The Crystal Frontier (12 page)

Pochos,
I called them, denaturalized Mexicans, worst of the worst. Don't be one of the enemies. They laughed at me. It's worse on the other side: Mexico's the enemy. On the Mexican side, there's more injustice, more corruption, more lies, more poverty. Be thankful we're gringos. That's what my son said to me. He's harder and more bitter. My daughter tried to be gentler. No matter how you look at it, Papa, from this side of the border or the other, there's injustice and you aren't going to fix it. And you can't make us copy you. Hard-headed old man. Old sucker. They're right in the gringo schools here when they say there's a sucker born every minute. We didn't put a gun to your head so you'd have us and bring us up. We don't owe you anything. You're a drag. If you were at least politically correct. You embarrass us. A Communist. A Mexican. An agitator. You gave us nothing. It's your obligation. Fathers are only good for giving. Instead you took things away from us. You forced us to justify ourselves, to deny you, to affirm everything you aren't so we could be ourselves. Be someone. Be from the other side. Don't get upset. Don't get that expression on your face. If you grow up on the border, you have to choose: this side or the other. We chose the North. We're not suckers like you. We adapted. Would you rather we wore ourselves out like you? You ruined our mother's life. But you're not going to ruin ours. Angry old man. Nasty old man. Have you forgotten your own violence? Your monstrous fury, your colossal rage? How you were gradually extinguished, disarmed in the mere presence of youth. If they're young, you forgive them everything. If they're young, you worship them. If they're young, they're always right. I feel surrounded by a world—North and South, both sides—that venerates the young. Before my eyes pass advertisements, images, offers, temptations, window displays, magazines, television—all promoting young people, seducing young people, prolonging youth, disdaining old age, discarding old people, to the point that age seems a crime, a sickness, a misery that cancels you out as a human being. I quickly raise a barrier against this avalanche of dazzling, blinding multicolored lights that split, spread out, scatter. I close my eyes. I duplicate the night. I people it with ghosts. Groping, I return to the earth. It is like my blind gaze. It is black. This time the dark part of the world we call earth receives me. It's full of another kind of light. There is an old man in the light. Barefoot. Wearing peasant clothes. But with a vest. On the vest a watch chain glitters. I approach him. I kneel. I kiss his hand. He strokes my head. He speaks. I listen attentively, with respect. He tells the oldest stories. He tells how everything began. He says there were two gods who created the world. One spoke, the other didn't. The one who didn't speak created all the mute things in the world. The one who spoke created men. We do not resemble the silent god. We cannot understand him. He is everything we aren't, says the old man, who strokes my head and is my father. We venerate him and know what he is only because he isn't what you and I are. God is only what we are not. I mean that, thanks to him, we only know what he is not. But the second god risks being like us. He gives us the power of speech. He gives us names. He dares to speak and listen. We can answer him. We don't venerate him as much, but we love him more. Name and speak, son—you, too, should speak and name things. Venerate the creator god, but speak with the redeemer god. Don't lock yourself inside yourself. Perfection is not solitude. Imperfection is community but also possible perfection. The old man who was my father gave me a bit of bitter peyote to chew and asked me to speak, name, take risks. Be like the god who gave us speech. Not like the god who left us mute. Mute as I am this instant, father, I try to respond. But my father is already gone, smiling, saying good-bye with one hand raised. He's gone far away. He's from a time that has nothing to do with mine. A time with no ambition to be different. A time of braziers and the
comal
for making tortillas. Time of smoke, of sudden dawns and watchful nights. Time of masks, doubles, spirits. Time of the Nahuatl language. Time when lives were one with the prickly pear and mesquite. How different from my own time of learning to read and write, of taking medicine, receiving the land, replacing
huizache
with pavement, looking at ourselves in shopwindows, buying newspapers, knowing who is president, immersing ourselves in the articles of the constitution. And how different from the time of my children, of refrigerators and television, days without nature, nights lit up, food untouched by human hands, envy of other people's property, desire to believe in something but failure to find anything, desire to know all but knowledge only of nothing, conviction we know it all, and alarm at what a bare, ignorant foot can know. They're right to be different. But I loved my father, I respected him and despite everything tried to find his redeeming, speaking, garrulous god. But now I find I'm like the mute god. As abandoned and solitary as he, with no name, no father. I kiss your hands again and again. I don't ever want to stop. I want to love. I want to venerate. I don't want to speak. I don't want to remember. And I understand that I've been left here—abandoned, anonymous—as a challenge to remember who I am. But if I don't know, how will anyone else know? My father asked me to do two things: remember and name. How will I speak if I can't? I was left mute. The attack left me speechless and paralyzed. I can barely move one hand, one arm. There we are: I don't speak, but I do remember. I try desperately to compensate for lack of speech with memory. Doesn't my father know what happened to me? How can he ask me to speak, name, communicate? The old idiot, can't he see that I'm a ruin, older than he was when he died? I bite my tongue. I'm a respectful man. I believe in respect for the elderly. Not like my children. Or is it a law of life to despise old people secretly like this? The old fogey, you heard them say. The mummy. Ready for the junk heap. Methuselah. Useless fossil, a burden, he's not leaving us a thing, he makes us earn a living at hard labor, and on top of that we've got to go on supporting him. Who has the time or patience to bathe him, dress him, undress him, put him to bed, wake him up, sit him down in front of the TV all day so just by chance he's amused and learns something, so he looks at something else instead of staring at us as if we were the TV set—or something alive and nearby but unbearable? Why wasn't he like his brother, our uncle? Twenty years younger, his brother understood everything our father couldn't fathom or scorned. You don't share poverty. First, you have to create wealth. But wealth trickles down little by little in droplets. That's a fact. Be patient. But equality is a dream. There'll always be dumb people and smart people. There'll always be the strong and the weak. Who eats whom? Wealth honestly come by doesn't have to be distributed among the lazy. Those who are poor because they want to be. There is no ruling class. There are superior individuals. Now I secretly laugh at my children. When they went to my younger brother for help, he told them the same thing they tell me and everyone else. I made my money the hard way. There's no reason I should support a family of lazy fools. Chips off the old block. You're the children my brother deserved. You want to live on charity. For your own good, I tell you to stand on your own two feet. Don't expect anything from me. From sea to shining sea. From the Pacific to the Gulf. From Tijuana to Matamoros. A dead part of my brain returns the way my old father wanted to return, laden with names. All along the frontier I hear the name of my powerful brother. But his real name is Contracts. His name is Contraband. His name is Stock Market. Highways. Assembly plants. Whorehouses. Bars. Newspapers. Television. Drug Money. And an unfair fight with a poor brother. A struggle between brothers for the destiny of our brothers. Brothers Anonymous. What's my name? What's my brother's name? I can't answer as long as I don't know the name of each and every one of my anonymous brothers. Why do they cross the border? We have different rationales in each instance, he and I. He: Because of Mexico's impoverishing statist policies. I: Because the gringo market lures these people. He: We have to create jobs in Mexico. I: We have to pay better wages in Mexico. He: The gringos have the right to defend their borders. I: You can't talk about free markets and then close the border to workers who respond to demand. He: They're criminals. I: They're workers. He: They come to a foreign country, they should show some respect for it. I: They're returning to their own land; we were here first. They aren't criminals. They're workers. Listen, Pancho, I want you to work for me. Come over here, I need you. Listen, Pancho, I don't need you anymore. Get out. I've just turned you in to Immigration. I never signed a contract with you. When I need you I make a contract with you, Pancho; when I don't I turn you in, Pancho. I beat you up. I hunt you down like a rabbit. I cover you with paint so everyone will know you're illegal. My boys are going to set packs of white cannibals out to kill you, you undocumented Mexican Salvadoran Guatemalan. No, I scream, no, you can't do that and talk about justice. That's what I fought for all my life. Against my brother. For my brothers. And against us, my children exclaimed. Against our well-being, our assimilation into progress, into opportunity, into the North. Against our own uncle, who could not protect us. You wouldn't allow it. You condemned yourself and you condemned us. What do we have to thank you for? Our poor mother was a saint. She put up with everything you did. We have no reason to. You gave us nothing but bitterness. We'll pay you back in kind. Cripple. Paralytic. Whom will you live with? Whom are you going to pester and drive to despair now? Who's going to get you up, put you to bed, clean you, dress you, undress you, feed you spoonful by spoonful, take you out in your wheelchair, sit you in the sun so you don't shrivel up? Who's going to wipe the snot off your nose, brush your teeth, smell your gases, cut your nails, wipe your ass, clean the wax out of your ears, shave you, comb your hair, put deodorant on you, fasten your bib when you eat, make sure the drool doesn't drip down your chin, who? Who's got the time, will, and money to help you? Me, your son who has to cross the border every day at dawn to work at Woolworth's? Me, your daughter who got a job as a forelady in an assembly plant on this side? Your grandson who doesn't even remember you, who makes burritos in a Mexican restaurant on the gringo side? Your granddaughter who also works in the assembly plant? Do you think they don't see your brother in the newspapers, saying, doing, traveling, with rich men, beautiful babes? Our children, your grandchildren, who barely made it through high school on the American side and only want to enjoy the music, clothes, cars, universal envy you left them out of ineptitude, out of generosity toward everyone but your own? Those sentences echo in my head. They resound like loose stones in a swift and swirling river. I wish the river would grow calm as it enters the sea. Instead, it smashes against the sandbar of its own waste. It accumulates sediment, garbage, mud. Mud you are and to mud you will return. Mud. Muddy. My muddy brother Leonardo. Leonardo Muddy. My name. My own. I don't have it. It was torn from me. I can't be admitted to a hospital. Or even a home. My name is on the blacklists. Here and there. I've been stripped of my rights. Agitator. Communist. Entry denied. Not even charity for this disturber of the peace. Let his own people take care of him. My labels were ripped out. A diaper was pinned on me. I was seated in this chair. I was abandoned at the line. The line of oblivion. The place where I don't know my name. The place where I am but am not. The vague intermediate zone between my life and my death. We're sorry, we can't let him in here. Or here. You understand. Charges were brought against him. He's not trustworthy. He's a marked man. He's got the worst political history. He's not loyal. Here or there. He's a red. Let the people take care of him. Or the Russians. Don't let him compromise our workers. Here or there. Confederation of Mexican Workers. American Federation of Labor. Freedom, yes. Communism,
no.
Democracy, well, let's see. They would have killed me. And it would have been a good thing. Cowards. They've abandoned me to chance. To the elements. To anonymity. I heard them: If we leave him without a name, he'll be taken in, someone will feel sorry for him. His very name is cursed. And he spatters it on the rest of us. He's our yellow star. The cross of our calvary. We're doing him a favor. If nobody knows who he is, they'll feel compassion for him. They'll take him in. They'll give him the care we neither can nor want to give him. Let someone else deal with him. Hypocrites. Sons of bitches. No, not that. They're Camelia's children. She was a saint. But you can be the child of a saint and still be a bastard. The children of wretchedness, that's who they are. What can be going through their heads that they'd do this to an old man, their father? What's wrong with the world? What has broken? Nothing, I tell myself. Everything's the same. Ingratitude and rage aren't something new. There are many kinds of abandonment. There are many orphans. Young and old. Children and even the dead. I wish I could ask Camelia if she remembers. What did we do to our children that they should treat me this way? There must be something I've forgotten. Something not even they recall. Something so much a part of our blood that neither they nor I know what it is. A fear perhaps. Perhaps neither the hospital nor the home nor the union would slam the door in my face. Perhaps it's just my children's idea of fun. They find excuses. They want to do what they've done. It gives them satisfaction. It makes them laugh, they get even, they feel the itch of the worst of all evils. Gratuitous evil—because it has no price, it makes a little circus of pleasure in the gut. I'm one more orphan. The orphan of evil. The orphan of my own children, who may well merely be lovers of comfort rather than perverse. Indifferent but not exactly cruel. I can no longer do anything. Even speak. Even move. I can barely see. But the sun's coming up. The night was more generous than the day. It allowed itself to be watched. The dawn blinds me. I think about orphans. Young and old. Children and even the dead. I hear them. Their sounds reach me. The noise of feet. Some bare. Others strong, stamping the heels of their boots. Others scrape their toenails. Others are silenced by rubber soles. Others mingle with the earth. The sound of a huarache. A sound without huaraches. Chihuahua, how many Apaches, how many Indians, without huaraches. Never take a step without huaraches, my father would say. I hear the footsteps and I'm afraid. I'm going to pray again, even if I pee. Blessed be the soul and the Lord who gives it to us. Blessed be the day and the Lord who gives it to us. Sunrise. The run rises with silhouettes I watch from my chair. Posts and cables. Barbed-wire fences. Pavements. Dung heaps. Tin roofs. Cardboard houses perched on the hillsides. Television antennas scratching the ravines. Garbagemen. Infinite numbers of garbagemen. Plantations of garbage. Dogs. Don't let them come near me. And the sound of feet. Swift. Crossing the border. Abandoning the earth. Seeking the world. Earth and world, always. We have no other home. And I sit here immobile, abandoned at the line of oblivion. Which country do I belong to? Which memory? Which blood? I hear the footsteps around me. Finally I imagine everyone looking at me and, as they look, inventing me. I can no longer do anything. I depend on them, the ones who run from one border to the next. The ones I defended all my life. Successfully. Unsuccessfully. Both. They must look at me now to create me with their stares. If they stop staring, I'll become invisible. I have nothing left but them. But they, too, tell me that I do not look at them, because I don't name them. But I already told them. I can't know the names of the millions of women and men. They respond as they pass, fleeting, swift: Say the name of the last one. Call the last woman lovingly. That will be the name of everyone—a single man, a single woman, they are all men and all women. The day is reborn. Will it bring my own name among its promises? I've been talking to myself all night. Is this the perfect state of truth, of comprehension? The solitary man who speaks only to himself? The night comforted me by making me think so. By day I plead for someone to come say something to me. Anything. Help me. Insult me, as long as he named me. Mud name. Mud soul. Muddy. Camelia, my wife. Leonardo, my brother. I've forgotten the names of my children and grandchildren. I don't know the name of the last man who names all men. I don't know the name of the last woman who loves in the name of all women. Still, I do know that in this final name of the final man and in this final tenderness of the final woman lies the secret of all things. It isn't the final name. It isn't the final man. It isn't the last woman and her warmth. It's only the last being who crosses the frontier after the one who went before him but before the one who follows. The sun comes up and I look at the movement on the frontier. Everyone crosses the line where I am stopped. They run, some in fear, others in joy. But they don't begin or end. Their bodies follow or precede. Their words as well. Confused. Unintelligible. Is that what they want to tell me? That there is no beginning, no end? Is that what they're saying in not looking at me or speaking to me or paying any attention to me: Don't worry? Nothing begins, nothing ends. Is that what they're telling me? We recognize you in not acknowledging you, not noticing you, not addressing you? Do you feel exceptional, seated there, paralyzed and mute, with no labels to identify you, with a diaper and an open fly? You're our equal. We'll make you part of us. Another one like us. Our interminable origin. Our interminable destiny. Are these the words of freedom? And what freedom is that? Will they thank me for it? Will they recognize that I helped them achieve it? What freedom is that? Is it the freedom to fight for freedom? Even if it's never attained? Even if it fails? Is that the lesson of these men and women who are running, taking advantage of the first light to cross the line of oblivion? What do they forget? What do they remember? What new mixture of oblivion and remembrance awaits them on the other side? I am between earth and world. To which did I belong more when I was alive? To which do I belong more now that I am dead? My life. My struggle. My conviction. My wife. My children. My brother. My brothers and sisters who cross the line even if they're killed or humiliated. Give a name to the person who wanted to give them a name. Give a word to the person who spoke in their defense. Don't abandon me as well. Don't avoid me. I'm still inevitable. Despite everything. In that I resemble death. I am inevitable. In that I'm also like life. I'm possible only because I'm going to die. It would be impossible if I were mortal. My death will be the guarantee of my life, its horizon, its possibility. Death is already my country. What country? What memory? What blood? The dark earth and the world that dawns commingle in my soul to formulate these questions, mix them, solder them to my most intimate being. To what I am, to what my parents were or what my children will be. The feet run, crossing the line. There is no reason to fear their sound. What do they take, what do they bring? I don't know. What's important is that they take and bring. That they mix. Change. That the world doesn't stop moving. An old man, immobile, mute, tells them so. But he's not blind. Let them mix. Let them change. That's what I fought for. The right to change. The glory of knowing we're alive, intelligent, energetic, givers and receivers, human containers of languages, bloods, memories, songs, forgotten things, things avoidable and not, of fatal angers, of hopes reborn, of injustices to be corrected, work to be compensated, dignity to be respected, of dark earth here and there, that world created by us and by no one else—here or there? I don't want to hate. But I do want to fight. Even if I'm immobile, in a mute chair, without any identification. I want to be. My God, I want to Be. Who will I be? Like a stream their names enter my gaze, my eyes, my tongue, crossing all the borders of the world, breaking the crystal that separates them. They come from the sun and the moon, from the night and the day. With difficulty I raise my face to look at the face of the sun. What falls on my forehead is a drop. And then another. Harder and harder. A downpour. A harsh rain, here where it never rains. The feet hurry. The voices grow louder. The day I expected to be bright becomes cloudy. The men and women run, cover their heads with newspapers, shawls, sweaters, jackets. The rain drums on the tin roofs. The rain swells the mountains of garbage. The rain pours down the ravines, washing them clean, runs along the canyons, rinsing them, pulling along whatever it finds—a tire, a porch, a pot, a cellophane wrapper, an old sock, a rush of mudslide, a cardboard house, a television antenna. The world seems dragged along by the water, flooded, companionless, divorced from the earth … I think we're going to drown. I think it's the second deluge. The incessant rain washes away the line where I'm stopped. The swift feet leave tracks on the pavement as if it were sand. They approach. I hear the howling of the sirens. I hear the loud voices, shocked, beneath the rain. The swift wet footsteps. The hands that search me. The lights of the ambulances. Questioning, uncertain, spinning, wandering, groping, seeking … An old man, they say. An immobile old man. An old man who doesn't speak. An old man with an open fly. An old man with a urine-soaked diaper. An old man with very old, very wet clothes. An old man with sturdy shoes, the kind that leave a mark on the pavement as if it were a beach. An old man with clothing whose labels have been torn off. An old man without a wallet. An old man with no identification: no passport, no credit cards, no voter registration card, no social security card, no calendar for the new year, no green card to cross frontiers. An old man with no plastic. An old man with a stiff neck. An old man with clear eyes open to the heavens, eyes washed by the rain. An old man with his ears open, his earlobes dripping rain. An abandoned old man. Who could have done this? Doesn't he have children, relatives? Something's funny here. Where do we take him? He's going to get pneumonia. Put him in the ambulance quickly. He's old. Let's see if we can find out who he is. Who the miserable bastards can be. An old man. A nice old man. An old man who's fighting against death. An old man by the name of Emiliano Barroso. What a pity I'll never be able to say it. How wonderful that I finally remembered it. It's me.