Mexico

by Josh Barkan

  “Do you have an appointment?” the guard asked.

  “No,” I had to admit. I was sent to another line and to another waiting room. For four hours I sat in a room with faint blue paint on the walls and fluorescent lights, with no windows to give me any sense of the passage of time and no hope there was any way out of the room. It was a trap, a box with one way in and it felt like no way out. The numbers in red, digital, primitive shapes—yet which looked so new to me then, like another world, outside of the world of analog where I lived—changed slowly. They were a sign of hope that this country, while cold and with barriers, might be something different, completely, from the neighborhood back home where Gordi, I hoped, was healing. This was before the days of cell phones. There was no way to check up on Gordi. I waited with all the papers I could think of that I might need: his birth certificate, my birth certificate and the certificate of José Manuel, a deed to the house we owned, which was worth almost nothing, a letter which indicated I was employed as a schoolteacher. I took what I had heard from others was necessary, a list of our single bank account and whatever else I could find that might indicate some money, which would show we were wealthy enough to be trusted to go to America and to come back.

  When my turn finally came, I could feel my lipstick had worn off. Why didn’t I freshen it up before I was called up to the window? From the window I was directed to an office. I followed down the dull lighting of a corridor, with white linoleum tiles that shined in a way I had never seen before, so shiny and yet so cold. I knocked on the door, which was already open.

  The man behind the desk did not look up at me, at first. He looked at a folder, among stacks of other manila folders on his desk.

  I sat in front of the man until he finally looked up. He looked bored, and tired, and he had a pair of black horn-rimmed glasses and a blue pinpoint shirt, and he had the look of a man who had never heard of my Gordi and would never care. I placed the envelope with all my documents on his desk.

  “You need to wait until I tell you you can put something on the desk,” he said.

  I pulled the envelope back. How could I change this man’s thinking? Should I cry? Should I show him I was a mother? Should I stand as straight and still as a fragile, obedient bird? Should I go straight to the point?

  I waited until he was ready. “You may now place your envelope on the table,” he said. And I did.

  He spoke in Spanish, but with a strange American accent that made his words twist into unrecognizable forms. I knew very little English, only a few words from when I had studied, years before, to be a teacher. But I thought it would impress him if I could speak some of his language, so I said, “Mr….Mr., I have come here today because I have a son.”

  “You should speak in Spanish,” he told me.

  I switched to Spanish, as he commanded. Long ago, I had learned you do whatever a bureaucrat wants, or nothing happens. It was the first rule to facing a bureaucrat in Mexico. And giving him a bribe.

  “Señor,” I said. “I am requesting a visa for tourism for me and my husband and my precious son, Gordi. He has always wanted to go to Disneyland. He wants to go to Disneyland, and my husband and I, we want to give him an opportunity to see the beautiful place of your country.”

  “And the reason for why you don’t have an appointment?” He opened the envelope I had placed on the table and looked at the papers, as I replied. He scowled at the papers. I could see he was not going to buy my story about Disneyland.

  “You know,” he said, “it is a punishable offense to lie about why you want to go to the United States. I see people like you coming in here, every day, saying they want to go see the Empire State Building or the Statue of Liberty. The whole family just wants to up and go for a few days to see the Statue of Liberty. And, strangely enough, they come with papers trying to show me how much money they have, when they clearly have very little. You, ma’am, have a house in Iztapalapa. Does that sound like a place where many people, suddenly, have the money to go for tourism to Disneyland?”

  “Please. I beg you,” I said. “I am begging you. My son Gordi has been attacked by a gang. He is lying at home bleeding now, and I must be a bad mother to have left him, and the only reason I have done so is because I believe in your government. I believe that your government stands for the land of the free, as it says in your national anthem. I believe that you will give a chance to me and my husband and Gordi, and so I am requesting a tourist visa for us to go to Disneyland and to Miami.”

  “I would be fired, in a moment, if I gave you the kind of visa you are asking for because your son is trying to get out of his neighborhood,” the man said. “But I will tell you what. If you will agree to meet me for a drink, then we can resolve this matter, and you and your husband and your son can go to Disneyland. A drink. One time, and at this place.” He wrote an address on a piece of paper and gave it to me. “Will you do that?” He paused. He looked at me with the officiousness of a man who had no scruples. Yet what did I think? Why did I expect him to be different from any other animal? Why did I really think that just because the floors shined more brightly that this bureaucratic dog from the United States would be any different from the Mexican bureaucratic dogs who reached out for money every time we needed something—a permit to buy our house, a permit to register the car.

  I knew he meant more than a drink. I knew the words, a drink, were a euphemism for sex. I knew he simply wanted to make me bend to his will to see if he could. I knew he was a pig of a man, who could ask to take advantage of a mother, dressed in her finest, obviously just trying to find a way to save her son and her husband and to get out of a hellhole of a circumstance. I felt like spitting in his face, but, as any mother would, I told him I would be there. I told him I would have the drink with him. I went to the address he gave me later that evening, staying in town until he was done with his day of work. I called Gordi a couple of times to see how he was doing, and the nurse said he was recovering, but nothing was certain. I thought of the gangs, like a cancer coming closer and closer around the house, circling like wolves. I thought of my husband doing who-knows-what to get another gun. And I slept with that officer in Polanco, in the hotel at the address he gave me. His breath tasted like cheap spearmint gum as he kissed me, later. His fingers moved like cold keys of a typewriter across my nipples and my chest. I had never done anything so abhorrent as to let a stranger touch my body, but I did it to get the tourist visas, to be able to take Gordi to a new land.

  My father refused to come with us when my mother came home with the news of the tourist visas. He reacted like a caged cat, pacing through the house, faced with what my mother had done. I was only, finally, coming out of the immediate shock of the blow El Farito had given me. I had missed my mother’s gift, her gift of her body to another man, which she had never wanted anyone to find out, but which I found out years later, when my father wrote to me in the United States saying he had reason to believe my mother had done such a “horrible thing,” as he put it. It was his reason, his excuse, for not making the trip with us. I heard him from my bed yelling at my mother, “You smell of another man’s cologne.” I had no idea what he was referring to, as I lay in bed, but his letter years later let me know what he was stating. How he had guessed what had happened to my mother, I will never fully know. He used this as the main pretext for not coming with us. At the time, when my mother had given me more than any son could ever hope or expect from his mother, her own sense of self-dignity, he turned on her and accused her of being unfaithful. For that I can never forgive him, but I know that what he was also afraid of was leaving the home of his birth, the country which, for better and worse, had raised him. There is a smell to the country that one comes from that is either necessary, a smell that cannot be left because it gives you your whole identity, the culture which cradles you and gives you your sense of purpose and norm and a sense of daily routine; or a smell which, for me, after El Farito struck me, would always be the smell of blood and fear.

&n
bsp; My mother snatched me out of that fatherland, like the stork which had originally given me life and which now wanted to ensure my continued survival. With no more than a small suitcase, because my mother insisted we look like tourists and not immigrants to a new land, she made the further difficult choice of not only leaving her home country but also of leaving my father, whom she had been married to, at that time, for twenty years. She had met my father at a wedding party of a cousin, with soft mariachi music accompanying them on their first dance, but she gave up even her husband—who certainly had many faults, but for all of his faults had still been her love, once—so that she could bring me to safety.

  We landed in the middle of the night, at the darkest hour just before the dawn in Miami, me with a teddy bear and my small suitcase, and my mother with an old, beat-up red nylon suitcase that was so old the back zipper was coming undone and the red had turned to a bruised reddish-black. And with no more than that in our hands we arrived in America, two tourists supposedly going to Disneyland, two members of a family now broken, my arm wrapped in gauze which my mother kept as fresh and as clean as possible.

  “What’s wrong with him?” the guard at the border said in the airport in Miami, pointing to my arm, looking at our passports, yet barely showing any real interest in us. Others were waiting. We had the proper visas. My mother merely said, “His name is Gordi. He is twelve years old, and he has always wanted to come play in this country.”

  That was enough to have the gentleman stamp our passports and, though he was clearly unconvinced, he was on to the next persons to stamp their passports.

  Soon after we arrived in Miami, my mother enrolled herself in night classes so she could say she was a student, worthy of a student visa. She enrolled me in school for the fall, so I could get a student visa as well. Our long climb with the immigration service of the government began, and we stayed in the United States, and I grew up in the country, first as a rebellious kid who, once my arm healed, began to play American football, and then, oddly, I received a minor football scholarship to Southern Methodist University, but the year I arrived at the university their football program was shut down and all of their money was put, temporarily, for a few years, into promoting music instead. In high school, because I had wanted to play the bass guitar in a band, I had started taking stand-up bass lessons in the public school orchestra. I was late to begin the instrument, but the bass is not like the violin, which you have to begin as a child to play well. I played the anchoring notes, and traveled with the orchestra, and became interested in the deep, underlying sounds that seemed to resonate with some inner pain I had kept from my days in Mexico, even though I had grown into a boy who talked a lot and who joked a lot with others in the hallways of my American school.

  —

  Today, thirty years have passed since my mother took me, bravely, to the United States. Thirty years to the day, and the United States is finally giving my mother her U.S. citizenship. Had we come completely illegally, we might have been able to become U.S. citizens much earlier, but ironically, by coming with official visas, by working through the legal system as you are supposed to, my mother had signed papers with fine print that said when we came as tourists we never intended to stay as immigrants. It has taken this long to work her through the legal system.

  I live most of the time in New York, where I eventually attended Julliard for a master’s degree, but I have bought a house with my wife down in Florida. She is a composer, and she finds the escape from New York a source of calming, a place where it is easier for her to compose. I follow my wife, who is far more famous than me, around the world. She is the star. I am her supporter, her biggest fan, just as my mother was once my biggest fan, saving me. I pull my wife’s suitcases through the airports. I check her in to hotels, as she is brought to compose music for some of the biggest orchestras and quartets in the world. I am a nobody, but I know my wife loves that I am so supportive of her. I live for my wife, as my mother has lived her life for me.

  To celebrate my mother’s thirtieth year in the United States, and the envelope that came in the mail this morning, announcing that she is now, formally, a citizen of this country, I take her to the mineral springs that I love so much, near our house just outside the town of Englewood, Florida. The place has the feeling of a spa. When you walk in the door there are lawn chairs spread out on the wide-open, manicured grass. Palm trees sway in the air.

  As is my habit when I am down in Florida with my wife who is composing, she works in the house, locked away from me in her room, while I go to the mineral springs. I like to wear a thick, white, plush bathrobe, which I stole from a hotel in Germany when we were on tour for one of her musical compositions. I have a second, equally plush robe that I give to my mother. We have lunch first, and I order plate after plate of sandwiches, fresh orange juice, beer, borscht soup, since the local Russians like to come to this artesian spring, and then I order a plate of caviar and black bread, which is the most expensive item on the menu. I like to celebrate everything in life. I like to take in every opportunity to have fun, to taste, to play music with friends, to feel just how good life can be.

  My mother, looking at all of the food I have ordered for us, as we sit under a large sun umbrella at the café of the mineral springs, says, “You eat like you are always running away from something, Gordi. You eat too much.”

  She is right, of course, in some ways. But I tell her, “It is not running away. It is taking in everything, sucking the marrow of the bone.” I feel my scar under the plush cotton cloth of my robe and pull the sleeve of the arm up, involuntarily, until I can see the scar. My eyes get watery looking at the scar, the deep gash where El Farito almost killed me. I think of my father, who only came once to the United States to see me, six years ago, when I was married to my wife. It is the only time he has ever come to see me. He came on the day of the wedding, though he hid from standing in most of the pictures because he was uncomfortable that my wife is Jewish. There is odd, lingering anti-Semitism there, another story for another time.

  Me, I have never been back to Mexico. I can never return. I have no desire to go back to the place where I was almost killed, and to those times of running away from the gangs of Iztapalapa. I order another orange juice and down it in three gulps. My belly is round, but it is a happy belly, not a slothful belly. I take in life. I play in the back of the orchestra, letting my arm sway widely to and fro. “You look wonderful today, Mamá,” I tell her. And she does look happy. “I can never thank you enough.”

  She smiles at me, gets up from the table for a second, leaning forward with her relatively small body next to me, her little bear cub, who is now not so little, with some gray around my temples, and gives me a kiss around the back of my ear. When we are done, and she is sitting in the chair with her eyes closed, leaning back, looking calm, I leave her and I walk out into the deep pond of the mineral spring. I walk into the water that others might think is full of muck, burbling up from the origins of a swamp, which is so deep the bottom cannot be seen. It is said the hole of the mineral spring goes down hundreds of feet to another place, to other origins, to a place so deep the bones of dinosaurs can be found there. The explorer Ponce de León passed near the place in 1513 when he came looking for seven fountains of youth and gold, which he never found, but which I lay floating in comfortably in the deepest part of the water, looking up at the sky as it breezes by. Floating in this water is my favorite activity when I am down in Florida. I like it even more than floating in the ocean. I feel the power of the healing minerals as they swish and move around my body, into my ears and over my scar, and the waters soften the scar, as time does—I should never have bought the gun, my mom and I will always be refugees, I think—and I feel my mother nearby, right next to me even though she is fifty yards away, the calm of another beautiful day in Florida, the calm of a mother’s love for her child.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  THANKS TO Tessa Hadley, Jaime Manrique, Edie Meidav, Susan Burmeister-Brown
, Linda Swanson-Davies, Albert Goldbarth, Tom Perrotta, Nathan Roberson, Philip Spitzer, Lukas Ortiz, Christopher Merrill, Jennifer Clement, David Lida, Peter Nazareth, Chris Walsh, Mary Sullivan Walsh, John Matthias, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Hermitage Artist Retreat, Patricia Caswell, Martin J. Sherwin, Marc Nieson, Sherrie Flick, Peter Trachtenberg, James Alan McPherson, Frank Conroy, David Hamilton, Steve Almond, Thorpe Moeckel, Margaret Dawe, Levente Sulyok, Bradley Narduzzi, Roberto Espinosa, Jessica Poore, Rafael Moreno Arnáiz, Dušan Sekulović, Dena Wetzel, Maria Elena Barron, Sandy and Bronwyn Barkan. In memory of my father, Joel Barkan.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  JOSH BARKAN has won the Lightship International Short Story Prize and has been a finalist for the Grace Paley Prize for Short Fiction, the Paterson Fiction Prize, and the Juniper Prize for Fiction. He is the recipient of a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, and his writing has appeared in Esquire. He earned his MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and has taught writing at Harvard, Boston University, and New York University. With his wife, a painter from Mexico, he divides his time between Mexico City and Roanoke, Virginia.

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