He handed me a small black-and-white image with a matt finish, printed on heavy card stock with scalloped edges. It was a group shot taken in front of this very house, back when it was surrounded by fallow land, the bare, undeveloped hillside. Perhaps twenty blurred faces.
“Besides a few of the babies,” my father said, “everyone else in this photo is dead.”
For a while we didn’t speak.
A bloom of mold grew wild on the kitchen wall, bursting black and menacing from a crack in the cement. To pass the time, or change the subject, we considered the mold’s shape, evocative of something, but we couldn’t say what. A baby carriage? A bull?
“Joselito’s moto-taxi,” my father said.
And this was, in fact, exactly what it resembled.
“May he rest in peace,” I added.
My father had been quiet for most of the trip—coming home always did this to him—but he spoke up now. Joselito, he said, must have been a real character. Someone special. He hadn’t seen an outpouring of emotion like that in many years, not since he was a boy.
“It was an act,” I said, and began to explain my theory.
My old man interrupted me. “But what isn’t?”
What he meant was that people perform sorrow for a reason. For example: no one was performing it for Raúl. My great-uncle had been mayor of this town when my father was a boy, had owned the filling station, and sired seven children with five different women, none of whom he bothered to marry. He’d run the town’s only radio station for a decade and paid from his own pocket to pave the main boulevard, so he could drive in style. Then in the late 1980s, Raúl lost most of his money and settled into a bitter seclusion. I remembered him only for his bulbous nose and his hatred of foreigners, an expansive category in which he placed anyone who wasn’t originally from the town and its surrounding areas. Raúl’s distrust of the capital was absolute. I was eleven the last time I saw him, and I don’t think he ever eyed me with anything but suspicion.
It was easier to talk about Joselito than about my great-uncle. More pleasant, perhaps. This town brought up bad memories for my father, who was, in those days, entering a pensive late middle age. That was how it seemed to me at the time, but what does a twenty-two-year-old know about a grown man’s life and worries? I was too young to recognize what would later seem more than obvious: that I was the greatest source of my old man’s concern. That if he were growing old too soon, I was at least partly to blame. This would’ve been clear, had I been paying attention.
My father shifted the conversation. He brought the tea out and asked me what I planned to do when I got to California. This was typical of the time, a speculative game we were fond of playing. We assumed it was fast approaching, the date of my departure; later, I would think we’d all been pretending.
“I don’t know,” I said.
I’d spent so much time imagining it—my leaving, my preparations, my victory lap around the city, saying goodbye and good luck to all those who’d be staying behind—but what came after contained few specifics. I’d get off the plane, and then… Francisco, I guess, would be there. He’d drive me across the Bay Bridge to Oakland and introduce me to his life there, whatever that might be. From time to time, when curiosity seized me, I searched for this place online and found news items that helped me begin to envision it: shootings mostly, but also minor political scandals involving graft or misused patronage or a city official with liens on his property; occasionally something really exciting, like an oil tanker lost in fog and hitting a bridge, or the firebombing of a liquor store by one street gang or another. There’d even been a minor riot not too long before, with the requisite smashed windows, a dumpster in flames, and a set of multiracial anarchists wearing bandannas across their faces so that all you could see in the photos were their alert and feral eyes; and I’d wondered then how my brother had chosen to live in a city whose ambience so closely mimicked our own. Could it really be an accident of geography? Or was it some latent homing instinct?
What it all had to do with me was never quite clear. Where I would fit in. What I would do with myself once I was there. These were among the many questions that remained. The visa, whenever it came, would not arrive with life instructions. Nor would it obligate me to stay in Oakland, of course, and I had considered other alternatives, though none very seriously, and all based on a whimsical set of readings and the occasional Internet search: Philadelphia, I liked for its history; Miami, for its tropical ennui; Chicago, for its poets; Los Angeles, for its sheer size.
But one can start over in any number of places, right? Any number of times?
“I’ll get a job,” I told my father. “Isn’t that what Americans do?”
“It’s what everyone does. In a copy shop?”
“I’m an actor.”
“Who makes photocopies.”
I frowned. “So I’ll make photocopies my entire life. Why not?”
He wanted me to study because that was what he’d wanted for himself so many years before. And for Francisco too. He’d hoped my brother would be a professor by now, an academic, though he was far too proud ever to share this disappointment with me. He had his own issues with me: his unbounded respect for playwrights and artists and writers was completely abstract; on a more concrete level, he wished I’d considered some more reliable way to earn a living. As for my day job, my mother told me once that seeing me work as the attendant at the copy shop made my old man sad. His sadness, in turn, made me angry. His politics affirmed that all work held an inherent dignity. This was what he’d always repeated, but of course no ideology can protect a son from the unwelcome inheritance of his father’s ambitions.
“When I was a boy,” my old man said, “this town was the middle of nowhere. It still is, I know. But imagine it before they re-routed the highway. We knew there was something else out there—another country to the south, the capital to the north—but it felt very far away.”
“It was.”
“You’re right. It was. We were hours from civilization. Six or seven to the border, if not more. But the roads were awful. And spiritually—it was even farther. It required a certain kind of imagination to see it.”
I smiled. I thought I was making him laugh, but really, I was just trying to close off the conversation, shut it down before it headed somewhere I didn’t want it to go. “I’ve always been very imaginative,” I said.
My old man knew what I was doing, even if I didn’t.
“Yes, son. You have. Maybe not imaginative enough, though.”
I didn’t want to ask him what he meant, so I sat, letting the silence linger until it forced him to answer my unspoken question.
“I’m sorry,” my old man said. “I wonder if you’ve thought much about your future, that’s all.”
“Sure I have. All the time.”
“To the exclusion of thinking about your present?”
“I wouldn’t say that.”
“What would you say?”
I paused, attempting to strip my voice of any anger before I spoke. “I’ve thought a great deal about my future, so that my present could seem more livable.”
He nodded slowly. We sipped carefully from our steaming cups. For once, I was grateful for my old man’s obsession with tea—it allowed us to pause, gather our thoughts. It excused us from having to talk, and the danger of saying things we might not mean.