NELSON: We Americans? But I lived in this country until I was eighteen!
SANTOS (talking over him): Everything you Americans say is very funny. Nothing impresses us unless it lasts five hundred years. We can’t even begin to discuss the greatness of a thing until it has survived that long. (It’s not clear whom Santos is addressing. Still, there’s a murmur of approval. His eyes close. He’s a teacher again, in the classroom.) This town is great. The ocean is great. The desert and the mountains beyond. There are some ruins in the foothills, which you surely know nothing about. They are undoubtedly, indisputably great; as are the men who built them, and their culture. Their blood, which is our blood, and even yours, though unfortunately . . . how shall I put it? Diluted. Not great: the highway, the border. The United States. Where do you live? What’s that place called?
NELSON: Oakland, California.
SANTOS: How old?
NELSON: A hundred years?
SANTOS: Not great. Do you understand?
NELSON: I’m sure I don’t. If I may: those five-hundred-year-old ruins, for example. You’ll notice I’m using your word, Profe. Ruins. Am I wrong to question whether they’ve lasted?
Television: the ruins.
SANTOS (taking his seat again): You would have failed my class.
NELSON: What a shame. Like these gentlemen?
SANTOS: Nothing to be proud of. Nothing at all.
NELSON (transparently trying to win them over): I’d be in good company.
ERICK: Cheers.
JAIME: Cheers.
MANUEL (reluctantly): Cheers.
COCHOCHO (stern, clearing his throat): I did not fail that class or any class. It’s important you know this. I didn’t want to mention it, but I am deputy mayor of this town. I once ran for Congress. I could have this bar shut down tomorrow.
ERICK/JAIME (together, alarmed): You wouldn’t!
COCHOCHO: Of course not! Don’t be absurd! (pause) But I could. I am a prominent member of this community.
ERICK: Don’t be fooled by his name.
COCHOCHO: It’s a nickname! A term of endearment! These two? Their nicknames are vulgar. Unrepeatable. And your father? What was your nickname, Manuel?
MANUEL: I didn’t have one.
COCHOCHO: Because no one bothered to give him a name. He was cold. Distant. Arrogant. He looked down on us even then. We knew he’d leave and never come back.
Manuel shrugs. Cochocho, victorious, smiles arrogantly.
NELSON: Here he is! He’s returned!
SANTOS: How lucky we are. Blessed.
COCHOCHO: Your great-uncle’s old filling station? It’s mine now. Almost. I have a minority stake in it. My boy works there. It’ll be his someday.
As if reminded of his relative wealth, Cochocho orders another round. No words, only gestures. Again Celia arrives at the table, bottles in hand, as Elena looks on, resigned. This time all the men, including Nelson’s father, ogle the girl. She might be pretty after all. She hovers over the table, leaning in so that Nelson can admire her. He does, without shame. Television: a wood-paneled motel room, a naked couple on the bed. The window is open. They’re fucking.
SANTOS (to Manuel): Don’t take this the wrong way. The primary issue . . . What Cochocho is trying to say, I think, is that some of us . . . We feel abandoned. Disrespected. You left us. Now your son is talking down to us.
NELSON (amused): Am I?
MANUEL: Is he?
SANTOS: We don’t deserve this, Manuel. You don’t remember! (to the group) He doesn’t remember! (to Nelson) Your father was our best student in a generation. The brightest, the most promising. His father—your grandfather, God rest his soul—had very little money, but he was well liked, whereas your great-uncle . . . We tolerated Raúl. For a while he was rich and powerful, but he never gave away a cent. He saw your father had potential, but he wanted him to help run the filling station, to organize his properties, to invest. These were his ambitions. Meanwhile, your father, I believe, wanted to be—
NELSON: A professor of literature. At an American university. We’ve discussed this.
COCHOCHO: Why not a local one?
Manuel has no response, is slightly ashamed.
SANTOS: Pardon me. It’s a very conventional ambition for a bookish young man. Decent. Middle of the road. You had politics?
MANUEL: I did. (pause) I still do.
SANTOS: A rabble-rouser. An agitator. He made some people here very angry, and the teachers—and I was leader of this concerned group, if I remember correctly—we collected money among us, to send him away. We didn’t want to see his talent wasted. Nothing destroys our promising youth more than politics. Did he tell you he won a scholarship? Of course. That’s a simpler story. He made his powerful uncle angry, and Raúl refused to pay for his studies. Your grandfather didn’t have the money either. We sent him away for his own good. We thought he’d come back and govern us well. We hoped he might learn something useful. Become an engineer. An architect. A captain of industry. (sadly) We expected more. We needed more. There’s no work here. Jaime, for example. What do you do?
JAIME: Sir?
SANTOS (impatiently): I said, what do you do?
JAIME: I’m unemployed. I was a bricklayer.
SANTOS: Erick?
ERICK: I’m a tailor. (to Nelson, brightly, with an optimism that does not match the mood of the table) At your service, young man!
SANTOS: See? He made me this suit. Local cotton. Adequate work. I’m on a fixed income. Cochocho. He is deputy mayor. You know that now. But did you know this? The money he just spent on our drinks? That is our money. He stole it like he stole the election. He brings his suits from the capital. We don’t say anything about it because that would be rude. And he is, in spite of his questionable ethics, our friend.
COCHOCHO (appalled): Profe!
SANTOS: What? What did I say? You’re not our friend? Is that what you’re alleging?
Cochocho, dejected, unable or unwilling to defend himself. Erick and Jaime comfort him. Just then, Elena’s daughter reappears, eyes on Nelson. Television: motel room, naked couple in an acrobatic sexual position, a yogic balancing act for two, a scramble of flesh, such that one can’t discern whose legs belong to whom, whose arms, how his and her sexual organs are connecting or even if they are.
CELIA: Another round, gentlemen?
MANUEL: I insist—
NELSON: If you’ll allow me—
SANTOS (stopping them both with a wave, glaring at Cochocho): So, are you our friend or not? Will you spend our money or keep it for yourself? (to Nelson) Unfortunately, this too is tradition.
NELSON: Five hundred years?
SANTOS: Much longer than that, boy.
NELSON: Please. I’d consider it an honor to buy a round.
COCHOCHO (still angry): Great idea! Let the foreigner spend his dollars!
At this, Nelson stands and steps toward the startled Celia. He kisses her on the mouth, brazenly, and as they kiss, he takes money from his own pocket, counts it without looking, and places it in her hand. She closes her fist around the money, and it vanishes. It’s unclear whether he’s paying for the drinks or for the kiss itself, but in either case, Celia doesn’t question it. The four local men look on, astounded.
SANTOS: Imperialism!
COCHOCHO: Opportunism!
JAIME: Money!
ERICK: Sex!
Manuel stares at his son, but says nothing. Takes a drink. Curtain.
I should be clear about something: it is never the words, but how they are spoken that matters. The intent, the tone. The farcical script quoted above is only an approximation of what actually occurred that evening, after my father challenged me to play Francisco, or a version of him, for this unsuspecting audience. Many other things were said, which I’ve omitted: oblique insults; charmingly ignorant questions; the occasional reference to one or another invented episode of American history. I improvised, using my brother’s letters as a guide, even quoting from them when the situat
ion allowed—the line, for example, about Mexicans ignoring blacks and vice versa. That statement was contained within one of Francisco’s early dispatches from Oakland, when he was still eagerly trying to understand the place for himself and not quite able to decipher the many things he saw.
My most significant dramatic choice was not to defend myself all too vigorously. Not to defend Oakland, or the United States. That would have been a violation of character, whereas this role was defined by a basic indifference to what was taking place. They could criticize, impugn, belittle—it was all the same to me, I thought (my character thought). They could say what they wanted to say, and I would applaud them for it; after all, at the end of the day, I (my character) would be heading back to the U.S., and they’d be staying here. I needed to let them know this, without saying it explicitly. That’s how Francisco would have done it—never entirely sinking into the moment, always hovering above it. Distant. Untouchable.
Through it all, my old man sat very quietly, deflecting attention even when they began discussing him directly, his choices, the meaning and impact of his long exile. I’ve hurried through the part where my father’s friends expressed, with varying levels of obsequiousness, their admiration, their wonder, their jealousy. I’ve left it out because it wasn’t the truth; it was habit—how you treat the prodigal son when he returns, how you flatter him in order to claim some of his success as your own. But this fades. It is less honest and less interesting than the rest of what took place that night. The surface: Jaime and Erick drank heavily, oblivious and imperturbable to the end, and were for that very reason the most powerful men in the room. I could not say they were any drunker when we left than they were when we arrived. Cochocho, on the other hand, drank and changed dramatically: he became more desperate, less self-possessed, revealing in spite of himself the essential joylessness at the core of his being. His neatly combed hair somehow became wildly messy, his face swollen and adolescent, so that you could intuit, but not see, a grown man’s features hidden beneath. No one liked him; more to the point, he did not like himself. And then there was Santos, who was of that generation that catches cold if they leave the house without a well-knotted necktie; who, like all retired small-town teachers, had the gloomy nostalgia of a deposed tyrant. I caught him looking at Celia a few times with hunger—the hunger of an old man remembering better days—and it moved me. We locked eyes, Santos and I, just after one of these glances; he bowed his head, embarrassed, and looked down at his shoes. He began to hate me, I could feel it. He expressed most clearly what the others were unwilling to acknowledge: that the visitors had upset their pride.
We’d reminded them of their provincialism.
Which is why I liked Santos the best. Even though the role I was inhabiting placed us at opposite ends of this divide; in truth, I identified very closely with this wounded vanity. I felt it, would feel it, would come to own this troubling sense of dislocation myself. I knew it intimately: it was how the real Nelson felt in the presence of the real Francisco.
Hurt. Small.
Now the lights in the bar hummed, and the empty beer bottles were magically replaced with new ones, and my father’s old history teacher aged before my eyes, the color draining from him until he looked like the people in Raúl’s old photographs. Jaime and Erick maintained the equanimity of statues. Cochocho, with his ill humor and red, distended skin, looked like the mold spreading on Raúl’s kitchen wall. He’d removed his suit jacket, revealing dark rings of sweat at the armpits of his dress shirt. He asked about my great-uncle’s house, and when my father said he’d transferred the property to a cousin of ours, the deputy mayor responded with a look of genuine disappointment.
“You could have left it to your son,” he said.
It wasn’t what he really meant, of course: Cochocho probably had designs on it himself, some unscrupulous plan that would net him a tidy profit. But I played along, as if this possibility had just occurred to me.
“That’s true,” I said, facing my old man. “Why didn’t you?”
My father chose this moment to be honest. “I didn’t want to burden you with it.”
And then the night began to turn: my old man frowned as soon as the words had escaped. It was more of a grimace, really, as if he were in pain; and I thought of those faces professional athletes make after an error, when they know the cameras are on them: they mime some injury, some phantom hurt to explain their mistake. It’s a shorthand way of acknowledging, and simultaneously deflecting, responsibility. We sat through a few unpleasant moments of this, until my father forced a laugh, which sounded very lonely because no one joined him in it.
“A burden, you say?”
This was Santos, who, excluding a year and a half studying in France, had lived in the town for all of his seventy-seven years.
Just then Celia came to the table with two fresh bottles. “Sit with us,” I said. I blurted this out on impulse, for my sake and my father’s, just to change the subject. She smiled coquettishly, tilting her head to one side, as if she hadn’t heard correctly. Her old T-shirt was stretched and loose, offering the simple line of her thin neck, and the delicate ridge of her collarbone, for our consideration.
“I would love to,” Celia said, “but it appears there is no room here for a lady.”
She was right: we were six drunken men pressed together in a crowded, unpleasant rectangle. If more than two of us leaned forward, our elbows touched. It was a perfect answer, filling us all with longing, and though we hurried to make room, Celia had already turned on her heel and was headed back to the bar. She expected us to stay for many hours longer, was confident she’d have other opportunities to tease us. Her mother glared at her.
But the men hadn’t forgotten my father’s insult.
“Explain,” said Santos.
My old man shook his head. He wore an expression I recognized: the same distant gaze I’d seen that first night, when we’d sat up, drinking tea and looking through Raúl’s old photographs. Who are these people? What do they have to do with me? He wasn’t refusing; he simply found the task impossible.
I decided to step in, playing the one card my father and I both had.
“I think I know what my old man is trying to get at,” I said. “I believe I do. And I understand it because I feel the same way toward the capital. He meant no offense, but you have to understand what happens, over time, when one leaves.”
Santos, Cochocho, and the others gave me skeptical looks. Nor, it should be said, did my father seem all that convinced. I went on anyway.
“Let’s take the city, for example. I love that place—I realize that’s a controversial statement in this crowd, but I do. Listen. I love its gray skies, its rude people, its disorder, its noise. I love the stories I’ve lived there, the landmarks, the ocean, which is the same as the ocean here, by the way. But now, in spite of that love, when I have a son, I would not leave it to him. I would not say: here, boy, take this. It’s your inheritance. It’s yours. I would not want him to feel obligated to love it the way I do. Nor would that be possible. Do you understand? Does that make sense? He’ll be an American. I have no choice in the matter. That’s a question of geography. And like Americans, he should wake into adulthood and feel free.”
I sat back, proud of my little speech.
“Ah!” Santos said. It was a guttural sound, a physical complaint, as if I’d injured him. He scowled. “Rank nationalism,” he said. “Coarse jingoism of the lowest order. Are you saying we’re not free?”
We fell silent.
For a while longer the bottles continued to empty, almost of their own accord, and I felt I was perceiving everything through watery, unfocused eyes. The television had been trying to tell me something all night, but its message was indecipherable. I was fully Francisco now. That’s not true—I was an amalgam of the two of us, but I felt as close to my brother then as I had in many years. Most of it was internal and could not have been expressed with any script, with any set of lines. But this audi
ence—I thought back to the two antagonists and Joselito’s moto-taxi, the way they became fully invested in the scene the moment they realized they were being watched. I’d taken my brother’s story and amplified it. Made it mine, and now theirs, for better or for worse. It was no longer a private argument, but a drama everyone had a stake in. I felt good. Content. Seized by that powerful sense of calm you have when you have understood a character, or rather, when you feel that a character has understood you. I felt very confident, very brash, as I’d imagined my brother had felt all these many years on his journey across North America.
I stood then and confirmed what I’d begun to sense while seated: I was very drunk. It was comforting in a way, to discover that all that drinking had not been done in vain. It was time to go. Celia and her mother came out from behind the bar to clear off the table, and the other men stood as well. And this was the moment I as Francisco, or perhaps Francisco as me, pulled Celia close and kissed her on the mouth. Perhaps this was what the television had been trying to tell me. She kissed me back. I heard the men call out in surprise, heard Celia’s mother as well, shrill and protective, but entirely reasonable. After all, who was this young man? And just what did he think he was doing?
The Best American Short Stories 2013 Page 5