as a janitor in the shop where we did our restoration work. Also unbeknownst to me is that earlier this morning, Papá hadn’t been able to shake a dark premonition that something wasn’t right and that it somehow involved me.
This is why the instant my father heard Pablo calling from the tracks, he knew that I was in trouble and came running at lightning speed. Not waiting to find out what has happened, Papá now sprints up the ladder to the top of the tanker in the same moment that I’m reaching for Pablo’s hand. Others, responding to the commotion, follow close behind as my father—screaming and crying my name—flies toward Pablo. One of my co-workers sinks to his knees beside the tracks and begins praying loudly to God to spare my life.
None of this enters my awareness, which has narrowed to a singular focus: Pablo’s outstretched hand. Time has slowed almost to a standstill, and fractions of seconds feel like eons coming to a close, life winding down to its final heartbeats. And as I’m about to clasp the hand of my co-worker, I feel the presence of my grandparents, no longer living, waiting to welcome me, as always.
So relieved, so happy, I summon a final molecule of energy and grab Pablo’s hand—with an intensity he’ll later describe as having the force of ten men. The hardest part comes next—to accept that the only path through the darkness is to surrender, to know that I’ve done all that is within my power. I surrender to faith, putting my life in the hands of others. I let go all effort, all resistance, releasing my grip from the rope and from Pablo’s hand, giving in to the pull of gravity and relinquishing consciousness.
Pablo later told me that when I took his hand in mine, he thought first that I was going to crush it and then that I seemed to be shaking it good-bye. On my face, he noted a “tender” smile that he would never forget—like the smile of a child who has just drifted off to sleep.
But at this moment my father is rushing with superhuman powers to the top of the tanker, knowing that Pablo can’t hold me much longer. He’s three steps away when the dead weight becomes too much for Pablo and I slip out of his grasp.
Deep in my psyche, I register a feeling of falling slowly, everything encased in darkness. Falling, falling, falling.
Outside, where the bright white light at the end of the tunnel was, Papá has taken his last two strides, arriving at Pablo’s side in time to hear the loud thud of my seemingly lifeless body landing at the bottom of the tank.
ONE Starry Nights
During the many minutes when I lay at the bottom of the tank without oxygen, struggling on the battlefield between life and death, there was something about the image of being on my back, enclosed in darkness and staring up at the light, that connected me powerfully to my childhood years. Indeed, whenever I travel back along memory’s narrow pathways that lead to the furthest past, the familiar, starry night sky is the first image that rises to welcome me home.
There in the outskirts of the tiny village of Palaco where I was raised, in the northern part of Mexico’s Baja peninsula, I spent many of the hotter nights of the year up on the roof of our little house. I would often lie awake for hours studying the infinite expanse of blackest outer space—everything lit by a glowing moon and millions of bright, sparkling, dancing stars. It was there, underneath the panoramic dome, that many of life’s most pressing questions were first planted in my imagination—and where my high level of curiosity and hunger for adventure were cultivated. Under the stars, I could also find relief from the weight of daily concerns and from other worries whenever sadness or sudden misfortune struck.
Such was the nature of my earliest, clearest memory, which was of an event that took place when I was three years old. The trauma had to do with one of my siblings, my baby sister Maricela, whom I would always remember for her big brown laughing eyes and her round, chubby, smiling face. Suddenly, when I came home from playing one morning, she was nowhere to be found.
At the time, we lived in the two back rooms of my father’s gas station. When I walked into the kitchen area of our living quarters that morning, I felt terrible sadness in the air. The day was gloomy, humid, and uncharacteristically cold. Unfamiliar yellow vinyl chairs had been arranged in the kitchen, where my mother, Flavia, was seated. A pretty, petite woman who was usually joyful, Mamá was sobbing as she cradled Maricela’s twin, five-month-old Rosa, to breastfeed her. At her side was my little brother, two-year-old Gabriel. Gazing around with his large, thoughtful eyes, Gabriel sucked his thumb quietly as he leaned against our weeping mother. In front of the yellow chairs sat a tiny rectangular wooden box—a casket, I later learned—covered by a colorful handwoven blanket. Family members and neighbors filed into the room, many of them softly crying.
When I asked my aunt why Mamá was so sad, she explained that this was the funeral of my baby sister Maricela.
“Where is Maricela?” I whispered, unable to connect my happy, chubby baby sister with the casket.
“Maricela went to heaven,” my mother said solemnly, wiping her tears.
Why was everyone so sad? After all, I had been told that heaven was a wonderful place where people could go to be with the angels. Shouldn’t we feel good that she had gone to such a nice place?
Years later, I learned the tragic circumstances of Maricela’s death—acute diarrhea and the accompanying dehydration, a common and curable condition, if the right medical resources are available. Initially, she wasn’t taken to the hospital because we lived in the middle of nowhere with no accessible facilities nearby. The difficulty in obtaining medical attention was a function of the relative poverty in this rural area outside of Palaco, a small village of about five hundred families, some thirty miles from Mexicali—the border town that is split by a fence and is known as Calexico on the U.S. side. In our village and environs, we had no private doctors who made house calls, nor were there clinics close by. Many everyday medical needs were met in the boticas housed in local pharmacies. When Maricela’s symptoms first appeared, my mother took her to the botica, and the pharmacist gave Mamá medicine to ease the baby’s stomach problems and the pain later diagnosed as colitis.
That evening, when my father came home from work, Maricela began to laugh when he picked her up in his arms. Papá took her smiles as a sign that the medicine was working. But in the middle of the night, as her screams worsened from what was clearly horrible pain, my parents rushed Maricela over to my grandmother, Nana Maria, my father’s mother, a curandera who specialized as a midwife and herbalist. My grandmother had delivered hundreds of babies through the years and was revered for her ability to know when a case required special attention. Nana knew at once that Maricela needed to be taken the hour’s drive to the seguro social—the public hospital—without delay. My parents understood the gravity of the situation and raced to get there.
At the hospital, one of the physicians on duty knew my grandmother and heeded her concern, admitting my little sister immediately while reassuring my parents that she would improve by morning. With their hopes raised, Mamá and Papá then suffered the anguish of watching Maricela’s convulsions increase over the next two days, and in the end, losing her. Though they did everything they could, their efforts weren’t enough to combat her colitis, which had quickly reached an advanced state, nor to make up for the fact that the small, poor hospital didn’t have the medicine or other forms of treatment that could have saved her. Tragically, in developing countries such as ours, diarrhea and resulting dehydration are still the main cause of death of little ones. But I know that my parents continued to ask themselves Why? and the question hung over the household for years.
My father and mother were not strangers to loss. My father had been one of eleven children, one of whom had died at the age of ten before my father was born and whose death left a lasting shadow in that household. My
