I arrived in the Bronx on the Fourth of July 1993 with nothing to lose, so I was able to drift along without thinking too much about it. My sister had arrived three years before me at the same time of year. We both immigrated in an airplane, with tourist visas. For myself, the most difficult thing was borrowing some money in order to open a savings account and trick the U.S. embassy in Mexico City into thinking I really had enough cash to be a legitimate tourist, while maintaining the attitude of someone who couldn’t care less. In Mexico, I had been unemployed for a year after quitting my last job as a butcher in a swank restaurant. I would start in the evenings and finish at dawn, returning home after a two-hour trip in a small bus following routes designed expressly for those of us on nightshift schedules, mostly at restaurants and clubs. Exhaustion traveled in the packed convoys, as well as a resentment that, with each shove upon getting off, getting on, or grabbing a seat, threatened to erupt into an all-out brawl, which the majority longed for as an outlet for their frustrations. Even though we recognized one another from the commute, there was always a reason to suspect that the other guy held the worst intentions. Many traveled plastered or stoned in order to catch some shut-eye before getting home. In those years, Coca-Cola had yet to become one of the basic food groups of many day laborers; but even then I experienced an intense love-hate relationship with the beverage and with my weak will. I was reckless about destroying myself and a coward when it came to assuming any responsibility about my predicament.
Before leaving Mexico, my only distractions were reading and the fading love of a woman who fed on her obsessive fears through me. At the slightest provocation, I would recite to her from memory something from Louis-Ferdinand Céline that always helped me during my all-hours journey through the city: “Travel is very useful and it exercises the imagination. All the rest is disappointment and fatigue. Our own journey is entirely imaginary. That is its strength.”
I had never come up with any specific goals apart from having a few bucks to keep myself afloat. In reality, far from the tragedies marking the routes of the average day laborer, my perception of work rested on the experiences of my father in Rosenberg, Texas, twenty-three years ago. He never complained or mentioned any insults or abuse.
From the Bronx, Norma wired some money to Mexico to help me set something aside for the plane ticket. She did so by subletting half of a large room she rented for $350 per month in one of those four-story redbrick vertical houses called brownstones. Sometime in the not too distant past, the bleak houses of the South Bronx housed working-class Irish, Italians, and Jews. Now they were rented out as tenements to inhabitants who were mainly black or Latino. One house could mix entire families, including different nationalities, equipped with their own prejudices, traditions, and nostalgia. The substance of daily anecdotes in the neighborhood was picaresque and tragic.
Initially, Norma and I got along well enough because our work schedules made it impossible for us to run into each other during the week. In Mexico, Norma had gotten married to and divorced from an egocentric and alcoholic painter who had taken their daughter and fled to Italy. At the height of this crisis, Norma met Rose, our landlady, when Rose was visiting Mexico to exhibit her sculptures, neither losing nor gaining any fame, in a gallery far from the capital. Norma’s husband had arranged the contacts and a place to stay in Mexico; he used to travel abroad using the same strategy. Rose was a slender fortysomething whose parents were Italian. She was as an assistant principal at a Manhattan art school and bought the house on the urging of her second husband, a Nuyorican with a top-ranking position on the city’s Council on the Arts. After a few years, when their divorce was finalized, Rose kept the house. She put up all types of nutcases, artists, and loners who worked in the arts and who would quickly move to safer neighborhoods at the first opportunity.
Despite our origins, Rose believed in keeping an open mind about different ethnicities, something that was important to maintain in the South Bronx. Norma and I piqued the curiosity of our fellow renters, who had neuroses like ours, but were all gringos: Rose’s much younger boyfriend, Joe; Sandra Parker, her antisocial confidante and accomplice; Mark, a son from Rose’s first marriage; and Mark’s wife, Carol.
Joe moved in shortly before I did. He was tall and well-built, like some Faulknerian farmer with a severe poker face. If a murder had been committed in the house, Joe would have been the prime suspect. When he opened his mouth, it was only to eat. He and Norma couldn’t stand each other. Joe’s quiet insolence amused me; he didn’t compel others to be polite or engage in chitchat, even when he prepared many of the Sunday suppers—almost always a roasted chicken with potatoes or a lasagna—when Rose and Norma played the role of little sisters getting the family together. At the table, Joe shoveled in enormous mouthfuls while hiding behind the newspaper. Norma always accused him of being a parasite, the thorn in her side. He knew this, and when Norma was about to explode over some crisis regarding household chores and his lack of accountability, Joe would shut her down with a “Hello. How you doin’?” while on his way to the refrigerator, where he would wolf down sandwiches and defiantly stare deep into a cabinet.
Our room on the top floor was separated from Sandra’s with a shared bathroom. Sandra, always dressed in black, was a fan of Elvis and cats, especially her own: Graceland. Sandra left lit cigarettes beside her plate during Sunday suppers, the only day when she would sit at the table with everyone else, the feeble and curling smoke protecting her from the bombardment of intrusions on her life. Everyone felt they had the right to give her advice or to fix her up with a love interest.
Upon returning from work, she often bit the tip of her dark glasses while listening to the messages on the answering machine. Then she rushed upstairs to her room to sit in front of the window with a view of the backyard. She would spend hours like that with a sad look in her eyes, her gaze lost among the bricks of the neighboring wall and its tapestry of ivy, which definitively announced the turning of each season. While petting Graceland, Sandra would chain-smoke with a glass of brandy. Slight and silent and approaching forty, she had watched her youth get bogged down during the Cold War. In an enormous trunk with a mirror were stored imitation jewelry and clothes dating from that period, which she used on special occasions.
At night I would go to the kitchen for a beer and sit down in the dining room in order to admire the ancient lineage of the house with its high ceilings, antique rugs and furniture, enormous altarpieces on the walls, and bright hardwood floor. The bookshelves were one more decoration; no one was interested in the books on mysticism or interior decoration, nor the novels penned by women. Rose had inherited some of the furniture from her parents, and she was careful about keeping it in a dusty and careless state. Someone else would clean it. Norma, for example. The house enclosed an atmosphere of stale gentrification cut off from the danger of the streets and its disturbing cacophony.
Sometimes Sandra came down from her room with a bottle of brandy in one hand and Graceland in the other, pressed against her plum-shaped breasts, and we would talk.
“How’s work going?”
“I guess it’s okay,” I answered. “At least I haven’t set myself on fire.”
I was alluding to the giant stove at the restaurant where I had recently found a job.
“Like a bonze monk?”
“Let’s say that I don’t have a religious bent.”
“That’s...good...surviving is what matters, or isn’t that so?”
“Yes. Keeping my mind occupied.”
She would return to the long stretches of silence by preparing doubles with ice while softly laughing at a joke that she wouldn’t share with anyone. We were the only self-confessed alcoholics at the house. We would sporadically hear arguments or moaning from Mark and Carol’s basement studio, where a sweet odor of marijuana would escape whenever Joe was there playing video games with Mark.
Sandra and I talked about experiences invariably alluding to infectious diseases or mental illness (she tirelessly