The Jaguar's Children (12 page)

 

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.

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 start 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.

Mamá wears her hair in the same braids like those ladies on the Diego Rivera bags that the tourists used to buy, with ribbons woven in and tied together at the bottom. It is pretty, of course, but that is not why she does it. She does it so her hair won't catch fire when she's cooking. Mamá tried pants once, but Chinese bluejeans are not made for the Zapoteca body and Papá said they make her look like a pile of tires so now she is back to the skirt and apron and huipil. Most of the time there is no reason to wear shoes, but she has some little rubber ones. In the pueblos nothing is new but Pepsi bottles, plastic buckets and babies, and none of these stay new very long. When I was little, except for the Chevy Apache and some clothes, just about everything we owned or ate came out of the ground.

Where I live, it is the truck that makes the difference between a slave and the free man. This is what my father always told me. The Chevy Apache was his pride, un clásico with the V-8 and four speeds. The engine sounded like river stones in a dump truck. Papá bought it before I was born when he was working up in Chihuahua for Don Serafín. It had holes in the back gate and Papá said they were made by bullets. On the windshield is the polarizado, the special band for blocking the sun, and this one says
GON MAN
. There is one photo from that time when the Apache was all black, and with its desert tires and long bed it looked to me like the Batmobile.

You could always tell Papá's truck from the others because it was covered over in dents like some crazy person beat it with a hammer. This was from the only time Papá drove into Texas. I was still a baby and there was some kind of storm up there. Papá was alone on the highway when it happened and he said there were balls of ice coming down the size of guayabas—oranges even. They came so many and so fast he didn't know what was happening. The noise was incredible, he said, like thunder under your hat. He thought it was one of those warplanes Tío told us about and he was sure he was going to die. Together with all the dents, the windshield was cracked all over. When finally he was brave enough to come out, the sun was shining and near him in the grass was a dead coyote in a circle of smoking white ice balls. He drove straight home after that because in his mind it was an omen. Since then, he had bad dreams about it—sometimes it was the coyote lying there, sometimes it was him. He asked Mamá to see if the Bible mentioned such things with the frogs and locusts and hemorrhoids, but she said no, maybe it is a new punishment from God, special for Texas—for killing John F. Kennedy. My mother crosses herself whenever she hears his name because he was a Catholic also.

Only once did Papá take me with him to Chihuahua. It was just before we left for el Norte and Papá was making a delivery for Don Serafín—peanuts and other things too, I think, but Papá did not talk about it because I was so young and because what matters is only the work. In the night that highway from Ciudad Chihuahua to Durango is full of trucks, nose to tail like a string of burros and driving so fast, 120 kilometers, sometimes more. No federales and the only way off is into the ditch. Everything is dark beyond the road—just the wide plain stretching away on every side, black like space and between the towns not a single light. It is dangerous and only the santos and virgins keep us alive. But even with hundreds of them they are still too busy—so hard to watch over everyone at once.

And we are driving the peanuts—cacahuates. You must hear SpongeBob sing that song:
¡Soy un cacahuate!—Boom Bam Boom Bam—¡Eres un cacahuate!—Boom Bam Boom Bam—¡Todos somos CACAHUATES!
And he is right. Out here we are all peanuts and SpongeBob sings it like he will die if he doesn't—like a true Mexicano, like Vicente Fernández. Of course you know this song. It was my first ringtone.

But this story here is from before the time of SpongeBob and celular—

It is late and we are driving and Papá is so still and quiet he is like a statue of someone driving. But this is normal, he is used to driving all night. I have eaten so many peanuts I never want to see another and I am trying to sleep against the door when all of a sudden the brake lights are on in front and we are going from 100 to 10 like that. Flashers everywhere and mi padre is cursing. He doesn't talk so much, but he curses con elocuencia. Many, many chingaos in all their different positions. So now everything is very slow in both directions and Papá pulls his head down into his neck, shoulders by his ears. He does this when he's not happy and it makes him look like a turtle sulking, but I would never tell him this. “¿Qué chingado es esto?” he says. “¿Una chingada calenda?”

There is a bend in the road and a rise in the land and on the other side a glowing. The sky is dark without the moon, but there is a light in the sky, big and orange like the sun is coming up early. Papá whistles and he pats the virgin on the dashboard—Juquila, por supuesto. “¿Qué es
esto?
” he says again. It is so slow now, like we are riding in an ox cart instead of the Apache, and when we finally get to the top of the rise we can see it. It is a fire—muy grande, como el infierno, and I wonder what can make such a fire like this. Most of the vehicles out here are panel trucks or vans with people, and these are not so big. But up there burning is something else, something enormous. Papá is holding the wheel tight with both hands and staring into the fire that is too bright to look at, and I am staring also because it is too bright not to look at. There are shapes in there—humans, black and thin, waving in the flames like puppets dancing. Monos in sombreros. After seeing this it is always how I imagine souls in Hell—in the dark by the side of a highway on an empty plain—el páramo despoblado—floating in fire. If it was Mexicanos writing the Old Testament, this is what it would look like.