The Line Becomes a River

by Francisco Cantú

  “From that moment,” he says, “that very moment, I realized that something very bad was happening to me. I was no longer any good. There was a line that I had respected between the work I did—as a guard, as an instructor, as an executioner—but this work no longer stayed on one side of the line.”

  Events like this finally led him to leave the business of killing. “During your trajectory through life,” he explains, “there comes a moment when you hit a roadblock, you reach your limit.” To sever ties with the cartel, the sicario fled with his family and began a life in hiding, a life that would be plagued with a new and unwavering fear. He accepted a friend’s invitation to accompany him to a prayer service at a Christian church. “My surprise was, as soon as I got there . . . I don’t know what I felt. I really can’t explain this feeling. I just started to cry.” In the film, the sicario begins to weep as he tells the story. His head, enveloped by the black hood, rocks gently, his voice quavers. “I did not hear the preaching,” he says, “I did not hear anything . . . I fell to crying, I cried as I had never cried, more than I ever remember crying in my childhood . . . I cried for five or six hours without stopping. Kneeling down, falling down on the floor . . . And I heard the people crying for me. And I felt their hands touching me . . . I could feel the warmth of them touching me.”

  —

  Between deployments Hayward scheduled our team to spend a morning at the firing range to satisfy our quarterly firearms qualification. After completing the course of fire alongside Manuel and Beto, I asked Hayward if I could speak to him alone. We walked out to the parking lot and stood beside his patrol vehicle. I looked at the ground and he crossed his arms. What’s up? he asked. I was accepted for a research scholarship to study abroad, I finally told him. I’m going to take it. It’s a good opportunity for me. Damn, Hayward said. Congratulations. That’s great for you. I kicked at the gravel beneath my feet. I need out for a while, I confessed. I looked up and held my hand out to block the sun from my eyes. I’ve been wanting to study again, I told him, I’m thinking about a master’s degree. Hayward stared off into the distance, squinting at the mountains. I hate to lose you, he said.

  As we walked back toward the firing range I told him how much I liked working for him, how much I liked being on the team, how much I’d learned from everyone. We stopped at the edge of the parking lot and Hayward stood in thought. You know, he said, we could offer you a leave of absence. You could do your time abroad and come back and take classes on the side. There’s even a program to support agents getting their degree—we can find a way for you to stay on if you want. I remained silent for a moment, clenching my teeth. I can’t, I wanted to tell him, it’s not the work for me.

  —

  “What Mexicans in the early twenty-first century have been forced to see,” writes poet and essayist Cristina Rivera Garza, “is without a doubt one of the most chilling spectacles of contemporary horrorism.” In her book Dolerse—the title is the Spanish verb meaning “to be in pain”—she attempts to construct and deconstruct the pervasiveness of pain in modern Mexican society. “Pain is a complex phenomenon which, in the first place, calls into question our most basic notions of what constitutes reality,” she writes. “Pain not only destroys, but produces reality.” The “social languages” of pain are, in fact, “political languages” as well, “languages in which bodies decipher their power relationships with other bodies.” Thus, at a political and social level, she argues, “the language of pain becomes a producer of meanings and legitimacy.”

  Pain, of course, is intimately linked with fear. “Fear isolates,” writes Rivera Garza. “Fear teaches us to distrust. Fear makes us crazy.” If we follow the arc of her argument, we see that pain has the power to destroy and to produce its own reality, a reality in turn legitimized and given further meaning through the politics and policies that shape our society. This reality is quite often a reality of fear, a reality that makes us—individually and as a society—crazy, isolated, filled with distrust for our fellow human beings, the people who share our neighborhoods, our cities, our country, our borders, our intractably and intimately interwoven global community—the people with whom we share our very lives.

  In her essay “War and Imagination,” Rivera Garza considers the work of Italian writer and cultural critic Alessandro Baricco. “He claimed that war has always existed,” she writes, “in the very bones of a vast range of different civilizations: the adrenaline of war, the excitation of war, the hypnotic song of war. It is only when we, as societies, are able to invent something more exciting, more risky, more adventurous, more revolutionary, that we can say we are truly against war.” She calls this “a form of radical pacifism.”

  Taking her cue from Baricco, Rivera Garza declares: “If we want to move beyond war based in fear, the purpose of which is to produce more fear, we’d do better to imagine something more exciting, more extreme; something even more wholly filled with adrenaline.” After all, “the person who imagines always might imagine that this, whatever this might be, can be different . . . The person who imagines knows, and knows from within, that nothing is natural. Nothing inevitable.”

  —

  I dream that I am out working in the desert, that I have stopped a vehicle on the shoulder of an empty highway. As I walk toward the vehicle, a long-haired man and a boy step out of the car and walk toward me. I see that the man has a gun and I shout at him to drop it. The man continues walking toward me and I reach for my sidearm, desperate for some element of control. I aim my weapon at the center of his body and yell for him to let go of his gun. He holds the weapon in his hand and looks at the boy. Then, before he turns again to look at me, I shoot him in the chest. His gun falls and slides across the ground and I shoot him again, over and over, firing five shots from my weapon. When I look up from the dead man’s body I see that the boy has taken the gun and is crouched and aiming at me from behind the car. He shoots at me and misses. I turn and aim at him, gripping the gun with both hands. I fire at the boy twice, hitting him once in the head and once in the shoulder. I look at the scene before me and am gripped with profound panic. A crushing darkness washes over everything and I throw my gun to the ground, terrified that I have become forever looped in a crippling exchange of violence. I think that I should call Hayward, that I should call my mother, and then I turn to look for the body of the dead man. I go over to make sure the body is still there, to see for certain that the man is dead. As I stand over him, moving his arm with the toe of my boot, I hear the boy struggling for air next to the car. I walk over and stand above his body, trying to understand how he could still be breathing. I’m alive, the boy gasps, looking at my face. Please kill me, he says, please finish it. I stand and look down at the boy in silence before finally turning to walk away.

  Upon waking, I sit up in my bed and weep. I wish to make the sign of the cross, to offer out my hand. “Brother wolf,” I wish to say, “I will make peace between us, O brother wolf.”

  III

  Today,” Carl Jung wrote near the end of his life, “we are again living in an age filled with apocalyptic images of universal destruction.” Jung was addressing what had become, after the conclusion of World War II, the defining conflict of the times. As he saw it, the cold war reflected the state of modern humanity’s psyche, with the Iron Curtain as its prevailing symbol. “This boundary line bristling with barbed wire,” he wrote, “runs through the psyche of modern man, no matter on which side he lives.” Even “the normal individual . . . sees his shadow in his neighbor or in the man beyond the great divide.” Jung went so far as to assert that it had become “a political and social duty” to perceive “the other as the very devil, so as to fascinate the outward eye and prevent it from looking at the individual life within.”

  In Jung’s view, “the mass State”—his term for government and its structures—has “no intention of promoting mutual understanding and the relationship of man to man; it strives, rather, for atom
ization, for the psychic isolation of the individual.” Jung asserts that when we come to perceive “the other” as someone to be feared and shunned, we risk the inner cohesion of our society, allowing our personal relationships to become undermined by a creeping mistrust. By walling ourselves off from a perceived other, we “flatter the primitive tendency in us to shut our eyes to evil and drive it over some frontier or other, like the Old Testament scapegoat, which was supposed to carry the evil into the wilderness.”

  The effort to push away our individual and societal shadows is undertaken in the hope that we might “quickly and conveniently sink into the sea of forgetfulness” and reclaim a sense of normalcy, however vague and distorted. But in reality, Jung warns, “nothing has finally disappeared and nothing has been made good. The evil, the guilt, the profound unease of conscience, the obscure misgivings are there before our eyes, if only we would see.” Jung urges us, instead, to recognize the selfsame nature of the other, to declare, “I am guilty with the rest,” to understand that “none of us stands outside humanity’s black collective shadow,” and ultimately to accept evil as something “lodged in human nature itself . . . as the equal and opposite partner of good.”

  In his work as a psychologist, Jung argued against the division of the psyche, the dissociation between good and evil, the bifurcation between the conscious and unconscious selves. The goal of psychoanalytic therapy, as he saw it, was not to bring life into some sort of harmony, but to engage in a process he called “individuation,” the opening up of a dialogue between our waking consciousness and the often repressed preoccupations of our unconscious mind. He saw individuation as a path toward discerning wholeness in seemingly irreconcilable opposites, a way of holding darkness within the psyche, a way of learning to live with the chaos and disorder of our lives.

  For Jung, understanding dreams was an essential part of this process. “Dreams are the guiding words of the soul,” he wrote. “Dreams pave the way for life, and they determine you without you understanding their language.” If the events of our waking lives were filtered and given an extra layer of meaning through dreams, then the unconscious held essential clues for coming to terms with hidden anxieties and preoccupations. “The dream describes the inner situation of the dreamer,” he wrote, “but the conscious mind denies its truth and reality, or admits it only grudgingly.” In order to begin a true reckoning with our inner situation, “we have to expose ourselves to the animal impulses of the unconscious without identifying with them and without ‘running away.’”

  To illustrate his point, Jung offered the following example: “When you dream of a savage bull, or a lion, or a wolf . . . this means: it wants to come to you. You would like to split it off, you experience it as something alien—but it just becomes all the more dangerous. The urge of what had been split off to unite with you becomes all the stronger. The best stance would be: ‘Please, come and devour me.’”

  I arrived at the coffee shop each morning at six-thirty, half an hour before the first customers. I ground pre-weighed beans and started the drip machine, filling three insulated airpots with coffee. I dialed in the espresso grind, weighing and timing each shot until I got the right yield, the right ratio of grounds in to liquid out. I turned on the water tower. I displayed bags of whole-bean craft-roasted coffee in neatly arranged rows. I set up a pour-over station, with scales and glass carafes and ceramic V60 drippers made in Japan. I unlocked the retail refrigerator, full of Italian sodas and green glass bottles of sparkling water. I set out the chocolate and vanilla and caramel syrups, I filled an insulated pitcher with organic half-and-half and restocked the to-go station with hot sleeves, stir sticks, straws, lids, napkins, and raw sugar packets. I walked across the courtyard to fetch ice from the commercial kitchen. Then I unfolded the wooden shop sign in the courtyard, removed the “closed” placard from the countertop, opened the register, and set out my tip jar.

  The coffee shop was one of many retail outlets in a shared marketplace, a small business complex situated around an open-air courtyard in the style of an old Spanish mercado. At six-thirty in the morning I encountered few other workers as I puttered about: the pastry chefs at the Mexican bakery, the prep cooks at the taco shop, and the maintenance man who maintained the mercado grounds—a strong and clean-shaven man from Oaxaca named José, dressed always in a black baseball hat and a gray T-shirt stretched taut across his broad shoulders and tucked neatly into a pair of black jeans. José would clean the surface of the courtyard with a garden hose or a long-handled push broom. He regularly cleared the adjacent sidewalks with a leaf blower, rippling small waves of debris toward the street gutters to be swept away by monsoon rains and hot summer winds. He arranged the courtyard furniture, unlocked doors with the keys dangling from his waist, punched in codes to disarm the security system, and opened the gates of the mercado to let in the day’s first customers.

  José and I often talked to each other across the counter of the coffee bar in the early hours before the morning rush. We spoke in Spanish, exchanging cordialities. He asked about my graduate studies, about my travel plans, about my luck with women. He asked about my family, and I asked about his. He asked about my mother, about the health of her heart, and he would ask that I greet her on his behalf when I left the city to visit her. I asked him, in turn, about his wife and three boys. He stood proudly with his arm resting on the countertop the day his oldest son started high school, smiled broadly the day his youngest boy won his first soccer tournament, and leaned infirmly on a broom handle the day his middle son was hit by a car. He’s getting better, he would say for months after the accident, gracias a Dios.

  —

  José knew I had spent several years in the Border Patrol, but he rarely questioned me about the work, almost as if there were not much to ask. Likewise, I relinquished certain questions about his arrival and status. In my day-to-day interactions with migrants—the customers at the coffee shop, the workers I encountered throughout the city, the day laborers who came to the park to play pick-up soccer with my friends and me in the evenings—I often recognized subtle marks left by the crossing of the border, an understanding of its physical and abstract dimensions, a lingering impression of its weight. I sensed this knowledge in José as well, but there was little way to speak of something so imprecise, and so we regarded each other with nods and silences, with glances and gestures, with something that soon became friendship.

  One day, as I stood counting tips at the end of my shift, José pulled up a chair at the bar and sat to drink from a bottle of sparkling water. As I changed out a pile of singles for a twenty-dollar bill, I could feel his eyes resting on me. I looked up at him and he motioned for me to come near. Oye, he said in a hushed tone, when you were in la migra you must have made good money, qué no? Sure, I said. He looked around to make sure no one was within earshot and then leaned closer. More money than you make here, qué no? I laughed. Claro que sí. He leaned back in his chair, confused. Entonces por qué lo dejaste? I shrugged, somehow surprised that he had finally asked. In the end, I said, it wasn’t the work for me. I avoided his eyes, thinking of what more to add. Finally I looked up at him. I wanted to go back to school, I said, study writing, earn a master’s degree. José gave me a mischievous grin. A student doesn’t make much money, he said. I chuckled and gestured at the small pile of tips on the counter. He looked at me unbelievingly. You could make more somewhere else. But I like the pace, I said, and the people are nice. I pointed at the espresso machine. The coffee’s good too. José laughed. Claro, he said. Todo el mundo necesita café.

  José continued to look at me curiously. Why study writing? he asked. Why not business, medicine, politics? Así podrías ganar más dinero. I shrugged again. Writing seemed like a good way to make sense of what I’d seen. José sat back in his chair. Ah. Ahora te entiendo, he said. I could write many books, he added after a while. He visto muchas cosas.

  —

  José and I often spoke of the dr
ug wars and the disorder swirling in Mexico—the forty-three students who disappeared in Ayotzinapa, the endless cartel shootouts along the border, the persistent corruption of police and government officials. One day he told a joke. There was this big deer-hunting contest, he began, with hunters from the U.S., Russia, and Mexico. On the first day, the Americans came triumphantly before the judges, but the carcass they presented was so destroyed by their high-powered weaponry that it was unrecognizable as a deer, so they were disqualified. On the second day, the Russians brought in the body of a large buck, but when the judges discovered the animal had been poisoned instead of properly hunted, they too were disqualified. A third and a fourth day passed and still there was no sign of the Mexicans. On the fifth day, the judges finally decided to go looking for them. After several hours of searching, they found them in a clearing in the woods, huddled around a rabbit. One of them was torturing the animal without mercy, while another stood over it, shouting: Confess you’re a deer, motherfucker!

  On the day the Mexican military captured El Chapo Guzmán in 2014, José asked me, Do you think it’s really him? I don’t know, I replied, do you? I’m not sure. He has body doubles, you know? José paused. Or maybe the government made arrangements to arrest someone who looks just like him. Several days later, José showed me pictures that had turned up on the Internet—zoomed-in images of the drug lord’s face side-by-side with pictures from his prior arrest in 1993. Se ve diferente, he said, qué no? I studied them. Puede ser, I offered. He set his phone on the counter and stared at one of the photos. He doesn’t really look like a drug lord, he said. No se ve tan malo. I poured him a cup of coffee and leaned against my end of the counter. You never know, I told him. Violent people look like everyone else.