The Demon of Dakar (10 page)

Manuel’s grandfather had been
a
bracero
, one of those who traveled around the United States in the 1940s in order to fill the gaps left by the men who had been called up to war. Most of them had done well for themselves, returning from Idaho and Washington with colored shirts, leather shoes, and cash.

This created an impression that life in the United States was easy, that one could quickly amass a fortune there. Many followed the pioneers. Manuel’s father was one of these. He returned, thin and worked to the bone after three long years, and with a gaze that alternated between an expression of desperation and optimism. Two years later he died. One day his carotid artery burst and he was dead within minutes.

In 1998, two days before he turned twenty-two, Manuel made his first trip.

It was easy to be impressed by the land in the north. What Manuel noticed first were all the cars, then he saw how he, as a Mexican, was not regarded as fully human. He worked for a year, saved four hundred dollars, and returned to the village.

Patricio worked out that if all three brothers worked for two years in the fields to the north, they would be able to rebuild the house and buy a mule, and so they set off together.

Those who went to the
border rivers had three to choose from: Rio Grande, Rio Colorado, and Rio Tijuana, all different, but out of whose waters thousands upon thousands of men, women, and children crawled.

Manuel, who had heard of people drowning, chose the highway. The first time he crossed the border near San Ysidro, south of San Diego, and everything was simple. He understood that the terrifying descriptions
of all the Mexicans who had died in their attempts to cross over—people spoke of numbers in the thousands—were exaggerated, perhaps these were rumors spread by the Border Patrol or the vigilantes, volunteers who helped to patrol the border.

But four years later it was significantly worse. A wall, that did not appear to have an end, had been erected. There was something absurd and frightening about this construction that cut through the desert landscape.

Angel and Patricio stood silently by his side. A few other men from Veracruz, whom they had met in Lechería and had joined up with, laughed in exhaustion and nervousness. Angel, who was severely rundown, glanced at Manuel. Patricio stared east.

“I guess we just have to walk,” he said.

“Walk?” Angel repeated.

He had been suffering. He had misplaced his cap and the sun had beaten down on him relentlessly. He scratched his forehead and large strips of skin came off.

“We can cross over by Tecate,” one of the men from Veracruz said, and pointed east. “This wall can’t go on forever.”

Patricio had already started to walk. They arrived late in the evening. The men from Veracruz, who had the experience of several border crossings, led the group to a dried up riverbed and across a godforsaken stony slope where only cacti were able to survive. Signs that warned them they were approaching the border made them shrink reflexively. The only thing to be heard was the sound of feet stumbling over rocks. Suddenly the light from a mobile watchtower was turned on and caught the men in a circular dip in the landscape.

In the distance they heard the frantic barking of dogs. The brothers ran, tripping their way across the stony ground. Angel fell and was helped up by Patricio. Manuel urged them on. He had read about dogs and the new ammunition that the border patrols were armed with. The bullets that tore your body apart.

Two of the group were driven into a ravine. One of them tried to climb up the steep cliff but lost his footing and fell when he was only a
meter from the top. Manuel saw the shadowy figure fall and disappear from view and heard the scream that ended abruptly.

Perhaps the patrol unit was satisfied with two Mexicans in their net, for the brothers and four others managed to get across the border, reach highway 94E, and thereafter set their sights on Dulzura. They were in California. Angel laughed and suggested they rest for the night, while Patricio wanted to push on. If he had been allowed to set the pace they would have made it to Oregon before sunrise.

Their father had worked in
Orange County, and this was also the brothers’ destination. It was no better or worse than anywhere else. They picked fruit and planted new fruit trees that would in the future be harvested by new generations of young men from Mexico and Central America.

Manuel realized, once they had reached a broccoli farmer where they would build an irrigation system, how many of his fellow citizens had come north. The farmer, who was the best one they had encountered, would come by in the evenings, sit outside their barrack, open a few beers, and talk.

“Half a million a year, at least,” Roger Hamilton said and smiled. “There are twenty-three million people in this country with Mexican heritage.”

He held out a beer to Manuel, who took a swig and tried to imagine this amount of people, unsure of what he was expected to say.

“It is because of your own government,” the farmer continued. “They do not want to keep you.”

Manuel had heard similar arguments at home. In the headquarters of the farmer organization in Oaxaca they had discussed NAFTA, the free-trade agreement between Mexico and the United States. For Manuel, and most others in the room, it was too big. He did not understand the implications of NAFTA. Not until cheap surplus corn from Alabama and Georgia started to flood the country.

The villages shrank and everything old broke up. Who wanted to
celebrate when the village was being drained of youngsters? For many young men, the move north was a kind of rite of passage. Manuel thought that was one of the reasons why Angel and Patricio were so insistent that Manuel bring them along to California. They wanted to become men.

The broccoli farmer would also bring them food. “To save you the trouble,” he said and smiled. He smiled often. He also smiled the last time they saw him. That was when he had tricked the brothers out of their remaining salary, over five thousand dollars, and then given them up to the police who picked them up outside the barracks.

During the trip back, in a specially constructed van, they sat without speaking. They got off in Tijuana. During the trip Manuel had decided that they would never again leave Mexico in order to work in the north.

“Only one in a hundred has any success,” Manuel objected when, after only a month or so, Patricio and Angel started to talk about returning to the United States.

“But not everyone is tricked,” Angel said.

“Most of us remain wetbacks, despised by everyone. Many of us get sick. Look at your hands!”

Angel had broken out in a rash of large boils that burst and became infected and Manuel was convinced that the cause was the pesticides they had used in the field.

Manuel stood his ground,
but could not stop his brothers from going down to Oaxaca several days later. What should he have done? Struck them down and bind them to the plow?

Angel and Patricio had been tempted by the
bhni guí’a
, “the man from the mountains,” an old term that the brothers did not want to admit to knowing, but one that was familiar to all Zapotecs. He was the one who came down from the mountains above the village, dressed in western fashion, shining shoes, and swinging a cane with a silver handle. He offered money and took your soul.

This man carried no cane but he did have a bundle of green dollar bills. He was large, almost bald, introduced himself as Armas, and spoke Spanish.

Angel and Patricio kept to the background, letting Manuel do the talking. In part because he was the eldest, in part because he knew English well, and during their time in California he was the one who had managed the negotiations in the fields outside Anaheim. But this time Manuel immediately turned away. There was something about the man that he did not like. Instead, Angel stepped forward.

The following day, when the village celebrated Saint Gertrudis, the three brothers sat in front of the church and discussed the matter. Manuel rejected it outright—no good could come from that man’s promises.

“But it is not a job,” Angel said. “All you have to do is fly to Spain with a package.”

“What do you think is in that package?” Manuel asked.

“You heard him. It is business papers that cannot be sent by mail,” Angel replied.

Manuel looked sadly at him.

“I would not have believed you were so stupid,” he said and shook his head. “He is lying to us, don’t you understand?”

Patricio had not entered the discussion until this point, but Manuel could see in his eyes that even he was tempted by the offer.

“With that money we can buy our own coffee mill, and we can clear more land for plants,” he said.

“Perhaps buy a car,” Angel picked up the thread and kept fantasizing. “Then we can transport goods to and from the village and make more money.”

That time, on the bench in front of the church, Manuel did not take the matter so seriously. He was only worried about his brothers’ naïveté, the fact that they allowed themselves to be pulled in and dream about future riches.

The young Ernesto, their closest neighbor, was preparing for the fireworks. The Alavez brothers watched him pick up the bull-shaped disguise, swing it onto his back, and set off running around the plaza in front of the church. The first bang was deafening and was followed by spurts of fire and whining missiles that enveloped everything in a sharp smell of gunpowder.

Angel jumped up and took the disguise from Ernesto. Manuel
laughed at his brother’s wobbling stomach as he attacked the flocks of small boys who ran away.

Manuel started thinking about their father. He had loved the fiesta, sometimes getting a bit too drunk but always in a good mood. He had not been a particularly good
campesino
. It was his dreams that mostly got in the way. He paused in his work and you could not do that as a small-time Mexican farmer. Nonetheless he had a good reputation in the village. He was considerate and he was the one who had the initiative for the coffee cooperative, and in this way he did his share to help propel the village out of the worst of its poverty.

Now Manuel was standing next
to a new river, one that was much gentler than the one he was used to. He had, after studying the map, understood that it was the same river as the one he had camped next to before. But this time he found himself upstream from the city and he was happy about that. He would not have enjoyed bathing in the same water he had dumped Armas into.

He had gone to the
tourist information center to get a map. Or was it fate that had led him there? When he stepped out onto the sidewalk, Armas was there, as if transported by a higher authority. He was tucking a yellow envelope under his suit jacket and spotted Manuel as he looked both ways before crossing the street.

Armas recognized him immediately. Manuel walked up to “the quiet one” as Angel had called him. The lie came to him in a moment’s inspiration.

“I have come in Angel’s place,” Manuel said, and not even then had he imagined what was about to happen.

He smiled tentatively, as if he was speaking to a gringo who was maybe going to give him a day’s or a week’s worth of work.

Armas looked around. It made Manuel momentarily unsure that he understood English and he repeated the sentence in Spanish.

“Where?” Armas asked.

“My tent,” Manuel said, and he saw Patricio’s face before him.

He wasn’t even sure
if the water next to his tent could really be called a river. It was mostly reeds. He was amazed that so few people came to the water. There was the man with the fishing rod, but no one else.

He very much liked the grass in this foreign country. It smelled good, was soft against his skin and reminded him of a special kind of grass that they sometimes found in the mountains above his village. Otherwise the grass there was mostly stiff and sharp.

He was lying on his back with his hands under his head, staring up at the sky. Time and again his thoughts turned to Armas, how he had staggered only to collapse in front of Manuel’s feet, his hands pressed against his throat. There was something mesmerizing about the way the blood pumped out between his fingers, in fine red ribbons that were strangely free but also condemned outside their path of circulation and the heart that propelled them.

As he thought about Armas, an image of Miguel came to him. Miguel, his neighbor and childhood friend, who almost always laughed, conceived children like a hamster, and burned for the village, for the Zapotecs and autonomy.

When Miguel was shot to death outside his home there was no beauty. His death was ugly and tattered. Seven bullets tore apart an already dirty and broken body, marked by harsh circumstances and hard work.

Miguel’s blood was dark, almost black, and his limbs were desperately tensed, as if all of him was screaming. One hand rested against the house wall. In the window above his hand, whose fingers appeared to be fumbling for something, one could see his three children.

The villagers stood in a semicircle around the dead man and found that there was no justice in his death, no beauty. Who would have been able to say that Miguel was an attractive corpse? His dead body was as repellant as the life he had been forced to lead.

Miguel’s death was expected. The extinguishing of his life was fated.
One who lives in a mountain village in Oaxaca, is
campesino
and Zapotec, and does not settle for what this means is put on the list. Behind the roar of life and Miguel’s laughter, there was always Death peeking out with his grinning mask. It was as if the flies were drawn to Miguel. The flies of death.

Armas’s end was different. He was a fine corpse. Manuel had at first not realized that the strong body with its smooth skin and well-manicured hands were without life. It was only when the first fly landed on Amras that Manuel fully grasped that the man was in fact dead.