The Invention of Exile

by Vanessa Manko

  He is grateful to see the ocean, a half circle of turquoise, the horizon beyond a swath of white and a fine, deeper blue like an outline. The late-day sun causes the water to flicker white, scalloped as if by white wings. He looks out upon the place where the very circle of his life began, or straight path, or whatever geometry it would come to be, and he casts himself back to here—to Mazatlán—hoping to have some sense of recognition. One should know, he’d always felt, become intimately acquainted with, the place of one’s birth. He tries to recall a memory, any memories of this place.

  He picks a leaf from the bushes and drops it into his pocket. Later, he’ll place it in his notebook and he’ll write out beneath it, “First sighting of the Pacific in Mazatlán, Mexico. 1948.”

  • • •

  THEY DECIDE TO STOP for food and a chance to stretch limbs. They will spend one night here, waking early to continue toward the border. Like all sea towns, the town itself, at midday, is deserted. It is lonely driving through the silent streets. Vera feels an eagerness to abandon all the metal and glass of the car for the salt air. As if he’d precipitated her thoughts, Leo veers off the back street, sidling up along the crumbling sidewalk.

  Vera adapts. She can already see how this town works—its rhythm and colors. While on first impression the old city seems empty, devoid of motion, the activity of the town takes place in the shade, making it difficult to discern. Is a store open or closed? Is a restaurant serving food or does it sit abandoned? Has it been inoperative for one year or ten? But slowly, nearly imperceptibly, movement begins. In fact, it had always been there, and now, readjusting her focus she can see, in the shaded areas—beneath awnings that line the square forming strips of gray, blue—a dog’s tail wagging, a white-aproned waiter removing glasses from a just-vacated table, the flutter of a green parakeet’s anxious wings. A long line of old men sit against the ochre-colored façade of a tobacco shop. They are like a daisy chain of paper dolls, every third one with a cane. The old men stare at the three newcomers. It is perhaps the most excitement they have witnessed in some time, Vera imagines. She smiles at them. One responds with a nod of his head. The others sit motionless, save for a yawn, a hand swept thoughtlessly across a brow, canes tapping in a waltz rhythm—just because.

  They are walking across the plaza. Leo falls behind.

  “Are we idiots?” he yells out.

  “What?”

  “Only Englishmen and mad dogs—”

  “It’s better than being in that car.”

  Nearing the ocean, Vera hears the crashing waves. She walks slower here. Gone are the furious, furtive steps of her Mexico City self.

  The real life of the town takes place on a meandering strip of boardwalk, the malecón, which, like the sand, rocks, and waves, traces the curves of the coastline. By noon the fishermen’s day is long over. Their boats strewn like the used crayons of reckless children—spent and worn wood of primary colors. Red, blue. The fish is now in the stalls—bull fish, shrimp. Gruff fishermen sit hunched over the work of mending—reweaving the frayed and broken ropes of their fishing nets. Vera likes the names of the fishing boats. Some are women’s names—Ibari. There are other names: El Faro del Sur, Vamanos, Sal Marina, Sand, Pearl.

  • • •

  AUSTIN, VERA, AND LEO eat sandwiches they purchased from a stall on the sidewalk. They eat in silence. Austin knew the lighthouse was down the malecón and up the hill. Within walking distance. They’d pass right by it. But he didn’t want to bring attention to this fact, didn’t want to tell them. The scent of the salt and sea air is like a burning. A trace of sulfur too makes him think of grief, thick and briny. He feels like a ghost here on this coast, looking upon a fragment of his life that should no longer be disturbed. Like a sleeping lion. Julia’s presence like sunlight. One couldn’t get away from it. He had dragged her across half the world, for what? The few years of peace in that lighthouse? Perhaps that was all they were meant to have? He shouldn’t be here. He’ll never return, he knows.

  To hear the waves hit the shore in their constant, unrelenting pulse reminds him of the drive ahead. He wonders how he will sleep, knowing what awaits him the next day. Could it really be that he need only step across? Step across and simply return and all the inventions, struggles, patent letters, trips to the embassy, post office, walks in parks—all of it, the years of separation spent in effort to return, all the empty years, one strung to the next in a chain of worn-out hours, a solitude abated by a simple triangle of boardinghouse, post office, embassy, drafting papers and designs, lines drawn and erased, tequila downed and bottles discarded—all of it could end? He wonders at that: end. He feels as if he’s peering deep, looking at some image hidden within one of the cards that doctor had shown him, and suddenly, here stood, here emerged, the thing, the truth, and he fights to hold it clear in front of him, examining it, turning it over, before it goes back down and hides within the rest of the ink blot—there, there. Without it, without that fight to rail against something, what would fill his days, who would he be, what purpose would his life have served?

  He wonders if his clothes might still hang in the closet. He’d imagined them one hundred times or more. Was the image to Julia like a dead man’s clothes? On narrow hangers. Had she kept them? One shirt, maybe? In his imaginings, when he does dare to think of standing before her once again, he can only see himself seated at a table with a single glass of water placed before him, Julia standing in the doorway watching. The wood is dark, walnut wood. A strip of lace cuts the table in two. And there are, he imagines, candles. Beeswax yellow. They are lit and dripping wax onto the lace, on what might be, he thinks, a quiet, cold Sunday at 4 P.M. The soft sound of cars beyond the window, the sun reflecting off a windshield might cause a ripple of light across the table or ceiling corner. They watch it come and then fade as if someone else had walked into the room and turned the corner down the hallway. A glass of water. That’s what he envisions. She would set the glass of water before him and stand in the doorway, watching him perform a simple enough act, drinking a glass of water. No ice. And he sees himself sitting before it, watching the way the glass and water distort the tablecloth and table and, when he holds it, his fingertips. And perhaps the glass is of fake, cut crystal so that the water reflects colors like a prism and he would drink the water and set the glass down, and she would fill the empty glass and return it and they would repeat this until one of them said a word, except the problem was that he could not think of what either would say to the other.

  Tears had rolled down his cheeks, a steady stream. He had not even known he was crying.

  • • •

  IN THE EARLY MORNING as they drive from the state of Sinaloa to Sonora, they pass a sign that reads, “Why leave? You’ll come back.” They pass it in silence.

  If it works, he’d complete the circle. In this final arc—one that would cut through Sonora, Arizona, New Mexico, the upper part of Texas, onward, to meet what was now the tip of the crescent, or sickle. Life’s geometries. These patterns that can shape one’s experience, that are perhaps set into place long before we have a chance to redraw our own boundaries, life lines, engineer, assemble, invent our own geometries.

  The car moves beneath him, and he likes the steady hum of the motor, the breeze mild, gentle warmth along his eyelids, with his forearm out the window in the sun. The anticipation of what is to come still far distant, even if only one mile, two as they near the state of Sonora.

  • • •

  NOGALES.

  “Has the place changed?” Leo asks. “It’s been what, over ten years since you’ve been back here?”

  “Nothing was here,” Austin says. “Nothing.”

  Cantina Nogales.

  The main street is bustling, but it is a leisurely, relaxed pace. His father is anything but, though one wouldn’t know it. Leo realizes that he is the kind who gets still, silent when nervous, holds it inside, his heartbeat racing, his body
seemingly calmed, though gripped, he can tell. If Leo were to touch him—an accidental brush of arm against arm, a mistaken nudge of shoulder—he’d jump as if licked by fire.

  The car is moving more slowly. The images flicker past. Buildings of white, blue, yellow. There are new storefronts. Windows, porches filled with copperware—pots, bowls—punched tin stars, serapes, hats, paper flowers in red, pink, orange, and yellow. Men stand slumped under shaded awnings. Some are seated on the short two steps leading to a store entrance. Others lean against a banister, a support beam. Most wear cowboy hats, white or brown. Other faces are shaded by wide-lipped sombreros. He can spot the Americans, the Mexicans. The Indios though—they are in the sun, their market wares spread out on hand-woven tapestries and cloths. Heads turn as they drive slowly past the buildings.

  “There she is. U.S.-Mexican border,” Leo says, pointing. He watches as his father follows his hand. It is the first sign noting the border. A small bronze plaque, the words and images in bas-relief. A line divides the sign in half, two arrows point toward each other symbolizing the two countries, the boundaries or límite.

  Silence. Leo can hear the radio turned low, a man’s deep voice, the rhythm imperceptible. He hears thwacking too and sees a woman beating a rug—red, yellow stripes draped over the banister; clouds of dust billow and sparkle in the sun.

  “I don’t know about anyone else here, but I sure as hell need a drink,” he says.

  • • •

  CANTINA NOGALES. 2:00 P.M.

  “There was a carnival they used to have in Cananea,” Austin says to Leo after they’ve been seated, drinking. Vera, after one drink, decides to go to the market, and, in her absence, Austin begins to talk, share his thoughts—an idea, impression, something he’s trying to articulate.

  “Really?” Leo says.

  “Do you remember?”

  “No.”

  “I don’t expect you to,” Austin says. “We used to take you every night when it was in town. You’d never seen so many lights.” He shakes his head. He looks up to Leo who takes a sip of his beer, looks down and away. “We thought you might be scared, all the lights and music, but no.”

  Austin understands now that Julia was right. How would they all have survived? But still they could’ve gone then, just kept walking out into that darkness until they’d seen some lights, a town in Arizona.

  “Should’ve crossed then,” Austin says out loud.

  “What are you saying?”

  “Just remembering.”

  “You can cross now,” Leo says. “That’s what we’re here for. Listen, Father. They’ll think we’re just American tourists coming back over the border after some rolls of the dice, you know? A night out on the other side—that’s all. We can look like that. Hell, we can smell like that. Or we can just claim we’re renewing our tourist visas. It’s half true. Mesero,” Leo calls over his shoulder, “cerveza.”

  Austin looks at his son, a young man now. A veteran who’d seen the war. His youngest sitting before him, now twenty-one years old. He shakes his head. The waiter sets down two beers. They sit in silence. Somberness descends, or, and this is more true, it dominates—all this talk suddenly seemed a way to feign normalcy. Beer bottles move to lips and fall to the table with a solid click. He wonders what he could offer them all now, almost sixty. What would become of him when he went back? They were no longer children, had managed well enough on their own, at an age when they wanted to, should be able to, strike out, away from their family. He knew it well. He’d crossed an ocean to do it.

  And he’d realized it on the drive here. Some of those views just break one’s heart—such a lovely drive, even the desert, how he’d hated it so in Cananea, but he sees its beauty now. It holds so many of his memories. (One has to love that geography, or at least it should have a significance—not indifference; never that.) And he thinks of the feeling that can come over one when traveling, when one is really speeding onward—eyes closed, half dreaming—and you know, you are certain, that you are moving forward, but somehow the monotony of moving, the velocity, speed, all of it, the slight pressure in the chest, can make you feel like you’re going in the other direction, as if some force were pushing you lightly, gently backward. And you wake up suddenly, disoriented to see that no, you are moving forward, the road rushing alongside of the car at a shockingly fast pace. And it occurred to him somewhere between Hermosillo and Nogales: when he thought of them or of Julia, he saw them as children, two, six, and eight and Julia as twenty-five. He’d never thought of the actuality, of what it would mean to go back. It was not a reclaiming of those years, was it? The ones they’d lived here, that was it. They are not children. And he is no longer thirty years old.

  “Go live the rest of your life. Go live the life that was taken from you,” Leo says.

  It was taken from him. He had a right to reclaim it, he sees that, now, here, but what would he say to Julia? What would it be to behold her? He wishes instead that he could arrive unannounced. He’d like that, prefer it maybe. To spy upon her, maybe slip in unnoticed, acclimate himself to the sounds and scents. Would she recognize him? Maybe not. He could arrive, step into her sphere, open a door for her, pass her among the aisles of the corner store perhaps, or follow her down the sidewalks of Main Street to the nickel movie house, or track her through Beardsley Park. He’d want to see her before he felt the eyes of recognition, or—and this harder to acknowledge—eyes empty and unfeeling, uncertain who he was, a cold unfamiliarity, indifference, and then, perhaps even a shame.

  • • •

  THE BAR IS PROTECTED from the sun by wicker shades and Leo can see the shadow of them along the stucco wall—like lead pencil tracings, hatch marks. The light enters, diffused as if through oilcloth. He has a chill, for inside is cool and it feels good to sit next to the window, warmed by the light. Outside, a truck passes. The tinny music from its radio enters for a moment, lingers, and then leaves. He can hear too the sound of horse hooves, though the horses are not in his sight lines and so he hears only the breathing and the steady, strong, clomping steps along some part of the dirt road. He is tapping his fingers on the table. He is bouncing his leg. Every once in a while he slaps his hand down hard on the table’s surface, which is of striped wood the color of patinaed copper. When he does this it startles all the inhabitants of this small square of being—the bartender, his father seated across from him, the white dog fast asleep in the doorway, the old man seated in the corner who is nearly inanimate, so still, save for his jaw and its incessant chomping.

  The bartender is busy. Leo watches as he takes strips of copper wire from a small pile assembled on the bar like pickup sticks. His thick fingers have a surprising dexterity, bending and twisting the wires into coiled circles and squares, the finished work littered across a piece of cloth. The bartender looks out the front door and Leo turns to the window to see what has caught his attention.

  “Trabajadores migrantes,” the bartender explains.

  “They do this every day?” Leo calls out. The bartender nods. It is a solemn sight, bodies tired. It’s in their faces, eyes drawn, lines at the cheeks, a haggard step even if some are smiling, laughing in their exchanges, others anxious to simply get home, walking with a tired deliberateness and direction. They are dust-covered. It is in their hair. A fine film coating their skin, and their words, Leo imagines, might form over granules of sand.

  “The mass exodus,” Leo says, pointing out the window, his father turns to look as well. The workers are returning from fields and farms in the United States, walking back home. Some on a truck, workers in their chinos cinched at the ankles with rope.

  “See, they do it every day,” Leo says, looking to his father, who is following the workers with his eyes, back and forth, back and forth as the stream continues.

  “Do what?” Austin says.

  “Cross the border.”

  The bartender has turned on the radio.
It crackles and then the music comes on loud. Leo and his father look up, the horns of a corrido blaring, and Leo can make out, in the tone, the voice breaking nearly, a pathos. Revenge for a death perhaps, a stolen first love.

  “Perdón,” the bartender calls. He readjusts the volume to a more palatable level.

  • • •

  VERA CARIES A BUBBLE of a pot, a terra-cotta olla. She bought a straw bag of stripes—vine green, aquamarine, orange, and bougainvillea pink. She is crossing into the shade of the bar’s storefront, nearing the steps, her face no longer burnished by sunlight, feeling the gray and blue, the light at her back now. Her entrance is a flurry. The dog, who has been asleep for what seems like days, sits up and stretches, back legs bent, front legs drawn out before him, standing now to walk, a little reluctantly, though with curiosity, toward Vera who is setting out her purchases on the table before Leo and her father.

  “It’s suddenly like Christmas,” Leo says, offering a nervous laugh. Vera sets down the bowl, a series of string animals. “A chicken, an armadillo, a turtle, a donkey, a horse,” she says, turning each one from side to side before placing it on the table. She is smiling, her father is beaming and picks up each animal and then the smile vanishes.

  “Now we’ll really look like tourists,” she says. “Everything okay here?” she asks, looking first to her father and then to Leo.

  “Fine, fine.”

  “It’s going to be perfectly all right,” Vera says, though she herself is not sure of that and wonders if she sounded even half convincing. She watches her father’s eyes, how they seem to fight now between sorrow and fear and then focus, draw to a still point on his beer bottle, the drink nearly finished. She sits down across from him, grabs Leo’s beer and takes a long sip. Leo motions for another round. The dog has seated himself in front of their table, chin rested on the ground, eyes cast toward Vera. She reaches down to pet him a few quick times on the top of his head, along his neck. He moans and then lets out a sigh.