By demanding that I attend a troubled entry into the world and, later, soccer games, science fairs, and graduation—by demanding not perfection but presence—José Luis drove me to ordinariness; that has been his great gift to me. He began by giving me reason to get up each morning. So that we could live, I got a job as a copy editor at the Albuquerque Herald. I joined a day care cooperative that the Quakers sponsored at the Meeting House. When José Luis started first grade, I signed on with the PTA and, eventually, a “Parents for Peace” project. We aimed to educate other parents about the menace of nuclear war and nuclear waste. When the elementary school principal tried to ban us from open house night, I circulated a petition demanding that we be allowed to display our literature. I presented it at a school board meeting and our request was granted. There was nothing mysterious about my budding interest in politics, which Soledad had long predicted. I wanted a better world for my son. God only knows if I have made any difference at all. But at the very least, life began to taste good to me; it became memorable. With each vote I cast or letter to the editor that I ghosted for friends, another part of me woke up.
Now, as I tell you these things, José Luis is at his computer in the basement, the room where he was conceived. The room where his father told me, I’m leaving now, I’m going back to El Salvador. Someday I have to tell my son the story of his room and the spirits that dwell there. But first, I must tell myself the rest of the story, chew on it like oshá root, sweat it out. What I can’t remember, I will invent, offer up my tales for those who were not granted time enough to recall, to mend. My son is cursed with a mother who makes up stories, a liar, blessed with a mother who is a storyteller given a blank notebook and a free hour. There are some memories I would rather fight to the death. Fight, rather than say to my son, mijito, once upon a time I gave you the name José Luis in order to make it real, to make a made-up name real.
Four
That night the rain sounded like piñón nuts trickling into a mason jar.
The world smelled like wet adobe, like chamomile flowers steaming on the stove.
Black lace clouds covered the face of the full moon, then lifted. Moonlight clear as white wine emptied into the room.
I tell you all this so that you will know the night was beautiful despite …
A blow to the face is the color of blueberries …
Let me backtrack. Let me try again. Son. Mijito.
It was the last day of October. And just as a woman’s cycle can get off track, the season mistook the sun for the moon or the moon for the sun and a rain that smelled like spring flooded ditches and arroyos. The rain beat down on Soledad’s house, made her screen doors swell and stick. José Luis and I opened windows and talked of wanting to turn the soil, plant seeds, make things grow. We were giddy that night, your father and I, laughing at nothing at all. Without giving me any reason, he insisted I drive him to the discount store; I did, and he bought a tape player for me—they used to call them boom boxes—with money he had saved up from washing dishes. Long and squat, it had speakers on each end and knobs in the middle for tuning treble and bass. We took it down to the basement along with a six-pack of beer and put it on the chest of drawers where your father kept his Bible and poems. During the summer he had introduced me to the music he loved: the Chileans, Víctor Jara and Violeta Parra, the exiled Salvadoran group, Yolocamba Ita, tapes he dug up from Soledad’s cedar chest. These were songs of struggle, not just about love’s struggles, and they began to break my heart. And as it is at times with bones, my heart needed to be broken and reset properly so it could carry me through life.
But on the night I am telling you about I wanted to hear Aretha. José Luis read my mind. He was so proud of that tape player, so proud that he could buy me a gift. He had the smile of a man about to win a marathon when he dashed upstairs to get my tape. He watched me while I put the tape in and fine-tuned the Queen of Soul. We wrapped ourselves in the starry night of her voice. Then, like pagans welcoming spring, we began to dance. I don’t know what got into us but whatever it was, I’ve seen it in you, mijo, when spring appears for a day in February and you walk outside in shorts. I was wearing your dad’s T-shirt over a white cotton skirt. My hair, which was very long, was tied back in a braid. I wore three or four rings, long black bead earrings, a diamond stud pierced in my upper right lobe. Can you believe your mother dressed like that? You must wonder why I can remember clothes in such detail. It helps me to remember feelings, that’s why. And if I can describe the feelings of that night, the silk and barbed wire of it, then I will have told you the whole truth.
You see those marks under the brass handle of your top drawer? That was where we snapped open beer bottles before we sat on the bed and toasted El Salvador. Your father was as dark as you, very handsome. He had found extra work tarring roofs; the autumn sun got under his skin and stayed there. He wore patched jeans, no shirt, a St. Jude medal on a chain around his neck. He took my breath away; I’m not embarrassed to tell you this. He leaned up against the headboard, smiled for no reason. His face did not flicker with a thousand emotions like yours does; it was an event when he smiled. We held hands, watched the moon disappear behind clouds, then reappear in the basement window. The lace curtain you used to think was so “girlish” was parted; I had hung it to soften the wrought iron bars that protected the glass. For some reason José Luis got it into his head to teach me how to blow on the lip of the beer bottle, to create the sound of wood flutes he said were played in the Andes. What I’m trying to tell you is that we were happy that night, happy. Yet the word is too homely to describe what we felt.
We opened more beers; empty bottles collected beside the Sacred Heart candle on the night table. José Luis said, mornings smell like this in Salvador, like soaked earth. He said, someday I’ll take you there, you would love the mornings. Your father had never said anything like this before. It was beautiful, outrageous, and we knew it would come to pass. We laughed, peaceful as oracles who know precisely how things will turn out and so are free to leave the logistics to God. José Luis may have said other things, I don’t remember. But slowly, silence had its way with us. You’ll see how it is someday when you fall in love. For several weeks our love had been quiet as circles radiating outward in a pond. We had forgotten the sound of the stone that started it all.
You see, your father had become my friend. No, I didn’t know his real name, but he had ceased to be a stranger. The drives to Old Town, washing the floor, cleaning beans. The most mundane tasks made us real to one another. You’ll know what I mean if you ever marry and stay in love. And so that night we loved one another, simply. There were no exploding stars, no insatiable hungers. We embraced with our whole bodies; we were like two hands clasped in a prayer of gratitude to the universe. Mijito, this is the night you were conceived. You were loved into being by a woman and man who, despite all the world can do to people, set aside their fears long enough to wonder at spring rain in October.
You need to know all this because I don’t want you to be frightened by what happened next. We got up and put on sweatshirts because the air had begun to thin. The window was cracked open and José Luis closed it, turned the tape over. He turned around and looked at me; it was my favorite song. Something about how you’re the only thing in the world that I need, that I’ll ever need. Standing there below the window, crossed with bars of shadow and light, José Luis was handsome as a god. I watched him, wanted him all over again. At that moment, I don’t know why, I remembered an invitation we had received in the mail the day before. I said, we’ve been invited over for supper by one of the Quakers. I know you remember her. She translated for you once. Her name’s Ana.… I never finished the sentence. In a frightening flash of movement, José Luis flattened his body against the wall as if someone around a corner were taking aim at him with a gun. He slid down to a squat. His eyes squinted into blades. I said, José Luis? But it was too late. He could no longer hear me with human ears.
Ribs heaving, he cam
e at me like a jaguar. And he let loose a terrible cry of no. Words surfaced on the dark waters of that no: I’ve been looking for you. We found Ana’s body in the ravine near the airport. I saw what you did to her hands and her tongue. You hunted her down like an animal. We were going to get married. All we wanted was an ordinary life. I sat, paralyzed on the dark bed. For a terrible, eternal instant clouds extinguished the moonlight and my face had disappeared and become the face of the soldier who killed Ana, the soldier with no heart, dismembered and dismembering. I opened my mouth to ask, who’s Ana? but nothing came out because José Luis’s hands turned into fists, one for each friend whose life had been torn like a page out of history. I thought I heard the air crack, branches breaking. I guess I lifted my hands to protect myself, surely I shouted. But I’m not sure, not sure at all. Because somehow I managed to leave my body, to float away from the basement bedroom and the hammer of fists on flesh.
Seconds as long as a train’s whistle passed, one by one. Then everything stopped. His hand was raised to strike me again but an invisible wire held it up, a puppet’s hand. On the wall behind him his shadow stuck to peeling paint exactly like those shadows of human figures in Hiroshima, signatures left by the bomb just before flesh evaporated. His whole body had come to a halt except for his eyes. And in his eyes I could see people running and dropping, flames and plumes of smoke, processions of women holding photographs of their children, telephone poles falling, bridges flying to pieces. I’m telling you the truth, I saw all this and more in his eyes. Your father and his friends had handed their lives over to the cause of stopping the war and in the end, they could not even flee from it. All these years I have been too afraid to tell you what happened to us that night. War is a god that feasts on body parts. It deforms everything it touches, even love. It got to me, too. It cut out my tongue.
Every story has its medicine; you must figure out what you most need from this one so you can take it and let go of the rest. Maybe you will come away from what I have told you with peace. It’s not your fault that anger sometimes splits you in pieces that crash like plates of earth. Those sounds penetrated my body the night we conceived you, and the blows figure into your destiny as surely as the positions of planets that ruled the night. I forgive you your rage, the rage of your teenage years that, aimed at an absent father, struck me instead. Now, son, forgive yourself.
And here, perhaps, is more medicine. I worry for you when your eyes turn to blades as you watch the news or when you pound computer keys like a wartime reporter as you write term papers about toxins and topsoil. What burdens you carry trying to save the world! It is a habit of Americans to think heaven gave us a unique destiny, that we are to spread truth among nations. Luck and too much wealth allow us to imagine ourselves in this strange light, luck and wealth that have benefited both of us. We have had the luxury, unthinkable to most people, of developing talents. Use them, José Luis. Hold to the dream of saving the world. But be at peace: you are not unique. It may be God is asking nothing of you except to remember who you are—one of millions conceived in love and war, in a night that shattered like a beer bottle on a curb as a voice called out stop, stop.
I’m tired, frightfully tired. Like snake venom, this story’s medicine had to be drawn from my own body. Maybe you won’t even read this, I don’t know. Long ago I began this tale for reasons I could not yet articulate, maybe for no reason at all. I could not have guessed I would end up fulfilling my half of a bargain I struck with God when you were born, that if you lived I would tell you the story of your origins. Promesas are as dangerous as skydiving, leaps into thin air. Nothing frightens me more than an answered prayer. And nothing taxes a body more than giving something back to God. This is why I am so tired, why I have spent this day crying in my room. This is how badly I wanted you to live.
What happened next was almost anticlimactic, like a building caving in a few minutes after an earthquake. I was on the floor by the bed, my face wet, my body still rumbling in an endless tremor. José Luis dropped down beside me, took my hands and whispered, what have I done? I said, it’s me, María. It’s me, María. He looked into my eyes; he saw me cowering inside. Then we reached for one another, held on for dear life. We were like two airline passengers who are perfect strangers until the pilot announces an emergency landing. We held each other, we landed, but instead of rejoicing, we wept. I touched my cheekbone. It was a large, hot pulse. I could feel my heart pumping extra blood to put out the fire in my face. The room began to spin, sickness washed over my abdomen. Then, I remembered.
A man, a neighbor, offers to stay with me while my mother goes to the hospital to see her father, who is dying. I’m seven years old. My mother’s long brown-red hair is pulled back in a braid. She kisses me. Says, I’ll be back soon. The car crunches gravel as she drives away.
The man, who has just come from work, wears a tie and a suit. When he smiles there isn’t really a smile there; it’s a minus sign.
He says, your dress is crooked. What a pretty red dress. Let me straighten it out. But I hear, I’m going to straighten you out.
Something about the hem of my pretty dress being too short. Something about hands crawling up my thighs, thumbs under panties.
A finger in a place you hardly know exists is a knife. A knife in a place for which you have no word is the most lethal of weapons. It carves words on your inner walls to fill the void. Words like chaos, slut, don’t tell, your fault.
The girl with the ponytail opens her mouth but someone has cut the wires that link thought and expression. She is receiving millions of signals, children everywhere crying out, but the speakers have broken down.
The girl is alone in the house, alone with the man. Within minutes she learns that bad things happen when you are alone. She learns fear of being alone long before she learns to say abandonment.
The place of pleasure becomes the place of fear.
I can only speak of this a few sentences at a time. Bear with me. I cannot recall everything. I might never recall everything. But see the blank spaces between sentences? I promise to fill them in if I do remember. For now let the blank spaces honor that in me which is too injured to remember. Bear with us, the thirty-nine-year-old woman, the seven-year-old girl. Honor.
The man smiles his minus sign smile, canceling the girl. He gets up off his knees and turns on the TV. Time for the news. Men in baggy clothes that make them look like rocks or trees genuflect, set rifles on their knees, take aim. Helicopter blades shred the sky. Winds beat the jungle down from three dimensions to one. The men with guns have on helmets that look like turtles. They point their guns at small men with almond eyes and matchstick cheekbones who come out of the trees with hands behind their heads. Smoke billows, breaks up into characters, a language that has yet to be invented. A village is burning. The village becomes a smoke signal that not even God can decipher.
The man with the tie greets the girl’s mother. She has come home from the hospital; her father is not doing well. She smiles through the worry, thanks the neighbor for staying with her daughter. The man turns off the television. Says, the war will get worse before it gets better. Or was it, the weather will get worse before it gets warmer? The girl’s mother gives him cookies wrapped in tinfoil. Thank you, good-bye. Thank you, goodbye. He smiles, canceling the two of them. He is dead in the eyes. The world is flat to him. He will go out and cancel whole populations.
The girl opens her mouth to say something to her mother. But she has no words for what has happened, no words for evil. Besides, it’s beginning to snow, a spring snow. She presses her nose to the windowpane. Fat flakes splat on glass, stick to rocks like moss. She imagines a wonderland as white as in fairy tales her mother reads to her each night. The girl is beginning to drift off, to forget. For many years she will not know that much of what she is doing is fighting sleep.
Twenty years later I still go by the name María. When I said to José Luis, it’s me, María, I remembered. And the ghost of the man with the minus sign s
mile fled. The demon could not bear it. He could not bear the sound of my true name.
November 2, 1982
Mijita—
Thank heavens you called me. You’ve been so quiet all summer, and I was worried about you when I took off last week. I’m just grateful you know I’m here for you all the time even when I’m away. Your bruises will clear up soon enough. It’s the inner bruises I worry about most. You’re very wise to go to José Luis’s counselor. He’s a good man. It’s not easy but you’re on your way. The worst thing is not remembering. That’s the devil’s tool. As I told you, it happened to me too. I was about five. So you’re not alone. I’m beginning to believe all those ladies who carry on about “the patriarchy.”
You and José Luis just keep holding each other and talking to each other. Dr. You-Know-Who from the university hospital called me and reassured me the two of you will be fine. He said José Luis is responding well to the antipanic pill. It’s a mild one but make sure he takes it with food. This war syndrome thing is very complicated. It’s turning up more and more in our work. My contact in Nogales said that some Toronto doctors have started up a center for torture victims. I’m writing a letter to see if we can’t get one of the doctors to come down and tell us about the work. If we can train some counselors and M.D.’s in some of those therapies we’ll save all sorts of grief. Dr. You-Know-Who has long said the same thing, and he should know, his parents were survivors of the concentration camps. Food, shelter, and political asylum applications have been our first priorities, but they’re not enough when the weight of the past hits the fan.
On the phone last night you kept saying that you should have listened to me. Yes, I did try to warn you that something could go wrong. But neither of us can predict the future. Life is a risky business but the alternative is to dig a hole and bury yourself. You may not know it, but I have my share of scars. And I would have them even if I had never come out of the house. Better to have scars from living than from hiding. So don’t beat yourself up, mijita, you’ve got enough bruises as it is. I’m sure there are lessons to be learned from the experience, but you can sort them out later, okay? Call me soon and fill me in on everything. I’m here for you.
Mother Tongue Page 8
