Reynosa: that grey border city where I was born, now submerged under water after the drugstorm. I was born in a hospital downtown that was demolished five years after, but that’s when the city first made an impression on me, even then, still a young boy, around the time my family made the move to the US. My father grabbed a dark brick from the site as a memento and brought it back like a powdery loaf of burned bread to take with us across. I remember Reynosa grainy now, like an old Italian film or footage of the first world war. I remember the undulating, unpaved streets leading to my grandfather’s house, and Doña Conchita who ran the little store across the street whom every time she saw me and my little sister she thought we were our dad and aunt grown young again, and she laughed her toothless, high-pitched, wondrous laugh, like she was glad the world still had the ability to surprise her. The paved streets were narrow and cars emitting purple clouds from their mufflers zipped by as if not-a-one had brakes and would find any reason to honk their horns, the only real mediator of traffic. Early some mornings an old man with a young boy would come by on a wagon pulled by a malnourished horse with a skin disease and blinders, and they’d empty the neighborhood trashcans in the back and haul it away. Around noon a man with a speaker attached to the roof of his pickup truck with a camper would use his best theatrical and business voice to sell queso fresco and kilos de tortillas de maiz from the local market. In the evenings, as the women and young girls watched their telenovelas, and the boys played with action figures or soccer in the street, a man pushing around a wheelbarrow went around ringing his bell and hollering ELOTES you could hear it echo from blocks away. The boys would all drop their games and run inside and they’d come out with their sisters and other adults, crowd around the elotero and he’d smile as he uncovered the metal tub where he kept the hot roasted corn. He’d peel each cob in front of you and stabbed one end with a skewer, prepare it the way you liked, but usually he’d use a painter’s brush to spread mayo and hot chile that was the elotero’s own recipe, and though I could never eat anything like that now, back then there was nothing else you looked forward to eating, it was the most delicious thing. When we were in a car, the closer we got to the border the more children with old, round faces approached your window at red lights to try to sell chiclets or tamarindo or copies of the newspaper El Mañana, and our father always reminded us children in the car to be thankful and pray for the people less fortunate. I had no idea what he meant by that but when I saw those little boys and little girls dirty and using their submissive charm and innocence to sell candy I remember being afraid and one night praying to God under the covers while everybody else slept and begging him not to let that happen to my sister or to my cousins, begged for that never to happen at all. A hurricane passed through around that time and only the outskirts of Reynosa were severely inundated. The very morning the skies cleared the fire-breathers were out there again in the busy intersections along with clowns who had a bit that lasted the duration of the red light, while the younger ones went car to car pidiendo limosna.

No bluejays or robins passed through Reynosa, only blackbirds erupting in whirlwinds toward the sky or lined up along the powerlines echoing their siren of doom. I remember color, but only the last of the color; now it’s different, and since I’ve been back there it’s all disappeared. Even from the faces of the people. The way I think about Reynosa now is like a sunken ocean liner and no fish swimming through the algae-carpeted corridors; like an older lover who, in the golden locks of morning, you realize stopped breathing overnight. I think about her big and precious like an emerald, or something bigger that can’t be articulated because of a lack of words. I try not to think about it, but when I do make my way to the bar and sit close to the jukebox and keep feeding it dollars, playing songs like ‘There Goes My Baby’ three or four times in a row, I can’t help myself. I tip well and hope nobody minds. I try to think of other things, like the eyes of Bengal tigers or strange words like impecunious. Other times there’s no helping me, though, when I end up thinking about Reynosa, there’s nothing to do but ride it and then it will pass, there’s no helping anything, not even the children in rags nor the fire-breathers in that distant city where once I was born and others remain, so why should it be any different for me now, all the way over here.