An Angle on the World

by Bill Barich

After three games, we go back upstairs, and everybody wanders off to be alone and have a smoke. It’s a relief for the others after so much interaction. I check the kitchen clock. Can it really be only eight? I feel the weight of empty hours. About a third of the residents have already gone to bed, sleeping through the doldrums. I don’t know quite what to do with myself, so I make a cup of tea. Thoughts drift idly through my head. What about a walk? “Anybody for a walk?” I ask. Anatole says, “Definitely! A walk—wonderful idea!”

  Ed decides to join us, after deliberating for almost a quarter hour. His dilemma over a job has him swinging back and forth on every question. One minute he’s angry, and the next he’s reconciled. On Guerrero Street, he lashes out at stupid drivers in their idiotic cars. For Anatole, such things hardly exist. The sidewalk is just an extension of the foyer he ordinarily paces, and he ambles along rolling a cigarette and scattering tobacco from his pouch. He’s wearing old bedroom slippers without any socks. In the six years he’s lived at the Chateau, this has become his neighborhood; though he talks incessantly of moving out, he’s more comfortable here than anywhere else on earth.

  We stop at a corner market. The merchant, an Arab, shouts, “Hello, Anatole!” It’s surprising how easily the community around the house has accepted its residents. They are welcome in shops, in restaurants and bars. Some of them even do odd jobs for store owners, stacking cans and sweeping floors, earning a dollar or two. This store has an electric eye, a beam of light that causes a buzzing if you cross it, and Anatole is standing in the beam. “Anatole! You make too much buzz!”

  “Oh, sorry.” A chuckle. “I was looking at the girl on that Playboy magazine.”

  Home again, we spread out some food on a dining-room table. Soda, potato chips, pretzels. Ruth leaves the kitchen, where she has been scrubbing the stove, and helps herself. Rodrigo and Ed eat something, too, overgrateful for crumbs. A woman named Alice passes by in her pajamas—she’s not hungry. Tomorrow, she starts doing volunteer work with stroke victims, and she’s nervous. A native of Maine, she has a bachelor’s degree in psychology, but after graduation she worked for five years packing Hummel figurines in boxes at a factory, and then it occurred to her that she really ought to be leading a world revolution. She laughs now when she tells the story. “I think I’m getting better,” she says. “So I must be getting better, right?”

  Around eleven o’clock, Leroy marches through the hall and locks the front door. Like the shopkeeper’s electric eye, he’s there but not there. Around him, he has created a force field whose message is “Do not disturb.” At five-thirty tomorrow morning, he’ll be up cooking breakfast.

  I’m tired, too, but I want to watch the late news on TV. “The news?” Anatole says when I mention it. “Sure, I’ll watch it with you. Really, that’s a good idea. I don’t watch much television, you know. It’s a little below my intelligence level. There’s too much violence, and it gives me nightmares. Of course, some of the comedic shows aren’t too bad if you can program your mind to be between eighteen and twenty-five. I do that sometimes. If I have a favorite show at all, I guess it’s Jeopardy.”

  The TV room, on the second floor, is vacant. I switch on the set and turn up the volume, but it’s hard to pay attention, because Anatole is more interesting than anything onscreen. What talk he generates! It’s like a combination of jazz and improvisational theatre, where every word is a note, and every note is a trigger. He’s in sync, catches every reference, finds another reference buried in it, and links that to an exotic dancer he once tried to date, or to something he read about the Tasaday tribe of the Philippines. There’s no distinction between conscious and unconscious, between self and other. I’d swear that he’s giving off heat, a regular dynamo, but in the midst of being enraptured I have to remind myself of something that Dr. Blaustein once told me. “Don’t be romantic,” he said. “This is a terrible disease.”

  Midnight. “Anatole,” I say, stretching. “I’m going to bed.”

  He walks me to my room. I hear the scuff of his slippers, the wheeze of his lungs. At No. 4, I say, “Well, good night.” But no: we must shake hands. First with the right, then with the left. His hands feel soft, almost boneless.

  I close the door. The sound of the latch brings with it a sense of separation. In the morning, I’ll be back in my own house, while here Anarole will wake slowly and repeat his routine, doing so in the face of obstacles, without complaint. He will be kind, decent, and unfailingly generous; he’ll even make jokes. Given his burden, this seems to me an act of heroism, like Paul’s speech or Duane’s efforts to stay out of the hospital, and it ought to be viewed in that light. Along with the others at the Chateau, he should be praised for managing his disease in the best possible way, inventing a life for himself out of the wreckage and debris.

  From my window I look out at the dark hump of Mt. Sutro rising above apartments to the west. Once, Leroy described the Chateau to me as “a living, breathing entity,” and as I listen to the creak of the floor and the soft rustle of the breeze I understand what he meant. The mattress on my bed is firm, the sheets are clean, and there is a bright patchwork quilt Kathy must have rescued from somewhere. Everyone deserves this much, really—a quiet, comfortable room in a house where care is worn into the wood, and an atmosphere of trust prevails. How would Leroy put it? “Forget your expectations. Deal with what’s in front of you. Let people be what they can be.”

  The New Yorker, 1987

  La Frontera: The Mexican Border

  The most heavily travelled border in the world is a strip of scrubby California desert that runs for fifteen miles between the United States and Mexico, starting at the Pacific Ocean and ending at a thriving yet isolated spot called Otay Mesa. A chain-link fence follows the border for much of its course, but it is torn in many places and trampled in many others, and in some places it has fallen down.

  Where the fence is still standing, you find litter on both sides of it which migrant workers have left behind—beer and soda cans, cigarette packs, diapers, syringes, candy wrappers, and comic-book novelas that feature cautionary tales about the perils of a trip to El Norte. These novelas tell of dishonest employers, horrible living conditions, and the corruptive power of American dollars. In their most dramatic stories, families come apart, brothers murder brothers, and lovers’ hearts are broken beyond mending. The stories offer a liberal blend of truth and fiction, but that is an accurate reflection of the border, where nothing is absolute.

  Between the ocean and the mesa, the only town of any size is San Ysidro, California, just across from Tijuana. About forty-three million people pass through its legal port of entry every year, in vehicles, on bicycles, and on foot, but nobody knows for certain how many undocumented migrants slip over la frontera. An educated guess would be about five thousand every day. They come primarily from Mexico and Central America, and they carry their most precious belongings with them in knapsacks or plastic supermarket bags.

  The Border Patrol, in its San Diego Sector—a territory roughly as big as Connecticut—catches about a third of them, logging almost fifteen hundred arrests every twenty-four hours, but the others drift on to Los Angeles or San Francisco or Sacramento, or to farms in the Central Valley, staying with relatives and friends while they look for work. If they fail to be hired anywhere, they go farther north, to Oregon and Washington, ready to pick fruit or to gut salmon in a packinghouse, willing to do anything to earn their keep.

  Like many border towns, San Ysidro is conducive to paranoia. Set in the midst of sagebrush and dry, brown mountains covered with chaparral, it has the harmless look of an ordinary suburb, but this is deceptive and does not hold up under close inspection. For instance, there is a blood bank on the edge of its largest mall, and all day you can watch donors come out the door with balls of cotton pressed to their forearms, bound for a shopping spree at a nearby K mart before going home to Tijuana.

  The sky above San Ysidro is often full of ravens and buzzards, and skulls of small animals
turn up in its playgrounds. Its population is mostly Hispanic, but more and more Anglos—retired folks, and those who commute to San Diego—are buying property in the tile-roofed housing tracts that are devouring the last farms and ranches, and they get very angry when some migrants dash through their back yards, trampling the shrubbery and pausing to drink from garden hoses.

  The Border Patrol is supposed to control the flow of uninvited foreigners into the States. In California, as in Texas, its stations are understaffed and underfunded, and are asked to perform a nearly impossible task. In the San Diego Sector, agents must police all of San Diego County, as well as substantial parts of Orange and Riverside Counties, scouring not only the canyons and the backwoods but also the teeming barrios in cities, where the newly arrived frequently seek shelter.

  Although the sector captures more migrants than any other sector in the country—more than four hundred and seventy thousand in the last fiscal year, almost half the United States total—this record does little for the morale of the agents, since there is no real penalty imposed on those who are apprehended, unless they have some contraband or resist arrest. Mexicans are given a brief interview, then returned to Tijuana, sometimes so quickly that they get caught crossing again on the same night.

  The law isn’t the only obstacle that the Border Patrol faces in dispatching its duty. It used to be easy for agents to spot new arrivals because they dressed like field hands and looked dirty and frightened, but now they disguise themselves in clothes fresh off the rack, relying on bluejeans, Reeboks, and L.A. Dodgers caps for protective coloration. The business of providing goods and services to migrants has grown enormously, forming a closed economy worth millions, and they have an elaborate network of support, which often involves extended families and functions in the manner of an underground railroad.

  Then, too, migrants are always testing agents by devising new tricks for sneaking into California. On a hot summer day, they like to put on bathing suits and wander up the coast, or they dive from a boat and swim to shore. They wade through raw sewage in the Tijuana River and slip into Imperial Beach, just north of San Ysidro. They jam themselves into car trunks and into boxcars, and they ride across the border spread-eagled on top of freight trains. The boldest ones merely sprint through the backed-up traffic at the port of entry, defying the Border Patrol to chase them.

  Once migrants get by this first line of defense, they can relax and blend into the crowd of legal Hispanics in San Ysidro. They treat the town as a sort of flea market, making connections and buying stateside necessities, usually on the sly. If they require fake documents—anything from birth certificates to green cards—they seek out a dealer in such papers and begin negotiations. A high-quality document might cost more than a thousand dollars. Only an expert can detect that it’s a forgery, while a so-called “fifty-footer” looks bad even at that distance and can be bought without much haggling.

  If migrants have some pesos to be laundered, they speak to the fellows hanging around the pay phones by the United States Customs gate. Those phones, supplied by half a dozen different companies, are the conduit through which a fortune in drug profits—from the sale of cocaine, marijuana, and methamphetamines—is annually rerouted. The men who smuggle in migrants use the phones, too, arranging transportation for their customers. The smugglers are known as coyotes, on account of their predatory habits, and they flourish on the border, where expediency is the rule of thumb.

  In San Ysidro, there are also safe houses, where, for a price, a migrant can hole up for a while. The safe houses look like the houses around them, but everybody on a given block can point them out. As it happens, secrecy tends to play a very limited role in illegal immigration. Anyone who wants to see how openly migrants cross the border, even in broad daylight, can take a drive on Dairy Mart Road, which winds from the outskirts of town through beanfields, pastures, and fallow land scattered with junked farm machinery. On any morning or afternoon, in any season, you’ll have to brake to a halt as people streak by in front of your car, speeding from one hiding place to another. For the most part, they are young men in their late teens and early twenties, and they never seem the slightest bit afraid. They emerge from arroyos, from stands of bamboo and pampas grass, from copses of trees, and from vacant buildings. One morning as I cruised on Dairy Mart Road, I counted twenty-two people in a two-hour period.

  The action at night is even more spectacular, and it occurs on a much larger scale. At dusk, you hear sirens and whistles all over San Ysidro, as if several robberies were in progress, and then comes the chopping sound of helicopter blades slashing up the sky. Step outside your motel room and you notice beams from above shining down on a Carl’s Jr. restaurant, on kids in baseball uniforms and elderly folks out for an evening stroll. Sometimes a beam illuminates a drainage ditch, and a human form scampers away, like a rabbit rousted from its burrow. It’s disconcerting to find normal life going on in what appears to be a suburban war zone. If you walk to a weedy field near the blood bank, you can look toward the concrete levee of the Tijuana River, where, in the glare of I.N.S. floodlights and in full view of the Border Patrol, more than five hundred people will be congregated in little bands, waiting for an opportune moment to begin their journey to the United States.

  * * *

  All around Tijuana, there are settlements that cater to the needs of people about to cross, and La Libertad, in Canyon Zapata, is one of them. Its most famous entrepreneur is a big, good-natured woman who goes by the name of Manuela. Manuela’s friends like to joke that she is a witch, whose supernatural business acumen has permitted her to become well-to-do, at least by the diminished standards of rural Mexico.

  She has built up a profitable cafe trade by feeding meals to those who leave for San Ysidro from the base of the canyon, where the ground is so perfectly level that the migrants call it “the soccer field.” Hundreds of footpaths are worn into it, fanning out in all directions, and every crack and crevice is stuffed with garbage, which scrawny dogs keep pawing through. Rusty, windowless cars and trucks dot the horizon, because occasionally migrants try driving to the States instead of walking, and they abandon their vehicles if they’re foiled by the Border Patrol or by the many potholes, gulleys, and ravines on the way to California.

  Manuela is about thirty-five years old. She has bright brown eyes in a handsome face. Her body is compact and fleshy, and she enjoys gossip and has an earthy sense of humor that makes men want to pinch her. Manuela does not actively discourage the men. Sometimes when she cooks she wears a T-shirt that says, in English, “Poverty Sucks,” but she hasn’t been poor since she started her business, ten years ago.

  There were no houses in La Libertad then, but now Manuela owns one on the canyon rim, sharing it with eighteen others, including her nine children, her husband, her two brothers, and an assortment of cousins. The house isn’t fancy. It’s constructed of plywood and concrete blocks, and has a plastic tarp over a leaky roof. In winter, when a cold wind blows in from the ocean, Manuela’s youngest boy, Javier, who is eight, collects cardboard to cram into the walls for insulation.

  For Manuela, the working day begins at noon, when she and a few of her children haul her cooking equipment from the house to the canyon. Pots, pans, bottles of peanut oil, tortillas wrapped in paper, tomatoes and onions for salsa, pickled jalapenos, strips of marinated beef—the whole cargo gets carried down in arms and on backs, along with some firewood and some cases of soda and beer. Manuela always sets up in the same place, where she has a wooden picnic table and a blackened oil drum. She starts a fire in the drum and puts an equally blackened grill on top of it. She uses this to roast chickens, make quesadillas, heat beans and tortillas, and sear the beef for carne asada.

  In addition to food Manuela sells cigarettes, mostly black-market Raleighs. She keeps painstaking records in her account books, and they show that she earns about two hundred dollars a month—as much, she says proudly, as a documented maid in San Diego, or the girls at the maquiladoras, or
twin plants, on Otay Mesa.

  Other food venders operate stands in the canyon, but they don’t have Manuela’s expertise, or her reputation for cleanliness. She does things skillfully, exploiting every opportunity. This is also true of her attitude toward border life. She approaches it as if it were a contest meant to challenge her intelligence, and she takes pleasure in her victories. Like many other Mexican women without the proper documents, she has managed to be in California “accidentally” while she was nine months pregnant, and two of her boys were born in San Diego County and became instant Americans. (Any Mexican can request a border-crossing card that allows day trips to the States. It costs the United States about a hundred and eighty-five dollars to process each one.) Her husband, a plumber, has papers and often works in San Ysidro, but he and Manuela would never think of living in the States, even if they could afford it. They have no desire to become Americans—they just want a little piece of America’s wealth.

  About three hours before dark, people assemble on the soccer field, arriving singly or in pairs, in family groups or in loose-knit associations formed on the road. There are always more men than women. Sometimes there are children—infants, toddlers, newborns in pink and blue blankets, nursing at a mother’s breast. Almost everyone is neatly dressed, and those who aren’t spruce themselves up by buying shirts and trousers from two women who have piles of clothing heaped on folding tables. Many of the migrants have crossed the border before. They speak a bit of English, have the confident air of seasoned travellers, and impart tips to the less experienced. The younger men may have their hair cut in the slick, youth-gang style of East L.A.—flat on the top and long at the sides, or clipped close to the skull with a tiny pigtail at the back. Hip young women have tight pants and spiral perms, and may be wearing heels and makeup.

  In the crowd, too, there will be a few criminals, who are concealing small packets of cocaine or heroin on their persons. (Large shipments of drugs go through the port of entry in trucks—hidden, say, in a load of sawdust or broken glass.) The criminals may have knives strapped to their legs, or revolvers tucked into the waistbands of their trousers, but in spite of their presence the atmosphere in the canyon is casual. Children kick balls around and play tag while adults eat tacos and sometimes polish off shots of tequila at a tequila vender’s stand. Roosters crow, and chickens scratch at the dirt. Snippets of recorded music may filter out from a shack above—accordions, drums, guitars, trumpets. The feeling in the canyon is communal, much like at a county fair, with crossing the border the ultimate game of chance.