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J. Jesús Esquivel has a degree in Journalism from the Carlos Septién School. Since 1988 he has been a correspondent for Proceso magazine in Washington, DC, assigned to the White House, the Federal Congress and the State Department of the United States of America. In the video below, Esquivel tells us about the content of his novel. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6dgwcaOtgdM Here is a snippet of the first chapter of J. Jesús Esquivel’s novel, edited by Grijalbo.
The doctor who delivered her held her in his arms and told her mother: “This girl is going to be very naughty. She has such lively eyes. This is going to give you a headache, ma’am.” Her parents named her Carolina.
Don Alberto Campos Rojas was born in Zacatecas, an only child; his parents owned several ranches. Don Berto’s father was a long-time rancher, very wealthy, and he had other children with the wives of his workers or with his maids in Casa Grande, where he lived with his wife Luisa, an heiress to a large tract of land in the state.
One day, Beto, who was about fourteen at the time, came home from school and found his mother crying.
Tears streamed down Luisa’s cheeks, and Beto wondered what was going on. His mother’s expression indicated that she was going through something serious.
—Nothing, son, nothing. I have nothing, only old age diseases.
Beto didn’t believe the story. He knew her well enough to know that something serious must have happened to make her cry.
As he went to the kitchen to ask a woman who helped with the housework what had happened in the house while he was away, he heard gunshots. Thunder echoed in his mother’s room. He came to the room like lightning and found her lying on the floor at the foot of the bed. Her mother had shot herself in the temple with her husband’s pistol. While lifting the lifeless body, Beto noticed the note: “You are a pig, a disgusting person with no limits, I watched you while you were rolling in the stable with Margarita’s daughter. Don’t you know that girl is also your daughter? Damn bastard; “I would rather hell than continue to live with you. “
Beto felt a sharp pain in his abdomen. He grabbed the note his mother had written before she committed suicide with infinite anger. He looked up and saw his father leaning against the door frame. An expression of disbelief and anger appeared on his face.
– What did your cruel mother do? She killed herself with my gun!
Beto said nothing, put the paper in his trouser pocket, and held his mother’s lifeless body in his arms.
Luisa’s wake and burial were the last things Beto experienced in Zacatecas. On the day of the funeral, he left Casa Grande without saying a word to his father, with a hundred pesos in his bag and the mourning clothes he had worn when he said goodbye to his mother at the Pantheon. When he arrived at the truck terminal, he boarded the first bus he came across without reading or noticing the signs for his final destination.
That’s how Alberto Campos Rojas arrived in Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua, in 1954.
Maurita Robles Hinojosa knew her parents were from Durango. His entire family is scattered across cities along the northern border of Mexico. I have cousins in Tamaulipas, Sonora, Nuevo León, and, of course, Chihuahua.
When Morita was five, her parents took her to live in Ciudad Juárez. She considered herself 100% Juarense. There, in that strange but beloved city, she spent her childhood and when she was a teenager she met Beto. One day in March she met him at the municipal market. She had just turned seventeen when she first saw those green eyes that had been watching her since she bought a receipt at a stand. From that moment on, she felt like a complete woman who wanted to be loved by the man who looked at her with ecstasy and tenderness.
Maurita knew how to read people’s faces from an early age. “The girl has a gift, she can guess things,” she said when several of her friends found out that she knew the day before that her uncle Martin would die, and they told her mother that he had been stabbed by a robber’s knife, who had stolen her purse while she was away from work. She warned her mother and uncle, but they thought she was crazy and didn’t believe her.
“Shut up, Maura, and stop being such a bird of bad luck,” her father, hearing the foreboding, called out to her.
That day at the market, Beto told her to let him help her carry the basket. Mora accepted immediately. The heroic man—because Beto was a heroic man: white, short and fat, with green eyes, and smelling good, like a good cologne—told her that he worked as an assistant in a mechanic shop and was saving money to buy a car. Morita knew at that moment that she had found her husband; that Beto was hardworking, honest, and kind; that she would have seven children and a long marriage with the man.
The dry heat of Juarez did not affect Morita’s manners, and she was walking arm in arm with Beto minutes after meeting him. She had an enviable figure, and although she always dressed very modestly – skirts that reached to the knees, tops that were tight to the neck – her walk was a sight to behold. Beto didn’t even notice it. He was drawn to Morita’s face and hair. He had dark eyes, a turned-up nose and lips that you wanted to bite. Her hair was like raven vines, and he fell in love with it as soon as his fingers touched it. Three months after they met at the market, Morita and Beto had a civil wedding in a church.
Carolina was born in a private hospital when Don Berto was forty and Dona Morita was thirty-nine.
Don Beto owns three car and motorcycle engine repair shops at 16 Avenida Septiembre, on the edge of Los Cerrajeros market. He had enough money to pay for medical care for a birth in a private nursing home rather than risk his wife giving birth in a government clinic, which provides poor service and often performs Caesarean sections on women even if they don’t need it.
Carolina was an admirer of her father and Morita, although her always sullen character prevented her from showing her daughter, the last of her seven children, how much she loved her. The doctor who saw her birth was not wrong: Carolina’s small honey-colored eyes were a point of attraction and captivity. Her mother dressed her in dresses, the color of which would help her to highlight the color of her eyes. The girl inherited her complexion from Don Berto; Morita’s nose, thick lips and a mass of hair that fell from her back to her waist. Carolina was a beautiful girl, one of the few little girls born in Ciudad Juárez.
In her home, she and her six siblings (four boys and two girls) were accustomed to seeing men and women walking the dusty streets of their land, their eyes seeming to ask questions they did not know how to answer. During Carolina’s childhood, Ciudad Juarez was a large, quiet town, a transit point for thousands of people from any part of Mexico who came here to look for work for a few days until they got familiar with the place and raised the necessary funds to pay the coyotes or boleros to cross the border undocumented, to reach El Paso, and from there to any other city in the country that offered dollars.
The house that Don Berto built for Morita and her children was huge. There was a large terrace in front with a swimming pool with four sinks that were no longer in use. There were five rooms on the first floor, two for the four men, two for the three little women, and the marital room.
Carolina’s brothers Roberto and Javier slept in one room, Luis and Pedro in another, Angelica and Sara in another, and Carolina, because she was the youngest and the most spoiled of her father, was the master of the big room in the house. Since she left the nursing home, Carolina had been placed in her husband’s bedroom. When he was one year old, his parents gave up the throne to him and moved into the room they had originally assigned to him. Angelica and Sara hated her for this and also for the respect her father showed that graya.
Roberto and Carolina are 20 years apart in age, and her brother treats her like a princess in the family…
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