Mother Tongue

by Demetria Martinez

  This is what happened back then to women who didn’t marry or have babies, who quit going to Mass. They begged to differ. They questioned their own names.

  He picked the name José Luis.

  Twenty years later, his name is a lens that allows me to see him as if for the first time. Five feet, five inches tall. Hair black as a pueblo pot. A scar above his right eyebrow, a seam sealing some old wound. His almond eyes were welcoming as windows open to spring, no screen, white curtain fluttering. But the rest of his face, with its hard jaw and serious mouth, was boarded up like a house whose owner knows what strangers can do when they get inside. Alert and polite, he always looked for ways to be of help. Before long he would be making coffee, taping grocery lists to the refrigerator, feeding the cats. But attention to detail was also a spiritual exercise to divert demons of exhaustion, I’m sure of this now. He had the hands of a man who had picked coffee or cut sugarcane for forty years. I’m not sure when he told me he was twenty-nine years old. By then it was too late. I had already counted the tree rings around his eyes and fallen in love with a much older man.

  We must have gone down to Soledad’s basement, must have heard steps creak as our soles adjusted the lower vertebrae of the house. But it is the smell I recall most clearly, the odor of damp earth, adobe walls maybe, or else just laundry swishing in the machine or hanging from a line that drooped above us like an eyelid. Red chile ristras hung from a rib cage of pipes over the door to José Luis’s room. Dusty sunlight from an above-ground window touched down and lit up the objects in the room in a kind of still life: a bed with a blue Mexican blanket, chest of drawers, night table with lamp shade over a yolk of light, and a black pot blooming with dried chamisa.

  He said, I don’t need much space, all I have are poems and a Bible. He pulled these out of a shoulder bag, put them on the chest of drawers. His face suddenly grave, he surveyed the bed as if he feared someone might be hiding beneath it. Soledad had left running pants and a Harvard T-shirt on the pillow with a note, “For Our Guest.” I translated it for him, only dimly sensing the depths of the conspiracy I was entering into, a pact to make him into someone else entirely. We were to shield him from the authorities by way of a fiction, a story that would obscure the truth rather than clarify it. It’s amazing, looking back, to think that a few miles away a law library had books that were filled with words like aiding, abetting, transporting. Surely I knew the dangers. Yet surely wrongdoing was at the root of the thrill for a Catholic girl who had indulged in sex for the first time the year before, who had learned that breaking the law is a pleasure more poignant than sex itself.

  Yes, from the very beginning I wanted him. In that time of my life, men were mirrors that allowed me to see myself at different angles. Outside this function, they did not exist. It was a supreme selfishness, the kind that feeds on men’s attentions, a void flourishing in a void. José Luis would have none of it. When desire flickered across my face, he extinguished it with talk about El Salvador, the civil war, death squads, landowners. His struggles were too large and unwieldy to be folded up and dropped into my palm like alms. In the end, I had no choice but to love him. Desire was not good enough. Love would ripen in the light of time we spent together, like an arranged marriage. Except that I was doing the arranging. And calling it fate.

  Weeks or months after his arrival, he asked me, do you want to know my real name? I said no. No. I feared the authorities. But even greater than fear was my need for him to remain a stranger, his made-up name dark glasses he must never take off. Because making love with a stranger is always good. Even if you’ve known that stranger for a very long time.

  July, 1982

  Let me be

  the bridge,

  those troubled

  waters,

  his eyes,

  Let me be

  He’s the most wonderful man I’ve ever met (and gorgeous too), this José Luis Romero. I swear to God the moment I laid eyes on him I knew he was The One. And it can’t be a coincidence—that he arrived on the scene just as I was asking the universe whether or not there was more to life than just holding down boring jobs. I’d been so depressed. Now everything has changed. Still, I know I should slow these feelings down. Or else I’ll want to act on them—which always ruins everything. I’ve got to remember I can’t “make” anything happen beyond doing the footwork for some greater purpose that may be trying to manifest here. Maybe I’m supposed to just be his friend. Anyway, I don’t know anything about that awful war he fled. Maybe it’s better. He needs a friend who can just make him forget.

  As for me, since he got here last week I have gotten up every morning feeling overjoyed. The usual guilt that bombards me whenever I wake up and try and enjoy my coffee while reading the classified ads has disappeared. I don’t care anymore—not about getting a job or setting a schedule. In the mornings I actually enjoy choosing my clothes and putting on my makeup before driving to Soledad’s. This morning a volunteer has taken him to meet with a lawyer and so I’m just sitting here listening to Gregorian chants and writing in this blank book I bought yesterday. It’s like I’m going for longer and longer periods of time forgetting I’m depressed. Which maybe is a definition of happiness.

  Unexpected things are happening to me. Like yesterday—I loaded up my truck with cans and wine and beer bottles, then went looking for the recycler’s on North Edith. I stopped to get gas. And for some reason the smell of gasoline brought back memories of springs past. On KALB they were playing every bad but beautiful ’70s love song you could imagine. Before I knew what was happening I got back in the truck and drove to Kmart on Candelaria. I had maybe five dollars in my jeans pocket, but I couldn’t stop myself—I bought a black bra. The man hasn’t even kissed me yet. It was on sale. The blue light special. The store siren went off and I and all the other nuts pushing shopping carts attacked boxes full of bras that flapped around like crows as we grabbed them and held them up for size. I even bought nail polish (Aztec Red, 69 cents)—and this notebook.

  Peace. Joy. Openness to the future. How else can I describe what I’m feeling except for the big “L” word, which I don’t dare say out loud. Because it’s like yelling fire in a theater. Men flee and my girlfriends say to me, you fool.

  Postcard of Old Town, Albuquerque: eighteenth-century adobe plaza, shops with red chile ristras on doorposts like Passover blood, Native Americans selling jewelry under the portal in front of the cantina. The picture must have been taken after rain. The stucco surfaces of San Rafael Catholic Church are the color of a bruised peach. The church is formidable, a battleship of adobe buttresses, dense walls and beams jutting around the top like cannons. A century ago an ancestor, Bernadina de Salas y Trujillo, helped make a soup of straw and mud to coat the church’s outer walls. This fact seemed important to remember whenever I began to fall in love. When the spinning began and desperation set in, I reminded myself I am the descendant of women who did something useful with their hands, who knew what really mattered was to help shape something that would outlast their lives and their loves.

  I rented a 100-year-old house with mud walls dark as a wasp’s nest. It was across from the church, a few doors down from the cantina. Its walls were thick; I could sit in the low window frames of the living room or bedroom and watch the throngs of tourists. They were always taking pictures, an activity that reminded me of people who steal rocks from Indian ruins. I wondered if I would wake up one day and discover that Old Town had disappeared. Before José Luis arrived, I often spent afternoons reading the Upanishads or the Tao Te Ching at the cantina, where a friendly bartender added wine to my orange juice at no extra cost. Like a homeopathic remedy, the dose acted on me in a way that was all out of proportion to its size. In a gesture of rebellion I mistook for dissent, I declared to myself that God could be found not just in a church but in a bar. I was nineteen, young enough to believe I had outgrown the walls of San Rafael Church. North American to the core, a consumer, I saw religion as a bazaar from which I coul
d pick and choose. At the same time, I envied the women I watched leave morning and evening Mass, their faces wrinkled as ancient decrees. I wanted their faith, a massive doorway to stand under during life’s earthquakes.

  San Rafael’s bells pecking away the shell of night. Tourists wielding cameras, machetes to tame their new wilderness. Shopkeepers hanging signs and drinking coffee in doorways from paper cups. Very often, when I try to remember those days, everything comes to mind except for memories of myself: what I looked like or said or felt. This is where it gets painful. You see, memory does not always serve me. It seeks images and feelings to hook on to, but at times encounters only voids. The facts are easy enough to recite. I quit college in southern New Mexico during my freshman year when my mother died. I returned to Albuquerque, held down a job at an escrow agency, then quit. During the years of my mother’s illness, or maybe years before, I fled the world, went inside, ceased to feel. You could say I fell asleep. There was no mystery to it. Quite simply, it was easier to sleep and pretend to be awake than to stay awake and pretend to be strong. Twenty years later I can say this without shame. They had words for women like me. Insane fell out of favor as did nervous breakdown. Clinically depressed was, I believe, in vogue. But ask any woman who has had times in her life when she was not all there. She will say she was asleep.

  And women who fall asleep and don’t know why lack a plot line; this is the secret source of their shame. So I concocted a plot of my own, orchestrating what I could until characters began to say and do things I had never imagined, me included. To prove the gods at least were interested in me, I courted disaster, set out to love a man I knew full well would go away. Falling in love was a way of pinching myself. It proved I was alive if only on that thin line between drama and trauma. I handed my body over to José Luis like a torch to help him out of his dark places. I felt no shame. I was utterly unoriginal. To love a man more than one’s self was a socially acceptable way for a woman to be insane.

  Photograph of the Quaker Meeting House: A one-room school house in front of a barn, white with black trim, dice tossed in the middle of an alfalfa field. On the horizon, black clouds bloated with rain brush against the west mesa. I often visited the meeting house after José Luis went away and I ran out of ways to grieve. It was safe there, without hard edges, no altars or crosses or creeds, just respect for spaces as well as solids and a silence big enough for God. But on the night I am remembering now, pews creaked like an orchestra warming up as people greeted one another and sat down, talking excitedly. I was in the basement with José Luis. There were cots everywhere, and a sweet smell of almost-burned rice. A Guatemalan woman took a bandanna from her apron pocket and tied it around José Luis’s mouth and nose. His eyes rose like little suns above the blue cloth. He adjusted it, then looked at her as if for assurance that he blended in—a refugee now, not a man.

  It is that face, bizarre as an image in a tarot deck, that would appear in many newspaper photographs and evening newscasts. By the time he left Albuquerque, José Luis had told his story to a number of church groups. I was always there to tie the bandanna and eventually, I forgot why we were doing it and I ceased to be appalled. It all became normal. The half-moon of a face, camera lights brighter than the sun, his welcome “in the name of the Lord” to any immigration agent who might be in the audience. I always sat in the back of the room. After hearing his story once or twice, I stopped listening and tuned my thoughts to other, less painful frequencies. Someone was always available to translate for him, to catch his words in nets then let them out again.

  “My name is José Luis Romero. I was born in Cuametl, department of San Juan in El Salvador. My father died when I was two years old. My mother washed clothes for the rich family—the village landowners—to support us.… In our colonia, among other problems, we lacked access to water other than the river. This situation came up in discussions at our Wednesday night Bible study group at the church. Father Gustavo had us reading and reflecting on the Beatitudes. Blessed the hungry, blessed the poor. Father Gustavo helped us to see that it was not God’s will that we cross ourselves with holy water and die of thirst. Or take communion and starve. We decided that as a church project we would put in a communal well. There was even talk of starting a medical clinic with help from some Maryknoll nuns who were nurses.… The next Sunday we held Mass as usual. A friend of mine brought pupusas, which Father Gustavo used for communion because he said it reflected the people’s culture. I tell you this because the Mass was the center of our village life. It was also where our village life, as we had known it, ended. I was standing in the back of the church when it happened. Father Gustavo lifted the sacred bread during the consecration and several shots rang out. Our beloved pastor died instantly, a merciful death. Two days later we found his sister, who was pregnant, cut up in pieces behind the church. I could tell you dozens of stories like that.… Before he was killed, Father Gustavo had helped me apply to the seminary in San Salvador. I wanted to pursue theological studies, perhaps become a deacon and serve in the provinces that have no priests. Father Gustavo even raised money for my tuition, appealing to some Jesuit friends in North America. I was there not even a full semester when I learned that some uniformed men had asked the dean where I could be found. He refused to say, and so the men went to my house in Cuametl and questioned my mother and grandmother. When I went there that weekend, my mother told me to get out of the country and not look back.…”

  For twenty years I have stored the tape recording of his speech in a shoe box, his words ashes I couldn’t bring myself to scatter. But last night he came to me in a dream, a blue bandanna covering most of his face. He took my hand and said gently, let me go. Let me go. As I write this, I am remembering that for a moment in the dream his hazel eyes became my eyes, clove-colored, lids powdered with brown shadow. When I woke up I took the tape recording down from the closet and listened to his voice, a river still muddied with pain, transparent with conviction. Then I transcribed the tape. Pressing play and pause and play again, I listened to the melody of his words and wrote out the score. Afterwards I erased the tape, let silence dislodge his every word. I played it back to make sure everything was gone. It was like taking one last look around a hospital room where someone I loved had died. And I cried, I couldn’t stop, it was a surprise. I thought my arroyo of grief had long ago dried up, leaving only an imprint of the storm.

  Twenty years ago, quietly as a cat, he came up behind me as I sat at Soledad’s piano, listening to the recording of his speech. It was morning; I thought he was still asleep. He said nothing, just listened, as if he might learn something new about his life in the retelling. But in those days, when a refugee told his or her story, it was not psychoanalysis, it was testimonio, story as prophecy, facts assembled to change not the self but the times.

  I poured fresh coffee into our cups then showed him the article on the front page of the Albuquerque Herald, the photograph of his half-disappeared face above a swath of heads. Before I translated it I told him, the only thing they’ll get right is that El Salvador is the size of Massachusetts. I said, because your skin is brown, what you say will be followed by words like Romero claimed. Whereas if you were white, it would read, Romero said. That is how they disappear people here. Reporters aim cameras at you like Uzis. They insert notebooks and microphones between themselves and your history.

  ALBUQUERQUE, N.M.—In a speech blasting U.S. military aid to El Salvador, José Luis Romero (not his real name) told more than 100 church activists that he fled the Central American country because of so-called death squads.

  Romero, who spoke last night at the Valley Quaker Meeting House, claimed that several of his seminary classmates had been murdered in San Salvador by the paramilitary organizations. San Salvador is the capital of the nation, which is about the size of Massachusetts.

  Romero alleged that government authorities targeted the students because of their participation in a sociology class project aimed at identifying ways in which “t
he social fabric is affected when a few families own most of the land.” Anyone who is critical of the ruling elites is in danger, he told the group.

  “One by one, grass roots leaders in the shantytowns around the capital are being disappeared or killed. People are hiding their Bibles,” Romero said. “If you are caught with one, the authorities assume not only that you are literate but that you might press for change. The government wants us to go back to the days when the Kingdom of God referred to heaven only and not to what is possible on earth.”

  The 29-year-old man’s face was covered with a handkerchief. Church activists told reporters that refugees’ identities must be concealed to prevent harm to their families in their home countries.

  According to several sources, dozens of Salvadorans and Guatemalans have stayed at the Meeting House as part of an “underground railroad” that helps them get to Canada. Activists claim such refugees are rarely granted political asylum in the United States.

  Immigration sector supervisor Jack Houston condemned the gathering.

  In a telephone interview, he said church people who harbor refugees or “put refugees on display” are “advocating open violation of the law.”

  “Those people are a sanctimonious band of renegades,” Houston said.

  Did I really say all that, about reporters? Was I not, in fact, the one who read only the horoscopes, who looked to the stars to tell me what God could not? José Luis was Aquarius, I Cancer. His life was destined to be a statement about the times; I was to suffer the times in my body. His fate was to be a refugee; mine was to love one.

  July 1982

  It was really awful hearing José Luis last night at the Quakers’. I know shit like that happens in the world, but why good people get the bulk of it is beyond me. In these past two weeks of hanging out at Soledad’s or running errands, he hasn’t said a word to me about what happened to him in El Salvador—even though he’ll talk in a general way about what’s happening to the country. He goes out of his way to be cheerful and helpful around the house—he even draws doves on notes he leaves me, telling me he’s gone off with a volunteer to see a lawyer or to meet other refugees or whatever.