by Michel Stone
Not many years ago, Héctor had believed that working his whole life for just a few pesos a day seemed like settling, like an admission his potential and abilities were limited. He’d dreamed of providing more for his loved ones than his family had been able to provide for him as a boy, and he’d longed to see what more he could accomplish, even if that meant leaving the place of his birth. Now his soul—at one time filled with optimism and the belief that he could do anything with hard work, hope, and determination—had hardened and become calloused by cynicism and exhaustion. How differently he now arose from his bed each day, how different his slumbering dreams had become since his return from el norte just over three years ago. Seeing Emanuel yesterday had ripped his wounded spirit anew.
Lilia sat outside on a blue crate, her hands wrapped around a mug of coffee. “Good morning, love. You were restless last night,” she said without rising from her seat.
He bent to her and kissed her mouth. She tasted like warm cinnamon. “You weren’t,” he said, pouring a cup of coffee from the pot on the fire.
She shrugged. “I guess Fernando wears me out. I didn’t know how active a two-year-old could be. But, oh, I do love that busy little boy,” she said, smiling. “Yes, I slept hard last night.”
Her comment about a two-year-old brought his mind to Alejandra, just as nearly everything did. Alejandra would have been nearly two when Fernando was born, and he wondered how she would have reacted to the arrival of a brother.
“I’ve been thinking about Emanuel. I’m sure you have, too. When I saw him…” He paused, shaking his head. “I should’ve felt hope, you know? Like you did when I told you I’d seen him. Instead I felt rage.” He sipped his coffee and rubbed Lilia’s shoulder with his free hand.
“We’ll find him,” he continued. “We must. And then we’ll find Alejandra. Emanuel’s the only person who can provide us clues to what happened to our girl.”
Lilia gripped Héctor’s hand on her shoulder and squeezed tight. “The past three years…” she began. “Maybe now God knows the timing is right. Maybe now we’ll find our girl.”
“I’ve been thinking about our time in el norte. In my youth everything was new, you know? I was ready to pluck the world from the vine.” He laughed at his foolishness. “I wanted to feel that dew on my fingers, like when you pick the fields at sunrise? What a stupid ass I was.” He shook his head. “The yearnings of an innocent boy.”
Lilia smiled. “You sound like a withered old man. You’re twenty-four years old, Héctor. Do you remember what you asked me the day we were sent back here from America?”
“What?”
“You asked me if I thought it was all worth it, our crossing, our time in America. You asked if it was all a mistake.”
He grunted, his mind flashing to their time in America, to thoughts so knotted with memories both pleasant and horrific that unraveling the experience into a concise and sensible recollection seemed impossible. He considered the day Lilia arrived in America, but she’d arrived without Alejandra, and then, months later, the day he and Lilia found themselves in the wrong place at the wrong time and were asked by a lawman for papers they could not produce. He looked now at his wife, her gaze gentle, loving, inquisitive.
“And I said I was sure that had we never crossed, just lived out our days here,” she continued, “you’d have always wondered. Always longed to cross. You would have continued to dream of America.”
“I remember,” he said, knowing her words to be true. Despite all they’d endured and the bone-crushing despair that tinged everything he said or did, Héctor loved Lilia with a fierceness that moved him to take her small hand in his, to press her knuckles to his dry lips and remain like that as she spoke. At times such as this, when her words proved her insight into his soul, he thanked God for her and their life together, regardless of the complexities and tribulations of that life. He knew he’d been hard on her, cruel, he supposed, after Alejandra’s disappearance, but he’d come to understand she’d been even harsher on herself.
“Plenty of time yet for dreaming and for hope,” she said. “Do you recall how intensely you longed to escape this village, this country?”
Héctor thought of the day he’d reached the border. La línea had looked nothing like he’d expected. His coyote had driven slowly along, pointing out the ill-prepared fools, many with children, sneaking through holes in the fence. A simple, rusted fence! Nothing more than that separated Héctor and his coyote from el norte. Héctor couldn’t believe his eyes. Many at the fence carried only a single jug of water, and Héctor’s smuggler’s words still haunted him. They will die, he’d said, with no emotion, adding, Death in the desert is the cruelest death. He spoke of withered corpses swinging in the hot, desert wind, of men too ill from the blistering sun to proceed but too far from home to turn back. Parched, disoriented men who hanged themselves by their belts from creosote trees to end their suffering beneath the searing sky. The coyote had assured Héctor he’d not allow Héctor’s bones to bleach in the desert sun, that for the fee Héctor was paying him he’d get Héctor across the border. He’d kept his promise, delivering Héctor to el norte in the sealed undercarriage of a truck. Lilia and Alejandra had never been far from his thoughts then. He was crossing for them, for their family’s future.
Héctor looked at Lilia and nodded. “But I’ll never know that intensity of hope, of possibility, again. A boy’s dreams are powerful when he’s inexperienced, Lilia, before he’s known fierce disappointment. You and I have known these things. Our experiences have hardened us. The damage can’t be undone.” He studied her eyes, needing her to understand his well-earned callousness.
“I have hope yet, Héctor. Listen, do you hear that?” She turned toward the window to the room where Fernando was waking, the room long occupied by Fernando’s great-grandmother Crucita. The child called softly, “Mama. Mama.”
“That’s the sound of my hope. Of our hope. If we fail to embrace the promise and potential of that sweet voice, then we fail God. That’s what I believe, Héctor.”
He pulled her close and hugged her until Fernando’s call became a shout, “Mama!”
“Go get your little sound of hope, then,” he said, smiling. “Your little god wants his mama.”
He kissed her and watched her go inside to retrieve his son, thankful for her steadfastness, her ability to find goodness and promise always, despite all they had endured.
Chapter 3
Emanuel
Rain drummed the awning under which Emanuel sat looking out at the gray, dirty bay. Rainy season or not, the tourists flocked here in their flowery clothes, eager to shop on Acapulco’s strip, to swim in the chlorinated swimming pools, and to sleep in the luxurious hotel beds. The deluge fell thick and slanting, erasing the hills and candy-colored high-rise hotels across the water, and land, sea, and sky melted into one gray expanse, concealing a pair of cruise ships bobbing like miniature cities.
Emanuel sucked a long, slow drag from his cigarette, dropped it to the soft, damp earth, and crushed it beneath his boot heel. He tilted his head back and exhaled, the smoke the same lifeless color as everything around him.
“This rain,” he said, shaking his head.
“What about it?” Diego said, licking the edge of the joint he’d just rolled.
“It’s wet.”
“Yes,” Diego said.
“Funny. Rain is water, which is cleansing. But these rains wash so much pollution down from the hills, dirtying everything down here.”
Diego held the joint between his lips and struck a match. “Good for the coffee crop, though, hey? And the marijuana,” he said, the burning herb pungent between them now. He passed the joint to Emanuel. “Nothing cleansing about this downpour. It’s like the clouds are shitting. Just shitting all in the bay.”
Emanuel waved off the joint. “No,” he said. “Too much I have to get done this afternoon if this goddamn rain lets up.”
Diego shrugged and took another puff before pinching
off the lit end and dropping the joint into his shirt pocket. “My father would kick both our asses if he walked up and smelled mota. But he’s gone for the day.”
“You smoke that shit before you dive?” Emanuel asked. “I’d have to do a lot more than just smoke weed before I’d dive from the cliffs of La Quebrada.”
“No, man. I smoke the marijuana after the dives. The diving gives me a rush, you know? And the marijuana brings me back down.”
The rain began to slacken, and Diego rose. “Diving is the only work I’ve known besides this,” he said, jutting his chin toward the storage building behind them. Diego’s father had begun a hotel laundry business when Diego was a boy. His grandfather and his father before him had been in the textile industry, and Diego’s father had figured a way to capitalize on their accessibility to good cotton and quality fabrics.
When he’d begun the business, all the hotels along the strip had been doing their own linens, but Diego’s father had convinced them. On the day Emanuel came to him for a job, Diego’s father told Emanuel all about his own industriousness and hard work, and how he valued those traits in others, and how, eventually, the fancy hotels had been persuaded.
“Imagine,” he had said, “no more linen shortages, no more possibility of threadbare sheets, and the guarantee of luxurious linens at your fingertips. We make it easy on these hotels, don’t you see?”
Emanuel had nodded and smiled when he thought doing so would be advantageous, and his interview had gone well. Diego’s father had hired him on the spot, and over the past two years, Emanuel had worked his way up to driving the delivery truck.
“Maybe one day I’ll be too old for the cliffs,” Diego said, bringing Emanuel’s mind back to the present.
“How will you know when that day arrives?” Emanuel said, thinking of the crowds of disappointed tourists, cameras clenched at their breasts like strange, benign growths.
“That day will have arrived when I don’t come back. When my timing is off, and I’m ground to bits beneath crashing waves on those rocks out there. Then you’ll know that Diego the Magnificent’s diving days have ended, eh?” He pointed at Emanuel but said nothing more, then jogged away down the palm-lined street.
Emanuel had grown up south of Acapulco, down the coast in Puerto Isadore, and he knew nothing of the cliff divers of La Quebrada in his boyhood. Diego and the other divers were part acrobat, part artist, part magician, and what they did frightened Emanuel. He often wondered, had he spent his childhood here among the divers, if the mystique of La Quebrada would be diminished for him, and that perhaps he, too, would climb the thirty-eight-meter cliff every day, utter a prayer at the small wooden altar erected above the inlet, and plunge into the sea below, all for the entertainment and pesos of tourists who perhaps half hoped a diver’s timing would be off, that he’d miss the incoming wave and perish on the sharp rocks in the shallows below.
The distant hills again took shape in the haze, and at their base, just beyond the beach, the hotels stood like stalwart guardians of Mexico in all their regalia of blue, purple, coral, and green, though muted still in the lingering mist.
He glanced down the street in the direction Diego had gone, but saw only a lone pair huddled beneath an umbrella, rushing toward a taxi. He wished he had a woman, and considered stopping by the restaurant to see if Ana María was working, but he had one delivery yet to make, and besides, Ana María talked too much. The only girl he’d ever been able to tolerate for any length of time had been Lilia, and like a fool he’d let her slip away from him years ago. He thought of her sometimes, mostly on cloudless nights, not on rainy days like this. He knew he’d likely never see her again because he had no intention of heading to el norte, and last he’d heard that was where she was with her husband, Héctor, raising their children as norteamericanos.
The last time he’d seen Lilia had been the morning he’d set her and her baby up with his uncle Carlos for their border crossing. Though he knew that would likely be the final time he’d see Lilia, he could not have known then he’d not see Carlos again, either.
Emanuel had returned to their village only twice since that day. The first time had been just weeks later, to clean out Carlos’s belongings after he’d been killed in a car crash. The second time had been recently, when he had to make a delivery to the airport in Escondido. The truck had broken down there, and he was waylaid for a day, waiting on a part, and so he’d caught the bus to Puerto Isadore. He’d run into a few familiar faces, but Puerto Isadore had nothing for him anymore. He’d been away too long, first in Oaxaca City with his father and now in Acapulco. That sleepy fishing village had offered little to him as a boy and even less to him now, and he doubted he would ever return.
Chapter 4
Rosa
“Sit still, child,” Rosa said.
“Are you almost finished, Abuela?”
“You will know when I’m finished when I’m finished.”
Rosa tied two tattered, red ribbons at the ends of her granddaughter’s plaits and playfully swatted the girl’s bottom. “Go on, now,” she said. “Go meet your abuelo, and help him carry home our supper.”
The child ran from the yard heading toward the village pier, leaving her grandmother sitting on her favorite wooden bench beneath thin vines of purple bougainvillea. Two other children remained with Rosa, and they played with marbles, rolling them around and around the inner edge of an upside-down trash can lid. Rosa watched them a moment then checked the time on her watch.
“Your mamas will be here soon,” she said to them, though the small boy barely gave her a glance, and the girl didn’t look up from the marbles at all.
Rosa stood and stretched her arms above her head, yawning.
“Have they tired you today, Rosa?” Lilia said, coming through Rosa’s gate, its white paint chipping and rust stained.
Even now, more than twenty years after Zarela’s death, Rosa startled at how similar Lilia looked to her mother. Zarela had been Rosa’s best friend, and Rosa felt Zarela’s absence most when Lilia’s son, Fernando, was in her care.
Rosa shrugged. “They’re easy children, those two. Most children are easy if you know how to handle them.”
Fernando ran to his mother’s side, and Lilia bent to kiss the top of his head.
Rosa’d been keeping Fernando several days a week for Lilia since the boy had been weaned so that Lilia could sell her pottery in the market. Lilia paid her for doing so, and Rosa appreciated the small income. The girl child belonged to Rosa’s neighbor Lupita, and on occasion Rosa made a few pesos providing child care for the girl, too. Besides, Fernando enjoyed having a playmate.
“How’s your pottery coming along?” she asked Lilia. Lilia’s interest in creating pottery had arisen through necessity. Though she’d been raised by one of the finest potters in Puerto Isadore, Lilia had shown no inclination to follow in her late grandmother’s path until after she and Héctor had returned from Norteamérica and Lilia needed work.
“You tell me what you think,” Lilia said, reaching into the sack draped across her shoulder and withdrawing a small clay water pitcher.
Rosa took the piece from Lilia and held it up to the sky, slowly spinning it in the sunlight, inspecting it for cracks or other imperfections. The pitcher was green glazed, with raised flowers beneath its lip. Not bad, she thought. “Marigolds?” she asked.
“Yes,” Lilia said, smiling. “Keep it.”
Rosa nodded her thanks. She’d known Lilia since the day of her birth, the day Lilia’s mother had died. Lilia had always been kindhearted but was hardheaded and rash in her decision making, and even now, Rosa helped Lilia with Fernando more out of a sense of duty to her dead friend and for the few pesos Lilia paid her than out of respect for Lilia.
Rosa studied a small hummingbird as it darted among blossoms beside the house. She understood that Lilia appreciated her approval, but Rosa had made it clear she’d offer no false kindness to Lilia or to her husband, Héctor. She’d warned them not to go to
the border, not to leave their history and their heritage behind. She loathed their lack of allegiance to Mexico, to their dead ancestors and those ancestors’ struggles, and all who came before them. And though she knew little of the details of their time in America, she knew that upon their return to their village the young couple had changed, and their fresh-faced eagerness to experience the world had withered like mangos left too long on the branch. She’d shaken her head when she’d first seen them back in Oaxaca, in this village, because she knew they’d not returned of their own volition, and so she had no welcome for them, no sense of a celebratory homecoming. They’d judged their country not good enough for them. They’d been greedy for a life, for things Rosa couldn’t comprehend.
And what did they know? Their beautiful child, lost somehow at the border. Lost. How could that happen? Rosa did not understand what had occurred, but her gut ached to this day when she considered little Alejandra and how sad Lilia’s mother would have been had she lived to know her daughter and granddaughter and to suffer the baby’s loss. Nothing in this world was more precious than a child, and though she knew that whatever had happened with Alejandra pained Lilia, had scarred her deeply, Rosa could not forgive her and Héctor for their choices.
“Do you want a drink?” Rosa asked, turning toward the house.
Fernando had returned to his game with the marbles, and so Lilia followed Rosa inside. Rosa set the pitcher on a shelf beside a bottle of mescal and pulled down the bottle and two small cups. She poured them half full.
Lilia held the cup in her fingers as if uncertain she wanted its contents, but Rosa tossed hers back and poured herself a second.
“Héctor saw Emanuel yesterday,” Lilia said, looking not at Rosa but staring into the amber liquid she held. “At least he thinks he saw him.” When Rosa said nothing Lilia added, “He was getting on the bus. To Escondido, Héctor says.”
Lilia could appear so childlike sometimes in her uncertainty, her vulnerability. Rosa almost felt sorry for her except that Lilia’s occasional recklessness and headstrong tendencies carried too much weight and tipped the scales of Rosa’s feelings toward disappointment and vexation. She took another, smaller swig from her cup.