The day I saw Yolanda, I walked back to my house through the alleys of Venice Beach. I had spent the morning and felt tired of the multicolored show that, daily, meets the main walk with the beach. He preferred the tranquility of small rear streets.
I delighted by admiring the small gardens of the beach houses, conceived in a disorderly way but with some imagination. I felt good there, between cactus and araucarias, hedges and splints, plaster dogs and surf boards, oxidized barbecues and floswn faded by the sun. With that Californian air of decadent youth impregnating everything.
Those streets are the quiet rear of a beach that is reputed to be as interesting as frivolous and crazy. The rear doors of apartment buildings, car parking lots and garbage containers are in them the anonymous landscape in which a silent and alternative type of life meets. In that landscape the poor and cats move, the enlightened wanders and the marginalized are suspended and refuge.
Yolanda knows these streets very well because, since he illegally emigrated to the United States and set his residence in Los Angeles, he traveled them every morning, along with his husband Rogelio, in search of glass and aluminum containers that, later, both both They will sell in the recycling plants of the city's suburbs.
It begins its day at three in the morning and, from that moment, it does not cease in its eagerness to discover its newspaper Lot of Treasures in the garbage containers ...
Many times he has thought about leaving him because his work, in addition to very tired, is dangerous. He has contracted diseases, has suffered assaults and, on some occasion, they have shot him. But, despite fear, he confesses that he has no choice but to follow. Because thanks to his work he is fulfilling his usual dream: that his three children receive a good education and manage to prosper in the United States.
The last time we saw each other, she confessed in tears that her eldest son, Rogelio, was compensating for the effort that she and her husband did for him. He was studying a scholarship in one of the best universities in the country and had managed to become the first of his class.
Pepe Navarro
