The Help (Part 2)

     I met her then 10-year-old daughter at the door of Marta’s tiny one room apartment at the top of a rickety iron staircase down a long tilting public hallway strewn with beer cans. Two little boys in chones (underwear) shot water guns at me as I walked by, yelling “pow, pow”. It was an outdoor balcony hallway and I honestly felt like it would collapse if I stepped too far to the downward tilting side. Their tiny one room apartment at the end of the hall was dark and stifling hot with no windows. It smelled like animal urine and was furnished with an old mattress, a beach chair, folding table and a tiny TV. Her daughter was holding a mangy cat and peered through the cracked open door. “Mi mama esta dormida.” (My mom is asleep).
     It was 3:00 pm on a Saturday afternoon and I was worried I hadn’t seen Marta all week. She had been coming by my house for a few weeks now, almost every day, asking for work and favors. She cleaned my house a couple of times, and watched the boys for a few minutes while I ran to the store. The last time I had seen her at my door she was burning up with a fever, really sick. I gave her some juice, Tylenol and a ride home since she was carrying a bag of groceries and her toddler son. That’s how I learned she lived just a few blocks away, in a crumbling, should be condemned apartment tenement aptly named “Villa Francesa” (French Villa), right next to our favorite Raspa stand. I didn’t go in with her that day, but asked her about her apartment as we unloaded her son from the car.“Hay tantas ratas, y cucarachas. A veces se caen del techo cuando estamos dormidos. Pero no me quejo porque no me han subido la renta. ” (There are so many rats and cockroaches, sometimes they fall from the ceiling while we are sleeping. But I don’t complain because they haven’t raised the rent). “It doesn’t have any windows because it used to be a storage room. I do wish it had a window. My daughter says she feels like we are ‘gallinas in a gallinero’ (hens in a hen house)."  

     Marta’s daughter, Emilia, was the thinnest, most demur 10 year old I had seen. I would have guessed she was more like 7. She was shy, and still is, but after some months I got to know her better and she would come ask for help on school work or to use our computer. She did pretty well in school, and was a serious student. Amazingly well considering her mother was illiterate and she had never had any books at home.  Now, years later and 20, she should be in college, but is working at a restaurant, part-time. Her dream was always to be a teacher, but luck would have it she was born in Mexico so, although she doesn’t remember anything about her birth country, having come to the U.S. at the age of one, she is not eligible to receive higher education since she is "illegal". Athough she graduated with decent grades from high school in Brownsville, she is one of many disenfranchised young people who are without a country— undocumented, unwanted. By no choice of her own, her mother returned to Mexico to have her, and then brought her without papers back to this side of the border where she was raised to become an American—without any of the rights or freedoms shared by the rest of us.

     “How did Emilia come to be born in Mexico?” I asked Marta one day several months later. After all, you were only 13 when you came across (the river)? Were you back in Mexico when you had her?"

     “I was 15, pregnant and had nowhere to go. I had been in the U.S. for three years. I knew I couldn’t go home, in such a shameful state, and anyhow, I had stopped communication with my parents since my dad kept sending the creepy coyote to collect my pay. I left the house I was working at in Harlingen after the first year, after los problemas. So my dad didn’t know where I was and I really didn’t care. A friend of mine helped me find another house to work at in Brownsville. I was there for a couple of years, when  I met Rafael, through a neighbor girl who worked for another Senora down the street. He was a friend of the family she worked for, and he had seen me sweeping the front porch. He told my friend (the maid) he wanted to know my name, and then he started sending me notes, which I couldn't read but the neighbor girl read to me. He was really handsome and drove a nice car. He was older, Mexicano, but seemed rich like the gringos, and I was flattered. He would come to take me to the movies and to a restaurant on Sunday afternoons, my only day off. I had no idea he was married since I never saw him with a woman and he never spoke of her. I didn’t find that out until I was already pregnant and she came pounding on the door of the house where I worked, calling me a ‘puta’ (whore) and other bad words I had never heard. I was so innocent. It all happened so fast. He was the first man who treated me kindly, tenderly. He told me I was pretty and that we would get married and I could have my own papers and I wouldn’t ever have to work as a maid again—that he would take care of me. Looking back I was so ignorant. I was just a girl from the rancho. I really believed him.”

     According to Marta, the lady she worked for was nice and  let her stay until she was so pregnant she couldn’t work much. "I decided to go to Matamoros (Mexico), where one of my sisters was now living, to have the baby. I stayed with her and her boyfriend. On a sticky hot July afternoon I walked two miles to the Hospital Pumarejo, the poor people’s hospital, to have Emilia. She was so small—too small—and I was so young and didn’t know what I was doing. I felt like a burden to my sister and her boyfriend who were barely surviving themselves and had to share their tin roof shack and outhouse with me and my new baby. So when Emilia was old enough to carry across the Rio, I wrapped her tightly on my back in a reboso, and stole away with a plastic bag filled with my belongings to a well known crossing point north of the old Brownsville-Matamoros bridge. That night was so scary since this time I didn’t have the strong arms of the coyote man to guide me across the current of the river. At one point I lost my footing and thought we would both go under. But God protected us and so I promised Him I would go to Mass every week.   On the bank of the river I wrung out my wet skirt and took my shoes out of the plastic bag and put them on my soaking, muddy feet. I walked along the dirt levee road, trying to avoid the migra by staying in the monte (brush). Several times I saw the glowing eyes of wild animals staring at me through the night, but Emilia started crying and they disappeared. Eventually she fell asleep on my back as I walked all the way under the highway and to the Senora’s house. I sat in her backyard until dawn, shivering and tired, holding Emilia close to keep her warm. I finally got up the courage to knock on the door. She looked shocked to see me, and kind of annoyed, but she let me in and let me fix some breakfast. I made avena (oatmeal) and spooned it into Emilias tiny mouth and we both fell asleep on the Senora’s couch. When I woke I heard her on the phone, talking about me and the baby. She was pleading with someone to take me, telling them I would work for room and board. Finally, after several calls, she said, “Ya está. Te encontre trabajo pero tienes que portarte bien! (It’s done. I found you work but you have to behave). This friend of mine is doing you a big favor, to take in you and your daughter. Try to keep  her quiet and do as much work as you can while the baby sleeps. This lady is old but it won’t be too bad because there are no kids to take care of.”

        A few hours later a big old Cadillac sedan pulled up in front of the house. When I first saw her I couldn’t help but stare at her icy grey eyes. They looked cold and I felt a chill when she looked back into my eyes.     “Don’t just stand there staring! Get your things and your baby, I don’t have all day! I can’t believe I’m taking in orphans now. God knows I have done enough for Him already. I hope you don’t think you’re on some kind of vacation!”  Marta said it never got better. For months she endured the old lady’s belittling and harsh words, usually culminating in her final condemnation of Marta’s state of single-motherhood. “I don’t know why you girls come here thinking you can just have a baby and get papers from a man. And then get all these benefits from the government. “I didn’t understand what she meant. I had never received anything from the government, of any country, other than some free medicine and a night at the hospital in Matamoros, Mexico when I had Emilia. I suppose my parents received their plot of land on the ejido from the government, and I went to school a couple of years. But I really couldn’t understand most of what she said to me. She was always rambling on and on and her accent was different. She said she spoke the real Spanish…what was it called…Castellano? She also talked badly about Mexicans, especially Mexicans who came and lived in the U.S. , but she was from Mexico, so I didn’t understand. I just tried to do what she said, keep my baby quiet and say “Si Senora”. I also learned not to look into her eyes. I felt like she was giving me the evil eye. She treated me better when I looked down at the floor. When the rare visitor would come to the house she would call me her ‘servienta’.” 

      Marta told me the best part of living with the Viejita was going to Mass. “She made me go, which was good because I had made that promise to God back at the river. I liked how it was peaceful in the old church, and I got to sit on my own in the closed in crying room. Even if Emilia was fussy, it felt like our time alone and away. I admit I didn’t really listen to the homily, I just sat quietly and watched my baby crawl across the floor or play with another toddler in the crying room. Sometimes I thought about my life back on the ejido, and all the chickens and geese that always wandered around our dusty rancho. It seemed a million miles away, and for all intent and purposes it was, because I knew I could never go back, and never make it  across the Rio Bravo again. I was a mama now and had two mouths to feed.”

Marta won’t talk much about the troubles she had at that first house where she worked as a 13 year old country girl, just arrived in the U.S. But it definitely had something to do with the man of the house, I suspect molesting her or even raping her by the way she refers to the times. Pain washes across her face when she speaks of them.

     “La senora at that first house was nice to me until her husband started flirting with me. I felt so dirty and bad and I tried so hard not to be alone with him, or even look at him. I lost my innocence at that house, and I knew I would never be a child again. All of my mom’s warnings about staying a Virgin were useless now. I felt my life spinning out of control. Once I moved to Brownsville and worked with a couple of  families, I was stable for a few years. That is until I met Rafael and shortly after became pregnant. Here I was, una servienta, ilegal, madre soltera con una hija bastarda,  ignorante (a servant, illegal, single mom with a bastard child, ignorant)”.

     I didn’t feel that way about Marta at all. I was amazed at how she had survived and thought she was doing a pretty good job of raising her kids. Especially given the worse problems she would soon reveal to me.