Irma Voth

ONE

JORGE SAID HE WASN’T COMING BACK until I learned how to be a better wife. He said it’s okay to touch him with my arm or my leg or my foot, if it’s clean, when we’re sleeping but not to smother him like a second skin. I asked him how could that be, I hardly saw him any more and he said that’s a good thing for you. He said people always lie about their reasons for leaving and what difference does it make? I blocked the doorway so he wouldn’t leave and I begged him not to go. He put his hands on my shoulders and then he rubbed my arms like he was trying to warm me up and I put my hands on his waist.

I asked him how I was supposed to develop the skills to be a wife if I didn’t have a husband to practise with and he said that was the type of question that contributed to my loneliness. I asked him why he was trying to blindside me with answers that attempted only to categorize my questions and I asked him why he was acting so strange lately and where his problem with the way I slept with my leg over his leg had come from and why he kept going away and why he was trying so hard to be a tough guy instead of just Jorge and then he pulled me close to him and he asked me to please stop talking, to stop shivering, to stop blocking the door, to stop crying and to stop loving him.

I asked him how I was supposed to do that and he said no, Irma, we’re not kids anymore, don’t say anything else. I wanted to ask him what loving him had to do with being childish but I did what he told me to do and I kept my mouth shut. He looked so sad, his eyes were empty, they were half closed, and he kissed me and he left. But before he drove off he gave me a new flashlight with triple C batteries and I’m grateful for it because this is a very dark, pitch-black part of the world.

The first time I met Jorge was at the rodeo in Rubio. He wasn’t a cowboy or a roper, he was just a guy watching in the stands. We weren’t allowed to go to rodeos normally but my father was away from home, visiting another colony in Belize, and my mother told my sister Aggie and me that we could take the truck and go to the rodeo for the day if we took the boys with us so she could rest. She might have been pregnant. Or maybe she had just lost the baby. I’m not sure. But she didn’t care about rules that afternoon so, miraculously, we found ourselves at a rodeo. Maybe it was the pure adrenalin rush of being away from the farm that made me feel bold but I noticed Jorge sitting there by himself, watching intently, and kind of moving his body subtly in a way that matched the movements of the real cowboys, and I thought it was funny, and so I decided to go up to him and say hello.

Are you pretending to be a cowboy? I asked him in Spanish.

He smiled, he was a little embarrassed, I think.

Are you pretending to be a Mennonitzcha? he said.

No, I really am, I said.

He asked me if I wanted to sit next to him and I said yes, but only for a minute because I had to get back to Aggie and the boys.

We had a conversation in broken English and Spanish but it wasn’t much of one because as soon as I sat down beside him my boldness evaporated and my knees started to shake from nervousness. I was worried that somebody would see me talking to a Mexican boy and tell my father. Jorge told me he was in town buying something, I can’t remember what, for his mother who lived in Chihuahua city. He told me that he had a job delivering cars over the U.S. border from Juárez to El Paso and that he got paid forty American dollars a car and he didn’t ask questions.

Questions about what? I asked him.

Anything, he said.

But about what? I said.

About what’s in the cars or who’s paying me or when or just anything. I don’t ask, he said. He seemed a little nervous, so we both looked around at the people in the stands for a minute without saying much.

Some people are staring at us, he said.

No they’re not, I said.

Well, actually they are. Look at that guy over there. He was about to lift his arm and point but I said no, please, don’t.

He told me he thought it was strange that a Mennonite girl was at a rodeo and I told him that yeah it was. I tried to explain the rules my father had but that he was out of town and my mother was tired and all that and then we started talking about mothers and fathers and eventually he told me this story about his dad.

All I really understood was that his father had left his mother when he was a little boy and that one day his mother had told him he was going to meet him for the first time and he better look sharp and behave himself. She said she was going to drop him off on this corner by their house and his dad would be there waiting for him and then they could have a conversation, maybe get a meal together, and then the dad would drop him back off on that corner when they were done. So Jorge, he was five years old, decided he had better clean up his sneakers, especially if he wanted to look sharp for his dad. He washed them in the bathtub with shampoo and then he put them in the sun to dry. When it was time to go, his mom dropped him off at the corner and said goodbye and left and Jorge stood there for a long time, waiting. The sky got darker and darker. Finally it started to rain and Jorge started to worry. Where was his dad? Some men in cars drove past him but nobody stopped to pick him up. It started to rain harder. Then Jorge looked down at his shoes and noticed that they were foaming. Bubbles were floating around by his shoes and he didn’t know what was going on. He was too young to understand that he hadn’t rinsed his sneakers when he washed them with shampoo and now the rain was rinsing them for him and the soap was bubbling out of them and making them foam. Jorge felt like a fool. Like a clown. He was mortified. He was just about to take them off and rub them in the dirt on the sidewalk to try to make them stop foaming when a car pulled up and a man got out and introduced himself to Jorge as his father. He asked Jorge what was going on with his sneakers and Jorge told him that he didn’t know. That they had just strangely started foaming like that and his father looked at him and told him that shoes didn’t normally do that. Jorge had wanted to tell him that he had only been trying to look good and clean for his dad but he didn’t really know how to say that and so he just started crying out of shame.

And then what happened? I asked Jorge.

My father told me that he loved my shoes that way, that they were great, that he wanted a pair just like them, said Jorge. That made me feel a lot better. And then we went and had some shrimp cocktail. Afterwards he dropped me back off at the corner and I never saw him again.

Oh, I said. Where did he go?

I don’t know, said Jorge. But I was sure it was because of my stupid shoes that he never came back. I realized that he had lied to me. Obviously he didn’t want a pair of shoes that foamed up. Who would want that? So eventually I made this decision not to act like an idiot in life.

But you weren’t trying to be a clown, I said. You just wanted to have clean shoes to meet your dad. Your mom had told you to.

I know, he said, maybe it’s not rational. But after that I decided I would try to be a cooler boy and not try so hard for things.

I told Jorge that I was sorry about that but that I had to get back to Aggie and the boys.

I guess I’ll never see you again either, he said. He was smiling. He told me it was nice meeting me and I said he could visit me in our field, maybe, beside the broken crop-duster that had crashed in it, and I gave him directions and told him to wait there later that evening.

Make sure you look sharp and behave yourself, I told him. But I didn’t really say it correctly in Spanish so he didn’t get the little joke which wasn’t funny anyway and he just nodded and said he’d wait all night and all year if he had to. And I wasn’t used to that kind of romantic speaking so I said no, it wouldn’t take that long. I wanted to tell him that I had tried most of my life to do things that would make people stay too, and that none of them had worked out, but then I thought that if I said that our relationship would always be defined by failure.

Jorge came to visit me a few times, secretly, on his way between El Paso and Chihuahua city. We would lie in the back of his truck and count the number of seconds it took for jet streams to evaporate. If you happened to fly over this place you’d see three houses in a row and nothing else for miles but cornfields and desert. Mine and Jorge’s in the middle and on one side of us my parents’ house and on the other side an empty house where my cousins used to live, the space between them approximately the size of a soccer pitch or a cemetery. On a clear day I can see the Sierra Madre mountains way off in the west, and sometimes I talk to them. I compliment them on their strength and solidity, and by hearing myself talk that way I am reminded that those words exist for a reason, that they’re applicable from time to time. It’s comforting. There are a few little villages around here. Some are Mexican and some are Mennonite, we’re sorted like buttons, and we’re expected to stay where we’re put.

If Jorge visited in the evening he and I would lie in the back of his truck and stare at the stars and trace the shapes of various constellations and touch each other’s bodies very gently like we were burn victims. Jorge told me that I didn’t have to be so nervous. Don’t you want to leave this place? he said.

I think so, I said.

So even if your father finds out about us the worst thing that can happen is we go away.

I know, but, I said. But then we can’t come back, really.

So, he said. Why would you want to?

Well, I said. I would miss my mother and my sister and—

But Irma, he said, you could visit them secretly just like what we’re doing right now.

I don’t know, I said.

But you and I are in love, he said. We’re eighteen now. We don’t need our mothers so much.

He told me that it was like a star museum out here, there were so many of them, every different kind from all the ages, stored right here in my campo for safekeeping. He said I could be the curator of the star museum.

I’d rather not.

I was just saying stuff.

I know, I said, but I’m not good at keeping things safe.

I know, he said, I didn’t mean it for real, it was just a thing to say.

I know, I said, but I can’t be the curator of anything.

Okay, Irma. I understand. You don’t have to take care of the stars, okay? That was just stuff to say. It was stupid.

I had meant to tell him, again, that I wasn’t good at keeping promises or secrets or people from leaving. I kept meaning to tell Jorge things.

On our wedding day nobody came except the justice of the peace from the Registro Civil in Cuauhtémoc, who finished the ceremony in under a minute. He got lost trying to follow Jorge’s directions to our campo and it was dark by the time he finally showed up. Jorge had brought a candle with him and he lit it and put it next to the piece of paper we had to sign and when I leaned over to write my name, Irma Voth, my veil caught on fire and Jorge pulled it off my head and threw it onto the ground and stomped the fire out. We were in a sheltered grove near my parents’ farm. The justice of the peace told me I was a lucky girl and Jorge grabbed my hand and we took off, running. He wore a white shirt that was too big on him and hard plastic shoes. We didn’t really know what to do but after a while we stopped running and we walked around for a long time and then we went to my house and told my parents that we had got married and my mother went to her bedroom and closed the door softly and my father slapped me in the face. Jorge pinned him to the wall of the kitchen and said he’d kill him if he did it again. I went into my mother’s bedroom and we hugged each other and she asked me if I loved Jorge. I said yes. I told her that he and I were going to go to Chihuahua city now and that we would live with his mother for a while until we found jobs and our own place to live. Then my father came into the room and told me that Jorge and I weren’t going anywhere, that we were going to live in the house next door and work for him and that if we didn’t he’d turn Jorge over to the cops and that the cops would sooner put a bullet in the head of another greasy narco than bother with the paperwork of processing him. He didn’t say it in a fierce or menacing way, just in a way that made it clear and final. And then he left the house and my mother went into the kitchen and put some buns and cheese onto the table and a rhubarb platz that she cut up into small pieces. Jorge and I sat down with her, on either side, and she held our hands and prayed for our happiness and for an everlasting love. She spoke quietly so the other kids wouldn’t wake up. After that she whispered congratulations to us in Low German and I told Jorge what she had said and they smiled at each other, I had forgotten how pretty her smile was. Jorge thanked her for the gift of me and she asked him to protect and cherish that gift. Then my father came back into the house and told us to get out and that we were no longer welcome in his home. Jorge and I walked down the road to our house and he took my hand and asked me if I believed what the justice of the peace had said, that I was a lucky girl. I looked west towards the Sierra Madre mountains but I couldn’t make them out in the darkness. Jorge’s hand was a little sweaty and I squeezed it and he was kind enough to let that be my answer.

We lived in the house for free but worked for my father for nothing. We looked after the cows so that he could work the fields and travel around from campo to campo imploring people to continue with old traditions even though the drought was killing us. The plan was that when my little brothers were older they would help him with the farm, and Jorge and I would be booted out of the house. Jorge said he wasn’t worried about that because he had other opportunities to make money and eventually he and I could follow our dream of living in a lighthouse. We didn’t know of one but he said he knew people in the Yucatán who would help us. I didn’t even really know exactly where the ocean was.

But none of that actually matters now and it’s embarrassing to talk about because Jorge is gone and I’m still here and there’s no lighthouse on my horizon as far as I can see.

Jorge came and went all that year and I never knew when he’d show up but when he did it wasn’t for long so I really saw no one, except the cows.

One morning my little sister Aggie snuck over and gave me some news. She told me that filmmakers from Mexico City were moving into the empty house next to mine and our father said she wasn’t supposed to talk to them or in any way whatsoever to acknowledge them.

She also told me that she had a new dream of becoming a singer of canciones rancheras, which are ballads of love and infidelity and drunken husbands. She had new dreams every day.

I missed Aggie. I missed her big laugh and her little tricks. I missed listening to her practice her swearing deep under the blankets so our parents wouldn’t hear. She has white-blond hair and a brown face from the sun and blue eyes that are so light they’re almost translucent, like a wolf. She told me that the sun and the moon are the two eyes of God and when one disappears the other one pops up to keep spying on us. When we can see them both at the same time we’re in big trouble and all we can do is run. Since I married Jorge she hadn’t been allowed to talk to me, which is why she had to sneak over, but it wasn’t really sneaking, not entirely, because our mother usually knew when she was coming and sometimes sent things along.

According to my father, Jorge was more interested in searching for sensations in Chihuahua city than taking care of the cows and the corn in Campo 6.5. He had other reasons for not liking Jorge but the real reason was that I’d married a non-Mennonite. A long time ago, in the twenties, seven Mennonite men travelled from Manitoba to the Presidential Palace in Mexico City to make a deal. They’d been offered this land for cheap and they decided to accept the offer and move everyone from their colony in central Canada down to Mexico where they wouldn’t have to send their kids to regular school or teach them to speak English or dress them in normal clothing. Mennonites formed themselves in Holland five hundred years ago after a man named Menno Simons became so moved by hearing Anabaptist prisoners singing hymns before being executed by the Spanish Inquisition that he joined their cause and became their leader. Then they started to move all around the world in colonies looking for freedom and isolation and peace and opportunities to sell cheese. Different countries give us shelter if we agree to stay out of trouble and help with the economy by farming in obscurity. We live like ghosts. Then, sometimes, those countries decide they want us to be real citizens after all and start to force us to do things like join the army or pay taxes or respect laws and then we pack our stuff up in the middle of the night and move to another country where we can live purely but somewhat out of context. Our motto is from the “rebuke of wordliness,” which is from the Biblical book of James: Whosoever will be a friend of the world is the enemy of God.

I once made the mistake of asking my father if it didn’t make sense that in all those years from then to now some Mennonite girl would fall for a Mexican boy and want to marry him. It’s called integration, Dad, it’s not a big deal. I mean if you accept their cheap offer of land … But he had stopped listening to me ages ago. The last real thing we talked about was the absurdity of life on earth. He was thinking about something he’d read in an old newspaper that had somehow managed to float into our field from El Paso or somewhere. We were in the truck on our way to Cuauhtémoc and he asked me how I thought it was possible that a crowd of people could stand on the street in front of a tall office building and cheer a suicidal man on to his death by encouraging him to jump. I was surprised by the question and said I didn’t know. What does that say about us? said my dad. That we’re cruel, I said. Then my dad said no, he didn’t think so, he thought it meant that we feel mocked, that we feel and appear stupid and cowardly in the presence of this suicidal man who has wisely concluded that life on earth is ridiculous. And we want him to die immediately so that the pain of being confronted with our own fear and ignorance will also, mercifully, end. Would you agree with that? my dad asked. What? I said. I didn’t know what he was asking me. It’s a sin to commit suicide, I thought. I said no, I still think it means we’re cruel. My dad said no, it doesn’t mean we’re cruel. He got a little mad at me and stopped talking to me for a while and then as time passed never got back into the habit.

My father had lost his family when he was a little kid, when they’d been driven off their farm near the Black Sea. His parents and his sisters had been slaughtered by soldiers on a road somewhere in Russia, beside trees, and buried quickly in the ditch. My father survived by singing some songs, German hymns I think, for the soldiers, who thought it was cute, this little blond boy, but eventually the novelty of that wore off and they foisted him onto some other fleeing Mennonite family who adopted him and brought him to Canada to help with the animals and baling. He hated his adopted family and ran away when he was twelve to work on some other farm where he met my mother and eventually married her. That’s all I know about that because by the time it occurred to me to ask him questions about it he had stopped talking to me. I tried to get more details from my mother but she said she didn’t know any more than that either.

We’d had fun, me and him, you know, typical farm fun, when I was young. He made me a swing that I could jump from into hay and he understood my grief when my favourite chicken died. He even brought me to the fabric store to buy some flannel to make a burial suit of little trousers and a vest and hat for my chicken and he let me bury it outside my bedroom window rather than tossing it into the rubble fire like the other dead ones. But it was colossal and swift like the sinking of the Titanic the way all that disappeared when he moved us overnight to Mexico.

Two weeks after we moved here my mother took me to the doctor for the first time in Cuauhtémoc and told him that I thought I was dead and nothing she or my father said could convince me of the truth. I was thirteen years old, the same age that Aggie is now. My father stayed outside in the truck. The doctor spoke to me in Spanish and I didn’t understand him very well. His office was in a big barn and the nurse was his wife. He had a small revolver in his pocket but before he examined me he took it out and laid it on his desk. He asked me what my life was like when I was alive.

I don’t know, I said.

Is this your life after death? he asked me.

Yes, I said. I think so.

How did you die? he asked.

I don’t know, I said.

Food poisoning? he asked.

Maybe, I said. I don’t know.

Snake bite? he said.

No, I said.

Heart attack?

I’m not sure.

Do you feel that you were born and lived and then you died or that you have never lived at all? he asked.

I was born and lived and then died, I said.

So, he said, do you think that you’re in heaven?

I don’t know, I said.

What makes you feel like you’re dead? he said. Are you numb in some parts of your body?

No, I said. I don’t know.

Did you see yourself die? he asked.

Yes, I said.

How did you die? he asked.

I’m not sure, I said.

But you saw yourself die? he said.

Yes, I said.

In a dream? he said.

I don’t know, I said.

If you still feel that you are dead in six weeks will you please come back to see me? he said.

I looked at my mother and she nodded. She didn’t like his question about food poisoning. The doctor thanked her for bringing me to see him and patted her arm. He put his pistol back into his pocket. My father was still sitting in the truck, waiting for us. He asked my mother if I still thought I was dead.

I don’t know, she said.

Why is it so important to you whether I’m alive or not? I asked them.

It’s not whether you’re alive or not, said my father. Clearly you’re alive. It’s what you believe. He pinched my arm. Do you feel that?

I nodded.

You need to stop playing games, Irma Voth, he said.

Someday you’ll be a wife and mother, Irma, said my own mother. Will you come alive for that? I didn’t know what to tell her. How was I supposed to know? On the way home I put my head in her lap and she undid my braids and combed my hair with her fingers. I like to remember how that felt. She was so gentle. I still don’t understand how she managed to take out my tight braids without any tugging or pain. Irma, she whispered to me, just begin. I didn’t know what she meant. When we got back she stayed with me in my bed even though I was thirteen and rubbed circles on my back slowly.

Aggie and I sat on the fence and talked. We were surrounded by nothing but three farmhouses in a neat row, sky and corn. How are the boys? I asked.

Annoying, she said. We had two little brothers, Doft and Jacobo, who liked to connect everything with rope.

Are they still tying shit together? I asked.

Yeah, and hiding shoes, she said. She told me that already my father was fighting with the director of the movie.

He’s here now? I said.

He came early, said Aggie. Mom and I listened to him talking with Dad in the kitchen. Dad said he’d shoot his dog if it attacks the cows or even if he sees him in the cornfields. He’s a fighting pit bull from Mexico City, Irma, and the director said he’s got a haunted soul and a natural sweetness, and he’ll play in the movie as a dog of the family. Dad told him that no family here has a fighting dog from Mexico City and especially not one with a soul and that’s the first sign the director doesn’t know what he’s doing.

Aggie told me the director said he had invested almost all of his own money into his art, into making this film about beautiful people in a beautiful part of the world, and that he has nothing but respect and admiration for the Mennonites. My father asked the director if the dog was really there purely for protection. He accused the director of lying to him. That the dog was there to protect his expensive camera equipment. The director denied that and said no, the dog would be an integral part of the film. Aggie said that our father told the director that films were like beautiful cakes, filled with shit.

How can he say that when he’s never seen them? I asked her.

He says art is a lie, said Aggie.

We sat on the fence and stared at things. Artless things. Things that were true. Things that belonged to ourselves and to each other. The clouds, our clothing, my hands. A bird flying over us had two long twigs in its mouth and he dropped one so that it landed directly at our feet like it was a gift. Here you go, Mennonite girls, prepare a nest. Or maybe it was an attack.

Dad says you believe in God but not an afterlife, said Aggie. He says that’s impossible.

That’s not remotely accurate, I told her. I never said that.

Frieda’s dad drove his truck the wrong way down the highway to Cuauhtémoc, said Aggie.

What a moron, I said.

No, she said, he killed himself.

On purpose? I said.

I don’t know, said Aggie. Didn’t he drive there all the time? Did they secretly reverse the directions?

What are they gonna do? I said.

Who knows, said Aggie. Get a new truck? Katharina at school said he owed money to narcos.

Aggie, I said.

Well, how should I know? she said. Oh, I have this for you. She pulled a tiny infant’s undershirt out of her pocket. There was a small faded flower on the collar. You wore it in Canada if you were a baby, she said. Mom told me to give it to you.

Thanks, I said. When I was a baby.

When you were a baby? said Aggie. English is such a prick.

You’re pretty good at it, I said.

Oh, and this is from her too, she said, and kissed me on the cheek.

Get lost, I said.

Can I come live with you, Irma? said Aggie.

Well, I said, are you looking for a quick and easy way to complicate your life forever?

Maybe I could live with you secretly, she said.

We sat quietly. We heard cows practising their English, trying with no luck to form words.

What’s he trying to say? said Aggie.

Help, I said. Our own stupid joke.

I told her to go before it got so dark she’d fall into the ditch on her way home but she didn’t move. Aggie ignores all my advice, as though she were determined to live successfully, and we sat on the fence for a long time. Then we started to get stiff from sitting and began to kick each other lightly in the dark.

When are they moving in? I asked Aggie.

I don’t know, she said. Tonight.

My power was still off and I couldn’t find the flashlight that Jorge had given me. I thought about bringing a cow into the house for company, just one. A small one. Or I could sleep in the barn like Jesus but without the entourage or the pressure to perform. I lay in my bed thinking of ways I could make Jorge happy if he ever came home again. One was: wash my feet before going to bed and dry them completely. The other one was: be hotter. It was true, what Jorge had said, that we weren’t kids anymore. I loved chasing him around fields and having dried turd fights and hiding in the corn while he looked for me and planning our future together in the Yucatán in a lighthouse with round rooms and a pole in the middle that we would use to slide down from the top floor directly into a boat that with one shove would put us out to sea. I told him we could call the boat Katie but he said he’d have to name it after his mother and even that was okay with me, I didn’t argue. I knew I would be alone for the rest of my life if Jorge didn’t come back to me. No boy from any of the Mennonite colonies would want a woman who’d been married and abandoned and especially one who’d been married to a Mexican.

I decided to go out and spy on my family from the roof of their grain shed. I could see directly into their large room. I thought about throwing myself off the roof of the grain shed and onto the roof of the outdoor kitchen which they’re not using now and lying there, dead, for months, invisible but toxic.

I wondered how long it would take them to find me. Then I remembered that they wouldn’t be looking. Well, maybe Aggie would be looking, but that’s the thing that stopped me from doing it. I had one question of myself: how do I preserve my dignity when nobody else is watching? By believing in a happy ending, I told myself. I had to get out of the house.

I stood in my yard and noticed the lights on at my cousins’ old place. The filmmakers had arrived. And then I heard voices and music and laughter and I had never felt more alone and strange in my life, which is something. I went back into my house and lay in my bed some more and tried to pray. God, I said, help me to live. Help me to live, please. Please God, help me to live. God, I need your help. I need to live. Please? I need help living. God. Help. I had never learned how to pray properly. It didn’t make sense that God would require me to articulate my pain in order for him to feel it and respond. I wanted to negotiate a deal. I knew I wasn’t supposed to talk to the filmmakers but wondered if it would be acceptable to observe them from a distance. I punched myself on the side of my head. What difference did it make what my father had said? I posed another question to myself. How do I behave in this world without following the directions of my father, my husband or God? Does it all end with me sleeping in a barn with cows and creeping around the campo spying on people from the roofs of empty grain sheds?

I got up again and went outside and crept along in the darkness towards the filmmakers’ house. I leaned against the water pump in the side yard and watched while several guys unloaded a million black boxes from a truck and a car and a van and carried them into the house. All the lights were on and the filmmakers were laughing and talking loudly and music was playing from somewhere inside. A dog was barking. In fact, a dog was barking and running at me in the dark and it looked like his eyes were on fire and I could see sparks flying out of them. I thought, well, I should run now, but I couldn’t move, I was galvanized to the pump, and then I heard a man yell, Oveja, Oveja!

Which is how I met Diego, the director of the film.

Vive aquí? he said. He was kneeling, looking up at me, and holding on to Oveja’s collar.

No, I said. Well, yes. Over there. I pointed. I tried to smile. I shook with fear. I may have bitten off a piece of my own tongue.

Me llamo Diego, said Diego.

Irma, I said.

Mucho gusto, Irma.

Mucho gusto.

Diego released Oveja and the dog wandered back to the house and Diego and I stood in the dark by the pump. He spoke quickly and precisely but his voice was soft, as though he were helping me through an emergency. He told me that Oveja, the pit bull, used to be a champion fighter in Guadalajara. He told me that Oveja, like every living thing, needs to love and be loved. And that his eyes tell a story of pain and suffering, and that he is haunted by his criminal past, a life he would never have chosen for himself.

Oveja and I are blood brothers, Diego said. We were soldiers and now we are artists. He explained that before he became a filmmaker he was involved in armed conflict, though on the legal end of things.

Oveja will eventually play the part of the family dog in my movie, said Diego.

I know, I said.

Ah, you do? he asked.

He suggested that we move closer to the yard light so that we could see each other’s faces. He smiled and I looked at him closely. He wore a thin thread around his neck and attached to the thread was a small piece of paper the size of a postage stamp. It had writing on it but I couldn’t read it. He had a red dot in the white part of his left eye, like a tiny pilot light.

Which languages do you speak, Irma? he asked me.

German, Spanish and English, I said.

Do you want a job? he asked me.

I don’t know, I said. I think I have one.

What is it? he said.

The farm, I said. I glanced over at the barn behind my house. And … wife.

How old are you, Irma?

I’m nineteen years old, I said.

And you’re married? he said.

Yes, I said, for one year already.

Have you been here all your life?

I was born in Canada, I said.

Where is your husband? he said.

He’s in the city.

Which city?

Chihuahua. Or Juárez.

For how long?

I don’t know.

Would you like to make some extra money as a translator? he said.

Diego said he’d explain to me in Spanish or English what he wanted his German actress to say and do and I’d tell her, in German, what it was. He told me that it didn’t really matter what the actors were saying because nobody watching the film would understand the language anyway. It wasn’t really German that they’d be speaking, it was Low German, which is the unwritten language of the Mennonite people and hardly used in the world anymore. And besides, he said, there will be subtitles.

My actors could be saying I have worms, you have worms, we all have worms, he said, and nobody would know the difference. Do you understand, Irma?

I do, I said.

But I want them to know what they’re saying, he said. So that they’ll feel the words and produce the appropriate emotional response.

He told me that Miguel, a sixteen-year-old production assistant, will pick Marijke the German actress up at the airport in Chihuahua city tomorrow and bring her here to Campo 6.5 and we’ll begin to shoot the movie the next day after she’s had some time to rest.

I’m looking for internal energy and presence, Diego told me. I travelled around the world searching for the woman who would play this role. I want her to be beautiful, but not beautiful.

I understand, I told him.

I want her face to feel at home on an ancient coin, he said. I want her eyes to harm me. I want her, I mean her, to be too big for her body, a living secret, so that she is squeezed out through here, he said. He touched my forehead.

And here too, he said. He put his hand on my throat. And here, especially. He covered my eyes for a second.

And you found her? I said.

Yes, he said. In Germany. In a very small village. There was a woman in France but she was too beautiful.

Are you from Mexico City? I asked him.

Yes, but I’ve been living in Europe for the last few years. How long have you been living here? he asked me.

We came six years ago, I said.

It’s very beautiful, he said.

It is? I said.

Yes, it’s astonishing, he said.

What’s Mexico City like? I said.

Ah, it’s heaven and hell, he said. Are you nervous? You’re shaking.

No, I said. I’m cold.

Why don’t you come inside and meet the crew? he said. It’s warm in there. I’ll make you an espresso.

No, I have to get back to … there, I said. I pointed behind me.

The cornfield? he said.

I pointed again, towards the shadowy assortment of metal and concrete that housed my belongings. Diego smiled but I couldn’t tell if he was sad or happy because he hadn’t stopped smiling since rescuing me from his blood brother.

Okay, he said. But, quickly, let me just explain a few things to you about the job. We have a small crew, he said, and we are investing in time, not equipment and salaries. We all have specific responsibilities but everybody will be required to help out with everything. It’s very necessary. Do you agree with that, Irma?

Sure, I said.

I hate stories and photographs, he said. They scare me. They freak me out. They’re dead. I want emotion, the feeling, the emotional resonance of the person, the character coming out of a shot, a painting. I hate narrative. I hate actors. It’s very important that your translation of my words is precise. Will it be?

Yes, I said.

And Irma, do you feel that we can rebel?

I don’t know, I said. I had no idea what he was referring to, or on which word of the question to put the emphasis.

Do you feel that we can rebel against our oppressors without losing our love, our tolerance and our ability to forgive?

I don’t know, I said. I looked around towards nature for a clue. A bird, a gust of wind, a star? But there was nothing, as though nature had noticed me trying to cheat and quickly covered up her answers. Diego put his hand on my shoulder and continued to smile.

Perfect, he said. You will be perfect.

The next morning Aggie and I met on the road between our houses and had one of our speed conversations. It’s a silly thing we do together to make it seem like our imposed separation is not the source of continuous heartbreak and an abomination of what is just and loving but one long ridiculous joke like the Berlin Wall.

You’re working for the filmmakers as a translator? That’s crazy! Dad’ll kill you! He already hates them!

I know, I said, so don’t tell him. Diego will pay me and then I can use the money to go to Chihuahua or Juárez to find Jorge. Here, I have something for you.

What is it?

A switchblade. I brought it from Canada. Open it.

It’s a comb!

It’s a joke!

Drag.

Okay, then give it back to me!

No, I’ll keep it.

I gotta go or you’ll be in deep shit.

Irma, she said. But I had started to walk away. I heard her say some more things but by then I had yanked my skirt up and was running down the road away from her and begging the wind to obliterate her voice. She wanted to live with me. She missed me. She wanted me to come back home. She wanted to run away. She was yelling all this stuff and I wanted so badly for her to shut up. She was quiet for a second and I stopped running and turned around once to look at her. She was a thimble-sized girl on the road, a speck of a living thing. Her white-blond hair flew around her head like a small fire and it was all I could see because everything else about her blended in with the countryside.

He offered you a what? she yelled.

An espresso! I yelled back. It was like yelling at a shorting wire or a burning bush.

What is it? she said.

Coffee! I yelled.

Irma, can I come and live—

I turned around again and began to run.