I'll read you something a little more cheerful.
And for those of you who don't know,
I like I said was born in Tijuana,
I was the first member of my family to graduate from college
and my father, unfortunately, is also dead
and he was killed near here in San Luis Río Colorado, handled
very badly by the police in Mexico.
And that put me in a very strange state,
he was killed in my senior year of college
in my second semester, and I was just blown away.
So I wandered around a little bit
and I did some odd jobs and artistic things,
and in 1978 I met this pastor who
led this missionary group working in Tijuana
with the poor.
I've told this story, you probably know it.
But for those of you who don't, his name
is Pastor Von and I've dedicated the first book about Tijuana
to him, Across the Wire, and he figures largely
in my second book that just came out.
Von is a really miraculous guy, I call him a zen Baptist
because he's got this strange satori thing happening.
And he has these snaps of brilliance
and he's also quite a commando, he's a crusty old man.
And I love him because he doesn't seek favor from anyone.
He doesn't seek petting from anyone,
and he will speak his mind whether it costs him
everything or not.
A good example of this is a story I relate in this book
when a friend of mine was at Sunday services at the church
that he works out of which is a church called Claremont Emmanuel
Baptist.
And it's become a very nice yuppie church
where everybody dresses really nicely and sings
give me oil in my lamp and then they go home.
Von has been in Mexico for about 33 years, 35 years working
and seeing unimaginable things.
So he has very short patience with this.
And he's a legend, so when he shows up,
everybody is kind of in awe of the great man.
Anyway, in the middle of this church service Sunday
morning, they're in the middle of one of their happy songs
and Von walks in.
And according to the witness, walks halfway down the pew
and stands there.
I mean halfway down the aisle.
Looking at everybody and the song petered out
and they all turn to him waiting for the word
and he looked at them and he said, dead sheep.
And then he walked out.
That's my Von, leaving them to wonder
what he was talking about.
So I started working with Von and I've told this story
at least three times today.
So I'm probably repeating myself too much.
But being from Tijuana, I figured I knew everything
about Tijuana.
My family's been there at least seventy years, we knew it.
But what you don't know is what goes
on up those canyons you see.
Where the paper shacks are, or what's
going on inside the dumps, or what's
going on inside the prison, or what's
going on inside the orphanage, I'd never seen it.
And I realized that my family had never seen it
and then everybody I knew from Tijuana had never seen it.
So I started seeing things I didn't know existed.
And the first night I was there, I
met this little child which I've mentioned to you named America.
America the orphan.
And she was in an orphanage one hill
over from my grandma's house, in Grupo Mexico,
which is a colonia in Tijuana.
And America was a little blond and blue-eyed girl, looked just
like an Urrea.
Probably was an Urrea, who knows?
And I started talking to her and nobody in this group
spoke Spanish.
They spoke the store-bought Spanish that people learn
and it wasn't the same as neighborhood street
Tijuana-Spanish that she knew.
So when we started to speak we got
this really warm relationship happening and it was time to go
and she wouldn't let me go.
And the children when they don't want you to go sit on your feet
and you get one going this way, one going that way,
one going that way, one going that way, and you're stuck.
And she had led this commando raid on my feet.
So to get her off me, I promised I would be back the next week.
I said, don't worry, I'll come back, just let me go.
And I walked outside and he was waiting for me.
He was like Godzilla enraged.
And he said, what did you say to that child?
And I said, what, I told her I'd be back next week.
And he said, don't ever lie to my children again.
He said that little girl is going to wait a week for you
and when you don't show up she's going
to wait another week for you, and when you don't show up
she's going to wait another week for you,
and she's going to wait months for you
and she may wonder her whole life why you didn't
care enough to come back.
And I thought, oh man.
So I went back the next week.
And then I went back the next week.
And then I went back the next week,
and then pretty soon about four weeks into it
this was Monday night, he said, why don't you come on Thursday?
So I went on Thursday and they said, well,
why don't you try Saturday too?
So pretty soon I was there full time
and I became his translator.
So all the kind of adventures that happen in these books
that I've published about the border
are from that experience translating for him
and becoming the ear of the people
and the mouth of the people.
And this thing that I find myself repeating a lot
is when you can speak the language,
you will hear the unspeakable because somebody
has to tell somebody, and they ended up telling me,
which was a very hard thing for me to live with
and I fled finally, I couldn't take it anymore.
But these books came out of it, so it was a blessing.
I thought I would read you one chapter to give you
an idea of what life is like and what the books are like,
this is probably one of the mildest chapters
in either of the two books.
So I see people buying these for Christmas
presents and I think, dang.
I feel really guilty.
In the new book there's a whole chapter about cussing
on the border and it's quite obscene and this mother was
buying it for her 12-year-old daughter.
And I was like, ma'am, that's a R rated book.
So I said, just at least look at it before you give it
to the kid, OK?
And my favorite story is someone who bought it for her
81-year-old mother and she said her mother went in the living
room and sat down on the couch and all she heard was, oh dear.
So I don't know if I was ashamed or proud of that.
I didn't mean to write that stuff
but you have to tell the truth.
Anyway this is a chapter called "The Last Soldier of Pancho
Villa" and it's pretty self-explanatory,
and it's about somebody I love a lot who is still alive,
even though you won't believe it when you hear how old he is.
Leaving Tijuana by way of the free road to Enseñada
takes you through a dusty poverty that
is suggestive of ancient days.
The canyons bristle with shacks and tumbled fences
while above maquiladoras crown the hills and castle
like sprawls.
The serfs below await the day the complexes above them
will open their doors.
The hillsides seem to crumble as you watch them.
Yards are dust and on the slopes,
where the soil is often shades of gray,
the people have built ingenious gardens
using abandoned car tires.
They dig the tires into the slope then fill them with dirt,
often whole hillsides will be made
of a staggered sloping wall of tires and in each tire
a plant or two.
Geraniums and nopales, you can eat the nopales of course.
Then there are yonques which are the junkyards, abandoned
discos, a Catholic orphanage.
Then you come around a bend into a field of flowers, buttercups
and mustard splash yellow over the hills, it's surprising.
If you're not prepared, it might startle
you to pop out of the sprawl of the city so suddenly.
The sea seems to rise in the distance and the cars spread out
on the road and begin to speed, clean wind tearing
through the windows.
There are small towns before and beyond Rosarito.
Near one of them, there's a rock in the ocean
that has the exact shape of a Volkswagen Beetle.
It looks like it's driving to Hawaii.
You'll see a bright red building on the right.
This is the orphanage that has always been run by Mamá and Papá
Torres.
I call them Mamá and Papá T in the book
so people won't hunt him down.
But Mamá had no teeth, her nose was a mass of brown scars
from years of continuous sunburn.
She was always either 49 or 70, there was no way to tell.
You heard her before you saw her.
She was either laughing, scolding a child or a dog
or crying out in her joy that you had come to see her.
Oh, oh, she'd shout, get away now.
She plowed into your ribs as you got out of your vehicle
and if you seemed at all friendly she gave you
a fierce hug, she patted you on the arms backsides and chest
in the manner of poor old Mexican women.
Her palm was open, her fingers stiff enough
so they bent back a little bit.
And her touch was so light you hardly felt it.
It was almost as though she were touching you to let
herself know you were there.
Then she was liable to hold her hand up next to your face,
and you thought you might get slapped.
And she'd offer an ecstatic soliloquy
that clearly included God, missionaries,
and abundant blessings.
You might even have gotten a tour of the compound;
she was proud of her new American toilets and bathtubs.
And if you took her donuts you could
expect to end up in her kitchen watching her sop up coffee
and slurp them down.
Papá, however, was more reserved.
He was a shadow.
You'd see him in the background, his slightly palsied head
nodding gently in a white hard hat.
Papá unlike Mamá was 90.
In 1978, he was 90 and in 1991 he was still 90.
His skin was dark brown, brown as mahogany.
His mustache was white and sparse, small enough
to look like a trace of milk he forgot to lick off.
His brown eyes were so faded, so encircled with cataracts
and clouded, they seemed almost blue.
He was five feet tall.
In his youth, Papá rode a horse, he carried a rifle.
He rode hard into desert towns and saw army garrisons fall.
He slept on the ground wrapped in a thin blanket.
You might see him in some of those old Mexican photographs:
he has gun belts crossed over his heart.
Long before he became a Christian,
Papá Torres was a soldier of Pancho Villa.
And when any commotion happened at his orphanage,
Papá retreated into his own silence.
He hid in the big chicken coop under the water tower.
If you followed him, you saw a pale shape standing in there.
He held the chickens to his lips; he had a few favorites.
He fancied some fluffy white show chicken someone gave him:
feel this, he'd say.
You'd pet the chicken.
Its feathers felt like cat fur.
Soft, he'd say.
His delighted laughter quiet, his voice a reed in wind, soft.
He'd kiss the chicken on the head.
Papá built the orphanage by hand.
He first made it of wood, hauling limber from-- limber.
How about limberly hauling, limberly hauling
lumber from Tijuana.
At the time the people of the small fishing village
were curious, if not suspicious.
Papá made a long two story building with his dwelling
at the West End and the boys lived downstairs and the girls
above and he called it Hogar de Luz, the house of light.
When he finished building, he painted it sky blue.
Then as a service to the children of the community,
he built a church next door.
He and his sons labored for almost a year using cement,
stucco, and wood, and it was the first Protestant church
on that part of the coast.
Once the church was done, Papá realized
the orphanage needed modernizing,
so he hauled out his ladders and hammers again
and began an ambitious construction project
behind the original orphanage.
This one would be entirely of brick and cement
with modern bathrooms and modern dorms.
American work crews eagerly joined in,
bringing him supplies and freshed faced youth groups who
scrambled up and down Papá's ladders,
slopping cement and banging nails.
On those days he stood watching, his ever-present white hard hat
bobbing slightly, he gripped either
a huge white cup of coffee or a banana and he pointed sometimes.
Then looked at me as if some secret
had just been confirmed between us.
At the end of the day, he thanked everybody,
and as soon as they were on the highway back North,
he climbed his ladder and undid the work they did.
Often Papá spent two days fixing angles and re-hammering frames.
It's all right, he said, these young people need to work,
it's good for them to have work.
Because of his age and his bobbing head,
Americans made the mistake of thinking him simple
or diminished somehow.
Once a missionary crew descended on him to repaint his orphanage.
They had brought bright red paint
so the orphanage would be easier to spot.
Papá liked it blue.
The Americans forged ahead anyway.
And the leader of the group said to me,
tell him he's a good man, then patted him on top of the head.
Papá stood there shoulders hunched, shaking a little.
He then offered me the only unsolicited comment
I ever heard him speak about Pancho Villa.
Pancho Villa, he said, was a gentleman.
At least he allowed a man self-respect.
Things went on as normal in the newly red orphanage
until one day we pulled into the driveway
and found Mamá crying and wringing her hands.
We thought he had died.
She ran out to us and wailed, Papá had run away from home.
He had this recurring dream, if you were friends
with him he'd tell it to you.
Jesus is calling me, he'd say.
He heard Jesus almost every night in his dreams.
No matter what he did, Jesus intruded in the dream,
took him out of whatever rivalry he was in,
and let him back to the same insistent vision.
He saw a vast barren plain.
It was stark, dead, nothing grew there, the sun was white.
He could hear the empty sound of wind
and Jesus would stride toward him.
And in his hand, a seed.
Papá always said, y es de este tamaño la semillita, más o
menos, always, más o menos así.
Jesus would press the seed into Papá's hand
and indicate he was to plant it where they stood.
Here my tree will grow, Jesus told him.
Papá cried sometimes talking about it.
He thought he was supposed to die there.
He was afraid to go back to the desert fueled by nothing more
than a dream, but he was a soldier.
And he had been in the desert before, he had his orders.
He put it off as long as he could,
he put it off until he knew his life was over.
And if he was going to die out there,
at least he would know he had done his work for the children.
He told Mamá goodbye one morning,
took a small bag of things and a blanket,
and walked up to the highway.
The children cried, she wrung her hands and pleaded,
and the last they saw of him was the white helmet
through the window of the bus.
Two months passed, a stranger appeared at the home of light
asking for Mamá, was she related to a Señor Torres?
Yes she cried.
Oh yes.
Did Señor Torres wear a white helmet and was he elderly?
Yes.
The man sipped a cup of coffee at Mamá's table.
He related a story of what he had
seen in the great northern deserts of Mexico,
just south of here by the way.
An old man got off a bus in a hamlet
where this man had a small business.
The locals watched him hobble along with his bed roll and bag
and he approached a Yaqui man.
They watched the stranger talk to the Yaqui man
just for a few minutes and the two of them
turned and hiked out of town.
Later, when the Yaqui man returned to town for supplies,
he reported the old Mexicano had brought him
a message from Jesus.
They were busy building a new house for God on the plains.
The townsfolk regularly visited the site and Papá
somehow accumulated tools, supplies, and helpers.
Tell Mamá, he told this visitor, that we are building a church,
it's going well.
The fellow had business in Tijuana
and was so curious about this marvelous scene
that he promised to drive down the coast and report to Mamá.
After the end of summer, we drove into the compound.
Halloween was approaching soon and the searing heat
of late September had finally drifted off
as though it had never happened.
Mamá wore a bright dress, a scarf tied over her hair.
She danced around clapping her hands like a kid.
He's back, she shouted, he's back.
We thought she meant one of us until we realized it was Papá.
Where is he, I said, with the chickens?
I went down to the chicken house.
It was dark in there.
I pulled open the wire door and stepped through.
The floor was three inches of chicken dung.
Papá, I said, are you in here?
I went in deeper: Papá.
He had a white chicken in his hands.
He held it out to me.
He gestured to me with the chicken: feel these feathers,
he said.
I petted the chicken.
Papá glanced at me, looking somewhat amused.
He leaned over and confided a great secret.
I lived, he said.
How are we doing for time?
Good.
We're all right?
By God this is going well.