He couldn’t remember what Michelina’s answer was, couldn’t even remember if he actually said those things to her or simply thought them. Then other boys danced with her, and he never saw her again. Until today.
He didn’t dare say hello. How would she remember him? What would he say to her? Remember how we met at a party at Chubby Casillas’s eleven years ago and danced together? She didn’t even look at him. Don Leonardo did. He looked up from reading an article in Fortune that gave figures for the richest men in Mexico but, luckily, once again omitted his name. Neither he nor the rich politicians ever appeared—the politicians because none of their businesses had their names on them: they hid behind the seven veils of multiple partnerships, borrowed names, foundations … Don Leonardo imitated them. It was difficult to attribute to him the wealth he actually possessed.
He looked up because he saw or sensed someone different. When the workers contracted as “services” had begun boarding the plane, Don Leonardo had at first congratulated himself on the success of his lobbying, then had admitted that it made him angry to see so many dark-skinned men in lacquered straw hats parade through first class. He had therefore stopped looking at them. Other planes had two entrances, one forward, the other at the rear. It was slightly irritating to pay for first class and have to put up with a parade of badly dressed, badly washed people.
Something made him look, and it was the passing of Lisandro Chávez, who wasn’t wearing a hat, who seemed to be of another class, who had a different profile, and who came prepared for the cold of a New York December. The others wore light clothing. They hadn’t been told that it’s cold in New York. Lisandro was wearing a red-and-black-checked wool jacket that zipped up to the neck. Don Leonardo went on reading Fortune. Michelina Laborde de Barroso slowly sipped her mimosa.
Lisandro Chávez decided to keep his eyes shut for the rest of the trip. He asked to not be served any food and to be allowed to sleep. The stewardess gave him a puzzled look. Only people in first class made those kinds of requests. She tried friendliness: Our rice pilaf is excellent. In reality, an insistent question, like a steel mosquito, was drilling its way through Lisandro’s forehead: What am I doing here? I shouldn’t be doing this. I’m not the man.
The “I” who wasn’t there had had other ambitions, and even when he was in high school his family had encouraged them. His father’s soda factory was prospering and a hot country like Mexico would always consume soft drinks. The more soft drinks, the easier it was to send Lisandro to private schools, take on a mortgage for the house in Colonia Cuauhtémoc, make the monthly payments on the Chevrolet, maintain the fleet of delivery trucks, and go to Houston once a year, even if just for a couple of days, stroll through the malls, say they’d gone for their annual medical exams … Lisandro was likable, he went to parties, read García Márquez; with luck, he’d stop taking the bus to school next year, he’d have his own Volkswagen.
He didn’t want to look down for fear of discovering something horrible that could be seen only from the air. There was no homeland anymore, no such thing as Mexico; the country was a fiction or, rather, a dream maintained by a handful of madmen who at one time believed in the existence of Mexico … A family like his was not going to be able to withstand twenty years of crisis, debt, bankruptcy, hopes raised only to fall again with a crash, every six years, more and more poverty, unemployment. His father could no longer come up with the dollars to pay his debts and maintain the factory; the soft-drink business became concentrated and consolidated in a couple of monopolies; the independent labels, the small outfits, had to sell out and leave the market. What kind of work will I do now? his father asked himself as he walked like a ghost through the apartment in the Narvarte district when it was no longer possible to pay the mortgage on the Cuauhtémoc house, when it was no longer possible to make the payments on the Chevrolet, when Lisandro’s mother had to put a sign in the window SEWING DONE HERE, when what was left of the savings evaporated first in the inflation of 1985 and then in the devaluation of 1995. The accumulated unpayable debts meant the end of private schools, the end of any illusions about having his own car. Your uncle Roberto has a good voice and earns a few pesos singing and playing the guitar on the corner, but we haven’t fallen that low yet, Lisandro, we don’t yet have to stand outside the cathedral offering our services, tools in hand and a sign saying PLUMBER CARPENTER ELECTRICIAN BRICKLAYER, we haven’t yet fallen as low as the children of our former servants, who have to quit school, walk the streets, dress up as clowns and paint their faces white and toss balls in the air at the corner of Insurgentes and Reforma. Remember Rosita’s son, the one you played with, the one who was born here in the house? Well, I mean in the house we had before, on Río Nazas. Well, he’s dead. I think his name was Lisandro, like you, of course—they named him that so we would be his godparents. He had to leave his house when he was seventeen and become a fire-eater on street corners; he painted two black tears on his face and ate fire for a year, taking a mouthful of gasoline and sticking a burning wick down his throat until it destroyed his brain, Lisandro, his brain just melted, became like dough, and remember, he was the oldest son, the hope. Now the little ones sell Kleenex, chewing gum—Rosita, our maid—Remember her?—told me. She’s desperate, struggling to keep the little ones from starting to sniff glue to get high after working in the streets with bands of homeless kids as numerous as stray dogs, and just as hungry, and forgotten. Lisandro, what’s a mother going to tell you whose kids walk the streets to keep her alive, to bring something home? Lisandro, look at your city sinking into the oblivion of what it once was but most of all into the oblivion of what it wanted to be. I have no right to anything, Lisandro Chávez said to himself one day, I have to join the sacrifice of all, join the sacrificed nation, ill-governed, corrupt, uncaring. I have to forget my illusions, make money, help my parents, do what humiliates me least, an honest job, a job that will save me from having contempt for my parents, anger toward my country, shame for myself but that will also save me from the mockery of my friends. He spent years trying to tie together loose ends, to forget the illusions of the past, stripping away ambition for the future, inoculating himself with fatalism, defending himself against resentment, proudly humiliated in his tenacious will to get ahead despite everything. For Lisandro Chávez, twenty-six years old, illusions lost, there was now a new opportunity, to go to New York as a service worker, ignorant that Don Leonardo Barroso had said:
“Why are they all so dark, so obviously lower class?”
“It’s the majority, Don Leonardo. The only thing the country can produce.”
“Well, let’s see if you can find me one who looks like a better sort, whiter—I’ll take him. What kind of impression are we going to make, partner?”
And now, as Lisandro passed through first class, Don Leonardo looked at him without imagining that he was one of the contracted workers but wishing instead that all of them were like this working fellow with a decent face and sharp features (although with a big moustache like that of a prosperous member of a mariachi band) and—heavens!—skin lighter than Leonardo Barroso’s own. Different, the millionaire noticed, a different boy, don’t you think, Miche? But his daughter-in-law and lover had fallen asleep.
2
When they landed at JFK, in the middle of a snowstorm, Barroso wanted to leave the plane as soon as possible, but Michelina was curled up next to the window, covered with a blanket, her head resting on a pillow. She wanted to wait. Let everyone else leave, she asked Don Leonardo.
He wanted to get out and say hello to the agents responsible for recruiting the Mexican workers contracted to clean various buildings in Manhattan over the weekend, when the offices would be empty. The service contract made everything explicit: the workers would come from Mexico to New York on Friday night to work on Saturday and Sunday, returning to Mexico City on Sunday night.
“Everything included, even the airfare—it’s cheaper than hiring workers here in Manhattan. We save between 25 and 30 pe
rcent,” his gringo partners explained.
But they’d forgotten to tell the Mexicans it was cold, which was why Don Leonardo, surprised by his own humane spirit, wanted to get out first to warn the agents that these boys needed jackets, blankets, something.
They began to parade by, and the fact was there was a bit of everything. Don Leonardo’s sense of humanitarian, and now national, pride doubled. The country was so beaten down, especially after having believed that it wasn’t; we dreamed we were in the first world and woke to find ourselves back in the third. It’s time to work more for Mexico, not to be discouraged, to find new solutions. Like this one. There was a bit of everything, not only the boy with the big moustache wearing the checked jacket but others, too, whom the investor hadn’t noticed because the stereotype of the wetback, the peasant with a lacquered hat and skimpy beard, had consumed them all. Now he began to distinguish them, to individualize them, to restore their personalities to them, possessing as he did forty years’ experience dealing with workers, supervisors, professional types, bureaucrats, all at his service, always at his service, never anyone above him: that was the motto of his independence, no one, not even the president of the republic, above Leonardo Barroso, or as he put it to his U.S. partners:
“I’m my own man. I’m just like you, a self-made man. I don’t owe nobody nothing.”
He’d never take that privilege away from anyone. Besides the moustachioed, handsome boy, Barroso tried to differentiate the young men from the provinces, who dressed in a certain way and appeared more backward but also more attractive and somewhat grayer than the young men from Mexico City, the chilangos. Even among them he began to distinguish from the herd those who two or three years earlier, during the euphoria of the Salinas de Gortari period, could be seen eating at a Denny’s, taking vacations in Puerto Vallarta, or going to the multiplex cinemas in Ciudad Satélite.
He picked them out because they were the saddest, though the least resigned as well, those like Lisandro Chávez who asked themselves, What am I doing here? I don’t belong here. Yes, yes, you belong here, Barroso would have answered, you belong here so thoroughly that in Mexico, even if you dragged yourself on your knees to the Basilica of Guadalupe to visit the Virgin, you couldn’t, even with a miracle, earn a hundred dollars for two days’ work, four hundred a month, three thousand pesos—not even the Virgin would give you that.
He looked at them as if they were his—his pride, his sons, his idea.
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 châteaus 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.