I dreamed I was washing my hands and the skin started coming off my fingers until my finger-bones were exposed. I cried for my mother, who was in another room in the house. I thought, please don’t let this be real. My mother heard me crying in the hallway where I stood leaning against the wall, staring at my hands. When she saw me, she threw a towel over my hands and dried them. When she took the towel away, they were normal again, only a little red. See, she said, you healed yourself. Is it a dream, mom? I said. She didn’t say anything. The dead novelist Henry Miller came out of another room and said, “That’s the way stars are, they just hang there.” Then he asked me for a dollar.
I drive Natalia to physical therapy this morning. We go every day now. She worked at McDonald’s for 15 years in Tucson. Then she got deported after she called in sick for a week because she couldn’t walk. Someone turned her in. All those years at McDonald’s fucked up her legs. Immigration didn’t drag her away, they told her to go voluntarily. I quit my job as a cab driver. That was the easy part. We bought some crutches, packed our bags and left to come live with Natalia’s parents here in Hermosillo.
Natalia does exercises in a small pool. The pool room is something out of the 1960’s, with old tile and a domed roof with semi-clear panels to the sky. It’s like walking into a tropical rain forest or an old greenhouse, your breath catches in the humidity mixed with chlorine.
The man in charge of the physical therapy is always bitching about how they don’t pay him enough and how they also make him clean the bathrooms and sweep up the parking lot. He was working with another woman in the pool when we walked in around 10 in the morning.
“…and then the next guy I picked up, I got him halfway home and he started masturbating…” the woman was saying. She is an Uber driver here in Hermosillo. The physical therapist kept dunking her head backwards into the water like a baptism. I don’t know why she was taking physical therapy, she looked perfectly healthy. But you can’t always tell just from looking. Every time she came up out of the water she continued talking.
“…I stopped the car and told him to get out but he wouldn’t get out. I took out my taser and nailed him. But he had on a big coat. The next time I got him in the neck and that got his attention!”
“Natalia, como estas?”
“Bien, Martin. Hola, Sylvia.”
“I’ll be right with you.”
“…anyway, he kind of rolled out and fell on the ground and I got the hell out of there…later I noticed he vomited on the side of my car…”
Her story reminds me of my cab driving days, may they never come again.
Natalia slips into the warm womb-waters of the pool and grips the sides with her little black swim cap on. Her sister Sofia told her if she keeps doing this pool therapy she’s gonna turn into a mermaid. I want to jump in there with her and splash around in that fountain of youth. It feels good with the weight taken off. The other day our niece Emma was telling us about some secret hot springs east of town in the mountains. They have magical healing properties. This is the same Emma who thinks taking a hot bath in your house is bad for you and goes against nature.
Natalia starts doing her leg exercises in the water. I bend down and give her a kiss.
“I’m gonna take a walk, I’ll be back in an hour.”
“Don’t be flirting with any viejas!”
I wander out into the breezy autumn day and head to the walled-in cemetery a few blocks away. I like to walk around there. Nobody bothers me, no traffic, no eyes look at me, no noise. I feel safe.
The cemetery is a chaotic grid of blinding white crosses and Catholic statues and crypt-houses. It is surrounded by a 10-feet high block wall painted blue with a 30-foot-high arched gate at the entrance and one long wide road down the middle paved with smooth old stones. Little dirt paths lead off from the main road. I walk around letting time pass.
Death keeps life in a box, not the other way around. Anybody with any sense knows who’s master. I imagine all those skeletons down there, mum in the substratum. Many of the graves are broken, dug-out, ransacked. A miracle there is no smell, besides the hot dust. The hierarchy of human economic status is on full display, from the tremendous marble mausoleums and shrines complete with pillars and towers to the tiny cairns of dirt with rotten wooden crosses tied with rusty wire. And of course, the many anonymous mounds, humble as mole-hills.
The fact that others have suffered too does not comfort much. But the peace and quiet do, and the trees and the birds. The sad-eyed stone angels perch, folded in their pinions of melancholy, silly sleeping guards over the meaningless tombs. Inner infinity and outer infinity meet in me, this flesh mysterious to itself, this biological fear, this shrinking dilation.
I see an open crypt and I look down into it. Someone has flung the huge iron door wide open. A stairway to nothingness. The calacas dance and kick and grin with their flowered halos and colored necklaces. The worms lick their way through the absolute. Markers stand hammered into the source, an irrational poetry fingernailed into the concrete, the countless tears of countless mothers and fathers gathered in an iron water-tank covered in algae and grime, the surface still as the eye of a butchered steer.
This is our solution. To be awake for a while and then to sleep. To crawl, to walk, to run, to sit, and then to lie down.
I sit down at the far end of the cemetery. It is probably disrespectful to sit on a stranger’s grave as if it was my own. But I mean no harm.
I check our bank account on my phone: 732 dollars. That’s 13,000 pesos, which sounds better. How are we going to make it?
“How did you all make it?” I ask.
But there’s no answer. One foot in front of the other, something dumb like that, until you can’t anymore.
I walk back to Natalia. She is waiting for me on a bench in the sun. She takes my hand and I help her to the car.
“Where did you walk to?”
“Just around,” I say.
“Do you want to get some tacos?” she says.
“Chicharrones?”
“That stuff goes straight to your veins. It’s bad for you.”
“Yep.”
I turn the radio up and drive over to El Diputado. It’s not far from the cemetery gates. It’s cheap, and they always have a table open.
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