The Invention of Exile Read online

  “Perhaps it is time now to come home and find out why, to remember why.”

  • • •

  THEY STAND WAITING LIKE CRIMINALS. The Cadillacs slide, curve through the morning city streets, which are damp still from the night’s rain. Car windows streaked white, then black like enamel. Austin has a cigarette at his lips and in his hands a book of matches, a compact square that he flicks loosely as he passes it through his fingers.

  “He said eight, right?” he says out loud.

  Vera nods, offering a murmured yes of confirmation. She is wringing her hands—she would be. He is pacing, the pebbles beneath the sole of his shoe making a pleasant scratching sound on the sidewalk. The city is slowly filling as the cars amble by through thin morning air that is fumed by the sweet, thick scent of gasoline.

  He watches the street. Far down a man on a bike approaches, his head peering out from behind a tower of packages—cotton sheets of periwinkle and pink, boxes, flowered oilcloths yellow and red and blue. His shoulders tense, rise. He turns his head and sees Vera in profile, her back to him.

  “Why are we standing in this sun? Come, let’s cross,” she says over her shoulder. She begins without him, he falling back behind her, pausing to allow the bicyclist to pass. He has moved from the sun to the shadows of the trees, and the leaves cast a pattern along his face. He enters into the full shade, the cooler relief of Parque México. The knotted, arthritic tree roots have cracked through the cobblestones so that the ground is uneven. She sits on a bench and he sits beside her.

  A Cadillac passes, the buttercream chrome and silver of the hood ornament unmistakable, like a mermaid or angel, hair billowing through water or wind, a sense of resistance, of pressing onward.

  The cars keep passing. He begins counting. Cadillacs in new models—the slim, dashing lines, the silver grille plate, the spearmint white tires blur. He’s stuck now with the distraction of it—Packard ’38, cobalt blue; Cadillac Sixty Series, blood red; a black one, slick as the top of a piano. Out on the Avenida Amsterdam someone is leaning on a horn. Too early. Others follow, someone pressing in fast bleats. It startles Vera and her shoulders jump from the suddenness of it. And he too. His blood seems to freeze and then course fast through chest, neck, temple, settling into a bloom of heat across his sternum. He thinks momentarily of simply walking across the street, getting up, sliding away farther into the park, away from their plan. He turns to see Leo. He’s hanging out the driver’s side window of a light pistachio green sedan. His hands wide and stretched along the bulge of the car, tapping it—one, two, three, four—full, hollow sounding. In one hand he holds a navy blue booklet.

  Vera stands, her torso blocking him from the sun. Then, the click of her heels, slow and dragging as she makes her way to the car, placing her palm down on the hood as she steps down from the sidewalk.

  “I’m sorry I kept you waiting,” he hears Leo say.

  “We didn’t hear you drive up,” Vera says.

  “I cut the motor and let it coast in.” Leo is out of the car now. He’s opening a pack of Wrigley’s Spearmint gum. Austin joins them, following up behind Vera. Leo offers him a piece of gum.

  “No. No, thank you.” Austin’s eyes are on the passport. It looks real enough.

  He has packed nothing, or nearly nothing. He has only one bag of minor effects. That and his satchel.

  Leo hands him the passport. The rectangular book lay in his hand—navy. The way he’d envied them at one point. Paper is stronger than one imagines, he thought to himself, flipping through the book now, slapping it against his palm a bit. Deep navy and crisp as the Atlantic and he remembered walks along the Long Island Sound, then a remembrance of possibility when he’d felt young, strong, enterprising, and in love. That was what the passport in its dashing, brash navy blue seemed to say, all neat and clean and almost as serene as a sea.

  • • •

  LEO IS WALKING TO the car. The doors are heavy, clicking open, a solidity to the metal handles, the button no larger than a thumbprint. He’d borrowed the car from a buddy. One of the kids lent it to him. It would be doing him a favor too. He’d drive it up across the border and meet a friend coming for a visit. The friend would bring it back down—a perfect exchange.

  Leo watching as his father aims for the door.

  He nods reassuringly, swiftly, and he opens the front dropping into the passenger’s seat with difficulty, his legs too long. Leo instructs him to readjust the seat, and then he settles in himself. The car smells of leather, Wrigley’s Spearmint, and a faint hint of perfume, which has left a gauze of flowery spice.

  “How long are we looking at?” Vera asks.

  “A day.” Leo turns to make sure Vera is in the back now. He sees her staring out the window, a heaviness at her lip, mouth, at his too, but they lock eyes and in the weary smile is a reassurance. He knows her worry, her anxieties, and he is trying to paint over all of this with his own calm, feigning it yes, but someone must be composed.

  • • •

  THE DRIVE, THEY’VE TOLD HIM, will take more than twenty-four hours. He didn’t have a say in it all, was following their lead. First, they will drive all day from Mexico City to Guadalajara, onward to the west. They will need to stop a few times, for gas, food, and rest, staying one night in Mazatlán. Leo wants to see where he was born. Then it’s MEX15-D up the coast, until they reach the Sea of Cortez, onward to Hermosillo and then through Santa Cruz to Nogales.

  Leaving a city as day begins is a humbling experience. There is—in the early light, in the first sounds of passersby, their footsteps and conversations—a promise. It is hard not to think about what one will miss as the activity of the day, the day in the city you are leaving, continues, as its inhabitants go on with so much busyness, flurry, and to do and to be, no one aware that you are leaving, no one to know you have left. But, leaving a city uncertain of return? It would go on. A body removed, deposited elsewhere—the city’s indifference to your absence, the days rising and falling, piling up without you.

  Anarose. Only she, he imagines, would wonder at his absence. He sees her now on the line, the first time he’d seen her. The fatigue and almost boredom of her stance as if she’d long been waiting for something, for anything, to happen. She had a face of her country—a pouting mouth that burst into smiles and laughter. She may come to the shop a few times more, enter and stand in the emptiness and perhaps pass her hand across the counter, leaf through papers, and maybe something about the way the things sat on their shelves, more still than usual, the sense of settled dust, would tell her that he’d done it, that he’d finally gone. He hopes she can in some way forgive him for balking. He’d half opened a door, peering inside, and then, on second thought, he’d turned away.

  As they drive the sky spreads out before them. Blue, with the sun’s glare threatening to whitewash. All the space, uncluttered by buildings, sets his thoughts open almost like the way he’d felt when standing before Julia those many years ago.

  “I will know you when . . . ,” he’d said to himself, and who is that brash boy now, he wonders?

  • • •

  VERA DOES NOT KNOW why she’d agreed to all this. Perhaps they should simply go on without her, she’d said to Leo. But he was so determined, had insisted. True, it was a last-ditch attempt, and she’d heard about others crossing with no problem, why shouldn’t it be just as easy for them?

  They have passed the city limits, are speeding outward. The sun lines the rearview mirror. She catches her image, a view of her profile. Her forehead creased, the eyebrow broken from the furrowing, the hollow of her eyes squinting against the haze. Leo is fumbling with the radio, leaning forward, one hand on the wheel. She can see the jaw muscles flex, moving up and down working over his Wrigley’s—the small tight rectangles he’d brought from the States.

  Her father is still and silent. If it were not for the occasional turn of head, one would assume he was asleep. Vera br
ought her knitting needles and draws them out now, her hands beginning to move in successive darting stabs, the click of the needles pleasant and soothing over the hum of the motor, the crackle of the radio. Leo has settled on a bolero station. He is singing along.

  It is a clear day, if blustery. The inside hood of the car, the leather ceiling and arc of it cut into her view of the sky, which is blue and searing, tranquil for a Mexican sky, though clouds are forming over the four peaks of Iztaccihuatl, the white woman. The city gradually slips away from them, as if undressing, shedding asphalt, cement, steel, and brick. The embassy, shop, Mexico City—it all lies far in the car’s wake now, discarded as they merge onto the four- and five-lane highways—the great valves. The other cars have fallen away too and soon they are driving, one lone car on a road far from Mexico City. The country now dotted with small, flat-roofed adobe houses of white and yellow, the flat landscape—maguey, dark, gangly against the sky.

  Nervous condition. Unfit for entrance. She cringes, remembering the scene. The unsuspecting, nearly oblivious doctor. The phrase keeps running over in her own thoughts. Well, and no wonder! she’d said, rising, and Leo telling her to calm down even though he too was seething, she could tell. She’d broken into a sob, left Leo there to continue talking with the doctor, stunned and speechless. She’d stormed outside, pacing back and forth, her hands wringing, teeth clenched. Her eyes flecked with the first of that night’s tears. She didn’t know what was coming over her, years of frustration on behalf of her father. Well, they’d go, they’d just leave, all three of them, just drive up to the border and cross, as Leo had said. She’d stood still for a moment, never believing something like this would come to fruition. How fully she’d imagined that she’d be able to simply do the paperwork, make her pleas, and they’d follow the processes and procedures and surely allow him in legally. But this now, this she’d not prepared for—now forced on this drive. She’d never really thought of the actuality of it. This drive. What it would mean. How it would be. It was always just a possibility, like when one watches another’s final breaths, anticipating what is to come, but the actual final severance, when it happens, is still a shock. No. One needed to adjust to the change now, to the reality of it, which is what she’s trying to do, knitting still, stitching it all up into some semblance of understanding, resigning herself to the decision; she’d be with them on this, the final, decisive push across the border.

  • • •

  AUSTIN HAD IMAGINED IT many times. Just how it would be—the day, the weather. But here they were, driving. One can only prepare so much—the day marked, the time chosen, the clothes, the people positioned, even the route that Leo had prepared. But all this thinking and preparation was an attempt to precipitate what would happen—the tricky complexities of the events of one day. What he had not expected was this quiet, his relative state of what he can only call calm, as if he were, for the time being, suspended in a hammock strung across a canyon whose depths he only half consciously knew of, like a memory, and only when bothering to do that hard, arduous work of recall would he remember and dare to sit upright, peer over the edge, to look down into the vast chasm that, all the while, had lain beneath him.

  The steady driving. The sun through the open window. The hum of the motor. Combined, all had a lulling effect, so much so that for full moments he could drop into a tranquility and strange stillness, the crossing in a future moment. A swell of numbness in his chest, stomach. They were worried—Vera and her panicked needles, Leo’s hand on the steering wheel, fidgety. And he, Austin, has his hand out the window. He’d never even considered that they would be traveling together, embarking on this together. He’d always seen himself there at the border, faced with it—alone.

  Rooms come to him—the shape and color of the dining room where he would see Julia. The violet light of a winter afternoon, the gauze of white curtains. The two large picture windows looking out into white, the gray branches of what were to him now foreign trees. And then in an instant the lighthouse. The peace of those mornings. Awake and working, hearing her voice below. The barracks house with all its wood and emptiness. His boardinghouse, alone in Mexico City. Then, he’d never have contemplated the need for such a trip that they were all embarking on now. Then, when he’d clung so fiercely to the belief that the embassy would soon grant him a visa, that his inventions would get him to his family. That terrible, old room, the shape of it, the bareness with white light from the windows. The dresser with bits of crumbs, an orange peel. The bed strewn with papers. He gathering them, placing them in his satchel, trying to take as much as he could. Vera had sat him down.

  “You don’t need these, Father,” she kept saying. “You’re coming home now.” He hears her voice still . . . home, mother, rest.

  • • •

  THE CITY FADES AWAY from them, its pull has loosened and they are driving faster now through the midmorning sun. Vera cannot imagine what her father is thinking—a kind of still preoccupation grips his whole body, his being. There is agitation in his silence. Reserve. It is as if, she thinks, he is storing up energy for the crossing. She can hardly imagine what it will be like, nor what it would be like for him. A simple crossing of some line demarcated by mere governments. She feels a dropping within, a hollow in the stomach as they leave the land plateau on which the city sits. The descent like staggered, labored breathing.

  She looks at her father, quiet in the swath of sun that blazes in a tight, neat square along the passenger’s side. His legs drawn up, his knees knobby, his hand out the window, and his gaze set forward. How, Vera wonders, could we think this would be a good idea, this faux joyride with the inevitable success or failure—crossing, not crossing—only two, three days away? She suddenly feels as if she were riding alongside a train pulling out of a station, struggling to keep up as the train picked up speed, the engines in full gear, falling back.

  The country out the window is dry and rugged. One American-like highway cuts through the cactus farms. The landscape shifts to vast fields of brush and brown. Soon, they drive through green, through mountains where roads are tight and winding, filled with steep climbs and descents, switchbacks and hairpin turns. The drops down are fast and she feels the falling in her stomach. The windows are open. Her hair, which she has tied back in a loose knot at the base of her neck, flies in tendrils that whip her cheeks, lash her eyes so that she is forever brushing the hair from her sight lines, removing a tendril from her mouth. They pass through cool swells and then through sunlight.

  She has only ever seen one picture of her mother in Mexico. She is standing, unsmiling, on a dirt road. Her hand is raised to her brow shielding her eyes from the sun. A maguey sits behind her and off to the side. Vera realizes that she is nearly the same age as her mother in that picture, with the Cananea landscape at her feet. Her eyes, though shaded, seem to struggle in the bright light of the desert. There was a softness and mildness to her features in that picture, incongruent with the stark extremes of the Cananea climate—arid, dry, desolate, and the sky massive and brooding above her, clouds like giants, and the land too, flat and vast and stretching far out behind her so that it reached the horizon, which seemed to vanish into the sky—Julia swallowed by it.

  Vera remembers too, and one could miss it if one did not look closely enough, but there in the foreground of the photograph, imprinted on the ground at a slight diagonal, is the photographer’s shadow. Her father, no doubt.

  Her mother had a similar picture of her father. They must’ve switched places, he taking the photo of her and then the awkward exchange of some cumbersome camera—the repositioning, the laughter. She maybe struggling with the weight of it. The heat. And the same shadow lies across the foreground of this photograph too, she remembers. But the shadow, of course, is different in this picture. It’s not his. It’s Julia’s shadow. The prescience of photographs.

  She looked at her father again. He, unlike her mother, did not seem so unfit for that severe Sono
ran landscape. He’d become weathered, burnished by the Mexican sun so that his face was rugged and tan now, his hair silver, wavy.

  • • •

  THEY SPEED THROUGH GREEN. On one side of the road, it is a straight drop down. On the other, the mountain rises gradually. The trees here all adorned with garlands of orchid vines. He can pick out the orange trumpets, the spider lilies, the tiger orchid of red and orange.

  They are driving forward toward a past, the past that he’d come to meet that would take him from Mexico. There is a finality in this traveling even as they try to make it bearable—retracing his past journeys, the towns he used to know nearing: Guadalajara, Tepic, Mazatlán, Hermosillo.

  His other travels return. The pier at Trieste. The wide-bottomed ship like the sheen of a whale, or what he’d imagined was a whale. Then, he’d had his first sight of open ocean, the roar and rush of the waves, shouts of men loading crates and trunks from the dock, large hoisting lines and foreign voices. The awful Atlantic crossing, and then the steamship back to Russia, the trains to Kherson and away again, a boat across the Black Sea to Constantinople, a boat to France, a train to Paris, and the steamship to Veracruz. He skips through the years so the images gather, one bound to the next as if looking at a child’s flip book. Another man may find in it adventure. From a different perspective, vantage point, perhaps it was, but he’d wanted a home and what was that but to wander day in, day out among the same knowable streets, frequent shops of a neighborhood, to be seen and known.

  • • •

  THROUGH DENSE GREEN Leo spots the ocean. It is a curved inlet, a bay of blue. Like a puddle of ink among mountains.

  “The Pacific,” Leo says. He is sitting forward now, slows down the car, pulling it to the side of the road.

  “Careful,” Vera says as branches tickle the hood of the car, threatening to poke through the back windows. Before he’s even put the car in park, Leo has opened his door, jumping out. Pebbles crunch beneath his shoes. He cut the motor, but the radio is still playing, and he can hear it softly behind him, guitars strumming, the high-pitched voice of a female singer—something about remorse or resignation.