Trauma Theme Analysis

Luca adjusts the brim of his father’s too-big Yankees hat. Papi’s sweat is seeped into the hatband, so little currents of his scent puff out whenever Luca pulls it to one side of the other, which Luca does now at regular intervals so he can smell his father. Then he has the idea that perhaps the scent is finite, and he fears he might use it all up, so he stops touching it.

In Carlos and Meredith’s house in Chilpancingo, there are new ghosts to contend with. Trauma waits for stillness. Lydia feels like a cracked egg, she doesn’t know if she is the shell or the yolk or the white. She is scrambled. […] Lydia tries to read but her mind can’t hold the words. […] So instead she tries to keep her body occupied. […] She watches as Luca grows silent.

All her life she’s pitied those poor people. She’s donated money. She’s wondered with the sort of detached fascination of the comfortable elite how dire the conditions of their lives must be wherever they come from, that this is the better option. That these people would leave their homes, their cultures, their families, even their languages, and venture into tremendous peril, risking their very lives, all for the chance to get to the dream of some faraway country that doesn’t want them.

It’s overwhelming, to be in a beautiful, festive place like this. Lydia is overcome by guilt. Because it feels incongruous and seductive and wrong to witness the simple charm of a pretty place. She can see that same kind of notion land across Luca’s features, and she reaches for his hand. His mind does his awful thing to remind him not to be enchanted: it floods him with the helpful memory of all his dead family […]. Everyone gone. Luca is gone with them for a moment […].

Soledad catches Lydia’s eye across the top of Luca’s head, and some byway of recognition darts between them. They perceive each other, the unspoken trauma they’ve both endured, their reasons for being there. It’s as subtle and significant as a heartbeat.

“You seem a lot older than you are. Like you’re this old man in this tiny body.”

Luca tries to take this as a compliment. His body isn’t tiny; it’s only moderately smaller than a typical eight-year-old’s. “I’ve seen bad things, too,” he assures her.

“Yeah?”

He nods.

“I guess you wouldn’t be on top of this train if you hadn’t.”

“Es un prerrequisito,” Luca says. A prerequisite.

Rebeca nods.

[Lydia] pictures [Lorenzo] following from a hidden distance, but she doesn’t turn to confront her suspicions. She keeps moving, adelante, keeps Luca and the girls moving. It’s not until hours later, on the doorstep of a migrant shelter, that she accords herself a pause of reassurance.

“Elmer, your daughters called today,” [Ángela] says quietly. “Soledad and Rebeca called from Mexico, and they’re doing well, Elmer. Your daughters are okay. They’re on their way to el norte.”

“I just want to die. I want it to be over,” Rebeca says without any inflection to her voice at all.

“Well, you don’t get to decide that, Rebeca,” her sister says.

“I want to go home.”

“There is no home. We’re going to make a new home. This is the only way forward, so we go forward. Adelante. No more crying now.”

Rebeca doesn’t believe a single word of it. She doesn’t even understand how Soledad can preserve that kind of naïveté after everything she’s been through. Rebeca has been cured of innocence. She knows that there’s no safe place for them in the world, that el norte will be the same as anywhere else. Hope cannot survive the poison of her recent proof: the world is a terrible place.

Beto is talking beside her. “I heard if your life is in danger wherever you come from, they’re not allowed to send you back there.”

To Lydia it sounds like mythology, but she can’t help asking anyway, “You have to be Central American? To apply for asylum?”

Beto shrugs. “Why? Your life in danger?”

Lydia sighs. “Isn’t everyone’s?”

Lydia expected the crossing would be momentous. That it would happen in an instant, that she would, in the space of one footstep, leave Mexico and enter the United States. She expected to be able to pause, however briefly, so she might look back and reflect, both physically and metaphorically, at what she is leaving behind […]. She’s hoped, like one of those desert rattlesnakes, to shed the skin of her anguish and leave it behind in the Mexican dirt. But the moment of the crossing has already passed, and she didn’t even realize it had happened. She never looked back, never committed any small act of ceremony to help launch her into the new life on the other side. Nothing can be undone. Adelante.

El Chacal has never read academic theories of trauma psychology, but he has seen a thousand different varieties of it here in the desert. He is, in every practical sense, an expert in the field. He knows better than to give Soledad the gun.

Luca pins himself in next to Mami in a small dark place. He curls into her even though there’s enough room, pressing against Mami as if his life depends on her proximity, because now that they’re here, now that it’s this close, now that they’re minutes away from starting their new life, he doesn’t want to. In some primal way, he knows that once they’re safe the monsters he’s so far managed will come crashing in, and now there will be new monsters with them.

[Lydia] wonders if [Javier] feels anything now, or if he’s shut it all down, if Marta’s death was too much for him, so he found a loophole, a way to opt out of humanity. She is stronger than he is; she feels every molecule of her loss and she endures it. She is not diluted, but amplified. Her love for Luca is bigger, louder. Lydia is vivid with life.