Arcangel shoveled more sand and cement into the wheelbarrow, tossed in another bucket of water, and mixed the heavy gray slop with a hoe. Rodriguez came to check the consistency of the mixture and nodded, “You have some experience in this business I can see.” He pointed at the unfinished brick work. “How are you at walls?” He smiled and shook his head. “The other day, I must have been ill. I could swear that this wall that I planned very carefully to be straight was suddenly curved. I ran my hands across it like this, and it seemed to have this great dip in it, all along here.” Rodriguez pointed it out to Arcangel. “Can you believe it? Impossible! It’s perfectly straight. Maybe it’s my eyes.”
“Is that so?” Arcangel pulled the wheelbarrow heavy with wet mortar up to the wall and wiped his brow with the sleeve of his shirt.
Rodriguez scooped the stuff up with a trowel, carefully placed a brick and tapped it lightly. He continued, “Everyone knows my work around here. ‘If you want a straight wall, call Rodriguez,’ they all say. Imagine. I must be going crazy. Too much praise is a bad thing. You begin to doubt yourself.”
Arcangel nodded.
“A young journalist, a Chicano,” Rodriguez waved his trowel about for special emphasis, “from the north, owns this place. Every now and then he shows up. The girl is only housekeeping for him, but she at least has brains. He must have wasted hundreds of dollars on plants and materials he brought from the north. Most of it has died, rotted, or rusted. Our climate requires hardier stuff. Finally, she has made the garden grow. And this wall, it should have been built years ago.”
The two men worked side by side laying mortar and bricks with a kind of rhythm that would suggest they had labored together all their lives.
“I’m glad you came along,” confessed Rodriguez. “I’m getting too old to do this work alone.”
“I can only work for you today.”
“Too bad. This place has work for a lifetime.”
Work for a lifetime. Arcangel pondered this.
“Where will you go? A factory further north? The government has a long-range plan, but don’t be fooled by that. A lot of big words about programs and production, but who does the work? They always forget the people who sweat for their bread. Unless it’s an election year, there’s nothing in it for people like us. No,” he shook his head, “stay here with me. This,” he pointed at his wall, “is work you can see.” He stood back for a moment and stared proudly at the wall.
Arcangel smiled. “Yes, it is a good wall.”
“Some people work with their brains. Like the journalist who owns this place. You and I, we work with our hands. But it is work just the same. Good work.”
“Noble work.”
“A good word. Noble.” He paused to think. “You and I. We are old men. No one thinks like this anymore.” Rodriguez looked sad. “My son said I am working all these years only to die.”
“He was drunk,” Arcangel said as if he had been there listening.
“He said poor people are doomed to work to their deaths. That we eat and drink all our earnings because anyway we will die.”
“It’s true. Anyway we will die.”
“But I am not working to die,” Rodriguez protested. “I work to live!” He looked as if he would cry. “All these years with the little I earn, I worked for my children to live. Even soldiers who labor with death, labor to live! Even my youngest son who ran away—” Rodriguez could not continue.
Arcangel sympathized. “You are right. Death is a strange excuse for poverty.” Rodriguez’s youngest son had run away to be a soldier and died in an ambush. Arcangel had held the dying heads of so many soldiers in his arms. Most of them were boys; they had not even seen the end of a second decade. They foolishly believed.
Believed in everything:
revolution,
illegitimate uprisings,
coup d’etats,
communist takeovers,
nationalization of the private sector,
populism,
military dictatorships,
leftist dictatorships,
destabilization tactics,
covert operations,
inflationary policies,
corruption,
unionism,
cultural assimilation,
development, and
progress.
Whatever it was, they believed.
“He was only a boy.” Rodriguez shook himself out of an old grief. “You must be hungry. We will stop here for now.” Arcangel watched the man’s stooped walk to the shade of the orange tree. He sat at the base of the tree and rummaged through the contents of a small bag, beckoning Arcangel. “It’s nothing much. Tortillas. Some fruit.”
Arcangel walked over with his great suitcase that never left his side. He opened it and produced the gifts he had received the previous day at the market: tomatoes, onions, potatoes, corn, limes, cookies, fresh tortillas, small sacks of grain, cans of condensed milk, and the orange. The orange seemed to sleep swaddled in a soft bed of shirts in one corner of the suitcase. Arcangel gently patted it.
Rodriguez looked on with surprise. “You are a walking market.”
“No. I am a walking kitchen,” he smiled, producing a pan and a knife and a portable gas stove. He pointed at the stove. “This is American. I got it in Nicaragua. Left behind with the garbage in a mountain camp.” In a matter of minutes, he produced a hot meal for the astonished bricklayer. “I have been traveling a long time.”
“How long?”
“Five hundred years.”
“Impossible,” Rodriguez laughed at the joke.
“Perhaps. I have seen more than a man may ever wish to see.” He closed his eyes for a long moment. He could see again
the woman who sold him the nopales in the plaza
and this Juan Valdez picking Colombian coffee
and Chico Mendes tapping Brazilian rubber.
He could see
Haitian farmers burning and slashing cane,
workers stirring molasses into white gold.
Guatemalans loading trucks with
crates of bananas and corn.
Indians, who mined tin in the Cerro Rico
and saltpeter from the Atacama desert,
chewing coca and drinking aguardiente to
dull the pain of their labor.
Venezuelan and Mexican drivers
filling their trucks with gasoline,
their cargos of crates
shipped by train,
by ship, and
by air and
sent away,
far away.
He saw
the mother in Idaho peeling a banana for her child.
And he saw
lines of laborers gripping
soiled paychecks at the local bank.
All of them crowded into his memory in a single moment. Now there was this bricklayer Rodriguez and his family as well. Everyone was so busy, full of industry. But Eduardo Galeano had himself explained to Arcangel that
this industry was like an airplane.
It landed and left with everything—
raw materials,
exotic culture, and
human brains—
everything.
Everybody’s labor got occupied in the
industry of draining their
homeland of its natural wealth.
In exchange
they got progress,
technology,
loans, and
loaded guns.
Arcangel saw his thoughts as a poem scratched across the unfinished wall, but Rodriguez interrupted. “This is very good,” he complimented the chef. “You will come to my home tonight, and I will also fill your belly with good food.”
“You remind me of a man I once knew in Colombia,” Arcangel reminisced.
“Did he lay bricks?”
“No. He was a gravedigger.”
“Well,” Rodriguez shrugged. “He too worked with the earth.”
Arcangel thought about this. “José Palacios. I worked for him for six years. In six years, we buried six hundred bodies. Side by side, they formed a line of dead longer than this wall. We dragged them out of the Cauca River. Bloated bodies. The stench was terrible, but no one came to claim them. We marked the graves N.N. No nombre.”
“A war?”
“Yes, the war over an innocent indigenous plant.”
“The traffic,” Rodriguez nodded. “It all goes north to the gringos. If they want it so much, why don’t they plant it in their own backyards? Make it in their own factories?” He stood up suddenly with anger. “How many people run along this road. Every hand is greased. My first son. Such a fool. Such a big shot. He used to carry a gun and fly a plane. He used to bring things: hard liquor, cigarettes, perfumes. I made him take it all away. It was only a matter of time. They shot him in the head through the window of his car. He used to brag to me, ‘Drugs,’ he said, ‘have come to kill our poverty and marry our politics. It’s a very powerful marriage. Join the honeymoon while it lasts.’ My first son was not a bad boy; he was only foolish—another stupid hero of a narcocorrido. He didn’t want to be poor anymore.”
Rodriguez returned to his work. Only work could make him forget that he only had one son left, and that son drank every night and scoffed at his work, at his straight walls, his careful laying of one brick after the other, because after all he would die, and the bricks that depleted the earth did so to make room for his body. Two bricks for his head, two bricks for his hands, two for his feet. Knowing this, Arcangel set the bricks with special care, blessing and naming each brick, reconstructing Rodriguez’s dying body again and again into that very straight wall. But it was a strange mumbling mantra, and Rodriguez, peering over the wall at his laboring partner, thought Arcangel might be chanting in Latin:
Trade balances and stock market figures.
Negatives and positives.
Black and red numbers.
Percentages and points.
Net, gross, and dividends.
IMF debts.
Loans and defaults.
A twenty-eight billion dollar trade deficit?
Devaluate the peso.
A miracle!
No more debt for the country. Instead
personal debt for all its people.
Free trade.
Arcangel remembered seeing the slain body of Emiliano Zapata, killed in an ambush by a vain young colonel named Jesús Guajardo and thrown across a mule as it passed through Zapata’s homeland, through the Villa de Ayala from the Hacienda Chinameca on April 10, 1919. By the end of the day, when the body was flung to the ground and peeled from the dirt to reveal the familiar and handsome features—the dark brows and thick mustache, Arcangel recalled—it was just another body, its blood thickened to clay. Now, from the mountains of Chiapas at the border of Guatemala, that very name had been reinvoked by the people who called themselves Ch’ol, Lacandón, Tzeltal, Tzotzil, Tojolabal, and Zoque.
Tierra y Libertad.
Revolution reinvented,
but consistently the same:
the hard labor of people at the bottom
with nothing,
nothing,
to lose.
It was only political poetry, but he couldn’t help it. It was always there carousing around in his brain. Such a nuisance. Arcangel made several trips with the wheelbarrow hauling bricks. Then he stopped to mix another slop of mortar. Rodriguez worked with a trowel quietly and carefully at one end of the long perfect wall. Arcangel wondered if it wasn’t a wall that could conceivably continue east and west forever. Labor for a lifetime.