Carlos Fuentes - The Crystal Frontier

until the river caught fire and the earth moved again

Thin and pale but muscular and agile, he bragged that even though he lived on the border he never exposed himself to the sun. He had the pale complexion of his European ancestors, immigrants who were badly received, discriminated against, treated like garbage. Dan remembered his grandparents’ complaints. The savage discrimination to which they were subjected because they spoke differently, ate differently, looked different. They smelled different. The Anglos covered their noses when they passed those old people who were young but looked old, with their beards and black clothes smelling of onion and sauerkraut. But the immigrants persisted, assimilated, became citizens. No one would defend their nation better than they, Dan thought as he stared across to the Mexican side of the river.

“Seen Air Force yet?” his grandfather Adam Polonsky asked, and since Dan was too young to have seen World War II pictures, the old man gave him a video so he’d see how the air force was made up of ethnic heroes, not only Anglos but descendants of Poles, Italians, Jews, Russians, Irish. Never a Japanese, it’s true; he was the enemy. But never a Latino, a Mexican. A few blacks; they say the blacks did go to war. But never Mexicans. They weren’t citizens. They were cowards, mosquitoes that sucked the blood of the USA and ran back home to support their lazy countrymen.

“Seen Air Force yet? John Garfield. His real name was Julius Garfinkle. A kid from the ghetto, like you, the son of immigrants, Danny boy.”

They gave their lives in two world wars and also in Korea and Vietnam. They almost equaled the sacrifices of the Anglo-Saxon generations of the previous century, the conquerors of the West. Why didn’t anyone ever say so? Why did they still feel shame at having an immigrant past? Dan felt proud looking at a map and seeing that the USA had acquired more territory than any other power in the last century. Louisiana. Florida. Half of Mexico. Alaska. Cuba. Puerto Rico. The Philippines. Hawaii. The Panama Canal. A stream of little islands in the Pacific. The Virgin Islands. The Virgin Islands! That’s where he’d like to go on vacation. Just for the name, so seductive, so sexy, so improbable. And for the challenge. To take a vacation in the Caribbean and not get a tan. To come back as white as his grandparents from Pomerania. To conquer color. Not let himself blacken for any reason, not by contact with a Negro or a Mexican, not by the sun.

He requested night duty for that secret reason, which he communicated to no one — he was afraid of being ridiculed. There was a cult of the tan. A man with such white skin even seemed suspect. “Are you sick?” another officer asked, and the only reason he didn’t punch him was because he knew the consequences of attacking an officer and Dan Polonsky did not want for anything in the world to lose his job — it satisfied him too much. From the moment when they positioned the equipment to detect the nighttime passage of illegal immigrants across the Rio Grande, Dan requested and was granted assignment to the details that saw the night world illuminated through movie-style robot glasses, night-scopes that spotted illegals as if they glowed, heat detectors that picked up the warmth of the human body … The bad thing was that so many Border Patrol agents, even if they were Texans, were of Mexican origin and Polonsky sometimes made mistakes; looking through his infrared goggles he would spot someone dark-skinned and it would turn out the person was carrying Border Patrol ID, even if he had the face of a wetback … The good thing was that it was easy to sucker those Tex-Mex agents, exploit their divided loyalties, demand they prove — Let’s see — that they were good Americans and not Mexicans in disguise… Polonsky laughed at them. He felt pity for them but manipulated them like laboratory rats.

One thing that did bother him, though, was the need to insist that the USA was always moral and innocent. Why did the politicians and the journalists pretend that they had no ambitions or personal interests, that they were always moral, innocent, good? That exasperated Dan Polonsky. Everybody had personal interests, ambitions, malice. Everybody wanted to be somebody. He stared intently through his night-vision glasses, which rendered the dry, hostile landscape of the river clear without the sun; he stared at an intoxicating red landscape, like a glass of Clamato and vodka. For Dan, the United States had saved the world from all the evils of the twentieth century: Hitler, the kaiser, Stalin, the Communists, the Japanese, the Chinese, the Vietnamese, Uncle Ho, Castro, the Arabs, Saddam, Noriega …

His list of enemies ran out, and all he was left with was one central, angry justification. It was necessary to save the southern border. The enemy was entering through there. Today the nation was being protected there, just as it was at Pearl Harbor or on the Normandy beaches. It was all the same.

There they were, provoking him indecently, grouped up on the Mexican side, showing their arms open in a cross, clenching their fists, saying to the other side: You need us. We come to the border because without us your crops would rot. There is no one to harvest them, there is no one to help in hospitals, take care of children, serve in restaurants unless we lend you our arms. It was a challenge, and Dan’s wife told him so with a brutal joke: “Listen, I need a nanny for the kid. Don’t tell me you’re going to turn Josefina in? Don’t be stubborn. The more workers that enter, the safer your job is, buster … I mean, darling.”

When his wife, Selma, became tedious, Dan would invent a trip to the state capital in Austin to lobby for more money and influence for the Border Patrol. He wanted to convince the legislators: If you don’t give us money, we can’t protect the country against the invisible Mexican invasion. He focused his night-vision glasses. There they were. Incapable of taking off their hats, as if even at night the sun were shining. He felt a furious need to urinate. He unzipped his fly and looked at himself in the phosphorescent light. His liquid was white, too, without color, like a flow of Chablis. He disliked the idea that grapes ripen and harden under the sun. But he consoled himself thinking of the farmworkers who harvested them in California.

He tried to resolve his contradiction. He wasn’t a man of contradictions. He detested the illegals. But he adored and needed them. Without them, damn it, there would be no budget for helicopters, radar, powerful infrared night lights, rocket launchers, pistols … Let them come, he said, shaking his penis to rid himself of the last pale drops. Let them keep on coming by the millions, he begged, to give meaning to my life. We have to go on being innocent victims, he said, absolutely certain that no matter how many times he shook the thing the last drop inevitably fell in his shorts.

the horse, the hog, the cattle came

steel and gunpowder came

the bloodhounds came

terror came

death came: fifty-four million men and women lived in the vast continent of the migrations, from the Yukon to Tierra del Fuego, and four million north of the rio grande, rio bravo,

when the Spaniards came

fifty years later, only four million lived

on the whole continent and the lands of the river almost turned into what they said they had always been:

the land where man never was

or almost ceased to be, decimated by smallpox, measles, typhus,

where the survivors took refuge in the highlands, seeking help and a will to resist

when Francisco Vázquez de Coronado came one fine day with three hundred Spaniards, including a mere three women, poorly rationed, six Franciscans, fifteen hundred horses, and a thousand Indian allies brought from the lands of Cohahuila and Chihuahua, in search of the cities of gold, the passage to the fabulous orient, another Mexico and Peru: