The Invention of Exile (30 page)

“Go live the rest of your life. Go live the life that was taken from you,” Leo says.

It was taken from him. He had a right to reclaim it, he sees that, now, here, but what would he say to Julia? What would it be to behold her? He wishes instead that he could arrive unannounced. He'd like that, prefer it maybe. To spy upon her, maybe slip in unnoticed, acclimate himself to the sounds and scents. Would she recognize him? Maybe not. He could arrive, step into her sphere, open a door for her, pass her among the aisles of the corner store perhaps, or follow her down the sidewalks of Main Street to the nickel movie house, or track her through Beardsley Park. He'd want to see her before he felt the eyes of recognition, or—and this harder to acknowledge—eyes empty and unfeeling, uncertain who he was, a cold unfamiliarity, indifference, and then, perhaps even a shame.

 • • • 

T
HE
BAR
IS
PROTECTED
from the sun by wicker shades and Leo can see the shadow of them along the stucco wall—like lead pencil tracings, hatch marks. The light enters, diffused as if through oilcloth. He has a chill, for inside is cool and it feels good to sit next to the window, warmed by the light. Outside, a truck passes. The tinny music from its radio enters for a moment, lingers, and then leaves. He can hear too the sound of horse hooves, though the horses are not in his sight lines and so he hears only the breathing and the steady, strong, clomping steps along some part of the dirt road. He is tapping his fingers on the table. He is bouncing his leg. Every once in a while he slaps his hand down hard on the table's surface, which is of striped wood the color of patinaed copper. When he does this it startles all the inhabitants of this small square of being—the bartender, his father seated across from him, the white dog fast asleep in the doorway, the old man seated in the corner who is nearly inanimate, so still, save for his jaw and its incessant chomping.

The bartender is busy. Leo watches as he takes strips of copper wire from a small pile assembled on the bar like pickup sticks. His thick fingers have a surprising dexterity, bending and twisting the wires into coiled circles and squares, the finished work littered across a piece of cloth. The bartender looks out the front door and Leo turns to the window to see what has caught his attention.

“Trabajadores migrantes,”
the bartender explains.

“They do this every day?” Leo calls out. The bartender nods. It is a solemn sight, bodies tired. It's in their faces, eyes drawn, lines at the cheeks, a haggard step even if some are smiling, laughing in their exchanges, others anxious to simply get home, walking with a tired deliberateness and direction. They are dust-covered. It is in their hair. A fine film coating their skin, and their words, Leo imagines, might form over granules of sand.

“The mass exodus,” Leo says, pointing out the window, his father turns to look as well. The workers are returning from fields and farms in the United States, walking back home. Some on a truck, workers in their chinos cinched at the ankles with rope.

“See, they do it every day,” Leo says, looking to his father, who is following the workers with his eyes, back and forth, back and forth as the stream continues.

“Do what?” Austin says.

“Cross the border.”

The bartender has turned on the radio. It crackles and then the music comes on loud. Leo and his father look up, the horns of a
corrido
blaring, and Leo can make out, in the tone, the voice breaking nearly, a pathos. Revenge for a death perhaps, a stolen first love.

“Perdón,”
the bartender calls. He readjusts the volume to a more palatable level.

 • • • 

V
ERA
CARIES
A
BUBBLE
of a pot, a terra-cotta
olla
. She bought a straw bag of stripes—vine green, aquamarine, orange, and bougainvillea pink. She is crossing into the shade of the bar's storefront, nearing the steps, her face no longer burnished by sunlight, feeling the gray and blue, the light at her back now. Her entrance is a flurry. The dog, who has been asleep for what seems like days, sits up and stretches, back legs bent, front legs drawn out before him, standing now to walk, a little reluctantly, though with curiosity, toward Vera who is setting out her purchases on the table before Leo and her father.

“It's suddenly like Christmas,” Leo says, offering a nervous laugh. Vera sets down the bowl, a series of string animals. “A chicken, an armadillo, a turtle, a donkey, a horse,” she says, turning each one from side to side before placing it on the table. She is smiling, her father is beaming and picks up each animal and then the smile vanishes.

“Now we'll really look like tourists,” she says. “Everything okay here?” she asks, looking first to her father and then to Leo.

“Fine, fine.”

“It's going to be perfectly all right,” Vera says, though she herself is not sure of that and wonders if she sounded even half convincing. She watches her father's eyes, how they seem to fight now between sorrow and fear and then focus, draw to a still point on his beer bottle, the drink nearly finished. She sits down across from him, grabs Leo's beer and takes a long sip. Leo motions for another round. The dog has seated himself in front of their table, chin rested on the ground, eyes cast toward Vera. She reaches down to pet him a few quick times on the top of his head, along his neck. He moans and then lets out a sigh.

“Shall we have a tequila?” Leo says.

“Now?”

“Yes. Take the edge off. We're all about to jump out of our skins.”

Vera turns to the window in her habit of looking elsewhere when searching for an answer, as if her words lay not within her mind, but beyond her—across the street, whispered amid the couple that just strolled by the open door, or within the store, lying patiently between sacks of coffee beans, or sealed inside the cars creeping by, these traveling vessels of glass and metal—and, upon finding them, returns proudly to present her found, much-sought-after words.

“Why not?” Vera says. “And then we will go.”

The bartender brings the tequila and he places the glasses down with a kind of reverence, pausing with a hesitation in his presentation as if he knew their gathering was not one of merriment. He must see lots of people at the outset or returning from back and forth across the border, Vera thinks. She finds herself wondering now about how many others before them have stopped before crossing—other families, illegal immigrants unsure of return or reunion.

 • • • 

T
HE
MUSIC
STAYS
WITH
HIM
, has impressed itself upon his memory so that as they leave the bar, the last song, almost without his realizing it, lingers. The tequila has worked itself through him so that instead of a singed dryness within his heart and throat, he now feels a rounded, soothing sense like a kind of balm. He was sweating, felt the wetness seeping through his shirt. He took off his jacket, following Vera and Leo out on the porch, in the shade, scorched by one lengthwise rectangle of sun.

The car sat in wait. Its pistachio green somehow brighter so far from the colored cacophony of the city, out here, where all is the color of almond. Something about it breaks his heart, sitting waiting for them—the curve of its fenders gleaming silver and streaked white from the sunlight. He hears Leo saying something about the time, and he repeats the hour, 3
P.M.
, and he feels his words fall like stones. Except for that exchange there is no more talk, only a bubble of anxiety seems to work across his body and he is fighting to catch his breath, seems unable to get enough air, his thoughts, voice blanched.

Hope for this moment had carried him through twenty years of the country's two seasons—dry and rainy. It had passed along from one day to the next, a circled gleaming glass like a water droplet, brimming, about to burst. It had moved from the dry season's days of whiteness and heat—orchids blooming, withering—to the rainy, when even the drying leaves were replenished by the torrents of rain that would gather and then slide in sheets across the city or the Sonoran countryside. It pervaded his rooms so that it was there among his drafting papers, within the curve of a pencil stroke drawn in the coolness and shadows of his boarding room while the sun blazed whiteness over the city. It was in his path as he walked out hours among the parks of Mexico—Parque Alameda, Chapultepec, Parque México, Xochimilco. It was even in the clouds that gathered heavy and violet and full, baring the rain that pummeled the willows and ash trees, and caused the branches to hang low and burdened, sodden and dank with, first, the June rains and then all the downpours of July and August.

And now it was here.

 • • • 

W
HAT
WAS
IT
THAT
he had said to her, that phrase that etched itself within? Here it was now, blooming. She was hearing it again. Something about separation. Her father had been talking about when they'd first returned to the States. Without him. Ah, yes, here it is, the sentence complete: “Separation comes quite suddenly.” He had said it once when they were walking in the Alameda. Yes. That was it. And here it was—separation, only this time they were leaving together. It felt like a slow dropping of a string. First, one inch, then another. Here, we walk to the car. Here, we open the doors. Here, we sit, turning on the car. Ten. Nine. Eight. Vera seated in the back. Her father in the passenger seat. Leo walking at a painfully slow pace to the driver's side. She got angry at that, how he was demonstrating that he was calm and collected. He even taps the hood of the car as if part of some ritual. He smiles, but it's a wan smile as if he too will soon brace himself like Vera, like her father, who are holding themselves together. But one has to do that. One has to summon up all the atoms, make them line up, these little things we are made up of, line them up and drop oneself into the moment. See it through. After all, they'd come this far. They were not going to turn back. He was going with them. They were nearly already gone, across the border, and she felt it like the switch of some internal knob. It was the same certainty of instinct that she'd come down to Mexico City with—something silver, knife sharp, shining. These little slivers of—one glimpsed them if one listened carefully enough maybe only a handful of times in life—clarity. It was so simple suddenly. After all this time, a simple yes, no; a going toward, a moving away from; life, death; crossing the border, not crossing; the United States, Mexico; the past, present. So much of the rest was a constant state of hesitation, preoccupation, decision making, analysis of thought and feelings, action. Only—and this she felt was one of those moments—when she sat as if hovering above herself, above them all in this car, watching, listening, pulling back to take it all in, this moment, did she get in and around the emotions that flashed, vibrated, and trembled within her. They were leaving Mexico. They were taking their father home.

The car keys clink in Leo's hands. The car starts. A grumble of gears, ignition, sparks before easing to a low and steady motor purr. How many years she'd wished, how tightly she'd clung and clutched to the hope of bringing him back. She thought of all the years they'd had to endure without him and it seemed a shame to her that there ever needed to be any such thing as leaving, as parting. The car was pulling away. A simple, basic image. One car now driving away, she still imaging it from above, taking it all in—the taillights red through a haze of billowing dust. It was so simple. One sees such images all the time.

 • • • 

“
T
HIS
IS
HOW
IT
'
S
going to be,” Leo begins after a silence. The car is creeping forward, he's pressed his foot on the gas pedal and he can see Vera seated, settling into the backseat.

“It's a white booth, no larger than a cottage really,” Leo explains. “The line of cars might be long. We'll see. Maybe, maybe not. But we drive up and stop. The two border guards will step out of the booth. They'll ask for our passports. It is absolutely imperative that you do not speak. If you speak, they'll hear the accent and then it'll be all over. So, not a word. They might inspect the car, look in the trunk, but mostly they just let the cars go through. And like I said, they'll smell the tequila and beer. They'll figure we're just some gringos crossing back over the border after a good time—simply on our way back home. Okay? And if it doesn't work, there's always the
mordida
, a little bit of money never hurts these fellows.”

“Yes.”

Leo is driving slowly as he talks, making sure his father is grasping each word, the full scenario, outlining it all for him so that there'll be as few surprises as possible. He can feel the heat of the steering wheel beneath his hand, with his other hand he is gesticulating, pointing.

“You ready for this?” he asks, though his own heart is pounding in his chest, the sweat beginning in a line across his forehead.

“Yes. Nervous.”

“Don't be nervous,” Leo says, feigning composure.

“All right.”

“We turn down here and there's no going back.”

“I know.”

“All right. Let's go.”

They creep forward. The sun is in his eyes, and he pulls his visor down. In two seconds, his father does the same, and out of the corner of his eye he can see the pack of Wrigley's tumble into his father's lap, the slim compact rectangles the color of nopal leaves. His father has jumped in his seat and Leo reaches down to help, all the while steering.

“Sorry about that,” Leo says, laughing, bending forward to pick up some packs that have fallen on the running board.