Francisco Cantú Character Analysis

Dragonflies migrate as birds do, she told me, beating their papery wings for days on end across rolling plains, across long mountain chains, across the open sea.

I wondered if he thought of his body as a tool for destruction or as one of safekeeping. I wondered, too, about my body, about what sort of tool it was becoming.

You must understand you are stepping into a system, an institution with little regard for people.

Hay mucha desesperación, he told me, almost whispering. I tried to look at his face, but it was too dark.

There are days when I feel I am becoming good at what I do. And then I wonder, what does it mean to be good at this?

In the course of their work along the international boundary, Emory’s surveying parties erected […] forty-seven monuments along the newly traced line from the Colorado River to the Rio Grande, asserting, for the very first time, the entirety of a boundary that had hitherto existed only on paper and in the furious minds of politicians.

Outside in the parking lot, trying to gather my strength, I thought about the tears in Cole’s eyes, about Morales’s far-off gaze, about his parents huddled in the corner […] My face became hot and I could feel moisture collecting in my eyes. […] I closed my eyes and took a deep breath. I would not go back, I decided, I would not let the water gather into tears.

I dropped the little bird with one shot.

Saint Francis proposed a compact: in exchange for the wolf’s promise to cease its killing of livestock and townspeople, the residents of Gubbio would feed the animal every day for the rest of its life. “Thought shalt no longer suffer hunger,” he told the wolf, “as it is hunger which has made thee do so much evil.”

After hanging up, I sat staring at the camera feeds on the massive screen in front of me, imagining all the bodies that I knew were out there, undiscovered under trees and in dry washes, slowly returning to the earth.

I look out at the walls of the canyon and find that all beauty has drained from the landscape, that I am surrounded only by the sinister threat of violence, by faceless men and stacks of empty chests.

It is difficult, of course, to conceive of such numbers in any tangible and appropriate way. The number of border deaths, just like the number of drug war homicides, or the numbers that measure the death toll of the Mexican Revolution or the War of Independence, does little to account for all the ways that violence rips and ripples through a society, through the lives and minds of its inhabitants.

Antígona González asks: “What thing is the body when someone strips it of a name, a history, a family name? … When there is no face or trail or traces or signs … What thing is the body when it’s lost?”

Almost as a rule, he and all the cartel men he knew and worked with were always high and drunk when carrying out their work. After killing or torturing a target, the sicario says, “I did not fully realize what I had done until two or three days later when I was finally sober. I realized how easy it was that the drugs and the world that I was in were controlling and manipulating me. I was no longer myself.”

My uncle began to recount all the natural things he had been made to destroy in the years he worked as a contractor in Santa Fe. At one job site he tore down a mighty pine tree and cut it into pieces. […] It’s overwhelming sometimes, he said, to think of all the trees I’ve killed, all the scars I’ve left in the land.

To live in the city of El Paso in those days was to hover at the edge of a crushing cruelty, to safely fill the lungs with air steeped in horror.

“We must be able not only to reckon the number of deaths but to reckon with each victim as an individual.”

In order a begin a true reckoning with our inner situation, “we have to expose ourselves to the animal impulses of the unconscious without identifying with them and without ‘running away.’”

Mostly I arrested migrants, I confessed. People looking for a better life.

I tell you, Walter said, the Border Patrol, the marshals, it’s like they forget about kindness. I’ve almost never seen these guys express any humanity, any emotion. I don’t know how they do it. How do you come home to your kids at night when you spend your day treating other humans like dogs?

Of course he has fear. La violencia, she said, la delincuencia, la corrupción.

All these years, I told her, it’s like I’ve been circling beneath a giant, my gaze fixed upon its foot resting at the ground. But now, I said, it’s like I’m starting to crane my head upward, like I’m finally seeing the thing that crushes.

For his family and for you, José is unique. Sure there might be thousands or millions of people in his position, but it’s because of him that their situation is no longer abstract to you. You are no longer severed from what it means to send someone back across the border. You know what’s keeping him away, what keeps him from his family. It’s something close to you, something that’s become a part of you.

The part of you that is capable of violence, she said, maybe you wish to be rid of it, to wash yourself of it, but it’s not that easy. […] You weren’t just observing a reality, you were participating in it. You can’t exist within a system for that long without being implicated, without absorbing its poison.

Dragonflies migrate as birds do, she told me, beating their papery wings for days on end across rolling plains, across long mountain chains, across the open sea.

I wondered if he thought of his body as a tool for destruction or as one of safekeeping. I wondered, too, about my body, about what sort of tool it was becoming.

You must understand you are stepping into a system, an institution with little regard for people.

Hay mucha desesperación, he told me, almost whispering. I tried to look at his face, but it was too dark.

There are days when I feel I am becoming good at what I do. And then I wonder, what does it mean to be good at this?

In the course of their work along the international boundary, Emory’s surveying parties erected […] forty-seven monuments along the newly traced line from the Colorado River to the Rio Grande, asserting, for the very first time, the entirety of a boundary that had hitherto existed only on paper and in the furious minds of politicians.

Outside in the parking lot, trying to gather my strength, I thought about the tears in Cole’s eyes, about Morales’s far-off gaze, about his parents huddled in the corner […] My face became hot and I could feel moisture collecting in my eyes. […] I closed my eyes and took a deep breath. I would not go back, I decided, I would not let the water gather into tears.

I dropped the little bird with one shot.

Saint Francis proposed a compact: in exchange for the wolf’s promise to cease its killing of livestock and townspeople, the residents of Gubbio would feed the animal every day for the rest of its life. “Thought shalt no longer suffer hunger,” he told the wolf, “as it is hunger which has made thee do so much evil.”

After hanging up, I sat staring at the camera feeds on the massive screen in front of me, imagining all the bodies that I knew were out there, undiscovered under trees and in dry washes, slowly returning to the earth.

I look out at the walls of the canyon and find that all beauty has drained from the landscape, that I am surrounded only by the sinister threat of violence, by faceless men and stacks of empty chests.

It is difficult, of course, to conceive of such numbers in any tangible and appropriate way. The number of border deaths, just like the number of drug war homicides, or the numbers that measure the death toll of the Mexican Revolution or the War of Independence, does little to account for all the ways that violence rips and ripples through a society, through the lives and minds of its inhabitants.

Antígona González asks: “What thing is the body when someone strips it of a name, a history, a family name? … When there is no face or trail or traces or signs … What thing is the body when it’s lost?”

Almost as a rule, he and all the cartel men he knew and worked with were always high and drunk when carrying out their work. After killing or torturing a target, the sicario says, “I did not fully realize what I had done until two or three days later when I was finally sober. I realized how easy it was that the drugs and the world that I was in were controlling and manipulating me. I was no longer myself.”

My uncle began to recount all the natural things he had been made to destroy in the years he worked as a contractor in Santa Fe. At one job site he tore down a mighty pine tree and cut it into pieces. […] It’s overwhelming sometimes, he said, to think of all the trees I’ve killed, all the scars I’ve left in the land.

To live in the city of El Paso in those days was to hover at the edge of a crushing cruelty, to safely fill the lungs with air steeped in horror.

“We must be able not only to reckon the number of deaths but to reckon with each victim as an individual.”

In order a begin a true reckoning with our inner situation, “we have to expose ourselves to the animal impulses of the unconscious without identifying with them and without ‘running away.’”

Mostly I arrested migrants, I confessed. People looking for a better life.

I tell you, Walter said, the Border Patrol, the marshals, it’s like they forget about kindness. I’ve almost never seen these guys express any humanity, any emotion. I don’t know how they do it. How do you come home to your kids at night when you spend your day treating other humans like dogs?

Of course he has fear. La violencia, she said, la delincuencia, la corrupción.

All these years, I told her, it’s like I’ve been circling beneath a giant, my gaze fixed upon its foot resting at the ground. But now, I said, it’s like I’m starting to crane my head upward, like I’m finally seeing the thing that crushes.

For his family and for you, José is unique. Sure there might be thousands or millions of people in his position, but it’s because of him that their situation is no longer abstract to you. You are no longer severed from what it means to send someone back across the border. You know what’s keeping him away, what keeps him from his family. It’s something close to you, something that’s become a part of you.

The part of you that is capable of violence, she said, maybe you wish to be rid of it, to wash yourself of it, but it’s not that easy. […] You weren’t just observing a reality, you were participating in it. You can’t exist within a system for that long without being implicated, without absorbing its poison.