Carlos Fuentes - The Crystal Frontier

“Why are they all so dark, so obviously lower class?”

“It’s the majority, Don Leonardo. The only thing the country can produce.”

“Well, let’s see if you can find me one who looks like a better sort, whiter — I’ll take him. What kind of impression are we going to make, partner?”

And now, as Lisandro passed through first class, Don Leonardo looked at him without imagining that he was one of the contracted workers but wishing instead that all of them were like this working fellow with a decent face and sharp features (although with a big moustache like that of a prosperous member of a mariachi band) and — heavens! — skin lighter than Leonardo Barroso’s own. Different, the millionaire noticed, a different boy, don’t you think, Miche? But his daughter-in-law and lover had fallen asleep.

When they landed at JFK, in the middle of a snowstorm, Barroso wanted to leave the plane as soon as possible, but Michelina was curled up next to the window, covered with a blanket, her head resting on a pillow. She wanted to wait. Let everyone else leave, she asked Don Leonardo.

He wanted to get out and say hello to the agents responsible for recruiting the Mexican workers contracted to clean various buildings in Manhattan over the weekend, when the offices would be empty. The service contract made everything explicit: the workers would come from Mexico to New York on Friday night to work on Saturday and Sunday, returning to Mexico City on Sunday night.

“Everything included, even the airfare — it’s cheaper than hiring workers here in Manhattan. We save between 25 and 30 percent,” his gringo partners explained.

But they’d forgotten to tell the Mexicans it was cold, which was why Don Leonardo, surprised by his own humane spirit, wanted to get out first to warn the agents that these boys needed jackets, blankets, something.

They began to parade by, and the fact was there was a bit of everything. Don Leonardo’s sense of humanitarian, and now national, pride doubled. The country was so beaten down, especially after having believed that it wasn’t; we dreamed we were in the first world and woke to find ourselves back in the third. It’s time to work more for Mexico, not to be discouraged, to find new solutions. Like this one. There was a bit of everything, not only the boy with the big moustache wearing the checked jacket but others, too, whom the investor hadn’t noticed because the stereotype of the wetback, the peasant with a lacquered hat and skimpy beard, had consumed them all. Now he began to distinguish them, to individualize them, to restore their personalities to them, possessing as he did forty years’ experience dealing with workers, supervisors, professional types, bureaucrats, all at his service, always at his service, never anyone above him: that was the motto of his independence, no one, not even the president of the republic, above Leonardo Barroso, or as he put it to his U.S. partners:

“I’m my own man. I’m just like you, a self-made man. I don’t owe nobody nothing.”

He’d never take that privilege away from anyone. Besides the moustachioed, handsome boy, Barroso tried to differentiate the young men from the provinces, who dressed in a certain way and appeared more backward but also more attractive and somewhat grayer than the young men from Mexico City, the chilangos. Even among them he began to distinguish from the herd those who two or three years earlier, during the euphoria of the Salinas de Gortari period, could be seen eating at a Denny’s, taking vacations in Puerto Vallarta, or going to the multiplex cinemas in Ciudad Satélite.

He picked them out because they were the saddest, though the least resigned as well, those like Lisandro Chávez who asked themselves, What am I doing here? I don’t belong here. Yes, yes, you belong here, Barroso would have answered, you belong here so thoroughly that in Mexico, even if you dragged yourself on your knees to the Basilica of Guadalupe to visit the Virgin, you couldn’t, even with a miracle, earn a hundred dollars for two days’ work, four hundred a month, three thousand pesos — not even the Virgin would give you that.

He looked at them as if they were his — his pride, his sons, his idea.

Michelina kept her eyes closed. She didn’t want to see the parade of workers. They were young. They were dead ducks. But she was getting tired of traveling with Leonardo. At first she had liked it, it gave her cachet, and although it cost her the ostracization of some and left others resigned, her own family understood and were not in the least disgusted, finally, with the comforts Don Leonardo offered them — especially in these times of crisis, what would become of them without Michelina?

What would become of grandmother Doña Zarina who was over ninety and still collecting curios in cardboard boxes, convinced Porfirio Díaz was still president? What would become of her father, the career diplomat who knew all the genealogies of the wines of Burgundy and the cháteaus of the Loire? What would become of her mother, who needed the comforts and money to do the only thing she really liked: to be left alone, to just sit quietly, not doing a thing, with her mouth shut, not even eat because she was ashamed to do it in public? What would become of her brothers, who relied on Leonardo Barroso’s generosity — this little job here, that concession there, this little contract, that agency …? But now she was tired. She didn’t want to open her eyes. She didn’t want to discover those of any young man. Her obligation was to Leonardo. She especially didn’t want to think about her husband, Leonardo’s son, who didn’t miss her, who was happy isolated on the ranch, who didn’t blame her for anything, for going off with his dad …

Michelina began to fear the eyes of any other man.

The men were given blankets, which they used in atavistic style as serapes. Then they were loaded onto buses. All it took was feeling the cold between the terminal exit and the bus for them to be thankful for the providential jacket, the occasional scarf, the heat of other bodies. They sought one another out, sorted one another out, looked for a comrade who might be like himself, might think the same way, share the same territory. With the peasants, with the villagers, there was always a verbal bridge, but its nature was a species of ancient formality, forms of courtesy that couldn’t manage to conceal a hierarchy, although inevitably there are wise-guys who treat the more humble as inferiors, speaking familiarly to them, giving them orders, scolding them. Here, now, that was impossible. They were all beaten down, and being screwed rendered them equal.

An anguished reserve imposed itself on those who did not have rural faces or clothes, a resolve not to admit they were there, that things were going so badly in Mexico, at home, that they had no other recourse but to give in to the three thousand pesos per month for two days a week’s work in New York, an alien city, totally strange, where it wasn’t necessary to be friendly, to risk confession, mockery, and incomprehension in dealing with one’s compatriots.

For that reason, a silence as cold as the air ran from row to row in the bus where ninety-three Mexican workers were squeezing in, and Lisandro Chávez imagined that in reality all of them, even if they had things to tell one another, were silenced by the snow, by the silence snow imposes, by that silent rain of white stars that fall without making noise, dissolving on whatever they touch, turning back into water, which has no color. What was the city like beneath its long veil of snow? Lisandro could barely make out the urban profiles of Manhattan, known to him from movies, the phantoms of the city, the foggy, snow-covered faces of skyscrapers and bridges, of shops and docks …