Cristinaland

ABOUT TEN YEARS AGO Cristina was studying to become a dentist when she got flattened by a drunk driver while crossing a busy street in Zacatecas, Mexico. Her head hit the pavement, and she was knocked unconscious. She spent a month in bed with a fractured pelvis and much longer learning to walk again, but eventually she resumed her studies. I met her two years after the accident, in her hometown of Jerez. She had become a dentist by then and was taking night classes in English at the instituto where I taught. At twenty-seven she had no boyfriend, lived with her parents, and was inclined to stay in each evening and drink tea with her mother. Her English was terrible. I was forty-four and had been alone for a long time. Neither of us had ever been married.

We went out on several dates. I had never really dated, even when I was young, unless you define dating as “drinking with women for the eventual purpose of sex.” But these were sober, proper, painstakingly old-fashioned dates. I found her pleasant company, though because of the old head injury she often drifted off to a place I came to call “Cristinaland.”

“Cristina?”

“Eh?”

“Where are you, baby?”

“What?”

“Tell me what it’s like. Tell me about Cristinaland.”

Slow, sweet smile.

I decided to bring Cristina back to the United States with me. She had only three big dreams: to see America, to learn to speak English, and to make enough money to open her own dental practice back in Mexico. (She estimated it would take five thousand dollars.) I thought I could grant all three wishes with one wave of my magic gringo wand.

Of all our American living options, the most practical was the town of Chadron, Nebraska, where I had held a cooking job six years earlier at the local hotel restaurant. The owner had been clamoring for my return, and he promised Cristina a job in the hotel and the two of us a rent-free house with a fireplace for three months.

Though I’d vowed that I would never cook professionally again, I took the offer. (I have cooked in a number of places since, which I consider proof that God has a sense of humor.) The life of a short-order cook is one of low pay, high pressure, and frequent injury — plus you get to work with jailbirds, drifters, drunks, and addicts. Before we left Mexico, I found a doctor who agreed to prescribe me Valium so I could get through six months in the hotel kitchen. But the blue tabs, even mixed with red wine, did little to ease my aggravation at work. Cristina was miserable, too: I was gone all night. The wind howled across the plains. The snow fell. She was far from her home and her family for the first time, unable to understand even the simplest phrases, thrown into a job as a maid in the old hotel, and living with a man who smoked and drank and cursed and came home smelling of French fries and beer. She cried many nights and had recurring nightmares about lavish houses full of the walking dead.

She asked me for Valium, but the pills didn’t have much effect on her — a whole ten-milligram tab, a dosage that sent me to the cool oasis, didn’t even make her sleepy. I was worried she would not be able to make the transition. America was not the dreamland she had anticipated. There was too much pressure here. Most immigrants, it seems, come to America in search of “opportunity,” which is a five-syllable word for “money,” and many of the good traits and habits they bring along with them are quickly exchanged for the aggressiveness, selfishness, and cheating required to compete for all that “opportunity.”

After six months Cristina’s tourist visa was up. We sat at the kitchen table to talk. I felt like a manager about to fire an employee. I was sorry that I hadn’t been able to grant all her wishes, but I had very little power in America. I could not get her a well-paying job or put her on the inside track. I couldn’t even save five thousand dollars. And she was so unhappy here that I thought I would be doing her a favor if I sent her back home.

When I told her this, she cried and said, “But I will go home with nothing.”

I explained everything again, slowly, in my crappy Spanish: She was homesick. She didn’t like America. I was too old for her. I would not be a good husband. “I want a simple life,” I told her.

“I want a simple life, too,” she replied, bowing her head.

“Are you sure you want this?” I pressed. “America? Me?”

“Yes,” she said.

“Do you understand what I’ve said?”

“Yes.” 

I calculated the relative unimportance of the few years I had left on earth and decided to do whatever I could to help her. When she returned to Mexico someday, she would not have to be ashamed. She would have an American husband who took good care of her.

This marriage will work, I thought. Despite our divergent backgrounds and the difficulty she was having acclimating, we were basically simpatico. We were both loners, indoor types, coffee drinkers. We were both inclined to leave the party early. I pictured us as husband and wife: We would take long walks. I would cook her nice dinners. She would learn English. Maybe she would change her mind about America. I wasn’t crazy about America either, but I had stopped idealizing it long ago. I’d realized its limits. America was not a storybook wonderland, but it beat the pants off Albania. America tried, at least. It was generous; it cared. Few Americans were standing in line to immigrate to China. There was no Mexican border patrol amassed at the frontier of Texas preventing undocumented Americans from entering Mexico — not yet, anyway.

Cristina and I had a civil wedding at city hall. It was the best I could do, not being Catholic, like her, or inclined to hypocrisy. The diamond on her ring was small, but it’s always seemed to me that the larger the jewel, the shorter the marriage. Unable to understand anything being said to her on one of the most important days of her life, Cristina was overwhelmed. She will be happy now, I thought. She will at last belong.

I HAD BEEN NAIVE enough to think that once I married Cristina, she would become an instant citizen, but I’d forgotten about the long tradition of marriage fraud: American citizens being paid handsome sums to wed aliens and then divorce them. Ahead of us lay thousands of dollars in fees, dozens of forms that could not be correctly filled out even by Immigration and Naturalization Service personnel, fingerprints, medical examinations, the resurrection of ancient Mexican documents, and several trips to ins headquarters on the other side of the state. I began to fill out forms and make frequent long-distance calls during which I was put on hold for hours and given a different answer each time.

With the arrival of summer and the onset of the brief Nebraska tourist season, Cristina began to work with me in the hotel kitchen. The hours were more reliable, it was a better environment in which to practice her English, and we could spend more time together. We’d get off late and go home to our dark house (on which we were now paying rent), wash off the grease, salve our cuts and burns, open a beer or two, and watch movies whose dialogue for the most part she couldn’t follow. Cable is a must for young newlyweds who don’t speak each other’s language well.

Every day Cristina seemed to like America less. She appreciated our power, culture, and wealth, but the Americans she observed — especially in films — were too predatory, mercenary, cold, coarse, bitter, vulgar, violent, and corrupt; too Night of the Living Dead. And it was true. Anyone could see that the splendor of America had faded, that it had become a tired, overweight, depressed, profane, and complaining nation. Almost all the resources once reserved for lofty goals now went toward repaying debt and repairing the gaping breaches created by its empire-sized desires.

Cristina’s mind often drifted, like a child who has wandered too far from camp, and I’d find her staring at the primeval forests of Cristinaland. Even when conversational, she was in the habit of starting sentences and not finishing them.

“If you want, we can . . .”

We can what?

“Let’s walk faster. It’s too . . .”

Twenty seconds. Too what?

“I wish I could . . .”

Three beats. Half a measure. “I wish you could too.”

“Huh?”

“Never mind.”

MY WIFE WANTED to have sex most nights. That was a bicycle I had not ridden for a long time, and the chain was pretty rusty, the handlebars bent. For most of the green valley of my youth I’d been drunk or high, and it was difficult for me to perform otherwise, but I tried to please her. Often we had long, fevered foreplay followed by a flop in the first act. She cried and took the blame. She wasn’t sexy, she said. She wasn’t like the American girls.

We visited the doctor. I explained my problem, which I thought I’d solved long ago by forfeiting the game. The doctor nodded and rubbed his goatee. He spoke about sex surrogates, implants, and psychologists. (Horrors!) “But we’ll try the Viagra first,” he said.

“Good,” I said. If the Viagra doesn’t work, I thought, I can always kill myself.

A boner pill — even if it drops your blood pressure, gives you a headache, and makes you feel flushed and dried out — is a true marvel. Flaccid middle-aged men must have lain in their beds and dreamed of such an invention for a hundred thousand years. Think of how much more territory the Romans or the Macedonians might have been able to conquer with that mighty blue pill. A dose lasts about eight hours, and after taking one I’d wake up in the middle of the night with a splendid woody, ideal for hanging coffee cups on but of no real use for sleeping. I’d get up for a glass of water, steering my unwieldy appendage before me as I made my way through the darkness into the kitchen.

Judging from the Viagra ads everywhere, I knew I was one of millions, but I still felt ashamed getting the prescription filled. Buying condoms is embarrassing, but at least you’re saying, I’m virile; I’m capable. If you’re buying Viagra, you’re saying, I am unable to achieve the only evidence of manhood recognized by this society. So I tried to function without it whenever possible. And then one night, without the Viagra, a bit of magic and wham! A month later Cristina began feeling nauseated. We got a home test kit and confirmed that she was pregnant.

Cristina had been pleading with me to have a baby, but I’d been telling her I wasn’t ready; I wanted to publish a book first. Perhaps two. Now here I was, forty-six and about to become a father. Well, I liked children. Of course I’d be slobbering in a wheelchair at his high-school graduation while all his friends said, “So nice your grandfather could attend.” But I vowed to do my best. Maybe the greatest opportunity for learning, better even than travel or hardship, is raising a child. It’s another try at growing up, but from a different perspective. The fates had given me one more chance to get it right. And I’d write as many books as I could so that there would be some trickle of pennies coming in beyond my days, and my child could say, Yes, he was an author. So what if you’ve never heard of him.

When our neighbors decided to move, they offered to sell us their house — a real ranch home, circa 1920, with three bedrooms, a skylight in the dining room, a large backyard, and two enclosed porches — for thirty-three thousand dollars. This was the only price at which I could ever have afforded to become a homeowner. I don’t know how the average American does it: house, car, insurance, wedding ring, Viagra (eight bucks a pill!), new roof, water heater, washer and dryer, college tuition, and an antique hardwood dining-room table that weighs two hundred pounds and won’t fit through the front door. Say what you will, the American dream, even the discount version, is one expensive proposition.

But our new house was sunny and spacious and watertight, with good ghosts and tulips and clean drains and a dishwasher and a crab-apple tree and a gorgeous view of the railroad tracks and the prairie across the street. And I had my own room in which to write, so I could finally open all those boxes of manuscripts I’d been dragging around for years. It would be a fine place to raise a child.

I just wished it had made Cristina a little happier. I told myself that when she finally mastered the language, things would be different. Or when she got her driver’s license. Or when she had the baby. Or when she got her citizenship. It wasn’t as if we had the option to turn back now. Even if we’d wanted to return to Mexico, she couldn’t leave the U.S. for the next two years without invalidating her bid for citizenship.

So we whiled away the time practicing her English, watching movies, working at the restaurant in the evenings, and talking about the baby. In spite of my views on the corrupting influence of material possessions, I tried to make sure Cristina got whatever she wanted: an aquarium, a new television, a new bed, an antique china hutch. When she wanted a car, however, I resisted: We could not afford a car. We had just bought a house and all the other items I’ve mentioned. The prenatal and hospital-delivery bills would total more than nine thousand dollars.

But then the ins demanded that we make our first of many appearances in Omaha, 460 miles away. There was no economical way to get to Omaha from Chadron without a car. And soon we would need to drive to the hospital, and later to soccer games and chess matches. And maybe if I bought a car, Cristina would stop being so homesick, stop dreaming about zombies, stop retreating so often into Cristinaland.

So I visited the used-car lot and asked Rick, a friend of mine, for a cheap, reliable car. He showed us a Buick (no thanks) and two Subarus: an automatic with 130,000 miles and a standard transmission with 107,000 miles. I chose the standard. It got us to Omaha and back without a hitch. It was not a pretty car, but it ran well, the air conditioning worked, and it got better than thirty-five miles per gallon. I tried to teach my wife to drive it so that she could become an American, all alone in her car in bank lines and fast-food drive-throughs and traffic jams, yakking on her cellphone, punching the radio buttons, and melting the ice caps. But she didn’t take to the stick shift. She thought we should get another car, one with an automatic transmission. OK, hold on a sec, honey. Was not something recently said about a simple life?

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