A Wetback in Reverse

by Frederick Martin-Del-Campo

  When the virus was first detected, I had no idea what it meant, and never learned the facts, except that it may have actually started somewhere in America, most likely in California.

  And, I never learned if anyone was getting sick from the virus right then, as I bumped a few heads in the Ayuntamiento to get some relevant answers to my fears. I also did not learn if the seasonal flu vaccine that Mexicans as well as Americans suffer every autumn were taken early this year, or if they even protect against this type of virus. All I could say on the subject is that people should just wash their hands and take other customary precautions. But no! With the local bums (mostly a motley cross section of Mexican males) stumbling about in the local cantinas hiding from their spouses, and emerging from the rest-rooms without having washed their hands after handling their manhood, and then sticking them in the peanut or potato-chips platters reserved for paying drunks, there was no chance that people anywhere would quickly change their hygienic habits, even for the sake of their children.

  For me, I would just have to spend another jolly day in beautiful, down-town Reynosa listening to Mr. San Roman’s intriguing tales!

  And so it was that I got a real-time fore-taste of all that would fill my “journalistic” diary until I got the hell out of Mexico for good.

  GETTING IN TOUCH

  WITH LONG LOST FRIENDS

  Finally, I made it out of Reynosa, God be praised! The smog and the stench of the local beans were really giving me cause for anxiety, and I don’t think my nose would recover for a while.

  I hopped on the first bus out of Reynosa, and headed straight for Chihuahua City, in the great state of Chihuahua. This would be the de-facto place where my hoped-for adventure would truly commence. It is the city of some of my maternal ancestors, and though dry, cold and windy, it is also filled with the exaggerated grandiosity of Spanish Baroque, and the clang of her cathedral bells awakened me each morning to a special kind of reality that hearkened back to another age. Things in any part of Mexico certainly still move to the pace of agriculture, the sowing or the harvest having to wait till the field-hands sober up after the previous night’s binging.

  The people are generally kind and friendly, and the mix of Spanish-Whites with the always half-naked Tarahumara Indians as they cavort about in the streets surrounding the zocalo, or town civic center, and the Mennonites from the Heartland of America ubiquitously selling their cheese products about the surrounding streets, made for an intriguing scenario that I would not have noticed had it existed back in California.

  Yet, here I would have the opportunity to get in touch with an old friend who had settled in Chihuahua about 10 years before ~ my old buddy Billy: a Gringo from Central California, tall and lanky, though solidly built, he wore glasses, a beard, and was instantly self-righteous about his newly adopted liberal attitudes as they rolled off the pinko assembly-line for the mindless consumption of arm-chair-wanna-be revolutionaries, just like my blustering friend. He had migrated, or wetbacked, his way to Mexico trying to escape drug-traffickers to whom he was indebted for an undisclosed amount of Marijuana sales. I have no idea why he’d dealt with them since he grew some find stock of his own, but now they were after him, and he has successfully eluded them during all these years past. I was genuinely fond of him, and he does have his generous and compassionate side, which brought us together in the near and distant past for many a cultural repast. He knew I too had been persecuted by druggie-gang-bangers, but for very different reasons; I had grown up, and had been friends with, some of them during our childhood and adolescence. Once the age of decision dawned on us, they chose to abandon their lives to crime, whilst I decided on a life of artistic, though impoverished, expression and contemplation.

  I had received numerous emails from Billy since coming here. Apparently he was “thrilled,” that I’d made the decision to send the past to Hell, and undertake this so-called journey of discovery.

  I thought it was very sweet of him to track me down, and he called me to find out how things were going once I rolled into Chihuahua. My guess is that the news of the pandemic hadn’t reached his ears yet; he is rather slow to get wind of really important matters. His call was very unexpected yet most welcome, and it left me thinking about the purpose of my trip. Furthermore, he really had me thinking aloud ~ I did indeed have moments of doubt when I’d wonder if I would really be better off back in California. With my loved ones begging me to go back, not to mention my cousin Maribel’s offer to find me a new job translating manuscripts, I really got nervous, and, though I had always avoided the subject with her, this time she had to talk to me directly about it.

  But, the same old conclusion: I can’t return ... I have to move forward, come hell or high water, for the sake of my soul. I have to realize this journey, even if it ends in disaster.

  I felt very guilty afterwards, having rejected her offer. Her own life is hard enough. I had Billy to contend with for the time being. With him, it was the same old domestic troubles and shouting matches with his lovely Mestiza-Mexican wife, Juana Benita with the big black eyes and long eye-lashes, all the time. She was very warm and welcoming as well; I had promised myself I would not give a shit about their domestic squabbles any more, but I guess I missed interacting with this very lively couple, and that forced me to eat my words. Upon arriving in their charming suburban flat they treated me to a feast of Carnitas, and had been so nice about my woes, and free with the beer and Tequila, that they forgot to fight during the whole time I spent with them. They hadn’t been so courteous to each-other since they were married, many years before! I couldn’t believe it, the quiet and calm was too eerie even for me. I guess I needed my dose of watching them heap abuse and bitterness on each-other. While they acted sweet and tender towards one another for my sake, I just laughed out loud while holding my belly from the disgust!

  Actually, it turned out, these lovely people hadn’t really fought in 3 months. Oh, some of the same troubles about money and dividing up the house-hold chores between them, but the terrible fights that ended in violence and destruction of personal property all over suspicions of infidelity and jealousies seemed to be receding at last, and they were truly jealous of each-other to the point of mutual murder. For their sake, I hope this peaceful truce really lasts forever. I know I really needed some breathing space upon deciding to get out of California and all the conventional bull-shit I was trapped in. That is so important to understand when one undertakes such a journey, and Billy and wife were clearly so fed up that they made of their exile a permanent one. They empathized, and knew all too well that I felt like I was suffocating with things as they were: my family, my greedy parents, Los Angeles, and the pretense of trying to move up while everything around you seems to be decaying. I knew I was just too close to my problems, too close to the people that ruined my life, albeit my own loved ones. I badly needed breathing space.

  Billy did his great part to convince me to send everything to Hell, and take my Fate into my own hands. He understood that I hesitated for psychological reasons; he wrote me once, “That is so poignant, and so revealing, when you tell me I need my dose of abuse. Forget it brother, time enough for abuse in the afterlife. And the worms will be busy on your body long enough!”

  I did not know it until he opened my eyes to the fact, but I had become pathetically co-dependent, and sought affirmation from my very oppressors by exposing myself to their predictable abuse, and thus my identity was re-affirmed. Lord knows I had no idea I was so blind to my own sad situation. My guess is that we grow accustomed to the humiliation, and it either sharpens our wits, like it did with Billy---it keeps your fighting skills, which one needs, ready in case of that next challenge or battle against the world---or the abuse weakens us, as it did with me. I never could get anything done when I was constantly assaulted like that, with insults and derogatory reproaches, reluctant offers of help, and expressions of repugnance for having been born.

  Well, whatever, Billy would assure me, I deserved my
peace and quiet as well. Therefore, to Mexico I did trek, and would sweat, cry, scream, bleed, and defecate the misery and uncertainty of my former life out of my being, and learn, at last, what being a Mexican is all about.

  I thought it great that Billy and wife found a new phone-calling plan just for me, so I would be able to reach them wherever I happened to be trapped in throughout Mexico. I would really have to depend on them, now that the precious hypocrites I once depended on had let me down so badly ~ especially my old associates from the university. And, if I should need help, then it will certainly make me think about California the more.

  I do want to return, and I do love the old haunts I frequented. California, expensive though it may be to survive there, is a great place to live in. But, I tell my dear friends, as long as my enemies are there, selling toxic drugs to innocent teenagers like they have been, and terribly worried that I, an old acquaintance of theirs, know all about it and they worry that I will rat them out, my chances for conciliation are destroyed and further destroyed. Their continued existence is the key to all this. Their (eventual) murder, or assassination by whatever means, would solve so many troubles (or, at least, all of my troubles), especially since I’d found out they were intimately connected as well with the narco-trafficking syndicates of Mexico. I did not set out to find out about the activities of these drug-lords, but as long as I had troubles with them back home, I couldn’t help myself but to find out more, and carefully document what I could in my trusty little journal.

  We are, Billy described, all victims of circumstances, children of bad-luck, and he is absolutely right about the fact that victims of our type need that dose of adrenaline that comes from oppression, and, unfortunately, for some it impairs their basic survival skills, which is probably true in my case. The way I felt after years of living under those circumstances, first with my family, and then dealing with the local Chicano drug bosses in Los Angeles, left me with the belief in Bad Luck. Thank God I freed myself from that. All children of bad-luck should feel the freedom I am enjoying, and should try and do the same. I know it is not, and cannot be, easy, but it is not impossible. I lived it, survived it, and the long coveted liberty from such a dreadful, monotonous, yet dangerous, life was not impossible.

  ... I wonder what Maestro San Roman is doing just now ...

  He did speak much of the transformation of Mexican Society due to the onslaught of these narco-syndicates while he elaborated his tales in front of the other admiring drunkards. He had me transfixed for hours, though I didn’t really understand what he meant at the time. Now I found myself actually wishing I was back in Reynosa, at least long enough to ask him a few questions.

  So, what could he have been doing just as I wrote in my journal? Probably imbibing that Cuervo Tequila he is so fond of, eh?

  THE PIG VIRUS STRIKES AGAIN

  No sooner did I pack up, salute Billy and wife, and prepare to ride to another part of Mexico, when there came more news out of the capital that, again, put a damper on my plans: A new pig flu bug had murdered more than 70 people, and laid low more than a thousand who, we were informed, just would not make it unless the Virgen de Guadalupe appreciated the tamales some of them had placed on her altar in exchange for a cure. The creepy officials were once again calling out the “pandemic potential,” and the World Health Organization was getting involved, saying on a bleak Saturday morning that this newest outbreak might not be contained in time before it spread to other parts of the country---thanks, according to them, to a few irresponsible Gringoes who just couldn’t “keep it indoors” while the epidemic scare was being touted from steeple to steeple.

  The wicked sickness had actually reached Chihuahua by the time I’d arrived, and with dozens of new or supposed cases being reported even by the local street dogs, it left my plans in utter uncertainty. Once again, schools were closed, and public events postponed in the major cities until the same-said officials came out to announce the end of the alert. Sadly, more than five-hundred concerts and similar gatherings had been canceled, and, conveniently for the promoters, no refunds were being offered. So much for catching Placido Domingo singing at the bullfights!

  I tried calling a health-hot-line, but they had fielded so many thousands of calls in their first few hours of operation, that no way in Hell could I get through to find out if they would restrict travel again. Too many frightened nellies suspected they had contracted the bug based on specious conditions, and hoped to get a few vaccinations. Soldiers, diverted from their bases, were obliged to hand out face-masks at all traffic stops; hospital workers, at least, dealt with panicky crowds seeking answers to their fears, and they also handed out disinfectant gels and rubber gloves to people who requested them.

  I got my share, of course, since I wasn’t going to expose myself to the dirty habits of the locals ~ I would have taken precautions, virus or no virus.

  I tried to make due with the free time this new scare, regrettably, afforded me. Even Billy informed himself of the situation, and advised me, “The crap is moving very quickly, and since the scientific nerds still don’t know how to define a new disease, then you’d just better take every precaution against the cooties, my brother.”

  Very prescient advice on his part.

  In either case, this sickness, this strange virus that is a mix of bird, pig and human cooties, had prompted the officials to get together to consider declaring an “international public health emergency.”

  Who could know if this measure would result in more travel advisories (which concerned me immensely), border restrictions or new trade barriers. In either case, the rest of us, all 110 million Mexicans, plus Billy, his wife and me, would just have to wait until the (ir)responsible officials enjoyed their last sip of champagne.

  I had heard of these warnings for years, about their danger of causing a pandemic from viruses that mix genetic elements from humans and pigs. Causes for worry included, according to people who know better, the corroborated fact that susceptible children and the aged were not counted among the dead, only the once prime and healthy young and mature adults. The Spanish flu, which, following the end of World War I, killed more than 40 million people worldwide (if I remember my history) had initially attacked healthy young adults as well, so the weak and infirm were doubly screwed.

  The different variants of the flu could have similar symptoms, like the vomiting I got after having those bad beans back in Reynosa, but the fever, cough and sore throat that accompany it were not yet manifest. The American victims who’d recovered, reputedly, also experienced vomiting and diarrhea, so, obviously, I would never know if I had indeed picked up the pig bug. Unlike with the common flu, however, regular people do not have a built-in defense against an awful virus that includes porcine and avian genes, much to my chagrin. The new vaccines, on which I had placed all of my bets, could very well take many weeks, even months to distribute, let alone prove effective.

  The ever faithful officials and experts at the WHO and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention insisted the nature of the outbreak could have made containment impossible. Well, fantastic! Billy and wife, at least, were very generous in assuring me that I would continue to have a home should travel restrictions be actively enforced. According to the Chihuahua papers, more than 1,000 people had been infected in as many as 14 of Mexico’s 32 states, including Chihuahua.

  After I had a chance to go to a local clinic to get tested, the lazy workers there casually reported that more than 20 people who had previously entered through their doors just up and died of the actual pig flu, and another four or five dozen sudden deaths were expected to follow ~ it sounded to me like the cure was worse than the sickness!

  God! I thought, who even knows if these people bothered to wash their utensils, or if they re-used infected needles. Maybe I should count myself among the four dozen---I was feeling woozy by then.

  Furthermore, I was warned that if I insisted on traveling, I might be screened or probed, with all the humiliating conn
otations attached thereto, as they had many other passengers traveling to and from Mexico. The symptoms were catching up with everybody it seemed, regardless of the simple fact that some of the symptoms might very well be due to something more obvious, like bad food or drink. In either case, now a quarantine around Chihuahua was being warned.

  The same, not-too-overly concerned officials, however, dismissed the idea of trying a quarantine in the United States where the virus was spreading like wild-fire. Some less than brilliant expert said it was too late to try to contain the spread of the virus.

  Well, what the Hell was I then supposed to do?

  I was itching to get out, in spite of my friend’s generosity.

  They noted there had been no direct contact between the cases in the North Mexico and Southern Mexico areas, suggesting the pig virus had already found its way across divergent geographic areas, and had crawled up an undisclosed quantity of unprotected anuses.

  My guess was that whatever they did right then to contain it would prove to be a political move, a measure to contain the fears of the masses. It was obvious that they did not know what they were doing. I had nothing to do but twiddle my thumbs until the next news report offered up some more frustration to my “journey of adventure,” as I sipped the draughts of CORONA beer my good friend left for me. Well, the news reports finally did announce something new: Mexican President Felipe Calderon’ announced that his administration barely discovered the sinister presence of the virus just a few days before, thanks to the warnings of international laboratories.

  “We are doing everything necessary,” he said in a brief statement.

  Again, FANTASTIC! (so I said with a measure of cynicism).

  Indeed and fact, I would be stuck again indefinitely. Why, oh why did this have to happen when I had just begun this grand voyage? And no, assurances that I was “living and experiencing a unique sort of history,” that I could relate to my grand-children was no consolation at all. These growing flu caseloads were nothing unusual, or so the clinic receptionist assured me, so why all the fuss then? Everyone knew that containing the outbreak would be difficult, yet the turn-around angered many as suddenly as the virus got to them. Needless to say, it left me smoldering in my own righteousness.