The tall, thin man sits beside him impassively. Simon has been a policeman long enough to know this kind of situation can be the starting point of the ugliest incidents, especially since the cartels have changed the roads of northern Mexico into veritable cutthroat zones: murders and kidnappings are commonplace, and some of the victims are not even connected to the drug trade. Still, from the moment the man spoke to him in the doorway of the grocery store, he had just one thought in mind: leave with him and drive until the truth was laid at his feet. With a loaded pistol concealed under his shirt, Simon invited the stranger to take a seat in his car.
“My name is Pablo,” he says, looking out the window at a gaggle of kids chasing a puppy.
“What do you want from me, Pablo?” Simon asks.
“Nothing. I don’t want money. I just want to tell you one or two things.” Pablo points north and Simon is not bothered by the vagueness of the signal. The car starts away in a cloud of heat that blurs the horizon behind it. The air conditioning is mercilessly lacking. Simon punches the dashboard a few times in the vain hope of reviving the faulty system.
“You were born up there?” Pablo asks.
Up there: a term used by some to refer to the state located literally above theirs on the map; a phrase that sometimes seems to denote an elusive beyond. Simon nods, surprised as ever by how easily Mexicans can spot those who have never experienced life in Mexico. It’s not a matter of accent or appearance so much as a way of being — this is how it’s been explained to him. It galls him, this inability to blend in with those whose complexion he shares, after all, while it is enough to mark him out as an outsider in the eyes of all Americans.
“And you’re a cop?” the passenger adds.
Once again, Simon nods without asking how he guessed his profession. Cops, for some people, are even easier to recognize than second-generation immigrants.
“How do you come to know my father?”
“I don’t know him personally. But I know where he’s gone.”
They drive for almost an hour on the road to Tijuana, where white students daring to venture south of their usual playground cross paths with workers going to work their shifts in the city’s bars, discothèques, and brothels. Pablo asks Simon to turn off toward a suburb and takes him down an almost deserted dirty road. Exactly the sort of place where hundreds of people have met their deaths. Simon squeezes his arm against his side to feel the weapon tucked over his ribs.
The heat thickens like a garment saturated with dirt, and even the wind rushing in through the open windows is insufficient to cool them off. And yet the passenger is not sweating at all. “Maybe he’s a ghost,” Simon muses, giddy from the sun.
After half an hour, a hazy structure finally appears on the horizon, giving the lie to the theory that has been growing steadily in Simon’s mind, to the effect that the car would soon reach the end of the world and drop into the void. Little by little, the building comes into focus, an immense, uniform shape, a factory or possibly a prison. The frontage is topped with barbed wire.
Gradually, however, the breadth of the building negates all such suppositions. As the car draws nearer, the building’s extremities retreat beyond what can be grasped, vanishing beyond the limits of what can be seen. A wall.
“The wall,” the passenger confirms.
Simon parks the car about thirty metres away and both of them get out. Although he has often seen it on TV and had enough time to be outraged and then to put it out of his mind, Simon has to admit the structure is impressive.
“And my father?”
Pablo looks at him sternly.
“Each year, millions of people try to climb over this wall. They’re caught on the other side by civilian patrols, self-appointed protectors of America, or they’re hunted down in the desert by coyotes — that’s if the psychopaths that hang out on either side of the border don’t eat them alive first. You think your father was an exception to the rule? If he had a kid in the United States it’s certain he tried to cross over.”
“I’m not sure he was so intent on finding me.”
Pablo obstinately shakes his head.
“I’m telling you. The people who leave something behind on the other side are the worst. They spend their whole lives trying to go back. Like deranged pigeons.”
Feeling bitter and frustrated, Simon does not have the strength to explain to his companion that his father never showed any interest in the family, which he had engendered probably by accident. He places his hand on the wall, the way that pilgrims and travellers at the end of their rope do.
“What about you? You don’t go across?” he asks.
“Me, I cross whenever I like,” Pablo replies. “I go through walls.”
An unimaginable fatigue settles on Simon’s shoulders. Suddenly there is only one thing he yearns for: the coolness of San Francisco summers, and the sea breeze. He walks back to the car.
“Where can I drop you off?”
Eyeing the barbed wire glinting at the top of the wall, Pablo declines with a wave of his hand.
“You go on alone. I think I’ll stay here for a while.”
Simon gets back into the car, which reeks of overheated plastic. He turns on the ignition, giving the silence a slap, and does a U-turn on the powdery road used only by clandestine migrants. The man soon becomes a threadlike detail in his rear-view mirror, a burning mirage. Simon’s right hand presses against his left side where the pistol is cradled against his skin, the ultra-smooth metal and the bullets nested in the barrel like so many possible deaths. At sunset he stops at the beach in Tijuana, the most northerly in Mexico, where, in close proximity to the bathers and sand castle builders, the wall stretches into the sea. A barrier five metres high, which at this time of day casts an even longer shadow, and yet could readily be skirted by a good swimmer or a sufficiently cunning sea monster.
It wasn’t what she was looking for. The article came out of almost nowhere while she was searching the Internet for Marcus’s date of birth. He had declined to tell her the exact day, but knowing his Zodiac sign was Cancer, she had seen an opportunity to surprise him. Then a series of links popped up about a dramatic event going back some fifteen years but still alive in the strands of the web, where nothing is forgotten.
Contrary to what Marcus had led her to believe, his family did not die in an accident. While Marcus was away on a business trip his wife killed their two children before taking her own life. According to newspaper reports at the time, she had found out her husband was cheating on her. Carmen immediately thinks of Simon. She can’t shake off the urge to call him, to leave yet another message in his voice mail and hear the chemical silence at the other end.
When he learned of the death of the three people he cherished most in the world Marcus tried to end his own life in the hospital but was thwarted by a male nurse. The follow-up articles recount the father’s descent into hell, his struggle with alcoholism, his confinement to a psychiatric hospital, and so on. Choking back her sobs, Carmen charges out of her house and sets off on a run that takes her into the night. When she returns, the computer has shut down and the house is dark. She keeps the lights off and goes to bed with her clothes on and her eyes open, as if the ceiling had just disappeared and she were looking directly at the sky.