Reciting the Histories
His wife had warned him of the dread in seeking such abundance. Was it not such a search that led them away from the seasonal migration, from field to field? Away from the tomatoes and the strawberries and the lettuce, toward a different harvest? Was it not such a search that led the two white men, the gringos to his door? It comes back to one action, then another. Something happens. Paulino closed his eyes, and his dreamlike vision returned. His wife had gone to tend the closing hours of the market, gathering together the unsold grapes and apples and nectarines from the small stand as she had done each evening. If Ciela had gone to Antonio’s as she had planned, her room would have been empty, as it should have been. And the two gringos who had promised him a fortune for heroin, for gray powder, would never have heard her song, been distracted by her voice, been curious about her bedroom door. And these men who had promised him wealth would have taken their drugs away as they had planned. A simple task—contact, pick up, drop. Cheaper than seed stock. Cheaper than saplings. Cheaper than planting and growing and harvesting. Simple, they told him. They would have left the money as they had planned. And they would have taken the drugs north—to New York or to Boston or to Chicago, where men of wealth could afford to lose a small portion of themselves and their children.
But a curse is not like that. It stays with you, he had come to realize. It does not wither but spreads into the hearts of wives and husbands and children.
“It is time,” he wrote.
Time for what? Torneado? Regresar? I continue to grasp for words your mother might have spoken, from a former life—before Ajo, before the border. She had always heard the voices more clearly, even as I had dismissed them. And now the word is “fear.” I fear that as the spirits hate me, you too will hate me, as I hate myself for the weight of the very word. Hate. Too grave a word for any man to ascribe to anyone’s soul, let alone that of his own daughter. And I do not know you well enough to press such language upon your heart. But I know myself and what I have done, and I would hate myself enough for both of us.
His anger and loathing only increased when he complained of his fate, his grief over his own misdeeds. What of his daughter’s grief? Had she not also been cursed? Had she not carried her own burden to the point of exhaustion? And at his hands? At his acts? He was her father. Should he not have had the strength to share the weight of her burden long ago? He knew this to be true, even before he had crossed this God-forsaken border, into this God-forsaken land. In this country, men drew on strength, did they not? They did not cower like children. He was certain this was true, but as of late he felt himself diminishing. He felt his center collapsing, shrinking, more child than man.
Your mother always insisted that what happens to us in this life cannot be dismissed by shifts in blame or time. That would diminish the power of God and make each man and woman a god. But she was returned to the earth a believer. How had we yearned for each other, clung to each other for all these years—she the believer and I the doubter? Asqueroso. (Forgive me. I cannot help slipping into the rhythm of your mother’s speech, even after so many years.) If only it were as easy for me to avoid casting blame for this act or that act. Each one of us faultless. Blameless. Something happens. Another of life’s events. The first day of school. The summer harvest. The birth of a child. Even if this is true, something happens again, something more.
Paulino thought back on these acts, the complete and the incomplete. If he had not agreed to the drug deal from the start, to arrange for the transport north. To contact his acquaintances and collect his fees. And even after—after the repercussions were clear. If he had widened the hall as he had planned, so that he could have maneuvered his wheelchair toward his daughter’s room. If he had maneuvered his chair in such a way to pound against the locked door, to pound against the voices within—the gringos’ voices, the child’s voice, the desert’s voice. If he had had the strength to splinter the wood from the hinges. But then what might he have done? Would he have grabbed the gringos by their throats as they had laid bare his daughter? Would he have squeezed the life and the breath from the men who had promised him wealth? Squeezed the life and breath from the men who sought to destroy his child? And the children of men in the north—in New York or Boston or Chicago? Paulino opened his eyes and glared down with surprising clarity at his useless arms and hands and fingers. For years he had dreamed of his arms, and in his dreams they still possessed the strength of his youth, when he could build houses and plant fruit trees and spread seeds amidst the growth of his family’s joy, his daughter’s joy, when he could save his own daughter from such a brutal youth instead of relying on words. Words. Or on voices to envision his life, to touch his life, to explain his place in this world.