Amigoland

6

Close to noon, after doing the cleaning and washing, Socorro packed his shaving kit and some clean clothes into a paper bag, then walked down the street to ask for a ride.
“The thing is that he should not be living by himself,” la se?ora Mu?oz said as she drove. She had come out in her housecoat and open-toed slippers.
“Some people like to be alone.” Socorro looked out the window at the palm trees along the median. They were traveling up one of the main streets in Brownsville, the same one he’d taken to show her the barbershop where he had worked so many years.
“But he shouldn’t be one of those people, not at his age. His wife would not have wanted him to be alone — that I do know. Don Celestino has been lucky until now.”
“And his family?” she asked, hoping it didn’t sound like the cleaning woman was asking more than she should.
“One of his daughters tried to get him to go live with her in San Antonio, but he wanted to stay here, in his own house.” La se?ora slowed down for the speed bumps leading up to the hospital. “No matter how nice a man he might be, you have to remember he is still a man and very thickheaded.”
She stood outside the entrance, watching her reflection disappear and then reappear in the sliding glass doors. Before driving off, la se?ora had scribbled the hospital-room number on the back of an old receipt. Now Socorro held on to the receipt and the paper bag filled with his clean clothes. Just beyond the sliding glass doors, a thick-necked security guard sat behind a large desk, eating the last bit of an empanada. His dark uniform reminded her of the men and women who every morning asked her to state her purpose for wanting to enter the country. To clean your house, she felt like saying. Why else would she be there practically every day of the week? She waited next to the sliding doors, allowing others to walk by her. This wasn’t like the clinics on the other side of the river, where they had taken her mother when she started complaining about the terrible headaches and about her hands, which she could hardly open anymore. Or later after her first attack, when they had to rush her to the hospital. At least then Socorro knew she could open her mouth, defend herself if necessary. Not that she’d ever had any real problems coming across; she knew this, yet she hesitated as if someone would suddenly run her off, tell her she had no business here. Even dressed nicely, she was still a cleaning woman from the other side. She could see this every time the sliding glass doors came back together. And as if it were not already obvious, the hem of her skirt was smudged with some dust that she had tried to wipe away. She thought about leaving and simply walking back to the house or the bridge, but then the guard’s phone rang, and as he was cradling the receiver on his shoulder, searching through some paperwork, she had just enough time to scuttle past the desk.
Once she arrived at the elevator, a maintenance worker explained to her how to find the room. Socorro stayed close to the plastic railing, making herself small as she walked by the nurses’ station. When she was almost at the room, she stopped altogether. She asked herself why she was doing this and if she shouldn’t have stayed at his house and finished the washing and cleaning, what he paid her to do. The rest of it, what had occurred those Thursday afternoons, was between them. And all of this was agreed to without either one of them having to say a word, as if they both understood that they had crossed some clear and definitive line. Only it had continued to happen. And so the line between being his cleaning lady and his lover had blurred before she realized it, and yet because no one else knew about them, the line had become more entrenched, like a moat intended to keep them apart.
Earlier that morning on the bus, she had sat next to Tere, a girl who lived around the corner from the apartment, and she thought about telling her everything, the meals and talks they would have at his house, the way she started finding more work for herself so their afternoons wouldn’t end so quickly, the first time she thought he might be interested, the first time they kissed, the first time they were really together, but mainly about all the things that worried her now. After the bus dropped them off, she had another chance to tell her during the walk to the bridge and even during the walk to the other side, and then again when they were both waiting for their rides on the street. She didn’t tell her for two reasons: the first was that Tere was just a girl who lived around the corner from the apartment. They had spoken a handful of times when they happened to be on the same schedule or they ran into each other at the little store down the street, each buying something for her mother, but this was the extent of their friendship. Maybe she would’ve had someone to tell if she hadn’t spent all her time either working or at home. Which was the second reason she had stopped herself from saying anything to Tere: she didn’t want it getting back to her mother and aunt. Already she could hear them accusing her of offering herself to him. Explaining it wasn’t like that and that things had started innocently between them would do little to help her mother understand what had happened.
She’d learned her lesson with Rogelio. The first years were difficult because of his temper, which seemed to be set off with the slightest disagreement. Her mother had told her to be more forgiving, that he would change once they had a family. It would be natural for him to want to be patient with their children. And perhaps this was true, but after four years she still wasn’t pregnant. He didn’t want to hear about her body. He didn’t want to know about her cycle or anything else that did not directly concern him. That was for her to talk about with other women. He was not a woman — he was her husband. And no, there was no money to go see a special doctor. If they were ever going to have a child, it would be the same way every other man and woman did it, not with the help of some doctor. And so she prayed for God to bring them the child they had been waiting for. The miracle happened shortly after their sixth wedding anniversary, only not for her. Rather than stay with him at his family’s house, she moved home. Her mother tried to convince her to go back, speaking of him as though nothing had changed and he was the same polite boy whose older brother and father had walked over to ask for her hand. The truth was she couldn’t stop blaming herself for his wandering and finding someone else who could give him what he wanted. With a baby on the way, he started crossing the river again to look for work. She never liked the idea of him swimming to the other side, but it had never been in his nature to agree with her, so as usual he continued doing whatever occurred to him. As time passed she came to accept that this baby and its mother were not going to change things: Rogelio was still her husband; she was still his wife. After a couple of weeks away, she decided she was ready to move back. She was waiting to tell him this when his naked body turned up, floating in the steady current beneath the bridge.
Just thinking of that time made her want to leave the hospital. She stalled by looking inside the bag, pretending to search for some item she might have forgotten. After all this effort she knew she couldn’t leave now, not when it had taken her most of the morning to work up the courage to ask for a ride. Perhaps she’d imagined it, but it seemed as if la se?ora had hesitated, as if she might not have heard correctly — The cleaning woman wants a ride to the hospital so she can visit the man she works for? Socorro wrestled with the feeling that she might be stepping beyond what was considered acceptable or proper, and in this way revealing what he had wanted to keep private. She asked herself how it would look if she went to the hospital for any of the other people whose houses she cleaned, some for much longer periods of time, but then decided it was better to not wait around for the answer.
She stood at the door, not wanting to interrupt what the doctor might be saying or wake the patient if he happened to be resting. Maybe she would just leave his clothes at the nurses’ station. When she did look around the corner, it was a nurse who was standing next to the bed and writing some notes on a metal clipboard. Don Celestino was lying back in the bed against a couple of pillows. His disheveled white hair from earlier that morning was now combed back in the way he normally wore it, and it looked as though he had shaved, maybe even trimmed the edges of his mustache.
“Is that you, Socorro?” he asked, squinting through his tinted glasses. “You came all this way to visit me in the hospital?” He used both hands to adjust himself and sit up straight in the bed. “Look at how they attached all these wires to me. All I needed was to eat a good breakfast so my sugar would be back to normal again. Now they want to run some tests, just to be sure about my heart. Please, Socorro, tell this young man here that I have many more years left in me. Tell him Celestino Rosales is not going anywhere.” He held his hands out for her to come closer.
She walked to the bed and kissed him on the cheek. It was a common enough gesture, one she had repeated countless times throughout her life, though never with anyone whose house she cleaned. And as his white whiskers brushed against her cheek, she wanted more than anything to believe that the differences in their ages and positions were gently being swept aside.