Native Country of the Heart

by Cherríe Moraga

  I recall that during our elementary school years, our mother once actually acted upon her constant lament that she had been denied an education. We were living in San Gabriel by then, and since her three children were grown enough to be home alone at night, Elvira slipped out to take English reading and writing classes at the local public high school. I remember her, in the late evenings, laboring over her composition workbook and my feeling a kind of curious superiority. The tasks inside seemed so simple to me. But we never lorded this over our mother. We very much wanted her to learn.

  The trouble was that my mother’s spoken English was perfect, as was her Spanish. She was fluidly bilingual in conversation and functionally illiterate on the page in both languages. Unlike her youngest brother and sister, who had garnered some Mexican schooling as children, followed by high school in the United States (which my breadwinner mother had insisted upon against the wishes of their mother), the specific conditions of Elvira’s binational gap in literacy seemed impossible to overcome. Plus, it was too damn humiliating.

  So, after a few weeks of having served as translator, community liaison, and social worker for her monolingual mexicano classmates (exchanging leads for jobs, childcare, y una buena sobadora), Elvira closed the book on her formal education and continued to use the fluency she knew best. She could walk and talk us out of most crises; and she deferred to her well-schooled children and her husband to maneuver the world of letters—check writing, job applications, and school permission forms. But that day in the psychiatric hospital, the world of letters came crashing down upon Elvira, without husband or child, as she saw it, to help dig her way out of the wreckage.

  I have no real idea what my mother thought on this, the first day of many incarcerations to come. I have only my sister’s story of unbearable sadness as she accompanied my mother, who was transported by wheelchair from the main hospital to the Della Martin Center psychiatric wing. I would fly down from Oakland in the next few days.

  “This is the most direct route,” the hospital aide assures my sister. They travel through a maze of underground passageways beneath the hospital. Low-hanging air-conditioning ducts and water pipes cast moving shadows across their faces. Elvira thrashes in the chair, banging her feet and dragging her heels against the unyielding cement floor. She is determined to stop this diabla steering her to hell.

  It was a horror film that JoAnn alone experienced, one that drew from the worst of our girlhood repertoire of grainy gray psycho films. And she, faithless daughter, was submitting our mother to this heartless drama. For I know this is how my sister felt. I know that in order to get my mother help, JoAnn had to counter every bit of self-doubt she carried and act above and beyond my mother’s violent protests. She had to be bigger than my mother. And this tore at the most elemental fabric of their fifty-two-year relationship.

  My sister had never talked back to our mother, not since her early teen years of Hollywood dreams and romantic dark-skinned beaus. My sister’s boldest acts of rebellion, or better said, resistance, ended by age eleven or twelve, just as puberty fell like an anvil of hopelessness upon our gender-restricted lives. Before that, before breasts and periods and pimples and maternal admonitions in the name of virginity, my sister wanted great things—movie stardom, international travel, and the free mind of books—and she had stood up for her cause with a tearless opposition against my mother’s lashing tongue and leather belt.

  “Cry, JoAnn,” I begged. It was all that our mother required. She’d stop hitting when the tears started flowing. But JoAnn would never cry, no matter how much I begged, the sting of the lash fresh on my own summer-naked legs. JoAnn would not submit and could not escape as my brother had. The moment he’d hear the metal belt buckle lifting off its nail hook behind the service porch door, he was out that door, my mother whipping the wind behind him.

  Ironically, JoAnn was the daughter who stopped rebelling, ending up closest to home, and made four grandchildren, to her mother’s delight and perennial worry. In that sense, maybe she had been the most faithful to my mother, she who always doubted my mother’s faithfulness to her.

  I remember so many of my mother’s dictums from when I was growing up—dichos, as they are called in Spanish—sayings by which we construct a life. “I may forgive, but I never forget” was one of Elvira’s most salient and was usually invoked after a particularly grievous act of disloyalty enacted by some relation. Locking her mother up that night, my sister knew the reverse had finally become true. Elvira would surely forget what had finally closed the keyless door on everything she understood as a life. But, my god, could whatever remained of our mother ever forgive us this beleaguered act of love?

  PART III

  ELVIRA’S COUNTRY

  The spiritual country of the human is a sensed world, not a known one. It’s a world where, put into words, meaning vanishes.

  —LINDA HOGAN

  From as early as I can remember, I thought of God and my mother as a kind of symbiotic unit. Hers was a faith no church could contain, since no church could contain my mother. She was a rebel in this regard, who turned to her home altar more confidently than any communion rail, who calculated the Catholic Church’s rules to her benefit, refusing to marry my father in the Church until she could wager, after her eldest child’s twelfth birthday, that the marriage might last. Until then, she had been technically “living in sin,” as her children’s Catholic school teachers instructed. And in that resided my first critical stance in relation to the Catholic Church. If the Church said my mother was a sinner, there was something wrong with the Church.

  My mother was a renegade of a Spanish-turned-gringo Catholicism that could never respond to the full depth of her faith. Even after the small wedding at La Placita Church in Los Angeles, and, as an elder, in tandem with my father, receiving her Confirmation, my mother’s spirit life had prevailed over the encumbrances of clergy and ecclesiastic law. I knew, as she knelt beside me at Sunday Mass, as I would one day witness at her own funeral, these rites did not house her ways of knowing.

  * * *

  Once my mother was admitted to the psychiatric wing, under thirty-day observation, and officially diagnosed with advanced Alzheimer’s, we knew she would not be returning home. As coincidence or fate would have it, my father would several days later be admitted into a nearby hospital for hip surgery; and I would sleep alone in my childhood home for the first time in my life.

  During the first few nights of my stay, I was awakened by a spirit presence, a palpable sensation of disquiet inside the walls of the house, especially in the back room where my mother’s altar stood abandoned, small plastic children’s toys and the smoked glass of an empty veladora awaiting her return. This is where my mother had spent her last nights of tormented sleep.

  There was nothing malevolent in the ánimo spinning down the hallway and in and out of rooms; only that the house felt alive with the memories Elvira had finally left forgotten inside those walls. Suddenly, to occupy that house without the physical presence of my mother was to stand inside the depth and breadth of the spirit life her small frame had carried for nearly a century. Without her physically there, her ghosts had been let loose to wander the rooms of that two-bedroom 1920s stucco house in search of her. There was no question in my mind that it was she they sought, she who in her last years at home straddled that seamless divide between visible and incarnate life.

  During those years, I had watched my mother begin to cultivate her dead ancestor relatives as her daily intimates. Spirit relations had come to reside in that small white house and increased in meaning as my mother’s remembered world lessened in importance. It was as if in a lapsed moment of synapse connection they had snuck in to inhabit my mother’s psyche. That’s one way to think of it. The Chickasaw writer Linda Hogan describes her own experience with amnesia as “a country of ghosts, a no-woman’s land [where] the daily details of a life no longer count.” This “country of ghosts” was the world my mother came to prefer over the intrusi
ons of caretakers trying in vain to tether her to our more mundane world.

  Elvira, she who had la facultad, as Gloria Anzaldúa called it, to carry all those ghost stories inside of her. How was I to honor them and their carrier in a twenty-first-century AngloAmerica where to reside with the spirits is to reside in a foreign country? We were so far from home, it felt to me—my mother and me—living out her final years in this nation of true amnesiacs that could not contain her calling.

  But that small white house, a house for which I believed I held no nostalgia, a house I had to leave in order to live, a house I marked as the site and source of my rebellion, had been country to my mother. It had allowed her permission to know what she knew and to reign madre over all of it, even as it occulted itself within the parameters of that narrow lot of crabgrass and rose garden in the smoggy basin of Los Angeles County.

  Are these small plots of lot and land what is left of memory as Mexicans in the United States?

  Is this how ancestral memory returns to us, indifferent to the generation and geography of borders?

  That night, alone in my mother’s house, for it was hers, not my father’s, as those abandoned espíritus made clear to me, I swallowed our Mexican Indian herencia in hard gulps of conciencia. It was she they missed, she who heard and spoke to them, she who had made daily offerings to them through finger-worn novena booklets, smoking veladoras, and a few folded dollar bills slipped beneath the altar cloth.

  But I had to get some sleep.

  I remember my Celia’s consejo: if you want spirits to go away you have to tell them so. I get out of bed and implore my mother’s spirit keepers. “She’s not here,” I say aloud, my voice dropping to a register of authority. “Now let me sleep.”

  And, miraculously, they do.

  Before succumbing to sleep, however, I make a promise to them; I will come back and put this house to rest. In my next visit, I will bring medicine to help us all—spirits and the living—make this crossing.

  SWEET LOCURA

  When I first spy my mother in the psychiatric wing, she is my mother and that is all that matters to me; that she is recognizable and that she looks back at me with that same light of recognition. I had learned from my sister that those first few days before my arrival had been the hardest. Each day JoAnn would find our mother latched inside a kind of adult-sized high chair that could be released only by the attendant.

  As JoAnn approached, my mother would scarcely acknowledge her. Hunched over the tray of the high chair, my mother applied her full concentration to folding a paper napkin into smaller and smaller fractions. When her folding could go no further, she’d open up the napkin and begin again, her arthritic fingers pleating and pressing the thinning paper over and over. Elvira must have derived a kind of comfort from the fine movement of her fingers, for it was an activity she would return to often over the next few years, especially when there was little impulse to respond to those around her.

  On the day that I arrive, however, she is remarkably “present.” “Mamá,” I call to her, feigning a casualness I could not possibly possess in that moment. She sits in the high chair, situated in the corner of a narrow dining-rec room of molded plastic chairs and long mess-hall-style tables. A large TV chatters in the corner. A few patients are gathered around it, others milling in and out of the room, others laid out in full stupors in La-Z-Boy recliners. Upon the sight of me, my mother immediately brightens. She opens her arms to me, “Ay, mi’ja!” She is elated to see me, no trace of rancor in her face. For the next twenty months, my mother, most times, could be counted on to greet me in just that way. “Mi’ja,” my daughter. “Mi’jita,” my little daughter.

  The translation cannot possibly express the pure grounding provided by that word for a Mexican child of any age. In a gesture of familial confidence, parents and tíos and abuelitas and even strangers tell it to us. So that, in a certain way, entre nosotros mexicanos here in an English-speaking world, it denotes the extended Familia de la Raza. A child knows instinctively whom to trust (or not) when that word is relayed between generations. For this reason, I have never called a lover “mi’ja,” nor allowed my peers to do so with me. It was a word reserved for my elders. It was the one thing that made the slow pain of losing my mother bearable; for when she could not remember my name, she always remembered “mi’ja.”

  After a day’s visit, of JoAnn and me escorting our mother in and out of the dining and activity rooms, Elvira asks me to go to the bathroom with her. There she borrows my comb to arrange her hair, wild from waning permanented curl and dark chestnut dye. She then accompanies us to the double remote-controlled doors to say goodbye. My sister and I are both nervous, fearful that with her newfound lucidity, she will want to come with us, fearful that we will have to reenact the trauma of relinquishing her to this place all over again. I hold my mother’s forearm against her unsteady gait as we make our way down the corridor. Her arm is pure vein and muscle, a road map of scars decades old, etched into the graying parchment of her skin. My mother and I share this: the hands and arms of worker women—stove burns and the abraded skin of decades of bleach and household detergent; the calluses of yard work, rose thorns, and heavy lifting.

  We make idle conversation as we near the door. I spy the attendant and with my eyes ask her to back us up as my sister and I take our leave. My mother and I embrace as I tell her that she has to stay. “You can’t leave now, Mom. Los doctores…” and then I mumble something by way of explanation. She is, for a moment, disoriented. Then she quietly complies. I observe her childlike wonder as we turn to leave and the door closes heavily before her. But in that final second, I glimpse her moving toward the attendant, having already forgotten we were there.

  On the other side of the door, my sister and I giggle nervously at the sheer marvel of our mother’s release of us. It is the first time in forever that my sister can remember our mother not being angry with her for something. The miracle of drugs, we think. For the first time we are hopeful that our mother might not go unto death in a fit of rage. For the first time, we imagine the possibility of peace for her and awareness, a slow, gentle letting go of all attachment, including her children. For the first time, the illness holds the fragile promise of benevolence.

  * * *

  Driving along Foothill Boulevard, I take the long way back to my parents’ house. The San Gabriel Mountains bear witness. Languorous gray silhouetted beasts, they remain my companions after so many years away from this valley. I loved watching those mountains as a child, bemoaned their disappearance in the summertime, when the smog fell like an iron curtain between hope and us. This was how it felt in those days, as if the smog had penned us in somehow, so close and yet so far from the muffled voices of Black and Brown rebellion in that late-1960s inner city just down the road from us. But when those Santa Ana winds kicked up and cleansed the Valley with their sweet loca currents, the mountains would reveal themselves personally to me. They were my emblems of hope; they compelled me to believe there was freedom on the other side.

  SEND THEM FLYING HOME

  I used to think the house mattered. Just a few months earlier, I had advocated for the importance of my mother’s daily rituals as a way to keep her grounded in her world: each morning taking a bowl of milk out to the street cat she had adopted; washing a few items of clothing; making the bed as expertly as she did when I was a young girl. Later I was not convinced that anything mattered to my mother except the events that transpired in the prison that was her scarred brain.

  In retrospect, I was weak. My sister’s hurry to clear out the house became my own excuse to avoid not only disagreement with JoAnn, but something else, something I could not quite say at the time. I only knew I held inside me a reserve—a holdout for Elvira that wanted to listen to each and every ghost she had abandoned inside those walls; that I wanted to take months to do so; that I felt they and she deserved at least that much. Maybe it is called spirit work. Maybe it is simply a matter of knowing that objects hold mea
ning. But in my weakness, I settled for three solitary days instead of three months.

  To say that closing up my mother’s house conjured strong memories would be to pretend to a kind of openheartedness I did not possess at the time. I found myself going through the motions, as it were, because the family body—living and ancestral—needed so much more time than this to inhabit the loss. In self-defense, I told myself that I already knew my mother’s secrets. What I didn’t know was the mystery behind my own impassiveness. Where was my heart?

  Where was that daughter who had been the privileged ear of her mother’s confianza? La niña who believed nobody was ever good enough for Elvira? No one could match her mother’s beauty and integrity, an innate intelligence that far outweighed the educated “foreigners”—the American nuns and laypersons—who stood before la niña in institutional-green classrooms, pressed beneath mission tiles and Anglo appropriation.

  I would never have thought to use such words then, for it was a wordless knowing—this half-century battle I was to fight against my family’s inevitable conversion to suburban stupor.

  In many ways, moving through that house was to move through the clutter of my mother’s mind. It was as if the house were a kind of three-dimensional staging of her life story—from health to illness, from order to what seemed like pure chaos, but at a deeper level that reflected its own strange ecosystem. Each cupboard and every drawer contained what appeared to be representative objects from every aspect of my mother’s daily domestic life: bras with their small foam cups stuffed into the same drawer with hair rollers, unpaid bills, loose change, a used dye bottle, a small box of costume jewelry, family snapshots inside unsealed envelopes, a half-used tube of Bengay, an old brown sock, prescription bottles, and holy cards, so many holy cards.