The Crystal Frontier

by Carlos Fuentes

  becomes a horse,

  becomes a rifle,

  becomes a target:

  the Indian dreams and his dream becomes a prophecy, all the dreams of the Indians become reality, incarnate, tell them they are right, fill them with fear and for that reason make them suspicious, arrogant, jealous, proud but horrified of always knowing the future, suspicious that the only thing that becomes reality is that which should be a nightmare: the white man, the horse, the firearm,

  oh, they had stopped moving, the great migrations were over, the grass grew over the roads, the mountains separated the people, languages were no longer understood, the people decided not to move anymore from where they were, from birth to death, but to weave a great mantle of loyalties, obligations, values in order to protect themselves

  until the river caught fire and the earth moved again

  DAN POLONSKY

  Thin and pale but muscular and agile, he bragged that even though he lived on the border he never exposed himself to the sun. He had the pale complexion of his European ancestors, immigrants who were badly received, discriminated against, treated like garbage. Dan remembered his grandparents’ complaints. The savage discrimination to which they were subjected because they spoke differently, ate differently, looked different. They smelled different. The Anglos covered their noses when they passed those old people who were young but looked old, with their beards and black clothes smelling of onion and sauerkraut. But the immigrants persisted, assimilated, became citizens. No one would defend their nation better than they, Dan thought as he stared across to the Mexican side of the river.

  “Seen Air Force yet?” his grandfather Adam Polonsky asked, and since Dan was too young to have seen World War II pictures, the old man gave him a video so he’d see how the air force was made up of ethnic heroes, not only Anglos but descendants of Poles, Italians, Jews, Russians, Irish. Never a Japanese, it’s true; he was the enemy. But never a Latino, a Mexican. A few blacks; they say the blacks did go to war. But never Mexicans. They weren’t citizens. They were cowards, mosquitoes that sucked the blood of the USA and ran back home to support their lazy countrymen.

  “Seen Air Force yet? John Garfield. His real name was Julius Garfinkle. A kid from the ghetto, like you, the son of immigrants, Danny boy.”

  They gave their lives in two world wars and also in Korea and Vietnam. They almost equaled the sacrifices of the Anglo-Saxon generations of the previous century, the conquerors of the West. Why didn’t anyone ever say so? Why did they still feel shame at having an immigrant past? Dan felt proud looking at a map and seeing that the USA had acquired more territory than any other power in the last century. Louisiana. Florida. Half of Mexico. Alaska. Cuba. Puerto Rico. The Philippines. Hawaii. The Panama Canal. A stream of little islands in the Pacific. The Virgin Islands. The Virgin Islands! That’s where he’d like to go on vacation. Just for the name, so seductive, so sexy, so improbable. And for the challenge. To take a vacation in the Caribbean and not get a tan. To come back as white as his grandparents from Pomerania. To conquer color. Not let himself blacken for any reason, not by contact with a Negro or a Mexican, not by the sun.

  He requested night duty for that secret reason, which he communicated to no one—he was afraid of being ridiculed. There was a cult of the tan. A man with such white skin even seemed suspect. “Are you sick?” another officer asked, and the only reason he didn’t punch him was because he knew the consequences of attacking an officer and Dan Polonsky did not want for anything in the world to lose his job—it satisfied him too much. From the moment when they positioned the equipment to detect the nighttime passage of illegal immigrants across the Río Grande, Dan requested and was granted assignment to the details that saw the night world illuminated through movie-style robot glasses, night-scopes that spotted illegals as if they glowed, heat detectors that picked up the warmth of the human body … The bad thing was that so many Border Patrol agents, even if they were Texans, were of Mexican origin and Polonsky sometimes made mistakes; looking through his infrared goggles he would spot someone dark-skinned and it would turn out the person was carrying Border Patrol ID, even if he had the face of a wetback … The good thing was that it was easy to sucker those Tex-Mex agents, exploit their divided loyalties, demand they prove—Let’s see—that they were good Americans and not Mexicans in disguise … Polonsky laughed at them. He felt pity for them but manipulated them like laboratory rats.

  One thing that did bother him, though, was the need to insist that the USA was always moral and innocent. Why did the politicians and the journalists pretend that they had no ambitions or personal interests, that they were always moral, innocent, good? That exasperated Dan Polonsky. Everybody had personal interests, ambitions, malice. Everybody wanted to be somebody. He stared intently through his night-vision glasses, which rendered the dry, hostile landscape of the river clear without the sun; he stared at an intoxicating red landscape, like a glass of Clamato and vodka. For Dan, the United States had saved the world from all the evils of the twentieth century: Hitler, the kaiser, Stalin, the Communists, the Japanese, the Chinese, the Vietnamese, Uncle Ho, Castro, the Arabs, Saddam, Noriega …

  His list of enemies ran out, and all he was left with was one central, angry justification. It was necessary to save the southern border. The enemy was entering through there. Today the nation was being protected there, just as it was at Pearl Harbor or on the Normandy beaches. It was all the same.

  There they were, provoking him indecently, grouped up on the Mexican side, showing their arms open in a cross, clenching their fists, saying to the other side: You need us. We come to the border because without us your crops would rot. There is no one to harvest them, there is no one to help in hospitals, take care of children, serve in restaurants unless we lend you our arms. It was a challenge, and Dan’s wife told him so with a brutal joke: “Listen, I need a nanny for the kid. Don’t tell me you’re going to turn Josefina in? Don’t be stubborn. The more workers that enter, the safer your job is, buster … I mean, darling.”

  When his wife, Selma, became tedious, Dan would invent a trip to the state capital in Austin to lobby for more money and influence for the Border Patrol. He wanted to convince the legislators: If you don’t give us money, we can’t protect the country against the invisible Mexican invasion. He focused his night-vision glasses. There they were. Incapable of taking off their hats, as if even at night the sun were shining. He felt a furious need to urinate. He unzipped his fly and looked at himself in the phosphorescent light. His liquid was white, too, without color, like a flow of Chablis. He disliked the idea that grapes ripen and harden under the sun. But he consoled himself thinking of the farmworkers who harvested them in California.

  He tried to resolve his contradiction. He wasn’t a man of contradictions. He detested the illegals. But he adored and needed them. Without them, damn it, there would be no budget for helicopters, radar, powerful infrared night lights, rocket launchers, pistols … Let them come, he said, shaking his penis to rid himself of the last pale drops. Let them keep on coming by the millions, he begged, to give meaning to my life. We have to go on being innocent victims, he said, absolutely certain that no matter how many times he shook the thing the last drop inevitably fell in his shorts.

  * * *

  the horse, the hog, the cattle came

  steel and gunpowder came

  the bloodhounds came

  terror came

  death came: fifty-four million men and women lived in the vast continent of the migrations, from the Yukon to Tierra del Fuego, and four million north of the río grande, río bravo,

  when the Spaniards came

  fifty years later, only four million lived

  on the whole continent and the lands of the river almost turned into what they said they had always been:

  the land where man never was

  or almost ceased to be, decimated by smallpox, measles, typhus,

  where the survivors took refuge in the highlands, seeking h
elp and a will to resist

  when Francisco Vázquez de Coronado came one fine day with three hundred Spaniards, including a mere three women, poorly rationed, six Franciscans, fifteen hundred horses, and a thousand Indian allies brought from the lands of Cohahuila and Chihuahua, in search of the cities of gold, the passage to the fabulous orient, another Mexico and Peru:

  they found nothing but the death that preceded them, but they left their sheep and goats, chicken and burros, plums, cherries, melons, grapes, peaches, and grain, scattered like their Castilian words, with the same facility, with the same fertility, on both banks of the río grande, río bravo

  MARGARITA BARROSO

  Every day she crossed the border from El Paso to Juárez to supervise the workers in a plant where television sets were assembled. Sometimes she wished she could talk about something else, but the job sucked out her brain, as her grandma Camelia said, and Margarita had long since decided that her only salvation was work. She found her dignity, her personality, in work; she respected herself and made herself respected. She had developed a hard, intransigent character: sure, there were nice girls, sweet, even sentimental, and also serious, professional workers, but all you needed was one bitch—and there was always more than one—to screw everything up and force the supervisor to be mean, put on a sour face, say harsh words …

  Now, at night, she returned. It was Friday and all the women were going out to have fun. Margarita wouldn’t miss it—it was her only concession to relaxation, okay, to probable abandon, when she could look less uptight and go to the discos with the girls. After all, she could mix with the crowd there, where women were allowed to exercise some fantasy in their outfits. You saw them all: Rosa Lupe with her mania for making vows and dressing like a Carmelite, Marina, who was dying to see the ocean, the fool, as if any of them after they get here ever see their dreams come true—what illusions!—Candelaria, who must think she’s Frida Kahlo or something, dressed like a perfect peasant, and the one who didn’t dance anymore, Dinorah, mourning her kid who strangled himself because there was no one to take care of him—who asked her to be an unwed mother, the idiot, and live way the hell out in Buenavista? Better to cross the river every day, live in a suburban house in El Paso, even if it was in a black neighborhood. At least you were assimilated there. Let them see that she was assimilated—she didn’t want to be seen as a Mexican or a Chicana. She was a gringa, she lived in El Paso; in Chihuahua her name was Margarita but in Texas she was Margie. From her school days in El Paso on, she was told, Listen, you’re white, don’t let them call you Margarita, make them call you Margie. Pass for white—who’s going to find out?—don’t speak Spanish, don’t let them treat you like a Mexican, a Pocha, a Chicana.

  “How do you get along with your family?”

  “They’re unbelievable. I can’t go out on a date without my mother chasing after me asking, Is he from a good family? Is he from a good family? It makes me want to go out with a black so they have a fit.”

  “Don’t be a jerk. Just go out with blonds. Never admit you’re Mexican.”

  She rebelled by fighting to be a majorette at her high school. She told her parents that she was joining the school band, that they were going to play at the football games. But when they saw her in the fall wearing skimpy shorts, her legs bare, showing her thighs—thighs nothing!—showing her ass, the thing I sit on, said Grandma Camelia—she never said ass—showing you know what and tossing around a baton that looked like a phallus, they knew they’d lost her. She left home, and they warned her, No decent boy will want to marry you, you show your fanny in public, slut. But she didn’t have time for boyfriends, she didn’t think about them, she only went on Fridays to the Excalibur to dance the quebradita with men who were all the same—they all danced with their white hats on, they were ranchers, rich or poor—how could you tell when they were all identical?—and the longhaired guys who wore bands tied around their heads and fringed vests, those were tough guys or pimps, no one took them seriously. It was all just a respite, a way to lose yourself and forget the grandfather who didn’t make it, paralyzed in his wheelchair, sweet Grandma Camelia who never said ass, her parents who were around there someplace, her father working in Woolworth’s, her mother in another assembly plant, her brother making burritos at a Taco Bell, and her powerful, incredibly rich uncle, the self-made man who doesn’t believe in family charity. I’m supposed to support that pack of lazy relatives? Let them work the way I work, make their own fortune. What are they, crippled or something? Money only tastes good if you earn it, not when someone gives it to you, or as the gringos say, There’s no such thing as a free lunch. She, Margarita Margie, she was ambitious, disciplined, and what did it get her? Stuck there on the border, trying to get through that mess of a demonstration that’s interrupted everything, eager to leave Mexico every night, bored crossing over to Juárez every morning past iron skeletons, cemeteries of skyscrapers left half-built because of Mexico’s repeated bad luck: money’s all used up, the crisis has arrived, they’ve locked up the investor, the government functionary, the top dog, but not even then does the corruption stop, fucked-up country, screwed country, desperate country like a rat running on a wheel, deluding itself into thinking it’s going somewhere but never moving an inch. There’s nothing to be done though—that’s where her job is and she’s good at her job, she knows the assembly line from A to Z, from the chassis to the soldering to the automatic test to the cabinet to the screen to the warm-up to see if all the parts work and to make sure there’s no infant mortality, as the Italian assistant manager jokingly calls it. She knows about the alignment that insulates the television set and keeps the earth’s magnetic field from causing interference, what do you think of that? She tries that one out on her dance partners, who immediately lose the beat because she knows more than they do. They don’t like her and leave her to herself because she talks about testing the TV in front of mirrors, about the plastic case, the Styrofoam packing, and the final shipping box, the television set’s coffin, all ready for Kmart. The whole process takes two hours, eleven thousand TVs per day, not bad, huh? Does this chick know her shit or what? And if it was her job that day to check that each phase was carried out correctly, sticking green stars on the TVs with problems and blue stars on those with none, she deserved a great big gold star on her forehead, right on her forehead, like the good girls in nuns’ schools, like the drum majorettes who twirled their batons and showed their panties when they marched and disguised themselves as colonels to lead the parades and were whistled at by the boys, who called her Margie and said she’s not Pocha, not Chicana, not Mexican, she’s like you and me …

  * * *

  the shipwrecked, the defeated, the man dying of hunger and thirst, the man in rags,

  from whom if not that man could come the impossible dream of the wealth of the river, disposable wealth as in Eden, golden apples within easy reach of hand and sin: who but a delirious shipwrecked man could make such an illusion about the río grande, río bravo believable?

  Alvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca of Extremadura, fleeing from the sleepless stone as most of the conquistadors fled (Cortés from Medellín, Pizarro and Orellana from Trujillo, Balboa from Jerez de los Caballeros, De Soto from Barcarrota, Valdivia from Villanueva de la Serena, men from the borderland, men from beyond the Duero), wanted, as they did, to transmute the stone of Extremadura into the gold of America, took ship at Sanlúcar in 1528 with an expedition of four hundred men bound for Florida, of whom forty-nine remained after a shipwreck in Tampa bay, wading through the swampy lands of the Seminoles, painfully marching along the Gulf coast to the Mississippi river, building boats to try the sea once again, squeezed in so tight they couldn’t move, now attacked by a storm from which only thirty escape alive, this new shipwreck in Galveston, the march west to the río grande, río bravo, defending themselves from Indian arrows, eating their horses and sewing up the hides to carry water, until they reach the lands of the Pueblo Indians north of the river,

&
nbsp; but the distance, their ignorance of the land and the people are nothing compared with the hunger, the thirst, the exposure, the nights without cover, the days without shade, their bodies more and more naked, darker, until the fifteen Spaniards left can’t be told from the Pueblos, the Alabamas, and the Apaches:

  only the black servant, Estebanico, is darker than the others, but his dreams are luminous, golden, he sees the cities of gold in the distance while Alvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca looks at himself in the mirror of his memory and tries to see himself reflected there as the hidalgo he was, the Spanish gentleman he no longer is; the only mirror of his person are the Indians he finds, he has become identical to them, but he misses the chance to be one of them, he is equal to them but does not understand the opportunity he has to be the only Spaniard who could understand the Indians and translate their souls into Spanish:

  Cabeza de Vaca cannot understand a history of wind, an endless migratory chronicle that takes the Indian from the hot hunt of the plains to the tepee of the snows, from the tanned and naked body of summer to the body wrapped in blankets and skins of winter,

  he does not want to rule over this world; nomadism attracts him but he denies it because here no one moves to conquer but simply to survive,

  he does not understand the Indians, the Indians don’t understand him: they see the Spaniards as shamans, witch doctors, sorcerers, and Cabeza de Vaca acts out the only role assigned him, he becomes a cut-rate medicine man, he cures by means of suction, blowing of breath, laying on of hands, Our Fathers, and abundant signs of the cross,

  but in reality he fights, horrified, against the loss, layer by layer, of the skin and clothes of his European soul, he clings to it, pays no heed to the advice of his internal voice: God brought us naked to know men identical to ourselves in their nakedness …

  which God? Cabeza de Vaca wanders the corridors and bedrooms of the great houses of the Pueblos, sees a god he doesn’t recognize fleeing from floor to floor up hand ladders that at night it pulls up in order to isolate itself as it pleases from the moon, death, the stranger …