It wasn’t until several weeks later that Rob reminded him about the suburbs and slavery. They were in the park, eating roast chicken at the picnic that the neighborhood school’s parents association had organized to celebrate the start of the new school year. As always, the early September heat made it impossible to think clearly, and so killed any appetite for conversation he might otherwise have had. Each picnicker balanced a paper plate and plastic cup in one hand while trying to eat with the other.
What you said about slavery and the suburbs seems like a generalization to me, Rob said to him. At first he didn’t understand what he was talking about; when his neighbor reminded him about the day he’d borrowed the lawnmower he tried to explain himself: It just seemed to me that white people have taken refuge in the outskirts of the cities to build themselves a world where there’s no difference between themselves and the descendants of the people they kidnapped in Africa to work for them for free. In the suburbs, everything is sweet, middle class, and homogenous. Out here the original sin of slavery doesn’t count; every little white house with its yard is an Ark of the Covenant. Rob put down his chicken leg on the paper plate and wiped his mouth on the sleeve of his T-shirt. He said: Although you’re an American now, your grandparents weren’t slave owners, mine weren’t either; they were Quakers, from Pennsylvania; I moved to the suburbs because the public schools are good and I couldn’t afford the tuition for a private school in the city. He shrugged his shoulders and thought that despite what everybody else thinks, gringos aren’t so simple: they prefer never to commit themselves to any particular position. He told himself, as he did whenever he was having a hard time at the Bank: The essential thing for surviving in this country is to never say what you’re thinking and then do whatever it is you feel like doing. He decided to act accordingly, so he held up his chicken breast and asked Rob what he thought about how the Orioles were doing. I’m not done yet, his neighbor told him: The other thing is, you’re not white. Yes, I’m white. No, you’re not. And you aren’t black. You’re Latino. I’m Mexican. Not anymore. You’re Latino now. Slavery is none of your business and you’ve got nothing to say about it.
THERAPY: CHINA
I was born in Ciudad Satélite, a suburb of Mexico City, which doesn’t in the least resemble what you folks call suburbia: for one thing, it’s highly urbanized, and it actually has fewer trees than you find in the capital.
Although the continuity between Mexico City—el Distrito Federal—and Ciudad Satélite is never interrupted geographically, the two areas are completely different, because Satélite, like Washington, D.C., is a preplanned community, one designed with vaguely utopian ambitions, the product of a shady real estate deal.
Of course it is. Read your American history: having retired to his Virginia plantation, General Washington decided to resolve the dispute over where to build the capital, placing it next to the village of Georgetown, in Maryland, where his brother-in-law had a swamp for sale. He bought it for a song and sold it for a fortune to the federal government, which was then headed by his soul mate, President Jefferson. Then the two bastards, quite proud of themselves, their pockets stuffed with dollars, went to see John Adams inaugurated in the brand new city that, on top of it all, was named after the general. Well, that would even make them blush in Ciudad Satélite.
Anyway, I was born and raised in Ciudad Satélite. I went to school there, my girlfriends were from there; that’s where I shopped at the supermarket and went to the movies.
Mexico City, which I didn’t start to get to know until I went to university, always seemed wild, complicated, and snobbish to me, so I never suffered the excessive identification with my native soil that residents of the capital have. I visited Disneyland for the first time when I was six years old, and when my father’s business was going well we took trips to Brownsville where we bought everything we had in our house. I never owned one single LP with songs in Spanish — in Ciudad Satélite listening to Mexican music was for servants — and I didn’t know until I was twenty years old that there were movies in other languages than English; at the neighborhood video store the Mexican movies were catalogued in the Foreign Films section, alongside ones by Fellini or Kurosawa. I spent fifth grade as an exchange student at a school in New Orleans, and my MBA is recognized by Harvard but not by the Universidad Nacional in Mexico.
The United States was always familiar territory for me and I always thought it was a place very similar to Mexico, except better. Even so, when, as an adult, I moved to Atlanta for my brand new job at AT&T, I had the impression that I’d moved to China or Romania; that’s how little I really understood my new environment. I never got used to life in Georgia. So, as soon as I could, I found a job at the World Bank and moved to Washington, D.C. I’d been told that the East Coast is a little more traditional and laid back, more like Mexico.
On my first weekend in D.C. I drove up to New York City to see an old high school friend who’d been living in the United States for seven or eight years. It didn’t take more than one tequila for me to start telling him about my troubles. He sat there thinking about it for a minute, then said to me: What do you want me to tell you, ’mano? The USA is a country where soccer is a sport for little girls.
SALIVA
Out of all the connections he’d made at the World Bank, that city within a city, Malik was the closest thing he had to a friend. They’d shared a tiny cubicle when he started at the organization, and they developed an open, easygoing working relationship: they chatted at break time, strolled out together for a midmorning coffee, and shared part of the commute home to the suburbs on the Metro. Their conversations always had something of the comic routine in them, which the other employees in the Development Projects office found a little shocking.
The difference between his relationship with Malik and those he had with the rest of his acquaintances at the Bank lay exclusively in what they talked about. Malik had been born in Sri Lanka and raised in Boston. He was intelligent, cultured, progressive, and nobody among the few who knew him understood very well why he worked there. I’ve got four little savages to feed, was the most he offered as an explanation. The extent of his erudition regarding almost everything showed that he was essentially a reader: between the ruckus from his children and his wife’s Hindu relatives, about whose endless visits he never stopped complaining, he must have spent his afternoons and evenings in some armchair in a little white house with a yard and garden, reading up on world culture.
The problem with gringos, Malik said to him one day, is that they don’t know how to make conversation. They share their opinions when they feel authorized to do so, but they don’t know how to sit down and talk about anything just to talk about it, without getting impatient. In Boston I used to live in the Hindu neighborhood, which is really something else, but since I came to the Washington suburbs, I’m like the deaf-mute of Sidon.
He recognized the Biblical sound of this deaf-mute reference, but he preferred not to ask: on a previous occasion when he’d shown his ignorance about Christian tradition, the Sri Lankan had worn himself out laughing at him. He waited until Malik went to the bathroom to make his ablutions — he was notoriously slow about it — to look up the reference on the Internet. He found it in a moment: it came from the Gospel of St. Mark.