Guilt of the Well-to-Do

“No comprendo.” That’s what I want to say as Lupe pauses from cleaning the kitchen to tell me about her weekend. But between my fractured Spanish and her broken English, I understand all too well.

Besides, the meaning of a finger slicing across a throat is universal.

Fighting tears, Lupe tells me that her relatives fell victim to an attempted carjacking on Saturday. Her sister-in-law screamed when their assailants tried to snatch her baby, and Lupe’s husband and father-in-law were knifed and badly beaten.“No good!” she says, tapping her skull. Her father-in-law was in a coma, perhaps brain dead.

“Muerto?” I inquire.

“Si, si,” she affirms, although it turns out he is paralyzed, not dead. Lupe’s husband will recover, the baby is safe. But her sister-in-law’s milk has dried up from fright. Lupe must now nurse her nephew along with her own infant daughter.

“Policia?” I inquire.

“No good,” Lupe repeats. The police do nothing. What can they do in a community where, threatened by retaliation and L’Immigracion, people are too frightened to come forward? Lupe tells me about neighbors who called the police and later had to shield their nine-month-old inside the apartment from a drive-by spray of gunfire.

I ask if other neighborhoods are safer. “Si,” Lupe says, but they cannot afford the rent. Lupe cleans for five families, and her husband works odd jobs here and there. Still, she says, it’s much better in America. In their home countries, if you fall behind on paying protection money, your whole family is killed.

“Lo siento mucho,” I say over and over. But what does it matter how sorry I am? I should empty my bank account and let her family move in with us. But I don’t, telling myself that salving the guilt of privilege does not really solve anything. Still, cash pays the bills a lot better than sympathy. I will slip some extra twenties among her wages next week. At least I hope I will.

Through an accident of birth, Lupe scrubs my toilets while I surf the Web. I look out over Mount Tam from my window as she dodges gunfire and the clutch of poverty less than five miles away.

I really don’t understand it at all.