Guadalajara 1
FIFTEEN YEARS AGO
The neighborhood is called San Juan del Dios, after the old church. The same people who buy the cheap products and black market stereos off the sidewalks call it “Taiwan del Dios” for a cheap laugh, but the neighborhood wasn’t always a joke.
In fact, the church of Saint John of God sits in one Guadalajara’s most important and historic intersections. Right across Mina is the famous Libertad Market, and on the other side of the church is the original Plazuela de Mariachis, where bands stroll among the tables to play for tourists and horse-drawn calandrias straight out of the Sleeping Beauty line up for fares. It’s a forbidding and ugly church, and the neighborhood doesn’t add much to its image; it’s a “red zone”, where street prostitution has been sanctioned for generations and squat Indian women promote their favors with practiced boredom in front of lighted storefronts where families shop for records, clothing and toys.
The church lent its name just as unhappily to Juanito del Dios, who was born and abandoned in the local streets and had no other name or home to claim. Stray children don’t starve in Mexico, but neither do large families with small incomes gladly take on more dependents. Juanito escaped the church orphanage as soon as he could and grew up in the streets, sleeping in the warren of old cellars, alleys and doorways. He did small tasks for the street vendors who qualified as a sort of proxy family by working him as much as they could and feeding him enough to keep him alive until he learned how to wheel, deal, and steal.
For that matter,who knew? He assumed his mother had been a whore, so his father could be anyone. He held the world as kin, and as guilty of a crime he had no words to describe. Deep inside him he stoked a fuming desire for something for which he also lacked words or names. This was one wary kid, with the air of someone waiting for an opening.
Juanito woke up before the light, as the first street vendors started arranging their stalls and wares. He kicked away the cardboard boxes that covered the entrance to his den, a very low stone archway created by ambivalence in architectural remodeling, and crawled out onto the raised sidewalk that ran under the Libertad overpass. At eleven, he was outgrowing the alcove and would need to make other arrangements soon. Of course, the size of the little cave was a major reason he was allowed it–the bigger street urchins couldn’t fit inside comfortably so they didn’t take it away from him.
He looked around at the sellers setting up for the day. At the corner in front of the church most of the merchandise was, if not strictly ecclesiastical, at least superstitious. There were cast metal “milagros” shaped like arms or feet or broken hearts and designed to be nailed on altars as decoys for miracle healings. There were Catholic tracts and paraphernalia, holy incense, magical herbal cures, and candles for specific metaphysical purposes such as attracting love or preserving fidelity.
Further up Mina towards the overpass, the wares varied wildly: flashlight batteries, cheap watches, T-shirts in English, baby hawks, wind-up toys, tamales, nylon shopping bags, live tarantulas, pirated rock cassettes, hijacked cigarettes…anything a person could make or afford or steal and might be able to sell to people going to the market or the church. They were a community, although probably the only non-organized one in a country where even street bands and whores have unions. Every day they came here and set up shop; every night they went home, leaving behind only string, sticks and old fruit crates to mark the skeleton of a micro-economy.
Juanito kicked idly at a broken crate. He had made his first shoe shine box out of crate wood and decorated it with bottle caps he’d picked up in front of the cafe where the mariachis ate lunch, then rubbed to a shine on the cement. He had scrounged rope for the shoulder strap, filched cans of polish sufficiently used-up that nobody would bother hunting him down and kicking him, stolen a brush from a shop on his second try after the first had gotten his ears boxed so badly they still looked a little misshapen.
The box he hefted was the same one, although no single part of the original was left. It was sturdy polished wood with a tooled leather strap; resplendent with brass tacks, worthless old peseta coins, yellow metal “milagro” figures of feet and wings. He had all colors of polish, in full cans. At eleven, he was a top practitioner of his profession; capable, shrewd, and well into his own personal style.
He was also very ready to look for a new line of work. He eyed the shoeshine box, once his pride and passion, rather narrowly as he swung it over his shoulder and considered his problem as he crossed the mouth of the Plazuela, changing step unconsciously to the bawling trumpets, dueling strings and thudding guitarón. Juanito had been born and lived his entire life in constant earshot of mariachi music. He didn’t know it, but he was never completely himself without hearing that forlorn lilt in the background. He jaywalked the busy Calzada with macho aplomb, still mulling over the state of his vocation.
Though simple and ignorant, Juanito was far from stupid and he’d been looking into the future and not much liking the looks of it. For one thing, he noticed an age cap on shoeshine boys, and it looked to be about twelve. Teenagers didn’t do well. For another thing, he’d noticed a lot more tennis shoes on people who should be wearing leather. Including foreign tourists, and if there was one thing that Juanito was convinced of it was that tourists, especially foreigners and most especially Americans, were the ideal market. They obviously had much more money than locals, spent it freely, were easy to dupe, didn’t haggle over prices and seemed to have a bottomless appetite for junk. He ducked into the Devil’s Corner Passage and headed towards Plaza Tapatio. He was starting to feel a new sort of hunger flickering inside him, an uncomfortable pang that he rather enjoyed.
He stopped for a taco at a sidewalk cart, but it didn’t dent his new craving. He felt it would be an important day. Usually he waited until after a few shines before eating anything. But he used his business at the taco cart as a front for his true goal, a cheap Bic lighter and can of Ronson fluid displayed among watch straps and cigarettes on the next cart. Timing everything perfectly, he tossed the remains of his taco between two scrawny dogs, who immediately fought over it. The card vendors watched, enjoying any diversion, and when the dogs stopped and slouched off Juanito was gone with the fluid and lighter in his pocket. Maybe this was what he needed.
He knew one of the more successful fire-eaters, who had told him he should try it. There wasn’t much to it; just walk between cars stopped at lights, spew a mouthful of fluid, flick it into a fireball, take a bow and collect tips from bored Mexican drivers, who admire any novelty if sufficiently crazy, macho, and spectacular. Juanito figured on giving it a shot. It was easy enough and didn’t have such a stringent age limit as shining shoes. On the other hand, it was a sort of dead end. And you’d go through a lot of lighter fluid, which wasn’t getting any cheaper. Then again, his first can had been cheap enough.
A quick scan of the Plaza turned up no potential shines, but he’d expected that and turned south towards the Cathedral. A group of Mexican out-of-towners were sitting on benches admiring the futuristic phoenix fountain, so Juanito strode over manfully and hopped up onto the fountain’s rim in front of them. He took a large swig of the lighter fluid, which was every bit as nasty as he’d expected, and immediately caused intense stinging on a sore inside his mouth. The stuff was worse than that clear, raw Tequila the vendors drink from plastic bottles. But he hung on, faced the wide-eyed family of hicks, held up the flaming Bic and spat a cloud of misty fire directly towards them. The little girls squealed, the boys cheered, the father grinned. Before they’d caught their breaths Juanito was off the fountain and in front of them, holding out his enamel coin cup with a professional air. A quick fifty pesos, no less. Juanito threw a deep bow and was off without saying a word. He couldn’t say a word for a half hour, in fact. And the cold sore stung for hours. But the hot little appetite in him surged. This would require some thinking, all right. He carefully tucked the can and lighter away in his shine box.
Cutting through the Plaza de Armas, Juanito skirted a row of booths where older men shined shoes of customers that sat in relative luxury; padded seat, complimentary newspaper, pin-ups of sexy blondes, soccer stars, and the Virgin of Guadalupe eternally modest amid clouds of glory and a patch of sacred blue. Booth shiners and street arabs are not the best of friends, but Juanito liked to look in on the older hands to pick up a rag-snapping technique, or just wonder what people did between being young enough to carry a shine box and old enough to have a booth and pay CROC dues for the space.
He also liked the heavy smell of wax around the booths. Juanito didn’t realize it, but the odors of the city were as vital to his sense of well-being as the sounds and tastes. The smell of fresh horse-droppings by the carriages at the Plazuela, the odors of young goats crucified over slow flames at the Nuevo Leon Restaurant down the street, pig entrails frying on a grill, ozone from the welders’ shop–these were signals of his day, landmarks of place and time like cocks crowing in the morning or the dull tolling of the Cathedral bells. He would have gone crazy in an American city–or just wasted away.
He came by the Cathedral on the East side in case anybody was about to enter the chapel with dirty shoes, then cruised the sidewalk out front. He didn’t know the Cathedral was over four hundred years old and he wouldn’t have cared if he’d known. To him the yellow tile spires were just landmarks to look for if he got lost, which he sometimes did, since he rarely strayed from an area less than a mile square. He’d noticed the 1513 date on the cornerstone, but had assumed it was an address since he could neither read nor write.
He walked over to the huge fountain in the middle of Laurels Plaza, looking over the business situation. The younger shine boys weren’t very happy to see him, since he would get first shot at customers and if they cut him out he would kick their butts, or even smash their boxes for severe infractions. Juanito smiled at them and they nodded back in various degrees of feigned cordiality. There were some trucks parked on the west side of the Plaza and men milling around. It was not the usual sort of group, like the government bookmobile or blood test bus, so Juanito strolled around the fountain to see what they were doing. As he watched them, he slowly lost interest in shoes as his new hunger throbbed up in him like his first blast of lust.