g From the Golden Sleep
Daniel Wetta
Copyright 2014 by Daniel Wetta
Awakening from the Golden Sleep
The Childhood of Ana Valdez
Mazatlán, México
1983 to 1986
Ana Sophía Valdez nació en 1971 en Mazatlán, México. In Spanish, the verb describing being born is in the active tense. It is something a person does, not something happening to a person. The beautiful way of saying that her mother gave birth to her in Spanish is that her mother, Lili, gave Ana to light. Mothers do that in Mexico. They give their children to light.
Ana was the last of six children, all girls. When she was born, her mother was twenty-seven and her father forty-nine. His name was Javier, and he had married Lili when she was seventeen and he was thirty-nine. She worked in the large and successful housewares store which Javier had begun as a hardware concession twenty years earlier. He had the foresight to purchase a building for nearly nothing in the downtown area near the beach before the boom period of the 1950s. Like so many Mexican men in those days, Javier came from a poor family, and because there was no welfare system on the scale known in Europe and the United States, he had only one way to survive: that was to hustle and work. So Javier left school after the third grade to work to support his family. An intelligent and immensely curious man with a natural sense of business (take in more money than you pay out; sell on consignment rather than finance the inventory), Javier began selling kitchen utensils and tools in his teenage years. He sought friendships with older, established merchants. They learned that on Javier’s handshake, they could depend on him to deliver whatever he promised. So by the time he was thirty, Javier had his downtown housewares store.
He compensated for lack of schooling by educating himself. He read voraciously in the few hours he was not working during a day. He liked reading classic literature and geography. He studied used business textbooks that he got from friends who went to college. He also realized the importance of exercise. Physically strong and well formed, he began a lifetime routine of swimming in the ocean for an hour early in the mornings before work.
Her mother gave Ana Sophía to light in Mazatlán, "the Pearl of the Pacific," just after its heyday of the 1950s and 60s, when movie stars and celebrities from the United States and Europe flocked to its lovely beaches. Offshore, manly sports fishermen such as John Wayne, Gary Cooper, and John Huston discovered the tuna near its waters. The city’s ideal year-round climate attracted retirees from the USA and Canada by the scores. They bought houses near the downtown area with its laid back, historic neighborhoods of tree-lined streets and Spanish-styled homes. Many stayed six months of the year, beginning in October, and so tourism, food service, and the hospitality industry flourished. This gave the gentle and polite native Mexicans in Mazatlán reason to learn English. Of course, there was economic disparity between the poor citizens of the city and the wealthy visitors from the North, but the Mexicans were grateful for the employment opportunities, and the ex-pats of foreign lands fell under the charms of these pleasant and attractive people. In the ‘70s, as other tourist ports such as the Mayan Riviera became popular along the Gulf of Mexico, the old Mazatlán began to decline. A new Golden Mile of time share developments and mega resorts sprung up on beaches north of the city and prospered with amazing rapidity.
Lili came to work in Javier’s store. Once Javier met Lili, he was a man in love the rest of his life. He married a young beautiful girl with common sense and reserve, a perfect person to manage the large family he wanted to have once he got established financially. In the first months before children, Javier came home at lunch every day and made love to his wife. After the children arrived, he came home to have lunch every day with his family, a tradition seldom breached. He adored each of his daughters, and he could not believe his good fortune to have six of them. The last of them was Ana. She was the first daughter to look like him. Definitely she inherited his love of the classics, education, the arts, and all things Mexican. She also had something that delighted Javier to the end of his days: a voracious appetite to devour life and to go for what she had never tried before.
When Ana was four, her father was successful enough to move his family into the seventeen-room, two-story house in Mazatlán's wealthiest neighborhood, in the historic district. The house resembled a large Spanish-styled bed-and-breakfast with tall narrow windows running nearly floor to ceiling on both floors and a front porch running the length of the house. The sides of the home almost completely enclosed a back garden. The central feature of the home was the oversized “cocina” (kitchen) with windows kept open nearly year round to the garden. The stove in the kitchen had eight gas burners and featured a huge oven. A heavy Mexican oak table that could seat twenty persons dominated the room. This was a necessity in a household of seven women and the extended family of children, neighbors, friends, and adopted aunts and uncles. All day, every day, Mexican women took shifts in the kitchen. Ana remembered this like watching a sped up time lapse of women passing through. They would be sitting and chatting; preparing chili, shrimp ceviche, fried fish, or barbacoa; talking above one another; interfering with Lili’s cooking; planning the week's fiestas, and discussing the ones just attended. In the early years, Ana was the little girl under the feet of everyone, always there with her Barbie dolls. Her two oldest sisters were already teenagers with seats at the table, but, in just a few short years, Ana had her place in the fray.
One of the women in the home was Lucía, whom Lili hired to help her keep up with the mountains of washing and ironing for the busy shop owner, his tireless wife, and six spirited and clever young daughters. The room for the washing and ironing was a large service room off the kitchen with a door to the outside where the washed clothes could be put. Lucía kept the door to the kitchen open so that she could listen to the commotion of conversations around the table and the stove; but more importantly, so that she could contribute her opinions. Everyone respected her right to do this. To relieve stress, Lucía smoked constantly. Ana could not stop wondering about its taste, and from the age of six she begged Lucía to let her try a cigarette. Finally, one day when Ana was nine, Lucía thought she should teach this determined girl a lesson. She handed Ana the lit cigarette from her mouth. Of course, Ana went into a coughing fit and with a flair for drama threw the cigarette on the floor as her body convulsed from coughing. But by the time Ana was twelve, she was a steady and sophisticated smoker. She taught a couple of her older sisters how to inhale properly in order to calm their teenage nerves.
When Ana was eight, she loved to ride in the car with her father to the housewares store on Saturdays. They would have an early morning swim together and, afterwards, change in a bathroom for employees. While Javier worked, Ana passed the morning chatting with the workers in the store and then venturing out to the other stores and restaurants where she knew almost everyone. Later, she met up with friends from her Catholic school or neighborhood. Ana knew all the cracks in the sidewalks and felt she owned that part of the city. Javier would never allow her to go too far, but every Saturday afternoon Ana successfully pestered him into letting her return to the beach with her friends.
But what thrilled Ana the most were the rides in her father’s cars. Javier had a passion for Chevrolet. One luxury he allowed himself was to have a new car every year. He also kept a Jeep and an old Chevy pickup. Ana was dying to drive. She was short, but she watched attentively when her father shifted gears, applied the clutch, braked, and accelerated. When she was eight years old, her legs wouldn’t reach the floor pedals, but Ana was certain that if that handicap could be overcome, she could drive with no problem. She liked to sneak into the Jeep and imagine shifting gea
rs. She envisioned the route to her father’s store as she looked through the windshield. Pretending her girlfriends had piled into the jeep with her, Ana shot off to the beach. They adored her for taking them along.
Then, one day when Ana was twelve, just after she had started sixth grade, she saw that her legs had become long enough to reach the floor pedals of the Jeep. It was a balmy, fall Saturday morning. Ana skipped riding into town with her father. She waited for her mother to become especially occupied in the kitchen with her sisters. Two of her sisters were away in college in Monterrey, and none of the other three had learned to drive. Her own mother seldom did. So Ana felt that it was time that one of the Valdez women should be able to make the errand runs into town and not leave so many things for her poor overworked father to do. It should be her. She wanted to surprise him with her grownup skills. Knowing that he kept his vehicle keys on the night table beside his bed, Ana retrieved the set to the Jeep. Although she had started the Jeep before, she felt her heart in her throat this time knowing that she was going