I speak on the phone with my father just about every day, he will be will be 89 this year. Our conversations usually consist of idle chit chat on the hot weather in Texas, the garden they try to maintain in the hot dry climate, and the meals he likes to prepare for lunch. Once in a while, about once a week, I get a real treat when I say something that triggers a memory from his youth. In most occasions he goes back to the adventures that he and his brother Gabriel had when they were between ages of 9 and 14 years old. I decided to take notes and start documenting these stories. What I write is almost verbatim from our telephone conversations and I hope that these stories will become a documentation of the adventures of two brothers from a very poor family of 10 trying to make a living in Nuevo Laredo, Mexico during the Great Depression in the 1930s.
The Whipping
Rafael and Gabriel liked to skip school and go and play in the river. One day their teacher came to the house and asked his older brother, Salvador, if the kids were sick because they had not been in school in almost two months. His brother told the teacher that they were not sick and that they would be in school tomorrow.
The next morning Rafael and Gabriel got up and went to school. But unknown to them Salvador followed them. They jumped on the train going to Texas. The train would go slow through Nuevo Laredo and passed near their house on Arteaga Street. It was slow enough that they could just jump behind a car and hitch a ride to the river. Unknown to them Salvador was following them and he jumped behind the last car.
As the train neared the bridge to Laredo Texas, it slowed down again on the curve and Rafael and Gabriel would get off. Seeing them get off, Salvador got off also and hid in the bushes. Rafael and Gabriel went down to the River and proceeded to take off their clothes. Their favorite spot was a small island in the middle of the river and they would spend all day there shooting birds and snakes with their slingshots, swimming when they needed to get cool and just relaxing seeing the river go by. They would carry a “cochinito” - a ginger bread pastry and a piece of “piloncillo” - a piece of hard unrefined sugar shaped into a cone, for lunch.
Salvador watched them and went behind some brush and made a whipping stick from a branch using his pocket knife. He then whistles at them with a whistle sound that they immediately recognized as the sound when he called them. A cold chill ran through their naked bodies and they froze. They knew what that whistle meant – they had been discovered! And by Salvador! The disciplinarian, the older brother who ran the house with an iron fist, the older brother who would think of nothing better but to whip them all the way back to the house at least half a mile away. They were discovered and had no choice but to go back and face the consequences. They swam back to shore, crying all the way, trying to make excuses as to why they were there, and begging not to get whipped. Rafael felt the branch first in his upper thigh and the pain was felt throughout his whole body. He landed a couple on Gabriel and was whipping them as they put on their pants. He continued to whip them as they put on their shirts and then proceeded to whip them as they half ran back to the house with Salvador right behind them with his long whipping stick. They were about to go in the house, but he stopped them. “Directly to school” he said. They continued to half run and sting from the whippings that were still landing on the back of their legs. By the time they got to school they could not cry anymore, their tear ducts seem to be dried and but they were still in a lot of pain and sobbing. They got to the classroom and were told to sit on their desks, the second most painful experience of the day. Their legs almost raw form the whipping, the pain just seem to amplify hundreds of times as the pressure from their slight 9 and 10 year old body weight pressed against the wooden seats of their desks.
The girls in the classroom were pointing and giggling but the boys said and did nothing. Although the two boys were in their most “socially vulnerable” state, they were “respected and feared” by their classmates. Not only did the other kids not want the teacher to discover their own faults, but they knew that sooner or later they would have had to face Gabriel and Rafael outside. Although they were not considered bullies, two were not afraid of a good fight and, or of getting even for laughing at them in class.
When they got home that evening their older sister “Chita” protected them form Salvador’s wrath and further whippings. They did their chores ate dinner and went directly to bed. Both of them, like their other brothers, made their sleeping pads in the living room since the house was very small. They found a corner of the living room, put down their sleeping pads and went to sleep. They never skipped school again – at least not that year.
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