Enrique's Journey Part 15

Maria Isabel moved in because it was less crowded than her mother's hut. Now twelve people crowd Gloria's two-bedroom house. Maria Isabel shares a bedroom with five others.

Gloria's store has gone bust. The only other one in the house with a job is Gloria's husband, who makes $125 a month. Her salary plus what Enrique sends isn't enough for Maria Isabel to support two households, Gloria's and her mother's.

She has to get away from Enrique's sister and aunts. Slowly, she has come to hate them. "I can't take it anymore," she tells Gloria.

She'll return to her mother's primitive hut, she decides. Her mother and younger sister will help provide Jasmin, now one and a half years old, with better care. She arranges for Enrique to send money for his daughter directly to herself instead of through his family. She does not give Enrique's family next door an address where she can be reached.

Maria Isabel's mother, Eva, lives in a hut perched on a mountainside in a neighborhood called Los Tubos, eight square blocks named after an aboveground water pipe that carries water from holding tanks on top of the mountain to Tegucigalpa below.

On top of the mountain, Tegucigalpa's highest, shrouded in wisps of clouds by day, bathed in an orange glow of lights by night, stands a towering statue of Jesus. The gray statue stretches out both arms. They reach down toward the residents of the city below.

The road up to Eva's is so steep that many cars can't get up it. Then there is a rutted dirt road, followed by a narrow mud and clay trail that zigzags upward. Maria Isabel must use the roots of a large rubber tree to step up to her mother's tiny wooden hut, which clings to the hillside. Nine people sleep inside. There has been one improvement since she left six years before: a relative built a small cinder-block house next door. It has a bathroom, which Maria Isabel's family can use.

Most children in Los Tubos don't go on to junior high because reaching the nearest school requires bus fare. Men work as bricklayers; women clean houses in wealthy neighborhoods.

Still, as one of the city's oldest neighborhoods, it is a small step above where Gloria's and Enrique's families live. Water, which flowed through the tap every two weeks in Gloria's house, is available here every other day. Many wooden huts have been upgraded to small brick or cinder-block homes, some two or even three stories high. Their windows have gla.s.s panes instead of wooden shutters. Almost everyone has a refrigerator.

Most in Los Tubos are longtime residents, but Maria Isabel's family are relative newcomers. They bought a lot in 1980 as homes were being built farther and farther up the hill. Above Maria Isabel's hut, there are mostly lush green slopes where it is too steep to build even the smallest place.

Maria Isabel's family, among the poorest in Los Tubos, eats twice a day. They have no refrigerator. They cook on two small burners. All that has kept disaster away has been Maria Isabel's oldest sister, who sends money from Texas, where she lives.

Still, Maria Isabel's life gets better.

Six days a week, at 11 A.M., Maria Isabel sets out for her new job at a children's clothing store at the Mall Multiplaza downtown.

From the back of the store, salesgirls ask Maria Isabel for a certain shoe and size. She fetches it. She shoves the box through a small opening in the wall. The light-filled mall, where Tegucigalpa's well-heeled citizens shop, has beige marble floors, potted indoor palms, air-conditioning, and gla.s.s elevators.

She gets home at 10 P.M. The job pays $120 a month.

Jasmin puts on weight. Both Maria Isabel's mother and her younger sister care for her while Maria Isabel works.

Jasmin plays with her six dolls, giving them baths in an outdoor concrete trough the family uses to hold water. She brushes the dolls' hair. Afterward, she runs inside. "I bathed the baby," she announces to her grandmother, a wiry, muscular woman with salt-and-pepper hair.

She chases her grandmother's black-and-white chicks, making them scurry across the kitchen floor. She plays dress up with a five-year-old girl next door, or agua de limon, where they lock hands and swing each other around in circles.

When Jasmin gets hungry, Eva scrambles her eggs with black beans. She changes her whenever she gets dirty. In the afternoon, Jasmin goes to her grandmother and demands money: "Quiero pisto!"

Eva hands her a little change. Jasmin crawls down a steep flight of stairs to a tiny bodega below. She peers through the black iron bars on the door and points. "Those, I want those!" Jasmin says. The store owner hands her a small bag of hot pork rinds. Jasmin makes her way back up the steep slope.

Each day, the girl reminds Maria Isabel more and more of her father. Like Enrique, she stands slightly knock-kneed, her pelvis thrust out, her bottom tucked under. She has his deep, raspy voice. She has the same temperament as Enrique and Lourdes: she is testy, a stubborn fighter who stands her ground.

When she turns two, Maria Isabel takes Jasmin to talk to her father on the telephone. Jasmin loves to accompany her mother downtown on Sundays to the Axdi-Cell Internet, where they can dial Enrique more cheaply. Maria Isabel knows his number by heart.

She sits before the gray computer, and Jasmin stands between her legs. "Mom, pa.s.s the phone," Jasmin demands, reaching for the computer headset. "I love you, Enrique," she says. Then: "When are you coming here?" Jasmin returns to her grandmother's and proudly announces, "I spoke with my daddy, Enrique."

Often, the things Jasmin tells her father are lines that Maria Isabel prods her to say. It doesn't matter, says her grandmother. "They are strangers," says Eva. "But they are blood."

Eva often shows Jasmin the eight photos Enrique has sent of himself.

Jasmin knows her father sends her things. When Enrique's aunt Rosa Amalia asks her where she got the beautiful gold-and-emerald earrings she wears, Jasmin touches them. "They are from my daddy, Enrique!" She adds, "He says he loves me a lot."

Eva tells Jasmin that someday she will go see her father in an airplane. Jasmin figures her father must have left on an airplane, too. Several times a day, when she hears one in the sky, she stops what she is doing and races outside. She looks up, her eyes bright. She thrusts both arms up and waves madly. "Adios, papi Enrique!" she yells.

UNITED STATES.

Enrique has been living with his mother for nearly two and a half years. One evening Lourdes and her boyfriend are watching a soap opera on the living room television. Enrique and a friend are playing cards down the hallway on the kitchen table. Enrique is wound up tight. He's working at a company that pushes everyone to paint excessively fast.

Enrique and his friend throw the cards down hard on the kitchen table. Each time they slap a card down, they yell.

Lourdes walks into the kitchen. She looks cross. "What are you doing?" she demands.

"If you don't want noise, you should live alone."

"You're an ignoramus," she answers.

Enrique likes to goad his mother by making noise. At dinner, he burps loudly and doesn't excuse himself. He bangs his spoon on the kitchen table. He slams doors. He plays music at high volume. He yells. He thinks it is incredibly funny to see her get mad.

Lourdes goes back to the television. Enrique and his friend slap the cards down harder and harder. Lourdes stomps into the kitchen. Her boyfriend knows trouble is near. He soon follows.

"Be quiet!" she orders.

Enrique answers badly.

"You must respect me. Don't forget, I am your mother. I gave birth to you."

"I don't love you as if you were my mother. I love my grandmother."

"I gave birth to you."

"That's not my fault!"

Lourdes grabs Enrique's shirt around the shoulders. Enrique pushes his chair back and bolts up. Lourdes slaps him on the mouth, hard. Enrique grabs her two hands, near her neck, to prevent further blows. Lourdes a.s.sumes that he is trying to grab her throat. "Let go of me!" she screams.

Lourdes's boyfriend pulls them apart. Then he ushers Enrique outside. Enrique is crying.

By the next day, all has returned to normal. Once, Enrique would have apologized. Today, there are no words of regret.

With others, Enrique is openly affectionate, especially with his half sister, Diana. He gives her money, drives her to the store, plays piggyback with her, caresses her cheek. He teaches her to dance. They play rhymes together. Unlike Diana, who can be selfish, Enrique is generous. "I have a secret to tell you: I love you," he tells her.

Still, with his third New Year in the United States, Enrique resolves to change. He can no longer wallow in what happened in the past. He must live in the present-and for the future. He's not hurting Lourdes as much as he is hurting himself.

Drinking so much alcohol makes his stomach ache constantly. He's tired of going to work after spending all night out drinking. He wants to look better when Maria Isabel comes to the United States.

Most important, he has to be more responsible for Jasmin. He can't have her grow up worrying about money as he did. He wants her to study. He can no longer blow hundreds of dollars in a single night of partying or thousands on troubles with the police. That has been a huge waste of money.

If he doesn't change, he will repeat his mother's mistake; time will slip by, and Jasmin will grow up without him. He must save $50,000 as quickly as possible to buy a house and start a business in Honduras.

Enrique starts working seven days a week. Bit by bit, he cuts back on beer and marijuana. He used to go out three or more times a week; now, it's just once or twice a month to play pool. He drinks a few beers, then switches to Pepsi. When friends call on his cell phone, beckoning him to party, he tells them he's not interested anymore.

He stops playing his music loud and slamming doors. When he burps, he excuses himself. He eats dinner with Lourdes. On Sat.u.r.day nights, they watch the Spanish-language variety show Sabado Gigante together, as they did when he first arrived.

He tells friends he'll quit beer and drugs altogether when Maria Isabel is at his side. He hopes to bring her next year, get married.

He cuts his hair really short and loses weight. He wishes he could fix all the lingering effects of his beating on the train: the scars on his forehead and his knees, the b.u.mp under the skin by his left eye, the pain in his teeth anytime he eats anything hot or cold. Maybe he can at least get caps put on his broken teeth.

HONDURAS.

Lourdes's sister Mirian is in trouble. She is out of work.

Her sister Ana Lucia offers her $50 a month to take care of her youngest child. The money falls short. Only another sister, Rosa Amalia, holds hunger at bay: each Sat.u.r.day, she brings Enrique's grandmother milk, cheese, b.u.t.ter, rice, sugar, beans, and vegetables.

Mirian can no longer buy construction paper for her children's projects at school. Many mornings, she doesn't have money for the school's midday meal. Those days, she keeps the children home. Sometimes they are absent from school three days in a row. Each of her three children owns one pair of shoes, purchased on a layaway plan.

She owes the grocery store up the block so much money, it cuts off her line of credit. She worries that her children are eating too much of the food her sister brings over for Enrique's grandmother. When Mirian walks her children down the block, they beg her to buy them a soda or an ice cream cone. She cannot.

"I can't stand this situation anymore," Mirian tells Belky. She wants to go to the United States. She'll go just long enough to save money to fix up her mother's house and add on a room for her own beauty parlor. She'll go for a few years and return before her children miss her much. They won't feel abandoned.

Lourdes is alarmed when she hears that Mirian wants to set out for the north on her own. No way, Lourdes tells her. Lourdes's boyfriend now pays the rent, and Lourdes has recently landed a better-paying factory job. Somehow, Lourdes and her boyfriend will come up with the money for a smuggler.

One morning, three years after Enrique left Honduras, Mirian sits her three children down to say good-bye.

"I'm going to the States. You will stay with your grandma." She tells them she is going to work and send them money, clothes, and toys. She cries. So does her oldest, nine-year-old Mich.e.l.le. Junior, seven, asks when she is coming back. She cannot say.

"But are you coming back?" he presses.

"Yes."

Mirian steps off the same porch Lourdes left from fourteen years before.

Her youngest child is two and a half years old. She still breast-feeds. The girl, used to sleeping with her mother, cries for Mirian that night. Belky takes her into her bed.

For the first time, Belky understands her own mother's choice to leave her as a young child. She has watched Mirian's plight. She has seen her grapple with the gut-wrenching decision to leave. She agrees with Mirian's decision.

Meanwhile, Maria Isabel's life has just gotten much better. A relative who lives in the cinder-block house next door moves out. Maria Isabel and her family move in temporarily. They raze their old wood hut. Maria Isabel's brother begins to construct a cinder-block home of their own.

The relative's home isn't a vast improvement. The tin roof is held down with large rocks. A torn sheet offers privacy in the bathroom, which has no door. Occasionally, a mouse climbs up the gray walls.

Still, it has two small bedrooms. Now Maria Isabel shares a full-size bed with only her mother, sister, and Jasmin. In the hallway, which doubles as a living room and kitchen, Eva celebrates how far they've come. She proudly hangs four elementary school diplomas her children have earned, including Maria Isabel's.

Maria Isabel's relationship with Enrique is coming unglued. Enrique used to send her money monthly. But in the year and a half since Maria Isabel has returned to live with her mother, Enrique has wired money only four times, usually between $150 and $180.

Enrique is struggling financially. Fed up with the cramped conditions in his mother's apartment and their constant fights, yearning for some sc.r.a.p of privacy, he has moved out and rented a bedroom in a trailer. Rent on his share of the trailer and utilities is $280. The payments on his used pickup truck and insurance run $580 a month, plus $200 in gas. His cell phone is $50 a month, and he gives his mother $200 a month for lunch and dinner, which he has at her house each night. Fixed costs eat up more than half of the $2,400 to $2,600 a month he makes. He's had to pay two police tickets. Sometimes, when work is slow, Lourdes has to loan him money for his truck payment.

Maria Isabel knows none of this. She wonders if Enrique sends his daughter less money because he is spending it on another girlfriend. Enrique swears that there is no one else.

Gloria warns Maria Isabel: I know you adore Enrique, but don't grow old waiting for him. If he doesn't send for you or return to Honduras soon, find someone else before you lose your looks.

Maria Isabel has heard that Enrique drinks too much beer. "It's hard to stay away from those drugs," she says. Before, when Enrique told her he was clean, she could ferret out the truth for herself. Now that he is far away, all she has is his word.

Right after Enrique left, she felt desperate to be with him again. Over time, she has adapted to his absence. She has not dated anyone else, she says. When a neighbor in the brick house up the hill calls down that Enrique is on the line, Maria Isabel sprints over. Still, when she gets on the telephone, she cries less. She has matured, changed. Now her life revolves around her daughter.

"I love him," she says, "but not like before."

Equally troubling: Enrique calls less frequently. Since she moved into her mother's hut, Enrique has rung at the neighbor's house only five times.

She feels snubbed. It feels as though the phone calls have become a one-way street. She stops calling Enrique as well. Both are stuck in their pride. He hasn't hired a smuggler because she hasn't asked for one; she hasn't said yes to coming because he hasn't hired a smuggler. They are drifting apart.

She has tired of spending Sunday morning, her sole day off, downtown at the storefront Internet store dialing Enrique. The manager types the number into one of the gray computers; $3 buys fifteen minutes.

"h.e.l.lo, my beautiful girl," he coos at Maria Isabel.

"h.e.l.lo, how are you?"

He asks how Jasmin is. "I love you. Do you have another boyfriend there?" he asks. "No," Maria Isabel answers. Enrique wishes she could be more affectionate on the telephone. Maria Isabel knows he wants her to say she loves him, but she can't; she has always been painfully shy. She feels inhibited in the Internet store.

When she first moved back into Eva's, Maria Isabel went to call Enrique every other week. Now they go two months without speaking. She brushes it off as a scheduling problem. Or she rationalizes, "I call him when he calls me."

Enrique no longer talks of returning to Honduras. He tells her he likes the comforts of the United States. He hints that he wants her to come north soon. Yet the more attached Maria Isabel becomes to Jasmin, the more she resists leaving her.

UNITED STATES.

After a few weeks, Mirian reaches the United States and settles in with Lourdes. She buys fake identification papers and quickly lands a restaurant job making biscuits. She nets $245 a week.

She tells Lourdes that she will be there three years, no more. She doesn't buy any furniture. She won't let herself adjust to the comforts of life in the United States such as hot water. She takes cold showers. She constantly reminds herself of the things she dislikes about the United States: children live confined indoors. Diana spends her afternoons and evenings chatting with friends on the Internet or watching television. In Honduras, Mirian's children play outside and come indoors only when they get hungry.

U.S. immigration agents raid Wal-Marts around the country for illegal immigrants. Mirian frets about being deported. She doesn't like the way people from North Carolina look at her in public sometimes. As if she were inferior, different. On her days off, she stays in.

In Honduras, each Sunday after church, Enrique's family takes Mirian's children to the airport, where they call their mother from a computer telephone.

"Study a lot. Don't fight. Be good to your grandma," Mirian tells them. Junior tells her he often feels like crying. He tells her he cannot sleep well at night. Quick-minded and chatty, he also tells Mirian about his excellent report card. Then he asks her to send him a bicycle.

Mirian says she's sending Nike shoes and Spider-Man, Hulk, Batman, and Barbie dolls. "I've bought beautiful things to send you."

Mirian's youngest is frightened when she hears her mother's voice on the telephone. For the first month, she pushes the telephone away. She hears her cousins call Mirian "Auntie" on the telephone. When she finally talks to her mother, she starts calling her mother "Auntie," too.

"I'm not your aunt. I'm your mother," Mirian corrects her.

"No, you're my auntie," the girl insists.

Enrique shares the trailer with two Mexican couples. They have four young children. They are a constant reminder of Jasmin.

Inside his bedroom, Enrique tapes two pictures of his daughter to his armoire mirror, one of her in a blue-and-white dress, another in a red-and-white dress. Two more framed pictures of her are on the shelf by his bed.

He didn't like school. He worries: Will she be the same?

Enrique loves sweets; whenever he buys some, he thinks of buying candy for Jasmin. Nearly every day, he sees things she might like. He tells himself he would buy them for her if she were there. He talks about her constantly to his friends.

His happiest moments are when photographs arrive. Or when Maria Isabel puts Jasmin on the line. "Te quiero, papi," Jasmin says. "I love you, Daddy." He knows Maria Isabel prompts Jasmin to say nice things to him. He doesn't care. In the end, she'll understand what's what.