Mother Tongue (3 page)

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.

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.