The Invention of Exile

by Vanessa Manko

  Love,

  Vera

  Words written—facts. For two, nearly three minutes he cannot move. Austin lingers on the name and what it is about to do. Vera. Arrival. It is difficult to contemplate. She’d written it herself clearly, she’d stated that. Vera, his daughter, will be coming to Mexico City. His mind races in all directions. He tries to gather his thoughts, focus them, but thinking of Vera now, he sees a young girl, wondering how she can come all this way by herself. He is wracking his mind to race up to her years. He folds the letter, following its two marked creases. He slips it once again into the envelope and inserts it into his front pocket. He leans against the wall, staring at the people traversing the lobby—some halting before moving on, others performing a dramatic about-face, still others a relaxed pivot as if they have misplaced a thought and had to step back to retrieve it. After a few moments, he draws the letter out once more.

  May 15. My God, he has no idea what day it is. He looks up for some sign of a calendar. Of course he knows it is Thursday, yes, but the date. Is it nearing the 15th? It seems just a handful of days ago that it was the first so the 15th, well, that is surely near, isn’t it? Or maybe it has passed, he thinks in horror. But no, that’s impossible. When did she mail the letter and how long had it taken to arrive? One never knows in this country, one just never knows. He scans the envelope for the postal date, difficult to read from the faded ink. The date must be written somewhere in this official building. He cannot find a single calendar, not even a polite little triangular cardboard calendar, quietly indicating the month, day, and year. Ludicrous for there not to be a calendar in a post office. He starts back for one of the postal windows, passing the line, excusing himself among the customers. Just need to know the date, he mutters to himself. The date. He hears himself asking, his voice coming to him loud and perhaps too overexcited so he checks himself, speaks softly again.

  “Excuse me. Sir. Can you kindly tell me the date? I know it’s Thursday, but what is the date?”

  “May 12.”

  “May 12.”

  “That’s right. May 12.”

  “Thank you.” Okay. It’s May 12. My God, May 12! She will arrive in three days. There are so many questions he nearly falls to the ground, his mind spinning. But now he has to get a hold of himself, calmly go about the rest of his days as if her looming arrival is the most natural thing in the world and not an occasion that to him sounds off in his mind like a trumpet, so that as he leaves the post office his thoughts stream ahead in counterpoint—at once tranquil and meandering, the next moment a blasting explosion of joy.

  • • •

  THURSDAY TURNED TO FRIDAY. Friday to Saturday, Austin’s busiest day. Then, Sunday—long and spacious Sunday. For Austin, most Sundays lay before him in long vacant hours filled by a well-ordered routine that had not been disturbed since his first months in Mexico City. He would rise at 6:12 A.M. Not at 6 A.M. sharp. Too inhuman an hour. He would then set the water on to boil. As he waited, he took his aspirin bottle from the shelf above the stove and removed one pill. Next, he’d search for the X-Acto knife in his rectangular box of tools, cutting the aspirin tablet in half. He’d learned the precise pressure needed so that as he pressed on the knife, one half would not, as it often did, project across the room, falling into a crevice behind the counter, where, if he were to ever peer down with a light, he’d find a series of half-moons that had never risen, trapped amid dust and cobwebs. He’d then take a spoon from the sideboard—one of three spoons in total—crushing the half tablet with its curve. A fine powder. The chalky bits left, which he’d stir into a glass of water, drinking it on an empty stomach. In twenty minutes, the dull ache in his hands would disappear.

  When the water was ready, he would make his coffee and a cup of tea and drink from each intermittently. He now preferred the dark, rich taste of coffee over the more mild, barky flavor of his tea, but he didn’t give it up. He would then take both cups—cups of clay, an indent the size of a thumbprint on the handle—and, sitting at his table—for drafting, for eating—place each cup in front of him. His papers in the early morning light, white like alabaster. He drank from first the coffee, and, as the tea grew lukewarm, the tea. The morning continued caught between sips. In an hour, two hours, his drafting papers would slowly fill with his arcs and equations and notes scribbled along the paper’s perimeter. Sundays would continue like this for hours. Then, he’d rise, a bit stiff in the legs, and take his late-afternoon walks in the Alameda.

  Though on this Sunday, he is now in a bewildering situation. He reads the letter over as a reminder. A reassurance—Vera would be coming to Mexico. He reads it sometimes once. Most days two or three times. It is too difficult to fully contemplate. How will he get through the next few hours, never mind the next few days? How will he contain himself, this expansiveness? He feels as if he is standing in sight of the ocean. My God, he hasn’t seen the ocean in years! But never mind that now. Her pending arrival lifts his spirits, which are rising and threatening to float away. He has to check himself, do a kind of mental pivot and not forget his looming predicament. He aches for a walk. To walk and dwell on the idea of Vera’s arrival. Where will she stay, for instance? He can assemble another bed. But he must remember Jack. He cannot run into him with all his taunts and persecutions. His presence sits in his mind like an irritating head cold, a faint pressure that he cannot locate, but that always makes its presence known—when he looks up from his work, when he turns his head too violently, when he yawns. And now all this sudden excitement. How much easier if he can simply sit before his papers, unaware of coming evening, disappearing within, drifting along on his ideas, for who knows what such hours preoccupied with other thoughts may force him to give up—a solution to a design issue?

  It is already the in-between hour. Daylight descending, evening rising. He stands before his desk now, the window a gray square silent and still in periphery. His paths out in the city awaiting him. He wonders in a ridiculous moment if the Alameda would miss him. He dresses now, is somewhat grateful for a place to go, even if it is only the cantina down the street. A plate of food with each tequila purchased. He doesn’t mind eating alone now. An old, forgotten self abhorred it. On Sundays in particular. Sometimes those afternoons the first years in Mexico City return to him in all their dry and brittle hours. Now, he has learned to contend with eating in solitude, he’s resigned himself to it.

  He stares into the mirror, shaving. The stubble along his jawline the color of iron. His eyes though still hold their sapphire blue. He draws his hand along his chin. In the Sunday afternoon’s near silence he can hear the lonely sputter of a truck, the dripping faucet.

  He dips the razor into the basin. In the mirror the window’s reflection, and within its frame, the sun is the color of tiger lilies. He draws the razor across his face in careful, even strokes. The blade is sharp, cool. His thoughts without his realizing it turn to Anarose—drawn, like stepping toward a place of warmth. A moment of sun along an arm. A pocket of possibility, something to mull over every now and then. A palliative. She’d surprised him so, she with her broken clock, her scent, her smile. Determination, bashfulness too as if she’d thrown something to him and then had been unsure of herself, clamoring back to fetch it. He had to admit, she was distracting. In her red, T-strapped shoes, in her yellow blouse with blue flowers. Light material—silk, crepe. Something as soft as a petal. The slight flush to her cheeks, the dampness along an eyebrow.

  When with Anarose, he’d taken an almost guilty pleasure in the fact that he could, for a moment, forget the years’ yearnings, but it came with a price he knew. His vigilance lagging and his ideas vulnerable to anyone free to intuit his thoughts, to Jack and his persecutions, his seeming omniscience, watching. And then a flood of remorse—if he did not continue his unrelenting pursuit to get back to Julia, to get to America, what purpose would the years have served here? For an instant he feels them crumble in his hands . . . In your
loneliest moments, know I have them too, that I long for you to be with me, dear, and oh the children, they long for you as you long for them. . . .

  • • •

  THE CANTINA’S TURQUOISE doors hang off the darkness. He does not like to use his hands to press them open. He’s gotten one too many splinters from that action and had offered to sand the doors down, polish them too, but Miguel would not have it.

  “What’s the point? Anyone coming here will not feel the splinter when they leave.” True, Austin thought.

  He uses his shoulder to step into the cantina. Empty, save for the regular domino players with their shouting or laughter, the crash of wooden chips. The scent of onions stronger. Glasses white and clear, clinking as the waiter walks, balancing the tray, arms pulled in close to his sides.

  Austin sits at a small round table in front of an open window. From here, he can see the bamboo trees that sway in the night. It is darker out now—navy, intense. The breeze with its insistence of a chill. A table erupts into laughter like plates clattering to the floor. Large platters of food line the bar. There is fruit salad, chopped papaya and watermelon. Beans and peppers. A small bowl of cilantro. Tortillas in their covered earthenware dishes. He has his first tequila and then rises to wait in line behind the others, workers mostly. Austin is careful to take only one serving, knowing he will return, ordering a second glass, taking two servings when no one is apt to notice.

  “Austin,” he says his name like a reprimand. Austin recognizes the voice at once. It can be heard over murmuring, quiet conversations. It is the same loud, grating voice, slightly gravelly, veering on a metallic abrasiveness. He stands in the narrow green frame made by the open jalousie doors.

  “I will sit with you, if you don’t mind,” he says. Austin does not move. He feels he should leave now. Without a word, turn and walk fast down the street, across the avenue.

  “I will get a plate of food first and then I will join you,” he says. Austin turns to go back to his table near the window.

  Jack joins him with a full plate, piled high with double servings. He sits hunched over his food, stabbing with his fork, taking large bites.

  “Starving,” he says as he delves in for a second bite. “You know the good establishments, don’t you?” he says, mouth full of food. Austin shrugs his shoulders.

  “I at least benefit from that. I appreciate it, let me tell you. Difficult to know which place offers the best food. You fit right in here, don’t you? Tell me, you found work okay here your first years in Mexico?”

  “I operated a lighthouse,” Austin says, addressing no one in particular. Eyes on the ground as if the question came from the air.

  “Lighthouse, copper mines, repairs,” he says.

  “I have learned to be versatile.”

  “Where was this?”

  “Mazatlán.”

  “Mazatlán?”

  “Yes. You know it?”

  “A fishing port. Lots of activity there.”

  “Yes.”

  “Not easy work, that. Lighthouse work.”

  “I managed.”

  A table erupts into laughter. Austin shivers from the suddenness of it, and then the dying out. Silence. He can hear other voices far in the distance, a word or two wafting over the low walls of the back of the restaurant, settling on the night air.

  “Two months, wasn’t that what they told you and Julia?”

  Julia. Her name had fallen between them—weighted with absence.

  “How did you know?” Austin says.

  “We have our ways of finding out these things. A mutual decision of course. Wise, at the time, considering the circumstances.” Jack sits across from Austin. “Certainly, she can’t come back. Of course, I don’t blame her,” Jack says, leaning forward, his eyes focused. There is a long pause. Jack is waiting for Austin’s response. Austin sits still, unyielding. He will not give anything away. He will not divulge, forfeit his curiosity, but he does want to know exactly how much they know. He sighs. Looks around. “I am glad to run into you. I usually don’t come here, but I am glad I did.” With his other hand, he reaches across the table, and shakes Austin by the shoulder a bit. His hands are firm and strong, like marble. “A marvelous coincidence that we should meet in this very place, in such a large city, don’t you think? What are the chances?” It was a phrase that lingered in Austin’s mind, Austin knowing full well that Jack and his people had arranged it.

  “Of course, I know most of your details from your file. Amazing what happened to you. I guess you don’t like to think of it too much, too difficult to recall all of it—such a chaotic time, why go back to a bad time, right? And here we are again, after the Reds, mostly in Hollywood now, but before, it was you people, Russian immigrants. But as I interpret it, you thought you’d just set up a life in the Ukraine, isn’t that right? Live a fine, simple life farming whatever it is you farm there—wheat, rye? I don’t know. To have traveled all that way only to realize you are unwanted there too. A civil war will do that to people, Reds versus Whites. And we know your family were landowners—at the wrong place at the wrong time, it seems to me. Oh, but from what it sounded like, Julia would’ve followed you anywhere, really, even if you were off to Siberia, right? Who could’ve ever predicted this Stalin? Brutal. What’s going on there now, just brutal. The labor camps. I wouldn’t want to go back there. But Mexico—after everything, this country must’ve seemed like a paradise to you. I know the aim was always to get to the States, but now, though, well, I bet you think the worst the two of you ever did was agree to part. In this crazy time, you just can’t do that. I know you think your inventions will get you in some way.”

  “If you don’t prevent it.”

  “Why do you think we didn’t allow you entry in the first place? It must have been hard, though, having them leave you, but then again I suppose you’ve grown accustomed to doing a lot of leaving in your life.”

  “I was to follow her. In two months they said. Two months!”

  “But all that time in Cananea—Austin, I am surprised you never tried crossing the border. It’s right there.”

  “No.”

  “And so you’re telling me that you never tried, never even stepped across?”

  “No.”

  “Why not? It was much easier then. Sometimes even a mile away from the border port of entry, people going back and forth right under the noses of the border patrol, smugglers at your beck and call. Of course, I suppose you had a reason to be fearful. I can’t blame you for that. No country. That’ll make you feel vulnerable in this world. Like you’re standing outside without a coat your whole life.”

  “I must go,” Austin says, rising. He is looking out the door.

  “Now? Right this minute?”

  “I just now forgot something.”

  “No you didn’t. Don’t forget I know your routine. Almost as if it were my very own. Like clockwork, really. Right about now, you’ll go to the Alameda, wandering, walking, and then in about an hour, two hours, I’ll find you at work, drafting.” Jack says all this while glancing at his watch and then looking back to Austin. “I am right, I see, by the slight blush across your face.”

  “You have no right to speak to me this way.”

  “I’m merely taking notice.”

  “How dare you come here and disturb me like this.”

  “Careful, don’t get so hot tempered. You must see that there is a reason why we keep your type out.”

  “You cannot begin to understand my type.”

  “I know what I see. I know what your file says.”

  “You know nothing.”

  • • •

  CANANEA, SONORA, MEXICO

  1930–36

  COPPER CAN BE TRICKY. In some lights—a morning’s blue before the sun, the violet gray of evening—it can be dull and opaque hiding in a guise of stone, rock. The sun ris
ing, setting will reveal copper’s brilliantine surface—sometimes a sheaf of copper as thin as paper, deposits of it spread across the surface of a rock face. Other times, it’s in boulder form. The scent is briny, cloying, during the smelting. The solid softens. The smell never leaves.

  Austin worked in the copper mines of Sonora. In the mining town of Cananea, which, before it was a mining town, was a land of Apaches. Cananea. The Apaches’ word for horsemeat. A land of copper too. Rich in copper. The great quarries rose-hued in some lights. A scarred earth, copper emerging out of rock and dirt, reddish against the camel-colored dust. The quarry like a canyon, steps carved into ore. The embers burned in the hills at night. Carts of molten, smelted copper gliding along the quarry paths, carts rumbling like far distant thunder, carts blazing like torches to a ritual, beacons with no messages to impart—no signs of safety or of conquest.

  The land beyond the mines is wide and empty, a craggy terrain. There are solitary nopals or agave cacti, a yucca plant’s spiky leaves black beneath a cobalt sky. The fragile wooden barracks are humbled by the otherwise barren, desolate land and the open, empty sky stretched tight above the Sierra Madre, the Sonora River, and the neighboring towns of San Pedro, Naco, Agua Prieta.

  • • •

  COPPER IS APHRODITE’S ELEMENT. No wonder it’s a place that can break your heart.

  Then, in the 1930s, the lands were owned by several California copper capitalists, the ones whose families owned homes in the hills, the hills where the Chinese grocers delivered crates of tomatoes, green beans, cigarette papers and tobacco, molasses and sugar. The mining town barracks sat on the outskirts of the mines, far, but not so far that one couldn’t see the molten copper at night, the carts of blazing embers along the hillside. The blue flames the hottest, burning to white, then blue, then amber, orange. At night, one could stand on the mesa, a mile off from the pit, with its ridges like the seats in an ancient amphitheater, watching the wooden carts follow paths to the right, then left, then right and left again, slowing slightly at the narrow turns.