The Pregnant Scientist Who Raced Against Death to Transform Physics
I was 6 when Don José surprised me with some cookies and milk before bed. I got so sleepy. The next day I woke up all bloody, with a cut on my ankle. Mami and my sister Valery washed me and bandaged my wound. It was not only my ankle that hurt. Everywhere, my body was sore. My back. Between my legs. But I couldn’t remember anything. Many years later, my therapist would explain.
This was in Tijuana, where I had moved with my mother and five sisters, in 1962, four years after I was born further south, in the Mexican state of Jalisco. Our neighborhood, Colonia Veinte de Noviembre, was a mishmash of wooden houses and shacks along the Tijuana River. Mami was a stout, resourceful woman who built a three-room house out of wood from discarded pallets. Our bathroom was a latrine behind the house with a blanket for a door. At first, we didn’t have electricity or running water, but Mami and my stepfather, Don José, greatly improved the property over the years.
Don José (whose name, like mine and others in this story, has been changed to protect my identity) was a middle-aged laborer whose distinguishing feature was his yellow teeth. What Mami saw in him, I don’t know, maybe simply that he was a hard worker, not a drunk like my father, and he provided a much-needed second income.
After the night he offered me cookies, Don José would often come get me from the bed I shared with my sister Lupe. Don José didn’t like Lupe because she was short and dark skinned, so even though I was younger, he took me back to his living quarters on the other side of the yard. Many mornings, I would wake up in his bed, my stomach knotted and lurching from the smell of his breath.
The abuse continued for three years until one day Don José tried to molest my younger sister, Berta. Mami caught him in the act. He said, “No, no. I was trying to put her to bed. I would never do anything wrong to the girls.”
That’s when I told Mami, “He does a lot of wrong things to me.” My sister Valery, who was older, and Mami asked me questions as they looked at my body.
Valery said, “Mami, she’s been raped for many years.” But they never took me to the hospital.
Although small in stature, Mami was strong. And violent. After she learned of his abuse, she began beating Don José so hard and so often that I thought she would kill him. When she didn’t, I thought maybe he would leave. But eventually, things got peaceful again, and Mami and Don José had a baby together — a girl they named Camila.
Only once more did Don José try to molest me. I was getting water from the well and he touched my chest from behind. I turned to him and said, “Don José, don’t ever touch me again! If you do, I will knock on the doors of all the neighbors and tell them what you do to me.” I had new confidence now that I was 9, and I felt strong as I shouted my threats.
In my mind, I was safe. Now that Don José knew I would shame him, I was free of his harassment and stalking.
Around this time, another older sister of mine, Rosa, announced she was pregnant. It was also about this time that a thin, pockmarked man named Eduardo insinuated himself into our lives. He was an itinerant farmworker who traveled between California and Guadalajara three times a year, and Mami rented him a room whenever he passed through Tijuana. When Eduardo learned that Rosa was pregnant, he asked her if he could help with the baby’s expenses in exchange for sex. Rosa initially agreed, but then she ran away with her baby. Next, Eduardo asked Valery if he could “help” her, but Valery refused.
A couple of visits later, Eduardo inquired after me, asking Mami if she needed help with my school expenses. Mami came to me and said, “You’ll never get married because you are not a virgin, so it’s better for everyone that you do what Eduardo wants.”
“No! I can work,” I told her.
“He will go slow,” Mami assured me. “He won’t be as rude and aggressive as Don José.”
“But Eduardo is old and ugly. And he already has a wife,” I protested.
“I know, but you’ve been spoiled by Don José and have no future. You must do what is best for the family.” This was Mami’s final word.
Mami built a room for Eduardo, on the far end of the house, where our meetings took place. I was his sex slave for three weeks out of the year. Everyone in the family except Mami and me thought that Eduardo was only a boarder. Looking back, my older sister Carmen must have also known, because although she never said a word to me, she would have found herself alone in bed on the nights I was taken by Eduardo.
Eduardo expected me to perform like an adult woman in bed. But I didn’t know anything about sex. All I knew was that after he violated me I felt like the dirtiest person in the world.
“When my wife dies, you will marry me,” Eduardo said. “With all the honors, with a white dress, and everything!” He promised me that. Like it was a big favor.
Things got worse after I graduated from elementary school. Like all of the graduates, I signed the backs of my school photos and handed them out to my friends. Eduardo got ahold of one of them and typed on it: I am Estela Salazar, and I am going to serve Eduardo like a wife, on my mother’s order. My signature was at the bottom. He showed me what he wrote on the photo. “With this photo that you’ve signed, I can put your mom in jail,” he said. “So now you must do whatever I say.”
Not long after, Eduardo took me to a photo studio and forced me to have a picture taken with my arms wrapped around his neck. Then he put the picture in a frame and left it in our home. Many years later, I asked Lupe to make the photo disappear.
When I started middle school, Eduardo began to get jealous. I was trying not to draw attention to myself, but he was paranoid that the older boys would notice my budding breasts and curves, so he would wait for me outside of school. When I saw him, I’d say to my friends, “Oh look, my uncle came for me!” I was certain everyone knew what was happening, and I felt the burning shame of someone walking naked down the middle of the street.
Valery’s husband, Fernando, was like the big brother I never had. He must have known something was amiss, because he offered to have the school where he was principal help to pay my $7 per month tuition. I was hopeful that this meant Mami wouldn’t need Eduardo’s money anymore. But it was too late. Eduardo used the photo with my signature to threaten Mami. He felt so empowered that he stopped giving Mami money altogether. Maybe if I was older, I would have understood that Eduardo was the villain, but at the time all I remember feeling was scared that Mami and I would go to jail.
Mami convinced Eduardo to bring her a gun to protect the family, and one day Eduardo arrived with a Beretta. Eduardo showed us the safety and how to load the gun and pull the trigger. Mami and I shot at the eucalyptus trees in our yard. Later, I watched as Mami hid the gun in her closet.
Emboldened by the power he wielded because of the photo, Eduardo became increasingly offensive, obscene and demeaning. “Act like a woman!” he demanded.
“How can I? I’m only 11!”
“How dare you disrespect me!” He slapped me across the face, grabbed me by the hair, and yanked me onto the bed. Eyes closed, my mind did as it always did — it flew away to my happiest memory, my sisters and me making tamales. While he forced himself on me, I was in the kitchen telling jokes with my sisters and laughing so hard we cried, as the radio played the music of my favorite composer, Vincente Villa.
Depression swallowed me whole. First Don José had stolen my innocence. Now Eduardo had stolen what was left of my childhood. Killing myself seemed like the only escape. I got the gun from Mami’s closet, unlocked the safety, and hid it underneath the pillow in Eduardo’s room. My plan was to shoot myself in front of Eduardo, so that he would have to live with the consequences of what he’d done to me.
The night before Eduardo’s next visit, I approached Mami as she stirred a pot of beans atop the propane stove. “Please, ask Eduardo to stop,” I begged her. “I’ll do anything you want, anything you need. Just please make him stop.”
“It doesn’t matter what you do, Estela. You have no future,” she said. “No one will believe your story, and no respectable Catholic man will ever marry a woman who’s not a virgin.”
Sobbing, I collapsed at her feet. “Mami, I can’t do this anymore!”
Mami patted the top of my head but said nothing for a long while. Finally, with resignation in her voice, she said, “I will talk to him.”
I threw my arms around her legs. “Oh thank you, Mami!”
The next day, when Eduardo arrived, Mami took him aside. He then departed. “He will not bother you again,” Mami assured me.
That night, the liquor on Eduardo’s breath entered my bedroom before he did. He grabbed me by the wrist and pulled me across the house to his room. He latched the door behind us, then shoved me onto the bed in the corner of the room. I watched as he dug into his knapsack and pulled out something long. “I will put this in your ass,” he said. “And you will like it.”
“No! You were supposed to go away and leave me alone!” I screamed.
He clasped his hand over my mouth. “This will be the last time,” he whispered. “I promise.”
As Eduardo turned away to place his knapsack on the chair, I slid my hand beneath the pillow, grabbed the Beretta and raised it to my temple, but as Eduardo turned to face me with the dildo in his hand, I turned the gun on Eduardo and fired one shot into his forehead.
I was deafened by the blast as Eduardo fell on top of me, his whole body shuddering in my arms.
“Que chingadera pasa!” Mami shouted, knocking loudly on the other side of the door. “What the fuck happened!” (My sisters slept on the opposite side of the house, and somehow the gunshot didn’t wake them.)
I rolled out from under Eduardo and let her in. Her worn hands gripped a candle. The light revealed a fine mist of blood splatter on three of the four walls.
“What have you done?”
“I killed him.”
“Estamos jodidos,” Mami sighed. “We’re screwed.”
We stood together looking at Eduardo’s dead body splayed across the bed.
“We will burn the body,” she said.
“No, Mami! A fire will smell and we cant’t draw attention.”
As we both came out of our shock, Mami got a pail of water and began cleaning Eduardo’s blood and brains from my face. “We must think of what to do with the body. We can’t let the others see it.”
“I will think of something,” I told her. “You go back to bed, and I will stay here with the door locked until morning.”
For the rest of the night, I huddled on the corner of the bed deciding what to do with the body.
It was light outside when Mami shook me awake. “What are you going to do?” she asked.
I wrapped Eduardo’s body in blankets, and as a cold rain began to fall I dragged the body to the nearby sandy riverbank. Mami took my sisters to town while Don José slept on the other side of the house. I often hauled trash down to the river to be burned and buried, and hoped the neighbors thought I was doing just that.
Just as I’d dug holes to play in as a child, and just as I’d dug holes for burning our garbage, I dug a long shallow grave for Eduardo’s body. I rolled him into the hole, covered the body with the silty earth, then packed the mound with the back of the shovel.
After I killed Eduardo, I was no longer a child. I was a soldier who had defended my family and my home. I even went so far as to order a police detective correspondence course in the mail, and after reading it cover to cover, I was convinced that I wouldn’t get caught for my crime.
Four uneventful years passed. Don José and Eduardo were no longer threats to me. I earned enough money to pay my tuition by tutoring first-grade students who were referred to me by Fernando. I converted the room where I killed Eduardo into a classroom.
Then one day, the authorities arrived. I thought they were there to arrest me, but it was for another reason. They explained that our colony needed to be evacuated because it was in a flood basin and the dam was beginning to crack. They offered Mami new land plus some money. Mami agreed without hesitation. She and Don José began to disassemble the house, so that we could take the wood with us and build again on the new land.
“Mami, we need to do something with the body. It can’t be here,” I said. “The authorities know whose property this is, and if they find the body here, we’ll go to jail.”
“What are you going to do?” Mami asked.
“We have to unbury him.”
“Who is we?” Mami asked.
“Me. I’ll do it,” I said.
Mami took my sisters to town while I dug up Eduardo’s partially decayed body. The first whiff of maggot-covered corpse nearly knocked me out. But I couldn’t stop, so I resorted to my old trick — my mind flew away to the kitchen, and the music on the radio.
I went to the shed and found a pair of work gloves and the old axe I used to cut up the chickens, ducks and rabbits that we ate for dinner. I decapitated the skull and then cut the torso into pieces. I put these parts in paper bags, then put the bags in the latrine of the abandoned house next door, knowing that the chemicals in the latrine would quickly disintegrate them.
Next, I cut up the bones and put them in smaller paper bags. I knew of a slum area with a lot of trash, so I carried the bags three at time and dropped one bag every couple of hundred yards or so. I then returned to the body and started out again with three more bags, until eventually the bones were scattered for a mile or more along the Tijuana River, sure to be swept away in the next flood.
There are moments of eternal sunshine and moments of eternal darkness in our lives. Killing Eduardo and disposing of his body were my moments of eternal darkness.
No one ever came looking for Eduardo. Perhaps no one missed him. But three months after I murdered him, Valery saw a picture of a young man in the local paper who bore a strong resemblance to Eduardo. Sure enough, this young man’s name was the same, only with a “junior” suffix. It turned out Eduardo’s son had been arrested for drug possession at the Guadalajara airport. That was the last news we ever heard about Eduardo or his family.
Even so, I continue to sleep with the lights on.
It wasn’t my plan to come to the United States. My plan had been to stay in my country and study to become a teacher. But I didn’t want to move to the new property with my family, and I no longer needed to be their soldier. So when a friend told me about a job caring for a doctor’s wife in Pasadena, California, I jumped at the opportunity. For the first time in my life, I lived in a nice house, working for nice people — like a normal person.
I met Diego in South Los Angeles, while visiting a sister who had followed me to the States. Diego was a shy man. I picked him for that reason, and also because he didn’t drink.
I got pregnant in late 1975, at the age of 17. I received a call from the clinic telling me I was pregnant and asking if I wanted to get an abortion.
“No,” I said. “I will marry the father.”
My daughter Bianca was born in September of 1976, and I married Diego that December. Both of us got our green cards in 1977, just before I had my second child, Noelle. After our third child, Dawn, was born in 1981, Diego and I became naturalized U.S. citizens.
Diego deduced that I wasn’t a virgin when I met him. He asked me again and again why not. I wouldn’t tell him my story, so he assumed the worst — that I’d slept around. He lacked the imagination to know that there are much worse things in life than a woman who has slept around. When he began referring to me as a puta, a whore, I knew our marriage would not last forever. However, in the meantime, he was a good father and a good provider. I bided my time until Bianca, Noelle and Dawn were grown. Then, finally, I divorced Diego.
I went to see the same Vincente Villa I’d listened to on the radio as a child at a concert in Los Angeles in 1990. When we were introduced backstage, he said, “The band played well tonight. You must be a lucky charm.” He then invited me to join him for an upcoming concert in Tijuana. Our eyes met throughout the Tijuana concert, and I felt confident that my strong attraction toward Vincente was reciprocal. After that night, he invited me to his next concert; however, the weeks that followed were some of the rainiest ever in Baja, and the remainder of his tour was canceled.
I did not see or speak to Vincente again until two years later. I was paging through a local magazine in Ontario, California, when I saw in an advertisement that Vincente was to perform at a Mexican restaurant near my home. I purchased my ticket immediately and surprised him. It was an emotional reunion — for him, because he didn’t expect to ever see me again; for me, because he did not look well.
“Why are you playing this small Mexican restaurant instead of a large venue?” I asked during intermission. He explained to me that he’d recently completed chemotherapy and radiation treatment for breast cancer, and he was easing his way back into work.
“I’ve often thought of you but did not think you would want me like this,” he said as he passed his hands over his body. During the second act of his show, Vincente looked directly at me and said, “I wrote this a few years back a beautiful stranger I met, and tonight I play it for the first time. It’s called ‘Mi Amuleto de la Suerte,’ or ‘My Lucky Charm.’” (In addition to Vincente’s name, I’ve changed the titles of his songs in this piece.)
From that day forward, we were a couple. The only two requests I made of Vincente were that he treated me with respect and not drink. “I hate drunks!” I told him. He accepted my conditions, and in 1994 I accepted his proposal of marriage. For the next 19 years, we bounced between Mexico and California, and lived for a brief spell in Chicago, but for much of the time we simply lived on the road, traveling from one concert venue to the next.
For my 55th birthday in 2013, Vincente surprised me with a party. But not long after the festivities began, he complained of feeling “un poco enfermo,” so we left the party for the hospital. I told him, “I will bring you to San Diego — to the university hospital.”
But he said, “No. If I die, I want to die in my Mexico!”
While Vincente slept, I passed time wandering down the garden path of my 20-year marriage to a man whom all of Mexico loved — and had loved — much longer than I. I revisited my favorite memory of all: the first time we spent the night together, at the Grand Hotel in Tijuana. I had never imagined such opulence. It was here that I first saw the look of a man in love. And it was here that Vincente first caressed me — beginning with his eyes, then with his warm, soft hands. I shuddered and felt my heart beating in parts of me I didn’t know a heart could beat. I flipped through the memories of our travels throughout Mexico and the United States, me managing the band, with the man often billed as something like “aging yet still charismatic crooner, Vincente Villa” performing romantic ballads night after night, for all those throngs of adoring fans.
Vincente opened his eyes and looked plaintively at me. I stood and gazed down at him. “I am here fighting along with you. With all my faith and hope,” I said. A weak smile crossed his lips before his eyes lolled in their sockets.
“I am with you forever, my love,” I told him. “For better and for worse.” And though he’d already fallen back asleep, I knew he heard me. You can’t cover the sun with a finger, or silence a truth as big as our love.
Vincente would not have a goodbye tour. After eight months in an intensive care unit, fighting renal failure and a brain tumor, Vincente died of a bacterial infection in a Mexico City hospital. All of our savings went toward his hospital stay, and in the end, I was left with only $160 to my name. Friends took up a collection for me and raised enough to pay for my flight back to Tijuana. I brought very few of Vincente’s belongings with me, but one thing I did keep was his polished patent leather band shoes. I gave them to my American grandson, Justin, before his first prom. “If Vincente were alive,” I told him, “He would want you to have these, and he would tell you that the secret to succeeding at love is to speak Spanish.”
Justin tied his new shoes, stood up, pulled down his cummerbund, and proclaimed, “I will learn Spanish in honor of Vincente Villa!”
I moved in with Mami, who had cancer, and commuted every day to San Diego to work for a cleaning service. I worked for $10 per hour cleaning homes, but I didn’t mind because the work at least took my mind off my bottomless grief.
I met Amy Roost, who I am telling this story to, when I cleaned her house. We formed a connection that I’ve never had with any other client. I told her I was newly widowed. And when she asked about my husband, I proudly shared that Vincente had been a very famous bandleader. I had never sent a client of mine a Facebook friend request, until Amy. I thought of her as my friend, and I felt confident she thought of me as her friend too. In 2017, when Amy shared her #MeToo story on Facebook — describing how she’d been sexually abused by her brother and raped as a teenager — I knew we were kindred spirits.
Eventually, Amy hired me away from the cleaning service and referred me to friends of hers. On my own, I earned $20 per hour, which allowed me to spend more time caring for Mami.
For all those years, Mami was still the only person who knew I’d killed Eduardo, and this secret was part of what bound us. So many times I’d wanted to share with Vincente and others what I’d done, but my shame would not allow me to. I also had to think of my three girls. I did not want their reputations tainted by having a mother who is a murderer. There were other practicalities to consider. For instance, who would ever hire a murderer to clean their house? And finally, the fear of going to prison, which had burrowed into me as a child, remained with me in adulthood.
Though she never forgave me for killing Eduardo, I forgave Mami. “What you did to me as a child is not your fault,” I told her. And it wasn’t. She’d suffered so much as a child at the hands of her own mother’s physical abuse and because she was expected to tend to her 14 brothers and sisters. Mami deserved another kind of life. But she wasn’t given the opportunity; she was too busy surviving. Even though she never went to school, she learned to sew, cook good food, build houses, construct fences and gates, and manage the family’s finances. How could I blame such a brave and intelligent woman?
My stepsister, Camila, had just given birth when Don José, her father, was hospitalized for prostate cancer in 1993. I offered to sit with him in the hospital, so that Camila could stay at home with her baby. After his surgery, Don José had three blood clots in his penis; the poetic justice was not lost on me. He screamed in pain over and over, so I called the nurse. “You must do something!” I said. “He’s in such agony.” The nurse left the room, then returned with a pump. While she worked on Don José, I prayed, “God, if it is your will, please forgive Don José. He gave me Camila, and she loves him. Please God, do not deny Don José his old age like he denied my innocence.” Just as I finished my prayer, the clots cleared.
Don José died in 2019, at age 98. Because his funeral was on a Saturday, when I was supposed to clean Amy’s home, I asked her if I could reschedule for the following weekend.
When I arrived at Amy’s, she asked, “Were you close to your stepdad?” I began to cry, which she mistook for a yes. I shook my head. “No! We were not close. He raped me!”
“Sit down,” she said. “It’s OK. You can talk to me.”
I sat next to her on the sofa, and for the first time, I told my story to someone outside of my family. Also for the first time, I told my story without feeling shame, because I knew that every tear on Amy’s face tasted the same as the tears on mine.
My name is Estela Salazar. I was once in the crosshairs of hunters, then I soared on the wings of love. Now I am a crystal vase covered in cracks. Not one has caused me to shatter.
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