The Miraculous Day of Amalia Gómez Read online

  They traveled for miles of desert, into New Mexico, across Arizona, night and day—days and nights, it seemed to Amalia. She got off, with the two children, only when they were hungry and the bus had stopped at one of the “rest stops” along the way, coffee shops always awash in dirty yellow light.

  “California immigration check!” the driver announced peremptorily as the bus pulled into one of several small, squat buildings in the desert. Amalia was aware that a Mexican man and woman who had remained in the bus throughout the long trip, eating out of a bag, seemed now to crouch, as if to become invisible.

  The bus doors scooped in hot air as they opened; and a man in a green uniform appeared, an immigration official.

  I don’t want my children asked about, stared at, Amalia thought. She had her American birth certificate, of course, and her children’s; but she remembered families in El Paso humiliated by men like this one, demanding papers for each child, studying the papers and the children.

  She saw the official approaching. She held her breath and parted her blouse so that the full flare of her breasts would show. She prepared a wide smile that hurt. The immigration man looked at her. She pulled the painful smile wider. The man passed his hand over the headrest, touching her shoulders for seconds. Then he moved on. She heard him questioning the Mexican man and woman, who answered in Spanish. They deboarded with him, disappearing into one of the ugly gray buildings.

  When the bus was moving on into California, Manny reached up and gently closed Amalia’s blouse.

  She arrived at the Greyhound station near skid row in Los Angeles.

  It was a day of fearful heated winds. In the distant horizon a fierce fire raged and coated the sun with a veil of smoke. The red, yellow, and green of traffic lights glowed strangely out of the film of ashes.

  Hot, shrieking wind whipped into the city as Amalia stood outside the Los Angeles bus depot with her two children and wondered where Torrance was.

  3

  NOW, YEARS LATER, in the bathroom of her stucco bungalow, Amalia prepared to face the rest of the day that had begun with the fleeting impression of a silver cross over the Hollywood Hills. The pipes in the cramped room were so corroded that Raynaldo had given up trying to install a shower for her; so he had bought her a hose with a rubber nozzle.

  Amalia arranged herself in the mirror. She never wanted her children to see her rumpled from sleep, the way some Anglo women she worked for looked in the mornings—and that was the last their children saw of them before they faced those flat-chested teachers. No, she always “showered,” put on a fresh dress, and made herself up entirely before they saw her.

  In the small hall that separated the bathroom and bedroom from the living room, she paused—as she often did—to stare at the telephone, in a small niche in the wall. What a luxury, a telephone! She had had one, briefly, in East Los Angeles, but it had been disconnected for lack of payment during one of the worst times. The demands for added deposits and new installation fees had made it impossible for her to have it reconnected. Now Raynaldo had provided this added symbol of her new status in Hollywood. Hollywood!

  She touched the telephone, a pale lavender color she had chosen. She always thrilled to its ringing, although lately she had begun to fear it might bring unwelcome news about Juan or Gloria. About what! Well, if it rang now it would be only one of her employers wanting her to change her usual day of work for them. They always assumed she had nothing else to do except work for them. One woman had even asked her to work on Sundays as her “regular day.” Amalia had informed her frostily that that was “God’s sacred day” and that it was a sin even to ask anyone to work then, although—God knew this—she didn’t, couldn’t always go to Mass; but, if not, she made sure to say a few extra prayers—and, of course, she did work on some Sundays, when she had to—that once to provide Manny with money when he was in jail; and yet—she paused on this wondrous memory—he hadn’t taken it, had signaled from behind the glassy partition that separated them that he wanted her to use it.

  She heard Juan’s voice, Gloria’s laughter. Since Manny’s death, that was the only time they laughed, that way, when they were together.

  Would they be glad Raynaldo had not come back last night, after their quarrel at El Bar & Grill? Would they hope he had left permanently? What a thought! Amalia chastised herself. Whatever the source of conflict—if there was any—it was temporary. There was no reason why they would not love Raynaldo like a father. She would tell them that he was on one of those jobs that kept him away overnight when freight was heavy.

  She stood at the bathroom door, and she looked into the living room that turned nightly into a bedroom. Their backs to her, her children sat in their “beds.” They hadn’t dressed yet, Juan in his shorts, so white against his brown skin, Gloria in one of those slips she only slept in—God knew there couldn’t be anything under the tight skirts she wore. When did they change toward me? Why? What do they have against me?

  Those questions recurred, unwanted, more and more now. Had the change begun after Manny’s death? No—they had been loving in that punishing time. Had they begun to change before that?—that time when Manny came home on drugs or drunk or God knows what and she heard him talking to them? What had he told them? There was nothing to tell. Of course there was that terrible time—just after Manny’s murder—when she had forbidden them to call her “‘Amita” because that belonged only to her first son and the wound of his death was too fresh. But surely they understood that. And hadn’t she hugged them right away, demanding they must call her “‘Amita”?

  Were her son and daughter aware of her as she stood watching them now? Hadn’t they heard her in the bathroom? The new sadness she had detected earlier tugged at her.

  It wasn’t a new sadness, she knew, it was an extension of the sadness she had known from long before that forlorn day when she had stood in front of the Los Angeles Greyhound bus station and wondered how to get to Torrance, that desolate day when the heated winds were thrusting in from the desert.

  Only later would she learn that those winds, which follow a tense, hot quietude, have the name of a saint, “Santa Ana winds”—“Sant’ Anas.” It would delight her to discover how many streets, plazas, nearby cities are named after saints—Nuestra Señora del Pueblo, San Vicente, Santa Monica, San Diego, San Juan Capistrano. She would come to love the city of angels and flowers and saints’ names. But she would also come to fear the ominous winds and the scorched odor that permeated the city during the season of fires, the floods she heard about that swept distant cliffs into the ocean—and she would come to hate and fear the prospect of earthquakes—and the presence of gangs. But all that came later.

  When she finally managed, the day of her arrival in California, to reach Torrance, she was sweating and weary to the point of tears. She had reached her destination after transferring from bus to bus. She arrived when the sun was setting on the flat city of small houses and plastic apartment buildings; the city where she was sure she would find Gabriel, a city she came to hate.

  She rented a room from a Mexican woman—there was a scattering of Mexicans in Torrance, she quickly learned. In the room, after she had located on its only table her statue of the Holy Mother and its plastic flowers, she sat staring blankly at blemished walls. Manny joined her pensiveness, holding her hand. Juan slept. How long would the money she had saved, for this, last her?

  First, they had to eat. She left her two children with the woman she had rented the room from, and she went to the giant supermarket she was given directions to.

  “Aren’t you that movie star?” a hefty, reddish-faced woman with pants that squeezed her flesh into lumps asked Amalia as she was checking out with milk and a package of cinnamon rolls.

  “Which one?” Amalia thought the woman might say Maria, la Maria, Maria Felix.

  The woman frowned. “You have an accent and you’re too dark. No, you can’t be Ava Gardner.”

  At the news rack, Amalia searched for a picture
of Ava Gardner. She found one. The American movie star looked like Maria Felix!

  The next day, with Manny and Juan, she took a bus to the only “airplane factory” near Torrance. She was there early when hundreds of workers went in with lunch pails. Again with her children, she returned when the workers were leaving in the afternoon. She did not see Gabriel.

  Her money had run out. She found a job doing housework. For almost half of what she earned, she left Manny and Juan with a Mexican woman who lived in the same building and who had three children and bristly bleached hair.

  The American woman Amalia worked for asked her why she did housework. “You could work in a cafeteria or even in a hospital tending to, you know, things.”

  But she didn’t tell me I could be a secretary like her, Amalia thought. Once again, she simply accepted doing housework, a line that intersected the course of her life. Too, she liked being in pretty apartments in California, and she was paid in cash, without deductions, and that was essential to her day-to-day survival.

  The woman let her go after one week: “Amalia, I really can’t afford—” she began. “My husband likes women like you,” she blurted.

  “What kind?” Amalia tried to keep anger out of her voice so the woman would get her another job.

  “Oh, you know,” the woman stumbled, “Spanish, and—” She waved her hands, outlining ample breasts. “But, look, I have a dress for you, I’ve outgrown it.” She tried to laugh.

  “I’m Mexican-American, not Spanish,” Amalia told her, “and I don’t care if your husband likes women like me, I don’t like men like him, and I don’t like your dress, it would look like a sack on me.”

  By herself she returned to the airplane factory. This time she stayed through two shifts of workers. She did not see Gabriel.

  A distant relative she contacted told her she should leave Torrance and move to East Los Angeles. “What are you doing out there with the rednecks?”

  Amalia, Manny, and Juan left Torrance. Her distant relative located a place for her, a pinkish bungalow in a small court. It was old, not exactly well kept. She tried to make it pretty with her blessed statue, religious pictures cut out from old calendars, and paper flowers. She sewed a bright cover for the gutted sofa Manny and Juan slept on.

  In East Los Angeles, populated almost entirely by Mexicans, Gabriel found her. He told her how much he had missed her and that he couldn’t get his baby out of his mind. Amalia showed Juan to him; he had now begun to walk.

  “Jesus Christ!” Gabriel said. He would back away from the boy, and then return to study the little creature he had produced. “I want to move back in with you,” he told Amalia the same day.

  He was kinder to her than ever, kissed her after sex, bought her a dress. He tried to play with Manny, throwing a ball at him a couple of times. But Manny would just let it drop. Then Gabriel would stare at Juan and say, “Jesus Christ!”

  After he had stayed out all night a second time, Amalia accused him of returning to his “old ways.” Gabriel slapped her. She fell to the floor, hunched quietly. He pulled her up. Manny rushed at him, battering him with his fists.

  Gabriel left her again, and Amalia became a divorciada a second time. Since God understood her first divorce, thanks to Father Ysi-dro, He would understand this one, Amalia never doubted.

  Times she did not work—she continued to do housework by the day—Amalia explored the blocks of this new city. Even with her two children at her side, she elicited admiring looks from men, and what was wrong with that? She liked East Los Angeles. There were flowers and vines everywhere, all shapes, all colors, and they decorated even the poorest neighborhoods. In wreckage yards—which were everywhere, too—enormous yellow sunflowers with brown velvety centers peered at twisted chrome veins on mangled metal bodies. Along every street were rows and rows of palm trees.

  And near her house was the chapel of Nuestra Señora de la Sole-dad, Our Lady of Solitude. Atop the yellowish church, Our Lady welcomed Amalia. Inside, within a large silvery shell enclosed in a gleam of blue, a statue of Our Lady of Guadalupe stood on a gathering of red roses. Before her, a statue of the peasant Juan Diego knelt, gazing in awe at her divine radiance. Amalia would always spend a few minutes there, especially when there was no one else nearby. That way, she felt even closer to the Holy Mother.

  Every Saturday night on Whittier Boulevard the young men of East Los Angeles would display their “customized” cars, growling machines worked on constantly, often prized ‘50s “Cheveez”; cars silver-sprinkled red, green, blue; purple birds or fiery flames painted on the sides and hoods. Flaunting their budding sexuality, girls rooted for the best cars, the best-looking drivers, the members of their favorite gangas, or the lowest “low-riders,” cars that almost touched the street and bounced up and down, to applause.

  Amalia liked watching the “parades”—although seeing the exuberant girls there reminded her that she had had no real girlhood. And Manny delighted in the display of cars, especially the antics of the drivers. He seemed to come to life then, out of an entrenching sadness that haunted Amalia, that she saw in his hurt eyes.

  One night, police helicopters hovered over the unofficial parade. Suddenly light poured down in a white pit. Squad cars rushed to block the side exits off the boulevard. Police motorcycles tangled in and out of lanes. Young Mexican men rushed out of cars. Some were pushed to the ground. There were screams. The police pulled out their guns. Amalia ran home with Manny. “No es nada,” said a woman who lived nearby. “Just the usual harassment.”

  Increasingly, Amalia noticed sun-glassed Anglo police prowling the area like leisurely invaders in their black cars. She saw young Mexican men—boys—sprawled against walls while cops frisked them. She saw those same young men, young men like them, in bunches—klikas that form the gangs—roaming the streets or idling; and she felt afraid of the police and the gangs.

  Sometimes Amalia would take some extra time to walk to a more distant bus stop so that she might pass the small plaza off Boyle Avenue on her way to work. At that corner, near a doughnut shop, there would already be a cluster of mariachis, from whom, throughout the day but especially toward evening, those wanting to hire a band for birthdays or weddings, or to play at a dance or a bar, would make their choices while sitting in their cars. The charros for hire stood already dressed in their trajes, tailored pants and jackets, black or blue, lined with silver. Guitars, trumpets, accordions, violins at their sides, they sometimes practiced their music right there on the street, songs of love and lament.

  Amalia would walk past, a bright flower in her hair, and with a slight toss of her hips she would encourage approving remarks and—her real goal—also a few strains from a guitar, perhaps something from a Pedro Infante song from way back, her mother’s sweet time of two-day weddings.

  She especially liked the murals scattered about the area—imagine!—paintings as colorful as those on calendars, sprawled on whole walls. One of the prettiest was of a bride, in white swirling veils, accompanied by her new groom. Colored confetti rained on them and on the lovely bridesmaids and handsome escorts, all joyous.

  In a spottily green park, where young Mexican men bunched together, idling, smoking—Manny stared at them and Amalia coaxed him away—there was a wall painting that fascinated and puzzled her, and she went there often to look at it: A muscular Aztec prince, amber-gold-faced, in lordly feathers, stood with others as proud as he. They gazed toward the distance. Behind them on a hill pale armed men mounted on horses watched them. At the opposite end of the painting brown-faced, muslin-clothed men stared into a bright horizon. They were the ones whom the Aztecs were facing distantly.

  Today, standing before it with Manny while Juan played nearby on the patchy grass, Amalia must have shown her bewilderment, because an old Mexican man who had been sitting nearby on a bench came up to her and explained: “The conquistadores are about to subdue the Indians with weapons, as they did, but over there”—he pointed to the band of muslin-clad men—“are t
he revolucionaries, who will triumph and bring about Aztlán, our promised land of justice.”

  Amalia thanked him for his explanation. She continued to study the mural. There were no women. Where were they? Had they survived?

  “—saw it, a glimpse of it. No, we demanded it.”

  Amalia hadn’t been aware the old man had remained standing nearby until she heard his emphatic words. “What?”

  “A short time ago when we demanded justice.” He frowned. “It seems so much longer. But it was right here, in East Los Angeles, when they tried to kill us on the streets.”

  “Who?” Amalia was not sure she wanted to hear.

  “The police,” the old man said, “when we protested in the streets, thousands of us, because so many of our boys were being killed in that terrible Vietnam. Why, my own grandson died there.” He made a sign of the cross in memory.

  Amalia made one with him, and she coaxed Manny to cross himself, too.

  The old man shook his head. “Our sons were fighting for the country, and yet we were being treated—” he paused, choosing careful words “—without dignity” he finished. “We marched in the streets,” he said proudly, “and we shouted, ‘No másf No more abuse. No more!… Then a thousand policemen gassed us, beat us with their clubs. Yes, men, women, children. One man was killed.”

  Amalia remembered something like that. When she was still in El Paso? When she was in Torrance? She wasn’t sure, because for her that had been only the time of Gabriel.

  “We rioted,” the man said. “I threw something, a rock, I can’t even remember what, I just wanted them to know that I was there, too. ‘No more!’” he echoed his words from that time. Then he looked about him. His voice was quiet. “But nothing’s changed,” he said to Amalia.

  Amalia needed to move away from this man’s troubled memories. So she said, “Buenos días” with extra courtesy, and walked away. Until she had almost reached her house, she wasn’t aware that in her mind she had kept repeating the man’s words, “No mas—no more,” without knowing why.