PERSPECTIVE PART DOS:
EL MUNDO ACCORDING TO ANDREA

By Brian Hannon

She stood a foot beyond the doorway, shining lines of tears on her face, an infant wrapped in a pink blanket tucked against her chest. Could she come in and use the phone?

I heard the argument, a real screaming match, when it started around 8:30 A.M. Their voices rising through the floor were muffled, but she clearly told him to “get the fuck out.” He countered with several versions of the word: fuck this, fucking, fucked, fuck you. The doors inside their apartment slammed hard enough to rattle my hinges a floor above. I wondered what could make anyone so mad on a Sunday morning.

Minutes later my doorbell rang five or six times in quick succession. I walked slowly through the apartment to the living room window to see who was at the front door of the building, but the two cops below were already climbing back into separate cruisers. They had lost interest in the minute or less spent at the entrance without a response. They never tried the other door at the side of the building. They never tried the other doorbell directly below mine: the one to her apartment from which the frightened 911 call had come.

The police officers checked their side mirrors and drove down the single-lane street and out of the neighborhood. It was a ghetto, after all; maybe not Compton or Harlem but still a rundown assembly of short apartment houses with loud music and drug dealers and bare-chested, violent street challenges and domestic incidents bellowing through open doors.

I was still at the window in my boxer shorts when the knock came: meek, like a shy bird testing the strength of a branch. I opened the door to find her in the hallway. Holding a baby, desperate in her search for temporary safe haven, she was the Hispanic Virgin Maria, blessed mother of all rotten luck.

Andrea said Jose had just threatened to stab her with a knife and a screwdriver. Apparently he needed more than a single blade to attack this young woman who was not an inch over 5 foot 3 or a pound heavier than 110. I met Jose when they moved into the building two months earlier. He was around 6 foot 2 and sturdy. She must have been a real firecracker for a big guy like that to need weaponry against her.

Yet Andrea, wearing long-sleeve pajamas and cartoonish, stuffed ladybug slippers, appeared slightly less than dangerous standing in my doorway. I would have said she was a thoroughly unlikely candidate for a man’s ire, although the gurgling, newborn girl with putty-soft brown skin in her bent arm might have simply given her a façade of vulnerability. As Steinbeck said, “No man really knows about other human beings. The best he can do is to suppose that they are like himself.” I took my suppositions and went to fetch the phone.

I had a friend over, and she sat with Andrea in my living room, at one point even holding the baby as the young mother tried to stop the involuntary shaking of her minute hands. The night before, my friend and I had eaten at one of the city’s more posh restaurants. We were both graduate students and neither of us well off, nothing even close, but occasionally we liked to treat ourselves with the grants bestowed by Uncle Sam, who undoubtedly intended the cash for books rather than cocktails and three-course dinners at market prices.

Jose did not work, Andrea told us, and had been unable to come up with his half of the rent the previous month. She had paid the apartment tab despite being an unemployed and homebound teenage mother. There was no explanation as to who paid for the satellite dish mounted outside their kitchen window. She also neglected to confirm my unstated suspicion that Jose did indeed have a job selling certain profitable wares measured on scales and sold in small plastic bags.

Jose was what the streets called a “player,” or at least he worked hard to maintain that illusion. Based on the sound waves filtering out of the windows, their apartment was a den of electronics: television, video games, chirping cell phones, and a stereo with rattling tall speakers and a subwoofer pushing bass up through my floor. He drove a white Nissan Maxima with tinted windows and gleaming rims, the car’s booming sound system audible a block away.

Jose stayed out all night every night, although he frequently made brief visits to the apartment during which I heard a loud rolling scrape recognizable as the same noise produced by the sliding panel doors fronting my bedroom closet. The tinny clink of moving coat hangers was audible through my porous floor as he dug into the space and retrieved what I imagined to be small plastic bags. After conducting a passing barking session with Andrea, he would return to his boys blaring rap music in the idling car outside. Sometimes he reappeared to raid the closet three or four times in a night. Other times, however, he was gone until the sun rose or later, and it was one of these occasions that sparked the Sunday morning blowout.

He had promised to be home early, she explained. Instead he came home at 8 A.M., and they were going to be late for church. Sleep was all he wanted, to sleep off whatever he was on. But they were late and now he didn’t even want to go and Andrea got mad. “What kind of man forgets his own daughter’s christening,” she asked us, repeating the same question she put to him as doors began slamming. Fuck this. Get the fuck out, you don’t even pay rent here. Fuck you. Then the knife and a screwdriver just for good measure.

This last part was unexpected, although not surprising. Jose hit Andrea when she was six months pregnant, she told us. He was loco, she said, so crazy.

As Andrea depicted threats and backhanded strikes, talking fast in her tiny voice to speed past the shame, I got angry. Pardon the impolite imagery, but I am of the opinion that men who hit women are prime candidates for castration with a rusty butter knife. If you want to turn back the clock of gender relations to the era of men in caves, I advocate medieval banquet hall justice. Threaten her with a screwdriver in the morning, and we’ll have thumbscrews for brunch. Belt her in the afternoon, and there will be a lovely rack of stretched rib cage awaiting you at dinner.

Yet I did nothing. I did not challenge Jose to a duel for the lady’s honor, Phillip’s heads at ten paces. There was no movie hero action, no violent chivalry. I was angry, but I was also cautious. I truly wanted to charge down and play the righteous vigilante, a grad school Travis Bickel. Yet I also wanted none of Jose’s screwdriver or his boys. I lived in a world where student loans paid for starters and Shiraz in places called Mill’s Tavern and Capriccio, where knives were for cutting entrees. Sunday mornings were for sleeping and talking about European backpacking and which Ph.D. program would be a good fit; not violent quarrels over weed hangovers and religious rites of legitimacy for children born out of wedlock.

Instead I urged her to use my phone to call the keystone cops who were writing up a false alarm report over vending machine coffee even while she was still in danger. Get them back here and press charges.

I know, Andrea said in a sudden fluster. She should file a complaint and leave him and never suffer his hand or hurtful words again. Yet just as quickly her agitation turned to acceptance. I repeated how she should abandon such a man and his threats and danger. She smiled politely, patient with my naiveté, and told me in her lilted accent that I did not understand. He was loco, but he was also the father of her child. What would her daughter do without a father, even one the likes of Jose? She knew she should leave him, Andrea said. Then she offered more excuses why she might not.

She called her family and spoke hurriedly to them, alternating between Spanish and English. Si, he’s gone muy crazy, mama. No, I didn’t do nada. He’s just loco. After the call we encouraged her to remain with her family and not return to Jose. She said she would, this was it. Or at least she would think about it.

They came and collected her in a red pickup truck. Her mother tapped on my door, almost as quietly as Andrea had, but did not speak with me when I opened it, only plucked the sleeping bundle of innocence from Andrea’s arms and guided them both down the stairs. We watched through the window as a man who might have been Andrea’s father helped the women place the baby in a molded seat before they all squeezed into the small cab, and the man drove them in the same direction the police had gone. I said aloud that I hoped she would stay away.

And she did. For an entire week she was absent from the apartment complex. For an entire week Jose had nightly loud parties with his boys. Then Andrea came back, and the boys had to wait outside in the Maxima with the gleaming rims all night every night and life returned to her version of normality.

I still complained about the stress of exams over restaurant meals as she spent evenings alone at home with her baby and satellite TV. While I comfortably slept off too much Saturday night wine or beer next to a friendly classmate, she faced-off threatened slashes and puncture wounds from the loco player to whom she was biologically connected for the duration of their child’s life.

We met just once more, shortly before I moved to a quieter neighborhood where people left friendly notes and bowls of leftovers on the stairs rather than empty cigarette packs and spit. Heading to campus, I descended to the landing in front of their apartment just as she came out to collect the mail. Andrea saw me, looked down, and closed the door between her world and mine. 

 

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