“New York,” she said again. Then she made another line to a smaller dot and said the magic word—“Sprangfail.”
This was the first time I saw my father smile since we crossed the river. When we got on the bus that afternoon, he patted the wall and said, “Perro bravo.” He slapped my knee. “¡Perro bravo! ¡Vámonos!”
We were on that bus so long I turned six. Tío Martín picked us up at the bus station and he laughed when he embraced my father. “¡Híjole! Biche, you smell even worse than usual!” We walked out into the parking lot and what I remember most was the cold and Tío Martín’s Chevy truck. It was a model we didn’t have in Oaxaca, dark green with a cap on the back, and it looked new. I was never inside a new truck before and I couldn’t believe how clean it was. The moment Tío Martín opened the door you could smell it—como la farmacia—perfecto, inmaculado. I was so cold, but I was afraid to get in and I went around to the back like I did at home. My tío opened the back window of the cap and threw my father’s bag in there. I started to climb in too, but he stopped me. “You can ride on your papá’s lap,” he said.
All this time, Papá was only staring at the truck. “This is yours?”
I had never heard his voice sound like that—amazed and sad all at once like he was saying, “You? In this? How is it possible?”
Tío Martín said the truck belonged to him and his boss and the bank, and he was laughing, but I didn’t care if he had to share it, that Chevy was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen. “¡Bienvenidos a El Dorado!” he said. “Where you can have everything but own nothing.”
“This is not Esprangfail?” I whispered, but Papá didn’t answer.
It was December and I had never seen snow before that day. We drove through the tall stone city and out onto a highway with the windows up. Our truck at home was an old Chevy Apache that didn’t even have all its windows, but this one was so new and quiet it seemed to float above the road. While Papá and Tío Martín hurried to fill in the missing years, I stared at the blinking radio, at the shiny paint outside and at the great green road signs growing bigger and bigger until they disappeared.
The place Tío Martín worked was in the forest and except for some tall pines all the trees around there looked like they were dead. The hotel was big and gray and made of wood with black windows and a stone roof. Everything inside it was made of wood also—the floors, the stairs, the toilet seat. It was nothing like Oaxaca, and I couldn’t understand why anyone would want to stay in such a dark, cold place. Across the road was a field, but there was no sign of corn or flowers anywhere. Everything had died from the cold. In their place were lights—in the windows, in the trees, on the roof, all blinking day and night like fireworks that never ended. I knew it was for la Navidad, but where was the nacimiento? The camels and the kings? This did not look like a fiesta por el niño, it looked like a fiesta for lightbulbs.
We stayed in a room above the garage. Papá worked for Tío Martín and I followed him around in a pair of red rubber boots that were cold and heavy on my feet. There were some gringo kids there and they liked to stare at me. They waved and said things, but they made no sense. “Why do all these gringos talk like babies?” I asked.
“It is their own language,” Papá said. “English, and you will have to learn it. That is your job here, that is why I brought you.”
This made me feel scared and proud all at once. I was small and young but I wanted to work because that is what we do. Always in the pueblo I helped my parents. This work, given to me by my father who can go for days without speaking, filled me with a reason. That is your job here. So I worked hard. At night I told him all my new words, and he nodded and said, “Say them again.” When he was working, shoveling the snow or taking out the trash or cutting firewood, I could see his lips moving, trying to make these new sounds himself, but it was so hard for him. He’d try and then shake his head, hawk up a big one from deep in his throat and spit into a snowbank. It was like those words were fishbones stuck in there.
There was a lady and her name was Señora Ellen. She ran the hotel with her husband, Señor Ron. Señora Ellen was the opposite of my mother—so tall and thin and white you could see through her skin to her blue veins. Have you seen some small plant trying to grow under a pot or in a dark place? They will look like this and I thought, even then, This pobrecita needs more sun and tortillas. I was afraid of her at first because she looked like la Catrina, the tall fine skeleton lady who comes out por el Día de los Muertos. She does not have her own lotería card, but she is famous in Oaxaca and before last year, when the tourists stopped coming, you could buy her in any form. Some of the workers at the hotel called Señora Ellen “Catrina” behind her back, but she was kind to me—she gave me cookies and taught me little songs. This is when I discovered I had special powers. Somehow I could remember her songs perfectly, without understanding the words.
The peace of Christ makes fresh my heart,
A fountain ever springing.
All things are mine since I am His.
How can I keep from singing?
Is a gift to be simple, is a gift to be free,
Is a gift to come down where you want to be.
And when you find yourself in a place just right,
It will be in the valley of love and the light.
And I could sing them like she did, even the tunes—all stayed perfect in my head. I could see this made her happy because she smiled and gave me more cookies. When you are six, Oreos Americanos can help you forget almost any sadness, at least for a while. She gave me many hugs also, and this was something I knew how to do so I gave them back, pushing my cheek into her chest which was all bones like an old man—so different from mi mamá, from any Mexicana I knew, and I wondered to myself, What kind of a woman is this? Where are her chichis? Sometimes she would hold me for a long time and I would get a strange feeling—you know when you shake someone’s hand and they don’t let go so you have to shake it more, even when the moment is really finished? But it made her happy and I wanted her to be happy—needed her to be. She had so many cookies.
“You are a very bright little fellow,” she said. “¡Y muy guapo! What I would give for a boy just like you.”
And I said it right back. Like a parrot—her pet parrot.
“You need to be in school,” she said.
Señora Ellen talked to Papá. He was nervous about la Migra, but Señora said, No, not at this school. It is small, she said, and she is the friend of the boss. All of them belonged to the same church, a strange one with no color and no padre. Papá was also worrying about the money, but Señora said, No, the church will pay it, because she thinks I am some kind of special boy and she wants to help. It was hard for my father to accept, but this is why he brought me to el Norte—to learn so I could come back later to work and to live, and bring him and Mamá and my sister Vera also. Then Señora Ellen took me to the doctor who gave me three shots and medicine for my worms. After this she bought me some new clothes and a handsome backpack with so many zippers, and I went to the school which was in a house of wood like the hotel and the church. It was all gringos in there except for me, but already I could speak some English and the words came easy, even though it was so hard for Papá. It went like this for more than one year and I was speaking a lot, learning my letters and numbers, learning the games those kids played, but I never learned to like the snow. La maestra, Miss Morris, was nice to me and very pretty and many times during Story I sat on her lap. It was there, in the warmth and softness of her, that I started forgetting I was different from them. I started forgetting where I was from, what Mamá and Vera and my abuelos looked like. There was one photo Papá had, but it was hard to know after a while who those people were.
I can feel it happening again now and it is dangerous because when you forget, you can disappear. Besides César, there is nothing and no one in here to remind me who I am. So I must do it, tell it.
10
Thu Apr 5—23:59
&nbs
p; On the day la Migra came to the hotel, the snow was finally gone and so was Tío Martín. Where did he go? To buy goldfish for Señora Ellen’s pond. How often did that happen? Only one time, but I told you Tío Martín was lucky. La Migra caught Papá and me and two others, but they never caught Tío Martín. I don’t know if there is a virgin for goldfish, but that is my tío’s protector. We heard the story later from his parents—my father’s tío and tía—about the lucky goldfish and how after we were deported Señor Ron helped him apply for the amnesty because he was in el Norte so long already. He is still there and always he sends money to his wife and his parents, but he never comes home. Maybe he has his own pond of goldfish now.
Papá never forgave Tío Martín for that—for his good luck of getting away. And he never forgave himself for not going up there when Tío Martín first asked him. But how could he know that the amnesty was only for Mexicanos who were there before 1986? I was just a baby then and if Papá had gone maybe I would never know him. Maybe I would never even exist. But here we are and there is mi papá. Envy is the dog and Papá is the bone. Or maybe it is the other way around because he can never put it down. I think life is always complicated for him, but there are reasons for it.
After they caught us, la Migra sent us to Brownsville, Texas, on a bus with other migrantes from all over the place. We were only allowed to get off once a day and the toilet was broken so the smell was terrible. My father was silent for most of the trip—three days, but one thing I remember he said was, “It is because of your school they found us.” I don’t know if it’s true or not, but when we returned to Oaxaca there was nowhere for us to go but back to the pueblo and for Papá this was a humiliation. “Why do they deport me,” he said to Abuelo, “when half of those pendejos up there can’t even mix cement? I have a right to work as much as that pinche Martín.”
“Maybe,” said Abuelo. “But how can they know it when you talk like such a mojado and can’t even read?”
That was the last time my father sat down in his stepfather’s house, which is the house where he was born. It was also the first time I saw him hit my mother. He was drunk and shouting in her face, saying he wasn’t going to live his life behind the oxen staring at their culos. “Walking all day behind them,” he yelled, “every time they shit, it’s like they’re shitting in your face!”
The next morning, Papá drove away in the Chevy Apache and from that day he lived most of his time in el centro, coming back only once in a month. Because he grew up making adobe bricks with Abuelo and his uncles, my father was good with plaster and cement and he worked on roads and buildings and made deliveries in the Apache. Often he did these jobs for Don Serafín, the same man who paid for our bus tickets home from the border. It was around that time el cacique Don Serafín tried to put a McDonald’s on the Zócalo, which is the heart of el centro and also a UNESCO site. There were protests and he did not succeed, but Don Serafín got his revenge. Now, at night, if you look out over the Valley of Oaxaca, cradle of the Zapotec civilization, you will see stars above the dark and ancient mountains, shadows of pyramids on the ridges, maybe the moon rising behind—and down by the baseball stadium, the great golden chichis of Santa McDoña. It is the biggest sign in Oaxaca—as tall as a church and bright like the sun, and it marks the only McDonald’s in south Mexico with the playground and the tunnel slide. My father told me this—it was him who built the walls around the flower beds.
We left the pueblo—my home—when I was thirteen. That’s when Papá had enough money to move all of us into a two-room cement house he rented in Mártires de Río Blanco under the Milenio Cross, thirty minutes walking from the Zócalo and la Basílica de la Soledad. The only water we had came in the garrafón, the electricity we took with a wire from the transformer down the hill and the same with the phone.
I never liked it there and I was glad to go away to secondary school because I had my own plan, you know—to go to university. I am smart enough for it. I did not win the scholarship like César, but the tuition is not terrible. For two years I studied at UABJO in Oaxaca—Tourism and Hospitality because of my English, and also Literature because of my abuelo who taught me to read. But then comes the strike last year, first the teachers’ union and then so many others joining—students, campesinos, all kinds of people from many other unions and tribes—until the whole city stopped functioning because so many were protesting our terrible governor. For months there was a big camp on the Zócalo, people were arrested and killed—people I know, and many things were broken. After all this trouble my father would not help me anymore. “Show me your tourists now,” he said. “You are wasting your time and my money. Look at your cousin Efraín—five years in university and still he is riding a bicycle!”
Last December, a month after the strike was broken, me and Papá and his mother-in-law, my Abuelita Clara, went to el centro so Papá could go to the market and Abuelita could sell some of her pots in the Zócalo. We had to go on the bus because the motor in the Chevy Apache will not hold oil anymore. Papá was in a bad mood about this and some other things and when we were unpacking my abuelita’s jugs and dishes he dropped one and it broke. “Look what you’ve done!” she said. “I haven’t sold a thing today and I’m already down forty pesos.”
“And what is forty pesos?” he said. “A liter of motor oil?” He kicked the broken pieces then and my abuelita flinched like he was kicking her. “And how many of these will you sell today with no tourists—two? Three? None? What difference does it make?”
It is not common for Zapotecos to shout in public, but Papá was doing it now and I wondered if he’d been drinking. “We’re trapped in the past!” he said. “All of us!” With his hand he swept past my abuelita’s pots and over to the French iron bandstand where they played music from a hundred years ago. “Who built that? Emperor Maximilian!” He pointed to the shoeshine man napping in his chair in his snakeskin boots. “Where is he going? Nowhere!”
Like this, his hand a compass needle, my father circled the Zócalo, pointing out the bird man by the fountain with the singing cages on his back, the blind organ grinder on the corner with his hat in his hand, the Maya candy seller with her long wool skirt and shiny blouse, the clowns with their white gloves and red noses, the woman selling sweets off a platter on her head, the young couple on the bench with their children eating ice cream, the Trique women protesting again with their bare feet and their banners. And watching all this—and him and us—like visitors to a human zoo, the handful of pale tourists in the empty cafés with their big black cameras, shooting everything in sight.
“Can’t you see it?” my father said to me. “The world has moved on without us, and for a young man there is no worse fate. You are missing the future because the future isn’t here.” He looked at me hard with his angry eyes. “The future is there!”
Papá’s compass needle swung again and he stabbed his finger to the north like he would poke a hole in it, like he would poke a hole in the bandstand with its bat-wing roof, in the central post office that hadn’t been modern since before he was born, in the cathedral that was built when the Spanish came, in the hills and corn and oxen that hadn’t changed in a thousand years, in the megacity of D.F. where he didn’t stand a chance, in all the states conquered by the drug cartels, in the new steel border fence growing longer and higher with every passing year, in the pile of bones spreading across the American desert, in all the family, friends and neighbors who had lost their faith in Mexico and were never coming back.
“But we are still here,” he said, dropping his hand to his side, too heavy to hold up any longer.
Fri Apr 6—00:17
There are different ways to count success in Mexico and for campesinos it is mostly counted in trucks and cement. You know someone is doing good when they buy a Ford Lobo Lariat with the super cabina in racing red. And you know it when they build a house of cement. In my old pueblo the brother of the mayordomo has such a house with the garage and two doors that are electric. Maybe it�
�s normal in California, but this house is in a little pueblo two hours from el centro on a road made of broken rock with chickens running and burro shit down the middle and all the neighbors in adobe. And who lives in that big house? Nobody. It is a palace for insects and mice. Everyone who can work in that family is in el Norte sending money home to pay for the house, and now it’s so hard to come back maybe they’re never going to live in there. Maybe their neighbor just sends them a video.
My abuelo could never understand why people want to give up adobe when it is so cool to live in and you can make it yourself. Cement is hot to live in and you must buy it from someone else. Cucarachas and spiders and scorpions still come in, and the cement patio holds water so mosquitoes can grow and these ones are carrying dengue now. But everyone wants it anyway because it looks so clean and modern and because it is what rich Americanos do. Más importante, it is what rich Mexicanos in America do. So of course we must do it too. Because adobe is for poor people—for Oaxacas. What does my father want more than anything? A new truck and his own house of cement—not to rent from someone else as we must do since leaving the Sierra. “Look at that shitbox you were born in,” he says. “We’re still living like the troglodytes. And your mother needs a gas range. You are young and strong. Go.”
It is a tradition in the pueblo to bury your baby’s placenta in the dirt floor of the house. It means you will always come back. For most of us it is a root into that place, but for my father I think it is a chain. That memory of Tío Martín with his goldfish and green card and shiny new truck—it chews on him, eating him alive. And you know, my young sister Vera is the same. After she turned thirteen, she would never touch Abuelita Clara’s clay again. I asked her why and she said it’s dirty. Now she is at the hairdresser school and her favorite T-shirt is a pink one saying with fake diamonds, “Is Not a Hobie—Is a Pasion.” When someone takes her picture with the phone, she will flash some gang sign she learned, but only to show her fingernails because if you’ve got long fingernails it means you’re not working in the milpa anymore, and if you’re eighteen and trying to make it in el centro the first step is to look like you never saw a milpa in your life. Many times when I went to visit Abuelo, Vera would laugh and say, “Hey country boy, don’t forget your huaraches!” Well, they are our traditional shoes with excellent ventilation, and the cactus spines will not go through the bottom. Even mi padre wears them. Once, Tío brought him some Nike Michael Jordans from L.A., but they are so big and white he saves them only for church. On him they look like shoes for a clown, but I never say this. Vera wears only el Converse, black with rainbow socks. Them, or las fuckmes.
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