Page 40 - 2017 WTP Special Edition

On the summer night when the police took his housekeeper Consuelo away, Antonio Guer- rera felt helpless for many reasons. One was that he himself had paid Consuelo’s wages in cash for years, rather than insisting she become a tax- paying American citizen. Another was that the police refused to listen to him or release Consue- lo on his recognizance: she was to be sent back to Mexico as quickly as Antonio would consign
a failed mug from his potter’s wheel to the slop bin. But most of all, he felt helpless and much too old because he could explain nothing to Tess, Consuelo’s daughter.
Let Me Take Your Hands
Tesoro—Tess, in English—was her mother’s trea- sure. Un tesoro real. Antonio knew that to Con- suelo, it made no difference that Tess was the result of her mother’s work as a prostitute, long ago in Mexico City, before Consuelo fled across the border. Nor did it matter that, as Tess grew older, it became clear that she would never be a normal child. She looked normal enough, certainly, but she didn’t speak, couldn’t stand to be touched
of his friends who died in the Guerra Sucia riots, Consuelo’s frantic phone call would have taken that faith from him. No just God would have al- lowed the ICE to make such a capture outside a church. But he went to the jail, driving out County Road 63L from Telluride to the San Miguel Coun- ty Detention Center, while the sun went down in
a wash of color behind the mountains. The color made Antonio think of copper red glaze fired on ceramic. Copper red was one of his favorite col- ors, one of the richest in his palette, but the sight of it in the sky did nothing to encourage him as he parked his car in the chain-link-fenced, barbed- wire-ringed lot.
by anyone but her mother, and often shrieked in seeming agony when something unexpected hap- pened. “Something unexpected” could be chunky instead of smooth peanut butter on her sandwich, a bee buzzing against a window, or something Antonio could neither see nor hear.
The officers, one black and one white, mouthed words. They were both big and tall, facing off against Antonio as if it took that show of strength to subdue one bent-backed old man. They said things like no exigency plan for parents and no proof of demonstrable hardship. Antonio sug- gested, angry now, that Tess’s desperate noise indicated more proof of hardship than the po- lice could possibly need, but anger made both
The ICE police had been waiting outside the mountainside chapel, Our Lady of Tears, where Consuelo took Tess every evening to pray for the Virgin Mother’s blessing. After eleven years, Con- suelo still believed that if only she and Tess made enough trips to the chapel, knelt enough times in front of the statue of the Virgin in her sky-blue robe, and lit enough votive candles, the Virgin would heal her girl. The police must have known Consuelo’s routine. They chose a mild, soft, cloud- less evening to make their move.
his hands and his voice shake. The policemen told him Tess was having “a tantrum” and would “quiet down soon.” They suggested Antonio take her home, because it was getting late, and “make sure she got some supper.” She had been born in America, carried across the border from Mexico in her mother’s belly, so she was not the police’s problem.
If Antonio had not left his Catholic faith behind in Mexico City decades ago, along with the bodies
Antonio could not offer Tess a hug to reassure her. He couldn’t explain to her what was hap- pening, when he himself could barely take it in.
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In the jail, while Consuelo sobbed behind bullet- proof glass and Tess screamed in some holding room down the hall, Antonio tried to tell the of- ficers why they could not take this woman away. After so many years in this country, his voice still had the old lilt of home. “Can’t you see,” he said, “her daughter needs her?”
Kris Faatz