The rooster, an animal that Pancho was certain had a demon inside it, scratched hard at the surface of the roof across from his apartment and then let loose a noise which if he had not been awake, would have certainly thrown him out of the bed and onto the floor. A warm, brown leg lazily stretched around him like a python, comforting him because it had gotten cold during the night, as they had all told him it would. The rooster again scratched violently and then again crowed, causing his girlfriend to smile in her sleep, he thought because she knew how much he wanted to kill the animal.
Pancho lit a cigarette and looked out the window towards the volcano. Even though the windows almost touched both the floor and the ceiling, the volcano filled it up to where it was hard to see anything but volcano when he looked out the windows, which was all he ever did when he was in the room. He had never seen one before. It was much steeper and more intimidating than a mountain and set off by itself which was also unlike mountains, with a split top like lips puckered up to kiss or, to be more precise, an upside-down vagina. He liked it best in the early morning when there was just the slightest variance in purple between the color of the sky and the color of the volcano, when you could just barely tell it was there at all and you had to ask yourself if something was really there or if your eyes were just playing tricks on you. How could anything be that large and powerful? How could anything take up the entire horizon like that? It had to be a trick. But it wasn’t and as the color of the sky dissolved, the power of such a force of nature, something impossible to measure, would be right there in front of you, like fingers wrapping around your throat.
Pancho turned from the volcano and focused on the curve of his girlfriend’s hip which, after so much of her tossing and turning, had become exposed in the seam between the two blankets, barely visible in the soft light. She was the same even color of a cocoanut shell from head to toe, as if she had recently been spray-painted that color, and it made him feel somewhat pale by comparison. In fact, she had, in the beginning, called him Gringo several times, but then she must have seen how the word had affected him and stopped. All his previous life, people had commented on his own brown skin and had then quickly followed that up with “are ya from Mexico?” Now, that he was in Mexico, they called him Gringo. Motherfuckers, he thought, exhaling a smoke cloud. I just can’t win.
He wished that there were more white people around so that maybe he could gain his ethnicity back through relativity, but he hadn’t seen a legitimate white person since he had left the states. He knew they were there—the Trump voters—but they tended to avoid the authentic parts of Mexico. They took direct flights and charters to the beach cities where some form of tourist colonization had been established for them, English being the preferred language and dollars the preferred currency. Of course, there were neighborhoods in the states that, in somewhat of the same fashion, seemed to belong to Mexico, captured in a silent war of attrition and Pancho knew that that was the real reason the white people were “freaking out” and why Trump had been elected in the first place and why he himself had been deported. He understood their concern but the gears of the universe were going to turn regardless. Go ask the Indians about that. Pancho had been studying engineering in the states and he recognized the laws of thermodynamics when he saw them; you can’t keep two distinct groups of people separated for very long, especially if one is exceedingly rich and the other is exceedingly poor. He looked at the naked hip of his girlfriend again and thought that some day we might even all be the same color—not white.
Pancho closed his eyes and carefully listened to the footsteps below on the street, reverberating off the crooked buildings, back and forth, until they entered the room through the open windows. He could distinguish between them and guess as to where each set of feet was and in what direction they were headed. He thought he might be able to map the entire city from the bed, listening to the sounds of Mexico—church bells, the thumping of bicycle tires on stones, the demon cries of roosters, the street grills—mariachi music blaring, the cooks rhythmically slicing potatoes into a giant pile to the chaos of the music--ricas papas fritas.
And then there was, of course, the smell of the streets. He hadn’t been prepared for that. He was certain, being a student of engineering, that it was the thin air because the city, although appearing flat, was actually at an elevation of more than 7000 feet. It must be the thin air that allowed smells to penetrate the brain like tequila, the cooks on the street luring you to them without even making eye contact. Eat with your hands, cabrón, standing up or sit in one of the plastic folding chairs circling the piece of discarded metal being used for a grill, wait your turn without complaining, pedestrians flowing around you like a river around a stone, everything aire libre because at high altitude you don’t have to worry so much about heat and insects, not like the Trump voters sweating it out at sea level.
At Observatorio there are exactly two hundred steps leading from the metro stop to the hospital and Pancho climbed them every day, then, sitting on the top step, he always lit a cigarette and looked for the volcano. He thought that maybe the entire city was just one endless ring of steps that eventually led to the volcano. It was always there, at the center, and he was always climbing and climbing, gasping for breath, circling towards it. His favorite uncle had told him to “hold on,” that Trump would be gone and then the new president would change everything and he would be able to come home. “Like a street dog?” Pancho had asked him. “And then another Trump gets elected and I’m deported again?” No thanks. Pancho wasn’t waiting for some politician to whistle for him to return. He was waiting for the volcano to set him free forever. Climb those steps, cabrón, step to the beat of the music. Forget about your pain. Listen to the howls of the vendors who will sell you anything and everything you could ever possibly need in this life for a handful of pesos.
“I don’t know anything about Mexico,” he had begged the judge. “I don’t even speak Spanish that well. How am I going to survive in Mexico?” He was ashamed at how he had behaved at his deportation hearing and that his uncles had seen him like that. We wished there was such a thing as time travel. If he could travel back in time, he would return to that courtroom and, given a second chance, he would not beg or cry. He would stand there like some renegade Apache surrendering his rifle, and he would only respond to them in Spanish.
The last conversation Pancho had had in the states was with his favorite uncle, inside the detention center. “Look. Forget everything I ever told you” he had said to Pancho as if in a confessional, taking Pancho’s hands into his own stone fists. “It was all bullshit. Mexicans take it because they don’t think they have another choice. We have been living in this country with fear for so long it has crept into us like a disease. This system has been taking advantage of us for so long, we don’t even feel it anymore. We work like slaves for nothing and then they call us names, tell us we are why America isn’t great anymore, and deport us. We let them do it to us. But that is not who we really are because our blood is a DNA-soup of the most fearless people this planet has ever seen. Mexicans fucking invented revolution, right? So this Trump is playing with dynamite and he doesn’t even have a clue. He tries to take our pride and self respect and maybe in truth he has already taken those things. But someday we are going to want that shit back and then you will see the true Mexicans take to the street and it won’t be like college kids standing up to tear gas. It will be like nothing you have ever seen before.”
Pancho had been thinking about his uncle’s face and how that had been the closest he had ever seen him to tears, when he had almost tripped over a young woman with rich brown skin the color of a cocoanut shell, her hands aggressively on her hips like a linebacker staring into the opposing team’s huddle. “Nunca,” she had growled at a police officer, just as Pancho had passed her on the street, her eyes partially obscured by a cascade of black hair which made her appear ferocious to him, goosebumps forming on his arms and legs. The police officer, a shotgun slung over his shoulder, had taken two steps backwards. “Nunca!” She had repeated, closing the distance. “Jámas!... Nuuunca!” Pancho thought that just like those Eskimos needed all those words for snow, Mexican women needed two words for never because never was an important concept for them and they didn’t play around with it. For instance, “we are never going to pay for that stupid fucking wall.”
“Insurgentes,” she repeated aloud whenever they passed that particular metro stop. At first, Pancho had thought it was worrisome the way she called out the stops when they arrived, the pneumatic doors popping opening, and then again after the doors closed, “Insurgentes!” But then he realized there was a pattern to it, that she didn’t read all of them, only half of them, a select half. “Insurgentes,…Zapata,…Coyoacán,…Pino Suárez.” She would read them aloud, as they arrived at the respective stops, her and Pancho’s bodies smashed together, their arms interlaced up above their heads for the metal bar that kept them from being thrown across the car. He had finally asked her why she did that, his chin firm on the top of her head. “So we don’t forget who we are,” she had whispered into his chest.
Pancho crushed out his cigarette and again turned from her cocoanut-shell hip to the volcano, the light steadily accumulating, the small room gently coming into focus like a polaroid photograph, still no shadows because even though the sun was above the horizon, it was trapped behind the volcano. It would take another hour for it to break free and for sunlight to enter the room. Until then, they would live in the shadow of the volcano. It was Pancho’s most favorite time of day, because it had taught him where real power existed in the universe and released him from all his fears. Whatever was wrong with him, the volcano was fixing it. Whatever wounds he had, the volcano was healing them. He stared at the cold, dormant silhouette, backlit by the sun. The volcano was watching everything and waiting, and when it had seen enough, it would show cruel men who thought they ruled the world what real power looked like. He leaned over and kissed his girlfriend softly on the cheek, then whispered in her ear, “call out the names as we pass, amorcito. So we don’t forget.”
Nicolas' work has appeared in many publications, including North American Review, Citron Review, Chagrin River Review, Gravel, and Eleven Eleven. He is a high-school dropout (not quite finishing the tenth grade) who now teaches AP chemistry in México City.
