Poet

Claudio walked over the border into Texas in 1981. He was alone, and didn't have a smuggler. It was easier in those days for Salvadorans fleeing the civil war to come to the US. He called his mother's cousin in Chicago from a pay phone in Brownsville; Cousin Armando wired enough money for a motel room for the night, and a bus ticket. The trip north in the old Greyhound was a luxury ride compared to bus travel in El Salvador, but Claudio did not notice. He didn't notice the quiet green countryside, the absence of soldiers patrolling the roads with automatic rifles, or the sleepy small towns along the Greyhound's milk-run route. He was working on a poem.

When the bus pulled into the station in Chicago, Armando was there to meet him and take him to his North Side apartment. Claudio was distant with Armando and his wife and children. Armando thought he was war-shocked, and the family made allowances for his coldness. Claudio had been a student at the national university and he was one of the student-poets who published an anti-government magazine. He had been arrested, tortured, and imprisoned, but his businessman father bribed the officer in charge of the prison for Claudio's release. He had to leave the country. His father paid someone to take him as far as the Mexican border with the US.

It was December in Chicago, and Claudio thought he was in hell. The trees looked dead, the old apartment was cold and rat-infested, and the sidewalks were ice-covered. No one walked. There seemed to be no life in streets, no place to be but huddled inside. Armando's family was not literary; they watched TV in the few hours they were not working or sleeping.

Armando found Claudio a job in the same banquet hall where he worked as a waiter, but Claudio dropped too many trays and spilled too much food and drink on the banqueters. He was fired after a week. Armando couldn't imagine another job that Claudio could do. He was too absent-minded to be a waiter, too clumsy to be a dishwasher, too slow to be a janitor. He was skinny and lank-haired, and shivered all the time, even in a heavy overcoat. He didn't look strong enough for anything other than a desk job. Armando suggested English classes, but Claudio refused. It would interfere with his poetry, he said.

Armando waited three months before telling Claudio that he would have to start paying for a share of the rent and food. “I can help you find a job,” Armando said, “but once I do, you have to keep it.” Armando's friend owned a shoe store that served mainly recent Latino immigrants to the North Side. Claudio worked stocking the shelves, taking out the trash, sweeping, unloading boxes. The owner kept him on because he knew he was a poet, and made allowances for his frequent inattention.

Claudio did keep the job, but he was never promoted. He refused to speak English, or even attempt to learn it. He was keeping his head clear of the new language and culture, waiting for the war in El Salvador to end so he could go back. He won asylum status in the US, and became a permanent resident. He wrote poetry in the first year or so, but then his inspiration dried up. He paid rent to his cousin, and kept to himself in his own room. Years went by, and the war ended in 1991. He thought of going back, but his father had died, and his mother and sister fled to Mexico and decided to stay.

Claudio has never found a home in the United States. He no longer has a home in El Salvador either. Unlike many immigrants, Claudio did not come in hopes of fulfilling his dreams. He fled to the US because he had no other option. He was physically tortured in El Salvador and now lives another kind of torture in the US. Despite having legal status, he remains an alien, a poet with no outlet, a man without a home.

Mismatch

Nathan was a student from India in the early 1990s at a Seattle community college, when he met and married Susan, a US citizen. They lived together for eight years before separating, but didn’t divorce for nearly ten years after their separation. Nathan got his legal residence based on the marriage, and became a citizen in the 1990s. He and Susan had no children.

In 2008, after years of living alone, Nathan signed up for an Indian matchmaking service. These services – there are many that match Indian nationals in the US seeking marriage – are a primary way for Indian professionals to meet and marry. This is vital, since often families of recent immigrant professionals don’t come with them. This kicks the legs out under the traditional Indian path to marriage, where families make the arrangement.

Nathan met three or four women in the Seattle area, but each match fizzled after the first date. He went further afield, and started corresponding with women in Oregon and California. He paid the match service fees for a year before he found Miranda, a high school teacher in a San Francisco suburb. She was in the US on a work visa, and was from the same Indian state as he. After two months of writing, posting photos and phone calls, Nathan flew to San Francisco to meet Miranda and her brother’s family, with whom she lived.

The first meeting was awkward. Nathan was smaller and thinner than Miranda had guessed, and was pockmarked from acne scars. He wasn’t witty or much of a talker. Miranda was more forceful, taller, and older-looking than Nathan had guessed. They sat at her brother’s dinner table while the brother and his wife tried to make conversation with Nathan about their memories of their home city. Miranda and Nathan had been born Christians, and belonged to the same evangelical denomination. It had given them plenty to talk about by phone – their churches, their faith – but didn’t lend itself as well to dinner-table conversation. Nathan talked about his high-tech computer programmer work, and didn’t let on that he was divorced. Miranda wondered why a forty-year-old man still wasn’t married. He said, “I guess I just never found the right woman.” He said he’d been work-focused to the exclusion of wife-hunting. He said he’d gotten his permanent residence in the US when his employer petitioned for him. Miranda barely spoke.

Nathan went back to his hotel room after the dinner meeting, and then flew home. He wrote right away to Miranda, to say he enjoyed the meeting and looked forward to seeing her again. He waited an agonizing week before she replied. She wrote, “As you can see, I’m no longer young. I was engaged when I was twenty, but my fiancée’s family thought my family was too poor, and he broke our engagement. Now I’m facing middle age with no husband or children. Our Christian faith can be a strong bond. I’m willing to continue to meet you and to see if a marriage is the right step.”

On this encouragement, Nathan flew several more times to San Francisco, and Miranda visited Seattle four or five times. She thought Nathan’s apartment rather small and dingy for a computer programmer who had focused on his work, and told him so. “I have to send a lot to my parents and brothers,” he said. “I’m building a compound for them all.” Hmmm, she thought, but then remembered that she was 36, nearly 37, with a teaching contract that would end in a year’s time. She’d have to go back to India, to nothing. Her parents were dead, and her brother and sister in the US, married to citizens.

She was prone to headaches, and got one nearly every time she visited Nathan. But I must marry, she thought. A year after meeting, they did marry, in San Francisco. She kept her job teaching – her contract was extended – and flew to Seattle for school vacations. Nathan visited her for long weekends.

She asked to see his workplace, but he demurred. “It’ll be dull for you”, he said. “No, really, it won’t”, she said. He said “No, family never visits; it’s not a good idea”. He took the car and left. She called a taxi, and went to the place he said he worked. No one had ever heard of him there.

She confronted him; he said he’d changed his job a week ago. She called him a liar. He insisted that he now worked at a new company. She insisted on seeing a paystub. He tossed one to her, and she saw the name of the company, and the fact that his hourly rate was $20, before he snatched it back. “Twenty dollars!” she shouted, “that’s not a programmer’s salary.” “Go to hell,” he said. “What is your job?” she shouted. “Tell the truth!” “None of your business”, he said. “Liar, liar!” she said, and went back to California without saying goodbye.

He called in a week. He said he was sorry about the lie, but he knew she wanted a professional. Every woman he’d ever dated wanted a professional. He didn’t have a degree, but he was a good man, a Christian, and he would be a good provider, a good father. He was a warehouse worker, and operated a fork lift.

She relented. What else could she do? The wedding had been in her church. It would be shameful to divorce. She traveled to Seattle during summer break. She was job hunting at high schools in Seattle and its suburbs. She and Nathan were looking for a bigger place, a condo. While organizing boxes, she found Nathan’s divorce certificate. It was dated nearly a year after he’d begun the relationship with her.

She was trembling as she held it out to him that night. “You lied! You lied!” She threw the certificate on the kitchen table. “You, you, you… you said you’d never been married!”

Nathan shouted, “Why are you snooping in my private papers? Now I’ll never petition for your residence! Get out of my house! No one will ever want you!” He slammed her against the wall, and tried to choke her.

Miranda took her suitcase, stuffed in her clothes, and ran out the door. She took a taxi to the airport. After a month, she filed for divorce. Nathan didn’t respond, and the divorce was granted. Her work visa expired, and her school let her go, since she couldn’t prove work authorization. She took a job selling clothes, in a store owned by her brother’s friend. She made minimum wage. She didn’t go back to her church, for shame. It wasn’t until another year went by that she learned that she could petition for her own legal residence in the US, based on the abuse she suffered. She is now a legal permanent resident. She has no plans to remarry.

Desert Crossing continued…

For the two days and two nights he spent wandering, looking for the road that la Migra must have used to capture his companions, David was tormented by thirst. The few tortillas he had in his pack were of no interest to him, without water. He slept in the day short stretches, his hat over his head and face, moving around a boulder when the sun’s blaze on his face woke him, dreaming of water, of swimming, of waterfalls, of rain.

He was a city boy and had no experience of desert of even of countryside, but what he did seemed instinctual. Keep low during the day, suck mosoquelete stems, try to sleep. At night, he blessed the nearly full moon, and walked northwest where the coyote said Tucson lay. He gathered mosoquelete as he walked and stuffed as much as he could in his backpack, for the day.

About an hour before dawn on his second night walking alone, he found a road, a two-lane blacktop. He walked along it toward the north. He was going to take it wherever it led, even if straight to border patrol headquarters. He’d turn himself in, ask for asylum. He’d heard that the US didn’t give asylum to Mexicans no matter the circumstances, but he couldn’t go back.

When the sun came up, he saw that there was no shade of any kind along the road. The asphalt began to heat up, and he walked in the powdery dust at its side. By mid-morning he was hallucinating, stumbling, barely able to keep to the side of the road since there were so many clear sparkling pools of deep water just a few yards away from the road. There were people, too, sitting by the pools, laughing and splashing each other with water. Some of them called to him to come to drink, to swim. He wanted to go, but something kept him to the road, a stubborn part of him that held one small thought; he must keep the black line of the road always in his sight, and when sight would fail, in his touch.

An hour or so before midday, an even more vivid hallucination began to torment him. A silver late model car pulled up beside him, and the elderly white man driving it asked in English “Want a ride?” David leaned against the car hood but couldn’t speak. The car felt real, and it was on the road. The metal was burning him, but it was an illusion anyway.

The man got out of the car and steered David into the passenger seat, then handed him a tall plastic glass filled with water. David made no move to take the water, so the man held it to his lips, and tilted the water into his mouth. Some of it ran out of David’s mouth before he began to drink. David tried to grab the glass, to gulp the water, but the man said, “Steady, amigo, take it slow.” David heard the word amigo – and it struck him, as he lost consciousness, that it was the first thing he understood in this very realistic mirage.

When he woke, he was in a bed with white sheets in a patio, under a clay tile roof. He watched water splashing in a small stone fountain in the center of thep atio, for a long while. He didn’t feel curious about where he was. It was so restful just to lie there. He noticed a needle in his arm attached by a clear tube to a hanging bottle of fluid. He slept; he woke, and slept again. It was dark and light, day and night for a dream-filled week. He mostly saw himself as a child again, on the old truck with his father making deliveries, but now they drove only in the desert, and made their deliveries to swimmers and picnickers lounging by the side of mirage lakes and waterfalls. He and his father swam and picnicked with their customers, too. These dreams were so happy that he mourned their end, when he was well enough to to be given a bus ticket to Seattle, where his cousin awaited him. He was never told who the people were who saved his life.

He started working almost right away as a dishwasher in the restaurant his cousin partially owned. But the conditions were hard, the workers joyless, and the pay not even close to minimum wage. He found another dishwashing job easily, and had the great good fortune to land in a good place, where he worked his way up to prep cook within a year. He discovered a flair for cooking, and loved his work. His wife told him not to risk coming back; the Zetas were stronger than ever, and never forgot anything. She tried to get a visitor’s visa to the US, but failed three times. He told her that he was fine, and he was.

When he was 65, after 10 years in the US, he thought he’d consult with an immigration attorney to see if there was any way he could get legal status. When he heard the news that there was no way, unless Congress passed immigration reform, he was unfazed. “It’s okay,” he said. “I’m happy here. I’ve got my work and I’ve got friends. I have my church, and I know my wife is fine. I send her money, and she bought a house in Puebla, where she’s from. She’s happy too.”

He has no health insurance, and no Medicare or Medicaid, no food stamps, no retirement savings, and no car. His apartment is small and dark, and he walks with a pronounced limp and a stout cane. He has no family in the US, and no legal status, either. Yet he said, as he left the lawyer’s office, “I have never met an American who treated me badly, from my first ride in the desert with the elderly man who gave me water. I’m lucky.” He is a happy man.