Enrique's Journey (6 page)

Black rats and a pig root around in a ravine where the children play.

At dinnertime, the mothers count out three tortillas for each child. If there are no tortillas, they try to fill their children's bellies with a glass of water with a teaspoon of sugar mixed in.

A year after Enrique goes to live with his uncle, Lourdes calls—this time from North Carolina. “California is too hard,” she says. “There are too many immigrants.” Employers pay poorly and treat them badly. Even with two jobs, she couldn't save. She has followed a female friend to North Carolina and started over again. It is her only hope of bettering her lot and seeing her children again. She sold everything in California—her old Ford, a chest of drawers, a television, the bed she shares with her daughter. It netted $800 for the move.

Here people are less hostile. She can leave her car, even her house, unlocked. Work is plentiful. She quickly lands a job as a waitress at a Mexican restaurant. She finds a room to rent in a trailer home for just $150 a month—half of what the small garage cost her in Los Angeles. She starts to save. Maybe if she amasses $4,000, her brother Marco will help her invest it in Honduras. Maybe she'll be able to go home. Lourdes gets a better job on an assembly line for $9.05 an hour—$13.50 when she works overtime.

Going home would resolve a problem that has weighed heavily on Lourdes: Diana's delayed baptism. Lourdes has held off, hoping to baptize her daughter in Honduras with Honduran godparents. A baptism would lift Lourdes's constant concern that Diana's unexpected death will send her daughter to purgatory.

Lourdes has met someone, a house painter from Honduras, and they are moving in together. He, too, has two children in Honduras. He is kind and gentle, a quiet man with good manners. He gives Lourdes advice. He helps ease her loneliness. He takes Lourdes and her daughter to the park on Sundays. For a while, when Lourdes works two restaurant jobs, he picks her up when her second shift ends at 11 P.M., so they can share a few moments together. They call each other “honey.” They fall in love.

Enrique misses Lourdes enormously. But Uncle Marco and his girlfriend treat him well. Marco is a money changer on the Honduran border. It has been lucrative work, augmented by a group that for years has been in constant need of his services: U.S.-funded Nicaraguan
contras
across the border. Marco's family, including a son, lives in a five-bedroom house in a middle-class neighborhood of Tegucigalpa. Uncle Marco gives Enrique a daily allowance, buys him clothes, and sends him to a private military school in the evenings.

By day, Enrique runs errands for his uncle, washes his five cars, follows him everywhere. His uncle pays as much attention to him as he does his own son, if not more. Often, Marco plays billiards with Enrique. They watch movies together. Enrique sees New York City's spectacular skyline, Las Vegas's shimmering lights, Disneyland's magic castle.
Negrito,
Marco calls Enrique fondly, because of his dark skin. Marco and Enrique stand the same way, a little bowlegged, with the hips tucked forward. Although he is in his teens, Enrique is small, just shy of five feet, even when he straightens up from a slight stoop. He has a big smile and perfect teeth.

His uncle trusts him, even to make bank deposits. He tells Enrique, “I want you to work with me forever.” Enrique senses that Uncle Marco loves him, and he values his advice.

One week, as his uncle's security guard returns from trading Honduran lempiras, robbers drag the guard off a bus and kill him. The guard has a son twenty-three years old, and the slaying impels the young man to go to the United States. He comes back before crossing the Rio Grande and tells Enrique about riding on trains, leaping off rolling freight cars, and dodging
la migra,
Mexican immigration agents.

Because of the security guard's murder, Marco swears that he will never change money again. A few months later, though, he gets a call. For a large commission, would he exchange $50,000 in lempiras on the border with El Salvador? Uncle Marco promises that this will be the last time.

Enrique wants to go with him, but his uncle says he is too young. He takes Victor, one of his own brothers, instead. Robbers riddle their car with bullets. Enrique's uncles careen off the road. The thieves shoot Uncle Marco three times in the chest and once in the leg. They shoot Victor in the face. Both die. Now Uncle Marco is gone.

In nine years, Lourdes has saved $700 toward bringing her children to the United States. Instead, she uses it to help pay for her brothers' funerals.

Lourdes goes into a tailspin. Marco had visited her once, shortly after she arrived in Long Beach. She had not seen Victor since leaving Honduras. If the dead can appear to the living, Lourdes beseeches God through tears, allow Victor to show himself so she can say good-bye. “
Mira, hermanito,
I know you are dead. But I want to see you one more time. Come to me. I promise I won't be afraid of you,” Lourdes says.

Lourdes angrily swears off Honduras. How could she ever live in such a lawless place? People there are killed like dogs. There are no repercussions. The only way she'll go back now, she tells herself, is by force, if she is deported. Soon after her brothers' deaths, the restaurant where Lourdes works is raided by immigration agents. Every worker is caught up in the sweep. Lourdes is the only one spared. It is her day off.

Lourdes decides to wait no longer. With financial help from her boyfriend, she baptizes seven-year-old Diana. The girl's godparents are a trustworthy Mexican house painter and his wife. Lourdes dresses Diana in a white floor-length dress and tiara. A priest sprinkles her daughter with holy water. Lourdes feels that one worry, at least, has been lifted.

Still, her resolve to stay in the United States brings a new nightmare. One morning at four, she hears her mother's voice. It is loud and clear. Her mother utters her name three times:
Lourdes. Lourdes. Lourdes
. “Huh?” Lourdes, half awake, bolts up in bed, screaming. This must be an omen that her mother has just died. She is inconsolable. Will she ever see her mother again?

Back in Honduras, within days of the two brothers' deaths, Uncle Marco's girlfriend sells Enrique's television, stereo, and Nintendo game—all gifts from Marco. Without telling him why, she says, “I don't want you here anymore.” She puts his bed out on the street.

ADDICTION

Enrique, now fifteen, gathers his clothing and goes to his maternal grandmother. “Can I stay here?” he asks.

This had been his first home, the small stucco house where he and Lourdes lived until Lourdes stepped off the front porch and left. His second home was the wooden shack where he and his father lived with his father's mother, until his father found a new wife and left. His third home was the comfortable house where he lived with his uncle Marco.

Now he is back where he began. Seven people live here already: his grandmother, Águeda Amalia Valladares; two divorced aunts; and four young cousins. They are poor. Gone are Marco's contributions, which helped keep the household financially afloat. Águeda has a new expense: she must raise the young child left by her dead son Victor. The boy's mother left him as a baby to go to the United States and hasn't shown any interest since. “We need money just for food,” says his grandmother, who suffers from cataracts. Nonetheless, she takes Enrique in.

She and the others are consumed by the slayings of the two uncles; they pay little attention to Enrique. He grows quiet, introverted. He does not return to school. At first, he shares the front bedroom with an aunt, Mirian, twenty-six. One day she awakens at 2 A.M. Enrique is sobbing quietly in his bed, cradling a picture of Uncle Marco in his arms. Enrique cries off and on for six months. His uncle loved him; without his uncle, he is lost.

Grandmother Águeda quickly sours on Enrique. She grows angry when he comes home late, knocking on her door, rousing the household. About a month later, Aunt Mirian wakes up again in the middle of the night. This time she smells acetone and hears the rustle of plastic. Through the dimness, she sees Enrique in his bed, puffing on a bag. He is sniffing glue.

Enrique is banished to a tiny stone building seven feet behind the house but a world away. It was once a cook shack, where his grandmother prepared food on an open fire. Its walls and ceiling are charred black. It has no electricity. The wooden door pries only partway open. It is dank inside. The single window has no glass, just bars. A few feet beyond is his privy—a hole with a wooden shanty over it.

The stone hut becomes his home. Now Enrique can do whatever he wants. If he is out all night, no one cares. But to him, it feels like another rejection.

At his uncle's funeral, he notices a shy girl with cascading curls of brown hair. She lives next door with her aunt. She has an inviting smile, a warm manner. At first, María Isabel, seventeen, can't stand Enrique. She notices how the teenager, who comes from his uncle Marco's wealthier neighborhood, is neatly dressed and immaculately clean, and wears his hair long. He seems arrogant. “
Me cae mal.
I don't like him,” she tells a friend. Enrique is sure she has assumed that his nice clothes and his seriousness mean he's stuck-up. He persists. He whistles softly as she walks by, hoping to start a conversation. Month after month, Enrique asks the same question: “Would you be my girlfriend?”

“I'll think about it.”

The more she rejects him, the more he wants her. He loves her girlish giggle, how she cries easily. He hates it when she flirts with others.

He buys her roses. He gives her a shiny black plaque with a drawing of a boy and girl looking tenderly at each other. It reads, “The person I love is the center of my life and of my heart. The person I love IS YOU.” He gives her lotions, a stuffed teddy bear, chocolates. He walks her home after school from night classes two blocks away. He takes her to visit his paternal grandmother across town. Slowly, María Isabel warms to him.

The third time Enrique asks if she will be his girlfriend, she says yes.

For Enrique, María Isabel isn't just a way to stem the loneliness he's felt since his mother left him. They understand each other, they connect. María Isabel has been separated from her parents. She, too, has had to shuffle from home to home.

When she was seven, María Isabel followed her mother, Eva, across Honduras to a borrowed hut on a Tegucigalpa mountainside. Like Enrique's mother, Eva was leaving an unfaithful husband.

The hut was twelve by fifteen feet. It had one small wooden window and dirt floors. There was no bathroom. They relieved themselves and showered outdoors or at the neighbor's. There was no electricity. They cooked outside using firewood. They hauled buckets of water up from a relative's home two blocks down the hill. They ate beans and tortillas. Eva, asthmatic, struggled to keep the family fed.

Nine people slept in the hut. They crowded onto two beds and a slim mattress jammed each night into the aisle between the beds. To fit, everyone slept head to foot. María Isabel shared one of the beds with three other women.

When she was ten, María Isabel ran to catch a delivery truck. “Firewood!” she yelled out to a neighbor, Ángela Emérita Nuñez, offering to get some for her.

After that, each morning María Isabel asked if Ángela had a chore for her. Ángela liked the sweet, loving girl with coils of hair who always smiled. She admired the fact that she was a hard worker and a fighter, a girl who thrived when her own twin died a month after birth.
“Mira,”
María Isabel says, “
yo por pereza no me muero del hambre.
I will never die out of laziness.” María Isabel fed and bathed Ángela's daughter, helped make tortillas and mop the red-and-gray tile floors. María Isabel often ate at Ángela's. Eventually, María Isabel spent many nights a week at Ángela's roomier house, where she had to share a bed with only one other person, Ángela's daughter.

María Isabel graduated from the sixth grade. Her mother proudly hung María Isabel's graduation certificate on the wall of the hut. A good student, she hadn't even asked her mother about going on to junior high. “How would she speak of that? We had no chance to send a child to school that long,” says Eva, who never went to school a day and began selling bread from a basket perched on her head when she was twelve.

At sixteen, a fight forced María Isabel to move again. The spat was with an older cousin, who thought María Isabel was showing interest in her boyfriend. Eva scolded her daughter. María Isabel decided to move across town with her aunt Gloria, who lived next door to Enrique's maternal grandmother. María Isabel would help Gloria with a small food store she ran out of the front room of her house. To Eva, her daughter's departure was a relief. The family was eating, but not well. Eva was thankful that Gloria had lightened her load.

Gloria's house is modest. The windows have no panes, just wooden shutters. But to María Isabel, Gloria's two-bedroom home is wonderful. She and Gloria's daughter have a bedroom to themselves. Besides, Gloria is more easygoing about letting María Isabel go out at night to an occasional dance or party, or to the annual county fair. Eva wouldn't hear of such a thing, fearful the neighbors would gossip about her daughter's morals.

A cousin promises to take María Isabel to a talk about birth control. María Isabel wants to prevent a pregnancy. Enrique desperately wants to get María Isabel pregnant. If they have a child together, surely María Isabel won't abandon him. So many people have abandoned him.

Near where Enrique lives is a neighborhood called El Infiernito, Little Hell. Some homes there are teepees, stitched together from rags. It is controlled by a street gang, the Mara Salvatrucha. Some members were U.S. residents, living in Los Angeles until 1996, when a federal law began requiring judges to deport them if they committed serious crimes. Now they are active throughout much of Central America and Mexico. Here in El Infiernito, they carry
chimbas,
guns fashioned from plumbing pipes, and they drink
charamila,
diluted rubbing alcohol. They ride the buses, robbing passengers. Sometimes they assault people as they are leaving church after Mass.