NELSON: A professor of literature. At an American university. We’ve discussed this.
COCHOCHO: Why not a local one?
Manuel has no response, is slightly ashamed.
SANTOS: Pardon me. It’s a very conventional ambition for a bookish young man. Decent. Middle of the road. You had politics?
MANUEL: I did. (pause) I still do.
SANTOS: A rabble-rouser. An agitator. He made some people here very angry, and the teachers—and I was leader of this concerned group, if I remember correctly—we collected money among us, to send him away. We didn’t want to see his talent wasted. Nothing destroys our promising youth more than politics. Did he tell you he won a scholarship? Of course. That’s a simpler story. He made his powerful uncle angry, and Raúl refused to pay for his studies. Your grandfather didn’t have the money either. We sent him away for his own good. We thought he’d come back and govern us well. We hoped he might learn something useful. Become an engineer. An architect. A captain of industry. (sadly) We expected more. We needed more. There’s no work here. Jaime, for example. What do you do?
JAIME: Sir?
SANTOS (impatiently): I said, what do you do?
JAIME: I’m unemployed. I was a bricklayer.
SANTOS: Erick?
ERICK: I’m a tailor. (to Nelson, brightly, with an optimism that does not match the mood of the table) At your service, young man!
SANTOS: See? He made me this suit. Local cotton. Adequate work. I’m on a fixed income. Cochocho. He is deputy mayor. You know that now. But did you know this? The money he just spent on our drinks? That is our money. He stole it like he stole the election. He brings his suits from the capital. We don’t say anything about it because that would be rude. And he is, in spite of his questionable ethics, our friend.
COCHOCHO (appalled): Profe!
SANTOS: What? What did I say? You’re not our friend? Is that what you’re alleging?
Cochocho, dejected, unable or unwilling to defend himself. Erick and Jaime comfort him. Just then, Elena’s daughter reappears, eyes on Nelson. Television: motel room, naked couple in an acrobatic sexual position, a yogic balancing act for two, a scramble of flesh, such that one can’t discern whose legs belong to whom, whose arms, how his and her sexual organs are connecting or even if they are.
CELIA: Another round, gentlemen?
MANUEL: I insist—
NELSON: If you’ll allow me—
SANTOS (stopping them both with a wave, glaring at Cochocho): So, are you our friend or not? Will you spend our money or keep it for yourself? (to Nelson) Unfortunately, this too is tradition.
NELSON: Five hundred years?
SANTOS: Much longer than that, boy.
NELSON: Please. I’d consider it an honor to buy a round.
COCHOCHO (still angry): Great idea! Let the foreigner spend his dollars!
At this, Nelson stands and steps toward the startled Celia. He kisses her on the mouth, brazenly, and as they kiss, he takes money from his own pocket, counts it without looking, and places it in her hand. She closes her fist around the money, and it vanishes. It’s unclear whether he’s paying for the drinks or for the kiss itself, but in either case, Celia doesn’t question it. The four local men look on, astounded.
SANTOS: Imperialism!
COCHOCHO: Opportunism!
JAIME: Money!
ERICK: Sex!
Manuel stares at his son, but says nothing. Takes a drink. Curtain.
I should be clear about something: it is never the words, but how they are spoken that matters. The intent, the tone. The farcical script quoted above is only an approximation of what actually occurred that evening, after my father challenged me to play Francisco, or a version of him, for this unsuspecting audience. Many other things were said, which I’ve omitted: oblique insults; charmingly ignorant questions; the occasional reference to one or another invented episode of American history. I improvised, using my brother’s letters as a guide, even quoting from them when the situation allowed—the line, for example, about Mexicans ignoring blacks and vice versa. That statement was contained within one of Francisco’s early dispatches from Oakland, when he was still eagerly trying to understand the place for himself and not quite able to decipher the many things he saw.
My most significant dramatic choice was not to defend myself all too vigorously. Not to defend Oakland, or the United States. That would have been a violation of character, whereas this role was defined by a basic indifference to what was taking place. They could criticize, impugn, belittle—it was all the same to me, I thought (my character thought). They could say what they wanted to say, and I would applaud them for it; after all, at the end of the day, I (my character) would be heading back to the U.S., and they’d be staying here. I needed to let them know this, without saying it explicitly. That’s how Francisco would have done it—never entirely sinking into the moment, always hovering above it. Distant. Untouchable.
Through it all, my old man sat very quietly, deflecting attention even when they began discussing him directly, his choices, the meaning and impact of his long exile. I’ve hurried through the part where my father’s friends expressed, with varying levels of obsequiousness, their admiration, their wonder, their jealousy. I’ve left it out because it wasn’t the truth; it was habit—how you treat the prodigal son when he returns, how you flatter him in order to claim some of his success as your own. But this fades. It is less honest and less interesting than the rest of what took place that night. The surface: Jaime and Erick drank heavily, oblivious and imperturbable to the end, and were for that very reason the most powerful men in the room. I could not say they were any drunker when we left than they were when we arrived. Cochocho, on the other hand, drank and changed dramatically: he became more desperate, less self-possessed, revealing in spite of himself the essential joylessness at the core of his being. His neatly combed hair somehow became wildly messy, his face swollen and adolescent, so that you could intuit, but not see, a grown man’s features hidden beneath. No one liked him; more to the point, he did not like himself. And then there was Santos, who was of that generation that catches cold if they leave the house without a well-knotted necktie; who, like all retired small-town teachers, had the gloomy nostalgia of a deposed tyrant. I caught him looking at Celia a few times with hunger—the hunger of an old man remembering better days—and it moved me. We locked eyes, Santos and I, just after one of these glances; he bowed his head, embarrassed, and looked down at his shoes. He began to hate me, I could feel it. He expressed most clearly what the others were unwilling to acknowledge: that the visitors had upset their pride.
We’d reminded them of their provincialism.
Which is why I liked Santos the best. Even though the role I was inhabiting placed us at opposite ends of this divide; in truth, I identified very closely with this wounded vanity. I felt it, would feel it, would come to own this troubling sense of dislocation myself. I knew it intimately: it was how the real Nelson felt in the presence of the real Francisco.
Hurt. Small.
Now the lights in the bar hummed, and the empty beer bottles were magically replaced with new ones, and my father’s old history teacher aged before my eyes, the color draining from him until he looked like the people in Raúl’s old photographs. Jaime and Erick maintained the equanimity of statues. Cochocho, with his ill humor and red, distended skin, looked like the mold spreading on Raúl’s kitchen wall. He’d removed his suit jacket, revealing dark rings of sweat at the armpits of his dress shirt. He asked about my great-uncle’s house, and when my father said he’d transferred the property to a cousin of ours, the deputy mayor responded with a look of genuine disappointment.