The Crystal Frontier

by Carlos Fuentes

  Now indeed, now indeed he looks at you with a red burning gaze like a coal brought back to life, the final coal in the middle of the ashes that everyone thought were dead.

  “When they’re old they get gray. The hogs. They only come out at night, when the young have already been hunted or have come back alive to say that the path is clear.”

  He laughed heartily.

  “They only come out at night. They get gray with time. Their tusks twist around. Old hog, twisted tusk.”

  He stopped laughing and tapped a finger against his teeth.

  He hired you a car on this side of the tunnel. He didn’t have to tell you he was counting on your sense of honor. He left you alone to drive to the other side. It took exactly fourteen minutes to cross the tunnel of Barrios de la Luna. He would start counting the minutes as soon as you pulled away. After fifteen minutes, you would turn around to enter the tunnel again and he, the old man, would begin to drive in the opposite direction.

  “Good-bye,” said the old man.

  * * *

  Surrounded by smoke from the power station and mist from the high mountains, they were leaving the highway that ran by abandoned coal pits slowly healing in the earth. Kids were playing soccer. Old women were bent over their gardens. The concrete, the poles, the blocks of cement, and the retainer walls progressively split the earth to make way for the highway and the succession of tunnels that penetrated the Sierra Cantábrica, conquering it. It was a splendid highway and Leandro drove his boss’s Mercedes quickly, with one hand. With the other he squeezed his Encarna’s, and she asked him to slow down, Jesus, not to scare her—let’s get to Madrid alive. But no matter how she softened him, he had his macho habits and responses he wasn’t going to give up over night; besides, the Mercedes was purring like a cat, it was a pleasure to drive a car that slid over the highway like butter over a roll. He smiled as they entered the long tunnel of Barrios de la Luna, leaving behind a landscape of snowy peaks and patchy fogs. Leandro turned on lights like two cats’ eyes. Behind him was an old van driven by a man dressed in black, his black hat pulled down to his huge ears and his gray whiskers prickling the top of his white collarless shirt. He scratched the lobe of his hairy ear. He took care not to change lanes or pass on the left and risk a crash. Better to follow at a distance, safely, follow that elegant Mercedes with Madrid license plates. He guffawed. Honor was for assholes. He was going to avenge his poor son.

  You were doing sixty miles an hour, ashamed to think you were doing it so a highway patrolman would pull you over and keep you from entering the tunnel, which was coming up. The rapid transition from the hard sun to the blast of smoke, the breath of black fog inside the tunnel, made you dizzy. With great assurance, you took the left lane, driving against traffic, telling yourself that you were going to leave that village of stone, that language of stone. It was better to go to America—that was the real thing—to be yourself, take a risk to win a bet, and what a bet, two hundred thousand pesetas in one shot. You were risking your life, but with luck you’d be rich in one shot. Now you’d see if luck was protecting you. If you didn’t put everything on the line now, you never would—luck was destiny and everything depended on a bet. It was like being a bullfighter, but instead of the bull what was rushing toward you was a pair of headlights, blinding you, two luminous horns. You took the bet: would it be the old son of a bitch, the father of his faggot sons? Who was the person, who were the people you were going to give a great embrace of stone, you with your shining bull horns, like the starry ones that support the virgin, all the virgins of Spain and America? You thought about a woman before smashing into the car coming in the opposite direction, the right direction; you thought about the bread of the virgins, the bride’s bread of the whole world, pan de chourar, the bread of tears transformed into stone.

  9

  RÍO GRANDE, RÍO BRAVO

  To David and Laanna Carrasco

  fathered by the heights, descendant of the snow, the ice of the sky baptizes the river when it bursts forth in the San Juan mountains, breaks the virginal shield of the cordillera, abruptly becomes young, youthfully challenges the canyons and open cuts of land so that the stormy waters of May can pass on to sleepy June tides

  it then loses altitude but gains the desert, wastes its maturity generously leaving liquid alms here and there amid the mesquite, parcels out its luxurious old age in fertile farmlands, and bequeaths its death to the sea

  río grande, río bravo,

  let me ask you:

  did the thick aromatic cedars grow with you, since the dawn of creation, and then become the wood for your cradle? did the plants that roll across the desert merely announce your arrival, always defending you from the spines and bayonets of yucca and palo verde? were your loves always perfumed by the incense of the pine nut? did the white poplars always escort you, the spruces disguise you, the olive-colored waves of your immense pastures always rock you? was your death avoided by the nervous nursing of wild thistles, did the black fruits of the juniper announce it, the willows not weep your requiem? río grande, río bravo, did the creosote, the cactus, the sagebrush not forget you, thirsty for your passage, so obsessed by your next rebirth that they have already forgotten your death?

  the river of shifting floors now travels back to its sources from the coastal plains, their fertile half-moon a cape of swamps; the valley drops anchor between the pine and the cypress until a flight of doves raises it again, carrying the river up to the steep tower from which the earth broke off the very first day, under the hand of God:

  now God, every day, gives a hand to the río grande, río bravo, so it may rise to his balcony once more and roll along the carpets of his waiting room before opening the doors to the next chamber, the step that brings the waters, if they manage to scale the enormous ravines, back to the roofs of the world, where each plateau has its own faithful cloud that accompanies it and reproduces it like a mirror of air:

  but now the earth is drying and the river can do nothing for it but plant the stakes that guide its course and that of its travelers, for everyone would get lost here if the Guadalupe mountains were not there to protect the river and drive it back to its womb, río grande, río bravo, back to the nourishing cave it never should have left for exile and death and the blinding hurricane that awaits it again to drown the river again and again …

  BENITO AYALA

  Stopped for the night by the river’s edge, Benito Ayala was surrounded by men who looked like him, all between twenty and forty years old, all wearing straw hats, cheap cotton shirts and trousers, sturdy shoes for working in a cold climate, short jackets of various colors and designs.

  They all raise their arms, spread them in a cross, clench their fists, silently offer their labor on the Mexican side of the river, hoping someone takes note of them, saves them, pays them heed. They prefer to risk being caught than not to advertise themselves, declare their presence: Here we are. We want work.

  They all look alike, but Benito Ayala knows that each of them will cross the river with a different bagful of memories, an invisible knapsack in which only their own memories fit.

  Benito Ayala closed his eyes to forget the night and to imagine the sky. Through his head passed a place. It was his village, in the mountains of Guanajuato. Not very different from many other Mexican mountain villages. A single street through which the highway passed. On both sides, houses, all one-story. And the shops, the hardware stores, the restaurant, the pharmacy. At the entrance to town, the school. At the end, the gas station with the best bathrooms in town, the best radio, the best chilled soft drinks. But to use the bathroom you’ve got to arrive by car. The staff knows the people from the vicinity. They order them to shit in the woods, they laugh at them.

  Behind the houses, vegetable gardens, flower gardens, the creek. All the walls painted over with beer ads, propaganda for the PRI, announcements of the next or last elections. All things considered and despite everything, a good little town, a sweet village, a village wit
h history and with what the past bequeaths its descendants to make a good life.

  But the town didn’t live off any of that.

  Benito Ayala’s village lived off the workers it sent to the United States and off the money they sent back.

  The old and young, the few businesspeople, even the political powers became accustomed to living off that. The money was the principal, perhaps only income the village had. Why look elsewhere? The income represented hospital, social security, pension, maternity benefits all in one.

  His eyes closed, his arms spread, and his fists clenched, Benito Ayala, stopped for the night on the Mexican side of the river, was remembering the generations of this village.

  His great-grandfather, Fortunato Ayala, was the first to leave Mexico, fleeing the revolution.

  “This war is never going to end,” he declared one day just before the battle of Celaya, fought there in Guanajuato. “The war is going to last longer than my life. When we all united against the tyrant Huerta, I stuck it out. But now that we’re going to be killing our own brothers, I think it’s better I leave.”

  He went to California and tried to open a restaurant. The problem was that the gringos didn’t like our food. Putting chocolate into chicken nauseated them. The restaurant folded. He looked for a factory job because he said that if he was going to bend over to pick tomatoes he’d be better off in Guanajuato. But no matter where he went, the answer was always the same, as if they’d learned a catechism lesson.

  “You people weren’t made for factory work. Look at you. You’re short. You’re close to the ground. Bend over, pick fruit and greens. That’s what God made you for.”

  He rebelled. He made his way as best he could (mostly by hiding in freight cars and not paying) to Chicago, where he didn’t give a damn about the cold, the wind, the hostility. He found work in steel. Almost half the workers in the steel mill were Mexicans. He didn’t even have to learn English. He sent his first few dollars to Guanajuato. In those days, the mail service still worked and an envelope containing dollars reached its destination at the district capital of Purísima del Rincón, where his family went to pick it up. Twenty, thirty, forty dollars. A fortune in a country devastated by war, where every rebel faction printed its own money, the famous bilimbiques.

  Before mailing his dollars, Fortunato Ayala would stare at them a long time, caressing them with his eyes, imagining them made of satin or silk instead of paper, so shiny and smooth. He held them up to a light and stared again, as if to assure himself of their authenticity and even of their green beauty, presided over by George Washington and the God’s eye of the Huicholes. What was the sacred symbol of Mexican Indians doing on the gringo dollars? In any case, the triangle of the divine eye meant protection and foresight, although fatality as well. George Washington looked like a protective grandma with his cottony little head and false teeth.

  But no one protected Great-grandfather Fortunato when U.S. unemployment led to his and thousands of other Mexicans’ deportation in 1930. Fortunato departed in sorrow, too, because in Chicago he left behind a pregnant Mexican girl to whom he’d never offered anything but love. She knew Fortunato had a wife and children: all she wanted was his name, Ayala, and Fortunato, resigned to being generous, gave it to her, though somewhat fearfully.

  He left. He established a tradition: the town would live off the money sent by its emigrant workers. His son, also named Fortunato, managed to get to California during World War II. He was a farmhand. He had entered legally, but his bosses told him his situation was precarious. He was just a step away from his own country. It would be easy to deport him if things started going badly. It was good he had no interest in becoming a citizen. It was good he loved his own country so much and wanted only to return to it.

  “It’s good I’m a worker and not a citizen,” Fortunato the son answered, and that did not please his bosses. “It’s good I’m cheap and reliable, right?”

  Then his bosses commented that the advantage of the Mexican worker was that he did not become a citizen and did not organize unions or go on strike, the way European immigrants did. But if this Ayala guy started getting uppity, he’d have to be isolated, punished.

  “All of them get uppity,” said one of the employers.

  “After a while they all find out about their rights,” said another.

  It was for that reason that, when the war was over and the bracero program with it, Salvador Ayala, the young grandson of old Fortunato, found the border closed. Workers were no longer necessary. But the little village near Purísima del Rincón had got used to living off them. All its young men left to look for work up north. If they didn’t find any, the town would die, just as an infant abandoned in the hills by its parents would die. It was worth risking everything. They were the men, they were the boys. The strongest, the cleverest, the bravest. They went. The children, the women, the old folks stayed behind. They depended on the workers.

  “Here there are men alive because there are men who leave. Nobody can say that there are men who die here because no one leaves.”

  Salvador Ayala, Benito’s father, the son and grandson of the Fortunatos, became a wetback who crossed the river at night and was caught on the other side by the Border Patrol. It was a gamble for him and the others. But it was worth the risk. If the Texas farmers needed man power, the wetback was brought back to the border and left on the Mexican side. From here he would immediately be admitted—his back now dry—onto the Texas side, protected by an employer. But every year the doubt was repeated. Will I get in this time or not? Will I be able to send a hundred, two hundred dollars home?

  The information made the rounds in Purísima del Rincón. From the little plaza to the church, from the sacristy to the tavern, from the creek to the fields of prickly pears and brambles, from the gas station to the tailor’s shop, everyone knew that at harvest time the laws were meaningless. Orders are given to deport no one. We can go. We can cross. The police don’t go near the protected Texas ranches even though they know all the workers there are illegal.

  “Don’t worry. This thing doesn’t depend on us. If they need us, they let us in, with or without laws. If they don’t need us, they kick us out, with or without laws.”

  No one had a worse time than Salvador Ayala, Benito’s father and the grandson of the first Fortunato. He caught the worst repression, expulsions, border cleanup operations. He was the victim of brutal whims. It was the boss who decided when to treat him as a contracted worker and when to hand him over to Immigration as a criminal. Salvador Ayala had no defense. If he alleged that the boss had given him work illegally, he implicated himself without having proof against his boss. The boss could manipulate the phony documents to prove that Salvador was a legal worker, if necessary. And to make him invisible and deport him, if necessary.

  Now was the worst time. Benito—grandson of the younger Fortunato and the son of Salvador, descendant of the founder of the exodus, the first Fortunato—knew that any period is difficult, but this more than any other. Because there was still need. But also hatred.

  “Did they hate you too?” Benito asked his father, Salvador.

  “The way they’re going to hate you? No.”

  He didn’t know the reasons, but he felt it. Stopping for the night on the Mexican side of the Río Bravo, he felt the fear of all the others and the hatred on the other side. He was going to cross, no matter what. He thought about all those who depended on him in Purísima del Rincón.

  He stretched his arms in a cross, as far as he could, clenching his fists, showing that his body was ready to work, asking for a little love and compassion, not knowing if he was clenching his fists out of anger, as a challenge, or in resignation and despondency.

  * * *

  this was never the land without men: for thirty thousand years the people have been following the course of the río grande, río bravo, they cross the straits from Asia, they descend from the north, migrate south, seek new hunting grounds, in the process they really disc
over America, feel the attraction and hostility of the new world, don’t rest until they explore it all and find out if it’s friendly or unfriendly, until they reach the other pole, land that has a placenta of copper, land that will have the name of silver, lands of the hugest migration known to man, from Alaska to Patagonia, lands baptized by migration: accompanied, America, by flights and images, metaphors and metamorphoses that make the going bearable, that save the peoples from fatigue, discouragement, distance, time, the centuries necessary to travel America from pole to pole:

  I will not speak their names, only those who know how to listen to silence know them,

  I will not recount their deeds, only the dusty stars of the paths repeat them,

  I will not recall their sufferings, the hurricane of birds shouts them,

  I will not mention their calendars, they are all a river of ashes,

  only the dog accompanied them, the only animal friendly to the Indian,

  but then they tired of traveling so long, let loose their dogs in ferocious wild packs, and they stopped, decided that the center of the world was right here, where their feet were planted that instant, this was the center of the world, the land of the río grande, río bravo:

  the world had sprung forth from the invisible springs of the desert waters: the underground rivers, the Indians say, are the music of God,

  thanks to them the corn grows, the bean, the squash, and cotton, and each time a plant grows and yields its fruits, the Indian is transformed, the Indian becomes a star, oblivion, bird, mesquite, pot, membrane, arrow, incense, rain, smell of rain, earth, earthquake, extinguished fire, whistle in the mountain, secret kiss, the Indian becomes all this when the seed dies, becomes child and grandfather of the child, memory, bark, scorpion, buzzard, cloud, and table, broken vessel of birth, repentant tunic of death,

  becomes a mask, ladder, rodent,