Love & Prayers,
Soledad
November 1982
Someday I’ll write down everything that happened the other night. It’s too overwhelming right now. I don’t know how to begin to describe everything. But I think I’m starting to understand why fear and sadness have always been too close, like my own shadow. I was hurt badly once upon a time. And now I know how I was hurt. There’s not much I can do with the information per se. But maybe that’s the point. What I know is more than information. It’s truth. I might never completely “recover.” But I feel I have a chance to be free.
I’ve been in a stupor for like two days, moving in and out of sleep. And after all this time, José Luis is sleeping very deeply. I don’t dare tell Soledad he quit taking the antianxiety pill Dr. Weisel gave him. José Luis said he needed to get old poisons out of him, and so he has been chewing on oshá root. He has let himself cry and cry, finally, about Ana, the woman he was going to marry, and about all his friends. He says that’s why he’s able to sleep. That tears that aren’t allowed to flow poison the blood.
It’s good that I know what I know because it helps me be more compassionate toward José Luis. I think a part of me envied him. It’s a terrible thing to admit. When he gets up to talk in packed churches, his wounds are deep as the Grand Canyon, open to everyone. Mine have always been invisible. I mean it’s not like I can stand up in front of a crowd and talk about something as dumb as sadness or fear of being abandoned or life spinning out of control. It’s not on the same scale as death squads and disappearances or rich people owning all the land. But the issue isn’t who got hurt more. I keep feeling like it’s all part of the same pattern. Of people loving power, or some such thing, more than life. Who knows. Anyway, it’s good that I’ve got this notebook. I feel better already, just writing things down.
I can hear you clacking away at the computer. It makes me feel old-fashioned, writing everything out by hand. But these years of getting up early to scribble in my notebook have made me a creature of habit. I know of no joy as great, while waiting for the caffeine to strike, as moving a pen across a page. It’s like watching a pointer skirting across a Ouija board; letter by letter, answers come. I’ll admit revenge may be the root of my joy. You see, before our neighbor moved away, he brought my mother a cigar box filled with pens and notebooks he said he didn’t need anymore. My mother gave them to me to practice my penmanship. She cleared a space on the kitchen table and set up a lamp. The man who tried to gut me like a fish had no idea what he had done by giving away those things. I swam and then I soared as I made up stories in notebooks that were blank except for a few pages of mathematical formulas. I like to think I am above revenge, but just imagine how sweet it feels; I got in the last word. Is this revenge? Or is it, as Soledad would surely say, the spirit working in mysterious ways?
Five
It’s just amazing. I can’t believe my mom and I are about to land in San Salvador. The plane is shaking like hell. We’ve run into interference, as the pilot keeps saying over and over, and I feel sicker than a dog. I know I shouldn’t try to read now, but Mom remembered this poem she had in her purse that she says my father left her. It’s by someone named Claribel Alegría. My father underlined parts of it: Return obsesses me / faces fly by / through the open fissure. / Once more there’ll be peace / but of a different kind. / The rainbow glimmers / tugs at me / forcefully / not that inert peace / of lifeless eyes / it will be a rebellious / contagious peace / a peace that opens furrows / and aims at the stars.… Shit, I can’t read anymore, I guess I’m just too nervous, but I don’t dare say anything to Mom. It was my big idea to come here. After she told me all about my father, I said we have to try and find out if he’s dead or alive. Even though the peace accords were signed ages ago, the San Salvador archdiocese is still trying to figure what happened to everyone; they keep all the photographs of the dead and disappeared under lock and key. I read in the newspaper that Salvadoran church leaders and members of the World Council of Churches are going before the UN to demand the opening of the mass graves. It sounds like they won’t rest until everyone is accounted for. I don’t know what we’ll find in the archdiocese’s office. It scares me to think they might have a photograph of my father’s body. I’ve seen him in photographs, alive and smiling, and I can’t imagine how it will feel to see him any other way. But mostly I’m worried for Mom.
Our flight was delayed—we didn’t arrive until 1 A.M.—but Sister Margarita Bautista was there to meet us. She seemed so happy to see us. You’d have thought we were old friends. Mom says she knew Soledad, that they’d met when Soledad went on her first delegation to El Salvador. We were supposed to spend the night at Ciudad Grande, where she runs a literacy project, but it was too late to drive out there so we ended up at the Sheraton. I didn’t sleep at all and neither did Mom. We stayed up for the rest of the night and played cards and she reminisced about my father. She laughed a lot remembering how he tried to teach her to make pupusas—corn pockets stuffed with cheese—and how hers always came out hard, like cookies. Then, out of the blue, Mom started crying, saying she never wrote down the recipe. I didn’t know what to say, so I said, that’s neat that Dad liked to cook. All of a sudden she stopped crying. I’d never, ever called my father “Dad.” But the word fit. It fit like a good pair of shoes. I think deep down inside I’ve always been angry at not having had a father. But after Mom told me I got my angry streak from the night he hit her, a part of me quit being angry. It never dawned on me that even though he went away, he left me parts of himself. Mom didn’t just make me from scratch.
I’m scared shitless. Sister Margarita is supposed to be here any second to take us to the archdiocese office. Mom’s touching up her lipstick. She always does that when she’s nervous. Now she’s complaining about the lone wrinkle between her eyebrows. She’s paranoid about turning forty. Maybe all this is just midlife crisis. But then Mom’s always been old for her age. From what she told me, it sounds like she felt too many things at too young an age. On the one hand, if I spot a gray hair she makes me pluck it. On the other hand, she says she can’t wait to become the age she has always been inside—fifty. She says she might join the Peace Corps when that day comes. I can’t figure Mom—oh my God, Sister Margarita is here.
The archdiocese office is not at all what I expected. It was rebuilt with cinder blocks after it was blown up—that was the same bomb that took out part of a cathedral wall and killed Archbishop José Grande, who Mom says was very famous for the stands he took on behalf of human rights. There’s nothing on the walls but a cross and a picture of Jesus risen from the dead, which seems to have bullet holes in it. Sister Margarita has gone back to the safe with the sister who works here. It’s crazy. They still have to keep all the documents in a safe—all these years after the signing of the peace accords. Mom is holding on to her shawl like it’s about to fly away. I wish I could make her feel better. At least we’re not alone. There are two other mothers here, both with children. Their heads are covered with scarves. I’ve never seen such faces. Tree bark faces, dark and lined, old before their time but strong. What’s weird is that if you take away the lines, they look like me—the cheekbones, the Indian eyes. For all I know they could be relatives. I think Mom is thinking the same thing. One of the children fell as he walked toward us and Mom jumped out of her chair and picked him up, then pulled some tissue from her purse to wipe the kid’s face as he sobbed. Now the Salvadoran ladies are talking to Mom. I wish I could understand what they were saying. Mom’s going to faint when she hears I signed up for a Spanish class next semester.
For two hours we’ve been searching through albums and albums of photographs. I don’t know why we’re not running out of the room crying. You just have to go numb sometimes. You have to look at the bodies as if you were watching television. But it’s not that easy because I have to search those faces for the face of my father. For my face. A couple of times Mom got up and left the room. I’ve never seen her look so o
ld. In two hours she’s taken on some of the features of the other women here. Her face isn’t sagging like a North American face. It’s growing thinner and tighter, as if to make room for—for all the dead. It’s like they take up so much space—their faces, their memories, the things they could never say. When we started going through the albums I wanted to run, to get the hell out of here. But curiosity is my strongest emotion, stronger even than fear. I want to find my father, my dad.
Mom, look, Mom, Mom, don’t cry, it’s okay, it’s him! It’s Dad. No, he’s not dead. There’s a question mark below the photo. See, there’s his birthday but no death day. He’s like he was in your pictures. Maybe he never even came back here. But look Ma, look at his name. It’s José Luis Alegría. José Luis. It’s not a made-up name after all! What do you mean, you knew it all along? It’s okay, Mom, go ahead and cry. Don’t worry about me, I’ll cry later. What do you mean, you’re crying with happiness? Yeah, you’re right, he wasn’t a stranger. See, Mom, he told you his real name because he loved you and he wanted to give you something real. I know because it sounds like something I would do. Me and Dad are funny that way, we’re stubborn. Ma, you never gave me a real middle name. I’ve got one now. Alegría. Happiness.
The nuns are stroking Mom’s back and the two other ladies who were flipping through the books are holding her hands. And all I can think about is my middle name. I should be crying. But why? Dad was always disappeared to me. But now he’s come back and given me another name. And I have a strange feeling he’s alive. For twenty years Mom has believed the worst. She’s funny that way, we’re really different. I’m convinced he’s—Jesus, there’s the archbishop. Sister Margarita is introducing him to Mom. It’s José Grande’s replacement. You’d never guess he’s an archbishop because he’s wearing cotton pants and a simple shirt and torn up sandals. Last year Mom sent me an article about a speech he gave at Harvard, something about how there will be no peace until all of El Salvador’s dead are named and honored, and all the killers brought to justice. Now he’s handing something to Mom—it’s a poster. A poster of a dark lady wearing a white scarf and holding a crown of thorns. Behind her is what looks like a human figure outlined in chalk on pavement. At the bottom of the poster are the words, madre de los desaparecidos, Mother of the Disappeared. I’ve never seen anything like it. It’s Mary the mother of Jesus.
The first thing Mom had me do when we got back was develop my film—she had me take photos of the picture of Dad. She has seemed very peaceful since we got back last week, which is good because I was worried sick that our experience would set her way back. We still don’t know what the hell happened to Dad. But she seems to have a lot of energy. She’s even gotten involved over at the Justice Center. She told me that at a meeting last night she volunteered to organize a letter-writing campaign—there’s a push now to get a team of forensic experts to Salvador to analyze what’s in the mass graves, to document just how bad things were during the war. This morning she dragged me to mass at San Rafael, and afterwards we stopped by the frame shop. When we got home, she had me put a nail in the wall above her bedroom altar and we hung the poster—she calls it an icon—of the Mother of the Disappeared. Then, she got a photograph of herself when she was seven and the photo of the picture of Dad and she stuck them in the bottom corners of the frame. She lit a candle and sat quietly for a long, long time. She didn’t say a word about why she hung the poster, which is weird because she’s always running around trying to analyze things, to put things in words. It drives me crazy. But finally I couldn’t stand it anymore, and I asked her what she was thinking. She smiled and said that the Mother of the Disappeared is forever remembering, forever waiting for everyone to return. “Mijo, I can get on with my life now,” she said.
I just finished a long conversation with my son. It’s happening so quickly; in the shadow of his lush and amber waves of English are tufts of Spanish, hardy and smelling of pupusas and taquitos and salsa verde he says he eats at least once a week at a restaurant in Spanish Harlem. No te preocupes, mamá, José Luis tells me, don’t worry about me. I’m getting enough sleep, yes, I’m very careful when I walk across campus at night.… Of all my child’s phases—jazz and photography, skiing competitions, and, last semester, Latin American novels—this is the one to fear and revere. A new language is a tincture, a drop of which forever changes the chemistry of the person who is learning it. He still talks about saving the planet—but now he seems to have found a point of departure—he tells me he will be volunteering next summer with a soil conservation project in El Salvador. It will be our first summer apart.
I remember the moment during our trip to El Salvador when he took his life in his hands and made something new out of it, although at the time I had no clue this was happening. After our day in the human rights office we were scheduled to visit Ciudad Grande, one of the settlements of repatriated refugees. I couldn’t even think of it, I was so exhausted. I told José Luis I preferred to sit in the cathedral and pray and think and that he should do likewise, he should rest up before our trip home. Rest up. One of those lame, motherly admonitions that, more often than not, backfire. I could tell he was feeling guilty about not wanting to stay with me. And like a fool I let my need to control tick away a few seconds too long, and he saw through me and blew up. He said, I didn’t come all this way to see my father’s face—and not his world.
When he returned a day and a half later with Sister Margarita, he was in good spirits. Ma, hey, you’ll never believe it. I met a family that’s doing restoration work with traditional farming techniques. Can you believe they had their land seized by the army in the 1970s.… He spoke with the infinite passion of a young man who imagines he has discovered something new; of course, for him it was new, the story of El Salvador. Later, on the flight home, I noticed my son’s face had changed, had traded in its hard edges for a more porous expression, something bordering on wonder. It was as if after having seen so many people who looked like him, he no longer had to bear the burden of his heritage by himself. He became free to explore new selves, new expressions. Now he tells me that he has been exchanging letters with the Salvadoran family’s oldest daughter, Angela. She is his age. I don’t know what this might mean, if anything. He is not one to admit, even to himself, that life has taken off in a new direction until long after the fact. And now all he can talk about is how much he enjoys writing Angela in Spanish and how much he looks forward to next summer. And I ache to think that we will be apart, I envy his ability to up and go at will, and I am bursting with pride at all he has become, strong and beautiful as a flowering cactus in the desert.
My baby, my son, beloved stranger, disappearing into a new language and landscape, leaving me to look inside myself for the magic I love in you. I am forty years old. I have melted down sadness and joy into a single blade with which to carve out a life. And I am just beginning to discern the shape that was there all along, just beginning to become me.
Epilogue
Ontario, Canada
Dear María,
I am sending this card to Soledad’s address with a prayer that it finds its way to you. Yes, I went back. And then into hiding for a very long time. Only recently has it been safe enough for me to live in the light of day. I heard through my contacts that you and a young man came looking for me. If only I could have known. Even though my reasons for returning to my country were right, the act of leaving you was never right. At the present time I am visiting the Toronto Center for War Survivors with the San Salvador archbishop. We are talking with the directors and looking for ways we can help refugees return home when they are ready. Remember that collection of poems I started? Well, I finished them. And I hope you will approve of my English translations. I have so many stories to tell you, María. I pray you have not forgotten me.
Your friend para siempre,
José Luis Alegría Cruz (y Romero)
To the memory of the disappeared
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Demetria Mar
tínez lives in Tucson, Arizona, where she works as a columnist for the National Catholic Reporter. She was born and raised in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and received a B.A. from Princeton University.
In 1987 Martínez was indicted on charges related to smuggling Central American refugees into the United States. A jury later acquitted her on First Amendment grounds.
She is also the author of a collection of poetry, “Turning,” included in the book Three Times a Woman.
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