#Zero

by Neil McCormick

  ‘Would you like me to read to you?’ asked Doña Cecilia.

  I nodded numbly. I couldn’t speak.

  ‘We will sit in your grandmother’s house. It is the nicest house in the village,’ she said.

  We sat there all afternoon, the schoolteacher and I, while she read to me in her perfectly enunciated English, and my grandmother sat with us, nodding and smiling, as if she could understand every word.

  And so, after more than a decade of silence, I heard my mother speak again.

  21

  Dear Mother, I write to let you know I am safe and well.

  The journey was long, so long, and tiring, so tiring, but wonderful too, driving across this beautiful country of ours, skies so wide, mountains so blue, just to be a dot in the landscape makes me feel tiny and enormous, like I am a part of something bigger than myself. My bones are still rattling from Emilio’s bus. I spent three days shaking up and down, shaking up and down, even shaking in my sleep, and shaking awake. Emilio says he is the greatest and safest driver in the world but I think he is just the shakiest. But he is a kind man, and he looked out for me all during the trip, just as you asked him. All the people on the bus were kind. We shared food, and told each other about our lives. Some gave me addresses in MedellÍn, to help me look for work. When soldiers got on to check our papers, one old fellow told them I was his granddaughter and they should treat me with respect. They were just joking with me and even shared some chocolate. I don’t think they were very much older than me. Boys with guns. That’s our country, Mother, it’s scary sometimes. I miss Father.

  What can I say about MedellÍn? It is beneath a range of mountains but nothing like the mountains of home. They are grey instead of blue, dark and brooding, standing guard over the city. But the city is climbing up the side of the mountains, the city gets everywhere. It’s a jungle made of brick and glass and concrete and steel. The monkeys and birds flit about, hanging from the wires, perching on the windowsills, chattering loudly to be heard above the noise of the traffic. There are buildings taller than the trees in our forest, where you could fit everyone in Esperanza on just one floor and still have room left over. I know it sounds frightening but I am not frightened. Some people say you can get lost in the city but I have this feeling, a special feeling, that I am going to be found.

  Well, I found a room anyway, which is a beginning. It is in a place called El Popular, which, as you can imagine, is very popular. The room is small but it has everything I need, a basin to wash, a bed to sleep, and the Virgin to keep me company. I say my prayers every night, Mother, and I pray for you and all our family and all my friends. I have a window that looks out on MedellÍn, and I am still amazed about how it fills up my eyes. At night the whole city lights up, it is like nothing I have ever imagined. It spreads out in every direction you look, houses and people and streets and roads and people and people and more people. I’ve heard the old men speak about it so many times, I’ve read about it in books, and still it is hard to believe there could be so many people crowded into one place, racing about like ants when you poke a nest with a stick. Everyone is busy, busy, busy all the time, with somewhere to go and something to do. There is plenty of work, at least, which is good, because tomorrow I will find a job. Say a prayer for me, Mother, I am nervous but excited about my future. I will send money as soon as I have some. I love you, always and forever. Maria.

  It was strange to hear my mother’s voice bubbling through those letters, young and excited and nervous, always emphasising the positive. Details were sometimes a bit sketchy, with strange gaps in the information she offered, and I got the feeling she was trying to spare her mother the worst. It turned out it was not so easy to find decent work but she was getting by, doing cleaning jobs, and you could tell she was dazzled by the city, the way she reported little things that struck her, like the constant traffic, the handsome soldiers, the hustle of markets, the smell of perfumes and hand creams and luxuries she had never known before. But something must have happened because she wrote that she had decided to continue her travels, saying that MedellÍn could be a rough city, and the boys did not always behave like gentlemen.

  ‘What age was my mother then?’ I asked.

  Doña Cecilia consulted my grandmother. ‘Seventeen,’ she informed me.

  I had never imagined my mother at seventeen. Younger even than I was when I left home to tour with The Zero Sums. And I thought I was such a bold adventurer, on the road at nineteen, even though there was always a hotel, always my band around to share highs and lows, always someone looking after me. What must it have been like for my mother, poor, barely educated and alone, travelling through unknown territory with just the hope of a better life waiting somewhere?

  Letters came from Panama and Costa Rica, telling of journeys in buses and trains and on the backs of trucks, sometimes travelling with livestock. In Panama, she saw the sea for the first time, and spent most of a letter trying to describe it to her landlocked mother: something so big it stretches beyond what the eye or the mind could comprehend, big enough to lose mountains in, and always moving, always shifting in your vision. She loved the sea but she was afraid of it too, because she had never learned to swim. She was finding jobs in bars and tourist hotels. The pay wasn’t good, and she was sorry she couldn’t send more money, but the things tourists left behind when they checked out, why, a girl practically didn’t have to buy anything for herself. They must be very rich in the United States, where most of the tourists came from. The letters were full of gossip about that vast nation to the north, where everyone lived in a big house with hot and cold running water all the time. Or so it seemed on television, the wonder of wonders, which showed stories all day long of beautiful ladies and handsome men who never went anywhere without music, all kinds of music, like she had never heard before. Papa would have loved the television, she was sure. One day, she hoped, they would have television in La Esperanza, then her mother could see for herself.

  Mexico City overwhelmed her: the skyscrapers, the lights, more people than you could even imagine were in the world. She felt like she was living in the future. She got a job on a production line making plastic dolls that cried and wet themselves. They were sent north to the USA, where she thought they must really love children to want toys like these. And she was working in a nightclub as well, where there was wonderful music, all kinds of music – mariachi, jazz, swing and pop – and oh, how she loved music, but how she missed her padre. She did not like the way Mexican men treated their women and she did not plan to stay there long. She was saving up, she had heard of people who would take you across the border for a thousand dollars, and then, anything was possible. But how long would it take her to earn $1000? She might be stuck in Mexico for years, with the promised land almost within touching distance, so close she could feel it. There was a song girls sang in the club, from an old musical, and she liked to join in the chorus, about living in America, where everything is free. One day, Madre, one day.

  For a while, the letters from Mexico fell into a pattern, talking about musicians in the club and friends she was making. It seemed she might be settling into her life, living in an apartment with two other girls, earning honest wages. Even the Mexican boys weren’t so bad when you got to know them. Then she met a man who said he could get her a ticket to New York. To fly, in an aeroplane! All she had to do was carry some things for his friends. Her mother was not to be worried, it was strictly business, but she wanted her to know that, whatever happened, she really, really loved her.

  Oh no, I thought, my mama was a drug mule.

  She made it to New York. She kept the statue of the Virgin with her all the time, to guide and protect her. The man did not pay what he had promised but at least she was in the city of her dreams, which was everything she had imagined and more. There were underground trains and yellow taxis and music coming from cars and shops and apartments. And the food, Mama, the food! Garbage cans were overflowing and there were rats the size of dogs picking
off the leftovers. Nobody could ever starve in America.

  She got a job working as a cleaner in a hotel where there were lots of Latino people, which is what Colombians and Costa Ricans and Mexicans were all called in New York, and they stuck together. When she was tired, when things weren’t going so well, she thought of something the old men in the village always used to say, siempre duro, life is always hard. It was so true, even in America, but she knew this was only the beginning. There was a song they sang in New York: if you can make it here, you can make it anywhere. She believed it. It was like a prayer for the future. She had started singing at nights in a Colombian restaurant, with some Colombian musicians, singing the old songs that filled her with longing for home. People seemed to like it. They told her she was very pretty, and she had a nice voice, and if she stuck at it she could go far.

  ‘She was a singer?’ I asked in amazement.

  ‘All of your family are musicians,’ said Doña Cecilia. ‘Your grandfather, may he rest in peace, was a wonderful musician and his father before him. Music runs in the family. Are you a musician too?’

  I nodded dumbly.

  ‘Your grandmother has many instruments here, you must play us a song later,’ said Doña Cecilia.

  My mother’s confidence, her language and handwriting improved, letter by letter. All that reading she used to do as a child in school was paying off, she boasted. She was learning to speak American in night classes, and was getting so good at it the manager moved her to reception. No more cleaning, now she had a smart uniform and talked to the guests and they talked to her. Some were famous stars. You were never supposed to admit you recognised them but she did anyway. She knew them all from television, which she watched religiously during her spare time, trying to catch up on everything she had missed growing up in the mountains. There was such a lot to learn, like what to wear, and what to drive, what to eat, what perfume went best with what lipstick and what detergent to wash your clothes with. The advertisements were the best for that but she also liked MTV, a channel that just played music the whole time. Any hour of the day and night, there would be someone dancing and singing, and they always had fabulous clothes and beautiful hair. She loved pop music, especially Michael Jackson, who was a white man who was really black, or a black man who had turned white. Anything could happen in showbusiness and it didn’t matter, people loved you if you could sing. Papa would have been a pop star in New York, she thought. They played music in the hotel all the time, softly through speakers in the background, very strange music that didn’t really have a beat at all. It was a very strange hotel, really. It was dark all the time, they kept the lights very low, and she worried that might be because it wasn’t very clean, and she had to talk to the Latino girls very strictly, to keep them on their toes. Even the porters wore suits and looked very elegant, maybe because none of them were really porters. They were actors and musicians and writers and painters, super talented guys who did their real work on nights off. This was the amazing thing about New York: everybody was really somebody else, just like her. And it was there, in her hotel, she met a handsome Irish boy named Patrick Noone.

  A boy!

  It wasn’t so hard to picture my mother as young because I barely had a sense of her at all, but it was impossible to conceive that my father might have once been young too. He worked as a porter in the hotel, apparently, and he was full of fun and always joking and teasing her, but in such a nice way that she knew he liked her. I wondered if this could really be the same sour Paddy Noone who had raised me, who was about as much fun as a death at a birthday party. She said he loved music too, which was news to me. His favourite was an Irish band called U2, who had a singer named Bono, like a ticket, who dressed like the devil and always wore dark glasses, even at night. That’s how you knew he was a star. But it wasn’t really her kind of music, too fierce and scary. She liked songs she could sing while she worked. Patrick took her to see The Phantom Of The Opera in the Broadway theatre on their first date, and you could tell my mother was very taken with this, cause she spent several pages relating the plot in great detail. The songs were so romantic they made her cry but she couldn’t stop listening to them, because Patrick had bought her the CD.

  Letter after letter was filled with my father, and to believe my mother he was the most dashing and romantic suitor who ever made suit. And the thing she liked most about him, weirdly, was that he was the only person she knew who didn’t want to be anyone else. He liked being himself, working in a hotel, living in New York and being with her. Mother, she announced solemnly in a particularly florid missive from 1992, I think I am in love.

  Her letters were growing giddy. She had joined up with one of the Colombian musicians from her old restaurant gig, only he had moved on and wanted to form a duo playing electro-Latino hip-hop music, which was too complicated to describe in a letter, but he had big ideas about the future and thought she could be a star. Imagine! Her voice would be on the radio, her face would be on MTV. She would be rich and famous and build a palace for her mother, and install television in every room.

  Then disaster struck. Mother, I have some news, began the letter. She had a show playing a warehouse party in the Bronx, which was a very cool part of New York, and they were being well paid. Only it turned out to be an illegal party, filled with Latino immigrants, and it was raided by police and everyone was arrested. And she didn’t have a Green Card so she was being held in an immigration centre. She lost her job in the hotel. She wasn’t even allowed back to her apartment to get her things. They told her she would be deported. Oh, Mama, she would never see Patrick again. But she told her mother not to worry, not to shed a tear, she was safe, she was being looked after, and at least she would soon be back in Colombia and they would be reunited. She might even be home before this letter.

  ‘So did she come home?’ I said.

  ‘No, she never came home,’ said Doña Cecilia. And she showed me the next letter, with a stamp from Ireland.

  It was the longest letter yet and full of news. Patrick turned up at the centre, even though it meant he would be deported too, because he did not have a Green Card either. But he brought a priest and an immigration lawyer and it was hard for her to tell her mother this, she felt deeply ashamed, but she was pregnant and Patrick was the father. They were married in the immigration compound and afterwards they danced to a song on the CD player, ‘All I Ask Of You’, from The Phantom Of The Opera. It would be her and Patrick’s song from now on. Then they were put on a flight for Dublin in Ireland, which would be her new home. And the letter was signed Señora Maria Noone.

  And so the newlyweds arrived in Ireland with nothing to live on but love. They travelled out west to stay with Patrick’s folks but that arrangement didn’t last long, because, as I knew from my father’s dark mutterings, my Irish kin were not enthusiastic about welcoming a South American peasant into the family. Oh I knew all about that, all right. The Irish took a perverse pride in calling themselves the blacks of Europe but they were as white as the potatoes they stuffed in their stupid faces and every minority needs another minority to persecute. I thought of my brown-skinned mother arriving in small town Kilrock and wanted to weep for her hopeful innocence.

  They got jobs in a hotel, Patrick as a porter and a cleaning job for her. It was a step down from reception but she was sure everything would work out in the end, when people got to know her. Ireland was very green, as green as the forests that covered the mountains back home. And if the sky was almost always grey, well, at least her husband’s eyes were blue, and she could lose herself in them. And if it rained all night and day, well, there was sunshine in his smile to warm her heart. And if their apartment was cramped and cold, all the more reason to take refuge in bed. And what could it possibly matter if people were sometimes unkind, and looked at her like she was a freak, or looked right through her and didn’t see her at all? All she needed was Patrick, and all he needed was her.

  And then there were three. My brother came alon
g, and they named him Patrick Jnr, after his father, and Jesus, after our Lord and Saviour, and he was a fat white baby, who looked so like his daddy it was strange to think she had carried him inside her brown belly. There were letters full of nappies and first steps and first words but it wasn’t hard to detect darkness looming beneath her repeated declarations of the joys of motherhood, as if she was trying to convince herself as much as her mother. She often dreamed of home, and home was always La Esperanza, and when it rained in the mountains it was a relief, not the constant drizzle that enveloped Kilrock like a cloud that would never move on. Life was hard and money was scarce and siempre duro. Oh, and by the way, she thought she might be pregnant again.

  And so it came to pass that a child was born, and the child was me. I listened with amazement as she described my arrival as if it were an epic religious battle. I was taking so long a doctor wanted to cut me out, but she refused, and Patrick stayed and held her hand while she pushed and pushed and prayed to the Virgin Mary, who had never let her down so far, and all of a sudden there I was, skinny and brown with a great shock of red hair on my head, black eyes popping in amazement, like a little alien who had just landed on Planet Earth. I was such a scrawny little thing, so small and vulnerable, her heart went out to me, and she knew she would have to love and protect me forever. She was afraid I was never going to catch a breath, she wondered if my lungs would even have the power to take in air, but the cry that I let out, oh, Madre! Such a noise! And she smiled a secret smile, because she knew that I was from her side of the family. But Patrick said the red hair proved I was from his side. What a strange creature I was, their own mestizo baby. And she named me Pedro after her dear father, and Patrick chose the name Ulysses after a big book he carried with him all the way to New York and back, because in Ireland they said it was the best book ever written, but he never got past the first few pages, and now, if he had his own little Ulysses, he could put it away and not think about it again.