Happy Families_ Stories - Carlos Fuentes [41]
You can see, my Indian nature comes out no matter how I try to hide it. It just comes out, like a wildcat crouching in my belly. I tell you that I see myself in the mirror and say, Change your expression, José Nicasio, put a nice friendly smile on your mouth, don’t twist it like that, nobody’s threatening you. And I try to do that, Señora, but it doesn’t work, my head filled with colors and my chest filled with trembling tells me so. Don’t look so fierce, José Nicasio, don’t show so openly that you’re taking revenge, not for your humble origin but for your present-day success, do you understand? Stop telling people excuse me for having moved up, I’m an Indian who carries on his back centuries of humiliation, an ordinary dark-skinned man, an indigenous Zapoteca who’s not allowed to be on the sidewalk, they whip us down into the dust in the street . . .
Let me laugh, Señora. I go to the museums of Mexico and walk through the rooms of indigenous cultures—Mayas, Olmecas, Aztecas—filled with admiration for the art of my forebears. Well, that’s where they want to keep us, Señora, hidden away in the museums. Like bronze statues on the avenues. What happens if King Cuauhtémoc climbs down from his pedestal on the Paseo de la Reforma and walks among the people? They burn his feet again . . .
Let me laugh, Señora. As soon as we’re out on the street, we’re filthy Indians again, submissive Indians, redskins. They seize our ancestral lands, force us into the wild and hunger, sell us rifles and aguardiente so we’ll fight among ourselves. They invent a right to our women. They attribute every crime to us. They discover that their white women desire us in secret, and they come after us opening our backs so that dark blood spills even blacker blood. They shout Indian! at us or they shout redskin! when they come after us. Didn’t you know, isn’t Your Grace aware of all this? Your Grace. We’re not “reasonable people.” We’re not “decent people.” You kill us as soon as we turn our backs on you. The fugitive law is applied to us. Does Your Grace, a reasonable person, know what it means to be a stupid Indian, without reason, a stupid animal scorned in this country? A tongue-tied, splay-footed Indian.
And do you know what it means to escape the world of our fathers? First to Oaxaca because of my meritorious amate paintings. Then, thanks to the gringos who admire my work, to a school of Mexican handicrafts in San Diego, California, right on the border between Mexico and the United States. Far from my family’s village in the privilege of Oaxaca, in the house of the distinguished professor who treated me like half a son, a proof of his generosity with the less fortunate. I heard him say so,
“I’m not racially prejudiced. Look at José Nicasio. I treat him like a son.”
And now, far from my village, wandering the border. The wetbacks in California are dry when they arrive because there’s no river between San Diego and Tijuana. There are barbed-wire fences. There’s the migra. There are tunnels full of rats. There are garbage trucks where you can hide to cross over. There are vans abandoned in the desert, locked with padlocks and full of suffocated workers who paid a hundred or two hundred dollars to cross the border like animals. There’s injustice, Señora. Something you can’t save yourself from, even if you migrate to California . . .
But I already was