Mother Tongue (8 page)

Sweat and heat: The memory of it keeps me from getting to the sad part of the story. In the summer of 1982 a steamy Rio Grande opened the pores of the city and released aromas of mesquite, pine, and cedar. The heat made it easier for me to find those places on José Luis’s body that were oblivious to the war. After we
made love, I often smelled bougainvillea near the place where his heart beat like wings against the bars of a cage. And I came to understand why José Luis and others like him risked everything—even if they were too young to remember life without war, their bodies remembered; their very cells concealed the scent of a healed El Salvador. The days the temperature climbed to dizzying heights I believed in God. I believed He devised the sense of smell so that people would struggle not for abstract ideas but for memory—the scent of the land and wind before men invented war.

One day—was it late September or early October?—Soledad returned. And she knew by the play of shadow and light on my face and in my voice that it was done: José Luis and I were lovers. She was my godmother, my mentor. She knew better than to quell the Spirit, the spirit of light that is love and the spirit of recklessness that is something else altogether. In her life, with her husbands, divorces, her breaking the rules of the church, in all these experiences and more, Soledad had seen the two faces of God. So she was not about to tell me not to live dangerously. She might offer advice to ease the blows, but she would never say, do not love him. She was a healer precisely because she had suffered and savored the faces of God, the dark and the light. And every remedio, she said, has elements of both, of the sickness and its cure. I am thirty-nine now, eleven years younger than Soledad was the summer José Luis and I were
lovers, and I am just beginning to fathom what she meant.

“Mijita, be careful, when I was your age I gave my heart away, and it took me years to find it again. Mijita, my Carlos was a good man but the war made him loco sometimes, and he would leave home for days. No, no, the only way to take the war out of a man is to end the war, all wars. What do you mean, the power of positive thought? You’ve been reading too many of those Eastern mystical books. You can’t even hear yourself think in El Salvador. I know, I’ve been there, it’s spooky as all get out. You know, the best thing you can do is to be his friend. Now I sound exactly like my mother. And you know what? I never did a damn thing she said until I was over 40.…”

I wish I had written down whatever it was that Soledad told me. All I can do now is imagine her words, but it’s not hard because I can see her: tobacco-colored hair, old jeans and a “Boycott General Electric” T-shirt, light brown skin prematurely creased because she
loved life too much to care about the latest creams for peeling away wrinkles. In my memory, she is always chopping cilantro or heating corn tortillas on the blue flame of her gas stove. Before she quit smoking, her evening ritual consisted of holding a cigarette to the flame, sucking in a deep breath, then turning on the radio. She kept a shortwave on her windowsill next to a bottle of green dish soap. After a smoke she washed dishes, then listened to news of El Salvador tearing apart like bread. She never spoke much about the man she had married, then divorced, to keep him from being deported. At first even I was fooled; I thought she had married for love. And in a sense, she had. Having no children of her own, she adopted El Salvador. She knew its provinces, its disappearances. Every day she scanned Mexican and U.S. newspapers for news of deaths, crops, army movements, culling moments in history as carefully as she picked pebbles from beans before putting them to soak. One day she had me proofread a letter she was about to take to the
post office. Dear Senator Marciando, My friends and relatives are being killed, she wrote, words short and fiery as fuses. By nature, Soledad tended away from anger. But she could pull it out and wave it like a knife when she heard of yet another death threat in the country she’d come to love.

Here is a recipe Soledad wrote out on a three-by-five card and taped to her refrigerator.

—————

“Mijita, your mother was right, you need to have some hobbies or sure enough, you’ll develop melancolía. You’d be amazed at how learning to cook takes your mind off men—if you do it for your own pleasure. Why do you think I’m such a good cook? I was your age once, don’t forget that. I know how it feels, to feel so in love that the sun and the moon trade places, it’s so crazy. But be careful. No, no, I’m not saying I don’t want it to work out, I do. But every woman should have a special place inside where she can think, where no man is allowed, a place that will, you know, endure. Why do you think I took up letter writing? No man is worth falling apart over. Take it from me. Now come on, let’s go take a walk.”

One day, Soledad’s heart gave out. She had given so much to everyone but herself. When I went to the mortuary to view her body, I started to grieve all over again. Someone had cleaned her hands, wiped away the film of newsprint that had
always marked them. That night at San Rafael Church, I said good-bye to her one last time before the open coffin. And pretending to touch her hand in a gesture of grief, I slipped the first few paragraphs of an Associated Press article under her palm. Two days before her death, Salvadoran guerrillas and government leaders signed an accord, shook hands all around, and proclaimed “cautious optimism” to a disbelieving world. I had cut out the article and taped it to my refrigerator next to a prayer for peace. Maybe Soledad was ready to go. Maybe she knew she had succeeded in teaching me to love a broken world.