First Movement: DACA

[First Movement Before Me Against the Wall]

My mother was the youngest child of seven, and her only memory of her father Jesús is when she was four, in 1958, and hearing him whistle as he approached their ranch on the mountain, La Loma, after being gone for months, working in the U.S. under the bracero program. He was a kind man, tall and slender. She could never remember the song, but she could always still hear the tune in her head many years later. Her father dropped his small bag near an avocado tree, and she ran up to hug him around his waist. He asked her to wash his red bandana, so she brought a bucket, filled it with water from the trough, and rubbed it between her hands. He wrapped it around his neck to cool himself down, and they finished the song together.

*

In her memory, his face is blurry, but the red bandana and the tune are as clear today as they were in 1958. It was the color, it was the sound. They say she looks like him; they say if he would have lived longer, she would have grown to be his favorite; maybe she already was. Because she was the youngest, she was spared from having to work in the fields. She spent her days stealing eggs from the henhouse and trading them at the store for candies and a box of cigarettes to give to her older brother. She would also place batteries on top of a hot rock in the sun to give them a little more juice. When that stopped working, she rolled them carefully over a fire, hoping there was even a minute more left in them for the radio. At night, Amá would climb up to the roof of her house, click the batteries in, and carefully tune to stations as far away as Laredo. They sold a cow to buy that radio. She liked boleros, rumbas, and danzón. She listened closely through the static at the soft voices of romantic cosmopolitan trios. She didn’t know how far Laredo was, but she knew it was in the direction of where her father came from, where he would leave again and would not return.

Her father would be dead the next year in Sonora, on his way to the U.S. The gangrene began in his foot and slowly crept up his body like endless tendrils of a seed. They told him not to go, but he would not listen. For generations, one thing was clear; the men in my family seemed experts at ignoring the warnings of the women.

*

Amá’s earliest memory of her mother, whom we called Amá Julia, is of them sitting beneath the same tree outside the courtyard walls of that same ranch, La Loma. Her mother wrapped her in a shawl and they sat huddled together on a rock, listening to the birds roosting for the evening in the trees. It was the evening chorus that makes birds feel as if they are as large as their songs carried over the valley, announcing themselves, saying “I’m still here,” as if there were any doubt about it. The stars were innumerable and soon the night would fall with its absolute darkness, because no one had electricity up on the mountain. It was so dark that everything seemed to be on fire when even the slightest light from the sun emerged in the morning, as if by noon it would all be burned to the ground. Amá said that never again were there as many stars in her life.

When the news came that her husband Jesús died, Amá Julia and her seven children all wore black dresses for six months as a rite of mourning. Julia, the new widow, turned every single picture of Jesús hanging on the walls around so that his face looked away—his head pushed against the cool adobe clay. The frames stayed that way until her own death many years later. My mother’s entire time in that house was spent looking at the backs of frames. Neither she nor any of her sisters were ever allowed to turn them over to see what their father looked like. They were obedient; these were traditions of the past, not to be trifled with.

*

In his final years, Jesús drank himself into debt. When he ran out of money, he used the land he inherited as collateral. It was said that he would give an entire plot of land in exchange for a bottle of tequila. All he had left to trade was the ranch of La Loma, but he died before he could sell it. Amá Julia worked the rest of her life sewing dresses, selling her cattle’s offspring, and growing corn to pay off his debt. She never remarried. She said she didn’t want another man living in her house because she had too many beautiful daughters.

Years after Amá Julia’s death, when they were certain her spirit would forgive them, the family finally decided to turn the pictures on the wall over. They mailed the pictures to the U.S., and for the first time since she was four, Amá saw her father’s face. All those years she had dreamed of him and what he might look like. All those years that his face was just a smudge in her memory left her feeling guilty, guilty that she remembered a useless piece of cloth and a meaningless whistle instead of her father’s face. And all those years he was right there, pushed against the wall, looking away.

Although she doesn’t drink, Amá admits that she likes the smell of tequila. Like their father too, her sisters like to smoke now and then as they sit around a table playing cards, taking small sips of mezcal, raising a cup to their father, who now looks straight at them, hanging from the wall above their heads.

2.

On the plane, I wondered if there was an exact point when we were no longer in one country and inside another, or if there was ever a moment when I occupied no country. If ever that was possible, it was possible up in the air. There was no clear correlation between what was happening down below and up above. I had heard that at the official port of entry there were turnstiles, just like the subway, ushering the travelers forward. If such turnstiles existed, you could map the precise moment when half of your body was here and the other half was there. I could measure; all I wanted was that little gold stamp that said I clicked past onto the other side, I entered, I returned, I was measured, counted for, recorded.

Would a sudden coldness come over us when our bodies moved over the actual line of the border? Wasn’t that how loneliness began, with the coldness of our bodies?

[First Movement Before Me as Salt]

Amá Julia poured salt into the shapes of crosses at the edges of her fields to save the crops and protect them from evil—whispering a soft prayer beneath her breath.

I imagine her in a long wool rebozo during the rainy season, walking out across a damp meadow in the morning, with a small bag of salt in one hand and a rosary in the other. One part of her religion was as ancient as olives or bells, not written in any biblical text. It was meant to save her seven children from hunger.

Amá, too young to work, walked through the damp field with no shoes, the soft dirt parting beneath her soles. The only sounds came from a distant wind, the earth muffling her steps as she counted seeds in her hand. It’s not possible to imagine any other sound in that moment. The sisters could go days without talking up on that mountain, without hearing anything louder than a bird’s call. And sometimes, Amá said, the air was so thick and heavy that it smothered even the bird’s songs, so much so that you felt like you were walking underwater—your clothes and your shoes weighed you down to the earth by the stillness. She said you could feel the penetrating silence on your clothes, as if it was something you could wash away, or something you could carry with you far away into another country. And my mother did carry it around like a glove that had no pair because her silence always felt like it was missing something. How I wished I could go even one day without uttering a single sound.

Perhaps the only sound was that of Amá Julia, shaking salt at the edge of the field, salt falling over her like snow, glittering in the air. So much salt that the crops no longer grew in the fallow corner. So much salt that they didn’t even resemble crosses anymore, just small white mounds broken only by her dark wool dress dragging behind her in the morning breeze—her thin lips mumbling a soft prayer through her teeth. Eventually her children would go north and leave her. They would be back with their own stories and their own children, with their own silences, some of whom she would never meet in this life.

3.

When I developed black-and-white photos in my high school art class, I erased all the grayness from their resolution because I believed you didn’t need gradients to understand an image. I believed in black and white and nothing else. I won an award because even though I deformed the images beyond recognition, people could still see through them and understand them. I wanted someone to look at them and know what they were looking at despite everything I had done. Everything was either light or it was a tree.

You were either in one country or you were in another, there was no in between. Black and white. I had no patience for gray.

There was nothing I could do to stop the plane from charging forward. It felt like we were going too fast, I was afraid I would miss the moment we would officially cross over. The border existed both outside me as well as within. I smiled at the flight attendant, who smiled back, I ate my wife’s Biscoff, and I pressed my face to the window.

[First Movement Before Me as Myth and Knife]

During a storm, my Amá Julia lifted her hands high and made the sign of the cross in the air with a knife. Before her time, her mother Josefina, whom they called Pepa, used to make the sign of the cross with a child and recite the Magnificat until the storm subsided. “My soul magnifies the Lord . . . Because he has regarded the lowliness of his handmaid . . .”

The child would die in the process of the prayer, but the crops would be saved. It was the price to be paid to save an entire family, or perhaps even all of the ranches on the mountain. It was the price paid to avoid hunger. Maybe that’s just what they told themselves, that the child died from the curse, not wanting to say that it died because it went hungry.

4.

When I came undocumented to the U.S., I crossed into a threshold of invisibility. Every act of living became an act of trying to remain visible. I was negotiating a simultaneous absence and presence that was begun by the act of my displacement: I am trying to dissect the moment of my erasure. I tried to remain seen for those whom I desired to be seen by, and I wanted to be invisible to everyone else. Or maybe I was trying to control who remembered me and who forgot me. But I couldn’t control what someone else saw in me, only persuade them that it was an illusion. There were things that I could not hide, things that would come out of me and expose me in my most vulnerable moments. It was my skin, my dark hair, my cheekbones, that I swore would give me away. I was afraid of the way I walked. It was easy to imagine being hit by a car, because even if they didn’t see me, I would for once be able to feel my body as more than smoke.

[First Movement Before Me as the Blood Moon]

Amá Julia believed that if a woman was expecting a child, she should not go outside during an eclipse and should stay away from the windows—lock herself up. She had to wear red underwear or at least something red on her and safety pins on her body.

When a child died, they never said it died, they said it was stolen. The ocean took her, the moon took her, or a witch who was jealous took her.

To prevent such thefts, the mothers wore red to fool the moon into believing they were dead or that they had miscarried. They stayed indoors and lay still to mimic their own death, since it was common for the newly dead to remain in the house longer than it is today. They needed at least nine days for the novenario.

*

Death was different then. It was something they allowed into their house. It was something they touched. The objects they placed on top of the soul-less bodies during the wake carried tremendous weight, almost as if to say “This will keep you down, this will keep you away.”

The safety pins on the pregnant woman needed to be large, as if they were knives, the instruments of the mother’s death. It was an act, it was theatrical, they needed to be seen. They put on a show for the spirits, for the moon, hoping to convince them that the child wasn’t worth their time, that it was already stolen, that someone had beaten them to it, to move on to another—like the blood smeared over the door of the Israelites to protect their firstborn.

It was all for the sake of the visible, of things of this world, of things that with enough time could be holy to some. It was precisely the belief that ordinary things could be considered holy that bothered Amá. So she left the Catholic Church because her prayers could no longer be to a saint incarnate—to the statue of that saint, its physicality. The divine needed to be more than something standing before her, something she couldn’t see, something she couldn’t have the language for, something she couldn’t even imagine or have a name for. Some people want physical proof of God; they want to see him just like they see their neighbor, in order to believe. But not my mother. She wanted a God who, like her, could hide in plain sight.

Maybe my mother didn’t trust this world and the relics and saints of the world, however holy they may have appeared to be, to carry her message to God. But if it wasn’t for things right in front of us, mediating our contact with God—the saints, the crosses, rosaries, and flowers—could our eyes stand such brightness? “I am that I am,” God said to Moses when Moses asked how would the people believe him without proof, without something visible to show? My mother wanted Yahweh, the only substitute we have as the name too sacred to be spoken for, denoted by the empty space between the cherubs atop the ark of the covenant.

But if it wasn’t for the blood, how would we know we were hurt? How would we know we were dying?

5.

I started to become undone, like a loosely coiled ball of yarn that was bound to come apart eventually. I felt like neither the U.S. nor Mexico wanted me and that I was between two opposing magnets and one was pushing harder than the other—my chest heavy beneath their weight. The U.S. was winning. How appropriate it would have been to die six miles in the sky with Rubi next to me—no footings on earth, a citizen of no country. How happy that would have made me.

I didn’t want to find a home. What I wanted was an origin, which was different than home, to look and see if that origin had a shape, or if I could give it one. If I was not welcome in the country of my birth, I would be okay. I was used to that feeling. What I could not withstand was never finding that from which everything of me came from. Up until that point, I had only heard stories, legends, and myths of my family’s past and what life was like on that mountain. I wanted something else that felt more real because I didn’t trust my imagination enough to fill in the gaps.

If only I could have jumped in the air inside the plane until not even my body was touching the plane and hold still there for hours. I wanted nothing to touch me—to know what it felt like to be untethered.

*

I knew that I was supposed to be grateful to be able to go back because only two other siblings had been able to see him, each a few times in the course of ten years. I knew that there were countless others who would kill for even just a day to be able to come back to see their father. It was a story I knew too well: Be grateful. Rubi held my hand and leaned her head on my shoulder. She had never been to Zacatecas, and even though I was born there, it would be as if we were both seeing everything for the first time. We didn’t talk much for the duration of the flight, we just stared out the window, looking at the landscape below. Being in the air, seemingly motionless, made me believe that I would actually attain it, that I would actually feel the moment we stepped over.

I needed to go to the place of my mother’s birth, the house where she was brought into this world, the ranch of La Loma on that mountain where she played her radio late at night on the roof. Yes, it was selfish to only want to return for my own needs, but I wasn’t done with the past. I could already feel the threads starting to unravel. What would be left of me when they all disappeared?

It was there, in La Loma, that I thought I could feel safe enough to uncoil what I had spent years wrapping tight around me. I had hid so much of myself through behaviors foreign to me, that I started to think those facades were in fact [me]. My whole life was an act, and it started to feel like a joke. I was a walking one-act play. I was tired because I had lost a sense of reality, a sense of who and what I was put on this earth to be. If in that moment at La Loma I became undone, I might be able to replace the center with something, to put something there and begin to wrap and coil myself together again. Maybe then I would be able to start a new life as myself all over again, the self that stayed behind when we migrated twenty years ago. I was returning to look for a five-year-old version of me, to tell him to stop, to hold him and tell him that things would be okay.

In a moment of great despair, I had tried to do this in California, but I soon found that the land, the country that is America, the foreignness of it, even if it was all I had ever known, would end me. Going to La Loma was the only way I could unravel and return to the world of the living. It happened when I was young, I wandered in the woods of the Sierra Nevada in the warmth of the summer, when the small mountain flowers and mule’s ear sprouts were lush. I tried to open, I yelled and yelled and sang and chanted, but even the warm breeze felt like knives to an exposed nerve. And a few years later, I came close to that disentanglement again, but again there was nothing for me to hold on to, nothing of substance to replace the center, so I buckled up and tried to drive my car into the river. I didn’t want to come back. And once this feeling of emptiness at my core started, it wouldn’t go away. It was too late and it felt like I was becoming smaller day by day, unthreading, I could feel how much of myself I left behind everywhere I went. I was almost reveling in it because I felt it as a kind of ecstasy—parts of myself scattered over an entire landscape. A little of me here, a little of me there. My anxiety no longer mattered, my sadness, my invisibility, and my hopelessness felt foreign to me, which is to say, they were inconsequential. I withdrew and let the world move my body without me, I tumbled like dried grass. I didn’t have anything like La Loma, with its thick walls built by my ancestors, to bring me back to reality. No semblance of permanence.

All I wanted was something to hold on to.

If I reached La Loma, I would replace the end of my thread at the center of me with a rock tucked close to my body, something heavy enough to keep me from moving—an anchor—one of those porous volcanic rocks that were found on my mother’s mountain, and in my head I said it as if it actually belonged to her, “My mother’s mountain . . . my mother’s mountain.”

We were always moving; I wanted to stay still for once.

*

I was going to take back what was stolen from me. My childhood was stolen, I had no memory of it whatsoever. It wasn’t my choice to forget; there were things my mind decided were best I didn’t remember. Maybe if I touched the places where I (and those who came before me in my family) were born, then something would come back to me. I couldn’t remember being seven, or nine, or eleven. If I started the journey again, to go to Mexico only to migrate out of Mexico again, maybe it would be like living my life again moment by moment.

It needed to be a rock, it needed to come from the earth, because the idea of place had always evaded me. The places I inhabited were always tied to some kind of origin, but it was always an origin that I was never able to access. In the act of immigrating, I was always looking for what I had lost, perhaps forever. And so part of me, even a microscopic part, was always looking back.

Some part of me feared that I was going home to die. Where would I want to be buried? If I were laid to rest in Mexico, then so much of my family in the U.S. would never be able to visit my grave. Perhaps fate staved off my death in the U.S. in order to avoid betraying that little stone that was waiting for me to unravel on my mother’s mountain.

Maybe it didn’t matter where I would be laid to rest. Maybe it was just one long stretch of land where people seemed to lose their minds. This moving back and forth felt like an endless repetition. We had been doing it for a hundred years and still here we were again. Maybe we would be doing it for a hundred more.

*

I was also going to reverse my parent’s journey; walking backward to what led them to cross in the first place. I was mapping. I was a cartographer. I would reach and keep reaching. It was an act of dissection, an opening up. I am trying to dissect the moment of my erasure. Something had been stolen from me.

Rubi held my hand on the armrest and nudged closer to me, trying to calm me down. What could I tell her? I looked down and noticed that the landscape had changed. We had been in the air for about two hours and were approaching what would be the border below. I felt myself getting smaller.

[First Movement Before Me: Amá and Apá]

There was not much courtship between my parents before they married. It was more of a convenience and numbers thing—this ranch had X number of sons, and another ranch on the other side of the mountain had X number of daughters. It was math.

People were carrying a statue of the Immaculate Virgin Mary of Fatima to every ranch on the mountain. My parents met at the gathering and procession of a saint known for secrets.

When they married, Amá and Apá went to live on a part of the mountain called Mala Noche, which means “bad night.” They had a small shack made out of adobe, which didn’t have a roof, only a plastic tarp that didn’t stop the rain from pouring onto the dirt floor. Amá said it was one of the saddest days of her life when she left her beloved home, where she didn’t have to work, where she rested beneath the sun during the day and still listened to the radio at night, for Mala Noche.

Apá was gone mostly, so Amá was left to feed and care for her firstborn daughter alone, as well as maintain the ranch. She herded cattle down the mountain, gathered firewood, and walked three kilometers to fetch water. It was hard work that she wasn’t used to, but she said those years at Mala Noche made her realize that she was on her own, even when Apá was home.

She would tie the baby to a tree with a rope so she could go work on the farm, and she left her faithful dog by the child to protect her from coyotes or snakes. On cold, wet nights, the dog would sit at the entrance to the shack and growl every now and then into the darkness. It was just her and her little girl, who at one point chewed on a straight razor she found on the floor because she was teething and her gums were itchy. Amá spent days cutting small pieces of onion for the child to bite on, hoping the onion would soothe and disinfect her tongue and gums that were tattered from the razor.

Amá doesn’t remember what happened to that dog, her only companion, the only one who knew her sadness, the only one who didn’t say to her “You’ve made your bed, now lie in it.”

6.

From the air, the actual borderline looked like a long thread of hair—but nothing in the landscape around it held a particular shape for long. This is why I turned to nature for answers—because it reminded me of inconsistencies, breaks in a pattern we work so hard to preserve. Even the perfect little squares and circles of cropland were bunched together to make an amorphous shape out of many perfect ones. They all stopped at the foot of the mountains, where farmers could no longer exert control over the land.

I felt like I always had to redraw myself back into the landscape in one way or another—to my detriment, I was light-footed, I never left a trace of me behind. I usually used cash because it couldn’t be traced and because there was no other option; for many years I didn’t have a bank account. None of my family’s cars were registered to our names, so it felt like we weren’t even there. Every time I went hiking I felt the urgent need to turn over a stone and move it. It was always obvious to me that I didn’t belong in the landscape of the West, the rolling foothills of Northern California leading up to the Sierra. Yes, I was aware I was entering a sacred space and I didn’t want to disturb it, but I wanted to let someone know that I was there, that I meant no harm, that I too had been scarred.

From above, the border looked so obviously out of place, so obvious that it didn’t belong, an encroachment to the snaking valleys, hills, and mountains. I heard that parts of the wall were made from old landing pads from the Vietnam War. Its point was to stand out, to be “other-than-the-landscape.” Its geometrical consistency was jarring to the eye, violent in its precision, stretching for hundreds of miles without a single curve even when everything around it was curving. It announced its presence. And even in the past when there was no wall, there was still its vivid presence breaking two things apart.

I knew there were workers down there maintaining it, repairing broken sections, putting up more wire, clearing bushes for trucks to drive alongside it; they were marking the earth. Without those small interferences, it would be swallowed by the landscape. It would not last a single decade.

Given the nature of decay, perhaps that was not the same border we crossed decades before. How much of it had been replaced—as if it were a living thing that replaced its entire makeup of cells every few years? And yet it was still there, quite unchanged.

*

I ventured to believe that the function of the border wasn’t only to keep people out, at least that was not its long-term function. Its other purpose was to be visible, to be seen, to be carried in the imaginations of migrants deep into the interior of the country, in the interior of their minds. It was a spectacle meant to be witnessed by the world, and all of its death and violence was and continues to be a form of social control, the way that kings of the past needed to behead only one petty thief in the public square to quell thousands more.1 The biggest threat to immigrants who succeeded in crossing was the fear that the apparatus was always watching you. It was the idea that was most menacing, that infiltrated every sector of a person’s life—total and complete surveillance. It was the unrelenting fear that was most abrasive on a person’s soul. And on the Mexican side of the line, it stood as a symbol for those wanting to cross, announcing: “This could happen to you if you dare cross.” We had all seen what happened to bodies in the desert; we knew the dangers of coyotes.

I always felt like it was on my back, looming just above me, the omnipresent nature of the beast. The border didn’t just exist in the Southwest, but rather, everywhere. I had possessed its lesson; I knew that place wasn’t somewhere I traveled to or lived in; the border had taught me that it had to be something else. I wanted to exist in a place that had no relationship to the border-at-large or to immigration or to my status or my family’s. I just wanted a tree, a beach, a mountain, even a bird, not tinged the color of all of my fake documents. But where could I go that didn’t involve a border in one way or another? Where on earth is a border irrelevant? How could I create a small landscape of memories divorced from that spectacle? Maybe this place could be independent acts of love that transcended the limitations of time and memory associated with borders, as in the phrase “I don’t remember where we kissed, all I know is that we kissed.” Place as memory. Place as disassociation . . . dissociation. There was no escape, so over the years I started drinking to create my own spectacle.

I knew that it was not simply birds, trees, and dirt down there. There were ghosts, very much as real as the trees around them. There was blood down there that didn’t possess the magical ability to dry, to wither away into nothing, to be forgotten.

How easy it would have been to look down and see nothing but sand. How fortunate for those who couldn’t or, better stated, refused, to see the bodies strung like sweaters on clotheslines beneath the water in the Río Bravo. I felt like I’d lost control of my body, like I was already dying six miles above the earth. There was death down there, and to some, it hardly made a shadow, it hardly made a sound; to others it was deafening, it started to sound like hammers.

[First Movement Before Me as Mist]

Throughout the 1970s and ’80s, when Apá left Amá to come work in the United States, he came to labor camps along California’s Central Valley, mostly in Stockton and Modesto and sometimes as far north as Yakima, Washington. He slept in basements along with thirty or so other men without electricity or running water. A bucket in the corner was the latrine, and they rolled dice to see who would empty it next. Rent and food was deducted from their pay, as were their tools (marked up, of course), and the company usually and conveniently owned a small store to supply the men with any other provisions. Whatever was left in their pay they would send back home. There never was much left. Yes, he left Amá alone in Mala Noche, to fend for herself, to feed herself, and to care for their child by herself, but he was trying to get their small family ahead. It was the price to be paid for any kind of comfort.

*

Apá said that on some weekends, when they felt festive, they would invite girls from town to the camp, borrow a guitar, buy cheap tequila, and have a makeshift baile, or party. Since they were only ever able to bring a few girls at a time, the remaining men would dance with each other, holding themselves by the waist to a polka or ranchera, cheek to cheek, drunk, never to mention this to their wives back home until decades later.

The next day they would be back in the fields, picking one red and ripe strawberry at a time. Immigration raids were more common then. They were more public, it was part of the show. They also came in vans, but back then, they were marked in large green letters. They would come to a screeching halt and agents would surround a field like cowboys herding cattle. There was chaos and screeching, and flailing, and ducking, and “Stop, inmigración” in thick American accents that always sounded like they were part of a Hollywood western. There were heavy-metal-bumpered Bronco pickups with big tires that kicked up a dust storm when they came to a halt and also when they peeled out. Everyone knew the drill.

Sometimes if the bosses didn’t want to pay their workers, they would call immigration themselves. During a raid, those who had papers never ran; they kept their heads down, continuing to pick their fruit as if nothing in particular was happening around them, as if they didn’t see their friends jumping off their ladders, or jumping in a hole, hiding in a tree. One day a raid came and Apá just kept calmly picking his fruit, a bluff. It worked. The agents left without bothering to ask him anything. They came and went like ghosts. He laughed about it with his friends at lunch a few hours later when they returned from hiding, drenched in ditch water, or scraped up from hiding in the branches, laughing a little as to why they didn’t think of it themselves, sighing because a bluff could only be done once.

*

Working in the fields was hard, but there was pride in it. The dirt felt good in your hands, and you were making your own living wage, much more than you would ever make back home growing corn, or anything else that came from the earth, even though it was the exact same earth you were cultivating up north as well. At the end of the day you could look back and see all the trees you stripped clean of their fruit. It was visible in the way other things were not. Sometimes there was no greater joy than sitting in the middle of a watermelon field, breaking open a melon and burying your face in the juicy red pulp. And on the hottest days, Apá said it almost felt nice when the crop dusters sprayed the neighboring field, how cool it felt when the pesticide mist poured over them with the slightest breeze.

7.

As we descended into Guadalajara, Jalisco, I began to worry about being able to return. My provisional document relegated my admittance back into the U.S. to the discretion of whichever individual border agent I happened to get at the checkpoint. If they were in a bad mood, they could deny me reentry and I would be stuck technically in Mexico but also in less of an actual “place” than I had ever been before. That feeling first came upon me when I boarded the plane back in Sacramento, when the stewardess announced that the doors would be shutting and wouldn’t open again until our landing. But as we approached Guadalajara, it felt more pressing. As we got closer I could make out the houses, which looked like compounds with large walls gating them off from the outside world. I could see into people’s courtyards, I could see the tiny dots of potted plants that I remembered having as a child in our courtyard. Even from that distance, I was starting to remember.

Ten years can do a lot to memory. I didn’t know who my father was anymore or who he had become. I wanted to know if he had changed beyond just appearances. Had I?

*

I was fifteen when he left, and he was fifty-five. Upon my return, I was twenty-five and he was sixty-five. Our birthdays were one day apart. We were both Aquarius. He left me as a child and I was coming back to him as a man. I had a mustache and beard, my shoulders had squared, I was taller, maybe as tall as him, and I had a wife whom I’d met shortly after his departure and who fell in love with me over many nights talking on the phone about the man I was now returning to see.

I wondered what he would think of Rubi. I wanted to hold her the way he never held Amá and to show him the kind of respect a husband should have for his wife. I wanted to be heavy-handed about it with my body because I knew I couldn’t talk to him directly. I always had to relay everything through symbols, images, and body language. We never spoke to each other, we spoke about each other. I wanted to prove to him that I made it just fine without him. And it was true. Had he been in my life at the critical times between fifteen and twenty-five, he would have probably told me not to go to college. I would find a way to tell him this. I would try to look him in the face and not say anything at all.

*

The day he left, he spent most of the morning packing old tools into the back of his 1970s Ford pickup, his favorite style of truck. He always drove stick shift and tried to teach me once, but I could hardly reach the pedals, and the gears were old and difficult to shift.

“Shift into third, shift into third,” he screamed, which didn’t help me shift into third any faster.

He went to Mexico often because he felt like he was rotting from the inside if he went too long without going back. With each trip, he packed his truck to the brim with farm equipment and old tools to sell or barter back home. Because I was small, he had me hunch inside the camper and arrange all the boxes that he handed me from the garage. This was always my job. I had to arrange them exactly right, otherwise they would not all fit.

“Not like that goddamnit!” he screamed when I put a box sideways when it should have gone longways. He grabbed the heavy boxes filled with screwdrivers and made the truck shake from side to side with his shuffling on the bed, trying to fit the box exactly where I was going to put it anyway if he had waited.

It never took long for my father to laugh off his rage and leave it in the past, while we were still left scrambling with remnants of his emotions from three or four episodes before.

That day, packing his truck for what I thought was just another of his trips to Mexico, I was almost happy that he was leaving. I felt that at last I would be relieved of the weight of his rage looming over my shoulders. Perhaps I wasn’t sad because in my head I was certain that he would return.

Most of the money my dad made in the States would be sent back to Mexico to buy land, or a truck, or to pay off one of his many debts. My mother, on the other hand, worked for rent, gas, electricity, food, but my father worked for a separate reality that envisioned us all living again in Mexico. They never brought up the fact that the realities of their futures never crossed, it was just always in the air, most prevalent with a heavy sigh or a slammed door—never actually spoken.

When the truck was completely loaded, he went inside and took a shower. Apá made it a point to never look presentable. It’s not that he didn’t care about how he looked, because he did; he wanted to look ragged. He wanted other people to feel sorry for him. He wanted my uncles to think that my mother never cooked for him or cleaned for him, which in Mexican communities was the currency of worth for a married woman. He was controlling my mother’s image to others more than she could herself. The reality was the opposite. My mother’s constant struggle was for him to take a shower and to change clothes; she always begged for him to eat at home, not on the streets. He did it on purpose, perhaps to justify his leaving for six months at a time. If he could convince himself that in fact he had a terrible wife who did not care for him, then it wouldn’t take much for him to enjoy his trip away from his family. Sometimes I thought he left only to be away from us; there was joy in his leaving, even though his joy looked nothing like any of ours. We each had our own definition of joy and kept its secret hidden as if in a secret box. No one would share their key; no one would allow anyone else to see inside their box.

Many times he would come home and scream at my mother that he hadn’t eaten in two entire days, which was a lie. “The food is ready,” my mother would respond, pointing to a pot on the stove filled with freshly boiled beans or squash. He would grumble something under his breath and walk away. He always wanted to make sure that he occupied the role of the victim. Nothing was ever his fault. And he fought hard to preserve and own that image of himself, even if he had to beat it into my mother to prove his victimhood, his woundedness.

*

When he got out of the shower, he put on some new boots I hadn’t seen before. They were dark brown with intricate white designs and floral patterns. He wore polyester wranglers, a crisp button-up shirt, and a palm sombrero, and he had shaved his beard except for his mustache, which was long and pointy. He looked handsome. He looked like someone who was loved or at least in love—a dapper older gentleman with a family. He combed his hair to the side, like he always did. Even for his age, his thick, lush head of hair never had much gray. Balding isn’t something passed down in my family. But I would have gladly preferred that rather than everything else I inherited: my anger and lack of patience. He’s always had a large potbelly. He doesn’t drink, so it’s not from beer, but rather from all the food he eats on the street to avoid my mother’s cooking, so he can complain about not eating a home-cooked meal. His belt is barely visible beneath his tucked-in shirt and belly spilling over.

Everyone says I look like him as a young man, and that soon I’ll start looking more like him as an older man. I have a picture of him in his early twenties, and I do in fact bear a striking resemblance beyond even the obvious father/son connections—our cheeks, our eyes, our thin faces.

As he was getting his bag ready, a small tan leather duffel, my mother began crying. She always cried for the departed, perhaps because she had to do it so many times. Her eyes swelled up, but Apá never looked up to console her. He merely kept shuffling through his duffel bag to make sure he wasn’t forgetting anything.

I was thinking about what I would be allowed to wear now that he was leaving. To anyone else who didn’t know him, that would sound silly, but most of the fights between Amá and Apá were about how we dressed. My mother didn’t really care how we dressed as long as we behaved and had good grades. My father, on the other hand, equated wearing baggy clothes with being morally bankrupt, with being looked down upon as a thief, as a gangster, as a useless miscreant, which stemmed from a long history of antiblackness and anti-indigenous xenophobia in ours and many Mexican families. He had a low regard for black culture because he equated it with so many negative stereotypes, and thus had a general mistrust of the black community in our low-income neighborhood. As a child and preteen, I didn’t have the language to articulate his antiblackness, but I see it now. Perhaps, in an ironic turn, he saw blackness as quintessentially American at the same time that America distanced itself from black life and people while co-opting their culture.

I wanted to be like my friends whose parents didn’t care if they wore baggy pants, or red shirts, or listened to rap and hip-hop. He saw it all as evil, a stain. I remember watching BET or VHI or MTV when I got home from school and quickly changing the channel when I heard his truck pull up the driveway. Like many older Mexicans, he had conservative ideas of what was good and what was wrong in the world, and no one would change his mind.

I always had to wear fitted jeans, and I had to tuck in my shirt. It was a struggle to be allowed even to wear regular crew-neck T-shirts and not buttoned-up collared shirts all the time. Shorts, of any size or length, were strictly forbidden. I could not comb my hair slicked back, or too short; it had to be combed to the side. I was absolutely forbidden to shave my head. I always needed to wear a belt, my jeans (and only jeans) always needed to be snug, nothing baggy, and I always had to carry a wallet with at least one dollar in it. If it was up to him, we would also be wearing cowboy hats to school. The strangest thing to me was that he wouldn’t let us wear tennis shoes until a certain age, and once he did, the only requirement he would not budge on was that he mandated that they could never be white, or majority white. I could never understand what white sneakers meant. I knew why he didn’t want us in baggy clothes, but what did he have against white shoes? I came to the conclusion that to him, white shoes were for women. He didn’t want his three boys dressing like women.

Maybe I snuck around him with baggy shirts because I wanted to get him mad, but more than that, it was because I didn’t want to stick out. To wear boots and a sombrero was to imminently be called a naco, and if you were labeled a naco in my middle or high school, then you were also read as undocumented. He didn’t care if people knew he didn’t have papers because he never wanted to belong here, he never had the desire to fit in with six hundred other high schoolers. Why couldn’t he see that I didn’t want to bring attention to myself, that I wanted to hide? And wearing a cowboy hat, boots, and tight jeans to a high school mostly populated by kids of color was not the way to blend in.

The house where I grew up was in a neighborhood called Wilbur Block that was run by a relatively small gang of Norteños, but it was the largest concentration of Norteños in town. He knew this. He saw them hanging out in their yards, walking the streets, sitting at the park. They were all my friends. We grew up together, went to school together, and yet he wanted me nowhere near them.

Often I woke up unnecessarily early for school just so that I could comb my hair like my friends and leave before he got up. I laid my clothes out and sometimes packed a larger shirt in my backpack to change into once I got to school. I liked to spike my hair up or slick it back, which he hated. I chose my clothes the night before and carefully laid them out by my bed along with my shoes so that I didn’t make any noise looking for them in the morning. I opened the bathroom door slowly because it creaked sometimes, and I turned on the faucet just enough for a small trickle to flow. The aerator on the tap made a loud hissing sound, which I wanted to avoid. It took a while for a small puddle of water to collect in my closed palm, which I rubbed together with gel and ran through my glossy hair. I tried to be as quick as I could.

Sometimes he would wake up quietly too and sneak up behind the bathroom door, which I had to leave cracked because closing it would have made too much noise. He would peek through the small opening of the bright bathroom, illuminating the hallway outside. His surveillance was obsessive. I never knew when he was watching me so I assumed he always was, and he would catch me and take the belt out. It was about control. The days that I didn’t hear him sneaking up behind the door, he would catch me and slam the door open, startling me, and grab me by my hair with his fist.

“Hijo de tu pinche madre,” “You son of a fucking bitch” was a favorite phrase of his.

Everything needed to be done his way, and his fights with Amá were somehow always our fault, the kids. According to him, if only we would dress respectably, like real men, like machos, then all of this could have been avoided. If only we wouldn’t talk back to him, even when he was wrong, then there wouldn’t be any problems. If only, if only, if only. Of course, there were always problems, but to him, none of them were of his making.

*

Clean-shaven, showered, and with fresh new clothes, he stepped out the door with his tan duffel bag in his hand. My mother followed behind, fiddling with something in her hands as if whatever she was holding would come to life and fly away. “Well, that’s everything,” he said to my mother and leaned over to me. I didn’t know where my younger two brothers were. They should have been there, but they weren’t. Perhaps my mother sent them away because she didn’t want them to see their father leave yet again, which was silly because they knew he was leaving either way. My father shook my hand, gave me a light pat on the back, and said to take care of my mother and brothers. It was a firm handshake, the way he always taught me to shake. I would be his little hawk, his little accomplice. I would be the man of the house. Besides, I was named Marcelo too.

There was nothing special about that day, nothing momentous. We didn’t know that his plan of being away for six months would turn into a deportation of ten years. It was a few days later that we got the call. He was charged with having violated the terms of his visa, which had been revoked. He entered Mexico no longer with the glee of visiting for as long as his money lasted him, but like a dog with his tail between his legs. His first plan was to buy a house in our hometown of Tepechitlán, Zacatecas; his second plan was to make us all come back with him, but that proved harder than he anticipated.

We didn’t know then that we would have to stretch our memories to last us ten years. I would have paid more attention on that last day that he left. Maybe there would have been a party where our joy would slowly morph into a sadness that still didn’t feel completely like sadness but had all of the consequences of sadness.

[First Movement Before Me as Good People]

It was easier to cross back and forth when Apá was young and still working the harvest seasons up and down the West Coast. He used to be more daring because the stakes were lower back in the 1980s. If they caught you, sometimes they just let you go and you would just turn around and try again the next day. Apá said he had friends who were sometimes caught three times in a single day. Still, one could never be too careful, so he crossed with larger groups because it was safer. In one of his trips north, he crossed with a group of about ten that included a pregnant woman who also had another small girl walking beside her. They walked mostly by night. The child tired quickly and often. The woman tired often too, and said her feet were unbearably swollen. The group stopped for them because that’s what anyone would do.

They stopped again and again, but they figured if they stopped anymore to rest for her, they would miss their rendezvous and would all be in danger of being stranded with no food or water. No one said the words, but everyone was thinking the same thing. They were all hoping that one person was brave enough to say it, to say, “We can’t stop anymore” and keep walking, or simply not say anything at all and just keep walking. The rest would surely follow, absolved.

Apá always said time stood still out there, like it was broken and would never work again no matter how many watches you wore, which meant that one step was no different than another—they were going nowhere.

*

They were good people, honest-to-God people, hardworking people. They didn’t mean to keep walking, but Apá said that no one outside that moment would understand. No one was meant to understand.

Maybe they had to pretend not to hear her anymore. In their heads, it wasn’t as bad if they simply didn’t turn around to see her—action disguised as inaction. They must have told elaborate stories to convince themselves that it was all a dream, that they were making it all up. There were ten of them, never twelve.

And so they moved on, empty, vacuous, everything ahead of them monochrome, buzzing in a low electric drizzle.

*

Apá stayed behind. It wasn’t that he was more courageous than them, not abandoning the woman; maybe it had nothing to do with choices. It was their fate to keep walking, and it was Apá’s fate to stay behind. I want to believe that morality had nothing to do with it. No one questioned the higher powers that descend to the lowly depths of people in the desert. They do as they do and, in the moment, do not ask why.

Night fell, and they huddled together. Apá opened his large coat and nestled the woman on one side and her daughter on the other. When morning came, they set out again. A day passed before they found a road. There was no sight of the group, most likely picked up the night before just as was planned. There were nine, not twelve.

Apá waited by the side of the road for a long time until he saw headlights in the distance. He flagged down the car and asked the driver to take them to Los Angeles, which the driver kindly did, seeing the precarious situation they were in. They didn’t care if it would have been immigration that they flagged. By that point, “immigration” was only an eleven-letter word and nothing else, except a chance to drink some water.

The woman’s family, nervous that she didn’t arrive with the rest of the group, buried their heads into my father’s shoulder when they arrived in Long Beach, trying to stuff dollars in his pockets, which he didn’t refuse. He said he liked the attention and told the story over and over about how he draped his jacket over them to keep them warm at night. They killed a pig in honor of Apá and threw a party with music and drinks and carnitas from said pig. They paid for his trip farther north, to the sister towns of Linda and Olivehurst, where we would eventually end up again a decade later.

If only the group had waited. Years later, I doubt they ever think of that woman and her child. But every now and then, I’m sure it returns to them, the memory, and there is nowhere they can hide. They didn’t mean to. They are still good people. They will create elaborate stories to rid themselves of doubt, but nothing will work. Maybe they will even bump into her without ever knowing.

In one impossible scenario in their heads, to appease their regret, she is still somewhere out there, holding her two children, now adults, by the hand.

8.

The plane finally landed, and I felt the weight of my country above and around me. It happened, I could feel it in my bones, I had arrived. When the door opened, a wave of petroleum fumes wafted in, mixed with the smell of burnt rubber and a slight hint of soft, damp earth. It looked like it had just rained, but I didn’t see a cloud in the sky. We took stairs off the plane and walked onto the tarmac to the terminal. Of all places, we agreed to meet at a Burger King inside the airport. Rubi and I walked closely together, lugging our suitcases behind us. I didn’t want to look like a tourist, so I pretended to act bored, like I had done this a hundred times, but Rubi could tell it was an act. I looked at her nervously. She didn’t care what people thought about her, and I envied her for that—I always had. She wore a large sun hat and a long dress. From afar, or up close, it was obvious we weren’t from Mexico, at least not recently. I didn’t have a question for her, but I hoped she had an answer.

It was so strange to hear everyone speaking Spanish. The attendants, the soldiers in the airport with their long assault rifles hanging across their chests, and the announcements over the intercom—all of it, Spanish. That was the first thing that disoriented me. I had never functioned in a space like that. I couldn’t remember carrying my body in Spanish, completely in Spanish. Back home, even in private moments the atmosphere was still English: the TV was English, the cardboard cereal box labels were all in English, as were the unopened letters and bills on the table, and everything in the fridge.

It was hearing Spanish through the vehicle of authority that shocked me most. I realized how little is made up of words and how much of it is something more ethereal. The energy was different. I changed my dollar bills for pesos, and the man behind four inches of bulletproof glass in the exchange cubicle waved me aside for the next person in line with an uninterested glaze across his face. Even the flicking of his wrist felt like it was in Spanish, quicker to the point, frustrated.

I approached Mexican customs and immigration thinking I had something to worry about, thinking I had to prepare myself for the worst, as I always had. But then a sudden relief came over me, as had never happened before. I was a citizen of the earth on which I was walking; I pertained to the same body that could be elected president. There was a small moment of pride that died as soon as the officer said, “Are you Marcelo Hernandez?” The police were the police were the police, no matter.

[First Movement Before Me as Animal]

The first time my mother came with my father to the United States, she left the kids back in La Loma in the care of her mother, my Amá Julia. They promised they would only be gone a few months and would be back as soon as they made enough money. When they crossed into the U.S., they wandered the desert alone for miles without food or water. They were still young; maybe they still loved each other, or would soon start to. Every direction seemed like it was north, as if it was always noon in their heads. They moved because regardless which direction they faced, they trusted what was ahead more than what was behind them.

*

After a day of walking, a pack of wild dogs appeared to Amá and Apá out of nowhere. At first they thought it was a hallucination, the first signs that their minds were going. Both parties stopped to observe each other. The animals were real. The humans were real. After miles of indiscriminate turns around arroyos and brush too thick to enter, almost a statistical improbability, they happened to find each other at the precise moment that fate ordained. In a way, every decision they had ever made, even in childhood, led my parents to those dogs. Every song my mother played on her radio as a child led her to those dogs, every bird my father shot led him to those dogs, every heartbreak, every dress she sewed, every cup of warm coffee in the morning.

Two of the dogs left, uninterested surely, but one stayed behind. It approached them with its head down as if to say “I will not hurt you,” and rubbed its head against Apá’s leg. It walked right past them and continued ahead, slowing its pace and looking back to make sure its new friends were following. And indeed they followed.

They followed the dog because they thought it must have known the way to something—anything. The dog moved through trails hidden to Amá and Apá. Trails that only dogs are keen to. It turned with precision, and intent, as if it knew its decisions were the difference between life and death.

The dog led them to a ranch where men were working. They told the men their situation and asked if the dog was theirs, but they said it wasn’t.

They’re still not sure if the dog was real or not, but they remember it so well—its jaw slightly open, its head hanging low like a wilted flower. Maybe there wasn’t a dog, and when those ranchers stumbled across my parents, rambling about a dog that no one else could see, dehydrated and wild-eyed, they simply shook their heads and said “Yes, yes, here, drink.” My mother has never wanted to own a dog since.

*

The men gave them chicken soup and plenty of water, but not too much at once, because they heard it was bad. They tried to eat slowly, they tried to eat quietly. Even half dead, they still remembered that they were guests in a stranger’s house, they still remembered it was bad for the body to drink so fast when it was thirsty.

Amá cooked a few days for them until the boss arrived with his provisions: food, water, and beer. They would have gladly stayed but the boss said he couldn’t take them because they had children waiting for them back home. He was nice enough, though, to give them a ride to Los Angeles.

Years later, while driving my mother to the doctor, the radio will come on and a special episode on the border will say that a body only lasts a few days in the desert before it completely disappears—no trace of it ever existing, ravaged by scavengers. Sometimes the bodies slowly make their way up a mountain, pulled up little by little by those scavengers moving their hunger in the same direction. And I will quickly turn it off, reluctant to admit a hint of gratitude that she doesn’t know enough English to understand. They said that out there dogs return to their owners with a hand in their mouth and drop it at their owner’s feet. Perhaps the hand just lies there on the ground, waiting for the authorities, because it is a hand, because that is what hands do, pointing in one direction or another.

They said sometimes dogs will last days out there, like the dog that saved my parents, and come back with nothing in their mouths, wagging their tails with joy at the sight of their owners, licking and licking their salty faces, tugging at their jeans to play. No one asks how it is they survive so long out there.2

9.

What had ten years of solitude done to his body? I didn’t really know about his personal life. I guess I never bothered to ask, or better yet, I didn’t want to know. Had he been alone that entire time? Had he taken a new girlfriend that we didn’t know about? I knew general things from other people: he had a dog, he drove a truck, he liked to spend time up in the mountains. I had probably only spoken with him a handful of times in the ten years he was gone. And even then, it was only because my mother pushed the phone into my ear to use up the last few minutes of a calling card. Was his voice still the same?

He always avoided taking pictures, the only times I saw him was when someone came back from a trip to Mexico with pictures to share. He was there, caught off guard, in the background of someone else’s picture—always in slight profile or walking away, never staring directly at the camera. That was something people did often. They would return and distribute any pictures where a family member of ours happened to pop up, almost like a footnote to their vacation, or perhaps as an excuse to tell us all about their vacation. It was bittersweet. The pictures were always so full of joy. We wondered how we could inject ourselves into that joy.

“Look, there’s your dad,” an aunt would say, pointing at a picture with my father lurking in the background and her daughters’ enormous heads squished together in the foreground eating a ripe mango sprinkled with flakes of pepper. “Thanks, Tía,” was all I could say.

I almost preferred to keep our interactions that way, filtered through someone else’s emotions—it was easier to borrow them and give them back. His solitude, and ours, masked by someone else’s joy. He was always caught in the middle of doing something—moving a bucket, crouching down to sit. It was in those rare moments that we got to see how he lived. I could tell a few things about my father’s life simply from the way he leaned back in his chair, the angle of his head, the placement of his arms.

I liked that he wasn’t taking the picture for me, it felt like I was watching him one frame at a time. In a way, it was like catching him in a moment of unfiltered sincerity, a moment that couldn’t actually exist given his stoic nature, one isolated by circumstance and time. Had I been there during the moment the photograph was taken, I doubt he would be acting the same.

Sometimes it felt voyeuristic, like I shouldn’t be looking at him without his permission. He didn’t know that weeks later I would be sitting alone on my bed sifting through pictures where he was a small blurry dot behind my cousins smiling on horses. But that moment was ours, it was ours to keep and ours alone. I knew he would never give me anything like it if I asked.

If he was laughing, it wasn’t for the camera, it wasn’t for us, only for him, only for the moment. But I wasn’t ready to confront him, so I was grateful for that removal of self, mostly because he wasn’t aware that those pictures were coming back to us. He wasn’t posing for the camera like my cousins in the frame.

[First Movement Before Me as a Tuft of Clover]

In one of those early trips of the mid-1980s, before I was born, Amá and Apá decided to make their life a little more stable and stay in the States for a while. They brought their two eldest children with them back from Amá Julia and began the slow work of settling down in Northern California. Yes, children are mobile and don’t necessarily tie you to one place, but for Amá and Apá, who didn’t have papers, to have a child born in America meant something different. Amá became pregnant in the States, and she had a home birth inside the doctor’s house, which had thick ivy winding over the windows.

The child died only a few hours after birth, and they snapped a picture of Amá holding him in her arms, inconsolable.

The day he was to be buried, they couldn’t afford a gravestone, so Amá spent the entire afternoon memorizing the exact placement of the trees and the bushes in the cemetery, counting how many steps from the path to where her child was lowered into the ground so she wouldn’t forget. She was mapping a gravestone in her head to make up for what others could not see just beneath the surface.

“There’s a tuft of clover nearby, he’s three steps after the olive tree.”

*

He was named Manuel for the four hours he was alive. They would have given him a name even if he had lived for two, or even if he died in her womb; he would always be Manuel. But no one would ever call him that. He would hardly ever be mentioned.

She wanted to mark it somehow, so that no one would step there, but anything short of a stone would be thrown away. She promised she would mark his grave one day. Soon after, they decided to return to Mexico, leaving the child behind. Besides, it was his land, he was born there. They gave up any hope of settling down, and after that, we never really stopped moving. It was too much to live near the clover, and it was too much to leave as well. Each paycheck she received, she handed over to Apá. There was never any chance for her to set aside a little for a stone. I always wondered, walking through a cemetery, avoiding the marked graves, how many times I was stepping on the unmarked graves of the poor. She didn’t go back to say goodbye to the child; she knew he would be there when she returned.

*

Out of everyone in the family, it was Manuel who remained in place. And over the years, they kept coming back to that town where he is buried like distant moons orbiting a planet. It’s where we eventually settled again somewhat, where the children had children. Something magnetic pulled us closer and closer to him.

Every time someone asks how long we have been here in this town of Marysville, California, they follow it with “why.” “We don’t know,” we tell them. Thirty-six years after he was buried, Amá still lives within five miles of his grave. She has never forgotten how to find him.

There’s a tuft of clover nearby, he’s three steps after the olive tree.

We don’t know if the olive tree is still there; surely the clover is gone. And still, no one has gotten a stone for him; afraid that in looking again, we wouldn’t know where to find him, or that another marker would be there instead, placed by another family due to a small clerical error, always small clerical errors. We prefer to leave things the way they were, exactly as they were. We couldn’t do anything then, so we won’t do anything now.

10.

The Guadalajara airport seemed urban and rustic at the same time because it was the only choice for people from the city as well as people from the surrounding rural villages. I began looking at the faces of every older man I saw. I didn’t know how long it would take me to recognize my father. Maybe it would be instantaneous, or I would look at him and keep looking in disbelief as if I was looking at myself for the first time through a dirty mirror. Streams of travelers spilled through two large double doors into the lobby where family members lined a pathway behind a metal barricade. It looked like a parade of weary travelers walking down the aisle with families cheering on either side, as if we had just finished a marathon. There were smiling faces, and people hugging, and tears. Was it always like that? How many other people on my flight were coming home for the first time too, how many were seeing some relatives for the first time in years? The mood in the air was one of joy. The workers, who had to witness this parade every half hour, seemed jaded, unfazed. Reunions only meant more trash for them to pick up. The salespeople standing beside their kiosks of lotions and perfumes straightened up for the newest arrivals.

That is the nature of airports. It is in airports where two countries actually meet. It is in the embrace between two people, wherever they might have been, that countries collide.

*

Rubi had seen Apá in pictures but wasn’t really sure what to look for. I knew what to look for. In the distance I saw a white palm sombrero and a man beneath its shadow, waving at us. I immediately recognized Apá. I didn’t know if I should hug him or punch him in the face, but my body took over, walked up, and embraced him.

Up close, I could see the changes in his face. He was much smaller than I remembered. His eyes were a little sunken, but his large potbelly still hung over his belt. He was clean-shaven except for his large mustache, which curved at the tips. It was the longest I had stared at my father directly. I had always been afraid to look at him in the face. I used that moment as an excuse to do so, to examine every wrinkle, every scar. I knew I would never again be able to look at him straight in the eyes for that long. It wasn’t like us.

It would either take another ten years of separation or death to be able to concentrate my vision on him completely, to take him in and hold him there. I was looking to see what ten years of solitude had done to him. I was looking for regret in his face—in his eyes—but I wasn’t sure what regret looked like, only that Apá smelled like dried sweat and blackberries.

*

“Apá, this is my wife, Rubi,” I said to him, and pointed to Rubi, who had been standing to the side. She shook his hand and gave him a hug. “It’s wonderful to finally meet you,” she said, and wiped her eyes. On our wedding day, just two years prior, Rubi asked to speak with Apá. I never knew what she said to him, and never wanted to ask. She sat by herself in her long white wedding gown in a far corner of the room and cried on the phone before hanging up and had to touch herself up for our wedding pictures.

I thought we would be leaving immediately after finding each other, but to my dismay, the “friend” my father paid to drive him three hours from Zacatecas to the Guadalajara airport decided to get more bang for his buck and include another pickup, so we had to stay and wait for those people to land. A bus would have been easier and cheaper but Apá insisted that a personal car was better for reasons unknown to me. I was very hungry, but I didn’t want to eat in the airport. I wanted to save my appetite for some good home-cooked meals. I wanted my first bite to utterly destroy me. I had more confidence in food to welcome me home than in my father, so I had saved my appetite. I hadn’t eaten all day. We decided to wait for the other passengers at the Burger King. Rubi got some fries, and I tried my hardest to resist them but I couldn’t, I was too hungry. I carefully ate one and then another, hoping that would stave off my hunger until we got home—or my father’s home, I still wasn’t sure what to call it.

I didn’t know what to say to my father. Could I show him love and anger at the same time without one erasing the other? I couldn’t look at him for long anymore. That moment came and went. Now I could only examine him in short spurts and had to quickly look away. How quick, the moment his face opened for me before it disappeared beneath the shadow of his large hat again.

Five long hours passed before the other passengers arrived—a man with his son, who was a little younger than me. All six of us, along with our luggage, finally left the airport and headed toward the car. As I was walking, I heard someone behind me grab my bag and shake my hand. He asked where our car was so he could help us with our luggage. Apá quickly grabbed the bags out of his hands and waved him away. “Trucha, mijo,” he said and took my suitcase himself. I felt bad for the man. I wanted to give him something, but my father refused. He knew this country more than I did. We crammed into the car as best as we could. I was irritated that we had to wait so long for the other passengers and even more so when I found out I had to sit on Rubi’s lap the entire way, hunched down. The other father’s son took the front seat so we squeezed into the single back seat and headed off. It was almost midnight. By the time we reached Tepechitlán, it would be close to two in the morning.

*

It took us about forty-five minutes to drive through the industrial city. There was a serene quiet to the gated yards full of commercial trailers illuminated beneath the orange lights of the city. It looked like everyone immediately dropped what they were doing as soon as night fell, and the hum of enterprise would pick up again in the morning.

I was already tired of hunching over, so I adjusted my body one way and another but couldn’t find a good position. Apá and I were elbow to elbow, but I didn’t know if it was okay to touch him. It was nice to be that silent, and to be that close to Apá, though I dared not lean my head on his shoulder to sleep. We left the city behind us and began the ascent over the mountain pass. The driver rolled down his windows and they got stuck. The night air was cold against my face as we drove through the winding road. I wanted to see the world outside, but it was too dark and the wind blowing in my face made my eyes water and my vision blurry.

By the first hour, the wind was unbearable. The driver said he could sometimes get the windows to work if he turned off the car, but then he ran the risk of the whole car not turning back on. The last thing I wanted was to be stuck in the middle of the Sierra at night. I wanted to be home already, but fate seemed intent against it. I changed positions with Rubi so that she was sitting on top of me, but I still felt a growing claustrophobia. I felt weak because I hadn’t eaten or slept in almost twenty-four hours. The road was narrow and wound around sharp turns as we edged closer to my town. My father whispered to me that the driver had had a few drinks on the way. I wrapped my thin jacket around my head, mostly because I was cold, but also because I wanted to scream.

*

With each mile, I felt like I was going into myself, toward a point of singularity. I was afraid of both scenarios: that all of my questions would be answered and none. I asked my father the names of all of the towns we passed along the way: Santa María, García de la Cadena, La Ceja, El Teúl. I’d heard those names before, and though I couldn’t see them from the road, I imagined their town squares, and their churches all the same. I imagined the prayers of their mothers for all of the children stuck in El Norte and I realized that we were who people referred to when they said Norteños, we were the same shape of a mother’s prayer in one of those small towns, except it wasn’t really us whose return she was praying for.

My world was getting smaller. What I dreamed about was right in front of me, out there, hidden beneath the blanket of night.

The car began to slow down at the edge of a town that looked defeated in the orange haze of streetlamps. All around us were half-finished homes and empty lots. “We’re here,” said my father, probably just as relieved to be home as I was. I would have to wait until morning to see the rest of the town, hoping it was better than what I was able to see nearby. I was too tired to eat or take a shower. My father’s German shepherd greeted us from the rooftop. At last I had arrived.

We made our bed in the spare room, and I told Rubi to shake the sheets to check for scorpions and look underneath the bed for snakes. It was a habit I didn’t know I had. It came back to me unannounced but just as strong as if I had been doing it all my life, as if I had never even left.

[First Movement Before Me as Niños de la Tierra]

They used to say that there were children living beneath the rocks on the west side of mountains. If you looked at their faces you would go blind, so you had to look up at the sky to avoid their stare.

This was a myth brought back to Mexico from the U.S. by braceros like my grandfather Jesús. I liked to think of these myths crossing the border as well, returning to their origin from thousands of miles away.

I remember climbing a hill the adults told me not to go near because Los Niños de la Tierra lived there. I looked up to the sky as I walked, careful not to look down at their faces, afraid of going blind.

Maybe those children belonged to someone, trapped in the north like everyone else, unable to return to the land of their birth. Or maybe that was the land of their birth, and they looked up because that’s where all the mothers and fathers were.

11.

I woke up confused and groggy, with mosquito bites down my legs. It took me a moment to remember where I was and why I was there. The air felt damp and cold, as if I had slept beneath the stars and was glazed with a film of morning dew. Rubi, lying next to me, stirred but did not wake as I stepped off the bed onto the cold cement with my bare feet. Unlike me, mosquitoes never really bothered with her. In Spanish, there’s a phrase for those who get bitten a lot: they call them sangrón, which means “bloody” (thus their attraction to mosquitoes), but it also means someone who is generally unpleasant.

I didn’t want Apá to think that I was delicate; I thought I could pick up where we left off the day he left ten years ago, when I was his “little hawk.” Mostly, I didn’t want him to think that I was too good for unfinished cement floors, mud walls, and old creaky mattresses. I pretended I wasn’t terrified of going through my luggage, which I accidentally left open on the floor, or the blankets in the corner of the room, piled three feet high, which I was certain were covered in scorpions. I recognized those blankets as the same ones we had sent to him over the years. We mostly sent him jeans, wool socks, and blankets because we thought there was no better gift than to keep our old man clothed and warm. Seeing the blankets tossed in the corner of the dirt floor for what seemed like years, with the most recent ones on top, made me think of everything I could have bought instead with the little extra I had.

I shook my pants in the air, peeked into my shoes, and walked outside, where it was brisk. There were dozens of large potted plants throughout the courtyard patio. Some were in large drying-machine barrels and others in plastic buckets. He had geraniums, and ferns, and bright morning glory growing everywhere. In the middle was a small garden bed lined with bricks where a few stalks of corn jutted out in random places. There was a stone washbasin in one corner of the courtyard, with clean socks hanging off the ends, and saddles were hanging off the brick walls. The air felt cold, but the sun was delicious. Even a single hour of that light would have been more than enough for any plant, more than enough even for me.

Because all of the rooms surrounded the courtyard and faced inward, I could see Apá darting through the kitchen, shuffling through some things. I didn’t know what to say to him. Who would be the first to talk? Over the years, the few conversations we had on the phone had mostly been him screaming, asking me why my mother didn’t want to return to join him in Mexico. Amá said she had never felt stronger in her life than when she told him she wouldn’t go.

He appeared from the kitchen out into the bright mess of flowers and smiled. I could never answer him over the phone as to why Amá would not return, just as I couldn’t answer him there, standing a few feet in front of me, when he asked me what was the first thing I wanted to do for the day.

I looked around—everything was his, only he had touched it. Here, in this courtyard, was the sum of his deportation ten years before, and his decision not to return every year thereafter.

My permit only allowed me to stay for a single week, so I had to make the best out of it.

“I want to go see my tías,” I said.

“We can do that,” he said.

*

It fascinated me that my father could keep a garden. That he could care for a plant, water it, prune its dead leaves, and turn the pot like a dial for the best light. I could see that he took care to put the ferns in the shade so the harsh sunlight wouldn’t burn them. I could see how he wrapped the geraniums around the brick columns to keep them from breaking under the weight of their own blossoms. He didn’t need to say much for me to see how lonely he must have been. I wonder if that was what solitude had done to him—if those petals were the soft edges of him I was forbidden to touch as a child.

I had heard talk of this garden from relatives who visited him in the past, but I never believed it. The courtyard wall keeping the outside world away seemed so large and absolute. Almost as if it was his intent to punctuate that solitude, and he pushed it as far as his property would go. He had a large bathtub in the middle of the courtyard and said he liked to take long baths in the sun, completely naked, because no one could see in. It all made me believe that perhaps he was happy, or at least that he could hide his loneliness better than others.

Since he’d always depended on Amá for domestic chores, he had never taught himself to cook, or clean, or wash, but in those ten years he had to learn it all. He had a clothesline with all of his jeans drying in the morning sun. He had a days-old pot of cold beans on the stove. The more I thought about it, the more I was certain that the large wall was there so he could make sure no one saw him washing his own clothes, doing what he said a woman should have been doing for him all along.

*

I never understood why he wanted to build such a big house. The living room and kitchen alone measured sixty by thirty feet, and the ceilings were about fifteen feet high. The house had four other rooms, one with a full bathroom. It was meant for a large family.

He built the house as soon as he arrived. He built it with the intention of using it as a way to convince my mother to leave the States and take us with her to join him after his deportation, but my mother would have none of it. She was firm in her decision to stay.

My mother could hide behind his deportation as an excuse to escape him. There was nothing he could actually do over the phone other than scream and plead. There came a time when my mother stopped answering his calls, not because she was too busy working, which she was, but because she was no longer afraid. She answered when she felt like it and hung up as soon as she thought his tone was starting to get too aggressive. “Bad connection, sorry,” she would say, indifferently, the next time they spoke.

Apá still believed she was the same person he left crying on the driveway; he refused to believe that she would not listen to him and return to Mexico. But solitude did something different to her than it did to him. She was emboldened to finally speak up and say no. He, on the other hand, built an entire house around his denial, which stroked his delusion of power. Late into his exile, he bought a large dining room table that had enough room for eight people. It took up most of the space in the kitchen. It looked Gothic with its intricate designs carved onto the arm rests. He had it made by hand at the local carpenter’s shop and even held the carpenter at gunpoint when it wasn’t done on time. When we sat down to drink coffee that morning, he said it was the first time the table seemed somewhat full.

The large house must have sharpened his solitude, and made it more unbearable. I could see him walking those corridors late at night, perhaps whistling a song as he headed for the bathroom outside in the courtyard. I wanted to feel sorry for him, but hearing my echoes throughout the house made me clench my jaw and drink my coffee fast, burning my tongue.

*

He had always been one to overdo things, as I was always prone to overcompensate. Even the kitchen countertop had fourteen steel beams inside the six-inch-thick cement. Who would ever need a countertop made of six inches of reinforced cement? He said you could actually drive a truck over it and nothing would happen.

“Ten hurricanes could hit this house and nothing,” he said.

“Apá, we’re in the desert, there are no hurricanes here” I said. “No earthquakes, no tsunamis, we’re even too high for a flash flood.”

He had built footings into the earth for the kitchen countertop alone. The footings for the house were as tall as I was beneath the ground.

He probably spent a third more unnecessarily reinforcing his house. So much that I began to wonder if it edged on paranoia—his insistence on never again moving, his solution to all of the damage that his constant flux had caused. It wasn’t extravagant, it was just thick and simple, like most of the other homes in the town—a few square parcels with a roof. He proudly pointed at the perimeter wall, which was made out of huge limestone blocks two feet wide by two feet tall by ten inches thick. He said it took four men to lift a single slab and drop it in place. He had to drive out of state to get the limestone from a special quarry, and proudly displayed a large scar running the entire length of his arm.

“Look, I cut myself open on the very first slab,” he said.

I remembered that wound on his arm; at least, I remember hearing about it on the phone and imagining it in my head. The scar from the concrete saw now looked different than what I had imagined; it zigzagged through his arm like lightning.

The garage was even larger, easily twenty feet high, with an industrial curtain door so that it could fit large cattle trucks with tall railings to transport cows.

“Apá, we don’t have cows,” I wanted to say to him, but I kept my mouth shut and simply kept gawking and marveling to satisfy him. He spent the whole morning going through every detail of construction, from the placement of the outlets to the lights and the sewage system. He kept repeating that it wasn’t a bad job for someone who only went to second grade. And indeed it wasn’t. I was genuinely impressed. His greatest accomplishment, according to him, was the fact that the entire house was flat—there were no bumps or steps of any kind. He said he was thinking about the future, when he would need a walker or a wheelchair in his old age. He wanted to make sure he would be able to get around his own house with ease. He didn’t want to depend on others. Even the shower had no partition; there was just a walk-in space slightly sloping into the drain. It was painful to hear him talk about the future because I knew it didn’t include me or anyone else in the family. I nodded along, walking with my coffee in hand, wondering if he knew he’d built a house he would most likely die alone in.

I knew he had always been selfish. This was nothing new. But seeing his house gave me something to hold on to, something tangible to measure his narcissism against. He could have used that money on so much more. I could see what was worth more than me, my brothers, and my mother, and it was all around me, the totality of his possessions. Deportation was conveniently final to him, just as it was for my mother. He could exclaim as much desire to return to the U.S. as he wanted without having to actually do it. And Amá could go on saying that the phone line kept cutting off and apologizing. In the end, it seemed like deep down they both wanted the same thing. It’s a wonder I ever thought he would return at all.

So many times I had asked why he never came back, or even attempted to come back, why he had never hired a coyote, and the answers were finally in front of me—in the red and white geraniums, in his large tub beneath the sun, in each steel beam running throughout the house, and even in the blood he lost cutting the stone. This was all enough for my father, enough for him to stay.

Rubi had woken up by then and was marveling at the garden, too. I looked at her from across the courtyard and wondered if by chance we could ever have a life in Mexico—if this life could ever be for us. No more hiding, no more fear of being deported, no more waiting and waiting for the laws to change. Could we see our children here? I tried to imagine her standing in that same spot but with no urgency to leave, just standing, and six or seven months pregnant, on the phone with her mother back in the States.

We hopped in Apá’s old Jeep Cherokee and headed into town to buy some groceries because his fridge was completely empty except for some orange juice in a cracked glass jug. No one knew that I had returned because I’d kept it secret. Mexico had changed a lot over the years, and it was best to keep a low profile. The town and the entire state belonged to the Cártel del Golfo, but things turned violent when Los Zetas contested for the same territory. Apá said things were okay, that the worst was in 2008, and that you just had to be careful about what you said and did in public because you never knew who could be watching.

I went house to house, visiting aunts and uncles I only knew by name, and all of them held me for a long time in their arms, in utter disbelief. My tías looked me in the eyes as if they had a story to tell me but they didn’t have time, or simply couldn’t.

“You were this little when you left,” my tía Beatrice said to me, pointing to the ground, still shaking her head.

Standing in front of my father as he presented me to family I never knew, I had to learn how to be a son all over again. Despite my misgivings, something deep inside me still wanted to impress him, still wanted to please him, though it would never be enough. I was his son, grown, with a beard and a wife. He paraded me through town like a trophy horse, like a gamecock with fighting knives dragging on my feet.

[First Movement Before Me as Peligrosa]

Amá used to say that a pregnant woman should never plant anything in the soil because she would turn the soil barren.

When Amá was pregnant with me, she lived on the ranch of La Loma. She said she would deliberately go into the cornfield and sow a small seed in the earth. Apá, as usual, was gone often in those days, and as usual, she took up the heavy tasks he was supposed to do—fetching firewood, herding the cows down the mountain. She talked to her animals a lot. She said she worried often that I would die as her last child, Manuel, had died. But that baby was three thousand miles away, in the ground, separated by a border. Perhaps the distance alone would make for a different outcome. Shortly before my birth, her mother, my Amá Julia, died of cancer in the stomach, suddenly and without much notice. Amá was lying in bed with her to keep her warm the night she died. Amá said her mother stretched her thin legs outward toward the end of the bed and let out a small breath before she stiffened.

A year after that, Amá was pregnant with me.

If, when she was pregnant with me, she buried the seed and the field became fallow, then maybe that would be an indication that the child in her womb wouldn’t die like the last one. It would mean there was actually something there inside her, and not just a stone, that it would live longer than the last one. She didn’t want to begin to grow attached until she was sure. It was my gravity—me at the center; she, orbiting around me like a moon. Or she at an even deeper center, and me in her womb, orbiting around her, pulled by the first green sprout in an otherwise dying field of corn.

I imagine her digging in the dirt, glancing around, making sure no one was looking, and dropping a small bean into a hole. Men might spend months toiling over something that would never grow while she held me inside her, growing, completely her own, something divorced from the world, if even only for nine months. She knew what she was capable of. And I grew and grew.

*

Perhaps it wasn’t only seeds she planted but objects—a small doll, hoping for another daughter, the wingless bodies of bees she found in the courtyard, all of her children’s baby teeth she kept in a small cloth, hoping for—I don’t know what.

During each of the six times she was pregnant, Apá never laid a hand on her.

Amá, tú eres bella y peligrosa.

12.

As we drove up to my mother’s ranch of La Loma, I realized how little I actually knew about the land and its specific characteristics. In his white Jeep, Rubi, Apá, and I ascended from the valley below. Apá drove slowly, pointing at small ridges along the road that told him exactly where it had rained and how much. He was precise, he was raised to learn the patterns of rain, how it left its subtle footprint even in the way the leaves hung off the trees. Apá took his time on the bumpy road, and even stopped completely, pointing to lines I could not see in the landscape that marked property boundaries of those old infamous families, five or six generations removed, whose heirs would come to kill each other over that land. He knew the names of the shrubs, and the trees, and birds. He could tell from a distance who had sewn their crop too early, who had done so too late, and who was wise enough to time it just right. His knowledge of the landscape seemed vast and effortless, and I was shocked that it had always been there just beneath the surface, ready to be called on at any minute.

From afar, Apá pointed to a compound on top of a hill. “That’s it,” he said.

Water was hard to come by in those areas, but La Loma was prized in its heyday because it had not only one but two streams which were now dry. The smaller stream, el arroyo chico, crossed right through the middle of the property, and the bigger creek was about one hundred meters down below. The truck stopped, and we were all silent for a moment. I asked both Rubi and Apá if I could go inside alone.

*

The thick adobe walls, which had withstood at least two centuries of rain, were evidence that my ancestors had no intention of leaving. They built the house once and never had to build it again because they built it out of the materials that were already there around them. Maybe that was why Apá built his house the way he did. Unlike us, he was thinking three, four, or five generations ahead. He wanted something to last as long as the pyramids of Egypt, of Teotihuacan, of Chichén Itzá. It was an internal clock that looked far into the past and as much into the future. I didn’t possess that clock inside me yet.

I opened the thick wooden door to the courtyard and took in a grim scene. The roof had collapsed years before, and shrubs taller than me grew in each room, making it difficult to walk through. I could tell that there was life there once, that people were happy. I could also tell that grief abounded, not because of its state of decay, but because there was no one left who would take over its care. Later, I would show the video footage to my mother, and she would stare at the screen for a long time before telling me to turn it off.

I walked into the room where my great-grandfather León, Amá Julia’s father, worked as a weaver. He made wool blankets using a small wooden loom and sold them down in the market in town. He was limited to the color of the year’s offspring. He sheared the wool from his herd and spun it into yarn. Sometimes he would get almost a golden hue in the yarn, or a crimson brown. But mostly it was a dirty white, black, and light brown. Nonetheless he designed birds, and deer, and different shapes of his own making.

*

As I walked through the rooms, parting the tall brush ahead with my hands, the house felt like a puzzle that had finally revealed itself after years when I was given nothing but fragments. I only remembered small details of the house from stories my family would tell, and now I was able to fill in the rest. I walked through each room, touching the walls with my hands.

Who would have thought that almost no one would be left on the entire mountain? So many homes built to last, only to be abandoned. There were holes in the ground throughout the house. Over the years people had broken in and dug, looking for some lost fortune, believing my great-grandfather buried some gold, but they always came up empty-handed, as far as we know.

Everything seemed familiar because I had imagined it endless times growing up. During Christmas, during a birthday party, or even just on a Sunday afternoon, anytime the adults would gather, the only topic of conversation was always Mexico and the ranch. I found the pig corral where my mother fell in as a child and was nearly eaten by a sow exactly where I had envisioned it. The three large avocado trees that my mother dreamed about looked nearly petrified, and probably didn’t bear fruit anymore, but nonetheless they were there, just as I imagined.

It was quiet; not even the insects announced themselves. I walked to the back of the house, which was surrounded by a stone wall. I picked up rock after rock and put it back down. I turned rocks around to see what was underneath them. My blood was in that earth; it was in those trees, and even in the walls themselves.

I wanted to change something about the scene, even if it was only moving a single rock around. I wanted it to be different because of my arrival, different at my departure. I wanted my ancestors to see that someone was still there, tending to their eternal home. I made a little clearing. Removed all the rocks I could pick up and placed them on top of the wall. I wanted them to know that a part of them, which was inside a part of me, was still breaking a sweat in the crisp morning air on that mountain.

*

I talked to them. I didn’t know all of their names, but I didn’t need to. They knew all about me. I knew they could hear me and knew why I had come, more so than I did. I said I was sorry. I said I would make things better. I knew a lot of things weren’t my fault, in fact most weren’t: why the ranch was abandoned, why my father drove us into debt, why he was deported, why the family couldn’t just stay a little longer in the U.S. after baby Manuel’s death to get their green card under Reagan’s famous amnesty order. How different our lives would have been if only they had waited. But although none of this was my fault, I wanted to take the blame, to let it all fall on me. If all it took to reverse any of this was for me to be punished, I would have gladly taken the beating.

I closed my eyes and saw the ranch in its glory days. I could see my mother as a child running through those meadows, laughing and swimming in the arroyo. I held my mother’s small hand as she guided me through the house. We played games, we made clay pots at the river bed and pretended to drink tea. She knew who I was, she knew what the future held for her.

There was a sapote tree with its large fruit hanging from its branches that looked new, as though it came only after everyone left, as if it was waiting for everyone to leave.

I wept quietly at the center of my blood.

My mother’s small hands led me to the courtyard, and there she was with all of her sisters, none of whom had been married yet. I could see them all sitting in the sun, sewing together, making dresses to wear into town, laughing at riddles they would tell each other to pass the time.

There was the room in which my great-great-grandmother Josefina died. She died on a cot near a wall. As she was dying, it was said that she kept digging her nails into a small crevice in the adobe wall. They said she was hiding jewelry in that hole, or that she was signaling to those standing around her that something was there. She died with her hand in that hole.

When I entered that room, I looked for the small crevice, and sure enough found it, right where my mother said it would be. It was just large enough for my palm. Nothing was inside. I took out a pen from my pocket and buried it in the wall.

*

I sat in a clearing in the courtyard. At my feet and around me were stalks of corn that sprouted haphazardly here and there. Gone from my vision was Amá and my tías in their youth, sitting in a circle, replaced by tall stalks of corn that came from those loose kernels dropped on the floor. For two hundred years my family had sat in that very courtyard repeating the same steps of desgranando mazorca to make nixtamal for tortillas.

I felt a sense of largeness come over me. I wanted to take my clothes off and touch every single adobe brick with every part of my body. I wanted to dance in the middle of the clearing and let all of the snakes hiding in the weeds come join me. I felt a sharp pain, like a wire wrapped around my throat and getting tighter, like something sectioning me in pieces. If the moon came out I would bow in reverence, I would unravel before it and speak softly into the dirt.

I envied the rhizomes sprawling beneath the earth, their secret language. I, too, wanted to touch that many things at once, to stretch for miles, connected by a single fungus, and to pulse through the roots of countless trees.

*

If I could, I would have left a part of my body behind. I rubbed my skin with a rock until it turned red. I knew the landscape would outlast me, that the border would still be up long after I died, that the trees would continue to be just that—nothing but trees. Apá’s house would still be there, as would the walls of La Loma. I wanted so much more, but I still felt that I was missing something. I still felt like I was opening a small box with another box inside it, and it would go on forever. Maybe the point was the box, not what was inside it; the point was those walls that no amount of rain or hail could crumble. The point was that they came from the earth and were in no hurry to return. It’s common to carry a small piece of dirt from your homeland when you leave. Knowing they will never return, some people eat it. I wouldn’t know where to begin collecting dirt.

We left the ranch and began our descent into town. Apá seemed annoyed that I had taken so long. Perhaps he was upset that I didn’t want him with me, that I wanted that moment to myself. In my hand I held a small rock I was hoping I could sneak past customs. They don’t allow dirt of any kind to be brought into the States. I put it in my pocket and rubbed it gently with my fingers.

The next day was Christmas Eve. We sat in the patio of Apá’s house with a large fire in an oil barrel between us. We were quiet, listening to the frogs and crickets in the darkness. At exactly midnight, and unannounced, Apá opened the main door to the courtyard, walked out to the street, and fired six rounds from his .357 Magnum revolver, which I had no idea was tucked beneath his jacket and which he had been carrying all day. I jumped at the sound of the shots. He came back in, locked the door, and sat down without a word, a slight smile across his face. It was his way of celebrating Christmas. No presents, just six hollow-point rounds into the air. In the distance I could hear others doing the same. He laughed a little and tucked the gun into his jacket. He said every man should know how to hold and fire a gun and that he would teach me in the morning.