The Miraculous Day of Amalia Gómez Read online

  Praise for The Miraculous Day of Amalia Gómez:

  “A marvelous account of one woman’s life in violence-torn East Los Angeles … a wonderfully contemporary novel … John Rechy demonstrates eloquently that it is possible to write of the serious contemporary problems of minority groups without penning a pronunciamento or a racist diatribe…. An uplifting and almost inspirational story … told so well that it’s impossible not to become caught up in it from the first page … a renewal of faith in the human spirit.”

  —The Dallas Morning News

  “John Rechy is a … rare and wonderful novelist. The Miraculous Day of Amalia Gomez… [has] one of the best endings of a novel that I’ve ever read … a ‘miracle’ so startling and original, so utterly convincing … that I’ll always consider Rechy a literary great, even if he never writes another novel.”

  —Wichita Eagle

  “Rechy probes the dark underside of the American Dream in this powerful portrait. … He scorchingly evokes the prejudice faced by Mexican Americans…. the poverty, gang warfare, illegal border crossings and visions of salvation.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “A fine novel.”

  —USA Today

  “Most successful in [its] graphic descriptions of the hellish underbelly of East Los Angeles.”

  —The New York Times Book Review

  “If Los Angeles is one of this country’s most important cities, then the human and social message of [this] novel is equally important. In taut, clear prose, the story line follows a day in the life of a twice-divorced Mexican-American woman in her mid-40s. Through her personal life we look into the human heart; through her working life we look into the conditions of invisible millions. … As Amalia moves toward her miracle … Rechy’s pictures are grainy, rough, raw. And yet … Amalia’s refusal to surrender enables her to make heroic resolutions at the end of this miraculous day [in a] last chapter worth waiting for.”

  —The Philadelphia Inquirer

  “Rechy’s controlled, wholly sympathetic portrait of Amalia is wrenching … we feel startled and moved.”

  —Hartford Courant

  “A disturbing portrayal… In a series of skillful vignettes, Rechy evokes the world of seedy neighborhoods … the violence in the lives of the poor. Rechy is, above all, a storyteller … but injustice and fear are the real subjects of this engaging novel.”

  —Los Angeles Times

  “A rich portrayal … a readable and moving work … The characters are vibrant and ring true.”

  —Library Journal

  “Few American novelists know our lower depths as well as Rechy … and he is particularly well equipped to write about the barrio. [With] truthfulness and credibility … Rechy lays it bare, right down to the blood and gristle, never softening or sentimentalizing the subject. As a study of working-class Hispanic life, Amalia Gómez can’t be faulted.”

  —Los Angeles Daily News

  “A fine novel, an eloquent feat of imagination … One is reminded how real stories can open doors in walls one didn’t know were there, how they can seize heart and mind.”

  —Paula Fox, author of A Servant’s Tale

  “[Rechy’s] best … as gut-wrenching as his first City of Night but in a completely different genre … [With] sensitivity and intuitive concern, he realistically documents the prejudice, gang warfare, drugs, despair and daily struggle to survive without losing sight of the human dignity that permeates the [Mexican-American] culture … searing veracity … brilliant characterization. … [It] leaps to a stunning climax.”

  —El Paso Herald Post

  “A gritty picture of life on the cusp … vividly rendered.”—Kirkus Reviews

  “A character well worth knowing … [The Miraculous Day of Amalia Gomez] will make the reader rejoice…. Amalia demonstrates startlingly and brilliantly that not all heroines must have lives of heroic proportions.”

  —San Antonio Express-News

  “John Rechy has a tremendous gift of insight into the lives of Hispanic women living in the barrio. Amalia Gomez’s spirit lives in every woman who is oppressed, victimized, trapped in poverty, humiliated, and surrounded by fear and violence.”

  —Maia Leyba, Albquerque Journal

  The Miraculous Day of Amalia Gómez

  ALSO BY JOHN RECHY

  Novels:

  The Life and Adventures of Lyle Clemens

  The Coming of the Night

  City of Night

  Numbers

  This Day’s Death

  The Vampires

  The Fourth Angel

  Rushes

  Bodies and Souls

  Marilyn’s Daughter

  Our Lady of Babylon

  Nonfiction:

  The Sexual Outlaw: A Documentary

  Plays:

  Rushes

  Tigers Wild

  Momma as She Became—But Not as She Was (one-act)

  The Miraculous Day of Amalia Gómez

  A NOVEL BY

  JOHN RECHY

  Copyright © 1991 by John Rechy

  Introduction copyright © 2001 by John Rechy

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any

  form or by any electronic or mechanical means, or the facilitation

  thereof, including information storage and retrieval systems, without

  permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who

  may quote brief passages in a review. Any members of educational

  institutions wishing to photocopy part or all of the work for classroom

  use, or publishers who would like to obtain permission to include the

  work in an anthology, should send their inquiries to

  Grove/Atlantic, Inc., 841 Broadway, New York, NY 10003.

  The characters and events in this book are fictitious.

  Any similarity to real persons, living or dead,

  is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  Published simultaneously in Canada

  Printed in the United States of America

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Rechy, John.

  The miraculous day of Amalia Gomez : a novel / by John Rechy.

  p. cm.

  ebook ISBN-13: 978-1-5558-4729-6

  1. Hollywood (Los Angeles, Calif.)—Fiction. 2. Mexican American

  women—Fiction. 3. Working class women—Fiction. 4. Miracles—

  Fiction. 5. Visions—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3568.E28 M5 2001

  813′.54 - dc21

  2001040159

  Grove Press

  an imprint of Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

  841 Broadway

  New York, NY 10003

  Distributed by Publishers Group West

  www.groveatlantic. com

  To the memory of my mother,

  Guadalupe Flores Rechy,

  and of Tía Ana

  and for Michael Earl Snyder

  Introduction

  On a spring day in Los Angeles, I looked up into a clear sky and saw two wisps of clouds intersect to form a very discernible cross. I watched until a breeze smeared the impression. What would one of the Mexican-American women I grew up among think if she had seen that cross? What if such a woman’s life was in crisis? Would she see that cross as a desperate sign of hope?

  In my mind I evoked one woman especially—a woman who lived near us in the Government Projects in El Paso, Texas. There were many others like her, “Mexican” women who often came to talk to my mother about their woes—a son in jail, a delinquent daughter, a missing husband. (A kind confidant, my Mexican mother was always, grandly, “Señora Rechy” to them.)
No matter how sorrowing, no matter how desperate, those women endured on the expectation that God, but more emphatically the Holy Mother, was on their side.

  That spring day, I returned home and in one sitting wrote a short story titled “The Miraculous Day.” Although I invariably go through several drafts before I show anything to anyone, when my partner of many years, Michael Earl Snyder, came home, I gave him the story to read. Impressed, he exhorted me to write a full novel on the same subject. Throughout its writing, he continued to encourage me.

  I had not entirely discovered the woman I was already calling Amalia until I went to a Thrifty’s Drug Store soon after and encountered one of the most resplendent women I’ve ever seen, a gorgeous Mexican-American woman in her upper thirties, a bit heavier than she might like to think, but quite lush and sexy. She wore high-heeled sling shoes—and a tight red dress, to show off proud breasts, but she had added a ruffle there to avoid any hint of vulgarity, a fashion that defied all fashion except her own. She had a luxuriance of black shiny hair, and into its natural waves she had inserted … a real red rose.

  Bedazzled, I followed her along the aisles. Aware of me, she added an extra sway to her walk. Just as I had been looking for her, I was then sure, she had been looking for me. Not quite. A short Chicano gentleman appeared from another aisle. Obviously with her, he confronted me. “Pós?” “Well?” “Pós nada.” “Well, nothing,” I assuaged him. The woman moved away, delighted to have caused such a confrontation.

  Where would that woman live? Yes, in the fringes of Hollywood, where bungalow units, now in decline and once supposedly rented by movie-studio trade workers, have been abandoned to new immigrants, mostly Hispanic. Driving there, I saw graffiti that signaled the invasion of gangs, some units struggling to retain the semblance of neatly kept homes; Amalia would seek one like that, yes, especially if she had a man to help her out. I liked the irony that setting would provide—the Hollywood of fantasy yielding to the harshness of today’s minority existence.

  I located an exact bungalow that was holding on bravely against the encroachment of the neglect that comes with poverty. I parked, got out, explored the small courtyard. In back, in the middle of a patch of dirt, there was a rose bush, dying. But one bud still struggled to bloom! The patch of dirt had been watered, although there was no hose anywhere. Of course, the woman I had been envisioning would want to resurrect that bloom, a second signal of hope on the day she saw the cloudy cross. She would go through the rest of the day awaiting the necessary third sign of a possible miracle.

  In the days that followed, I walked and drove to every place Amalia visits in her one turbulent day. Memories of my own Mexican-American roots surfaced, memories I would adjust for her—including a memory engraved in my mind, of a Mexican woman and her child drowned in the Rio Grande, on one of the few occasions when it is an actual river, as they fled from Immigration officers mounted on horses in search of “wetbacks.”

  To Amalia, I gave the horror and rage that I had felt then, and felt always when I saw signs in small Texas towns barring “spiks, niggers, and dogs” from certain eating facilities. Soon, Amalia had run away from me entirely, with her own memories, her own life. Perhaps no other character of mine has acted so totally on her own volition, once she shaped in my mind. She argued with me, flirted to get her way, seduced me with her often humorous but always assertive beliefs.

  As she moved through the troubled landscape of Los Angeles today, I winced at the risks she took, the young man she went with, who looked very suspicious to me—but she wouldn’t be warned. The more I tried to protect her—yes, I wanted to protect her, she became that close to me—the more I tried to restrain her, the more reckless she became. There were passages I didn’t want to write, places of cruelty made inevitable because of what she insisted on doing, realizing that life was preparing to crush her, and that she must move to the edge of despair before she would be able to confront her beloved Holy Mother, woman to woman. That passage of confrontation in church, a short passage—and one I consider among my best writing—took me weeks to write, from draft to draft to draft.

  At Harvard, where I spoke to a roomful of bright graduate students in a Chicano Literature course where this novel was assigned, this question (which would recur variously in other universities I visited) was posed. A young woman asked me: Isn’t Amalia a stereotype? She went on to delineate what would make her so: an often-married Chicano woman who prefers to be called “Mexican-American,” has a romantic penchant for telenovelas, falls for handsome, abusive men, is unquestioningly Catholic—and superstitious—takes in “live-in boyfriends,” has rebellious children. I answered her somewhat along the following lines:

  The word “stereotype” makes me wince. Today, it carries such severe politically correct judgment that it becomes sinful to “perpetuate stereotypes.” But the objects of such usually thoughtless judgment continue to exist, most often courageously on the front lines of oppression—easily spotted, easily derided. Yet, examined closely, those “stereotypes” reveal a powerful source of enduring, often ancestral courage, even as, today, they challenge the insistence that they no longer exist. But they do, and they survive. Certainly, my Amalia continues to exist, an individual, and proudly so.

  Quite often, even those who introduce the matter of stereotypes end up admiring Amalia. Perhaps, at first, young Mexican-Americans want to relegate to the past women like her—she is, however, only in her thirties. Perhaps they see their mothers, their own families. Perhaps—and I hope so—they see parts of themselves in Amalia’s dogged courage to overcome the strictures of her background.

  Another question I’m frequently asked is whether I agree with Amalia at the end of the novel. There are times when she convinces me entirely, and then, yes, I agree with her. But finally whether Amalia is correct or not at the end of the novel, that is left to each reader to decide.

  John Rechy

  Los Angeles, California

  July 2001

  Es tan difícil olvidar

  cuando hay un corazón

  que quiso tanto,

  es tan dificil olvidar

  cuando hay un corazón que quiso tanto, tanto.

  It’s so difficult to forget

  when there’s a heart

  that longed so much,

  it’s so difficult to forget

  when there’s a heart

  that longed so much, so much.

  —“A Punto de Llorar” (song)

  by José Alfredo Jiménez

  The Miraculous of Day Amalia GÓmez

  1

  WHEN AMALIA GÓMEZ woke up, a half hour later than on other Saturdays because last night she had had three beers instead of her usual weekend two, she looked out, startled by God knows what, past the screenless iron-barred window of her stucco bungalow unit in one of the many decaying neighborhoods that sprout off the shabbiest part of Hollywood Boulevard; and she saw a large silver cross in the otherwise clear sky.

  Amalia closed her eyes. When she opened them again, would there be a dazzling white radiance within which the Blessed Mother would bask?—a holy sign always preceded such apparitions. What would she do first? Kneel, of course. She might try to get quickly to the heart of the matter—in movies it took at least two more visitations; she would ask for a tangible sign on this initial encounter, proof for the inevitable skeptics. She would ask that the sign be … a flower, yes, a white rose. Then there would follow a hidden message—messages from Our Lady were always mysterious—and an exhortation that the rose and the message, exactly as given, be taken to a priest, who would—What language would the Virgin Mother speak? “Blessed Mother, please, I do speak English—but with an accent, and I speak Spanish much better. So would you kindly—?”

  What strange thoughts! Amalia opened her eyes. The cross was gone.

  She had seen it, knew she had seen it, thought she had. No, Amalia was a logical Mexican-American woman not yet forty. There had been no real cross. No miraculous sign would app
ear to a twice-divorced woman with grown, rebellious children and living with a man who wasn’t her husband, although God was forgiving, wasn’t He? The “cross” had been an illusion created by a filmy cloud—or streaks of smoke, perhaps from a sky-writing airplane.

  Amalia sat up in her bed. The artificial flowers she had located everywhere to camouflage worn second-hand furniture were losing their brightness, looked old and drab. She heard the growl of cars always on the busy streets in this neighborhood that was rapidly becoming a barrio like others she had fled. Looking dreamily toward the window, she sighed.

  It was too hot for May! It’s usually by late August that heat clenches these bungalows and doesn’t let go until rain thrusts it off as steam. Amalia glanced beside her. Raynaldo hadn’t come back after last night’s quarrel at El Bar & Grill. Other times, he’d stayed away only a few hours after a spat; usually he was proud of the attention she drew, liked to show off his woman.

  And Amalia was a good-looking woman, with thick, lustrous, wavy black hair that retained all its vibrant shininess and color. No one could accuse her of being “slender,” but for a woman with firm, ample breasts and sensual round hips, her waist was small; any smaller might look ridiculous on a lush woman, she often assured herself. “Lush” was a word she liked. An Anglo man who had wandered into El Bar & Grill once had directed it at her, and that very night Raynaldo had called her “my lush brown-eyed woman, my lush Amalia.”

  Daily she moistened her thick eyelashes with saliva, to preserve their curl. She disliked downward-slanting eyelashes—but not, as some people of her mother’s generation disdained them, because they were supposed to signal a predominance of “Indian blood.” Unlike her mother, who repeatedly claimed “some Spanish blood,” Amalia did not welcome it when people she did housework for referred to her—carefully—as “Spanish.” She was proud to be Mexican-American.

  She did not like the word “Chicano”—which, in her youth, in El Paso, Texas, had been a term of disapproval among Mexicans; and she did not refer to Los Angeles as “Ellay.” “The city of angels!” she had said in awe when she arrived here from Texas with her two children—on an eerie day when Sant’ Ana winds blew in from the hot desert and fire blazed along the horizon.