The Railroad Killer
One
The locomotive's whistle at dirt road crossings was a familiar sound to the residents of Puebla, a city with a population of well over a million, nestled in a valley between a clutch of Mexico's most fearsome-looking volcanoes. The local train service still used steam engines back in the late 1950s, and clouds of sweet-smelling smoke would waft across the town at regular intervals after the main express chugged through the dusty streets.
Its old cranking engine would clatter and clunk on narrow-gauge iron rails, drumming a sturdy, steady beat as its great pistons strained their way up to the city on a plateau more than 2,000 feet above sea level. Alongside the rusting hulk, many of the town's barefoot kids would scramble to get a look inside the long line of cars in its wake.
Often boys as young as four or five would jump into the cars to try and steal some fruit or vegetables before leaping to safety when the train picked up speed as it exited the town.
This was the world into which Angel Leoncio Reyes Resendez was born on August 1, 1959.
Virginia Reyes Resendez, a pretty, young mother of two hurried out into the humid summer heat from her tiny one-bedroom shack on the edge of Izucar de Matamoros--one of Puebla's hillside slums--to a relative's rusting wreck of a VW Beetle. She was extremely worried. The pains in her stomach indicated that her pregnancy might end prematurely. She wanted to have the baby like all her others. But life never seemed to go smoothly for Virginia. Here she was, pregnant at 25 and already abandoned by the child's father, Juan Reyes. She wasn't surprised he'd fled because he was penniless and incapable of resisting the lure of alcohol.
But Virginia was determined to make sure this child was born healthy. She had never forgotten how a local priest invited into the family shack by a relative had predicted that her third child would be a boy who would possess great intelligence that would help Virginia and her loved ones escape the slums forever. She still tells people to this day what the priest said: "One day a boy will come and illuminate your life and make you very famous." At the time she had taken little notice of the priest's kind words, but as she was driven along a bumpy dirt road toward the local medical center, she began to once more hear his words ringing in her ears.
To Virginia--ever the daydreamer--her marriage had at first seemed to offer a well-used route to happiness for a woman who had then felt her destiny was to remain on the poverty line forever.
Virginia's marriage five years earlier had actuallyprovided nothing more than a brief respite from the drudgery and poverty of life in a slum where running water and plumbing was a rarity. Virginia's family saw the marriage as an ideal way to get her off their hands. In their eyes, she was a maternal young girl who had struggled at what little schooling she received. Marriage was the only answer for her survival. In Virginia's eyes, she was a child who always played second fiddle to a bottle of booze or a slap in the face.
But, as usual, Virginia's happiness was short-lived. Her husband had struggled to find work in Puebla as he drifted around the crowded streets. One day he left the family home to try and get manual work across the border where many of his friends had earned good money working for the gringos. He never returned.
So it was that Virginia had worked as a cleaner in a pizza parlor, slaving at grueling double shifts to try and keep the family fed. It was only after her husband had gone that she found out she was pregnant for a third time. Now the strain of life was threatening to turn her latest pregnancy into a disaster.
The day before Virginia went into labor, she cleaned their tiny home from top to bottom. In many ways it helped her avoid thinking about her desperate situation: often alone, about to become a mother for the third time when she could barely afford to feed one child on the $10 a week her husband occasionally sent in from his travels.
Virginia's pride prevented her from asking for money from relatives. In any case most of them were just as poor as she was. However, she was determined to survive with or without her runaway husband's help.
As her relative's rusting VW Beetle charged through the crowded streets of Puebla, Virginia felt no fear. But then she had no choice.
The medical center they finally arrived at was only marginally more hygienic than her shack of a home. As she was helped through to the maternity ward, the sheer numbers of other women about to give birth seemed overwhelming. Many of them were screaming and some of them were actually giving birth in the open ward as dozens of others looked on.
Half an hour later, Virginia was the one giving birth.
"It's a boy," announced the doctor, holding up the tiny infant with his mop of black hair. "What are you going to call him?"
Virginia looked up bleary-eyed, and forced a smile as she looked in the direction of the beautiful, neat features of the infant. "He looks like an angel."
One of the nurses smiled. "What a beautiful name."
"Yes," replied Virginia, remembering what that priest had told her. "He is a gift from God and his name is Angel."
The truth was that Virginia had not given her newborn son's name much thought. She had felt it a bad omen just in case there had been complications.
But, as Virginia lay there recovering from the birth of her son, she felt detached from everything that had just occurred. It was as if those dramatic events had happened to someone else. She was worried about the welfare of her other children back at their rundown home. There was no one there to look after them.
Virginia could not even afford to register the birth of Angel, although she was obliged by law to do soimmediately. The doctor's medical fees were paid with coins collected from some cousins and friends who lived in the neighborhood. It wasn't until weeks later that Virginia scraped together the $1 birth registration fee and--because the family wanted to avoid being fined for failing to register the birth earlier--they declared that Angel had been born some days later. Even at birth the need to re-invent family history had a become a necessity.
But there was nothing unusual about this. More than a quarter of a million births every year in Mexico are not registered at all.
From that moment on Angel celebrated two birthdays every year. As far as his family are concerned it was on August 1. Officially it was some weeks later.
But back in 1959, Virginia had no time for postnatal depression. She breastfed Angel whenever possible for many months because it was the natural, cost-effective way. By the time she left the hospital, with her tiny Angel wrapped in a blanket in her arms, she had already worked out a game plan. The child was going to be her inspiration. He would be a something special. That priest and his predictions might just turn out to be true.
Soon after the birth, Virginia got another job serving behind the counter of a luncheonette, working up to 12 hours a day for just over a dollar a day. She would leave little Angel in the care of her sister who lived in the same street in Izucar de Matamoros. Virginia had to make work her priority if they were to survive financially. She would drop her baby son at her sister's even-more-dilapidated shack across the dusty pathwayfrom her home, then take the bus into work every morning. Angel would not see her mother again until the early evening.
Not surprisingly, Virginia felt enormous guilt over having to leave her children with relatives while she went out to work. However, she steadfastly refused to rely on anyone for support.
On her return to the family home each evening, Virginia would change diapers, cook supper, and then fall asleep. Her only entertainment was to go to a friend's house once a week when she would lap up the corny dialogue and appalling story lines of the Mexican soap operas that dominated evening viewing on the local TV station. Her friend was about the only person for miles around with a television.
"It was not a real existence," Virginia explained. "I had few friends. My life was wrapped around the children and work when I should have been out having a good time with my husband."
Virginia's addiction to the cheesy Latino soap shows was her only release. Years later she scrapped together the money to buy a TV and then she would sit and watch them for hours on end. The men seemed so handsome and honorable. Why couldn't she find a man who was the perfect combination of these TV characters?
Angel, his mother, brother, and sister all grew up together as one family unit. "It was them against the world," one relative later explained. But they all desperately wanted to find an escape from the poverty and degradation. Even back in those days it seemed that the United States of America was the place where all their dreams belonged.
Virginia often thought back to the friendly priest who had made those bold predictions about her third child. Maybe the answer to her problems lay in that infant? Certainly when she looked at the beaming child he gave her a feeling of optimism and she believed he might be the key to her happiness. He seemed truly to be an Angel sent down from the heavens.
Copyright © 1999 by Wensley Clarkson.
