Children of the Land
Page 16
I didn’t like questioning Apá the way I had been questioned because I didn’t want to assume that role, even if we were just pretending. I didn’t want him to apologize; I wanted them to apologize for his solitude, for all of those years my mother was forced to work overtime and take up an extra job to raise us by herself. Why were we the ones who needed to apologize?
“I’m sorry, Apá,” I wanted to say in the interviewer’s voice. “For what?” he would say. “I don’t know, maybe for this, for having to be here, for not being here sooner.” I never said anything. I felt like everything was my fault, even things that happened before I was born. “I’m sorry, great-grandfather León, for what they did to you, I’m sorry, baby Manuel, that it took so long for them to believe you were dying.”
A friend once told me that any time we apologized, we could instead turn it into gratitude. So that instead of saying “I’m sorry I am late,” we could say “Thank you for your patience.” In my head, the conversation continued like this:
“—I’m sorry you were deported, Apá.”
(Thank you for letting your sons be raised by their mother.)
“—I’m sorry we never called you.”
(Thank you for understanding that our Spanish was starting to fade and we didn’t want to embarrass ourselves in front of you, or for you to think that the distance between us was more than just miles.)
“—I’m sorry we never came back to you, and that you were alone.”
(Thank you for being proud that I went to college instead. Thank you for growing a beautiful garden.)
“—I’m sorry things never went as you planned.”
(Thank you for letting us live in surprise.)
18.
On the evening before his interview, I thought it would be a good idea to have a Skype session with everyone back home. We had seen pictures; his face was nothing new. We had heard his voice over the phone throughout the years, so his voice was nothing new either. But we had never, in all those years we were separated, received them together. And we always thought it was enough of him to get by—voice but no image, image but no voice. We got pieces of him doled out to us, which, I suppose, made it easier to hang up, or to toss the pictures back in the drawer instead of hanging them on our wall.
*
I sat Apá next to the window near the light. Juárez was still buzzing outside. I placed my laptop in front of him and waited for the connection. The Internet at the hotel was slow so it took a while, and we sat there staring at the dark screen, our faces bright with the evening sun beginning to edge toward the horizon.
We were at the precipice of disaster. We felt it but we could not admit it, and it was strongest while waiting for the Internet connection, staring at ourselves in the dark computer screen. Somehow, we knew already the next day would not bring good news. The small buffering signal turned and turned until we heard a new voice in the room. It was a child’s voice. Apá had never met his grandchildren before.
He sat there on the edge of the bed, an old man, the sun already gone. The lightbulbs with their soft glow made it look like a dream. A few words were exchanged. They didn’t know how to talk to him either, I imagine they felt the same things I felt each time I opened my mouth to speak to him. “Ya, turn that thing off,” Apá exclaimed, wiping his eyes. It caught me off guard, so I slammed the laptop shut without closing any windows, without saying goodbye to the small voices on the other end. And just like that, they were gone from the room.
The room was quiet except for Apá’s heavy breathing. “I don’t like that,” he kept saying to himself, or to us, I wasn’t quite sure. “I don’t like that at all.”
“I’m sorry, Apá,” I said quietly. And in my head I turned it into gratitude: “Thank you for teaching me how to wait.”
*
I wanted to ask him one more time if he knew his facts for the interview, but I decided not to push it any further. We had said enough, we had prepared enough—it was out of our hands, if it ever was in our hands to begin with. We had done everything in our power to better our chances. I had moved on to a new credit card to keep us going; we just needed another little push that required luck, not money.
I just wanted to be done with it, I wanted to leave that city already. I couldn’t stomach going back to the food court and eating those same eggs, beans, and bland salsa. I just wanted to go home, as I knew my father wanted too. But I wondered if for him, home still meant Tepechitlán, or if now, after he’d seen the rest of the family in real time, if home meant California. Perhaps Apá’s greatest gift, and what I inherited but had yet to fully understand, was that his conception of home was not singular but plural. It was malleable and could evolve, adapt to the situation. Maybe that’s why he was so calm the entire weekend. He would make a home out of whatever outcome came from Juárez.
*
I went to my room and took another long shower. I thought about the times my brothers and I would shower together when we were little. We would play games about space and monsters until one of us inevitably left the shower crying because we wouldn’t play fair.
I turned up the heat as much as my back could handle, feeling my hands over my tattoo. My nose ring was still new and tender and would bleed at times. Apá didn’t ask me about either; he tried to avoid talking about them all together.
The piercing had gotten infected since I’d arrived in Juárez. The dry air made it break out with keloid bumps, and I kept picking at it, which made it worse. I dried myself and went to sleep next to Rubi; the other bed was still empty except for a pile of our clothes. I heard a small thumping from Apá’s room next door. I tried to imagine what he was doing but I couldn’t. The thumping continued for a few minutes until it stopped abruptly.
I heard a soft wail and I convinced myself that it was the TV playing a Mexican movie from the golden age, with those sad songs by men who looked slightly away as they sang.
19.
We packed our bags in the morning to check out of the hotel. I saw that Apá had packed his bags too. Everything he carried fit inside his small duffel bag, and he carried so little that I wondered if he even planned on crossing over. But whatever the outcome of his interview, we knew we wouldn’t stay another day at that hotel. We kneeled in the middle of the room and called Amá. I put her on speaker, and she said a quiet prayer over us. Her voice was soothing and gave us a little hope. My father wasn’t a religious man, but I heard him mouthing words of supplication, words of longing. I heard him repeat the words that my mother spoke, and it was like an echo. She would start and he would finish.
I held his hand, which I couldn’t remember ever having done for a long time. His hands always felt larger than normal, cartoonish even. “Jesucristo—Jesucristo—Jesucristo.” He squeezed my hand, and together in a circle on our knees (Apá, Rubi, and myself), we repeated my mother’s words. It was a prayer not so much of sentences as it was of phrases—short and distinct from one another. The common language of the church. My mother finished speaking and I hung up, but the vibrations of her voice lingered in the air like the scent of a candle.
[Third Movement as Migration and a Flock of Birds]
I don’t know why I went temporarily blind in Tijuana while waiting to cross in 1993. It didn’t happen all at once. It wasn’t like someone suddenly turned off the lights. First it was the colors that started fading, then it was the shapes, and then shadows altogether. Or maybe not in that order. I could explain the colors leaving, I knew that the world sometimes did that—seemed grayer than usual. I thought it was clouds. I thought the gray came from the walls themselves, and the dried trees and the loose dirt. Maybe that’s just what Tijuana looked like.
But it was shapes I could not explain. Their edges softening into the empty space around them until I couldn’t tell where one thing started and another ended. I could see something was more of itself closer to the center, and less of itself farther out—a gradient. Maybe the soul wasn’t just one thing but an assortment of many little
things huddled together, like penguins keeping warm in a blizzard. Or like a flock of birds packed so tightly in a tree that you think they’re all just leaves until a loud noise startles them, and they shudder the bare limbs loose.
The things in front of me slowly became less and less of themselves, but they stretched out nonetheless, beyond the edges of themselves, as if they no longer wanted to be whatever it was that they were put on this earth to be—as if they too wanted to get a little farther north.
Even the sky no longer felt distant but rather like it began right above my head. And didn’t it?
When I tried to look at Amá and Apá, I saw an interchangeable thing. Part was more mother, the other part was more father, but was one thing nonetheless—malleable, connected.
The trees and the cars and the houses and the children felt like the same thing too. I could feel the dirt, I could feel the bricks along the wall and their grainy textures—how one square ended at the deep ridge of the grout. I could feel the grout, and I ran my finger along it until it scraped the tip. With time, maybe things would have separated again, maybe they would have gone back to themselves.
But initially, and because it happened so fast, it looked like someone went by and smudged the people’s faces with paint thinner. I could hear Amá talking to me, but I could only see the darkness of her eyes contrasted with her light skin.
After colors, after the shapes, and after the shadows, all that was left was contrast—one thing held up against another. I could tell there was a chair not by what it looked like but by the things around it. By what it was not. It never went completely dark, just almost.
I cried and felt my way along the edges of the wall. There was no here or there, except the sounds of the cars outside and Amá and Apá fighting in another room about what to do with me.
“Mijo, can you see me?” I heard my mother say somewhere in front of me.
“What about now, can you see me now?”
Soon we would be crossing. Soon we would want no one else to see us—to go invisible too, to move through the mountains like a flock of birds shaken by a sudden clanging of a bell.
Wouldn’t it be wonderful to slowly disappear? First our shapes, then the edges of ourselves, and finally our shadow, how we looked against the backdrop of the sky. How easy it would be to walk right past the guards so that Amá would not have to run with my baby brother knocking around inside her big belly. We could take our time, stand in the middle of the checkpoint and watch the faces of others as they nervously talked to the guards. We could look at the landscape instead of trying to run away from it, pick up a few rocks and toss them leisurely against the lights and laugh.
I could hear Apá grunt and complain that I was watching the TV too closely and that’s why my eyes “hurt.” He didn’t say blind, he said that’s why they “hurt.”
“He’ll be fine, just give him a few days,” said Apá.
Was it something so ordinary, so common? He’ll be fine. What was the point in worrying anyway? We had no money for a doctor, we hardly had enough money for food. All we could do was wait for my vision to return. And if it didn’t, would they go on without me? Would they lead me by the hand and describe what was happening around me? “Here is a mountain. Here is a snake. Feel the coarse leather of this man’s boot.”
When it came back, it didn’t return in the same order it vanished. Things were separate from themselves again—distinctly each their own. Amá was Amá, and Apá was Apá. The birds in the trees were again just birds.
I saw her face at last as she held me—rocking me to sleep. It wasn’t smudged. I would need my rest. Her shirt was green. If we were in a meadow somewhere far away, it would still be the brightest thing in that field.
20.
We had finally arrived at Apá’s immigration interview. Thousands of people clustered into numerous amorphous lines outside the embassy. We couldn’t tell where the lines ended or why some people were in one line and not another. We figured they all must lead to the same place. “Remember what we talked about, Dad. You know your dates, you know your facts. Everything should be fine, just stick to your facts,” I told him as we took our spot toward a bulk of people in the back before being sent to another line by a guard. I ran through every excuse in my head for them to allow me to enter with him—I’m his translator, I’m his son, he’s elderly, he needs me.
Despite so many years of waiting for that moment, and having spent all of the previous week getting ready for this day, I still wasn’t sure if we were ready. Anything was still possible. A future with my father was still possible, still imaginable. Or if denied, he would return to his town, his house, and his dog. He would not have to go through the trouble of making a new home for himself. A future identical to the present was possible.
After hours of waiting and moving from one line to another as we were instructed, a guard pointed and hurried us down.
“Whose case is being heard?” he said. I pointed to my father nervously.
“Only he can come in, no one else,” he said in a loud voice. “You have to wait over there, outside.”
“But I have to go with him, he’s my dad, he needs me to translate.” That’s all I could think of, that he needed me as a translator. In the moment, I had forgotten everything I would have said and simply said that I was his translator.
“He won’t need any translators in there—they all speak Spanish. And only the person whose case will be heard can go in.”
Apá looked at me and reassured me that he would be okay. I gave him the thick portfolio of papers I was holding that he might need, his biometrics envelope, and hugged him. Rubi hugged him as well and held his hand for a moment. The guard grew inpatient and called again, in a louder voice. I should have been more persistent in demanding to enter with Apá, but I didn’t know how. His words seemed so final, so absolute. I couldn’t fathom any room for interpretation in what he said, or any alternative. It was my instinct to avoid conflict, obey, turn around, and walk away. They took him inside, and I watched the doors close behind him. He had done this many times before and was far more experienced in such matters than me, but I felt like I was now the parent looking after a child, watching him walk into his classroom on his first day of school, staying in place until the doors slammed shut.
I saw a crowd gathering to the side of the building. They too, whether out of instinct, defeat, or fear, dared not question the guards, and looked nervously at two doors where people were exiting the embassy. Every time the doors swung open, all eyes jumped to them, to see if it was their loved ones who were coming out. Rubi and I sat on the curb and waited, anxiously looking at the double doors from which Apá too would eventually emerge.
*
Every time we heard the doors open, I took a few steps forward through the crowd to see if it was Apá. I was absorbed by the faces of those who emerged. There were only two possible answers for every person who left that building, and their faces told the story. I could see in their eyes if they had been accepted or denied. Some showed it more than others.
A woman exited the doors and walked through the crowd, looking for her family, her eyes scanning the crowd as if we were at Disneyland and she had briefly lost her child. She had a manila envelope beneath her arm and was holding it firmly with her palm. Her lips were tight and her gaze was sharp, darting in every direction. I couldn’t read her gestures, I couldn’t tell if she had received good news or bad. I saw her face light up when she saw a man. Two girls joined them at their waist, and they quickly gathered themselves and walked away. The rest of the crowd watched them leave and went back to staring at the doors.
I was happy but also envious at the same time for anyone who walked out smiling, either because they were accepted or because they accepted their rejection with grace. We didn’t even know Apá’s decision yet, and I was already fearing the worst. In my head I thought of it as a give-and-take: one green card for someone else meant one less for us. There was some truth to that, there was
a cap to certain kinds of visas, but I wasn’t sure if it applied to us. I thought every person who walked out smiling was worsening Apá’s chances inside. But maybe they just smiled for us and would cry as soon as they turned away.
Not many walked out smiling. In truth, the majority of those who walked out through the doors looked somber, some stricken with grief, a sadness about them that looked inconsolable. I could see tears running down their faces that they didn’t bother to hide, looking at the crowds for their loved ones, their gaze locking on everyone as if saying, “Yours, too, are next.” I didn’t feel guilty about staring either. Everyone was staring. It was like the back door of a theater, and we, the fans, stood crowded outside, waiting for them, the stars, to exit. We, the paparazzi wanting a little taste of stardom.
I tried to figure out how long each of us in the crowd had been waiting and what it could mean, but there didn’t seem to be any logic attached to the variety of wait times. Some came and went quicker; others had been there far longer than us. There was an unspoken bond between the ones who were waiting the longest, and we tried to cheer each other up with small talk, pretending it was normal, pretending we couldn’t hear the growing anxiety in each other’s voices as we spoke, or that we didn’t see the others coming and going faster than us. My worry turned to panic when I couldn’t recognize anyone who was there when we first arrived. What if something had gone wrong, and they detained him? We were already in Mexico, what were they going to do—deport him again?