Foreigner

Abstract

Foreigner Cristina Rivera Garza (bio) Translated by Sarah Booker (bio) I stopped at the restaurant off the highway because I couldn't stay awake. I'd been driving for eight hours after learning that my mother's health was quickly deteriorating. As soon as I hung up the phone with her, I put a few things in a little suitcase and, knowing it would be difficult to find a flight at that late hour, grabbed the car keys and ran out the door. Following by memory the route I hadn't driven in years, I took the interstate as far as I could. Then I turned right onto a state highway, and later, as it got dark, I proceeded down local roads. I'd forgotten about the beauty of that drive. The evening hues outside [End Page 55] the city. The way the wind softly bends the grass on the hills. The shapes of certain clouds. I stopped several times along the way to drink coffee and ask myself, silently and guiltily, whether my quick response really had to do with a concern for my mother's health or just the overwhelming desire to leave everything behind. Tabula rasa. My life in the city was a disaster. I was working more hours than necessary and living off cheap food, coffee, and cigarettes. I hadn't gotten a haircut in months, and I was wearing the same clothes I'd acquired years before, when I'd first arrived, full of dreams. Desires. Ideas for the future. None of it had come to fruition, I had to admit more than once during the drive. Other things had been achieved, that was true, but not the ones I wanted. Not the ones that had brought me there. The sense of failure, at first discreet and bearable, had become a permanent bitter taste in my mouth. An invisible snake slithering across the backs of my thighs, steadily creeping up my torso, under my clothes. An inner clatter that kept me from sleeping. I was not a happy man. The person who was driving these narrow country roads, now skillfully avoiding the body of some nocturnal animal, was as bitter as the saliva he couldn't swallow. I screamed it to the heavens: I am not a happy man. I shouted it out to the deer that forced me to screech to a stop in the middle of the road, the deer that kept looking at me with its big, bright eyes as I got out of my car and fell to my knees on the asphalt, crying. Who are you? I yelled. What the hell are you doing out here? I realized it was just a fawn, cocking its head to the left. I said it once I could finally stand and get back in the car, looking into the rearview mirror: I am not a happy man. I am barely a man. I was wiping away snot when I remembered my mother's youthful face. She'd also moved away, but in the opposite direction. Instead of going to the city, she'd bought a little cabin in a place difficult to find, even on a map. There, she told me, she would have time to think. She said nothing more, as if no further explanation were necessary. Time to think about what? I wondered for the first [End Page 56] time, keeping an eye on the speedometer as I counted the insects crashing into the windshield. Time to think, I guess, about how to get even farther away. That's what she did, anyway. She drifted away, to places I knew little about. One morning she woke up having finally become what she'd always wanted to be: a foreigner. Someone not from here. A person recently arrived. Tabula rasa. For years she'd talked about that with my father. At night, lying next to one other, sharing private landscapes, she'd always end up whispering: somewhere else. That was the only thing I could hear from my room. Sometimes it sounded like a plea. Sometimes it echoed threateningly. Somewhere else. Anywhere, but elsewhere. Not here. That's what she'd said...