Los Tres Amigos

It was the rainy season and the roof was leaking. Water poured into the bedrooms.

“When can we fix these leaks?” I asked, as we emptied buckets of water into the courtyard.

“When the rainy season is over,” Neto insisted.

“When will that be?’

“October 15th.” 

I’d never experienced rain like this before. Certainly not in Colorado. From June until October, rain flooded the streets. Palm trees bent in the wind until they were nearly horizontal. Dogs and cats hid under abandoned cars. The humidity was stifling. 

October 15th, Neto showed up with heavy-duty metal spatulas to scrape decades of tar and styrofoam off the roof. Publio and Pepé, his best friends, were with him. They assembled a scaffold and built a makeshift ladder from 2×4’s

Laborers in Mexico earn very little money. A skilled tile-layer or carpenter earns 200 pesos for a ten hour day. When I first moved to Mexico, that amounted to $20/day (U.S.). Now, under the current exchange rate, that amounts to $10/day. It is a shockingly stingy amount of money. Food costs roughly the same in Mexico and the U.S.. Clothing actually costs more. Housing is the only commodity that costs less.    

I rewarded my workers by providing lunch for them every day. As a special treat for showing up on Mondays, I ordered tortas from Tortas Kuwait, the sandwich shop down the street. The rest of the week I cooked. I bought a Mexican cookbook and worked my way through the pages: Tortilla soup, flautas, tacos, quesadillas, rice and beans, macaroni and cheese with marlin, whatever sounded good as I flipped through the pages. The only worker who was fussy was Christina. She told me during the first week that people in Mazatlan never eat black beans. “That’s for the poor people from the South.”

The roof project took more than three weeks.

Day 1. No rain. Neto set up the ladder. It consisted of a scaffold with a long board attached diagonally to one side. Small sections of 2×4’s  were hammered onto the board, to create footholds up the slope. Neto, Publio, and Pepé ran up the ladder and started working at 9:00. By 10:00 the sun was beating down on them and sweat was pouring off their faces. They drank gallons of water and kept working.

Day 2. Still no rain. Neto hauled a big bucket of sand up the ladder, along with a beach umbrella that looked like a giant watermelon. He plopped the umbrella in the bucket of sand and now they had shade. 

Day 3. Still no rain. I was beginning to believe the rainy season was over. Neto asked if he could borrow my boom box to take to the roof, along with the watermelon umbrella and the bucket of sand. Now the guys had shade and music. They sang and laughed as they continued to scrape layers of mold and crud from the old roof. 

Day 4. Neto brought a new worker, a young guy from Vera Cruz, to help load the old, stinky roof into buckets to take to the dump. Everyone called him “Vera Cruz.” I never knew his real name. Halfway through the morning, Vera Cruz fell off the ladder and needed to be rushed to the local Red Cross. He fell on his skinny hip and was hurt badly when he bounced hard on the cement. By afternoon, Vera Cruz was back on the job.

“How can he keep working? Isn’t he in a lot of pain?” I asked Neto.

“The doctor gave him a shot of Ibuprofen in his hip. He’s feeling better now. He wants to keep working.”

And that’s the way it went for the next three weeks. After the roof was scraped clean, the men laid a fresh coat of cement before spreading buckets of waterproofing across the roof. 

My house would never have been ready for guests without Los Tres Amigos. They arrived every day with a smile. They tried to understand my English and struggled to teach me Spanish. They thanked me every day for allowing them to work and for giving them lunch. They became my good friends, as well as Neto’s.

Publio is still one of Neto’s best friends. His family became my family, too. Sadly, Pepe died two years ago, from complications of a motorcycle accident and horrible medical care. Seeing Publio again last winter was a joy. But I will always have a hole in my heart, where Pepé used to live.