Ivo Andric and the Rio Bravo: Dreams of Bridges in the El Paso Spring
“My favorite memory of Downtown was when El Paso-Juarez used to be considered the Paris of the Continent. We used to walk down there when we were lads and go to the banks of the Rio Bravo — the lush green banks. We would sit there for hours and watch the rowboats landing and the barges where the music played: the strains of those strange and sad songs that still haunt me to this day; the houseboats anchored for the night and festooned with lights and the merrymaking of a May evening; the merchants with their carts and stalls. We would watch the fine ladies stroll, dine in the open air; the courtship rituals of these blessed people; the elderly couples on their benches on the promenade, their social clubs, their games of leisure and fun, the stories they would tell.” — Arlo Klahr, “Paris of the Continent, or, When We were Lads”
***
It is spring in El Paso, a year into the COVID-19 pandemic, and life is again bursting from the ground, sprouts of green shooting from under the dead cacti and waxy savila that melted after the freeze. The mesquite trees have a particularly bright green hue for about the first two weeks of the season, before the leaves mature and settle into a deeper green. My son says with a nine-year-old’s certainty, “and who doesn’t like neon green?” There is not yet water in the canals or river; our bridges span a grey, hard concrete. There is no promenade, no reeds or willows, and any music is for private consumption only.
I’ve just finished reading Ivo Andric’s seminal novel Bridge on the Drina, spanning the wilds of the Balkans and the physical/metaphorical chasms of that region. It is an odd novel; a fictionalized history, with the bridge as almost a character and not just a setting in the story, which takes place over a period of 500 years. Towards the end of the novel, Alihodja, a Muslim shopkeeper, tells an origin story of the first bridge. When Allah created the world, it was smooth and round, but still not dried, and the devil was jealous. He scratched with his nails deep rivers and ravines in order to divide people and keep them apart. God felt sorry, and so sent down an angel, who spread his wings out over the chasms, allowing men to cross. Alihodja explains,
So men learned from the angels of God how to build bridges, and therefore, after fountains, the greatest blessing is to build a bridge and the greatest sin to interfere with it, for every bridge, from a tree trunk crossing a mountain stream to this great erection of Mehmed Pasha, has its guardian angel who cares for it and maintains it as long as God has ordained that it should stand.
But for a lot of the first part of this novel, the angels seem to be on break. Turkish guards execute two Serbs, the first an old man who was a wanderer between monasteries, who bore a “sort of thick stick decorated with strange signs and letters.” He speaks with no fear, answering the guards’ questions without guile. He emphasizes his lack of importance, “a mere traveler on this earth, a transient in a transient world, a shadow in the sun,” visiting tombs and monasteries and awaiting the Day of Judgment. In the translation to Turkish, “his words seemed suspicious, smelled of politics and seditious intent”. They take apart his staff, looking for concealed messages, to no avail. The Turks were “as if drunk with bitterness, from desire for vengeance and longed to punish and to kill whomsoever they could, since they could not punish or kill those whom they wished.” Wanting no trouble from the “mad old fool”, he is made to suffer execution. He and a youth gathering wood on the banks, singing a nationalist song, are the first two beheaded, their heads placed on stakes decorating the bridge and the bodies thrown into the Drina, the first two victims of many to follow during the Serbian revolt.
For most of my childhood, the Balkans were synonymous with conflict. Tourists largely did not visit, and the word “balkanization” was used in a pejorative sense, a fragmenting of groups that were mutually hostile. It’s only in hindsight that we can now see the beginning of our own splintering, our divisions, stemming from the 1990s in El Paso and our odyssey towards the abstraction of border security as a first and often sole priority. El Paso served as a staging ground for the increasingly punitive and cruel tactics to use on migrants, and despite the growth of population as a region during these past thirty years, we have no new immigration laws and no new bridges, but many more obstacles and impediments to our movement and connection.
***
Andric accurately portrays the blending of cultures and the adaptability of people who become used to mixing languages, currencies, and holidays. The Austrian Empire proclaims the lands of Bosnia and Herzegovina to now belong to the Emperor of Austria and the King of Hungary — coming not as an enemy, but “to restore peace and prosperity” and put an end to the “disorders” of a frontier region. Alihodja reads the proclamation, which is received with great skepticism by both Turks and Serbs. Andric describes both the tensions and the changes, as well as the preservation of traditions within homes from before the occupation:
But on the other hand the outward aspect of the town altered visibly and rapidly. Those same people, who in their own homes maintained the old order in every detail and did not even dream of changing anything, became for the most part easily reconciled to the changes in the town and after a longer or shorter period of wonder and grumbling accepted them. Naturally here, as always and everywhere in similar circumstances, the new life meant in actual fact a mingling of the old and the new. Old ideas and old values clashed with the new ones, merged with them or existed side by side, as if waiting to see which would outlive which. People reckoned in florins and kreutzers but also in grosh and para, measured by arshin and oka and drams but also by metres and kilos and grams, confirmed terms of payment and orders by the new calendar but even more often by the old custom of payment on St. George’s or St. Dimitri’s Day. By a natural law the people resisted every innovation but did not go to extremes, for to most of them life was always more important and more urgent than the forms by which they lived. Only in exceptional individuals was there played out a deeper, truer drama of the struggle between the old and the new.
***
My husband gave walking tours of downtown Juarez for more than a decade, prior to the fears of contagion that have largely shuttered tourism. In the spring of 2019, he started noticing Custom and Border Protection (CBP) officers at the top of the bridge, at the exact dividing line, asking for people’s documentation before they set foot in the United States. A few months later, the bridges were lined with desperate people, families with children, in tired and dejected piles, over 1,000 miles from their home. Advocates tried to organize school for the children and shelters attempted to house people, but nobody wanted to leave the doorstep, in case their number was called. It was a perverse lottery.
We see a similar procession of Turkish refugees from the town of Uzice through the eyes of Salko, a one-eyed son of a gypsy and an Anatolian soldier. The setting is idyllic, with the bridge shrouded in summer mists that change colors, and with the taste and smells of fresh melon and roasted coffee. The summer idyll is interrupted by a procession of 120 families, some making their way to settle in Sarajevo, covered with dust, overtired, destitute, the children beyond the point of crying. Their appearance makes a solemn impression on the townsmen who gathered for the evening at the bridge; some look down and ignore the people, and others offer a piece of food or a cigarette. This scene ends with one of the refugees smoking, then addressing the townspeople bitterly:
You sit here at your ease and do not know what is happening behind Stanisevac. Here we are fleeing into Turkish lands, but where are you to flee when, together with us, your turn will come? None of you knows and none of you ever thinks of it.
In mid-March, a group of migrants seeking asylum was flown from their point of crossing in the Rio Grande Valley to the El Paso Airport. From there, they were put on a bus and led over the bridge to Mexico, where the agents told them to keep walking. Without a river, they did not even realize they were in Mexico. Journalists observed people breaking down, weeping, realizing all their plans were for naught. A week later, President Biden announced a plan to further “deter” migrants, by deploying thousands of troops in Mexico, Guatemala and Honduras to hunt migrants. Our borders are shifting from the Rio Grande to the Rio Suchiate. We build centers of detention rather than centers of welcome.
***
Andric’s novel ends with the onset of World War I. A year prior, in 1913, the partitioning of the Balkans began, with Serbia and Greece grabbing different cities:
And now, now they lived to see that power like some fantastic ocean tide suddenly withdraw and pass away somewhere far out of sight, while they remained here, deceived and menaced, like seaweed on dry land, left to their own devices and their own evil fate. All this came from God and was, without doubt, envisaged in the ordinances of God, but it was hard for men to understand; their breath came short, their consciousness was troubled, they felt as if the solid earth was being drawn irresistibly away from under their feet as if it were a carpet, and how frontiers which should have been firm and lasting had become fluid and shifting, moving away and lost in the distance like the capricious rivulets of spring.
In the spring, the Rio Grande used to flood, with snowmelt making its way down into the acequias that channeled water throughout a city, depositing all sorts of minerals and rich soil that fertilized fruit trees and grape vines. The Spanish wrote of my city as a paradise, a river valley with the most delicious peaches. In the late 19th century, after El Paso was incorporated, there was still an acequia that ran by Magoffin, and residents would eagerly await the spring runoff to water their fruit trees. We have transformed a city with tendrils of life into one with official channels only. We adjust to the dictates of ever-shifting political forces in Washington and Mexico City. The pain they inflict is lodged somewhere within us all. I don’t know what it is doing to my children to live in a city and witness cruelty as fact.
Alihodja welcomes one of the imperial sergeant-majors into his coffee shop and takes the opportunity to question him about the explosives placed within the bridge, so that at any moment this monument could be destroyed and plunged into the Drina. The exchange between the two would be familiar with anyone on any border — the amiability and the appearance of “confidence and serenity in which Viennese good-humor and Turkish courtesy met and mingled like two waters” — was halted once it became clear that the actions of the state were being challenged. It’s best not to speak of these things, there are official secrets, “and so forth and so on”. The Alihodja persists with his line of questioning, asking what the bridge has to do with the war. He is not convinced by the officer’s explanations and finally loses his temper, saying the bridge was made as a bequest and it remains a sin to remove even one stone from it. The officer retreats into himself, changing the subject, returning to polite platitudes. Andric writes, “A page of white unsullied paper is eloquent compared with the dumb caution of such a face.”
One of my tenants, a traveling nurse, tells me that where she is from, “jumper” refers to a suicidal person. Here, it means someone who has jumped or fallen from the border wall. She has never seen injuries like this; compressed spines, broken bones, using gravity for the state’s dirty work. Is this what war looks like here? What wars are we fighting? Cartel wars, drug wars, wars against immigrants, wars against terrorism, race wars, water wars?
***
I went running from my house to a downtown neighborhood that abuts the border. It was just dawn, and I got trapped by a train that stopped for about ten minutes. Waiting, I sauntered alongside the park next to the wall, the steel slats topped with razor wire. On the other side is a wide bend in the river, and above are cameras that keep a watchful eye on the sparse vegetation. I think of how our imagination has totally failed us, if we only know how to build hard grey things. On this windy spring day, with the dust settling on my body, I know that those of us who paint murals, plant trees, open our homes and our hearts, and imagine a different world are in the end no match for the nation state.
A bridge should be more than a place of transit. It is a place of gathering, the possibility of an opportune palaver. It is a place to contemplate the middle — in the Balkan case, the rushing water that women threw themselves into over an unhappy marriage — to play games of chance or gossip, or in our case, for us to look down the dividing line of two great countries and marvel about how the air seems remarkably the same.
In the mastery of Andric’s storytelling, I can, from a century and an ocean removed, recognize the jaded border guard, the welcoming shopkeeper, and the Austrian elites coming to lay the railroad, promising industry. I can empathize with Lotte, the Jewish hostel-keeper who balances her books and keeps her extended family afloat, and I can distinguish the drunks and gamblers who patronize her inn. It is a familiar place, and I wish that literature could provide this same understanding for our border guards and for our politicians, so that we might settle for more contemplation and less action. Our well-worn bridges, not even a century old but crossing hundreds of thousands of souls each year, could use more color, more love, more vibrancy. They could be centerpieces of a post-national polis, places of rest to contemplate the desert flows, if our drought ever ends. I dream of our cities connected with one hundred bridges, every few blocks like in Paris or Dublin, small pedestrian bridges like the Ha’penny Bridge next to large ones like the Bridge of the Americas, with frogs and fish and birds playing in the undergrowth.
Glimpses of our future bridges, courtesy of Andric, include:
The bridge remained as if under sentence of death, but none the less still whole and untouched, between the two warring sides.
Or:
Down below there, too, was the ruined bridge, horribly, cruelly cut in half… the broken arches yawned painfully towards one another across the break.
Or:
The bridge still stood, the same as it had always been, with the eternal youth of a perfect conception, one of the great and good works of man, which do not know what it means to change and grow old and which, or so it seemed, do not share the fate of the transient things of this world.
We rise, we continue. We both placate and ignore the authorities. We scoff and dream. We lament and we suffer. We are more than a year without our cities connected, but we still smuggle, we still kiss, our children color outside the lines, and the nopales are all in bloom. Some of us are broken, some of us thrive, but we still can rise and, hand in hand, go “slowly down the slope which led towards the bridge whence the singing came.”
April 2021
