"It's smaller than I remembered," Juan thought as the car lurched over the uneven surface of the old rock streets, springs who in their short life had never squeaked complaining loudly now. He was disappointed. It was not supposed to be like this; this was not the way he had dreamed it on the cold empty Northern nights when he had felt so outside.

Acámbaro, population 50,000. The houses of adobe, dirt-colored like the unpaved streets, like the brown and ageless woman passing by, her inevitable rebozo a bright and striped splash in a dusty void. The odor of fresh bread, proud trademark of a town where bakeries reigned absolute and lonely kings of industry. He remembered leaving that odor without regret. He was no baker.

The jardín was as beautiful as he remembered, the flowers and lush greenery shocking to his winter eyes. Here was paradise where the harsh barrenness of the biting North was unknown and the perpetual crowd of Sunday lovers took for granted sunshine, laughter and sweet uncovered flesh in January…But the teenage girls in their jumpers from the secundaria looked so much younger, and he recognized no one. No one recognized him either, he realized with a certain bitterness. Was a year so long?

Turning the corner at Aldama, he tried to pretend it was a year ago. The same little restaurant where many a coffee cup and beer bottle, many a half-smoked cigarette had been wasted witnesses of unspoken dreams and whispered plans and defiant shouted promises. The conqueror would return, laden with spoils and glowing with victory, and his admiring subjects would flock to greet their hero, who left a boy and came back a man, who went with his hands empty and returned overladen, his shiny black brand-new Mustang sagging with its cargo of gringo magic. He laughed to remember that it had been a Mustang even then, sleek black Northern siren that lured him.

Well, he had conquered-it was black and shiny and so new that some of the "extra features" hadn't been put in yet. No one in Acámbaro had anything like it, but he was surprised how little satisfaction he felt now as he raced the motor at the only stoplight. He was somehow out of place, as if the flashy arrogance of such a luxurious machine, so natural and even necessary where he had been, were cheap presumption, a crude embellished lie which never fooled the humble wise old town that knew him well. He felt duped and cheated, reluctantly angry for having spent so much in exchange for little.

Only four more blocks to go. He thought of his mother. She was alone now. Her memory had sustained him in his darkest moments: a night of fear crouched in the trunk of a coyote's car in black blindness, all around him the dread noises of the Migra's ruthlessness (rough,cold voices, furniture thumps echoing-was it furniture?-ripping, tearing, these crude doctors of expediency snatching helpless from the womb aborted Sons of Liberty); weeks of bitter, hungry despair, when he was lost in a horrible limbo without work, no friends, hiding out in an icebox of an empty room in an abandoned house on Denver's west side, coming out after dark like a miserable cockroach to forage for food; the endless months of weariness, ears numbed by English and the constant need for vigilance, body broken by relentless sweat ten hours in the laundry on Stout Street, by unceasing backaches, cold feet and humiliation in the stinking fish house where he daily fought back nausea eight more, his heart aching, aching with starvation for some piece of his native land to cover himself with and feel human again. Never had he been so much a Mexican as then, a man without a country. In the midst of all this he had seen his mother's tired, wrinkled hands, bent and cracked before their time by love, and he had held out for a couple of dollars more and a black shiny promise made publicly to himself. His mother's parting tears symbolized his manhood, and in pride and shame for that costly, ghastly independence he had not dared to waste them on an inglorious return.

One more block and an unseeing, careless truck pulled out of him automatic anger, the same familiar words: "Stupid Mexican!" He was really home, he realized with malinchista scorn.

The same old house, easily identifiable in the block-long streetfront wall by its peeling paint. He was shocked to notice its shabbiness and realize that it had always been that way. He knocked on the door, mustering up a remaining shred of feeling as he tried to imagine his mother's face when she saw him. She wouldn't believe it; she would grasp him in those tired hands and grip him like she did, like she knew better now and would never let go again.

She wasn't answering the door in any hurry, though. He knocked again, suddenly annoyed. Conquering hero. What was she doing that was so important at this one moment in the whole year when she had no right to be busy elsewhere? This time he pounded angrily, nervously on the hard metal door, calling her name. Nothing. She was probably out gossiping and he was waiting again. Again, impotent, holding his breath, at the mercy of circumstances, as he remembered so many examples in the past year. (Futile and frustrated, waiting nervously two months for his social security number to stop suspicious questions at work, afraid they knew, afraid to move a muscle; getting at the very end of the line at the Post Office, letting all newcomers in ahead of him, embarrassed, ashamed of his inability to communicate well enough to buy stamps, buying time uselessly; marking off the days on the calendar, hopelessly watching the time creep almost backwards toward the day when he could be here, when he would be a victim no longer.)

Enraged finally by his powerlessness to pull a response out from behind the mute defiant door, he began pounding like a crazy man. People passing viewed him strangely, as one would look at a ghost.

"Juan. Juan, your mother isn't here anymore. She-she died last week…we tried.."

Juan got very drunk in his Mustang. He wondered what was happening in Denver.

© 2004 Margaret McGavin de García

FOOL'S GOLD
MARGARET McGAVIN de GARCÍA
Ficción Portada

Portada Literatura Portada