The Crystal Frontier (28 page)

Not this time. A boy with the speed of a deer came out of the river, soaked, dashed along the shore, and ran right into Mario—into Mario's chest, his green uniform, his insignia, his braid, all his agency paraphernalia—hugging him, the two of them hugging, stuck together because of the moisture of the illegal's body, because of the sweat of the agent's. Who knows why they stayed there hugging like that, panting, the illegal because of his race to avoid the patrol, Mario because of his race to cut him off … Who knows why each rested his head on the other's shoulder, not only because they were exhausted but because of something less comprehensible …

They pull apart to look at each other.

“Are you Mario?” said the illegal.

The agent said he was.

“I'm Eloíno. Eloíno, your godson. Don't you remember? Sure, you remember!”

“Eloíno isn't a name you can forget,” Mario managed to say.

“The son of your pals. I know you from your photos. They told me that if I was lucky I'd find you here.”

“If you were lucky?”

“You're not going to send me back, are you, Godfather?” Eloíno gave him an immense white smile like an ear of corn shining in the night between his wet lips.

“What do you think, you little bastard?” said Mario, furious.

“I'll be back, Mario. Even if you catch me a thousand times, I'll be back another thousand times. And one more for luck. And don't call me a bastard, bastard.” He laughed again and again hugged Mario, the way only two Mexicans know how to hug each other, because the border guard couldn't resist the current of tenderness, affiliation, machismo, confidence, and even trust that there was in a good hug between men in Mexico, especially if they were related …

“Godfather, everybody in our village has to come to work over the summer to pay their debts from winter. You know it. Don't be a pain.”

“Okay. Sooner or later you'll go back to Mexico the way all of you do. That's the only advantage in this thing. You can't live without Mexico. You don't stay here.”

“This time you're mistaken, Godfather. They told me it's going to be harder than ever to get in. This time I'm staying, Godfather. What else is there to do?”

“I know what you're thinking. Once upon a time all this was ours. It was ours first. It will be ours again.”

“Maybe you think that, Godfather, because you're a man of sense, my mother says. I'm here so I can eat.”

“Get going, Godson. Just figure we never saw each other. And don't hug me again, it hurts … I'm hurt enough already.”

“Thanks, Godfather, thanks.”

Mario watched the boy he'd never seen in his life run off. He was no godson or goddamn anything else, for that matter, this Eloíno (what was his real name?). He'd read Mario's name on his badge, that's how he knew it, no mystery there; the enigma lay elsewhere, in the question of why they lived that fiction, why they accepted it so naturally, why two complete strangers had lived a moment like that together …

*   *   *

but the territories were lost even before they were won

the lands did not grow

the population did not increase

the missions grew

the long whip of the Franciscans grew, the whip of implacable colonizers moved by the philosophy of the common good above individual liberty, the letter arrives with the whip, the word of God is written in blood, faith arrives as well,

whip for the Pueblos because the brothers previously used it on themselves, doing penitence and inflicting it: but

the rebellions increased,

Indians against Indians, Pueblos against Apaches,

Indians against Spaniards, Pimas against whites,

until they culminated in the great rebellion of the Pueblos in 1680, it took them two weeks to liberate their lands, to destroy and sack, to kill twenty-one missionaries, burn the harvest, expel the Spaniards, and realize they could no longer live without them, their crops, their shotguns, their horses: Bernardo de Gálvez, a little more than twenty years old and with the energy of more than twenty men, established peace by means of a ruse:

the technique for subjugating the wild Indians of the Río Grande is to give them rifles made of soft metal with long, flimsy barrels so they'll depend on Spain for their replacement parts, “The more rifles, the less arrows,” says the young, energetic Río Grande peacemaker and future viceroy of New Spain, Gálvez of Galveston,

let the Indians lose the ability to shoot arrows, which kill more Spaniards than badly used rifles:

“Better a bad peace than a pyrrhic victory,” says Gálvez for the ages,

but just plain peace requires inhabitants, and there are only three thousand in the río grande, río bravo, they invite families from Tenerife, they give them land, free entry, the title of hidalgo, fifteen families from the Canary Islands come to San Antonio, exhausted by the voyage from Santa Cruz to Veracruz, colonists come from Málaga, exhausted by the voyage to the Río Grande,

and the first gringos arrive:

the territories were lost before they were won

JUAN ZAMORA

Juan Zamora had a nightmare, and when he woke up to find that what he'd dreamed was real, he went to the border and now he's here standing among the demonstrators. But Juan Zamora doesn't raise his fists or spread his arms in a cross. In one hand he carries a doctor's bag. And under each arm, two boxes of medicine.

He dreamed about the border and saw it as an enormous bloody wound, a sick body, mute in the face of its ills, on the point of shouting, torn by its loyalties, and beaten, finally, by political callousness, demagoguery, and corruption. What was the name of the border sickness? Dr. Juan Zamora didn't know and for that reason he was here, to relieve the pain, to give back to the United States the fruits of his studies at Cornell, of the scholarship Don Leonardo Barroso got for him fourteen years earlier, when Juan was a boy and lived through some sad loves …

On his white shirt, Juan wears a pin, the number 187 canceled by a diagonal line that annuls the proposition approved in California, denying Mexican immigrants education and health benefits. Juan Zamora had arranged an invitation to a Los Angeles hospital and had seen that Mexicans no longer went there for care. He visited Mexican neighborhoods. People were scared to death. If they went to the hospital—they told him—they would be reported and turned over to the police. Juan told them it wasn't true, that the hospital authorities were human, they wouldn't report anyone. But the fear was unbearable. The illnesses too. One case here, another there, an infection, pneumonia, badly treated, fatal. Fear killed more than any virus.

Parents stopped sending their children to school. A child of Mexican origin is easily identified. What are we going to do? the parents asked. We pay more, much, much more in taxes than what they give us in education and services. What are we going to do? Why are they accusing us? What are they accusing us of? We're working. We're here because they need us. The gringos need us. If they didn't, we wouldn't come.

Standing opposite the bridge from Juárez to El Paso, Juan Zamora remembers with a grimace of distaste the time he lived at Cornell. He doesn't want his personal sorrows to interfere with his judgment about what he saw and understood then about the hypocrisy and arrogance that can come over the good people of the United States. Juan Zamora learned not to complain. Silently, Juan Zamora learned to act. He does not ask permission in Mexico to attend to urgent cases, he leaps over bureaucratic obstacles, understands social security to be a public service, will not abandon those with AIDS, drug addicts, drunks, the entire dark and foamy tide the city deposits on its banks of garbage.

“Who do you think you are? Florence Nightingale?”

The jokes about his profession and his homosexuality stopped bothering Juan a long time ago. He knew the world, knew his world, was going to distinguish between the superficial—he's a fag, he's a sawbones—and the necessary—giving some relief to the heroin addict, convincing the family of the AIDS victim to let him die at home, hell, even having a mescal with the drunk …

Now he felt his place was here. If the U.S. authorities were denying medical services to Mexican workers, he, Florence Nightingale, would become a walking hospital, going from house to house, from field to field, from Texas to Arizona, from Arizona to California, from California to Oregon, agitating, dispensing medicines, writing prescriptions, encouraging the sick, denouncing the inhumanity of the authorities.

“How long do you plan to visit the United States?”

“I have a permanent visa until the year 2010.”

“You can't work. Do you know that?”

“Can I cure?”

“What?”

“Cure, cure the sick.”

“No need to. We've got hospitals.”

“Well, they're going to fill up with illegals.”

“They should go back to Mexico. Cure them there.”

“They're going to be incurable, here or there. But they're working here with you.”

“It's very expensive for us to take care of them.”

“It's going to be more expensive to take care of epidemics if you don't prevent diseases.”

“You can't charge for your services. Did you know that?”

Juan Zamora just smiled and crossed the border.

Now, on the other side, he felt for an instant he was in another world. He was overwhelmed by a sensation of vertigo. Where would he begin? Whom would he see? The truth is he didn't think they'd let him in. It was too easy. He didn't expect things to go that well. Something bad was going to happen. He was on the gringo side with his bag and his medicines. He heard a squeal of tires, repeated shots, broken glass, metal being pierced by bullets, the impact, the roar, the shout: “Doctor! Doctor!”

*   *   *

the gringos came (who are they, who are they, for God's sake, how can they exist, who invented them?)

they came drop by drop,

they came to the uninhabited, forgotten, unjust land the Spanish monarchy and now the Mexican republic overlooked,

isolated, unjust land, where the Mexican governor had two million sheep attended by twenty-seven hundred workers and where the pure gold of the mines of the Real de Dolores never returned to the hands of those who first touched that precious metal,

where the war between royalists and insurgents weakened the Hispanic presence,

and then the constant war of Mexicans against Mexicans, the anguished passage from an absolutist monarchy to a democratic federal republic:

let the gringos come, they too are independent and democratic,

let them enter, even illegally, crossing the Sabinas River, wetting their backs, sending the border to hell, says another energetic young man, thin, small, disciplined, introspective, honorable, calm, judicious, who knows how to play the flute: exactly the opposite of a Spanish hidalgo

his name is Austin, he brings the first colonists to the Río Grande, the Colorado, and the Brazos, they are the old three hundred, the founders of gringo texanity, five hundred more follow them, they unleash the Texas fever, all of them want land, property, guarantees, and they want freedom, protestantism, due process of law, juries of their peers,

but Mexico offers them tyranny, Catholicism, judicial arbitrariness

they want slaves, the right to private property,

but Mexico abolished slavery, assaulting private property,

they want the individual to be able to do whatever the hell he wants

Mexico, even though it no longer has it, believes in the Spanish authoritarian state, which acts unilaterally for the good of all

now there are thirty thousand colonists of U.S. origin in the río grande, río bravo, and only about four thousand Mexicans,

conflict is inevitable: “Mexico must occupy Texas right now, or it will lose it forever,” says the Mexican statesman Mier y Terán,

Desperate, Mexico seeks European immigrants,

but nothing can stop the Texas fever,

a thousand families a month come down from the Mississippi, why should these cowardly, lazy, filthy Mexicans govern us? this cannot be God's plan!

the pyrrhic victory at the Alamo, the massacre at Goliad: Santa Anna is not Gálvez, he prefers a bad war to a bad peace,

here are the two face-to-face at San Jacinto:

Houston, almost six feet tall, wearing a coonskin cap, a leopard vest, patiently whittling any stick he finds nearby,

Santa Anna wearing epaulets and a three-cornered hat, sleeping his siesta in San Jacinto while Mexico loses Texas: what Houston is really carving is the future wooden leg of the picturesque, frivolous, incompetent Mexican dictator

“Poor Mexico, so far from God and so close to the United States,” another dictator would famously say one day, and in a lower voice, another president: “Between the United States and Mexico, the desert”

JOSÉ FRANCISCO

Sitting on his Harley-Davidson on the Yankee side of the river, José Francisco watched with fascination the unusual strike on the Mexican side. It wasn't a sit-down but a raising up—of arms displaying the muscle of poverty, the sinew of insomnia, the wisdom of the oral library of a people that was his own, José Francisco said with pride. Perched on his bike, the tip of his boot resting on the starter, he wondered if this time, with the fracas going on on the other side, both patrols might stop him because he looked so weird, with his shoulder-length hair, his cowboy hat, his silver crosses and medals, and his rainbow-striped serape jacket. His only credible document was his moon face, open, clean-shaven, like a smiling star. Even though his teeth were perfect, strong, and extremely white, they, too, were disturbing to anyone who didn't look like him. Who'd never been to the dentist? José Francisco.