Free The Memories of Ana Calderón by Graciela Limón

muttered, “This must be the mom. Dead, too, I’ll bet.”
    After rubbing his eyes and cheeks, the officer continued speaking, “Okay. You’re all lucky we’re still doing it this way. Soon crossing will get tough, you know. Anyway, the registration fee for each one of them will be six bits. Here, take these forms over to the other room. Fill them out. We need a picture of the father and each kid. That’ll cost a nickel a piece. In the next room you’ll find Artie Hess. He’s the court photographer, you know.”
    The man, finding this last remark funny, laughed out loud, heaving his mid-section in and out. The group filed out of the room, and it took several hours before they were handed a group visa. It was a large document. On it were printed words none of them could decipher; a large, spread-out eagle was stamped at its top, and each of their pictures was pasted to the bottom of the paper. César was taken in the same shot with his father. Pilar and Cruz were also paired off. On their own were Octavio, Zulma, Rosalva, Alejandra and Ana. OnlyAna’s eyes burned with a strange brilliance that even the years that intervened between the time of that photo and when she became a grown woman would not diminish.

    As things worked out, Reyes Soto and his family became so close to us that people thought that we were cousins, aunts and uncles. I’ve never known why he did so much for us at a time when he could have walked away from us. What’s important, however, is that he didn’t. I mean, he didn’t leave us in Nogales where we probably would have had a life much different than it turned out to be.
    He was a man about my father’s age. When he came into our lives, I think he must have been around forty, maybe just a little less, or a little more. He was a short man and, because of this, he held himself very straight, with his shoulders arched up as if trying to stretch himself just a little more. He had bushy brown hair that coiled upwards, each hair seeming to be a separate curl. His face was round and so were his eyes, which were cheerful most of the time. He wore a thin mustache that was dark when we first knew him, and later on it turned gray, just like his hair. Reyes was one of those men who lived his entire life without becoming bald.
    As the years passed, he liked to tell everyone that he was a pachuco. He even tried to adopt the words and expressions such as “Ese Vato Loco” when speaking to men, and “Esa Huisa” when speaking to women. But no, Reyes was never a pachuco. He was from East Los Angeles, but he was never one of those angry young men who dressed up just so that someone could come and attack them.
    I know that for us he was a hero because he rescued us from the desert, and from a trap that would have destroyed us. Reyes guided us from that terrible place to where we finally made our home. There are some parts of that trip that brought us to Los Angeles that I’ve forgotten, and others that I’ll always remember. I’ll never forget that even though my father’s money ran out before we even got to Yuma, Reyes continued to pay for the gas and for what we ate on the road. I remember the desert we had to cross, and how Reyes put a big
canvas cover over us, trying to keep the sun and sand from hurting us.
    The girls couldn’t help themselves; they cried a lot because of the intense heat that burned their skin during the day and because of the cold at night. When darkness overtook us at the end of each day, Reyes stopped the truck and we had to spend the night out in the desert, in the middle of nowhere. We had very little to eat, but he was careful to make sure that we had enough water to drink. I think, however, that my sisters cried mostly because they were afraid. Octavio and Alejandra didn’t seem to mind any part of that trip; they played their usual games. Most of the time they were oblivious to the rest of