Enrique's Journey by Sonia Nazario Page A

raise the young child left by her dead son Victor. The boy’s mother left him as a baby to go to the United States and hasn’t shown any interest since. “We need money just for food,” says his grandmother, who suffers from cataracts. Nonetheless, she takes Enrique in.
    She and the others are consumed by the slayings of the two uncles; they pay little attention to Enrique. He grows quiet, introverted. He does not return to school. At first, he shares the front bedroom with an aunt, Mirian, twenty-six. One day she awakens at 2 A.M. Enrique is sobbing quietly in his bed, cradling a picture of Uncle Marco in his arms. Enrique cries off and on for six months. His uncle loved him; without his uncle, he is lost.
    Grandmother Águeda quickly sours on Enrique. She grows angry when he comes home late, knocking on her door, rousing the household. About a month later, Aunt Mirian wakes up again in the middle of the night. This time she smells acetone and hears the rustle of plastic. Through the dimness, she sees Enrique in his bed, puffing on a bag. He is sniffing glue.
    Enrique is banished to a tiny stone building seven feet behind the house but a world away. It was once a cook shack, where his grandmother prepared food on an open fire. Its walls and ceiling are charred black. It has no electricity. The wooden door pries only partway open. It is dank inside. The single window has no glass, just bars. A few feet beyond is his privy—a hole with a wooden shanty over it.
    The stone hut becomes his home. Now Enrique can do whatever he wants. If he is out all night, no one cares. But to him, it feels like another rejection.
    At his uncle’s funeral, he notices a shy girl with cascading curls of brown hair. She lives next door with her aunt. She has an inviting smile, a warm manner. At first, María Isabel, seventeen, can’t stand Enrique. She notices how the teenager, who comes from his uncle Marco’s wealthier neighborhood, is neatly dressed and immaculately clean, and wears his hair long. He seems arrogant. “
Me cae mal.
I don’t like him,” she tells a friend. Enrique is sure she has assumed that his nice clothes and his seriousness mean he’s stuck-up. He persists. He whistles softly as she walks by, hoping to start a conversation. Month after month, Enrique asks the same question: “Would you be my girlfriend?”
    â€œI’ll think about it.”
    The more she rejects him, the more he wants her. He loves her girlish giggle, how she cries easily. He hates it when she flirts with others.
    He buys her roses. He gives her a shiny black plaque with a drawing of a boy and girl looking tenderly at each other. It reads, “The person I love is the center of my life and of my heart. The person I love IS YOU.” He gives her lotions, a stuffed teddy bear, chocolates. He walks her home after school from night classes two blocks away. He takes her to visit his paternal grandmother across town. Slowly, María Isabel warms to him.
    The third time Enrique asks if she will be his girlfriend, she says yes.
    For Enrique, María Isabel isn’t just a way to stem the loneliness he’s felt since his mother left him. They understand each other, they connect. María Isabel has been separated from her parents. She, too, has had to shuffle from home to home.
    When she was seven, María Isabel followed her mother, Eva, across Honduras to a borrowed hut on a Tegucigalpa mountainside. Like Enrique’s mother, Eva was leaving an unfaithful husband.
    The hut was twelve by fifteen feet. It had one small wooden window and dirt floors. There was no bathroom. They relieved themselves and showered outdoors or at the neighbor’s. There was no electricity. They cooked outside using firewood. They hauled buckets of water up from a relative’s home two blocks down the hill. They ate beans and tortillas. Eva, asthmatic, struggled to keep the family fed.
    Nine people slept in the