Father Chuy of the Sagrada Familia

The place where the boy came from was a wide, low dale encircled by a sierra of mountains that jutted heavenward like the pikes of a fortess, separating los guanajuatenses from the vast, desert-like country around them. If the boy had ever flown in an airplane he would have seen those mountains, like a contingent of august sentinels, their hoary locks and craggy faces giving character to the flat, dry landscape from which they rose. But the boy had never gone anywhere. The closest he’d come to flying was riding a rickety bus, the American school name long ago painted over, up the steep and winding road to the statue of Cristo Rey every December on pilgrimage.

The old people of that place told how it had once snowed on the low ground, a razor-thin veneer of white over the terra-cotta earth, like a powdered doughnut, and how the people, in response, had prostrated themselves on the frigid ground like los moros and prayed, filled with the grim conviction that the world was coming to an end. Over time, the day of the snowfall had taken on a legendary significance: the day when the wrath of God was averted. But in the boy’s time there had never been snow, or even the faintest hint of frost. The defining characteristic of the boy’s world was dust. For three-quarters of the year, the houses and shops and churches baked in the searing sun under a thick coat of dust that rose up from the surrounding lands–sembradillos of yellow corn and blue agave–and settled over the city like the sandman’s prodigious powders over the closed eyes of sleeping children. The women waged their individual wars against it, wetting down their tiles and front walks with buckets of half water, half crisp-smelling Fabuloso and tickling the figurines of fat clay mariachis or beatific saints or grinning cats with feather dusters. But the dust, like the relentless sun, was inevitable.

Then, in the summertime, the city was transformed. The rains came, hard and steady, soaking the low ground into flash floods and bringing spectacular lightning storms over the cerro. The dust was washed away by the confluence of a thousand little streams and rivulets all leading to the malecón. The malecón was their salvation, for the great concrete riverbed caught the whole accumulation of rain each season for drinking water, lest the people and animals of that place perish in the nine hot, rainless months to come. Sometimes–at least once a summer, it seemed–a drunk fell into it and was drowned.

The boy’s state was Guanajuato, the place of the frogs in the old language, for with the rains came a horde of tiny transients who made nightly serenades and perched, inert and Buddha-like, on low garden walls and bus stop benches. His city, too, was an animal, and a statue of its namesake stood, majestic, atop the great stone arch at the city’s old entrance, as if daring invitados to approach. By the boy’s time the arch was in the middle of the city and was surrounded by Lupillo’s Pizza, a XXX movie theater, and the Bara-Mart, but the sleek grandeur of the lion remained undiminished. In the evenings after school, the boy liked to sit with a book on the cobblestone promenade below, imagining with awe all that the statue must have seen in its more than three hundred-year vigil over its eponymous city.

So much, then, for the place where the boy was from.

*****

The boy himself was not a happy child. He couldn’t remember ever having been happy, though he suspected that he had been once, in that time before memory when his family was complete and lived in the little blue house on Avenida Oriol. He knew the place because his mother pointed it out to them with a sigh every time they walked past it on their way to the plazita or the panadería or Tía Carmen’s house. He looked at it with a mixture of longing and curiosity, as if, like an amnesiac, he might be able to jog some memory of that other, forgotten time just by a sufficient scrutiny of its azure stucco and brick window arches. The house had been theirs, but now it was only an itch the boy couldn’t scratch.

He knew what it was that had brought them–him, Maria Eugenia, Maria Antonia, and their mother–to the house that was not theirs. To Uncle Guillermo and his family, four more empty stomachs to fill in a house with too many already. He had heard the one-word explanation for why they lived in a single room with a concrete floor punctuated by a round drain. A room that had been a back patio until they came and where, in spite of cans of noxious spray, they were plagued by rats and cockroaches and scorpions because there was no wall on one side, but only a faded blue tarp stretched out taut with fraying yellow cords. The reason was Thirst.

When the boy was small, the word denoted for him some horrible sickness of plague-like proportions, a fatal condition that could strike even a strong, handsome man in the prime of his life. The same man whose rugged, sun-browned countenance kept watch over them from a shiny gold frame beside the bed where they slept, the boy and his mother facing the doorway, the girls turned opposite, their tiny bodies wedged between to keep them from falling out of bed. Your father died of Thirst in the Sonoran desert.

When he was older, the boy learned that it wasn’t Thirst after all but only thirst, the same kind that made baby Toña pull at the neckline of their mother’s blouse to pedir teta or that he felt after fútbol. He learned that thirst unsated kills, but first it tortures, wracking the body with cramps and slurring the speech and shutting down the organs, starting with the kidneys. He learned that one of the last things thirst does is to poison the brain with madness. When they found his father on the Arizona side of the border, his body had been stripped of clothes and his neck was criss-crossed with deep red lines where he’d clawed at his throat in desperation. There were clumps of his own curly hair still clutched in the bloody palms of both hands. That body, the repository of half the boy’s genetic material, lay buried somewhere in el norte because his mother hadn’t had the money to have it shipped back to them, half a country away.

There was an old song where the boy came from:

Beautiful León, Guanajuato

with her carnival and its games.

One gambles with his own life there;

respect is what the winner gains.

There in my León, Guanajuato,

where life means nothing at all…

Such was the machismo, the desperate bravado, of the men of his city, but in the boy this fierceness in the blood lay dormant for almost a dozen years before, quite suddenly one summer evening, it awoke. He’d been watching an old episode of Miami Vice–dubbed into Spanish, with an audio track that didn’t quite sync up to the movements of the characters’ mouths when they spoke–and when it ended, a documentary program took its place on the screen. His cousin Mario tried to change the channel, but the boy stopped him. He’d seen enough to know that this program was of imminent relevance to him. It was about the sunburnt, day-and-night-trekking, river-crossing, muro-climbing, trunk-of-car and airless-trailer-truck immigrations that people like him, from places where life meant nothing at all, undertook to get to that vast, extravagant, obscenely wealthy land to the north of them. Mario, bored, disappeared behind the curtain splashed with flaming poinsettias that hung year-round in the doorway, but the boy stood up and walked closer to the 19-inch television set that sat atop a thick board on cinderblocks in the front room of his uncle’s house. He wanted a better look at these güeros rancheros.

They were mostly fat-bellied old men in flannel shirts and wide-brimmed campesino hats, though there were a few younger, thinner ones among the group. The words they spat into the camera about the brown people on the other side of their border were harsh and gutteral, words that the Spanish subtitles at the bottom of the screen seemed powerless in their melodiousness to correspond to. The boy watched a group of them, their eyes as clear and cold as the eyes of cats, make a swaggering patrol of the lifeless borderlands with the somber intensity of boys at play. Then the scene shifted, and the men–they were all of them men–were working in pairs to lift up the back ends of big blue barrels that humanitarian groups and Catholic churches left for immigrants. They were emptying the water out of them. Time seemed to slow down for the boy as he watched a stream of that water sparkle in the bright sunlight then melt into the hot Arizona dust until only a dark stain marked the place where it was swallowed by the desert.

The boy had known resignation. He’d eaten and breathed it and sweated it from his pores for as long as he could remember. He had not known fury, and the magnitude of it frightened him. If he could have razed the entire country of moon-faced gringos to the ground at that moment he would have, and left a scorched trail of earth in his wake, like Zorro’s Z, as undeniable, gloating proof of what he’d done.

That was the beginning.