Mexico

by Josh Barkan

  After all my time looking at death row cases in the U.S., and meeting families down in Mexico of the perpetrators of crimes, it was clear to me the case against Martinez was so flimsy, based solely on the fact he was deaf, that I couldn’t believe he could ever have been convicted. But there he was, behind bars, in a maximum-security prison in Mexico City, placed in prison for the rest of his life, with no real chance of parole, for the killing of a lovely grandmother who I was certain he’d never met before in his life.

  —

  I have been thinking about what made me bring the metal file in to Martinez this morning. What made me act? What made me cross the line? I am normally an observer, not an actor. I sit on the edge of the world, like most writers, watching and taking in every detail, seeing more, perhaps, than any person should see.

  Growing up in New York, I began to see lies at an early age. I remember, once, as a boy, watching my brother steal some candy from the store around the corner. He ran and ran with the few pieces he’d stolen from Mr. Horowitz’s local grocery on Fourteenth Street and Eighth Avenue. He did it for the sport, more than anything. We didn’t have much money, but we weren’t so poor he needed to rob that candy. I watched from across the street as my brother came dashing out of the grocery, Mr. Horowitz running onto the street after him twisting and huffing and puffing through the cars, until he hung his head, hangdog on the sidewalk, with my brother running away through the alleyways of the West Village. My brother had taken that man’s bread and butter, the fruits of his hard work, and I asked my brother, when he got home and he ate the candy slowly in his bedroom, why he’d done it.

  “What? Done what? I didn’t do nothing.”

  “But you stole Mr. Horowitz’s candy. I saw you do it,” I said. I was no older than seven. It was my first experience with a bald-faced lie, something I knew was wrong staring me in the face. I could have told on my brother. I could have gone to tell my parents, or a teacher, or even Mr. Horowitz.

  I was shocked when my brother said, “Georgie did it.” Georgie was a black boy who lived down the street. “Georgie took ’em. I didn’t do nothin’.”

  And I didn’t do nothing, either. I watched, I observed. I saw him make his racist accusation, pinning the blame on another boy, simply because he knew he was an easy target.

  As I grew up, I saw the same thing, over and over. I saw the lies pile up. I’m fifty-two. I was born in 1961. I remember, as a kid, watching President Lyndon Johnson on our black and white TV telling us North Vietnam was a country of Communist invaders that wanted to destroy my country, and I watched the older brothers of my friends go off to Vietnam to protect my country from Communism, from the evil red carpet that was going to take over the world, but I never saw that red carpet come close to my shores, all I saw was the silent, faraway look of those boys as they came home, looking older in their faces, like men, when they were only twenty-two. And that was the big lie, the lie that let me know my country wasn’t going to tell me the truth, and as a kid I watched the protests up at Columbia University, and I took the subway up there when I was just twelve, and I saw students screaming through megaphones, I heard them shouting, “Hey, Hey, Ho, Ho, President Nixon has got to go!” By then, they were protesting against Watergate and the bombing of Hanoi, and Nixon and Kissinger’s plan to end the war with “Peace with Honor,” words which even then I could tell had nothing to do with the photos of bombed-out bodies I saw on the front page of the New York Times.

  My parents were hardworking Jews who’d immigrated to the U.S. as kids, just before the end of World War II, ferried through England from Germany. I knew that lie, too, when Hitler said he was going to cleanse Europe and make a Reich that would last a thousand years. I grew up with history books in the house, which told of President Wilson and the gassing of World War I, and of the League of Nations, and of the “War to End All Wars,” and of Neville Chamberlain’s “Peace in Our Time.” And I saw the worn books of Yiddish writers that my father would read and finger over and over, which told of the pogroms my ancestors had fled from in Russia before they’d landed in Germany, before they fled to the U.S. The history was everywhere, the history of lies, and power and abuse, and I read those books in bed, sometimes long after my mother said I had to be asleep, with a flashlight under the sheets.

  When I was older, I knew of other lies, the lies of another president, Ronald Reagan, as he sent money from the secret sale of weapons to the government of Iran, which he’d labeled the devils of Islamic tyranny, but he sold weapons to them anyway, to funnel money off to his secret war in Nicaragua against the Sandinistas. Those were the images I grew up with in college, photos of people dying in mass graves in Nicaragua and El Salvador, all funded by my government.

  I am not telling all these things because it is any surprise to anyone hearing about this, I am telling this to give the context to why I took a metal file in to Martinez this morning. Because when I look back at all these pieces of news, at all these incidents, from the stealing of the candy by my brother to the wars and the lies of my politicians—the leaders of the country whose speeches and pronouncements flooded around me like syrup in the air, inescapable, everywhere—I realize that for years and years, my reaction was always one of quiet outrage, of words of denouncement, of curiosity, of anger, of telling others in cafés and at my schools that I was upset, but doing nothing. I did nothing. I watched, and knew, and became more and more knowledgeable, and could see the wrong, and I told myself that what mattered was that at least I knew, at least I was aware, at least I was conscious unlike the others who didn’t see, who weren’t conscious, who didn’t even take the first step to responsibility. Because at least I knew. I was informed, unlike those other Joes.

  And when I came down to Mexico City, at the age of thirty, twenty-two years ago—deciding to leave the world of my country behind in the U.S.—wasn’t that a political statement, even though I said it was just because I liked Mexico City better than New York? Wasn’t I really saying that I wasn’t going to participate in the lies of my country anymore? Didn’t that make me somehow cleaner and better than my fellow citizens, because I wasn’t going to be tainted with the blood of America?

  No, not me. I was a serious thinker, someone who could see things as they were. I read and I read, and I rented a cheap apartment in La Roma, a neighborhood that is now chic in Mexico City, but that wasn’t chic at all when I came to Mexico City in 1991. There was a big earthquake in Mexico City in 1985, and the ground of La Roma is on the part of the city that is much looser, since the city was constructed on an old lake in the center of a valley, and the buildings shook and many fell apart in the quake, so the fear of living in such a neighborhood after so many had died meant that the neighborhood was undesirable. So I found a cheap apartment, and I began to live off the savings I had from working as a young journalist in the U.S. I wrote and I wrote, and I conjured up characters that I thought were pregnant with meaning. None of what I was writing was very good, but I was writing so earnestly, with so much belief that what I was writing mattered. Fiction is nothing like writing journalism, and I wasn’t making much progress, but all the time I thought I was doing something that might show what I really felt, that might really change the world. Because isn’t that what all those great writers, whom I admired so much, like Dostoyevsky, were trying to do, to change the world? Weren’t they trying to reflect the pain and torture of our existence back at us so we might take pause and choose to change our ways and reorganize who we were and how we decided to act?

  But my fiction wasn’t any good. My characters had no life in them. They were puppets, extensions of my ideology. And after a while I realized that wasn’t why Dostoyevsky and the others wrote, in any case. If they brought us to action, it wasn’t because they were trying to get us to change our ways, it was a by-product of them simply creating life, and when we looked at life it made us see the need to make changes. If we saw the world as it truly is then it couldn’t help but make us pause and reflect that we had
to make personal changes, just as the characters always went in these nice arcs from ignorance to enlightenment, to epiphanies that caused them to change their ways.

  And yet, as I spent days in my small apartment in La Roma, reading and reading, and writing and failing to write well, what I realized is that I had epiphanies up the wazoo. I was one walking, giant epiphany. I had seen the sickness of the world, right in front of me—how far did you really have to go?—looking out at the poverty in my neighborhood, at the poor men sweeping up the streets so the rich men could walk by and make it dirty, again. Did I really need to know more? Did any of us really need to know more? I began to realize the hard thing was to act. The hard thing was to take action, not to know, because knowing was the relatively easy part. I had known that my brother had stolen the candy, I had known the politicians were lying to us all as they waltzed into other countries and stole from those countries and killed their citizens. I had known I was an earnest young man wanting to be pure when I left my country, looking for adventure. It wasn’t the knowing that was hard, it was the doing.

  So I took a job doing more of what I thought needed to be done. I took the job to pay the bills, working for the U.S. government with the death row inmates. I took the job meeting the family members of the death row inmates, seeking out any “mitigating circumstances” that might influence their sentences. For, Christ!, wasn’t the possibility of saving a life the biggest act of doing you could do? The words “mitigating circumstances” were the most Orwellian I could think of. Who doesn’t have “mitigating circumstances” in life? I found the way most of these men grew up poor, and the small shacks where they grew up, and the places where chickens ran around on the street, and where there often isn’t any running water, and hell, yes, there are mitigating circumstances, and I presented my findings to the court as ordered, in neat folders, neatly printed out on paper. And all of this was a form of doing, and yet I felt I was still an observer. I wouldn’t have broken the law if the law had come looking for me, because I thought the best way to do is from within the system. You can’t change the world unless you work within the world the way it is. I didn’t want to be one of those guys throwing himself against the barricades in the French Revolution or in the revolts of 1968. I was a thinking man’s doer. That’s how I would do things. Let others throw the stones; I would do by working within “the system” and making it change.

  Until Martinez. Martinez was different. When I saw Martinez, something clicked in me, and I knew I didn’t want to be working within the system anymore. I was, for the first time in my life, about to become, as they say, “radicalized.”

  —

  The first time I saw Martinez, two months ago, he was on the floor in the corner of his cell, smelling of feces that clung to his body. He was in the back, far right corner of the small area that pertained to him, and I thought he wasn’t even present. “Watch out for the prisoner. Keep going forward,” the warden of the prison told me.

  “Where is he?” I asked.

  “There. In front of you. To the right, on the ground.”

  I had been in so many Mexican jails before, nothing should have surprised me. They are nothing like an American jail. The prisoners often have to get their food from their family in the outside world. They sleep so many to a bunk, there is frequently someone sleeping on the concrete floor beneath two others in mattresses above. The prisoners do not always have time out in an exercise yard each day. They often have to bribe the guards who run the prison for basic necessities like toilet paper and chances to ask for their cases to be reviewed.

  Given that Martinez was all alone in his cell, I knew it was almost inevitable his cell had been cleared out, just before I saw him, to give the appearance he had the whole place to himself. There was no real chance the whole place was just for him, since I had never seen such a solitary cell for a prisoner, and this most likely explained his crouching on the floor as if he had just been liberated of the presence of other prisoners. I had been told of the existence of Martinez by a friend who worked, independently, for the release of prisoners, funded on his own dime and based on money he raised himself. He had approached me because he knew about my work with death row inmates in the U.S., and I went to the prison in the south of Mexico City because I thought there might be an article here worth writing, not for the American press, but for a slick glossy magazine called Gatopardo, a bit like Vanity Fair but for Mexicans. The thought I might be exploiting Martinez if we put him in the magazine only vaguely crossed my mind. What I thought of, instead, was that this would be a good chance to get my foot in the door with a magazine that paid well, which reached a sophisticated audience, and that I might be able to do something to further the cause of prison reform with the elites of the country.

  What I didn’t expect with Martinez is that he would act out what he had experienced and what he felt, with such strength of facial expressions with so many movements, like a great mime, every bit as good as the French Marcel Marceau. I had little experience with mimes, and little experience with deaf people, and I expected that I would spend most of my time writing questions on a piece of paper, with Martinez writing his answers to my questions back on the same piece of paper. This definitely happened sometimes, but the first thing I didn’t fully expect is that Martinez would be a perfectly good lip reader. Once the warden left me inside the cell and the guards closed the doors, and I was warned he was “very dangerous,” I approached a table in the middle of the cell, which took up a good chunk of the space, and I sat down, leaving Martinez in the corner to decide how he wanted to respond to me. I had learned from other prisoners, in other jails, that it was often best not to approach them with too much haste or with too much directness, to let them get adjusted to me and to decide whether or not they wanted to communicate with me. Giving the prisoner the liberty of choosing how to react to me placed them in a position out of their normal routine, and allowed them to enter into a different dynamic with me than with the other prisoners and guards.

  Martinez took his time in the corner as I sat at the table, Martinez deciding, it seemed to me, whether he even wanted to approach me. I had a piece of paper and a pencil out, ready to write to him. He looked me up and down, moving his head in a smooth, sweeping gesture. He wore a gabardine trilby hat, which tilted back rakishly on his head, which had been shaved until he was bald. He had on a white undershirt that left his shoulders bare, a pair of worn-out jeans, and a pair of even more worn-out flip-flops. His shirt was clean, which led me to believe the prison had washed it for him just for the interview. He walked back and forth in the prison cell, touching each wall in a repetitive movement, ignoring me, back and forth and back and forth as if a man in a play by Beckett, losing himself in the space, which seemed foreign to him now that the cell was empty of the belongings that were usually there, tapping his head, with the brim of his hat, against each wall before turning to take five paces to the other side.

  This went on for five minutes, and I watched him, and then he abruptly sat down across from me in the other chair provided and he put all of the attention that had previously been focused blankly on each of the walls and stared straight into my eyes. It was a challenge to me, I felt. He sat perfectly motionless, with his back straight, his gaze level into my eyes, still not looking down at the paper. The challenge seemed to be: “Don’t come here just to exploit me, to rob from me. Look at me for who I am.” And then, after he had my full attention, he wrote as much on the paper. He picked up the pencil and wrote in Spanish, “They tell me you want my story so you can write an article. They tell me this is for an important magazine and that I should behave. What makes you think I want to speak to you? What makes you think you have the right to just walk in here and take my story to put it in a magazine? I am not some plaything, you know, some object of curiosity.”

  I began to write my answer, but he stopped me from writing and pointed at my lips and showed me I should talk. He used his hands to show me I should speak slowly enough so
he could read my lips.

  “OK. You’ve got me,” I said. “I admit there is some element of exploitation in this. But how many other people have come, recently, to try to bring your story to the outside world? Without me, you will stay in this prison for the rest of your life.”

  “That’s a threat,” he wrote on the paper. “I don’t need threats. I am threatened in here every day. Sometimes, when they don’t want to do anything, they threaten to never let us get food again, or that we will have to sleep with that bucket of our shit, over in the corner, forever. There is nothing you can threaten me with. I am prepared to stay in here forever, if I have to.”

  “So what do you want?” I said. “To be a martyr?”

  “I want you to take me seriously. I want you to promise you will keep coming to this prison after you have written your story. I want you to show me the article you write, before you publish it. If there is something that strikes me as false, as a lie, I will cross that part of your story out and I will ask you not to publish it.”