Camilo and Ingrid scanned Zyanya’s home as they pulled up. To the right of the driveway was a guava tree. They used to come to Zyanya’s house—as did many others—when the tree fruited to buy guavas for the holiday ponche. To the left was a trellised box frame curlicued with chayotes, and on the floor, an assortment of herbs, and flowers.
The gate to the backyard was open, so they drove through. Once parked, they noticed chicken wire before them, and beyond it, chicken crests snapping back and forth. They got out of their car and watched a dozen black, red, and yellow birds walk around on the dirt, pecking at fruit and vegetable scraps. They were watching when Elías met them.
“Glad you made it,” he said, with open arms.
The couple looked at their host, a bigger version with some gray hair of the twenty-something they had last visited.
“So are we,” said Ingrid, as she and Camilo embraced their host.
Elías looked at his guests. Camilo’s full head of gray hair aged him beyond his years. Ingrid had lost the looks that had once made Elías harbor a secret crush for her.
“Follow me, my mom’s inside and dinner is ready. Do you remember her mole?” asked Elías.
The couple nodded, suddenly excited.
The party walked down into the patio just as Zyanya was stepping out to meet them. She looked even smaller than they remembered her. There were bags under her eyes, jowls around her mouth, and pouchy skin below her chin but her small dark eyes were lucid and her skin shiny.
“Doña Zyanya! How are you?”
“I’m well. You two have been strangers long enough!”
“I’m sorry. Thank goodness Elías and I ran into each other!”
“Yeah! He told me all about it. Now come in, ¡ya está listo el mole!
The party stepped into the dining room and Ingrid moved to follow Zyanya into the kitchen to help serve but Elías held her shoulder and said, “I’ve got it. Have a seat!”
Camilo and Ingrid took in their surroundings.
There was a tall display case with wine glasses, bottles of tequila, and other crystalware. There was an entertainment center in front of inviting sofas. The tiled floor was dark brown. The high ceilings augmented the already large sense of space. The smooth beige walls were decorated with a jumble of family portraits, Mexican textile crafts, an acrylic painting of a pretty, young bailaora in a bright red dress, a map of the Mexican republic, and a random Kandinsky print.
Elías appeared back from the kitchen first, carrying a white ceramic container. He set it on the table and returned to the kitchen. Behind him came Zyanya who set down a red pot. Then came Elías again with a jar of ice-cold agua de chilacayótl and, finally, Zyanya with a warm tenate full of tortillas.
“Dig in!” said Zyanya, as she took her seat.
The spicy chocolate sensations of the ancient Oaxacan dish were settling into their palettes as they chewed their first tacos when Ingrid asked, “Doña Zyanya, where is Don Enrique?”
“He’s in Mexico visiting family.”
“I am sorry we won’t have a chance to greet him,” said Ingrid.
Camilo nodded in agreement.
“You will if you return!” said Zyanya.
Camilo thought to himself, well then I guess we won’t be seeing Don Enrique. The couple shifted in their seats.
Elías asked, “Camilo, what do you do these days for work?”
“I am in construction.”
Elías nodded and inquired, “Do you work for a company or for yourself?”
“Myself,” said Camilo.
“Congratulations!”
“Eh, it sounds better than it actually is.”
“I think I know what you mean. I have been self-employed and paying for Social Security out of pocket is no fun.”
“I don’t have Social Security, we’re still undocumented.”
“I’m sorry, I didn’t know,” said Elías.
“It’s no problem. We’re not the only ones. And what about you?” said Camilo.
“Oh, I’ve been a citizen since I was twenty-three.”
“I mean your work. What are you in?”
“I work at the public library.”
The couple nodded, wide-eyed and impressed.
“Ah, librarian,” said Camilo.
“No, library tech,” clarified Elías.
The couple nodded wide-eyed again, but confused.
“And why aren’t you a librarian?” asked Camilo.
Elías shrugged and said, “Just not what I set out to do.”
“I see,” said Camilo.
Just then, a casually dressed woman holding a Chihuahua under her arm appeared headed towards the back door.
“Buenas tardes,” she said, smiling cordially.
“Hola, Lore,” said Zyanya.
The woman, who neither Camilo nor Ingrid had ever seen before, reached the back door and stepped outside.
“Who’s that?” asked Ingrid.
“That’s Lorena, one of my tenants,” answered Zyanya.
“Tenants? Like in the old days in Encinitas?” asked Camilo.
“Yes,” said Zyanya.
Camilo had assumed that Zyanya lived alone in her big home, like all rich people.
“Don’t you like to live alone?”
“I don’t know. I’ve never done it. I like living with chusma,” she said, chortling.
Everyone laughed.
The cackles relaxed Camilo but he could not help wanting to do the home’s math.
“And how many rooms do you have?” he asked.
“Six.”
Ingrid and Camilo were goggle-eyed. They looked around.
Rooms are renting at around $600, thought Camilo to himself. He totaled it and was gearing up to ask how much the mortgage was when, sensing his intentions, Ingrid pinched his thigh, stopping him. He settled back down.
“What about you two? Have you bought your own home yet?” asked Zyanya.
Ingrid and Camilo looked at each other, incredulous, then answered in unison.
“Doña Zyanya. We are undocumented.”
“That doesn’t matter!”
“It doesn’t?” asked Ingrid.
“No, my niece and her husband are undocumented and they did it.”
“How?”
“Well, Eusebia’s father, who has a green card, took the loan out for them.”
“Ah, that’s risky. What if her father decided he wanted them out one day?”
“I suppose it is risky, but, if you’ll remember, Camilo. When I bought my first home, your father co-signed on my loan. I trusted that he wouldn’t want to steal my property and he that I would not default.”
Ingrid nodded her head in agreement.
“Is he still on your loan?”
“No, I removed him a long time ago. I added Elías once he finished college and started working.”
The couple turned towards Elías with a mix of envy and admiration. The former for Zyanya’s good luck in having a successful son, the latter for her son’s willingness to sign off on such a financial commitment.
“But finding a co-signer is not necessary if you have enough money in the bank. I sold the home on Nita Lane to an undocumented couple and they did it all by themselves.”
“What? How?”
“You need a realtor who can do an owner-carried loan for that.”
“An owner-carried loan?”
“Yes, you need to talk with my realtor. I’ll give you her phone number before you leave.”
“Okay,” said Ingrid, feeling newfound hope.
Camilo had just put the moist pitcher of agua de chilacayotl down after serving himself a glass when he said, “So, Elías, what is it that you set out to do?”
Elías was half-way chewing through a bite of chicken but he did not hurry to finish.
After a minute, he swallowed, wiped his mouth, and said, “to write books.”
Then he looked away and began making himself a new taco. He knew what was coming.
Neither Camilo nor Ingrid had ever heard of someone wanting to write books. If you were poor you built homes or scrubbed toilets. If you got to go to school, like Elías, like some of their nephews, like some of the children of their friends, then you could be a doctor, a lawyer, or an engineer, but write books? Who wrote books? What were books?
The couple raised their eyebrows and blinked. Elías chuckled.
“Remember Octavio Paz?” asked Elías.
Every Mexican who had finished grade school, like Camilo and Ingrid, knew who Paz was.
“Yes, the poet,” said Ingrid.
“Well, I will never be an Octavio Paz, but I want to do what he did. Read and write books.”
“About what?” asked Camilo.
“Us,” answered Elías.
Now another woman, middle-aged like Lore, walked through the dining room with a Glad bag full of clothes over her shoulder and laundry detergent in one of her hands. Her straight salt and pepper hair was tied behind her. She had big dark eyes and her front teeth were capped with silver.
“Buenas tardes, comadre,” she said to Zyanya.
Zyanya returned the greeting.
Unlike Lore, this second woman looked familiar.
After the woman disappeared through the back door, Camilo asked, “Is that Marcela?”
“Yes, it is!” answered Elías.
Marcela had lived with them back during their days in Encinitas.
“I remember when she first came to this country. Claudio and Poncho had smuggled her. She snuck over the hills in a black dress with French trimming and that is how she arrived in the apartment. She fell in with that dude, what was his name?”
“Miguel,” said Elías.
“That’s it! So, what became of their lives?”
“Her and Miguel had three boys. But he gave her a bad life. He drank, smoked dope, and beat her. They finally went their separate ways a few years ago. That’s when she called and asked if I had any rooms.”
Camilo and Ingrid leaned back in their chairs. How fast the world turns, they thought to themselves.
“Her oldest, Saúl, lives across town. He has made Marcela a grandma,” said Zyanya.
Ingrid and Camilo raised their eyebrows.
“What about you, Ingrid? Have your daughters made you a grandma yet?” she asked in jest, for she calculated that they were not even twenty yet.
Camilo had hoped that the subject of their daughters would not come up. He would have preferred that Ingrid tell a white lie when it came to them. However, Ingrid did not share his attitude.
“As a matter of fact, they have! They each have baby boys,” she said, with a sparkle in her eyes.
“¡Ah, caramba! They started young! So they didn’t go to school?” said Zyanya.
Ingrid, please stop there, Camilo thought to himself; to no avail.
“No. Well. They finished high school but neither went to college.”
“That’s okay! They’re bilingual. They’ll find jobs easy!” said Zyanya, blithely.
“Well, they’ve both found jobs at Walmart,” said Ingrid.
“Which one? I work at Walmart too,” said Zyanya.
“Really? I never thought you’d quit cleaning houses. You did well.”
“I didn’t quit. Remember the Recession?”
Ingrid nodded.
“Well, at the time, Elías was working alongside me...”
“Alongside me” thought Camilo. Elías, a college graduate, cleaning houses?
“...He was very successful in drumming up new business. We had plenty of clients. But then came the Recession. I lost two-thirds of our business from one day to the next, lost three additional homes I had bought.”
Three homes? Where would she be now if not for the recession, thought Camilo.
“Three more homes?” asked Ingrid, incredulous.
“Yes.”
Just then, a tall, dark man with a film of white paint on his face, dressed in old white clothes splattered and dripped with dry paint, walked inside from the back door. He greeted the party and went on down a hallway.
“Who’s that?” asked Camilo.
“That’s José, Enrique’s nephew.”
“The drunk?” asked Camilo, who vaguely remembered from the old days.
“Yes. Well, no. He’s been sober for many years now.”
The mole and tortillas were cleaned out and the party stood up to take the dishes to the kitchen. Ingrid and Zyanya stayed to wash them and, after pulling out two cold ones from the refrigerator and snapping them open with a wall-mounted opener, Camilo and Elías walked to the backyard.
“Let me show you the garden,” said Elías.
Camilo followed Elías out to the backyard, which was a third of an acre. They walked along the patio to the stairs up and out onto the dirt lot. Elías then swung a sharp right and now they were overlooking the patio.
“These are some of our citruses. As you can see, this is an orange tree. There is another one just a few feet further and next to that one is a blood orange tree.”
Camilo looked at the first tree. He remembered it from before he and Ingrid stopped visiting Zyanya. But back then, it was only a year old. The tree had grown to nearly three yards. It expelled a sweet, citrusy aroma. It was weighed down by its orange bulbs. Elías pulled some of them off and put them in a bucket.
“Come this way! We have a fig too!”
The fig tree was also three yards tall. Its leaves were green and fuzzy, and looked like cattle ears. Its bulbous fruits were purple. Some of them had already burst with ripeness and were bulging with sweet flesh. Elías picked two of them and gave one to Camilo. Both men bit into the fresh figs, warm with sunlight.
Many thoughts circled in the current of Camilo’s mind. He was loving the tour. The fresh air and the sun revived him after beginning to feel soporific due to the feast he had just enjoyed. He was feeling overwhelmed by Zyanya and Elías’s wealth, but it was not the material wealth he had imagined and envied. It was the wealth of, somehow, finding access to homemade mole, the wealth of Zyanya’s joy, Camilo’s wealth of his mother, and the ineffable wealth of owning fruit trees to their heart’s content. Yet, still, something irked him like a pebble in his shoe.
Elías was just starting to show him the soursop tree when Camilo blurted out, “Why aren’t you rich?”
“Huh?”
“Yes, why aren’t you rich? Do you know what kind of opportunities you’ve had in life compared to people like us? Do you know what I would have given to be in your shoes when you were young?”
Camilo spoke with righteous anger. Elías understood perfectly. He knew that he was a failure and a laughing stock in the eyes of many in his mother’s community. He struggled not to feel like a failure himself. Many of his college classmates earned six-figure salaries, or close to that. They had families, luxury SUV’s, and a dozen stamps on their passports. Meanwhile, he had reached his late thirties and lived in his mother’s version of success. However, he was not going to let Camilo shame him.
“I know you would have given an arm and a leg. My answer to you is that I never wanted to be rich.”
“But that is the American Dream! One generation builds the foundation and the next capitalizes, cashes in! You could have had your own home, just as big or bigger than your mom’s. You could have a beautiful gringa for a wife and beautiful children. They would grow up even better than you!”
“Nothing on your list appealed to me.”
“Then what appealed to you! What could possibly be more important than getting your piece of the promise. Look at us! Look at everyone like us! We are barred from moving forward!”
“I already told you what I want!”
“You mean what you said about books? Are you serious about that?”
“Yes!”
“Grow up, man. That’s only for dreamers!”
“Let me ask you something, Camilo. How did ‘growing up’ work out for you?”
Flustered, Camilo said, “What? What do you mean?”
“You know what I mean. You were once an artist too. You know how it feels to make art and to share it with the world. Do you remember the Christmas of 1998?”
“No, I don’t.”
“It was the year I graduated from college. I spent Christmas Eve at your apartment. We got very drunk and we were dancing and it just so happened that both of us lost our balance at the same time. There was a guitar on the sofa and we crushed it when we fell on it.”
“I remember,” said Camilo.
“Do you remember what happened?” retorted Elías.
“We cried. We cried like babies holding the pieces of the guitar.”
“I am still young. I can go to law school and become rich, but no matter how much I try to convince myself to do something that, I cannot bring myself to do it. It would be like breaking my own guitar on purpose. It would be like setting fire to my books and all my papers.”
“I understand now,” confessed Camilo.
“I’m not in the best period of my life. I know this is not what’s best for me. However, I am going to get where I need to be. I am going to move on. Don’t worry about me.”
Back inside the home, Zyanya and Ingrid sat in the living room.
“Why hasn’t Elías married yet? He is well into his thirties.”
“I wish I knew.”
“Is he serious about the whole writing thing?”
“Yes.”
“Has he written any books?”
“No, but he has published one.”
“Wait, how did he publish a book and not write it?”
“He translated one.”
“Oh!”
“Do you want to see it?”
“Sure”
Zyanya led Ingrid down the hallway from the kitchen. It got dark but Zyanya flipped a switch. On both sides of the aisle there were books neatly tucked into interior wall bookshelves,
Zyanya scanned one of the shelves with her fingertips until she found the book she was looking for.
“Here it is!” said Zyanya.
Zyanya handed the three hundred page, six by nine, softcover to Ingrid. Her guest held it between her hands; her palms pressed against the spine and text block, her thumbs pressed against the waxy-smooth cover page. The title, “Selected Poems of Teddy Santos Chacón,” was typed in black letters over a blue sky in the upper half, “Poemas Selectos de Teddy Santos Chacón,” typed in white letters over the light brown wall of an adobe home typical of New Mexico, where the author hailed from, in the lower half. Scanning downward, Ingrid read, “Introduction by Gerald Vizeñor,” and below that, “Translated from the English by Elías Vidal and Kim Weisz.”
Ingrid glowed with pride.
The back door opened and Camilo and Elías entered. Ingrid ran to Camilo with the book in her hands.
“Look, Camilo! Elias’s own book!” she said, pointing at their friend’s name with her index finger.
Camilo looked and his eyes widened.
He turned towards Elías and said, “Why didn’t you tell me about this?”
“Ah, it’s just a translation, not original work!” said Elías.
“It’s a book,” insisted Camilo.
The party continued chatting for another while until it dawned on all of them that it had darkened.
Camilo said, “Well, it’s time for us to go but first there is some important business for us to settle with you, Doña Zyanya.”
“What is that?” asked Zyanya.
“Back when I thought I was going to hit the big time with Amway, I asked you for a lot of loans.”
Zyanya took a moment to recollect, then said, “Yes, you did.”
“Well, if you’ll remember, we never paid you for the last loan we took from you.”
Zyanya remembered. Always had. However, she had long ago written that money away and was more happy to see her old friends than to remind them of their debt.
Camilo reached into his trousers pocket and pulled out a wad of cash.
“Here it is. One thousand dollars.”
Zyanya took the cash in her hand and looked up at Camilo, searchingly.
Confused, Camilo said, “What’s the matter?”
“Well, where is the interest? It has been fifteen years!”