Crux

by Jean Guerrero

Mando and I made plans to meet Sunday at the PRI headquarters. He blew me a kiss goodbye and headed out the door. The next morning, I woke up and checked my emails in bed. I had one whose subject read, simply, “Mando.” I clicked on it.

  Jean, this is Mando’s mother. I heard about the accident and I just wanted to touch base with you. The AP buo chief and colleagues are investigating. Do you know anything?

  I called Mando. He didn’t answer. I ran upstairs and found the door to his apartment wide open. The housekeeper was mopping the floor. I walked into his bedroom. It was empty. But there was an energy there, by the bed. Crouching. Loneliness. Fear. I backed away, sick to my stomach. Surely, I’m projecting, I thought. I returned to my apartment as questions raced through my head: An accident? Like, a car accident? Is he okay? I ran into one of my roommates, a Spanish girl with straight brown hair and bright blue eyes. She told me she had gone barhopping with Mando and other friends. Around midnight, she encouraged Mando to go home. He was so intoxicated he could hardly stand. She accompanied him outside to wave down a taxi. You put him in the taxi alone? Was it a safe taxi? Did you get the plates? She couldn’t remember.

  I called Mando’s mother. She said Mando was “dead.” The adjective felt like a piece of raw meat in my brain, impossible to digest. I know this must be hard for you to hear, she continued with the incredible calm of traumatic shock. His body was found in an elevator shaft in a building on your block.

  I knelt on the floor and braced against a noise passing through my body. I sobbed without tears; the relief of shedding them had become largely inaccessible to me after Los Tuxtlas. Mando’s mother asked me to call the Associated Press and help them coordinate with the police. I promised I would. I stumbled into the bathroom, turned on the shower and let it soak me as I heaved.

  On Sunday, I stared at the video screens in the media room of the PRI headquarters. My roommate called and said, crying: The police say the official cause of his death was asphyxiation. He was crushed by the elevator. A mob of reporters rushed past me. Peña Nieto had just been declared the next president of Mexico. He was going to make a speech outside. I followed with my camera, trying to get to the stage. A security guard stopped me. Passage is closed as of an hour ago, he said. I tried to argue. But as I spoke, I could hear my voice getting increasingly hysterical, and I found it suddenly very hard to breathe. The booming sounds—of screams, of drums—were strangely rhythmical. It was unmistakable: I was hearing Mando’s heartbeat, accelerating as he ran out of air. I knew exactly what it felt like not to be able to breathe. I knew how painful it was: the terror, the loneliness. The pounding got faster and faster. It ran together into something primordial. The figure of Peña Nieto flickered on a stage, blurred, growing, monstrous, like an Animorph becoming a beast. Cameras flashed. My vision blackened. People laughed. Panting. Panting. Mine. I was surrounded by paramedics, breathing through an oxygen mask on the outskirts of the chaos. An ambulance was parked beside us. “You’re fine,” one of the paramedics said. “Just breathe. Just breathe.”

  * * *

  •

  A young man pulled my body out of the sea. But my flesh was so dense I couldn’t feel myself in it, only darkness. I was erasure embodied. I had caused Mando’s death by getting too close. I could feel him at night, clawing my back, begging me to hear him. I’m sorry, I wept. I’m sorry, I don’t know how to save you.

  * * *

  •

  I visited my father in Rosarito. His door was blocked by a maze of unused bags of fertilizer covered in seagull droppings. His yard was a mess of rotting plants contrasting devastatingly with the intricate constructions he had made for them: complex trellises and shelves and enclosures. He said: It isn’t the polycythemia, it’s too horrible to be that; it is some kind of radiation, it’s Lyme disease, it’s cancer, it’s a curse, it is something so heavy and dark that there is no room for myself.

  I knew exactly what he meant.

  The past had shifted my center of gravity behind me. I could no longer move forward without turning around. I decided to quit my job. I couldn’t save my friend. I didn’t know how. But perhaps I could save my father. Perhaps I could save myself. I needed to disentangle our threads, a knotted mass of unknowns. I needed to give Papi a story—his story. Maybe then I could stop living his life. I had to finally deal with my chief motive for migrating to Mexico—Papi, the past—to free myself.

  On February 28, 2013, I rehearsed my resignation over breakfast. I feared my boss would argue with me about my decision, and I wasn’t sure how to defend it. Journalism was a struggling industry plagued by mass layoffs. I worked for one of the few news corporations with money—I enjoyed raises and bonuses and trips through Latin America. I loved my supervisor and coworkers. What if I never found such a great job again? Suddenly, I received a text message from Tony. He informed me that Pope Benedict XVI had just resigned—the first pope to do so in nearly six hundred years. He asked me to film the reaction in the Zócalo. The coincidence of being asked to cover a resignation as I was rehearsing my own flooded me with relief. It felt like a sign that I was moving in the right direction, even if I was potentially committing career suicide. The Pope was stepping down due to a lack of strength in his “body and mind,” validating my need to address my corpse-like feeling. I can’t work here anymore, I told Tony that day. I’m going to write a book.

  Abuela Carolina had mentioned something to me, casually, in conversation: My abuelita was a witch. I remembered Eddie’s words: I think he is a shaman. Echoes. Mirrors. Repetitions. Time rhymes to tell us secrets. Perhaps the witch could teach me something about combating black magic, if in fact it was black magic that plagued us: my father, dying of mysterious diseases; me, plagued by death. I had followed Papi’s footsteps into a cursed world. Both nature and nurture had failed to reveal the exits. Maybe the supernatural could show us the way. I felt the only way out of Hell was through the graves of our ancestors.

  THE ROOT

  Come, Papi, to the turn of the twentieth century: to the sowing of our rootlessness. Railroads multiplied up and down your country, writhing and stretching like snakes, thousands upon thousands of new miles of steel tracks, man-made vertebrae catalyzing, growing, connecting…and in the state of Zacatecas, in the rural town of Tlaltenango, a love story between a very old man and an adolescent clairvoyant girl, or clarividente. Your great-grandfather, Gregorio Valenzuela, was in his seventies: the past incarnate in a country where less than ten percent of the residents were over fifty. He was the same age as the dictator with abscessed teeth, Porfirio Díaz, who was robbing peasants of their land and selling it to Americans. Extranjeros owned ninety percent of the value of Mexico’s industries, and nearly a third of the land. The gross domestic product swelled like a beating black heart, pumping oil for the first time. The campesinos, or countrymen, found themselves as nomadic as their Mexica ancestors had been before spotting the eagle and serpent on a cactus—the prophesied site of their empire in the 1300s. Already there were rumors of a revolution coming; no man was immortal, and in your very young country, the ancient dictator’s impending doom was discernible, to say the least.

  Gregorio’s agedness was a fact often remarked upon as well. The villagers called him “San Gregorio” because of his saintly air. He was a descendant of Spanish immigrants. His eyes were blue or green, no one alive remembers which. A lengthy snow-white beard grew from his face. He was a cattle rancher with a family of grown daughters. He lived in Rancho de Encinillas, alongside dozens of Spanish families and their mestizo and indigenous peones. The outer walls of every adobe house were decorated with pots of pink and purple flores malvas, watered by the women. Each house had its own cobblestone well. The ranch is now pure ruins, crumbling adobe façades. But in the late 1800s and early 1900s, it was bustling, with families tending cattle and cultivating maize, barley, lentils, sweet potatoes and sugarcane.

  Gregorio’s mestiza mistress, Juanita Vel
asquez, was probably the daughter of peones. She had hair as black and sleek as obsidian. She had striking cheekbones, pómulos, protruding from her face like plump sapodilla fruit, casting shadows over her eyes. I don’t know how she and the wrinkled San Gregorio became entangled. Perhaps Juanita never loved the old man. Perhaps the spirits told her to be with him. She bore Gregorio three sons: Trinidad, Isidro and Antonio.

  Antonio, their youngest son, was born on June 13, 1901, at two in the afternoon, the product of an autumnal conception. His irises were the color of the sun. He was your grandfather, and he was not yet walking when Juanita ran away to fight in the revolution. War had not yet been declared, but there were revolts in the north, including a notorious battle in Chihuahua that involved the magical intervention of a young sorceress, Teresa Urrea, age eighteen. A magazine called Regeneración was circulating throughout the country, full of apocalyptic messages to fan the flames of agrarian discontent. Perhaps Juanita had read it; I found a letter she wrote Antonio at the end of her life that indicates she was among the few Mexican women then literate. The details remain in darkness, and it may always be so. Everyone who knew her as a young woman is dead.

  They say history repeats itself. They say, too, that everything happens for a reason. But the redundancy of events seems purposeless. What is the use of repeating experiences if people never learn from their past? Perhaps these echoes have an aesthetic reason for being, as in the rhythmic repetition of poetry. Can it be, Papi, that you are part of a rhyme?

  After Juanita ran away, abandoning her sons, San Gregorio paced up and down the dirt roads of Tlaltenango with a distraught expression, cradling the youngest boy, your bebé abuelito. If San Gregorio died, his sons would be left to fend for themselves at a time of revolution and chaos. San Gregorio walked and walked as if to ward off death, Antonio in his weakening arms. Martyr-like, he wandered daily. But no man is immortal, and soon the old man ceased to wake up with the dawn. The boys were orphaned just as the revolution turned el campo into the Devil’s backyard. Though it was the first time the boys saw so many corpses, it was not the first massacre on their homeland. The decomposing flesh of humans had long fertilized the crops here, where the waterfalls wetted the mountains, and the maize stalks towered on avian claws.

  Four hundred years before, in the early 1500s, word reached the valley that bearded white men with godlike powers had come from the direction of the sunrise, landing in the Yucatán Peninsula, then conquering the mighty Mexica empire at the center of the country. (The Mexica were later renamed the Aztecs.) The leader of these wizards, Hernán Cortés, was alleged to be Quetzalcóatl, the sacrifice-hating god who had long ago disappeared into the eastern horizon, promising to return on the date Ce Acatl, which coincided with 1519: the year the conquistadores arrived. At the time, more than a hundred languages were spoken in Mesoamerica. The cultures of the different societies were diverse, with a common thread: an obsession with time and outer space. Their buildings harnessed the light of celestial bodies in active dialogue with gods and the past. The ancient Maya were aware of the concept of zero—nothingness—hundreds of years before the Europeans discovered it through the Middle East. But the white-skinned conquistadores subjugated them with ease because the Mesoamericans perceived the Spaniards as gods. An indigenous princess from Tabasco, named Malintzin, fell in love with the second coming of Quetzalcóatl. She persuaded diverse groups of natives to ally themselves in Cortés’s favor. To this day, her name is used to curse Mexicans who prefer foreigners over their own: malinchista. It is as common an insult in Mexico as “materialist” is in the United States. Moctezuma, the leader of the great Mexica, refrained from turning his once-invincible army against the white magos until it was too late. The Spaniards destroyed Tenochtitlán, the floating city.

  Tlaltenango, with a mere hundred cottages, was a modest land compared with the powerful Mexica capital. The Caxcans of Tlaltenango were among the seminomadic tribes called “Chichimecas” by the Mexica, a derogatory term likening them to canines. The Caxcan men and women ran through the mountains to hunt snakes and other creatures for restorative broth, and sometimes settled for a while to grow maíz and chiles and frijoles on the wet banks of the rivers. The valley of Tlaltenango, which means “walled land” in the indigenous Caxcan language, was a porous ground of canyons and cliffs. The Caxcans were animists, and surely appreciated the symbolism of the earth’s permeability. They believed all elements of nature, from wind to scorpion, were sacred, with connections to a parallel world. Their curanderos used the plant life to heal the ill. They danced and chanted to manipulate the fabric of reality.

  The conquistadores came in a thundering stampede. Led by a man later described as the most evil in the history of the Conquest, they brought colossal dogs with bloodthirsty tongues, strange creatures called caballos and weapons more precise than any known force of nature. Nuño Beltrán de Guzmán left a carpet of corpses in his wake. His men unleashed deadly plagues for which the natives had no immunity. Unlike the great Mexica, the Caxcans resisted the cruel gods for decades. They were accustomed to movement, and their limbs were fast and agile; they learned to ride caballos and outmaneuvered the Spaniards on the rocky terrain. It was a long, hard battle, but by the 1540s, the wizards with light-colored irises were victorious once again. And as a consequence, men like your great-grandfather Gregorio, with his white skin and blue/green eyes, existed in this town nearly four centuries later, and women of largely indigenous blood, like your great-grandmother Juanita, still awaited an opportunity for vengeance.

  After their father’s death, Antonio and his brothers became scavengers, beggars and hunters, catching snakes like their ancestors and cooking them over improvised campfires. When word reached their half sisters, one decided to give shelter to the youngest, Antonio. At the age of five, your grandfather became a peon for his half sister. In exchange for a bowl of beans each evening and a straw petate to sleep on in a horse barn, he milked cows, mucked stalls, harvested corn, transported cattle to and from the main pueblo. His half sister almost never spoke to him; he ate with the animals. Decades later, he would remember the gnawing hunger he felt growing up, the gaunt and grimy faces of his vagrant brothers. Sometimes he sat sunburned on the dirt, exhausted, dripping sweat in damp underwear, flies licking his throat and lips. By his eighth birthday, he was a smoker, making his own cigarettes by rolling tobacco in leaves of maíz.

  One night, when Antonio could no longer stand the hunger, he snuck into his half sister’s kitchen to steal a pinch of honey. He unscrewed the jar’s lid and saw the rich nectar inside. Unable to control himself, he dipped in both hands and desperately licked them as he scurried back to his stall, unaware he was leaving an incriminating trail. He was beaten the next day and deprived of his daily frijoles.

  For the boys, there was never any hope in the revolution; for the ranchers, its glimmer faded quickly. It is believed that Francisco I. Madero, the aspiring sorcerer who replaced the ancient dictator, got the idea for the revolution from his dead brother, who spoke to him. A spiritualist wave of thought had spread across the nation, inspiring everyone from wealthy elites to campesinas like your great-grandmother. It combined indigenous curanderismo, or healing, with Western practices such as Tarot readings. Madero, a tiny man with dreamy eyes, was too busy communing with spirits to keep his promises, such as restoring stolen lands to the poor. And so the early 1900s brought never-ending discord between competing revolutionary factions. Bullets permeated the air like lead insects. Rebels looted businesses and lit aflame fields of maíz. The river that ran through Tlaltenango turned red. The betrayals among brothers that characterized the Spanish Conquest once again prevailed among the campesinos. To make matters worse, the United States kept meddling, helping a bloodthirsty military general, Victoriano Huerta, murder the mystical Madero, then replacing Huerta with a bespectacled norteño named Venustiano Carranza.

  When a battle broke out in Tlaltenango, Antonio ran
into the mountains and ducked behind some brush. The sound of hoofbeats overcame him. He leaped out of his hiding place to avoid being trampled. A soldier dismounted with a rifle in his hands. Hold my horse, boy! he cried, handing Antonio the reins. The soldier opened fire at an approaching mob. Antonio heard a crack at his side. The horse fell. Thick dark blood poured out of its splintered skull. Your grandfather ran for his life.

  The revolution, some historians would later say, was a hallucination. A mirage. Like all fantasies, however, it possessed a great power: it bestowed the belief that a better life was possible. Stories about the United States began to spread. Like el campo for crops after a soft rain, the tales said, the United States was ever fertile for the dreams of men. Few spoke of the United States as the culprit of their woes. The northern country was their only salvation. Hay que ir al Norte, the storytellers said, pointing at Heaven, a los Estados Unidos. It sounded idyllic, a soft whisper with so many s’s, a secret promise. Antonio knew that anywhere was better than his tough town of Tlaltenango. Someday, he would hop on a train on one of those new railroads, and he would walk across the border to the other side: to los Estados Unidos.

  * * *

  •

  What is a crossing? The conquistadores who crossed the sea brought with them the symbol of the cross. The crucifix represented atonement, a reminder of God’s love for man despite his sins. But the cross symbolized other things before that, and today it has a multitude of contradictory and complementary meanings: addition, multiplication, rejection, cardinal directions. In runic divination, the cross can prophesy either a gift or a hardship, depending on the angle at which the two lines intersect.

  How often this symbol comes up in your story, Papi! Border crossings. Crossings into madness. Crossings into trance states and parallel worlds. Crossings of ethnicities. Crossings into life and crossings into death.