Leaving Home

La casa decía por fuera “boarding home,” pero yo sabía que sería mi tumba. Era uno de esos refugios marginales a donde va la gente desahuciada por la vida.

The house said “boarding home,” on the outside, but I knew that it would be my tomb. It was one of those marginal refuges where the desperate and homeless go…

                        -Guillermo Rosales
                        La casa de los náufragos (Boarding Home) // The Halfway House
                                Translation by Anna Kushner

            The ominous opening lines of Guillermo Rosales’s 1987 novella establish the dread and desperation that permeate the entire story. Having arrived in Miami as a refugee from Cuba, narrator William Figueras comes to terms with where his life will end. Impoverished, living with untreated schizophrenia, and unable to cope with his disillusionment of the Revolution and its censoring of his work as a writer, William is relegated to a halfway house. It’s within this house that he, like Rosales in 1993, lives out the remainder of his soon-to-be-abruptly-ended life. (This, I don’t think, is any kind of spoiler since it’s in the opening lines.) What matters, then, isn’t what’s going to happen to William—or what happened to Rosales—but rather how and why it happens, and how we understand it.

            I’ve been thinking recently about Boarding Home and its author. Rosales flexes an incredible dexterity, summoning hopelessness and psychological claustrophobia while flashing just enough sunlight and oxygen into his story to keep it from feeling like 90 pages of torture. Amid his mental and spiritual apocalypse, no one is heroic, but no one needs to be heroic to earn what little warmth and kindness characters can offer one another. For someone who has spent any time impoverished or confronting severe psychological hardships, these scenes and sentiments ring hauntingly familiar. And for those who haven’t previously encountered such brutalities, these scenes might provide the language necessary to process the present pandemic.

            I should clarify that I don’t have firsthand experience with being a political refugee or living with schizophrenia. As a child of working-class Mexican immigrants, I grew up in poverty, and I’ve confronted bouts of depression, anxiety, and mania. Boarding Home resonates with me for its unencumbered relating of a displaced person unable or unwilling to return home, but struggling to find a life in a new land—a land where your human value is predicated on your ability to work and work and work and work. To work means to sustain, and largely ignore, wounds to your body, your mind, and your soul in the hopes that those who succeed you might have it better.

            Might.

            Growing up, we had enough money to eat, be clothed, and have a roof over our heads. I recognize these to be great privileges. I must also acknowledge, however, that to have this kind of stability, meager though it felt at times, my parents spent years under-documented, working scores of jobs to make ends meet, separated from their families and homelands.

            That money I referenced? My parents were able to save it only after they received documents thanks to the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act—colloquially known as “amnesty” for a generation of undocumented people in the U.S.

            That house I grew up in? It was purchased thanks to affordable housing programs and using money my parents had won in litigation after barely surviving a car wreck. My working- class upbringing was privileged, relatively speaking, but it was built on a foundation of suffering.

            In Boarding Home, William briefly glimpses a path towards escape. He meets Frances, a fellow refugee committed to the halfway house by her family. The two develop complex romantic feelings for each other, and he eventually sets out to find them an apartment somewhere in the city. These are some of the lightest moments in the story, as William walks the streets of Latino Miami, singing to himself, daydreaming about a possible life with Frances, and reconnecting with fellow Cuban refugees who knew his family back in the old country. However fragile and improbable, this hope buoys the spirits of narrator and reader alike and makes the ending all the more devastating.

            Throughout my childhood, my siblings and I would spend our summers living with mi abuelita in Monterrey, Nuevo León, México. When I was thirteen, I asked my mom why we did this? I wanted to spend summers at home, farting around with my friends and generally being as carefree a kid as I could manage.

            She responded, “Porque no queremos que pierdan su cultura ni su lengua.”

            Whether this was the truth—that my mom saw our time in Mexico as a means of keeping us close to our roots and mother tongue—is secondary in my mind today. To her credit, mis hermanos y yo mantuvimos nuestra lengua y nuestra cultura, a pesar de toda la discriminación en este país. Even still, it’s secondary in my mind because mi abuelita once told me that my parents would pick up additional jobs or shifts every summer, and we were sent to México so they wouldn’t have to worry about us being home alone, not being fed, or out in the streets doing whatever. And this, in a way, was part of keeping our culture: relying on one another, connecting elders to younger generations, thinking of home as more than one place, despite increasingly militarized borders—borders which separated both my mother and father from my dying grandmothers years later.

            The business of getting to mi abuelita’s place was also an ordeal. Every summer, we piled into my parents’ van or pick-up truck and endured the nearly 30-hour trip to Monterrey and the nearly 30-hour trip back home. We had food so we never stopped to eat, we had blankets so we never stopped to sleep, and we had no air conditioning so we drove the whole way with our windows open and the sound of desert wind howling against us. The only relief arrived when my dad stopped for gas and we could get out and stretch, or when we passed familiar landmarks, which provided evidence of our progress—allowing us to imagine a time when we wouldn’t be stuck in our vehicle. These difficult and weird circumstances and my own moodiness notwithstanding, I always felt a twinge of excitement about being on the road, about being constantly on the move.

            Recently, as I sat in my house—working, trying to work, trying to help curb the spread COVID-19 in my hometown, separated from my mom and dad, who are both in their 60s—I felt a swelling in my chest. It was the kind of feeling I get when I can tell spring is on the horizon here in the Sonoran Desert, or when I read a painfully relatable line in someone else’s writing. My mind drifted back to those long, stuffy drives to México, back to my childhood when we didn’t have money for anything but essentials. Then, I realized what this pandemic feels like: it feels like leaving home without knowing whether we’ll come back.

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