NOTHING TO DECLARE Read online

  A GIANT WHITE ROOSTER STOOD ON MY SMALL balcony at five in the morning, greeting the dawn. He was so loud it seemed as if he were in bed with me. I opened my glass doors and tried to shoo him, but the rooster wouldn't leave. That was when I noticed the yard on the other side of the wall, perhaps only a dozen feet away, where my neighbor lived.

  In Mexico, there are many walls whose purpose is to keep poor people away from rich people. Often the tops of these walls are decorated with bits of broken bottles—Coke, Pepsi, Seven-Up—to deter people from climbing over them. There was the wall that lined the road to San Antonio. And between my house and the rest of Mexico was a wall eight feet high.

  From my balcony I looked into the yard and saw lumber, debris, mud, a pig, a lamb, animal droppings, chicks, assorted articles of clothing, and no vegetation. A radio played mariachi music over the sound of running water and scrubbing. Somewhere beneath a makeshift wood-plank shelter a woman was doing the wash under a small light.

  I put on my robe and went outside. The sky was a deep shade of blue-green and the rooster continued its dialogue with the other roosters of San Antonio. I climbed on a large stone by the wall and pulled myself up as far as I could, shouting. A few moments later a woman peered down at me. I could barely make out her dark face in the blue-green light of morning, but she had thick black hair and weathered skin, a brilliant smile. "Excuse me," I said in my broken one-year-of-college Spanish, "but is that your rooster on my balcony?"

  She looked up and shook her head. "He is always on the prowl. He hates to stay home," she said in dismay. "Like all men."

  The next thing I knew she had come around to my side of the wall and we went into my apartment. She seemed to know the place well. Without a word, she went upstairs into the bedroom and onto the balcony, grabbed the rooster by his legs, and carried him, flapping, out of the house.

  I tried to go back to sleep, but the feathers floating around my head and the sound of the radio and the woman's comment about the rooster and men stuck in my mind. Finally I fell asleep until about ten o'clock, when I heard someone knocking.

  I opened the door and found two small children. "My mother," one of them whispered, holding out a napkin, "asked me to give you these." I could barely hear her as she handed me the napkin. I opened it and found five corn tortillas, still hot. "What are your names?" I asked them. They said nothing. "Where do you live?" They pointed to the other side of the wall. Then they ran away.

  That afternoon I climbed the hill to the market to go shopping for the first time. The market was about a mile's hike from San Antonio—a long, steep climb that takes about half an hour. Then suddenly I was bombarded by the market.

  Honeycombs covered with dead bees were thrust into my face. Huge chunks of brown mescal that look like caramel, red and black zapotes, papayas and mangoes cut open for sampling, cactus ears, cheese, garlic, long-stemmed gladiolas, juice stands, polyester dresses, pottery, watermelon. I paused at the herbalist who sells his bark and wood chips, dried grasses and flowers, roots and herbal teas, to cure your insomnia, kidney failure, weight loss, tension, headache, infertility. I was struck by it all, from the flowers to the stench of the butcher's unrefrigerated meats. There was beauty and filth everywhere as wasps buzzed the candy man and sucked the exposed sugar, and diseased children, selling corn, flicked maggots from their eyes.

  I bought chicken, rice, avocados, beans, wild honey, and mangoes, which was more than I could carry. After a few blocks, I had to stop at the jardín to rest. I had not been there long when a man sat down beside me. He was a handsome Mexican with a camera around his neck. "So how long've you been in town?" he asked in good English. I told him I was new. He introduced himself. "Guillermo Gonzalez," he said. He was a photographer and offered to help me with my bags. He carried them down the hill as far as the turnoff to San Antonio. And then he said, "Why don't I pick you up tonight and take you to La Fragua."

  "La Fragua?"

  "Yes, it is the place where most people go. I'll pick you up at six and introduce you to some people I know."

  I made myself an early dinner and got dressed up. At six he had not shown, so I read. I read until seven, then seventhirty. When he still had not shown, I decided to go into town on my own. I was not yet accustomed to Mexican time, nor to being stood up. I put on lipstick and headed out the door.

  I was ready to climb the hill when the rains broke. They came out of nowhere and I rushed back inside. Within moments torrents had fallen on my enclosed patio. My windows were a sheet of rain. I went up to the roof and from the small shelter where I would do the wash, I watched it come down. Gray rain swept across the high desert, a rain that would bring incredible wildflowers and turn the hills into an easel of color with cornflowers, primrose, buttercups, and lavender thistle, but I didn't know this at the time. I went downstairs as dusk fell and the rain continued and I sat reading, waiting for the rain to cease. But it did not. It kept coming. It came longer than any rain should have come. And then, just as the night began, the electricity failed. The lights went, leaving me in darkness.

  I was caught completely unprepared. I had no light to read by, no candles, no batteries for my flashlight. I had no television or radio or phone. No one to talk to, no one to see, no plans for seeing anyone, no way back to the life I had known.

  I listened to the endless buzzing of mosquitoes as they bit me. I listened to my own breath. I told myself that in a few hours it would be morning. All I had to do was sleep. Instead I listened to the whisper of two lovers who sought refuge beneath the awning of my porch. I was perhaps no more than five feet away from them. They did not know I was there as they panted and caressed and made sounds like animals into the night.

  I woke to the sound of sweeping and the bleating of a lamb, so I stumbled downstairs and opened the door. There I saw a woman with a distended belly and strong, crablike arms and legs. Her skin was dark and her thick hair was tied up in a loose bun. She wore a miniskirt, to which a small child clung. It took me a moment to recognize her as the woman who lived on the other side of the wall.

  I wished them good morning. The children hid their faces and giggled. The one ducked beneath the lamb, hiding her face in its fleece. The woman brushed the strands of hair off her face. We introduced ourselves. Her name was Lupe and she said she took care of the property of the Señora who ran the Blue Door Bakery. Her youngest daughters were Lisa, who was four, and Cristina, who was two, nicknamed Polio because she was scrawny like a chicken. The lamb was Pancha.

  I was not sure what to say in this first conversation, so I asked Lupe if she knew where I could buy plants for my house. "Flowers?" she asked. And I said yes, flowers. I told her I wanted flowers. Living things.

  Lupe said she would take me if I'd wait while she changed her clothes. I had wanted to work that morning, but since she was offering, I felt I could not say no. I asked her if it was far and she said no, "No muy lejos." Not very far. She dragged Polio off with her and left me with Lisa and the lamb.

  I asked Lisa, "Is that your lamb?"

  And Lisa said, "Yes."

  "Is he your friend?"

  And she said, "Yes, he's my friend."

  "What will you do when he gets big?"

  And she said, "We're going to eat him."

  In a few moments Lupe returned in a clean dress, her hair combed neatly, pushing a wheelbarrow into which she plunked Polio. She grabbed Lisa by the hand and told me to follow. Thus Lupe, Polio, Lisa, me, and the doomed lamb, Pancha, set off with wheelbarrow in search of the elusive flower lady.

  We climbed up a hill over cobblestones, across the open sewer that would bring typhoid and dysentery and in some instances death to those who drank from it. In the heat and dry sun of the morning we climbed, farther and farther, into the poorest section of San Miguel, deeper into San Antonio, past mud-and-plank shacks where hungry children sat and scrawny dogs with open sores begged until I thought I could stand it no longer, and after about half an hour I asked, "Is it much farther?" a
nd Lupe responded, "No muy lejos."

  While I sweated and ached just from moving up and down hills, Lupe pushed and laughed and trudged. I have no idea where she took me or how long we walked, but eventually we reached a dusty road and there, along the side of the road, sat a one-eyed old woman in a shawl, selling flowers and plants at a good price. I picked a half dozen or so and felt suddenly embarrassed as I pulled money out of my wallet. The plants cost less than ten dollars, but I was slowly realizing that ten dollars would feed all Lupe's children (she had six at the time) for a week.

  But I bought the flowers because that was what we'd come for, and we surrounded Polio in bougainvillea and some house plants and a rose bush. Then Lupe proceeded to push the wheelbarrow back to where we'd come from. When I offered to help, she laughed. She said I was weak and she was strong. She made a muscle and made me feel it. She told me she was old but strong. I asked her how old and she said thirty-six. I told her I was thirty-two. She laughed and said I was old, too.

  LUPE BEGAN TO COME TO MY HOUSE OFTEN AND we'd sit in the kitchen and talk. She told me the story of her life in inconsistent bits and pieces. I strained to understand. My Spanish, which had been a requirement in college, was a necessity now. While I was often mute, like some aphasiac who comprehends but cannot speak, I grasped much of what Lupe said. And as time went on, without my paying much attention to the process, we would carry on real conversations. But for now I mostly listened to what she said.

  At different times she gave me contradictory information. Sometimes she said her parents were ranchers who died in a fire, leaving her with a cruel grandmother. Other times she said that her father left her mother bereft and her mother died of grief. But the story Lupe told most often when she came to sit and drink coffee was the story of how her father had been a landowner from a rich gentry of high birth, and her mother, a poor Indian. She said she knew this story only through what was whispered to her at markets or, as she walked the dirt roads of San Antonio, from the rumblings of brujas —witches—in the hills, all of which composed the little mosaic that made up her past.

  Lupe first told me this after we had not known each other long. It was a dark night, but with a large moon, and we sat in my darkened living room. She said her father had taken her mother on a night not unlike the one we were talking in, because her mother was so beautiful with her long black hair, silken, which hung to her waist, braided. I pictured this woman, dressed in sackcloth but exquisitely beautiful in the moonlight, her hair glistening, her body trembling and afraid.

  Lupe did not know the details, but I often wondered how it had happened. Had the patron called for her and she had to go to him? Or did he go to her hovel, where she lived with her aging father and brothers? Her father, I imagine, knew what the patrón wanted when he came and knew there was no choice but to let her go. He could not fight after so many years tending the patron's fields, planting his seeds, watching his crops. But her brothers, what about them? Did they expect a better position from the patrón because he had taken their sister? Was this part of the deal?

  I believe the patrón went to Lupe's mother's shack and took her somewhere into the fields as was his custom because he could not take her back to his house where his indolent and portly wife and children slept. He took her to the spot where he'd taken all the other women, a smooth bank by a stream where a willow dipped into the waters, and there he undressed her. He admired her skin, olive and soft in the moonlight. He caressed her silken hair. She could not have been more than eighteen. When he touched her, she shivered and pulled away.

  But soon she began to wait for him. Perhaps because he was skilled, even gifted with women, she learned to like it, and even to anticipate his visits. She would go to the well and wash her hair and her skin. She would look at her reflection and begin to think about what it was that made the patrón desire her.

  And then, when she was with his child, the patrón withdrew. He pretended he did not know her. Perhaps he sent some money to the family, some baskets of food, perhaps he put one of the brothers in charge of the corn crop for a season, but that was all. He did not come again. Now her days stretched themselves into a solid line of abandonment and grief. She had grown to depend on his caresses. Her belly grew. Her brothers said nothing. Her father said nothing. No one spoke of it. No one acted as if anything had happened at all.

  Then one night she went out to the fields when the moon was high, and she went to the spot by the stream where the willows dipped their branches into the water. And there she lay to give birth. She clutched her wrist in her mouth, or thrust a branch between her teeth, and gave silent, writhing, solitary birth.

  What did this woman feel as the child slipped from between her legs, a wet, bloody mess, a lonely child born to a lonely woman? I like to think she thought about the child first. About what was best for her.

  She nursed the child once. Then she carried it to the door of an old woman and left it there. Afterward she disappeared. Perhaps she let herself be carried away by the shallow water of the stream. But I think she wandered into the sierra, where she remained hidden in the hills. She was an invisible woman and it was easy for her to escape. A woman without substance, the one no one saw.

  In the Sierra

  IT WAS MY MOTHER WHO MADE A TRAVELER OUT OF me, not so much because of the places where she went as because of her yearning to go. She used to buy globes and maps and plan dream journeys she'd never take while her "real life" was ensconced in the PTA, the Girl Scouts, suburban lawn parties and barbecues. She had many reasons—and sometimes, I think, excuses—for not going anywhere, but her main reason was that my father would not go.

  Once, when I was a child, my parents were invited to a Suppressed Desire Ball. You were to come in a costume that depicted your secret wish, your heart's desire, that which you'd always yearned to do or be. My mother went into a kind of trance, then came home one day with blue taffeta, white fishnet gauze, travel posters and brochures, and began to construct the most remarkable costume I've ever seen.

  She spent weeks on it. I would go down to the workroom, where she sewed, and she'd say to me, "Where should I put the Taj Mahal? Where should the pyramids go?" On and on, into the night, she pasted and sewed and cursed my father, who it seemed would have no costume at all (though in the end my bald father would win first prize with a toupee his barber lent him).

  But it is my mother I remember. The night of the ball, she descended the stairs. On her head sat a tiny, silver rotating globe. Her skirts were the oceans, her body the land, and interlaced between all the layers of taffeta and fishnet were Paris, Tokyo, Istanbul, Tashkent. Instead of seeing the world, my mother became it.

  I have always had an excellent sense of direction and my mother always trusted it. Looking back now, I think she was crazy to do so. When I was fourteen, she decided she had to see Europe, so she got me a passport and let me wander freely through the great capitals—London, Paris, and Rome. Once, as our taxicab sped through London streets, we saw a fruit vendor selling peaches and my mother said, "God, I'd love some peaches." When we got to the hotel, she went to rest, and I made my way back through the streets.

  I returned two hours later with a bag of beautiful peaches. Since then my mother has never concerned herself about my wanderings. She has never pictured me lost. I have never felt her afraid.

  I never told either of my parents the truth about the places I'd been. My father would write me newsy letters, photocopy them, and send copies to every American Express office in Europe or China or Central America, hoping I'd show up for my mail. And I'd write back chatty notes about going to the beach or visiting a native market. I never told them about the earthquakes in Mexico, the near-rape in Jerusalem, the searches of Soviet border guards, the mud slides in Bolivia. They have come to assume that somehow I'll return, safe. So far, I have.

  How do you know if you are a traveler? What are the telltale signs? As with most compulsions, such as being a gambler, a kleptomaniac, or a writer, the obvious pro
of is that you can't stop. If you are hooked, you are hooked. One sure sign of travelers is their relationship to maps. I cannot say how much of my life I have spent looking at maps, but there is no map I won't stare at and study. I love to measure each detail with my thumb, to see how far I have come, how far I've yet to go. I love maps the way stamp collectors love stamps. Not for their usefulness, but rather for the sheer beauty of the object itself. I love to look at a map, even if it is a map of Mars, and figure out where I am going and how I am going to get there, what route I will take. I imagine what adventures might await me even though I know that the journey is never what we plan for; it's what happens between the lines.

  I have never really been disoriented except when I come out of the New York City subway and can't figure out whether I am facing east or west, uptown or downtown. But otherwise I have always instinctively found my way and in this I feel blessed, as if somehow I am intended to be a journey woman, a wanderer of the planet, and, I suppose, of the heart.

  I have been, and am, a woman who has often found herself, through circumstance and fate, alone. Nothing terrible has ever happened to me. I have had close calls, but I have never been raped or wounded or kidnapped or tortured. But I have been left and betrayed, bewildered and afraid.

  Sometimes it is difficult, but I try to read other maps. Maps of my own inner landscape, of dreams and of the outcome of the events of my life, of the warnings and signs of others. When I see danger, I step away. When I think I can move forward, I move ahead, and when I think I can come closer, I do. Sometimes I am wrong, but often, if I pay attention, I am right, and these maps of my own instincts guide me as surely as any by Rand McNally would.