Children of the Land by Marcelo Hernandez Castillo

Author:Marcelo Hernandez Castillo
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2020-01-27T16:00:00+00:00

[Third Movement as Migration and a Flock of Birds]

I don’t know why I went temporarily blind in Tijuana while waiting to cross in 1993. It didn’t happen all at once. It wasn’t like someone suddenly turned off the lights. First it was the colors that started fading, then it was the shapes, and then shadows altogether. Or maybe not in that order. I could explain the colors leaving, I knew that the world sometimes did that—seemed grayer than usual. I thought it was clouds. I thought the gray came from the walls themselves, and the dried trees and the loose dirt. Maybe that’s just what Tijuana looked like.

But it was shapes I could not explain. Their edges softening into the empty space around them until I couldn’t tell where one thing started and another ended. I could see something was more of itself closer to the center, and less of itself farther out—a gradient. Maybe the soul wasn’t just one thing but an assortment of many little things huddled together, like penguins keeping warm in a blizzard. Or like a flock of birds packed so tightly in a tree that you think they’re all just leaves until a loud noise startles them, and they shudder the bare limbs loose.

The things in front of me slowly became less and less of themselves, but they stretched out nonetheless, beyond the edges of themselves, as if they no longer wanted to be whatever it was that they were put on this earth to be—as if they too wanted to get a little farther north.

Even the sky no longer felt distant but rather like it began right above my head. And didn’t it?

When I tried to look at Amá and Apá, I saw an interchangeable thing. Part was more mother, the other part was more father, but was one thing nonetheless—malleable, connected.

The trees and the cars and the houses and the children felt like the same thing too. I could feel the dirt, I could feel the bricks along the wall and their grainy textures—how one square ended at the deep ridge of the grout. I could feel the grout, and I ran my finger along it until it scraped the tip. With time, maybe things would have separated again, maybe they would have gone back to themselves.

But initially, and because it happened so fast, it looked like someone went by and smudged the people’s faces with paint thinner. I could hear Amá talking to me, but I could only see the darkness of her eyes contrasted with her light skin.

After colors, after the shapes, and after the shadows, all that was left was contrast—one thing held up against another. I could tell there was a chair not by what it looked like but by the things around it. By what it was not. It never went completely dark, just almost.

I cried and felt my way along the edges of the wall. There was no here or there, except the sounds of the cars outside and Amá and Apá fighting in another room about what to do with me.

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