The Most Beautiful Place in the World (2 page)

So my mom and I lived in my grandmother’s house, and my mom earned some money cleaning houses and washing people’s clothes in the big washtub in back of the house; and at night she’d take me out to walk around town, and we’d meet all her friends and talk to them, and it was fun.

One night when we were out like that, a man came up to my mother with a big smile on his face. He said, “What a good-looking boy you have! He certainly resembles you!” And then he bought me a
piece of candy, and talked to my mother some more.

Pretty soon every night that we went out, we’d see him, and he’d walk with us. Then one night he invited my mom to a dance. After the night of the dance, she started leaving me home when she went out. I guess she wanted to see him alone.

All of a sudden one day, she told me she was going to get married again to that man we met on the street. She was going to go live with him. But I couldn’t go with her. He didn’t want me. He wanted to start his own family. He wanted his own children. He didn’t have the money for me.

And that same day, my mother moved out of my grandmother’s house and moved in with my stepfather. He had a house,
but just one room. And he didn’t have a bed, so he and my mom came up to my grandmother’s house, and he and my mother carried out the bed she and I had been sleeping in and took it down to his house. My grandmother wasn’t home when they came for the bed, or maybe she wouldn’t have let them take it.

When they were carrying the bed, I followed them out to the road, but my mother said, “You stay here, Juan,” so I went back to the house.

Once they were gone, I didn’t know what to do, so I just hung around all day until my grandmother came home, and went up to her and pulled her into the room where our bed used to be.

My grandmother frowned. “So now you have no bed!” she said. I started to cry. It’s bad enough not having a father
and a mother, but when you don’t even have a place to sleep, it’s worse.

When I stopped crying, I asked my grandmother if I could sleep with her at night, but she said no.

“I have to work too hard,” she said. “I need my rest. I have had enough sleeping with children. Children kick,” she said.

“I won’t kick,” I said.

“You say you won’t, but in your sleep you would,” my grandmother said.

She could see I was going to cry again.

“But just a minute,” she said. “We’ll fix up something for you.”

And she looked around and found a bunch of empty rice bags, and put them on the floor by her bed, and gave me a blanket off her bed. She got everything all ready for me before dinner, about five in the afternoon. I guess she knew I was
worried that I didn’t have a place where I belonged anymore, and if I at least had a place to sleep, I wouldn’t be so scared.

Then she told me, “Well, Grandson, you can stay here, but you know the rule about the gate. You have to obey the rule about the gate, you know.”

I nodded and said, “Yes, Grandma.”

My grandmother’s house has a high fence around it, and a wooden gate with a lock on it that my grandmother locks every night. The only ones besides her who have keys are my uncles. Everyone else has to be in by eight thirty. After that, my grandmother won’t get up to let them in. No matter how hard anyone knocks, she just shuts her ears. And she won’t let anyone else go open the gate either.

I told my grandmother I understood
about the gate, but since I was still little, maybe I didn’t exactly understand.

Once my mother was gone, I started going walking alone after dinner. I didn’t really belong to anyone, so I did whatever I wanted.

One night a few days after my mother left, I went for a really long walk, all the way to the lake. By the time I got back to my grandmother’s house, it had been dark a long time, and the gate was locked.

I didn’t know what to do. And I was cold, besides. I just had shorts and a T-shirt on, and even though San Pablo is hot during the day, it gets cold at night because we’re so high up in the mountains.

The only thing I could think of to do was to look for my mother. I knew where
my stepfather’s house was, so I decided to go there. When I got there, through the window I saw a candle burning. Nobody ever goes to sleep or goes outside leaving a candle burning, because it could burn up everything in the house. So I knew somebody was awake, and inside.

I wasn’t tall enough to see who, so I put a rock below the window and stood on it to look in. I saw my mother, alone.

I knocked once, so softly she didn’t hear me, and then once again, louder.

My mother opened the door a crack, and saw me. All she said was “You!”

Of course, my mother knew the rule about the gate, and how late it was, and how I must have got locked out.

She stood for a minute in the doorway, and then she said, “Come on in.”
She could see I was shivering. Sometimes when you shiver, it’s not just from the cold.

Inside the house there was a table with the candle, two stools, two plates, two cups, and some bananas. There were a few clothes hanging on nails in the wall,
and a little rug on the floor, and, of course, the bed. That was all. The room could have used a lot of other stuff. Mainly, the one thing I wished it had was a back door for me to go out if my stepfather came in the front door.

“You can stay here,” my mother said, “but if your stepfather sees you when he comes home, he’ll get very angry and hit you. So you’ll have to hide, and sleep under the bed.”

So I got down on the floor under the bed, back against the wall out of sight, and my mother shook out the little rug to make it cleaner and put it over me.

But I couldn’t go to sleep, because I was afraid of what would happen when my stepfather came home.

After quite a while there was a loud knock on the door, and my mother unbolted
it. From where I was, I could just see my stepfather’s legs and feet coming into the house. Then I heard him kiss my mom.

“The guy finally showed up and paid me the money he owed,” my stepfather said. “So tomorrow you can buy the things you need.”

“Good!” my mother said, and then they talked a little about what they’d buy for the house.

“The candle’s going out,” my stepfather said. “Time to turn in for the night.”

I watched his feet coming closer and closer. The bed creaked as he sat down on it. He took his shoes off and put his bare feet on the floor.

“Where’s the rug?” he asked.

“I washed it,” my mother said. “It’s outside. It’s still wet.”

“Well, we don’t need it,” my stepfather said, and they both went to bed, and I went to sleep.

In the morning my mother woke me early, before my stepfather woke. I crawled out from under the bed without saying a word, trying to be perfectly quiet. My mother unbolted the door and I tiptoed out.

“Remember,” my mother whispered, “you can’t come here again!”

She closed the door, and I ran up the road all the way to my grandmother’s house.

“Where were you?” my grandmother said.

“At my mother’s house.”

“And what happened?” my grandmother asked.

“Nothing,” I said. “Only I can’t go there again.”

I thought I never would. But the next night my grandmother took me by the hand and said, “Come with me,” and we walked to my mother’s house.

My grandmother knocked on the door, slowly, three times.

My mother opened the door. My stepfather was behind her, sitting on the bed, but he stood up when he saw my grandmother.

“How are you, Mother?” my mother said. She and my stepfather looked nervous, but my grandmother didn’t.

“I’m fine, as always,” my grandmother said, “but your son needs a bed, and you must get him one.” She turned around and put her hand on my shoulder and we left.

Sure enough, they did get me a bed, and they brought it up to my grandmother’s house the next week. It was a wooden bed, and all the legs were slightly different lengths, but my uncle Luis borrowed a saw and fixed it up for me.

After that, I only saw my mother by accident, in the street. She always said, “How are you, Juan?” as if she cared, but I only said, “Fine, Mother,” and nothing else. One day when I saw her, I realized she was going to have a baby, and a few months later she had it. So I had a half brother, but he didn’t know who I was. When I saw him on the side of the street playing, I wanted to knock him down and punch him—for having a mother, when I didn’t. But I never hit him. He was just a little kid. I could see nothing was his fault.

Anyway, my life wasn’t so bad. I
played soccer in the street with my cousins and the kids in the neighborhood. My uncle Rodolfo taught me how to do somersaults and backflips, and my uncle Miguel let me use his paints sometimes. And a few times I went walking with my aunts at night, the way I used to walk with my mother.

The other thing I did was help my grandmother in the market with the
arroz con leche.
I learned how to ladle it out, and how to make change and see that nobody
took any when Grandma wasn’t looking. And after I did that for a while, my grandmother told me she thought I was ready to have a job alone, and she taught me how to shine shoes, and bought me a shoeshine kit and a stool for customers to sit on, and the two of us figured out where I should stand downtown to get the most business—by the Tourist Office and the giant photo of San Pablo that has writing underneath it.

At the beginning my grandmother watched. The first two customers I did a good job for, and then, on the third pair of shoes, I skipped a little.

The customer said, “Oh, that’s okay.” He was going to pay me anyway.

But my grandmother said, “No, it’s not okay. He has to do them right, all the time. He has to work well, all the time.
If he can’t do that, he’ll never earn a living.”

“Okay,” said the customer. So I got his shoes perfect.

“Can you do that every time?” my grandmother asked, and I said yes, and she went back uptown to her rice.

So I shined a lot of shoes, and pretty soon I earned about a dollar every day. Grown men only earn two dollars, so I was doing great.

And I talked to people when I shined their shoes, and asked them where they lived, and what they did, and if they had kids. Working was fun. And I gave all the money to my grandmother. She always gave me a hug and a big smile, and let me keep ten cents for myself.

The only thing was, it got bad when I saw kids who were going past me on the
way to school. I was sitting in the dust all smeared up with shoe polish, and they were all neat and clean, with their pencils and their notebooks, going to school.

A lot of kids don’t go to school because their parents want them to work. The law is, they are supposed to go to school until they are twelve. But the school really doesn’t have space for everyone, so nobody makes them go.

Most kids who work, work out in the country, in the onion fields, so I felt alone when I watched the school kids going by.

And after a while I started wondering why my grandmother didn’t send me to school. I started thinking, if she really loved me, she’d send me to school and not just have me shine shoes.

I wanted to ask her to let me go, but I was scared to. I was scared she’d say no.
Then I would find out she liked me only because I was earning money for her. I’d find out she was like my father and mother and stepfather, who never cared about me. I’d find out she was just acting like she loved me.