95

The dream of America

Walter came to see me.

“I’m leaving,” he said. “I came to say goodbye.”

He was going to America. Meaning North America. He was heading out the next day.

My heart caught in my throat. As much as he’d disappointed me by taking the wallet, I loved this boy—a young man now, not so many years older than my son would be. He felt to me like a member of my family. He’d let me down, but even family members did that sometimes. (My mother certainly had. So did my grandmother. Even Lenny, in a way. He’d let me down by dying.)

“Is this because you took the wallet?” I asked him. “Because I can forgive you for that. I already have.”

He shook his head. “I can’t forgive myself. I need to become a better man,” he said. “There’s nothing for me here.”

Walter didn’t have papers of course. He had nobody waiting on the other side to help him if he made it over the border. He’d been saving his money for this since he was ten, but the recent stretch in which he’d been unable to find employment had left him with no more than a few hundred garza for food along the way.

For Walter, no doubt, the decision to go north had been prompted by his disgrace. But the choice of a young person in the village to seek out opportunities in the United States was not an unfamiliar story. For as long as I’d made my home here, I’d watched hopeful young men setting out with the same dream. Nobody had the money to pay, up front, the fees of the man who promised to get them over the border—the going price to hire a coyote: eight thousand dollars. What they did was to sign a promissory note to pay the fee back, with high interest, from the wages they imagined they’d be earning once they made it across.

Some succeeded. Many did not. I knew of at least a half a dozen boys from the village who’d died trying, locked in the back of a panel truck with twenty others or drowned in the Rio Grande. Or they’d died of heat stroke trying to make it over the desert. At least half had been rounded up and sent home. Either way, they carried the debt to the coyote. No money-back guarantees.

The danger of the trip never seemed to discourage them. Neither did the fact that almost none of them spoke English, or had any family in whatever place it was—Arizona, Texas, California—where they hoped to find the work that would make it possible for them to pay back their debt, send money home, and someday—far in the future—return home themselves, with enough to buy a piece of land, build a house, provide a good life for their children.

I should have anticipated that Walter might be drawn to making the trip north. Walter, a boy who’d been greeting American guests at the hotel since before I got there and observing up close, as he did, the wealth and privilege of their lives, so different from his own. Here was the boy who, at age seven, had inquired of me whether, in my travels around America, I’d ever run into Spider-Man.

I tried to give him money, but he wouldn’t take it. All he wanted was my blessing. It was difficult giving him this, knowing what I did of what lay ahead for him. In the past, when some young man in the village had spoken to me about the idea of making the trip north, I’d tried to discourage him, or at least to paint a more accurate picture. People in my country would try to pay them the lowest wages they could get away with, I said—many dollars less than what an American with papers might receive. It would be hard, finding work without a vehicle, or tools, or a command of the language.

And then there was this, the hardest part of the story, or at least the one most difficult to convey to one who’d spent his entire life in this one small village. “You are used to having your family and friends all around. Your culture. Your language, the beauty of the natural world all around you,” I told the boys—whatever boy it was, that month, dreaming of California. “Imagine a life without a lake, without birds singing every morning, without a volcano?”

Here in La Esperanza, they knew everyone. When somebody got sick, the women of the village all showed up with food. If a hurricane took your house, your neighbors showed up with their shovels and helped rebuild it.

Imagine a life so far from your family you only got to talk with them on your cell phone every Sunday.

“I used to see men from places like this lined up outside Home Depot on Sunday mornings, looking for work,” I said. “And standing alongside the highway. For every job, there were fifty men waiting.”

“I don’t mind working hard,” Walter told me. “I want to work. That’s the problem here. No work.”

I wished I had a phone number to give him, of someone to call when he made it over the border. But it had been so long now since I’d lived in the country of my birth, I didn’t know anyone anymore in the country I came from myself. The irony did not escape me that the place Walter wanted so desperately to get to was one I had so desperately needed to leave.

“I’ll be back someday,” he told me. “One day, I will be the one getting off the boat and walking out onto the dock with my suitcase.”

After he left, I sat on the stone steps. I had told myself, long ago, on those hikes Walter and I used to take together, when he served as my guide and protector (never mind that he was seven years old at the time) that I would not let myself love another child ever again. I was not going to love this boy. But I had.