And I wondered: which of these two men is Joselito?
The name could’ve fit either of them. The more aggressive of the pair was short and squat, his face rigid with fury. His reddish eyes had narrowed to tiny slits. He threw wild punches and wasted vast amounts of energy, moving like a spinning top around his antagonist. His rival, both taller and wider, started off with a look of bemused wonder, almost embarrassment, but the longer the little one kept at it, the more his expression darkened, so that within minutes they and their moods were equally matched.
A boy of about eighteen stood next to me and my father. With crossed arms, he observed the proceedings as if it were a horse race on which he’d wagered a very small sum. He wore no shoes, and his feet were dusted with sand. Though it wasn’t particularly warm, he’d been swimming. I ventured a question.
“Which one is Joselito?” I asked.
He looked at me like I was crazy. “Don’t you know?” he said in a low voice. “Joselito’s dead.”
I nodded, as if I’d known, as if I’d been testing him, but by then the name of the dead man was buzzing around the gathered circle of spectators, whispered from one man to the next, to a child then to his mother: Joselito, Joselito.
A chanting; a conjuring.
The two rivals continued, more furiously now, as if the mention of the dead man had animated them, or freed some brutal impulse within them. The smaller one landed a right hook to the bigger man’s jaw, and this man staggered but did not fall. The crowd oohed and aahed, and it was only then that the two fighters realized they were being watched. I mean, they’d known it all along, of course they must have, but when the crowd reached a certain mass, the whispering a certain volume, then everything changed. It could not have been more staged if they’d been fighting in an amphitheater, with an orchestra playing behind them. It was something I’d been working out myself, in my own craft: how the audience affects a performance, how differently we behave when we know we are being watched. True authenticity, I’d decided, required an absolute, nearly spiritual denial of the audience, or even of the possibility of being watched; but here, something true, something real, had quickly morphed into something fake. It happened instantaneously, on a sandy street in this anonymous town: we were no longer accidental observers of an argument, but the primary reason for its existence.
“This is for Joselito!” the little man shouted.
“No! This is for Joselito!” responded the other.
And so on.
Soon blood was drawn, lips swollen, eyes blackened. And still the wheel spun. My father and I watched with rising anxiety—someone might die! Why won’t that wheel stop?—until, to our relief, a town elder rushed through the crowd and pushed the two men apart. He was frantic. He stood between them, arms spread like wings, a flat palm pressed to each man’s chest as they leaned steadily into him.
This too was part of the act.
“Joselito’s father,” said the barefoot young man. “Just in time.”
We left and drove south for another hour before coming to a stretch of luxurious new asphalt, so smooth it felt like the car might be able to pilot itself. The tension washed away, and we were happy again, until we found ourselves trapped amid the thickening swarm of trucks headed to the border. We saw northbound traffic being inspected, drivers being shaken down, small-time smugglers dispossessed of their belongings. The soldiers were adolescent and smug. Everyone paid. We would too, when it was our turn to head back to the city. This was all new, my father said, and he gripped the wheel tightly and watched with mounting concern. Or was it anger? This corruption, the only kind of commerce that had thrived during the war, was also the only kind we could always count on. Why he found it so disconcerting, I couldn’t figure. Nothing could have been more ordinary.
By nightfall we’d made it to my father’s hometown. My great-uncle’s old filling station stood at the top of the hill, under new ownership and doing brisk business now, though the truckers rarely ventured into the town proper. We eased the car onto the main street, a palm-lined boulevard that sloped down to the boardwalk, and left it a few blocks from the sea, walking until we reached the simple public square that overlooked the ocean. A larger palm tree, its trunk inscribed with the names and dates of young love, stood in the middle of this inelegant plaza. Every summer, the tree was optimistically engraved with new names and new dates, and then stood for the entire winter, untouched. I’d probably scratched a few names there myself, years before. On warm nights, when the town filled with families on vacation, the children brought out remote-control cars and guided these droning machines around the plaza, ramming them into each other or into the legs of adults, occasionally tipping them off the edge of the boardwalk and onto the beach below, and celebrating these calamities with cheerful hysteria.
My brother Francisco and I had spent entire summers like this, until the year he’d left for the U.S. These were some of my favorite memories.
But in the off-season, there was no sign of these young families. No children. They’d all gone north, back to the city or further, so of course, the arrival of one of the town’s wandering sons was both unexpected and welcome. My father and I moved through the plaza like rock stars, stopping at every bench to pay our respects, and from each of these aged men and women I heard the same thing. First: brief, rote condolences on the death of Raúl (it seemed no one much cared for him); then, a smooth transition to the town’s most cherished topic of discussion, the past. The talk was directed at me: Your old man was so smart, so brilliant…
My father nodded, politely accepting every compliment, not the least bit embarrassed by the attention. He’d carried the town’s expectations on his shoulders for so many years, they no longer weighed on him. I’d heard these stories all my life.
“This is my son,” he’d say. “You remember Nelson?”
And one by one the old folks asked when I had come back from the United States.
“No, no,” I said. “I’m the other son.”
Of course they got us confused, or perhaps simply forgot I existed. Their response, offered gently, hopefully: “Oh, yes, the other son.” Then, leaning forward: “So, when will you be leaving?”
It was late summer, but the vacation season had come to an early close, and already the weather had cooled. In the distance, you could hear the hum of trucks passing along the highway. The bent men and stooped women wore light jackets and shawls and seemed not to notice the sound. It was as if they’d all taken the same cocktail of sedatives, content to cast their eyes toward the sea, the dark night, and stay this way for hours. Now they wanted to know when I’d be leaving.
I wanted to know too.
“Soon,” I said.
“Soon,” my father repeated.
Even then I had my doubts, but I would keep believing this for another year or so.
“Wonderful,” responded the town. “Just great.”
My father and I settled in for the night at my great-uncle’s house. It had that stuffiness typical of shuttered spaces, of old people who live alone, made more acute by the damp ocean air. The spongy foam mattresses sagged and there were yellowing photographs everywhere—in dust-covered frames, in unruly stacks, or poking out of the books that lined the shelves of the living room. My father grabbed a handful and took them to the kitchen. He set the water to boil, flipping idly through the photographs and calling out names of the relatives in each picture as he passed them along. There was a flatness to his voice, a distance—as if he were testing his recall, as opposed to reliving any cherished childhood memory. You got the sense he barely knew these people.