Voyage to Alpha Centauri: A Novel (51 page)

Sure enough, the car chose the worst possible moment in my life to break down. There was an ominous little “pop”, followed by chuff-chuff-chuff, a wheeze, and then we rolled to a stop. Instantly, the sun began to broil us.

“
Ay, caramba
”, my father mumbled, which made me angrier. I think I rolled my eyes and exhaled through my nostrils.

“Well, let’s see what the matter is”, he said in his patient tone, the tone that irritated me most.

So we got out of the car and walked all around it.

“What now?” I asked abruptly.

“I don’t know. Maybe I should look at the tubes.”

“Maybe you should”, I shot back in a tone that lacked our usual solidarity in trials. My disdain was just below the surface, and rising.

This drew a swift glance from him, and I felt sudden shame for my rudeness. Without comment, he opened the fuel-access hatches on the roof, and the front lid covering the engine that he had jerry-built from the far superior (though unrepairable) original motor.

“Ay, ay, ay”, he muttered as he checked all the components, one by one.

“What is it?” I demanded. “Do you see anything?”

“It looks okay to me. I don’t understand it.”

To make a long and horrible story shorter, let me say that after two hours of tinkering we gave up trying to find the source of the trouble. My father sighed and unrolled an old tarp he kept stored in the trunk, and tied it between two
piñon
trees to make us some shade. We sat down on the ground under it and drank from our water bottles. Neither of us said anything. My life was in ruins.

“Why do we sit here?” I said after some time had passed.

“Maybe a car will come along”, he replied. “It will take us to a service station. There we can hire a tow truck.”

“But we have no money.”

“I have
Uni
credits”, he mumbled, not very convincingly. I had two hundred
Unis
coded into my personal card, but I wasn’t sure if he knew. After a short struggle with myself, I withdrew it from my hip pocket and handed it to my father with a facial expression that would have chilled the heart of the hungriest beggar.

He stared at the card and then delicately took it. He did not thank me; he did not say anything at all. He merely held the card in his hand and lowered his head, covering his eyes with the palm of his other hand.

I was very embarrassed. I had never heard my father weep before, not in all my long life of nineteen years. Generally, he was a most confident man, never daunted by setbacks and blows. But now, strangely, he looked defeated.

“Why do you cry!” I exclaimed, more a protest than a question.

He did not answer me, did not look at me.

Is this my father
? I thought to myself.
Is this what I have been given!
?

The injustice of it, added to the constant burdens of our life, our endless striving that never got us anywhere, now hit me full force.

“Why are we so poor?” I shouted. But the question needed no answer. We both knew that our family was on the bottom of things because he could not make enough money to raise us up.

“Why are you and
Mama
always so sad?” I threw at him. “Why do you cry? Why does she cry all the time?”

This was unfair of me. The truth is, while he could not be called a jolly man, he hardly ever seemed despondent. And my mother rarely cried. Both of them were calm, generous people, full of good thoughts and kind words, and were ever involved in valiant attempts to make “our village” a welcoming place for the world’s unwelcome people.

Still, he said nothing. I was staring at him when we heard the clippitty-cloppity of donkey hoofs and the tinkling of little harness bells. Looking up, I saw an old man coming along the road toward us, leading a burro. He was smiling, his eyes twinkling beneath the shade of his straw sombrero; his silver handlebar moustache was quaintly long, the skin of his face and hands dark brown. I resented him mightily. He was the embodiment of
mañana
. He had no worries, no responsibilities. He had a four-legged vehicle of his own, and such vehicles perpetuate themselves. Cars did not give birth to little cars. Even the poorest of the poor were better off than me!

The old fellow came to a halt beside the car and shook his head over it.

“
Ay, ay, pobrecito, estás tan triste
”, he said in a sing-song. “
No te pongas triste, no estés triste. Todo va a estar bien
.” (Oh, oh, poor little one, you’re so sad. Don’t be sad. Everything will be okay.) Whether he was addressing us or the car, I do not know.

My father slowly rose to his feet and went over to him. The stranger gave him an encouraging smile, and then without another word, he peered under the hatches on the roof. He reached inside like a blind surgeon and felt all around with his very ancient fingers.

“It is the blood vessel of the
automóvil, no
?” he said in the high voice sometimes used by very aged Mexicans. “
Señor
, the hose is crack and pull from the heart. You make the wire around it,
el coche pobres
is fix,
sí
.”

My father tinkered as directed. The old man watched, humming to himself. My father got into the car and turned the ignition, the motor rumbled, and our chariot sat there in front of us, vibrating nicely and ready to go.

“The pressure hose”, my father said. “That’s all it was.”

He got out of the car, rummaging in his pockets for some money to give the old man, but this was only a courtesy gesture, because there was nothing in the pockets.

“
Nada, nada
”, the old man waved it away. Then he turned and led the burro off the road and into the desert. He passed beyond a thicket of mesquite, and we saw him no more.

My father got in behind the steering wheel, I jumped into the passenger seat, and we continued our journey.

I don’t think we said a word for about forty miles or so.

Somewhere east of Albuquerque, he handed me back my card, keeping his eyes on the road.

“I am sorry,
Papacito
”, I murmured shamefacedly.

“Benigno”, he replied and said no more.

More time passed.

There came a moment when he cleared his throat. “You ask me why we are sad all the time. Does it seem to you we are always sad?”

“No,
Papa
, you are not.”

“Your mother cries one time a year, I know.”

“Yes. It worries me. She will not tell me why. Never has she explained it to me. I can see no cause for it. Why does she cry at the end of July every year? For three days she cries. Every year. It is very strange.”

“There are reasons.”

“Can you tell me the reasons?”

I watched his face closely. A wave of sorrow washed across it.

“You are a man now”, he said. “Perhaps the time has come for me to tell you. For a long time, you have known that the world is a hard place. You can see with your eyes that we have guarded you from the evil all around us, and I think you have discovered that we guarded your thoughts as well.”

Still, Benigno, the world is a dangerous place
, my mother had called after me when I strode confidently out into the desert, the day a rattler struck me down.

I said nothing. I did not want him to speak negatively about the world. I knew that the world had problems, even serious ones. But my life was beginning. There was promise in it. Maybe I would become a genius. I had a scholarship. I did not want him to tell me, as he had done so often before, that there was much wrong in the way people thought and the way they lived.

“Why does my mother cry?” I asked, hoping to steer him away from general criticisms of the world.

“Your mother cries because there is a great suffering in her heart. Long ago it happened. We have wanted to tell you, but. . .”

“What did you not tell me?”

“Neil”, he said. He always called me Neil when he was about to speak of the gravest matters. “You once had a brother and a sister.”

“What?” Stunned, unable to absorb what he had just said, let alone understand it, I stared at him with my mouth open.

“When you were a year old, we conceived a child,
Mama
and me. There were two children in her womb, twins, though we did not know this at first. Later, when she became bigger, Fray Ramon brought a doctor to us. He was a good man who did work for free. He brought an instrument and put it on her belly, and we watched the
niños
swimming around inside. We could see it was a boy and a girl. Very pretty, very strong they were.”

As I listened to him tell the story, my throat choked up, and I stared straight ahead through the windshield. I did not know what to feel. I felt only that I did not want to hear this.

“We hid her pregnancy. She never left the village after her belly could no longer be hidden. Your grandmother lived with us then. Do you remember her?”

“No”, I said. Looking back, my memory produced only vague impressions of several old women with gray hair, the ladies of the village who were like grandmothers to any and all children.

“The people were accustomed to guarding such secrets”, my father continued. “They did not report us to the police. There were other illegals among us. Do you remember the red blossom children?”

“Yes. They always ran into the desert when the police came.”

In our village, mothers or grandmothers often painted little flowers on the hands of certain
niños
among us—not all of the children, just some, the illegals. They made a game of it, because they did not want to frighten the little illegal ones. Whenever the bell rang, the red blossom children knew that they must hide. In the chaparral and sage bushes, they could not be found. If they remained hidden until they were called home by their mothers, they received sweets.

“The police always come fast. They give no warning”, I said. “Yes, and that is why we made the trailers into a maze.”

“We are a town of crazy streets. I thought it was because people are stupid.”

“It is because people are smart and because they love their children. Later, the police and the social workers used the heli-floaters and heat scanners, so it was not so easy to hide. The fathers of the village dug holes in the earth beyond the edge of the village and covered them with plywood and sand. Little caves. They were dangerous because of snakes and scorpions.”

“I used to play in them.”

My father took his eyes from the road and gave me a severe look. “That was foolish, Neil.”

“We thought it was part of the game. The older ones helped the little ones.
Mama
used to ring the bell.”

“Yes, the mothers took turns watching. If a strange car came along the road or a hovercraft appeared in the sky, they rang the old brass bells—the same as the one your
Mamá
uses for the
piñata
feasts. There are many bells like it in the village. The children stopped playing and hid themselves.”

He grew silent again.

“Where are my brother and sister?” I asked.

“I do not know who betrayed us”, he said in a shaken voice. “Maybe no one betrayed us. It is possible the police just came that day in the hope of finding something. They checked every trailer. I was away at work. Your mother was napping in our home at the time. Your grandmother had taken you for a walk, wrapped up in her
tilma
. When
Mamá
heard the bell ringing, she got out of bed and tried to go quickly into the desert. But she was eight months along, very big with two babies inside, and she could not walk well. She did not get far before they spotted her.”

Now I was frozen inside. It was the strangest sensation in the world, to feel nothing emotionally, with the hair lifting on the back of my neck, my fists tightly clenching, my heart pounding, my throat closing, my lungs struggling to breathe.

“They took her away to a hospital. They cut the children from her womb. They killed them, Neil. They killed them. And then a doctor did something so that she could never again have children.”

“What did you do?” I asked in a choked voice.

“I could do nothing—nothing! I searched for her. I went to Las Cruces and banged on many doors. The police would not tell me where they had taken her. The department in charge of these things would not tell me. I hit one of their men. I spent six months in jail because I hit him.”

“And my mother?” I gasped.

“Three days after they took her, they returned her to the village, to our home.”

As he drove onward, I observed my father’s face. Never had I seen him look like this. Never. Until the day I die, I do not want to see another look like that on anyone’s face. I saw a grief so deep it was fathomless, beyond my comprehension, then and now. There was an old anger in it too, an utterly helpless kind of anger. All these years later, I wonder if there was also despair. I don’t doubt that he had feelings of despair. Yet I think there was no absolute and final despair, because of what happened later that night.

I can’t write any more today. I feel sick. I feel helpless. Why has all this come back to me now? I want to kill the people who killed my brother and sister. Sixty years have passed, and I still want to kill them. I am watching myself kill them in my mind. Why does this pain not stop?

Day 225
:

Look at it, Neil. Look at everything and see it. Why have you tried to bury this? Why have you turned away from it throughout all these many years? Was the pain too great for you? Is a man a man if he does not face the worst with courage?

But where would courage have taken me? What would I have done? What
could
I have done? Learning the truth of my family’s history left me in a state of rage and dread, and for neither of these was there any outlet.

As our car approached the outskirts of Santa Fe, the sunset was a violent red over the city.

“Take me back to Las Cruces”, I said to my father.

“You must not miss the registration”, he replied, shaking his head. “There are only a few hours until it closes.”