Читать книгу Dusk & Dust - Esteban Rodríguez - Страница 9
ОглавлениеWe weren’t exactly tourists anymore, amateurs at crossing over,
tossing change
and lint inside their half-cut, empty jugs of milk, nodding as they
blessed us
from behind the fence; their scabbed fingers anchored to the plastic’s
jagged edge,
heavy with the weight of pity, stares. We weren’t exactly shocked by all
the begging
at the border, the women sprawled outside the bridge, sleeping children
cradled
in serapes, strapped like hammocks below their mother’s breasts,
as hordes of flies
dove at their eyelids and crawled across their swollen cheeks. As sad
as the scene
was supposed to be, I still had fun feeding quarters down the slot,
swinging past
the metal arms, the rattle from the turnstile louder than pennies dancing
inside a can.
We’d matured from trivialities, group photos at the flagpole,
at the emblem
of an eagle with a snake perched above a cactus, copper cruelly
chipping off,
a metaphor for the landscape of this country. At ten, I had no
metaphors
for barefooted boys selling Chiclets like insurance, running after
every passerby,
tugging their sleeves, nagging how their gum was cheaper than
the other guys’.
But diez centavos was too desperate to translate to my mother’s ears,
and even though
she spoke their language, she used her English silence to mute
their pleas; those shouts
for discount pharmaceuticals, healing herbs and Freon, strings of garlic
and streetside
taco stands drenched in spices I had never smelled. We were them
without the burden
of being them, shared last names with them, an economic convenience
living so close
to them, but when my mother tugged me closer to her waist, clenched
the collar
of my white and sweaty shirt, I heard the tension in her grip saying
I was not,
would never be one of them, would play the role of ‘in-between’ instead,
the relative
from el otro lado, the boy straddled on the valley of two geographies,
walking over
with his stoic, middle-aged mother, unaware that her stay-at-home salary
didn’t come
with dental, that her enamel was dissolving, riddled with cavities across
her molars,
where she’d thrust and dig with toothpicks, nails, scoop out the half-
chewed gunk
of food, repeat the rhythm after every meal. And there came a point
when all she scraped
was nerve and gum, when her habit spread into years of sleeplessness,
aggravated
by a dentist speaking Spanish too clinical to understand: drilling, talking,
drilling,
pausing, yanking out the reasons why we made our trips, those weekend
afternoons
crossing back high on anesthesia and lobby candy, staggering past
the line of women
still staring through the heavy mesh, and still melting along the shadeless
pavement,
wondering, I imagined, how our sloppy smiles tasted.
