My Refugee
It is five in the morning in the worst of winter, and I wake up to a knock on the door (we bought the house last year, when everyone who could buy a house was buying a house, and were told to install a buzzer or a Ring or at least a peephole—everyone in the North Shore has one—but we’re never going to), so I look through the front window (basically a giant, two-way peephole), and the person who knocked is also me: Juan, the writer trying to get all this down and tell it to you. This other Juan has my face, my build, my middle-aged tells. It takes a moment to recognize him (I mean me; I mean myself) because that’s also what happens when I look in the mirror. I’m like, Who’s that old Colombian? What happened to me? But also, what happened to that other me? Though I sort of know. This other me asks if he can come in. I tell him to whisper. I tell him, Don’t wake up the children. He says it’s cold out, which duh. The phone says it’s close to zero degrees; with wind chill, likely under that. That other me is not wearing an appropriate coat, just a dirty beige windbreaker. He’s shivering. I’m wearing an L.L. Bean robe, fleece lined. Again, he says it’s cold. I tell him, Yeah, it’s cold, that’s why I’m keeping the door closed. He tells me it’s been a rough day already—it’s been a couple of long, rough weeks actually—could I let him in? I don’t want to, but I let him in, and again, I tell him to be quiet. The children are sleeping. He says he knows—he’s me—he shouldn’t have to explain: what I know, he knows, mostly. He follows me to the kitchen, where I give him a cup of coffee.
You’re not surprised to see me, he says, and drinks half the cup down.
He’s still shivering, as though I’m the ghost and he’s the one freaked out by the whole thing. Says it again: You’re not surprised. I’m totally surprised, I say. You’re not, he says, not really, not that surprised, not surprised at all. You’re here with me, I say. Where else would you go? But, he says, here is a whole other you, an exact replica (not exact, I want to throw in: he looks way older than me), here in your kitchen, drinking your coffee. You could be in a horror movie! You could be in Us or any of those creepy body-double movies we both love. Like the pod-people movie whose title I always forget, the one with Donald Sutherland? Or the remake that Abel Ferrara directed? Or the one that came before all of them, the one from the fifties? The other me says that’s what he’s trying to say: I should be freaked out; I should be close to inflicting violence or fear the potential infliction of violence. Also? Invasion of the Body Snatchers, come on, how do you forget a title like that? What if this other Juan (he points to himself) was here to take over my life? What if (and here, he points to the many innocuous kitchen implements in the kitchen) he were to grab one of these many innocuous kitchen implements and use them to bludgeon or stab me and take over my nice life, like we were in a Dario Argento giallo? I say, Please (not as in, “Please do,” but more like, fed up with his movie title one-upmanship, as in, “Come on!”), and what I don’t say, what I don’t want to tell him, is that I’ve been afraid that something like this would happen the moment I bought a house in the Chicago suburbs and had children: that some other version of my world would stop by to remind me of paths not taken, etc. Mostly, I’d like this other Juan to go away—the children usually wake up at six, the youngest first, so I have at most an hour in the day to myself, and that’s only if they don’t wake up early. Juan takes his time with the coffee, but I know he’d love to drink it down and go on to a second cup. I say, You should have called.
He pulls a dead and battered phone out of his pocket and asks me if he can charge it. I say sure, but also that he should have called before—he should have let me know he was coming. And he tells me, What’s the point—I knew or should have known, at any rate. Which, in all fairness, I did. Long before he was here, I had a watery awareness of his possible arrival, some apprehension that he might be in trouble. I’d wake up from what I told myself was a dream, even as the dream itself insisted it was no dream.
I’d told myself it was just a dream even when I knew it wasn’t, not quite. It was both a dream and also a kind of stubborn path that diverged and converged with mine, a life that belonged to me but one I’d rather not think about, some other version of myself I refused to recognize.
Right before we bought the house—on the day we closed on the house, actually—I dreamt that my dad never moved back to Colombia from Venezuela after the end of his gig in Guri. Our family stayed even as the economy collapsed, as Venezuela moved into the years with Chávez and Maduro. I kept this dream to myself, but I kept dreaming this other life, this other Juan, every night, and I knew that I had somehow brought this other self into being. He was very much his own person now, very much alive, if tucked away in a place I’d left behind.
I called my dad and told him about the dreams, not anyone else. Not my wife, not my friends.
Dad told me had had the same dreams: another Alvaro lived a parallel life down there, and because my father is an engineer, he did the reasonable thing—he Googled his other self, and sure enough. It was easy to find him, this shadowy other living a not-at-all shadowy life. I asked my dad if this other Alvaro and this other Juan had visited the family we still had in Venezuela, because that family would have been his as well, and he said no, he didn’t think so. Neither Juan nor Alvaro had made contact, even though the rest of his side of the family had had the same disquieting dream. Maybe, I suggested, we should call our other selves, or at least text them, and I was relieved when my dad asked why. They weren’t us, after all.
Why did he leave? That’s what I want to ask, but I’m not sure I can: I don’t know if he’s spoken to Julia Ema, my aunt who still lives in Venezuela. He wouldn’t know how sad and disappointed she’d be in his departure, even if I’m not entirely sure if she knows him or believes he exists. She’s just disappointed in anyone’s departure. My aunt has lived through the worst of Venezuela’s instability and has chosen to stay and doesn’t understand why you would choose to leave. Julia Ema insists that you can live in Venezuela, that the country is worth saving. My other aunt, Carmen Alicia, agrees: she travels freely between Colombia and the country my other self just abandoned; sometimes, she takes buses across the border, usually by Cúcuta, but she flies just as often from Bogotá to Caracas, and lives comfortably with the pension my grandparents left her. The money goes far, she says. Which is true and also not what Juan experienced. Also, not how I imagine Venezuelans these days: they’re just this long stream of people crossing rivers, crossing the Darién Gap, crossing with their children in tow. I don’t really see them. I try not to. I like them safely tucked away in the news. Or—sure—they made it here, and I see them—sure—but they’re panhandling at an intersection, and the light’s always about to turn green. Off I go. There they stay.
The Venezuelans ran out of sensible choices, is what I’m saying. Juan ran out of sensible choices too, is what I’m also saying. I saw what he faced, in my most disquieting dreams, what stark options he had left, what he had to do to make it here. It wasn’t easy. I don’t tell him about my other uncle, Rodrigo, the other brother in a brood of sisters, who had to call my dad when the military stormed his house, looking for some entirely different Rodrigo—my uncle calling while holed up in the bedroom he’d been shoved into with his whole family, all while men with machine guns destroyed his living room, and how my dad convinced him to move to Bucaramanga, to get a job as a warehouse custodian for one of our other cousins—even though Rodrigo had built himself a life in Venezuela and owned property. He left it all behind. Or how about one of my (many) cousins? Julia Ema’s daughter, Julieta, educated as a vet: she left that life in Venezuela and traveled the length of Amazonian Brazil on a bicycle. She dressed up as a clown and entertained children all along the villages close to Manaus. She did it for years. Julia Ema fought her daughter over this itinerant clown life: how could she just go out and do this, by herself, out in the wilderness? Julia Ema also deeply admired her. The last time she heard from her daughter was before Christmas. (I’m done making stuff up, by the way. What follows actually happened. What I’m about to tell you happened a week ago.) They found Julieta’s body buried not too far from what remained of her bike.
I couldn’t say any of this to this other Juan. He knew, or almost knew it, anyway, I imagined: I imagined he dreamt of me on the night I heard the news. I also couldn’t tell him that I kept it all to myself, that I didn’t write about it or put it on social media or anything. What I’m telling you now is no longer a story, no longer really made up. I’m just telling you something I don’t have the right to tell you, something that is not mine and that doesn’t make sense. It’s all true, this part, even if I am the wrong person to be telling it. I never met Julieta. I have lovely memories of Julia Ema. I am sure she was a wonderful mom. But she stayed in Venezuela. She insisted on staying. Venezuela had its troubles, sure, but she had built her life there. And this other Juan had to leave, he had no papers, nothing to prove that he was Colombian or something other than my own shadow, and here he was. Rodrigo lost his warehouse job. He’s a handyman now. And he is a phenomenal writer. And one of my other other aunts, Constanza, worked as journalist for glossy Colombian airline magazines for years, and when she left for England, that side of her got erased, and now she does something else. They should be telling you this story—you should hear it from them, not from me—but I’m not sure about your Spanish. I’m not sure you’d be at all interested in these crossings, or in what our family might have to say about the places we’ve left behind. That’s what I want to tell my refugee, but maybe he has dreamt of my own uneasy silence, my own troubling indifference—some kind of reciprocity is surely at work in these dreams that are the lives of others.
Mostly, I am trying to find the words for the good parts, the parts Julia Ema insists you can still find in Venezuela and that can I see and feel in the other Juan’s dreams: how you can still find cachapas and oysters, how you can drive to the coast sometimes, how the mountains and the plains and the churn of the Orinoco refuse to fade into the background, into a story of perpetual poverty and danger and death. How it’s a beautiful place, Venezuela, the country I remembered from when my parents were themselves beautiful—beautiful and young—and how my dad followed Julia Ema fresh off his engineering degree into Caracas because the country boomed with oil money. He thrived in Venezuela. We all did. And we left it all behind, and now Juan is here, no longer left behind, and I’d like for him to go back. Or at least to leave the house. It is almost six now—we’ve been at this for nearly an hour. In five minutes, my youngest will wake up. I’d rather she not see this other self. I want to tell him to go. I offer him a shower instead, but he doesn’t quite make it to the door: My daughter wakes up. She’s two, regular in her sleep habits. We fish her out of the bedroom, and for one awful moment she slips out of my hands and into the swift waters of a muddy river—the Rio Grande or the Orinoco or some shadowy stream in the Darién—and then I’ve got her, I’m myself again, and the river just a carpet. Our son will wake up soon—it’s inevitable now—and also my wife, and they will be like, way too sweet to this other Juan. They’ll insist he stay. Or stay at least until he’s back on his feet. They’ll give him some of my clothes. They’ll help him find work, even though he doesn’t have a work permit and is not, in fact, strictly real. I’m making him up as much as he’s dreaming my life, the both of us an imaginary possible self, had circumstances been just a bit different. And yet he still needs a job. But, like, he’s not really a person—even though he’s definitely got a body, my body, and even though his English is not atrocious. His life wasn’t even that terrible back in Maracaibo: he taught English, he lived modestly, he kept to himself and read decrepit Golden Age science-fiction paperbacks. He loved the warmth and the oily light of his tropical world. We have so little of that light here in the chilly Midwest, is what I want to say.
“Hi!” my daughter says, loud enough to wake up the whole house.
Now they’re here—my daughter, my son, my wife—all clustered around this second Juan.
My wife asks him if he’s hungry and I say, Of course he’s hungry, he’s walked all day, he’s been at this for weeks. For months. I never offered him any food, never offered him anything but coffee. I should have known better. Now there’s cereal in front of Juan. Now there’s toast. Now there’s more coffee. He knows that I’m a writer, that I’m turning him into a story, and for that I am sorry—I can feel him fading by degrees with every word—and I am sorry, too, for him not fully knowing that it’s happening, even as it is, and so I ask him about La Romanina, if he ever ate there when he lived in Caracas. That was our favorite restaurant, I tell him. I still dream of it. He’s about to answer but fades fully into this story, no longer a person, just the words you’re reading, just something I want to say about a person—and when he is finally gone, when my wife asks if he was ever really here (and I say, I don’t know, I guess—I guess so), I Google the restaurant.
La Romanina is a real place, an Italian restaurant where they’d serve me and this other Juan and so many other selves. They’d serve you too. All of us could sit together with heaping plates of lasagna. They’d shave parmesan tableside, like they do in any other city, and they did so all through all our lives, and they did so long after we left, and they’re apparently doing so now, refugee crisis or not. Through violence. Through dictatorships. Through absolutely fucking everything, La Romanina persists, as does everyone, those of us who leave and those of us who stay. And those of us who died. And those of us who do not strictly exist. We stick around. I’ll call the restaurant; I’ll do it as soon as I’m done telling you what happened, as soon as my other self makes his fictional exit. I want to know how the restaurant survived, how the restaurant owners kept going when so many could not, when so many had no choice but to stop. So many of us were forced to go elsewhere or forced out altogether, willed into someone else’s problem or dream or story, never here in the first place, never here and always here—always—even if you’d rather they be elsewhere. They’re not. They’re here. They’re not going away.
