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By chris Date: 2007 Feb 17 Comment on this Work [[2007.02.17.17.12.18523]] |
| You're calling from a pay phone in Juarez on the Texas side of the border. Mexican calling card. Took you ten minutes to figure out the instructions and convert them to a kind of gringo spanglish. She answers on the third ring. You imagine her waiting there, waiting for the call she knew would come sometime that day. Mucho hours to fill with rolling tortillas and watching crazy kids. Dodging husbands, wives. But she answers and then you're in another country - two other countries: the one a hundred yards away across in the river with no water in it and the country of her. The intanglible country of cumin-scented yellow tableclothes and shadowed rooms with clouded glass in the windows. The phone you hold smells like cigarette smoke but you breathe in her scent. "You're going to laugh at me," you begin, and confess the out-of-the-way pay phone near the International Bridge. "Viva Chiapas! Viva Zapata!" screams the graffiti at the base of it. You can see it. She laughs at the way your pronounce her home, like she always does, but in a good way - "It's 'SHE-wa-wa', chico. Chihuahua!" You roll off the names, the places - Cabo San Lucas, la playa, Nogales, Nuevo Laredo - saying them all more-or-less wrong, grasping for credibility. You smile (can she hear it in your voice?). You close your eyes, let her voice carry you. The people disappear around you, vanishing into their preoccupations. You could easily be seen but you don't care. You know you will never grow old with her in this place. You will never see the sun rise for more than one stolen morning over those treeless mountains. By the sounds of her hands doing things you know she is cradling her cell between her shoulder and the side of her face. Later, her arms will hold a baby who turned three months old last week. You kissed her face once. You ate her chile verde and made love as though hundreds of women hadn't disappeared in that city, as though the horror of the world belonged to another one somewhere else. You hear the sound of running water in the background. She says something to someone in the room you don't know and washes her hands in water you could never drink without getting sick. |