Midnight Cactus

by Bella Pollen

  ‘I’m not.’

  ‘Why are you lighting candles then?’

  ‘I like candles . . . and, um, they save on electricity.’

  ‘Okay, I’ll turn out the lights,’ Emmy offers.

  ‘No, don’t do that,’ I say quickly. ‘I mean not yet.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because we won’t be able to see.’

  ‘But we’ll have the candles!’

  ‘Yes, but they won’t be enough.’

  ‘Wait a second,’ Jack re-examines, ‘did you or did you not claim that the candles in question were to be lit in order that electricity might be saved?’

  ‘Yes, but . . .’

  ‘Just answer the questions yes or no, Mrs Coleman,’ he says wearily.

  Obviously, I take the fifth.

  ‘Mummy’s having a romantic dinner, Mummy’s having a romantic dinner,’ Emmy chants.

  I sigh. When did my children get so savvy or do all kids, from birth, have some extra-sensory perception that informs them of an approaching opportunity for blackmail? I look at them suspiciously. They’re both wearing that familiar expression, the one that invariably precedes public parental humiliation and is usually adopted on aeroplanes or in the confectionery aisle of the local supermarket checkout. They smile back sweetly. They fully recognize the signs of distraction and know full well how to exploit them.

  ‘Can we stay up, Mummy, can we? Jack, ask Mummy . . .’

  They go on, cawing away at me, but I cannot keep my mind from wandering back to those white crosses in the sand, back to Duval and his story, back twenty years to the desert one hot and terrible June . . .

  Benjamín had left the body of the girl where it lay. He’d taken the strip of cloth El Turrón had torn from the hem of her dress, then in one swift, agonizing movement, lifted the loose shelf of his jaw back into place and tied it with the cloth, knotting the ends on top of his head. Looking like an old-fashioned ad for a man with a toothache, he headed north, or his nearest approximation of it, the stabbing pain in his relocated jawbone keeping him conscious, keeping one foot in front of the other, keeping him alive. Eventually, when he could walk no further, he leant against a rock and closed his eyes. He slept fitfully through the night and part of the morning until the buzz of the helicopter entered his brain like a wasp, and when he opened his eyes the first thing he saw was a pair of black shiny boots. The cop shouted something then knelt down in front of him and put a bottle of water to his cracked lips. Two hours later he was back on the other side of the line. And that had been only the beginning . . .

  Years passed and Benjamín crossed the border in every way imaginable. Under the wire, over the fence, along the tunnel, through the river – just another peripatetic soul, drifting like a phantom in the dust of the desert, not dead, but yet not alive either, belonging neither to this country nor to any other – simply going round and round, back and forth through the revolving doors from Mexico to the US. It was a life of relentless low-intensity conflict with the authorities, a deadly serious game characterized by childish names: Touch Tag, Hide and Seek, Snakes and Ladders, Cat and Mouse.

  In the spring he worked picking citrus fruit out of the irrigated desert of Phoenix. After the season he headed south like some weary migrating bird, back over the border, through the turnstile, down the street to the bus station, and from there, the all-night drive, with its comforting whispers as it bumped along whatever road would lead him home, to Nopalillo, to his wife and children.

  But his broken promise to the dead girl haunted him. How it had happened, he wasn’t sure, but sometime during that first night, with his mind drifting in and out of consciousness, she had become an emblem of his survival. Of the two faces forever branded into his consciousness, it was El Turrón’s that kept his anger hot, but it was Estella’s that softened his bitterer moments. Her face became more familiar to him than even his own wife’s. Once or twice when the trickle of work swept him further west, out of Arizona and into California, he’d thought about delivering the letter. Tried to imagine himself walking into the University of California, but then what? Without the child, he would be no more than the bearer of bad news, yet he could not bring himself to throw it away. Instead he rolled it like an ancient archaeological map, secured it with the strip of Estella’s dress, and placed it in the wooden box at home where he kept things he valued the most.

  There were constants in his life: men he got to know from the orchards, the better farmers who employed them, a coyote he fell in with en route and came to trust. And if he knew that life was difficult and lonely for him, he knew, too, that it was just as lonely for Marie Elena waiting back in Mexico with only a wire transfer once a month to keep her company. So he kept his aspirations low. To earn enough money for his wife to be happy. To return often enough for his children to recognize him. For these reasons he tried to find work as close to home as possible. He hugged the line, picking avocados, melons, lemons, inhaling the pesticidas, sleeping on the ground, avoiding the thorns, because even in one short season he could make more money than any of his sisters’ husbands could in a lifetime.

  Then one day he returned home and it was all over. Maria Elena waited for him no longer. She had taken the children, moved to another village, gone with another man. Cuckolded, his jaw beating with rage and humiliation, Benjamín sought her out. He stood on the cobblestone street in front of her new house and screamed bitter abuse. Now she would never have a refrigerator or shop for groceries in an American supermarket or own a car. Now their children would be as poor and ignorant as their forefathers and all because she couldn’t wait, all because she was a puta to end all putas. So he left the dustbowl of Nopalillo, walked away from the only things worth staying alive for. He left his children and climbed back on the rattling bus to el Norte, vowing never to return.

  That time, appropriately, he crossed the border curled up by the engine in the front of a Ford whose battery had been removed and jacked up underneath the car to make room for him. The heat and the dirt and the burns served to stoke the furnace of his anger, but he was nearly asphyxiated by pollution travelling through south LA. Still, he held it together long enough to find a job on a rose farm. For a month he put on a leather apron and picked flowers till his hands bled, but on his first payday he went on a wild drinking binge and was eventually picked up by the police.

  It was 1996 then and the border was no longer just an ideal. It was a hard tangible thing, forged out of steel, barbed wire and intolerance. It had become a politicians’ tool, a $235 million sop to real Americans, the ones with a vote. Following the devaluation of the peso, 1995 was a year of economic crisis in Mexico and the floodgates opened. In came Operation Gatekeeper, Operation Safeguard, Operation Hold the Line. Under the new crackdown everyone got scrutinized, employers and illegals alike – and what, the police asked Benjamín, was a campesino doing with a letter from the University of California if not being offered work of some kind? Benjamín couldn’t remember what he answered, but maybe in his drunkenness, in his numbness, he boasted of friends in high places – thinking anything was better than having his ass dumped ninety miles south of the border again. So the police contacted the INS who contacted the head of staff at the University of California – and finally, finally, this particular deus ex machina, thirteen years in the making, came full circle.

  ‘Mummy. For God’s sake!’ Jack’s voice finally breaks through. He wipes charcoaled hands on his jeans. ‘You’re so unfair.’

  ‘Yes, you’re so unfair,’ Emmy echoes. ‘You always tell us we don’t listen to you, but you never listen to us. Never.’

  ‘I’m sorry. What were you saying?’

  ‘We want to know if we can stay up.’ Jack might not have graduated onto pro-bono work, but he’s perfectly willing to support a class action.

  ‘Mmm. For a bit.’

  ‘No, not just for a bit,’ he says with infinite patience, ‘for dinner.’

  ‘Not for dinner, no . . .’

&nbs
p; ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because it’ll be late.’

  ‘So . . .?’

  ‘So . . . you’ll be tired.’

  ‘Certainly won’t. Besides, we can sleep late in the morning. It’s the weekend!’

  ‘Jack, I said no already.’

  ‘But why? What possible harm can it do, what would actually happen? I mean, would the world actually come to an end?’

  ‘Probably not, but you’d be bad-tempered which is more or less the same thing.’

  ‘I wouldn’t be bad-tempered. If I slept late, I’d get the same amount of sleep.’ His voice rises imperiously as he counts hours on fingers. ‘One, two, three . . .’

  There’s no arguing with either the mathematics or the logic of this, it’s just a question of who can sustain the debate the longest.

  ‘Maybe you’re right,’ I concede, ‘but I’d be bad-tempered if you stayed up late.’

  In the end we cut a deal. The children agree to go to bed on time in return for a cup of hot chocolate with real melted chocolate pieces which they are to be allowed to drink in their bedroom. I listen to them slurping and giggling, as I stand in front of the cupboard, suddenly insecure, wondering what to wear, wondering why I care and if Duval is the kind of person who will notice anyway. In the small tin mirror I’d hung there, the face that looks back at me is pale and English, so different from Estella’s striking beauty.

  He’d met her in Guanajuato. She was seventeen with slim brown legs and a mouth that didn’t quite close over her teeth. He had come to Guanajuato to look at an eighteenth-century Jesuit seminary he had heard people talk about. She was selling arts and crafts in the square. He watched her through the window as she did a little dance around her rug of dolls when she thought no one was looking. She came from a small speck of an Indian town fifteen miles to the south where at nights the streets are empty save for the dogs scavenging for rubbish.

  Duval had been born on a cattle ranch in New Mexico. His father was a tight-lipped but upstanding citizen who’d inherited the property from his own father, a conservative east-coast businessman who’d decided in a single act of spontaneity to take advantage of the free market and availability of public lands for the grazing of livestock in the west and headed there with his twenty-three-year-old bride. Every skill Duval truly valued he learned from the cowboys, both Mexican and English, who worked on the ranch. He had these old boys to thank for being immensely practical with his hands, for breaking in a colt, speaking Spanish; but he told me later that everything he learned about fighting he taught himself. He’d been schooled locally and post-college had applied to the University of California, which he got into on the quota system before spending a year cowboying down in Mexico – more than anything to escape his father’s overbearing personality.

  Mexico changed him. Its utter corruption, its relentless poverty. Disenchanted with the greed and privilege of developed America, his sympathies lay increasingly with the people of its peripheral borders. Once he was in college their faces came back to him like black and white photographic stills. Farmers in the strawberry fields. Indian women on street corners. Children sleeping under blue tarpaulins. He wrote to Estella as a form of absolution for the first love affair, the one that carries so many hopes and expectations but eventually comes down to the memory of innocence lost – a feeling of guilt for promises made and forgotten. He’d never known for sure whether she received it until the day he’d walked into that INS office and found himself face to face with the small Mexican with the broken jaw who’d stared at the floor as Duval read the fading piece of paper. He’d never known about his son until Benjamín raised wary eyes to his. ‘You help me,’ he’d whispered, ‘and I will tell you about the child.’

  I shake myself. The house has been quiet for a long time. Downstairs, I open the oven and haul out the heavy skillet. A shoulder of pork has been slow-cooking all day. Underneath the lid, the liquid bubbles gently. The fat from the meat has melted into the juices and the onions and chillies have caramelized at the bottom of the pan into a sticky delicious gunge. Dolores’s puerco con chiles poblanos. I put it back in the oven and look out of the window in the direction of the schoolroom where the workers would also be hungrily waiting for their food.

  Estella’s story had been harrowing, shocking. I had so many questions, but it hadn’t seemed like the right time. I’d turned the horse away from the grave, not knowing what to do, what to feel.

  ‘What is it that you want from me?’ I’d asked Duval.

  ‘Fair warning.’

  ‘For what?’

  ‘Oh you know ... if I’m to send the men into hiding. Post Winfred as lookout on top of the hill to decipher the probable danger of every approaching dust cloud.’ He drew alongside me and I could see he was smiling.

  I nodded my head slowly. ‘Okay.’

  ‘In that case,’ he led the chestnut on, ‘I think it’s time you finally met your crew.’

  There had been around fifteen Mexicans in the schoolroom. Some I recognized from their building-site clothes, others were strangers, obvious newcomers, streaked with dirt and sweat, their clothes dirty and crumpled. All talking stopped and curious eyes flicked to us as Duval showed me into the low-ceilinged shack adjoining the schoolroom. ‘Compañeros,’ he said, ‘this is Alice.’

  He went on to introduce each man as though hosting some professional dating party at a smart Phoenix venue. Joaquim, this is Alice, two children, temporarily separated from her husband. Alice, this is Joachim. He lost his brother in a border accident some years ago. One by one they told me their stories. Almond growers, peach pickers, porch sweepers, janitors, each a tiny cog in the wheel on which Wall Street and the price of frozen OJ turns. And what I began to understand that afternoon was that if America is the land of opportunity, a country where perseverance and hard work is rewarded by recognition, then an illegal harbours the opposite ambitions. His greatest reward is anonymity, invisibility. Aided and abetted by market forces and the laws of supply and demand, he hones his skill to stand up but make sure he’s never counted.

  The men shook my hand, some smiling, most sombre, shy. Of all of them it was Dolores, the only woman, who found it hardest to face me straight on. She stood at the makeshift stove stirring a frying pan of beef and chillies, a high stack of flour tortillas on a paper plate at her elbow. Duval said her name twice before she reluctantly turned. She raised big oval eyes to mine and blurted out something.

  ‘What did she say?’

  ‘She says she thinks she’s a lousy housekeeper.’

  ‘Oh no, she’s great,’ I lied.

  Dolores muttered again, rubbing her fingers fretfully over the tiny red roses embroidered on the pockets of her apron.

  ‘She says it’s better she doesn’t clean the house any more.’

  ‘Okay, sure, whatever she wants.’ There were beads of perspiration on Dolores’s upper lip. ‘Está bien’ I said to her and, equally embarrassed, made to move on.

  ‘¡Espera!’ She laid a timid hand on my arm, then – plucking a tortilla off the pile and cradling it into a half shell – she spooned in meat from the pan. The rich smell of beef had been intoxicating and I realized I hadn’t eaten all day.

  ‘¿Te gusta?’ she asked and I nodded, mouth ablaze with chilli.

  Duval chuckled and leant in to hear what Dolores was saying.

  ‘She says, if you like, instead of cleaning your house, she will cook for you.’

  I looked at the faces of the men then back to Dolores’s own, questioning, anxious, and I felt the warmth and the smoke close round and found myself overcome with a sort of heady acquiescence.

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Tell her, yes, please.’

  Duval lays his hat on the table. He looks round the room and gives a low whistle. The cabin looks pretty in candlelight, and despite my protestations Emmy has laid the table with her favourite mismatched booty from the yard sales. Duval picks up the frosted glasses one by one, examining the painted Indian chiefs on each.
‘Sequoyah, Geronimo!’ He looks up. ‘These are wonderful. Where did you find them?’

  ‘Apparently, they were given out as freebies in the sixties by the oil companies.’

  He laughs. ‘So no irony there then.’

  ‘No, I guess not.’

  He puts the glass carefully back on the table. ‘This was Geronimo’s territory, you know.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘He was an Apache. In fact the only interesting thing about Tombstone, a town beneath contempt as far as I’m concerned, is that it hosted a baseball team which was interrupted by one of Geronimo’s raids.’

  ‘Somehow baseball and Geronimo don’t feel like they belong in the same century.’

  ‘They don’t, hence the tragedy. When Geronimo was eventually exiled to Florida, a newspaper man asked him if it broke his heart to leave his people and he apparently replied, “I had no heart left by the time I got to Florida.”’ He lifts the lid off the pork and the sweet smell of spices and cilantro fill the room. ‘So how’s Dolores’s cooking?’

  Dolores is a wonderful cook. Benjamín told me she comes from his home town, that her husband died in an oil rig accident in the north. The other men wanted her to stay in the schoolroom, a Wendy to their Lost Boys, but Benjamín didn’t want to risk her being alone there, not when the men were up working on the town.

  ‘So where is she sleeping then?’ I’d asked him, and Benjamín, turning a reddening face to the wall, admitted she was staying with him. Now every morning when she covers her pistachio shirt with a checked cotton apron and gets cracking at the stove, I worry about where she does her laundry and how she applies her red lipstick with only the reflection of the tin St Joseph to peer into. I wonder whether to offer her a change of clothes, a hot bath and some soothing Burt’s Honey Bath Milk to go in it, but I don’t because I’m guessing she’d be mortified. I’m guessing that Dolores still believes, despite Duval’s protestations that I am a friend and will not turn her in, that she is working in the lair of the she-devil. So, to date I have offered her no more than fatuous compliments about her food in my dire Spanglish, but in answer to Duval’s question, the stuff she makes is incredible. Tostadas, chilaquiles, albóndigas, and the children’s favourite, cajeta, a fudge sauce made of goat’s milk which they eat straight from the pan. The truth is, Dolores doesn’t seem to mind what she cooks as long as she gets to use the Magimix. No matter how small the quantity to be chopped, no matter that it takes her longer to wash the machine than to do it by hand, if something needs grating, slicing, or even hacking in two, into the Magimix it goes while Dolores stands, finger on the pulse button, a beatific smile playing about her full lips.