This story was first published by WordRiot.org in August 2003. With a Kindle Unlimited subscription, you can read it and other stories from my collection American Gospel for free.
I first saw Anapra the day I arrived in El
Paso. The previous summer I had come
from Arizona in a Greyhound bus that roared along Interstate 10 until it
reached the city limits and slowed, allowing me to take in the desolate
view. To the right, West of El Paso, the
town of Santa Teresa sat lonely and quiet on the desert floor. Directly ahead, Juarez, mother of my strange
destiny, awaited me. Ahead and to the
left, El Paso del Norte was not sure if it was America, Mexico or Texas. All around were low, brown barren hills that
couldn’t have cared less about which country they resided in.
The I-10 closely parallels
the border as it approaches downtown El Paso and turns eastward. Anapra lays between this multi-million-dollar
testament to America’s technological advancement and the naked cliff faces
opposite in Mexico. Cristo Rey, the
giant white crucifix that sits atop a hill in El Paso, can be seen from a
distance of many miles, and from this promontory a crucified Jesus looks out over
creation.
The full name of the area is
Puerta Anapra. It is not a town unto
itself but rather a colonia of
Juarez. Ciudad Juarez is divided into
colonias the way an American city might be divided into zip codes. Except Anapra had not been planned by the
city fathers; people just built there, raising homes on the desert floor or
carving them out of the sides of low hills.
The land occupying this space before the recent settlement must have
been as barren and lifeless as the Moon. In the corner of God’s eye, it had
become a squatter colony.
I saw the result of this
sudden sprawl from my moving vantage point on the bus. The view lasted only seconds and I was
grateful when I was carried out of Anapra’s sight and into the slow-beating
heart of El Paso.
A week later Peter took me
and a few other volunteers on our first trip to Anapra. He drove and talked endlessly about the
border and the plight of immigrants throughout history, starting with Abraham
and Israel. The other new guys and I, for a variety of motives, had decided to
come live in shelters on both sides of the border, working for free. Most had been like me, kids fresh out of
college and wanting to do anything besides go back to school or get a job. Some were religious, some were leftists. We sat in the back of Peter’s van joking
about Nebuchadnezzar’s furnace to take our minds off the poverty and misery we
were seeing. The immense shantytown,
built on desert sand and into the sides of barren hills, was a stark,
undeniable reminder of our own mortality.
When you grow up surrounded by food, computers, designer clothing,
excellent housing and movie screen television, you never know the eternal
enemies of the race: hunger, weather, violence, madness. To see others afflicted by these things suggests
a common destiny. Yes, they will die out
here, but you will die someplace else.
We tried to listen to
Peter’s lecture while our minds browsed memories of home and middle-class
security, wondering if we would stay.
One of the others left the next day without saying a word to
anyone. I was the only one left by the
following summer. For reasons mysterious
even to myself, I remained.
I had subsequently been out
to Anapra a number of times but not since early July, when I went to the fiesta patronal of the small church that
served the area. Nothing had
changed. It was just as hot, just as
disturbingly impoverished, and I still had the diarrhea I’d gotten from eating
tacos made with spoiled meat. A year had
gone by but I still got weak and feverish once a month for several days at a
time.
Peter had called me an hour
before and told me why I had to go with him.
I’d been sitting, sweating, in the office at Casa Maria, one of Peter’s
Juarez shelters, going over the schedule for the last week of August, when he
called. He reminded me that the previous
summer I had attended a free course about documenting human rights abuses
committed by the border patrol. I
remembered, sitting there and feeling as empty as a discarded beer bottle, how
fervent I’d been at the time I was trained, only beginning to think that I,
too, might someday burn out like so many other volunteers I knew. I had been positively anxious for the border
patrol to kick someone’s ass so that I could write it up. But I never got a chance. Either the border patrol wasn’t abusing
anyone or the people being abused weren’t talking.
“I need your assistance.”
Peter had said, speaking to me from the dingy office of his decrepit house in
downtown El Paso where he lived alone. He spoke in a cold, formal voice, as if
he didn’t know me very well. Maybe after
seventeen years of being the border saint it was easier not to know any of the
transients you met, be they volunteer or refugee.
“That’s what I’m here
for.” I was drawing up the work schedule
as we talked, but focusing neither on that nor on the conversation.
“I just got a call from Rita
Melendez.” Rita was a woman with four children who inexplicably made a living
in Anapra. The organization had been in
touch with her for a few years in order to have a contact in Anapra.
“How’d Rita call you?” I
asked, somewhat more attentive now. I
knew that neither Rita nor any of her neighbors had phones.
“She had to take a bus into
town.”
That morning a neighbor had
told Rita that a man who tried to cross over into the States the night before
had been brutally beaten not far from Anapra.
He had been taken in by someone just a few blocks away.
“But Rita hasn’t seen the
man?”
“No, and I’m aware that this
could be a wild goose chase, but I want to act on it. I’d like for you and I to go out there and
try to document the event.”
I had forgotten almost
everything involved in creating such documentation. But I couldn’t bear admitting that to Peter
so I agreed to go. A part of me was
hoping the poor bastard would die of his injuries before we got there and save
me the embarrassment.
As Peter and I entered
Anapra proper I recalled the disgust I had felt at my first view. This was the grimmest, lowest level of
poverty I had ever seen. Houses were made out of anything their owners could
get their hands on: wooden pallets, styrofoam, cement blocks, plastic bags,
plywood. Most homes were a combination
of this garbage. The floors were usually
dirt, packed down by the treading feet of the occupants. There was no running water.
Some residents used car
batteries as a temporary energy source.
If not, electricity was pirated from nearby electrical poles. Every now and then some poor bastard got
electrocuted trying to hook up his house so that his family could listen to the
radio, watch TV or run some other rare appliance they might be lucky enough to
have. The dirt roads were girded by the
tangled cables that ran from these poles to people’s shacks.
As the Toyota struggled
through sand, rocks, and clouds of dust to the top of a hill, I looked out over
that human disaster and felt pity and empathy rising up out of the junkyard of
my soul. I felt compassion for the man I
was supposed to interview and hated feeling it.
Not for the first time I wondered if I had been wise to volunteer for
another year in this slow hell of other people’s suffering.
We stopped at Rita’s
ramshackle home. If I had wanted to find
out how Rita eked by I could’ve done so, but I never got around to asking. She
was one of those unbelievable examples of human fortitude and mercy. The year before I arrived in El Paso, with my
college smile and my duffel bag, Rita took in an old man, abandoned by his own
children, to live in her home. As if
supporting her children on virtually nothing hadn’t been difficult enough, Rita
had taken in an old gimp that did nothing but consume and whine. Volunteers tended to speak of her as the soul
of charity, but I thought she was nuts.
Her house was made mostly of
cement block, which was nice for the area.
The dwelling had a low ceiling and a back room made from wooden pallets
and semi-transparent plastic sheets.
There was a faint smell of wood smoke in the dusty air. By the time we had stepped out, two of Rita’s
three boys had come running out of the shack and were babbling something faster
than I could understand. Peter contorted
his face and listened intently.
Rita, short and brown with a
pretty face for her thirty-some tough years, came out as the boys rattled on,
probably having long past disbursed any important information and now simply
repeating or rephrasing it. Peter was
too polite to interrupt. I looked
inquisitively at their mother. She
smiled, showing a rare mouth with only one missing tooth, and explained
quickly.
“Don Luis esta mal. Necesitamos
llevarlo al doctor.”
Don Luis, the old boy Rita
had taken in, was sick and needed to see a doctor. Secretly, I felt good for Rita. If Don Luis died she’d have one less mouth to
feed and a slightly better shot at survival.
It sounds heartless, but you haven’t seen how she and her kids
lived. You haven’t watched those
barefoot boys play with sticks and rocks while, a few miles away, American
children whined if their parents didn’t buy them new shoes or more video games
once a month.
We crowded into her home and
stood against the walls. The living
room, to the right of the entrance, was small, perhaps ten feet by eight. There was a small, fold-up card table
standing uncertainly in the middle of this space, surrounded by a green,
plastic patio chair, an actual wooden chair and two milk crates stacked one
atop the other. Don Luis occupied the
patio chair, arms dangling at his sides, head bowed as if in prayer. On another milk crate sat a battered TV. It showed little more than static.
Rita chattered and Peter
nodded, repeating a few times that he would help her.
“What’s wrong with him?” I
asked Rita.
“We found him on the floor
when we came back from the store.” There
was a market just a block from her house.
“He was shaking and moaning.”
I had seen things like this
before in the shelters; old men and women, trembling uncontrollably, having
fits, shouting incoherently. They might
go on like that for weeks, months, or years before dying. In the States such a case would have been
diagnosed and treated, someone would have done something for them. In
Mexico, they just suffered on the margins of society. Then they died. Until now Don Luis had been a burden, but he
had been lucid and ambulatory. I was
slowly realizing that things really could get worse for Rita and her children,
after thinking for so long that it couldn’t be any worse than it was.
Peter, Rita and I lifted him
simultaneously. “Aah. Aah. Aah.” He
moaned, exhaling noxious breath. I held
Don Luis’s shoulders. His head lolled against my chest. With his eyes closed and his mouth hanging
open, the old man resembled an infant.
As close as I was, I could smell that he had shit himself a little, just
like a baby would do. But another look
at that weather-beaten, wrinkled, slack flesh around his eyes and I saw the
death in him. Don Luis forever became
the personification of Death for me, even though he did not die that day. When my mother was dying of cancer two years
later, I sat at her bedside in the hospital and remembered Don Luis. I imagined the old man coming for her,
reeking of shit and moaning “aah, aah, aah” as he stumbled down the hallways,
shutting the eyes of the dying with a trembling hand.
We staggered outside like a
confused, six-legged juggernaut. With a
quick flash of his hand Peter cracked open the passenger side door and pushed
it wide open with his body. We put Don
Luis in the middle of the seat and Rita hopped in to support him. I got out of there quick, just in case
whatever the old man had was catching. I
had known volunteers who got tuberculosis during their stay. In a year I had managed to avoid that and
certainly wasn’t going to risk getting anything worse.
As Peter and Rita tried to
decide whether to take him to the clinic or the General Hospital, I couldn’t
help but look northward to America. A
few hundred yards from Rita’s house, the only thing separating Mexico and her
northern neighbor was a low dirt berm.
One could easily step over it. I
thought of running for it just to see what would happen. It looked so easy. Of course, one could easily pick out the
border patrol trucks stationed at regular intervals. They were the real border;
magnificent, gasoline-powered, steel machines that vigorously pursued anything
that tried to penetrate our defenses. The dirt berm was only a symbol.
But with the trucks so still
it was easy to imagine that they were asleep, that one could bolt across the
border and into the promised land and hide before the guardians awoke. I tried
to imagine having that temptation all the time.
From his perch above all the misery, Christ also seemed to contemplate
this temptation.
Eventually Peter decided to
take Don Luis to the General Hospital.
This was a tough decision, since the General Hospital was known for
taking off a leg when you needed a kidney removed and vice versa.
“I’ll go with Don Luis.”
Rita announced. “Veronica will be here
in a few minutes. She can show you the
way.” She spoke the last words to me.
Veronica was Rita’s sixteen-year-old daughter. She visited the house occasionally and I had
seen her on most of his trips to Anapra.
Rita left her two boys with
me. The three of us watched the truck
kick up dust as it pulled away, then we went inside to escape the Sun.
Inside was little
better. The enclosed darkness of Rita’s
dwelling offered no more than an almost imperceptibly cooler environment and
brought her family’s stark poverty far too close.
The kitchen was a small
space to the left of the front door.
Over one corner a mesh bag hung from a nail in the ceiling. The idea was to keep the mice and the bugs
out. An onion weighed the bag down. I thought of a man with one testicle. A hot plate sat on the ground below, next to
a small tank of propane gas. A wooden
stand, holding a few dishes and cups, and a water basin were in the other
corner. Rita’s family took baths by
filling up the basin with cool water and then pouring in a pot of the boiling
kind. That much water was hard to come
by so they bathed infrequently and all in the same water, one after the other.
The boys babbled, excited to
have one of the gringos in their home.
Soon I understood that they wanted to play soccer, futbol, with me. I agreed on
the condition that I had to leave as soon as Veronica arrived to show me the
injured man that I was supposed to interview.
“Hokay!” They shouted before
running out the door. They ran right
into their eldest sister, Veronica, who immediately began to scold them in
vicious Spanish.
When I walked out she
stopped right in the middle of a particularly foul phrase and smiled.
“Ay, que verguenza.” She batted her eyes. “Perdoname.”
She was thin and dark-skinned with jet-black hair and blacker eyes.
“Esta bien. No hay problema.”
I responded. I told her about what had
happened and why they had left me behind, waiting for her.
“Si!” She began, nodding her head vigorously. “Yo se
donde esta!” She reached out to take my wrist and pulled me along. I made sure our hands parted as we began our
trek.
“Vayanse!” She hissed, turning back to the boys who had started to
follow. They scampered back inside the
house and let us depart.
“Como esta todo en la casa?” She asked demurely when we came to the
end of the street. How is everything in the house?
She referred to Casa Maria.
“Bien. Bien.”
She turned left and I
followed. The conversation carried on,
touching on benign subject matter like the house and the weather, until it
lamely died a minute later when we reached the house we were looking for.
It was not much different
from Rita’s house, perhaps in slightly worse condition but the same size. It had no front door. Instead, there was a heavy blanket hanging
across the single doorway. Windows were
also curtained with blankets. There was
no noise from inside.
“Oye!” Veronica called from a few yards away. “Oye!”
I stood beside her,
listening to the distant sound of cars roaring over the interstate, listening
to the more intimate sounds of our feet on the sand, the susurration of our
breath. The other myriad noises of
Anapra were filtered out as we stood there, waiting for a dead man to respond.
After a minute, Veronica
spoke to me.
“Aqui es donde me dijeron.” Here
is where they told me.
I shrugged and asked her if
it would be okay to go in, or could we get hurt trying that? Veronica assured
me that if she went in front, calling out, we would be okay.
Thus we approached the
shack, Veronica in front, announcing the purpose of our visit as we
precariously covered the short distance between the gate and the front
door. Soon we stopped again, before the
curtained doorway, listening. Veronica
looked at me, shrugged her shoulders, and pushed aside the blanket. Holy of
Holies, I thought as I stepped through the doorway, following Veronica into
the cool darkness of the dead man’s abode.
Dark it was, but not
quiet. Flies buzzed and hummed in the
unlit room. I was used to flies swarming
all over me, taking whatever sustenance they could from my sweat, but these
flies paid me no attention. There was a
more attractive dish set for them. The bloody
remnant of a person lay on the dirt floor.
With the curtain slightly
open it was possible to make out some of the former man’s features. He was dark-skinned, moreno as they say in Spanish.
He was small, with black hair.
His eyes were, mercifully, shut, so his eye color was not verifiable but
I had a pretty good idea of what they would have looked like. The man was probably from Guatemala, an
indian from the mountains. I could tell
where someone was from just by their appearance. His eyes would have been
black. His voice would have been
high-pitched, his Spanish fast and mingled with indian terms that made it
nearly unintelligible to me. He must
have recently died because I detected only the faint odor of unwashed skin,
rather than the stench of rotting flesh.
While I was still staring
down at the dead man’s face, Veronica turned and threw her arms around me. She whispered hoarsely, “Llevame de aqui!” Take me away from here.
In the moments the embrace
endured, while I inhaled her strange mixture of pleasant girl-scents and
repulsive body-odor, I wondered what she meant.
Was she asking me to take her out of the shack, or out of Anapra?
I pushed her away
slowly. She jutted her face forward and
up, into mine, her full lips grappling my own.
I pulled her back and returned the kiss, hands running up and down her
body, underneath her shirt, rasping against her back. She used her arms to force my face against
her own. Our teeth clacked together
painfully. I slipped her shirt up over
her breasts. Her torso, slender and
brown, was unbelievably smooth.
Then I became aware of the
smell, an awful reek. It was sweat,
dirt, blood and the stench of her sex all at once. I remembered the corpse and Don Luis and
suddenly wanted to vomit. I pushed her
away, against the concrete wall, and stepped outside into the clear sunlight.
I stood there and listened
to the sounds of Anapra and the distant sound of America. I heard Veronica crying inside the house,
just a few feet away; easy to comfort there in the darkness with the dead.
I stepped through the gate
and onto the street.
I waited at Rita’s house and
played reluctantly with the boys, kicking around a half-deflated soccer ball
that appeared to be older than Peter’s Toyota.
I thought about something
Peter had told me and the other new volunteers the day after we arrived. He’d said that we needed to understand that
that we did not become volunteers to help poor people. We did it for ourselves. I can remember thinking it was a bunch of shit
and feeling a little insulted. I had come to help poor people even if
he didn’t think so. After a few months,
though, I realized that he was right. In
all the emotional turmoil I experienced in those early days I cried on several
occasions. But I never cried for the
miserable, downtrodden people I met. I
cried because I was afraid that the same misery could occur to me someday, that
reality was a relentless tide of events that could not be stopped by wishful thinking. I cried because no one else would cry if I
ended up on the street, hungry and cold.
I cried for myself.
Standing there at dusk in
Anapra, I played soccer with Rita’s boys and understood that Veronica, too,
cried for herself and not for the dead man.
But just as no one could do anything to assuage my sorrows, I could do
nothing to alleviate hers. We were two
different worlds and the distance between us was not navigable.
Veronica had not returned
when Peter and Rita came back with Don Luis, who was conscious but weak, just
after sunset. There had been no room at
the General Hospital and they had given up waiting there. In the meantime, Don Luis had recovered
somewhat. Peter promised to come in the
morning and take him back to the hospital.
I told Peter that we had not
found the victim and that Veronica had stayed out trying to find him. Peter resigned himself to trying again the
next day and I was grateful when we got in the truck and drove away.
Peter called the next day
and informed me that Veronica had found the man dead. The whole thing was being investigated by the
federales and I could forget about
documenting it.
“Keep me informed.” I
replied dully.
I had two days coming to
me. I planned on going over to El Paso
to take a shower. Then I was going to go
to the library and read magazines in the air-conditioned basement before eating
a hamburger and drinking some beer in a clean bar. I was going to be a good American and forget
about Rita, about Veronica, about Don Luis and the dead man, about a whole
world out there just dying to live.
