by Obed Silva
With my body bent like a crescent moon, the boys and my father rushed me to the bottom of the ramp, where Danny and the couple were holding on to my wheelchair. “Okay, okay, turn him over,” my father said to the boys when we came to my chair, and gently the three turned me over and placed me on it. I grabbed on to the wheels and pulled myself firmly on to the frame, and then I put the brakes on. Everyone stood around me in a circle, hovering, concerned that I might fall again. “I’m okay,” I told them. “Thank you.” But they still stood there like idiots, not knowing what to do, so I turned toward the boats and rolled myself away from them to the end of the docks. I didn’t say a word. I wanted to move on.
“¡Hijo! ¡Espera!” my father yelled, but I ignored him and kept rolling. He could catch up. Eventually he did and so did Danny. I turned back toward the ramp and noticed that the people who’d helped me were no longer there. I hoped they didn’t think I was ungrateful for their help. “Are you okay?” my father asked me again as Danny stood beside him, blankly staring at my face. “Yes, I’m fine,” I assured him. “Just forget about it. It’s over. Let’s just enjoy the rest of the day.”
I don’t recall much of what we did for the rest of the day, but the pictures say that we went on to pose in front of multiple docked boats. They say that the three of us were happy and enjoying ourselves. Later in the afternoon, I drove us back to Tijuana, where I dropped off my father and Danny at the bus station. And after hugs, kisses, and goodbyes, I watched them walk onto a bus and make their way to their seats, my father holding one plastic bag with his things in it, and Danny another with his. They found a seat somewhere in the middle, and from there they continued to wave bye to me through the window until the bus drove away. I wouldn’t see my father again for over seven years after that, for my life would get even more complicated. In less than a year, I’d be charged with attempted murder and wouldn’t be allowed to leave the country until first the case and then the sentence were completed.
* * *
It happened at a house party in Anaheim, California. We’d come to see the Mike Tyson fight where he bites Holyfield’s ear. I was with my younger cousin Chucky and my homeboys Cricket and Wino. I’d also brought along my girlfriend Angela, who, less than a year later, would become my wife. This was our second date.
A friend of Wino’s had invited him, and Wino had invited us. So we went. Didn’t think much of it. If Wino’s friend said it was cool that we come, then it was cool. But it wasn’t cool. At the party, we were confronted by a rival gang, and they outnumbered us. At the time I’d been carrying a gun with me everywhere I went because I was still an active gang member, or at least was still trying to be. I’d come to the conclusion early on after getting out of the hospital that I needed a gun on me at all times in case I was ever “caught slippin’” by a rival gang. I couldn’t run or fight anymore, but I certainly could still shoot a gun. So a gun it was. And not just any gun, but a TEC-9. I drove around with it underneath my car’s driver seat. And that’s where it was on this night.
The guys from the rival gang had been eyeing us all throughout the Tyson fight, and I knew it’d be only a matter of time before they made their move on us, so before the fight ended, I leaned in to Wino and whispered into his ear to take care of Angela, and, as inconspicuously as possible, rolled out of the party as fast as I could to retrieve my gun from the car, which I’d parked in the alley around the corner. Once the gun was in my hands, I cocked it, placed it on my lap with a sweater over it, and rolled back to the party. But when I turned onto the street from the alley, the party had already spilled out onto the street. People were out on the sidewalk watching a large group that had formed a semicircle around another smaller group. I knew right away what was going on, so I pushed as fast as I could.
Before I knew it, I was in front of my homeboys and girlfriend telling the others to back off. But they wouldn’t listen. They were too drunk and eager to do us harm. So after the last time I told them to back off, one of them, the one that was leading them, looked right at me and said, “What are you gonna do?” Then, in less than a second after saying this, he took the beer bottle he was holding, broke it on a concrete pole, and charged right by me at my cousin Chucky with the jagged edges of what remained of the bottle leading the way. It was then that I pulled my gun from under the sweater and let off a shot. Everything happened in the blink of an eye. And just like that, my life once again took a turn for the worse. I was arrested that night and charged with attempted murder. And again, it was not my father to the rescue, but my mother, who bailed me out of the county jail before I could spend another night there. It was also my mother who found two great lawyers to fight the charges. For two years I fought the case, showing up to different hearings every few months with my mother at my side.
It was during this time that my mother also enrolled me in college again, which at the end of the case was a big part of the reason that I wouldn’t go to prison and would instead be sentenced to five years on gang-terms probation. Taking it upon himself, the judge, recognizing the progress I was making in college and the changes I was making in my life, put aside the deal that I had already agreed to with the prosecutor, which entailed me serving twelve years in prison in exchange for pleading guilty to three charges: reckless discharge of a firearm, causing great bodily injury, and being a gang member.
During those five years on probation, I wouldn’t be allowed to leave the country; thus for those five years I would also not see my father. I couldn’t go to Mexico, and he couldn’t come to the United States. During this time, however, things weren’t all bad. For although I was unable to see my father, I managed to graduate from community college, transfer to California State University, Los Angeles, and at the end of spring 2005 graduate with a bachelor’s degree in creative writing. The future was looking promising, except for two things: Angela and I would separate at the end of 2004, and as a way of dealing with the depression over losing her, I’d submerge myself in various political movements, one of which had been formed to protest the anti-immigrant vigilante organization called the Minuteman Project. Like many university students, I’d become an idealist, a believer in revolutions, a wannabe Che Guevara, and the Minuteman Project had become my Cuba. I needed to free my people from the oppressive and discriminatory views and actions of these paddy bigots who were gung ho to capture immigrants crossing over into the country illegally.
My gang-terms probation ended on May 25, 2005, and the very next day I joined a group of students at a protest against the Minutemen in the city of Garden Grove at the Garden Grove Women’s Club. Things turned terrible quick. Minutemen supporters taunted protesters from behind yellow police tape and the protesters shouted back. This would go on until the sun set. It was then that sheriffs on horseback began to arrive, forming a line on one end of the street. This agitated the protesters, and to make matters worse, this was around the same time that a Minutemen supporter would drive his van into the protesters who were blocking the entrance into the Women’s Club property. The protesters, over a hundred of them, moved in and many began to yell obscenities at the Minutemen, the driver of the van, and even the sheriffs. Eventually many of us began to throw water bottles and rocks at the Minutemen. I was one of them. In the mix of the milieu I felt the overpowering urge to participate in this moment of revolution, in this fight for my people. Like the others, I was driven by anger toward these paddies who demeaned and used violence toward my people at the border and who here at this moment were being protected by the sheriffs. I had to do my part. I had to hurt them as much as they hurt us. But alas—the joke was on me, because by the time it was all over the only ones who were going to hurt more than anyone else, even more than the people who’d been hit by the van, were myself and four other students. We’d be arrested and hauled off to the county jail. And the next day the newspaper would dub us the Garden Grove Five. I was now a political prisoner.
My mother would bail me out, again, and I would fight the case througho
ut the rest of the year. The outcome would be another three years’ probation, but this time informal, which meant that, with permission from my probation officer, I would be allowed to travel. The following year I finally got to go to Mexico for the first time in over seven years and see my father.
20
Every December 1 she awakes at dawn. Before the cock crows three, she’s well on her way. In the same clothes she slept in, she rises from her bundle of blankets and makes her way through her dark and cold home to the bathroom sink, where she washes her hands and splashes cold water on her face. Cold, everything’s cold; but nothing more than her heart. Love moves her. Death moves her. There’s a memory in her mind that she can’t shake. Her bare toes and fingertips are nearly freezing. Already she’s beginning to cry, but her children and grandchildren are still asleep, so she represses the sorrow stirring inside and wipes away her tears. Everything is slow, even the way she looks at herself in the mirror. She could stay there a lifetime and wonder if she’d ever been happy. She knows something in her eyes has died, and that what has been set to time cannot be left for tomorrow.
Her double-layered socks, her shoes, her two sweaters and jacket help only a little, so she crosses her arms, rubs herself, and then blows hot breath into her cupped hands. After, she grabs her hand-stitched satchel and walks over to the refrigerator, opens it, reaches for the two caguamas she stowed there the night before, and carefully places them inside her bag. When the two bottles meet they clink and she remembers the way they once shared a glass together. “Te llevo una,” she says to her memory and drapes the straps of the satchel over her shoulder. The cock crows three and she shivers from sadness. “Jesus was supposed to die,” she says to herself. “Dying was his purpose, not yours.” With her satchel at her hip and her heart leading the way, she walks into the living room, kisses every one of her children and grandchildren on their foreheads as they silently sleep on their beds and the floor. None of them feel her kisses, and when they awaken only the youngest of her granddaughters will ask for her abuela.
She’s walking up an empty street. She’s waiting at a lonely bus stop. She’s riding on a hollow bus. She’s walking down a lifeless dirt road. Ten miles of emptiness. Twenty-five years of terror. This is love. This is the picture that it leaves behind. She remembers him every step of the way, up every street, at every bus stop, on every bus, down every dirt road. “I’ll never forget you,” she says to her memory, “and I’ll never stop coming to be with you.” She’s close now and can see the sun beginning to show itself on the other side of the mountain. Behind her, her footprints mark her journey. She passed through here, they say, on her way to be with her beloved. But this is a journey that no one will ever value, an event in history that one day will never have happened. This is the march of the sorrowful, the march of the ones who can’t free themselves of the dead.
My lonely widow,
My lonely black heart,
Why do you come to the grave?
Why do you bring life to the dead?
Turn ’round and go whence you came,
Turn ’round and go away.
But on this December 1 this dead man was born, on this December 1 many, many years ago. So on this day she’s come to his grave to cry and to bring life to his memory.
She’s standing at the gates, peering through its decaying bars at the valley of death. She’s cold and tired. The sun is gaining strength, but it’s still no match against the winter morning that envelops her world. “¿Dónde estás, Pedro? Abreme aquí,” she yells out to the gatekeeper. And from the other side of the adobe wall adjacent to the gate a voice responds, “¿Eres tu, la viuda del primero de Diciembre?”
“Sí, yo soy. Abreme por favor.”
“¡Ya voy! ¡Ya voy!”
Pedro’s old and crippled. Drags his right leg when he walks as if pulling an iron anchor. He’s the keeper of graves at this cemetery, and he calls it his home. “Yo vivo con los muertos,” he says. And every morning before opening the gates to the living he recites a dozen Our Fathers and Hail Marys in front of his altar of saints for his “muertitos,” as he likes to call them, while drinking a pajarete (mixture of warm cow’s milk, chocolate, and tequila). This is what he was doing on the other side of the wall when he heard the widow’s voice. “¡Aquí estoy! ¡Aquí estoy!” he says to the widow while searching his pockets for his keys. “¡Es que estaba resandole a los santitos para que cuiden a mis muertitos!”
“Pues ojala y lo escuchen, Don Pedro,” the widow tells him, watching him insert the key into the lock. “Que frío,” she adds, folding her arms.
“Sí, tremendo.”
The two shiver at the same time and he offers her a drink from his pajarete, but she refuses, telling him that she brought something to drink of her own: “No, gracias. Yo aquí también traigo que tomar.” And, bowing to her the way subjects bow to their queen, he says to her, “Pues pásele, mi borrachita. Pásele que allá la espera su muertito.”
She’s on her knees, weeping before a weathered and crooked white cross with the name of her beloved written across it, barely noticeable now, erased by the elements. She has one hand on top of it and the other at her side over her satchel, pressing it against her body. Her head is lowered and her tears sadly fall to the earth. Nothing’s changed here; the scene remains as always. A thousand sad stories with a thousand sad endings, but hers is the only one worth a thousand tears. She’ll sing it and no one will hear: “Te amo. Te amo. Te amo.”
Why did you go, my Beloved,
And why didn’t you take me with you?
There is something terrible about your hands that I miss,
The way they would make me feel alive
When they crashed with my flesh,
The way they pounded my breasts,
The way they beat my spirit.
Why don’t you scream,
Why don’t you yell my name?
I love you so much less when you are silent.
Awake, my Beloved!
Awake thine fury!
She reaches inside her satchel and brings out one of the caguamas. “Mira lo que te traje,” she says to the cross. “Vamos a tomar, mi amor, por que es tu cumpleaños.”
One drink.
Two drinks.
Three drinks.
Four drinks.
Five drinks.
The tears turn to laughter. Vicente Fernández sings in her head and she cries out to the cross with a smile on her face: “¡El Rey! ¡El Rey! ¡El Rey! ¡Siempre serás mi Rey!” Three-quarters through the bottle she pours the rest onto the dirt and watches as it bubbles up and seeps into the ground. “Para ti,” she says. She reaches into her satchel for the second caguama and just as soon as she pops it open she puts it to her lips and begins to drink. There’s a shouting match inside of her now and she’s weeping again, and laughing. And soon she’ll be curled up on the dirt, tasting its grains and shivering from the cold. Next to her, two caguamas will lay sadly spent like neglected children. This is love. This is sorrow. This is misery.
* * *
Chihuahua, like many states in Mexico, is in constant mourning. It has been ever since the war between the cartels and the government broke out. Death is everywhere, from the narcos who fill the streets with blood every day to the women who continue to disappear off the streets of Juárez. This is why the city of Chihuahua, which once had been peaceful and quiet, is now anything but. Not a day goes by that the sound of a gun or machine gun being fired doesn’t fill the air in some parts of the city. Bullet-riddled homes are no longer uncommon, as well as makeshift altars that decorate the streets to memorialize the dead. Candles and calaveras reveal the deceased’s last moment alive on this earth: Someone died here—here is where their spirit left them. Everyone knows where the hearse is going; and the sympathy from those who follow it has vanished. Because everyone is certain that another hearse is coming shortly after this one. The dead, now, have become to the people as un-intriguing as the living. Every new dead man
, woman, or child, is just that: only another dead man, woman, or child, a lifeless body being carried to its final resting spot.
As in Juárez—the epicenter of the narco war in the state of Chihuahua—La Santa Muerte has begun to reign all over the city of Chihuahua. Of the thousands of cartel-related deaths that have occurred throughout the state since the beginning of 2007, many have occurred in this once-peaceful capital of no more than a million people. Death’s shadow looms over the whole city, and one can’t help but feel the piercing eeriness that comes with it, especially when you’re slowly creeping behind a hearse. Chihuahua’s under siege. Handfuls of young masked soldiers in military fatigues ride on the beds of trucks, clenching M16s. Death is on their minds. They fear it because they know it’s on the face and heart of every Mexican citizen they have sworn to protect. They’ve been called to arms, to fight the cartels gun to gun. They’ve pledged allegiance to the flag of their great country, and are now in the hands of Fate. Fatum. Wyrd. Anatkha. That mighty force that has been the topic of much debate among philosophers, men of God, and men of letters ever since the beginning of thought: What of life if man must die? “I cannot suffer what is not my fate,” cried Antigone. To Boethius, man was subordinate to Fatum and Fatum subordinate to divine Providentia. To King Alfred the Great, Fate was God. To the Old English poet of “The Wanderer” and “The Seafarer,” all of man’s journeys are set by Fate. Fate! Fate! Fate! Every man must die. Man has no say in the matter. He can seek, hoard, build and destroy, love and hate, and drink and drink, but in the end, there’s something he will never do again: live.
