Colum McCann - Songdogs

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A boy in the town, Miguel, Rolando’s son, was fond of drawing maps, and the old man bought them from him, hung them on the walls of the house. They were copied from a school atlas, but his versions were full of fabulous and unusual colours. Miguel drew magenta oceans, white mountains, green rivers, purple roads, a red tongue of river, and sometimes he rubbed a little soil on the maps to give the countryside a brown tint. If you put your nose to the maps, you could smell the soil. The cities were shown with little pieces of metal that could rip the tips of your fingers if you ran your hands along them. My father moved the maps from wall to wall, switching them from the kitchen to the living room and back again so that he felt as if he were going somewhere. The year was 1949, and he was over the cusp of his thirties — if he couldn’t go in reality he would go in his imagination. At times he took my mother’s hand and led her all the way around the world within that small house, teaching her English as they went, so that she quickly acquired an Irish accent, the sound of it merging with her own native euphony. She would write new words down in a spiral-edged book, wondering when she might get a chance to use them. In truth she was a little frightened by it all, this possibility of going. Still in her twenties — the difference of nine years sometimes a ravine between them — she had never set foot outside her town. Even if she wanted to, there would be no moving anywhere for a while — my grandmother made sure of that.

‘You can leave when the sun comes up in the west,’ she said, heaving around under her chest. ‘And maybe even a few days after that.’

Miguel’s maps were a sign that my father’s feet were itching again. He even invited the young genius over to draw a few maps on the wall of his darkroom, but Rolando refused to let his son go. A chicken had been named after Rolando — he had been delighted at first, came over to the house every day, leaned over the fence, a grey crooked eyebrow dipping down, talked about how much uglier the mayor was. But then the rooster had seemed to take an overwhelming fondness for mounting and treading Rolando’s namesake, and Rolando was the butt of feral jokes, especially among the other drunks. ‘You’re walking funny today, Rolando.’ ‘Watch those feathers fly!’ ‘Have you room for another egg?’ He never came over to the house anymore, even after the hen was renamed. Young Miguel sneaked over to the darkroom after school, sat in and talked with my father, but he never managed to get the maps finished. He was trying to figure out a way to get a particular mound of soil to suspend itself in the air — it kept dropping down near the vats of chemicals, even when he made a shelf for the soil from tiny pieces of wood. One day when he came over he found a note tucked into the chastity belt above the door, ‘Sorry, Miguel, closed for a while.’

The old man took a job in a small copper mine far south of the town. Wanting to take photos of the mines, he left town with a truckload of men on Sunday mornings, wearing his dirty vest and his hat. With the help of a few men he smuggled cameras into the mines. At the end of the week he came home coughing up red spit, his vest showered with dirt. Copper coloured his skin. He and Mam locked themselves in the darkroom, working together, and sometimes they fell asleep, waking up the following day with a plate of my grandmother’s stew grown cold outside the door. The work consumed them both. Agonised faces came to life in the chemical baths, the whites of eyes appearing like coronas, dirt smeared on chins. Backbent by the work they had done and backbent into the future, the men leaned on picks as they sucked copper dust into their lungs. They stared with an anger of dispossession, their cheeks gaunt, a fury of poverty in discoloured lips. But he also captured them in the bars and the whorehouses, sometimes even at home with their children, happily kicking a soccer ball outside a shack. The miners took to him, hailed him when he came down the shafts, all of them helping carry the hidden equipment. But he came home bloodied one afternoon. He had lost a fight with a foreman after taking a photo of a dead boy being carried from the mines. The boy was no more than ten years old, the same age as Miguel. My father was hit with the long barrel of a gun. It left a small scar in the shape of a gondala on the right side of his temple. He tried a few times to go back, but the trigger of the same gun was cocked.

He went back to the house and the chickens, walked around the yard, muttering, scattering spit like seed. ‘Fuck this for a game of soldiers.’ Mam came out and ran her fingers over the scar, maybe kissed him there. They retreated to the darkroom to work on his photos. More plates of stew piled up outside the door.

After a time they sold two cameras and three dozen chickens in order to buy a clapped-out car so they could bring the eggs to neighbouring towns. My old man drummed his fist on the dashboard as the engine rattled, the panels held together with wire, the roof covered in birdshit from grackles. The car — a 1928 Model A — would fling him outwards once again. They began to save money, and the circle of their wandering moved gradually outwards. At first it was no further than a few miles, then it grew and grew, ripples reaching out, towards Jiménez, Delicias, Chihuahua and even south to Torreón. Once or twice they went all the way to Mexico City, a three-day drive, where they bought supplies of film, paper, trays, chemical fixer. I can imagine those shop clerks, with thin moustaches sliming on their lips, hair cut short, in very well ironed shirts, garters on their sleeves, giving the once-over to my father as he leaned over the counter, in clothes sometimes still faint with the smell of chickenshit.

On those nights in the city they went celebrating together — my mother told me that they were crazed and lovely evenings in the cafés and the bars, with the accordions and the guitars and the wine and the white tablecloths and the waiters and all the things that a fistful of money could bring. Those few evenings in Mexico City were pure colour to her memory — the way it rose out of its crater, the thick traffic, the rows of red-clay flowerpots, the grey sprawl, the streaked darkness of poverty, the men in blue coming out from the factories, the brown naked children outside shacks, the soldiers and police with giant loping strides underneath their hats, the lines of whores in flimsy clothes on narrow streets with eyes turned to dusklight, the hustling boys, the double-breasted suits, the smell of rotting fruit, the belch of steel — the jazz of it all — the vivid oppressive redness of a southern sky, the houses of the rich with pale blue swimming pools, the grasshoppers fried by an old woman in a market. My father took photos of Mam under bright streetlamps and flitting clouds, her eyes looking cocksure into the lens, hair thrown back like a horse’s tail. In one of the shots, down by the Palace of Fine Arts, I noticed that she carried flowers, white dog roses clutched between her fingers. On the long drive home she stayed awake in the passenger seat, passing bottles of Coke to the old man, a mesquite wind blowing through the open windows.

My grandmother had swapped some rabbits for a few bottles of wine, and she gave them to my parents in the hope that the drink would somehow spur on a grandchild. Ancient as the notion of love, my grandmother went to bed early, whispering fertility prayers. My parents drank. Mam had her own special mug — a clay one which she had cast herself years before, but the old man broke it one night in an argument, smashing it against the bathroom door when she said that he’d had too much to drink. For a while he slept outside and my grandmother was hysterical at his disappearance. It was viciously cold at night, with no clouds in the sky to hold the heat, and sometimes my father might have thought about walking forever, skimming over the arroyos and the cacti and the flowers that held water with a startling parsimony. There were plants that would bloom only once every hundred years. He went searching, but never found one of them in bloom. One evening he went wandering too far and got lost, found himself a small cave and lit a fire in it. The heat expanded the rock. A piece of it unlodged from the roof of the cave and fell down, hitting him on the shoulder. He improvised a sling with his shirt, wandered, lost. A local policeman found him — a search party had been sent out because of some bad news in town.