Carlos Fuentes - The Crystal Frontier

they found nothing but the death that preceded them, but they left their sheep and goats, chicken and burros, plums, cherries, melons, grapes, peaches, and grain, scattered like their Castilian words, with the same facility, with the same fertility, on both banks of the río grande, río bravo

Every day she crossed the border from El Paso to Juárez to supervise the workers in a plant where television sets were assembled. Sometimes she wished she could talk about something else, but the job sucked out her brain, as her grandma Camelia said, and Margarita had long since decided that her only salvation was work. She found her dignity, her personality, in work; she respected herself and made herself respected. She had developed a hard, intransigent character: sure, there were nice girls, sweet, even sentimental, and also serious, professional workers, but all you needed was one bitch — and there was always more than one — to screw everything up and force the supervisor to be mean, put on a sour face, say harsh words …

Now, at night, she returned. It was Friday and all the women were going out to have fun. Margarita wouldn’t miss it — it was her only concession to relaxation, okay, to probable abandon, when she could look less uptight and go to the discos with the girls. After all, she could mix with the crowd there, where women were allowed to exercise some fantasy in their outfits. You saw them all: Rosa Lupe with her mania for making vows and dressing like a Carmelite, Marina, who was dying to see the ocean, the fool, as if any of them after they get here ever see their dreams come true— what illusions! — Candelaria, who must think she’s Frida Kahlo or something, dressed like a perfect peasant, and the one who didn’t dance anymore, Dinorah, mourning her kid who strangled himself because there was no one to take care of him — who asked her to be an unwed mother, the idiot, and live way the hell out in Buenavista? Better to cross the river every day, live in a suburban house in El Paso, even if it was in a black neighborhood. At least you were assimilated there. Let them see that she was assimilated — she didn’t want to be seen as a Mexican or a Chicana. She was a gringa, she lived in El Paso; in Chihuahua her name was Margarita but in Texas she was Margie. From her school days in El Paso on, she was told, Listen, you’re white, don’t let them call you Margarita, make them call you Margie. Pass for white— who’s going to find out? — don’t speak Spanish, don’t let them treat you like a Mexican, a Pocha, a Chicana.

“How do you get along with your family?”

“They’re unbelievable. I can’t go out on a date without my mother chasing after me asking, Is he from a good family? Is he from a good family? It makes me want to go out with a black so they have a fit.”

“Don’t be a jerk. Just go out with blonds. Never admit you’re Mexican.”

She rebelled by fighting to be a majorette at her high school. She told her parents that she was joining the school band, that they were going to play at the football games. But when they saw her in the fall wearing skimpy shorts, her legs bare, showing her thighs — thighs nothing! — showing her ass, the thing I sit on, said Grandma Camelia — she never said ass —showing you know what and tossing around a baton that looked like a phallus, they knew they’d lost her. She left home, and they warned her, No decent boy will want to marry you, you show your fanny in public, slut. But she didn’t have time for boyfriends, she didn’t think about them, she only went on Fridays to the Excalibur to dance the quebradita with men who were all the same — they all danced with their white hats on, they were ranchers, rich or poor— how could you tell when they were all identical? — and the longhaired guys who wore bands tied around their heads and fringed vests, those were tough guys or pimps, no one took them seriously. It was all just a respite, a way to lose yourself and forget the grandfather who didn’t make it, paralyzed in his wheelchair, sweet Grandma Camelia who never said ass, her parents who were around there someplace, her father working in Woolworth’s, her mother in another assembly plant, her brother making burritos at a Taco Bell, and her powerful, incredibly rich uncle, the self-made man who doesn’t believe in family charity. I’m supposed to support that pack of lazy relatives? Let them work the way I work, make their own fortune. What are they, crippled or something? Money only tastes good if you earn it, not when someone gives it to you, or as the gringos say, There’s no such thing as a free lunch. She, Margarita Margie, she was ambitious, disciplined, and what did it get her? Stuck there on the border, trying to get through that mess of a demonstration that’s interrupted everything, eager to leave Mexico every night, bored crossing over to Juárez every morning past iron skeletons, cemeteries of skyscrapers left half-built because of Mexico’s repeated bad luck: money’s all used up, the crisis has arrived, they’ve locked up the investor, the government functionary, the top dog, but not even then does the corruption stop, fucked-up country, screwed country, desperate country like a rat running on a wheel, deluding itself into thinking it’s going somewhere but never moving an inch. There’s nothing to be done though — that’s where her job is and she’s good at her job, she knows the assembly line from A to Z, from the chassis to the soldering to the automatic test to the cabinet to the screen to the warm-up to see if all the parts work and to make sure there’s no infant mortality, as the Italian assistant manager jokingly calls it. She knows about the alignment that insulates the television set and keeps the earth’s magnetic field from causing interference, what do you think of that? She tries that one out on her dance partners, who immediately lose the beat because she knows more than they do. They don’t like her and leave her to herself because she talks about testing the TV in front of mirrors, about the plastic case, the Styrofoam packing, and the final shipping box, the television set’s coffin, all ready for Kmart. The whole process takes two hours, eleven thousand TVs per day, not bad, huh? Does this chick know her shit or what? And if it was her job that day to check that each phase was carried out correctly, sticking green stars on the TVs with problems and blue stars on those with none, she deserved a great big gold star on her forehead, right on her forehead, like the good girls in nuns’ schools, like the drum majorettes who twirled their batons and showed their panties when they marched and disguised themselves as colonels to lead the parades and were whistled at by the boys, who called her Margie and said she’s not Pocha, not Chicana, not Mexican, she’s like you and me …

the shipwrecked, the defeated, the man dying of hunger and thirst, the man in rags,

from whom if not that man could come the impossible dream of the wealth of the river, disposable wealth as in Eden, golden apples within easy reach of hand and sin: who but a delirious shipwrecked man could make such an illusion about the río grande, río bravo believable?

Alvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca of Extremadura, fleeing from the sleepless stone as most of the conquistadors fled (Cortés from Medellin, Pizarro and Orellana from Trujillo, Balboa from Jerez de los Caballeros, De Soto from Barcarrota, Valdivia from Villanueva de la Serena, men from the borderland, men from beyond the Duero), wanted, as they did, to transmute the stone of Extremadura into the gold of America, took ship at Sanlúcar in 1528 with an expedition of four hundred men bound for Florida, of whom forty-nine remained after a shipwreck in Tampa bay, wading through the swampy lands of the Seminoles, painfully marching along the Gulf coast to the Mississippi river, building boats to try the sea once again, squeezed in so tight they couldn’t move, now attacked by a storm from which only thirty escape alive, this new shipwreck in Galveston, the march west to the río grande, río bravo, defending themselves from Indian arrows, eating their horses and sewing up the hides to carry water, until they reach the lands of the Pueblo Indians north of the river,