In “Anyone Can Do It,” the lead story of Manuel Muñoz’s brilliant collection The Consequences, the author captures the incalculable effects of those unpredictable moments that rupture the lives of immigrants and those around them. With unpretentious yet precise prose, Muñoz draws us into the hopelessness that deportation may incite but also intimates that these struggles can breed resolve.
“Anyone Can Do It” begins with the line “Her immediate concern was money,” which calls to mind my own family’s experience when we emigrated from Cuba. My father had died by then, and, like the story’s protagonist, Delfina, my mother was left to raise three kids on her own in a place thousands of miles away, surrounded by a language and a people we neither understood nor trusted.
Difficult circumstances can bring a kind of clarity, but moving away from home, even within one’s own country, always involves a form of loss too. Nothing we expect to gain when immigrating comes without a price, and those left behind may become embittered.
Muñoz compassionately unfolds Delfina’s story as she finds herself alone in California for the first time after her husband is deported. When she calls her family back in Texas, she is vilified for having made the choice to leave against the objections of her sister, who did not want to be left alone to care for their parents. It was much the same with my family. Three months after we left Cuba, my maternal grandmother passed away. The family blamed my mother for my abuela’s passing. For the next 28 years, only one tía wrote to us.
Muñoz understands that we Latinos can be insular when it comes to family. We are duty bound to care for our elders. It is not a matter of choice. To sacrifice for the sake of the family’s needs is an integral part of our culture. Maybe that’s why some of us have such an uncomfortable relationship with martyrdom. To give up one’s life for the right ideal, for country, or for family is something to be valued, and those who make this sacrifice are elevated, turned into someone whose actions we should emulate. Delfina senses this when she realizes that her neighbor Lis’s daughter was “inside the cool of the house.” Muñoz writes that Delfina “took this as a sign of the same propensity for sacrifice that she believed herself to hold.” From a cultural standpoint, to do anything less is to invite guilt. Lacking her family’s support, Delfina is forced to accept the inherent loneliness of exile and the anxiety that it engenders, some of which proves justified as the story takes a turn.
Lis, the one neighbor Delfina allows herself to trust, says of the man who used to live in Delfina’s house, “It’s a terrible thing to be alone.” The same sort of loneliness permeates many immigrant stories. And Delfina uncovers her ambivalence about the condition of her own life when she thinks, “This was only half true, that it is hard to make a go of it alone, but that it could be just as hard to live in a house without kindness.” The moment presents an unexpected opportunity for independence; she considers what would happen if her husband were to return: “To have them come back would mean the lull of normalcy, of what had been and would continue to be, just when she was on the brink of doing something truly on her own.”
Lis deceives Delfina and steals her car, and Delfina is faced with the reality that when survival is at stake, certain values become negotiable and trust is rendered uncertain or perhaps misplaced, the result of misinterpreting the forging of a true kinship. But to our surprise, she receives from a foreman—an unlikely source—what Lis so callously discarded: compassion.
On the day we were scheduled to depart from Cuba, the authorities told us that our flight was full and we’d need to wait another day. With our house already confiscated by the state, we had nowhere to go. They bused us to a run-down, rat-infested motel at the edge of town to wait the night. As we exited the bus, a young couple near the entrance saw my mother alone with three kids in tow. “We don’t have much, but here,” they said, handing her 20 pesos. “So you can feed the kids.”
Both Delfina and my mother learned that kindness and cruelty can come from unpredictable places and that even the direst of circumstances can unveil our strengths and our compassion. Muñoz leaves the reader to imagine Delfina’s fate after she experiences Lis’s betrayal, but my mother grew strong because of hardships and unexpected twists in human behavior, and we survived. Despite Delfina’s initial dismay about her husband’s deportation, I know she will too.•
Please join us on Thursday, February 20, at 5 p.m. Pacific time, when Muñoz will sit down with CBC host John Freeman and special guest Talia Lakshmi Kolluri to discuss The Consequences. Register for the Zoom conversation here.
