example, about Mexicans ignoring blacks and vice versa. That statement was contained within one of Francisco’s early dispatches from Oakland, when he was still eagerly trying to understand the place for himself and not quite able to decipher the many things he saw.
My most significant dramatic choice was not to defend myself all too vigorously. Not to defend Oakland, or the United States. That would have been a violation of character, whereas this role was defined by a basic indifference to what was taking place. They could criticize, impugn, belittle—it was all the same to me, I thought (my character thought). They could say what they wanted to say, and I would applaud them for it; after all, at the end of the day, I (my character) would be heading back to the U.S., and they’d be staying here. I needed to let them know this, without saying it explicitly. That’s how Francisco would have done it—never entirely sinking into the moment, always hovering above it. Distant. Untouchable.
Through it all, my old man sat very quietly, deflecting attention even when they began discussing him directly, his choices, the meaning and impact of his long exile. I’ve hurried through the part where my father’s friends expressed, with varying levels of obsequiousness, their admiration, their wonder, their jealousy. I’ve left it out because it wasn’t the truth; it was habit—how you treat the prodigal son when he returns, how you flatter him in order to claim some of his success as your own. But this fades. It is less honest and less interesting than the rest of what took place that night. The surface: Jaime and Erick drank heavily, oblivious and imperturbable to the end, and were for that very reason the most powerful men in the room. I could not say they were any drunker when we left than they were when we arrived. Cochocho, on the other hand, drank and changed dramatically: he became more desperate, less self-possessed, revealing in spite of himself the essential joylessness at the core of his being. His neatly combed hair somehow became wildly messy, his face swollen and adolescent, so that you could intuit, but not see, a grown man’s features hidden beneath. No one liked him; more to the point, he did not like himself. And then there was Santos, who was of that generation that catches cold if they leave the house without a well-knotted necktie; who, like all retired small-town teachers, had the gloomy nostalgia of a deposed tyrant. I caught him looking at Celia a few times with hunger—the hunger of an old man remembering better days—and it moved me. We locked eyes, Santos and I, just after one of these glances; he bowed his head, embarrassed, and looked down at his shoes. He began to hate me, I could feel it. He expressed most clearly what the others were unwilling to acknowledge: that the visitors had upset their pride.
We’d reminded them of their provincialism.
Which is why I liked Santos the best. Even though the role I was inhabiting placed us at opposite ends of this divide; in truth, I identified very closely with this wounded vanity. I felt it, would feel it, would come to own this troubling sense of dislocation myself. I knew it intimately: it was how the real Nelson felt in the presence of the real Francisco.
Hurt. Small.
Now the lights in the bar hummed, and the empty beer bottles were magically replaced with new ones, and my father’s old history teacher aged before my eyes, the color draining from him until he looked like the people in Raúl’s old photographs. Jaime and Erick maintained the equanimity of statues. Cochocho, with his ill humor and red, distended skin, looked like the mold spreading on Raúl’s kitchen wall. He’d removed his suit jacket, revealing dark rings of sweat at the armpits of his dress shirt. He asked about my great-uncle’s house, and when my father said he’d transferred the property to a cousin of ours, the deputy mayor responded with a look of genuine
My most significant dramatic choice was not to defend myself all too vigorously. Not to defend Oakland, or the United States. That would have been a violation of character, whereas this role was defined by a basic indifference to what was taking place. They could criticize, impugn, belittle—it was all the same to me, I thought (my character thought). They could say what they wanted to say, and I would applaud them for it; after all, at the end of the day, I (my character) would be heading back to the U.S., and they’d be staying here. I needed to let them know this, without saying it explicitly. That’s how Francisco would have done it—never entirely sinking into the moment, always hovering above it. Distant. Untouchable.
Through it all, my old man sat very quietly, deflecting attention even when they began discussing him directly, his choices, the meaning and impact of his long exile. I’ve hurried through the part where my father’s friends expressed, with varying levels of obsequiousness, their admiration, their wonder, their jealousy. I’ve left it out because it wasn’t the truth; it was habit—how you treat the prodigal son when he returns, how you flatter him in order to claim some of his success as your own. But this fades. It is less honest and less interesting than the rest of what took place that night. The surface: Jaime and Erick drank heavily, oblivious and imperturbable to the end, and were for that very reason the most powerful men in the room. I could not say they were any drunker when we left than they were when we arrived. Cochocho, on the other hand, drank and changed dramatically: he became more desperate, less self-possessed, revealing in spite of himself the essential joylessness at the core of his being. His neatly combed hair somehow became wildly messy, his face swollen and adolescent, so that you could intuit, but not see, a grown man’s features hidden beneath. No one liked him; more to the point, he did not like himself. And then there was Santos, who was of that generation that catches cold if they leave the house without a well-knotted necktie; who, like all retired small-town teachers, had the gloomy nostalgia of a deposed tyrant. I caught him looking at Celia a few times with hunger—the hunger of an old man remembering better days—and it moved me. We locked eyes, Santos and I, just after one of these glances; he bowed his head, embarrassed, and looked down at his shoes. He began to hate me, I could feel it. He expressed most clearly what the others were unwilling to acknowledge: that the visitors had upset their pride.
We’d reminded them of their provincialism.
Which is why I liked Santos the best. Even though the role I was inhabiting placed us at opposite ends of this divide; in truth, I identified very closely with this wounded vanity. I felt it, would feel it, would come to own this troubling sense of dislocation myself. I knew it intimately: it was how the real Nelson felt in the presence of the real Francisco.
Hurt. Small.
Now the lights in the bar hummed, and the empty beer bottles were magically replaced with new ones, and my father’s old history teacher aged before my eyes, the color draining from him until he looked like the people in Raúl’s old photographs. Jaime and Erick maintained the equanimity of statues. Cochocho, with his ill humor and red, distended skin, looked like the mold spreading on Raúl’s kitchen wall. He’d removed his suit jacket, revealing dark rings of sweat at the armpits of his dress shirt. He asked about my great-uncle’s house, and when my father said he’d transferred the property to a cousin of ours, the deputy mayor responded with a look of genuine
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