14 October
Ambassador Senator Morrow died in his sleep while his wife was playing golf. All the newspapers are about him, Best friend of Mexico. His daughter’s husband is Charles Lindbergh, so he only has to wave his cap at the crowd and everyone cheers, or mourns. Mother says she had that ambassador pegged from the start: the type to love his wife and die young. She’s sore because P. T. did not produce the cash after all.
26 October, luna de octubre
Some of the boys at work say the Painter is going away again. Señor Alva says they want to make a big show of his paintings in a museum in New York. But his paintings are on the walls of Mexico. How could they leave here?
12 November
He’s gone. He took Señor Alva with him. In the forgotten white land at the bottom of our wall, the eagle has no cactus, no snake for his lunch, he can’t find home. The story of Mexico waits for its beginning.
PART 2
Washington, D.C.
1932–1934
(VB)
1 January 1932
For a son on the wrong track, Mother has found a different set of rails and packed him off on them. Lock, stock, and barrel, she said with a raised glass. Describing a firearm in its entirety.
This train runs north from the city. At the little struggling desert towns, children run alongside, reaching toward the windows. Then come the rocky flatlands where the towns give up altogether. Spiked maguey plants reach out of the ground like hands. A great clawed creature trapped underground. At evening, the light drained and the land went from brown to umber, then dried blood, then ink. In the morning the pigments reversed, the same colors rising out of a broad, flat land that looks like a mural.
This compartment has one other person, an American named Green who got on at Huichapan. Not old, but he stares out the window like an old person, rocking in rhythm with the suitcases over his head and water in a glass in his hand. He sips a little every hour, as if it’s the last water on earth. Overnight some flames appeared in the distance, each standing alone like a candle. Oil wells, burning to remove the gases.
Last night the conductor came through to say we were three hours from the border and it was twelve o’clock; his privilege was to wish us a prosperous New Year. He moved down the car repeating the same news and the same privileged wish.
Happy new year, Mr. Green.
Just before the border were pecan orchards, dark blocks of trees with their boughs half bright and half shadowed, lit by the electric lights of the shelleries. People working there in the dead of night, New Year’s morning. The train sighed and stopped at the border, waiting for the customs agents to arrive at their offices. The whitening sky showed a thin stretch of river with dogs skulking along its shores, their up-curved tails reflected on the gray surface. The riverbank is a dumping ground: planks and metal, flaps of tarred paper. At daybreak children began walking from the scrap piles, not a dumping ground after all but a terrible kind of city. Women came out of the shacks too, and last the men, straightening to unfold themselves, placing both hands against their backs, shifting their trousers and pissing in the ditches. Squatting to splash their faces at the river’s edge.
Old men thin as bones walked along the stopped train, looking in the windows. They lingered at the rear until police came with sticks to beat them away from the iron-sided cars. These people look as poor as could ever be, worse than the beggars and borrachos of Mexico City, who at least always have a ballad of the Revolution to sing into their shirt collars as they lean on a doorway. Here is the end of Mexico, end of the world and Chapter One. This train ride is like the long, narrow cave in the sea. With luck it might open on the other side into someplace new. But not here.
6 January
Five days and the train has passed through many underworlds. Grass hills, dark swamps of standing trees. And now, almost nothing but fields of dead sticks, immense as the sea. Not a green leaf anywhere. The gringos read magazines, failing to notice their world has nothing left alive in it. Only the Mexicans look out the windows and worry. A woman and four children are the only others who have come this same unimaginable distance, from Mexico City. Today when the train crossed a bridge over a high river gorge, she made the children sing for the Feast of the Kings so they wouldn’t cry. She took a rosca cake from her bag, crumbling out of its paper wrappings into the worn velvet seats. The family huddled together, locking their small holiday from the inside.
7 January: Federal District of North America
Lock, stock, and barrel the human cargo arrived today at Union Station, delivered into such fierce cold, stepping off the train felt like being thrown into water and commanded to breathe it. The Mexican mother reached her little foot down from the doorway like the feeler of a snail. The freezing air set her to panic, rolling her children up in shawls like tamales, pushing them ahead of her into the station, adios.
Would he be here? And if not? Mother had suggested no other plan, if the father should fail to arrive and claim his baggage. But now here he was: a painful clap on the shoulder, the blue eyes measuring, how strange, a relative with pale eyes. Who could have picked that one, from just the one tinted photograph? Of course, he must have been experiencing similar disappointments in the son. “Your train was an hour late.”
“Sorry, sir.” Ragtag boys rushed past like pigeons flushed from the bush, coshing people’s suitcases into their knees.
“A bunch of little tramps on the rods,” he said.
“On the rods?”
“They ride into town on the outside of the train.”
The cold was killing, every breath prickling into needles of nostril-ice. And clothes itching like mange after so many days. People in long coats, the howling steam engines. Finally it dawned, what he’d said: these ragged boys rode outside the train. Dios mio. “Where will they go now?”
“Bunk on their ears in some hobo jungle. Or else they’ll go listen to the Christers. Accept the Lord for one night in exchange for a mulligan.”
“Is mulligan a kind of money?”
His laugh was a loud burst, like notes exploding from a mariachi trumpet. He was amused by this empty bank of bewilderment, his son. The inside of the station was like the cathedral: so much space overhead, a great dome rising toward heaven, but not enough room down here for all the people jammed in. A grand marble doorway opened to the street, but outdoors the sun was cold, shining without heat, like an electric bulb. Crowds hurried along, unconcerned their star had no fire.