10.
To our knowledge, there was nothing left we could do to keep Amá in the country; it was only a matter of choosing the date. However, perhaps because we had resigned ourselves to defeat and had stopped looking, too overcome with grief, we missed a crucial development in U visa legislation and we wouldn’t find out about it until years later. A year after our U visa rejections, California Senate Assembly Bill 674 went into effect, which mandated all certifying agencies to sign off on U visa certifications in order to standardize the process and eliminate inconsistent protocols between jurisdictions. It ensured that more individuals had an equal opportunity to have their cases heard by USCIS and not be blocked at the local level due to personal bias or discretion from the authorizing agencies like law enforcement or DA’s offices. It ensured that USCIS would “make the determination as to whether the victim has met the ‘substantial physical or mental abuse’ standard on a case-by-case basis during its adjudication of the U visa petition. Certifying agencies and officials do not make this determination.” When our final rejection came, we shut down as a family, and perhaps if we would have held out a little longer, we would have caught this detail. Someone should have caught it, but no one did. If only we would have waited. If only we would have bothered to turn on the news.
*
During those months before her departure, we never actually said any word that indicated departure. We never said “leave,” we never said “away,” or “gone,” or “after.” At least not when directly speaking to her or about her, or when she was in the room. The topic was in the air, and there was no point in repeating what would happen either way. We busied ourselves planning and preparing Apá’s house to accommodate Amá in order to keep our minds away from the clock.
We sent Apá money to renovate his house so she would be as comfortable as possible, as if that would somehow lessen the pain of her leaving. We should have probably left the house as it was; nothing we could have done would have made any difference. Our plan was to make Apá’s house look as much like her house in California as possible, to make the transition easier.
Apá was obsessed with the past, and his house was an homage to that time. It was rough and rustic. I remembered clearly how the walls still had exposed cement without any plaster, the steel beams across the ceiling, and all the doors that looked like barn doors, with heavy welded latches instead of door knobs. The bricks lining the courtyard arches should have been plastered as well, and all along the walls were saddles and equestrian tack hanging from large hooks. It was a Brooklyn hipster’s wet dream.
It was difficult to imagine Apá holding anything softly in his hands. It was as if his hands didn’t know how to bend toward care, his body wasn’t built for it. All of the pictures hanging on the walls were covered with fine cement powder from other construction he did to the house. None of them were pictures of Amá.
*
I always had to be careful about comfort whenever I called Apá to tell him our plans for how we wanted his house to change. “Isn’t it good enough?” Apá would yell through the phone. One of the worst sins of poor Mexicans was arrogance. To save face, we had to compromise comfort in favor of feigning humility. But I wanted Amá to be comfortable, and I didn’t care if people thought she was arrogant. I was determined to make Apá’s house, which I assumed was Amá’s house too, the biggest and best house in town. I wanted people to know that this wasn’t a loss for us, that she was not returning in shame but rather in victory, and her house was a way to announce it. I recognized my father’s pride brewing inside me, but I couldn’t do anything to stop it because I couldn’t understand Apá’s ideas about “roughing it.”
Why was it a good thing to suffer, according to him? The truth is, it wasn’t. Apá only wanted to display suffering but not actually suffer. Amá, on the other hand, actually suffered but didn’t let anyone see. There were times, however, when she could no longer hide it.
I was asking a lot from him. I was demanding that he take apart some of the things on his house he’d worked incredibly hard on.
Apá, you have to cut a door to the bathroom. . . . You have to fill in the two doors that lead out of that room and turn them into windows, you have to plaster the whole house, you have to put tile down, and make sure there is warm water. . . . How about we lower the roof, too? Isn’t it too high? You have to make sure the sink has a good faucet. . . . Apá, let’s divide the living room, let’s make it smaller, let’s make it look less like a ranch and more like a house.
*
Putting money in Apá’s hands to renovate his house felt like throwing money into a well that you knew had no fortune left. Not all wells are lucky, not all wells are meant for receiving money.
Apá’s property in fact did have a deep well in front of the house, near the sidewalk. Kids used it as a dump on their way to school. It was filled with broken bottles, and a few raccoons had fallen in and drowned. We gave him money to fix the well, to cover it up with a metal sheet and clean it up. He hoisted himself down with a rope and cleaned it. His hands were torn ragged from all the shattered glass at the bottom.
We knew sending him money would be difficult. We needed to send him enough to make the repairs we demanded, and it wasn’t cheap, so we sent him money in small increments, only enough to pay the workers for a particular job.
He would call us to say how the progress was going and try to paint a picture for us in his head because he didn’t know how to send picture messages on his phone. I tried my best to dictate exactly what I wanted, but he always put his own little spin on it, because he knew there was nothing I could do from California other than send him money. He called us a few times and said the money we had sent him wasn’t enough, so we reluctantly sent him more. “Besides, it’s for your mother,” he said, and I had no choice other than to trust him.
11.
In the summer of 2015, Rubi and I flew to Zacatecas to see Apá again. Our plan was to help him with the renovations however we could, but really it was to test the waters. It was our last chance to see if he would treat Amá with care, before she left the U.S. to join him for good, or to find any excuse to make her stay with us. Although it was only my second visit to his house, it was starting to feel routine. When we arrived, I waved to the dog on the roof and opened the fridge. He took us through each room just like he had the first time, a proud look on his face for all the work he had done.
It was still the large and barren house I had seen two years before, but the finishing details made it look somewhat homey.
The furniture was thrown out onto the patio into a giant pile in order to tile the floors, and I could tell it had been there a while from the water stains along the bottom.
“It looks so different, doesn’t it?” said Apá, with his arms still crossed and looking closely at us as we admired the interior stonework and plaster. He wanted to show us that he was serious. He pointed to the ceiling. During construction, he’d asked the workers to put a limestone embellishment around each light fixture. It was almost Baroque in its flourishes. All said and done, it almost looked like a church, with the limestone wall surrounding the courtyard, the white plastered walls, and the ornate embellishments on the ceiling. I called Amá in excitement, describing each room to her, and I could imagine her on the other end, nodding away—though, through the phone, I didn’t know in which direction she was nodding.
I had seen that kind of plasterwork before when I used to work in construction, building multimillion-dollar homes in the rolling hills of Northern California. It was sleek, not textured. It was a new kind of design that was trendy among homes that claimed a specific kind of Italian country rustic chic. It was minimalist and impossible to keep clean. It wouldn’t last long like that. I could already see a few handprints on the walls where Apá had leaned for balance to take off his shoes.
Apá took pride in the fact that he didn’t hire locals for the construction; instead, the people he hired were expensive. He smiled as he kept looking a
t us for a sign of approval.
*
After the first week, the excitement of being back in Tepechitlán started to fizzle, and I slowly acclimated to the rhythm, to the slow midafternoons and the raucous evenings in town, with its street food and ice cream parlors, its plaza where all the old men gathered to gossip, including my father. Apá didn’t have a job, but he had a routine that kept him regular, and we followed along to the pace of his life.
I carried around a small piece of aloe vera with me to rub over my mosquito bites, which were dreadful and felt hotter than the rest of me in the summer. My aunts made fun of me and exclaimed “You’re too dramatic.” Which I read as, “You’re too delicate—this isn’t comfortable enough for you. You’re too soft.”
It didn’t take long for my anxiety to catch up to me. I was dumb enough to think that it was like a jacket, like I could leave it behind in the U.S. I could feel it in my toes, and wherever the sun hit my body in the morning light as I lay naked on my bed, contemplating whether to get up or not. The room was empty except for Rubi and me.
As we tossed on the white linens beneath the tall ceiling, I imagined my mother’s mornings. It was insufferably bright, especially with the new paint. I could feel the cold that came with the night still lingering in the air, looking for a dark place to settle. But there was none. I looked at Rubi, who had gone back to sleep, and pushed my head into my pillow.
I got up and walked through the new door Apá had cut into the wall at our request and into the bathroom, which was still a little dusty from the leftover grout. I washed my face with cold water and put on my clothes, shaking them first for scorpions.
*
I wasn’t used to doing nothing, even though nothing was far from what we were doing. I forced myself to slow down and try to embody the pace of life that Amá would soon be living. Each day I pretended I was my mother, waking up, putting on my slippers, washing my face with cold water, and tried to imagine if she would want that.
I poured myself a coffee and sat on a comfortable chair in the courtyard beneath the morning sun. I took out a book to read, but I couldn’t read. I liked the weight of it on my lap. Apá had already left. He always left before we woke up and always came back around noon for his midafternoon nap. There was a lot I should have been doing, but instead I sat in the sun.
If I left my chair I would probably break a window, I would probably throw myself through one. I ran out of my anxiety medication and couldn’t get more. It was quiet despite the horns blasting outside. I gripped the armrest, trying to dig small holes with my finger. I couldn’t shake the feeling that we were rushing things, that even if it was Amá’s decision, what we were doing was wrong.
I couldn’t bear to look at all of the furniture piled in a large heap in the courtyard. I couldn’t stand seeing it get wet with morning dew, so I took a rag, a bucket, and decided to clean.
Good mezcal was cheap, so I uncorked a new fifth, dipped a rag in a bucket, and wiped down every square inch of the furniture. I turned the tables upside down and scrubbed even where no one would see that I had cleaned. By noon, Apá had returned, and he paced back and forth, insisting that it wasn’t dirty, that I was wasting my time because it would be dusty again in a few days anyways. I pretended not to hear him.
*
Every morning Rubi and I made breakfast—eggs from the neighbor’s hens with fresh handmade cheese, handmade tortillas, red salsa, and a cup of coffee. If it wasn’t for my father, and if it wasn’t the circumstances as to why we were there, I would say it was paradise. The flowers in the courtyard were in full bloom, the food was good, and I could have all the quiet I longed for. I could write, I could even take up sculpture. I could go find clay at the river and spend the whole summer forming a large piece of mud into a smaller piece. I wouldn’t know what it was that I was making, and it wouldn’t matter.
But I couldn’t even read a book. What good was writing, what good did any of that do, if at the end of the day I knew the reason why I was cleaning?
Drinking made it easier to live with my father and see past all of the chaos he inflicted; it allowed me to see how small he was, how short his gait reached as he walked, and the way he looked down sometimes when he didn’t know what to say.
Being among all of his possessions, among the materials that he made his life out of in his solitude made me think of all the times I had sent him ten or twenty dollars out of pity and wondered how many of those things he had bought with my money. I never told anyone how much I was drinking. It made it easier to imagine my mother’s presence in her new home.
*
At night, we heard the loud thunder of large trucks speeding by, their lights swinging across the ceiling.
Every now and then, Apá’s dog would run up to the edge of the roof, pound his feet, and bark. Apá was not one to name his animals, so I gave him a name—Capitán, the captain. The dog never came down from the roof. His claws were whittled down from running on the cement. He was a beautiful long-haired German shepherd. All night long we would hear him scattering around the roof, nervously listening for horses or people. I wondered if he ever slept. Eventually we got used to him and learned to ignore his long pleading that something or someone was coming.
Rubi and I made love in that room. It made sense to look for each other in the dark, more so than in the bright morning, when we could see from the gestures on our faces the feelings we were keeping from each other, and the pain in our release. But it was never really dark, even at night. The light from a large streetlamp rolled into the room like a steady stream. I knew it was night because it was cold, because the scorpions took their eventual roost in the ceiling, and because the dog kept whimpering at something in the distance.
*
There was still a lot of work to do on the house. But according to Apá, everything was done. He didn’t think it was necessary to seal the grout on the tile spanning the entire house, but I insisted because Amá hated dust. Tepechitlán was nothing but dust. Her home needed to be a haven from the outside.
I gathered my tools and got down to work while Apá paced back and forth between the courtyard and the kitchen, looking down with uncertainty. Every so often he would mumble under his breath, “I don’t know why you’re doing that.”
I could see myself in the reflection of the shiny tile. It was the color of Spanish clay, with small designs on the corners that fit together into a circle where four tiles met. I stroked my small brush with resin up and down. The repetition of the brush was soothing. For a moment, I forgot about my mother, about the fact that we hadn’t eaten because we ran out of food and no one bothered to go get more. I forgot that the resin would probably chip off with time because I’d bought the wrong kind.
I started to see the house as my house too, even though it wasn’t. I put a pillow on the floor to rest my knees and kept dipping the little brush in the bowl. After the second day, the routine became a kind of meditation. I turned on Apá’s old stereo, which only played one cassette tape over and over, took a large sip of mezcal, and dipped the little brush.
For a few days I found consistency, which I liked, because I liked predictability. I woke up, made myself a coffee, mixed some liquor in, and found a nice spot in the courtyard where the sun was just starting to shine. I brought a few books with me and sat down with my mug and notebook. I still wasn’t sure if I could bring myself to read, so I scribbled a few notes to save for later. I finished my coffee and sat there in silence.
Apá sat down in a chair next to me. Neither of us talked. I didn’t know what he expected from me. We passed the silence back and forth like a gift we were reluctant to receive.
*
It rained often during the summer and the water leaked through the windows onto the living room floor, where it gathered in a small pool. As good as the house looked, it was as if it kept wanting to break down again, as if everything we did to fix it was a mistake.
Everything came apart around me. The house, the town, even
the dog looked different. Tired. I was determined to make things better. If I could not change Apá, I could at least change his house. I bought five large tubes of caulking to seal the windows, put my music on, grabbed another bottle of mezcal, and got to work.
The rain fell sideways, and another thin trail of water leaked down the wall at each window joint. I realized the house would never be finished completely and that it was too late, that the wheels of this giant machine had already slowly started grinding forward, and I needed to move out of its way. Amá would not change her mind. Nothing I could say or do, or not say and not do, would make any difference. Either way, I squeezed the white latex caulking with as much care as if the leak could have been the difference between her staying or leaving. I rubbed my finger along the edge of the stone until it was soft and pink and tender.
“What are you doing now?” Apá asked, rather annoyed, standing behind me as I hummed along to my music and sipped from my coffee.
He was proud of his windows. He’d designed them himself and had his friend weld the frames together. He didn’t like that I kept finding things wrong.
“I’m just sealing the windows, Apá—all the water is leaking into the house.”
“That’s fine, it’s just a little water, don’t worry about it,” he said.
But I did worry. I was trying to patch up all of the bad, trying to keep the house from crumbling into itself. I poured large globs of caulking where the windows joined. Still the rain was coming in.
Another day. More tubes of caulking. More music. More cheap mezcal. More water.
The caulk took a day to dry. I went back the next day and threw a bucket of water against the window to test it out.
“Did it leak?” I yelled to Rubi, waiting on the other side.
“Yeah, it’s all over the floor.”
I let out a deep sigh and went inside to seal the windows from the other side. I moved on to other windows. The caulking came out softer from the tube beneath the warm sun, which made it more difficult to pour. People drove by and stared for a long time, and I pretended not to notice them, or the neighbors sweeping the same spot over and over as they stared to see what I was doing. They knew “Don Marcelo” had children and probably suspected I was one of them. My first visit was so short that no one even noticed I came and went. But this time, I had been in Tepechitlán for a month already, and people certainly noticed. They were weary of outsiders because of the violence that outsiders brought with them in the past, so I couldn’t blame them for being suspicious of me.
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