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THE FENCE

Alejandro stood on the south side of the fence and looked across. In his small village a long way from here, where the air smelled of wet dirt and rotting mango, rumor had it that the other side was like nothing a person from Teptapa had ever witnessed. Alejandro thought perhaps the sun had blinded his eyes, so he pulled the wide brim of his straw hat down to shade them. Straight ahead of where he stood, the other side appeared exactly as the side he stood on – dusty and tan, without a tree or plant growing anywhere.

He walked along the fence on this side, to the east a little ways, in the direction of the mountains. The air was dry and hovering on hot, even at this early hour when the sun hadn’t yet popped up over the hills. Alejandro stopped walking and listened for bird sounds, a rooster crowing, dogs, but all he heard was his breath and a slight unpleasant ringing in his ears. At home, the tortillas would be warming on the fire and the air would be sweetened with the scent of corn. A music of familiar sounds would be tuning up to welcome the day. Having spent his life up till now in Teptapa, Alejandro had never known that a silence of such magnitude existed.

For another half hour, he walked, but nothing changed. So he stopped and stepped closer to the fence. His boots were covered with dust. Even his pant cuffs had picked up pieces of the dry powder covering the ground no matter which direction he looked. Perhaps if he stood here long enough, he would understand. It could be, he thought, like heaven. The other side that all the people in his town talked about, the place that everyone’s relatives had gone, might not be waiting there, for any man who came along.

Alejandro nodded his head, signifying that he understood. To see the other side, he realized, would take faith and sincere concentration.

Alejandro was thirsty and hot and hungry. He hadn’t thought to bring water or some cold corn tortillas and beans or a mango. A good meal, he’d figured, would be waiting on the other side. He shook his head, trying to silence the warnings from his wife. You don’t know what you’re getting into, Alejandro, she had said. Your mind is always up in the clouds. You have a family now and that means you’ve got to stop dreaming.

Dreaming. Yes, he thought now, he did like to dream. Or rather, he liked to let his mind wander. Mornings, he rose before dawn and stepped outside. Sitting on the front porch, in an old wooden rocker that wobbled because a chunk of wood was missing on the bottom left side, he would watch the sky brighten to gray before a faint orange light appeared on the horizon. Not long after, the orange ribbon would squeeze out and rise, lightening to a bright yellow-white that pushed up into the sky. His spirits tended to lift along with the sun, and then travel some distance, where his mind would be suffused by unimaginable delight.

Some mornings, he jotted down his thoughts, though the writing gave him trouble. That was not surprising, since Alejandro had failed to get past the third grade. His letters looked scratched, as if etched by an old, palsied hand, and many of the words were spelled incorrectly. Alejandro didn’t care. God and the spirits of his ancestors that hovered in the air around Teptapa knew what he was trying to say.

Alejandro decided to walk west now. He’d begun to think less about seeing the other side and more about how good a glass of water would taste, along with a bite or two of a warm tortilla. The heat that had risen with the sun was causing sweat to leak, under his arms and in a widening circle on his back, and in beads across his forehead and down his neck. He pulled a handkerchief out and wiped his forehead, but in minutes his skin was damp there again.

As he walked, he caught sideways glimpses of desolation on the other side that seemed to stretch past the fence forever. Each time, Alejandro was surprised. Holding himself still inside, as he did the one Sunday a month when a priest would come from the capital to say mass and give holy communion, as the women covered in black lace kneeled and folded their hands and the men pressed cowboy hats to their chests, Alejandro tried to visualize the other side that he’d dreamed about back home. It took a moment before he could let go of the heat gripping him like an angry man’s hands. Another minute passed while he put aside the ache in his feet and the hunger gnawing at his belly. After that, he let go of a thirst that caked his lips and felt like sharp rocks were slicing the tender lining of his throat.

Eventually, he managed to leave all that behind, the way he did at home. For years, he’d tended the small plot a few feet from his house, watching the dark green beans ripen to red on the coffee plants. As he checked the beans, he would picture the place everyone whispered about, whose three-word name, el otro lado, caused the Teptapics’ eyes to glisten. El otro lado, the other side, had everything that this side lacked. As the days and weeks and months passed, Alejandro watched the prices he was paid for his coffee beans slide down. Each week, he added more colors and light, subtle details and shading, to the picture he was painting of the other side in his mind. He imagined that a man like himself, a humble man who never asked for much, could get a plot of land there and earn two, three or ten times what he did on this side. And over there, a man would be paid the proper price for his beans, enough to honor the clean mountain air and the rain and the hot sun, and all the colorful birds and bugs, and even his flock of chickens scratching in the yard.

Alejandro had lost all sense of time. He was no longer walking with any destination in mind. In a sense, he had arrived at the place he’d intended. His mind had transported him there. He could see it now, the wet world in several shades of green, from nearly black to the yellow-green of early spring. In his mind, he stepped over a stream and was delighted to discover that the water was cool and clean. Cupping his hands, he filled them and drank, slowly at first and then more quickly, until he couldn’t keep himself from gulping.

The temperature had reached ninety-five and was headed toward a hundred. Though his mind had left him, Alejandro’s body was still trudging along, through a desert that seemed to have no end. His breathing had grown hard, and if he had thought about it, he would have wondered if he was taking in enough air. He was long past caring where he would end up. By now, his mind had begun to go back.

Elena, who would later become his wife, was walking on the other side of the plaza. In a white dress, she looked to Alejandro like a spirit dropped down out of the air. She couldn’t have been more than sixteen. Her dark hair slid alongside her face in slender curls resembling snakes and fell nearly a foot beneath her shoulders.

Now she was heading toward Alejandro on the plaza’s inside circle. Other girls promenaded there, with the young men walking the other way, on the outside. It was the hour before sunset. The air had begun to cool.

Alejandro stepped up next to the girl. The outer circle of young men continued to walk. Alejandro looked into Elena’s eyes. And then she smiled. He nearly lost his footing, as the whiteness of her teeth and the curves he noticed rising and falling with her breath caused him to grow dizzy and tremble.

Alejandro didn’t feel himself hit the ground. A moment later, he lost consciousness for good.

At the point where he fell, someone had cut a hole in the fence. Dust particles he’d kicked up, when his feet went out from under him, lifted into the air. For a moment, they hovered, before moving along. In minutes, without anyone witnessing the breach, the dust particles migrated over the fence, descending grain by grain, slowly, onto the other side.

As Alejandro breathed his last, no one could have said which particles of dust had been created on this side and which particles had always been a part of the ground on the other side. If Alejandro had been able to look up then, he surely would have smiled, on realizing that this side and the other side had so effortlessly become one.