The Invention of Exile (5 page)

“We cannot do anything,” the clerk says. He swallows, his Adam's apple like a knot of contrition. He sits motionless.

“Please.”

“I'm afraid we are not permitted.”

 • • • 

A
CITY
AWAKENING
.
Siesta
is over. The sky has grown crimson and mauve with gray plumes rising up from factories situated on the city's periphery. Lovers open windows, shopkeepers roll up gated storefronts and people emerge from narrow, dark doorways. Blue clouds lined in blood orange sit on the horizon.

Sun and dust. Broken stone. He feels heavy, his whole body turned inward. He sits down. He rises. He walks beneath the building's arcade, the marble slippery. He leans against the railing enclosing the small, manicured gardens—gardens of magnolia trees, palms. So much like those first weeks in Mexico City—how dizzying the impression for an émigré without a map. He'd come to the embassy, had been so certain then, brazen enough to believe his passage to America would be swift, secured. He is still hoping for that day.

He walks down the stairs and across the street, his brown, sorry loafers caked with dust. He draws a cigarette from his back pocket, stops at the corner to light it, watching as the little flicker of blue begins before the burn. A car speeds past, its motor loud. Over the car's fading rumble and from a window open and overhead he hears the faint voice of someone singing, a warble like that of a bird. The tightness in his chest loosens. He raises the cigarette to his lips, exhaling. He leans back against the building, one leg tucked up and under, resting against the stucco wall, its grainy surface pressing through his shirt. The last of the sun cuts a diagonal of light across his body—a man marked, a man crossed out.

For just a fleeting moment, Austin feels something like contentment, so tired he is of always wishing to be elsewhere. A respite from longing, an easy satisfaction in a small desire sated. A last inhale and he tosses the cigarette to the ground, wishing it could be the day.

He had tried to adapt as well as he could, had come to, some might say, resign himself to this adopted country of his with its bright sun, dusty roads, sepia buildings, past built upon past. A city stripped down and built up again.

But it was not the life he was supposed to live—this life, this Mexico City life. He closes his eyes and there they are—all quite clearly, going on about their lives, waking in those cold northeastern mornings when it was dark blue and felt as if night had forgotten to end, the heater clanking the children awake, he imagines. Three children, each born in a different country (Russia, France, Mexico) and all now Americans. They were walking around in streets filled with memories of his young manhood. His children, there without him. He can sometimes feel them, when younger, their small arms around his neck when he carried them in the early years in Mexico, the sound of their voices, saying Papa. How does one live with longing? He knows it. It was as if he were forever reaching, arms extended in a gesture of entreaty. Pulling on a rope, hand over hand, fist over fist, the rope only growing longer.

 • • • 

T
HE
Z
ÓCALO
:
SPACE
,
a
dusky silver sky. Steadfast buildings enclose the square. Streetlamps jeer, orange in the early evening . . .
not going
to
the
States after all
 . . . He falls alongside three older men, white hair, hands clasped at the back. One man's voice low and thick from years of tobacco. The others listen as he speaks, nodding, earnest, grave nods. Austin recoils, draws his gaze inward and down, his shoulders hunched as if direct eye contact will sting. He is not far from it. These empty afternoons of old age, stepping into evening, stunned by the throb and pulse of all this life.

Two women arm in arm clatter across the wide flagstones of slate, emerald, cobalt. A splice in his path. In their T-strapped heels and full skirts, he feels a yearning, a dull, near-forgotten burn of want that had made him falter in his fidelity; he was not a saint, he knew, could not be celibate. Long ago he'd come to know this, given in to it. Women of satin skin, women he'd clung to. He thinks of Julia. (It was always Julia.) He tries to picture in his mind the shape of her face. If he can recall even that much, her other features will soon emerge, come into focus—her steely blue eyes, how they sank in slightly, the better to see the curve of her cheekbones; the way her brow sloped gently upward to the honey hair, full and always pulled back from her face, tied into a chignon at the base of her neck. And maybe, if he thinks hard enough, concentrates on the image, he can see her smile forming, which always took a little coaxing, her lips often—and when he remembers her last—pressed together into a pout, one that masked a panic. And if he allows himself even more time, if he is lucky, he can conjure up the sound of her voice: high and sweet, like a chime, and always with that American, northeastern accent of hers, so fast and held tight in her chest as if she never quite drew enough breath when speaking. And, then, when he has the face, her likeness, her very presence quite set in his mind, he continues across the Zócalo, trying to hold her in his mind's eye. The image, though, is like quicksilver—shattered by the sounds, the night, a second's onslaught.

He passes what had once been the Aztec marketplace, the Inquisition's execution ground. A walk through centuries. His mother had given him her love of walking; how much she loved to walk in the fields of their farm. Even in those insufferably frigid days of Russian winter, when evening came at three in the afternoon. They'd walk to the road that ran along the wheat fields, barren, hard. Or even those closer, less distant winters of New England, winters cracking, breaking into spring—rain or sap on branches, the green and moss of the thaw come in earnest. Could he withstand either of those winters now?

The Mexicans are a kind people, he has to admit, though he has learned to keep a distance, slide by people, let others slide off him. He's grown into it, another habit, though if he strips it all back and really looks, his true nature, core, or whatever one wants to call it, longs to embrace the world free of any suspicion or cynicism. And back then, in the first years in Mexico City, he had been such an obvious gringo, standing out so in the cantinas of La Condesa. His pale, white skin with its bluish pallor, like alabaster. His tall, commanding countenance.

“You come here to get lost?” they asked him that first year. “It's the right country. The land of the disappeared,
los desaparecidos
. Even so tall a man, you can disappear, you can.” He'd been angry at that. What right had the man to define him? He would not disappear. He would not stay in this godforsaken country.

“My stay is temporary,” he had told them. “I'm going to America.”

“Is that right? Where are you from?”

“Russia.”

“
El ruso!
He's Russian.
Amigos. El ruso
.”

He did not like that to be known, regretted it as soon as he'd revealed it out of anger. He'd learned the necessity for vigilance—the vigilance of a foreigner. Aware, always—who surrounded him, who might be at the next table over, who lingered too long within a doorway, who asked too many questions. He did not know how else to live in the world when he was so far still from any place he could call, think of as home. Now, a city, a language has gone ahead and seeped in, and, more often than not, he knows he is mistaken for a native Mexican: skin around the eyes dark; face, forearms, and hands a tarnished bronze; black hair graying into a metallic iron.

And now where is he? He's come out of an alley, disoriented. He doesn't know which way to go. It is shocking and in his confusion he begins, instinctually, to move not left or right, but straight ahead.
Tout droit
he thinks, remembering that was the first phrase he'd comprehended in French, those years ago on the tightly wound, cobblestoned streets of the ninth arrondissement in Paris. Hungry and in search of work, cold and bewildered by the incomprehensible streets of another foreign city. And now here he is,
tout droit, tout droit,
he thinks as he walks, laughing at himself for the sudden switch of language, not straight ahead, or in Russian, how does one say it? But never mind that he thinks, he has to now calmly do an about-face and pretend as if he were walking the other way and now no longer
tout droit
because in his disorientation, in his wanderings and his furtive, crazed walk (half run) to get away, he's unknowingly stumbled to where he stands now—before him, just a few yards ahead, sits the building he often walks twenty minutes out of his way to avoid: the Soviet Embassy. His heart nearly gushes in his ears. He sees the steps to the front door, the sheen of the heavy thick wood and the brass doorknob. He can see two figures at the bottom of the steps, hands in coat pockets, one man nodding his head, the other suddenly giving out a loud laugh. Austin freezes. He really cannot pass in front of them. He would not be surprised if his name were printed on some large banner, a kind of indictment. He dares not look in the direction of the embassy. He'll instead feign nonchalance, pass by it, pretending that he does not care in the slightest if his name is written in big, bold block letters, all in black, on a three-foot-high canvas banner like a call to arms—VORONKOV.

 • • • 

T
O
SEE
HIS
STREET
after the evening's wandering is a relief. He feels lucky for at least that, to see the recognizable shape of the buildings, their jagged silhouettes edging sky. The Cantina de los Remedios. Its laughter and voices fall out the lighted windows like mouths. It reaches him, draws him into the warmth, the stale, layered smell: tequila, beer, smoke, and ammonia. He sits in the way he likes, at the far end of the bar, on the side so he can see the door, aware of who walks in, who comes toward him either too nonchalantly or too directly. The clatter, rumble, and whispers bloom up from full tables, filter over those that are empty, and linger amid the few dotted with solitary patrons.

“Austinito el inventor
.
Buenas tardes,”
the bartender says. Austin taps his fingers on the bar. Its wooden surface nicked. The mirror above the bar like a strip of river. His eyes catch the ravaged reflection—a sudden recognition of self. He does not look good. He could have at least gotten the buttons on his shirt right. Has he really walked around all day, presented himself at the embassy with the shirt buttons all misaligned?

“Austin, Austin,” the bartender says, grabbing his shoulder. And then to no one in particular, “the inventor who cannot invent his way out of Mexico.” He is holding a cloth in his hands. He begins to fold it into a small square.

“
Una tequila
,” Austin says.

Austin remembers how he'd first come here, still new to the neighborhood. Everyone assumed he was working for the Soviets. Then, Miguel had whispered to him, with a smile, waving his finger at Austin, “One day, you will tell me what you did that you can't get to your family.”

“Nothing,” Austin had said, and then, for emphasis,
“Nada.”

And it was true. He had done nothing. In fact, what he had done was follow the rules, or, at least, followed them in the way he understood them at the time. It seemed to Austin that when he looked at his life thus far, examined each year, connecting one to the next, the years were marked by a keen obedience, not unlike the bottles that sat before him in their ordered rows, the overhead light painting first one and then another bright, white arc along each successive curve of dark amber glass.

He—an anarchist? What kind of anarchist would be so compliant? What of all his repeated visits to the embassy, all the attempts to enlist the help of the correct authorities, the formal letters to the senators, to D.C., the affidavits, notarized birth and work certificates, port of entry papers—was not all this proof enough? How could these men not see the very thing that sat right before them? But then again that was perhaps asking too much of them. He'd come to know—his very predicament was a testament to this fact—that appointed clerks, all members of this bureaucracy, were only able to see what was set before them in black and white. They could not—sometimes Austin felt that it was done intentionally, a requirement of their posts and positions—read between the lines.

He sips his tequila from the thick, hand-blown shot glass. Its lip of indigo blue is curved, soothing. A spiky astringency. Next, warmth. Voices rise, then soften. He remembers Julia and the children on the day of parting. How very logical it had all seemed at the time. The consulate in Nogales had told them it would only take two months, maybe three. Julia would fight to get Austin, her husband, the father of her children, reinstated. How they believed so fully in the sheer momentum of travel, her travels, from Mexico to the United States—the train breaking through the border, from Cananea to Nogales, hurtling onward toward the northeast. Surely that and the bonds of marriage, progeny, would help to drag him in her wake. She had made them arrange their suitcases into a kind of sitting room on the railway platform.
Sit, sit, a moment of stillness please
, she'd insisted. A Russian tradition. She'd learned it from him, made it her own and practiced it with diligence, reverence. The five of them sat in silence. The train exhaled its smoke in big, rushing hisses. People clamoring, dashes on and off the train. The embraces. And still, they remained, taking pause before the journey. What to say? A forced awkward stillness. Julia cried. He distracted the children.

“And you must remember all of it for me,” he'd told his sweet ones. “When I come, you can tell me all your stories, all your adventures.” They clung to him, squeezing his neck. The train whistle blew, a piercing cry that frightened his daughter Vera and made her bite his shoulder. The small teeth marks lasted two days.