Carlos Fuentes - The Crystal Frontier

“Try her out. These people are eager to serve and accustomed to obeying.”

“You’ve got your own prejudices, see?” Miss Amy laughed a little as she arranged her hair, which was so white and so old that it was turning yellow, like papers exposed to light for a long time. Like a newspaper, said her nephew Archibald. All of her has become like an old newspaper, yellowed, wrinkled, and full of news no longer interesting to anyone.

Archibald went to the Mexican section of Chicago frequently because his firm defended a lot of cases involving trade, naturalization, people without green cards — a thousand matters having to do with immigration and labor from south of the border. He also went because at the age of forty-two he was still a bachelor, convinced that before embarking on marriage he had to drink the cup of life to the dregs, with no ties, no family, no children, no wife. Chicago was a city where many cultures mixed, so Miss Amy Dunbar’s only nephew chose his girlfriends according to ethnic zones. He’d already gone through the Ukrainian, Polish, Chinese, Hungarian, and Lithuanian sectors. Now the happy conjunction of business and amatory curiosity brought him to Pilsen, the Mexican neighborhood with the Czechoslovakian name of a beer-producing city in Bohemia. The Czechs had left and the Mexicans were taking over little by little, filling the neighborhood with markets, luncheonettes, music, colors, cultural centers, and, of course, beer as good as Pilsen’s.

Many people came to work as meatpackers, some legal, others not, but all respected for their dexterity in cutting and packing the meat. Miss Amy’s nephew, the lawyer, started going out with one of the girls in a huge family of workers, almost all of whom came from the Mexican state of Guerrero and all of whom were linked by blood, affection, and solidarity, and occasionally by name.

They were extremely helpful to one another. Like a great family, they organized parties and, like all other families, they fought. One night, there was trouble and the result was two deaths. The police didn’t waste time. There were four killers, one of them named Perez, so they rounded up four Perezes and charged them. As they barely spoke English, they couldn’t explain themselves or understand the charges, but one of them, visited in jail by Archibald, claimed that the charges were unfair, based on false testimony intended to protect the real murderers. The idea was to sentence the suspects as soon as possible and close the case; they didn’t know how to defend themselves. Archibald took them on, and that’s how he met the wife of the defendant he’d visited in jail.

Her name was Josefina and they’d just been married— about time, too, since they were both forty-one. Josefina spoke English because she was the daughter of an ironworker named Fortunato Ayala, who’d fathered her and then abandoned her in Chicago. But she’d been in Mexico when everything happened so she hadn’t been able to help her husband.

“He could learn English in jail,” suggested Archibald.

“He could,” said Josefina without really agreeing. “He wants to study English and become a lawyer. Can you make him a lawyer?”

“Sure, I can give him classes. And what about you, Josefina?”

“I have to get a job so I can pay you for the lawyer classes.”

“No need for that.”

“Well, I have the need. It’s my fault Luis Maria is in jail. I should have been with him when everything happened. At least I speak English.”

“I’ll see what I can do. In any case, we’re going to fight to save your husband. Meanwhile, he’s got the right to study, to keep himself busy, while he’s in jail. I’ll look after that. But tell me why Mexicans rat on other Mexicans.”

“The ones who come first don’t like the ones who come later. Sometimes we’re unfair among ourselves. It isn’t enough that others treat us badly.”

“I thought you were like one big family.”

“The worst things happen in families, sir.”

In the beginning, Miss Amy wouldn’t even look at Josefina. The first time she saw her confirmed all her suspicions. Josefina was an Indian. Miss Amy couldn’t understand why people who were in no way different from the Iroquois insisted on calling themselves “Latinos” or “Hispanics.” Josefina did have one virtue. She was silent. She entered and left the old lady’s bedroom like a ghost, as if she didn’t have feet. The rustle of the maid’s skirts and aprons could be confused with that of the curtains when the breeze blew off the lake. Autumn was coming, and soon Miss Amy would be closing the windows. She liked the summer, the heat, the memory of her hometown, so French …

“No, Aunt Amy,” said the nephew when he wanted to argue with her, “the architecture of New Orleans is completely Spanish, not French. The Spaniards were here for almost a century and gave the city its shape. The French part is a varnish for tourists.”

“Taisez-vous” she would say to him indignantly, suspecting that this time Archibald was involved with some Latina or Hispanic or whatever these Comanches who had come too far north were called.

Josefina knew the old lady’s routine — Archibald explained it in detail — and opened the bedroom curtains at 8:00 a.m., had breakfast ready on a small table, and came back at noon to make the bed. The old lady insisted on getting dressed by herself. Josefina went off to cook and Miss Amy came down to eat a Spartan solitary lunch of lettuce, radishes, and cottage cheese. In the afternoon she sat in front of the television set in the living room and gave free rein to her perverse energy, commenting on everything she saw with sarcasm, insults, and disdain for blacks, Jews, Italians, Mexicans. She delivered it all out loud, whether anyone heard or not, but she alternated these disagreeable comments that paralleled the picture on the television with sudden, unexpected orders to Josefina, as to Bathsheba and the others before her. My plaid blanket for my knees. The Friday tea should be Lapsang souchong, not Earl Grey. How many times do I have to … See here, who told you to move my glass marbles? Who else could have moved them but you, dummy? You’re useless, lazy, like all the black women I’ve ever known. Where is the photograph of my husband that was on the night table last night? Who put it in that drawer? I didn’t do it, and there’s no other “person” here but you, absentminded, useless. Do something to earn your pay. Have you ever worked hard a single day in your life? What am I saying? No black has ever done anything but live off the work of whites.

Out of the corner of her eye, she spied on the new Mexican maid. Would she say the same things to her that she did to the fragile and weepy Bathsheba, or would she have to invent a new repertoire of insults to wound Josefina? Would she hide the photo of her husband in a drawer again so she could accuse Josefina of moving it? She spied on her. She licked her chops. She prepared her offensive. Let’s see how long she lasts, this fat solid woman with a delicate face and fine features that seem more Arabian than Indian, an ash-colored woman with liquid, very black eyes and very yellow corneas.

For her part, Josefina decided three things. The first, to be thankful for having a job and bless every dollar that came in for the defense of her husband, Luis Maria. The second, to carry out to the letter the instructions of the lawyer, Don Archibaldo, as to his aunt’s care. And the third, to risk making her own life inside the big house facing the lake. This was the most dangerous decision, and the one Josefina recognized she could not avoid if she intended to endure. Flowers, for instance. The house needed flowers. To her cramped maid’s room, she brought the violets and pansies she always kept on her dresser, along with the lamp and the religious pictures that were her most important companions after Luis María.