Into the Beautiful North Read Online Free PDF Page B

watched the girlfriends leaning against each other’s shoulders, sleeping with their mouths open.
    “My black-eyed girls,” she said.

    Tía Irma turned to the vegetable seller in his booth and said, “What the hell is happening to these beans!”
    “Excuse me?” he said, pausing in his inventory, holding the stub of a pencil above the wilting pink pages of an order pad. “There is something happening to my beans?”
    “How dare you charge so much for beans!”
    “Charge?” he said. He looked at the hand-lettered tag he’d magic-markered onto a fragment of manila folder two days ago. “No,” he said, “this is the rate.”
    “ ¡Es una infamia!” she said. “¡Es un robo!”
    “No, no, señora,” he said—not knowing he’d just made her even angrier because she’d never been married and didn’t intend to have the slave’s moniker of “Mrs.” applied to her under any circumstances. “This is the correct price.”
    “First, tortillas,” she complained. “Now this. What’s next, water? Will you charge us for water? Ha! What are the poor people supposed to eat?”
    He looked at her with wide eyes and shrugged.
    “The poor?” he said. The poor did not shop at the fruit market—they sold lizards and birds and corn husk dolls on the highway. They ate armadillos. He didn’t have time for the poor.
    Beyond the fruit market rose the green Mazatlán hills and the white cliffs of the gringo tourist hotels. They could hear joyous voices and splashing from the hotel pools. They could smell the salt of the sea among the odors of cut sugarcane and fish and crushed mangos and oranges. Music and radios and trumpets and whistling and laughter and shouts and truck engines and some idiot’s “La Cucaracha” car horn. Seagulls fighting over pieces of bread. Oyster shells.
    “Forget the poor!” Irma shouted. “What about the good working people of Mexico!”
    “Go, Tía,” Nayeli said.
    “We are Mexicans,” Irma informed the fruit seller—needlessly, he felt. “Mexicans eat corn and beans. Did you notice? The Aztec culture gave corn to the world, you little man. We invented it! Mexicans grow beans. How is it, then, that Mexicans cannot afford to buy and eat the corn and beans they grow?”
    He would have kicked her out of his stall, but he had manners—his mother would have been deeply offended if he had tossed out this old battle-ax.
    He smiled falsely.
    “Look here,” he said, pointing to the burlap sacks full of 100 pounds each of pinto beans. “These beans come from California.”
    “What!”
    He actually flinched away from her.
    La Osa took her reading glasses out of her voluminous black purse, and the girls crowded around her. They read the fine print. California, all right. Right there on the bag.
    “¡Chinga’o!” she said.
    “These beans are grown here in Sinaloa,” he said proudly. “The best frijoles in the world! Right near Culiacán. Then they’re sold to the United States. Then they sell them back to us.” He shrugged at the mysterious ways of the world. “It gets expensive.”
    Tía Irma took a long time to replace the glasses in the purse.
    “That,” she finally proclaimed, “is the stupidest thing anyone has ever said to me.”
    He smiled, hoping she would not strike him with that purse.
    “NAFTA,” he said.
    Irma stormed out of the stall and spied a Guatemalan woman picking through the spoiled fruit.
    “What are you doing?” she snapped.
    “Provisions. For the journey north,” the woman replied. She made the mistake of extending her hand and saying, “I have come so far, but I have so far to go. Alms, señora. Have mercy.”
    “Go back where you came from!” Irma bellowed. “Mexico is for Mexicans.”
    The girlfriends were appalled.
    “Do you think anyone ever showed mercy to me?”
    As the girlfriends followed Aunt Irma, she told them, “These illegals come to Mexico expecting a free ride! Don’t tell me you didn’t have Salvadorans and Hondurans in your