zona norte

I. Hector

Tijuana has a certain magic, it exists on her very own terms, its really not part of Mexico. It’s a city made of hills, and so most streets are sensuous curves of deteriorated black asphalt that go up and down all over the urban landscape. Clouds make the city look darker and cooler in the early mornings, the ocean is close enough to inundate the air with a breeze, to make it seem like it sits on top of a mountain.

The streets of Tijuana are almost never empty. The city hardly sleeps.

Hector was on his way to school. As he stood alone on the corner of Constitucion and Calle Madero waiting for the bus, Hector felt like crying, but he held back his tears. It made him shake, this feeling of despair, this uncontrollable anger that traveled through him and burned his intestines, it boiled his heart and made it shriek as if it had been ripped out of his chest and had been thrown into a burning stew.

He took a deep breath while looking at the ground, and as soon as he lifted his gaze, he saw the festive dark blue bus come from over the hill, a roaring monster against the foggy morning. He held his hand up, and the bus took him away to start his day. In his seat, he took a look at the Tijuana morning before he closed his eyes.

He heard her come in late (very late). It must have been close to dawn already. She walked straight to bed, sliding her body under the sheets, drunk and clumsy, he could smell her stench of alcohol and cigarettes from across the room. He looked outside through sheerness of the curtains: daylight was slowly creeping in, gently overtaking the Tijuana sky. Tormented, thinking only about her, he had been unable to fall asleep. Now that she was home though, the sounds of fading police sirens outside, the distant Norteno music, the laments of the mariachi singers hummed him to sleep; at least for a couple of hours.


II. La Bayamesa

Alberta opened her eyes, late into the day as usual. It was Monday, minutes to noon and the stuffiness of the Tijuana summer had awakened her; she was sweating. Her skin was transpiring last night’s alcohol, the mix of Presidente rum with Coke, the famous cubas, the cocktail of the poorest. The cigarette smoke impregnated the fading yellow sheets. Her ears were stunned by the piercing traffic outside, by the zooming sound of the speeding cars on the Via Rapida right underneath her balcony; the main road to the beach towns of Rosarito and Ensenada, the one that runs perpendicular to the border, following it all the way to the western end, to the Pacific Ocean.

The sun streaks filtered through the white sheer cotton curtains, through the tender skin of her eyelids. She looked across the room and realized Hector was already out for the other twin bed was made with impeccable detail. She couldn’t help but smile, to think of what a perfect son she had. The indolent sun had been steaming and suffocating the air in the apartment all morning long. She stood up and shook up her drowsiness, her mouth was a desert, drying creases lined up her lips; and so she walked up to the window, faced the world outside, her caramel eyes fixed on the passing cars, on the rest of Tijuana existing by daylight. Not her, she was a night creature, a middle aged vampire woman, a border soul.

She looked much older than her 47. She had a damn good reason for it. It was the result of life in the streets; of the endless nights spent forcibly awake, among the other night owls, standing there with the other rental women, long past the first sights of dawn. Her body was drying slowly, holding onto the last bit of dignity that had been eating her inside out. An infernal thirst led her to the dark kitchen, a little rectangle with nothing more than a half-sized fridge and a tabletop stove. Shaking and still buzzed, she grabbed some ice cubes from the freezer and threw them into a small glass and went for the water gallons. She found one half-empty and poured the water into the glass, the ice made a cracking sound right before she drank it in one huge gulp. Her bones ached. Her real name was Alberta Dominguez, but in the streets below, she was baptized La Bayamesa