PRIVATE FACES, PUBLIC SPACES : You Learn to Get in Line Early

In the middle of the night, shadows of men go to work. Unnoticed, alone, they clean offices, sit in gas stations, deliver newspapers. In the early morning, as bundles of papers stand in a store, who questions how they got there, whose back carried them in?

Alberto Morales works seven days a week delivering Spanish-language newspapers. He gets to work just after midnight; they give him the papers at 3. He gets in line early for the same reason that he is afraid to take one night off: knowing that another, stronger, younger man--an even hungrier man--will jump into his place. Afraid to have surgery, afraid to rest.

When he was younger and worked in a bank, his face was full and confident. He stood straight, as men like him had stood once in Galicia or Madrid, long before they sailed to his country as conquerors. He is smaller now, his face is longer, sadder, his eyes more knowing. His long, silvery beard creates a chiaroscuro, the light and dark of old Spanish paintings of men who have survived treachery or cheated death.

Here is Alberto Morales at home in Van Nuys: a bright, anonymous apartment, cookies arranged on a silver tray, glasses of nectar on embroidered coasters. The sofas are newly upholstered in black brocade. He covered them himself, as he covered the deep library chair in black leather. It had been broken, its stuffing spilling out, its wooden claws splintered. It stood that way in the back of his son’s pickup truck. When his son was killed, the old chair and the truck were almost the only things left behind of him.

Here is Amparo Morales, his wife of nearly 30 years. Her hands are carefully manicured, her dress rustles as the dresses in which she waltzed away nights in the mountain air in Colombia once rustled, while her mother watched carefully.

In an old Spanish book on the glass table in Van Nuys is a photograph of a handsome woman, poised and proud: Amparo’s grandmother, Clara de Ramirez, philanthropist. For 100 years, her family lived in the tall green mountains of Colombia, made proud by their distinguished Spanish air, their pure Spanish accent.

Some people might say that Amparo Morales is a maid. They would be wrong. She works as a maid, cleaning houses. She dreams of owning a small shop, of selling her exquisite needlework; she makes ruched curtains, swagged and finished with hand-stitched flowers, and organdy baby baskets. Meanwhile, she does what she can to help put food on the table, cookies on the old silver tray.

Her eldest son, Mauricio Alberto, was killed in a hit-and-run motorcycle accident on the Golden State Freeway. “God lent my beautiful Mauricito to me for 24 years, and then it was time to give him back.”

The Moraleses came to the United States only for their sons--for a fine college education, for a larger future. Alberto gave up his position in life as a man whose family was known in the town in Colombia. He thought he could, at least, be a craftsman here. He is a skilled woodworker and has gone, tenaciously, with his little English, to trade school to learn the upholstery craft that he hopes to practice when--or if--he can afford tools of his own. And so he rises at midnight to bale newspapers and then deliver them in the old truck that once belonged to his fine young son with his perfect English, his carefree American ways.

But sometimes he remembers the early days in the States, when he learned to cook and clean for his sons while Amparo stayed behind in Colombia to nurse her ailing mother. Then, he gives thanks for Gustavo Adolfo, his kind, good younger son who works at the Van Nuys courthouse, a job with medical benefits and a paid vacation. One day, one year, Gustavo Adolfo will graduate from the college he attends two nights a week, coming home as his father leaves his bed.

“Each person,” says Amparo Morales “has her own destiny.” The faith to accept that bitter destiny was the great wealth the Moraleses brought with them.