Enrique's Journey (26 page)

Sometimes María Isabel doesn't respond. Other times, she bristles: “No, I take care of my girl.” They have no right to criticize. One of Enrique's aunts has a son who is just as skinny as Jasmín. Should she have to explain that her breasts stopped giving milk? If the women next door are so concerned about Enrique's interests, why did some of them treat him like a dog, she wonders, when he lived in their home?

The women next door have another reproach: María Isabel is misspending the hard-earned money, $100 to $150 a month, that Enrique diligently sends his daughter.

María Isabel spends most of the money on Jasmín. She also gives $15 a month to Gloria. She stocks Gloria's refrigerator with fruit, milk, and chicken. She gives Gloria's daughters pocket change. She sends $10 across town to her mother to help her buy heart and asthma medicine.

To the women next door, María Isabel is showering money on her family that rightfully belongs to Enrique's child. They know exactly how much she gets. María Isabel's money comes in a joint wire that Enrique and Lourdes send to one of Lourdes's relatives.

Enrique's aunt Mirian vigilantly watches when María Isabel goes shopping, whom she goes with, how many bags they have when they return.

Mirian, a hairstylist, hears that María Isabel has bought hair dye for herself and Gloria's daughters. Mirian is livid; she is so broke she can barely buy used clothes for her three children. When she visits Gloria's house, she sees a can of Jasmín's powdered milk spilled on the floor. Gloria's grandchildren are racing around with fistfuls of white powder in their hands.

Another day, Mirian scolds María Isabel for paying $150 for a chest of drawers to store Jasmín's clothes. “You were a fool to buy such an expensive piece of furniture.” My cousin could have gotten you a better one for a third of the price, Mirian tells her.

María Isabel seethes. She says nothing.

She is grateful for what Enrique sends. Still, most of the money pays for diapers, clothes, medicine, and food for his daughter. Powdered milk alone costs $20 a month.

María Isabel has spent most of her life deprived of decent clothing. Can't she buy a dress or splurge $2.50 to get her hair dyed? She cannot live with her aunt Gloria, who is in financial distress, without helping.

Mirian, a single mother, is desperate for money. Since the birth of her third child, she has cleaned a sister's house for $35 a month and food. As each of her children begins elementary school, Mirian's costs rise. They need books, supplies, and $1.50 per day for lunch at school.

“Enrique doesn't send me a dime!” she moans. His only wire has been $20 on her birthday. She remembers changing Enrique's diapers as a baby, and how later, when he was a teen, she looked out for him. When Enrique was a glue sniffer living in his grandmother's home, she cooked his meals. Now, when she is in dire need, all of Enrique's money flows to the girl next door.

She isn't spying on María Isabel, Mirian tells her family. She's just protecting Enrique's infant by demanding that María Isabel be a better mom. Does Enrique know, Mirian angrily asks her sisters, that María Isabel sends money across town to her mother?

When Jasmín turns eight months old, Mirian mails Enrique a letter: Your daughter isn't being well cared for, she writes. María Isabel is misspending your money. I've seen some of the clothes you sent Jasmín strewn in the dirt behind Gloria's house. Enrique recalls that when he visited Gloria's house, the children there were dirty. He asks Mirian to keep an eye on Jasmín.

On the phone, he also chides María Isabel: “If you don't take good care of that girl, I will come to Honduras and take her away from you!”

For a moment, María Isabel is silent. Then her voice turns stiff. “No one takes my daughter away from me.”

Gloria is fed up with the digs at María Isabel, how her actions are scrutinized, how Enrique's family tries to control her. “Stop bothering María Isabel. You are driving me nuts. Stop criticizing her,” she tells the women next door.

Gloria's grandson Allan plays rough with Jasmín, who is smaller. He picks her up by the waist and throws her to the ground. He bites her and pulls her hair. When Jasmín is nine months old, Allan plops her inside Gloria's green wheelbarrow. From the porch of her grandmother's home, Belky screams, “Allan, leave the girl alone!”

Allan is already pushing the wheelbarrow. It tips.

Jasmín tumbles to the ground. She wails. María Isabel is out on an errand. “Gloria! Allan has thrown the girl off the wheelbarrow!” Belky yells.

Gloria snaps. She shouts across the dirt street that divides their homes: “You think this child is an assassin? All you do is talk shit. You stick your noses in everything!” She curses. She tells them to mind their own business.

Then she offers up Jasmín. “Here she is. Take her! You can raise her. Let Enrique send money to you,” she says. “If the dollars are causing you to make all these allegations, keep the damn dollars!”

For months, the families don't cross the street or speak. But Gloria's grandchildren do. They hear the women next door say they think María Isabel is having an affair. When she's out doing errands for Gloria, they say, she's really seeing a boyfriend. María Isabel is enraged; they are sullying one of the few things she has—her honor. Whenever María Isabel sets off on an errand, one of Enrique's aunts steps outside and inquires across the street, “
¿Adónde vas?
Where are you off to?”

Jasmín will soon turn one year old.

Lourdes and Enrique send $400 and instructions: they want a joint birthday party for Jasmín and Mirian's one-yearold daughter. That way, Lourdes figures, there will be a video to send north of everyone together.

María Isabel feels she is being forced to have her daughter's celebration with women who have maligned her as a bad mother. She has barely stepped into their home since Jasmín's birth.

On Jasmín's birthday, María Isabel dresses her in the red dress and white shoes Enrique and Lourdes sent for the party. She sends Jasmín next door. María Isabel stays behind, sobbing.

Gloria finally tells María Isabel that she should go next door long enough to be in the video for Enrique. Jasmín and the other children have already taken turns whacking her piñata. María Isabel arrives as Jasmín is blowing out candles on her Winnie-the-Pooh cake. She balances Jasmín on her hip, nervously adjusting her daughter's party hat. “Happy birthday to you!” the children sing in English. María Isabel does not sing. She wipes away tears. A half hour after arriving, she retreats to Gloria's.

Enrique has a short lull in work; he stops sending money. María Isabel finds a job sanding chairs at a small furniture factory for $35 a week.

UNITED STATES

A year after Enrique's arrival, Lourdes's boyfriend smuggles his fourteen-year-old son into the United States. The boy was eight years old when his father left Honduras. That's when the boy started drinking and getting into fights. His father hopes that bringing him to the United States will straighten out the teenager. Instead, he finds new troubles. Teachers constantly call his father in to discuss his behavior. After six months, he drops out of school.

Enrique blames the boy's father for his aggressiveness and penchant to fight. As a boy, Enrique says, he never had a father to protect him. “If his father had been with him, he wouldn't be that way,” Enrique says. “He wouldn't be in trouble.” The teen and Enrique share a room and drink together. Lourdes fears that the boy is reinforcing Enrique's sense of abandonment.

Enrique drinks more and more. His eyes are red from smoking marijuana. After work he eats, showers, and goes out to play pool and drink late into the night.

Enrique calls María Isabel less often—every two weeks, then every month. He tells her he wants to bring her to the United States in a year.

But he hasn't saved any money for a smuggler.

Enrique has never returned to his low: sniffing glue. Now, a few days before Christmas, twenty-two months after he left Honduras, beer and marijuana are no longer enough. He ends the workday by pouring a little paint thinner into an empty Pepsi can. He brings it home. He does the same the next night. The thinner doesn't give him as good a high as Honduran glue, but it's handy.

Over the holidays, his family and others who share the trailer move into a newer, three-bedroom duplex. It has a big kitchen and a living room with three sofas draped in lilac floral slipcovers. There is enough space to hang a painting of the Virgin of Guadalupe, a wooden carving of the map of Honduras, and a small American flag. Still, the home is crowded. There is little room for Enrique to hide his growing habit.

Twice in two weeks Lourdes has seen her son hold a smelly handkerchief over his nose. She never steps inside Enrique's bedroom. One morning, concerned that he hasn't gotten up for work, she walks in. She smells something funny, like paint.

“What are you using?” she demands.

“Nothing.
Nothing!
”

She asks about the smell. Enrique yells at her. Lourdes senses that he is hiding something.

For a few days, Enrique stays cooped up in his bedroom, listening to reggaeton music. He has been sniffing thinner for two weeks. One night, he decides to go out. He walks through the living room, toward the front door.

He is hiding something under his arm. “What do you have there? Show me,” Lourdes says from the living room sofa.

“None of your business.”

Enrique tries to brush past her. Lourdes jumps up and grabs Enrique by the shirt. She smells paint thinner. She's asked friends some questions. Now she knows what the smell means.

Enrique shakes himself loose.

Lourdes's words tumble out. She doesn't care that her boyfriend and three of his relatives are in the living room, listening.

“You're broken, ruined. A drug addict! Why did you even come here? To finish screwing yourself up?”

Enrique curses.

“You're a disgrace. Get your act together! Instead of seeing you this way, I wish God would take you from me!” Lourdes says. If you keep sniffing thinner, Lourdes tells him, you have to move out. She must think of her daughter.

Enrique does not respond. He peels out of the gravel driveway in his car.

Lourdes is despondent. She worries that he will kill himself driving recklessly. For the first time in her life, Lourdes feels as though she wants to die. Maybe if she were gone, she tells herself, Enrique would know what it is truly like not to have a mother.

That night, Enrique realizes that his body cannot withstand the thinner. Each time he inhales it, the left side of his head, where he took the worst of the beating on top of the train, aches badly. His left eyelid, which still droops slightly from the assault, pulses and twitches. He has excruciating pain when he turns his head.

He stops sniffing.

He's not doing it because his mother wants him to. He is doing it for himself. He focuses on his old habit, drinking.

One morning at 2
A.M
., Enrique is caught doing 55 miles per hour in a 35-mile-per-hour zone. He gets tickets for speeding and having an open container of beer in his car. The sticker on his license plate is expired. Police give him a breath test. They impound the car and take him to jail, where he spends the night. Lourdes sends her boyfriend to bail him out. Enrique's license is revoked for a week.

Many of the men in his paint crew drive drunk. Nearly four times as many Hispanic drivers as non-Hispanic drivers in North Carolina have been charged with driving while impaired. Enrique's workmates tell him not to worry. The government, they say, just wants you to pay a lot of money and tell a judge you are very sorry. The real problems, they tell him, begin with your third arrest.

Enrique pays an attorney and the government $1,000. He tells a judge he is very sorry.

HONDURAS

Life in Gloria's house has turned tense.

María Isabel moved in because it was less crowded than her mother's hut. Now twelve people crowd Gloria's two-bedroom house. María 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 María 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 Jasmín, 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.

María 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. María 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 María 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.