The Invention of Exile (20 page)

 • • • 

H
E
WAS
SURPRISED
NOT
to find the three men he'd seen enter. Surely, they'd be standing at the front desk, but they were nowhere to be found. He wondered if he'd half imagined them, when, as he approached the front desk, he heard men's voices in low, secret discussion, the suit sleeve of one of the men now visible through a half-closed door. The man made eye contact with Austin, looked away, and then closed the door. He turned back to the room, a single ceiling fan turning slow and apathetic above the clerk at the reception desk, a Mexican family sitting on wooden chairs lined along the front window. Why had the man looked at him with such a strong gaze, and then shut the door so abruptly? Not a good sign, he thought, as he took a seat beside the family. Not good at all, he thought, sitting on his hands and leaning forward a bit in his chair before sitting back to take a less anxious pose, shoulders pressed into the back of the chair, legs outstretched, one crossed over the other, in repose. A confident posture. Let them open the door and shut it in my face once more, he thought. Let them see me seated here in this way.

 • • • 

“
Y
OU
SAID
MAYBE
A
month, two,” Austin said. He was seated before the Nogales consul, wondering if the man remembered him at all, remembered his Julia and their children. He'd once been considerate, accommodating then, had left them with some hope.

“I make no promises,” he said now, eyes hard.

“You men and your power,” Austin said under his breath. He shook his head and stared out the window.

“Mr. Voronkov, it is not easy with this anarchist charge. You must have patience.”

“It has been two years.”

“Anarchy is taken very seriously, you see.”

“I am not an anarchist. My wife is an American. My children— You see, if I can simply enter the country, I will show them I am not an anarchist. I will—”

“It does not work that way.”

“And what am I to do for them down here?”

“We can petition again, but it takes up to a year.”

“A year?”

“Yes.”

 • • • 

1936.
T
H
E
MEN
IN
white muslin are back. White tunics and pantaloons. A red sash around the waist. Their hats wide and flat. He sees them once every month or so. They pass by his barracks house sometimes in groups of three or five. They stare at him, smoldering gazes, accusatory and patient, as if they knew a secret about him.

He'd been thinking hard, running through a pattern of an idea, the position of the hoist chain for the cement block lifter, his thoughts wandering off to his boys and his baby girl,
be good to your mother
. Telepathy. They might even be able to hear him. Did they remember the sound of his voice? “Papa's funny accent,” they always used to tease him. And he'd been working all that morning, three hours or more spent at the desk he'd built for Julia, trying a new idea from all angles so that he'd run out of the last bit of paper and was forced to go out to the company store. How much he did not like to venture out on a weekend when the mining barracks were more desolate and empty than during the week. Chalk days is what they were, brittle and breaking—it was running smack into their absence and it hurt and stung like any lash of a whip he'd ever felt. And he'd run into one of the men in muslin. Hard, cold stares and silence. “What do you want from me?” he'd asked the man, and then walked away, onward toward his house.

Now, he is watching them cross in front of his barracks house, slow strides, two front, three behind. They never speak to him. Just stare. Not a blink of eye or movement of head. Nothing. He steps out on the porch, better to let them know he knows they are watching. He walks down the steps and makes as if he's mending the railing that lines the porch. Best not to let them wonder at what he might be doing inside, let them think he is a man with a house to attend to, fixing the loose boards. With his hammer he begins to knock on one of the wooden railings. Will they see that there is no nail? They watch him for what seems an hour, but it could be only five minutes. Or is it? He is hammering, sweating.

He stands tall, arching his back, and runs his palm along the banister. “Shit,” he yells and looks into his palm where a long splinter the length of a needle has lodged itself into his thumb. The men are still watching. He can see them out of the corner of his eyes and all it took was one man to enter his rooms, hold a rifle to his chest and demand his papers, his inventions, taking his notebooks. His hand is throbbing, but he will not let go of his grip on the banister, he will show them that he is simply a man working on his house. When he turns around the men are small as toys, far up into the hills, hardly visible save for their shadows, which stretch sideways on the ground.

Cananea, 1936

Dear Julia,

How I do miss all of you dearly—my wife and children. When I think of the good times we had. I can only hope for a future when we are all together. I am working, and thank goodness for that—I have my work. Without it I do feel these hours would seem useless for I must say this is a lonely place. I know not a soul. All are strangers to me, and for a man like myself—rather peaceful and calm of nature—it is not easy for me to always face people I do not know whose customs are so different. I am afraid that I spend my time in the barracks house, working on my inventions. I do have a wonderful new invention—a stationary hydro-propeller for steamships. . . . I have also corresponded with the D.C. patent office. Of course, what will they make of me here in Mexico, but I've explained my situation thoroughly and can only hope they will accept my ideas. If they do, we will all benefit, and mostly you my dear Julia, who I've written on my application as a sole benefactor of any monies earned. We shall see what they write me. And I hope they will accept my oath of a single inventor. Being alone here, I had to sign the witness as God.

 • • • 

A
USTIN
SOON
DEVELOPED
A
series of pastimes for the weekends. He'd wander through the vacant works, closer to the border, not altogether unpleasant at times to walk within the shadow of the machinery at rest, lying quiet and unused, the smell of copper lingering, a screech of metal as wind blew dust into gears. Vultures sat atop the hoist and the cement blocks, and on his walks he stopped to watch them—their sternums pulsing, fast undulating breath.

Other days he ventured farther along the border. He was only one man, and all he need do was walk calmly across it, and continue. One foot in front of the other. All the way across the open expanse like any farmer surveying his land, and he'd walk not parallel to the border as his pathways took him now, but perpendicular, a simple repositioning of the body. And he would stumble upon a town, and as long as he spoke to very few, he would then walk to the next one over, and the one after that before finding water and food, and maybe he would take a situation, an odd job or two—fix car engines. He would save enough for a rail ticket—he would need $25 for the ticket, a month or two of work. No more. His hopes lifted like a small prop plane along a runway and for a while it was all clear before him—the sky, the ground. The border placard reached knee height and if he kicked it with his boot it would fall down into the dust and brambles. He could see that, he could make sense of it, the openness, but he stood still and before he knew it his mind was wandering down pathways, as he imagined Julia's letters to the congressman and senators, next, his own walks to the consulate, the company store, his meandering along the edge of the border, at the end of each journey, each trip he felt the weight of a heavy door like a tomb. The consulate in Nogales, the patent officers, his ideas, all of them together formed in his mind an impenetrable barrier and he saw it as paper—a clean, white boundary filled with an incriminating fact—he was an anarchist, a threat, a dangerous, subversive element. And then he stood tall, shoulders pressed back, staring out across the border, and for an instant he was back in the cement block cell, hearing the taps through the walls, the men and their questions, an endless barrage that seemed to afflict and wound him, and he felt a terrible shudder, a quaking at the exposure, alone. He cowered back, ashamed and broken, and when he could look no more, he crouched on the ground to bury his head in his hands.

He wept, his eyes blinded by the tears. He tugged at the ends of his hair. The dirt scratched at his ankles, and the dust stuck to his damp, sweaty forehead, soon to pour down his brow and neck. The beads of sweat formed along his back, tears rolled down his face, and his heart felt dry and parched with anguish as he felt something break, a deep terrible split, like a tendon torn, his heart beating faster, a sinking feeling as if he were falling from a great height, though when he looked he knew he was on the ground, and the tearing pulled and stretched and, as much as he tried to throw himself across, he felt it all fall away from him.

A truck passed, its wheels kicking up dust in clouds of misty sparkle. Austin rose, placed his hat on his head and turned to face the road two yards from the border. The truck windows were down and someone had a radio on, the static and scratch like tangled twigs of a bird's nest. A man's voice was booming through the static. The words were in Spanish or maybe not. It was hard to tell through the interference, not on the right frequency, something off there, he thought. The voice surrounded him, in an accusatory tone, but he was not certain.

The voice trailed off into buzz and noise and then the truck sped farther off. The sun overhead was hot and bright. His jaw locked tight, his eyes watering slightly, and a stillness came over him, nearly paralyzed. His heart raced. He pivoted to look behind him, took in the horizon on all sides, the white sky above him, and the sun temporarily blinded him so that he saw blackness and then red and then light. He closed his eyes, feeling a vertigo. He stumbled, breathing hard and trying to relax his mind, struggling to gain a foothold as he opened his eyes to see the horizon slanted on an angle, tilting, as if the earth had been momentarily jarred off its axis and then back again.

The man stood twenty yards from him, a dark shadow underfoot. The sun reflected off the man's watch, the sheen of his polished shoes. He did not know where the man came from, and the barracks and the mines were a far ways off from where he stood at this lone, abandoned border placard, though he knew about the patrols—the border agents, the FBI, the Mexican police, even the Soviet agents were here. He looked behind him and across the border placard, searching for any sign of a car or truck, for any others, a horse even. Nothing. The man did not move, simply stared at Austin, and then he began to open and close his mouth, but Austin could only hear a kind of roaring tumult and then a piercing ringing, his heart seemed to flex as if it were a hand opening and closing within his chest. The man took a step toward Austin, then another, still his mouth was moving, but Austin could not make out what the man was saying. He tried to steady himself with the now-still line of the horizon. When he turned back, the man was flanked by others, they held their bayonets in dirty, rough hands, five of them in all, their bast boots in rags. One was holding a cigarette between lips, Siberian blue eyes like his own, a sapphire now dulled to white gray, and beyond them in the hills the red flags were in wait. He looked to the border and then back again. The men were gone. Austin was left alone.

 • • • 

T
HE
MINE
CLOSED
IN
1937—the depression's victim. He heard about work for the electric company in Mexico City. They needed engineers to inspect the machines. They'd take him without any working papers. He would get a recommendation from the Anaconda company, continue his case with the more senior consulate in Mexico City, and lose himself, find safety, in the balm of the city's anonymity.

 • • • 

1948

S
HE
STANDS
BEFORE
THE
French doors that lead from the bedroom to the balcony. The olive green curtains are drawn, the sun lining the edges like a frame. She is up before the others. She draws her poppy red robe tight around her waist, placing her hand on the doorknob, cool to the touch. She winces and draws in her stomach as she turns the brass handle. It makes such a loud noise upon opening and she fears waking anyone in this house full of people she hardly knows. Best to simply get it over with in one swift thrust. The light grazes her chestnut curled hair, pouring into the room in one long diagonal. She slips out onto the lip of the balcony that overlooks Avenida Amsterdam, drawing the door closed behind her.

It is a warm May morning. She blinks in the brightness. The wrought iron railing is cast in shadow along the red flagstone floor of the balcony. She leans back against the doors, her shoulder blades pressing into the glass. She places the arch of her bare foot on the lower rung of the railing, dragging it back a little so that her toes curve into the iron, cold still from the night. She pulls her cigarettes from the deep side pocket of her robe. She lights up, the smoke mixing with the air. Leaves lie scattered across the street and sidewalks like pencil shavings.

Like at home, it is here on mornings like this, in the quiet and stillness before the day begins, that she loses herself in memory. She stares down the line of windows—watery and watchful—so much like the many years that had piled up now to bring her back to Mexico. Sometimes, when she was younger and walking with her mother, she'd catch a profile, a sudden flick of a match to light a cigarette that would cause in her a reverberation, the shudder of remembrance—at first a cool memory of far distant happiness and then a burning longing. Sometimes she would keep the moment, freeze it for a pleasurable, lolling few seconds, pretending that the man was her father, and that he was merely out in the city, at work, or away on a business trip, soon to be on his way back to her and the family. She is ashamed that she does this still. After so many years. She is older now. No longer that eight-year-old with such girlhood longings. No longer she who had once—and still in the way she recounts it—been his baby girl.

She thinks again of her father. She is worried about who and what she might find. The letters he sent home always left everyone feeling guilty and sad. They were sometimes loving, sometimes angry and questioning. Why had no one come to visit him? How could they ever explain the truth? “He'd die of shame,” her mother always said. They were forbidden to let him know how much they were struggling, with barely enough money to eat, never mind an extravagance like train tickets. But to live knowing he felt abandoned? Oh, it was a futile situation. She ached to think of it even now, now that she was here, really here—in Mexico City in search of her father.

These thoughts are only a few stolen moments of reflection before she will go back inside, and prepare for the day ahead. She hesitates and then tosses her cigarette off the balcony, her gaze tracing the arc of its fall.

 • • • 

H
ER
ACCEPTANCE
INTO
the
work exchange program came with Spanish lessons and the promise of secure employment as either a receptionist, if you knew how to operate the phone keyboards, or a secretary, if you could type forty words per minute. She knew how to do both, but lied on her application, knowing she'd need to use work hours to type—letters to her mother, letters to the U.S. Embassy. She sat now in the low-ceilinged, fluorescent-lit office. A phone beside her. A slate-blue desk rimmed in silver chrome with a speckled sky-blue surface held a black typewriter and, next to that, the previous girl's dictation pad set askew as if she'd left in a hurry. Vera flipped through the notepad, recognizing the shorthand. Of all the crucial things she needed to accomplish in this city, it seemed so unfortunate to her that she had to sit still at a desk, answer phone calls, type correspondence, take dictation, and cater to colleagues who, she knew, would come and go in a confusing bluster of cologne and cigar smoke. She'd be working for a Mr. Davies, whom she'd not met yet and who appeared not to be in the office. The main office door was closed and no coat or hat rested on the coat stand.

While she waited, she made lists. Lists of letters she needed to write—to her mother, first; postcards she needed to buy; errands to run (the post office, the bank, the market, she needed one of those brightly colored straw bags she saw all the women carrying in the
puestos
); and then there were the lists of the sites she'd like to visit—Palacio Nacional, the museum, Chapultepec, Coyoacán. There were her obligations to her hosts, the Zaragozas, too, incorporated as she'd become into their family activities, though more and more feeling as if her presence merely meant an excuse for them to have a party. Add to this whatever she might need to do for her father—find him first, speak to lawyers, if she could, embassy officials, or maybe the Mexican authorities to see if his years in Mexico would amount to any rights as a Mexican citizen, gather the letters she'd taken from home, the one her mother wrote, too, and see what she might be able to do. She looked at her list—or several lists. Each scrawled across a different part of the page. They each represented some fraction of her very self and she was overwhelmed to see such stark contrasts spelled out before her.

The irony of her new employment was not lost on her. A little absurd really. She surveyed the various forms on the little desktop set of shelves to her right. Forms for duties and taxes, country of origin and country of destination, embarkment and landing. She felt the tragic comedy in the fact that she would spend most of her days here ensuring the safe passage of fruits, clocks, guitars back and forth across the border, but not her father. If she thought too much about it she knew tension would grow, turning to tears, and, well, she'd be no use to anyone in that state—no use to Mr. Davies, the Zaragozas, her father, and least of all her mother. No. Best not read too much into it for she'd have to keep herself together as if she were made up of a fine network of strings, calibrated and tuned with just the right tautness and tension. Too much strain and she'd snap.

 • • • 

S
UDDENLY
,
THE
DOOR
BURST
open and in sauntered a tall lanky man who stood as if on a tennis court. A bounce to his stance. His straw-colored hair swirling to the left and combed down on the right. He bounded into the room, leaning on her desk, hands splayed.

“It's a straightforward and simple process,” he began without introduction, noting she had been surveying the forms. “For each import, you use the light blue one here,” he said, pointing to the pile of light blue forms to his left. His thin, long fingers seemed to match his long limbs. “For export, you use the pink ones here. Fill out all the information required, place the completed forms on my desk. I sign. You mail off and we're done.”

“Yes. I understand,” Vera said.

“What else? I'll need you to answer the phones, of course. Take dictation. All that sort of thing, which I assume you know how to do?”

“Yes, of course.”

“Good then,” he said, and disappeared into his office with the same abruptness with which he'd entered.

The morning went by with Mr. Davies making a few outings, asking her to fill out some forms before he left and then a series of phone calls for which she took messages. She cleaned out some of the desk drawers and reorganized the papers and notebook on top of her desk. On her lunch break, when she could be sure the office was quiet, she took the time and privacy to write to her father. If he did receive her first letter, sent General Delivery to the post office, then he must know that she was now in the city. She would write to him again. She would schedule a meeting and then what? She'd no idea. She'd only ever known him as a young girl, and through his letters, and those much more directed to her mother. As the years continued, they grew more distant, formal and as if written by a stranger. How odd to think of him as that—a near stranger. She was learning the possibility of, the power of, contradiction; one could have a fundamental connection—father, daughter—but still be two mere strangers.

She sat at the typewriter. Its rounded metal keys more cumbersome than the machine she'd learned on back home. She pulled out a piece of stationery paper from the top drawer of her desk and began.
Dear Father, I've arrived in Mexico City.

After a few mistyped words, going back with the delete key and typing over the misspelled letter, she was able to continue with few mistakes, detailing her trip, the state of her mother, how her brother would be arriving in a few weeks' time, on account of the fact that he'd finished his service work and was able to study in Mexico City on the G.I. Bill.
Your son a member of the U.S. Navy!
, she'd typed with an exclamation point. She'd gotten halfway through typing the letter when she'd realized it was ridiculous to be writing in such detail when she'd be able to tell him all of it in person. Was that not the very reason for her visit anyway? She laughed at herself, tugging the paper from the roll. She began again. She would not go all astray. She'd stick to the point of her letter—to secure a date, time, and place to meet. She would not clutter it up with details, and when she'd finished and reread it, she was concerned about the tone, thought it sounded much too brusque, formal, and, due to its brevity and directness, cold. But it would have to do. Lunch break was over. This is what she wrote:

Dear Father,

I've arrived in Mexico City. I'd like to meet at Sanborns in the historic center. 6:00 pm on Thursday, after my work hours. Please do come and meet me there.

Love,

Vera

 • • • 

S
H
E
WALKED
THROUGH
THE
shadows cast by the street's wrought iron railings, fitting her feet within the coiled squares of their Greek eternity symbol design. Her day began again, though only Vera knew this, slipping away from work and delaying her return to the Zaragoza family so that she could meet her father and begin what she knew was sure to be a laborious process of getting him home.

She counted out her steps as she walked—fast and chin tucked. Her new straw bag hung heavy off her shoulder, her market purchases from the morning pressed into her hip bone.

 • • • 

S
ANBORNS
. 6:00
P.M
.
Casa
de los Azulejos, the House of Tiles. The street noise and pedestrian traffic faded as she walked into the now louder din of the restaurant. The inside coolness. A break from the dry and dusty streets. She looked at her shoes and was surprised to see how much dust had gathered on her otherwise black, polished, T-strap heels. She looked around, but in searching realized she might not recognize him. Of course, he'd sent some photographs home, but the last one she'd seen was five years ago. Would she recognize him? Would she be able to pick out her own father in this city of what seemed to her millions, narrow it down to here, at this moment, amid the overcrowded clatter of Sanborns? All the tables of tourists, mostly Americans, she could hear that from the language, though Mexicans were here too she saw as she let her gaze draw arcs back and forth over the main dining area.

She knew it was him in an instant. The full mop of charcoal, nearly white hair. The rather thin figure, hunched over his cup of coffee. His gaze rising every few seconds in a way one knew that he was waiting for someone. He sat back in his chair for a moment and then leaned forward again, shoulders drawn into his small frame. She took a breath, pulled herself up and walked straight to his table, her hands falling onto the tabletop, dropping her bag, and saying with more emotion than she'd realized,

“Father, it's me, Vera. It's Vera.” Her cheeks hurt she was smiling so hard, barely realizing his own reaction—a little stunned, a little confused. He opened and closed his eyes in a way that seemed to blink back tears. He rose and smiled, grasped her hands, and then they embraced. She could feel how slim he was, not the robust, thick-necked man she'd always thought of as her father. But he was still tall, taller than she, and that somehow gave her comfort. The years may have diminished his strength and width, but not his height. He sat back down and extended his hand in a gesture for her to sit. She did so, sitting across from him and smiling what she knew was her brightest smile. Then began an odd period she would only later be able to define as her father's shock. She watched his face, his eyes still with that blinking, glazed-over sheen. He placed his hands on the table and she saw that they were dirty. Dirt under the fingernails, grease maybe, she thought. Calloused and dry too. He had a deep gouge across the fleshy part of the back of his right hand. She imagined a razor or barbed wire had done that. But her eyes were drawn to his thumb, smashed in, crushed beneath the nail bed, and the nail itself a deep purple. He noticed that she'd seen and Vera looked away from his hands, but it was too late. She flushed and felt a triple shame—that he'd caught her staring, from her own sense of remorse, and finally the sudden fear that she'd offended him. Oh, dear, poor father, she thought, but then tried to change her expression lest he think she pitied him. If she knew one thing from her mother, he did have a kind of pride. “Stubborn, just like Vera,” her mother always said. But he could not speak. He kept looking down at the silverware. Back up to her. She was now conscious of the people next to them staring at the odd exchange. His eyes were so blue. As blue as Leo's. The gestures too, just like her brother's—the furrowed brow, the slight squint to the eyes, even the way he brought his hand up to his hair, rubbed his nose. This was her father.
Solemn.
It was the first word that came to her mind. In the blue eyes, sometimes frantic, searching. A handsome, if worn face, she thought. She wanted him to speak, but she felt she had to contain herself, not throw too much at him at once. He seemed able to process little bits at a time and this frightened her as much as he seemed frightened, overwhelmed himself. Finally, he began.