Mother Tongue

by Demetria Martinez

  The Sandia Mountains, true to their name, ripened at daybreak, the color of watermelon. Here is a postcard of the Sandias, this is how they looked one early morning when José Luis and I were loading up Soledad’s brown station wagon. Two friends of hers were borrowing it for a fishing trip. Roped to the top of the car, a canoe extended over the windshield like the beak of an eagle. Fishing rods poked out of windows like antennae. One of Soledad’s friends—they did not tell us their names—adhered a Reagan-Bush sticker to the car’s back bumper. In those days, the Border Patrol did not stop cars with Reagan-Bush or Right-to-Life stickers on them. Nor did the Patrol stop and question white men. In my memory, one of Soledad’s friends that morning had blond hair and wore horn-rimmed glasses. Back then, when “fishing trip” meant transporting refugees north, a white man was an asset. Millions of years of genetic coding culminated in a kind of liturgy each time a Border Patrol agent waved him past the checkpoint outside El Paso.

  I’m trying to remember how it is that, after Soledad’s friends drove away, José Luis kissed me for the first time. It is like trying to take snapshots twenty years too late. At least I recall the smell—the sage we burned in a seashell for Soledad, who had called to say she had forgotten to bless the house before she left. If only I could follow the wisp of sage back in time to the moment.… The truth is, some of our tenderest moments are the ones I am least likely to remember. It has to do with what I said about sleep, how women like me sometimes flee, letting loving words or glances melt on the hot pavement of some nameless fear.

  So forgive me if I embellish; even a conjured memory is better than no memory at all if you would dare to give your life what the world did not, a myth, a plot. Besides, I never intended to reconstruct him from memory, just from love, which may be the only way anyone can ever hope to get at the whole truth. So let me say what might-have-been and maybe the facts will break through.

  We are sitting cross-legged on Soledad’s paisley couch facing one another and drinking coffee out of the blue mugs. I see a man who is not the same one I met weeks earlier at the airport. He is talking about rumors he picked up from the other dishwashers, about how easy it is to cross into Canada and to ask for a lawyer, to apply for political asylum. He says several of his coworkers invited him to join their soccer team, the best in the city, made up of Guatemalans and Salvadorans. It was amazing to me, how José Luis had salvaged the makings of a life out of fate’s refuge heap. Earning money, teaching me Spanish, helping Soledad’s friends translate human rights alerts: His activities gave him the confidence of a man who pokes a bonfire with a stick, dignified by the skill of generating light and heat.

  He asks, have you ever kissed a man whose name you did not know?

  I say, I knew the name but not the man.

  I am trying to escape into abstractions, to speak with an authority all out of proportion to what I am actually saying. To dazzle him so he won’t hear my heart galloping. I am about to get what I want and a rope of panic is stretched out before me as I run toward desire. I’m all stutters and sweat and clashing colors: purple pants, a green Lady of Guadalupe T-shirt. I’m afraid, after sitting cross-legged for so long, that my big toe will curl up in a cramp, my body an unruly cowlick. Then, he thanks me, yes, this really happened. He thanked me for sharing my sleeping pills with him, for making up a social security number based on numerology. Acts of solidarity, he said, his hazel eyes smiling. He touched my arm and I laughed, sipped from the chalice of happiness the universe set suddenly before me. He said, I love it when you laugh. Yes, it was real laughter, the kind that makes fences inside you fall. And seeing his opportunity, he crossed yet another border. Sweet collision of lips and tongues. I tasted Kahlúa and chamomile and some other barely familiar herb, steeped and sipped in another lifetime.

  Yes, I believe it happened that way; I feel joy now echoing in me, striking against the canyon walls of forgetting. Our faces floated above our bodies, helium balloons linked by static. Like a radio alarm clock, the cicadas started up. Time stopped. There began a never-ending August that, years later, I would remember every time I smelled the sea in a swamp cooler or tasted the sea in another man’s mouth.

  August 1982

  He said he loves me. He said he loves me. (I used to plead with my first boyfriend to say it!) José Luis kissed me for the first time, but what he said means even more. It’s happening just as I knew it was meant to happen. Spanish lessons, a ring that fits on my wedding finger, our drives back and forth between Soledad’s and Old Town. But most important of all, the word love. Without it my feelings spill all over the place—and it’s always me (and my friends) who have to mop up afterwards.

  Now I have reason to improve my Spanish. I have a word and a way of life to conjugate: Quiero, quieres, quiere, queremos.… To want and to love, the same thing! God, make this thing last. Make it last. I sound crazed, I know, but with good reason. My period’s due any moment, and I have found true love. The kind that pulls all of life in one direction. It’s too much. Already, his presence in my life is helping me forget all the sadness (what was it about?) that pulled me down for so long before he came to Albuquerque. And with the power of love I’m going to help him forget, too. Help him to forget the war that he fled from, that he says he still dreams about.

  This morning I woke up to the sound of San Rafael’s bells, and I remembered yesterday. I felt a grin spread through my whole body, pure bliss. The thought of being with him forever is intoxicating. But I’ve got to be careful. I’ve got to stay in the present. The minute I get hung up on the idea of forever, on what will happen tomorrow, I ruin everything. For all I know, the universe could get scratched like a record groove. We might do nothing but repeat yesterday morning over and over—couch to coffee maker, coffee maker to couch. (Yet what a gift this would be!)

  From the Tao Te Ching: Heaven is lasting and Earth enduring. The reason for this is that they do not live for themselves alone; therefore they live long.

  We did not make love, that is to say have intercourse, for weeks. Something perversely Catholic kept our explorations above the waist, the old religion erotically charging the most humble expanses of skin. Inner elbow, collarbone, fingertips. We touched each other on Soledad’s couch until 3 A.M. when the train’s cry severed the night. It’s late, we have to work tomorrow, he said. But I don’t need sleep, I don’t need food, just you, I answered. I unpeeled myself from him, removed myself like a bandage. The cruelty of limits stung: the need for sleep, food, a paycheck however small. If an hour were a house one could move into for good, I would have built a wall around the 2 o’clock hour, a brick wall arrayed against the disfiguring fury of the future. He playfully yanked at my hair and patted my cheeks as if plumping up a pillow. He said he worried I might fall asleep while driving to Old Town. I assured him I would not; after being with him I always tuned in to a rock station, volume full throttle. He took my hand and walked me through the portal where red chile ristras were suspended like tongues of fire. We opened a rotting wood gate that led to the front yard. After I got into the pickup truck, he kissed me goodnight, lips and forehead, through the rolled-down window. If he asked me for a sleeping pill I gave him half of mine, snapping apart a chalky oval no bigger than an infant’s thumbnail. I took a pill whenever emotions, good or bad, detonated, leaving a cloud of mental chatter I could not dissipate on my own. He said the pills helped him fall asleep after nightmares woke him up, causing his heart to race. It was as if our minds were satellite dishes, open to the murmurings of some dark universe. Signals bombarded us, signals we could not yet decode.

  Then one day it happened, it happened. I love you, José Luis. Te quiero, María. We opened each other up like sacred books, Spanish on one side, English on the other, truths simultaneously translated. I remember the scent of our sweat, sweet as basil as we pressed against one another on the basement bed. Lindita, mamacita, negrita: love words, the kind that defy translation. With his hands he searched my depths. When he found what he was look
ing for I moaned, felt a chill and then warmth as the seasons moved through me. Minutes later he came inside me, stiffened, sighed. Afterwards, he lit his cigarette on the flame of the Sacred Heart candle on the night table. He rubbed my feet with almond oil, talked in the dark about developments in El Salvador. We had both dreamed the night before about his country. I said, José Luis, last night I dreamed I was there, I smelled bougainvillea. He said, I dreamed I was there too, mi amor, but it was something about white phosphorus, napalm.

  He stayed awake, talked to me; I didn’t feel the doubts women sometimes feel when men fall asleep after making love, doubts delicate yet dangerous as asbestos fibers. Sometimes we held one another and listened to the shortwave radio that we had brought down from its place on the kitchen window sill. I remember a BBC commentator saying something about South Africa, and how his descriptions shattered like crystal wine glasses at the sound of a woman crying out in grief. But the sounds diminished as our bed bobbed away on the tide of sleep. Holding on to José Luis, my head pinned to his chest, I held on to the night, refused to let it slip through my hands. There were times I felt sad after making love. Intercourse often disappointed me. It could feel like a linear fitting of parts, a far cry from the creative pleasures of foreplay when we painted on the caves of one another’s flesh. Perhaps it would have been different had I wanted a baby. Maybe then the act, with its audacious committing of present to future, would have touched the flaming core of my being. But I’m deceiving myself again. Lying. For a long time after José Luis left me I continued to believe a man could touch my essence, make me whole. All that time I could have been writing, touching the fires of my being and returning to the world, purified and strong.

  You see, I was one of those women who is at her best when she wants something very badly. The mating dance, the yearning and flirting, surrenders and manipulations—I was good at that, so good at the pursuit that when I actually got what I wanted, terror appeared. Terror that wore the silly mask of disappointment.

  Here is a poem José Luis wrote, dated August 13, 1982. As part of a Spanish lesson, he had me translate it. We kept several dictionaries on the kitchen table. Dodging from word to word for hours at a sitting, we made our way across borders of language without passports or permits. I hid whatever poems he gave me in a sock drawer. The feelings his poetry engendered in me were like nothing I had experienced before. His words and those of the poets he admired made me want to sell my belongings, smuggle refugees across borders, protest government policies by chaining myself to the White House gate—romantic dreams, yes, but the kind that dwell side by side with resistance. The space we cleared on the kitchen table to do translations, near folders of clippings about El Salvador, was a magic circle. It was beyond law and order.

  #1

  night sheds her black silks

  it is the first day of the world

  love, lover

  I uncurl your sleeping fist

  your hands on my chest

  yield up their aloes

  scars recede

  resplendent our flesh

  no losers or winners

  when wars end

  just survivors

  to lay hands

  on one another

  to begin again

  —JL ROMERO

  Around the time of José Luis’s arrival, large numbers of U.S. citizens were beginning to make trips to El Salvador in groups called delegations. They met with sisters and priests, unionists, students, those who worked the land—anyone whose life the government had deemed dispensable, that is to say poor people, most of El Salvador’s population. And when delegations returned to the States, members spoke to anyone who would listen, in parish halls, homes, and on campuses. José Luis and I were among those who attended these presentations. I got good at whispered translations, rapid-fire summaries. Sometimes, exhausted, I reverted to Spanglish. I sprinkled Spanish words about just so, like dots in a connect-the-dot puzzle, and José Luis made the connections, discerning the full shape of the speaker’s intent. What I did not need to translate, however, was the grief in the voice of a U.S. citizen who went to El Salvador to learn about la situación and who came away with a memory of evil. Innocence was lost time and again in this fashion, leaving a void that would be filled with either forgetting or anger, an anger embodied very often in commitment.

  A priest who had traveled with an Albuquerque delegation came back with bullet casings imprinted with the name of a U.S. city—I can’t recall which one—where they had been manufactured. A month or so later the cleric gave away his possessions and returned to El Salvador for good, to work with the poor. These were not isolated incidents but formed what became a movement of sorts, of U.S. citizens taking an “option for the poor,” which liberation theologians said was God’s way of acting in history. These conversions could be traced to the stories of Salvadorans, stories about torture, dismemberment, hunger, sickness. I heard those stories and felt lucky. I had lost a mother to cancer and a father to infidelity. My losses were natural. Or so I thought then.

  After a delegation member spoke one evening at San Rafael church, José Luis and I went outside and, sitting on the steps of the kiosk, watched fake gas lamps light up one by one. The setting sun added a bronze lacquer to the adobe walls of Old Town’s shops. Folding their wool blankets, Native Americans loaded up pickup trucks with cartons of jewelry. José Luis took my hand and pressed it to his lips. Then, he yawned and stretched, reaching for the last rays of sun with forearms that had grown strong from washing dishes for endless afternoons. He took my hand again, traced the creases in my palm. For no reason I could discern, he looked at me and asked if he could call me María. I said of course, it’s just Spanish for Mary. He said no, Mary is English for María.

  The few friends I had during that spell of my life quit calling; the word must have gotten out that Mary was in love. They knew I wouldn’t come out of the house, the house I drew with crayons, a house of primary colors I called love. The first time I fell in love, friends tried to tell me it was not real. To prove them wrong, I drew a keyhole on the front door and invited them to look through to the other side. See for yourselves, I said.

  August 1982

  I can’t stop dreaming of marrying José Luis. It only makes sense. Marriage would be a way to kill two birds with one stone; I could save him from being deported and help him begin, at last, a new life. I could make something useful out of my life—and give myself some structure and direction while I’m at it. Besides, I practically live with him as it is. We’re either hanging out at Soledad’s or going back and forth to Old Town. He’s getting pretty regular work now at the cantina. (He met some other refugees there, including a guy from his own village.) The plaza’s like a third home to him, after Soledad’s and after Salvador.

  Heck, maybe we should just move in together. It would make things a lot easier. We wouldn’t have to spend half our lives in the truck. We could spend more time doing poetry translations, which is when he seems happiest. The problem is I don’t know if I could really bring myself to believe in living together. Because I still believe in marriage—no matter how many tries it takes to get it right. Though most people my age, last I heard, tossed marriage out along with the flat-earth theory. It’s embarrassing. Once a Catholic always a Catholic. You rebel and rebel against the Church’s stupid rules, but the fact is, you wouldn’t bother to rebel if you didn’t believe in your heart of hearts that there was something worth rebelling against.

  Even Soledad says if she ever gets married a fourth time, she’ll get one of her radical Jesuit priest friends to do the wedding. Besides, living together seems so ordinary nowadays. (And my life has already been too ordinary!) And Old Town is still an old-fashioned little village. If word got back to old Mr. Baca that the girl he was renting to was living in sin (across from the church at that), who knows what might happen? I still worry about what people think—as if they didn’t have their own secret sins. It’s ridiculous.

  (B
ut if by some miracle José Luis and I do get married, I want to write my own vows. It’s dangerous for a couple to promise to stay married until they die. It’s better to vow to stay together until the marriage dies—and to do everything in their power to keep it alive. If you don’t think of marriage as a plant, fragile and in need of attention, then you’re asking for major trouble.)

  I’d better get over to the cantina. José Luis will be off his shift, and we can get beers at this time for half price. We’ve gotten in the habit of going there in the afternoons. It’s really beautiful. Ancient wooden saints stand in niches in the adobe walls. Candles burn everywhere. We feel safe there. He told me that in the darkness, with the santos, no one can tell he’s an illegal. I told him no human being on earth is illegal. He accused me of being romantic again and said, go tell that to the authorities.

  One thing that worries me is he’s been drinking a lot lately.

  Every afternoon last week he finished off something like five beers in a sitting. I told him it’s not good to drink that much, and he cut back to two beers or so when we went back the next day. I think he did it not because it’s good for him but to please me. I don’t like that. It’s all to the same end, but I don’t like the means. When I’m most centered I want him to put his needs above mine. That’s what I hate about love. Bit by bit you start to give things up. You become like a good parent. But I love him so it’s all worth it. I’ve never felt this way about anyone.

  Two

  August 5

  I wish there were a way I could tell her. Say to María, you’re inventing José Luis. And your invention may be very different from who I really am. She sees my scars and thinks I was brave for having survived. She doesn’t understand that you don’t always need to be brave to survive the most brutal injuries. Unfortunately (or fortunately?), wounds will often start healing even if you don’t want them to, even if you would rather die quietly in the corner of a cell. The body’s will to live sometimes is greater than that of mind or spirit.