4.
It had been a year since I last saw my father. We still didn’t know how to carry on our conversations over the phone, even though things should have been better since we reconnected after my DACA trip. Talking still felt like an obligation. Our conversations were dry and repetitive—“Hi Dad, how are things, are you cold, has anyone died, how’s the dog, the young ones are fine, the older ones are fine, Mom is fine, I’m doing okay, I’m teaching now, I’m teaching poetry, no, poetry, po-e-try, it’s cold here, no, I’m teaching poetry, Dad, I’ll explain it later.”
Every time I spoke with Apá, I had to repeat what it was that I did—“I’m a graduate student, Apá, but I also teach, it pays okay.” He was obsessed with knowing how I made a living, and what I would do after I finished. He wanted specific details, a game plan. It was so different from how we had always made a living that I had to make up an ideal situation of my future to hide the uncertainty looming ahead.
Every time he asked, I would respond exactly the same way, and he would hum as if mulling it over, as if he was hearing it for the first time. The calls never lasted more than ten minutes. Most of the times we fit everything we needed to say to each other in less time. I asked him things I already knew the answers to but asked them anyway because it was part of the show. We didn’t know what else to say. We checked each item off the list. We fulfilled our duties of father and son, and we both seemed content with it, even proud. I think he preferred it that way too. I wished we could have stayed silent on the phone the entire time, just to be in the company of each other. But our silent breath against itself would have been harder to pronounce than any apology.
*
Part of me believed that if we kept up the act, if we just repeated the motion out of obligation, we’d eventually find our conversations enjoyable, that practice would lead to sincerity, which would lead to something organic—that we would work our way up to affection.
*
There was a time when I believed in repetition, when I thought repetition meant things would be simple—predictable. Maybe then, when nothing changed, when all the variables were accounted for, I could move through the world in a way I had never moved through it before, how I imagined mostly everyone else made it through their day—intact, aware of what time, day, or month it was. If I drew the same circle a thousand times, I was certain I would see something different about the things around me.
Once, when my anxiety was so great that I thought my skin would actually peel off my body, I went out for a walk on a warm evening in California. I found myself in an empty parking lot beneath the largest moon I had ever seen. I sat down and stared until the moon started making faces at me, yes, actual faces. They would appear and disappear and move in circles. I sat there for what seemed like hours, not blinking once, and just letting my tears keep my eyes from closing. Joyfully weeping, I walked back to my mother’s house and counted the steps it took to get there. I wanted to record exactly what I had done to repeat it for the next day. I wanted that feeling to last forever, and I was afraid that any small change would scare it away. I couldn’t remember the last time I wasn’t trembling with anxiety. Repetition as sustained attention made me pick up my body, walk home, and tell my mother I loved her in Spanish. It was so simple. I didn’t even need a pen or paper to draw the moon, just trace it with my eyes.
*
I once read a book on Alberto Giacometti and his ritual of painting people’s portraits. He would spend weeks painting over the same face; so much that the layers would start to clump. He would chisel away, polish, and start again. He said he felt like he was looking into a hole, something he could not see completely to the bottom. Was the hole in the face he was staring at, or in the canvas he was painting on? I wonder if he was looking for the right version of the same face, the one that few people knew existed. And in the end, you could tell there was something there behind the lines and scratches. You could tell that there was more than just a face, the emotion distilled behind the face; he always managed to find the right one. Somehow he captured the sadness of his lover, his friends or acquaintances. It could never have happened on the first try, it took him hundreds of attempts before he would be certain that he’d painted something worthwhile—all the while his models stood still, their hands folded on their laps, looking at his frustrated expressions. He wasn’t interested in perfection, only in the process of getting there.
Did we, after nearly a century of my family’s border crossings, come close to that repetition? Were we close to perfecting something that we knew we would never finish?
He said he would give up art forever if he could not find his way out of any particular painting. Find his way out, meaning he was lost. Maybe in the end, the final version was no different than the first—a complete circle—but the pain of repetition, of painting the same face over and over, made it something different in the end after all.
I wanted out, too. I walked to get lost, but I couldn’t lie to myself that I didn’t know the way back.
[Third Movement: Horses as Transitive Verbs]
I was supposed to die in 1990, dragged behind the horse in Mexico. My father was supposed to spend the rest of his life thinking about who I would have become, which is to say in regret. I was supposed to be only a story people would still be reluctant to tell even years later. I was supposed to be a story that led to a better story, a jumping point that led away from grief. Amá would be known as the woman who lost two children, the first to the U.S., the second to a mare. Apá would be known as the man who lost only one, because I doubt he would admit he had anything to do with the other.
I should have been a secret my family told new friends only when they were sure they would be friends forever.
I should have died again falling off my roof at the age of four, and then again a few months later when I walked into a corral where my father and other men were branding cattle and wrapped myself around the leg of the bull, which was already too tired and defeated from the burning iron to kick me.
I should have died when I swallowed a large plastic ball. My face turned purple and my feet dangled limp off the tailgate of a truck as they rushed me to the hospital. Before arriving, I looked at my mother’s face covered in tears and said, “It’s okay, Amá, it went down, you don’t have to cry anymore.” From then on my body was no longer soft.
I was never afraid of falling. I didn’t think falling would hurt.
Because I did not die when I was supposed to, there were times I thought I wouldn’t. I liked commotion, things that went fast. I liked the horses my father broke, even though they almost broke me. They would run around him in circles all day until they learned what it meant to go left, what it meant to go right, and eventually hung their heads low to the ground in defeat. They bucked and they kicked until they knew the common sign for stop, slow down, go fast. My father made a hole in the dirt from spinning on the same spot. He was like the shiny nail of a top, the horses lassoed to his waist, trying to run away from his hollering and his madness.
5.
We landed in El Paso and hopped in a taxi that would take us to Juárez. The borderlands were just as foreign to me as the Midwest, even though I’d measured so much of myself against that dividing line, living my life as a simulacrum of its possibilities and limitations. Just as from the air, from the ground too it seemed like the border retained an inherently elusive quality, unknowable, ever shifting. It existed for me as a myth, but in a time when myths were flesh and blood—a time when the gods would actually descend from the foggy mountain to keep an eye on things. It was both real and not real at the same time. Everything I dreamed about was there: the floodlights, the metal, the cement. It was the body of the name I had kept inside me for so long. It was exactly as I imagined it, exactly as it must have looked when I first came in 1993.
However, coming back this time to Mexico felt different than when I came with my DACA permit. I was now a legal permanent resident. If I wanted to, I could cross back an
d forth a hundred times in a single day. Entering Mexico with my green card, knowing I could leave whenever I wanted, heightened my pride and affection for the country of my birth. I felt like it was safe to love Mexico if I knew I could leave and return if I wanted, whereas before I was cautious of attaching myself too much to Mexico, since I didn’t know if or when I would ever be able to return.
As we approached the checkpoint, I shuffled through my bag to get my passport ready. “There’s no need for that, going into Mexico,” the taxi driver said in a low tone, almost laughing when he said it. He was kind; he kept saying how long he’d lived there, as if time alone was proof that a city treated you well enough to stay.
We didn’t stop. The car rolled right into Mexico. Perhaps because it was late and there wasn’t much traffic. I was waiting for some kind of pause, something that would signal even the slightest change in velocity, that clicked us through. But the driver kept his pace and sped up as soon as we left the bright lights behind. It happened so fast I hardly noticed I was holding my breath.
*
The second we crossed, my phone changed service to a different communications company—either Telcel or Movistar. High above the wall, there was also a wall. It was invisible, it stretched up for miles in the air, it penetrated even the dust around my body. It said “From here forth, it will be different.” And it was. I got a text that said “Welcome to Mexico.” If my passport didn’t say I entered, at least my cell phone did.
I could see the wall, I could see the guards and the floodlights through the car’s mirror. It was something I could point to and say “That—that—was what hurt me.” But when my phone switched, I realized just how hopeless and small I was. I thought there must have been a place where reprieve from the line existed. But I was wrong. There isn’t a single square foot on earth that is not affected in one way or another by borders, even the oceans.
Perhaps it was different for people who lived on the border, who saw it as something routine, something so common that it felt like air. It was almost mundane, but behind that lay the very real threat. They lived each day balancing themselves on the sharp spine of a large beast. And wasn’t that the most dangerous, when it felt like air, when people were so used to something that they forgot how easily they could fall off and break?
*
For so many years, I was resolved to think that I would never come back to the actual line and see the wall up close. It was a spectacle to behold, but just because it also served the purpose of optics as well as separation, that didn’t mean the barbed wires weren’t sharp, or that those weren’t real bullets in the agents’ guns. Its grandeur, its exorbitant budget, and its generally overbearing nature was typical of the U.S., just like the Empire State Building, the Hoover Dam, or Mount Rushmore.
When I asked other people what they would do if they were ever able to go back, their answers always had an air of youthfulness, as if by returning, they could start over again, perhaps differently the second time, and reverse their regrets and mistakes in life, as if their town had stayed unchanged—perfectly unwrapped—all those years they were away. Some said they would do nothing, “Just go to the post office and mail some letters, or go to the market and buy some milk.” It was peace of mind they wanted, to not have to say anything particularly special in a letter—“How are you? The weather here is wonderful, soon it will begin to rain.”
6.
The United States was never my father’s country, so I couldn’t really say that he was exiled. Neither he nor the U.S. would ever claim the other. He was already on the way out when he left; they just gave him the final nudge by revoking his visa at the gate and locking the door behind him. He spent a couple days in custody, and then they released him into Mexico. It wasn’t his first time being deported, but he was certainly resolved to make it his last. He only now, after being away for over a decade, wanted to come back to the U.S. so that he could leave it on his own terms. Maybe he, too, could only learn to like it if he was allowed to leave whenever he wished.
And yet his departure so many years before still felt like an exile, not to him personally, but to us who were left behind. The rupture caused by his departure necessitated explanation—one I was reluctant to give whenever teachers, doctors, pastors, friends—anyone—asked his whereabouts. “He’s fine, he’s still over there . . . no, I don’t know when he’s coming back . . . it’s just complicated.” Most of the time I avoided talking about him altogether. It made people think he’d been gone much longer than he actually was. It made them stop asking questions. As the years dragged on, and each of his three youngest children grew, we increased our vocabulary of deflection.
I never liked saying the word “deported.” It felt like a bad word—it was difficult to say in my mouth. It was especially difficult to say in Spanish because it carried an extra syllable—“de-por-ta-do.”
Somehow even a single extra syllable made it infinitely heavier.
I would say everything that pointed to the word, but never it exactly—“he’s over there . . . he can’t come back . . . he’s been there for five, eight, ten years . . .” and if I found enough approximations, enough euphemisms for he-is-never-coming-back-don’t-you-get-it, people usually understood. I could use synonyms because they didn’t carry the same kind of weight—“They sent him away, you know how it goes . . . dismissed, displaced, removed, transported,” gone. The worst was when they asked about my mother: “So, are they still together?” People were so nosy. I was always ready with my response—“Yeah, they’re together still, they still talk on the phone.” “Together” meant different things at different times. There were months when I was sure they were finally through, but then Amá would break and send him a blanket, or some underwear, or socks. Or Apá would break and every once in a while send us a pair of boots or a cowboy belt, which we would toss into the closet and never wear—same as the blankets he tossed in the corner of the abandoned room and never used.
Who were the famous exiles? Seneca, Leon Trotsky, Marlene Dietrich, Pablo Neruda, Victor Hugo. What did they do during their time away? Their best work was completed in moments of exile—longing for home, trying to make sense of their distance, trying to build bridges any way they could. Hugo wrote Les Misérables, and Neruda wrote Canto General, both while in exile. How great was their longing to return? They stood at the edge of one land and looked back at another—perhaps standing outside their country, they could see what no one else could see from the inside. In Apá’s case he first left Mexico, and from the outside, he saw the beauty and horror of Mexico—he longed for the beauty and looked past the horror. Then he was deported from the U.S., and from the outside, he saw the beauty and horror of the U.S.—he exclaimed at the horror and looked past the beauty that was hidden most of the time.
*
When my father was—banished? sent away? excluded?—he took part in this ancient tradition of exile, and what had he to show for his ten years away? Where was his Canto General, his Les Misérables? In those ten years away from us, he learned to build a house that wouldn’t fall, that was warm in the winter and fresh in the summer, with a garden in the middle of a courtyard where geraniums tilted their small petals to the sun. It was enough. It took him ten years to learn to care for something like a pot of flowers for no particular reason; just for the sake of flowers. When I asked him why he had so many flowers, he didn’t know how to answer me, as if he didn’t understand the premise of the question. “Why wouldn’t you have that many flowers?”
At least those years were not for nothing. Amá says that even though it was hard on us, I should be glad that he was gone when and as long as he was, because otherwise I would have never left the fields or peach orchards. His gift was precisely the absolute fact of his absence.
7.
I wonder why the government chose ten years specifically as enough time for a punishment before you can attempt to file for a return. That is, if you are allowed to return at all. Maybe in ten years, your fading memory
began to soften the hard edges of your wounds, as if we were angry dogs put aside to cool down. Think about what you’ve done. It takes about ten years to master anything. What did they think we were supposed to master in that time away from each other? Our silence grew, and our estrangement grew. By the end, we were experts in nothing in particular, and Apá was just as sharp and hot as the day he decided he would learn to grow flowers.
Apá surpassed his ten years, in fact. He stayed for two more, just to be sure. Almost as if he were saying “I did what you told me and then some,” as if he would be rewarded for his noble efforts. We were looking for a reward at the end of our sacrifice. We paid a price, and now we were getting ready to collect what we thought was ours. Apá would have the freedom to come and go as he pleased.
I guess we thought it would be automatic; that if he completed his punishment, that if he was a good boy and followed the rules, cooperated, then he would automatically be allowed to return—quid pro quo. But it didn’t work like that. In reality, he was just waiting for his punishment to be declared. It would take them ten years to tell him he would never be able to return. And they needed to do so in person, on the spot, so that he could hear it with his own ears, instead of reading it in a letter that might ring empty in his head. They needed to deliver the most visceral kind of no, to get the point across that he was never to return.
To them, his punishment didn’t mean anything; it was just a clock in a file somewhere with his name on it counting down. It was just a one and a zero, something you only read about in school. Ten years seemed like such an ancient number. It was a decade, which turned into a century, which turned into a millennium. Ten was everywhere I looked. The Ten Commandments God gave to Moses. Ten was the times the referee counted for the boxer, ten was in the verb phrase “to decimate,” to reduce something by one one-tenth, which had something to do with the killing of one in ten soldiers as a punishment for mutiny.1 Odysseus took ten years to journey home to Penelope, the Trojan War having already lasted ten, long enough for a corpse flower to bloom just twice, once every ten years, long enough that they could barely remember each other’s faces.
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