“No question about it. Oh, there’s an outside chance that a fishing boat might have picked us up if the Coast Guard had not found us. But the Coast Guard did find us and did save us.”
“Is your life—your two lives—worth less than eight thousand pesos? Mine is worth considerably more, I assure you.”
“It isn’t that, sir. We have no money, not a cent. It all went down with the boat.”
“So send for money. You can have it sent care of the consulate. I’ll go that far.”
“Thank you. It will take time. In the meantime how can I get them off my neck? I was told that this judge will want cash and immediately.”
“Oh, it’s not that bad. It’s true that they don’t permit bankruptcy the way we do, and they do have a rather old-fashioned debtors-prison law. But they don’t use it—just the threat of it. Instead the court will see that you get a job that will let you settle your indebtedness. Don Clemente is a humane judge; he will take care of you.”
Aside from flowery nonsense directed at Margrethe, that ended it. We picked up Sergeant Roberto, who had been enjoying backstairs hospitality from the maid and the cook, and headed for the courthouse.
Don Clemente (Judge Ibañez) was as pleasant as Don Ambrosio had said he would be. Since we informed the clerk at once that we stipulated the debt but did not have the cash to pay it, there was no trial. We were simply seated in the uncrowded courtroom and cold to wait while the judge disposed of cases on his docket. He handled several quickly. Some were minor offenses drawing fines; some were debt cases; some were hearings for later trial. I could not tell much about what was going on and whispering was frowned on, so Margrethe could not tell me much. But he was certainly no hanging judge.
The cases at hand were finished; at a word from the clerk we went out back with the “miscreants”—peasants, mostly—who owed fines or debts. We found ourselves lined up on a low platform, facing a group of men. Margrethe asked what this was—and was answered, “La subasta.”
“What’s that?” I asked her.
“Alec, I’m not sure. It’s not a word I know.”
Settlements were made quickly on the others; I gathered that most of them had been there before. Then there was just one man left of the group off the platform, just us on the platform. The man remaining looked sleekly prosperous. He smiled and spoke to me. Margrethe answered.
“What is he saying?” I asked.
“He asked you if you can wash dishes. I told him that you do not speak Spanish.”
“Tell him that of course I can wash dishes. But that’s hardly a job I want.”
Five minutes later our debt had been paid, in cash, to the clerk of the court, and we had acquired a patrón, Señor Jaime Valera Guzman. He paid sixty pesos a day for Margrethe, thirty for me, plus our found. Court costs were twenty-five hundred pesos, plus fees for two nonresident work permits, plus war-tax stamps. The clerk figured our total indebtedness, then divided it out for us: In only a hundred and twenty-one days—four months—our obligation to our patrón would be discharged. Unless, of course, we spent some money during that time.
He also directed us to our patrón’s place of business, Restaurante Pancho Villa. Our patrón had already left in his private car. Patrones ride; peones walk.
XI
And Jacob served seven years for Rachel;
and they seemed unto him but a few days,
for the love he had to her.
Genesis 29:20
Sometimes, while washing dishes, I would amuse myself by calculating how high a stack of dishes I had washed since going to work for our patrón, Don Jaime. The ordinary plate used in Pancho Villa cafe stacked twenty plates to a foot. I arbitrarily decided that a cup and saucer, or two glasses, would count as one plate, since these items did not stack well. And so forth.
The great Mazatlán lighthouse is five hundred and fifteen feet tall, only forty feet shorter than the Washington Monument. I remember the day I completed my first “lighthouse stack.” I had told Margrethe earlier that week that I was approaching my goal and expected to reach it by Thursday or early Friday.
And did so, Thursday evening—and left the scullery, stood in the door between the kitchen and the dining room, caught Margrethe’s eye, raised my hands high and shook hands with myself like a pugilist.
Margrethe stopped what she was doing—taking orders from a family party—and applauded. This caused her to have to explain to her guests what was going on, and that resulted in her stopping by the scullery a few minutes later to pass to me a ten-peso note, a congratulatory gift from the father of that family. I asked her to thank him for me, and please tell him that I had just started my second lighthouse stack, which I was dedicating to him and his family.
Which in turn resulted in Señora Valera sending her husband, Don Jaime, to find out why Margrethe was wasting time and making a scene instead of paying attention to her work…which resulted in Don Jaime inquiring how much the diners had tipped me and then matching it.
The Señora had no reason to complain; Margrethe was not only her best waitress; she was her only bilingual waitress. The day we started to work for Sr. y Sra. Valera a sign painter was called in to paint a conspicuous sign: ENGLIS SPOKE HERE. Thereafter, in addition to being available for any English-speaking guests, Margrethe prepared menus in English (and the prices on the menus in English were about forty percent higher than the prices on the all-Spanish menus).
Don Jaime was not a bad boss. He was cheerful and, on the whole, kindly to his employees. When we had been there about a month, he told me that he would not have bid in my debt had it not been that the judge would not permit my contract to be separated from Margrethe’s contract, we being a married couple (else I could have found myself a field hand able to see my wife only on rare occasions—as Don Ambrosio had told me, Don Clemente was a humane judge).
I told him that I was happy that the package included me but it simply showed his good judgment to want to hire Margrethe.
He agreed that that was true. He had attended the Wednesday labor auctions several weeks on end in search of a bilingual woman or girl who could be trained as a waitress, then had bid me in as well to obtain Margrethe—but he wished to tell me that he had not regretted it as he had never seen the scullery so clean, the dishes so immaculate, the silverware so shiny.
I assured him that it was my happy privilege to help uphold the honor and prestige of Restaurante Pancho Villa and its distinguished patrón, el Don Jaime.
In fact it would have been difficult for me not to improve that scullery. When I took over, I thought at first that the floor was dirt. And so it was—you could have planted potatoes!—but under the filth, about a half inch down, was sound concrete. I cleaned and then kept it clean—my feet were still bare. Then I demanded roach powder.
Each morning I killed roaches and cleaned the floor. Each evening, just before quitting for the day, I sprinkled roach powder. It is impossible (I think) to conquer roaches, but it is possible to fight them to a draw, force them back and maintain a holding action.
As to the quality of my dishwashing, it could not be otherwise; my mother had a severe dirt phobia and, because of my placement in a large family, I washed or wiped dishes under her eye from age seven through thirteen (at which time I graduated through taking on a newspaper route that left me no time for dishwashing).
But just because I did it well, do not think I was enamored of dishwashing. It had bored me as a child; it bored me as a man.
Then why did I do it? Why didn’t I run away?
Isn’t that evident? Dishwashing kept me with Margrethe. Running away might be feasible for some debtors—I don’t think much effort went into trying to track down and bring back debtors who disappeared some dark night—but running away was not feasible for a married couple, one of whom was a conspicuous blonde in a country in which any blonde is always conspicuous and the other was a man who could not speak Spanish.
While we both worked hard—eleven to eleven each
day except Tuesday, with a nominal two hours off for siesta and a half hour each for lunch and dinner—we had the other twelve hours each day to ourselves, plus all day Tuesday.
Niagara Falls never supplied a finer honeymoon. We had a tiny attic room at the back of the restaurant building. It was hot but we weren’t there much in the heat of the day—by eleven at night it was comfortable no matter how hot the day had been. In Mazatlán most residents of our social class (zero!) did not have inside plumbing. But we worked and lived in a restaurant building; there was a flush toilet we shared with other employees during working hours and shared with no one the other twelve hours of each day. (There was also a Maw Jones out back, which I sometimes used during working hours—I don’t think Margrethe ever used it.)
We had the use of a shower on the ground floor, back to back with the employees’ toilet, and the needs of the scullery were such that the building had a large water heater. Señora Valera scolded us regularly for using too much hot water (“Gas costs money!”); we listened in silence and went right on using whatever amount of hot water we needed.
Our patrón’s contract with the state required him to supply us with food and shelter (and clothing, under the law, but I did not learn this until too late to matter), which is why we slept there, and of course we ate there—not the chef’s specialties, but quite good food.
“Better is a dinner of herbs where love is, than a stalled ox and hatred therewith.” We had only ourselves; it was enough.
Margrethe, because she sometimes received tips, especially from gringos, was slowly accumulating cash money. We spent as little of this as possible—she bought shoes for each of us—and she saved against the day when we would be free of our peonage and able to go north. I had no illusions that the nation north of us was the land of my birth…but it was this world’s analog of it; English was spoken there and I was sure that its culture would have to be closer to what we had been used to.
Tips to Margrethe brought us into friction with Señora Valera the very first week. While Don Jaime was legally our patrón, she owned the restaurant—or so we were told by Amanda the cook. Jaime Valera had once been headwaiter there and had married the owner’s daughter. This made him permanent maître d’hôtel. When his father-in-law died, he became the owner in the eyes of the public. But his wife retained the purse strings and presided over the cash register.
(Perhaps I should add that he was “Don Jaime” to us because he was our patrón; he was not a Don to the public. The honorific “Don” will not translate into English, but owning a restaurant does not make a man a Don—but, for example, being a judge does.)
The first time Margrethe was seen to receive a tip, the Señora told her to turn it over—at the end of each week she would receive her percentage.
Margrethe came straight to me in the scullery. “Alec, what shall I do? Tips were my main income in the Konge Knut and no one ever asked me to share them. Can she do this to me?”
I told her not to turn her tips over to the Señora but to tell her that we would discuss it with her at the end of the day.
There is one advantage to being a peón: You don’t get fired over a disagreement with your boss. Certainly we could be fired…but that would simply lose the Valeras some ten thousand pesos they had invested in us.
By the end of the day I knew exactly what to say and how to say it—how Margrethe must say it, as it was another month before I soaked up enough Spanish to maintain a minimum conversation:
“Sir and Madam, we do not understand this ruling about gifts to me. We want to see the judge and ask him what our contract requires.”
As I had suspected, they were not willing to see the judge about it. They were legally entitled to Margrethe’s service but they had no claim on money given to her by a third party.
This did not end it. Señora Valera was so angry at being balked by a mere waitress that she had a sign posted: NO PROPINAS—NO TIPS, and the same notice was placed in the menus.
Peones can’t strike. But there were five other waitresses, two of them Amanda’s daughters. The day Señora Valera ordered no tipping she found that she had just one waitress (Margrethe) and no one in the kitchen. She gave up. But I am sure she never forgave us.
Don Jaime treated us as employees; his wife treated us as slaves. Despite that old cliché about “wage slaves,” there is a world of difference. Since we both tried hard to be faithful employees while paying off our debt but flatly refused to be slaves, we were bound to tangle with Señora Valera.
Shortly after the disagreement over tips Margrethe became convinced that the Señora was snooping in our bedroom. If true, there was no way to stop her; there was no lock for the door and she could enter our room without fear of being caught any day while we were working.
I gave some thought to boobytraps until Margrethe vetoed the idea. She simply thereafter kept her money on her person. But it was a measure of what we thought of our “patroness” that Margrethe considered it necessary to take precautions against her stealing from us.
We did not let Señora Valera spoil our happiness. And we did not let our dubious status as a “married” couple spoil our somewhat irregular honeymoon. Oh, I would have spoiled it because I always have had this unholy itch to analyze matters I really do not know how to analyze. But Margrethe is much more practical than I am and simply did not permit it. I tried to rationalize our relationship to her by pointing out that polygamy was not forbidden by Holy Writ but solely by modern law and custom—and she chopped me off briskly by saying that she had no interest in how many wives or concubines King Solomon had and did not regard him or any Old Testament character as a model for her own behavior. If I did not want to live with her, speak up! Say so!
I shut up. Some problems are best let be, not chewed over with words. This modern compulsion to “talk it out” is a mistake at least as often as it is a solution.
But her disdain for Biblical authority concerning the legality of one man having two wives was so sharp that I asked her about it later—not about polygamy; I stayed away from that touchy subject; I asked her how she felt about, the authority of Holy Writ in general. I explained that the church I was brought up in believed in strict interpretation—“A whole Bible, not a Bible full of holes”—Scripture was the literal word of God…but that I knew that other churches felt that the spirit rather than the letter ruled…some being so liberal that they hardly bothered with the Bible. Yet all of them called themselves Christian.
“Margrethe my love, as deputy executive secretary of Churches United for Decency I was in daily contact with members of every Protestant sect in the country and in liaison association with many Roman Catholic clerics on matters where we could join in a united front. I learned that my own church did not have a monopoly on virtue. A man could be awfully mixed up in religious fundamentals and still be a fine citizen and a devout Christian.”
I chuckled as I recalled something and went on, “Or to put it in reverse, one of my Catholic friends, Father Mahaffey, told me that even I could squeeze into Heaven, because the Good Lord in His infinite wisdom made allowances for the ignorance and wrongheadedness of Protestants.”
This conversation took place on a Tuesday, our day off, the one day a week the restaurant did not open, and in consequence we were on top of el Cerro de la Nevería—Icebox Hill, but it sounds better in Spanish—and just finishing a picnic lunch. This hill was downtown, close to Pancho Villa café, but was a bucolic oasis; the citizens had followed the Spanish habit of turning hills into parks rather than building on them. A happy place—
“My dear, I would never try to proselytize you into my church. But I do want to know as much about you as possible. I find that I don’t know much about churches in Denmark. Mostly Lutheran, I think—but does Denmark have its own established state church like some other European nations? Either way, which church is yours, and is it strict interpretationist or liberal—and again, either way, how do you feel about it? And remember what Father Mahaffey said—I
agree with him. I don’t think that my church has the only door into Heaven.”
I was lying stretched out; Margrethe was seated with her knees drawn up and holding them and was faced west, staring out to sea. This placed her with her face turned away from me. She did not answer my query. Presently I said gently, “My dear, did you hear me?”
“I heard you.”
Again I waited, then added, “If I have been prying where I should not pry, I’m sorry and I withdraw the question.”
“No. I knew that I would have to answer it some day. Alec, I am not a Christian.” She let go her knees, swung around, and looked me in the eye. “You can have a divorce as simply as we married, just by telling me so. I won’t fight it; I will go quietly away. But, Alec, when you told me that you loved me, then later when you told me that we were married in the eyes of God, you did not ask me my religion.”
“Margrethe.”
“Yes, Alec?”
“First, wash out your mouth. Then ask my pardon.”
“There may be enough wine left in the bottle to rinse out my mouth. But I cannot ask pardon for not telling you this. I would have answered truthfully at any time. You did not ask.”
“Wash out your mouth for talking about divorce. Ask my pardon for daring to think that I would ever divorce you under any circumstances whatever. If you are ever naughty enough, I may beat you. But I would never put you away. For richer, for poorer, in sickness and health, now and forever. Woman, I love you! Get that through your head.”
Suddenly she was in my arms, weeping for only the second time, and I was doing the only thing possible, namely, kissing her.
I heard a cheer behind me and turned my head. We had had the top of the hill to ourselves, it being a work day for most people. But I found that we had an audience of two streetwise urchins, so young that sex was unclear. Catching my eye, one of them cheered again, then made loud kissing noises.
“Beat it!” I called out. “Scram! Vaya con Dios! Is that what I wanted to say, Marga?”