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“Various Men Who Knew

Us As Girls”
©2010 Cris Mazza

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 VARIOUS MEN WHO
KNEW US AS GIRLS
I can hear the ashamed middle­class Liberal requests now:
tell that story, tell Lena’s story. The same people who are
overcome with helplessness over what they can’t do to fix
what they can’t stop themselves from wanting to know.
The ones who go out of their way to learn about it, go out
of their way to brood over global problems that barely
make it into the media and seem unsolvable. People
tortured by their remoteness and inability to generate
change. So they want to hear more, and know more, and
they think reading about it makes them better people,
makes them people who maybe didn’t – after reading
what they thought they should – go check their e­mail, or
go take dinner out of the oven, or go turn on the end of a
ballgame.

There are rumors of girls as young as eight or nine,

but any reporter who sees a girl younger than 14 and
doesn’t testify to authorities is committing a crime, so
instead of blowing their cover, reporters for these stories
simply claim to see girls and young women from 14 to 22
years old. I’m not concerned with maintaining a
journalistic reputation, so will reveal all when the
information is available. That is because this “reporter”
will no longer be skulking into the fields merely to
observe, to take note of horrors, to describe them in lurid
details. What I will be reporting is the rescue and
deliverance of one of the girls I saw, who burst and flew
from me like startled quail into the sagebrush and dry
grasses.
Probably very simple, the manipulation methods used by
the procurers in Mexico to get the girls to trust them, to
get the girls to follow them anywhere. It’s easy to imagine
her, a huge­eyed, dark­haired 7­year­old, clinging to her
mother’s multi­hued skirt, sitting together in the dust of a
Tijuana street of shops, the sleeping baby sister in her
mother’s arm appearing to be dead when her mother
raises her tray to offer her wares of chewing gum to
passersby. Lena’s there to complete the picture for
American tourists, just like the bright red, green and blue
striped skirt, the kind that might be worn at a festival of
traditional dance, but which wasn’t anyone’s traditional
attire on the muddy, oil­stained alley where they sleep in
a plywood shack, mended with cardboard and pieces of
fences scrounged from numerous slag heaps, here and
there, or even smoldering constantly, between rusted­out
cars. He might have spotted her during the day, between
the leather goods kiosk and Panaderia, and daily, at least
weekly, stopped to buy a Wrigley’s Juicyfruit from the box
her mother holds, paying while he smiles and looks into
the eyes of the child, nearly hidden behind the mother’s
shawl, weekly, monthly, yearly, and somewhere along the
line the child has begun to smile back, and the man
knows her name. It’s part of his job, besides wooing, even
courting the older ones, the 12, 13, 14­year­olds, he also
makes the rounds of those he has his eye on for later,
remembers their names, begins to touch their cheeks,
gives them chocolate.

If he didn’t find Lena there, perhaps it was at the

dump, another place her family could’ve lived, in the
nearby unofficial village that has developed on the
outskirts of the city’s refuse pile. She and her sisters and
brothers and their mother, spend the morning foraging
5
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through the newest piles of garbage. Some is edible, if
they find a cache from a restaurant or grocery store: limp
heads of lettuce, withered potatoes, out­dated dented
cans with peaches or stewed tomatoes inside that haven’t
made actual contact with the diapers and shoes and slimy
unidentifiable rotten stuff falling from the newest torn
plastic bags. Some is usable: jars and discarded broken
bowls, wood for cooking, rags for lining shoes and
plugging holes in the walls. Some can be fixed and sold:
rusted bicycles, broken chairs. That would be their
father’s job, if he weren’t picking strawberries or bell
peppers up in California.

The procurer would visit the dump daily, at least

weekly, looking for girls — the ones with the smallest
features, without scars on their faces, without cleft pallets
or deformed, of course the slim ones, but they’d all be
skinny. He can offer her a better job than picking through
the dump. She can work as a hotel maid and send money
back to her mother. As soon as she pays off their debt to
him and the other people who help her start her new
career.
A hundred yards from the corner of the last growing field,
I approached, exposed, without a tree or shrub to duck
behind. But all was quiet except the soft coastal breeze in
the grass. When the square plywood was at my feet, I
stopped, swept my gaze over the vista before me. It was
just past a rise in the terrain, where a descent into a
shallow ravine had already started. The toe of my boot
lifted the wall, which was heavy, double­ply. Then caught
it with my hand and lifted to shoulder height.
Underneath, on the ground, the two long 2x4s. On the
underside of the plywood, two blocks nailed at two
corners. One at a time, I propped the 2x4s against the
blocks, secured the other ends into the grasses, so the 45­
degree braces held the plywood wall mostly upright. From
down the two­track, perhaps only the top two­thirds of
the wooden wall might be visible.

The days had grown longer, the time changed to

daylight savings, nothing and no one drawing me home,
so I had continued to walk the two­tracks at late twilight,
spring of 2002 before beginning my research, before
committing a word of my article to the hard drive.
Binoculars in hand, I frequently left the two­track to slip
between rows of conifers, my footfall a quiet crunch on
shredded mulch, zigzagged my way parallel with the two­
track, to the spot where I’d first seen them, four or five
months before. A few times, fleetingly, from various spots
where I’d parked my golf cart, I’d been able to discern
movement, but never again more than one girl.

The sun about to set but already buried in the

coastal cloudbank, it was late enough I already knew the
day’s activity would be over. I had headed, not directly —
as though to thwart surveillance of my approach — to the 7
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place where I’d first seen the plywood wall lying in the
grasses. I’d since then seen it propped leaning upright,
blocking views from the west, from the nursery rows,
from the scattered workers, and from me.

The grasses beneath where the plywood had been

lying were flattened, some bare patches of dirt showing,
but clear of rocks or sticks. Other than that, it was just
the ground of native coastal California. I kneeled there,
facing the wooden partition. It blocked the breeze.
There was no writing on the plywood, not even scratch
marks made with a stick. No primitive communication
left for the would­be rescuer. An ant crawled up my arm,
another on my hand. Just in front of my knee, ants
swarmed. Light green against the ground, it was not the
growth of new grass, but tiny shreds of lettuce, a few
crumbs of bread. Today’s, or yesterday’s midday meal.
There, on the flat top of a rock buried so its surface is
ground­level, a pickle carefully placed. She doesn’t like
pickles.
We’d had several days of rain. Vilified by those with no
thoughts beyond their relaxation on the beach, their
power walks on park trails, their lunches outside in
courtyards, but always welcome by those of us in the
nursery industry. And yet this time, as our paths between
retail stock became too gluey to walk, and the two­tracks
grew ruts from the streaming run­off, I was thinking of
Lena. Surely they wouldn’t send her out in weather like
this, but would the hiatus be a relief, or would someone
take out the disruption of income on her? And yet many
day­laborers also wouldn’t be working during days of
downpours. Was there some other fall­back location?

Good questions. A real investigator would have

followed through. I never found out. The sun returned,
and before long the dry­summer hills and ravines
transformed themselves into supple emerald, the
“seasons” mainly determined by when and how much it
rains.

As soon as the roads weren’t inches thick with mud,

I returned to my blockade, put my muddy boots on either
side of the toilet hole I was sure no one ever used, and
watched through the air vent. Though the fields were
turning green, and the rows between our tree stock
nurturing too many grass­weeds and dandelions, the old
brush had retained enough toughness to serve as walls, so
the location of the brothel remained the same. And the
same day that I returned to my vantage point, Lena
returned, although I suppose she could’ve also been there
the day or week before as well.

I was dressed and ready, had memorized my new

questions, and I was fairly quickly able to advance on her 9
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lair. Perhaps the men, as well, were unsure she would be
there, or unwilling to visit in the sodden and muddy
chaparral.

This time she immediately took the money from me

and kneeled at my feet, startling me with her easy
assumption of our position, and yet she said,
“Rápidamente. Entonces vaya.” Quickly. Then go.

“Está bien, está bien,” I said quickly, my hands

automatically going to her head to hold my balance, and
added, “it’s okay,” certain that every Spanish­speaker in
California understood that idiom.

She was kneeling on the still­wet ground, although

she, or someone, had cut dry grasses somewhere else and
spread them around here. Still, her shoes were caked with
drying muck, mud streaks and spatters extended up her
legs, her skirt was dirty, even her shoulders had traces and
smears, likely left by dirty hands.

“Qué sucede a usted cuando llueve?” I asked what

she did when it rains, and she did whisper, “Nada.”

“Mira usted la televisión?”

She may have shook her head. It was hard to tell,

with her forehead against my abdomen, and her hands on
my backside trying to move my body, although not as
adamantly or fearfully as she seemed to on my previous
visit.

“Es mirado usted?” Admittedly, a radical shift, to

go from asking a teenager if she watches television to
asking her if she’s being watched while she performs sex
for money in a field.

Perhaps I was just validating an excuse for my

prolonged delay, because she said, “Sí. Casi siempre.”
Almost always. Perhaps her voice quivered as she said
this; or perhaps I am inventing the quaver because my
knees had gone buttery and I had to hold onto her head a
little firmer, making her support me, and knew even then
how wretchedly backwards that was.

“Qué tuvo usted para cenar?” I switched to

questioning her meals, partially a pre­planned strategy to
open her up, also because these happened to be the
questions I had memorized. But perhaps, as well, relieving
my gagging shame by letting myself pretend it was a
normal small­talk dialogue with a girl, like the sort I
might have with a customer’s child.

“Hamburger.”

I don’t know if it’s really what she ate the

night before, if she had hamburgers for every meal of her
life, or if it was the only English word she knew for any
kind of food. While I was silently mouthing, practicing,
the word for make­up, maquillaje, that was part of my next
question, Lena released me and turned away, digging in a
plastic grocery bag I’d thought might be the trash
receptacle for condom wrappers.

“Toma esto,” she said, returning to her

position on her knees in front of me. She was feeling for
my back pocket and pushed something inside. “Entonces
vaya. Go. Por favor. You, please.” 11
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I didn’t know, and of course still don’t, if she’d
learned these English words for me, or if a smattering of
English was inevitable, even in the circumstances she
lived, with so little time for words.

She stood, took my shoulder and simultaneously

tried to turn me around and push me toward the place
that represented a doorway, where men came and went. I
tried to hold onto a look at her face, a face I’d actually
looked into so little during our visits, but she was strong,
my backward glance was quick, and I came away with
only an image of how a streak of dried mud was
obscuring the rouge on one of her cheeks. I left, as usual,
without hesitation that would mark me as atypical, and
by the time I reached my barricade, the soles of my boots
had collected an inch of mud with embedded pebbles.

By that day in 2003, I still didn’t know her name,

although I’ve been using it here all along. That was the
day I learned it. I didn’t fish the paper from my pocket
until I was safely in my office, my boots outside the door,
my bulky socks draped over the back of my chair and
replaced by fleece slippers. Stalling, long enough, that if
anyone had observed me leave an hour ago, and return
from the fields in a straw hat and flannel shirt, they would
not any longer be watching or thinking about what I’d
been doing, once I was inside my office for several
minutes.

The paper in my pocket was a windowed return­

payment envelope that would have come with a bill for
utilities or credit card, possibly taken from the trash
somewhere. The envelope was limp and creased. Perhaps
Lena had carried it with her several days, waiting for me
to come to her again. It was sealed and addressed,
although it would never be able to go anywhere. The
address was almost illegible, had no numbers, no street.
It’s possible some of the jumble of letters forming words
were a description of a town, or an attempt to explain
where a town was, what it was close to, how far from the
ocean or mountains. I couldn’t read it at all, except that
“Mexico” was printed beneath the short sprawl of run­
together letters, and there was a name above them:
Alicia Ruiz.

Of course I opened it. If I’d been able to make out

any kind of address, I would’ve resealed it, or put it in
another envelope and re­written the address. But the
letter couldn’t possibly find Alicia Ruiz — obviously Lena’s
mother, the way it was addressed. So I opened it. The
letter was not any better, as far as my being able to glean
what she wanted to say. But at the bottom, unmistakable
enough, was her name, Lena.

If I’d fully appreciated, or believed, that this

tangible piece of Lena, her communication from inside
her bondage, could have spurred someone better
equipped than me to take action, believe me I would have
done so. Especially had I known that Lena would
disappear from me forever. Was I hording my “contact”
because of the fame and accolades her rescue might bring
me? I don’t think that was it, but I do question my
stagnancy concerning the letter, why it didn’t spur more
immediate action, or an immediate development of a
different plan, or any plan at all.

Instead, I began to spend some evenings at home, 13

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staring at individual words, or what I thought were words,
trying to find any similar word in my Spanish dictionary,
or asking the translation website I’d been using. For
example:

Jarden … possibly meant to be jardin … either garden

or kindergarten, if the words after it were de niños, but
which looked more like infamia (disgrace).

Embarazo … embarrassment … but some dictionaries

say it also means pregnant. How’s that for a patriarchal
language when these two meanings reside in the same
word? Also obstacle or obstruction. Mercifully, she had a No
in front of it ... if she could be believed.

Peluca or peludo or peluche … not spelled exactly like

any of those … wig or hairy or teddy bear. But could’ve been
pileta (basin, swimming pool) or even piloto (driver).

Contento or contante or contado or conteno ... happy

(content) or cash or scarce or hold back (restrain) but not I am
restrained, more I restrain, so not likely.

One word looked too much like hospital to be

anything else, but it was very close to another that could
only be hotel, and both words are spelled the same,
English or Spanish. Those were the only words that
actually made sense, not that she’d been taken to a
hospital or lived in a hotel, but lies, telling her family
that’s where she worked, or works, or will work soon. The
same lies she was told when she was taken, or given to
the procurer.
Cris Mazza has authored over a
dozen books. A native of
Southern California, Mazza grew
up in San Diego County. She
currently lives 50 miles west of
Chicago and is a professor in the
Program for Writers at the
University of Illinois at Chicago.
"I considered writing a story about chapped lips."
­­Amelia Gray

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