The Best American Short Stories 2013 (7 page)

SANTOS
: Much longer than that, boy.

NELSON
: Please. I’d consider it an honor to buy a round.

COCHOCHO
(still angry):
Great idea! Let the foreigner spend his dollars!

At this, Nelson stands and steps toward the startled Celia. He kisses her on the mouth, brazenly, and as they kiss, he takes money from his own pocket, counts it without looking, and places it in her hand. She closes her fist around the money, and it vanishes. It’s unclear whether he’s paying for the drinks or for the kiss itself, but in either case, Celia doesn’t question it. The four local men look on, astounded
.

SANTOS
: Imperialism!

COCHOCHO
: Opportunism!

JAIME
: Money!

ERICK
: Sex!

Manuel stares at his son, but says nothing. Takes a drink. Curtain
.

I should be clear about something: it is never the words, but how they are spoken that matters. The intent, the tone. The farcical script quoted above is only an approximation of what actually occurred that evening, after my father challenged me to play Francisco, or a version of him, for this unsuspecting audience. Many other things were said, which I’ve omitted: oblique insults; charmingly ignorant questions; the occasional reference to one or another invented episode of American history. I improvised, using my brother’s letters as a guide, even quoting from them when the situation allowed—the line, for example, about Mexicans ignoring blacks and vice versa. That statement was contained within one of Francisco’s early dispatches from Oakland, when he was still eagerly trying to understand the place for himself and not quite able to decipher the many things he saw.

My most significant dramatic choice was not to defend myself all too vigorously. Not to defend Oakland, or the United States. That would have been a violation of character, whereas this role was defined by a basic indifference to what was taking place. They could criticize, impugn, belittle—it was all the same to me, I thought (my character thought). They could say what they wanted to say, and I would applaud them for it; after all, at the end of the day, I (my character) would be heading back to the U.S., and they’d be staying here. I needed to let them know this, without saying it explicitly. That’s how Francisco would have done it—never entirely sinking into the moment, always hovering above it. Distant. Untouchable.

Through it all, my old man sat very quietly, deflecting attention even when they began discussing him directly, his choices, the meaning and impact of his long exile. I’ve hurried through the part where my father’s friends expressed, with varying levels of obsequiousness, their admiration, their wonder, their jealousy. I’ve left it out because it wasn’t the truth; it was habit—how you treat the prodigal son when he returns, how you flatter him in order to claim some of his success as your own. But this fades. It is less honest and less interesting than the rest of what took place that night. The surface: Jaime and Erick drank heavily, oblivious and imperturbable to the end, and were for that very reason the most powerful men in the room. I could not say they were any drunker when we left than they were when we arrived. Cochocho, on the other hand, drank and changed dramatically: he became more desperate, less self-possessed, revealing in spite of himself the essential joylessness at the core of his being. His neatly combed hair somehow became wildly messy, his face swollen and adolescent, so that you could intuit, but not see, a grown man’s features hidden beneath. No one liked him; more to the point, he did not like himself. And then there was Santos, who was of that generation that catches cold if they leave the house without a well-knotted necktie; who, like all retired small-town teachers, had the gloomy nostalgia of a deposed tyrant. I caught him looking at Celia a few times with hunger—the hunger of an old man remembering better days—and it moved me. We locked eyes, Santos and I, just after one of these glances; he bowed his head, embarrassed, and looked down at his shoes. He began to hate me, I could feel it. He expressed most clearly what the others were unwilling to acknowledge: that the visitors had upset their pride.

We’d reminded them of their provincialism.

Which is why I liked Santos the best. Even though the role I was inhabiting placed us at opposite ends of this divide; in truth, I identified very closely with this wounded vanity. I felt it, would feel it, would come to own this troubling sense of dislocation myself. I knew it intimately: it was how the real Nelson felt in the presence of the real Francisco.

Hurt. Small.

Now the lights in the bar hummed, and the empty beer bottles were magically replaced with new ones, and my father’s old history teacher aged before my eyes, the color draining from him until he looked like the people in Raúl’s old photographs. Jaime and Erick maintained the equanimity of statues. Cochocho, with his ill humor and red, distended skin, looked like the mold spreading on Raúl’s kitchen wall. He’d removed his suit jacket, revealing dark rings of sweat at the armpits of his dress shirt. He asked about my great-uncle’s house, and when my father said he’d transferred the property to a cousin of ours, the deputy mayor responded with a look of genuine disappointment.

“You could have left it to your son,” he said.

It wasn’t what he really meant, of course: Cochocho probably had designs on it himself, some unscrupulous plan that would net him a tidy profit. But I played along, as if this possibility had just occurred to me.

“That’s true,” I said, facing my old man. “Why didn’t you?”

My father chose this moment to be honest. “I didn’t want to burden you with it.”

And then the night began to turn: my old man frowned as soon as the words had escaped. It was more of a grimace, really, as if he were in pain; and I thought of those faces professional athletes make after an error, when they know the cameras are on them: they mime some injury, some phantom hurt to explain their mistake. It’s a shorthand way of acknowledging, and simultaneously deflecting, responsibility. We sat through a few unpleasant moments of this, until my father forced a laugh, which sounded very lonely because no one joined him in it.

“A burden, you say?”

This was Santos, who, excluding a year and a half studying in France, had lived in the town for all of his seventy-seven years.

Just then Celia came to the table with two fresh bottles. “Sit with us,” I said. I blurted this out on impulse, for my sake and my father’s, just to change the subject. She smiled coquettishly, tilting her head to one side, as if she hadn’t heard correctly. Her old T-shirt was stretched and loose, offering the simple line of her thin neck, and the delicate ridge of her collarbone, for our consideration.

“I would love to,” Celia said, “but it appears there is no room here for a lady.”

She was right: we were six drunken men pressed together in a crowded, unpleasant rectangle. If more than two of us leaned forward, our elbows touched. It was a perfect answer, filling us all with longing, and though we hurried to make room, Celia had already turned on her heel and was headed back to the bar. She expected us to stay for many hours longer, was confident she’d have other opportunities to tease us. Her mother glared at her.

But the men hadn’t forgotten my father’s insult.

“Explain,” said Santos.

My old man shook his head. He wore an expression I recognized: the same distant gaze I’d seen that first night, when we’d sat up, drinking tea and looking through Raúl’s old photographs. Who are these people? What do they have to do with me? He wasn’t refusing; he simply found the task impossible.

I decided to step in, playing the one card my father and I both had.

“I think I know what my old man is trying to get at,” I said. “I believe I do. And I understand it because I feel the same way toward the capital. He meant no offense, but you have to understand what happens, over time, when one leaves.”

Santos, Cochocho, and the others gave me skeptical looks. Nor, it should be said, did my father seem all that convinced. I went on anyway.

“Let’s take the city, for example. I love that place—I realize that’s a controversial statement in this crowd, but I do. Listen. I love its gray skies, its rude people, its disorder, its noise. I love the stories I’ve lived there, the landmarks, the ocean, which is the same as the ocean here, by the way. But now, in spite of that love, when I have a son, I would not
leave
it to him. I would not say: here, boy, take this. It’s your inheritance. It’s yours. I would not want him to feel obligated to love it the way I do. Nor would that be possible. Do you understand? Does that make sense? He’ll be an American. I have no choice in the matter. That’s a question of geography. And like Americans, he should wake into adulthood and feel free.”

I sat back, proud of my little speech.

“Ah!” Santos said. It was a guttural sound, a physical complaint, as if I’d injured him. He scowled. “Rank nationalism,” he said. “Coarse jingoism of the lowest order. Are you saying we’re not free?”

We fell silent.

For a while longer the bottles continued to empty, almost of their own accord, and I felt I was perceiving everything through watery, unfocused eyes. The television had been trying to tell me something all night, but its message was indecipherable. I was fully Francisco now. That’s not true—I was an amalgam of the two of us, but I felt as close to my brother then as I had in many years. Most of it was internal and could not have been expressed with any script, with any set of lines. But this audience—I thought back to the two antagonists and Joselito’s moto-taxi, the way they became fully invested in the scene the moment they realized they were being watched. I’d taken my brother’s story and amplified it. Made it mine, and now theirs, for better or for worse. It was no longer a private argument, but a drama everyone had a stake in. I felt good. Content. Seized by that powerful sense of calm you have when you have understood a character, or rather, when you feel that a character has understood you. I felt very confident, very brash, as I’d imagined my brother had felt all these many years on his journey across North America.

I stood then and confirmed what I’d begun to sense while seated: I was very drunk. It was comforting in a way, to discover that all that drinking had not been done in vain. It was time to go. Celia and her mother came out from behind the bar to clear off the table, and the other men stood as well. And this was the moment I as Francisco, or perhaps Francisco as me, pulled Celia close and kissed her on the mouth. Perhaps this was what the television had been trying to tell me. She kissed me back. I heard the men call out in surprise, heard Celia’s mother as well, shrill and protective, but entirely reasonable. After all, who was this young man? And just what did he think he was doing?

I placed one hand at the small of Celia’s back, pulling her to me. The crowd continued to voice its disapproval, scandalized, but also—I felt certain—glad for us. The dance is complete. The virile foreigner has made his mark. The pretty girl has claimed her property. And it was the role of the gathered men to be appalled, or to pretend to be; the role of the mother to wail about her daughter’s chastity when she herself had never been chaste. But when it was over, when Celia and I separated, everyone was grinning. The old men, my father, even Elena.

Very late that night I called Rocío. I did not feel any guilt. I just wanted to talk to her, perhaps have her read me the letter I’d already imagined. Be amused by her. Perhaps laugh and discuss her lover’s murder. It must have been three or four in the morning, and I could not sleep. I’d begun to have doubts about what had happened, what it meant. A few hours before, it had all seemed triumphant; now it felt abusive. The plaza was empty, of course, just like the previous night; only more so—a kind of emptiness that feels eternal, permanent. I knew I would never come back to this place, and that realization made me a little sad. From where I stood, I could see the sloping streets, the ocean, the unblinking night; and nearer, the listing palm tree scarred with names. I would have written Celia’s name on it—a useless, purely romantic gesture, to be sure—but the truth is I never knew her name. I’ve chosen to call her Celia because it feels disrespectful to address her as
the barwoman’s daughter
. So impersonal, so anonymous. A barwoman’s daughter tastes of bubblegum and cigarettes, whereas Celia’s warm tongue had the flavor of roses.

Santos and Cochocho and Jaime and Erick left us soon after the kiss, and it was just me and my father, still feeling amused by what had happened, what we’d been a part of. We maybe felt a little shame too, but we didn’t talk about it because we didn’t know how. Grown men with hurt feelings are transparent creatures; grown men who feel dimly they have done something wrong are positively opaque. It would’ve been much simpler if we’d all just come to blows. Santos and Cochocho wandered off, a bit dazed, as if they’d been swindled. My father and I did a quick circle around the plaza and begged off for the evening. We never ate. Our hunger had vanished. I tried and failed to sleep, spent hours listening to my father’s snores echoing through the house. Now I punched in the numbers from the phone card, and let the phone ring for a very long time. I wasn’t drunk anymore. I liked the sound because it had no point of origin; I could imagine it ringing in the city, in that apartment I shared with Rocío (where she was asleep and could not hear, or was perhaps out with friends on this weekend night), but this was pure fantasy. I was not hearing that ring at all, of course. The ringing I heard came from inside the line, from somewhere within the wires, within the phone, an echo of something mysterious emerging from an unfixed and floating territory.

I waited for a while, listening, comforted; but in the end, there was no answer.