Chapter Eleven #2
“No bus, but you can take the train from here to the end of the line at Cuautitlán. That gets you a little closer. You can walk from there, maybe four, five hours.” Only the youngest man talks. The other two watch the conversation like it’s a tennis match. Luca watches them watch the tennis.
“That’s too far tonight,” Mami says.
“You can camp with us.” The man grins. “Go in the morning, senora.” His body moves like a noodle, and the offer feels abrupt and dubious.
Luca steps in between the men and his mother, not from any real sense of martyrdom, but because he’s observed that, on occasion, the presence of children serves to inhibit people’s bad behavior.
He tugs on Mami’s hand, and together they get moving.
At Lechería station once again, they take the next northern-bound train to the end of the line at Cuautitlán, where Mami splurges on a cheap motel room. She tells Luca it’s their last stay in a hotel for a very long time.
In the morning, she wakes him at first light, and they set out north toward Huehuetoca, not necessarily because they need to find the migrant shelter, but because they need to find the migrants.
Cuautitlán is the last stop on the commuter railway line, but the tracks continue north.
A new million-dollar fence separates the street from the tracks; it’s part of the Mexican government’s Programa Frontera Sur, which is funded largely by the United States, and aims to clear migrants from the trains.
Migrants can’t jump onto the trains here because the fence keeps them out, but about a mile north of the station that fence ends abruptly, so Luca and Lydia walk up the grassy little berm and stay beside the tracks.
Luca doesn’t understand why they have to walk.
He knows they have enough money to buy a ticket.
He’d like to ask Mami about it, but his voice stays sealed inside.
He hops from tie to tie on the outside of the track, and Lydia watches their backs to make sure there’s no train coming.
He still has the ticket card from yesterday in his pocket—the one they bought from Lechería to Cuautitlán.
Mami trusted him to be in charge of his own ticket, even though they had to swipe it twice—once getting on the train and then again getting off.
He digs into his pocket now and pulls out the card.
He tugs on Mami’s sleeve, and she turns to look at him.
He waves the card at her, and she understands what he wants to know, because she understands everything.
“You can’t buy tickets for these trains,” she explains. “That was the last stop.”
Luca frowns, and a small groove appears in his forehead. He tilts his head up and squints. He can see the tracks. He crawls his fingers upward through the air, tracing the railway lines he can see on the map in his memory.
“Those tracks beneath your feet keep going and going,” Mami confirms. “All the way to el norte.”
Luca’s gaze expands and he can nearly feel the tracks beneath him, trundling through the miles ahead, stretching beneath the daytime and nighttime skies, all the way to Texas. So then why can’t they buy a ticket?
“The trains that run north from here are only for cargo,” Mami says. “Not for people.”
With effort, Luca manages a single word. “Why?”
She shakes her head. “I don’t know, amorcito.”
It seems so simple when he asks it. Why?
Didn’t there used to be passenger trains in Mexico, along with the freights?
Lydia has a vague childhood memory of trains ferrying more than just cargo across the landscape.
She remembers people standing on platforms holding luggage, the cheerful peal of a steam whistle.
But the railways stopped carrying passengers a lifetime ago, and Lydia searches her gauzy memories, but it’s no use.
She can’t remember why, and it doesn’t matter anyway.
Beside her, Luca continues stepping from tie to tie. He watches the toe of his blue sneakers press against the wood. Sometimes he asks why only because he’s programmed to ask it, she realizes. He doesn’t really care that she doesn’t have an answer, as long as she gives him something.
“Some people ride the trains anyway,” she says, glancing sideways at him. “Even without a ticket, even without seats.”
Luca looks up from his feet and studies her face. He says nothing, but his eyes are round.
“They climb on top,” she says. “Can you imagine that?”
Luca cannot.
Lydia feels encouraged by their progress.
It feels good to grow the distance between Javier and them, but it’s also frightening to venture out from the vastness of Mexico City and back into the modest districts, where Lydia can feel the urban fog of invisibility begin to dissipate.
It’s hard to feel inconspicuous when you’re a stranger in a small place.
So Lydia keeps her head down and stays vigilant.
They walk quickly, and Luca doesn’t complain, even when they pass a little bike repair shop and he longs to grab the handlebars of a bike leaning against the wall outside.
It’s green with a golden bell, and Luca thinks it’s small enough for him.
But they keep walking, and less than an hour later they happen upon a group of young migrants beside the tracks.
They are all men, perhaps two dozen of them, gathered in a clearing behind a warehouse, just where the urban sprawl begins to diminish and the landscape begins to prickle and pop. A place between places.
Most of the migrants have backpacks and grim faces.
They’re a thousand miles into their journeys already, weeks from Tegucigalpa or San Salvador or the mountains of Guatemala.
They’re from cities or villages or el campo.
Some speak the languages of K’iché or Ixil or Mam or Nahuatl.
Luca likes to listen to the foreign sounds, the peaks and rolls of the words he doesn’t understand.
He likes the way voices sound the same in every language, the way, if you train your ear to listen just outside the words, to only the shifting inflections, you can attach your own meaning to the sounds.
Many of the men speak English, too. But here, as they wait for the northbound train outside Mexico City, they all speak Spanish.
Most are Catholic and have placed their lives in God’s hands; they call on him with frequency and conviction.
They invoke the blessings of his son and all the saints.
It’s been two days since the last train, and the men have grown weary of waiting.
Nearby, a woman sells food from a cart. She takes tortillas from one pail and fills them with beans from a second pail.
She serves them without smiling or speaking.
Luca and Mami buy breakfast and find a shady place in a bald spot beneath a tree.
Mami flings out the brightly colored blanket she bought at La Ciudadela after they left the library, and they sit.
Nearby, two young men are reclining with their heads on their backpacks. One leans up on his elbow facing them.
“Buen día, hermana, y que Dios la bendiga en su camino,” he greets them.
“Thank you,” Lydia says. “And may God bless you on your travels as well.”
He leans back with his head on his pack while Luca and Mami eat. Then he says, “You seem fresh on your journey. You have strong energy. My brother and I have already been traveling for fourteen days.”
“Where did you begin?” she asks.
“Honduras. My name is Nando.”
“Hello, Nando,” she says, without offering a name in return. He doesn’t ask.
“Nando, can I ask you something?” He props up again on his elbow. “Where is everyone?” she asks.
“Hah?”
“Where are all the migrants? I expected there would be so many people here, waiting for the trains.”
“Well, with the migrant shelter gone from Lechería and now the new fences, I guess a lot of migrants don’t stop here anymore. That’s why it’s only young men here now, hermana,” he says. “The athletes.”
“?Los olímpicos!” his brother says without raising his head or opening his eyes.
The brother is skinny except for his little potbelly, and Luca doesn’t think he looks much like an Olympian at all. His hat covers his face from the sun.
“Really? The fence keeps people from stopping?” Lydia asks. It seems such an unlikely deterrent.
“Not only this fence,” he says. “All the fences at all the train stations.”
“They’re everywhere?”
The man shrugs. “Most places now, at least in the south.”
“And all those expensive fences, they’re just to stop people from riding the trains?”
“Yeah, they’re supposed to be for safety,” he says.
“But, see, they put the fence only where the train stops.” He gestures back down the tracks, the way they came, and Lydia remembers the spot where the metal caging fell away and the track opened up.
La migra had trucks there, watching the parade of foot traffic passing by.
“By the time the train arrives here, it’s already picking up speed.
So you have to jump on while it’s moving. ”
Luca gasps, causing Lydia and Nando both to look over at him, so he returns his attention to his stuffed tortilla.
“Haven’t you seen the government signs attached to the fences? Safety First!” Nando laughs. “You going to jump onto a moving train, hermana?”
“Maybe not.” Lydia frowns. “Or maybe.”
The man draws his legs in and crosses them, looking at Luca. “What about you, chiquito? You going to jump onto La Bestia? Like a cowboy riding a bull at the rodeo?”
Luca’s never seen a rodeo, and he’s not even sure if he’s seen a real-life cowboy. He shrugs.
“So that’s it? They put up some fences, and just like that, people stop coming?”
“Who said they stopped coming? From my country, there are more people than ever, more and more all the time.”
“So then if they’re not on the train, where are they?”