Mother Tongue (4 page)

It wasn’t long after we met that he began introducing me to his favorite poets, copying in his notebook passages that meant something to him by writers like Pablo Neruda and Roque Dalton. It became obvious to me that poetry was his life. In the throes of apparently meaningless suffering, he lit it and smoked it and passed the sacred pipe to his friends until a new vision came to them about their earthly mission. Of course, this is clearer to me in hindsight. Because whenever he let me see
what he had copied down, all I could conclude was that his heart, in advance of his mind, was trying to make contact with me. Trying to say I love you through the subversive valentines of great poets. We taped his jottings on the refrigerator where Soledad posted recipes, to-do lists, and prayers. I would not understand the sentiments actually expressed in those words until much later when I understood love could not be divorced from history, that his war had to become my war.

“Honor of the revolutionary poet: to convince his or her generation of the necessity for being revolutionary here and now, in the difficult period, the only one that has the potential to be subject of an epic.… to be so when the condition of being revolutionary is usually rewarded with death, that is truly the dignity of poetry. The poet takes then the poetry of his or her generation and gives it over to history.”

—
ROQUE DALTON

I’ve saved these jottings in my shoe box; the lead pencil letters are dark and fresh as new stubble on the face of a lover. The word
mortally
, smaller than the others, appears to have been written in a hurry. José Luis always spoke slowly and deliberately but with the passion of a prisoner imparting final instructions before a mass escape. The words in my old notebook, by contrast, look like they were written in a giddy
stupor, the letters lassos with which I struggled to rope in feelings that galloped off in no clear direction. While José Luis was copying the works of revolutionaries, I was poring over Eastern mystical texts, discovering the meaning of life, for the moment at least, in gods incarnated as elephants and monkeys and many-breasted goddesses.

Here’s a page from my notebook. No doubt I believed at the time that one or the other passage contained the sum of human wisdom.

It is difficult to recall the day-to-day exchanges that became bridges by which we transcended borders of culture, language, and history. We strolled back and forth into one another’s worlds, or at least the outskirts of those worlds, as casually as if crossing from El Paso to Juárez to buy liquor or pharmaceuticals. In exchange for my driving him around, he offered to help me with my Spanish. Almost every day we sat together at the
kitchen table where we conjugated Spanish verbs with an old grammar Soledad had brought with her from Mexico. I was young, future tense came naturally to me: Iré, irás.… I will go, you will go. I have always lacked talent for living in the here and now, and back then I was easily transported into luminous, unobtainable futures. There were days I dreamed I would not only marry José Luis, but that we would buy a little house in the Valley, live on black beans and tortillas, and aid la revolución with computer bulletins to Central America. Whenever I took off on the runway of daydreams, always about José Luis, he playfully tugged at my braids and said, “Mary. Mary, can you hear me?” I remember how this little custom became another “sign” I took to mean he was falling in love with me. Everywhere, signs cropped up. And I hoarded them, rose petals I stashed between the pages of my days.

Still another custom evolved that made me feel he was carrying me over the threshold to a life more
spacious than the one I inhabited: late evenings on the couch, swirling spoons of molasses in black coffee, and talking about la revolución in Nicaragua. Don’t ask me what I said. I couldn’t have cared less about politics. I was of that generation that held to some vague theory about how hearts must change first; we had the luxury of being able to think that way, and maybe there’s some truth to it. José Luis must have found it charming. Both of us were, after all, dreamers. José Luis’s great misfortune was that he and his compañeros had tried to put flesh on their dreams, make them breathe. They counted them as blessings and paid with their lives.

Here are more items I saved in the shoe box:

A prayer Soledad copied from Our Lady’s Prayer Book and mailed to me with instructions to repeat it at least three times each day.

And a grocery list—my handwriting:

Soledad had a saying: Reality is a lump of clay and prayer is the potter’s wheel. I believed her, because by late July or early August, not long after she called to say she was praying for us, both José Luis and I found part-time work in Old Town. He washed dishes at the cantina where the owner had no qualms about hiring “illegals”;
he paid less than minimum wage but always in cash and on time. I covered for the owner of a bead shop when she was on buying trips. I sat behind a glass counter that held miniature jade Buddhas and amethyst prayer beads from Tibet. I remember fixing my attention on these objects and inhaling to the count of two, holding my breath to the count of seven, then exhaling as I counted one, two, three. My chest rose, froze, and fell in a triangle of attention that I undoubtedly learned about in books on Eastern mysticism. But whatever in me that may have actually aspired to enlightenment, to being in the present, did not bear up for long. I began using the tantric technologies to outwit the heat rather than embrace it. And when that failed, I daydreamed about autumn. But the fantasy was impossible to sustain.

The summer of 1982 still sounds like ice crunching between teeth, still looks like church bulletins folded into fans. The sun was red as a black widow’s hourglass, and Old Town floundered
in webs of heat. Nights were hot as cast iron; it was hard to hear anything above the cicadas. Even in the early mornings, the sky sparkled in a way that was not natural, like a vacant lot glittering with broken glass. After my shifts at the bead shop I always walked over to the coolest spot by the plaza kiosk to wait for José Luis—a cement bench under the sycamores where I watched the rites of summer. Touching stucco walls, shopkeepers gauged the heat’s advance as if feeling a child’s forehead for fever. Old women left Mass and scanned the heavens for signs of rain, shielding their eyes from the sun in a limp salute.

As the twin steeples of San Rafael pierced the sky and more hot air leaked into the world, the old men of the area flocked to benches on the plaza, their canes feeling the turf in front of them like trunks of elephants. They wondered aloud, as they did every year, whether the heat was not a sign from God, a punishment for having sold so much land to the gringos from back East. Brilliantine
heads nodded and shined. The men fanned themselves with wilted newspapers while above them the flags of Spain, Mexico, and the United States snapped in false breezes. The old families of the area had endured the heat as they had so many sovereignties; they changed what they could and waited out the rest, forging over iced tea a solidarity that outlasted kings and seasons.

After finishing his shift at the cantina, José Luis sometimes crouched under the portal to look at silver and turquoise laid out on blankets in long furrows. He used to linger at the rug of a Navajo woman who sat on a precarious throne of milk crates as she awaited the day’s harvest of tourist dollars. Now and again, groups of tourists engulfed her, cutting off my view of José Luis. This used to unnerve me. The Border Patrol had recently opened an office, declaring Albuquerque a border town—a city like El Paso or Brownsville, ordered to empty its pockets and produce its documents. I feared if I lost sight of José Luis, the Patrol might take him away in one of its
avocado-colored vans. And they could have, easily; they were armed to the teeth. I believed that watching José Luis generated protective forces; I vaguely remember some Eastern texts I was reading about the power of mindful observation—ironic, given that sight was my least evolved sense. Where others saw indigo, I saw blue; where others saw teal, I saw green. It’s the draining away of color that happens in a woman’s life when she can’t name her own reality. It is only now that I am able to go back and color in the pale places, creating a mural on the walls of the life I now inhabit.

To track José Luis, I developed a sixth sense. Scanning the sea of tourists, I managed to latch onto a white patch of fabric among earth-toned clothing the better-off tourists ordered that year from the Banana Republic catalogue. His swatch of T-shirt became a kind of hologram that revealed the whole of him to me in three dimensions. And I held to that vision until the tourists moved on, their purchases made, cameras banked with images of a “real” Indian. Looking back
now, I wonder what troubled me more, the fear that the Border Patrol might see José Luis or that the tourists in his midst could not see him, at least not in three dimensions. No, he was very dark, a dishwasher, an illegal alien. Had he spoken English, it would not have mattered; he still would lack the credentials pinned on those with British or French accents. All over the city refugees were rendered invisible with each stroke of the sponge or rake they used to clean motel rooms and yards and porches. Unlike wealthy refugees who fled their pasts and bought homes in Santa Fe, people like José Luis lacked the money to reinvent themselves. So they became empty mirrors. A ghostly rustle of Spanish spoken in restaurants above the spit of grease on a grill.

I still have the ring, a simple silver band, that José Luis bought from the Navajo woman. He gave it to me, said it was just a small gift to thank me for being his friend. Years later, I gave it to a psychic who ran her fingers over it and said she saw a man with a scar on his forehead who was saying, I will return. Last night I took the ring
from the shoe box and held it, my eyes closed, until I, too, saw José Luis: We were making love on a bed in a basement. I slipped the ring on, inhaled, and counted to seven. And I arrived at that stillness so absolute the chaotic fragments of one’s life arrange themselves, if only for a moment, into a mandala of meaning. On the exhale I remembered that José Luis was the first man to touch me in a way that I could feel real pleasure, could feel my flesh yield up its own indivisible truth.