A Nip Across the Border by Vitali Vitaliev
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"A Day in Mexico" is one of my favourite chapters in "Little Golden America" - a quirky and insightful travel book by Ilya Ilf and Evgeny Petrov, two Russian scribes who criss-crossed the USA in 1935-36. As it transpires from the chapter's title, they made a brief foray into Mexico while staying in the Texan city of El Paso. They only had to walk across "a bridge over the Rio Grande… and there it was Mexico - the city of Juarez."
The seeming ease of their walk-about was complicated by the writers' fear of borders: they were wary of - literally - making a faux pas, which for them, citizens of the Stalinist USSR, could prove - no less literally - fatal. "We were afraid to go to Mexico," they wrote and explained: "On our passports was a one-year visa for staying in the United States… But every visa ends automatically as soon as you leave the country… Horror possessed us at the very thought that the remainder of our days we should have to pass in the city of Juarez, located in the Mexican state of Chihuahua. On the other hand, we wanted very much to be in Mexico."
In the end, the Russians must have recalled one of the unwritten rules of Soviet life: "If something is forbidden, but very much desired - then it is allowed" - and ventured onto the bridge. A cigar-smoking (it was 1935, don't forget!) American immigration official, having carefully scrutinised their passports, kindly escorted them over to the Mexican "border station". "There, true enough, near a booth stood a saffron-faced man with a dirtyish neck, dressed in a dazzling uniform of dark-coloured khaki, with gold pipings. But on the face of the Mexican border official was utter contempt for the duties imposed upon him. On his face was sketched: 'Yes, a sad fate has obliged me to wear this beautiful uniform, but I will not soil my graceful hands by looking over nasty scraps of paper. No! You will never live to see that done by the honourable Juan Ferdinand Cristobal Collbajos!' We … were very glad that we had come across such an honourable hidalgo, and quickly walked down the main street of Juarez."
Ilf and Petrov had a full day in Juarez: they tasted Mexican food, visited a church, witnessed a street rally and attended a bullfight. On their way back to the States, they walked past "Juan Ferdinand Cristobal Collbajos", who as before, paid no attention to them…
Although I tried to follow in Ilf and Petrov's footsteps as closely as possible in my trans-American journey 65 years on, certain deviations from their itinerary were inevitable. Unlike the Russians, who stopped in El Paso, I spent several days in Lajitas, a border town priding itself in being "the remotest settlement in the USA". A small Mexican hamlet of Paso Lajitas was a stone's throw away, across the Rio Grande. Similar to my predecessors, I was very keen on the idea of venturing across the border and adding Mexico to the list of 50 odd countries which I had visited in the last 10 years.
My indisputable advantage over Ilf and Petrov was that I had a multiple-entry US visa in my passport, and, with the Cold War firmly in the past, I did not expect any complications resulting from my distinctly Russian-sounding name in the unlikely, as I hoped, event of my detention by frontier-guards.
I knew that the 2,000 mile US-Mexican border was guarded, even if sporadically. On the way to Lajitas, our bus was stopped a couple of times by heavily armed (and heavily sweating) US border guards, dressed in dark-green battle fatigues and cowboy hats, for perfunctory checks. They were looking for drugs, which smugglers, as they explained, often hid inside pinatas, traditional Mexican toys. Having made sure that none of the passengers was carrying pinatas, they wished us a nice day and waved the bus through. Border-patrolling, like almost everything else in Texas, seemed to be taken easy. No wonder a leading American Mexico specialist recently compared the US-Mexico border to "a sieve blasted by buckshot."
The residents of Lajitas assured me that they routinely went to Paso Lajitas for a cheapish Mexican lunch - and thus encouraged, I eventually decided to follow their lead.
With my dog-eared Australian passport in my breast pocket (and with a good deal of trepidation underneath), I walked down to the Rio Grande one scorching afternoon. I nearly turned back, having spotted an empty "Waco Christian School" van parked on the river bank, next to a strict "Permits Required" sign-post: anything coming from Waco, Texas, could be safely regarded as a bad omen.
A battered leaking boat, paddled by a bearded Charon look-alike, materialised from nowhere. I jumped in without thinking. The dark-green waters of the Rio Grande (or was it indeed the Styx?) were opaque and uninviting. My grim Mexican ferryman didn't utter a word throughout the crossing. "Permits" were obviously not required. Nor was conversation.
Having barely stepped onto the Mexican soil, I saw two Mexican soldiers, their tunics unbuttoned, having a siesta in the shade of a tree. "Border guards..," I thought with awe, bracing myself for an unpleasant encounter. But, being probably the descendants of the honourable Juan Ferdinand Cristobal Collbajos, they didn't pay the slightest attention to me.
Another unshaven type appeared and offered me a lift to the village, only several hundred yards away, in his jalopy of a pick-up truck. Just like "Charon", he was taciturn and seemingly altruistic (he adamantly rejected payment). I wondered whether they both received commissions from one of the village's restaurants.
The first thing that struck Ilf and Petrov in Juarez "were smells of fried food, burned oil, garlic, red pepper", so different from "the odour of gasoline, which reigns in the United States". When I got off the pick-up truck in the centre of Paso Lajitas, I was hardly able to smell (or to see) anything at all. A dust storm was raging above the village. Rags, empty plastic bags and torn newspapers were flying in the air. The wind, like a bored village bully, was tugging aimlessly at the permanently unlocked doors of lop-sided clay bungalows, trying to tear them off their rusty hinges.
When clouds of dust somewhat dispersed, I started along the unpaved main (and only) street of the village. Escorted by a couple of sorry-looking dogs with dust-ridden tearful eyes, I went past skeletons of ruined cars, past an empty water tank, past an unexpectedly clean and freshly painted basketball pitch (the only bit of the village that seemed to be properly maintained). A lonely satellite dish on a holey house roof, hastily patched up with rubber-foam, looked alien and out-of-place - like a stranded UFO, which had landed here by mistake. Further down the street, I stumbled over a toy-truck, abandoned in the dirt and no-less-decrepit that its full-size counterparts lining the road. Everything in Paso Lajitas spoke poverty and despair of the proportions I had only seen in the most deprived parts of Romania and on some East London council estates.
A man in a greasy singlet sat on the steps of Tienda Rural, the village general store, swigging beer from a can. Inside, a sad-faced and dark-eyed teenage girl of about 15 was rocking a baby behind the counter. The stock was limited to rolls of toilet paper, cans of chillies, several packets of cornflakes, one (!) bottle of Kahlua - a strong Mexican liquor, and a couple of crude wooden eagles.
"Where did he buy the beer?" I asked the girl pointing at the man outside, barely visible through a grimy shop window. "In America," - she replied with a clear-cut Texan accent. " I went to school there," she explained, having registered my surprise. "All village children do, although it is kinda illegal…" Her lips parted in a radiant half-smile that momentarily lit up the shop's gloomy interior.
She told me that she was born in America, since village women always preferred giving birth across the border. "There's little choice: the nearest Mexican town is two hours away…"
"Why aren't you at school now?" I asked.
"I kinda dropped out," she shrugged, squinting at the baby in her arms.
In the shop's tiny "front garden", all plants were dead, except for one fading red rose, its few remaining petals covered with thick layer of dust. It was obvious that the miraculously surviving flower wouldn't last here for much longer…
I had late and solitary lunch of Platillo Mexicano - a plentiful Mexican food platter - at Los Amigos, the village's only functioning restaurant (which made the choice easy), and washed it down with a bottle of local Carta Blanca lager. The meal was prepared by a fat Mexican woman, who lived next door. When she saw me approaching, she waddled out of her hut and into the restaurant and, without saying a word, started cooking. The dining area was Spartan, yet clean, and the menu was in English. The place was obviously targeting clients from across the border. Behind the window, ostriches were grazing among rusty carcasses of smashed cars. The woman's son, a little boy called Orlando, was running in and out of the kitchen munching a burito…
My return journey to the USA passed without incident, and soon I was back in my air-conditioned hotel room in Lajitas watching CNN. Larry King was grilling his guest, but, staring at the screen, I could only see the eyes of the Mexican girl from the store - the eyes full of quiet resignation to all the injustices of fate.
I switched off the TV, opened my copy of "Little Golden America" and re-read the last paragraph of "A Day in Mexico" chapter: "Having travelled considerably in the United States, we had become so accustomed to good roads, to good service, to cleanliness and comfort that we stopped taking any note of it. But after one day in Mexico we began to appreciate once again … all the material achievements of the United States. It is useful at times, in order to know a country the better, to leave it for a day."
With sadness, I had to conclude that the last 65 years did little to bridge the gap between the First and the Third Worlds, still securely separated by the narrow and virtually unguarded stretch of the Rio Grande.