A Peculiar Kind of Immigrant's Son. Sergio Troncoso
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STORIES BY SERGIO TRONCOSO
A PECULIAR KIND OF IMMIGRANT’S SON
STORIES BY SERGIO TRONCOSO
A PECULIAR KIND OF IMMIGRANT’S SON
A Peculiar Kind of Immigrant’s Son. Copyright © 2019 by Sergio Troncoso. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written consent from the publisher, except for brief quotations for reviews. For further information, write Cinco Puntos Press, 701 Texas Avenue, El Paso, TX 79901; or call 1-915-838-1625.
FIRST EDITION
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Troncoso, Sergio, 1961- author.
Title: A peculiar kind of immigrant’s son / short stories by Sergio Troncoso.
Description: First edition. | El Paso, Texas : Cinco Puntos Press, [2019]
Identifiers: LCCN 2019009976 | ISBN 978-1-947627-33-8 (pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN 978-1-947627-34-5 (eBook)
Classification: LCC PS3570.R5876 A6 2019 | DDC 813/.54—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019009976
Cover and book design by Antonio Castro H.
Making his way in the international world these days.
FOR RODOLFO TRONCOSO G. & BERTHA Ε. TRONCOSO
FOR DOLORES M. RIVERO & JOSÉ L. RIVERO
TABLE OF CONTENTS
CROSS-CUTTING RIVERS IN THE SKY
“What, then, is truth? A mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms—in short, a sum of human relations which have been enhanced, transposed, and embellished poetically and rhetorically, and which after long use seem firm, canonical, and obligatory to a people: truths are illusions about which one has forgotten that this is what they are; metaphors which are worn out and without sensuous power; coins which have lost their pictures and now matter only as metal, no longer as coins.”
—FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE, On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense
“All you need now is to stand at the window and let your rhythmical sense open and shut, open and shut, boldly and freely, until one thing melts into another, until the taxis are dancing with the daffodils, until a whole has been made from all the separate fragments.”
—VIRGINIA WOOLF, Letter to a Young Poet
ROSARY ON THE BORDER
I am glaring at a casket: can that be my father, that shrunken, waxlike face? These idiots wouldn’t put just anyone’s body in there, would they? His face is so gaunt, his slight smirk now a permanent smeared smile. Did he lose that much weight? His mouth tight around his lips somehow, as if his skin is already stretching against his skeleton and melding with oblivion. Did they sew his mouth shut? When a body is embalmed, is it hollowed out and left as a meaningless sign for the living? When Ysleta’s Mictlán Funeral Home—next to the Walmart on Americas Avenue—embalms you, well… But it’s him, I think. It must be him. I haven’t been home for a while, the rooms all seem smaller, my father…
Adán sidles up to me. He has lost a lot of weight, had his stomach stapled, but he looks shriveled somehow, not exactly healthy. I ask him, Is that our father? He reassures me. “Yes, of course, that’s our father. He lost a lot of weight the past two months. Hey, can you read this tomorrow, at the mass?”
“Yes, okay.” I know he knows I don’t believe in these rituals anymore, yet he still trusts me. Or pretends to trust me. The dutiful, once-fat Adán, the priest-who-never-became-a-priest. He hands me a sheet inside a wrinkled plastic cover as my eyes trace the contours of my father’s body. Maybe Adán just doesn’t want me to screw anything up.
“It’s easy. Take it. You’ll sit next to me and Pablo tomorrow, and we’ll be reading from the Bible too. I’ll tell you when and everything.”
Adán must’ve seen the nervous look in my eyes: I don’t want to screw anything up either. For years, my older brother has volunteered at Our Lady of Mount Carmel. Me? I often imagined Christ-on-the-Cross rapt, and not from pain. Okay, I’m a non-believer, but I don’t have to be an asshole about it.
In the middle of leaf-peeping season, I flew from Boston to El Paso for the funeral. Our father made it to eighty-two. That’s something, isn’t it? But I haven’t been back since Christmas, when for six days I could only endure a few minutes alone with my father.
Mom’s next to me. She kissed him a few minutes ago, when the family was allowed first dibs. A slow kiss on the forehead. Like she meant it, and she probably did. What’s it like to kiss a dead man? Could pieces of his skin flake off on your lips? Here in Ysleta they did love each other for sixty years. Despite the arguments, our poverty. Despite the last two years of bedsores, and the diabetes killing Dad. Despite the urine-stink engulfing his bedroom and escaping into the hallway like a gas leak. Despite my mother fainting with fatigue, and my father holding her to “her obligations.” Despite Mom, ‘Señora Big,’ too timid to fight back. She’s always been too timid, and my father too lucky to find her in Juárez. As my father’s body collapsed around him, my mother did not break, but Dad almost yanked her into the coffin with him to el otro lado. His mind never abandoned him, but diabetes destroyed his legs, his arms, his eyes, until he couldn’t roll over in bed. What was left was this demanding, bitter voice from the room next to the kitchen. Mom never stopped obeying that voice.
My sister is here with her daughters, three dark angels. Sometimes I like my sister Linda, and sometimes I hate her. I mean, she’s old like me, already in her late fifties. She’s disorganized, wasteful with money, still “taking classes.” That hasn’t changed since her twenties. Is this an unending school fetish? But you know, my father died three days after she returned from Virginia to Ysleta. Dad waited until Linda was next to him, his favorite,