One of the drunks, Rolando, used to stand by the front fence in his huarache sandals and roar them on, leaning over to clandestinely spit on the one named after the mayor. But when my father came out to watch the episodes, Rolando moved away, sneaked up behind him and either flicked my father’s ear or tweaked his nose, particularly if Obispo Michael was having a hectic day. After the first flicking, Rolando would stare into my father’s face, reach up and pull or flick again. But the tweaking stopped one afternoon when Rolando got drunker than ever before and touched a lit cigarette against a mole on my father’s forearm. My father recoiled, and with his elbow — he said it was accidental — caught Rolando in the mouth. The blow could have been harmless; only, Rolando had rotten gums. Teeth were spat out on the ground. Guilty, my father picked Rolando up from the ground while my grandmother went crazy on the front porch: ‘Animal!’ ‘Pig!’ ‘Leave Rolando alone!’ Rolando settled down in the dust, fingering his mouth. My father shooed my grandmother away, went walking to clear his head, bought a bottle of tequila for Rolando. They searched together on the ground for the teeth, one of which was never found. While they were searching, Rolando burnt my father’s mole with another three cigarettes and let gulps of laughter roll down into the neck of the bottle.
Still, slow times lay in that dry soil for the old man — dust billowed in the air when the rare car or pick-up truck went past on the potholed road on its way down to the petrol station, where gas was pumped by hand from an ancient American pump. When he was finished work he sometimes sat with Mam on the front steps, slurping bottles with the men, swatting mosquitoes, and staring at the vehicles, wondered where they were off to, dust settling back down around them. They put their arms around one another, and he told her of other places. They watched the sun sink its way southward on the horizon, month giving way to month, season giving way to season. It was strange for my father to stay so long in one place, and he wondered where the two of them should go next. Once or twice planes were seen in the sky over the Chihuahuan desert and the whole town stood, mesmerised. But still the dust settled on the ordinary. Night rose up on the banal. The days often merged into lethargy as they sat with one another, holding hands. Even the sight of a burro or a cart gave him the want for movement. It thumped within him, haunted him, as it always haunted him — and maybe still does.
* * *
Down beyond the barn a bored raven landed on the telegraph wire, and the old man watched it for the longest time as he stroked the cat. I thought about that wire and how a billion unknown voices might be running under the raven’s feet, moving through the long black body, through the shaggy throat feathers, scuttling along through hollow bones and stringy ligaments, all the way to the wedge-shaped tail sheening with black and purple, voices all the way to the core, to the heart. Those townspeople in Mexico could be voiced here in seconds, talking of its new cafés with their giant wine racks, Miguel’s chandeliers, its tarmacadamed streets, the screeching grackles, the lottery-ticket sellers, the abandoned cinema, the low adobe bars, the malicious heat. I can still feel it. All that heat. As I walked along those roads. In that colonial hotel room with the dancing ceiling fan other voices talked to me. When I went looking for their house there wasn’t a weather vane in sight. And Mam wasn’t there, not her, not her ghost, nor her image, hardly even her memory. And he was summoned up from only a couple of throats. The streets at dawn had a retinue of red, a typhoid rash over the morning. I walked along, under a grove of trees, under the sun, under a universe of curiosity and doubt, a telephone wire within myself, gurgling.
* * *
A boy in the town, Miguel, Rolando’s son, was fond of drawing maps, and the old man bought them from him, hung them on the walls of the house. They were copied from a school atlas, but his versions were full of fabulous and unusual colours. Miguel drew magenta oceans, white mountains, green rivers, purple roads, a red tongue of river, and sometimes he rubbed a little soil on the maps to give the countryside a brown tint. If you put your nose to the maps, you could smell the soil. The cities were shown with little pieces of metal that could rip the tips of your fingers if you ran your hands along them. My father moved the maps from wall to wall, switching them from the kitchen to the living room and back again so that he felt as if he were going somewhere. The year was 1949, and he was over the cusp of his thirties — if he couldn’t go in reality he would go in his imagination. At times he took my mother’s hand and led her all the way around the world within that small house, teaching her English as they went, so that she quickly acquired an Irish accent, the sound of it merging with her own native euphony. She would write new words down in a spiral-edged book, wondering when she might get a chance to use them. In truth she was a little frightened by it all, this possibility of going. Still in her twenties — the difference of nine years sometimes a ravine between them — she had never set foot outside her town. Even if she wanted to, there would be no moving anywhere for a while — my grandmother made sure of that.
‘You can leave when the sun comes up in the west,’ she said, heaving around under her chest. ‘And maybe even a few days after that.’
Miguel’s maps were a sign that my father’s feet were itching again. He even invited the young genius over to draw a few maps on the wall of his darkroom, but Rolando refused to let his son go. A chicken had been named after Rolando — he had been delighted at first, came over to the house every day, leaned over the fence, a grey crooked eyebrow dipping down, talked about how much uglier the mayor was. But then the rooster had seemed to take an overwhelming fondness for mounting and treading Rolando’s namesake, and Rolando was the butt of feral jokes, especially among the other drunks. ‘You’re walking funny today, Rolando.’ ‘Watch those feathers fly!’ ‘Have you room for another egg?’ He never came over to the house anymore, even after the hen was renamed. Young Miguel sneaked over to the darkroom after school, sat in and talked with my father, but he never managed to get the maps finished. He was trying to figure out a way to get a particular mound of soil to suspend itself in the air — it kept dropping down near the vats of chemicals, even when he made a shelf for the soil from tiny pieces of wood. One day when he came over he found a note tucked into the chastity belt above the door, ‘Sorry, Miguel, closed for a while.’
The old man took a job in a small copper mine far south of the town. Wanting to take photos of the mines, he left town with a truckload of men on Sunday mornings, wearing his dirty vest and his hat. With the help of a few men he smuggled cameras into the mines. At the end of the week he came home coughing up red spit, his vest showered with dirt. Copper coloured his skin. He and Mam locked themselves in the darkroom, working together, and sometimes they fell asleep, waking up the following day with a plate of my grandmother’s stew grown cold outside the door. The work consumed them both. Agonised faces came to life in the chemical baths, the whites of eyes appearing like coronas, dirt smeared on chins. Backbent by the work they had done and backbent into the future, the men leaned on picks as they sucked copper dust into their lungs. They stared with an anger of dispossession, their cheeks gaunt, a fury of poverty in discoloured lips. But he also captured them in the bars and the whorehouses, sometimes even at home with their children, happily kicking a soccer ball outside a shack. The miners took to him, hailed him when he came down the shafts, all of them helping carry the hidden equipment. But he came home bloodied one afternoon. He had lost a fight with a foreman after taking a photo of a dead boy being carried from the mines. The boy was no more than ten years old, the same age as Miguel. My father was hit with the long barrel of a gun. It left a small scar in the shape of a gondala on the right side of his temple. He tried a few times to go back, but the trigger of the same gun was cocked.