LEQUEITIO, Mexico -- Saul climbs out of a pile of cotton. He wants to be a doctor. His teachers at the local elementary school skipped out after lunch. ''I won't learn my medicine very well," Saul says.
The ''lagoon rain" starts to fall. In the desert of northern Mexico, the rain is dust, thrown by wind. It sets upon the loading yard behind a factory with a clattering contraption marked ''Lummus Cotton Gin Company," ''Columbus, GA USA," and ''Patented July 23, 1935."
Battened tarps squirm and cough. The tractor men tug at T-shirts to shield their faces. A brick tower disappears. Young Saul, pudgy and round beneath his white tank-top undershirt, leaps over a metal duct, fallen to the ground, and laughs. Dust and cotton merge.
Octavio Paz, Mexico's Nobel laureate poet, once wrote:
''Time comes to a full stop, and instead of pushing us toward a deceptive tomorrow that is always beyond our reach, offers us a complete and perfect today of dancing and revelry, of communion with the most ancient and secret Mexico. Time is no longer succession, and becomes what it originally was and is: the present, in which past and future are reconciled."
Paz was describing the annual fiesta for the Virgin of Guadalupe. But does time not also come to a full stop for men and boys unloading cotton behind the factory? The present is not perfect. Yet it is there, for a moment, as air rises in a rush.
Like dust and cotton, Mexico and the United States merge.
One country was born from England, the other from Spain. Each brutalized its indigenous people. The United States isolated those who remained; Mexico included them, if barely. A war ended in 1848 with a new border, one of the longest in the world.
Markets opened. Dollars go south. Millions of Mexicans come north to work and live. They make up roughly one-third of all immigrants to the United States. A new culture digs deeper in Los Angeles and San Antonio, but also in Seattle and Des Moines. In East Boston, they hail from Jalisco. In New Hampshire, from Zacatecas.
Our future, however distant, is one.
In to Mexico, then, to measure the moments when succession stops and time becomes again the present.
At the very center, in Mexico City, the high valley paved thick with the concrete homes of some 20 million people, a room within a room falls silent.
A tall young man with dark features stands before a middle-aged woman with golden hair.
''Speak. Do not be embarrassed," the woman tells the young man. ''To me, what's most important is my daughter's happiness."
''Sorry, madam," he says, his expression pained, ''but it's too late for her and me to be happy together."
