Pochos, I called them, denaturalized Mexicans, worst of the worst. Don’t be one of the enemies. They laughed at me. It’s worse on the other side: Mexico’s the enemy. On the Mexican side, there’s more injustice, more corruption, more lies, more poverty. Be thankful we’re gringos. That’s what my son said to me. He’s harder and more bitter. My daughter tried to be gentler. No matter how you look at it, Papa, from this side of the border or the other, there’s injustice and you aren’t going to fix it. And you can’t make us copy you. Hard-headed old man. Old sucker. They’re right in the gringo schools here when they say there’s a sucker born every minute. We didn’t put a gun to your head so you’d have us and bring us up. We don’t owe you anything. You’re a drag. If you were at least politically correct. You embarrass us. A Communist. A Mexican. An agitator. You gave us nothing. It’s your obligation. Fathers are only good for giving. Instead you took things away from us. You forced us to justify ourselves, to deny you, to affirm everything you aren’t so we could be ourselves. Be someone. Be from the other side. Don’t get upset. Don’t get that expression on your face. If you grow up on the border, you have to choose: this side or the other. We chose the North. We’re not suckers like you. We adapted. Would you rather we wore ourselves out like you? You ruined our mother’s life. But you’re not going to ruin ours. Angry old man. Nasty old man. Have you forgotten your own violence? Your monstrous fury, your colossal rage? How you were gradually extinguished, disarmed in the mere presence of youth. If they’re young, you forgive them everything. If they’re young, you worship them. If they’re young, they’re always right. I feel surrounded by a world — North and South, both sides — that venerates the young. Before my eyes pass advertisements, images, offers, temptations, window displays, magazines, television — all promoting young people, seducing young people, prolonging youth, disdaining old age, discarding old people, to the point that age seems a crime, a sickness, a misery that cancels you out as a human being. I quickly raise a barrier against this avalanche of dazzling, blinding multicolored lights that split, spread out, scatter. I close my eyes. I duplicate the night. I people it with ghosts. Groping, I return to the earth. It is like my blind gaze. It is black. This time the dark part of the world we call earth receives me. It’s full of another kind of light. There is an old man in the light. Barefoot. Wearing peasant clothes. But with a vest. On the vest a watch chain glitters. I approach him. I kneel. I kiss his hand. He strokes my head. He speaks. I listen attentively, with respect. He tells the oldest stories. He tells how everything began. He says there were two gods who created the world. One spoke, the other didn’t. The one who didn’t speak created all the mute things in the world. The one who spoke created men. We do not resemble the silent god. We cannot understand him. He is everything we aren’t, says the old man, who strokes my head and is my father. We venerate him and know what he is only because he isn’t what you and I are. God is only what we are not. I mean that, thanks to him, we only know what he is not. But the second god risks being like us. He gives us the power of speech. He gives us names. He dares to speak and listen. We can answer him. We don’t venerate him as much, but we love him more. Name and speak, son — you, too, should speak and name things. Venerate the creator god, but speak with the redeemer god. Don’t lock yourself inside yourself. Perfection is not solitude. Imperfection is community but also possible perfection. The old man who was my father gave me a bit of bitter peyote to chew and asked me to speak, name, take risks. Be like the god who gave us speech. Not like the god who left us mute. Mute as I am this instant, father, I try to respond. But my father is already gone, smiling, saying good-bye with one hand raised. He’s gone far away. He’s from a time that has nothing to do with mine. A time with no ambition to be different. A time of braziers and the cornail for making tortillas. Time of smoke, of sudden dawns and watchful nights. Time of masks, doubles, spirits. Time of the Nahuatl language. Time when lives were one with the prickly pear and mesquite. How different from my own time of learning to read and write, of taking medicine, receiving the land, replacing huizache with pavement, looking at ourselves in shopwindows, buying newspapers, knowing who is president, immersing ourselves in the articles of the constitution. And how different from the time of my children, of refrigerators and television, days without nature, nights lit up, food untouched by human hands, envy of other people’s property, desire to believe in something but failure to find anything, desire to know all but knowledge only of nothing, conviction we know it all, and alarm at what a bare, ignorant foot can know. They’re right to be different. But I loved my father, I respected him and despite everything tried to find his redeeming, speaking, garrulous god. But now I find I’m like the mute god. As abandoned and solitary as he, with no name, no father. I kiss your hands again and again. I don’t ever want to stop. I want to love. I want to venerate. I don’t want to speak. I don’t want to remember. And I understand that I’ve been left here — abandoned, anonymous — as a challenge to remember who I am. But if I don’t know, how will anyone else know? My father asked me to do two things: remember and name. How will I speak if I can’t? I was left mute. The attack left me speechless and paralyzed. I can barely move one hand, one arm. There we are: I don’t speak, but I do remember. I try desperately to compensate for lack of speech with memory. Doesn’t my father know what happened to me? How can he ask me to speak, name, communicate? The old idiot, can’t he see that I’m a ruin, older than he was when he died? I bite my tongue. I’m a respectful man. I believe in respect for the elderly. Not like my children. Or is it a law of life to despise old people secretly like this? The old fogey, you heard them say. The mummy. Ready for the junk heap. Methuselah. Useless fossil, a burden, he’s not leaving us a thing, he makes us earn a living at hard labor, and on top of that we’ve got to go on supporting him. Who has the time or patience to bathe him, dress him, undress him, put him to bed, wake him up, sit him down in front of the TV all day so just by chance he’s amused and learns something, so he looks at something else instead of staring at us as if we were the TV set — or something alive and nearby but unbearable? Why wasn’t he like his brother, our uncle? Twenty years younger, his brother understood everything our father couldn’t fathom or scorned. You don’t share poverty. First, you have to create wealth. But wealth trickles down little by little in droplets. That’s a fact. Be patient. But equality is a dream. There’ll always be dumb people and smart people. There’ll always be the strong and the weak. Who eats whom? Wealth honestly come by doesn’t have to be distributed among the lazy. Those who are poor because they want to be. There is no ruling class. There are superior individuals. Now I secretly laugh at my children. When they went to my younger brother for help, he told them the same thing they tell me and everyone else. I made my money the hard way. There’s no reason I should support a family of lazy fools. Chips off the old block. You’re the children my brother deserved. You want to live on charity. For your own good, I tell you to stand on your own two feet. Don’t expect anything from me. From sea to shining sea. From the Pacific to the Gulf. From Tijuana to Matamoros. A dead part of my brain returns the way my old father wanted to return, laden with names. All along the frontier I hear the name of my powerful brother. But his real name is Contracts. His name is Contraband. His name is Stock Market. Highways. Assembly plants. Whorehouses. Bars. Newspapers. Television. Drug Money. And an unfair fight with a poor brother. A struggle between brothers for the destiny of our brothers. Brothers Anonymous. What’s my name? What’s my brother’s name? I can’t answer as long as I don’t know the name of each and every one of my anonymous brothers. Why do they cross the border? We have different rationales in each instance, he and I. He: Because of Mexico’s impoverishing statist policies. I: Because the gringo market lures these people. He: We have to create jobs in Mexico. I: We have to pay better wages in Mexico. He: The gringos have the right to defend their borders. I: You can’t talk about free markets and then close the border to workers who respond to demand. He: They’re criminals. I: They’re workers. He: They come to a foreign country, they should show some respect for it. I: They’re returning to their own land; we were here first. They aren’t criminals. They’re workers. Listen, Pancho, I want you to work for me. Come over here, I need you. Listen, Pancho, I don’t need you anymore. Get out. I’ve just turned you in to Immigration. I never signed a contract with you. When I need you I make a contract with you, Pancho; when I don’t I turn you in, Pancho. I beat you up. I hunt you down like a rabbit. I cover you with paint so everyone will know you’re illegal. My boys are going to set packs of white cannibals out to kill you, you undocumented Mexican Salvadoran Guatemalan. No, I scream, no, you can’t do that and talk about justice. That’s what I fought for all my life. Against my brother. For my brothers. And against us, my children exclaimed. Against our well-being, our assimilation into progress, into opportunity, into the North. Against our own uncle, who could not protect us. You wouldn’t allow it. You condemned yourself and you condemned us. What do we have to thank you for? Our poor mother was a saint. She put up with everything you did. We have no reason to. You gave us nothing but bitterness. We’ll pay you back in kind. Cripple. Paralytic. Whom will you live with? Whom are you going to pester and drive to despair now? Who’s going to get you up, put you to bed, clean you, dress you, undress you, feed you spoonful by spoonful, take you out in your wheelchair, sit you in the sun so you don’t shrivel up? Who’s going to wipe the snot off your nose, brush your teeth, smell your gases, cut your nails, wipe your ass, clean the wax out of your ears, shave you, comb your hair, put deodorant on you, fasten your bib when you eat, make sure the drool doesn’t drip down your chin, who? Who’s got the time, will, and money to help you? Me, your son who has to cross the border every day at dawn to work at Woolworth’s? Me, your daughter who got a job as a fore-lady in an assembly plant on this side? Your grandson who doesn’t even remember you, who makes burritos in a Mexican restaurant on the gringo side? Your granddaughter who also works in the assembly plant? Do you think they don’t see your brother in the newspapers, saying, doing, traveling, with rich men, beautiful babes? Our children, your grandchildren, who barely made it through high school on the American side and only want to enjoy the music, clothes, cars, universal envy you left them out of ineptitude, out of generosity toward everyone but your own? Those sentences echo in my head. They resound like loose stones in a swift and swirling river. I wish the river would grow calm as it enters the sea. Instead, it smashes against the sandbar of its own waste. It accumulates sediment, garbage, mud. Mud you are and to mud you will return. Mud. Muddy. My muddy brother Leonardo. Leonardo Muddy. My name. My own. I don’t have it. It was torn from me. I can’t be admitted to a hospital. Or even a home. My name is on the blacklists. Here and there. I’ve been stripped of my rights. Agitator. Communist. Entry denied. Not even charity for this disturber of the peace. Let his own people take care of him. My labels were ripped out. A diaper was pinned on me. I was seated in this chair. I was abandoned at the line. The line of oblivion. The place where I don’t know my name. The place where I am but am not. The vague intermediate zone between my life and my death. We’re sorry, we can’t let him in here. Or here. You understand. Charges were brought against him. He’s not trustworthy. He’s a marked man. He’s got the worst political history. He’s not loyal. Here or there. He’s a red. Let the people take care of him. Or the Russians. Don’t let him compromise our workers. Here or there. Confederation of Mexican Workers. American Federation of Labor. Freedom, yes. Communism,