John Kaufmann

John Kaufmann

Willi

Omar told me, “I like women. I came out of one.” When my face said ick, he clarified, “We say that in Mexico.”

“You can’t say that in New York,” I said. “Even if it’s true.”

Omar was dark-skinned, short, roly-poly, good with people. He looked out the window of his optical shop, toward the sidewalk that the Palomas DPW had blocked off for water line repair just outside the door. “When the judge declared her missing, they gave me custody of the kids,” he said. “But they were living with me already.”

I scrolled on my phone for a picture of my son.

“She got into drugs,” he explained. “Went to Juarez, started hanging around with the wrong people.”

You don’t fuck with the cartels, I wanted to say but caught myself. Instead, I flashed my phone at him. On it, my son squatted on a dock in Maine, smiling and holding a minnow that he had caught with a hook and bait.

“How old is he,” Omar asked.

“Twenty-four,” I said. “He was born in late ninety-nine.”

“He looks like he is fifteen.”

“And your ex,” I said. Omar settled back into his chair behind the counter. “What happened to her?” I sat, too, in one of the customer chairs. “Her parents filed the missing person report,” he said. “That was that.”

I understand that people disappear in Juarez. There is no body and no funeral. The missing person report is the equivalent of a sheet pulled over the face. Many of the disappeared are women. There is even a term for it, femicide. The word is not a true calque on “homicide,” because homo, hominis means “person,” rather than “man”—but that is niggling. The thing itself, below the words, is a void.

“How old are your kids?” I asked.

“Two and three.”

“I miss having them at that age.”

“It’s a struggle, man.”

“Where are my damn glasses?”

“They’ll be here soon, amigo.”

When I tried speaking Spanish with Omar, he said, “I grew up in Colorado Springs.” He is thirty or thirty-two. His English is native, with the clear “L “s and up-talk that you hear in New Mexico. He has a talent for customer service and a head for business.

“What are you doing here?” I asked. If I were to stick my head out of the shop door and look to the left, I would see the Fence, two blocks to the north. Behind the yellow and black hazard tape around the hole where guys were digging up the water line, the main street was tan and dusty.

“I was deported. We had visas, but my visa expired when I graduated high school.”

The afternoon of the day before, I crossed right after school let out. International borders make me nervous because they remind me of Weber’s statement that the state has a monopoly on the legitimate use of force. That said, I had come a long way. I am not Homo economicus—I had travelled to the border for no good reason—but I understood that it would be a loss not to dive in. A gaggle of elementary and middle-school kids had just descended from three school busses and ran to the checkpoint past me. As some of the boys ran past me, I stuck out my hand for a high five. Children who live in Palomas can go to school on the American side for free, if they are American citizens. After the checkpoint, I wandered and then found Omar’s shop a block and a half into Mexico. He told me that he could put new lenses in my glasses in two hours, but I would have come back in the morning because he was about to close up. His mention of high school made me think of the kids I had seen the previous day.

“Why didn’t you go to college?” I asked.

“I was making good money doing IT for a telecom in Colorado.”

“Can you go back?”

“No, man. I was deported.”

“How many times?”

“Multiple times.”

When I ordered my lenses, Omar told me that I couldn’t use a credit card. “Efectivo only, man,” he said.

“Can you break a hundred?” I asked. “I hate cash. It takes up space in my wallet.”

Omar pulled out a wad of bills and flipped it open. “People here get angry that we only take dollars,” he said. “Ninety-five percent of our business is with Americans.” He peeled off a five, a ten and two twenties to make change. When he stuck the bills back into the register, the wad looked fat and moist.

“You ever want to go back?” I asked him. I thought about fondling dollars and speaking English all day every day, seventy yards from the Fence, what that could do to a guy.

“All the time, man. All the time.”

The Fence was what I imagined it would be. Twenty feet tall, parallel black metal slats with a thick cylinder at the top to make it harder to grab. Large enough, and black enough, to be a barrier separating two dimensions in a science-fiction movie. If that were the case, the gate that I scoot through by flashing my passport would be a wormhole. Just south of the Fence, the playground of the Escuela Primaria Ignacio Zaragoza abuts it. It would be possible for a child to jump off the swing set or the jungle gym and grab the slats of the Fence without touching the ground. Maybe cousins of some of the boys I gave high fives to do that.

When I emailed a picture of the school, next to and dwarfed by the Fence, to my wife, I captioned it, “There’s a story here.” Later, she asked me, “What’s the story about the school?” I said, “What I meant was, the picture is pregnant with a story that I don’t know.”

“You must get lots of women into bed,” I told Omar. “You’re good at customer service. You have a knack for it.”

“My girlfriend lives in Deming.”

“So—you can’t go visit her?”

“She’s gotta come here to see me, man.”

A few days later, a friend from Texas called me. We spoke about the time he spent on the Navajo reservation. “You would like the Navajo,” he said. “They don’t talk too much, but when they have something to say, they just say it. They don’t sugarcoat.”

“So, you think I’m a sour bastard,” I said.

“I’m just saying.”

The ability to sugarcoat would have helped me in the corporate world. It would have made it easier to glad-hand clients and climb the slippery flagpole. It would have made time in the office less lonely. I am married and have been out of the sexual marketplace for thirty years now, but I am still a healthy straight guy. I can’t help but think that an ability to sweet-talk would have helped me get partners into bed, back in the day.

My great-great-grandfather, Willi Spiegelberg, arrived in New Mexico in 1861. He was born in 1844 in Prussia and died in New York in 1929. He lived in Santa Fe from 1861 to 1888, from the ages of seventeen to forty-four.

In third grade, I wrote an essay about Willi. I said, “When Willi was thirty, he went back to Germany to find a wife. I guess he didn’t like the Mexican women.”

When I told that to my first son—the one who caught the minnow—he told me, “I could see you saying that when you were eight.”

“What do you mean?”

“You’re not a people person.”

Willi’s wife was named Flora. She had been brought up in San Francisco. Her father took her home to Prussia to find a German Jewish husband for her. That is where she found Willi. Maybe she didn’t like the guys in San Francisco.

Willi was the youngest of six brothers who came to Santa Fe from Germany. The two eldest, Solomon Jacob and Levi, founded a store in town. Before that, Solomon Jacob had worked for a merchant in Saint Louis and had served as a sutler for the United States Army during the Mexican War. Willi started in the store as a clerk and was admitted to the partnership soon thereafter.

It would be misleading to call the Spiegelbergs’ dry goods store a “store.” It was more the headquarters of a family office. The brothers had supply contracts with the Army and with the civilian government. In addition to trading goods, they invested in mining ventures, founded a bank, offered secured financing services, and, for a while, issued company scrip with the legend “Spiegelberg Hermanos” that was accepted as legal tender in the territory. In 1852, when the New Mexico legislature was short funds to pay its members, Solomon Jacob lent them four thousand dollars, which was paid back the following year. Their name wasn’t “Goldman,” “Sachs,” “Guggenheim,” or “Salomon,” but then again, the Guggenheims, the Goldmans, the Sachses, and the Salomons weren’t who they are now back then either.

The brothers’ core competence—the area where they made the capital that they later put into mining and banking—was supplying the Army. They supplied the American Army during the Mexican War and the Union Army during the Civil War. Levi was captured and held briefly by the Confederate army after the Battle of Valverde in 1862. When the Confederates occupied parts of New Mexico territory, the brothers suffered commercial losses, but they survived and continued to supply the United States Army after the war.

Between the Civil War and the Spanish American War, the United States used its newly industrialized military to clear the West of Natives. The clearance wasn’t called “genocide.” That is a twentieth-century term. It was called “Manifest Destiny.”

The brothers’ Jewishness was their edge. Because they were outsiders, they could trade with all the opposing parties. In addition to supplying the army, they supplied Native tribes who the army was displacing. They were the first retailers to offer credit to Hispanic customers who had been defeated in 1848. Like Mother Courage, they sold to all sides. Unlike her, they succeeded at it.

Willi was a people person. Everyone—Jewish, Christian, Anglo, Hispanic, Native, White, military, civilian—liked him. His nickname was Handsome Willi. He was a judge and mayor of Santa Fe. Flora founded a school. They entertained President Grant, General Sherman, and General Sheridan in their house. I imagine Willi selling firearms to a bunch of Navajo and then meeting with the local Army quartermaster an hour after the Natives departed. Everyone leaves a negotiation with Willi with a warm, fuzzy feeling. A man you can trust. Clubbable. Un hombre honesto y integro.

They climbed the greased pole well.

In the late 1880s, the family business broke up. Willi moved to New York to raise his daughters. He had made his pile. Now he was going to spend it. He passed the rest of his time playing pinocle. If anything is left of the Spiegelberg money, I don’t know of it. I certainly don’t have any of it.

I am related to Willi exclusively through women. My mother’s father was Irish. Her mother’s mother, Rose, was Willi and Flora’s second daughter. That makes Willi my mother’s great-grandfather and my great-great-grandfather. We are two men, both Jewish, linked tenuously by a line of women. There’s a Jew joke in there. Not one that I know. I just mean that the facts are pregnant with it.

Omar would say, “You should respect those women, man. You came out of them.” I would say, “You can’t fucking say that.”

Twenty years ago, the Spiegelberg descendants discovered that we owned a small, irregularly shaped plot of land in Santa Fe. Sandwiched between railroad tracks and an industrial throughway, and diluted between six brothers and five generations, it was not worth much. The family donated it to the city. It is now a park.

In exchange for the gift, the city put a plaque in the park commemorating the Spiegelberg brothers. A picture of Willi, Lehman, Solomon Jacob, Levi, and Emmanuel cast in bronze sits above a section of text describing the brothers’ contribution to the city. Elias, the brother who went back to Germany, is not present.

In the picture, Willi and Emmanuel stand like end posts, while Lehman, Solomon Jacob and Levi sit between them. Willi, wearing a frock coat and sporting mutton-chop whiskers, clasps his hands together behind his back and looks at the viewer’s seven o’clock. He is neither smiling nor frowning. His face has a blank, wistful air. I expect Willi to be smiling or at least locking eyes with his counterparty. Blank and wistful (or vistfull) is not an expression I expect from Handsome Willi, but the facts are the facts.

In a bar in Roswell, I showed a picture that I had taken of the plaque to a couple drinking next to me. “That’s my great-great-grandfather,” I said. “The one on the far left,” the woman took the phone from my hand to have a better look.

“He looks like you,” she said.

“Hardly,” I said.

I don’t think I look like Willi any more than I look like any other White guy with all his limbs. I believe that he has a blank look about the eyes that I have noticed in myself, but that could be me seeing what I want to see. And the past is, you know, a foreign country. I am clean-shaven, and I wear jeans and crewneck fleeces. I have a big nose, the beginning of a turkey neck and thinning hair. I appear in 3D and in color, while the nineteenth century is black-and-white and flat. It is hard to see through the mutton chop whiskers, the frock coats, and the paper collars.

I would like to speak with Willi. We are different types of people. He is a backslapper, and I am a sour bastard. He is a pillar of society, and I keep to myself. But we could talk about business. I would be curious to know where his goods came from, how he marked them up, and how he gauged the market when he ordered inventory. I’d like to know how he assessed borrowers’ credit and how he valued illiquid collateral. I don’t understand how documents issued by a private firm can function as legal tender, or how the issuing firm can make money from it, but I am sure that he could explain that to me. A lot of the information that I would like to learn would be closely guarded secrets—but he could divulge them to me because I am, after all, family.

I think that Omar and Willi would have enjoyed each other’s company. They are both extroverts and people-people, with a knack for customer service and business. Willi must have spoken Spanish. He spoke German and English, and Spanish was the lingua franca of New Mexico Territory even after the United States gained control of it. He might have loosened his paper collar, put his leather boots on the counter and lit up a cigar while he and Omar blew smoke rings and chatted about the price of corn and Indian raids in a mishmash of English and Spanish. If I were there, I would have sat next to them quietly, the only non-Spanish speaking, non-smoking introvert in the group.

There was no Fence when Willi and his brothers were running the firm. The border was pushed south to where it is now shortly after Solomon Jacob and Levi arrived in the territory. Jurisdictional claims were shifted, but people wandered over the river and the imaginary line the same way we cross from New York to New Jersey now. Nothing would have kept Omar from travelling to Santa Fe and working in the Spiegelberg Hermanos’s shop—or visiting his girlfriend in Deming.

If Omar worked for the Hermanos, they might have taken him on as a valued and trusted employee, but they would not have given him equity in the firm. He is not Jewish, and he’s not family.

The owner of the hotel that I stayed at in Columbus, just over the Fence from Palomas, was also the mayor of the town. For extra money, he drove a school bus.

“The kids who I saw crossing the border,” I asked him. “Can, like, anyone do that?”

“Some people say that they are a drain on our resources,” the owner told me. He was an older guy with a hunched back, but quite spry. “All of those kids, ten, fifteen years from now, will be in this country.”

“Say again?” I asked.

“Those kids you saw are American citizens. Every one of them will come to this country to work. The pay differential is too big for them not to come here. And when that happens, do you want them to be educated or uneducated?”

“I met a guy in Palomas today,” I said. “He grew up here, but he left because he wasn’t legal. He’s a decent guy and a smart entrepreneur. I think the country would be lucky to have someone like him.”

“We have boneheads in the legislature,” the owner said.

“We have boneheads everywhere,” I said.

“I call my girlfriend my ex,” Omar told me. “The girl in Deming. You know, I’m a Christian.”

Christian, I thought, pronounced a certain way, is a loaded term. It can mean different things, depending on tone and context.

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“When we met, we did everything everyone does. Then I joined the church, and we had to stop.”

“You’re shitting me.”

“No.”

“So, marry her!”

“I will, man. As soon as she’s baptized.”

“She can sponsor you once you’re married.”

“I don’t think so, man. They tell me I have been deported too many times.”

In an old joke, a Jew and a Mexican are both given a wish. The Mexican wishes for a million dollars. The Jew wishes for a bunch of cheap jewelry and fifteen minutes alone with the Mexican.

Willi does not wear glasses in the pictures that we have of him. I do not know whether that is because he had perfect vision or because he wore glasses but took them off when he stood in front of a photographer. I do not believe that any of the Hermanos wore glasses in any of their pictures. The likelihood that all six of the men had perfect vision, I think, is low.

Before he slipped the glasses onto my nose, Omar polished them. “I’ll throw in a case,” he said. “I usually only do that if you buy frames, too.” In the mirror, I saw a middle-aged Jewish man wearing dark horn-rimmed sunglasses with cat-like corners. When I turned my face, I noticed that the reflection on the left lens shifted more slowly than that on the right. I did not know whether that was an impurity in the way the lenses were ground or a neat trick. Put me in shorts and socks and I could be a dentist in mid-century Los Angeles, I thought. On a soundstage, I could be Groucho. Outside, the day was still hot and bright, but the lenses filtered the UV rays.

If Willi were alive now and needed glasses, I think, he would buy them from Omar. Omar’s lenses are well-made, quickly made, and cost only forty-five bucks. If the two men had spent some time together, Willi would have sold Omar a pallet of optical glass blanks, two large boxes of glasses cases, and a spherometer. But Omar is a smart guy. Both parties would have made money from the deal. In the alternate universe that I imagine, Omar walks the seventy yards from his shop to the Fence, sits down, and waits for it to crumble. Once that happens, he moves to Deming, starts a chain of optical ships and invests his extra cash in manufactured housing or self-storage facilities. Willi stops by his shop every month. When Willi visits, Omar closes the door and takes out a bottle of special reposado tequila. The two men loosen their collars—one soft and made of linen, the other hard paper—light up cigars, and play a few hands of cards. They ask each other about their kids and chuckle about an in-joke I struggle to catch. When they want to keep things between themselves, they speak in Spanish because they know that I can’t understand a word of it.