Crux

by Jean Guerrero

  * * *

  •

  Back in San Diego, you stayed at your mother’s house. You built a cage for her multiplying lovebirds. She had acquired two large mutts: Pechocho and Muñeca. You took them on runs. Your calves swelled. Your skin browned. You stopped drinking. You purchased a digital camera and lighting equipment. You transformed your bedroom into a studio. You planned to become the professional photographer you had once desired to be.

  One day, during a run with the dogs, you noticed Pechocho was losing weight. You increased his food rations, figuring he was not getting enough calories. But he continued to shrivel. Within weeks, his rib cage protruded from his sides. You stopped taking him on runs. It was confusing. Pechocho was a good, young dog, only three or four years old. Weeks ago he had been in perfect health. Now he seemed to be dying. One day, his hind legs collapsed and he dragged them as he walked. You knew you needed to take him to a veterinarian. But you felt feverish and exhausted, and decided to wait until you felt better. Pechocho died before that happened.

  His death mystified and frightened you, especially when Muñeca began to show identical signs of deterioration. You knew you had to act quickly, but every day, you became more sick. You felt so heavy you could hardly move your limbs. Your hands shook with the effort of the simplest gesture. You saw Muñeca at the patio door, bones jutting from her torso and limbs, her back legs collapsed on the floor. She stared at you with cloudy eyes. It was like looking in the mirror.

  When Muñeca died, you forced yourself to haul her carcass to your truck, sweating and gasping from the effort. Whatever had killed the dogs was killing you. You needed to get Muñeca autopsied. You dropped her off at an animal diagnostic laboratory. Days later, you received the report. “They said they couldn’t perform the autopsy because the dog had been in such an advanced state of decomposition,” you recall.

  This seemed impossible. You had taken her to the lab literally hours after her death. What could have caused her body to rot so thoroughly, so quickly?

  You asked for blood and urine and fecal tests from doctors on both sides of the border. All claimed you were perfectly healthy. You typed different diseases into Google and made a squiggly list of symptoms, pencil trembling in your hand. You thought a tick with Lyme disease had bitten you and the dogs during one of the runs. Or maybe a fungus or bacterium was eating you alive. You created folders on your computer and filled them with PDFs of scientific papers on Lyme disease, H. pylori, amoebiasis, adrenal fatigue and more. You printed out the documents and highlighted large sections. You researched cures—goldenseal, gentian, wormwood, hawthorn, yucca root. You were interested only in natural solutions; the pharmaceutical industry was repellent to you. On sheets of paper you had used to diagram renovations for your mother’s backyard, you scribbled questions and theories. You printed out studies about epidemiologies, microbiologies, enzymatic reactions and more.

  You wondered if the CIA was experimenting on you again, or if perhaps they had done permanent damage to your body during the previous period of torture. You were determined to find a cure—you wouldn’t let the government or nature or whatever win. Your parents had stopped using a house they owned in the Mexican beach town of Rosarito, due to rampant bloodshed among warring drug cartels. You moved into the abandoned house, a few blocks from the ocean. You started an experimental garden in the backyard, planting crops with curative properties. You toiled in the dirt, pushing past the pain in your limbs, the growing exhaustion, imagining that as you dripped sweat you were also expelling the illness. You strung bamboo sticks into small square-shaped enclosures that served as trellises. You stacked healing flowers on a pyramid of shelves. You prepared teas and tinctures in the kitchen. You used yourself as a guinea pig. Your cabinets overflowed with combinations of powders, pills and potions. You varied dosages and amalgamations, diligently recording each regimen and its results. You tried everything until you found a cure: black walnut husks.

  After a few days of consuming their ground-up powder, newfound vitality gushed through your veins. Finally, you felt normal again. The effect was long-term. When your mother’s favorite Chihuahua, Habibi, began to go blind, clouds forming in her beady eyes, you flew to Missouri, rented a car and bought black walnuts in bulk. Back home, you grated the husks to make a powder that you placed in empty plastic pills. Per your instructions, your mother fed the pills to Habibi by hand, folded up in little pieces of ham. Habibi regained her sight.

  * * *

  •

  One day, your stepfather developed an open sore on his foot. He visited doctor after doctor. The sore kept growing, in spite of the powerful antibiotics prescribed to him. It looked like Jesus was going to lose his foot. His days at the Butcher Block were becoming unbearable. He could hardly stand, let alone walk. You did some unconventional research and concluded that your stepfather needed sessions in a hyperbaric oxygen therapy chamber. You took him to a place in Tijuana. The sore on his foot began to shrink. The sore vanished. Jesus was healed.

  * * *

  •

  I remember the first time I told you I wanted to write a book about you. I was listening to you recount your life at a bar in Tijuana. Your chameleonic eyes matched the reddish brown of your Victoria bottle. I was nervously peeling the damp label off my own Victoria. You paused to take a sip of your cerveza and I confessed: “I want to write your story.” You gasped and gulped and coughed. Your eyes watered and their whites reddened, causing your irises to appear rust-colored, congruous with the sunset sky outside the windows. You pounded your fist against your chest. When you could breathe again, you shook your head and said:

  “Absolutely not. Maybe if someday you become famous, and respected, you can do it. Otherwise, nobody will think twice if”—you lower your voice—“if the CIA kills you.”

  I paused, trying to think of the best response.

  “Pa, if I write your story, you’ll be immortal,” I said.

  You rolled your eyes and squeezed indignation into your brow, saying you didn’t give a damn about superficial bullshit like the perpetuity of your insignificant ego, but I could see the grin growing on your face as you spoke, the grin you were trying but failing to suppress. If you remain forever beyond my grasp, Papi, at least I could determine this: you were human, just like me, dying to live among the gods.

  EL MONSTRUO

  I moved to Mexico City on September 30, 2010. My father’s country had never been bloodier. Drug cartels were diversifying their portfolios with human trafficking, murder for hire and kidnappings for ransom. My job was to report out of coffee plantations and cocoa farms, where corpses accumulated in clandestine graves. Abuela Carolina touched her fingers to my forehead, chest and shoulders, in the sign of the cross. My mother wept.

  Mexico had terrified me as a child. Now it loomed magnetic on the southern horizon. From the back of the Aeroméxico plane, I saw the capital.The protruding peaks of Popocatépetl and Iztaccíhuatl were the eyes of the terrain. The city—like all cities in Spanish—struck me as feminine (la ciudad). It was evident in the curve of her back, in her maternal embrace of the dead. Every year, she sank a few more inches into the buried swamp of the ancient Tenochtitlán. Buildings of all shapes and colors rose from her skin. The unapologetic chaos of the landscape was congruous with the man she had conceived, the man awaiting me, the man I had come here to understand. I was plummeting into an alternate universe, into the dream of the city itself, where the laws of fairy-tale physics reigned.

  Papi had long showed me how to palpate borders for a “beyond.” I had found it everywhere. The United States had its own brand of fantasy, with its UFO sightings, mind-control programs and drug-infused raves. But the magic of Mexico was different. It was earthier, more organic—as elemental as nature, and as merciless. It recalled an old garden a young father built, a jardín that swallowed life and made it nil. The sight was exhilarating. It felt like coming home.

/>   * * *

  •

  Papi hadn’t seen the capital since he was an infant. He had grown impatient as I struggled to stuff my library and thrift-store dresses into suitcases, and had left two days before me from Tijuana. He told me he’d get the lay of the land. He greeted me at the Mexico City airport by the baggage terminal, arms crossed in front of his chest. He looked like an emblematic figure in his element. He had grown a medium-length salt-and-pepper beard and black hair he kept in a little loop at the base of his neck. Abuela Carolina’s half brother, Goyo, and two of Goyo’s children stood with him. Papi had moved here to “keep me safe,” according to him. This gave my mother and grandmother comfort, but I knew it was a vain promise. My father couldn’t join me on reporting trips, and the capital was safe compared with the rest of the country. Still, his concern made me happy. It enhanced my sense of invulnerability.

  How could a fearless girl ever be vanquished, with her fearless father at her side? We had ventured into the unknown together, in quest of ¿Por qué? The beasts and demons in this land were real: flesh and blood. Earth-hewn creatures, feeble foes. Death was for mere mortals. I had pushed past the boundaries of quotidian reality, into the story I had longed to live as a child: I was a protagonist in a book about my father, and, as such, I could bleed and die without ever truly perishing. I felt immortal within the perimeters of the pages I was living.

  We drove to a Mexican restaurant and ate from steaming plates of meats with melted Oaxaca cheese. After dinner, I checked in to Hotel Habita in the upscale neighborhood of Polanco. It was a ten-minute walk from the news bureau. I would start work the next morning, a Friday, which happened to be my father’s birthday: October 1.

  Alone in my all-white hotel room, I sprawled out on the king-size bed and ordered room service: an extravagant dessert of brownies and galletas, which came on a porcelain plate with raspberries. While sampling the sweets, I turned the pages of the day’s El Economista, reading, among other things, about a mudslide in the state of Oaxaca that had killed a family. It seemed so far away.

  * * *

  •

  The news bureau was in a three-story house with pseudo-baroque quarry windows. A dark stone staircase spiraled up to the hardwood floors of the living room, where I met my editor, Tony, a laid-back British man with a wheat-colored mustache. He showed me to my desk, which was in one of the bedrooms. I guess you can start by calling the agriculture ministry, he said. I was one of only two women in the bureau of nine people. A calendar featuring images of buxom women in bikinis hung in the coffee room.

  * * *

  •

  My first interview was with the spokesman for Mexico’s Ministry of Agriculture, Paco. We met at Vip’s, the Mexican version of Denny’s. Paco was a thin, olive-skinned man with glasses, an aspiring poet. He folded his hands on the table and asked: So, did you always want to be a journalist? I confessed that I had once dreamed of writing novels. He furrowed his eyebrows. Novels? Paco leaned forward and lowered his voice: Mi niña, living here, what you write won’t have to be fiction. In Mexico, things happen that don’t happen anywhere else.

  * * *

  •

  Papi celebrated his birthday at a mariscos restaurant in Polanco near my hotel. Family members I had never met came from the outskirts of the capital. They sat around my father, watching him with captivated eyes as he described life on the border: how the Rosarito fishermen near his house sell fresh pescados on the shore, how the northbound lines at the ports of entry stretch for miles but can be bypassed on a motorcycle in minutes. I had never seen anyone look at my father in the mesmerized way of our relatives—as if he were a saint or a celebrity. Their faces informed me of what mine must have looked like gazing at my father sometimes. He turned to me, tipsy and happy. He told me he was planning to look for his Mexico City birth certificate. He thought it might lead him to his biological father, whom he had never met. The man was probably dead by now—he’d be nearly a hundred years old, based on the few details Abuela Carolina had revealed to him. But he was curious to see where the search might take him.

  Yes! I’ll help you investigate, I said, excitedly. Oh my God, Papi, what if we find him?

  One of his eyebrows twitched, a flame flickered in his eye. He made a sound like agh, then took a swig of his beer. He shrugged.

  I don’t really care, Jean. I probably won’t find him. I just figure I might as well try.

  I had noticed a pattern in our conversations, and I wasn’t sure how to eradicate it. He spilled his guts, I asked questions, he seemed to enjoy my curiosity, and then, out of nowhere, one of my questions—its excessive emotionality—would irritate him, and he would look at me like I was an annoying teenager, causing me to panic. Afraid of losing my father’s friendship, I would cheerfully steer the conversation in a new direction.

  I got up to go to the bathroom. At the end of the table, a dark-skinned young man with spiky blue hair and an eyebrow piercing gave me a piece of paper with his phone number on it. He was my cousin Rodrigo, a taxista. He wanted me to call him whenever I needed a ride. He confessed he had stolen his cab, like the criminal taxistas who express-kidnap gringas like me. Never wave down a taxi on the street, Rodrigo said. You can’t trust any of them. But you can trust me—because we’re cousins.

  After a couple of hours, I started looking at my phone. One of my colleagues, Nick, had invited me to drink mezcal at his apartment in the expat hub of Condesa. Nick was a handsome young man with curly brown hair, thick-rimmed glasses and light brown skin faintly freckled on the nose. He covered the drug war. We had spoken over the phone before my arrival about what I should expect from the bureau. When I told Nick my father was coming with me to Mexico City, he confided that he had never met his own father. I was eager to cultivate a friendship with Nick, who felt like a kindred spirit. A few minutes after 10:00 p.m., when I noticed that my father was drunk and happy again, I whispered to him that I was leaving. Papi had situated his birthday dinner in Polanco for my benefit, had just relocated to a different country to be near me. The disappointment was evident in his face. It’s not safe for you to walk at night! Plus, your hotel is too far, he said in Spanish, too tipsy to sound authoritative. An uncle offered to take me on his motorcycle. Papi seemed placated. I stayed neither to order him a piece of cake nor to sing “Feliz Cumpleaños.”

  * * *

  •

  I spent the night smoking Lucky Strike cigarettes with Nick and two of his expat friends. They were all book lovers living abroad to avoid becoming ensconced in the privilege of first-world countries. They discussed the links between Mexico’s violence and U.S. drug use in hushed voices, like characters in a novel: through inquiry, through calculated risks, they would solve the Big Questions. I was living a dream, surrounded on all sides by people like me. I felt I had to tread lightly—as if this world’s foundations were made of water and I might fall through. I called my cousin Rodrigo at around four in the morning. He picked me up in his taxi and drove me back to my hotel. In the morning, he took me apartment shopping. I chose a two-bedroom penthouse with a library and a hot tub in Condesa next to Parque México, the neighborhood’s largest park, a few blocks from Nick’s place. The rent seemed cheap because of the exchange rate—I was earning U.S. dollars and spending in Mexican pesos. I had come to Mexico to unshelter myself; I was living with more advantages than I had ever known.

  * * *

  •

  I asked Rodrigo to show me the Zócalo. The main plaza of Mexico City gave him claustrophobia, but he agreed. We chugged Indios in his taxi and crept through traffic as Rodrigo told me about his life. He worked part-time as a security guard at a whorehouse. He felt like an outsider. The family rejected him because of his unusual style in work and fashion, he claimed. By the way, your vintage look is very outdated, Rodrigo said, wrinkling his nose at my frayed faux-fur coat. Ever since my father gave me a brown Vietnamese dress threaded wi
th floral patterns when I was eighteen, my wardrobe had been dominated by the color brown. I rolled my eyes, gesturing at Rodrigo’s spiky blue hair. Okay, Beauty Queen, I said. Rodrigo and I passed graffitied tortilla factories, hardware stores, supermercados, laundries. Clothing lines on balconies showcased panties, socks, T-shirts. A newsstand sold the latest issues of El Gráfico, the capital’s most popular tabloid, featuring images of decapitated corpses beside images of half-nude women. My best friend is a transvestite, Rodrigo mused. She is so beautiful, nobody believes she is a man.

  Rodrigo parked his taxi. We walked through the narrow streets strewn with Coca-Cola bottles, McDonald’s bags, flattened cockroaches trailing their guts. Wedged in a slow-motion stampede, we passed food stands selling quesadillas and boiled maize.

  Finally, we reached the main plaza. A towering Mexican flag rose out of the Zócalo, waving its snake-devouring eagle on the nopal. According to legend, the gods told the ancient Aztecs to build their civilization at the site of that apparition. Hidden by asphalt beneath our feet, I realized, was the gutted heart of Tenochtitlán. Before destroying the Aztec capital, the Spanish conquistadores wrote that it was as beautiful as a dream—a floating metropolis of brightly colored pyramids. Centuries later, a Gothic gray cathedral grew out of the ruins. I saw the National Palace beside it, made of the same materials as the palace of Moctezuma, who was killed by the conquistadores.