The Death of My Father the Pope

by Obed Silva

  “Did you see Dad yet?” I ask her.

  “Yeah,” she says, bringing her eyes to her chest.

  “And, what did you think, how’d he look to you?”

  “I don’t know. He looked fine, I guess.”

  “Handsome, eh?”

  “Sure.”

  “Did you cry?

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “I couldn’t.”

  Of course not. Why would you cry for him? It wouldn’t make any sense.

  * * *

  Drunk off some cheap four-dollar wine, I’m back at home and writing this. And I’m stuck because I don’t know shit about how my father met Cecilia’s mother or what the circumstances were in which Cecilia was born. So I send her a late-night email asking her to tell me all she knows. But the next day when she writes back all I get is a short and unsatisfactory “I don’t know anything.” So I write her again and press her to find out, to ask her mother. She does. And the following day when I check my email I discover this short and heartbreaking tale of a little girl who never had a father:

  They met at a bar on New Year’s Eve 1985. I was conceived January 12, 1985, after Dad went looking for my mom at my grandparents’ house. Dad paid my grandma to babysit my brother and sister while he and my mom went out to have some drinks. Margaritas. They stayed the night at my mom’s place and I was born nine months and one day later. My mom said [our father] should have a burn scar on his butt from where she kicked him and spun him around and he bumped into the wall heater and he burned his butt! They stayed together for a while after that, living at my mom’s house. But they were kicked out a few weeks later. The landlord didn’t like Mexicans. So my mom went with Dad to his place. I don’t know if he had the place already. But they stayed in a studio apartment that only had a bathroom. The kitchen was in the living room/bedroom! So my mom told him he had a month to get them all a bigger place, my mom already having two kids from a previous relationship. He couldn’t get a bigger place, so on the thirteenth day my mom moved out. She moved all the way to Roswell, New Mexico, and stayed there until she was seven months pregnant. Then she returned to Belen, New Mexico. My mom said she would see Dad around town but they would not talk. My mom didn’t have a car, so she would walk to the store and other places. And Dad would not pick her and my brother and my sister up, Mom being all pregnant. She had me there in Belen. My grandmother watched my brother and my sister while she was in the hospital, but left right when my grandpa brought her home. That night Dad went to my mom’s house doing doughnuts in the yard and yelling out “My daughter! My daughter!” but never stopping to see me. When Dad finally came to see me I was one year old. I don’t remember how that went. Then again when I was five years old. This time he took me to the store and got me a Barbie! My brother went with me because my mom wouldn’t let him take me alone. Then the next time I saw him I was about seventeen. I went and saw him in Belen. At the time I lived in Albuquerque, about fifty miles away. He came to Albuquerque to work the next day and spent a couple of days with us at our house. This was kind of awkward because I didn’t know him. When he went back to Mexico he didn’t even call to say bye. I did talk to him a few times on the phone but that was short and not so sweet. We never could communicate. The last time I saw him was at his funeral. Got any more questions?

  Cecilia

  No. There was nothing more I needed to know. From beginning to end, it had my father all over it. I could see him in every sentence: his shamelessness, his inability to feel anything for his daughter or for the woman who’d given birth to her. My father had been a selfish man, wickedly arrogant in his own ugly skin, for him to think that he could impregnate a woman and not do his part as a father, as a man. Sure, he hadn’t had the means to support a family, and perhaps he’d never planned to have a child with a woman he’d only known for a short while. The unexpected always happens, and he probably tried. He had, after all, shown up at the woman’s house on the night she’d come home from the hospital with her child yelling “My daughter! My daughter!” while doing doughnuts on her lawn. Yes, my father had shown up all right, but probably drunk and only because in his drunkenness he’d been unable to resist his narcissistic impulse to make a scene, to let it be known that Juan Silva was a man who’d made a child, that he was un hombre muy macho.

  Thinking about Cecilia and my father, I can’t help but think of my own life as a little boy. I have trouble connecting the two. How could the father who’d always been warm to me have been so cold to her? A Barbie when she was five and a few “not so sweet” hellos when she was a teen. This man who on countless occasions had told me that he loved me while pressing his stubbly cheek against mine had been the same man who’d left this little girl to wonder what had become of her father. Did he even love her?

  * * *

  Sometimes my mother drops a jewel on me when I least expect it, like on the day she heard me singing “Hermoso Cariño” along to Vicente Fernández: “Hermoso cariño que Dios ha mandado nomás para mí…”—“My beautiful beloved that God has sent only for me…”

  I’d been listening to this song in my room while grading my students’ essays when she walked in, put her hand on my shoulder, and said, “You want to know something?”

  I laid down my red pen, turned down the music on my phone, and asked her, “What?”

  “When you were born,” she said, “your father would sing that song to you almost every day. He would hold you in his arms, swing you from side to side, and sing this song to you from beginning to end. And you would never cry. You would just stare up at him with your big, wide eyes. Maybe that’s why you like this song so much, because your father would sing it to you.”

  8

  I’ve been asking for Aarón since I arrived at the funeral parlor. “Where’s Aarón?” “Why isn’t he here?” and “When will he be back?” I keep asking the crowd, but all anybody can tell me is that he left to pick up a friend only minutes before I arrived. I haven’t stopped worrying about him ever since the moment I first heard him crying over the phone. I can’t bear the thought of him being in pain. So the more that time passes and he still isn’t here, the more desperate I get. I keep looking around for him, often ignoring the voices that fight for my attention. “Yeah, yeah, but where’s Aarón?”

  Finally, out of a mouth of people, he appears. He breaks through the crowd with a glorious smile aimed directly at me. Without saying a word, upon reaching me, he wraps his dark skinny arms around my thicker but just as dark arms and trunk as if he were a bounty hunter and I a fugitive he’d just captured. Squeezing me with all his might, he buries his face in between my neck and shoulder and begins to sob. This time, however, I don’t pray to God for him not to start crying or for him not to fuck up my shirt. This time, I don’t care. Let this boy cry. Let him make hell of my shirt. I don’t say a word to him, and he doesn’t say a word to me. We say nothing to each other. We don’t have to. The pounding of our hearts speaks for the two of us; they say I love you to each other, and I am happy to finally see you. We remain embraced for a couple of minutes that, beneath the dark and melancholy Chihuahua sky, make up for the last two years we’ve been apart. My brother’s tears are now running down my neck. I can feel them making a trail. There is no distance between us—no time and no border. His whimpers are at the base of my ear. They feel like quiet screams from a baby, echoes of a broken heart yearning for repair. Your father is gone but your brother is here, my heart screams back.

  When we finally allow space to come between us and the world to reenter our lives, Aarón’s first words to me are: “¿Cuándo te vas?” Already he wants to know when I’m leaving. Already he’s preparing himself for what is sure to come. Reality has been cruel, and now he has to protect himself from it by mitigating the pain it sends his way. Every time I come I never stay, and every time he has to see me leave hurts him; it’s something he can never grow accustomed to. And this time it will be worse. This time, it will hurt more. Even before our
father died, every time I’d speak with Aarón over the phone the last thing he’d ask me before we said our goodbyes was “When are you coming back?” And every time I’d have to tell him that I didn’t know, but that I’d make it there as soon as I could. Now he’s asking me when I’ll be leaving. If only I could say never.

  I put my hands on his shoulders and place him at arms’ length. I stare at him, his small frame and round brown face. I take my right hand and wipe his tears away, then run it over the angled scar on his forehead, a memento left from a car accident my father had caused as a result of him driving while drunk. Five-year-old Aarón had been sitting in the front seat, without a seat belt, between my father and Cokis, when my father, unwilling to listen to Cokis’s cries to stop the car, ran a red light and sideswiped another vehicle. Aarón flew and crashed headfirst into the windshield. Unconscious, he was taken by ambulance to the hospital and treated for a head injury. My father and Cokis would walk away from the accident unscathed, though Cokis would suffer emotionally for many years after, blaming herself for the accident, believing that it had been her cries that had distracted my father from driving, causing him to run the red light.

  “In a few days,” I tell Aarón. “I can’t stay that long, but I’ll be back.” He lowers his head and continues to cry. I pull him in and wrap my arms around him once again.

  * * *

  Before returning for my father’s funeral, the last time I’d been in Chihuahua was during the summer of ’07. Since then I’d been prevented from returning by my United States government. The only way I was going to return to Chihuahua after that summer was if I were officially deported from the country or if I were granted a pardon by an immigration judge. For though I’d lived in the United States all my life since the age of one, and had been a legal permanent resident since the Reagan administration, I was now, after this last trip to the land of the Tarahumaras in ’07, once again officially a wetback, a straight-up mojado “subject for removal” at any time. I was like the annoying piece of masticated gum that sticks to the bottom of your shoe and pushes itself completely into the grooves lest it be discovered, scraped off, and tossed into the gutter.

  It happened when I flew into Dallas airport on my way back home to California. At one of the gates I was met by a Department of Homeland Security agent who demanded I show her my green card, which I did, and happily. I’d never had a problem before, so why would this time be any different? However, after the inquiring agent ran my name through the system, everything changed—something was different. She quickly put up a rampart between me and the country I loved and led me to a room where I was to be interrogated by another agent. “What gives,” I said quietly to myself as I followed the obese Black woman past various doors and down cold hallways away from the flow of travelers. Feeling nervous, I began to perspire heavily beneath my fake Panama hat and made-in-China gray guayabera I’d bought at Olvera Street in Los Angeles from a pushy Hondureña who said I looked like a real guapo in it the day before I had departed to Chihuahua. I couldn’t have chosen a worse day to look like a wannabe Cuban communist or a Miami drug pusher.

  In the room I was met by an older white male agent who was sitting at a wide metal desk in front of a computer. He was bringing a blue coffee cup with the Department of Homeland Security emblem stamped on it down from his lips when the sista walked me in.

  “What do we got, Shirley?” the white agent asked, looking at me and my wheels and then back at Shirley, who was now at my side handing him my card.

  “A possible subject for removal” was all Shirley said, before quickly exiting the room.

  What the fuck did she just say? Removal from where, and who is going to be removed, and removed how, and removed when? I turned back to look at her as she walked away, hoping she’d say something more. But nada. She just turned and disappeared.

  “What did she say?” I asked the white agent as he examined my card. But he didn’t say a word. Fucker was as cold as the room. It was not until after he’d put his cup down and typed all of the information on my card into the computer and then intently looked over all that came up on its monitor that he finally turned to me and acknowledged that I was more than just a face on a card or a bunch of words on a screen.

  “It seems you have quite a history, Juan. Is that your name, Juan Obed Silva Mendoza?”

  “Yeah,” I said, staring at the left side of his face. There was nothing interesting about it, just plain and white. I gripped tightly on to the nylon straps of my backpack and looked around the quiet room, but there wasn’t shit to look at, because like the agent’s face, it was plain and white as well, empty of anything unique or the slightest bit appealing.

  “Then this is all you here?” he said, tapping at the monitor’s screen with his long and lanky white finger.

  “I don’t know what that is.” I played stupid because by now I had a hunch as to what was transpiring.

  “Have you ever used a weapon to injure another person?” he said, looking suspiciously into my timorous eyes the way cops do when they want to catch you in a lie: like they lost some shit behind your eyeballs and are trying desperately to find it.

  “Yeah,” I said, carefully, giving him the best pitiful look I could muster. Maybe he’d see that the person on the monitor and the person sitting meekly before him were two different people. Maybe.

  “A gun?”

  “Ye-ah.”

  “How long ago?”

  “A long time ago. I don’t remember.”

  “And you are also a member of a street gang.”

  “No.”

  “Were you ever?”

  “Ye-ah.”

  “But you’re not anymore?”

  “No.”

  “Hmm.”

  “Hmmm.”

  “Hmmmm.”

  “Hmmmmm.”

  “And where are you coming from?”

  “Chihuahua.”

  “And what were you doing there?”

  “Visiting my father.”

  It’s true. I’d been a member of a street gang, and in 1999 I’d been convicted for shooting a gang rival. What was jumping out at this agent’s prying blue eyes from the monitor was an extensive criminal record that went back to when I was thirteen. It was bad. So bad that even as I sat there staring the agent in the face with my own uninteresting cara de palo, answering his questions, I was serving out a three-year probation sentence for an assault-on-a-peace-officer charge I’d been convicted for only two years earlier after having been arrested at a protest in the city of Garden Grove against a group of beaner hunters who called themselves the Minutemen. These two criminal acts I’d committed as an adult, and apparently were now cause enough to return my defected brown ass back to Mexico. I had lots of explaining to do, from every detail pertaining to every crime I’d ever been convicted of to the reason why I was in a wheelchair. This would go on for hours. I’d miss a dozen flights to Los Angeles before the interrogation was over. At one point, much amused by what he was hearing, the agent called in a fellow agent who’d happened to be passing by in the hallway so that he, too, could indulge in my grief.

  “Go on, tell him what you told me just a few minutes ago about how you ended up in that chair,” white agent number one, who had now kicked up his boots on the desk and was leaning back on his chair as if he were enjoying a movie, said to me as I now tiredly found myself staring at another agent with a similar, uninteresting pale face.

  “I got shot, that’s all,” I said, shrugging the whole thing off, hoping we could move on, that I could be let go and sent on my way to move freely about the country. But white agent number one wasn’t having it; he wanted me to recount this whole fucking part of my life all over again just so white agent number two could get a kick out of the extraordinary. Nothing about the part where I was a scholar working on an MA in English, or about how much I loved to spend hours reading French and Russian novels in trendy coffee shops while sipping on five-dollar lattes next to other Americans who sha
red my affinity for the bohemian lifestyle. Nothing about my poetic inclinations or about my talent for writing plays—nothing.

  “But tell him who shot you, and why, what you were doing,” white agent number one persisted, now with his hands behind his head. Meanwhile, white agent number two kept looking at me and my wheels with morbid fascination. From where he stood in the doorway, he’d often twist his head to one side and look down at me with a bewildered expression on his face. When he’d do this, he’d squint his eyes and tuck in his lips. I take it he didn’t know what to make of me and my fashion. Maybe the Vans and black baggy jeans threw him off; or maybe it was the guayabera and the Panama hat; or maybe it was the whole fucking ensemble.

  “I got shot by a gas-station attendant. Me and a friend were running away from his store with two cases of beer each that we hadn’t paid for when he followed us out and shot me.”

  “In the back?” said white agent number two, taken aback by what he’d just heard.

  “Yeah, right through my spine. The bullet almost came out through my front, but my skin stopped it.”

  “Ain’t that something? Some good ol’ American vigilante justice,” interjected white agent number one with no less excitement in his voice than when I’d first relayed the story to him.

  “Sure is,” said white agent number two, now leaning back and crossing his arms. “And how old were you when this happened?”

  “Seventeen.”

  “Just a kid,” said white agent number one, smacking his lips and shaking his head.

  “Pretty terrible,” said white agent number two, doing the same, though with a more sympathetic expression on his face.