twoGabriel lifted a cardboard box

tied with a string and slung his backpack on his shoulder. Those two bundles contained all his belongings. His legs unfolded like an accordion, stiff from being constrained for so many hours on the bus. Even though it was only 8 am, hordes of people swarmed at the gates to pick up their relatives, blocking those like Gabriel, who didn’t have a welcoming committee. Female echoes announced unintelligible departures from the loudspeakers. A deafening cacophony of strident cumbias and norteña music pierced his temples.

He walked out of the station and made his way through the stalls of raw meat piled on mounds of spring onions and cilantro surrounded by flies, fruit smoothie stands, tamale stands, and others with the same “Made in Taiwan” plastic junk he had seen in New York’s Chinatown. The smells of street food stirred his appetite, and he ordered some tlacoyos. They tasted like heaven.

He tried to get through the narrow sidewalks teeming with people, next to which rapids of dirty water transported iridescent bubbles of soap, grease, and spittle. Geological layers of ancestral and newly originated dust, of toxic gases and pulverized excrement saturated his lungs. He had almost forgotten the unholy noise of the boomboxes, the honking cars, the insistent chimes of the videogames, and the shouts of the street vendors.

Welcome to fucking Mexico City, he thought.

He changed minibuses three times and walked the dusty streets of his neighborhood, strewn with garbage and adorned by graffitied walls. The evidence of three years of Western Union wires rose in front of him with less dignity than he had expected. The old shack of corrugated metal had become a cement and brick cube painted sky blue, with a white metal door and a little window trapped behind rusted iron bars.

He knocked on the door. He heard the tired slippers of Irma, his mother, drag on the floor. Her voice asked, “Who is it?” with her usual distrust.

“Gabriel.”

When she opened the door, a swift emotion crossed his mother’s dry gaze. She hugged and kissed him and then inspected him from head to toe.

“Look at these rags you are wearing, hijo. Your pants are dropping.”

“It’s the fashion, mamá.”

She bit her lip to hide a disbelieving smile. Gabriel was still thin, but his shoulders had broadened, and now instead of those two straws with which he could barely lift a papaya, his arms were thick with muscle. His face had sharpened. Something in his eyes had hardened.

“What’s that on your ear?” she asked.

“An earring,” he answered. “So what?”

He put his luggage on the cement floor and sat down on a chair. A bare, dangling lightbulb was the only source of light. Gabriel had to touch his hands to his temples to see if he was still wearing his sunglasses. The cold, dark house made him feel uneasy.

“I sent you a shitload of money. ¿Qué pasó? ” he asked his mom.

“Not that much money. You just arrive from Gringoland dressed like a clown and you think you have the right to talk to me like that, canijo escuincle. If you are going to shack up here, don’t whine.”

“Don’t worry, jefa. Tomorrow, I’ll look for my dad to see if he can get me a job. My aunt told me he works as a driver in Las Lomas.”

“He’s not going to get you anything. He hasn’t shown his face or one single cent for fifteen years.”

“Carajo, I arrive after three years of shit in the United States, and you don’t even ask me how I’m doing. You think I came back because I wanted to?”

In all her life, Irma had never heard him say so many words. She didn’t remember exactly when his voice had changed, but the sounds she had committed to memory were those of a screechy teenager. His rich, mature tone surprised her.

“I almost got beat to death. And on top of everything, I got deported. Pero te vale madres—You don’t give a shit.”

Irma did not answer. They had replaced him with another boy, this was an impostor.

Gabriel clung to the metal tube as the minibus jolted up Paseo de la Reforma, pushing him against the bodies pressed around him. The drivers thrust their cars at the passersby, blaring their horns hysterically. The sky was the color of a plucked chicken. His eyes burned and his nose itched, and everything smelled of dust, rust, and sewer. He felt as if a molcajete stone was bouncing inside his head.

He got off the minibus at one of the stops. He walked under the shade of the trees on the boulevard’s median. Here there was greenery. Here, pansies were planted along the pavement like spectators at a parade. He had to run to cross the street in front of the cars that careened down the wide avenue, walled with mansions, as if they were in a Formula One race.

He stopped in front of a wrought iron fence wrapped around a garden sprinkled with isles of roses and perfectly symmetrical shrubbery.

The grand old house looked like a castle. It even had a turret, decorated with a long, stained-glass window with hummingbirds fluttering around immense tulips. Big fat clouds of pink sandstone framed the windows. Three cars glittered in the garage. A surveillance camera and a security stand guarded the door. Gabriel swallowed and rang the bell.

A young woman’s voice chirped through the intercom.

“Who is it?”

“Is Señor Mendoza here?”

“There is no one here by that name.”

“Excuse me.”

Gabriel looked again at the address scribbled on a piece of paper. Reforma 2347. He rang again.

“Who is it?”

“Excuse me, señorita, but I was told that Señor Agustín Mendoza works as a driver in this house.”

The static burp of the intercom answered back.

“Let me see. Please hold on a second. Who is calling?”

“His son Gabriel.”

Gabriel waited at the door for a long time. His stomach cramped. The door opened a sliver. His father was grayer, paunchier, and more wrinkled, although his sour expression was intact. Gabriel recognized it from the only faded photo that his mom had kept, taken in the Alameda Park. It took Agustín a few seconds to recognize in that young man the skinny tyke he had not seen since then.

“How did you find me?”

“My aunt gave me the address.”

“Weren’t you supposed to be in the United States?”

“I’m here now.”

“Why would you come here without letting me know?”

“Necesito chamba—I need a job. Do you know of anything?”

“How am I supposed to know, like this, all of a sudden?”

“Well then, see you later.”

Gabriel started walking, feeling like an idiot for having allowed himself the fantasy—as he waited for his deportation, handcuffed to the ICE van, in the cell at the detention center, at the courthouse, on the plane to San Diego, in the Flecha Amarilla bus to the capital— that his dad would recognize him immediately and would give him a long, tight hug, ruing the day he abandoned him, proud to see him a grown man.

His father ran after him, offering him a couple of crumpled bills he took out of his pocket, but Gabriel turned his back on him and walked away. He waited for a minibus and went back to his mother’s house in San Gregorio Tepehualco.