Norte

by Edmundo Paz Soldán

  He was partial to the injections. He heard a doctor say: morphine. Then a nurse said: scoplomine. Another doctor said: bromium. The pills came in assorted colors and the only reason he didn’t collect them was because he had to swallow them with a glass of water. He let the pills float. The water seemed to hold them up. But shouldn’t it be the other way around? Shouldn’t the pills be holding the water inside? He shuffled across the building’s mosaic floors, and it felt as if the entire building was floating and about to explode in space. It didn’t explode because of him, though. It was one of his missions: hold the building together. The gardens. The earth.

  He developed a chronic cough. His head ached constantly. Drawing was the only thing that calmed him. The nurses and doctors were considerate and brought him notebooks and colored pencils. Every now and then he’d write to María Santa Ana and his children, though you couldn’t really call it writing: he narrated his daily life in colorful images instead of words, there was a man wearing a hat who entered and exited buildings under a bright yellow sun.

  The orderlies asked Martín to draw things for them. One day he found one of his drawings framed and hanging on the wall in a doctor’s office. He didn’t like his drawings as much as the other engravings he saw around, though. In one, there was a man sitting on a chair in the middle of a meadow and beside him there was a man with pliers in one hand and a stone in the other, taken from the open skull of the man seated next to him. There was another of a man lying on a table with a bat fluttering around him. There were drawings of instruments that looked like they were for torture. Patients like him, their faces expressing despair, tongues lolling and eyes bulging in stupefied smiles.

  Dates: 1583. 1623. Such a long time ago, and here these poor folks are still living in states of utter disgrace.

  Martín was assigned manual chores outside, around the grounds. Some days he mowed the lawn and pruned the plants in the garden; other times he was taken to a farm to milk the cows or clean their stables, wash hogs or shear the sheep. He started drawing animals. After a while they stopped monitoring him so closely, and he was able to come and go more freely.

  Once in a while the man who had brought him there would visit. He asked Martín all sorts of questions, some in English and others in Spanish. Martín understood some things he said but could never fully respond. One question came up every time: what year is it? He understood that much. He would plunge his hands deep into his overall pockets, as if the answer could be found in there somewhere. Then he’d pull his hands out, his fist closed around whatever he’d fished out to show Mr. Walker. Then he’d write “August 24, 1925.”

  Mr. Walker corrected him once: “June 16, 1931.” And once more, “October 9, 1931.” And yet again, “January 20, 1932.” Martín kept searching around in his pockets.

  The man projected drawings on a screen and asked him to choose the biggest one, the thinnest one, and the roundest one. Sometimes he’d show him stains on a paper. Martín didn’t know what they were, but he had fun trying to figure out if it was a fish or a flower or a house. The visits weren’t always pleasant, though; sometimes they’d take him to an empty room and make him sit on a gurney. They’d put cables to his temples, and an electric current shook him violently and left him aching for days.

  Eeeeeehhhh.

  Once Mr. Walker made Martín stare at a swinging pendulum for a while, until he lost consciousness. They had better not be toying around with him. He’ll just go ahead and blink and that’s that. And no way those disappeared doctors could come back whole. They’d be sliced in half, or left just feet and arms, or a head with nothing to hold it up or a man floating in the nothing. It had happened that way once, in his village.

  They. Better. Not. Mess. Around. With. Martín.

  The man brought him magazines with illustrations and photographs. He stared at the letters, touched them: Sa tur d ayEv en ing P ost. Lif e. Ti Me. Headlines in large type, photos and text that described what was happening in the world. He was partial to the advertisements more than anything else. A woman wearing a shower cap held out long, white arms that offered soap. They seemed to break through the surface and continue extending outside of the page. Martín noticed how much she looked like María Santa Ana. She was fair skinned, with a ski-slope nose, but the outline of her face was the same as that of his good-hearted and pretty wife. At night he dreamed about the soap woman, somehow she escaped from the magazine’s pages and came to lie in his bed, and the pain, the noise, and the smell of ammonia mixed with shit, it all went away.

  There was the picture of a train on one of the pages. It was all shiny and new, and there was a joyful family ready to jump aboard, all wearing bright smiles. He had never seen a train like that, so fresh from the factory, with aerodynamic lines and bright names painted on the sides; he liked Aztec Eagle the best. The rickety trains that passed by his white building were all rust-covered and mold-infested. He never saw trains like that when he was laying track either, how could he see them if he and the crew were fixing the crossties and anchor spikes? For the trains to come, they had to set the switchmen and build the level crossings to prevent accidents and the stations for passengers to get off. They board the trains from the stations too, you know. You can’t only get off. Same as you can’t only get on, either. There’s a happy family who wants to board the train as soon as possible, get lost in a whirlwind cross-country adventure and who knows, maybe even a shopping spree in Mexico before the journey back home. Wouldn’t that be splendid? But just for a second, imagine it wasn’t Martín or his fellow Mexicans who had been forced to leave their country and survive somehow in the North, struggling to earn a few pesos so their families could live with dignity, spending so many nights alone, so far from their wives and children, so homesick. Imagine it was the other way around and now the happy gringo family was migrating, heading due south to find work and food because they weren’t so happy after all, in fact they wanted for many things, were strangled by debt, pobres cabrones. So now Mexicans stayed in Mexico, and it was the white folks who were being forced across the border. Wouldn’t that be better?

  Or what if nobody was forced to migrate anymore? Leaving one’s place on earth is a cruel experience. People should be allowed to stay at home. Martín should be allowed to stay in the place where he was born. The street where he was born. The ranch where he was born. The village where he was born. The region. The country.

  Where. He. Was. Born.

  But if that’s the case, then how come trains exist? Or borders. Or countries. Aha, Martín, you haven’t thought it through enough. If you had to choose, would you prefer a world with or without trains?

  He couldn’t say. But one thing was for sure: he preferred a world where there were magazines. With pages of drawings and photographs of trains. At night the trains would jump straight off the pages of the magazines and through his pupils. He traveled in the trains beside a white lady who was the spitting image of María Santa Ana, and she smiled at him and offered soap with her arms stretched out wide.

  The soap was very fancy. He could always use a little washing up in that white building.

  For a time he was overwhelmed by panic attacks and nothing would calm him down, so they started tying him to his bed. He bellowed so long and loud that within minutes the room emptied of people. An orderly slapped him once to get him under control, but Martín just went on bellowing. They enclosed him in a windowless room with an obese man who had a dimpled scar that cut straight across his right temple. He knew they were trying to scare him: you keep misbehaving like that and you’ll see, we’re going to cut a hole in your head like we did to the fat man, and stick our fingers in it and steal your brain.

  He wasn’t allowed to walk the grounds or work in the farm during those weeks. They took his magazines and notebooks away so he couldn’t draw. Spending so many hours a day in the main building with nothing to do made him even unhappier. He was going to turn into one of those old people who don’t do anything but stare at the ceilin
g. I wonder how long you have to stare at a wall before stains appear.

  When the spell passed, he finally went out into the garden. And one evening when he was there by himself, watering the plants, it occurred to him to sneak off and run. He made it to the nearby city but didn’t know what to do when he got there. He just stood at a corner and stared at the passersby. A woman who saw him was concerned and asked if something was wrong. Martín’s answer was incoherent. When two adolescents tried to help him, he stuck his tongue out at them and had a coughing fit. Then he lowered his pants and masturbated in front of them. Someone called the police.

  They finally brought him back to his bed, in his room, in the building. His building?

  They brought him back to that room with the cables and shook his body with electricity.

  A storm was unleashed. Lightning lit up the sky, and it was inside of him.

  Aaaaahhhh.

  Weeks later, Mr. Walker delivered a verdict before a board of doctors and Martín: dementia praecox, catatonic form. Martín didn’t understand anything.

  More cables. More storms. More lightning.

  He escaped four more times. One time he made it far away and spent several nights in jail listening to the deafening sound of a passing train.

  The other times he only lasted three or four days before he returned to the white building on his own. He must have slept in an alley or a park, and the nights were freezing; nobody fed him, and there was no place for him to draw.

  What about María Santa Ana? She must be in the custody of the Federales. They were probably still fighting their common enemy who had stolen the animals and taken their children and burned the churches to the ground.

  He would go back to his ranch and undestroy it. He would return to his town and un-burn the images of the Virgin. They’ll see. In the blink of his eye.

  He wouldn’t say a word. He wouldn’t betray her.

  He started drawing trains. Then came the winged horses, their riders dressed in hats. Naked women on horseback. When he was homesick, he drew the houses in San José, the farms, the churches, the trees, his family, his animals, the fiestas—men and women dancing and playing musical instruments, mostly the guitarrón—the bullfights. His blood bay mare. El Picacho. Sometimes he tried to fit everything into a single drawing, taping several sheets of notebook paper together.

  He cut pictures and illustrations from his magazines, things like women’s faces, airplanes, and cars. His favorite ones were taken from soap and train advertisements. He would spend hours at a time sitting on the ground, gluing cutouts to his drawings. Mr. Walker liked what he did. “What day is today?” he’d ask. And Martín wouldn’t answer. February 21, 1936, he wrote. December 2, 1937. July 13, 1939. January 5, 1942.

  That’s how they got to 1948.

  3

  Ciudad Juárez–Smithsville, Texas, 1985

  Jesús took on a few more gigs in Texas. He liked easy riding in the freight trains; he’d sprawl out on the floor, getting up every once in a while to stretch his legs and poke his head out the half-open door, let the rush of wind blow across his face. He still got jittery when the train slowed down to approach a station. He’d get low to the ground if he wasn’t already, lie back with his hands over his chest, and shut his eyes. Jesús could always sense when the Migra was closing in, and soon he’d hear the dogs. One morning an agent’s head popped through the doorway, his eyes scrutinizing the dark space inside. The dogs made a racket outside, tugging hard at their leashes, eager to pull loose and attack. But they closed the door again, and he could hear their steps slowly fade into the distance together with the growling animals.

  He ran into agents a second time in El Paso, but the train hadn’t left the station yet, and he was hiding among the metal containers in one of the cars. He couldn’t believe they just left him alone, like he was invisible. That must have taken some serious cash. Fucking gringos don’t come cheap. Someone told Jesús an embassy employee in DF charged as much as thirty grand a month to green-light visas for cartel members.

  Braulio rustled him some odd jobs in the city, like driving cars for special guests; he’d pick them up at the airport and take them to their hotel. He did Braulio’s grocery shopping for him. He felt very fine driving Braulio’s black Ford Explorer with its tinted windows. Qué padre. He could watch everyone without them seeing him.

  Jesús slowly picked up on the fact that despite looking like a two-bit hustler, Braulio was actually a big shot. He had a wife but enough cash to keep a mistress too. Her name was Paloma, just a young thing about Jesús’s age. Braulio paid for her apartment near the Instituto Latinoamericano, even splurged on fancy gifts: ermine coats that weren’t climate appropriate, a huge-screen television, diamond-studded belts. Paloma was a tiny thing—at times Jesús imagined what they looked like having sex, imagined her body squished under Braulio’s beer gut—but she had a twinkle in her eye when she smiled, and men paid attention to her. She wasn’t Jesús’s type, but he could see why Braulio was sweet on her.

  Jesús was seeing a bleached-blond whore named Coquis, who lived in Colonia Anapro. She got off on rough sex, no frills, no foreplay or the games Jesús liked. Just changing positions wasn’t enough for him; he liked to tie her up, spank her ass, slap her in the face. Once, when he had gotten drunk and stoned, he bit her in the neck until she bled. That frightened her. He tried to explain that when he was totally into it the limits simply disappeared. Didn’t she want him to be fully hers? Complete surrender leads to cannibalistic urges: the need to scratch, to hear her cry out in pain that was also pleasure. But Coquis couldn’t be persuaded.

  María Luisa wasn’t on his mind much these days, these weeks. Sometimes he wondered what Father Joe was up to. One of these days he’d figure out a way to get a message to him, let him know that things were fine.

  He didn’t bother showing up at the body shop anymore now that he was working as Braulio’s personal assistant. He was his driver, his bodyguard, and his errand boy. He watched sports on television during his spare time: wrestling, baseball, American football.

  He liked to stand in front of the living-room window, above the patio, and gaze out at the dusty trees lining the sidewalk. He could feel a kind of energy building up inside, fighting for a way out, some sort of a release.

  One night when Coquis slept over, he snuck out of bed and rummaged around in his closet looking for his Mil Máscaras mask. He located it and put it on, then climbed back into bed and pounced on her, tearing at her clothes in a sudden rage. Dazed and still half-asleep, she screamed at him: What did he think he was doing? What the hell was going on? Nothing, puta. He struck her hard and grabbed her ass, penetrating her with force. Coquis wasn’t aroused and it burned. She reacted by biting him in the hand. He brought his hand to his mouth.

  “What the fuck is wrong with you? It’s me, Jesús, for Christ’s sake.”

  Maybe he should pull his knife on her. The Landslide incident was still fresh in his mind, how he got rid of that Victoria bitch feeling power-drunk, his blood hot and racing hard throughout his body. And that other puta from The California, what the fuck was her name? Lucy, Suzy . . . Yeah, Suzy! He needed that high again. Las mujeres. All just a bunch of bitches, like his sister. They’ll see, he’ll put them all in their place.

  Coquis caught her breath while Jesús rustled through his drawers looking for something to alleviate the pain. She gathered her clothes and ran out of the room as fast as she could. On her way out she shouted, “Don’t you ever come looking for me you fucking piece of shit.”

  Braulio wanted to send him on another job. A Ford Explorer was waiting to be picked up in Smithsville. The Explorers were brand-new and in high demand now; Broncos were yesterday’s lunch.

  He agreed to do it. At least it would get him out of Juárez for a few days.

  Back on the train, in a boxcar carrying metal containers that stank of piss, he felt that high again, the dizzy freedom that comes from being on the move. He realized he was rolling t
oward a bright future. He had his lucky gray blazer on, hadn’t changed a thing about it from the time he bought it, not even the little cardboard price tag, which still hung from one of the pockets.

  The train passed through tiny, two-bit towns without even a station, and broad, dry fields with tractors and little white and yellow dots scurrying behind cows, leaning over and bending toward the ground to pick up—what? At sunset he started to get excited. The darkness was embracing him, stroking him. Soon the train would slow down as it approached the next station and he’d use his power again. Because now he was convinced that someone or something was protecting him and nothing bad was ever going to happen to him.

  There was a wagon check in El Paso again, though he wasn’t concerned yet that this recurring scene had turned into a routine. The agent didn’t bring dogs with him this time, but Jesús still felt the thrill of having the Migra approach to within a meter of where he was lying on the boxcar floor. The agent mumbled something in English when his eyes detected Jesús, probably cursed at him, and the dirty guard continued on his rounds.

  He wished he’d brought something to eat. All he had in his pocket was a pack of M&Ms and two Snickers bars. There were still a few more hours to go before he got to his destination, and he was famished.