The Short Sweet Dream of Eduardo Gutierrez (2 page)

Behind the older boys, his bare feet causing the dust to rise, came Eduardo with a single slate in his hands, all he could lift.

“You see,” the father called out, “this is how you learn. My son is little. He learns so much in bricks.”

Three years later, when Eduardo could carry four slates, his father said he had a skill with the slates and bricks that would be with him for the rest of his life.

“Yes, school is very important,” the father said. “It is also important that he learns a skill so when he leaves school after the sixth year he can work and help his family.”

When he was old enough to carry four slates, Eduardo was asked: “Which do you like, school or work?”

“Trabajo!”
Eduardo called out.

The school was the one-story Benito Juárez School, a few blocks up Calle Libre. Looking up the street from Eduardo Gutiérrez’ alley at number 8, you can see low posts placed permanently to block trucks and horse carts from passing in front of Our Lady of Guadalupe, one of 365 Catholic churches in the Cholula area. There is a plaza and a walk on a path under trees to enter the yellow church with red trim, which has insides of gold. After the church, the street continues through the same dust and flies, and the same children in doorways and young women holding babies, until it narrows to the eyes under the hot sky.

A block up from the church, one large truck, here to haul bricks, raises a cloud of dust that obscures most of the street.

On one desolate street corner there is the school, where Eduardo sat at a scarred white wood desk. The learning was difficult because nearly all the kids in the school knew they would go only as far as
the required sixth grade, after which, at age twelve, they would go out to work, as do 90 percent of Mexican grammar school pupils. There are charges for junior high school. Books must be bought. There is a 320-peso bill, about $30 American, for tuition, and then charges for administrative costs and building repairs needed during the school year. The taxes do not cover this because the tax money is openly stolen by politicians in Mexico City. The payments don’t seem high, 30 pesos here, another 30 there, but families feel that not only is it intolerable that kids who should be doing some of the heavy lifting at home are wasting the day in a schoolroom, but it is not right that the family has to pay for this injustice. Having a kid come straight home for a big free dinner after school on a day when he didn’t even try to lift something is the sacrifice that hardens the heart.

In Eduardo’s fourth-grade class, all parents had to appear on the next-to-last day of school to collect report cards. Mostly mothers did this. While Eduardo’s mother signed all his report cards at home, she was too shy to go to the school and pick it up. The father showed and was instantly angered when Eduardo’s card said he had not been promoted.

The father went home and told Eduardo, whose mood immediately turned dark—but not nearly as much as that of the father, who told Eduardo that instead of finishing school in two years, now it would take him three more years. This meant that the father would have to wait an extra year before he had a son giving fulltime help in the brickyard.

It was the start of a life for Eduardo Gutiérrez that was to allow him to see nothing in San Matías other than the dirt and dust and flies. He lived in the end room in the compound with an uncle, two brothers, and various cousins. When he heard older people in town talking about going to America, he thought of going there to get money so he could build a new room in the one space left in the
dusty compound. He would build the one room and a second atop it. He saw an iron staircase going up to it. He would paint the outside blue.

Dreaming, he could look to the north, to a sky of many colors billowing with white clouds. Somewhere up there—he knew because everybody said so—was a place of excitement and money. Breathing the sultry air on Calle Libre, he could not smell the air of Brooklyn, of Middleton Street in Williamsburg, with buses and an el, and streets so often cold and wet, and of the sound of creaking building walls.

A
LL HIS YOUNG DREAMS
gave him no idea of the dangerous path ahead. The young dream of everything except death. There was no vision of working alongside Nelson Negrón, for example, who cannot read or write in Spanish or English and who does what he is told, climbing the scaffold until he is chest high to the third level of a construction site on Middleton Street in Williamsburg, in Brooklyn, his right side straining under the fifty-pound sack of cement on his shoulder, looking up at a roof that is being held aloft by virtually nothing. If there are no roof beams, he reasons, what could there be under this third floor he is about to throw his sack onto?

There are twenty workmen crawling over the row of three-story brick condominiums being built. If the builder were legit, the workers would cost him about $15,000 a week. But the builder is Eugene Ostreicher, a man in his middle sixties who fled Hungary in 1944. He hires mainly Mexicans, and they take short money and like it or they’re gone and Ostreicher finds somebody else for the same or less. His Mexican payroll is $5,000 a week.

Negrón is looking up at Eduardo, who is standing on a deck that moves when something is dropped on it.

In San Matías, Eduardo could not see himself here on this deck.

“The boss told me he wants it this way,” Eduardo says.

Negrón drops the bag from his shoulder and shoves it at Eduardo’s feet.

The floor went up and down.

“It’s going to go down,” he told Eduardo.

A
CROSS THE STREET
from the Benito Juárez School was an open-air tortilla store. A young woman in black stood at the end of a moving belt, and as a tortilla came off, smoking hot, she grabbed it with her right hand and snapped her wrist as if pitching a baseball, making the tortilla flip over, taking some of the heat off her fingers. She put the tortilla on a stack and immediately, continuing the motion, grabbed the next hot one from the moving belt. Every few moments another young woman took the growing stack of tortillas over to a counter, draped a towel over them, and sold them to people coming down the street.

The two jobs do not change, ever. Neither does the pay. Twenty dollars for a seventy-hour week.

Next to the tortilla store was the tiny box of a store where Silvia Tecpoyotti’s mother, Olivia, watched the group of teenagers growing into men, one of whom could be for her daughters. Olivia Tecpoyotti Daniel sat in her store on the dirt street, a crammed closet of a store. She sold socks, packs of crayons and boxes of white paste for children’s projects, sodas, and chips and tacos for the young men who came in from the street corner to play the two video game machines—among them, Tomás Eduardo Daniel Gutiérrez, eighteen. Right away, the mother’s eye picked him out for her daughter. Silvia Tecpoyotti was only fourteen, but life starts suddenly in the dust.

Olivia had seven daughters, with Silvia the third oldest. Olivia’s husband had a brickyard across the street. When Silvia was thirteen and sleeping in a room with three of her sisters, the father had a bedroom added to the house. The father and mother moved into it, and soon Silvia announced that she didn’t want to sleep with anybody
anymore. She carried clothes into the vacant bedroom that was formerly her parents’, shut the door, and the room became hers. Nobody thought of complaining. Silvia was a girl who with one long glance got everything she wanted. To make it permanent, Silvia had a lock put on the door. Such luxury, a bedroom where life can be lived in privacy and thoughts can remain personal and be protected.

She put pictures on the wall of Enrique Iglesias, the singer, and her favorite movie star, Rosa Gloria Chagoyán, an actress who could sing. Silvia’s favorite movie of hers was
Lola the Trucker
.

Silvia remembers hearing for the first time, at age nine, the lecture mothers gave to all daughters: “The boy must come after you. You are never to go after the boy. Better the man comes to you and talks. You do not go to them and talk. Never. Remember this all your life.” This was mixed with religious instructions so that the daughters believed any act of being forward with a boy was sacrilegious.

Silvia needed no such lecture. If she had any early wild thoughts, only she would know of them and nobody else could even have the slightest notion. As for chasing a boy, that would never be her way, even if she was wounded by her stillness in the end. Who was a boy to expect her to follow him?

As the mother inspected Eduardo, Silvia was next door doing schoolwork in the small house attached to the store.

On the street corner outside Olivia’s store was a group of young men. Watching from behind her counter, Olivia could see that Eduardo was not rowdy like the others. He was tall and everybody else was short. He already had a thin mustache and brickyard arms. But he fought with nobody on the corner outside. She knew that he worked for his father in the brickyard right up the street, worked hard, and that spoke for the future more than any other quality that could be found in San Matías.

The mother didn’t talk much to Eduardo. She watched and listened. To her, there was no question that he was the best of the bunch outside the store.

She told her daughter Silvia, fourteen but almost fifteen, that Eduardo was good. Silvia was the rare one who made it to junior high school. But it was still time to tell her this. Silvia was old enough to start thinking of marrying and having children. And her bright body would bring the proudest young Mexican male crawling at her feet. Oh, she would attract many young men, the daughter would, just with her eyes alone, eyes that widened in laughter and then crinkled in joy and thrilled a boy at a glance.

Then there were moments when her look reflected wisdom so far beyond a teenager. Even the young men who would have recognized intelligence were unable to sense the wisdom, for their attention was taken up by her long, curving neck, a neck as soft as a cloud. They had to remind themselves to breathe.

Silvia had seen Eduardo before, at town dances. She danced and watched him stay against the wall as if nailed to it. At this time, Teresa Hernández was the girlfriend of José Luis Bonilla. One of her sisters married Gustavo Ramirez, who lived on the dirt street behind Eduardo in San Matías. Her other sister married Alejandro Huitzil, who wanted to be an upholsterer in Puebla. It was Gustavo who started it all by leaving his wife and child and crawling into America where there were construction jobs at the astounding pay of $6 and $7 an hour in Williamsburg, in Brooklyn, where there was a builder, Ostreicher, who was going to build many buildings on streets called Lorimer and, later, just around the corner, on Middleton.

THE CITY OF NEW YORK FIRE DEPARTMENT

1ST ALARM—PHONE (STRUCT)

02/06/96 E230 E209 L102 L119 BC 35 E216 RES
03 RC01 RS04

BOX 0341

LORIMER STREET MARCY AVENUE
STRUCTURAL BUILDING COLLAPSE

Found cause to be partial collapse of metal beams and building material at a new construction of homes from uppermost floors to cellar with two construction workers who were not injured, Henry Korl, mw39, and Thadeusz Sokilski, mw56. No further construction was permitted until arrival of Department of Buildings. Inspector Migone, Dept. of Buildings, arrived on the scene later. Richard Ostreicher of Industrial Enterprises which is constructing the buildings was on scene.

John M. Dillon, time arrived 9:01.

CHAPTER FOUR

I
n San Matías, Silvia Tecpoyotti and other young women, like Teresa Hernández, knew that you can get $4 an hour for scrubbing floors in Texas, and even more, as much as $5, for making up beds in a motel. How were they going to stay in San Matías? They were not. They believed in the Job. The young of San Matías lived their lives with pictures of American money in their heads.

One night in San Matías, Eduardo came to the corner by the store. He had his black baseball cap pulled down, but the corners of his eyes had the look of a hungry bird as they seized on Silvia’s face. Inside the store, she looked out.

He walked on with his face showing nothing. For his next visit, he came into the store with three or four of his cousins. He went right to one of the video game machines as if she were not in the place, and began manipulating the knobs.

It gave Silvia a chance to inspect his broad back, which came down in a V, and the arms shaped by carrying all those stacks of bricks for so long now.

He finished playing, and as he left with his cousins, she remembers,
he glanced at her, his eyes licking like a camera shutter, maybe committing the sight to memory forever.

And then immediately his expression turned blank with shyness.

The following night, Eduardo’s cousin Rafael came into the store.

“Eduardo thinks you are pretty,” he said.

Silvia’s expression was impassive.

“He told us that last night when we left here,” Rafael said.

“Why doesn’t he tell me himself?”

“He is afraid,” Rafael said.

Silvia didn’t answer, and Rafael left.

Anything Eduardo earned in the brickyard was turned over to his family. He did an adult’s work and brought the money home like a kid bringing change back from going to the store. To get money for the dances, he went through the farms on the outskirts of the dusty streets and ripped up tomatoes, apples, corn, and other plants and sold them to housewives for a few pesos. Others began calling him Chato, meaning “pug nose.” Afterward, virtually everybody drank fat beers and tequilas. Eduardo drank only a little. Then on the way home he unscrewed all the streetlight bulbs.

On another night, Eduardo was back in the store with two cousins, the brothers Moisés and Rafael. Now and then he would turn and look at Silvia and she would meet his eyes with a steady pleasant gaze but show him nothing more. He finished the game and left with his cousins.