Norte Read online

  No cross should have Christ nailed to it, he thought. He was as absent as his father before him.

  She turned around: she didn’t look a day older. She saw him, and there was no hint of surprise in her expression. She brought him his breakfast, sat down beside him, asked if he wanted anything else.

  He didn’t answer, just bit into the tortilla.

  She ate in silence. He did the same, his gaze fixed on his plate.

  She looked at him as if she could see straight through him and fix her gaze on the soot-stained wall behind him.

  “You took off just like your father,” she finally said. “Everyone runs away from this place. In the end, all that remains are voices.”

  “María Luisa?”

  “She left too. She lives with Jeremías, he’s a hardworking man. She has a son. All I ask is that you don’t hurt her.”

  Jesús felt a pang in his heart. The trip had been useless, then.

  He asked where she lived.

  “In New Mexico. I don’t have the address. Jeremías’s brother might know.”

  Jesús stood up and carried his plate over to the sink, then walked into the bedroom. It seemed smaller now, and the walls were bare, stripped of the flashy colors of his wrestling posters. The floor where his mattress had been was now split in two, as if an earthquake had wanted to pull one side of the room away from the other. As if someone had cast a spell, a hex strong enough to turn this tiny paradise into a grimy black hole.

  His mother and father’s bed was still there. His mother and María Luisa’s bed. His and María Luisa’s bed.

  Nobody, nothing, never. What if that’s all the truth there ever was? What if he had never really lived there and his mother was right to behave as if his visit wasn’t really happening?

  He walked out of the bedroom and turned for one last look at the bed. Whatever tricks reality was using to mess with his head, they didn’t stand a chance against his memory: it had been true, all of it.

  He didn’t want to approach the bed but observed it from the distance, feeling edgy, as if what had gone on there had the power to take him places where the best thing he could do was clutch a knife.

  His mother escorted him to the door.

  He asked her for Jeremías’s brother’s address; she gave it to him. He said a silent goodbye with an embrace. She let him; her limp body offered no resistance, but neither did she receive his hug with warmth.

  Jesús walked out onto the street. The sharp daylight blinded him for a moment before he slowly recovered the sight of things.

  Once he’d visited Jeremías’s brother and secured his sister’s address, Jesús went on a sotol bender in cantina Paso del Norte—a Chinese couple waited on him, the jukebox was stocked by someone with an abusive passion for Los Tigres and Juan Gabriel, a cat snoozed on a table beside an old fart playing solitaire—and spent hours reminiscing over that glorious afternoon he spent at the circus with his father and María Luisa. The only thing he remembered of the show that day was a stubborn goat that wouldn’t budge despite the menacing lashes of the tamer’s whip, and two clowns parodying a wrestling match. The three of them sat perched on rough planks; his feet were sunk into the layer of straw thrown over the ground, and he stared obsessively at María Luisa, captivated, hypnotized by the reactions on her face. He couldn’t have cared less about the trapeze artists, the sword swallower or dwarf contortionists, what compelled him was watching how María Luisa experienced the spectacle. She expressed awe, fear, tension, sorrow, wonder. He had thought, or at least now in the cantina Paso del Norte he believed he had thought, that he should never, ever part from her for the rest of his life. Everything would be as it should be, as long as he could continue relishing the way she relished everything so passionately.

  How would she react when she saw him? How would he react?

  He had imagined this reunion so many times when he was in Starke that he hadn’t really considered the implications. Was he prepared for her rejection, her disappointment, her aversion? He was no longer that little boy with the mischievous twinkle in his eye who liked to play outdoors with his sister. Nor was he the restless boy of those few days spent together before that night when, though their lives were moving in different directions, they had shared secrets and complicities.

  At times he was consumed by rage and thought that perhaps the knife was the best thing for her too. Fucking sow. What was she doing with that cabrón Jeremías. What was she doing with a son?

  He asked the Chinaman for a paper and pencil. He started writing a letter to her right there at the counter.

  “Dear litle sister I see all is good I alway want to see yu and hab think that”

  “Dear sister all I wan say to yu is that”

  “Litle sister lots a things hapen I wan yu to no I keep yu in my hart”

  “Sister sister life seprate us but mie fist is ful of”

  “Dear sister is good see that lif is good to yu, I just”

  “Fucking sow idiota kill idiots KILL THEM ALL.”

  He staggered out of the cantina boozed up and once he was outside, the street rushed straight at him. He tried to get back onto his feet but wasn’t able to; eventually he just passed out. Two adolescents who were passing by pushed his inert body to the curb so he wouldn’t be run over.

  Jesús came to around midnight, numb from the cold.

  He had a tough time getting up. When he finally did, the first thing that popped into his mind was how he was going get to Albuquerque to find her.

  Jesús no longer cared about what happened years ago. It was time to concentrate on what lay ahead.

  When he arrived in Juárez, he gathered all the money he had hidden in the station locker and, taking Miguel’s advice to heart, went to live in a town called Rodeo, in Durango, some two hundred kilometers due southeast. It wasn’t easy to get there—the only way was by a winding mountain road—but that’s just what Jesús was looking for, at least for the time being: isolate himself from the world, get lost. Begin a new life.

  A simple home, white walls, one story, and two rooms, it didn’t cost more than a thousand dollars.

  He started wearing glasses because his eyes hurt. He was drinking less and managed to get his drug use under a modicum of control. He was sleeping better, and the red blotches on his cheeks had disappeared. He wanted to make a good impression on his sister when he saw her.

  Soon he got a job as an English teacher in a small school run by the Fray Bartolomé de las Casas convent. The school stood just in front of the town’s only police station. It made Jesús smile: if they only knew.

  3

  Auburn, California, 1948–1952

  Did he like it, or didn’t he? They had transferred him to a bigger building. They said he’d be better off here, he’d have more space. It was true enough, there were more than a hundred spacious buildings connected by roomy hallways with nice tall windows looking out over the surrounding gardens and the walls that separated the building from the roadway. But there were more people here too, wandering around aimlessly. Many of them had some kind of physical deformity—crippled or one-eyed, amputees, missing chunks of their faces, their big tongues lolling. All of them were survivors, he understood, of someone else’s war, some war that had been waged far away from Martín’s home. He was now in a great nation of warriors who would soon go to the aid of señor gobierno to burn churches there, just like they had sailed the oceans to attack other nations.

  The nurses and orderlies, dressed in blood-spattered white uniforms, were constantly obliging Martín and his companions to stand in line while they dispensed remedies for this and that. Never gave them any peace. They were like soldiers. Yeah, he reckoned, they were enemy troops after all, and he’d best keep that in mind despite their good manners.

  Early in the morning they roused them with a shrill alarm that went off in all the rooms, and the patients were assembled into rows. Young ones over here, elderly ones over there. Men over here, women over there.


  Fluids and more fluids. Everywhere fluids. In all shades and colors. Reddish, greenish, yellowish. He knew it plain as day now: everything on the inside of a person was liquid, and skin was the outside, like the wall of a dam. Gooey rivers flowing around with every heartbeat. They’ll open his noggin and there’ll be liquid inside there, too.

  He gave nicknames to the orderlies. Whitey, Gitupboy, Little Stepbackwards, Coyote, The Shack, Whachusay. They brought them to the two bathrooms in each of the halls and made them take turns bathing, showering, and dressing. They doled out the meds. They counted constantly to make sure nobody had gone missing or was hurt. Three times a day, twice from sundown to midnight, once in the wee hours.

  Breakfast was served when they were finished in the bathrooms. They were sent back to bed and food was brought on carts. They gave them plastic knives, forks, spoons, and plates. Martín helped collect the dirty dishes and utensils.

  He liked Whitey. Not so much Gitupboy. Little Stepbackwards was OK. Coyote was too, but could get moody; it depended on when you caught him. The Shack was plain nasty. And Whachusay was a nurse, and she was the best of all.

  Order was essential. The doctors came to check on them at specific times. Lights went out at appointed times. In the afternoons they were allowed to play board games or cards, or do crossword puzzles. There was a small movie room. If they behaved, they were allowed to spend time outside in the garden.

  Martín didn’t care for cards and board games. He found a secluded table where he could draw by himself. People approached him to talk every once in a while, but when he didn’t answer they’d leave him alone. Sometimes they’d ask to be drawn. That was the best.

  He sketched the room where he spent most of his time. Walls with windows. He liked to draw what he had inside his skull more than anything. The cinematographer inside his own brain, like that one film he had seen with María Santa Ana a couple of times in Los Altos. The images in his head projected endlessly, but he stopped them and mixed them up with the ones he had seen in magazines, full-color pages with women advertising soaps and washing machines and cars and trains. He drew horses and cowboys. A man sitting at a table by a huge window like a tunnel with a train passing through—everyone thought he was the man in the picture. Crowned virgins, saints in red robes, landscapes with trees, churches, and animals; trains coming and going, endless tracks that crisscrossed the hills. Cars, trucks, and wagons driving through tunnels, lightning bolts everywhere. Diagonal lines, vertical lines, horizontal lines. Undulating wave after wave, enough to make you dizzy, bottomless black on white paper, softer black on brown paper. He liked to create mood, symmetry.

  At times he used charcoal. Other times he preferred colored pencils, graphite, watercolors, wax crayons. He’d sit on the floor and glue loose pages together to make a surface space that was big enough for his drawings. He cut figures out of the magazines to create collages.

  He missed Mr. Walker. He wondered what would be of María Santa Ana.

  What about his daughters? And Candelario?

  One of Martín’s pavilion mates roamed around wearing a blue cape tied around his neck. He would bare his teeth in an evil-looking grin. Another would race around in his wheelchair and spray everyone with an aerosol can. Martín went to great pains to talk to them in the hall or outdoors in the garden, but all he could do was grunt and babble. Then he would laugh. But his laughing annoyed The Shack, who always came running over to tell him to shut up, even though it was hopeless; nobody could make him stop laughing.

  The man with the cloak would cry “I am a hero!” over and over again, and Martín wondered what “jiro” meant. The one in the wheelchair shouted, “My spray will make you invisible!” Martín understood the words, but no one ever disappeared after being sprayed.

  Martín, on the other hand, was able to close his eyes and make them all vanish. Whenever an orderly would take him to one of them rooms where the doctor connected him to cables, he concentrated real hard and the doctor would disappear. The electricity shook him and he tried to keep the pain from existing, but that was impossible. It was easy to make the orderlies and doctors and walls and gardens vanish. It was much harder to make the pain go away. It was always there, somewhere. If not stabbing his head, it was like a hammer bludgeoning his chest, or in the cold water in the bathroom where he stayed until his skin got pruney, or the hot water that turned it pink, or the electricity that shocked him in the room of walls so white that all he wanted to do was draw.

  “Eeeeeeaaaaaa.”

  Martín attended pottery class once a week. He met people from other areas who were interested in drawing and sculpting. He made friends with a güero who relentlessly drew soldiers and cannons, parachutes and airplanes, and a cross that looked like a propeller. He observed the drawings, which were never very good, and they made him think of María Santa Ana’s war. Things were different there. Atanacio had talked about razed churches and horses, destroyed houses and crops, but he never mentioned airplanes and parachutes. Is María Santa Ana still running with the Federales? At times the thought kept him up late into the night, wondering whether she had joined up of her own free will or if everything had been part of her strategy to get behind enemy lines and fight from inside, shouting, “Viva Cristo Rey!”

  He shouldn’t kid himself. He was a prisoner of war. María Santa Ana: a lousy traitor. Maybe he was there because she had alerted the Federales, and señor gobierno was a friend of the United States of the North’s señor gobierno.

  The güero would sit beside him without saying a word. He clapped a lot though, that’s for sure. He clapped whenever he liked something, and when he didn’t like something too. Martín had no idea what the güero really thought of his drawings, but he never seemed to stop applauding them.

  After class Martín liked to go outside. He could spend all his free time with his friend there, in silence. Gitupboy took a photograph of them. Martín didn’t like it because he was smiling in the photo and he’d lost a few teeth. He’d learn how to smile with his lips pursed together for the next one.

  The pottery teacher decided to show some of the drawings by his class. A gentleman would come to see them with students. An art professor who wants to build ties with the community, Martín heard them say. He’s from Romania, Whitey said one day when Martín was taking a bath. “Transylvania, ha ha,” he said. The joke circulated throughout the building: Dracula was coming for a visit.

  They arranged the drawings on the solarium walls. There were colorful ones, and others in black and white; some were done using watercolors, and a few with crayons. There were plenty of yellow suns, windows, and little girls floating on cottony clouds, coddling teddy bears and holding balloons.

  When the gentleman and his students arrived, they remained standing before Martín’s drawing for a long time. It was of an armed horseman riding across wavy hills with a deer at his side. He asked whose drawing it was. The pottery teacher pointed to Martín.

  The man approached him. Dracula, it’s Dracula: Martín’s mind raced. “You have talent,” he said. “You know that?” Martín didn’t respond.

  Dracula asked him through gestures if he could take a drawing as a gift. Martín agreed.

  The art professor left with a satisfied grin.

  From that day on, the man visited him regularly. Martín anxiously awaited the visits, because he brought drawing books and other supplies like crayons and colored pencils. He couldn’t rule out that this was all part of the enemy plot, but he had to admit it was stronger than him. He didn’t want to make the teacher disappear. Though he’d keep on his toes, and the moment he saw anything suspicious, Martín would close his eyes and send the teacher to face his wrath and annihilation.

  A. Ny-ah. Lay. Shun.

  When the professor saw that Martín had new drawings, he’d date them in the lower right margin. “It’s good to record when you did them,” he said. Martín smiled. The drawings were carefully stored in the pottery workshop. Martín was allowed to come and go
freely. He was no longer expected to make beds and clean rooms. Now all he was supposed to do was draw. And he drew. He couldn’t stop drawing. Little sketches, colossal illustrations, some bursting with color, others in various shades of gray. He asked them for magazines, and he cut the illustrations out and glued them to the drawings. He didn’t want the professor to come for a visit and find him empty-handed.

  One day the güero didn’t show up in pottery class. Martín waited for him the next week, but he didn’t come then either. He approached the teacher, holding one of the güero’s drawings. He gestured frantically. Where is he? The teacher brought his hands to his neck. Then he drew a noose on a piece of paper. He expressed grief in his face.

  Martín made the sign of the cross.

  One day in pottery class, they told him he had a visitor. He was a strong, brown-skinned youth. He identified himself as his older brother’s son. Martín didn’t want to see him.

  The director called him into his office and made explanations for things that Martín didn’t understand. In the end, the only thing that was clear was that he had no option but to receive the young man.

  Little Stepbackwards supervised the visit.

  His brother’s son was so moved that he began to cry and embraced him. He said he was working in San Francisco and a paisano came with news that he might have kin in a hospital upstate. He followed his hunch and did some research, and the doctors verified that they had institutionalized him around the same time the family had lost track of him. He had to be his tío Martín.

  “Calma, calma,” Martín said. “What do you mean San Francisco? Where’s that?” He was in the north, way up north, he knew that much. When he came, he remembered, he had passed through a state called Texas with his traveling buddies, and eventually they migrated to California, and slowly but surely they got separated and he was sent up north, up and up, until he finally stopped. The train, it had to be built. The rails, the tracks, the crossties. The steel, the wood, the sweat in the afternoons under the scorching sun out there in the desert and in El Picacho. Sometimes his whole body hurt, though not like now, and accidents had happened, once a steel beam fell on his leg and he limped for a spell, and once a dynamite explosion threw him to the ground and his ears kept on ringing, for how long? A long, long time, in the faraway, that place he wasn’t now, with other folk like him, everyone hoping to go back, never going back, that’s right, that’s right, something in this country made them not go back, made excuses to stay, happy to send money home, but even when no more money, no more job, no nothing, and now what, hey, what, now it’s war, hey, war in Mexico, that’s why he didn’t go back, blame it on señor gobierno, blame it on María Santa Ana.