The Jaguar's Children Page 9

  Nothing is changing in five hundred years—more, even. Always there is a handful of chingones controlling everything and the rest of us chasing the crumbs. So many other young people have gone already—anyone who can make the trip north. I saw this with my own eyes, how the pueblo is a nut with a worm in it—the shell is there, but inside, out of sight, the meat is being eaten away. Many young people say that in Mexico to get ahead now the only way is to cheat and break some rule. But to do this you must have some connections or be very smart, or very hard. For the rest of us there is only el Norte y los dólares gringos.

  In my pueblo, half are gone to the States. Almost four hundred people. You walk through there now and you think maybe there has been a war or some disease—just kids and old people and animals left. Abuelo told me it was like this also after la Revolución—a million Mexicanos died from that and many survivors went to el Norte, maybe a million more. And you had half our country already—Tejas, California, Arizona, Nuevo Mexico, Nevada, Colorado and some others I can’t remember, plus all those rivers. It was all once Mexico—you can see it by the names. Mexicanos don’t forget this and there are many songs. Tijuana No! are rapping about it also, a history lesson for gringos and a kind of promise too—la Reconquista . . . Because we are coming back.

  Maybe this is our destiny—not for Mexico to lose her people or for America to lose her soul, but for all of us to come together—the United States of Améxica. It will be a new superpower, but with better food.

  Ever since I was young, my father talked of going back, but he never did, and when I asked him why, he only made excuses until one day last fall when we were arguing again about me going to university, I got angry. “Why are you always telling me to go up there,” I said, “when it is you who wants it so much?”

  It was the first time I spoke to him like a man and not like a son or a boy. Instead of shouting or raising his hand, Papá looked away out the window, took a sip of his beer and said nothing. We were in the Chevy Apache on the road to Tlacolula, the nearest town to our pueblo. I was driving and we had just come through Santa María del Tule, past the giant cedar there, which rises like a green fountain from the valley floor—three thousand years old and wider than the church. Outside of town, vultures circled over the road waiting for something to die. Papá did not speak as we passed the quarry where they cut a hill in half and the fallen blocks lie scattered, almost yellow in the pale green brush. Or when three state police cars raced up behind us with sirens and disappeared over a hill. My heart was starting to settle and my hands relax again when my father finally spoke.

  “You may not remember this,” he said, still looking out the window, “but when we got deported, they held us in Brownsville for two days. They put me with the men. You were the only child in our group and you went with the women. You didn’t cry when they took you away and I was proud. Of course I protested—I said you were my only son and that we must stay together, but the agents said I had broken the law and had no right to make demands. They put us in barracks like in the army, it was hot as hell, the mosquitoes were terrible, and I hoped it was better where you were. On the second day, two agents from la Migra took me to another building. There, in a small room, they took my picture, my fingerprints, all my details, but it was not this that frightened me. It was their words. ‘We will be watching for you,’ they said. ‘If you ever come back we will put you in prison, and where will your boy be then?’” My father finished his beer and threw the bottle out the window. “That is why.”

  “You believed them?” I said.

  “If you had been in that room,” he said, “you would have believed them too. Those chingados can take anything from you—your job, your freedom, your child. Without these, what is a man?”

  11

  Fri Apr 6—00:49

  If you are my witness, AnniMac, I am your invisible man. O su suplicante. Pues, I am saying all this because I cannot see or do anything else. Because remembering the past helps me forget the present. Because maybe right now someone is fixing the tower and these messages will finally go. I tell myself that even if the mechanic never comes, la Migra will find us. It is what your border army is for, no? We hear all the time in Mexico about your modern technologies for catching migrantes—the cactus microphones and the cameras in space and the great engines under the desert that rumble in the night, powering the whole machine. And we see the pictures of all your green men with their trucks and planes and helicopters, and their dogs and indios to follow the tracks. I know this truck is big and easy to see—it is an elephant out here. It even has a sign on it en español which is yelling now—DEPORT ME. Or maybe it is DRINK ME.

  Even with César so close I’m freezing. I’m holding him as tight as I can. It is the only way I can stop my teeth from rattling. I’m not the only one doing this, but I’m glad no one can see it.

  Fri Apr 6—08:36

  The helicopter went over us so low we were sure they saw us, but that was half an hour ago. The truck is getting warmer, but I am so stiff from the cold and the metal. The viejo in front who was insulted by the coyote, I think he is hallucinating—talking to his wife, asking her for agua de jamaica. There are some in here who think I am hallucinating too, talking to people who aren’t there. Sometimes the baby-face man and his friend told me to be quiet, but not for a while. I know people are in trouble now, I can hear it by how they breathe—like dogs and sick people. It is a big question—if all of us will live to be saved. My water is gone and I think it is the same for everyone.

  Maybe César is the lucky one. Maybe his accident was Juquila’s mercy protecting him from something worse. Because what are the chances of such an injury? César said Juquila saved me also—from the federales. He said she might have a plan for me, but a plan is not the same as protection. César didn’t give me his phone because he is a nice guy or because he didn’t want it anymore—he gave it to me because he wanted someone to keep it alive. In there are some files and documents about the corn and a company called SantaMaize. I know this because of what I saw and what he told me on our last night in Altar. But this is not the only thing I have from César.

  I did not say before how I came to have his phone because of what came with it, what I took. Two nights ago when the tank was cooling—for a short time before the cold it was better for us. This is when César started moving again—his hand. It was a surprise for me because it is the first time since he fell, and I said, “Cheche! Are you OK?”

  But he only whispered, “Tito,” his voice so quiet I must put my ear by his mouth to hear it, and I said, “Yes, I am here,” and took his hand.

  Luego, he pulled my hand over to his pants and they were wet. He pushed my hand down on the zipper. “Take it,” he whispered. “Take it.”

  I didn’t know what he was talking about and even in the dark it was embarrassing. I thought he must be delirious, so I’m pulling my hand away and saying, “What? What is it?” But he keeps pushing my hand down there so I can feel everything and he’s saying, “Take it,” and then I feel something hard that is not him. It is completely dark, but I’m looking around anyway because you don’t want anyone to see you doing like this—it feels so wrong. And then I do it, AnniMac, reach my hand into his pants. I try to stay outside his chones, but that’s not where it is. I have to go inside them all the way because this is where he hides his phone. It is a safe place there and it is the reason he still has it, but I think I am going to be sick, trying not to touch anything but the phone, and when I get it I wipe it on my pants, and that’s when I feel it—his battery, the new Mugen that lasts for many days.

  César took a big breath, and another, and then he lets go my hand. I am afraid he’s dying, right in that moment, but when I listen he is still breathing the same way like before. When I touch his head I can feel that the bleeding is finished which I hope is good. I try to give him some water, but he chokes on it and I don’t know what else to do. No one can help me, and I can’t help César.

  But hi
s water—when I found that in the pocket of his jacket, I put it in my backpack. All this time I saved it.

  Fri Apr 6—10:01

  I am finally warm and I was trying to rest, but there was a problem in the tank. The Zapotec man who cut himself still has my phone from before, and the baby-face man asked him to use it. “It’s not my phone,” said the Zapoteco. I could hear by his voice that he was having problems. He was gasping.

  “Just give it to me,” said the baby-face man whose voice didn’t sound right either. “My feet are fucking killing me. They don’t fit in my fucking shoes anymore.”

  “I can’t,” said the Zapoteco.

  “What the fuck,” said the baby-face man. “You down there, paisano, I need to use your phone.”

  I do not like this guy since he pulled off César’s shoe, and before, when I passed my phone to the Zapoteco, I didn’t want him to touch it so I sent it down the other side of the tank, from the Maya to the mother and her son to the baker from Michoacán to another young woman who didn’t speak and then to the Veracruzano. “What do you need it for?” I asked.

  “So I can call my motherfucking lifeline. ¡Güey! My fucking feet are swelling up. Something’s not right with them. I need to look.”

  I did not have the energy to fight or argue. I was afraid of this guy, but I was also afraid of people turning against me, coming after the water. “You can use it for a minute,” I said, “but don’t waste the battery.”

  “Órale,” says the baby-face man.

  All of this was happening in the dark. The Zapoteco must have given him my phone then because when the screen came on the baby-face man had it. “¡Jesucristo!” he said. Even in that light I could see his feet—like someone blew them up with air, and dark red. The baker from Michoacán was sitting opposite him and when she saw them so close she pulled away. “You need to elevate them,” she said. She was whispering because her voice didn’t work anymore. “Put them over your head.”

  “How the fuck am I going to do that?”

  “Is that the only word you know?” asked the baker who was more like a mayordomo than a baker. “I’m telling you—if you want the swelling to go down.”

  The baby-face man held up my phone and looked around the tank. To his right, in the glow of the screen, I saw the two Nicas and the injured one was pale and silent, his head on the other’s shoulder, holding his hand which looked now like a purple glove. The way the light was in there, people’s faces did not look like living faces anymore but like masks, the kind a witch would make if she wanted to curse you, and I wondered if I looked the same.

  “Who has water?” croaked the baby-face man.

  To ask this in here is like going to a cemetery and saying, Who’s alive?

  He went from face to face with the screen light, saying, “You? You? You?”

  People covered their eyes or turned away. With his head down, the Veracruzano held up an empty bottle in one hand and wiggled two fingers in the sign for Fuck yourself.

  “Turn the screen down,” I said, but he ignored me.

  “What about you?” he said to a young woman next to the Veracruzano who was kneeling on her bag, facing the wall of the tank. She was an india, but I couldn’t tell where she was from. Her jeans were wet and her head was bowed over her hands. She looked like pictures I saw of people waiting to be executed. “What are you doing there?” he asked. “Praying for rain?” The woman didn’t answer. The baby-face man looked around the tank again. “We’ll be drinking our piss pretty soon.”

  “Speak for yourself,” whispered the baker. “Someone will come—la Migra, o un ranchero—”

  “Or the fucking Minutemen,” said the baby-face man.

  “Turn the phone off,” I said. “You’re wasting the battery.”

  He turned the screen toward me. “What are you saving it for?” he asked. “Do you know something we don’t? And why are you talking all the time?”

  “We’re going to need it if the bars come back,” I said. “Turn it off and give it to me.”

  “No bars on it now,” said the baby-face man, holding the light on me. “You have his phone—and his water also.” And then to everyone, “Isn’t that right? How can he talk so much without water?”

  “¡Dios mío!” said the baker. “How can you talk so much?”

  He put the light on César and the only thing moving on him was his chest, up and down like a pump. The blood on his face was dry and pieces were breaking off like old paint. He turned the light back on me. “You took his water, didn’t you?”

  “He cares for him all this time,” said the Maya. “Making the bandage, talking to him, giving him water. It is why he still lives.”

  “He gave you some?” asked the baby-face man, pointing the phone at the Maya.

  “What have you done for anybody?” asked the praying woman whose son’s head was still cradled in her lap. “Besides break that pendejo’s fingers.”

  The baby-face man pointed the phone at me again. “My water’s gone,” he said.

  “Because it’s all in your feet,” said the baker. “Now turn around, put them up on the wall, and for God’s sake give us some peace.”

  Even whispering, you could hear in her voice that she was used to telling people what to do. I thought about what she said about his feet, and I understood that the women would last the longest. With their hips and chichis, they are full of water, like camels. The baby-face man was trying to turn around and having trouble so the baker made room for him. “You can put your head here for a little while,” she said and patted her lap. “How old are you?”

  “Twenty-six,” said the baby-face man.

  “The same as my son,” she said. “He’s in Texas now. You even look like him.” She held her hands out to him and with no more words he laid his head in her lap and slowly moved his feet up the wall. For a moment the screen light went across the face of his friend. The man’s lips were white with foam and his eyes were open, seeing nothing. He was breathing, but only enough for a much smaller person. I wondered if he was really a friend of the baby-face man, and if he would be the first to die.

  12

  Fri Apr 6—10:21

  I told César in his ear that I am holding his water, keeping it safe for him, but to myself I say, Only as long as I can.

  My greatest fear, AnniMac—besides dying in here—is for my mother to learn of it on Primer Impacto. This is her favorite program with news, celebrities and always some catastrophe—a plane crash or narco violence or dead migrantes—Mexicanos with more wounds than Jesus Himself, and on Primer Impacto they show every corpse and cut and bullet hole. Since we moved to el centro my mother is addicted to it. The neighbor has a television and whenever she can she is over there watching. There are enough of us in here, I think, for Primer Impacto to notice, especially if we die. Because in Mexico death is our national drug, the god everyone worships but no one will name. And I can see mi madre with her neighbor, Lola, in their braids and skirts and aprons, sitting in their plastic chairs when that hot presentadora comes on with her white teeth and incredible lips and chichis bigger than your head, and she’s telling the story and my mother is thinking, Qué lástima, more dead paisanos on the border—until she sees the pictures and hears the names and understands that no, these are migrantes from the south—Oaxaqueños—Zapotecos—her own son! Mi madre has suffered enough.

  I will tell you about my mother because if you can see her, then you can see me. Her name is Ofelia. She is darker and shorter than my father and so am I, and our eyes are the same shape and color brown. When she smiles her face is a dark room with the sun coming in and to see it will make you smile also. Mi mamá is wide now and stands to my shoulder, and I am only one meter and sixty-five. There is a thing that happens to a woman after she has some children and spends a few thousand days in the field, and to a man after he carries a few thousand bricks and follows the plow for a thousand kilometers, and that is you stop walking forward with your legs like a horse or a dog and st
art moving from your hips—side to side like a lizard or the Hulk—stiff as an old burro. That loose way of the girl or the dancer goes away, the muscle turns to something else, and you start looking like the pots they made in our pueblo before plastic came. Everything in our old pueblo is low and sturdy like the people and you may wonder if we built the houses and the pots to fit us or if we have grown to fit them. If you are the way I imagine you, I think you will need to bend down to come in our door, but my mother will make you such a feast. Maybe she will teach you her recipe for mole—thirty-seven steps and two days to make it. She can feed a hundred people like nothing.