The Short Sweet Dream of Eduardo Gutierrez (23 page)

Now there were firemen and cops everywhere, tugging, heaving, and these voices were calling out, “Angel?” “Juan!” One Mexican, battered, dazed, and bleeding, tried to slip away after they pulled him out. Firefighters grabbed him. They were afraid he was hurt and would collapse trying to walk home. The guy kept trying to get away. He was more afraid of an immigration agent than of an injury.

Eduardo’s body was pulled out of the cellar by ropes. He was one hundred pounds heavier with the cement on him. The body was taken to the morgue at Bellevue Hospital.

In Woodhull Hospital, Lucino was in bed in a haze and with his body hurting. José J. Eduardo, the husband of Lucino’s cousin Julisa, was allowed in. She had medical knowledge and the husband had none, so of course she remained with the children and he saw
Lucino in intensive care. José told him in amazement, “Do you know, somebody died.” He told Lucino it was Eduardo. It would be many months before Lucino could say the name without crying. Miguel called Eduardo’s father, Daniel, and said that something had happened. The father went into denial and hung up on him. Then Gustavo’s sister, Teresa Hernández, who had gotten several calls about the accident, called the father from her basement room in Queens Village. She said that Eduardo had died. The father in San Matías shouted, “No!” and hung up. The father called Brighton Beach and got only Mariano Ramirez, a brother of Gustavo and Teresa who’d slept on the floor with Eduardo and who had two brothers hurt in the collapse. Mariano didn’t want to be the one to tell Eduardo’s father. He told Daniel that he would find out and call back. Finally, after many calls, Miguel, the husband of Martha, Mariano’s sister, called Daniel and told him. This time, Daniel believed the bad news. He closed the cell phone and turned around and told his wife that the first child born to her was dead.

Silvia was surprised that her mother was calling her this late, after she had returned home from the night job at the Olive Garden. It was her mother who called rather than anybody from Brighton Beach, because Eduardo never had informed anybody that she was his girlfriend.

The mother said she did not know how Eduardo died. Silvia remembered him saying he had to climb up the building. In her mind she saw him dead on the ground, sprawled dramatically. Nobody told her mother or her how he actually died. Her mother asked if she was coming for the funeral, and Silvia said of course she would be there. She hung up and sat through part of the night thinking about it. That they had not seen each other in months was suddenly not important. They could get past that and live their lives. But the death left her blank. She had never experienced anything that had a finality to it. This did. At her age, all the days and months were part of looking ahead.

B
ACK IN
N
EW
Y
ORK,
a social worker, Awilda Cordero, drove Angel and Mariano to the morgue. They went into a conference room, and one of the assistants came in with color pictures of Eduardo’s corpse. The two looked at the picture, said,
“Sí,”
and the identification was through. It took several more days for the body to be released because immigration people had to be notified that the young man was here without papers. This is poor form for a dead body.

That Sunday afternoon, with the sky gray and the wide commercial street outside desolate, Eduardo’s body was in a white casket in a closet of grief at the Lopez Funeral Home in Brooklyn. He was in a good white shirt, and the black cap he loved sat atop the casket. Everybody who was not in the hospital came there in rough clothes and sat in silence. Gustavo was angry and kept mopping his forehead, which was still bleeding.

The cost of getting the body to Mexico was paid by the Red Cross and the New York City Central Labor Trades Council, whose members in the construction trades are mostly white and from New Jersey, and whose officers are in their element at cocktail parties in Manhattan with politicians. The labor leaders paused to pay for the funeral and get in the newspapers.

The case was in the jurisdiction of the Kings County District Attorney’s office, whose normal tenacity in pursuit of justice slowed to a stroll when faced with the history of the Board of Elections, in whose records are carried no list of winners who attack Hasidim.

At this moment, into the ominous gloom and wet smell of the collapsed building on Middleton Street came James Vanderberg of the Department of Labor. He was another of these people who exude mildness and can destroy you. He was slim and young. His job was to find out how this poor Mexican got killed. But he had to do it with a lightened step. Under the OSHA rules, a violation of safety rules causing the death of a worker is a misdemeanor. The maximum for the misdemeanor is six months in prison. There is no restitution for the victim. But if a felony could be made out of
Ostreicher’s lying to the federal agent, Caterina, then there was a chance that something could be gained out of the sourness and misery of the matter. For the felony would be punishable by from zero to six years in prison. Restitution for the Gutiérrez death could somehow be made a part of any plea agreement, and there certainly would be one; Ostreicher could face no jury. The fine could then be substantial and Eduardo’s family, which had only been hurt until now, could receive some financial help. Eduardo had drowned in concrete during great arguing on Mount Olympus about world commerce and work. Eduardo had no understanding of the names of the technologies that caused fists to wave on the streets of Seattle and Genoa. Nor could he name the diversities of trade, nor the new merchandise that comes off the shelf not by hand but by a tapping key whose message flies to the sky and back to the shelf. Yet Eduardo represented the most invaluable part of the economy of the world. He was cheap labor.

I
N A VACANT CORNER OF THE
airport in Mexico City, international trade was represented by the casket of Eduardo, who had died in Williamsburg, in Brooklyn, and was in Mexico to be buried. He was put on a van. Mariano, who had brought the body home, cried as he got into the van, which drove down to Eduardo’s house and the funeral.

In College Station, Silvia sat one last night before deciding that she couldn’t go to the funeral. Getting to San Matías was simple. But then she would have to sneak across the border again, and that could take days and weeks, particularly if she got turned back. Surely she would lose both her jobs. She thought of the railroad tracks in the night with snakes in the brush. That settled it. She would sob for Eduardo and then live for the living.

The order of grieving in San Matías calls for nine days of prayers before the burial. By the time the body arrived in the yard
at Calle Libre, eight days had passed, and the father agreed with the priest that the young man should be buried on the next morning.

The night before the funeral, Eduardo’s casket was in a room that had been cleared out and was across from his new blue room. There was no upstairs because there was no money to build. Eduardo’s new room shrugs off storms and sun. It is painted blue with white trim. It is a glorious room. The casket was surrounded by candles, and there was wailing and fainting.

Instead of many prayers and drinks, there were only prayers that night. On the morning of the funeral one of his cousins, a woman with a face of the Aztecs, bit her lip and began hauling a bucket of water out of the well. One hand over the other, arms straining as she pulled the rope. Now the large pail came out with the water sparkling in the sun, and some of this reflected onto the wall of the room Eduardo died for.

They carried Eduardo’s body through the heat and among the children running with dogs alongside, the large crowd pushing to get closer to the casket of Eduardo Daniel Gutiérrez, who drowned in concrete in Brooklyn at age twenty-one while trying to make money.

They went to the old yellow church with red trim, with candlelight flickering on the gold wreaths and babies crying and the sound of children’s feet. The people stood outside the doors and threw rice to symbolize the marriage Eduardo never had.

Then they walked the streets to the cemetery. They were in the middle of the cobblestone walk that went up to the cemetery gates. The walk went past stacked tires and the clotheslines of families living in shacks, and the crowd threw white carnations at the casket.

Nine young women stepped out of the crowd. One, whose name was Sol, wore a white sweater and a heartbreakingly young face. She went up to the casket and took the place of a young man. She held the casket handles underhand. Eight other young women took the places of the young men who had been carrying it.

Now there were nine young women, each of whom held the handles underhand.

A mariachi band at the end of the procession played a song called “Las Flores.” As the trumpets sounded in the hot sunlight, the band leader, wearing a powder blue suit and black gloves, began singing the song.

On the left side of the casket, Sol swayed back on her right foot. So did the other young women on her side. The young women on the other side swayed forward with the casket.

Now the young women on the left side stopped going back and swayed forward. All hands gripped the casket handles, and the young faces were determined as they swayed with the heavy box. The young women on the right side stepped back.

As the left side came forward, all the young women caused the casket to dance a couple of feet closer to the cemetery gate.

Young women learn this dance just by living here. It is done only with the caskets of women who die unmarried or a young man like Eduardo Daniel Gutiérrez, who drowned in concrete at age twenty-one in Williamsburg in Brooklyn.

The young women carrying his casket were friends of Eduardo. Their faces were determined. Soon, however, they cried as they made Eduardo’s casket dance. Sway forward on the left leg, sway back on the right foot, sway forward, sway back, sway, sway, sway, dance the young man to his grave.

In front of the cemetery, as the mariachi singer cried out the last notes of his song about flowers, the young women had their places at the casket taken by older men. The older men now rocked the casket as if it were a rowboat.

Three young men sat atop the cemetery arch and threw candy down. The kids raced for it.

Inside the graveyard there was a tangle of small graves covered with dead flowers. The grave had been dug by friends of the father, Eduardo Daniel. The cemetery is staffed only by flies.

Before the casket was lowered, Eduardo’s mother, Teresa, was at the foot of the casket, and her face, uncovered, held a thousand years of grief. All through her roots, lifetime after lifetime, somebody young had died in every one of the families that came before her. At moments like this, her only emotion was dull acceptance.

Mariano Ramirez Torres tried to bury his round young face into the top of the casket. In the throng pushing forward to be near the grave was his mother, Angelina. With the two sons hurt in Brooklyn and not working, and the other son here to mourn, she said that there were no money orders from Brooklyn. She is raising the four children of one of the injured sons, Gustavo.

At the graveside the grandmother, Angelina, was racked with grief and necessity.

There were at least half a dozen men standing in the fresh dirt at the lip of the grave. Two men in white polo shirts were in the hole. When they pushed and tugged the casket into place, they got on either side of the casket and began slapping new red bricks, baked in this shack town, atop the casket. They wanted a brick wall to protect the top of the casket when the dirt and sand would be thrown down on it.

Eduardo Gutiérrez had already drowned once.

EPILOGUE

O
n June 15, 2001, the New York City Central Labor Trades Council ran a media bus tour of South Eighth Street in Williamsburg, where another Mexican immigrant from Puebla, Rogelio Daze Villaneuva, was crushed to death. He lost his life only blocks away from where Eduardo had perished.

A Hi-Lo forklift caused a ramp to collapse on the demolition job of an old hot dog factory that was uninspected.

In the doorway of a building next door, a gray-haired man wearing a shirt with the words
Kabila’s Knishes
on the front pocket said, “No papers.”

“The contractor?”

“No, the Mexicans. They have no papers, no green card. No paper, no pay. Cheap pay. Five, six dollar an hour. Nobody looks at the building.”

Rogelio, an immigrant with no papers of any sort, had been making about a third of union wages. He had four children.

The union announced that the bus ride was to “shine a bright, public light on violations of basic human rights of workers in New York City.”

Eduardo’s father, Daniel, arrived in Brooklyn unnoticed at that time. He was here for depositions for lawsuits. The lawyer had sent tickets. He got off the plane with two hundred dollars. Two hundred American, he said to himself. I can stay here for a month.

He was on Lorimer Street, the one behind the ruined buildings on Middleton Street where his son died. This is not using the name Lorimer Street as geography in a story. Rather, the attempt at justice was made on that dull, treeless block.

Daniel crouched and pushed through a narrow, ragged opening in a chain-link fence and trudged through this lot filled with debris that was covered with weeds. He came to the rear of the collapsed buildings where Eduardo drowned in concrete.

The father was forty-six. Suddenly, he seemed so much older. Pain spilled from the dark eyes and ran through the small creases around his eyes and into the ravines and rivulets of his cheeks and mouth. He looked over seventy.

Then the sunlight splashed the brown face and the lines softened and he was forty-six again. A sadness weighs on his eyes, and he looks down to hide this.

The construction site is silent. A metal sign says it is in the hands of a demolition company. On the left, the last two units have wood ladders of four steps leading up to the second level. The one next to last has a basement yawning dark and wet. Daniel looks into the open first floor. He shakes his head, then holds his thumb and forefinger far apart. He points at a space between the wall and the floor above.