A Peculiar Kind of Immigrant's Son. Sergio Troncoso
opportunities he only dreamed about, who had finished an American college degree in an American city as strange as Moscow would have been to any of us.
As we sat on that wooden bench and waited for their train, my mother defended my ambiguity, defended my wanting to keep searching for what I truly wanted, which of course, like any smart-ass twenty-one-year-old, I could not articulate very well. This college, this city had opened my eyes beyond Ysleta, beyond El Paso, beyond the border desert, and now just working to pay bills seemed like a prison to me. I knew I would not be able to think, and that’s what I had relished in college for the first time in my life. A certain openness to my life that I did not want to close. His life had been defined by what he had to do; mine would be, I hoped, by what I could do. In his life, he fantasized about becoming a doctor and forever blamed his father for giving him nothing to achieve that goal. In my life, I had taken a rash leap away from home, made my way with little interference from my parents, and would not give up on my nascent dream.
My father criticized my indecisiveness, my wasting time at school without having a plan. It was more than just that he didn’t want to pay the bills. And really, he hadn’t paid the bills. I had worked every summer, work-study every academic year, I had taken shitloads of student loans, and yes Mom and Dad had sent me hundreds of dollars here and there. But I had carried the load to what I think he saw as a wild gambit in Boston, to this strange, faraway New England school without Mexicans. At graduation, my parents had been the foreigners, much darker than everybody else, with awkward accents, intimidated next to my roommates, friends, and their casually suburban parents.
It wasn’t the money. It was another of my weaknesses, that’s what he used against me at South Station. His green eyes glinted like the edges of Damascus steel. A snide little comment that sliced between my ribs like a switchblade, about my girlfriend, Jean, a blue-eyed beauty from Concord, Massachusetts. My lovely and loving Jean who had sought them out with her college Spanish, and laughed heads-together with my mother; Jean who had accompanied me to El Paso for Thanksgiving my senior year; Jean who was more delicate and sophisticated than the richest Anglo girl they had ever come across in El Paso, Texas.
My father at South Station: “Why would Jean want to stay with someone who doesn’t know what he’s doing? Who doesn’t have a job? It’s time to stop living in a fantasy world. It’s time to be a man.”
I hated him for pitting what he imagined Jean was and what he believed I would never be. I hated him for not believing in me, I hated him for not giving me another chance, I hated him for wanting to slam the door shut on what I could be. I told my mother—because I knew it would hurt her—and I told my father too—because he was next to her—I told them I had always felt abandoned and adopted, that they had always favored my brothers and my sister, that I knew I wasn’t loved by them in Ysleta. I was shouting at them, even as hot tears slashed across my cheeks. I didn’t care that a few others turned to stare at us in that waiting-room cavern. I didn’t care about the propriety or impropriety of what others thought of me, unlike my father. It was the moment when I had felt the most alone in my life, more than that first day as a freshman when I had stumbled with my old suitcases into the dingy, one-room cell, carrying two dozen flautas wrapped in foil from Ysleta.
Thoreau, too, had once been in dark exile in Hollis Hall. I was that iconoclast’s Mexican brother.
Only a few minutes to go, and they would have to leave for their train. I wanted to punch my father. My mother in tears said, of course, she loved me. My father held back, embarrassed, watching both of us as if we were insane, he averting his green eyes from mine. Waiting for him to stand up, I stared through him, my chest heaving in spasms. My mother’s hand reached to hold mine, to calm me. I believed—and did not believe—what I had said. I still wanted to punch him.
I had felt so alone for so many years. Part of it was what I had done by leaving home. Part, too, was having never felt at home in Ysleta.
Then my father, inhaling, finally meeting my eyes again, said, “We love you, David, but sometimes we didn’t know what to do with you. You are not like any one of us.”
I think my father said these words because he never wanted to see my mother in pain. I think he said them because he didn’t want to see his grown son angry and out of control at South Station, surrounded by strangers. He may have even meant what he said, too. I don’t know.
We said our goodbyes. I hugged and kissed both of them politely. My head throbbed. I was alone, and I had always been alone, and they had been together and would always be together. It took me years to understand what this meant.
I made many decisions, some awful and others brilliant, but I found ways to keep that openness in my soul that meant more to me than breathing. I told them over the years what I was doing, how I was trying what no one in my family had ever tried to do. When I was failing, I admitted that as well, and they listened politely. I also knew that’s all they could do. One lonely night in Connecticut, I pulled myself from a window’s ledge. No one else next to me. Another day I chose to do something someone like me should have never accomplished, and yet I did, and kept going. I learned to recognize when others, like Jean, were much better than me, because they had faith in my soul. I believed in very little, but I kept going until I would get tired or defeated, and then I would take time to discover another wall to throw myself at. I was, and I am, and I will be, a peculiar kind of immigrant’s son. I got old, and that made everything better, including me.
The next day I arrive first at Mictlán Funeral Home, my McDonald’s one-dollar coffee in hand. The funeral director, who looks like Freddy Fender, arrives after me and opens the door for the “last-respects family visitation,” before the casket is sealed for burial. I know my brothers will soon be here. My sister is bringing my mother for one last look at her beloved. I imagine she will kiss my father one last time. I finish my coffee before stepping inside.
My mother was crying last night, in Ysleta, in front of her bedroom. I could tell in her eyes she was lost, waiting, waiting… for him who would never return. I closed the other bedroom door where my father had died, to prevent the scent of urine from escaping to the kitchen. I looked at my mother as we sat in the kitchen. She trembled as she walked, my eighty-year-old mother, a homemade green apron around her black dress. Her eyes were bloodshot and drifting. She got up to serve Adriana and Julio salad, and she hugged Alma and Rita and asked about their children, the kitchen full of family just as the funeral home had been jam-packed earlier for the rosary. Someone even bragged about how many had attended the service. Old friends. Cousins. Neighbors. Visitors from Chihuahua to Los Angeles. Los compadres y las comadres. Neighborhood hypocrites and hangers-on.
My mother mentioned to somebody about that odd empty space next to the Formica counter, where the case of water bottles was now, that’s where her husband would sit for hours in his wheelchair, with his television tray. She grabbed a tray of food, offered it to someone, or remembered she was about to offer it to someone, her mind suspended between thoughts, neither here nor there. I could tell she didn’t know what to do, to be a host or not to be, to continue, and how to continue.
Over time she would be better.
When there was a lull in the conversation among the eaters at the kitchen table, she said, “Ahora tengo que valer por mi misma.” Now I have to believe in and fight for myself.
What an odd thing to say, I thought. She was so old, she wasn’t a child or young adult anymore. Shouldn’t you be doing that your entire life? Shouldn’t you be doing that when there was still time for you? Both my parents had possessed timid personalities, my father having been thrown out by his father, my mother having endured her often violent mother. Sometimes I imagined them as “old children,” still fighting wars that had ended decades before, frightened children-adults who had discovered each other amid the rubble.
But together they had not been timid parents, together they had accomplished more than most in this poor neighborhood. Together they had found—what?—something stronger than this godforsaken earth?
The funeral home’s chapel is empty. I walk to the casket, and my father is there. Yes, it’s him all right. Thinner, but it’s him. I can’t see his green eyes, but I know