Crux

by Jean Guerrero

  Can I use the cross to save us, Papi? Juanita reintroduced me to the magic of my youth, but unlike my sixth-grade Wiccan self, I am full of skepticism. Spells strike me as nonsense riddles, requiring absurd tools such as lambskin, eagle feathers, crowns of vervain and gold, just to invoke the power of simple shapes like the cross, the triangle, the pentagram. I want to take Occam’s razor to the spell books, strip them of the superfluous. Touch would be the vehicle for the magic of forms—that is my mystical conclusion, the yield of my two cultures.

  Touch. Tacto. It is the most elementary sense, the sense of amoebas and bacteria, the only sense crucial for mammalian conception, to create all other senses. And yet the somatosensory system, in all its simplicity, is the least understood by scientists. Its strange-named receptors seem magic spells of their own: Pacinian and Meissner’s corpuscles, Ruffini endings, Merkel’s disks, Krause end bulbs.

  I have stripped us naked on these pages. Papi, it is monstrous of me to have done this, considering how much you hate it when I get too close. But you are the one who told me, when I was a child, that wounds need oxygen to heal. I just pressed Send on an email; I hope you read it: “I think you opened up to me because in your heart you believe in the Truth, like I believe in it, despite its ever-elusive nature. I think you know that lying, keeping secrets and refusing to acknowledge the past are what poison us as human beings. It’s hiding that closes the soul….What gives liberty is transparency, owning what you have experienced, letting light reach your interior, seeking to be illuminated.”

  Perhaps it all comes down to this: our skin. Perhaps, stripped bare, we are capable of anything. I look at my hands: small and thick-fingered, double-jointed, full of lines and veins, the hands of a very old woman, even in my twenties. My palms have more crisscrossing lines in them than most hands. One lover, a French boy, told me they were “Gollum’s hands, alien.” I like my hands. They have guided me through this place, where the clocks spin in all directions. They are my mother’s hands.

  For years, I taught myself not to feel my flesh. As I explored commodities industries, the campesinos placed my hands in the soil, in the crops that grow in it: cacao, café, caña de azucar. I saw green strings sprouting from the earth, erupting into pods and leaves. I remembered worms, and flies, and a garden bloated with bodies. Cupping la tierra, I found I could travel through time.

  I know how to reach you now, Papi. I close my eyes and hold my hands in front of my face, summoning textures and temperatures as my guides. I feel roiling waters rippling through my body. A sound like the ocean in a conch, but much louder, fills my skull. I hold it there, even as it swells and becomes scary, even when I think the ocean is going to explode from my ears. Papi, I whisper. The grooves of your cross-shaped scar emerge under my palms. I remember the ouroboros of The Neverending Story: two snakes devouring each other’s tails. In their entwinement, they cross each other several times. Papi, I think I have found the cure: it is our curse.

  LARVAE

  On the night of April 5, 2013, about a week after my last day at the news bureau, my father got a phone call from an unfamiliar number. He heard a woman’s bloodcurdling scream. A male voice said, in Spanish: I have your daughter.

  My father clutched his cellphone to his ear. What? he asked. Which daughter? But he already knew. Michelle was in San Francisco. I was in Mexico. I was the one who had just resigned from a large media company to freelance in one of the most dangerous countries in the world.

  The stranger ignored my father’s question. He demanded several thousand dollars, and told Papi that if he didn’t wire over the money in minutes, he was going to slice my throat. He advised my father not to hesitate.

  My father’s body was an earthquake. As he tried to think it through, a seed of doubt sprouted roots in his brain. Which daughter? he repeated.

  The stranger cursed, threats slurring into an alien language, salivary and strange. The woman’s sobs grew louder.

  Tell me her name! my father cried.

  The anonymous man swore he would rape and kill me if my father delayed a second longer. The woman shouted in Spanish for help. Ayúdame, Papá! she cried. And then he almost knew.

  I had spent most of my life speaking English. English was my main language. Would I, in a state of primal terror, speak Spanish?

  Papi ended the call. He dialed my number. I was sleeping and my phone was on silent. He called again. And again. And again. He told himself that I was asleep, that surely he had experienced what is known in Mexico as a virtual kidnapping call—a cruel hoax to extract money without a real abduction. When I woke up at 11:00 a.m., having slept in, I noticed his numerous missed calls and called him back. After a long silence, he sighed and said: It’s not safe in Mexico, Jean. Not anymore. Go home. He didn’t understand: I could not abandon my body here.

  * * *

  •

  Earlier that year, an American trader embarked on a journey through Latin America by motorcycle. Harry Devert was a tall and classically handsome thirty-three-year-old who planned to write a book. “Adventure is delving into the unknown,” he wrote in his blog. In late January, while passing through southern Mexico, he sent his girlfriend a text message informing her that the military was escorting him out of a cartel zone. Then he vanished. For months, I followed news updates about his case with anxiety. I had never met Harry, but I identified with him and hoped he would be found alive. In the summer, his remains were found in plastic bags next to a road in the Mexican state of Guerrero. He had been slaughtered. According to news reports, drug traffickers had mistakenly believed the white-skinned gringo was working undercover for the Drug Enforcement Administration.

  I emailed his mother, Ann: “I am profoundly sorry to hear about what has happened to Harry. I didn’t know him, but I am a freelance journalist in Mexico from the U.S., own a motorcycle, and love to travel. I feel deep sympathy for your son….What happened is terrible beyond words, but I want you to know…some people live their whole lives afraid…lately I count myself among them….Your son should not have died, but he died alive.”

  She wrote me back. She had just found Harry’s self-penned obituary in his email drafts: a permanent goodbye, as if foreseeing his death:

  I died doing what I love….I was okay with this. Our time here is so short and many people I have known have passed on before their time…people better than myself….I want to thank everyone who has kept me company along the way…and the many authors who kept my mind and my imagination alive when I was lonely…and to hug my mother…the most important person who has ever been in my life.

  After Harry’s death, Ann traveled to one of the last places Harry visited: Cerro Pelón in Macheros, Mexico, where monarch butterflies gather densely on the trees. When she saw the orange-and-black creatures, she felt she was seeing them through her son’s eyes. She wrote: “The butterflies rise and settle as the sun shifts.”

  * * *

  •

  That autumn, police officers in Iguala, Guerrero, detained forty-three students who planned to march in commemoration of a 1968 student massacre. Then the students vanished. During the search, hundreds of bodies were unearthed from clandestine graves in the mountainsides—but not those of the forty-three youths. Their disappearance brought global attention to tens of thousands of other missing people in Mexico, and dragged the country’s darkest problems of impunity and corruption into the light. In December 2014, more than 200,000 Mexicans flooded the Zócalo wearing all black. Flames rose from the center of their mass of silhouettes. They burned an effigy of Enrique Peña Nieto.

  * * *

  •

  Diego Rosas Valenzuela, one of Goyo’s grandsons, was abducted three weeks before the one-year anniversary of the Iguala kidnapping. He was a shy, well-mannered boy who spent much of his free time with Eddie, my cousin with the crow’s-feather eyebrows. He had just turned sixteen. I had often seen him at family events.
When he was twelve, he attended my father’s despedida. A few days after he was kidnapped, his mother, Vero—who raised Diego, her only son, by herself—received a phone call and a package: two of his severed fingers. The kidnappers wanted more money than she ever possessed. Vero and her sisters gathered their life savings. Eddie’s father, Chucho, left the money by a hardware store per instructions. Chucho drove up and down a highway where the kidnappers had promised to leave Diego. My cousin did not appear. The kidnappers did not call again. Vero has not lost faith that she will save her son. A mother will never give up on her missing child. Time passes. Time passes. Time passes. The hope stays alive. The dread never dies. It is a nightmare that never ends.

  * * *

  •

  What is happening to my father’s country? Piedragil blamed Mexican people. Ven la muerte como el sueño. In constant communion with spirits, they see death as a dream. But it’s the United States that consumes the drugs behind the violence. It’s the United States that supplies the cash and the bullets that spill the blood. La culpa must lie somewhere in between.

  * * *

  •

  My father ordered one hundred black-soldier-fly larvae online. After sprouting wings, the creatures live only a week and do not eat. They don’t touch food like other flies and therefore don’t spread diseases. They live long enough to mate and lay eggs, then die. Their larvae eat like gluttons, excreting a brown elixir.

  Papi planned to use their feces to revive his dying garden. He sought to create a colony of a million larvae, and sell the excess fertilizer to farmers in Rosarito. He turned a plastic tub into a composter with a drainage system and a harvesting tube connected to a smaller container lined with sawdust. He placed the grubs in the composter. He fed them seaweed from the beach. The larvae multiplied and metamorphosed. Flies buzzed around the living room, the kitchen, his bedroom. They escaped from his composter each time he lifted the lid to drop in more food. Papi coexisted with the flies as they mated. When I visited, he snatched flies midair to point out their coal-black velvety wings.

  Papi threw their fertilizer on his backyard crops, which flourished. The one hundred larvae became tens of thousands. He transferred them to a wooden enclosure outside. He fed them horse manure from a nearby ranch. Papi showed me his garden with pride. He had transformed the backyard into an intricate fairy-tale landscape, with curving rows of crops and towering blue-tongued orange snapdragons. An impressive brown gate in an avocado-green wall led out of the jardín into the coastal Baja California neighborhood. Papi had built it by arranging wooden panels in concentric squares around a sculpted yin-yang symbol. He told me he was collecting stray-dog carcasses to feed to his larvae, and was on the lookout for those not flattened by cars, so he could sell their intact skeletons to schools. I had never seen my father so productive. His occupation was death and deterioration, but also rebirth and renewal. In his living room, with an ocean breeze wafting in through an open window, my father and I spoke for hours. I recorded our conversations with his permission. He paused repeatedly in his recollections to philosophize—about the origin of the universe, about parallel worlds, about the meaning of life. The moonlight gave his face a ghostlike milky pallor as he spoke: “Somos como un arbol. We are like a tree. Like a plant. Which yields leaves, and each leaf thinks it’s an individual, like—ohhh, I can do it all, I’m the head honcho—but you don’t realize, as a human being, shit, I’m the leaf of a tree. The force…it belongs to the tree and the roots and the soil and something that is incomprehensible to a leaf.”

  * * *

  •

  I met my uncle Gustavo Perez—the nephew of my father’s biological father—for breakfast at a restaurant in San Diego. Gustavo was eager to meet my father, but the prospect made Papi panic and so I went alone. A bald bookworm in his seventies, Gustavo brought me Historia del Narcotráfico en México, photos of my biological grandfather and a thirty-page document tracing our roots back to the 1800s. The document, authored by the son of Mario’s twin sister, Gildarda, was a gold mine. I learned of Ildefonso Perez, my paternal great-grandfather, an entrepreneur who moved from Santander, Spain, to Mexico City. He smoked a pack of Alpines a day. “He always wore a hat and was very friendly to everyone, especially women,” the document reads. “He was concerned about good nutrition and always bought lots of fruits and wholesome food.” He drove a taxi, sold gasoline, designed special cartons for milk. Once, he started a farm in a town the document refers to as “Juachilko,” with cows and pigs. I looked up the town; it doesn’t exist as spelled. According to the document, all of the farm’s creatures began to die due to “a disease of the pigs.” Then the ranch ceased to exist.

  The document is rich with anecdotes about every person except for the most important one: Mario. My father’s father remains a mystery. He died a recluse in the nineties. I learned his nickname: Colillitas, meaning “cigarette butts,” because he started smoking when he was ten. And the fact that he worked for years installing and repairing neon lights for businesses in Mexico City. And this: “Mario…was always very intuitive with mechanical things. You name it, car engines, electrical things, and anything that was mechanical in nature, came easy to him.”

  * * *

  •

  My father believes our universe was born of the implosion of a four-dimensional sun in a parallel plane. “You can have other universes,” Papi said, sitting in the dark of the house in Rosarito. “I mean, it’s infinite, everything continues and continues and continues. Why do we want to limit it?” Nocturnal Mexico poured in through the windows, turning us into black silhouettes. Neither of us bothered to turn on the lights. My father smoked a cigarette, which glowed each time he breathed.

  * * *

  •

  I flew back to Mexico City. A self-proclaimed shaman moved into a house where I was now renting a room in a less expensive neighborhood called Del Valle. Norberto stood less than five feet tall and had dark corkscrew curls down to his shoulder blades. He claimed to be in his twenties but looked fourteen. I told him about my fear that Mexico wanted me dead. When you look in the mirror lately, do you see anything strange? he asked. His question was eerie because I had been avoiding mirrors.

  Sort of—it’s more like I sense something strange. Something sinister. Like a malevolent presence crouching behind me.

  Norberto nodded as if he understood. Someone who has died does not know they have died. You must help show them the way. He disappeared into his bedroom and emerged with a mortar and pestle. Close your eyes. I let my lids fall and heard a ringing. I opened my eyes, curious, and saw the pestle sliding on the mortar. Take deep breaths. Tell me when you see the ghost. I closed my eyes again. I wasn’t sure if the ghost was supposed to be Mando or Piedragil. I figured it was more likely Mando, as Piedragil would have accepted his death, probably even reveled in its drama. I pictured Mando surrounded by dark. Norberto told me to tell the spirit it was time to cross into the next dimension. I envisioned a bright light enveloping my friend and guiding him. I opened my eyes. It was remarkable: I felt suddenly weightless with tranquility. Thank you, I said.

  Tienes que regresar al agua, he said, cryptically. You must return to the water.

  I walked back upstairs. Norberto tended to speak in poetic riddles. I wondered: Was he using “water” as a synonym for emotion, as in the Tarot, which I had begun to study after learning that Juanita may have used the cards? Or as a synonym for the past, analogous to the underworld, as the ancient Maya used the term? It didn’t matter. I felt so light, so cleansed. I didn’t necessarily believe Norberto was a real shaman or that he had performed a real exorcism. But I had faith in the power of suggestion. I approached my large old-fashioned vanity mirror with its ornate gold-painted wooden frame, which I had purchased at a flea market. I was sure I would no longer fear my reflection.

  What I saw in the mirror paralyzed me. I could not only sense a malevolent presence, I could see it. It
was in the shadows of my face, in the engorged pupils of my eyes. The malevolent presence was inside me. The malevolent presence was death itself. The color drained from my face. Norberto’s words echoed in my brain: Someone who has died does not know they have died. With a chill that turned my flesh to ice, I saw that I was the ghost unaware of having died. Paul had never pulled me out of the sea. He had never saved me. I had drowned. I had literally drowned—not figuratively and spiritually, but physically. Everything that had “happened” since—Mando’s death, Piedragil’s murder, the kidnapping phone call my father received, Papi’s larvae—it was all a delusion of limbo, a dream to help me accept that I was dead.

  I stared at my hands: white, rotting appendages, bloated from two years inside the Gulf of Mexico. I touched my face: dead cells crumbling. I tried to breathe, but I couldn’t make my lungs expand. I was trying to inhale the sea. Saltwater leaked from my eyes. My body coughed and convulsed as the tears soaked my face. I cried for the girl I had been: the fearless girl who was like her father. I cried for the woman I would never become. I cried in mourning. The more I wept, the more I felt alive again. I was exorcising myself of the sea.