I shook my pants in the air, peeked into my shoes, and walked outside, where it was brisk. There were dozens of large potted plants throughout the courtyard patio. Some were in large drying-machine barrels and others in plastic buckets. He had geraniums, and ferns, and bright morning glory growing everywhere. In the middle was a small garden bed lined with bricks where a few stalks of corn jutted out in random places. There was a stone washbasin in one corner of the courtyard, with clean socks hanging off the ends, and saddles were hanging off the brick walls. The air felt cold, but the sun was delicious. Even a single hour of that light would have been more than enough for any plant, more than enough even for me.
Because all of the rooms surrounded the courtyard and faced inward, I could see Apá darting through the kitchen, shuffling through some things. I didn’t know what to say to him. Who would be the first to talk? Over the years, the few conversations we had on the phone had mostly been him screaming, asking me why my mother didn’t want to return to join him in Mexico. Amá said she had never felt stronger in her life than when she told him she wouldn’t go.
He appeared from the kitchen out into the bright mess of flowers and smiled. I could never answer him over the phone as to why Amá would not return, just as I couldn’t answer him there, standing a few feet in front of me, when he asked me what was the first thing I wanted to do for the day.
I looked around—everything was his, only he had touched it. Here, in this courtyard, was the sum of his deportation ten years before, and his decision not to return every year thereafter.
My permit only allowed me to stay for a single week, so I had to make the best out of it.
“I want to go see my tías,” I said.
“We can do that,” he said.
*
It fascinated me that my father could keep a garden. That he could care for a plant, water it, prune its dead leaves, and turn the pot like a dial for the best light. I could see that he took care to put the ferns in the shade so the harsh sunlight wouldn’t burn them. I could see how he wrapped the geraniums around the brick columns to keep them from breaking under the weight of their own blossoms. He didn’t need to say much for me to see how lonely he must have been. I wonder if that was what solitude had done to him—if those petals were the soft edges of him I was forbidden to touch as a child.
I had heard talk of this garden from relatives who visited him in the past, but I never believed it. The courtyard wall keeping the outside world away seemed so large and absolute. Almost as if it was his intent to punctuate that solitude, and he pushed it as far as his property would go. He had a large bathtub in the middle of the courtyard and said he liked to take long baths in the sun, completely naked, because no one could see in. It all made me believe that perhaps he was happy, or at least that he could hide his loneliness better than others.
Since he’d always depended on Amá for domestic chores, he had never taught himself to cook, or clean, or wash, but in those ten years he had to learn it all. He had a clothesline with all of his jeans drying in the morning sun. He had a days-old pot of cold beans on the stove. The more I thought about it, the more I was certain that the large wall was there so he could make sure no one saw him washing his own clothes, doing what he said a woman should have been doing for him all along.
*
I never understood why he wanted to build such a big house. The living room and kitchen alone measured sixty by thirty feet, and the ceilings were about fifteen feet high. The house had four other rooms, one with a full bathroom. It was meant for a large family.
He built the house as soon as he arrived. He built it with the intention of using it as a way to convince my mother to leave the States and take us with her to join him after his deportation, but my mother would have none of it. She was firm in her decision to stay.
My mother could hide behind his deportation as an excuse to escape him. There was nothing he could actually do over the phone other than scream and plead. There came a time when my mother stopped answering his calls, not because she was too busy working, which she was, but because she was no longer afraid. She answered when she felt like it and hung up as soon as she thought his tone was starting to get too aggressive. “Bad connection, sorry,” she would say, indifferently, the next time they spoke.
Apá still believed she was the same person he left crying on the driveway; he refused to believe that she would not listen to him and return to Mexico. But solitude did something different to her than it did to him. She was emboldened to finally speak up and say no. He, on the other hand, built an entire house around his denial, which stroked his delusion of power. Late into his exile, he bought a large dining room table that had enough room for eight people. It took up most of the space in the kitchen. It looked Gothic with its intricate designs carved onto the arm rests. He had it made by hand at the local carpenter’s shop and even held the carpenter at gunpoint when it wasn’t done on time. When we sat down to drink coffee that morning, he said it was the first time the table seemed somewhat full.
The large house must have sharpened his solitude, and made it more unbearable. I could see him walking those corridors late at night, perhaps whistling a song as he headed for the bathroom outside in the courtyard. I wanted to feel sorry for him, but hearing my echoes throughout the house made me clench my jaw and drink my coffee fast, burning my tongue.
*
He had always been one to overdo things, as I was always prone to overcompensate. Even the kitchen countertop had fourteen steel beams inside the six-inch-thick cement. Who would ever need a countertop made of six inches of reinforced cement? He said you could actually drive a truck over it and nothing would happen.
“Ten hurricanes could hit this house and nothing,” he said.
“Apá, we’re in the desert, there are no hurricanes here” I said. “No earthquakes, no tsunamis, we’re even too high for a flash flood.”
He had built footings into the earth for the kitchen countertop alone. The footings for the house were as tall as I was beneath the ground.
He probably spent a third more unnecessarily reinforcing his house. So much that I began to wonder if it edged on paranoia—his insistence on never again moving, his solution to all of the damage that his constant flux had caused. It wasn’t extravagant, it was just thick and simple, like most of the other homes in the town—a few square parcels with a roof. He proudly pointed at the perimeter wall, which was made out of huge limestone blocks two feet wide by two feet tall by ten inches thick. He said it took four men to lift a single slab and drop it in place. He had to drive out of state to get the limestone from a special quarry, and proudly displayed a large scar running the entire length of his arm.
“Look, I cut myself open on the very first slab,” he said.
I remembered that wound on his arm; at least, I remember hearing about it on the phone and imagining it in my head. The scar from the concrete saw now looked different than what I had imagined; it zigzagged through his arm like lightning.
The garage was even larger, easily twenty feet high, with an industrial curtain door so that it could fit large cattle trucks with tall railings to transport cows.
“Apá, we don’t have cows,” I wanted to say to him, but I kept my mouth shut and simply kept gawking and marveling to satisfy him. He spent the whole morning going through every detail of construction, from the placement of the outlets to the lights and the sewage system. He kept repeating that it wasn’t a bad job for someone who only went to second grade. And indeed it wasn’t. I was genuinely impressed. His greatest accomplishment, according to him, was the fact that the entire house was flat—there were no bumps or steps of any kind. He said he was thinking about the future, when he would need a walker or a wheelchair in his old age. He wanted to make sure he would be able to get around his own house with ease. He didn’t want to depend on others. Even the shower had no partition; there was just a walk-in space slightly sloping into the drain. It was painful to hear him talk about the future b
ecause I knew it didn’t include me or anyone else in the family. I nodded along, walking with my coffee in hand, wondering if he knew he’d built a house he would most likely die alone in.
I knew he had always been selfish. This was nothing new. But seeing his house gave me something to hold on to, something tangible to measure his narcissism against. He could have used that money on so much more. I could see what was worth more than me, my brothers, and my mother, and it was all around me, the totality of his possessions. Deportation was conveniently final to him, just as it was for my mother. He could exclaim as much desire to return to the U.S. as he wanted without having to actually do it. And Amá could go on saying that the phone line kept cutting off and apologizing. In the end, it seemed like deep down they both wanted the same thing. It’s a wonder I ever thought he would return at all.
So many times I had asked why he never came back, or even attempted to come back, why he had never hired a coyote, and the answers were finally in front of me—in the red and white geraniums, in his large tub beneath the sun, in each steel beam running throughout the house, and even in the blood he lost cutting the stone. This was all enough for my father, enough for him to stay.
Rubi had woken up by then and was marveling at the garden, too. I looked at her from across the courtyard and wondered if by chance we could ever have a life in Mexico—if this life could ever be for us. No more hiding, no more fear of being deported, no more waiting and waiting for the laws to change. Could we see our children here? I tried to imagine her standing in that same spot but with no urgency to leave, just standing, and six or seven months pregnant, on the phone with her mother back in the States.
We hopped in Apá’s old Jeep Cherokee and headed into town to buy some groceries because his fridge was completely empty except for some orange juice in a cracked glass jug. No one knew that I had returned because I’d kept it secret. Mexico had changed a lot over the years, and it was best to keep a low profile. The town and the entire state belonged to the Cártel del Golfo, but things turned violent when Los Zetas contested for the same territory. Apá said things were okay, that the worst was in 2008, and that you just had to be careful about what you said and did in public because you never knew who could be watching.
I went house to house, visiting aunts and uncles I only knew by name, and all of them held me for a long time in their arms, in utter disbelief. My tías looked me in the eyes as if they had a story to tell me but they didn’t have time, or simply couldn’t.
“You were this little when you left,” my tía Beatrice said to me, pointing to the ground, still shaking her head.
Standing in front of my father as he presented me to family I never knew, I had to learn how to be a son all over again. Despite my misgivings, something deep inside me still wanted to impress him, still wanted to please him, though it would never be enough. I was his son, grown, with a beard and a wife. He paraded me through town like a trophy horse, like a gamecock with fighting knives dragging on my feet.
[First Movement Before Me as Peligrosa]
Amá used to say that a pregnant woman should never plant anything in the soil because she would turn the soil barren.
When Amá was pregnant with me, she lived on the ranch of La Loma. She said she would deliberately go into the cornfield and sow a small seed in the earth. Apá, as usual, was gone often in those days, and as usual, she took up the heavy tasks he was supposed to do—fetching firewood, herding the cows down the mountain. She talked to her animals a lot. She said she worried often that I would die as her last child, Manuel, had died. But that baby was three thousand miles away, in the ground, separated by a border. Perhaps the distance alone would make for a different outcome. Shortly before my birth, her mother, my Amá Julia, died of cancer in the stomach, suddenly and without much notice. Amá was lying in bed with her to keep her warm the night she died. Amá said her mother stretched her thin legs outward toward the end of the bed and let out a small breath before she stiffened.
A year after that, Amá was pregnant with me.
If, when she was pregnant with me, she buried the seed and the field became fallow, then maybe that would be an indication that the child in her womb wouldn’t die like the last one. It would mean there was actually something there inside her, and not just a stone, that it would live longer than the last one. She didn’t want to begin to grow attached until she was sure. It was my gravity—me at the center; she, orbiting around me like a moon. Or she at an even deeper center, and me in her womb, orbiting around her, pulled by the first green sprout in an otherwise dying field of corn.
I imagine her digging in the dirt, glancing around, making sure no one was looking, and dropping a small bean into a hole. Men might spend months toiling over something that would never grow while she held me inside her, growing, completely her own, something divorced from the world, if even only for nine months. She knew what she was capable of. And I grew and grew.
*
Perhaps it wasn’t only seeds she planted but objects—a small doll, hoping for another daughter, the wingless bodies of bees she found in the courtyard, all of her children’s baby teeth she kept in a small cloth, hoping for—I don’t know what.
During each of the six times she was pregnant, Apá never laid a hand on her.
Amá, tú eres bella y peligrosa.
12.
As we drove up to my mother’s ranch of La Loma, I realized how little I actually knew about the land and its specific characteristics. In his white Jeep, Rubi, Apá, and I ascended from the valley below. Apá drove slowly, pointing at small ridges along the road that told him exactly where it had rained and how much. He was precise, he was raised to learn the patterns of rain, how it left its subtle footprint even in the way the leaves hung off the trees. Apá took his time on the bumpy road, and even stopped completely, pointing to lines I could not see in the landscape that marked property boundaries of those old infamous families, five or six generations removed, whose heirs would come to kill each other over that land. He knew the names of the shrubs, and the trees, and birds. He could tell from a distance who had sewn their crop too early, who had done so too late, and who was wise enough to time it just right. His knowledge of the landscape seemed vast and effortless, and I was shocked that it had always been there just beneath the surface, ready to be called on at any minute.
From afar, Apá pointed to a compound on top of a hill. “That’s it,” he said.
Water was hard to come by in those areas, but La Loma was prized in its heyday because it had not only one but two streams which were now dry. The smaller stream, el arroyo chico, crossed right through the middle of the property, and the bigger creek was about one hundred meters down below. The truck stopped, and we were all silent for a moment. I asked both Rubi and Apá if I could go inside alone.
*
The thick adobe walls, which had withstood at least two centuries of rain, were evidence that my ancestors had no intention of leaving. They built the house once and never had to build it again because they built it out of the materials that were already there around them. Maybe that was why Apá built his house the way he did. Unlike us, he was thinking three, four, or five generations ahead. He wanted something to last as long as the pyramids of Egypt, of Teotihuacan, of Chichén Itzá. It was an internal clock that looked far into the past and as much into the future. I didn’t possess that clock inside me yet.
I opened the thick wooden door to the courtyard and took in a grim scene. The roof had collapsed years before, and shrubs taller than me grew in each room, making it difficult to walk through. I could tell that there was life there once, that people were happy. I could also tell that grief abounded, not because of its state of decay, but because there was no one left who would take over its care. Later, I would show the video footage to my mother, and she would stare at the screen for a long time before telling me to turn it off.
I walked into the room where my great-grandfather León, Amá Julia’s father, worked as a weaver. H
e made wool blankets using a small wooden loom and sold them down in the market in town. He was limited to the color of the year’s offspring. He sheared the wool from his herd and spun it into yarn. Sometimes he would get almost a golden hue in the yarn, or a crimson brown. But mostly it was a dirty white, black, and light brown. Nonetheless he designed birds, and deer, and different shapes of his own making.
*
As I walked through the rooms, parting the tall brush ahead with my hands, the house felt like a puzzle that had finally revealed itself after years when I was given nothing but fragments. I only remembered small details of the house from stories my family would tell, and now I was able to fill in the rest. I walked through each room, touching the walls with my hands.
Who would have thought that almost no one would be left on the entire mountain? So many homes built to last, only to be abandoned. There were holes in the ground throughout the house. Over the years people had broken in and dug, looking for some lost fortune, believing my great-grandfather buried some gold, but they always came up empty-handed, as far as we know.
Everything seemed familiar because I had imagined it endless times growing up. During Christmas, during a birthday party, or even just on a Sunday afternoon, anytime the adults would gather, the only topic of conversation was always Mexico and the ranch. I found the pig corral where my mother fell in as a child and was nearly eaten by a sow exactly where I had envisioned it. The three large avocado trees that my mother dreamed about looked nearly petrified, and probably didn’t bear fruit anymore, but nonetheless they were there, just as I imagined.
Children of the Land Page 6