46 8.23.20
was a Styrofoam container with his remains.
Lucas and Eufemia didn’t open it. Instead, they
put it into an ornate gray metal coffi n and that
into a hearse that followed them back to Cubulco,
where the town turned out for Roberto’s funeral.
A procession fi lled the street in front of Rokuzzo,
where the wake was held. Ten Cubuleros then
carried the coffi n on their shoulders to the grave-
yard. There, Lucas had built a simple red brick
sarcophagus for his son.
Not long after the funeral, I went to Cubul-
co. At the Sunún family’s grocery, I found Caty
tending the register. When I said why I was there,
she began crying. Tomás and Magdalena were
in the store, too. They took me to the faintly lit
back room, near a conveyor- belt oven that was
pumping out tortillas. Men carried sacks of animal
feed in and out. On a table was a small altar with
a statuette of the Virgin Mary and a burning can-
dle. Above the doorway hung a framed portrait of
Caty and Roberto on their wedding day.
As Caty and I spoke, she gently swayed a
hammock. Inside, swaddled in blankets, was
her son, asleep. He was born a few days before
Roberto’s remains were repatriated. I asked his
name. ‘‘Roberto Tomás Emmanuel,’’ she said.
‘‘But we haven’t been able to formally name
him yet. The government hasn’t sent Roberto’s
death certifi cate.’’
Late in the conversation, Caty told me that
one of the other Guatemalan migrants in Rober-
to’s group, a young man named Santos, was
from Cubulco. He was, in fact, a distant cousin
of Caty’s. Santos and Roberto had met on one
of the buses and fi gured out their connection.
They were paired by the foot guide before the
group went into the desert. The guide gave them
a phone to use if they got separated from the
group. It was from this phone that Roberto had
last tried to call Caty.
After Roberto went missing, Caty called the
phone, again and again, for weeks. It was always
off. Then, one day, Santos answered. He told her
what happened.
Toward the end of the trek, he said, he and
Roberto were nearing the rendezvous point
where they would be picked up. But they were
dehydrated and exhausted. Santos couldn’t go
on. He collapsed. The guide wouldn’t wait, but
Roberto refused to leave Santos. He poured what
little water they had left into Santos’s mouth.
He prayed over him. Santos revived, and, now
separated from the group, they pushed on. The
guide called them, gave them directions. They
were so close, Santos recalled.
Roberto collapsed. There was no more water,
no shade to rest in. Santos didn’t know what
to do. He didn’t want to leave Roberto, but he
believed that if he stayed with him, he would die
himself. They would both die. So he left.
Santos didn’t see Roberto die, he told Caty,
but he also didn’t see how he could have made
it out alive.
‘‘He seemed to feel bad about leaving Rober-
to,’’ Caty told me.
She couldn’t be sure from Santos’s story that
Roberto had died in the desert, so she had held
out hope, to the end.
She had never told Roberto’s family any of this.
As I was leaving the grocery, I told Tomás that
I’d like to come back to speak with him about
Roberto. He shook his head sternly.
‘‘I don’t need to remember that,’’ he said.
Tomás had wanted Roberto to experience
the America he had. But that America no longer
existed — not for Guatemalans, at any rate. Of
the 860,000 people apprehended by the Border
Patrol in 2019, more than 265,000 of them were
Guatemalan, the single largest group. In the same
year, over 54,000 Guatemalans were deported.
Tens of thousands more have been detained. Sev-
eral Guatemalans have died in these facilities,
among them a teenage boy from a village near
Cubulco. Most of the detainees have been caught
near the border soon after crossing, but many
have been arrested in the interior, in raids on
the kinds of businesses and neighborhoods that
Roberto would have been working at and living
in. In April 2018, federal agents arrested 97 peo-
ple, many of them Guatemalan, in a meatpacking
plant near Nashville.
In Tucson, after Roberto was positively iden-
tifi ed, I discussed his case with the Guatemalan
consul. When I asked whom in Roberto’s family
I should contact, the consul told me that it wasn’t
clear. His widow and his family were arguing over
who would receive the body at the airport. Before
I spoke with Caty, I noticed that her parents’ store
was a matter of feet from the Rokuzzo barber-
shop. I asked if she ever went there to say hi to
Roberto’s brothers. No, she said. ‘‘They talk about
me behind my back.’’Roberto’s parents lived in the hills above Cubul-
co, in the same three-room wood-slat house that
Lucas built after they married. When I arrived,
washing hung over bucket sinks and chickens
chased one another around in the mud yard.
It was a Sunday morning, and I suspected that
they would be at church, so I came with a bas-
ket of fruit and a note with my phone number,
planning to leave it at their door. But as I stood
on the porch, a woman stepped outside. It was
Roberto’s mother.
I told her who I was and why I’d come. She
began crying. I apologized, off ered my condo-
lences and was preparing to leave, when she
began talking about Roberto. She spoke as
though he had only just died.
When I told her I had come from the U.S., the
place where her son was now supposed to be, her
thoughts turned to the coyote. She grew angry
thinking of that man who ‘‘left my son in the des-
ert,’’ she said. ‘‘That ungrateful, ungrateful man.’’
But then she returned to Roberto, recounting the
moment when she learned that he was leaving.‘‘He made up his mind to leave in a matter of
three days,’’ she said. ‘‘In three days, he realized
he had to make that journey. I told him no. But
he didn’t take my advice.
‘‘Well, he’s gone, right? He’s by God’s side. But
we’re still in pain, yes. It hurts because he was a
very smart man. He was a hard- working man.
Yes. He was kind.’’
She had been told nothing of her son’s death by
the Guatemalan government, nor for that matter
by the American one. When I told her I had been
with the medical investigator in Arizona when
Roberto’s body was retrieved, she had many ques-
tions. ‘‘I wonder if he was there for many days,
suff ering,’’ she said. ‘‘Do the immigration offi cers
go to that place often? Why did it take months
until they found him?’’ Finally she asked, ‘‘Did they
take pictures when they found him?’’
I told her yes, and I had them, but they were
upsetting. She didn’t hesitate before answering: ‘‘I
would like to see them. It doesn’t matter, because
we have experienced that pain already.’’
We went into a bedroom, where we were
joined by Roberto’s younger sister, Nohelia.
On the wall were photographs of Roberto, in
the corner a black case containing his saxo-
phone. Nohelia brought in two plastic chairs,
and Eufemia and I sat next to each other, while
Nohelia sat on the bed behind us. I opened my
laptop, brought up the fi le with Roberto’s autop-
sy photos and began scrolling.
‘‘I’m sorry’’ was all I could think to say. But
Eufemia didn’t look grief- stricken. She was con-
centrating intently on the images.
We looked at the fi rst photographs, of Roberto
lying facedown on Bird Nest Hill. ‘‘They found
him stuck on the ground?’’ she asked, as doubt
overtook her face. Roberto was unrecognizable,
and she seemed not to know whether to believe
this was him. After all, she had not seen him since
he left Cubulco. She had not opened his coffi n
after it arrived at the airport. ‘‘But that’s not him,
right?’’ she asked again. ‘‘That’s not Roberto?’’
I assured her it was. She motioned for me
to continue scrolling. We arrived at an image
of his face, with the mud- fi lled eye sockets and
the skeletal hand pressed to his cheek — and
the hair, still looking good. She didn’t cringe,
or even blanch. She looked up at a photograph
of him on the wall.
‘‘He was a handsome boy,’’ she said. ‘‘Look
at him.’’
‘‘When he was here, people called him Grin-
go,’’ Nohelia said.
I brought up a picture that the Tohono
O’odham detective had taken, the most striking
image in the fi le. It showed Roberto in the fore-
ground, while beyond stretched the desert, seem-
ing to emanate from but also culminate in him.
Hills, basins, hills, basins, a mild golden glow, a
ribbon of blue above. You could see deep into
Mexico. Eufemia gazed at it for a long time.
‘‘He walked all this,’’ she said.