Near my house, there is a railroad crossing, and now and then—usually at the hour when night is thinnest—the whistle of a train breaks the darkness. It lasts only a few seconds, but it is enough.
In that sound, something opens in the depths of my memory.
I am no longer here. I am standing again behind my grandparents' house, (Mema and Pempa), in Brownsville, Texas, where the tracks passed so close that the earth itself seemed to remember every train.
When it passed, around four in the morning, the house would shake. The windows vibrated in their frames. The dishes moved slightly inside the cupboards. The sound broke through the walls and entered the body, low and heavy, like thunder refusing to stay far away.
And yet, I was never afraid. Not once. Instead, I pulled the blanket closer, turned towards the pillow, and let the noise pass through me. Even then, not knowing how to name it, I understood something essential: nothing could reach me there. Not while they were in the next room. Not while that house stood.
The nights stretched longer in those days. Time didn’t press as it does now. It loosened, let itself be carried away. The afternoon slipped into midnight, and midnight into the pale edge of morning, without warning.
The air carried the remnants of dinner—rice with chicken, the soft and warm aroma of homemade flour tortillas. Even hours later, it lingered, as if the house itself refused to let it go.
I moved through those rooms without doubt, without questioning anything. Mema and Pempa asked nothing more of me than to be there. In their presence, I didn’t have to become anything. I was already enough.
I didn't understand that then. Children rarely do. We accept love as we accept light—without examining its source, without imagining its absence. It is only later, when time begins to take inventory, that we recognize what was given to us.
Mornings began before the sun. Pempa was always the first—the spark of a match, the low boil of coffee when it was lit, the constant rhythm of something already cooking before the rest of the house awoke.
The house no longer exists. They tore it down, replaced it with something new, clean, forgettable.
But absence is not the same as erasure. It remains—intact, untouched—in the only place that does not yield to time: my memory.
I return to it without warning. In the middle of a silent room. In the space between waking and dreaming. In the brief and penetrating call of a train crossing the darkness.
That house was never just a structure. It was a border against the world. A pause within it. A place where nothing was demanded and nothing was denied.
I wouldn’t trade that house for anything—neither for comfort, nor for success, nor for all the distances I have traveled since then.
If I had known that those nights would reduce to memory, I would have tried to stop them. I would have listened more closely. I would have paid more attention to the common sounds—those that never think to last.
Now I am sixty-two years old. I am a grandfather too. My grandchildren call me Pampa—a name so similar to Pempa’s that sometimes, at night, I wonder if he found me alone, or if some part of me chose him unknowingly.
And sometimes, in the early hours, the train passes again.
Some hear it as noise, an intrusion, a break in the silence.
I hear something else. A distance that closes. A door that opens. A reminder that somewhere, still, that house waits in the darkness, steadfast as ever—waiting to welcome me home.
Leo Silva — Writer and former special agent of the DEA.
For 28 years, he was part of the United States Drug Enforcement Administration, with operations and investigations on the southwest border and in Mexico. His experience in the fight against Mexican cartels forms the backdrop of much of his literary work.
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