The Book of Unknown Americans: A novel
Cristina Henríquez
For my father, Pantaleón Henríquez III
Let us all be from somewhere.
Let us tell each other everything we can.
— BOB HICOK, “A PRIMER”
Alma
Back then, all we wanted was the simplest things: to eat good food, to sleep at night, to smile, to laugh, to be well. We felt it was our right, as much as it was anyone’s, to have those things. Of course, when I think about it now, I see that I was na?ve. I was blinded by the swell of hope and the promise of possibility. I assumed that everything that would go wrong in our lives already had.
THIRTY HOURS AFTER crossing the border, we arrived, the three of us in the backseat of a red pickup truck that smelled of cigarette smoke and gasoline.
“Wake up,” I whispered, nudging Maribel as the driver turned into a parking lot.
“Hmmm?”
“We’re here, hija.”
“Where?” Maribel asked.
“Delaware.”
She blinked at me in the dark.
Arturo was sitting on the other side of us. “Is she okay?” he asked.
“Don’t worry,” I said. “She’s fine.”
It was just after sunset and darkness bled in from the outer reaches of the sky. A few minutes earlier, we’d been on a busy road, driving through four-way intersections, past strip malls and fast-food restaurants, but as we neared the apartment building, all of that had given way. The last thing I saw before we turned onto the long gravel lane that led to the parking lot was an abandoned auto body shop, its hand-painted sign on the ground, propped up against the gray stucco facade.
The driver parked the truck and lit another cigarette. He’d been smoking the whole trip. It gave him something to do with his mouth, I guess, since he’d made it clear from the moment he picked us up in Laredo that he wasn’t interested in conversation.
Arturo climbed out first, straightened his cowboy hat, and surveyed the building. Two stories, made of cinder blocks and cement, an outdoor walkway that ran the length of the second floor with metal staircases at either end, pieces of broken Styrofoam in the grass, a chain-link fence along the perimeter of the lot, cracks in the asphalt. I had expected it to be nicer. Something with white shutters and red bricks, something with manicured shrubs and flower boxes in the windows. The way American houses looked in movies. This was the only option Arturo’s new job had given us, though, and I told myself we were lucky to have it.
Silently, in the dim and unfamiliar air, we unloaded our things: plastic trash bags packed with clothes and sheets and towels; cardboard boxes filled with dishes wrapped in newspaper; a cooler crammed with bars of soap, bottles of water, cooking oil, and shampoo. During the drive we had passed a television set on the curb, and when he saw it, the driver braked hard and backed up. “You want it?” he asked us. Arturo and I looked at each other in confusion. “The television?” Arturo asked. The driver said, “You want it, take it.” Arturo said, “It’s not stealing?” The driver snorted. “People throw away everything in the United States. Even things that are still perfectly good.” Later, when he stopped again and pointed to a discarded kitchen table, and later again at a mattress propped up like a sliding board against someone’s mailbox, we understood what to do and loaded them into the truck.
After we carried everything up the rusted metal staircase to our apartment, after we found the key the landlord had left for us, taped to the threshold of the door, Arturo went back down to pay the driver. He gave him half the money we had. Gone. Just like that. The driver put the bills in his pocket and flicked his cigarette out the window. “Good luck,” I heard him say before he drove off.
INSIDE THE APARTMENT, Arturo flipped the light switch on the wall and a bare bulb in the ceiling flashed on. The linoleum floors were dingy and worn. Every wall was painted a dark mustard yellow. There were two windows—a large one at the front and a smaller one at the back in the only bedroom—both covered by plastic sheets held in place with tape, the wood casings warped and splintered. Across the hall from the bedroom was a bathroom with a baby blue sink, a toilet ringed with rust, and an upright shower stall with neither a door nor a curtain. At first glance, the kitchen was better—it was bigger, at least—though the stove burners were wrapped in aluminum foil and bedsheets had been stapled over the lower cabinets in place of doors. An old refrigerator stood in the corner, its doors wide open. Arturo walked over to it and poked his head inside.
“Is this what smells?” he asked. “?Huácala!”
The whole place reeked of mildew and, faintly, of fish.
“I’ll clean it in the morning,” I said, as Arturo closed the doors.
I glanced at Maribel standing next to me. She was expressionless, as usual, clutching her notebook to her chest. What did she make of all this? I wondered. Did she understand where we were?
We didn’t have the energy to unpack or brush our teeth or even to change our clothes, so after we looked around we slapped our newly acquired mattress on the floor in the bedroom, crawled on top of it, and closed our eyes.
For nearly an hour, maybe more, I lay there listening to the soft chorus of Maribel’s and Arturo’s long, even breaths. In and out. In and out. The surge of possibility. The tug of doubt. Had we done the right thing, coming here? Of course, I knew the answer. We had done what we had to do. We had done what the doctors told us. I stacked my hands on top of my stomach and told myself to breathe. I relaxed the muscles in my face, slackened my jaw. But we were so far from anything familiar. Everything here—the sour air, the muffled noises, the depth of the darkness—was different. We had bundled up our old life and left it behind, and then hurtled into a new one with only a few of our things, each other, and hope. Would that be enough? We’ll be fine, I told myself. We’ll be fine. I repeated it like a prayer until finally I fell asleep, too.
WE WOKE in the morning bewildered and disoriented, glancing at one another, darting our gaze from wall to wall. And then we remembered. Delaware. Over three thousand kilometers from our home in Pátzcuaro. Three thousand kilometers and a world away.
Maribel rubbed her eyes.
“Are you hungry?” I asked.
She nodded.
“I’ll make breakfast,” I said.
“We don’t have any food,” Arturo mumbled. He was sitting bleary-eyed on the mattress, his elbows on his knees.
“We can get some,” I said.
“Where?” he asked.
“Wherever they sell food.”
But we had no idea where to go. We stepped out of the apartment into the bright sun and the damp early-morning air—Arturo wearing his hat, Maribel wearing the sunglasses that the doctor had suggested she use to help ease her headaches—and walked down the gravel drive that led to the main road. When we came to it, Arturo stopped and stroked his mustache, glancing in both directions.
“What do you think?” he asked.
I peered past him as a car sped by, making a soft whooshing sound. “Let’s try this way,” I said, pointing to the left for no reason.
Between the three of us, we knew only the most minimal English, words and phrases we had picked up from the tourists that traveled to Pátzcuaro and in the shops that catered to them, and we couldn’t read the signs above the storefronts as we passed them, so we peered in every window along the way to see what was inside. For the next twenty minutes, flat glass fronts, one after another. A beauty supply store with racks of wigs in the window, a carpet store, a Laundromat, an electronics store, a currency exchange. And then, finally, on the corner of a busy intersection, we came to a gas station, which we knew better than to pass up.
We walked past the pumps, toward the front door. Outside, a teenaged boy stood slouched against the wall, holding the nose of a skateboard. I could feel him watching us as we approached. He had on a loose black T-shirt and jeans that were frayed at the hems. Dark brown hair, bluntly cut, brushed forward past his hairline. An inky blue tattoo that snaked up the side of his neck from beneath the collar of his shirt.