The Children of Sanchez by Oscar Lewis Page A

be waiting for you at six on the corner near my house.” I was very happy, naturally, and I came at six on the dot, but she didn’t show up. Pancho had spoken to her that very day, so, of course, she went out with him and left me “whistling on the hilltop,” as they say here.
    Well, school continued and I played hooky at least one day a week. That’s when I started smoking with my friends. We’d be going along and one of the fellows would say, “How about taking ‘three drags’?”He’d hand me his cigarette and I’d take three puffs, and pass it to the next guy.
    I had to hide my smoking from my father. I have even popped burning cigarettes into my mouth when he came home unexpectedly. He caught me once, when I was twelve, smoking in the courtyard with my friends, and right in front of them he said, “Aha, you bastard, so you already know how to smoke? Now you have to work to keep yourself in cigarettes. Just wait until you get into the house, you’ll see, you little son-of-a-bitch.” After that, my friends kidded me when I asked for a cigarette. “No, kid, why should we, if your
papá
is going to hit you!”
    It wasn’t until I was twenty-nine that I first smoked in my father’s presence. It was a kind of small rebellion against him, no? I am still uneasy when I do it, but I want him to see that I am a man now.
    In looking back, I seemed not to have had any homelife. I didn’t have much to do with my family and spent so little time at home I can’t even remember what we did there. Besides, I have no memory for everyday things. I have an aversion for routine and only the very good or very bad things, the exciting things, stick in my memory.
    I don’t want to sound ungrateful, but about my father … the truth is, he always mistreated my brother and me. What I mean is that he made us pay for the piece of floor we slept on, and the bread we ate, by humiliating us. True, he was very loyal and responsible, but he imposed his strict personality upon us, and never permitted us to express our opinions, or to approach him. If we asked him something, he’d say, “Slobs! what do you know? Shut your snouts.” He would squelch us every time.
    In a way, it was his fault that I didn’t come home. I never had the feeling that I had a true home because I wasn’t free to bring my friends there. In the afternoons and evenings, when my father liked to read, he chased us into the courtyard. “Get out of here, you mules. A man works hard all day and he can’t even read in peace. Get out!” If we stayed inside, we had to be absolutely quiet.
    Maybe I am hypersensitive, but my father’s lack of feeling for us made me think we were a burden to him. He would have been happier with Elena if he didn’t have us; we were like those heavy loads that one carried only because one must. I will never forget the look of hatred he gave Roberto and me, while we were having supper thatday. I went into the kitchen to cry, and couldn’t eat because of the lump in my throat.
    Many times I wanted to say, “Look, Father, what have I ever done to you? Why do you have the worst opinion of us? Why do you treat us like criminals? Don’t you realize that there are sons who are addicts, who abuse their families right in their own house? Or who even kill their own fathers?” Someday, if I dare, I would like to say this to him, in a nice way, of course.
    But whenever I tried to speak out to my father, something stopped me. With others, I had more than enough words, eh? But with him, something formed in my throat and didn’t let me speak. I don’t know whether it was the profound respect I felt for him, or whether it was fear. Perhaps that is why I preferred to live my life apart from my father, and from the rest of my family, too. There was a gulf between us, a disunity, and although I respected them, and was hurt to see what was happening to them, I shut myself off. A selfish attitude, yes, but I believe I hurt them and myself less that