The Invention of Exile (18 page)

Jack joins him with a full plate, piled high with double servings. He sits hunched over his food, stabbing with his fork, taking large bites.

“Starving,” he says as he delves in for a second bite. “You know the good establishments, don't you?” he says, mouth full of food. Austin shrugs his shoulders.

“I at least benefit from that. I appreciate it, let me tell you. Difficult to know which place offers the best food. You fit right in here, don't you? Tell me, you found work okay here your first years in Mexico?”

“I operated a lighthouse,” Austin says, addressing no one in particular. Eyes on the ground as if the question came from the air.

“Lighthouse, copper mines, repairs,” he says.

“I have learned to be versatile.”

“Where was this?”

“Mazatlán.”

“Mazatlán?”

“Yes. You know it?”

“A fishing port. Lots of activity there.”

“Yes.”

“Not easy work, that. Lighthouse work.”

“I managed.”

A table erupts into laughter. Austin shivers from the suddenness of it, and then the dying out. Silence. He can hear other voices far in the distance, a word or two wafting over the low walls of the back of the restaurant, settling on the night air.

“Two months, wasn't that what they told you and Julia?”

Julia. Her name had fallen between them—weighted with absence.

“How did you know?” Austin says.

“We have our ways of finding out these things. A mutual decision of course. Wise, at the time, considering the circumstances.” Jack sits across from Austin. “Certainly, she can't come back. Of course, I don't blame her,” Jack says, leaning forward, his eyes focused. There is a long pause. Jack is waiting for Austin's response. Austin sits still, unyielding. He will not give anything away. He will not divulge, forfeit his curiosity, but he does want to know exactly how much they know. He sighs. Looks around. “I am glad to run into you. I usually don't come here, but I am glad I did.” With his other hand, he reaches across the table, and shakes Austin by the shoulder a bit. His hands are firm and strong, like marble. “A marvelous coincidence that we should meet in this very place, in such a large city, don't you think? What are the chances?” It was a phrase that lingered in Austin's mind, Austin knowing full well that Jack and his people had arranged it.

“Of course, I know most of your details from your file. Amazing what happened to you. I guess you don't like to think of it too much, too difficult to recall all of it—such a chaotic time, why go back to a bad time, right? And here we are again, after the Reds, mostly in Hollywood now, but before, it was you people, Russian immigrants. But as I interpret it, you thought you'd just set up a life in the Ukraine, isn't that right? Live a fine, simple life farming whatever it is you farm there—wheat, rye? I don't know. To have traveled all that way only to realize you are unwanted there too. A civil war will do that to people, Reds versus Whites. And we know your family were landowners—at the wrong place at the wrong time, it seems to me. Oh, but from what it sounded like, Julia would've followed you anywhere, really, even if you were off to Siberia, right? Who could've ever predicted this Stalin? Brutal. What's going on there now, just brutal. The labor camps. I wouldn't want to go back there. But Mexico—after everything, this country must've seemed like a paradise to you. I know the aim was always to get to the States, but now, though, well, I bet you think the worst the two of you ever did was agree to part. In this crazy time, you just can't do that. I know you think your inventions will get you in some way.”

“If you don't prevent it.”

“Why do you think we didn't allow you entry in the first place? It must have been hard, though, having them leave you, but then again I suppose you've grown accustomed to doing a lot of leaving in your life.”

“I was to follow her. In two months they said. Two months!”

“But all that time in Cananea—Austin, I am surprised you never tried crossing the border. It's right there.”

“No.”

“And so you're telling me that you never tried, never even stepped across?”

“No.”

“Why not? It was much easier then. Sometimes even a mile away from the border port of entry, people going back and forth right under the noses of the border patrol, smugglers at your beck and call. Of course, I suppose you had a reason to be fearful. I can't blame you for that. No country. That'll make you feel vulnerable in this world. Like you're standing outside without a coat your whole life.”

“I must go,” Austin says, rising. He is looking out the door.

“Now? Right this minute?”

“I just now forgot something.”

“No you didn't. Don't forget I know your routine. Almost as if it were my very own. Like clockwork, really. Right about now, you'll go to the Alameda, wandering, walking, and then in about an hour, two hours, I'll find you at work, drafting.” Jack says all this while glancing at his watch and then looking back to Austin. “I am right, I see, by the slight blush across your face.”

“You have no right to speak to me this way.”

“I'm merely taking notice.”

“How dare you come here and disturb me like this.”

“Careful, don't get so hot tempered. You must see that there is a reason why we keep your type out.”

“You cannot begin to understand my type.”

“I know what I see. I know what your file says.”

“You know nothing.”

 • • • 

1930–36

C
OPPER
CAN
BE
TRICKY
.
In some lights—a morning's blue before the sun, the violet gray of evening—it can be dull and opaque hiding in a guise of stone, rock. The sun rising, setting will reveal copper's brilliantine surface—sometimes a sheaf of copper as thin as paper, deposits of it spread across the surface of a rock face. Other times, it's in boulder form. The scent is briny, cloying, during the smelting. The solid softens. The smell never leaves.

Austin worked in the copper mines of Sonora. In the mining town of Cananea, which, before it was a mining town, was a land of Apaches.
Cananea.
The Apaches' word for horsemeat. A land of copper too. Rich in copper. The great quarries rose-hued in some lights. A scarred earth, copper emerging out of rock and dirt, reddish against the camel-colored dust. The quarry like a canyon, steps carved into ore. The embers burned in the hills at night. Carts of molten, smelted copper gliding along the quarry paths, carts rumbling like far distant thunder, carts blazing like torches to a ritual, beacons with no messages to impart—no signs of safety or of conquest.

The land beyond the mines is wide and empty, a craggy terrain. There are solitary nopals or agave cacti, a yucca plant's spiky leaves black beneath a cobalt sky. The fragile wooden barracks are humbled by the otherwise barren, desolate land and the open, empty sky stretched tight above the Sierra Madre, the Sonora River, and the neighboring towns of San Pedro, Naco, Agua Prieta.

 • • • 

C
OPPER
IS
A
PHRODITE
'
S
ELEMENT
.
No wonder it's a place that can break your heart.

Then, in the 1930s, the lands were owned by several California copper capitalists, the ones whose families owned homes in the hills, the hills where the Chinese grocers delivered crates of tomatoes, green beans, cigarette papers and tobacco, molasses and sugar. The mining town barracks sat on the outskirts of the mines, far, but not so far that one couldn't see the molten copper at night, the carts of blazing embers along the hillside. The blue flames the hottest, burning to white, then blue, then amber, orange. At night, one could stand on the mesa, a mile off from the pit, with its ridges like the seats in an ancient amphitheater, watching the wooden carts follow paths to the right, then left, then right and left again, slowing slightly at the narrow turns.

“Stare long enough and it's like one is staring at beads of fire on an abacus,” a fellow engineer had said when showing Austin around.

 • • • 

A
USTIN
HEARD
ABOUT
THE
work on a trip from Mazatlán to Hermosillo. In 1927 the companies had begun to send out labor agents wearing placards—to the city, the coast towns, the farmlands, to the places they knew—to find the immigrants and migrant workers, the Yaquis and the farmers, all willing and in desperate need of work. The placards read: “Electricity. Running Water.” The men walked back and forth in the train depots passing out flyers.

They built a home there in the land of Cananea, in 1930. In the two-room barracks house. A shack of raw wood really, filled with splinters. He'd sanded it down, but the splinters were endless—on the porch, along the beams of the slotted wooden railing, the stairs. The children always with a fresh white bandage wrapped around a thumb, a heel. The interior was shadowy and dim. A meager light came from the small saltbox windows in the morning hours, a light that grew stronger, more persistent as the day wore on. They got to keeping the door open—Julia's idea. It lets in the most light, she'd said once to his concern about danger.

“No one comes around,” she'd told him in response.

“True.” He couldn't argue with that, but in her voice, the “no one” echoed. She'd missed her family, her first home, and in this open space, during those long hours and the lingering weeks, there was time for the stillness that allows loneliness to enter, reflection too—enough to absorb the distances; the ties to what was once home stretched far and thin, nearly severed.

 • • • 

S
H
E
WROTE
LETTERS
.
She
wrote every day. Sometimes two in a day—letters to her sister, her mother.

“What do you write from one day to the next? You know they both read them anyway so there's no need to write to each one separately.”

“Oh, you'd be surprised the thoughts that flit through my mind when you're off digging for gold.”

“It's copper, my dear Julia, copper. The best conductor of a little something called electricity.”

“Yes. I know, I know.”

He made her a desk. Two planks, smooth and sanded, balanced across bases of wooden milk crates. She liked to write with the door open so that, in the periphery, she could see first the shaded gray of the porch and then the way it gave onto the whiteness of the Sonoran afternoons.

We deliver ourselves through letters. He understood that soon enough. She was writing herself out of Cananea, out of Mexico. After she and the children had left and he'd been there on his own, six months, seven, he walked around in what he could only decide was her discarded solitude, like a garment tattered from overuse. He couldn't deny her that loneliness—he gone for sometimes up to two weeks, required, as the foreman, to stay at the works full through, the children at the company's school all day. Some weeks he was let out days early due to an equipment problem, lack of labor, but he never knew before leaving just when he'd be back and so the good-byes now linger in his mind as stagings, intimations of the larger, future parting even if he was only a mile away. He was always stunned and awkward with her tears. She, tense, tight, hands wringing. They seemed to be both standing in awe, overwhelmed by the chasm of sorrow that seemed to crack open within her.

“A letter travels so easily. Why can't we?” she'd said one night. This, after he'd been home for a few days. That week's inevitable parting upon them, the night darkening as the horizon disappeared into black, and with the burning copper and the stars out all simultaneous, one couldn't distinguish between land and sky, sky and land.

“I wrote a letter today,” she'd begin in the silence after dinner. He'd come to wait for it, the day ending with its horizon in bands of blue, apricot, pale yellow deepening into blackness.

“To whom?”

“My sister.” He knew the answer.

She sat, bending forward, her torso pressed into her thighs so that her chin was nearly propped on her knees, her forearms clasped around her shins. The yellow light of the porch illuminated the rectangle of her letter. She clasped it between both hands, and, held that way, he could make out her fine script.

It was their routine. The pauses between each letter reading a way to extend the pleasure of this small ritual, these habits of their domesticity—this, her eventual, evening reading, letters she had written and was about to send, letters to her sister who was trying to plead their case, trying to get the entire family, Austin included, reinstated.

Silence.

“And are we going to hear it?”

Cananea

September 9, 1930

Dear sister Catherine,

We are in what they call here the Desierto, which is not desert as we know it, but more a wilderness, and is it ever quiet, especially with the children gone during the school hours. If you could only know this silence. And there is nothing around. No neighbors, mostly officials, that is all. Not the neighborly kind either. The only entertainment is when we receive a letter so do please keep them coming. We so love to hear news of home and all your doings. All I have while Austin is at the works and while the children are at school are the cars that go by or any that happen to stop in front of the house.

Now that we are somewhat settled (after all our travels), with Austin as a foreman here at the mine—he does work ever so hard and they don't ask too many questions here which is a relief—I can begin to make a case on our behalf, and work toward reinstatement. I shall write again regarding our efforts.

Your loving sister,

Julia

Cananea

September 28, 1930

Dearest Mother,

It's now what they call the dry season here and is it ever dry with enough dust to keep me always sweeping. It seems that I can't ever sweep enough. How I do miss grass. It's never something one thinks about missing, is it? Well, you'll laugh to know that I'm sitting here and right outside the front door is a cactus.

Now, to business. I have been corresponding with Senator Tierney, who, in all these years that we have been trying to return back home, is the first human I have encountered. Every one of the officials have said they could do nothing without the permission of the Immigration Department. And now to finally have some clear directions as to how to proceed with efforts to get reinstated. As you know, due to the Cable Act, I now qualify for a visa and will need to go to the Consulate here in Nogales, who in the past has not been helpful and quite unfriendly, and suspicious of Austin. But they tell us that if the children and I receive a visa and return to the U.S. we will have a better chance of getting Austin reinstated. By then, I will be an American citizen again, you see, and can work all that much more, with more power to get him home with us. Of course, the authorities will realize the humane aspect of this. How can they possibly let a young mother and her three children live away from husband and father at a time like this? No. I am an optimist and do believe we will succeed on every front.

Your loving daughter,

Julia

Cananea

November 3, 1931

My dear Catherine:

The children are learning Spanish. How strange, Catherine, to hear these words come out of their little voices. “Mas, mas,” they ask when wanting more food. How ever are these my children, I wonder? There are no other Russians here so I'm afraid Austin is quite lonely—that is, there is no one for him to speak to in his native language as we had when in Constantinople and then more so in Paris. How much he misses his countrymen. Even me, I cannot give that to him, knowing only a few words of Russian, but we try to keep up with the traditions, give the children some sense of Austin's culture. But you should see him—with his dark black hair and his skin darkened so by this sun, he looks just like one of the Mexicans. I call him an Indio. He fits right in.

Your loving sister,

Julia

Cananea

November 22, 1932

Dearest Mother:

We received your letter today and what a joy it is always to see your fine print. I have come to recognize it like I would your very face. The man at the company store teases me so and I believe if it were not for his kindness, I may not get even half of your letters as the mailman, who comes delivering the mail on the burros, is not diligent and often a letter disappears.

Your loving daughter,

Julia

Cananea

January 12, 1933

Dear Catherine:

I want to thank you for writing such clear, succinct letters to the Senators. You should be proud—and tell mother this—that you are communicating with such esteemed men in public office. I do believe Senator Tierney, though I have never met him, is a good man who genuinely feels for our situation, and, as his letters have illustrated, is working hard to secure a way for me and the children, and God willing, Austin, to travel back to all of you. It is what I pray for most.

Your loving sister,

Julia

Cananea

March 15, 1933

Dear sister Catherine:

I do believe it won't be much longer and the Consul tells us that too. So we will settle for the time being and wait for word. The consul says to return in a few months' time, but I wonder if that means one to two months or several months. A funny phrase, that—“a few months' time,” vague, sitting on either side of hope, either soon or not soon enough.

Just yesterday (Sun.) we went to a neighboring town where the company held a carnival. The children were overwhelmed with such excitement. Poor dears, they never have seen such color, brightness, toys and games. The border runs through this town, cuts it right in half. So close. You can see the other side, almost throw yourself over it, really.

Your loving sister,

Julia

Cananea

April 2, 1933

Dearest Mother:

I do wonder if you've had any word from Senator Tierney. They've given us such hope here thinking that if the children and I can come home, we'll have more of an argument and case to plead on Austin's behalf. He is just about the most hardworking, kindest man, and it's absolutely silly of them to think he'd do any harm. Oh just thinking of it makes me furious. And they've got us so worried here at the Nogales Consulate, with all their questions and suspicions. There is never any rest from thinking they will take Austin away. It stays with us always. Oh, but they must let him in. How can they not? Where would he go and what would happen to him? But I do hope what they say here is true. Perhaps I'll get a letter from you with news before this one reaches you. We are just now preparing for the rainy season and as much as I've complained about the dust—from the dirt yes, but also from the copper smelter which is a very particular kind of dust, lighter than dirt dust, more of a resin that is light and diffuse and enwraps everything in a bronze cloud—I'll be writing you mud-stained letters with raw hands from all the washing I'll be doing.