Into the Beautiful North(30)

“What,” Tacho asked the universe, “in the hell,” he raised his hands in entreaty to the Almighty, “did that boy say?”

“?Agarra la onda, guey!” Vampi suddenly spouted. “Don’t you speak cholo, vato? ?La mera neta! I speakin’ the cholo! ?Bien de aquellas, de aquellitas! Rifamos, ?sí o no?”

Tacho let out a small cry of despair.

“He said,” Vampi explained, reverting to a human dialect, “that the wall extends into the sea. You can’t swim around it.”

“Oh.”

“Ahi te wacho.”

“Whatever.”

Tacho raised his hand to his brow as if looking a great distance and turned in a small circle.

“So this is the border,” he said. “I don’t get it.”



They trudged, lost. Vampi and Tacho had never walked so far in their lives. Even Nayeli and Yolo, the soccer stars, were tired. They kept veering north, as if there would be some magical gap in the fences. As if there would be some way into the USA that nobody had ever tried, or that the Border Patrol had overlooked. They made their way into the Río de Tijuana corridor, an area of nicer hotels, shopping malls, nightclubs with volcanos that erupted all night on their dance floors. They saw an IMAX theater in the shape of a white sphere.

“The Death Star,” announced Jedi Master Yolo.

They finally collapsed in the hot shade of the city fruit market. It was a warren of sheds and shops, and the smell of cooking, fruit, rot, diesel, fish, onions, and cigarette smoke filled the air. It reminded Nayeli of Aunt Irma’s trips to the Mazatlán market. She looked into the glass cases holding stacked Mexican candies and saw the same drunk bees staggering around, wiped out by the same fermented sugar.

Yolo found a small chapel in the parking lot dedicated to some local saint. She dragged Tacho in there to pray and light candles. Vampi somehow latched onto a gringo missionary group that was buying beans and potatoes for an orphanage run. She followed them around, trying to make small talk with the blond boys in her strange pidgin English.

One of the burly men working the fruit trucks stopped beside Nayeli.

“Tired?” he said.

She glowered at him. After last night, she was not about to talk to strange men.

He smiled.

He handed her a mango.

“It gets better,” he said, and walked down the line of trucks. She watched him shoulder a hundred-pound bag of rice and stagger away.

The mango rained juice down her front, but she didn’t care. She ate it with her eyes closed. It tasted like home.



The beggars were having a bad day. Do?a Araceli was dressed the way the mestizos expected her to dress—in indigenous clothing. She was a Mixtec Indian, one of the main tribal groups working the Tijuana area. She and her husband, Porfirio, had come north—not to cross the line, but to earn money in Tijuana. They didn’t know that it was the most visited tourist city on earth, but they did know there was a great flow of money to be had if you worked hard. The worst insult they could think of was: That man doesn’t want to work. Work was everything to them, even though they had no work left to do. Their small farm plot in Michoacán had died out in a drought, and their two cattle had been sold, then their one pig, and finally their ten chickens. They left their plot of land to Porfirio’s parents and rode freight trains to the border, looking for a new life.

Don Porfirio had worked the trash at the Fausto Gonzalez dump, while Do?a Araceli dressed as a “María,” one of the indigenous alms-seekers, and walked the long streets of the city looking for coins. Don Porfirio used to say, “At least in Tijuana they have garbage,” because even the dumps of their homeland were barren and picked clean. But then the city of Tijuana closed down the Fausto dump, started trucking the trash to Tecate, and three hundred garbage-picking families had to find new ways to survive. Some followed the trash to Tecate. Some crossed into the US. Most struggled along like he did. Don Porfirio washed windshields. He didn’t beg—begging was for women, children, and the infirm. No, even if it was for two dollars a day, swiping a filthy rag on American windshields, breathing in exhaust fumes on the borderline, a man worked.

Don Porfirio and Do?a Araceli were on their way home to the dompe. They met at the fruit market and counted out their money. Not great: four American dollars. They bought some cheese, stale sweet rolls, and three potatoes. They saved enough to take the bus back to their small house in Fausto. Baptist missionaries had built their home out of old garage doors smuggled in from San Diego.

It was Do?a Araceli who saw the bedraggled group sitting on a folded rice bag made of burlap. They were so exhausted and filthy that nobody even yelled at them to get out of the way, and trucks pulled around them in the crowded lot. She pointed them out to Porfirio, and he laughed. He didn’t often see mestizos like these so beaten down.

“They look worse than we do, vieja!” he said.

She liked it when he called her “old woman.” In turn, she liked to call him “gordo,” though he was anything but fat. He would like to be fat. That would be nice. He would like to weigh three hundred pounds when he died, so it would take ten cabrones to carry his coffin.

They ambled over to Nayeli’s group.

“Are you all right?” Araceli asked.

They looked up at her.

“Indians,” said Tacho.