The Memories of Ana Calderón Read online

  Just as the tenth grade was ending, ’Apá told me that I had to quit school. He said it to me as he was passing through the kitchen on the way out the back door. At first I thought that I hadn’t understood what he had said to me because he spoke, as he always did, with his face turned away from me. I stood for a few seconds staring at the soapy water in the sink before running out to the yard where he was standing.

  My voice was shaking, but I asked, “What did you say, ’Apá?”

  He repeated his words. “You have to leave school to go to work. I can’t feed and clothe all of you on my own anymore. It’s up to you and Octavio to share the responsibility.”

  Without thinking, I began to cry. The desert fields of the Yaqui Valley and the hot orchards of Fresno appeared in my mind. I saw the campesinas; their haggard, blotched faces were turned looking at me as if waiting for me to join them. Far behind them I saw Miss Nugent inviting me to join her, but she began to grow smaller until she disappeared.

  I pleaded with my father. “’Apá, only two more years, please! That’s all I need to finish. After that, I’ll be a different person. I can get a good job; maybe in an office.” While my mouth formed those words I was thinking of Miss Nugent and how she had shown me that she believed in me and in my ability to learn.

  ’Apá turned his eyes to look at me, but his eyes were like hot coals. They burned my face, and his words hurt me even more.

  “You can’t go on thinking that you’re better than the other women of the family. A head filled with foolish thoughts means empty hands not only for the woman, but for everyone else around her. Your mother worked with her hands as had her mother, and her mother. She did what God had put her on earth to do: to work and have babies. It’s now your time.”

  I confess that in my heart I longed to raise my hands to strike him, hoping that my fists would be like iron. I wanted to scratch my frustration and disillusionment into his face with my nails, to force open his eyes with my fingers, making him understand once and for all that I was not like my mother and her sisters. But instead of showing him what I was thinking and feeling, I became stiff, frozen, and my mouth was blocked, as if a rag had been stuffed into it. I was remembering the penitent woman at the Shrine, and I wondered if her sin had been that of disobeying her father.

  I wanted to run as far as I could, away from his hot, hard eyes, but even then I knew that I had nowhere to run. I lowered my head and went back into the kitchen.

  It was early in the summer of 1937 when Ana and Octavio went to work at a shoe factory located on Alameda Street. Octavio’s job was to oil the machines that stamped out leather that later would be fashioned into men’s and women’s sandals and pumps. Ana worked up front in the finishing department. She put in eight hours a day inspecting each shoe as it came off the conveyor belt, making sure that the stitching on the toe and heel was properly done.

  A few days before beginning work, Ana ended her days in school. She had hardly slept since her father had spoken to her; the night hours dragged by as she tried to think of how to stay in school. At the end of each plan, her mind bumped into the cold glare of her father’s eyes until she finally told herself that she had to obey him.

  On the last day of school, Ana thought of walking away without saying anything to her teachers, not even to Miss Nugent. But after thinking it over, she decided that she couldn’t just disappear; she knew that they would wonder, maybe even worry. She realized that Miss Nugent, especially, would be surprised not to hear from her again. She had demonstrated an interest in Ana over the years, even after she had left grammar school to go on to junior and high school.

  Miss Nugent had seen to it that Ana would come twice a week to her classroom for more books. It hadn’t been easy because Mr. Calderón had objected, protesting that his daughter should not be out of the house after school hours. He insisted, through Reyes Soto’s interpreting, that books were of no use to any of his daughters because they would not help with the feeding and clothing of the family. It was instead, he claimed, a waste of time for Ana, and would only end by giving her false ideas of what life is.

  This is what Mr. Calderón emphasized to Miss Nugent. She, on the other hand, persisted in asking that Ana be given permission to continue reading with her for just one semester. When he grudgingly approved, the reading sessions kept up, term after term, until that day in the Spring of 1937 when Ana approached her teacher.

  “Miss Nugent, I can’t come for my reading session any more. I have to get a job to help out the family.”

  “What? Ana, what are you talking about? What about your other studies…You mean, you’re even pulling out of your regular classes at the high school?”

  “Yes.”

  The teacher was perplexed, even shocked. Her face mirrored disbelief at the thought that someone like Ana should be yanked out of learning, cut off before she could even begin to reach her fullness.

  “But!… This can’t be! I’ll talk to your father…”

  “It’s no use. He told me that he’s been patient enough, that this should have happened a long time ago. Maybe he’s right, Miss Nugent. I mean, look at all the time I spend at home reading, and…well…”

  “Well, what, Ana? Look, you’ve got talent. God gave you something special; you have brains. Brains, you hear me? But they have to be developed and that can only happen here, in the classroom, and in the library.”

  The teacher put her hands on the girl’s shoulders saying, “Listen to me, Ana. How old are you?”

  “I’m seventeen.”

  “Well then, hear my words and remember them. If you give up preparing yourself for a life that is bound to be better than the one your family left behind, you’ll live to regret it. Believe me. Working can wait. How have all of you got along up to now, anyway? What changed all of a sudden to make it necessary for you to drop out of school just a couple of years before you finish? What’s going on, Ana?”

  The girl was overwhelmed by her teacher’s questions; she couldn’t respond to any of them. She knew that her life was changing, that its course was now pointing her in a direction she did not want. She felt powerless, frustrated, but there was nothing she could do. She realized that there was no way Miss Nugent could understand, and she closed her eyes because she was unable to sustain the intensity of her teacher’s gaze.

  “I have to do what he says, Miss Nugent. He’ll throw me out of the house if I don’t.”

  “Is there anything I can do, Ana?”

  “No. It’s no use.”

  This conversation happened in early June, and through one of Reyes Soto’s contacts, Octavio and Ana began as laborers in the shoe factory soon afterward. In the beginning, Ana was overcome by the intensity of the long hours during which she had to keep up with a conveyor belt. It never stopped, not for one moment, and many times its constant motion and purring nauseated her. Until she became used to the machine, her head throbbed almost constantly during the first weeks of working at the assembly line, and once her stomach was so upset that she had to leave her place to run to the ladies’ room to vomit. When she returned, her supervisor reprimanded her, saying that several shoes had been damaged because of her carelessness.

  Octavio easily adjusted to his new way of life. He didn’t mind leaving school, and he was pleased, telling himself that now he could work and become a man. He was confident that Ana would see him in a different way, and that the silliness of reading books that had filled her head for so long would disappear, leaving him as the most important thing in her life.

  When he went on the job, Octavio was accepted by his fellow workers; they liked his clowning and his usual cheerfulness. He had a good voice for singing Mexican love songs in the men’s locker room during his shift. Despite the loud machine noise that made even speaking difficult, his singing could be heard above the din.

  Although he was kept busy by his job of going from one machine to the other, Ana thought that his job was easier than hers. In fact, she was convinced that the jobs all
otted to the women were all heavier than those of the men. She saw that the women had to be at the end of conveyor belts and had to keep up with their ceaseless, rapid pace. The men, on the other hand, pulled levers, or inserted material, or loaded bobbins of thread. Octavio, she saw, spent eight hours squeezing oil out of a small can.

  When the five o’clock hour finally appeared, Ana was so exhausted that she could hardly speak. Octavio, however, seemed ready to leap out onto the street and do something exciting. He prattled gaily as they waited for the streetcar that took them to the bus that finally landed them at the corner of Floral Drive and Mariana Street. He didn’t seem to notice Ana’s fatigue, much less her depressed mood, and instead he talked about himself and of how happy he was to be working.

  Alejandra hated the idea of Octavio and Ana working in the same place, and she begged her father to let her quit school so that she, too, could bring in money. After all, she told him, she was almost fifteen years old, much too old to be in school. Besides, she explained to him, she was bored; she still hated being cooped up in a room with a bunch of stupid kids.

  She stopped speaking to Ana because she couldn’t help being eaten up by jealousy. She resented that her sister was with Octavio all day long. She detested the way he tried to make her laugh, and Alejandra hated, above all, the manner in which her sister seemed to ignore his efforts. Alejandra saw that the less Ana noticed Octavio’s advances, the more intent he seemed on gaining her sister’s attention. At the same time, Alejandra saw that he was losing interest in her, and that he was treating her as if she were a little girl, one that should stay out of his and Ana’s company.

  Nearly two years passed before Ana became accustomed to the factory. She realized one day that her head no longer hurt nor did her stomach churn until she was sick. The depression that had gripped her for almost two years had become less intense, and she found herself thinking, not of the future as she used to before, but more about Octavio. She was surprised, because they had lived together ever since she could remember, and never had she spent time thinking of him.

  In the beginning, she forced herself to stop thinking of Octavio, but this became more difficult with each day. Ana noticed new things about him. Her attention was often caught by the way his face had developed. What had been a transparent fuzz had now turned to hard bristle, mostly around his chin and over his lips. She was surprised when he once playfully picked her up in his arms and whirled her around for several seconds. His action was not what startled her, because he had done things like that even when they were in Puerto Real. It was, rather, the strength that she felt in his arms as he took her off her feet. She was astounded at the hardness of his chest and stomach, and she couldn’t help feeling that his body and arms had grown, tightened, stretched.

  These experiences and sensations made Ana look closely at her body. She noticed that she wasn’t flat-chested any more; her breasts had filled, and they were round and firm. Even though her sisters knocked loudly at the bathroom door each morning, she often gazed at the reflection of her naked upper body in the small mirror over the hand basin. She also took time to stand on top of the toilet bowl to look at her lower body in the mirror because she was curious about the coarse, fuzzy hair that had grown over the mound separating her thighs.

  Ana realized that her body had changed. But what engaged her interest most of all were the transformations that she felt inside of her, like the heat she felt gripping the tiny bead buried inside the lips of the hairy mound when she touched herself there. At those times, she discovered that her fingers caused a feeling so intense that her legs shivered.

  During the winter months of that year, when the days were short, she and Octavio rode in the streetcar through the dark Los Angeles streets on their return trip home. More and more, Ana found herself enjoying those moments when she forgot how tired she was, and she began to like Octavio’s way of laughing, especially how he was able to make a joke out of anything. She found out that she liked to feel his body up against hers when the streetcar filled with people, when they were forced to stand so close to one another that they could feel each other breathing.

  By springtime, she and Octavio were inseparable. On Saturdays, when the work shift ended at two in the afternoon, they usually walked slowly from the bus stop to their house. It was on one of those afternoons that Octavio suddenly stopped and said, “Ana, I have a great idea!”

  She looked at him, smiling. Recently, it was impossible to look at him without showing how happy she was to be with him. “Oh, yeah? What big idea do you have now?”

  “Let’s walk all the way up to the hill. It’s not a long walk, and we can watch the sunset. Maybe we can even see the ocean from there.”

  “The ocean! Ay, Octavio! I think you’ve been working too hard.” Ana was nearly laughing when she spoke, but her eyes had already accepted his idea.

  “Really! Just look at that sky. It’s beautiful, and we haven’t been up there in a long time. Besides…” Octavio’s voice trailed off.

  “Besides, what?”

  “I mean…it’s April.”

  “I know it’s April. What’s so special about that?”

  “It’s my lucky month!”

  Octavio took her hand as they walked up the incline to where the small frame houses became more widely separated until they disappeared altogether and the road turned to dirt. They walked in silence, listening only to the soft breeze that hummed as it sifted through the swaying new grass. Above them was a canopy of blue sky.

  When they reached the crest of the hill, they found a spot they liked, and without speaking they sat on the grass, which was still warm from the day’s heat. Ana and Octavio sat facing the declining sun; its long rays cast golden patches on their hair and cheeks. They breathed in the cool air of the early evening. He held one of her hands as he placed his arm around her shoulders. He drew her close to him because neither of them had ever felt what they were feeling at that moment.

  When his lips touched mine, I loved Tavo and I knew that at that moment he loved me, too. As we laid on the sweet grass, its fragrance mixed with our breath. We were both intoxicated by desire, and neither one of us wanted to stop it. When we kissed, I felt the earth spin uncontrollably, so much that I thought that Tavo and I would be thrown off its surface to drift away into empty space. I didn’t care because I would have given my life to spend eternity with him caught up there where no one could ever reach us.

  At first his hands were soft and warm on my body, but soon they began to tremble as he fumbled with my clothes. I felt myself shuddering when he inserted his fingers between my thighs, and even though I knew what would happen if I let him go further, I could not stop. A voice in my brain reminded me of the sinful woman begging for forgiveness at the Virgin’s Shrine, but the sound was remote and it gradually grew so still that soon I stopped hearing it.

  I was unconscious of everything except that Tavo was between my legs, plunging in and out of me, and that what I was feeling was the reason for which I had been born. Everything around me was in motion; I felt the dirt and grass beneath me quake and shift. Then, in a few seconds, the world exploded, giving me a pleasure that I had not imagined possible.

  Tavo whispered over and again that he loved me, and I said the same thing to him. When it ended, we remained on the hill locked in each others’ arms until darkness covered us. The crickets began a song that has stayed with me ever since.

  As spring turned into summer, Ana and Octavio climbed the hill every evening to make love and to talk about their future. For the time being, they decided to keep their relationship a secret until they had saved enough money for a place of their own. Keeping what they were doing from the others was easy because they had been in each other’s company almost constantly for the last two years. However, Ana could not help noticing Alejandra’s growing moodiness and her continued refusal to speak to her. But she told herself that as soon as her sister knew that she and Octavio were to be married, she would like the idea and th
ey would be friends.

  When she realized how often Alejandra whispered in the kitchen with her father, Ana began to sense that the two of them had noticed something. This feeling grew to apprehension when Ana began to suspect that she was pregnant. June had come and gone, and she had not menstruated. She forced herself to calm down by remembering that her body had probably developed a new pattern now that she was being intimate with Octavio. When July passed and nothing happened, she couldn’t conceal her fear. One day on the hill as they watched the sun’s last rays, she decided to tell Octavio. He was holding her hand in one of his, and caressing her breast with the other.

  “Octavio, when are we going to tell ’Apá that we’re going to be married?”

  The question startled him. He gawked at Ana as if they had never spoken or planned to tell Rodolfo. He dropped his hands, looking stunned and confused. “What do you mean when are we going to tell him? He’ll kill me if he knows what you and I have been doing!”

  Ana felt her breath catch in her throat. “What do you mean?” She tossed the question back at him. “We’ve been planning to get married all these weeks, haven’t we? How do you expect us to do that without telling ’Apá? Besides, he doesn’t have to know about this…” Ana waved her arm, taking in the slope.

  Octavio, caught off guard, didn’t know what to say, so he placed his elbows on his crossed knees as he cupped his chin in his hands. He clenched his jaw and stared out across the city to where he imagined the blue of the sky connected with the ocean.

  Ana looked up and saw a tiny star, the first one for the night. It was twinkling brightly in the gathering darkness. “Tavo…I’m…I think I’m pregnant…”

  She stopped speaking, suddenly intimidated by his eyes that snapped in her direction as she stumbled over her words. Octavio glared at her, obviously struggling with emotion because his mahogany-colored skin took on a pinkish hue and his eyes filled with tears. Ana sensed intense fear and anger in him when he leaped to his feet.