Ernesto has two daughters by Loca, a woman from his neighborhood. He is adamant that he didn’t like Loca and never married her, but he has always loved his daughters. He calls them Princesa and Reina. In this essay, I call them Uno and Dos.
Loca’s mother owned the house that Neto and Loca rented when the girls were young. Most mornings, Loca’s mother would put her fat head in his bedroom window and yell, “Get up you good-for-nothing lazy ass.” When I first met Ernesto, he was working nights as a security guard at a parking lot. He had often just returned home from working overnight when his landlady appeared at his window.
The first year Neto worked for me, he was excited about Christmas. He saved $700 from his paychecks to buy gifts for Uno and Dos, who were six and ten years old. It was the first time he had money to spend for gifts. He bought bicycles and art supplies. The girls were delighted when they saw their gifts on Christmas night. They called him Papí and gave him hugs and kisses. After he put the girls to bed, he came back to the living room and Loca threw him out of the house. She told him never to return. He was too embarrassed to tell me or his mother what had happened, so he went to sleep on the beach. The girls woke up the day after Christmas Day and he was gone.
When Neto came to work for me the next day, I asked him, “How was your Christmas?”
“It was nice,” he told me. “The girls really liked their gifts.”
Neto spent the next nine months sleeping in the sand. He slept on the beach until he moved into my house the following September.
Loca tormented me the entire time I lived in Mazatlán. She didn’t want Neto to live with her and the girls, but she didn’t want him at my house, either. Eventually, she chased me out of Mexico. She was not the only reason I left, of course, but she was one of the main ones.
Loca’s weapon was the telephone. She called my house at all hours, wanting to speak to Neto. If I answered the phone, she hung up and immediately called back. One night, when Neto was at his AA meeting, she called sixty-three times in a row. It was a landline so I could get calls from the U.S. After that, I unplugged the phone and only plugged it in when Neto was home.
Loca knew that Neto was devoted to his daughters, especially Dos. She would call late at night with alarming news:
“Dos has been raped. You need to meet me at the hospital.”
“Dos is choking. You need to take us to the hospital.”
“The girls have run away. You need to help me look for them.”
Neto would jump on his bicycle and fly out of the house. Of course, all of these were false alarms, but what father would take a chance? Certainly not Neto.
The five years I lived in Mexico, I noticed that the girls wore clothes that were dirty, torn and wrong for the season. They didn’t do well in school. Uno failed two grades in elementary school and didn’t move on to middle school until she was thirteen years old. Neto tried to get custody of the girls but was denied by a judge, who was bribed by Loca’s mother.
One day, I heard someone pounding on my front door. I opened the door and saw an armored truck full of police carrying automatic weapons.
“We have reports that you have kidnapped this woman’s children,” said a policewoman, who spoke English. “Where are they?”
“I did not kidnap them! They are not here,” I answered.
Loca was standing next to two policemen. She was speaking in agitated Spanish. I lost it. I started screaming in a mixture of English and tortured Spanish. “This woman is crazy! Because of her, I’m leaving Mexico and never coming back.”
“Please don’t leave,” the policewoman said. “We believe you. But we had to check this out.”
I left Mexico in 2010 and Neto went back to living at his mother’s house. They girls visited him every Sunday, asking for money and food.
Follow-up:
Uno is now 28 years old. She has a son and a daughter, by a man from the neighborhood. He is a known drug-dealer and is often in rehab. Uno lives with her mother-in-law and works full-time. She calls Neto about once/week.
Dos is 24 years old. She has two daughters. She lives with a man who is an Uber driver and she calls Neto only when the Uber car breaks down. She seldom calls, unless I am visiting. Then she calls relentlessly, just as her mother did years ago.
The parish priest recently came hurrying down the street to find Neto. A band a neighbors were close behind.
“Neto, you have to do something with Loca.”
“Why? What is she doing?”
She is standing outside my church, yelling, “The Virgin Mary is a whore!”
“Call the police,” Neto told them. “I’ve never been able to do anything with that woman. She’s Loca!”
