The bus broke down. The engine blew up. The pistons imploded. The diesel ran out through a rusty hole in the tank. And only minutes from the border. They all got out of the bus and looked. Arcangel opened his dusty suitcase and pulled out the steel cables and hooks. He was never without them; one never knew when they might be useful. And this was the second incident this week to prove this theory. Sol was jumping on the seats, pressing his nose into the windows and making faces. He peered into the suitcase and selected the orange from Arcangel’s assortment of toys. Arcangel closed the suitcase and sat the boy on top. “Stay right here,” he commanded gently.
Sol pressed the orange to his nose, then shook it up and down.
“Good. Good.”
Once again, Arcangel offered his services to pull the bus, slipping the steel cable through the axle and hooking his old skin through the metal talons. And once again, the people scoffed at his efforts and gawked amazed as the bus inched slowly along the highway, harnessed to an old man’s leathery person, skin pulled taut across his bony chest and empty stomach, minute droplets of blood kissing the earth, dragging everything forward. It was as the burden of gigantic wings, too heavy to fly.
Such a commotion was aroused that no one noticed, either on one side or the other of the Great Border—that Arcangel and a broken bus and a boy and an orange and, for that matter, everything else South were about to cross it: the very hemline of the Tropic of Cancer and the great skirts of its relentless geography.
Televisa, Univision, Galaxy Latin America and local border stations congregated to eyeball the event. If there were a dozen local and national stations, there were a dozen eyes, translating to a dozen times a dozen times a dozen like the repetitious vision of a common housefly. Arcangel strained for this vision even though live television had no way of accommodating actual feats of superhuman strength. The virtually real could not accommodate the magical. Digital memory failed to translate imaginary memory. Meanwhile, the watching population surfed the channels for the real, the live, the familiar. But it could not be recognized on a tube, no matter how big or how highly defined. There were not enough dots in the universe. In other words, to see it, you had to have been there yourself.
Arcangel, despite his pains, looked out across the northern horizon. He could see
all 2,000 miles of the frontier
stretched across from Tijuana on the Pacific,
its straight edge cutting through the Río Colorado,
against the sharp edge of Arizona
and the unnatural angle of Nuevo México,
sliding along the Río Grande,
tenderly caressing the supple bottom of Texas
to the end of its tail
on the Gulf of México.
It waited with seismic sensors and thermal imaging,
with la pinche migra,
colonias of destitute skirmishing at its hard line,
with coyotes, pateros, cholos,
steel structures, barbed wire, infrared binoculars,
INS detention centers, border patrols, rape,
robbery, and death.
It waited with its great history of migrations back and forth—in recent history,
the deportation of 400,000 Mexican
citizens in 1932,
coaxing back of 2.2 million
braceros in 1942
only to exile the same 2.2 million
wetbacks in 1953.
The thing called the New World Border waited for him with the anticipation of five centuries. Admittedly a strange one, but Conquistador of the North he was. Ah, he thought, the North of my dreams.
South of his dreams, it had been a long journey. He could remember everything. Here was a mere moment of passage. As he approached, he could hear the chant of the border over and over again: Catch ’em and throw ’em back. Catch ’em and throw ’em back. Catch ’em and throw ’em back. It was the beginning of the North of his dream, but they questioned him anyway. They held the border to his throat like a great knife. “What is your name?”
“Cristobal Colón.”
“How old are you?”
“Quinientos y algunos años.”
“When were you born?”
“El doce de octubre de mil cuatrocientos noventa y dos.”
“Where were you born?”
“En el nuevo mundo.”
“That would make you—”
“Post-Columbian.”
“You don’t look post-Columbian. What is your business here?”
“I suppose you would call me a messenger.”
“And what is your message?”
“No news is good news?”
“Is that a question? Say, do you speak English?”
“Yes.”
“Where did you learn to speak English?”
“At Harvard University.”
“So you’ve studied in the U.S.? Where?”
“At Harvard at the School of Business. I was there at the same time as Carlos Salinas de Gortari. Then at Stanford University in Economics with Henrique Cardoso. Also at Columbia University with Fidel Castro; I did my thesis in political theory there, you see. And finally at Annapolis; what I studied there is a secret.”
“Where is your visa? Your passport?”
“Were you not expecting me? You had better consult your State Department, not to mention the side agreements with labor and the environment. I am expected. Me están esperando.” He moved forward, slipping across as if from one dimension to another.
And the words came immediately, “SPEAK ENGLISH NOW!”
The first wave came like a great flood behind him, showing their hands at the border. Ten working fingers, each times thousands. Having to show their fingers meant that they must enter with nothing in their hands,
nothing but their hats to shade their foreheads,
the sweat on their backs,
the seeds in their pockets,
the children in their wombs,
the songs in their throats.
The cockroach. The cockroach. The cockroach.
Customs officials chased after Arcangel. “By the way, are you carrying any fresh fruit or vegetables?”
Arcangel yelled behind him, “Only three ears of corn and one lousy orange!”
“California currently has a ban on all oranges. We are authorized to enforce a no-orange policy,” they shouted back.
“But this is a native orange!” he yelled, but his voice was swallowed up by the waves of floating paper money: pesos and dollars and reals, all floating across effortlessly—a graceful movement of free capital, at least forty-five billion dollars of it, carried across by hidden and cheap labor. Hundreds of thousands of the unemployed surged forward—the blessings of monetary devaluation that thankfully wiped out those nasty international trade deficits.
Then came the kids selling Kleenex and Chiclets,
the women pressing rubber soles into tennis shoes,
the men welding fenders to station wagons and
all the people who do the work of machines:
human washing machines,
human vacuums,
human garbage disposals.
Then came the corn and the bananas,
the coffee and the sugarcane.
And then the music and its rhythms,
pre-Columbian treasure,
the halls of Moctezuma and all 40,000 Aztecs slain—
their bodies floating in the canals.
In slipped the burned and strangled body of the
Incan king Atahualpa in a chamber filled with gold.
And then came smallpox, TB, meningitis, E coli,
influenza, and 25 million dead Indians.
After that everything clamored forth:
the spirit of ideologies thought to be dead
and of the dead themselves—
of Bolívar, of Che, Francisco de Morazán,
Benito Juárez, Pablo Neruda, Sandino, Romero,
Pancho Villa, and Salvador Allende,
of conquistadors, generals, and murderers,
African slaves, freedom fighters, anthropologists,
latifundistas, ecomartyrs, terrorists, and saints.
And every rusting representation of an
American gas guzzler from 1952 to the present
and all their shining hubcaps.
Then came the rain forests,
El Niño, African bees, panthers, sloths, llamas,
monkeys, and pythons.
Everything and everybody got in lines—
citizens and aliens—
the great undocumented foment,
the Third World War,
the gliding wings of a dream.