Children of the Land

by Marcelo Hernandez Castillo

  I wasn’t certain if I knew Rubi’s body the way the law wanted me to. Had I ever spent my nights looking at the shapes of her birthmarks, wondering what they resembled? Was I supposed to look at her the way some people looked at the sky and made animals out of the clouds?

  “Yes, she has a birthmark on her back that kind of looks like the state of Texas,” I answered rather abruptly.

  Texas?

  I hardly even knew my own body. We held each other at night not to count or measure each other but because we knew that we didn’t have to. We didn’t have to guess the shapes of our irregularities—our inadequacies. The world outside our bed was one that asked us questions that demanded answers—answers that had definite beginnings and endings, definite shapes. Inside, we could ask and ask and never feel compelled to answer if we didn’t want to. We could spend the entire day in bed, naked, asking each other questions that would only be answered by other questions.

  Inside, it was a world of feeling our way through each other in the dark. How could I tell our interviewer what I felt and saw in the hazy darkness of our room? How could I tell her what Rubi said at two in the morning as we both climaxed inside each other? I couldn’t remember which side of the bed Rubi slept on. We didn’t really pick sides.

  *

  How much could we possibly know about another person? I was certain that the amount of ourselves that we allowed others to see was minuscule compared to what else was there. Sometimes our secrecy is unintentional. Even six years after being together, one day Rubi discovered that I had a crown in my left molar. Shocked, she grabbed my face with both palms close to hers, looked me straight in the eye, and said, “Has that always been there?”

  “Yes,” I said, looking at her, confused.

  “You’re lying!”

  “No, I’ve had it since I was little.”

  Had I never opened my mouth that wide for her that it took nearly a decade to see inside completely? I used to enjoy asking Rubi, “How many times do you think we’ve kissed? A thousand, ten thousand, a million?” My mouth was always so close to hers, and still she had never seen my crown’s glint in the sun, even when I yawned. I wondered how many parts of her body I had yet to know.

  *

  We were under oath. We had raised our right hand and sworn to tell the complete truth. There was so much more I wanted to tell the interviewer, as if I was confessing my sins to a priest. Maybe telling her that I was afraid of clowns would ease my fear. In a way, it felt good to have someone give me their complete attention; her entire body was focused on every word that formed on my lips. But I didn’t say more than what was asked, and my answers were short. I pointed at pictures of ourselves that were laid out on her table and recounted the moments when we were happy over the years.

  It was strange to think that somewhere in a federal warehouse were pictures of my mother, my brothers, my senior prom, field trips in high school, graduation day, my wedding day, and mine and Rubi’s first apartment together, among so many others. There were even ones in which I was doing absolutely nothing. It was those in which I was most mundane, most myself. It gave me a small joy to think of my monotony as a subject of interest, archived inside a box with a Dewey number, never to be opened. It reassured me that perhaps something of mine would survive this world after all. I was hoping that between the pictures and the documents submitted, I wouldn’t need to choose what parts of myself to tell. But as personal as that information was, it wasn’t the full picture. The intimacy of sharing those pictures did not escape me. Would the agent remember them on her drive back home that day? Would they remind her of her own marriage, or her own children?

  “What would you do if granted the green card?”

  “Nothing different, ma’am.”

  “I see,” she said, and jotted some more notes on her paper.

  [Second Movement: Hometown Family Album]

  Nobody could remember where we got the cameras. Amá, wearing bright red lipstick with her bangs puffed high in that early ’90s trend, stood next to Apá for the picture. His face was stern and stoic, with his shirt unbuttoned down to his large potbelly.

  In the picture, Amá still looked slightly happy, even though moments before, Danny was crying and Apá was yelling at him to stop, which made him cry louder. The only way Amá had permission to make herself pretty in a picture was if Apá was in it. The other time was if she went to church. Amá became a very religious person.

  We went to a church where the pastor told us our poverty was all part of God’s plan. “Believe,” he said every Sunday, “believe that God is great and will recompense you tenfold.” My mother fainted in the presence of the Holy Spirit every Sunday, and then she got up as if nothing ever happened, as if from one moment to the next the Holy Spirit was no longer in her—moved on to the next believer. I fainted too sometimes, but she hit me on the head and said, “That’s not funny.”

  I practiced fainting in the backyard so she wouldn’t hit me at church anymore, so I could be more convincing, and people would believe I too was capable of being emptied by the very hand of God.

  6.

  In preparation for the interview, I had to purge all of my social media accounts. I attempted to erase any trace of myself from the Internet so as to not let anything I had said be found. I was worried they would see something about me they wouldn’t like. Would this country want another poet? I regretted having published so young on the Internet. I hoped they wouldn’t conduct a background check, looking for some reason to deny me. There was nothing there to find, I had never committed a crime, but I was worried something would magically come up out of thin air. English was the language of misinterpretation.

  Midway through the interview, the woman said, “I’ll be right back,” and returned after a tense ten minutes with my personal folder beneath her arm. I was sure they were looking for something.

  “We just had some things to clarify and sort out with my boss. It says here you left the country and returned with advanced parole through DACA recently. How was your trip?” she said as she folded her arms and placed them on her desk.

  “It was fine. I needed to go see my dad.”

  “How long had it been since you’d seen your dad?”

  “About ten years.”

  “And why was he there so long?”

  “Because he was deported.”

  “Oh.”

  She said the last “Oh,” as if she was surprised that that was what happened when people got deported, that ten years actually meant ten years. It was one thing for her to see it on paper, and another to see it in person. I was that person, I was the product of one of those removal proceedings she might make again before her lunch without thinking twice.

  It suddenly became clear that in all of the pictures we presented to validate our marriage case, still laid out on her table, my father was missing. Maybe I’d said too much.

  “Well, Mr. Hernandez, I think that’s it. I’m usually not supposed to say this to people, but I think you passed. It won’t be final until you receive an official letter in the mail, but I’m confident you’ll get that shortly. In the meantime, I suggest you take your wife on that honeymoon you owe her.” She smiled as she said this, and I tried not to make my affectation too obvious.

  She shook our hands with a firm grasp, smiled, and kept nodding her head. That was it. There was no applause, no musical accompaniment, and none of us would go home to watch reruns of ourselves late at night. We followed the rules, we passed the questions back and forth between each other. We got up to leave, but before we did, she said, “Welcome to America,” as if I hadn’t already been here for twenty-two years. I feared she could take back her decision at any moment so I kindly smiled, said thank you, and quickly walked away.

  7.

  Sometimes, when I had no business being nervous, even when everything in my life was calm and going well, I would still get this feeling of being sunken into the earth. Of walking through a deep sludge of mud. Thick mud. Dark mud.
The kind of mud that exists where there is no water but no one questions where it comes from. I wanted the deepest roots of me uplifted. But there was another side to this feeling—it was sometimes good to know that I was at least holding on to something. That at least it was difficult for me to fall, even if I was going nowhere. That it was hard for me to burn.

  After the interview, I wanted to go home and make love to Rubi and apologize for nothing in particular, just say “I’m sorry” over and over again and kiss her on her forehead and trace all of her birthmarks with my finger.

  8.

  Do other people who also undergo this interview think of this country as belonging to them? In effect, all the green card meant was “You can stay,” not “It is yours to keep.” I still saw it as temporary, something that could be taken away for even minor violations of the law. Besides, before even considering accepting the U.S. as my country, I had debts to settle with myself, the landscape, and its people. There would always be parts of me that would want nothing to do with this country and what it has done to many of its people.

  For a moment, I understood my father a little better and his desire to distance himself from anything “American.” More so than me, he came of age in the U.S. as a young farm worker actually hearing people say with disgust to him, “You cannot stay,” “This is not yours to keep,” instead of it being implied. So instead of being rejected, he rejected America first. Perhaps we had become too American for him. Maybe it wasn’t us he didn’t approve of, but what the U.S. had done to us. I could hardly keep up a conversation with him anymore. I felt his anger well up inside me, and I knew it was his anger and not mine because it came from an older part of me, a deeper part of my gut that had been hurt far longer than I had been alive.

  Getting the green card and all of the benefits that came with it seemed like such a simple thing to ask for such a large price. All I was asking for was peace of mind, for protection, for basic human rights. And in return, for the duration of the interview at least, I was supposed to speak and look patriotic. I was supposed to show or prove an attempt at assimilation; that I aligned myself with undeniable American values—“values” that ensured the continuation of a system historically aligned against me. I had to align myself with a history of denial toward the violence committed on entire generations of people.

  Perhaps to some, this was hardly a price at all. From their perspective, it was the other way around, how little I needed to give and how much was given in return. All I had to do was show a little love for a country that had given me so much, and in return I would be granted entrance into the greatest country on earth. Be grateful. Maybe it was my father’s voice in my head, which sounded more and more like my voice, telling me about everything that this country had done to us that made the price of the green card heavy. I already had to erase much of myself, trying to survive; how much more was needed?

  *

  I should have been happy. Didn’t I have something to be grateful for? Wasn’t that so generous of them? The interviewer’s final words rang inside me like the low baritone of a large bell, Welcome to America. Her message reminded me that there were people who actually believed I was not really here. That I was a ghost wandering through the corners of their eyes, easily dismissed as nothing more than fog.

  She announced that I was finally here, in the flesh, whole, as if somehow before that moment there had been something essential missing in me, as if I was flawed before my interview and had been corrected by her generosity to grant me permanent residency status. Welcome [read]: you now have a name, [read]: come out now. Be grateful.

  “How do you feel?” asked Rubi, holding her phone up to me to record as we exited the clean granite-and-limestone building.

  “I don’t feel any different. Actually I feel worse,” I confessed.

  This was supposed to be the end of a very long journey—a culmination of events all pointed at this moment. Our lawyer shook our hands and congratulated us. I could tell he was genuinely happy because his firm had been working with our family for decades. He had known me since I was little, when he was handling other family member’s cases. His work would never end. Perhaps his generations after him would continue to become attorneys assisting my future generations in the same thing we were doing.

  There were people entering the building as we left, all of them with a stack of papers in a folder beneath their arms, most likely going for their own interviews. They looked dressed for a special occasion, like a wedding or a christening. I wondered if they thought the same things I was thinking early that morning. “Which shirt says ‘I want to be an American’?” There was hope in their eyes as well as fear.

  No, there was nothing missing about them, there was nothing flawed. I could see them as well as I could see myself. There was nothing I had to be grateful about. What if I asked them questions? What if I asked if they were in love? “Who are you wearing? When did you know you were famous? Does your lover have a birthmark the shape of Texas?”

  I entered that building the same way that I left it. I didn’t want to make of this another border in my life. I was tired of dividing things in two. I wanted there to be a name for what I was doing that had nothing to do with papers, that had nothing to do with legality, that had nothing to do with anything larger than me. No, it had to be small, smaller than me, something I could carry. Maybe something that didn’t even have a name, but just a sound. If I could call forth a sound that would embody what it was that I was doing, it would be low, an utterance not unlike the low moan an elephant makes that is carried just beneath the soil for miles. There should be a name for the time it took to exit that building; for the swiftness with which Rubi put down her phone and kissed me.

  9.

  We celebrated our new “entrance” into American life by going to a Mexican restaurant in midtown, which boasted a dazzling array of shiny hats hanging on the walls and murals of rural Mexican country life. We liked the irony. Chips and salsa were brought to us in a little plate shaped like a pig with its back hollowed out for the salsa. The fact that I was a permanent resident, the tall walls, the bright colors, and the cold AC blasting down on us gave me the sensation of falling.

  “What’s going through your head?” Rubi asked.

  “I don’t know, I’m just irritated.”

  I didn’t know what to believe anymore. I still wanted to believe that the paperwork and the process were all artificial, that they were just numbers on a piece of paper made to make me believe that they mattered, made to make me desire them.

  In the years before my interview, to pacify my anger, I tried to convince myself that having papers didn’t matter because legal documentation was a social construct. And as a child, before I had that language, I said I was a perfect boy without them. By the time I was in college, I knew they were created by artificial laws founded on a history that was designed to beat us every time. I took what little comfort I could from telling myself that I wasn’t going to give any more power to the systems that had gripped us by our throats for most of our lives.

  At one point I felt the same way about the border, that it was just an artificial line drawn over a landscape that in turn was indifferent about its presence. That because we conceived it, that because it began as an idea, it was doomed to be returned by the landscape as nothing more than an idea if not for our constant upkeep—Ashes to ashes . . . The ecclesiastical meaninglessness of it all etc., etc., etc.

  But the reality was that people lived there on the border. They made their lives and memories from such artifice, which meant it was hardly an artifice at all.

  I could no longer pretend that they were just numbers scribbled down on a piece of paper. I always knew they weren’t. They were as real as my hand, as real as my teeth; their consequences had a weight and shape to them. If I sharpened the edges of my green card when it came in the mail, I could cut myself open.

  How little I deserved any of it, I thought, as I dipped a chip into the bright red salsa inside the
little pig. The salsa looked too bright, a color not natural in peppers, as if they’d added food coloring. But surprisingly it tasted good. Welcome to America. Be grateful.

  *

  How many others deserved my green card more than me? I had waited so long for the day of my interview, but after it was over, I felt sick to my stomach. I didn’t want to face my family with the news. Why couldn’t I be happy for myself for once? What about me inherently negated joy at every point in my life? My joy was always elusive. It crumbled in my hands as soon as I held it. My problem was that I thought joy was something that was supposed to be given to me, or at least something that I was supposed to find, instead of making it myself.

  That was my immigrant condition. I didn’t know how to stand in one place without moving. I was suspect of any good that ever came my way and always turned it away. Nothing good ever happened for no reason.

  “It isn’t fair,” I said to Rubi.

  “What isn’t fair?” she said as she looked up from her menu.

  “How am I going to look at my mom?”

  “What do you mean? She’s going to be happy. You should call her.”

  I dipped another chip into the little pig. I didn’t realize that I hadn’t eaten all day, and before long, I finished all the chips and bright fluorescent salsa. What would I say to my mother? I was ashamed that I had been given something she had wanted for longer than I was alive. It felt like I had stolen it from her, it felt like I had stolen it from so many other people who deserved it more than me. If only it was like a seed and I could plant it and grow more. I would take my mother’s picture, bury it, and out would sprout her own card. I would hand out the secret like religious pamphlets at street corners.