Bodies and Souls Read online

  After that, Manny became an intimate stranger to Yolanda, someone who watched her very closely at times, at times didn't seem to see her even when she talked to him.

  Yolanda preferred for her children to call her by her first name. After all, it was a pretty name, and she was young, her hair lustrous and dark, and even when she was a few pounds heavier than she might have been, she looked good, lush—some said she looked better a little heavy. She had married at sixteen, to get out of an infested tenement in the “Second Ward”—where only Mexicans live—up to ten people, more, different generations, occupying two dark rooms without running water; the bathroom outside, frigid in winter.

  As it turned out, Yolanda merely exchanged one tenement for another—and a brutal husband. The “son of a bitch”—the only way she referred to the father of Manny and his two sisters—she told them he was the father of all three, but not of Paco, whose father was also a “son of a bitch”—disappeared after a fight that left her bruised for more than a week. Manny remembered that: he was six and kept pounding with his fists at the man's legs. Later, Manny kissed the bruises on Yolanda's face, thinking his saliva would heal them. The events of all those years often ran out of sequence in Manny's cramped memories. Several times in detention, and returns home, often fused into one endless time.

  When Manny was fifteen, Yolanda decided that they would go to Los Angeles “to make a new life.” They traveled, with many bandaged boxes, by Greyhound bus. A distant relative helped them locate a soiled pink bungalow, one of several in a ratty, squeezed stucco unit off Brooklyn Avenue in that clutch of small communities cemented by gray concrete streets and known as “East L.A.,” populated almost exclusively by Mexicans.

  Each summer, heat clenches these bungalows and won't let go until the rains thrust it off as steam. In the heat-clasped house, Yolanda slept in the bedroom, with Margarita, then almost a teenager. Manny, the oldest, Ernestina, younger by three years than Margarita, and Paco, the “baby,” slept in what would have been a dining room. There would be an occasional other occupant—a man, not necessarily the same one, who stayed over for a few days, even a few weeks, and contributed a week's, even a month's groceries. Then Margarita slept in a fold-out bed in the “front room.” Not that Yolanda was a prostitute—no, absolutely not. She was a religious woman. Having a boarder merely made things easier for them all.

  Even the poorest sections of East Los Angeles have an impressionistic prettiness that camouflages the poverty. Flowers seem pasted on crumbling walls; vines splash color on rotting porches. In wrecked-automobile yards—which are everywhere—enormous yellow-leafed sunflowers with brown velvet centers peer at twisted chrome veins on mangled metal bodies. And green, green trees are everywhere. On far-off flowered hills up Atlantic Boulevard, pretty homes, some almost elaborate, keep a measured distance.

  Murals decorate walls in the poor sections: A squad of jubilant, muslin-clothed brown-faced Zapatistas—triumphant agrarian revolutionaries! A noble Aztec prince, amber gold-faced, in lordly feathers! Muscular Indians conquered by pale conquis-tadores armed with guns and blessed by a livid Spanish priest—at the edge of the fresco, a specter of a victorious Villista emerges out of the colored vicissitudes of oppression. It is often under these murals, in abandoned, spottily green parks, that young Mexican men—often gangs—bunch together, expecting nothing.

  There are many other areas where Mexicans live in Los Angeles—in the central city, downtown. In fists of blackened tenements, families live in shifts, in the same ugly apartment, sleeping in the same beds, eating at the same tables—at different, designated times. And so Yolanda was proud that she “managed” in “East L.A.”

  Manny was lean and sinewy, not tall. He had dark brown hair, smooth brown skin, liquidy dark eyes, thick black eyebrows, a straight nose like those of the Aztecs in the murals. He worked unpacking boxes, arranging their contents on shelves, and keeping clean a grocery store that featured, in a bold sign on its window, a “Mexican-style” butcher shop—slabs of cheap meat on melting ice.

  Near the store is the Church of Nuestra Señora de la Soledad, Our Lady of Solitude. Atop the yellowish church, Our Lady stands with hands outstretched welcoming those who walk up its iron-grilled steps. Manny moved slowly when he passed it, and then he began to pause before it. Once he even stopped.

  Yolanda paid two dollars—though not every day—to an old woman in the court to look in on the children while she was gone. She worked in a clothes factory in downtown Los Angeles—“sweatshops,” a woman doing a television story on the terrible conditions in the city's garment district called them; Yolanda hated that designation. Rows of Mexican women sewed endlessly in shops owned by “Anglos” who came in once a day to hear the constant pick-pick-picking of the machines. The pay was low; hired knowingly, “illegals” from across the border were willing to work for anything. The immigration authorities made periodic raids—almost always before the women had been paid. The illegal women just surrendered. Yolanda detested it when the hatchet-faced immigration men would demand to see her birth certificate, even though she would speak in her best English to them. So she began dressing more “Anglo”—a lower-cut dress, more modish shoes, more makeup, shorter hair. But they still asked her for her papers.

  With his background—tough credentials from detention homes—Manny would have been a leader in any of the gangs in the barrios of “East Ellay.” Idle, jobless, restive factions of young Mexicans war against each other, from neighborhood, to neighborhood, into Central Los Angeles, brandishing bats, knives, guns. They are united only in their detestation of “the man” —the white cops—and when occasional incursions occur from “gringo surfers” along the coast—or, more often, from “redneck” gangs in the Valley. Then the grandsons of the exploited Okies tangle bloodily with the descendants of the conquered warriors.

  Once a week, the young Mexican charioteers parade “customized” cars along Whittier Boulevard—prized Fifties’ “Cheveez” with silver-sprinkled red, green, blue, purple birds or fiery flames painted on the hoods and sides of the growling machines. Girls, flaunting their budding sexuality, root for the best cars, the best-looking or most daring drivers, the members of their favorite gang, or the lowest “low-riders,” cars that seem almost to touch the street.

  Police helicopters hover over it all. Lights pour onto the street carving a pit of daylight. Surly squad cars with agitated blue and yellow lights swirling rush to perform rehearsed assaults. The very next day, resentment burrowing, gangs turn more ferociously against each other.

  Always a loner, Manny did not join a gang. His proven credentials for “toughness” made that possible. His only friend was El Indio, and he encouraged Manny to stay away from the gangs, no matter how tight they tried to squeeze him to join. El Indio was a very dark youngman with long hair so black it looked blue; he had a scar that began at the tip of his right ear and ended at the edge of his left shoulder—carved by one switch of a sharp blade. He wanted no part of the gangs anymore. “Fighting your own people instead of the pigs, man,” he told Manny, “that's what the pigs want, to keep us killing each other.” It was afternoon, and they were sitting in the shade of the wall with the triumphant brown-faced revolutionaries painted on it.

  A black and white squad car cruised by. Hands on their holsters, two white cops swaggered toward the youngmen. “Got any tattoos?” one of the cops asked them.

  Manny knew the question meant, Do you have any needle marks, do you shoot up? “No. Gonna get one, though,” he said.

  “Let me see your arms,” the cop said in that soft tone that meant he would turn mean.

  Manny held out his right arm.

  “The other one,” the cop said.

  Hesitating, Manny held it out.

  “What's that ugly scar on your hand?” the cop asked.

  “A burn.” Manny clenched his fingers and pulled his hand away.

  One cop shoved Indio against the wall, the other spread-eagled Manny. They kicked at the an
kles of the two youngmen so that their bodies were rendered helpless. Laughing, the cops walked away, leaving the two in that position against the mural.

  “Pigs,” El Indio spat as the cops drove away.

  Manny rubbed the scar tissue on his hand, as he did often, especially when he was agitated. He heard a car drive by. Ping! Blood crawled over Indio's chest. Manny thought he himself was screaming, but it was sirens.

  When he learned Indio was dead, Manny went to the bathroom of the stucco bungalow. With a knife, he drew a long line from the middle of his chest and down almost to his navel. He thought he was imitating El Indio's diagonal scar. But now he drew another line from one nipple to the other. He didn't cut into the skin, just scratched it deeply. It flared dark-pink. Only one drop of blood gathered at one edge of the horizontal line. Manny watched it trickle down and didn't try to stop its flow.

  The next day he didn't go to work. He hung around the streets. Finally he walked to the yellowish church. The front doors were locked. He went into the side courtyard that separates the church from the rectory. That side door was open. He walked into the church, past the blaze of supplicants’ candles lighted to the Virgin of Guadalupe, brown-faced, robed in tawdry gold-starred blue and red—the way she was supposed to have appeared in Mexico to the Indian Juan Diego, stamping her gaudy image on his peasant's smock to prove her miraculous presence to the doubting priests.

  The church was empty. There is no railing before the altar, just a step. Over the ornate altar is the statue of Christ. Especially on the right side, the loincloth is brief enough to reveal sharp muscles in a U over the groin. Two mosaicked windows flank the crucified figure. Light flowed from one side now and splashed deep hues on the tortured body.

  Manny walked up to the altar, where only priests and altar boys are allowed. “Why aren't you ever naked? Why don't you ever really reveal yourself?” he asked the figure.

  At the entrance to the church, in the growing darkness, the flames of the candles before the Virgin of Guadalupe rose fiercely as he passed the statue. He raised the scarred hand over one, almost allowing the flames to burn it away into another scar. Then he withdrew.

  He went to work and drew the owner's ire: “Convict!”

  Manny demanded, in mean tones, and got his twice-a-month pay. “Fuck you,” he said to the man.

  At dinner Yolanda introduced a new “boarder,” a not-unattractive dark man. Manny didn't even look at him. Instead, he studied Paco, his five-year-old brother—he was getting thinner, listless; he never smiled. Manny made a face at him, to get him to laugh; but Paco didn't even smile.

  Margarita sat next to Paco. She was fourteen now. She would be an exotic beauty before long; already she was the proud “old lady” of one of the leaders of a ruling gang. She was cool to Manny, maybe because he'd seen her put something like cotton between her legs, or, more likely, because he refused to join her “old man's” gang. Next to him, Ernestina—eleven years old and plain as an olive—couldn't sit still, fidgeting; the opposite of Paco, she oozed nerves.

  Still avoiding the new boarder, Manny stared at his mother. She was looking especially pretty for the new man. She wore a shiny, watery dress that shoved her breasts together and showed off the ripe round ovals.

  Yolanda caught Manny studying her. She never wondered what the other children thought of her “boarders,” but she wondered what Manny thought. He was grown. When he kissed her—now and then, and always impulsively—when she left for work or when he did—she began to turn her lips instead of her cheek. He looked moodier to her today, his eyes steady on her; she smiled at him, but he didn't smile back. She raised her dress just slightly at her bosom, then lowered it again. Was it because of this new man he kept staring at her, or was he remembering— … ? No, that was forgotten!

  Manny jerked up suddenly, almost overturning the table.

  “What the hell!” the man said.

  Manny had just seen it: Hanging on the wall—probably to conceal a new crack—was a garish drawing of Jesus, with long concealing robes. Yolanda kept old religious calendars. Each time a crack developed or plaster peeled, she went through them, chose one, and pasted it over the scar. Usually it was a picture of the Madonna.

  El Indio was dead, gunned down by one of his own people, one of a rival gang or the gang he had abandoned—dead, just like that: Ping! —and there he was, Jesus, in his white fucking robes! “Fuckin’ bastard!” Manny shouted at the picture—and then his eyes sliced over to see the new “boarder” for the first time. “Fuckin’ bastard!” he repeated.

  “Please!” Yolanda hit the table.

  “What the hell,” the man said.

  Paco pushed his plate away. It broke on the floor with a loud crash. Gratefully, Ernestina slid off her chair to gather the pieces—it gave her a chance to hide.

  Manny walked out into the starless night. He moved on to Brooklyn Avenue, the wide street that fades for a few blocks, enters a tunnel, and then emerges as Sunset Boulevard—the beginning of one of the longest streets anywhere, beginning here before it flees from the poverty of East L.A., the spill of Skid Row, the dinginess of downtown Los Angeles—and curves along the strip of electric posters announcing hit records, then sweeps into Beverly Hills, Bel Air, mansions, lofty houses perched like wide-winged birds on the purple cliffs of Malibu over the ocean.

  Manny was on Main Street, in downtown Los Angeles. He had hitched a ride, so pensive he hardly remembered the driver, remembered only the man kept asking, “What's the matter, kid, what's the matter?”

  It was a Los Angeles night, both hot and cold; moisture chilled the hot air.

  Along that squalid street are porno shops, with colored close-ups of squashed organs on magazine covers like slabs of meat in the butcher shop; smelly fried chicken counters; cheap black and Mexican whores in tiny pants; mean bars with men who look like convicts—and fussy older men out of place—and, like giants, on platform shoes, men as rough as the convicts but painted and dressed like women.

  And tattoo parlors.

  Manny stood outside the largest one. Its walls were illustrated with every conceivable design—flowers, naked women, hearts, ships, panthers—the intricate map of an exotic world. And decorated crosses. And heads of Jesus.

  Manny walked in.

  “You gotta be eighteen,” the tattooer, a thin man, said.

  “I am,” Manny told him.

  “What's the matter with you?” the man asked him.

  “I want a tattoo of a naked Christ on my chest,” Manny said. He heard his voice; it sounded strange. He opened his shirt, revealing the scratch, which had healed into a vague scar on his dark brown skin. “I already got the cross, now I want a Christ, with cock and balls.” What was the matter with his voice? It hurt him to speak.

  “Get out of here,” the man barked.

  “Fuckin'-ass hypocrite,” Manny shot back. “Look at all the naked bodies you do.”

  “I'll call the cops, punk.”

  “Shove the needle up your ass,” Manny said.

  He walked into the rancid street. Angry black and brown faces—he'd seen them before but not with so much rage on them. He remembered the boys in the detention home in El Paso, the one who had sliced his wrists with the broken light bulb. He saw roaming tramps. He thought of Paco and began to feel then what he would know later. Drunks sleeping in their own piss on filthy sidewalks. He heard the wounded laughter of desperate whores. Black-uniformed cops, cruising slowly—mean faces. He thought he saw Indio standing on a corner. Only when warming wind blowing against his face evaporated the moisture did Manny realize he was crying, had been crying from the moment he had left the house in East Los Angeles.

  When Manny returned home, everyone was asleep and the house was beginning to sweat in darkness. Manny went to the kitchen, to the drawer where his mother kept semiused candles. She lit one occasionally before a crucifix or a framed picture of the Virgin—but she never let any run down entirely, snuffing each out halfway, saving it in case of
a power failure—or an unpaid electric bill. Manny took one—and the pencil she used to write the notes she left when she went out, telling them she'd be late.

  He went to the new picture of the robed Christ. He was right, Yolanda had used it to patch a crack growing behind it like a heavy spider web. He lit the candle and placed it on a chair so he could see the picture clearly. He drew dark swirls of pubic hair on the lower torso of the figure.

  In the room where he slept, Paco and Ernestina were lying soundlessly in their cots. Manny went to a corner of the room covered with a floor-length remnant of cloth; it was draped over a wire nailed from a wall to one adjoining it. Behind the small triangle creating a makeshift closet, there was another wire. On it hung their clothes. Now he took most of his, not that many, and knotted them into a roll. He tied it with two belts so that he could loop it over his shoulder. He went to Paco's bed and sat next to the little boy, deliberately to rouse him.

  Even suddenly awakened, Paco did not register surprise. He just looked with odd eyes at his brother.

  “Good-bye,” Manny said.

  “Goo'bye,” Paco imitated the sound. He sat up. His head lolled to one side. He kept it in that position. He's retarded—Manny faced what he had suspected—Paco's retarded. He kissed his brother and eased him gently back into his cot. Paco closed his eyes.

  Outside, Manny looked at his hand under a streetlight. The scar looked like a mangled flower. The avoided memory thrust powerfully: His hand forced over the lit burner of the stove, the odor of scorched flesh—or was it burnt blood? Too much of the drowned memory had floated up. He pushed the palms of his hands against his eyes. Exploding colors scattered the fragmented memory.

  He welcomed the moisture of his own sweat as he walked all the way back to Main Street. Now past midnight, the ugly street was uglier—more broken bodies staggering around, some as young as himself. The tattoo shop was lit but closed, a barred iron gate spread before it. Through the bars, Manny looked into the jungle of inked contorted bodies among flowers and trees and animals and crosses. He noticed a ragged old woman sobbing beside him.