Michelina kept her eyes closed. She didn’t want to see the parade of workers. They were young. They were dead ducks. But she was getting tired of traveling with Leonardo. At first she had liked it, it gave her cachet, and although it cost her the ostracization of some and left others resigned, her own family understood and were not in the least disgusted, finally, with the comforts Don Leonardo offered them — especially in these times of crisis, what would become of them without Michelina?
What would become of grandmother Doña Zarina who was over ninety and still collecting curios in cardboard boxes, convinced Porfirio Díaz was still president? What would become of her father, the career diplomat who knew all the genealogies of the wines of Burgundy and the cháteaus of the Loire? What would become of her mother, who needed the comforts and money to do the only thing she really liked: to be left alone, to just sit quietly, not doing a thing, with her mouth shut, not even eat because she was ashamed to do it in public? What would become of her brothers, who relied on Leonardo Barroso’s generosity — this little job here, that concession there, this little contract, that agency …? But now she was tired. She didn’t want to open her eyes. She didn’t want to discover those of any young man. Her obligation was to Leonardo. She especially didn’t want to think about her husband, Leonardo’s son, who didn’t miss her, who was happy isolated on the ranch, who didn’t blame her for anything, for going off with his dad …
Michelina began to fear the eyes of any other man.
The men were given blankets, which they used in atavistic style as serapes. Then they were loaded onto buses. All it took was feeling the cold between the terminal exit and the bus for them to be thankful for the providential jacket, the occasional scarf, the heat of other bodies. They sought one another out, sorted one another out, looked for a comrade who might be like himself, might think the same way, share the same territory. With the peasants, with the villagers, there was always a verbal bridge, but its nature was a species of ancient formality, forms of courtesy that couldn’t manage to conceal a hierarchy, although inevitably there are wise-guys who treat the more humble as inferiors, speaking familiarly to them, giving them orders, scolding them. Here, now, that was impossible. They were all beaten down, and being screwed rendered them equal.
An anguished reserve imposed itself on those who did not have rural faces or clothes, a resolve not to admit they were there, that things were going so badly in Mexico, at home, that they had no other recourse but to give in to the three thousand pesos per month for two days a week’s work in New York, an alien city, totally strange, where it wasn’t necessary to be friendly, to risk confession, mockery, and incomprehension in dealing with one’s compatriots.
For that reason, a silence as cold as the air ran from row to row in the bus where ninety-three Mexican workers were squeezing in, and Lisandro Chávez imagined that in reality all of them, even if they had things to tell one another, were silenced by the snow, by the silence snow imposes, by that silent rain of white stars that fall without making noise, dissolving on whatever they touch, turning back into water, which has no color. What was the city like beneath its long veil of snow? Lisandro could barely make out the urban profiles of Manhattan, known to him from movies, the phantoms of the city, the foggy, snow-covered faces of skyscrapers and bridges, of shops and docks …
Tired, the men entered the gymnasium quickly, tossed their bags onto the rickety army-surplus beds Barroso had picked up in an army-navy store, and made for a buffet set up around the corner; the bathrooms were in back. Some of the men began to get familiar, poking one another in the belly, calling one another Bro, Bud and mano. Two or three even sang, out of tune, “The Ship of Gold,” but the others quieted down, wanting to sleep — the day had begun at five. I’m on my way to the port where the ship of gold is waiting to carry me away.
On Saturday morning at six, it was most certainly possible to feel, smell, touch, but not yet see the city. The fog, laden with ice, made it invisible, but the smell of Manhattan entered Lisandro Chávez through his nose and mouth like a steel dagger: it was smoke, acrid, acid smoke from sewers and subways, from enormous twelve-wheel trailers with exhaust pipes and grills at the level of the hard, shiny streets, like patent-leather floors. And on every street, metal mouths opened to eat boxes and more boxes of fruits, vegetables, cans, beers, sodas that reminded him of his dad, suddenly a foreigner in his own Mexico City, just as his son was in New York City, both asking themselves, What are we doing here? Were we perhaps born to do this? Wasn’t our destiny different? What happened?
“Good, upstanding citizens, Lisandro. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. We’ve always been good, upstanding citizens. We did everything properly. We never broke a rule. Why did things go so wrong? Because we were good, upstanding citizens? Why do things always go so wrong? Why doesn’t this story ever turn out well, son?”
In New York, he thought of his father lost in an apartment in Narvarte as if he were walking across a desert with no shelter, no water, no map, transforming his apartment into the desert of his confusion, caught up in a whirlpool of unforeseen, inexplicable events, as if the whole country had gone wild, jumped its tracks, run away from itself, escaping with shouts and bullets from the prison of order, foresight, institutions. Where was he now? What was he? Of what use was he? Lisandro saw corpses, murdered men, dishonest government officials, endless, incomprehensible intrigues, life-and-death struggles over power, money, women, queers … Death, misery, tragedy. His father had fallen into this inexplicable vertigo, giving up in the face of chaos, incapable of standing up to fight, to work. Depending on his son, just as Lisandro the child had depended on him. How much did Lisandro’s mother earn sewing torn clothing, eternally knitting a sweater or shawl?
If only a curtain of snow would fall on Mexico City, covering it, hiding its rancor, its answerless questions, the sense of collective fraud. To look at Mexico’s burning dust, the mask of an indefatigable sun, resigning oneself to the loss of the city, was not the same as to admire the crown of snow that ornamented the gray buildings and black streets of New York. New York: building itself up out of its own disintegration, its inevitable destiny as the city for everyone, energetic, tireless, brutal, murderous city of the entire world, where we all recognize ourselves and see our worst and our best.
This was the building. Lisandro Chávez refused to stare like a hick all the way up the forty floors. He only wondered how they were going to wash the windows in the middle of a snowstorm that at times managed to dissolve the very profile of the building, as if the skyscraper, too, were made of ice. It was an illusion. As the day cleared up a bit, a building completely made of glass became visible, with nothing in it that wasn’t transparent: an immense music box made of mirrors, unified by its own chrome-covered, nickel-plated glass, a palace like a crystal deck of cards, a toy of quicksilver labyrinths.
They were here to clean the inside, it was explained to them, gathered together in the interior atrium, which was like a patio of gray light whose six sides rose like sheer blind cliffs, six walls of pure glass. Even the two elevators were glass. Six times forty floors, two hundred forty interior facades for offices that lived their simultaneously secret and transparent life around a shared agnostic atrium, a cube excavated in the heart of the toy palace, the dream of a child building a castle on the beach, except that instead of sand he was given glass.
The scaffolding was waiting to lift them to the different floors, adjusting to the surface at each level as the building became narrower, like a pyramid, at the top. As if in a Teotihuacán made of glass, the workers began to rise to the tenth, twentieth, thirtieth floor to clean the glass and descend, in ranks of ten, armed with manual cleaning devices and tanks of a special glass cleanser on their backs, like the oxygen tanks worn by underwater explorers. Lisandro ascended to the crystal sky but he felt submerged, descending to a strange sea of glass in an unknown, upside-down world.