The Invention of Exile

by Vanessa Manko

  • • •

  THE MINE CLOSED IN 1937—the depression’s victim. He heard about work for the electric company in Mexico City. They needed engineers to inspect the machines. They’d take him without any working papers. He would get a recommendation from the Anaconda company, continue his case with the more senior consulate in Mexico City, and lose himself, find safety, in the balm of the city’s anonymity.

  • • •

  MEXICO CITY

  1948

  SHE STANDS BEFORE THE French doors that lead from the bedroom to the balcony. The olive green curtains are drawn, the sun lining the edges like a frame. She is up before the others. She draws her poppy red robe tight around her waist, placing her hand on the doorknob, cool to the touch. She winces and draws in her stomach as she turns the brass handle. It makes such a loud noise upon opening and she fears waking anyone in this house full of people she hardly knows. Best to simply get it over with in one swift thrust. The light grazes her chestnut curled hair, pouring into the room in one long diagonal. She slips out onto the lip of the balcony that overlooks Avenida Amsterdam, drawing the door closed behind her.

  It is a warm May morning. She blinks in the brightness. The wrought iron railing is cast in shadow along the red flagstone floor of the balcony. She leans back against the doors, her shoulder blades pressing into the glass. She places the arch of her bare foot on the lower rung of the railing, dragging it back a little so that her toes curve into the iron, cold still from the night. She pulls her cigarettes from the deep side pocket of her robe. She lights up, the smoke mixing with the air. Leaves lie scattered across the street and sidewalks like pencil shavings.

  Like at home, it is here on mornings like this, in the quiet and stillness before the day begins, that she loses herself in memory. She stares down the line of windows—watery and watchful—so much like the many years that had piled up now to bring her back to Mexico. Sometimes, when she was younger and walking with her mother, she’d catch a profile, a sudden flick of a match to light a cigarette that would cause in her a reverberation, the shudder of remembrance—at first a cool memory of far distant happiness and then a burning longing. Sometimes she would keep the moment, freeze it for a pleasurable, lolling few seconds, pretending that the man was her father, and that he was merely out in the city, at work, or away on a business trip, soon to be on his way back to her and the family. She is ashamed that she does this still. After so many years. She is older now. No longer that eight-year-old with such girlhood longings. No longer she who had once—and still in the way she recounts it—been his baby girl.

  She thinks again of her father. She is worried about who and what she might find. The letters he sent home always left everyone feeling guilty and sad. They were sometimes loving, sometimes angry and questioning. Why had no one come to visit him? How could they ever explain the truth? “He’d die of shame,” her mother always said. They were forbidden to let him know how much they were struggling, with barely enough money to eat, never mind an extravagance like train tickets. But to live knowing he felt abandoned? Oh, it was a futile situation. She ached to think of it even now, now that she was here, really here—in Mexico City in search of her father.

  These thoughts are only a few stolen moments of reflection before she will go back inside, and prepare for the day ahead. She hesitates and then tosses her cigarette off the balcony, her gaze tracing the arc of its fall.

  • • •

  HER ACCEPTANCE INTO the work exchange program came with Spanish lessons and the promise of secure employment as either a receptionist, if you knew how to operate the phone keyboards, or a secretary, if you could type forty words per minute. She knew how to do both, but lied on her application, knowing she’d need to use work hours to type—letters to her mother, letters to the U.S. Embassy. She sat now in the low-ceilinged, fluorescent-lit office. A phone beside her. A slate-blue desk rimmed in silver chrome with a speckled sky-blue surface held a black typewriter and, next to that, the previous girl’s dictation pad set askew as if she’d left in a hurry. Vera flipped through the notepad, recognizing the shorthand. Of all the crucial things she needed to accomplish in this city, it seemed so unfortunate to her that she had to sit still at a desk, answer phone calls, type correspondence, take dictation, and cater to colleagues who, she knew, would come and go in a confusing bluster of cologne and cigar smoke. She’d be working for a Mr. Davies, whom she’d not met yet and who appeared not to be in the office. The main office door was closed and no coat or hat rested on the coat stand.

  While she waited, she made lists. Lists of letters she needed to write—to her mother, first; postcards she needed to buy; errands to run (the post office, the bank, the market, she needed one of those brightly colored straw bags she saw all the women carrying in the puestos); and then there were the lists of the sites she’d like to visit—Palacio Nacional, the museum, Chapultepec, Coyoacán. There were her obligations to her hosts, the Zaragozas, too, incorporated as she’d become into their family activities, though more and more feeling as if her presence merely meant an excuse for them to have a party. Add to this whatever she might need to do for her father—find him first, speak to lawyers, if she could, embassy officials, or maybe the Mexican authorities to see if his years in Mexico would amount to any rights as a Mexican citizen, gather the letters she’d taken from home, the one her mother wrote, too, and see what she might be able to do. She looked at her list—or several lists. Each scrawled across a different part of the page. They each represented some fraction of her very self and she was overwhelmed to see such stark contrasts spelled out before her.

  The irony of her new employment was not lost on her. A little absurd really. She surveyed the various forms on the little desktop set of shelves to her right. Forms for duties and taxes, country of origin and country of destination, embarkment and landing. She felt the tragic comedy in the fact that she would spend most of her days here ensuring the safe passage of fruits, clocks, guitars back and forth across the border, but not her father. If she thought too much about it she knew tension would grow, turning to tears, and, well, she’d be no use to anyone in that state—no use to Mr. Davies, the Zaragozas, her father, and least of all her mother. No. Best not read too much into it for she’d have to keep herself together as if she were made up of a fine network of strings, calibrated and tuned with just the right tautness and tension. Too much strain and she’d snap.

  • • •

  SUDDENLY, THE DOOR BURST open and in sauntered a tall lanky man who stood as if on a tennis court. A bounce to his stance. His straw-colored hair swirling to the left and combed down on the right. He bounded into the room, leaning on her desk, hands splayed.

  “It’s a straightforward and simple process,” he began without introduction, noting she had been surveying the forms. “For each import, you use the light blue one here,” he said, pointing to the pile of light blue forms to his left. His thin, long fingers seemed to match his long limbs. “For export, you use the pink ones here. Fill out all the information required, place the completed forms on my desk. I sign. You mail off and we’re done.”

  “Yes. I understand,” Vera said.

  “What else? I’ll need you to answer the phones, of course. Take dictation. All that sort of thing, which I assume you know how to do?”

  “Yes, of course.”

  “Good then,” he said, and disappeared into his office with the same abruptness with which he’d entered.

  The morning went by with Mr. Davies making a few outings, asking her to fill out some forms before he left and then a series of phone calls for which she took messages. She cleaned out some of the desk drawers and reorganized the papers and notebook on top of her desk. On her lunch break, when she could be sure the office was quiet, she took the time and privacy to write to her father. If he did receive her first letter, sent General Delivery to the post office, then he must know that she was now in the city. She would write to him again. She
would schedule a meeting and then what? She’d no idea. She’d only ever known him as a young girl, and through his letters, and those much more directed to her mother. As the years continued, they grew more distant, formal and as if written by a stranger. How odd to think of him as that—a near stranger. She was learning the possibility of, the power of, contradiction; one could have a fundamental connection—father, daughter—but still be two mere strangers.

  She sat at the typewriter. Its rounded metal keys more cumbersome than the machine she’d learned on back home. She pulled out a piece of stationery paper from the top drawer of her desk and began. Dear Father, I’ve arrived in Mexico City.

  After a few mistyped words, going back with the delete key and typing over the misspelled letter, she was able to continue with few mistakes, detailing her trip, the state of her mother, how her brother would be arriving in a few weeks’ time, on account of the fact that he’d finished his service work and was able to study in Mexico City on the G.I. Bill. Your son a member of the U.S. Navy!, she’d typed with an exclamation point. She’d gotten halfway through typing the letter when she’d realized it was ridiculous to be writing in such detail when she’d be able to tell him all of it in person. Was that not the very reason for her visit anyway? She laughed at herself, tugging the paper from the roll. She began again. She would not go all astray. She’d stick to the point of her letter—to secure a date, time, and place to meet. She would not clutter it up with details, and when she’d finished and reread it, she was concerned about the tone, thought it sounded much too brusque, formal, and, due to its brevity and directness, cold. But it would have to do. Lunch break was over. This is what she wrote:

  Dear Father,

  I’ve arrived in Mexico City. I’d like to meet at Sanborns in the historic center. 6:00 pm on Thursday, after my work hours. Please do come and meet me there.

  Love,

  Vera

  • • •

  SHE WALKED THROUGH THE shadows cast by the street’s wrought iron railings, fitting her feet within the coiled squares of their Greek eternity symbol design. Her day began again, though only Vera knew this, slipping away from work and delaying her return to the Zaragoza family so that she could meet her father and begin what she knew was sure to be a laborious process of getting him home.

  She counted out her steps as she walked—fast and chin tucked. Her new straw bag hung heavy off her shoulder, her market purchases from the morning pressed into her hip bone.

  • • •

  SANBORNS. 6:00 P.M. Casa de los Azulejos, the House of Tiles. The street noise and pedestrian traffic faded as she walked into the now louder din of the restaurant. The inside coolness. A break from the dry and dusty streets. She looked at her shoes and was surprised to see how much dust had gathered on her otherwise black, polished, T-strap heels. She looked around, but in searching realized she might not recognize him. Of course, he’d sent some photographs home, but the last one she’d seen was five years ago. Would she recognize him? Would she be able to pick out her own father in this city of what seemed to her millions, narrow it down to here, at this moment, amid the overcrowded clatter of Sanborns? All the tables of tourists, mostly Americans, she could hear that from the language, though Mexicans were here too she saw as she let her gaze draw arcs back and forth over the main dining area.

  She knew it was him in an instant. The full mop of charcoal, nearly white hair. The rather thin figure, hunched over his cup of coffee. His gaze rising every few seconds in a way one knew that he was waiting for someone. He sat back in his chair for a moment and then leaned forward again, shoulders drawn into his small frame. She took a breath, pulled herself up and walked straight to his table, her hands falling onto the tabletop, dropping her bag, and saying with more emotion than she’d realized,

  “Father, it’s me, Vera. It’s Vera.” Her cheeks hurt she was smiling so hard, barely realizing his own reaction—a little stunned, a little confused. He opened and closed his eyes in a way that seemed to blink back tears. He rose and smiled, grasped her hands, and then they embraced. She could feel how slim he was, not the robust, thick-necked man she’d always thought of as her father. But he was still tall, taller than she, and that somehow gave her comfort. The years may have diminished his strength and width, but not his height. He sat back down and extended his hand in a gesture for her to sit. She did so, sitting across from him and smiling what she knew was her brightest smile. Then began an odd period she would only later be able to define as her father’s shock. She watched his face, his eyes still with that blinking, glazed-over sheen. He placed his hands on the table and she saw that they were dirty. Dirt under the fingernails, grease maybe, she thought. Calloused and dry too. He had a deep gouge across the fleshy part of the back of his right hand. She imagined a razor or barbed wire had done that. But her eyes were drawn to his thumb, smashed in, crushed beneath the nail bed, and the nail itself a deep purple. He noticed that she’d seen and Vera looked away from his hands, but it was too late. She flushed and felt a triple shame—that he’d caught her staring, from her own sense of remorse, and finally the sudden fear that she’d offended him. Oh, dear, poor father, she thought, but then tried to change her expression lest he think she pitied him. If she knew one thing from her mother, he did have a kind of pride. “Stubborn, just like Vera,” her mother always said. But he could not speak. He kept looking down at the silverware. Back up to her. She was now conscious of the people next to them staring at the odd exchange. His eyes were so blue. As blue as Leo’s. The gestures too, just like her brother’s—the furrowed brow, the slight squint to the eyes, even the way he brought his hand up to his hair, rubbed his nose. This was her father. Solemn. It was the first word that came to her mind. In the blue eyes, sometimes frantic, searching. A handsome, if worn face, she thought. She wanted him to speak, but she felt she had to contain herself, not throw too much at him at once. He seemed able to process little bits at a time and this frightened her as much as he seemed frightened, overwhelmed himself. Finally, he began.

  “Vera? How can this be?”

  “It’s me.”

  “Vera, Vera.” He shook his head, looked down at his hands and then said, “Truth or faith.”

  “What is it you’re saying?” She did not understand. His thick accent, harsh on the English, jagged. It had surprised her. She had not remembered the sound of his voice. Her father’s voice.

  “Vera. In my language—it means truth or faith. So you choose.”

  “I never knew.”

  “You don’t know Russian? Your mother didn’t tell you?”

  “No. We went to Russian school, but we learned very little of the language,” she said. He frowned and shook his head. Disappointed, as if she’d caused him a mortal wound.

  “Truth or faith?” He then smiled. “Choose.”

  “Well,” she laughed, remembering that he did always have a kind of trick or game to play with her, “with truth I’d always know. So, I’ll take faith.”

  “Smart girl,” he bellowed, beaming. He hit the table with an outstretched hand. “You’ve grown so. A young lady.”

  “I should hope I had grown. It’s been fourteen years.”

  “It has been fourteen years,” he repeated, nodding his head and looking down.

  Silence.

  She crossed her legs. The restaurant was crowded, filled with businessmen, workers, the American tourists with their binoculars, sunglasses, and heavy black cameras dotting tables cluttered with Coca-Cola bottles. There was a couple next to them. The woman was looking at a map. The man was far back in his seat, nodding to the woman’s suggestions that they go to see Teotihuacán not today, but on Sunday. The restaurant’s high ceilings enveloped the drone of conversations. The chandeliers hanging by chains as thick as wrists. It was noisy. Chairs scraping. Waiters called to each other and from the street came a steady stream—cars, pedestrians on after-work errands, halts, beeping. In the fad
ing daylight the darkened storefront windows, as still and serene as a lake in the morning, doubled the dusk’s movement.

  “You look so like your mother.”

  “People do say that. Of course, I never see it.”

  “You do. You have her hands too,” he said, picking up one of her hands, turning it over in his own and patting it gently. “And your mother. How is she?”

  “Happy to know I’m here. She’ll be even more happy to know I’ve met with you. Of course worried too.”

  “Yes. She always did worry herself,” and he began to fiddle with the silverware before him. “Tell me, Vera. You traveled all by yourself, all that long way?”

  “Took a plane, flew Pan Am.”

  “All by yourself? You should be careful, traveling alone, such a young woman.”

  “People travel all the time now, Daddy.”

  “Still, you must watch yourself.”