Borderline
I want this to be one of those vacations where you sleep until noon, where you take late afternoon siestas on a porch hammock, but my first morning in San Pedro, I wake in the early dark with my jaw clenched against the cold, stiff as someone who has died during the night. I'd slept in my jeans and hooded sweatshirt to keep warm, but also ready to fight or flee should anything happen. I lay in one of the lumpy beds in the rear room. A battered Jesus figurine hangs on the wall, impaled to the cross, ankles breaking, a cracked elbow exposing the wires within. The tin roof creaks and the roosters call.
The front door of Lucha’s house is posted with a holy card that reads San Ignacio De Loyola Dice Al Demonio ¡No Entres!, followed by a fevered testament about the card’s effectiveness against the threat of evil, but when Lucha gets up and props opens the door with a stone, a cold graveyard wind blows through the house.
Lucha moves to the kitchen, where she cooks a breakfast of eggs and refried beans. She doesn’t apologize about the clatter she’s making since she’s already decided that we’re rising early to make a day trip to Monterrey. I pack my guidebook into my backpack.
*
Daylight breaks as we leave the house and reach the paved road where we made the turn yesterday afternoon. In the bruising chill, the three of us wait for the local bus.
Forty-eight pesos cover the forty-mile trip to Monterrey for two adults and one senior citizen. My mother and I take the front seats while Lucha sits behind us. The seats are hard and rattle my hipbones and spine. The windows are stuck shut and the accordion doors squeak. Posted signs announce “PLEASE DO NOT SPIT.” A dirty fringe drapes the dusty windshield. A mangy red pelt decorates the dash. This isn’t the sleek transport that we took from Reynosa, but rather a refurbished school bus without a single amenity.
The driver stops a number of times. Every waylaid person is picked up. One ponytailed guy in tight jeans comes in sashaying down the aisle. “She” looks at each of us with steady hostility and takes one of the seats in the back.
My mother turns to me. “You saw that guy?” she whispers in English. “Right away you can tell he's a G-A-Y.” She spells it out so that no one will know what she’s saying. “It's better for you to be the way you are, like a real man, so that nobody knows. Even your aunt Flor said she didn't know you’re one of those.”
One of those? I don’t even know what to say to that.
“Yeah,” she says, with a toss of her hand, dismissing the issue as if it no longer mattered. Never mind that she hounded me for most of my life to sit up straight, to talk deep (and not too much), to dress in pressed, button-down shirts she thinks command respect. In other words, to be the hombrecito I was supposed to be.
She’s obviously satisfied that at least I’m not flamboyant, not realizing that the muscles I’ve packed on at the gym are gay-giveaways in a place like Manhattan. But what mother wants to hear about her son’s sex life? In our weekly phone calls, she only asks about my boyfriend as we’re ready to hang up, referring to him as “el amigo,” the friend. Ten years have passed since I first told her and my father that I was seeing another man. Ever since there’s been this forced enquiry about The Friend. First of all, he wasn’t just a friend, and there have been a number of men in my life since. Not that they’d know that.
The silence now, as the bus grinds forward, reminds me that she loves me in a way that still won’t let me be. She only wants her son. Not the man I’ve become. There are still miles of rough road for us to go.
The driver pulls off the highway to pick up the laborers leaving their shift at the surrounding refineries. The bus leans to one side as it churns up clouds of dust. Our speed drops a few hash marks, but the bus never stops. It rolls at a slow enough speed for the refinery workers to jump aboard. The men, in their green work shirts, and the orange hard hats carried in their grimy hands, pay their fares and move down the aisle toward the back. Most of them are quiet, exhausted from their work that night. They pack in tight. When there is no more room, the last man is forced to cling to the outer doorframe as the bus pulls back onto the highway.
The air stinks of petrol. Beyond the windows the pollution hangs like a brown curtain that refuses to part. The mountains of Monterrey, clearly visible on our walk into San Pedro yesterday, now make the barest suggestion of an outline against the chemical haze. The toxins prick my nostrils and make my lungs ache.
We hurtle down the highway. Then, as if the driver might be lost, we make a U-turn at the toll, cutting across the approach lines of the pay booths, switching from one side of the divided highway to the other. I think, for a moment, that the driver might not have enough pesos for the toll but days later, after taking this bus enough times, I will realize that this is the circuitous route the San Pedro-Monterrey local makes every day.
We arrive in Cadereyta. The town is nothing more than a bedroom community for the refinery and office workers who commute to Monterrey. The streets are narrow, the sidewalks high, and the stop signs appear to be mere suggestions. Our driver shoots through intersections without slowing down or taking a cautionary glance up or down the cross streets. Unless a passenger signals to get off. Even then the driver doesn't stop. He only shifts the bus to a lower gear. Even old ladies hurl themselves through the air like flying wrestlers.
In Cadereyta the bus empties. My mother, Lucha and I are the only passengers who ride into Monterrey. The driver, bored, totaling his haul, counts the coins in the change box. He lines the various denominations in shiny rows. The tidy sums rattle and scatter at the next bump and turn. It gives the driver something to do as he drives, keeping the immense steering wheel steady, tapping the quivering stick shift.
Camelia from Corpitos
My mother has fallen into a snoring slumber by the time we rumble into Monterrey. Overhead, the hulking track of the monorail shadows the highway, plunging the bus into an eclipse of chilly darkness. Other buses screech past. They are filmed with soot, as if they had escaped a nearby volcanic eruption, but the passengers at the open windows seem untouched by the filth, their faces bright and brown.
Lucha, who has been a romantic thought in the back of my mind, shakes my mother awake and leads us off at the last stop, the grimy garage of the bus line, blocks away from the Central de Camiones.
I’m ready to show them Monterrey’s marvels, but then Lucha leads us across the avenue, darting past cars and delivery trucks, turning down one street and then another. We walk through a desolate labyrinth of pretty houses. Their pastel colors whisper from behind the ornate grillwork of the front gates.
My muscles ache from the ride. My stomach grumbles. We had rushed through breakfast to get here. Though I don’t know where we’re going, and my mother doesn’t either, until Lucha says for the first time that we’re headed to her mother's house.
“I never make the trip into the city without visiting her,” she says. “She’s not expecting me, but, chinga’o, if I don’t stop, she’ll find out somehow and get angry that I didn’t see her.”
*
Lucha's mother, brown and beaten as tamarind paste, slumps in a plastic garden chair and complains about her ailments. Her arms have little strength in them. Her legs refuse to hold the rest of her upright. She says she can’t even manage the walk to the alley gate in front of the row apartments where she lives.
The place is a single room, with a kitchenette, and a rear patio. The potted plants in the back are decorated with tinsel and paper trumpets left over from the celebrations of the recent New Year. The festive touch must have been the work of the ten-year old granddaughter now laying on one of two beds in the front room. She fills the pages of a coloring book while the grownups talk. A son, older, in his forties, remains in the kitchen eating his lunch. An invitation to join him never comes.
The walls are painted green and hung with a number of framed certificates, recognition for the son's twenty-some years of service at the hotel where he works. The old woman sits proud. All my mother wants to know is whether he is able to get free rooms. He isn't sure. He works in the hotel restaurant.
“A busboy,” my mother tsks.
Not understanding what my mother has said, the son comes into the living room, pulling up one leg with effort, dragging the other foot across the floor. I expect her to ask him about the leg. It is the kind of blunt question she never fails to ask. Instead, with the determined energy of a crack missionary, she wants to know about getting a free room for next time.
The old woman, frustrated by the talk, tells the granddaughter to get the leg brace from under the bed so that the grandson can get to work.
When he leaves, my mother turns her attention to the girl, telling her that my father has wanted another little girl for a long time now. She doesn’t mention my dead sister, though I expect it, brace myself for it.
The girl's mother, the old woman tells us, dropped her off when she was a month old. “Left her without milk or money,” she says. “Been raising her since. The girl once told me that if anyone at all wanted her—" and I can't tell if she means as a daughter or a wife, "—that she'll leave, adding that I better not cry. 'No te quiero ver llorando,' the girl said." This makes the women laugh.
Lucha sends the girl next door to make a phone call. Rushing back, she knocks over a neighbor's potted aloe vera plant. No one scolds her, except for my mother, who marches her to the neighbor to apologize and makes her sweep the spilled dirt.
Camelia, the woman the girl called, arrives with big-boned and white-blond swagger. She’s a gringa but insists on speaking Spanish with a twang that she says comes from being a lifelong Texan. She’s from Corpus Christi, or, as she calls it, “Corpitos.” Nobody explains how she’s related to the family, but she’s respectful with the old lady as if she were her own mother, answering her with that typical phrase of “tell me,” that all the Mexican-born kids use when their parents call them. All we do is squawk an impatient “What?”
She has not brought food, as I hoped, but instead promises to take us to lunch. Though she let’s us know that she has to return home to pick up her daughter. I like her at once, and then not so much as we ride in her truck. It isn’t the monster vehicle that bugs me but her sudden proposition. “I can help you cross the girl to the other side,” she says aloud.
My mother gasps from the backseat. “You cross people?”
“I have contacts. I don't actually take anyone across.” The woman glances into the rearview mirror, perhaps measuring my mother’s seriousness. “I also have Chihuahuas.”
Bitter Homes & Gardens
Despite the Saltillo tile and stucco walls, Camelia’s house reminds me of our old place, the patch-worked, wood-frame we had before my parents moved to the trailer. More than anything it’s the not-yet and might-never-be-finished look of this place that makes it familiar. The ornate dining table serves as a dump for junk mail. The kitchen cabinet doors are not all hinged in place. The aristocratic, striped and gold-corded couches have nothing to do with the rest of the house, which echoes with a rustic sensibility. My mother, of course, loves everything and she asks about the "architect."
“It’s that we want to build,” she explains.
She’s been badgering my father for a new house, wanting it "bien Mexican style," which to her means adobe walls and mosaic bathroom tiles. They don’t have the money to build so much as a doghouse. Here in Monterrey she goes on as if the whole project is settled. She asks Camelia about the cost for a house plan, for building materials, for labor. When Camelia rounds out the figures, my mother shrieks.
“I thought it was supposed to be cheaper here?” she says.
Lucha shrugs as she sits on the edge of the couch, sitting as if she's afraid to wear away its veneer of luxury.
Camelia runs to another room to hurry her daughter out of the shower. No word on the whereabouts of her husband. If she has one.
When she returns, she makes a year-end-report of all her businesses, as if she wants to recruit my mother into being one of her associates. Other than reselling used clothes, Camelia says she breeds Chihuahuas, and she sells parcels of land she owns in San Pedro. My mother asks for locations and prices.
For someone who once told me she didn’t want me traveling in Mexico, I can’t believe she’s now interested in buying real estate. She explains that my father wants to retire in Mexico.
He’s never said that. My father is the first to admit that he won’t dare cross the border anymore. He may have spent childhood summers in San Pedro, but these days he doesn’t want to move too far from his recliner and the six packs in the fridge. Still, my mother barrages Camelia with questions about the property.
The Treaty of My Mother
The humiliating thing about being driven around by Camelia is that she is thirty-years-old, as I will be in a matter of days. Only I don’t own a house. (Even the lease on my Manhattan apartment is listed under my roommate’s name.) I don’t own a car or truck or whatever you call the monstrosity we are riding.
My mother, knowing the make and model of the vehicle, asks where she bought it and for how much. I pray she doesn’t say anything about my age. Camelia had thought I was a teenager, as most everyone does, but admitting my age would have shamed me.
Then, perhaps feeling that Camelia would commiserate with her, my mother rails against the Mexicans who cross to our side. “They cross pregnant,” she says from the back seat. “They have their babies on our side so they can qualify for welfare. That's how they do it.”
“I know,” Camelia says. “And I’m sure there are worse abuses.”
I’m stunned, first with my mother’s anchor-baby theories, and then with Camelia for encouraging her.
Never mind that the entire southwest of the United States was once Mexico, my mother complains about everyone coming over with false papers. “And there they are on the television, que por que nomás a nosotros nos paran. Ey, de volada, con la pura cara, just looking at you, you know where they’re from. Se te nota si eres del otro lao. They stop everybody. They check everyone. The other day, ni pa’ qué te platico, I went to Las Flores and they stopped us on the bridge. N’hombre, que nos abajan del caro. ‘Everybody out.’ A mi, nunca me han para’o. Y un feo cabrón me dijo, ‘Well, ma’am there’s always a first time.’ Así dijo. Should you believe? Yo les dije que I. Was. American.”
My mother goes on about those from “that side,” not stopping until we arrive at Los Cavazos, a commercial strip of curio shops and buffet restaurants. We stop at one place and eat till we are as fat as chinches, piling our plates with pollo en mole, carne guisada, cabrito, chiles rellenos, tortillas de maíz, and deserts of arroz con leche and fresh pineapple with jícama. Camelia's daughter laughs when I can’t get the proper accents on jícama. After paying the bill, we get back in the truck and head up the mountain to la Cola de Caballo.
We visited Horse Tail Falls years ago, on that family trip to San Pedro the summer of ‘79. Back then, along the road, there were fewer houses and more trees. With hammocks for sale slung in between. My father bought one for me. Back home it unraveled. Now the road to the falls looks like a drive through a suburban district with houses on either side. The front yards display plaster ornaments for sale with the same gaudy enterprise as the strip we had just left. My mother oohs. She wants to stop to buy one of the fat doves. I tell Camelia to keep driving and remind my mother that we aren’t going to buy any souvenirs on this trip. She wouldn't be able to carry anything home with her ruined arm, and I don’t need the extra load. She laughs, embarrassed, I suddenly realize, at the way I must be shaming her in front of everyone.
At the falls, Lucha tells me that when her husband was alive, she never came on these trips to the tourist sites. “He escorted everyone and I stayed home,” she says, pulling me to where she’s standing, so that I can feel the cool mist drifting from the waterfall. Neither of us moves for a while. She says, “It’s nice being out here.”
Suddenly, I’m glad we came after all.
My mother leans against the railing, quieted by the exertion of the climb. We stay less than a quarter hour and then head back to the truck. At the parking lot, at one of the vendor's stalls, my mother admires a handbag, a simple black sack with embroidered flowers.
“Get out our money,” she tells me.
I try to discourage her from buying anything but only Camelia and her daughter convince her to forget the bag. They tell her the price is too high.
"You can get it cheaper elsewhere," they say.
With that we get back into the truck, drop down the mountain, and return to Los Cavazos. When I am not looking, my mother buys two framed pictures of angels, which she says represent her three kids. The explanation does nothing to soften me. The portraits are heavy and made of cheap materials. She doesn’t care. All I can think of is myself not as an angel but a pack mule hauling her precious cargo.
*
Back at Lucha's mother's house, thanking Camelia for her generosity, my mother presses a few bills into her hand to fill the truck with petrol. She refuses it and even gives us a few round loaves of pan de elote, sweetened cornbread studded with kernels, which she’d bought in Los Cavazos while my mother and I argued.
Entering the house, the old woman tells us about ten pesos the girl needs for school tomorrow to buy materials for an art project. “I don’t know where I’m going to scrape that money together,” the old woman says, putting a sagging hand to her wrinkled forehead.
Ten pesos is little more than a dollar and it’s obvious that we are supposed to offer the money. The fee for entertaining the idea of adopting the girl. My mother insists I give the girl something. I only have a fifty-peso note.
Making the rate of exchange in her head, my mother asks if that’s like five dollars and says, “Give it to her anyway.”
I hand it to my mother and let her pass it to the girl. My mother must think there is no harm in it even though she had been going on for hours about all the handouts our country gives to the undeserving Mexicans. That’s my mother. She talks tough and then softens at the sight of a girl in need.
¡Alarma!
On a dark street corner, where smoky taquito and elote carts do a quick business with night commuters, Lucha, my mother and I board the local bus back to San Pedro. We push down the cramped aisle and are forced to take separate seats. My mother sits up front with Lucha, but I am forced all the way to the back, and share a seat with a chiseled-jaw guy in uniform. He smells of Three Flowers hair oil and spicy aerosol deodorant. With his white top, he looks like a sailor, but on his shoulder an embroidered patch reads SEGURIDAD. Security guard.
He scans a tabloid, the kind of full-color rap sheet that features photographs of fender-benders that escalate into horrifying blood orgies between machete-wielding drivers. He steadies the magazine against the bag of clothes on his lap. Our thighs press against each other and our knees knock as the bus rocks forward. More might have happened had the overhead lights been turned down. At least I would have ventured more.
I close my eyes so that I don’t have to see everyone else forced to stand, even one lady with a child slung under her breast, though no one bothers to offer up their seat to her. Against my shut eyes, the street lights pulse with a slow rhythm, a hypnotic blast of light and then its loss.
When I snap awake the guy beside me has pulled a black knit cap over his own eyes. The rest of the bus empty, my mother motions for me to move closer. I ignore the frantic hands signs and pretend to fall back to sleep.
The security guard and I are the only ones left in the rear and, when I next open my eyes, I fear he might kick me into the next seat if I don’t stop pressing against him, so I move over to a seat across the aisle. When I do, without lifting the cap from his eyes, he lays his bag in my spot as if he’s been waiting for me to move several miles ago.
What the hell is wrong with me? Why am I desperate to pick up strangers on a bus? At my age my parents were already settled. They’d met in their early twenties at one of the church festivals at Our Lady of Guadalupe. That’s what my mother says. My father insists they met working in the onion fields. They’ve been married so long now that they no longer remember the exact date of their wedding. My older sister came within the year. I arrived on their second anniversary, which is why I’m the only one in the family who remembers the date. Jessie, as the family story goes, came two years after me—an accident. We were too young to know what our parents meant by that. We imagined she was born amid the broken glass of a mash-up on the highway. Never thinking it’d be how Elizabeth’s life would end.
This night in faraway Mexico, the bus presses toward San Pedro. The lights turn off. In the dark, I turn to look at the security guard, but he is gone. Alone in my seat, I run a hand over my thigh, pretending the security guard has done it. I imagine him stroking an already hard desire in me, kissing me as a chill air funnels through the bus, making it howl all the way home.