Portrait of Happiness, a story by John Blanchard

The bus traveled south down a straight road through the Sonoran Desert. Saguaro cactus on either side raised their spiny arms, like soldiers surrendering in battle.

When Alberto wasn’t too sick, he and Luis listened to the radio, a portable that ran on batteries. Alberto, who had spent a lot of money to get one, cradled the device in his arms, like a little boy with a teddy bear.

A station on the border somewhere broadcast advertisements in Spanish for sheep’s glands to cure male impotence and, “for a limited time only,” portraits of Jesus Christ, personally autographed by the Savior Himself.

Luis, who accompanied his sick friend on the long bus ride back home to Mexico, had seen a few of these likenesses in California— one on the wall of a cantina, and the other above a migrant worker’s bunk in a camp in Visalia. Luis couldn’t read Spanish very well, but the worker, a man named Jesús like his namesake, told him that the autograph read, “Best wishes, JESÚS, and good luck, from Your Lord and Savior, Jesucristo.”

To Luis the autograph appeared to be a form into which someone could have inserted anyone’s name in the space after “best wishes.” But people bought and treasured the portraits anyway.

The man on the radio sold so many things that pretty soon Luis lost interest and looked out the window for a while at the monotonous landscape— at the crumbling black and olive and magenta hillsides, at the beige desert sands, the cholla and ocotillo and barrel cactus, and in the dry washes, mesquite and screwbean and willow. But Luis was not a tourist, and so the landscape did not interest him much. In it, he had encountered the rattlesnake and the scorpion and the corpses of men, and of women and children, too. He did not go there to visit and admire its beauties and its palette of colors at sunset. Instead he had travelled through it, in the other direction, because he had to, on his way to find employment in a foreign country.

After a few minutes the advertisements came to an end and the music started up again— rhythmic and brassy charro music and swelling love ballads. A pair of comedians interrupted at times and told amusing and off-color anecdotes. People in the surrounding seats who didn’t have radios leaned over to listen. Some came back or forward to listen to the comedy. In this and other ways they passed the time on the long bus ride, along a route with infrequent stops and few towns.

“When we get to Durango, you must stay as long as you want,” said Alberto. Even though the air inside the old third-class bus was warm and stuffy, Alberto had begun shivering, so that he stuttered out some of his words.

“Are you all right, amigo?” said Luis.

Alberto nodded and tried to say something, but his lower jaw quivered too much. He had long ago given up trying to sit straight in his seat, which was next to the window, and so he leaned against the side of the bus with his head against the glass. Every minute or so a hacking cough wracked his body. Sometimes a cough started a series of other coughs, one after the other in shorter and shorter intervals, until they became blended into one overpowering spasm. Sometimes Alberto struggled to catch his breath between the spasms.

At a layover in Hermosillo, Luis bought a bottle of cough medicine at a pharmacy. The medicine subdued the cough for a while, so Alberto could sleep. Overnight, it seemed, he had become a wasted man. The bones in his face stood out like those of a corpse and his eyes sank into their sockets and stared back at Luis, as if from the grave. When he spoke at all, he took hold of Alberto’s arm with a skinny hand and implored him in strange, strangulated words. Luis spoke back to him in soothing tones. “We will be there soon,” he would say. “Your family longs for you.”

Alberto was one of the fortunate ones. Usually when a bracero got sick in California in those days, the company he worked for loaded him onto a bus and transported him across the border and left him there, so as to avoid the cost of hospitalization, and also the cost of paying for a bus ticket all the way home. But Alberto had a friend, a man he had met in one of the camps during his latest contract. Alberto and Luis, people said, could’ve been twin brothers. Not identical twins, but in a rough kind of way they resembled one another— same height and build, same way of talking and walking. Luis, however, was a wisecracker, and in this respect, he was unlike Alberto, who was more serious at all times. The two “brothers” spent all their spare time together and traded stories about their families back home. Alberto, from Durango, was married and Luis, who came from Tepatitlán, was not. Alberto liked to show Luis the family photo his wife had sent him and tell him about his three children. In this way, he relieved some of the loneliness he felt; and Luis liked to listen because he had always wanted a family, too, and had come from a small one and wanted to get married someday.

Both men had broad faces. Luis had a gap between his front teeth and a wandering eye. He used his eyes to make humorous expressions when he made wisecracks.

When Alberto became sick, Luis offered to help him get back home. At first Alberto refused to go because his family depended upon the income he derived from working in the fields. But as he got sicker and sicker, eventually he couldn’t go out into the fields at all; and at this point the company discharged him, so he had no choice but to go home. He was still in the middle of his contract, and Luis was, too. But Luis insisted on accompanying his friend back home, because he feared that Alberto could not make it alone.

Later on, people stopped coming around to listen to the radio. The harsh sound of coughing interrupted the music. Some people took hold of their children and moved to seats farther away.

Alberto woke up and clutched Luis by the arm with sharp bony fingers. At the same time, with great effort, he turned toward his friend and with burning eyes said, “If anything should happen to me . . ..”

The sound that came out of his throat was more like the hissing, hollow voice of a demon or an animal. Hacking coughs interrupted his speech until he almost suffocated for lack of air, but still he tried to speak. “If anything, . . . if anything . . ..”

“Calm yourself, my friend,” said Luis, whose soothing words belied his growing alarm at his friend’s deterioration. “Soon we will be in Durango and you will be in the arms of your family. They will take care of you.”

Luis just shook his head in despair and coughed and coughed.

“Here,” said Luis, taking up the bottle of medicine again. “Take another drink.”

Luis held the bottle to Alberto’s lips and guided the thick purple liquid into his mouth and helped him sit up as far as he could, so he could swallow it. Still, half the medicine spilled out of the corner of his mouth and ran down the side of his cheek. Nevertheless in a few moments the hacking subsided again, and Alberto completed his thought. “If anything should happen to me, will you take care of my family? Will you?” Luis started to answer, but before he could finish, Alberto had fallen into a feverish sleep.

To Luis, the question seemed almost superfluous. Of course, he would take care of the family, forgetting he had never met them. Weren’t he and Alberto twin brothers? He especially liked to think about Eva, the little one, Alberto’s favorite (although he would never admit that he had a favorite). She was the one for whom Alberto had once made a family of rag dolls, when between contracts, he had spent a few months at home. Of course, the family misses me terribly when I am away, thought Luis, forgetting once again that he was Luis and not Alberto, getting things all mixed up again. Alberto used to say, “It is because you have no family of your own.” But Luis would just make a joke of it and say, “I must be getting old,” even though he was younger than Alberto. Then he would hobble around on one leg with a stick for a crutch under his arm, like an old man, and make fun of old people.

Luis understood perfectly. Of course, the family misses a man when he goes away for long periods of time. Alberto said that his wife had become depressed over the years whenever he left. She had consulted a doctor about it, first a curandero and then a medical doctor in Durango. The children, too, had suffered. Alberto had made a doll family out of rags, including one which represented himself, so that when he went away, Eva still had a family to play with— a family that had not become a cripple with a missing part, a sort of hunchback family.

Eva was the prettiest one. How pretty she looked in the photo, in her brand-new store-bought dress. Alberto had told him how his wife, Isabel, had bought Eva a new pink dress for the occasion of the photo and how excited the girl had been on the day when Isabel took her and the other children— Bernabé, the son, and Margarita, the older girl— to the department store in town to buy a new suit of clothes for the photo— new dresses for the girls and a new suit for the boy but nothing for herself. For the photo, the girls held bouquets of flowers in their hands. Isabel had carefully combed, oiled and parted Bernabé’s hair and tied his tie and had polished his shoes. The girls smiled radiantly, and even Isabel managed to smile, although her heart must have been aching. This photo— so carefully preserved yet wrinkled now from handling and faded from hanging on walls in shafts of sunlight— was the one that Luis had become so familiar with, the one he took out again as Alberto slept.

The sun was going down over the flat sandy desert and over the dark shapes of mesquite and cholla and ocotillo and saguaros, over the black crumbling volcanic hills and distant turquoise mountain ranges. Darkness began to obscure the photo, leaving weltering images in Luis’ tired mind. Here and there in the dim interior of the bus, someone lit a cigarette. People settled down in their seats and tried to sleep. But Luis, filled with anxiety and anticipation, couldn’t sleep.

After all, I am only human, he thought. Luis was trying to push down thoughts that increasingly troubled his mind, at the same time as they comforted him. What was the harm, anyway? Alberto, after all (well, perhaps not in so many words but in many small ways) had encouraged Luis to think of himself as part of the family; and now, in his distress— perhaps in delirium— he had even said that if anything should happen to him (he had even begged him)— that he, Luis, should take care of his family, especially of little Eva, but of course, of Bernabé, too, and Margarita, and even, perhaps— even most especially— of his wife Isabel.

Even in the manner in which Alberto had become ill, the two might as well have been brothers. People said (people such as inspectors and scientific people and labor organizers) that sometimes the work itself made men ill. Hadn’t Luis and Alberto worked in the orange groves side by side? Hadn’t he and Alberto mixed the pesticide together, mixing the components together in the barrels, with their bare hands, plunging their hands deep into the barrels of the orange and green liquids, in the barrels with the labels they couldn’t read? One time, after spraying the liquids in a fine mist over the green buds and the new shoots to kill the rust and the insects, he and Alberto had become ill and vomited and had to travel to Visalia to a hospital to get a checkup. But the fit had passed. Well, it was just another thing that brothers shared, because they shared everything; and if one man died, the other took his place, even sometimes becoming the head of the household if that man had no family of his own. After all, a man becomes lonely in a faraway place . . ..

Still, Luis tried to push down certain thoughts a man ought not to have, hope he should not allow himself to feel. Hope was such a funny thing; he could never admit to himself that he might actually hope that . . .. No, he mustn’t allow himself to think such thoughts, to covet another man’s wife. Still— out here in the desert among the tall thin cactuses that raised their arms to heaven, perhaps in supplication, or in surrender to thoughts and desires a man can no longer control, that push their way into the mind— he wondered if a man might actually become a devil— if a man might bring about the very thing he wished for and in this way obtain happiness.

In the early morning, they arrived at the bus station in Durango. Luis tried to wake Alberto. He shook him and waited for him to open his eyes and sit up so they could get off the bus. But Alberto never woke up. He had become a corpse wrapped in a dirty blanket. The hair of his head was still damp with sweat. His open eyes stared upwards; his lower jaw hung like a broken hinge. Luis covered the face of his friend and waited for the other passengers to get off. Then he told the bus driver what had happened.

Luis sat down again and waited. In the meantime, he searched the station platform for anyone who might have been expecting them.

An hour passed before two men in white uniforms came and took away the corpse.

After getting off the bus, Luis made a telephone call. “Telephone Bernabé,” Alberto had said, in case he couldn’t do it himself. He had given Luis the telephone number.

A woman answered and took the message, then hung up.

Luis waited a long time, pacing back and forth on the station platform. Eventually, he saw a man standing among a crowd of travelers, looking from side to side and puffing nervously on a cigarette. The man wore a business suit and a pair of worn dirty shoes. In his other hand, he held up a hand-painted sign with Luis’s full name on it⎯ the name Luis had given to the woman on the phone when he explained the circumstances of his arrival. Luis didn’t recognize this man. Perhaps he had come in place of the family; perhaps the family had not been expecting Alberto’s arrival. Perhaps Alberto in his illness had neglected to contact them ahead of time.

“Alberto was my father,” said the man, when they met. “My name is Bernabé.”

Luis stared at him. He still did not recognize Bernabé— no longer a boy— as it turned out. He was now a balding and portly man, a salesman for the Goodyear Tire Co., he said. He traveled continually and found himself recently unemployed.

“I asked them to buy me a god damn radio,” he said, wiping his sweaty brow with a soiled white handkerchief.

His suit was rumpled; a tie hung loosely around his throat. The shirt was open at the collar. The cigarette dangled from his lips.

“Ten years and they fired me, like that,” he said, snapping his fingers. “Like road kill, they got rid of me. Just because I asked for a radio. It gets pretty lonely on those roads, by yourself all the time.”

He had a way of talking under his breath with his head down and stroking his thin oily hair with one hand, babbling through his lips like a baby and occasionally glancing upward at his listener from under his eyebrows. At times a slight smile broke through the cloud of his five o’clock shadow and his dark eyes. He coughed, covering his mouth with a clenched fist and excusing himself — perdone, perdone.

He offered Luis a cigarette. Luis took one from the pack and cupped his hands around it as Bernabé lit it with a lighter.

“I got your message,” said Bernabé, looking around. “We didn’t see much of him over the years. I grew up without a father, you might say. He came home from time to time, got his wife with child, left a little money on the table and went back.”

Bernabé paused and paced a little back and forth, glancing up at the cloudless sky.

“Mother finally gave up,” he said. “In spirit, too. Became mentally ill. I’m not saying it was his fault. She died a few years ago . . ..”

Luis couldn’t find any words at first. He didn’t understand.

“I don’t suppose he had any money?” said Bernabé, looking fully at Luis for the first time.

Luis shook his head.

“Still working in the fields?” said Bernabé. “At his age? Someone should pay an indemnity. I swear I’ll sue those bastards.”

“He talked about you,” said Luis. “About his wife, and Margarita and little Eva. Somehow, I thought . . ..”

Bernabé exhaled smoke through his nose and mouth. He had a withered rose in his lapel, like a man who has just come from a wedding.

“Eva?” he said, when Luis asked. “She works for Mary Kay. Lives in Texas. You should look her up. Give her a call some time. She’d love to hear about Dad . . .. She was too young to be bitter . . ..”

Of course, Bernabé had grown up, and the rest of them, too, and one had died. The photo was an old one. It all seemed so obvious now in the harsh desert light in front of the bus station. The heat made ripples over the blacktop, wavy lines that blurred the landscape out of which the bus had come to this isolated place.

Luis started to take out the photograph. It didn’t lie. It couldn’t lie. It was an indelible, an infallible record of a family, the way it had been at one time, a long time ago, the one Alberto had told him about. Luis still believed in it. Bernabé was the liar, not the photo. He wanted to show the photo to Bernabé, to contradict him emphatically, once and for all, to stop the foul lies that came out of his mouth like poison. He wanted to tear it up and stuff it into his foul mouth to cleanse the sink of lies, with a caustic soap of Truth. The photo was a bridge of truth from the past to the present, connecting and healing; and Luis would walk over it and take the place of his friend in the Portrait of Happiness.

Luis left the photograph in his pocket.

“Alberto was my friend,” he said. “Maybe he wasn’t a good father after all. I don’t know. But it meant something to him, having a family. It kept him going somehow. Here, take this radio. It was the only thing he had. I’m sure he would have wanted you to have it.”

“I don’t need it anymore,” said Bernabé, flipping the stub of his cigarette into the road with disdain. “I’m going to work in an office now. Lots of folks around . . .. Can I give you a lift anywhere? Can you stay for the funeral?”

Luis shook his head. “I’ll wait for the next bus,” he said.

On the way back to the border, Luis took out the photo one more time. Little Eva beamed from it like a lamp in the darkness. He tried to fill in the years; and despite his bitterness, he wondered if she were married and if she led a happy life with children of her own. Or maybe she wasn’t. He wondered if she still had the doll family her father had made for her; and if sometimes, when she felt lonely, she went to sleep with her rag father and cried, just as she used to do.

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