“Honey, guess who I ran into at the 7-Eleven?” said Ingrid, after Camilo had showered and dressed after arriving from work.
“Who?” said Camilo, as he sank into the couch, exhausted, in their tiny apartment, reaching for the remote control.
“Elías, Zyanya’s son!” said Ingrid.
“Elías? I haven’t seen him since the girls were in grade school! How does he look?” said Camilo, as he powered the TV on.
“Young for his age, but fat. Remember when he was in high school? He ran track and field,” she said.
Camilo’s eyes focused away from the TV as he tried to remember Elías the athlete. Then his eyes brightened up.
“I remember that! We raced once. He was fast,” said Camilo, refocusing on the moving images on the screen.
“He invited us to his mother’s house for dinner!” said Ingrid, excited.
“What did you say?” said Camilo, putting his arm over the side of his chair and turning towards his wife.
“‘Yes,’ of course! It’s Elías and Zyanya!”
Camilo glared at Ingrid for a split second before he put his arm inside his chair again and turned back towards the TV. He folded his legs and sighed. Ingrid’s face became oval.
“What’s the matter? I was sure you would be just as excited. It’s Elías and Zyanya!” pleaded Ingrid.
Camilo shrugged.
“I can’t believe you! So, you’re not going?”
“No,” he said.
Ingrid rolled her eyes and retired to the kitchen.
That evening, in bed, Ingrid turned her back to Camilo, and held the sheets tight to her chest. Camilo got the message and left for the living room but, unable to sleep, he stepped out.
The night was cool and foggy. Walking north on Melrose Avenue, he looked across the avenue. On the other side was the 7-Eleven where Ingrid had ran into Elías. Zyanya’s home was only a few minutes’ drive away.
Many years prior, he and Ingrid visited Zyanya at her new home, the third one she had bought since Elías had graduated from high school. They were in thrall of Zyanya’s ability to make things happen. Her pride and joy as she showed off her dream home made them feel, for a moment, that one day they could have some of what their friend had.
Camilo reached the corner and turned east, his head down and his hands in his pockets. He reached the transit station and crossed Vista Village Drive into the mall where he walked past Starbucks, Wings-n-Things, and Cinépolis, until he reached the urban park with an old creek running through. He laid down on the damp grass next to the gurgling water and cast his eyes on the sky, where pregnant gray clouds glowed with silver moonlight.
When Camilo was nineteen, his father, Daniel, had already been in America for a decade, and his older brother, Junior, had followed their dad three years prior. Back home, in Huajuapan de León, Oaxaca, Camilo made a living as lead guitarist of Los Diseñadores, a cumbia band. However, after Ingrid had Lucía, their second child, the regional success of his band was not enough to sustain his growing family. Persuading himself that he could start a new band in the United States, he listened to his dad and migrated to California with his wife and children.
Daniel and Junior lived, with one other boarder, in the living room of a two-bedroom apartment in Encinitas, California, where Zyanya was the lease owner. Previous arrangements had been made for Camilo and his family to move into the second bedroom. Zyanya and Elías lived in the first one.
He and Elías struck up a friendship over their love of music. For a year, Camilo taught Elías new songs on the guitar until he got good. Along with Junior and the next-door neighbor, Tino, they started a band that played Mexican weddings, quinceañeras, and restaurants on holidays and weekends. It was not Los Diseñadores playing original songs and touring Oaxaca, but it was a start, until Elías began missing practices.
“What’s going on?” said Camilo one night as they were packing up their equipment.
“As far as?” asked Elías, throwing up his hands.
“You didn’t play well tonight. You’ve been missing practices.”
“I’m sorry. I have a lot more going on now that I’m graduating,” said Elías.
“Oh, you are looking for a job?” said Camilo, imagining Elías as a concrete finisher or carpenter.
“No, I am going to college,” he said, smiling awkwardly.
“College?” said Camilo.
“Yes, university,” said Elías.
“University, Universidad” thought Camilo finally understanding. As a teenager in Huajuapán de León, some of his classmates whose fathers sent money for them to continue schooling went on to university, but his father’s plan had always been to bring him to the U.S. so he could make his fortune that way.
“Oh, I didn’t know,” said Camilo, quickly turning away because his stomach smarted and eyes glistened.
After that night, Camilo grew more and more aware of the daylight between him and Elías, who was not all that younger or different from him.
The stories of Elías’s opportunities and successes began circulating around the apartment complex. Elías had gotten offers to study all over California. Elías had won a dozen scholarships worth tens of thousands of dollars. Elías was in the newspaper and even on TV surrounded by other boys and girls shiny with success. Zyanya put up Elías’s prom portrait with a girl too pretty for words.
Without a band, Camilo joined his father and brother, and a neighbor, on the stoop of the apartment to drink every night, and the next morning for a “hangover beer.” A few hours later, he would report to his job where he would disappear into his corner of a kitchen where he chopped and diced vegetables for the city’s burghers.
One day, Camilo and his gang were still drinking at four in the morning when Zyanya got home from her night job. She felt an instant embarrassment for all of them, but particularly for Camilo whose children still needed him. Everyone escaped to their beds, except Camilo who was too drunk to follow.
“¿Qué haces?” asked Zyanya, standing akimbo, as Camilo struggled to get on his feet.
Zyanya had left her car lights on. She could see Camilo clearly. His eyelids were half-shut and his irises floated like buoys on the sea.
“What do you mean?” he said, slurring his words.
“Do you want Ingrid to leave you like your mom left your father because he drank too much?” said Zyanya.
“Don’t talk about my mother,” said Camilo.
“Don’t give me excuses to do so! Now what has gotten into you? What happened to the band?” said Zyanya.
“Your son left. That’s what happened!” said Camilo, glowering.
Zyanya was startled by Camilo’s anger, but it made a number of things make sense.
Camilo had not just started drinking. He had also joined in the backbiting against her and Elías that had started since she took a night job to add to her day job.
Marta, the neighborhood Mary Kay lady, who knew everything about everyone, including Zyanya’s own indiscretions, told her.
“The men in your house talk behind your back. They say it’s a lie that you clean a supermarket at night, that what you really do is prostitute yourself,” Marta said.
Zyanya laughed and said, “¡Favor que me hacen! And when Elías covers my shift on Fridays, do they think he prostitutes himself also?” she said, before both ladies laughed.
“They also say that you are breaking your back for nothing, that Elías will never pay you back, that he will abandon you when you are old!” said Marta.
“And about Elías they say he does not deserve all those scholarships, that he surely cheated on his exams. They call him a marijuano, a presumido, and that he will never make anything of himself,” added Marta.
“I know you are jealous of my son. I know what you and the lowlifes in this neighborhood say about us,” said Zyanya, before spelling out what she had learned from Marta.
Cornered and embarrassed, Camilo began retching into the hedges like an open fire hydrant. Zyanya held him so he would not fall into his own vomit.
A few months later, Zyanya threw a party to celebrate Elías’s high school graduation. By then, Camilo had reined in his drinking and his attitude towards Elías’s success had changed. Elías was what his daughters could grow up to be when they became teenagers.
Only a few weeks after Elías left for university, Zyanya’s home loan closed and she moved out, handing the lease off to Camilo and Ingrid. The couple dozen people who had lived at Zyanya’s apartment over the years attended her house-warming party. Zyanya was the first of them, many of whom were married, to buy her own home and they wanted to see it for themselves. If it was real, then maybe they could buy their own homes next.
At the start of dinner, Zyanya got up to say a few words.
“I want to thank my son for being my right-hand in this new country. He could not be here because he is away at school, but Elías interpreted and translated for me since he was a little kid and he advertised my house cleaning business. I could not have done this without him. Thank you son, and look out, because I’m adding you to the mortgage as soon as you get a job!” she said, before causing people to cough up their drinks in laughter.
“I also want to thank Daniel and Junior for having faith in me and co-signing on my loan. You’re on the hook now, suckers!” she said, causing more laughter and her co-signers to blanche for a moment.
Camilo giggled, remembering the face on his dad and brother. After hours reminiscing while falling in and out of sleep it had become morning. He got up, shook off the grass on his clothes, and returned home.
To be continued…