Norte Read online

  Wasn’t it a contradiction allowing Jesús to spend the majority of his time with the Aryan Brotherhood when they were ruthless against blacks and Latinos?

  “Nah,” Randy would say. “They make good slaves.”

  Jesús thought he was right. He didn’t like the blacks, and the Latinos were filthy and abusive, worse than animals. Whenever one of them tried to approach him, he pretended he didn’t speak Spanish.

  He stopped spending all his time in his cell. His uniform hung loose on his frame since he hardly ate—the gruel they served for dinner made him sick, a blend of chicken, cornbread, and grits—so he started lifting weights and hanging out in the yard during the day.

  Thanks to Randy’s influence, he began reading books and newspapers from the library. He read about Richard Ramirez, the Night Stalker. Talk about a potent Latino: he’d committed thirteen rapes and murders in California. No compassion for his victims whatsoever. He read up on the First and Second World Wars, about Vietnam. After listening to Randy, he agreed that Hitler was right. He reached the conclusion that wars were necessary for human survival. Life was a constant struggle. Only the strong survived, the most cunning, the best.

  “When you get outta the can,” Randy told him, “remember to join the Libertarian Party. The government’s a piece of shit. They gave niggers too many rights.”

  That was what he’d do.

  When Waco happened, when the FBI killed the leader of the Branch Davidian sect and several children, the Aryan Brotherhood in Starke took it personally. Jesús heard Randy say that it was a big government conspiracy to get rid of powerful white people like them. “They better be prepared for a fight when we get out. We ain’t gonna let them rest.”

  And Sarajevo? Clinton sent planes to the Balkans to take advantage of the war and bomb cities and decimate entire populations. “That’s where the whitest races of all came from,” Randy explained.

  Jesús decided it had been naive of him to think the government ever gave a hoot about them. Randy was right to suspect everything.

  He would leave Starke prepared for the coming fight. But which one? The Aryan Brotherhood might be right, but they didn’t think much of him. He wasn’t really interested in joining their struggle anyway. His interest was merely provisional, circumstantial.

  His was a solitary fight. Against the government. Against everyone.

  One night Jesús dreamed that a sinister force arose from the deepest part of the darkness and came looking for him. It surrounded him and enveloped him entirely, then stole his heart. His cell lit up with a blinding flash of light. He saw himself covering his eyes and rising from his bunk, while at the same time he could feel himself lying there without moving, without opening his eyes, as if he had split into two.

  The energy had no face or body. But it said that he belonged to it now, that he no longer had a will of his own and he had to do what it said. The voice said it was half man and half angel and couldn’t die. He told Jesús it was time to prepare for the deluge of fire and ashes to come down, and the rivers of blood that awaited him upon release. He had been sent there to fulfill a mission of purification. This was part of his journey through the desert, in preparation for the final battle.

  Jesús woke up trembling and drenched in sweat. He was convinced that he had just been visited by the Unnamed.

  He thought about going to talk to the prison chaplain, tell him what happened. No, Jesús thought, he would never understand.

  He did tell Randy, who gave him a few pats on the back.

  “What a lucky shit, Speedy, Son of fucking Christ! I been waitin ma whole life for the Unnamed to appear. Mysterious are His ways, bro. He goes and calls upon a fucking Mexican. Ain’t that just proof of His greatness!”

  “What I gotta do, buey?”

  “Get yerself some toilet paper and write the gospel down same as the Lord shared it with you.”

  His comment pissed Jesús off: he’s making fun of me and thinks I don’t know.

  Orlando got him a few sheets of rolling paper. He wrote BOOK OF REVELATIONS at the top of one, followed by a few lines describing Unnamed’s visit.

  It took six years for Jesús to finally be released from Starke Prison on good behavior.

  When they gave him back his belongings, the blazer was missing from the bag, so he complained to the officer who walked him to the door. The officer laughed at him and suggested that he file a complaint with the prison director.

  The Migra was waiting for him outside, to escort him to the Mexican border for immediate deportation.

  THREE

  1

  Landslide, 2008

  Fabián called back several times. I didn’t always answer, and when I did, I would barely listen to what he said. The more I rejected his calls, the more fascinated he became. He wrote emails. One of them said: “i love you but i’m not in love with you. i love you but I love many people. i wish I could write poetry and tell you how i feel but i can’t. you shouldn’t feel bad. someone like you can’t feel that way. but maybe you’re fine and it’s just the wee hours, the three o’clock silence that makes me have these thoughts, or maybe it’s the silence of six o’clock, because there are silences and there are silences, and nothing matters to me as much as you do.” Another one read: “angst, my companion, but i survived and that’s why i’m prepared for the abyss. i have little faith and plenty of reasons. it’s what destroys me because i want to be with you.”

  And that’s how we started meeting in cafés again and going to bookstores together—in Comics for Dummies we bought bound collections of Betty Boop and Krazy Kat—and got lost in the dive bars on Sixth Street that always reeked of weed. He would show up for lunch at Taco Hut and interact with my coworkers (Osvaldo was Panamanian and tempted to join the army; Sabrina came from Lubbock and read Nora Roberts novels on her break; Mike made fun of Fabián’s accent and was obsessed with Faith Hill).

  Once I prepared a majao for him with dried beef my mother sent to me. It wasn’t as tasty as the ones my Aunt Vicenta prepared in Santa Cruz, but Fabián seemed to like it, and luckily he’d never tried the dish before to know the difference. We went to the movies one Saturday at the university theater, bought the biggest bucket of popcorn they had with an XL Coke, and watched a double feature of Hitchcock movies, sneaking furtive kisses in the darkness. Thanks to those rare moments of fulfillment, I slipped back into the world I had abandoned, back to a place where the man I was so desperately attracted to would spend days at a time in bed, struggling to control his panic attacks, and others when he would return to his office and his writing desk, determined to reimmerse himself in his work, still teetering on the verge of a collapse.

  Sam called to apologize, and I said forget it, but when he suggested we have a coffee I begged off. La Jodida stopped by the restaurant to say hello but then just stood there in silence. I had nothing to say, so she left and then I felt bad.

  I tried to develop a storyboard for a piece I had in mind, set in a town of vampires and zombies who coexisted peacefully—except for a few skirmishes between fundamentalist vampires and purist zombies—but then Samantha showed up. I wanted to blend my readings of Hamilton with Rulfo and use a touch of the imagery from the Silent Hill video game. I hadn’t figured out yet how to work the perspective with the squares on the page, and the colors; I was trying to innovate, but I didn’t quite know how to go about it.

  Chuck had recommended a stack of magazines with supernatural themes, variations on superheroes. I drew Samantha wearing black boots up to her knees, a black jacket, and gloves, and thought that what I was really drawing was some man’s wet dream. I threw the notebook in the trash. Fabián told me not to get discouraged, my drawings had more spirit to them than before; he kept giving me ideas so that my story would be “truly apocalyptic.”

  We decided we weren’t going to pretend this time around, and attended department receptions together. Konwicki, the Pole, seemed bothered to see me, as if he were making good use of his moral super
iority to make assumptions about me (or maybe the reason was simpler, he remembered my paper mocking “Agustín Yañez, precursor to Agamben” the semester I left). I couldn’t care less what he thought now; I wasn’t a student anymore.

  One day when I was in the hallway leaving Fabián’s office, Ruth Camacho-Stokes approached and greeted me warmly, as sweet and affable as ever. She was dressed in a red-and-white checked skirt and horrendousorange Crocs. Her shoulder drooped with the weight of a bagful of books from the library. She told me she wanted to give me something.

  “I’ll never forget those papers you wrote for my class,” she said. “Admittedly, they lacked a bit of theoretical depth, but your voice was strong and it made me forgive the other shortcomings. I’m preparing a dossier for the Martín Ramírez exhibit next semester, and I thought you might find the time to write a text inspired by one of his drawings. It doesn’t have to be academic, that’s why I thought of you.”

  She pulled a hardcover book out of her bag. It was an expensive coffee-table edition full of color reproductions, some of which were 3-D popouts.

  “This might help motivate you.”

  “To be honest,” I steeled myself, “this type of illustration doesn’t really appeal to me.”

  Ruth wouldn’t take no for an answer. “Just think about it, maybe you’ll come up with something. We have until January, you still have a few months to think it over.”

  I accepted but without committing myself fully. She smiled and then whispered: “You’re good for Fabián, you know, I admire your patience, though as colleagues we’ve been more lenient with him than we should.”

  “It must not have been easy. Knowing him to be so brilliant and then, once his wife left him, watching the shipwreck . . .”

  She looked at me, flabbergasted.

  “Oh that’s not the chronology of things, my dear,” she sighed. “Fabián left her, it wasn’t the other way around. When we hired him, he’d already been having—um—problems, but he could hide it well. His book was published, the reviews were spectacular, and we decided to look the other way. Little by little, we started hearing about some messy stuff going on with Mayra. So yes, the cause and effect gets a little complicated. It’s not so easy to decipher, maybe his anxiety is what led him down this path. Maybe it was the early success. Or maybe neither one, maybe it’s just something in his personality. We’re all addicted to something, aren’t we? It’s just that some more than others. Who knows?”

  After Ruth left, I kept thinking about Mayra. Till then I had thought Mayra was the culprit, the one who’d opened this black hole into which a despairing Fabián had been falling. Now there was a different version: him as perpetrator.

  The professor had said she admired my patience. Maybe she really meant something else: she was amazed at my stupidity.

  I was sitting on a bench in the Arts Quad, reading Black Hole and waiting for Fabián to get out of a meeting, when Sam showed up. His hands were buried in his jacket pockets; he was chewing gum and made an effort to appear unconcerned. I had been avoiding him, trying not to let him get to me, the gloomy unrequited lover bit, his splendid bravura of despair and complete surrender to a lost cause. But it was too late now, I was already infected, we were being cast in similar life roles. And in his case, I was the perpetrator. Maybe I had infected him with my own virus. It made me able to understand him better and not feel so bad; you believe you’re praying at the right altar and the strength of your prayers will bring the miracle that transforms reality into what you want it to be.

  He told me that Oprah had chosen a novel by Roberto Bolaño as the book of the month. “It’ll be good for Latin American literature. Readers will be curious to know what else there is besides Bolaño.”

  “It will do a lot of good for Bolaño,” I said. “Readers will want to read more of his books. This country doesn’t allow for more than one ‘great foreign writer’ at a time. Murakami and Sebald already had their turns.”

  “You’re being unfair.”

  “Have you seen how they talk about Bolaño?” I responded. “As if he were a Beat writer, a Latin American Kerouac. Always romanticizing. ‘In Latin America they are still producing the type of writers this hyper-professionalized country isn’t able to because of what’s being taught in the thousands of creative writing programs.’ It goes something like that. I read it in Harper’s.”

  “We’re good at creating legends, that’s for sure,” Sam said. “But also at destroying them. Did you read the New York Times? Now we know that Bolaño didn’t shoot heroin and he wasn’t in Chile for the Pinochet coup. Pretty soon we’ll find out that he never went out, and was more of a bibliophile recluse than Borges. Anyway. I’m thinking about doing my thesis on a chapter of The Savage Detectives. When it’s published, I’ll have to compete with a whole slew of other doctoral theses on Bolaño. I should have been quicker. He’s created an industry.”

  “Bolaño, Inc. A brand name.”

  He talked about an essay comparing Bolaño with Philip K. Dick, and I remembered some scenes from Ubik, though I didn’t see any connection between the two writers.

  “So, how’s he doing,” he asked abruptly.

  “You’re his student. You should know better than me.”

  “My dear. Your level of dedication never ceases to amaze me. You’re blind where he’s concerned. Fabián is never going to change. There’s no way out, it’s been too many years. His colleagues have covered up for him the whole time; they’ve substituted for him in his classes, kept information from the deans about his cancellations, his missed faculty meetings, forgotten students, unwritten letters of recommendation. People are just fed up, which is understandable.”

  “He’ll publish his book and you’ll see how everything is going to change.”

  “And you’ll go live happily ever after in a cabin on a deserted beach in North Vancouver?”

  “Don’t be mean, Sam.”

  “And don’t tell me it hasn’t crossed your mind. How romantic, to run off and live beside someone tormented by the furies. An older man, too. How many years is it? Eleven, twelve?”

  I let myself daydream, contemplating my Converse, until he finally changed the subject to his weekly radio program. His analysis of what he called “the psychopathology of everyday violence” in the US had been very popular among his listeners. He drew up a theoretical framework to the discussion, composed of the usual suspects: Freud and the death drive, Nietzsche and the Superman, Sade and Bataille and the attraction to evil. But the listeners really got hooked on the program’s tabloid feature, the way Sam covered the most extreme cases of serial killers and school mass murderers. His most popular program had been the one dedicated to Columbine.

  “The listeners began a discussion about whether a fifteen-year-old boy, even one as dedicated to evil as Eric Harris, could truly be considered a psychopath. I tried to stay out of it, but to me it’s obvious that he is one. Cultural conditioning of course plays a role, but in cases like Harris’s, nature is so strong there’s no way of treating the psychopathy.”

  “Why don’t you ever talk about your thesis with this kind of enthusiasm? Maybe you should change your project.”

  “Too late. I’ll be good, finish my thesis, and when I’m finally hired, I’ll teach classes with titles like ‘Killing Machines’ and force my students to read Natural Born Killers, and I’ll give quizzes with questions about who was the Railroad Killer or what is The Book of God.”

  “Why not? To each his own.”

  I wish we had been able to find more subjects like that, things we felt passionate about. He wanted to hurt me with the issue of age, but I’d already dealt with it a long time ago and had to admit that the difference attracted me. He said nasty things about Fabián, which only succeeded in getting me to defend him to an absurd extreme; why in the world, for example, had I lied about Fabián and his book?

  Sam got up, winked at me, and left.

  December rolled around, the end of the semester, the
temperate part of winter. We spent a weekend together in San Antonio as if we were a normal, stable couple. We stayed at the apartment of a friend who was in Argentina on a research grant. It was a small, minimalist apartment with a futon thrown on the floor and bare walls and science books everywhere, and an empty fridge. Not a single photograph. “He’s a strange type,” Fabián said. “I met him at college in Buenos Aires. He doesn’t like to accumulate things, and I mean neither possessions nor relationships. He makes a lot of money, but his belongings fit in a single bag.”

  “You should’ve been more like him. You might have avoided a number of problems.”

  “Don’t think I didn’t try. But it’s a little too late now, don’t you think?”

  Fabián was thin and his eyes were sunk deep into his skull; he did what he could to keep his mood light, and devoured his favorite dishes—devil’s shrimp, chilaquiles—displaying an appetite I hadn’t seen before. He washed it all down with Coke Light and didn’t touch any alcoholic beverages.

  We spent another weekend with some friends in El Paso (we were surprised to see the waves of Mexicans pouring in from Juárez, trying to escape the cartel wars and the Mexican government’s desperate attempts to control them). He returned to teaching, resumed his office hours.

  I went back to work in the restaurant, but only part time. I worked the night shift. Luckily I was scheduled along with Mike, who immediately started spouting bad jokes, making me laugh whenever he saw me a little down. When my shift ended, I’d go to Fabián’s house. They were wild times, we experimented a lot with uninhibited sex. One morning he asked me to slap him in the face with all my strength; I was surprised but complied. He told me to stop holding back, that I should let myself go. I slapped him hard; his cheek turned a shocking tone of red and I could tell he had liked it.

  I knew the whole thing was dangerous, but I hadn’t gauged to what extent. I found out one Wednesday when I went to his house from Taco Hut and found him drunk, watching a porno film on television with the volume up full blast. He was lying back in bed without a shirt, his hairless chest dusted with birthmarks. I looked at him and he laughed as if I’d caught him in the middle of a prank.