All Over the Map - Laura Fraser [93]
Sí, sí, he says, muy difícil, and I can tell that’s an understatement. He crossed the border several times, and a few of them were very dangerous. He’s been lost, parched, shot at, hidden from border patrols, and had to catch food to survive, eating armadillos and snakes, and glad to have them.
“Were there lots of rattlesnakes?” I ask, shuddering.
“Everywhere.”
Martín is offhand in his manner, but there is something so dark in his answers that I ask if anyone ever died crossing the border with him. I’m not prepared for his answer. Once, he set off with thirteen other people, including a coyote they each paid $1,500 to lead them, draining the family coffers, borrowing from everyone, incurring high-interest loans. None of them brought along much water or food because they were told to travel light, it was going to take just a couple hours to reach their destination. Some of them carried just a bottle of Coke. Martín, who had crossed the border before—the first time was when he was fourteen years old—took a full knapsack and lagged behind the group. At some point they stopped for a siesta, and when Martín awoke he discovered that the rest of the group had left him, abandoned in the middle of nowhere. He called out and walked in every direction, but he was absolutely alone. With no coyote to guide him, he was lost in the middle of the vast Sonoran Desert, where every saguaro cactus looked the same and there were no landmarks and no shade or shelter from the relentless sun. He wandered for several days, surviving with what food and water he had brought, resting during the day and setting out after dusk, trying to avoid nocturnal scorpions and sidewinders. By the end he was burned, beyond thirst, staggering, and seeing visions. His feet were bleeding, his arms and legs infected by cactus spines. A border patrol—the enemy, the savior—picked him up just in time, offered him water and food, and sent him back across the border. The other thirteen people in his group, he eventually learned, had all died of heat exposure, every one.
“Lo siento mucho.” There’s nothing to say but I’m sorry. I look back at Atotonilco, whose bloody, violent murals reflect the harsh history of this place. It’s a brutal, unfair land. It is so easy for me to get on a plane and come to Mexico, so dangerous for people who cross over to build our houses and pick our vegetables and grapes, keeping our prices low. And the gringos in San Miguel de Allende, it must be said, are profiting from the huge disparity in wealth between the countries, living easy here on a lot less. It’s complicated, of course: they’re bringing jobs and raising wages, too, so fewer people have to cross the border. Martín is able to stay in the town he grew up in and loves instead of crossing the border, he says, because he makes a good living driving a tour van. Good and bad.
The group at Atotonilco has finished with the lecture and is now shopping at the souvenir stands nearby. “I guess God wanted you to survive,” I say to Martín. “He had plans for you.”
He smiles. “Gracias a Dios,” he says.
AFTER THE TOUR, Martín drops the group off near the jardín, and the rest of the people scatter. I sit down at an outside table of a café on the corner and order my favorite dish, tortilla soup, with smoky chipotle peppers, strips of avocado, and tortilla shreds, along with a beer. I watch the people in the jardín, which is constantly active, and look up at the Gothic-style La Parroquia, almost comic in its faux-European splendor. I wonder, after I leave in a couple of days, whether I’ll ever come back here. It’s been wonderful to revisit a place from my childhood, to feel its emotional tug, and exciting to think about buying something here, to consider settling in a foreign but friendly place. But