The Invention of Exile by Vanessa Manko Read Free Book Online

permitted.”
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    A CITY AWAKENING . Siesta is over. The sky has grown crimson and mauve with gray plumes rising up from factories situated on the city’s periphery. Lovers open windows, shopkeepers roll up gated storefronts and people emerge from narrow, dark doorways. Blue clouds lined in blood orange sit on the horizon.
    Sun and dust. Broken stone. He feels heavy, his whole body turned inward. He sits down. He rises. He walks beneath the building’s arcade, the marble slippery. He leans against the railing enclosing the small, manicured gardens—gardens of magnolia trees, palms. So much like those first weeks in Mexico City—how dizzying the impression for an émigré without a map. He’d come to the embassy, had been so certain then, brazen enough to believe his passage to America would be swift, secured. He is still hoping for that day.
    He walks down the stairs and across the street, his brown, sorry loafers caked with dust. He draws a cigarette from his back pocket, stops at the corner to light it, watching as the little flicker of blue begins before the burn. A car speeds past, its motor loud. Over the car’s fading rumble and from a window open and overhead he hears the faint voice of someone singing, a warble like that of a bird. The tightness in his chest loosens. He raises the cigarette to his lips, exhaling. He leans back against the building, one leg tucked up and under, resting against the stucco wall, its grainy surface pressing through his shirt. The last of the sun cuts a diagonal of light across his body—a man marked, a man crossed out.
    For just a fleeting moment, Austin feels something like contentment, so tired he is of always wishing to be elsewhere. A respite from longing, an easy satisfaction in a small desire sated. A last inhale and he tosses the cigarette to the ground, wishing it could be the day.
    He had tried to adapt as well as he could, had come to, some might say, resign himself to this adopted country of his with its bright sun, dusty roads, sepia buildings, past built upon past. A city stripped down and built up again.
    But it was not the life he was supposed to live—this life, this Mexico City life. He closes his eyes and there they are—all quite clearly, going on about their lives, waking in those cold northeastern mornings when it was dark blue and felt as if night had forgotten to end, the heater clanking the children awake, he imagines. Three children, each born in a different country (Russia, France, Mexico) and all now Americans. They were walking around in streets filled with memories of his young manhood. His children, there without him. He can sometimes feel them, when younger, their small arms around his neck when he carried them in the early years in Mexico, the sound of their voices, saying Papa. How does one live with longing? He knows it. It was as if he were forever reaching, arms extended in a gesture of entreaty. Pulling on a rope, hand over hand, fist over fist, the rope only growing longer.
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    T HE Z ÓCALO : SPACE , a dusky silver sky. Steadfast buildings enclose the square. Streetlamps jeer, orange in the early evening . . .
not going

to

the
States after all
 . . . He falls alongside three older men, white hair, hands clasped at the back. One man’s voice low and thick from years of tobacco. The others listen as he speaks, nodding, earnest, grave nods. Austin recoils, draws his gaze inward and down, his shoulders hunched as if direct eye contact will sting. He is not far from it. These empty afternoons of old age, stepping into evening, stunned by the throb and pulse of all this life.
    Two women arm in arm clatter across the wide flagstones of slate, emerald, cobalt. A splice in his path. In their T-strapped heels and full skirts, he feels a yearning, a dull, near-forgotten burn of want that had made him falter in his fidelity; he