A journey

HIS WAS A BOX OF A BEDROOM in a triple-decker on a busy East Boston street. He didn't have much. He slept on a bare, beige-and-blue floral mattress. No sheets, red blanket. On a beat-up dresser sat an old Panasonic stereo. He liked Tejano music best. A sticker on one of the speakers read “I have issues.” Sometimes, he watched Univision or Telemundo on one of his roommates' TVs. Mostly, he ate meals at work or bought take-out. Francisco Portillo spent little time in the crowded, yellow-walled apartment he shared with three other men. Every day but Tuesday, he took the Blue line to the Orange to the Red to the Porter Square T Station, and crossed Mass. Ave. to Kaya Restaurant, arriving by 10 a.m. for his 12-hour shift. On his day off, he washed his clothes, relaxed a little, drank a couple of beers, and, always, called his wife back in El Salvador.

HE CALLED HER at a friend's house, because she didn't have a telephone. Four years ago he left her, and his five children, in La Reina, the cluster of humble adobe houses where he grew up. He learned about responsibility early. His father died when he was 10, and his mother sent Portillo, the eldest son in a large family, into the fields to pull corn and beans. He became the man of the house, put aside grade school and soccer to help buy the food his mother cooked over open flames. Bad luck, he always called it. He didn't want the same thing to happen to his own children. So, at 30, he did what other men were doing, and came to Boston. Of 15 households in the farm town, 10 had sent men to the United States to find work and wire back money. La Reina is the kind of place everybody wants to leave. But after four years in America, all Portillo wanted was to go back. A father should be with his children, he told his cousin, Carlos Cartagena. This coming Christmas, he told his wife, he would be with them again in La Reina.

HE HAD WORKED ALL DAY in the flat, fluorescent light of the Korean restaurant's white-tiled kitchen, a steel warren of benches, sinks, and refrigerators, where the produce and hard liquor are stored. Squat green bottles of Jinro rice vodka were lined up on a high shelf that every kitchen hand knew was strictly off-limits. Portillo had spent much of that day, Feb. 21, rocking slabs of beef back and forth through the heavy slicer. He liked the prep work, and had told his boss he wanted to do more of that, and less sweeping and dishwashing. That night, he washed a tall pile of small white side plates. He carried them back to a shelf in the closet-sized space where the kimchee and bean sprouts and seaweed salad and sauces sat in trays. Then the plates slipped through his hands, smashing, and sending white ceramic shards into the food. Nobody wanted to risk serving that food to the customers, so they threw it all away. His boss asked him to come over to talk about it, but Portillo hesitated in his narrow aisle, surrounded by sinks and shelves, as if no one could find him there. When he finally came and stood -- unsteadily -- before his boss, Portillo slurred his words. His boss gave up trying to talk to him. Portillo went to the break room upstairs, and then left the restaurant a half hour before the end of his shift. Colleagues who saw him through the restaurant's side windows barely recognized the man staggering past toward the T station.

HE WAS LYING ON HIS BACK at the bottom of the stairs, his feet facing the top, when somebody saw him, flailing, as if having a seizure. An almost empty, squat green bottle had rolled away from him. At some point during the 89 seconds it took for the escalator at the Porter Square T station to make its steep descent from the turnstiles to the platform, Portillo had gotten turned around. The hood of his blue sweatshirt had slipped into a gap in the machinery, and every moving stair wrenched it more tightly around his neck. Somebody hit the yellow emergency stop button. When the paramedics arrived, Portillo's face was blue. They cut the sweatshirt off him and tried to shock his heart into motion but they couldn't. He was gone. After they loaded him into the ambulance, mechanics pulled Portillo's sweatshirt from the metal stairs. It had been drawn in so deeply, they had to take apart the escalator to do it.