Enrique's Journey Read online

  In nine years, Lourdes has saved $700 toward bringing her children to the United States. Instead, she uses it to help pay for her brothers’ funerals.

  Lourdes goes into a tailspin. Marco had visited her once, shortly after she arrived in Long Beach. She had not seen Victor since leaving Honduras. If the dead can appear to the living, Lourdes beseeches God through tears, allow Victor to show himself so she can say good-bye. “Mira, hermanito, I know you are dead. But I want to see you one more time. Come to me. I promise I won’t be afraid of you,” Lourdes says.

  Lourdes angrily swears off Honduras. How could she ever live in such a lawless place? People there are killed like dogs. There are no repercussions. The only way she’ll go back now, she tells herself, is by force, if she is deported. Soon after her brothers’ deaths, the restaurant where Lourdes works is raided by immigration agents. Every worker is caught up in the sweep. Lourdes is the only one spared. It is her day off.

  Lourdes decides to wait no longer. With financial help from her boyfriend, she baptizes seven-year-old Diana. The girl’s godparents are a trustworthy Mexican house painter and his wife. Lourdes dresses Diana in a white floor-length dress and tiara. A priest sprinkles her daughter with holy water. Lourdes feels that one worry, at least, has been lifted.

  Still, her resolve to stay in the United States brings a new nightmare. One morning at four, she hears her mother’s voice. It is loud and clear. Her mother utters her name three times: Lourdes. Lourdes. Lourdes. “Huh?” Lourdes, half awake, bolts up in bed, screaming. This must be an omen that her mother has just died. She is inconsolable. Will she ever see her mother again?

  Back in Honduras, within days of the two brothers’ deaths, Uncle Marco’s girlfriend sells Enrique’s television, stereo, and Nintendo game—all gifts from Marco. Without telling him why, she says, “I don’t want you here anymore.” She puts his bed out on the street.

  ADDICTION

  Enrique, now fifteen, gathers his clothing and goes to his maternal grandmother. “Can I stay here?” he asks.

  This had been his first home, the small stucco house where he and Lourdes lived until Lourdes stepped off the front porch and left. His second home was the wooden shack where he and his father lived with his father’s mother, until his father found a new wife and left. His third home was the comfortable house where he lived with his uncle Marco.

  Now he is back where he began. Seven people live here already: his grandmother, Águeda Amalia Valladares; two divorced aunts; and four young cousins. They are poor. Gone are Marco’s contributions, which helped keep the household financially afloat. Águeda has a new expense: she must raise the young child left by her dead son Victor. The boy’s mother left him as a baby to go to the United States and hasn’t shown any interest since. “We need money just for food,” says his grandmother, who suffers from cataracts. Nonetheless, she takes Enrique in.

  She and the others are consumed by the slayings of the two uncles; they pay little attention to Enrique. He grows quiet, introverted. He does not return to school. At first, he shares the front bedroom with an aunt, Mirian, twenty-six. One day she awakens at 2 A.M. Enrique is sobbing quietly in his bed, cradling a picture of Uncle Marco in his arms. Enrique cries off and on for six months. His uncle loved him; without his uncle, he is lost.

  Grandmother Águeda quickly sours on Enrique. She grows angry when he comes home late, knocking on her door, rousing the household. About a month later, Aunt Mirian wakes up again in the middle of the night. This time she smells acetone and hears the rustle of plastic. Through the dimness, she sees Enrique in his bed, puffing on a bag. He is sniffing glue.

  Enrique is banished to a tiny stone building seven feet behind the house but a world away. It was once a cook shack, where his grandmother prepared food on an open fire. Its walls and ceiling are charred black. It has no electricity. The wooden door pries only partway open. It is dank inside. The single window has no glass, just bars. A few feet beyond is his privy—a hole with a wooden shanty over it.

  The stone hut becomes his home. Now Enrique can do whatever he wants. If he is out all night, no one cares. But to him, it feels like another rejection.

  At his uncle’s funeral, he notices a shy girl with cascading curls of brown hair. She lives next door with her aunt. She has an inviting smile, a warm manner. At first, María Isabel, seventeen, can’t stand Enrique. She notices how the teenager, who comes from his uncle Marco’s wealthier neighborhood, is neatly dressed and immaculately clean, and wears his hair long. He seems arrogant. “Me cae mal. I don’t like him,” she tells a friend. Enrique is sure she has assumed that his nice clothes and his seriousness mean he’s stuck-up. He persists. He whistles softly as she walks by, hoping to start a conversation. Month after month, Enrique asks the same question: “Would you be my girlfriend?”

  “I’ll think about it.”

  The more she rejects him, the more he wants her. He loves her girlish giggle, how she cries easily. He hates it when she flirts with others.

  He buys her roses. He gives her a shiny black plaque with a drawing of a boy and girl looking tenderly at each other. It reads, “The person I love is the center of my life and of my heart. The person I love IS YOU.” He gives her lotions, a stuffed teddy bear, chocolates. He walks her home after school from night classes two blocks away. He takes her to visit his paternal grandmother across town. Slowly, María Isabel warms to him.

  The third time Enrique asks if she will be his girlfriend, she says yes.

  For Enrique, María Isabel isn’t just a way to stem the loneliness he’s felt since his mother left him. They understand each other, they connect. María Isabel has been separated from her parents. She, too, has had to shuffle from home to home.

  When she was seven, María Isabel followed her mother, Eva, across Honduras to a borrowed hut on a Tegucigalpa mountainside. Like Enrique’s mother, Eva was leaving an unfaithful husband.

  The hut was twelve by fifteen feet. It had one small wooden window and dirt floors. There was no bathroom. They relieved themselves and showered outdoors or at the neighbor’s. There was no electricity. They cooked outside using firewood. They hauled buckets of water up from a relative’s home two blocks down the hill. They ate beans and tortillas. Eva, asthmatic, struggled to keep the family fed.

  Nine people slept in the hut. They crowded onto two beds and a slim mattress jammed each night into the aisle between the beds. To fit, everyone slept head to foot. María Isabel shared one of the beds with three other women.

  When she was ten, María Isabel ran to catch a delivery truck. “Firewood!” she yelled out to a neighbor, Ángela Emérita Nuñez, offering to get some for her.

  After that, each morning María Isabel asked if Ángela had a chore for her. Ángela liked the sweet, loving girl with coils of hair who always smiled. She admired the fact that she was a hard worker and a fighter, a girl who thrived when her own twin died a month after birth. “Mira,” María Isabel says, “yo por pereza no me muero del hambre. I will never die out of laziness.” María Isabel fed and bathed Ángela’s daughter, helped make tortillas and mop the red-and-gray tile floors. María Isabel often ate at Ángela’s. Eventually, María Isabel spent many nights a week at Ángela’s roomier house, where she had to share a bed with only one other person, Ángela’s daughter.

  María Isabel graduated from the sixth grade. Her mother proudly hung María Isabel’s graduation certificate on the wall of the hut. A good student, she hadn’t even asked her mother about going on to junior high. “How would she speak of that? We had no chance to send a child to school that long,” says Eva, who never went to school a day and began selling bread from a basket perched on her head when she was twelve.

  At sixteen, a fight forced María Isabel to move again. The spat was with an older cousin, who thought María Isabel was showing interest in her boyfriend. Eva scolded her daughter. María Isabel decided to move across town with her aunt Gloria, who lived next door to Enrique’s maternal grandmother. María Isa
bel would help Gloria with a small food store she ran out of the front room of her house. To Eva, her daughter’s departure was a relief. The family was eating, but not well. Eva was thankful that Gloria had lightened her load.

  Gloria’s house is modest. The windows have no panes, just wooden shutters. But to María Isabel, Gloria’s two-bedroom home is wonderful. She and Gloria’s daughter have a bedroom to themselves. Besides, Gloria is more easygoing about letting María Isabel go out at night to an occasional dance or party, or to the annual county fair. Eva wouldn’t hear of such a thing, fearful the neighbors would gossip about her daughter’s morals.

  A cousin promises to take María Isabel to a talk about birth control. María Isabel wants to prevent a pregnancy. Enrique desperately wants to get María Isabel pregnant. If they have a child together, surely María Isabel won’t abandon him. So many people have abandoned him.

  Near where Enrique lives is a neighborhood called El Infiernito, Little Hell. Some homes there are teepees, stitched together from rags. It is controlled by a street gang, the Mara Salvatrucha. Some members were U.S. residents, living in Los Angeles until 1996, when a federal law began requiring judges to deport them if they committed serious crimes. Now they are active throughout much of Central America and Mexico. Here in El Infiernito, they carry chimbas, guns fashioned from plumbing pipes, and they drink charamila, diluted rubbing alcohol. They ride the buses, robbing passengers. Sometimes they assault people as they are leaving church after Mass.

  Enrique and a friend, José del Carmen Bustamante, sixteen, venture into El Infiernito to buy marijuana. It is dangerous. On one occasion, José, a timid, quiet teenager, is threatened by a man who wraps a chain around his neck. The boys never linger. They take their joints partway up a hill to a billiard hall, where they sit outside smoking and listening to the music that drifts through the open doors.

  With them are two other friends. Both have tried to ride freight trains to el Norte. One is known as El Gato, the Cat. He talks about migra agents shooting over his head and how easy it is to be robbed by bandits. In Enrique’s marijuana haze, train riding sounds like an adventure. He and José resolve to try it soon.

  Some nights, at ten or so, they climb a steep, winding path to the top of another hill. Hidden beside a wall scrawled with graffiti, they inhale glue late into the night. One day María Isabel turns a street corner and bumps into him. She is overwhelmed. He smells like an open can of paint.

  “What’s that?” she asks, reeling away from the fumes. “Are you on drugs?”

  “No!” Enrique says.

  Many sniffers openly carry their glue in baby food jars. They pop the lids and press their mouths to the small openings. Enrique tries to hide his habit. He dabs a bit of glue into a plastic bag and stuffs it into a pocket. Alone, he opens the end over his mouth and inhales, pressing the bottom of the bag toward his face, pushing the fumes into his lungs.

  Belky, Enrique’s sister, notices cloudy yellow fingerprints on María Isabel’s jeans: glue, a remnant of Enrique’s embrace.

  María Isabel sees him change. His mouth is sweaty and sticky. He is jumpy and nervous. His eyes grow red. Sometimes they are glassy, half closed. Other times he looks drunk. If she asks a question, the response is delayed. His temper is quick. On a high, he grows quiet, sleepy, and distant. When he comes down, he becomes hysterical and insulting.

  Drogo, one of his aunts calls him. Drug addict.

  Enrique stares silently. “No one understands me,” he tells Belky when she tries to keep him from going out.

  His grandmother points to a neighbor with pale, scaly skin who has sniffed glue for a decade. The man can no longer stand up. He drags himself backward on the ground, using his forearms. “Look! That’s how you’re going to end up,” his grandmother tells Enrique.

  Enrique fears that he will become like the hundreds of glue-sniffing children he sees downtown.

  Some sleep by trash bins. A gray-bearded priest brings them sweet warm milk. He ladles it out of a purple bucket into big bowls. On some days, two dozen of them line up behind his van. Many look half asleep. Some can barely stand. The acrid smell of the glue fills the air. They shuffle forward on blackened feet, sliding the lids off their glue jars to inhale. Then they pull the steaming bowls up to their filthy lips. If the priest tries to take away their glue jars, they cry. Older children beat or sexually abuse the younger ones. In six years, the priest has seen twenty-six die from drugs.

  Sometimes Enrique hallucinates that someone is chasing him. He imagines gnomes and fixates on ants. He sees a cartoonlike Winnie-the-Pooh soaring in front of him. He walks, but he cannot feel the ground. Sometimes his legs will not respond. Houses move. Occasionally, the floor falls.

  Once he almost throws himself off the hill where he and his friend sniff glue. For two particularly bad weeks, he doesn’t recognize family members. His hands tremble. He coughs black phlegm.

  No one tells Enrique’s mother. Why worry her? Lourdes has enough troubles. She is three months behind in school payments for Belky, and the school is threatening not to let her take final exams.

  AN EDUCATION

  Enrique marks his sixteenth birthday. All he wants is his mother. One Sunday, he and his friend José put train riding to the test. They leave for el Norte.

  At first, no one notices. They take buses across Guatemala to the Mexican border. “I have a mom in the United States,” Enrique tells a guard.

  “Go home,” the man replies.

  They slip past the guard and make their way twelve miles into Mexico to Tapachula. There they approach a freight train near the depot. But before they can reach the tracks, police stop them. The officers rob them, the boys say later, but then let them go—José first, Enrique afterward.

  They find each other and another train. Now, for the first time, Enrique clambers aboard. The train crawls out of the Tapachula station. From here on, he thinks, nothing bad can happen.

  They know nothing about riding the rails. José is terrified. Enrique, who is braver, jumps from car to car on the slow-moving train. He slips and falls—away from the tracks, luckily—and lands on a backpack padded with a shirt and an extra pair of pants.

  He scrambles aboard again. But their odyssey comes to a humiliating halt. Near Tierra Blanca, a small town in Veracruz, authorities snatch them from the top of a freight car. The officers take them to a cell filled with MS gangsters, then deport them. Enrique is bruised and limping, and he misses María Isabel. They find coconuts to sell for bus fare and go home.

  A DECISION

  Enrique sinks deeper into drugs. By mid-December, he owes his marijuana supplier 6,000 lempiras, about $400. He has only 1,000 lempiras. He promises the rest by midweek but cannot keep his word. The following weekend, he encounters the dealer on the street.

  “I’m going to kill you,” the dealer tells Enrique. “You lied to me.”

  “Calm down,” Enrique says, trying not to show any fear. “I’ll give you your money.”

  “If you don’t pay up,” the supplier vows, “I’ll kill your sister.”

  The dealer mistakenly thinks that Enrique’s cousin Tania Ninoska Turcios, eighteen, is his sister. Both girls are finishing high school, and most of the family is away at a Nicaraguan hotel celebrating their graduation.

  Enrique pries open the back door to the house where his uncle Carlos Orlando Turcios Ramos and aunt Rosa Amalia live. He hesitates. How can he do this to his own family? Three times, he walks up to the door, opens it, closes it, and leaves. Each time, he takes another deep hit of glue. He knows the dealer who threatened him has spent time in jail and owns a.57-caliber gun.

  “It’s the only way out,” he tells himself finally, his mind spinning.

  Finally, he enters the house, picks open the lock to a bedroom door, then jimmies the back of his aunt’s armoire with a knife. He stuffs twenty-five pieces of her jewelry into a plastic bag and hides it under a rock near the local lumberyard.

  At 10 P.M., the family returns to
find the bedroom ransacked.

  Neighbors say the dog did not bark.

  “It must have been Enrique,” Aunt Rosa Amalia says. She calls the police. Uncle Carlos and several officers go to find him.

  “What’s up?” he asks. He has come down off his high.

  “Why did you do this? Why?” Aunt Rosa Amalia yells.

  “It wasn’t me.” As soon as he says it, he flushes with shame and guilt. The police handcuff him. In their patrol car, he trembles and begins to cry. “I was drugged. I didn’t want to do it.” He tells the officers that a dealer wanting money had threatened to kill Tania.

  He leads police to the bag of jewelry.

  “Do you want us to lock him up?” the police ask.

  Uncle Carlos thinks of Lourdes. They cannot do this to her. Instead, he orders Tania to stay indoors indefinitely, for her own safety.

  But the robbery finally convinces Uncle Carlos that Enrique needs help. He finds him a $15-a-week job at a tire store. He eats lunch with him every day—chicken and homemade soup. He tells the family they must show him their love.

  During the next month, January 2000, Enrique tries to quit drugs. He cuts back, but then he gives in. Every night, he comes home later. María Isabel begs him not to go up the hill where he sniffs glue. He promises not to but does anyway. He looks at himself in disgust. He is dressing like a slob—his life is unraveling.

  He is lucid enough to tell Belky that he knows what he has to do: he has to go find his mother.

  Aunt Ana Lucía agrees. Ana Lucía is wound tight. She and Enrique have clashed for months. Ana Lucía is the only breadwinner in the household. Even with his job at the tire store, Enrique is an economic drain. Worse, he is sullying the only thing her family owns: its good name.

  They speak bitter words that both, along with Enrique’s grandmother Águeda, will recall months later.