Short Sweet Dream of Eduardo Gutierrez

Chapter One Tomas Eduardo Daniel Gutierrez was the firstborn of a fifteen-year-old mother in the town of San Matias Cuatchatyotla in central Mexico, about three hours by car from Mexico City. Daniel is his father's last name and Gutierrez is the mother's. The baby was familiarly called Eduardo Daniel, but the official records used the formal name, Tomas Eduardo Daniel Gutierrez. A midwife assisted. He was born on a Sunday morning, which allowed his father to be present. The father was away on the other six days, traveling by truck to sell loads of bricks. Sometimes he was given the wrong address for the customer, and he wound up driving for an entire day around Mexico City, selling the undelivered bricks door to door. San Matias Cuatchatyotla starts as an alley running from the two-lane highway going to Puebla in central Mexico, forty-five minutes away. The alley is a Third World dirt path that runs straight through the dust with children leaning against walls and young mothers standing aimlessly on street corners holding staring babies, and dogs coated with flies sleeping in the alleys or walking in circles in front of entranceways to shacks. Old women walk bent in the heat and the flies. Their legs are thick and the grandchildren's thin, but this does not matter. All in San Matias, body bowed or lithe, have legs that can walk a thousand miles. The alley runs into a network of other dusty alleys. They are lined with one-story sheds and lots filled with bricks. At first, the brick piles seem to be unfinished buildings, but then a kiln shows its hot sides to display the town's business, baking bricks. Papers by archaeologists say that fired bricks used in the construction of a temple in the area disputes the conventional belief that only the Mayans built structures in this region. Fired bricks were not Mayan; they were from the Roman Empire. All these centuries later, archaeologists say the bricks of San Matias are relics not of the Mayans but of people from Europeyou figure out how they reached here. The physical evidence says they did. The official address of Eduardo's birth was number 8 Calle Libre, that figure scratched on the wall at the start of the alley that runs to a green tin fence with a door in it. A loud knock, and the door is opened by a child with a dog leaning against its legs. The hour of day, day of week, or time of year doesn't matter, for there is always a child with a dog at the door. The doorway opens to a crowded yard that has a large evergreen tree and is lined with concrete huts of single-room size that have flat roofs and curtains over the doorways. The thirty members of the Gutierrez family (the next baby makes thirty-one)uncles, cousins, nephews, nieces, dogsbrush through the curtains. There are no toilets or showers. Water is pulled up from the deep old stone well in a heavy wooden bucket with great effort by women whose mouths contort and whose bare arms throb as their large hands go one over the other in pulling up the bucket. On a long table there is a row of seven plastic buckets for washing dishes and pots and scrubbing clothes. Dogs lap up soapy water in spill buckets on the ground. The women hang wash on lines tied to the evergreen tree. The clothes flap just above rabbits in wood cages. There are chickens in a wire pen, and dogs covered with flies spread out on the ground, peaceful now but not always. On the day Eduardo was born, the father, Daniel, waited in the courtyard while the women washed dishes and clothes. "Somebody always washes," he recalls. "When somebody dies, they wash. When somebody is born, they wash." Eduardo's mother, Teresa, was shy to the point of agony. She spoke to nobody but her famBreslin, Jimmy is the author of 'Short Sweet Dream of Eduardo Gutierrez' with ISBN 9780609608272 and ISBN 0609608274.