very good.” He sat down on the bench next to her.

“Thank you.”

“What's your name?”

“Olivia,” she said.

“Olivia,” he repeated.

“What is
your
name?”

“Jorge. Jorge Luís Rodriguez Hernandez.”