On that afternoon our visible history unfolded our other history,
the invisible one...
-Octavio Paz
I did not realize he was serious until now, waist deep in the middle of the Río Grande, watching the moon reflect off the ripples like bubble wrap.
I guess that the popular tale begins in Mexico City in October of 1968 when President Ordaz ordered the troops into Tlatelolco. But the story is not one of Tlatelolco – although we were witnesses to the protests against charrismo and tapadismo; the singing in the streets between students from the high schools, like us, and from the University and the Polytechnic school; dodging the bullets in the Plaza de las Tres Culturas, surrounded by tanks and granderos. The banners strung over the Olympic rings – Justicia y Libertad, Victoria, and Venceremos. I remember September, before the killings, when a Uruguayan hid out in a restroom defying the government's illegal entry and occupation of the UNAM – an autonomy preserved to this day. The tanks surrounded the exits of the students who protested. They opened fire on S and I. I remember the blood running down thick against the gentle mountains that night – the normalcy of the next morning. I remember going home the next morning scared that a priísta would take us away forever. The news, for quite some time, told us that four people had been killed that night. Our family was shocked, but not surprised – as if it was normal, which I cannot say it wasn't during those days.
Of course, it was not four dead, but nearly four hundred.
But again, the story is not one of Tlatelolco, although for most Mexicans, including S and I, the division of our lives (public and private) hinged upon this one moment of violence and disregard. Tlatelolco is a catalyst for many of my generation – sometimes pointed to as a reason for the insanity that followed that October in 1968.
I tried not to talk about Tlatelolco; tried not to talk about the PRI. S and I stayed close throughout high school, but having different classes as well as separate interests broke us apart. I was too indebted to the various women in my life as well as the poetry they forced from me. S was much involved in, how else to put it, the present circumstances. Sure, we stayed close – like brothers, almost – but it was S, not I, drifted towards Tlatelolco. I played to our usual tastes on the occasions we would meet together, but S didn't know what he wanted anymore (or was that me)? He'd always be reading the newspapers and asking me about current events, of which I was woefully ill-prepared.
It was on this one afternoon I saw him reading La Noche de Tlatelolco by Elena Poniatowska. It had been two years by that point and we did not talk about that night in 1968 any longer. For, at the time, I didn't give it any relevance (much to my ignorance) but in an effort to make conversation, I said, Someone will write great poetry about Tlatelolco one day. He looked up at me with his brown eyes, pupils dilating, shifting between my two eyeballs and said, with an uncontrolled passion, No one will have to write about this one day. We'll be living it soon enough. I didn't know if this was a slogan or if he genuinely believed this until I saw the way the moonlight blinded me from the sky as well as its reflection off the Río Grande.
The story changes after we graduated high school and both got accepted into the UNAM. I decided to study literature and creative writing. S, naturally, decided to take up history. The economy was nearly in shambles at this point and our parents (needless to say) were not excited about our career choices. How will you get a real job? our mothers would ask. What real jobs do you see? we'd reply.
I spent my first two years chasing women and fun, observing them in my poetry. I joined little groups here and there in an effort to spread my name but the kings of Mexico City in the early seventies reigned and there was little chance for someone like me. S cared little for poetry unless others could eat it, clothe themselves with it, or gain dignity and justice from it. He'd often ask, in the hallways when we crossed paths, if poetry had risen to that level yet. I'd smile. Get in touch with me when it does, he'd opine. After he'd leave, I'd frown to nothing but the empty hallways and laboratories.
I knew I didn't need a degree, but in 1976 I didn't know what else to do. I felt like I wasn't alone at the UNAM in feeling this. S and I had no desire to teach kids to think like us (we had spent the last four years trying to separate our thoughts from the teachers we had to imitate in our term papers). By then I was in love with love and lousy poetry. For the most part, I still am. I'd seen my poetry change over the years – like anyone's thoughts and feelings change. The only problem was standing out in a crowded scene that involved patronage to the greats of our day or complete defiance of everything I thought writing stood for in those strange, unassuming days. I tried my hand at prose, but it was sloppy and always took place in distant lands where the good times were good, the bad times were trivial and the women were never short of abundant. S didn't write, but that didn't mean he didn't think. Of course, he wrote his term papers, like the futility of Madero or the influence of the Plan de Ayala on modern Mexican social life. But the only thing I remember him scribbling was the oft-quoted line by Matrí – Es mejor a pie que vivar arrodillado, it is better to die on your feet than live on your knees – which, no matter how innocuous at the time, is telling.
How could I have known that at the beginning of our final semester I'd be less than a year away from this dreadful river? At this time, I was living north of the University on Insurgentes Sur while S was living on Ignacio Allende so it was difficult to meet more than once at week at best. We'd meet when we could (our missed visits more my fault than his, I'll admit) and drink and talk at local cantinas. Neither of us was into disco or dance so we gravitated to venues with open mics and the like. We'd listen to the singers, dancers, poets (though never myself) but these times were our own. We'd talk about life after school, the new friends we were making daily from the ever growing Latin American diaspora – Chile, Argentina, Guatemala. He'd ask what I was reading. I'd tell him the same answers every time, unfortunately I was never lying. I'd ask him the same. He'd tell me the same answers as well, unfortunately I knew he wasn't lying either. We'd talk México, nationalism, patriotism, activism – what interested S. We never talked poetry or fiction – just polemics.
In that final semester, we had one class together – a European literature course required for graduation. He never came to class or asked for my notes. At this point, I didn't see him much (my fault) and never pressed him for information when I did run into him. He didn't inquire into my life, I didn't inquire into his. Until one day, outside of one of his upper-level history courses, I cornered him. I demanded to know why he wasn't coming to class. It is a waste of my time, he said, learning about white men across the ocean – we see their literature in our literature every day. I wanted to disagree with S. I wanted to say that we've transcended it. I wanted to feel it but S said it was such conviction I could do nothing but blow it off. If you're content with throwing this all away, why don't you do it, I suddenly screamed. The stares of onlookers didn't deter me for once. S placed his books down on a bench. He said, with a smile, I think I'm going to go to the United States. This was obviously the last thing I expected from him just then. All this about the white man and now he's headed for the United States! Do you want to come?, he asked me. Of course not, I replied. You've avoided me all semester (I made him the scapegoat for our problems) and now you want me to come to the US with you? A sí was all he could muster. I shook my head, looked into his eyes and turned toward class. I looked back as I reached the steps to the literature department and he was still standing there, looking at the broken asphalt rippling like a sea current I wade through now with ancient México almost within sight.
Yet I couldn't stay away. I went to Ignacio Allende the next morning and showed up at his apartment. He's out, said his attractive roommate whose name I have since forgotten. She invited me in, but, reluctantly, I declined. I asked where he was. He went to the US Embassy, she said. Does he even know how to get there? I asked. We laughed at S's ignorance. After giving me directions to the Embassy I found S outside yelling something at one of the security guards outside the American fortress. He was yelling about securing his constitutional rights (we had some?) and his right to explore the Americas – free trade as he called it. I thought you liked free trade, he screamed as I approached him in the shadow of the mammoth building. He told me he couldn't get a visa out of México. He assumed he couldn't get one due to his active past, and his being a student didn't help his case. Why do you want to go to the United States anyway? I asked.
He never did tell me. I came to our Europe literature class and we graduated in May – our parents proud but ambivalent. University City was in upheaval with ten thousand graduates lining the streets going the bars and restaurants with family and friends. At the school, amidst the fractured dusk light seeping through the skyscrapers and thick Royal Poinciana trees, I made out S standing alone in a fog of confetti and loud music.
I'm leaving for the United States tonight, he said. I was annoyed, more than anything. I asked him a month ago at the US Embassy why he wanted to go only to be ignored – now what did he want from me? I can't go with you, I told him. At that time I did have other plans – like an internship at a publishing house or a trip to the Gulf coast to visit my family before I found a job teaching or something. He was looking at the failing sun. His eyes looked tired. I try to remember them now. He had not been enthused since those childhood days prior to 1968 – no one had really. The light faded from his impersonal eyes. He looked defeated but did not long for my recognition of his condition or my agreement to go to the United States with him. He must have just wanted me to take note of his sorrow – for reasons I now know all too well.
This is something I have to do Luis, he said. It has been boiling inside of me for years and there is not better time than now. I asked him of his plans upon his (or our) return. He said, It doesn't matter what I do as long as I'm alive. In our moment of weakness, I fell into his eyes and I felt some need to right my wrongs and stand up for friendship, an elusive concept that I was never good at upholding. How long do you need? I asked. He didn't make a move. Three weeks, a month, he said. Why are we going? I asked. He, again, didn't answer but looked up at me. I'll meet you at the bus terminals downtown in two hours, he said.
I debated leaving him downtown to fend for himself. I drew up images of gringos and cowboys and suburbs and vast expanses of land. I packed two weeks worth of clothes, a toothbrush, toothpaste, deodorant and a few books. I wrote my mother a note and took the subway to the downtown terminal. Downtown Mexico City was luscious and vibrant at this time of night yet I couldn't help but reflect on a quote by Fuentes about Mexico City, which reminded me then that the country we were going to was not much different than the one we're in: "We live in a spiritual Dachau surrounded by perishable goods of a consumerist Disneyland." Yet I couldn't wait to leave this holy land for whatever lied ahead. S bought both tickets to Matamoros, outside of Brownsville. S smiled at the thought of Texas – a state that carries baggage with México the size of S's suitcase. We boarded our bus and over the course of a day passed through mountainous Ciudad Valles up Highway 85 on our way to colonial Ciudad Victoria before finally arriving in Matamoros. The ride was fairly comfortable, but S was ill at ease from the first spark of the engine and did not say much. The contrast between Matamoros and Brownsville on the other size of the security fence is damning – like a poet's dreams. I can't recall what I felt that last night we shared in Mexico for my notebook I'd eventually record those feelings in now sits at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean.
Matamoros was disgusting – not less so when juxtaposed to the massive red, white and blue regalia across the intersection of Alvaro Obregon and International Blvd. looking into American affluence. Celebrate the Bicentennial, July 4 in Ringgold Park, I read to S. He was not amused and pressed us west away from the border station that I assumed we'd try to pass through. The border had its cast of lost souls and deadbeats – each one I wanted to take with me to our México.
The Río Grande left a thick, heavy humidity in the air. From Hidalgo Norte, we got a full view of the polluted river separating two monoliths and the chain-linked fence that kept those from experiences both worlds. The story didn't end with our crossing of the border, although I am crossing the same river now, fleeing the smoke from the fireworks celebrating those careless two-hundred years. In the dead of that night, I felt like a fugitive pushing my backpack over the currents of the murky brown water, my feet sticking to the silt on the floor of the tributary as we, without passports or permission, entered the United States like so many of our brothers and sisters have over these past couple of years. Yet it wasn't until I was stumbling out of the water that a tension mounted in my heart that radiated into my fingers and toes. I saw another two men our age swimming to the shore with duffel bags on their heads. One of the men was yelling at the other as he passed S, who was still dragging his suitcase wrapped in a trash-bag across the river. The other man opened his bag and yelled back at the first man. He began to take out sandwich size bags of cocaine and put them into piles, cursing his friend for getting some of the bags soaked. I wondered what S had in his suitcase. As he arrived on shore, the men had already left the banks. I was nervous, but S tore the trash-bag off the suitcase, unzipped the lip, and pulled out a can of white spray paint. He smiled for the first time since, 1968 in all seriousness, and began to waste the bottle walking across the flat grassland, looking for border guards and dreaming of the bright lights of Elizabeth Street.
From his bag, he pulled out, with a grin, an old map called "Mexico and Texas 1845-1848." My dirty fingers held the torn page (from an atlas perhaps) with one thumb in the Mayan Yucatan and the other on the Tropic of Cancer. Before I could ask, he points to Brownsville and outlines the route we plan on taking. The route is already marked in red on the map and conforms to the current borders of Texas, which S, I assume, wants to take north before turning west on the Red River, the border with Oklahoma. The red border is also the land that seceded from México before the war. I notice another border, in yellow, which follows faithfully the current highway pattern from El Paso to Denver before the line cuts west all the way to California. This border and all inside of it (California, Nevada, Utah, Colorado, Arizona, New Mexico) is a part of the current maps "Mexico." Before I can ask him what is going on, he says, Do you see the red border? I told him I did. He told me he wanted to reclaim it for México. He was painting the Mexican border prior the War of 1848, prior to Texas seceding from our union.
I was ambivalent to say the least. This act of painting the landscape white from Brownsville, north to Denver, then west to...Crescent City, California is poetic in nature – out of character for S. I wanted to ask him how this was going to feed, clothe and dignify others! I told him that we are college graduates (whatever that meant). As I told him so he stopped at the intersection of 7th and Polk, with US-83 in sight, put the cap back on his spray can and turned to me.
Do you remember waking up behind that building on October third? he began. Blood stains that never came off our hands, literally bodies still in the Plaza. Do you remember how the businessmen moved towards their jobs, toward their morning coffee, toward Mexico City – their diamond in the rough – as if nothing happened. I nodded, I did not forget. We're college graduates, my friend, that you are right. But the México we go back to is not ours, or at least, not mine. All our friends – all those in Tlatelolco, in the Zócalo, in the Paseo de la Reforma – have turned toward Echeverría and are becoming those priístas that we ran from that night so long ago. I asked you to come Luis because you do not belong there, you do not belong in that country. Our natures, believe it or not, are one in the same.
I always saw S as a gaucho misplaced in México – his clarity and purpose amazes me to this day. I pointed to the highway – quiet and ill-at-ease this early in the morning. He smiled and began to waste his can of white paint as we walked towards the highway.
Exhausting paint across a quarter of the United States is impossible as S began to realize just how ambitious his poetry was as he had not even traversed a mile before running out of the first can of spray-paint. Shall we not, I proposed, say that Highway 83 and all the highways walked by our poor Mexican feet will be claimed for México? Must we spray the streets; the Americans have done a fine job with their white and yellow lines. I got another smile as he placed the can into his suitcase and pressed on. We hitched many rides on our trip, our first being from a quiet Mexican in a Ford pickup. He took us to Harlingen where we caught another ride to Corpus Christi. S was extremely open in regards to my feelings and my suggestions (for reasons I would be privy to later). My inclinations of being dragged across formal México were eased when we let the highway act as our anaconda, slithering across Texas leading us to our Amazon – the Red River.
In Corpus Christi S bought a straw cowboy hat. You know the first cowboys were Mexicans, he informed me. Having been to Sonora, I already knew this. Both our grandparents were Villistas during the revolution – S was carrying on the tradition. When our solitude was reinforced by language or culture, the map became a bible to us. At a road side picnic table, S and I sat next to one another and plotted the next move and counting our pesos, which we still hadn't exchanged for American dollars.
In a hardware store run by a man from Torreón, S inquired about the price of spray-paint, regular wall paint and bundles of rope. I walked the aisles of the man's homely store – the floor and racks a slight lime-green, the walls covered in red, white and blue bunting. Business was non-existent. All this man was selling, I could tell, was of his own possessions and as the years dwindled for him and his brow grew lower and lower, his dreams of coming out even in America lowered with it. I bought from the man my journal (really a notebook for architects with graph paper, but paper is paper).
In the town of Odem, we caught the final bus in the fading night to Houston. I wrote the entirety of the way – I did not know if I was the poetry to S's compass. My suggestions were always being taken with nothing but a smile. It was not really S leading us as much as the map and our general consensus. He talked that morning in Brownsville of being the same – at the time, riding on the cramped bus (quite unlike the bus from Mexico City to Matamoros) I did not see the similarities and wrote about it in my architect's notebook. In a way, I was beginning to feel that this was my trip.
Boring one with the accounts of our way to Beaumont, our trip up Byway 96 and our mystical night in Texarkana (in which I will never forget sensuous Natalie, although forgetting my verses about her is another story), is not the arch of mine and S's journey to the Red River, which was arrived at two days later.
Of course, the Red River gets its name from the red clay that is famous in Oklahoma. The droughts of the previous year was still visible as we approached the center of the river on foot (we realized we had no boat). It took us half a day of walking the banks of the shallow river until we found someone who was motoring back to a campsite in Almont. He told us of a place to rent canoes. Without access to these things in México, canoes brought up images of white cowboys and dark Indians; the cowboys on horseback and the Indians paddling away on their wooden canoes – modernity chasing the poor Indian from their paradise in their antiquated vehicles. S was more than excited about this proposition (I guess he didn't share my stigma). At Gunn Lake, where the canoes could be rented, we bartered with an Indian man to take our pesos for a trip around the lake. He agreed, believing the lake to provide a safe return for his investment in kindness. Obviously, we are both sorry and hope no harm came to his tenuous employment. At the edge of the lake, we dragged our canoes to a rather rapid part of the Red River and began our journey anew.
It was not that easy, of course. We both wished we had water running in our veins. No, neither of us had been to the ancient Amazon that is associated with us Latin Americans (I still have not seen it). We lived on top of a lake in Mexico City, but we never saw water. The Red River would dry up in spots and we'd have to drag our canoes before having to fumble back into the seat to venture further down the sticky river. When the river would dry, S would open a bottle of spray-paint and slay the Okie soil with rapier movements, letting the paint seep into the cracks, taunting the stagnant water on both banks, thirsty for convergence. The banks also held personal markers and gravestones. We saw Southern Plain Indians as we sailed across the river – their eyes somber, as if the war in 1874 had just happened, said S. I was ignorant to any war, but their eyes showed me blood. Do they think we're Indians? I asked as it is something hard to tell in México. S looked at them, then down at our canoe, No.
The tender beauty of America lies not on its jumbled, greedy highways but on its backroads that lead, in much richer detail, to the destination S and I longed for. From our map, we guess our journey to take us north around the time we saw Interstate 44 connecting Wichita Falls, Texas and Oklahoma City. We laid out our canoes on the clay banks between the two states, crossed more gravestones and Christian crosses, and headed north beside the highway toward a town called Lawton. The Wichita Mountains sang gloomily in the connecting sundown and deadening Southern horizon – the Lawton cotton fields and granite mines pump in the foreground; our brothers work the lands of formal México for our white neighbor. S's cowboy hate sparkled in the dying light. What will we do tonight? I asked due to our dwindling funds and the parading darkness. S shrugged and sat down near a tree. The highway hummed in our background.
I don't feel like an Okie, Luis, S said. This isn't Steinbeck and I'm not Tom Joad. Hell, we're not even George and Lennie. But we are going to California and we're sitting in Oklahoma and we've got no money to our name. He put a blade of grass into his mouth and said with all earnestness, Okie's is what we are.
The next morning, near Geronimo's grave at the decidedly unimposing Fort Sill, we had a look about town – in the hopes of earning some money, or stealing (we are in America, I tried to tell S). Okie's is what we are, I tried to reason. We have to think like Indians – or whites, – we can't think like Mexicans here, they'll put us to work. The knuckles of the overseers cracked as we passed – their hands encased in white gloves – a spectral quality; a ghostly, imperceptible image. S began to talk under his breath, warming to the days beginning. Reyes has written, "words of rebellion cannot be heard well from between clenched teeth." I wish I knew what S was thinking as I scribbled in my architect's notebook until S wandered off on what appeared to be a typical North American main street – its Puritan idealism and capitalistic fury waiting to be exploited by our two hungry stomachs, clutching the last pesos we owned. The plains of Oklahoma glimmered in the distance – the flat and dry earth relented at moments with bursts of momentum in the soil, the mountains proved a "wilderness of mirrors," something out of Borges. In my words, in my solitude, I lost my voice and begged for S's return – or did I beg for my return home? How did I get dragged to this strange land with a man whose inhibitions are only surface-level deep?
S never got a chance to tell me how, but he found a way out of Lawton and towards Denver. Our poor Mexican feet, in Denver in only four days! I exclaimed. S let me calm down before telling me that our bus wouldn't arrive for another four days. Of course, we could not afford a hotel or much food (how he got bus tickets is beyond me) but we made going to the bar a priority, if only because their spirits infused ours which Lawton was in the process of stealing. The local cantina stood off the main street and was open at this early hour in the afternoon. The beer was cheap and tasteless – something we were used to. The company was exotic and foreign – our English was tertiary at best. The music was god-awful – but our days passed quickly and we left a presence that was sorely missed in that little Oklahoma town. My architect's notebook, if I can remember, recorded many an aphorism – Mexican and North American. My graphed paper served as paper for tic-tac-toe games – a mutual expression between cultures without a shared language. Our binge never ended – we didn't run out of money and the kindness of our patrons, the kings of Lawton, never let the alcohol run dry, like the Red River in August, they say. Life in the pampas of North America is one of excess which S and I got caught up in for a brief moment. It is a constant game of cat and mouse, pushing one another to the limit and experimenting with physical sensations (whores, pills, alcohol). Of course, as two young men raised in machismo México, drinking is the only time one can let down your guard and express real emotion and sentiment. The conversation is lost in the hills of Lawton – my architect's notebook could not even contain the nuance and exploration that our bodies and minds felt in those seemingly endless days and nights. We were used to dealing with abstracts, vanquished entities and faceless gods (reality in México) so S felt abdicated. I felt our mutual security and foundation crumbled beneath our feet. Disappeared. We'd never felt more alive. They drank to forget, we drank to remember. The indentured slavery and plantation economics were lost among the proletariats in the Lawton cantina – how our brothers in the cotton fields would have love, in more ways than one, to join us.
Walking to the bus station, still drunk, I asked S for a can of paint. He pulled it out and I cracked the top and took off running down the main street, white paint marking Lawton as ours. S yelled, in his best accent, I've got gold teeth and curse for this town in my mouth! We caught the night bus to Denver, waiting for the hangover to begin as we crossed New Mexico on I-25. All I could think about was our map: were we doing it justice? But was that still a concern? I felt then, as I recall now as I pick my body out of the quicksand and peering eyes of another thundercloud heading towards the border,
that is was then the journey,
not the myth,
which drove S and I across half of the continent.
Our bus drove onto 16th Street in downtown Denver in the early hours of the morning. We got antacids from a convenience store and wandered the downtown mall judiciously until lunch. We did not speak much as we explored the tourist traps, the street musicians, the restaurants and record stores – delighting in the shadows that the large buildings gave our sweaty foreheads. I saw the "great wheel on the plain below" which the light resembled "where the mountains roll down foothilling on the plain and where in primeval times soft waves must have washed from the sea-like Mississippi to make such round and perfect stools for the island-peaks" as Kerouac had once described our Denver. S had family in Denver on Colfax Avenue, south of Denver. Colfax, by foot, seemed to be where Coloradans (and Mexicans) shopped, ate and lived. Denver was where they worked and played. The mixture of colors and hues, religions and ethnicities, cultures and worldviews on Colfax was astonishing, as I remember writing, and acceptable in formal México. Yet among the hustle of Denver, S and I felt the sting of American isolation. Their purposes and dress did not match ours. In a bookstore in Denver, I remember finding our poet and quoting the best I could, deciphering the English the best I could: When you sense you are alone, it does not mean that you are inferior, but rather that you are different. Also, a sense of inferiority may sometimes be an illusion, but solitude is a hard fact. We are truly different. And we are truly alone. He was speaking of Mexicans. He could be speaking of us Mexicans in the United States. We were truly alone.
That wouldn't change, but I did I met Noemí, who worked at a café off 16th Street. S and I, during our extended stay in Denver until we gathered enough funds to continue across the mountains and deserts of western Colorado and Utah, would come and go two to three times a day. Noemí is a sister of a man called Coyoy, from Los Altos in Guatemala, a friend of S's, who was kind enough to let S and I stay with his family until we had to leave. Coyoy worked for the municipal water center and his trust is something I regret to this day. S was never a fool to get mixed up with women – as I explained earlier of our different lives in Mexico City. I gave my body to women and immortalized theirs in verse. I became the breadwinner in Denver – I got a "job" with Noemí at the café as a busboy – working from mid-afternoon until close, just so we could be together. She has all that is left of my ruptured and wet body, currently slung around my outstretched arms, steadying themselves along the steep bank of the rolling Rio Grande. We would make love under bowls of coffee beans – her hair was like pitch-black snakes; her eyes like a tropical hurricane; her hips like a pendulum; her thighs like a vice, and her mouth like tomb, inviting life and death. In México, women come alive to the touch (another victim of the machismo culture); Noemí, though, was always alive, and if anything, she awoke me to her touch. Womanhood, for Noemí, was an end within itself. I wanted to learn English so I could never leave Denver, never leave the United States, never leave formal México. I wanted to wear her teeth marks on my chest forever. Her convulsions, her disbelief that I was leaving, her scorn are all vivid in my mind. Poor, beautiful, sensuous American Natalie in Texarkana (a decade away, for me) – how we promised so much but understood goodbye. The skylights of the café window let the mysticism of Denver into our little sanctuary that was quickly being flooded with white paint. S was right not to get involved – the ones you love, or know you can love, are the ones you hurt first. I did the hurting, but I hurt the worst.
I got paid at the end of the week and parted with Noemí, who told me that she loved me – it was forced; an acquiescence to ancient Mexica that was not necessary or attractive. I took a paint brush from a closet in the café and bought S a bucket of paint from a hardware store. After I got off work that final night, after making love to Noemí for the last time, S and I walked out of Denver painting the sides of the buildings white until we were confronted with the foothilling plains and the snowcapped Rocky Mountains.
We started out on Highway 70. I could not stop thinking about Noemí and wished we were back in Denver tonight. The mountains are non-existent on a dark night like this; the brighter half of the moon straining through the darkness, clouded by her darker brother. The downside of poverty is the cheapness one feels. My poor Mexican feet felt contemptible and used. We walked through the night on the long walk west to California. The morning brought the clouds battling for alms in the western skyline. We braved the blood and the metal of the hearts that picked us up and drove us down the bends and curves. In Grand Junction, arriving in the late afternoon provided another opportunity to paint the road out of the town white, to prove that we came and saw. That night I saw the sun set in the east, but it turned out to the sun rise and I remember waking in a panic, flying down the highway. Our driver had a joint in his mouth and offered us both a hit. Our declining was polite; there was hardly enough for him and his friend. They were taking us near Salt Lake City. I wish to keep the details of that night enclosed in my architect's notebook, floating in the Pacific, unreadable perhaps. Let me suggest that S lost his mind, for a moment I thought, and there was little I could do. I let him rest in a park in the city while I bought more paint at a hardware store. He was living between reasons to live; the borders of his nightmares beginning to give. From the park bench, he said, These days and nights have attractive traits. I nodded. Luis, would you rather be alive at noon or dead at dawn?
S and I circumnavigated the desert of wonder and uncertainty. There is no highway across the northern border of Nevada or California – our poor Mexican feet would finally do nothing but walk to the ocean's shore. The days reached over one hundred degrees. As the night faded in Utah's graveyard of crag cliffs and bluffs, I reminded S that it freezes in the desert. He said, Just because you're breathing doesn't mean you're a living. Just because your heart is beating doesn't mean you're not a ghost. His rhetorical wisdom is a locked door – only to me, it seems. Night came outside the Independence mountain range (one of the only places in America that knew nothing of red, white or blue). We avoided scorpions and snakes by sleeping in a cave. We froze, but awoke in the morning – as we did every morning in the two weeks that it took us to cross the desert. Our emotions became mere background noise to the fires bursting out of the sand beneath our feet or the rushing wind that is the constant reminder of the sea bed we walked on (and of the sea we were walking toward). We crossed many rivers – some large, some small. Walked around many buttes and craters in the sand and rock. Climbed many ranges and traversed many valleys. We crossed two highways in Nevada leading north and south but S had no interest in going home or leaving it all behind. Malnourished, poor, and weak – we entered California and saw the forest. The terrain remained the same but the trees gave us both life, provided nurture. S collapsed in the brittle soil. I sat next to him and breathed the damp California air. So this used to be México? I said. He nodded. I'd give away a million Sonora's for just an acre of this, he said. He got up and I could hear him crying, perched on the trunk of a downed tree. I can't recall much from my notebook, but I remember writing, saying to him, It wasn't Tlatelolco – it's much more than four hundred students...The pulses and rhythms he learned in México weren't etched in stone...I can't help a heart that is impossible to touch...Show me anything, I'll always be waiting on the other side. We were given a final stay from a park ranger in Medicine Mountain. He offered a ride to the coast, but I refused before S could say anything. I needed to see the completion more than he did at that point. We painted the floor of the ranger's cabin white before leaving in the early morning.
The ocean –
a sound as foreign to the ears as was the distance from us to the Red River. The desert and the Pacific Coast Byway behind us, our second wind propels our feet up the Northern California dunes down to the pearly beaches littered with seaweed from high-tide and burrowing crabs, their discarded shells announcing their presence in the tunnels beneath our poor Mexican feet. S searches through his bag and emerges with a bundle of rope bought in Corpus Christi; all he had left. It is only a couple dozen yards and he pulls it from the dunes to the rippling water. He stops at the edge of the water and falls to his knees then sits on the beach, just out of the Pacific's reach. I join him.
He looks me in the eyes and smiles. It is nearing the end of June and, in less than a month, we'd made it – just like S promised back in Mexico City (the land of giants and temples – different, but similar to our journey across formal México). How to begin. Years of divergence comes together in one moment of convergence as he leans over and gives a hug with a great sigh. Tlatelolco seemed decades away. The art deco of America (seemed) different than the colonial of Mexico City. Many minutes passed – S felt no need to say anything, I had no guts to confront him. It is the journey, not the destination that defines a trip. But it is in the destination that one finds the inspiration to return home.
What now, my friend? I ask. He smiles once again. My anger swells as this has been a repeating pattern – his smile still haunts me – teases me – as if everywhere. I see it now as my sandals are muddy and torn as I navigate myself out of the driving rain – a once in a lifetime on the Mexican border – and step into the nightmarish Sonora desert.
I guess, Luis, it's time for you to go home.
Why, I ask him. He smiles for the last time. We needed each other to get here, in more ways than one, he said. It was crossing the border that only I could do. It was getting those streaks of white paint across the surface of our México that only you could do. I know you thought, and would think, this to be poetic in nature but it is not. Or at least did not start that way. He paused. Life! he shouted, got in our way. Near the end, it was history driving you, the intimacy of life driving me – something I had not foreseen. Tlatelolco is so far away, Luis. (It was as if reading my mind). It has affected me so – but will not after today. For you, the memory will fade of that night – and of me – but you will lead México, our México in your own way.
I did not understand, I told him.
Luis, the paint will wash away tomorrow. The thunderhead we can both see in the distance foretells of such a history. The paint laid back in Texas and Colorado is already gone. The highways that hold our dotted yellow and white lines will one day crumble into disrepair. What we've done this month will not exist to anyone but you and I. There is no chronicle of our journey – our discovery of the New World. No one will believe you – and that may be for the best.
I told him, poetry has kept the greatest of adventures alive. I told him our people love myth and legends. I said I would put our tale in prose as well as poem – forever keeping a record. I pulled out my architect's notebook – I showed him my chronicle of our voyage. His eyes asked if anyone would be fed, clothed or dignified...I had no answer to his downcast eyes.
I'm tired, S said. Burdened, I knew he meant.
He holds out his hand, I give him my notebook. He opened to the first page. If I recall now, my eyes closed to the blinding rain, my mind remembers: Green tiles...Torreón...The Alamo...Sam Houston...the inevitability of nature and the sustainable qualities of white paint across this barren, rainless landscape...the doubts I had about history and poetry being able to capture this rugged biography of two people juxtaposed as one...I saw a lot of what S mentioned before and he nodded through his quick perusing of my notebook. He placed it in his back pocket, gave me a hug and said, I'm going on. No one will believe you. None of this makes sense but you must go back. I'm sorry.
With that he walked into the water and as the third wave pushed him back, he dove into the sea and I watched him race towards the thundercloud in the deepening Pacific Ocean – a river to some heaven S hoped to achieve, a place I could not understand. I felt that priístas, granaderos, Tlatelolco, cristeros, Mexico City and all the baggage of México had nothing to do with anything – and, despite my vanity, he acted on principles that were his own. He talked about a New World, our world. The poetry of everyone. This journey was S's way of fighting the silence, the solitude he felt in our México. The saltwater washed away his mask – he became his true self; his supremely naked self, a pariah, a man who belongs nowhere, as Paz has said. He died the death he created, the death he was looking for. We're all fragments, I remember writing in Utah. We're all separated, nothing is what it seems. Alienation exists, he told me on those cold, Colorado nights, from being someone else inside one's self. Was it historical consciousness that S wanted – or wanted out of me? I could imagine S smiling at me as I thought this on the beach, his gums enjoying the saltwater at the bottom of the ocean. No, I return home with a story – not facts – to a country attempting to forget its history and its horrors. Perhaps, that is my role. My horrors sink off the California coast (the only solitude for S is the bottom of the sea) – formal México – and I return to informal Mexico, our Mexico, to atone for whatever it is I must absolve –
sink whatever it is that holds us back.
About the author:
Daniel Schmidt is a musician, writer, and student of history, journalism and the lives of those around him in Norfolk, Virginia. Visit him at danielschmidt.wordpress.com
© 2009 Word Riot
