Borderlands Read online

  Now did I begin to learn about the complexities of nationality. Even though about half of the families in the neighborhood were clearly of Mexican descent, many of their members had been born north of the border and were therefore Americans, whom I had always thought of as fair-skinned people who spoke only English. Those people, I would soon be informed by my Mexican friends, were called Anglos.

  The Anglo kids of Zaragoza Street—most of them native Texans, all of them Southerners—were the first I’d ever known, and my acquaintance with them roused deep confusions about my own identity. My first exchange with them was in front of our new house on the day we moved in. When they asked where I was born and I said Mexico, they thought I was joking. When I insisted on my Mexican birth, some of them got irritated, and one said, “Then how come you don’t look like it nor talk like it neither? You ain’t like them.” He pointed at a bunch of kids watching us from the front porch of a house down the block, a group of mestizos, typical brown-skinned Mexicans of mixed Spanish and Indian blood, and to these Texas boys what all Mexicans looked like. They didn’t believe I was Mexican because I didn’t look or sound like one. And they had not yet met my parents, not yet heard my pale-complexioned mother addressing me in Spanish, not yet caught an earful of my father’s movie bandido accent, which the years would never abate.

  “If you really Mexican,” one said, “let’s hear you say something in Mexican.”

  Now I was getting irritated at having to prove to these peckerwoods who I was, so I said: “Ustedes son una bola de tontos.” They looked at each other as if any among them might certify that what I’d said had indeed been said in “Mexican.” But none in the group had any understanding that I’d just called them a bunch of dummies. I turned to the Mexican kids down the street and hollered, “¿Qué tal? Me llamo Jaime Carlos y ahora vivo in este barrio también.”

  The Mexican kids showed white grins and hollered back their welcomes, and the Texas boys’ mouths hung ajar. For a moment nobody said anything, and then blond Danny Shaw, my new next-door neighbor, said, “Dang if you ain’t the unmexicanest Mexican I ever seen.”

  VIII

  They never really knew what to make of me, the Anglo kids, both in the neighborhood and at school. Although they didn’t often mingle with Mexican kids, they didn’t shun me at all even after I’d proved to them I was a Mexican myself. And so I was able to pal around with both groups. Before long, I was speaking the slangy sing-song border Spanish of the Mexicans when I was with them, and falling into a Texas accent whenever I spoke English in the company of the Anglo kids. It was the start of a lifelong habit of trying to fit in with the people around me by assuming their modes of speech, a practice reputedly common to misfits, con artists and liars of all sorts, which of course includes writers.

  Over time, some of the Mexican kids came to resent that I buddied with the Texans so often and so easily. And some of the Texans were always ready to remind me that I was not truly one of them. Although my English was improving in school every day, I often made mistakes with the language during my first years with it, and the Texans would leap at the chance to make fun of me for it. Sometimes they merely laughed for a moment and I merely felt embarrassed. Sometimes it went past that and the fight was on.

  The first time it happened was on my neighbor Danny Shaw’s front porch, when I was looking on with him and Nicky Welch at a magazine cover photo of a horse wearing a beautiful saddle. Without thinking, I said, “That’s a pretty chair.”

  The two of them gave me puzzled looks and Danny asked, “What chair?” I pointed to the saddle—in Spanish called a silla, which also is the word for chair—and they burst out laughing. “That ain’t no chaairrrr,” Danny said, “that’s a saaaddddle!”

  My face burned with the vocabulary error, one which seemed all the worse to me because I was grandson to a horse rancher. And then Nicky Welch, who always went for the extra bite whenever he could, said, “Only some stupid greaser would call a saddle a chair.”

  My father had been teaching me to fight since before I entered school. He knew what would be in store for me with the Texan kids sooner or later and knew he couldn’t protect me from it, he could only prepare me. Whenever my mother had seen him showing me how to deliver a proper punch, how to use knees and elbows in a fight, she’d chide him for it and he’d stop—until she left, and then we’d resume our lesson. I always suspected that she knew we continued with them, and that she secretly approved. In fact, the first time I ever heard the word “greaser” was in her company. We were in Mexicali and heard an American yell it from his car at a Mexican cab driver who’d nearly run into him. The cabby didn’t even look the man’s way, but my mother glared at the Anglo and muttered that somebody ought to smack that damn gringo’s face—and my mother rarely used the word “gringo” and even less frequently swore.

  I had been in little-kid fights in Mexico, a lot of shoving and wrestling and no real meanness intended, but this was my first fight with anger in it, with a desire to inflict pain. Nicky Welch was bigger than I was, but he fought in the clumsy awkward manner of the beefy and untutored, and by the time Mr. Shaw came stomping out of the house to pull us apart I had pretty well bloodied Nicky’s nose and puffed his eye and, best of all, had him bawling. Mr. Shaw demanded to know what the fight was about, and when Danny told him, he just sighed and looked away and softly told Nicky and me to get on home. I felt sorry for him because I knew him for a kind man and I could see that the word “greaser” embarrassed him. But what I mostly felt was exultation, felt it all the rest of that day and through the evening and as I lay in bed that night looking out my window at the stars. The next afternoon I saw stars of another sort when Nicky’s big brother Ruben got hold of me as I was coming home from buying a comic book at the drugstore. My mother nearly shrieked at the sight of me when I limped into the house.

  There were plenty of other fights to come. I had more fights with gringo kids than my Mexican friends did for the simple reason that I spent more time with them than they did. Whenever some Texas kid made a crack about greasers or spicks in my presence, I usually shrugged it off because I knew that was how Texans talked and there was no personal insult intended. I thought only fools got angry at insults not directed at them personally. I still think so. When the insult was personal, there was of course nothing to do but fight. Sometimes, though, as I was punching and kicking and scrabbling around in the dirt with some other kid, I’d hear the Mexicans cheering in Spanish and the Anglos rooting in English and I’d have the strange feeling that the only one in the fight was me.

  The fights fell off over the next few years, and one reason for that was my growing facility with English. The better I got with the Anglos’ language and the more I sounded like them, the easier it was for them to accept me as one of their own. By the time I was in fourth grade even the Anglo kids were asking me for the answers on spelling and grammar tests.

  In the brief rest of our time in Texas, I was fully at ease in both cultures, was fluent with both languages, and had more of a sense of being at home than I’ve ever had since.

  IX

  One day my father announced that we were moving to Florida for reasons of business and within the month I left the borderland behind me.

  But not really.

  In the years to follow I would lose my ties to my native country, lose my ease with my native tongue. But I had not, I would learn, left behind the truest of the borderlands—the remote world of the outsider.

  I would come to understand that a borderland is as much a region of the spirit as a physical locale, that some of us are born to it and come to know it well in childhood and inhabit it forever after, no matter where we might be on the map.

  And I came to understand that even though I am hardly alone in lacking a sense of place in the world, I always feel that I am.

  So do all outsiders feel.

  So do many of the characters in these stories feel.

  RUNAWAY HORSES

  “Our pa
ssions are ourselves.”

  –ANATOLE FRANCE

  From the bars of my high window I can see the shimmer of the Río Zanjón through the trees, and beyond them the dark Sierras de San Antonio. The mountains are especially beautiful under a full moon, even though on those nights a crowd always comes out from town and gathers by the iron-barred front gate to be entertained by our howling. I have heard their raucous laughter, their mock howls and drunken derisions. I have imagined their bright faces and delirious exultation not to be among us. Usually, however, on those evenings of the full moon I am oblivious to their echoing caterwauls because I am howling with the other inmates, and when I howl, I am aware of nothing but the brute events that brought me here.

  At first I was permitted to visit the gardens behind the main building twice a week, like most of the others. But before I’d been here a month I attacked another inmate. We tumbled into a rose bed, snarling and grappling in the dirt. I got my hands hard on his throat and his eyes bulged like red plums. I would certainly have killed him if the guards had not rushed up and clubbed me insensible. When the warden pressed me for an explanation, I told him the fellow had been singing about a woman named Delgadina, which was the name of my wife.

  “But señor,” he said, “there must be hundreds of women called Delgadina. Why do you believe he was singing about your wife?”

  Bastard. Addressing me as “señor” rather than “don.” I knew all about him. He came from a family of sucklings to the viceroy—bureaucrats, administrators, a line of glorified clerks. My family had been the better of his by leagues since long before the founding of New Spain. We had come wearing armor—not, like his people, lace and rose-water. Now this smiling, bloated pig sat reveling in the circumstance that put him in official authority over me.

  “That isn’t what I believe,” I said. “And if you say her name again, I will tear out your tongue.”

  I have not been allowed from my cell since.

  I do have periods of lucidity—this moment is proof of that. Sometimes they last for days, but I have yet to pass a week without relapsing into … what shall we call it … my spectacular dementia. I’ve been told quite explicitly what I look like in the throes of my lunatic fits. I tear out my hair—what’s left of it. I slaver like a sunstruck dog. My eyes roll up in my head. I beat my fists on the heavy wooden door, on the stones of the walls and the floor. I howl for hours. In this place of iron and shadows and sweating stone, I become the madman of theatre. I lack only the rattling chains, but I expect they’ll come soon enough.

  My howling has rent my voice to a croak which some of my keepers find amusing. My battered hands often look like spoiled meat. They brought a mirror to me last week, thinking, I suppose, the shock might do me good. I saw eyes like firepits, a beard gone wild, facial bones jutting sharply against skin the color of lemonwater. I roared and smashed the glass, and the officious fools bolted from the room like spooked mares. If I were given to religion, or to self-pity, or—worst of all—to the sentiments of Romance, I might say that I have come to know hell. But such talk is the idiom of fools, the self-pitying locution of stage plays and poetry, and I will no more indulge in it myself than I will endure it in others.

  Forgive me: I tend to ramble in these periods of respite from the dementia. Insanity of this sort is more than mental torture, it is abject humiliation. How I envy the steadfastly insane all around me. They are spared such recurrent seizures of sanity as I must bear, spared these periodic realizations of where we are, and why.

  Suicide? Bah! Some choose it, of course. Not a month goes by without at least one wretch found hanging in his cell or drowned in one of the garden ponds. Cowards, all of them! Suicide is contemptible, the final refuge of the true poltroon. (Like Rojas, that bastard slyboots!) But not I. I will not kill myself, not ever. I am insane, but I am no coward.

  Again, I beg your pardon. I not only ramble like a fool, I shame myself with gross discourtesy. My name is Don Sebastián Cabrillo Mayor Cortés y Mendoza. I am patrón of the Hacienda de la Luna Plata. My family has owned this region of Sonora since Coronado marched through it on his way to search for the Seven Cities of Gold. The first of my New World ancestors, Don Marcos Cabrillo, was a lieutenant in Coronado’s expedition. He lost a foot in a battle with Yaqui Indians and was left behind when the column moved on. With a following of four other maimed soldiers and a handful of converted indigenes, he laid claim to all the land visible from the bloodstained mesa where he had been crippled. He named his portion of the earth after the region’s dazzling silver moon—La Luna Plata—and over the next three and a half centuries the hacienda expanded to more than a hundred square miles. It took sharp steel to conquer this country of cactus and rock, and an iron will to rule it. It took hardness—as each generation of Cabrillo men was taught by the one before it. As my father taught me. “Hardness,” he told me repeatedly through my youth, “is everything.”

  By the time my father became patrón of La Luna Plata, his authority, like that of hacendados everywhere, was enforced not only by his own pistoleros but also by the powerful Guardia Rural, the national mounted police. Since the rurales’ wise creation by our esteemed president, Porfirio Díaz, bandits no longer pillage the countryside so freely as they once did, and reports of peon insurrections are now quite rare. Like Don Porfirio himself, the rurales well understand the efficacy of hardness. They are authorized to make arrests on their own suspicions, incarcerate suspects indefinitely, interrogate by any means necessary to encourage the truth, and confiscate a suspect’s property as legal recompense to the state. And under the provision of the Law of Flight, they may legally shoot dead any man who attempts to escape their custody. Thus does that highly efficient police force often spare the state the cost and inconvenience of extending judicial formalities to those undeserving of them.

  Malefactors on La Luna Plata have always received swift punishment—the branding iron, the lash, or the noose, depending on the severity of the offense. My father was renown for tailoring the penalty to the transgression. As a descendant of devout apostles of the Inquisition, he owned an imagination well-suited to the invention of punishments. There was, for example, the arrogant mestizo foreman who set his mastiff bitch onto a group of Indian children for no reason but sport. My father sentenced him to kill the animal, skin it, and hang the carcass from a tree in the main plaza for a week. He then had to eat the dog’s hindquarters, raw and rotten, with the villagers looking on. He also had to forfeit half-a-month’s pay to each of the families of the children his dog had savaged.

  There was a band of drunkards whose loud cursings in the street disturbed the village mass every evening until the priest complained of it to my father, who had the men arrested and sentenced each one to receive a live coal in his mouth. He ordered a rapist to be conveyed to a pigsty, there castrated, and made to watch the swine consume his severed parts before he was hanged. He permitted the father and brother of a young woman who had been beaten to death by her bad-tempered husband to take the killer into the desert and do with him as they thought proper. Among other things, they flayed his skull, and on their return to the ranch they nailed the entire headskin to the crosspiece over the corral gate, where it was shortly devoured by birds and ants. After a few days, only the scalp remained, and it stayed up there for months, a withered testament to the hard certainty of Luna Plata justice.

  I was my father’s son in every way—educated by the Jesuit fathers, skilled in the arts of weaponry, easy in the saddle. I was confident in command of men, versed in the social graces, and wholly comfortable with my privilege. And I was guarded in my passions, or so I believed.

  On the matter of women my father was as adamant as on all else in life. I was still a boy when I discovered he kept a rawhide quirt on his bedroom wall, and I intuitively perceived how my mother came to bear the small dark scar on her wrist which she tried to conceal under lace-cuffed sleeves. I do not presume to judge my father on that point, though I have dwelt upon it.


  Understand: I loved my mother. She was a lovely woman of grace, refinement, and generous spirit. Yet who but my father can know what she was like as a wife? Whatever he felt in their most intimate moments, whatever urges she inflamed in his soul, whatever image of her he carried in his heart—such were the things he surely had in mind when he warned me of the perils of passionate love. In my boyhood he encouraged me to indulge my young appetite for women as freely as I wished. His own casual indulgences had produced a scattering of blue-eyed mestizos among the peons of La Luna Plata. “Enjoy your lust,” he advised me, “but beware of love. It is the most perilous of the passions.”

  A few days before my wedding, as we took brandy in his study, he advised me once again. He had arranged the marriage when Delgadina Fernández Ordóñez was but six years old. “She was an awkward, bony child,” my father told me with a smile. “Legs as spindly and knobby as sugarcanes, eyes like a baby owl’s. Your luck is pure gold, Sebastián. Who would have thought she’d bloom into a rose of Castile?”

  It was indeed a matter of luck—a bartered bride’s beauty, or her lack of it, is of no significance in these arrangements. My father’s sole concern, of course—the only concern of any don seeking a bride for his son—was to secure some sort of economic or political gain for our family. My union with Delgadina would increase both the expanse of our land and the strength of our political influence in Hermosillo, the capital, where her father, Don Antonio, had powerful connections. “Your dowry,” my father said proudly, “is the most admirable I’ve heard of since my own.”