Mother Tongue

by Demetria Martinez

  I wish I could say to her, nothing I have done has required courage. When you’re being shot at, it doesn’t take courage to duck. Animals do as much. Me and my compañeros were being shot at so we dived for cover. And when we were not dodging bullets, we were asking questions about who made and sold the bullets, who bought them, and why they always end up in the hearts of poor people. We tried to figure these things out, to use our minds, our reason. Me and my seminary classmates are people of the book. Bible readers. Our cry has been, not by the gun but by the Word made flesh in action. How naive it sounds now. Like a dream of poets and would-be mystics writing in blank notebooks in far away North America.

  If there is courage to be found, maybe it is in the hearts of those who have headed for the mountains with guns of their own. The rebels feed the people, teach them to read and write. But they also teach them to defend what they have gained. That is the courage of choosing not to be a martyr. I thought I had made that choice, too, by coming here. And by day, when I am speaking to the other dishwashers about their situation, or helping volunteers translate human rights alerts, I know I am doing the right thing. Using words to educate people who have the power to influence the U.S. government. But at night, when I can’t sleep, the torture starts up. I think of friends sleeping under ceiba trees or on dirt floors in cement block cells. I am tormented, wondering if I did the right thing. Or if I should be in my country, fighting. With words. Or with guns.

  Sometimes the torment is so great that I turn to María for sleeping pills or sex or both. Sex to escape or at least to get me breathing again, to stop the cold shaking inside. And the next morning I have to live with my guilt at having used her. It wouldn’t be bad if she just loved sex. But she loves me.

  Or perhaps what she really loves is the idea of me. A refugee, a dissident, spokesman for a cause she knows little about, ignorance she seems to have made her peace with. She is trying to separate me in her own mind from my history. She thinks by loving the “real” me, the me before the war, she can make my memories of the war end. It is so American. The belief that people can be remade from scratch in the promised land, leaving the old self behind. I really think she believes if she loves me enough the scars inside me will disappear.

  And in my own imperfect way, I love her too. I love her for believing that I can be whole, for loving me even if I exist largely as a figment of her imagination. My María with a heart as big as this house.

  She makes a big deal out of the fact that I read the Bible. She says she has “fallen away” from the spiritual life. I hate it when she talks about me as if I were half god. She won’t give me the gift of flaws. And this is what worries me the most, that she wants me to save her. She talks about how beautiful our love is, how wonderful it would be if we got a little house in the Valley and brought my friends and relatives up from Salvador. Any woman who talks that way a month into a relationship wants to be saved—from what, I don’t know.

  If I knew, I could at least offer advice. But María doesn’t want advice. She wants a whole new self. It’s too great a burden for me. It’s all I can do to keep my own mind in one piece, far from the knowledge that I might never return home. How do I say these things to her? Do I just let things continue until they fall apart? The warmth of her flesh is all I have to make me forget. But alcohol does the same thing. Am I using her? Or is she using me each time she looks at me and loves what is not there?

  —JL ROMERO

  Until now, I haven’t had the nerve to translate one line from José Luis’s journal. I should have just buried it. I might have saved myself the pain of having to open it up to identify the remains. Before he went away he asked me to keep his notebook because he feared the authorities could use it against him if they found it on him and pieced together his true identity. Now, all these years later, my life has come to a halt because of words written long ago by a man whose name I didn’t even know. One new testament is all it takes to warp time, to call into question the neatly bound volume of trivia and revelations you thought was your history. He was right to leave his notebook with me. It has not betrayed his identity. But it is betraying mine, handing it over to be tried before a court in which I am the jury and judge.

  I said earlier that I have forgiven myself; it is not true. I look back and see a woman who was naive and sad, who looked to a refugee to save her from fear—the kind of fear that destroys, cell by cell, because it rampages undetected, unnamed. No, I haven’t forgiven myself for being disappeared from myself any more than I have forgiven him. You see, there’s more to the story than I have let on, more than I ever intended to let on. All these years I have told myself that he returned to El Salvador, that the authorities found him and killed him; this was what happened to most Salvadorans who got deported. But the truth is, I don’t know what happened to him.

  And all these years I have avoided calling José Luis by his true name, desaparecido, disappeared one. My altar should have a photograph of him, the date of his birth, and a question mark for the date of his death inscribed below his face. But I’m a coward. I couldn’t bring myself to draw a question mark much less live with it day in and day out. But God was wiser. He carved that question mark into my heart and kept watch over it until I could wake up and cry out. José Luis disappeared. He defied the ordinary scheme of things in which one is either dead or alive and I cannot forgive him for this. And I cannot forgive myself for loving him now, twenty years too late, in ways I could not love him when I looked to him to swim out in the dark waters of my life and save me.

  I have not laid hands on this story for six days, have not gotten near the paper. It has taken me this long to move beyond the resentment I feel at having told you the part of the story I had intended to keep to myself. Resentment, because in telling you—whoever you are—I opened the wound. I told myself the part of the story I had hoped to keep from myself, the disappeared part. But the unspoken words were turning into hooks, they were caught in my throat. Once a story is begun the whole thing must be told or it kills. If the teller does not let it out, the tale will seize her, and she will live it over and over without end, all the while believing she is doing something new. The Great Circle will come to represent not life but stagnation, repetition; she will die on a catherine wheel of her own making.

  Things began to happen. There were times he didn’t call, times he didn’t say I love you, nonevents that hurt in little ways, like paper cuts, but that added up. It could be these nonevents had happened all along, the normal ups and downs of relationships. But at a certain point, I began to perceive that he was pulling away from me and thinking about other things. And fear ate at my heart like battery acid. But it’s very likely that I only imagined him pulling away, imagined the whole thing. You see, the fear I am best at is always based upon a myth. It could be that the whole time José Luis was growing closer to me. He used to clip flowers from Soledad’s garden and give them to me, stems wrapped in foil, one of hundreds of small ways he showed he cared. But all these acts took place against a backdrop of flight—the assumption that to survive one sometimes must flee all that is loved. This is what terrified me. His body was branded with the equation, love equals flight.

  Sometimes we made love in my Old Town house, the mud house that the sun baked and cracked. The thick sheets of plastic I taped over my windows for winter insulation were down and the lace tablecloth I had pinned to a curtain rod could not thwart the gaze of tourists who occasionally mistook my house for a shop. So before we made love, I took a length of golden cloth that was seared with red Farsi characters and tacked it to the wood frame above the window. I don’t know what the characters meant. A man who sold lamp parts at the flea market had it among his wares; he couldn’t say where it came from, but he swore it was the color of luck. The forked letters were beautiful. The sunlight that strained through them dyed my bedroom a golden yellow; I felt I was moving through flames. In the heat and light we made love like the last two animals on earth. We struck at each other with our t
ongues like cobras. We twisted around one another and vowed never to let go. The fear that he would one day leave me jetted through my arteries. Fear was my yoga—it loosened my limbs and elongated my breath. It opened my third eye to the myriad possibilities of misshapen mattresses on nineteenth-century floorboards.

  The silence of the golden room with its blue walls and white door frames was astonishing. At most, we whispered to one another. To try to keep the room cool, we kept the door leading outside open. A sarong from Bali, the color of apricot skin and just as thin, hung over the screen; it was all that separated us from the din of tourists. Keeping quiet, we read the braille of one another’s bodies. Keeping quiet, he moved on top of me, found his way in. Afterwards, he whispered, I love you. I love you, I said. I remember how those words moved up and down my thighs, how, over time, they evoked not happiness but a thrill. You see, after a certain point nothing resembling peace filled me in that room except perhaps, for the smoky, gold light. No, it was all a thrill, exactly as one might feel after parachuting from a plane, joy dependent upon fear. José Luis’s body unclenched, he kissed my eyelids, my nose. He would have been happy, I’m sure, to rest. But I roused myself, roused him, and we had at it again. To this day, I’m not sure what aroused me more, sex itself or sex the symbol—emblem of a bond all the more magnificent because it would be torn asunder. I prayed he would stay but assumed he would not, assumed he would leave me for his war or for another woman. My mother’s cells had fought one another, a civil war that took her from me. When I was three, a woman lured my father from home. This story is not about them, but it would be dishonest to disregard the role their ghosts played in my life, maybe still are playing; I had to make something beautiful out of abandonment. Long before José Luis left me, I was using sex to weld our bodies together into a bronze statue so magnificent I knew even if it shattered, each remnant could stand alone.

  I remember how the room used to spin after we made love. It was always the same—to staunch the strange feelings of panic I got up, got dressed, turned on the classical station, and then took down the cloth with the Farsi words. What might have been a pleasant ritual turned into a series of regimented acts. I took down that beautiful cloth and folded it like a flag. I guess it was a way to make the room stop spinning, although I never would have admitted to myself that making love with José Luis was churning up something like chaos in me. Chaos that creates or destroys worlds, whichever comes first.

  You see, real love is quiet as snow, without chaos, hard to write about. Perhaps that is why I haven’t mentioned the man I have been seeing for a year, or maybe our love is just too new to have accrued meanings beyond pleasure. Our idea of a good time is a bed and breakfast in Northern New Mexico where he works for the state weatherproofing houses of the low-income and elderly. When he visits here every other weekend our time together is joyful, blessedly nondescript. His parents were survivors of the Holocaust. He loves life in a way peculiar to those free of reverence for authority, who can see through its claims, its need to order and crush life. When he comes over he tells stories of how he defies the state bureaucracy, weatherproofing in ways beyond those detailed in the code book, using whatever materials are at hand. In their Zen simplicity, his stories exorcise the inner authorities that say quiet, don’t tell, that keep women like me from speaking the truth about their lives.

  Photograph of my bedroom altar, Old Town: Santo Niño de Atocha, a Christ child on a throne who wears out his shoes as he wanders around each night doing good deeds; miniature Taos Pueblo incense burner; painting of Our Lady of Guadalupe from Nogales; African fertility doll, her coal-black head shaped like pita bread; mouthwash bottle filled with holy water Soledad had a priest bless; a film canister full of healing earth from the sanctuary at Chimayó. I liked it that José Luis and I made love in the presence of my santos. I knew they had blessed my love for him, however imperfect it was, however mad. They were not like the white God I’d had to kill, that women like me must kill if we are to have any hope of ever finding God. Nothing replaced Him for a long time. But looking back now I can see that the growing chaos inside blazed away dead growth, clearing a space, however violently, for God to be reborn.

  —————

  There were so many moments I would rather not talk about but in this dark night of remembering, they are blooming like night flowers. I remember waiting for his phone call as I sat in the kitchen counting the tablecloth’s red and white checkerboard squares. A volunteer who had taken him to meet with his lawyer had also invited him out for dinner. She was one of those women who knew everything there was to know about El Salvador, who ate and drank and slept El Salvador, who wanted to give birth to another Salvadoran. At least this is the lie that I told myself to justify my envy and fear. When no phone call came, I curled up like a shrimp until midnight cast its nets and hauled me to sleep. Another time I held my finger above the flame of my Guadalupe candle and held it there to see how long I could take the heat. When he didn’t call, my world shriveled. Fetal position. Blistered finger pad. Or when he called and didn’t say, I love you, I shattered, then mistook a piece of me for the whole, a mistake that disfigures women’s lives time and again. But I lacked the nerve to tell him how I was feeling. When his phone calls finally came, our conversations usually went something like this: María, I would have called earlier but I ended up helping some friends translate Urgent Action Alerts after the meeting. A literacy worker in El Salvador found red crosses, the death squads’ signature, painted on her walls. We started a telephone tree. Everyone is calling two friends and asking them to send telegrams to the embassy.… Don’t apologize, José Luis. It’s not that late, I was just sitting here reading the horoscopes.

  URGENT ACTION ALERT

  Following is a summary of KEY EVENTS in El Salvador for the month of AUGUST.

  8/5 Guerrillas enter Belén north of the city and hold public meetings.

  8/6 Twenty-six families occupy the abandoned Aragón hacienda in San Vicente.

  8/8 Archbishop José Grande denounces destruction of crops by the Mixtec Battalion (trained at the U.S. Army School of the Americas, Fort Benning, Ga.).

  8/13 Catholic Church officials announce that the military budget for El Salvador is likely to increase four percent next year.

  The amount used to pay the foreign debt will increase by 400 percent.

  8/20 Third anniversary of the Santa Ana massacre.

  8/25 Sixty families in villages north of San Vicente denounce army bombardment of their area.

  8/30 Archbishop Grande announces findings of his human rights commission. Interviews with surviving witnesses indicate El Cordero was the site of an army massacre. No estimates yet on numbers of dead but could be close to 200. U.S. State Department officials question commission’s findings and criticize American reporters who travel to the site. U.S.-trained Mixtec Battalion believed to be involved.

  URGENT ACTION:

  Write politely worded letters to President Alfredo Amérigo (registered mail, address on page two) asking for the release of catechist Margarita Bautista, who has been detained by Treasury police for over a month after speaking at a peace rally outside the Cathedral in San Salvador.

  Send copies to the White House and your representatives. See other side for updated list of disappeared and extrajudicial executions.

  September 1982

  1. Boil lavender in water and steam face (lavender to harmonize body and soul)

  2. Make a list of job-hunting tasks

  3. Do a 20-minute ONG NAMO GURU DEV NAMO meditation

  4. Go visit the sick or elderly or join a cause

  5. Get out of yourself.

  He hasn’t called, so I’m making a list. I’m making a list so I won’t fall apart. I won’t fall apart if I follow through on the list. If I follow through, I’ll forget about him and therefore set up the karmic conditions that will allow him to call.

  Now I remember why, in junior high, I used to write letters to myself (“Dear Mary”) w
hen I was feeling really good. I sealed them away in envelopes and opened them whenever I sank into sadness and paralysis. They always included pep talks, reminders of fun times, and to-do lists. I always said to myself, “I promise this won’t last forever” and I signed them, “the real you.”

  Now, as I write this, I can’t remember the real me. It’s terrifying, that you can love someone so much that you lose your own self in the uproar. I can’t remember the me who loves September, who loves to walk or read. It’s incredible outside. I can hear the hooves of horses pulling carriages around the plaza, San Rafael’s bells, the daily “shoot-out” for the tourists in front of Wild West Saloon. I know in my mind that I would feel better if I got out. But my body can’t follow through.

  At times like this I wish I had hobbies or political causes. My mother used to tell me, “develop your inner resources.” I should have listened. That’s how she survived Dad’s leaving her. That’s how she survived her death. She read bestsellers, she went on retreats at the Franciscan House, she recorded Soledad’s memories of coming up from Mexico, she even took up folk dancing and said, without any bitterness, that if she’d taken it up earlier she wouldn’t have gotten cancer, but at least she knows this for the next life. Thank God I’ve at least got this notebook. As long as I can keep moving my hand across the page I know I won’t die of depression.

  Here is a photograph of me and José Luis sitting on the adobe banco in front of San Rafael Church, frozen in mid-laugh. Behind us roses are growing wild around the rectory’s arches. With his Tibetan eyelids and Mayan cheekbones, José Luis looks like a god, an obsidian idol native people buried beneath Catholic shrines and revered under the noses of priests. He had slipped a rose behind my ear, a bud opening like the mouth of a hungry infant. I have on a purple T-shirt that I’d cut the collar out of to make it cooler. It’s slipping to the right; there’s a whisper of a black bra strap. My long hair is black with red highlights, my face olive. When a tourist snapped this photograph with my camera, my face had already taken on the full, fleeting beauty of young women the summer before something happens to make them ripen, the summer before the first fragile harvest of wisdom. The kind of beauty that returns much later in life if one can surrender all acquired wisdom and begin again.