* * *
That was a hot summer morning, four years ago, walking with Miguel through the town, looking for their old house. I was nineteen years old, just arrived from London, stupid with hope.
Miguel’s son — another Rolando, named after his late grandfather — held on to Miguel’s hand like it was glued there. Little Rolando wore a sailor’s suit and scoured his finger up his nose. He was scared of all the strange words coming from us. I had only a smattering of Spanish, picked up from a phrase book I’d bought in London, and Miguel’s English was useless. We walked slowly down the street, in the gathering heat; through the market, where the ribs of pigs dangled in the air on hooks and men in overalls with splatters of blood cried out as if they themselves had just been butchered; past women with sun-dried faces as they sold bananas and apples and reams of boxed vegetables, impervious to the flies that were buzzing around them; out to the street where a lorry coughed fumes; beyond a giant white adobe house with roses growing in the courtyard, a hipheavy woman out watering red and white geraniums; past a café advertising tamales; alongside some slum houses, a dog slinking through dustbins; the sun flailing down as we skirted the edges of a dry-soiled park where two old men played chess. Children were out on bicyles — they were raggedy but there were no open sewers for them to negotiate. The town had changed from the one Mam and my father told me about. Underneath the Mexican flag in the plaza the Star-Spangled Banner fluttered. A boulevard in town had been renamed to welcome American business.
Miguel had a puffy face that pillowed itself into silence. He must have known all along — it was as if he was trying to stall me — but the house had been replaced by a clinic that was run by a young man from Italy, a rainbow of freckles across his cheeks, his hair shiny and black around his ears. He had knocked the house down, darkroom and all, and built the clinic, a low white affair, where he gave his services free of charge. I looked through the gate and foot-scuffled at stones. Miguel ran a hand across the top of his brow, where beads of sweat had settled.
A row of scraggly kids waited with their mothers outside the house, where the chickens used to peck. The Italian was wrapping a white bandage around a teenage girl’s leg and he was humming some tune, maybe something about his own mountains far away. He saw me, with the backpack huge on my shoulders, and beckoned me over with a tug of his head. ‘Come,’ said Miguel, taking my arm, ‘meet Antonio.’ But I didn’t want to meet Antonio. I didn’t want to meet anyone. Little Rolando was screaming at the top of his voice. Miguel slapped him on the bare legs and he stopped. We went back along the road, great silence between us.
‘Did she ever come back?’ I asked later, in his house.
‘She no return,’ said Miguel emphatically.
‘Are you sure?’
‘You ask many questions,’ he said.
‘I’m sorry.’
‘It’s okay. You will have una cabita? She come again no.’
His wife, Paloma, prepared glasses of rum and Coca-Cola for us. Maps hung on the walls. They dotted the hallway, light coming on them from a fancy glass chandelier. Miguel had grown artistically. Now he made faces from contour maps — geological and ordinance surveys with eyes from history staring out of them. All sorts of Mexican revolutionaries were drawn within the valleys and the troughs, the towns sometimes used for eyes, hills for hair, the rivers for arms. He located Riley for me, a tiny figure drawn from the contours of a hanging valley. His head was leaning against the knee of Santa Anna who was slumped beneath the shoulders of Emiliano Zapata. The strange thing was that Miguel didn’t have to distort the lines — he had stayed true to the contours and the faces were fluid within them. He made a good living from it, sold them to galleries all over the country. Someone had commissioned a portrait of Salinas. Miguel was working on it. He said his art had nothing to do with his politics, but the face of Salinas looked chubby and wobbly, and it seemed as if there was an American eagle on his shoulder with television sets for eyes.
The drink was served in cut glasses with gold around the rims. I sat and sipped. The day’s heat pushed us down. Paloma held her glass with her little finger extended daintily. An emerald ring bobbed on it. Her fingers caressed the air as she spoke. She sounded as if she’d been sucking on helium.
‘You stay?’
They offered me a bed on their porch, mosquito screen all around so that it made something of an outdoor room, an old army cot with the cleanest of sheets standing in the corner, a Bible on a bedside table, candles in silver holders beside it.
But I moved on — wanted to be on my own — and booked myself into a hotel down near the courthouse, in the old part of town.
The hotel stonework was arthritic. Bits of it crumpled down into the street. The hallway carpet had cigarette marks on it. Soap operas rang out from neighbouring rooms. In the back of the hotel there was a pool of water in a blue tarp that hung above the patio. The mosquitoes gathered in the tarp as if in communion. At dusk they would enter my room, even through the smoke of a mosquito coil. I swatted them with a towel, leaving marks on the wall, along with thousands of others from previous tenants. Even the ceiling was splattered, a collage of red spots. A cleaning lady came in early one morning, when I was sleeping late. Hipheavy in her uniform. She looked up at the wall, counting the fresh stains. ‘Te la pasaste matando moscos anoche, verdad?’ she said to me. You spent the whole night killing mosquitoes, true? A fat brown finger wagged in the air and she laughed. She came over to my bed and ruffled my hair, ran her fingers along my cheek, and for a moment I thought she was going to climb in beside me. Instead she dipped her cloth in a bucket and wiped a few of the marks on the wall away, said she’d be back later to make the bed. I went down the corridor to the broken urinal down the hall, where the water was constantly flushing, wet my bandana in the sink and came back to the room to wipe the spots off, but fell asleep in the heat instead.
Graffiti rolled in red on the courthouse walls. Policemen, chameleons in the shadows, flicked in and out between the scrawls. Old men sat outside the cantinas, gesturing. A labyrinth of laneways ran outwards towards a brand-new shopping centre. I pulled back the curtains and stuck my head out, felt a slight breeze. A young man sat on the hotel steps, a ghetto-blaster perched on his knees, heavy-metal music pumping out. Within the music, grackles in the trees exclaimed in high pitches, let their droppings down on to the streets. I kept a large knife handy in the side of my backpack, just in case. I had heard things about Mexico — foreigners robbed, dumped in prison, bellies stuffed with a steel blade, people fucked over into a roadside ditch, left to the turkey vultures who made those great hungry spirals above the world. I fingered the steel blade, put it in my waistband, decided against it, walked out into my parents’ old town.
Nobody disturbed me. Maybe it was my dark skin and hair, inherited from Mam, but I don’t think so. The town was quiet among strangers and sunsets, and settlings of dust.
A boy with a violin busked in a plaza full of red flowerpots and a bordello-sweep of litter. The song was raucous and stripped bare, a sound that could have belonged to a forest animal. An elderly woman and her husband — he was wasting away handsomely in a collarless shirt — came and stood beside me on the curb as I listened. The man took his wife’s arm in the crook of his and danced. She kept her hands tentative at the sleeve of his shirt, but they laughed as they went down off the curb and in between two parked pick-up trucks. His feet were slow, his body creaking. Holes opened and closed in the toes of his shoes, two brown sieves showing calloused toes. He put his head near his wife’s shoulder, smiled, moved his dentures up and down in his mouth. She reached up and touched her lips against the stubble on his cheek, kissed his ear, danced on. I tried to imagine my parents once doing the same dance, couldn’t.