Fernando?
Hmm?
Aren’t you sleepy?
No.
Want some gum?
No. Thanks.
Nick didn’t like people who chewed gum and he could never find out about the little strawberry-flavored packet that lived in the bottom of my bag.
Did you tell my mother what happened to you when you left Brazil?
Fernando was fully dressed, lying on top of the bedspread, the bed still made. His shoes, on the ground, looked like giant sleeping beetles, with the appendages of their laces hanging at their sides.
Some of it, he said. Not everything.
Do you think much about it?
I used to. Not so much anymore.
Don’t you like to think about it?
At this stage, it doesn’t make much difference. You know? Thinking about it or not thinking about it.
We stayed there like that, awake and silent for a while, listening to Carlos breathe. Listening to the noises from the highway. A digital clock with scarlet letters on the bedside table showed 23:11.
Could you pass me a beer? Fernando asked.
I got a beer from the dwarf fridge that was snoring with its dwarf asthma next to my bed. Fernando opened the can with a metallic sneeze and took a sip.
Do you want me to tell you the things I never told your mother?
I was quiet and listened. For a good while, I just listened.
I never asked Fernando why he decided to talk that night. If, by any chance, he had decided to indemnify my mother for the things he hadn’t told her by telling her daughter. But if I asked he probably would have said: at this stage, it doesn’t make much difference.
I was awoken shortly after 8am by Carlos tugging on my big toe. I felt like hitting him. But I just grumbled and pulled my foot up and rolled over to keep sleeping.
He and Fernando were already up, dressed and groomed. Fernando was wearing the birthday T-shirt. The coffee-maker was making coffee as it always did, as it was condemned to do for countless guests, day after day, gurgling and blowing out steam on the counter between the toothbrushes. The coffee came in sachets, the sugar and sweetener in little packets.
I knew it must be time to get up. We ate a trio of bagels in the motel foyer on Styrofoam plates and used plastic knives to spread on the cream cheese and jam that came in tiny individual plastic packages. We drank a little processed juice from Styrofoam cups and more coffee in other Styrofoam cups. By the time we had finished we had three Styrofoam plates, six Styrofoam cups, three plastic knives, three plastic spoons, a few empty packets of sugar and some empty cream cheese and jam packages to throw in the trash. After that, we had a car to get from the workshop and a trip to resume.
Las Animas bordered on New Mexico. At the top of Raton Pass, Carlos wanted to stop, get out of the car and take photographs at the state border. Then he asked Fernando what New Mexico had to do with Mexico.
Camino Sin Nombre
We met June in Santa Fé a day late. Fernando had let her know that the car had broken down. Late that Sunday morning, there were tourists in the main square buying silver and turquoise jewelry made and sold by the Indians. Women in fur coats and leather boots strolled about in pairs, followed by men in cowboy hats, who paid for the things their wives bought and carried the bags.
The Indians spread out their earrings and necklaces and bracelets on colorful blankets, on designated sidewalks, next to the wall of the Palace of the Governors. They also wrapped themselves in colorful blankets if it was cold, and some ate the food they had brought from home.
In the surrounding area, the stores inhabited adobe constructions. They sold Native American art and Rolex watches.
June’s father, she told us later, was a descendent of the Zuni nation. June’s mother was an English linguist who had gone to New Mexico to study the Zuni language, Shiwi’ma, an isolated indigenous language according to scholars. She didn’t find any answers, but she found a man she liked (who wasn’t fluent in Shiwi’ma, because he had grown up outside of the pueblos, but who had his own particular, paralinguistic attractions).
June’s mother returned to England with June’s father by her side and June in her belly.
But after New Mexico, England seemed excessively wet, excessively tame. Subtle. European. June learned to play the piano, June’s father got a job, and June’s mother continued to study isolated languages.
One fine day, as if it had been agreed upon from the outset, they sold or gave away everything they had, crossed the Atlantic and returned to New Mexico. They passed through the portal that returned them to that climatic and visual violence as one might recover their name or soul. June started teaching piano, put on a little weight and then a little more, and years later inherited her parents’ home in Santa Fé. She didn’t speak the Zuni language, but she had studied Latin at school, in Oxford.
We arranged to meet at a gas station. Carlos read aloud EXCLUSIVE PARKING FOR TEXACO AND 7-ELEVEN CUSTOMERS. He grew worried because we were taking up a parking spot and we weren’t Texaco or 7-Eleven customers. Fernando told him not to worry. But he kept glancing around suspiciously. Perhaps he imagined a police officer was going to come and warn us about our offence and ask to see our papeles, as he drummed on the car with his club — like in the movies. Carlos would break into a cold sweat, then he’d cry and then he’d be deported. Like in the movies.
June pulled up next to us. We watched as that enormous, dark-skinned woman got out of her green pickup and leaned over to rest her forearms in Fernando’s open window. But she looked at me before she looked at him, and said, in a British accent: Suzana’s daughter. Only then did she look at Fernando and say: Suzana’s ex-husband. And then, at the back seat: and their little friend. We’d best go indoors somewhere to chat a little. It’s cold today. Though you folks from Colorado aren’t afraid of the cold. And she smiled, and her smile came with twin dimples, one in each cheek. Aren’t you lot hungry? Do you want to have lunch? There’s this place I know, it’s my treat.
She didn’t seem to remember that none of us were, in essence, from Colorado. Our address was there, but that was all. June was wearing a flannel shirt with tiny blue flowers on it and a long, thick skirt. She told us we could follow her. She went back to her green pickup, and as we watched, her backside swayed under her skirt, back and forth, confident and magnificent.
Carlos asked how she knew that we were who we were, quite impressed. And he loved June immediately, for everything: because she smiled, because she had dimples, because she knew that we were who we were. But above all for having said that he was from Colorado. That was what Carlos felt in the pit of his stomach, in his bones, under his nails, in everything that in him served as roots. In Colorado, some people had bumper stickers that said NATIVE. Once Carlos had sworn to me that when he grew up and got his papeles and had a car he was going to buy one of those bumper stickers. Because that was how he felt: NATIVE, with mountains in the background. And June had known it just by looking at him, which was enough to make him love her at that very instant.
It still hadn’t snowed in Santa Fé and everything was a uniform, thirsty brown. The trees were scrawny. June took us to a restaurant far from the tourist center and said everything’s crowded because of the holiday. What do you want? A soda? I’m going to order something a little stronger, and she and her dimples laughed, and when the very young, thin waiter with several piercings in his ear came to take our order she named the wine she was going to have in her semi-British accent. Then she told us, by way of an explanation that we hadn’t asked for, that she needed a glass of wine to celebrate, and didn’t Fernando want one too? Maybe they could get a bottle? And after the waiter had taken the order she sighed. How lovely to see you. How lovely to see you. And she held my two hands with her two hands on top of the table. Her big, fat, soft hands. My small, thin, rough hands.