I told him that I was happy that the package included me but it simply showed his good judgment to want to hire Margrethe.
He agreed that that was true. He had attended the Wednesday labor auctions several weeks on end in search of a bilingual woman or girl who could be trained as a waitress, then had bid me in as well to obtain Margrethe - but he wished to tell me that he had not regretted it as he had never seen the scullery so clean, the dishes so immaculate, the silverware so shiny.
I assured him that it was my happy privilege to help uphold the honor and prestige of Restaurante Pancho Villa and its distinguished patrón, el Don Jaime.
In fact it would have been difficult for me not to improve that scullery. When I took over, I thought at first that the floor was dirt. And so it was - you could have planted potatoes! - but under the filth, about a half inch down, was sound concrete. I cleaned and then kept it clean - my feet were still bare. Then I demanded roach powder.
Each morning I killed roaches and cleaned the floor. Each evening, just before quitting for the day, I sprinkled roach powder. It is impossible (I think) to conquer roaches, but it is possible to fight them to a draw, force them back and maintain a holding action.
As to the quality of my dishwashing, it could not be otherwise; my mother had a severe dirt phobia and, because of my placement in a large family, I washed or wiped dishes under her eye from age seven through thirteen (at which time I graduated through taking on a newspaper route that left me no time for dishwashing).
But just because I did it well, do not think I was enamored of dishwashing. It had bored me as a child; it bored me as a man.
Then why did I do it? Why didn't I run away?
Isn't that evident? Dishwashing kept me with Margrethe. Running away might be feasible for some debtors - I don't think much effort went into trying to track down and bring back debtors who disappeared some dark night - but running away was not feasible for a married couple, one of whom was a conspicuous blonde in a country in which any blonde, is always conspicuous and the other was a man who could not speak Spanish.
While we both worked hard - eleven to eleven each day except Tuesday, with a nominal two hours off for siesta and a half hour each for lunch and dinner - we had the other twelve hours each day to ourselves, plus all day 'Tuesday.
Niagara Falls never supplied a finer honeymoon. We had a tiny attic room at the back of the restaurant building. It was hot but we weren't there much in the heat of the day - by eleven at night it was comfortable no matter how hot the day had been. In Mazatlán most residents of our social class (zero!) did not have inside plumbing. But we worked and lived in a restaurant building; there was a flush toilet we shared with other employees during working hours and shared with no one the other twelve hours of each day. (There was also a Maw Jones out back, which I sometimes used during working hours - I don't think Margrethe ever used it.)
We had the use of a shower on the ground floor, -back to back with the employees' toilet, and the needs of the scullery were such that the building had a large water heater. Señora Valera scolded us regularly for using too much hot water ('Gas costs money!'); we listened in silence and went right on using whatever amount of hot water we needed.
Our patrón's contract with the state required him to supply us with food and shelter (and clothing, under the law, but I did not learn this until too late to matter), which is why we slept there, and of course we ate there - not the chef's specialties, but quite good food.
'Better is a dinner of herbs where love is, than a stalled ox and hatred therewith.' We had only ourselves; it was enough.
Margrethe, because she sometimes received tips, especially from gringos, was slowly accumulating cash money. We spent as little of this as possible - she bought shoes for each of us -and she saved against the day when we would be free of our peonage and able to go north. I had no illusions that the nation north of us was the land of my birth... but it was this world's analog of it; English was spoken there and I was sure that its culture would have to be closer to what we had been used to.
Tips to Margrethe brought us into friction with Señora Valera the very first week. While Don Jaime was legally our patrõn, she owned the restaurant - or so we were told by Amanda the cook. Jaime Valera had once been head-waiter there and had married the owner's daughter. This made him permanent maitre d'hotel. When his father-in-law died, he became the owner in the eyes of the public. But his wife retained the purse strings and presided over the cash register.
(Perhaps I should add that he was 'Don Jaime' to us because he was our patrón; he was not a Don to the public.
The honorific 'Don' will not translate into English, but owning a restaurant does not make a man a Don - but, for example, being a judge does.)
The first time Margrethe was seen to receive a tip, the Señora told her to turn it over - at the end of each week she would receive her percentage.
Margrethe came straight to me in the scullery. 'Alec, what shall I do? Tips were my main income in the Konge Knut and no one ever asked me to share them. Can she do this to me?'
I told her not to turn her tips over to the Señora but to tell her that we would discuss it with her at the end of the day.
There is one advantage to being a peón: You don't get fired over a disagreement with your boss. Certainly we could be fired... but that would simply lose the Valeras some ten thousand pesos they had invested in us.
By the end of the day I knew exactly what to say and how to say it - how Margrethe must say it, as it was another month before I soaked up enough Spanish to maintain a minimum conversation:
'Sir and Madam, we do not understand this ruling about gifts to me. We want to see the judge and ask him what our contract requires.'
As I had suspected, they were not willing to see the judge about it. They were legally entitled to Margrethe's service but they had no claim on money given to her by a third party.
This did not end it. Señora Valera was so angry at being balked by a mere waitress that she had a sign posted: NO PROPINAS - NO TIPS, and the same notice was placed in the menus.
Peónes can't strike. But there were five other waitresses, two of them Amanda's daughters. The day Sefiora Valera ordered no tipping she found that she had just one waitress (Margrethe) and no one in the kitchen. She gave up. But I am sure she never forgave us.
Don Jaime treated us as employees; his wife treated us as slaves. Despite that old cliché about 'wage, slaves', there is a world of difference. Since we both tried hard to be faithful employees while paying off our debt but flatly refused to be slaves, we were bound to tangle with Señora Valera.
Shortly after the disagreement over tips Margrethe became convinced that the Señora was snooping in our bedroom. If true, there was no way to stop her; there was no lock for the door and she could enter our room without fear of being caught any day while we were working.
I gave some thought to boobytraps until Margrethe vetoed the idea. She simply thereafter kept her mo hey on her person. But it was a measure of what we thought of our 'patroness' that Margrethe considered it necessary to lake precautions against her stealing from us.
We did not let Señora Valera spoil our happiness. And we did not let our dubious status as a 'married' couple spoil our somewhat irregular honeymoon. Oh, I would have spoiled it because I always have had this unholy itch to analyze matters I really do not know how to analyze. But Margrethe is much more practical than I am and simply did not permit it. I tried to rationalize our relationship to her by pointing out that polygamy was not forbidden by Holy Writ but solely by modern law and custom - and she chopped me off briskly by saying that she had no interest in how many wives or concubines King Solomon had and did not regard him or any Old Testament character as a model for her own behavior. If I did not want to live with her, speak up! Say so!