My Broken Language
Page 11
For an hour I sat amongst unassuming strangers. There was no leader or moderator, no Bible or hymnal. There were only these benches and this quiet now, an open space into which the spirit might enter. Occasionally someone stood to decry the Gulf War or sing “Amazing Grace” or offer ecumenical analysis of Thelma & Louise. Some meetings were talky, others proceeded without testimony. Some folks were less animated than Charlie Brown’s faceless teacher. Some wept quietly, or screamed. Others stood in rapture.
When it came to prayer, I was a novice. Should I ask god for a dance, like the prom-going teens in John Hughes flicks? The room’s silence seemed profound from without but in the clatter of my brain felt mundane. Think of nothing for ten minutes, I told myself, and soon my watch’s progress infuriated me, the second hand a slow-motion laugh. I remembered a few nonadjacent Ginsberg lines. I saw the best minds of my generation / America I’m putting my queer shoulder to the wheel. They played on loop, a mantra of misquotes. Next thing I knew, the carpet’s diamond pattern grabbed my attention. Focus, Quiara. I needed a directive, a compass, a map. I tried remembering mom’s Spanish prayers from the horse farm. Words surfaced—tierra, pecho, creator, great spirit—but no whole prayers. Mom’s Orishas and ancestral guides, her full house of spirits, eluded me on that old wood bench. With each failure to tap into her cool divine current, my frustration coiled and glowed. The more I pondered life, the more bewildered I grew, a stranger to all I had seen, a fraud who went god shopping in Center City though the divine sat in my sunroom and by my front door. Why had mom shut me out since the horse farm? Why had she abandoned me, tradition-less, in pursuit of her gift? Was there not space for two on her path? Was my Spanish too shaky for any practical conversation with babalaos? Was I too white for the Afro-Caribbean river to roar in me? Was I too constant a reminder of my dad, who had disavowed spirits and scorned religion? God is the opiate of the masses. His old declaration thrummed at my organs. No no no! my original response roared. And I remembered that time on the hilltop, overlooking the cows, when mom asked if spirits had ever visited me. How tenderly she had masked her disappointment when I answered no. Was I a disappointment? Not the kind that stems from misdeed, for she sang to me daily of her pride. My grades, my Chopin, my latest in the lit mag. Those earned me kisses and songs of admiration. Instead, did something at my core disappoint mom? Some ingrained selfhood guaranteeing her displeasure would stick forever? And I finally let loose the thought I hated thinking, tired and obvious as it was, and unresolved as it would remain. Was I not Puerto Rican enough? The next thought was new. Was mom not Puerto Rican enough? Had years in Philly resulted in her own selfhood slipping away, rendering my halfness an abrasion in her migrant wound?
Puerto Rico. Its vistas stretched before me. I could finally imagine them because I had visited at last, thanks to Pop. Plunged headfirst into Luquillo Beach’s turquoise waves. Tasted calabaza ice cream from los chinos. Seen the cement house her papi built and the farm across the road, which had become a nunnery. The images soothed me, pulled me toward a focused silence. And within that softer place, my knee began to tremble. No sooner had I stilled it than the shaking moved to my shoulders, stronger. Then my knees and shoulders quaked together, joined by my jaw, and I heard the rush of blood through my heart’s chambers. I stood. My mom and stepfather took me to Puerto Rico. I was now both speaker and listener. My mom and stepfather took me to Puerto Rico, and we were driving in the mountains….
* * *
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We had been in Puerto Rico a week—me, mom, and Pop. We had double-parked by the highway for roadside bacalaitos. We had braved Viejo San Juan’s weekend traffic so mom and Pop could play blackjack. We had hooked around to Piñones, chewing ensalada de pulpo as sandflies bit our ankles. And spent a day down south in the bone-dry Ponce heat. The mountain roads were different, an adventure unto themselves. Blind turns fed you, head-on, into school buses or wild horses ridden bareback. Last-second swerving was crucial, horn honks a matter of survival. Cars, trucks, stray dogs, and roosters formed two-way traffic on one-lane switchbacks. No barrier marked the edge or kept you on the road. “Suave, Papi! Suave!” mom cried, which he found hilarious. “Negra ya! Is this my turnoff?” Looking out the window, I saw no off-ramp at all, only a plunging drop over a cliff. It was barely afternoon and they had visited two open-air bars. Pop was tipsy, lurching cliffward. After the third bar mom took the wheel. To mitigate her own tipsiness (she kept up with Pop one beer to his three), mom dedicated one foot to the brake and one to the gas. The ride grew more sickening, what with stopping short and hiccupping on. My head all but came loose and bounced away. My eyes were rolling like Mega Millions ping-pongs. “Where are we going?” I muttered, semiconscious and miserable. “Here!” Pop laughed, stretching his arms wide. “Be here now!” Opening the window brought some relief. Gulp down that mountain air, taste its crisp citrus dew. All that greenery, a verdant drape, as if the island were a king who wore these mountains for robes. “Mira, Sedo, hay cocos frescos!” and I nearly fucking died—another stop—as she pulled into a roadside ditch. A folding table’s sparse inventory included a few green coconuts and unlabeled bottles of hot sauce and honey. Mom bought everything. A machete swooshed through the air and voilà, the huge seed arrived in my palms with a straw. Abuela had told me of her old machete, how she’d used it to scare off burglars and bad guys. But I’d never seen one in use. Certain a revelation awaited me, instead cloying lukewarm liquid filled my mouth. I hated the flavor. Back in the car I cranked the window down, waiting for the coconut water to reappear any moment, all over the backseat.
* * *
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When we reached a flat wide stretch of road, mom’s driving slowed. She stopped, scanning the road, did a three-point turn. Finally, we pulled over. There was nothing around. Just an uncovered drain hole in the derelict road and a mud puddle that threatened to overtake the drain. Knee-high wild grass stretched to the horizon. A white cement structure was either a kiosk or modest home, before which sat an old man in a sun-faded beach chair. A loud wind blew as mom and Pop questioned him. “No hay boletos, no hay que pagar.” The wind further muffled his naturally gentle voice. “Camina por allá,” he said. Mom glanced at Pop, wary. It had been different last time, but that was in her childhood. The man insisted. When mom pressed a ten into his palm, he cried a little and clasped her hands, saying he only took it out of sheer necessity.
Wild grass sliced my shins. The dense mountain greenery had given way to stony, airy terrain. The breeze whipped, slapping our faces with its strong flat palm. As the wild grass shortened to crabgrass, the rocky ground became so eroded and sharp it poked through my rubber soles. Mom grew nervous. “They’re coming up soon! Sedo, hold Quiara’s hand! Cuidao!” She proceeded no further, boycotting our progress. “Turn around, Papi! Nos vamos! It’s too powerful! The wind is too strong!” Pop waved her off. “Ya Negra, quieta!” And then the ocean appeared, way down below. We were atop a seaside cliff. Pop grabbed my elbow. I’d almost fallen into the thing. A hole in the rock, wide as an elevator shaft, shot straight down, no end in sight. The darkness swallowed Pop’s flashlight beam. “Do you see it yet?” he asked. My eyes scanned the algae and lichen blanketing the cave walls. Slowly, a shape came into view. Tall as I was, carved in thick outlines. A sun. Its rounded beams hummed with energy. A second petroglyph whispered into sight and now a tapestry of carvings revealed themselves. The glyphs were large, their manifold forms bursting with testimony, all bearing witness to the natural world. There were animals and babies. Spiral shapes evoked hurricanes and waves. The carvings huddled together, their proximity purposeful. This was a book. Or an altar. Perhaps both.
Many old texts had found their way to my hands. Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet, Death of a Salesman, Animal Farm. But those were all reprints. Here was a first edition. A cliff-size ledger, immortalized in stone. A Taíno assertion that the sun ought to be recorded. Giver of life, opener of paths, t
he trickster sun that can also burn—the shapes were survival and resilience, paradox and reverence, knowledge and explanation. Here was Boriken before empire, before crucifix, gunpowder, or smallpox and maybe before English or Spanish. Here was the way Taínos spent their time: carving the numinous world in stone. They were writers.
Then Pop pulled me to another. Caves and carvings were everywhere. Mom screamed from a distance. “Step back from the edge! It’ll suck you like a vacuum! Sedo, hold her hand!” She knew by how I teetered. Each cavern was a geological esophagus. Swallow me, I thought, eyelids closing, wind wailing at my shoulder blades.
* * *
—
I reached out to strangers on nearby benches. “Thank you for sharing,” they said, shaking my hand. Meeting for Worship was over but I was still jangled by the quaking. Embarrassment lingered. While testifying, I had fallen silent here and there, unable to still my clattering jaw, or to annunciate clearly past the tumult in my throat. As folks meandered across the hall for potluck, I escaped into the Sunday morning sun. The brick courtyard and autumn sky, the yellow chestnut leaves, were welcome anchors back to the material world.
It had been, perhaps, too much god—being overcome by spirit, my pulse surrendering the reins. The sensation still rippled with some aftershocks and tremors. As I walked south on 15th, footsteps wobbly, adrenaline forced my progress until I remembered mom-not-mom at the table—speaking in tongues, transformed by possession. I nearly laughed aloud. Had I been like her for one deviant inexplicable moment? The city’s colors and sounds throbbed around me, and I felt startlingly present.
I now craved something atheist, even vulgar. It was 11:35 a.m. If I hustled, I’d make it to the museum in time. I walked past the Logan Circle fountains, whose spray cooled my skin. The wide promenade of the Benjamin Franklin Parkway cut diagonally beneath a corridor of flags. The Rocky Balboa steps welcomed me up and the guard waved me through. Free. No sooner had I begun attending Quaker meeting than I had also become a weekly visitor to the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Admission was free before noon.
I sped through the Early American galleries, in austere shades of red and gray. Gold-leaf frames, hand-turned Chippendales, pasty old patriarchs immortalized in oil. Just beyond, at the building’s outer reaches, the contemporary wing was a white-walled affair. The ceilings were vaulted like Catholic churches but undecorated, in contemporary minimalist style. Sunlight reflected on concrete floors. Familiar works formed a receiving line. The Warhols, ironic and cheeky. I poked my head into the grotto of Cy Twombly’s Iliam series to see if I had started liking it since last time. Nope. The lithe Brancusis curved hello. The blue Frank Stella was a geometric splat. Two or three breaths before the Chuck Close thumbprints—a few moments in short range, a few squinting from a distance. A moment of reverie before Richard Long’s Limestone Circle.
My destination was the Duchamps. They beckoned like a bare shoulder at the edge of a dream. There was the wooden stool with the bike wheel—rebellious. There was the cubist nude descending a staircase—kinetic. The Boîte-en-valise was a sinister curio box. There was repurposed junk—a bottle rack, an infamous urinal. The Female Fig Leaf was a bronze square of innuendo. Duchamp even deigned to create representational art—a chocolate grinder with three drums in rotation, a portrait of Adam and Eve as blotchy humanoids with huge craniums. Duchamp was a swiss army knife, an attic of ideas, a flea market of art jokes. Ribald as a bathroom stall punchline, with the abandon of a master who’d earned every rebellion. Though I disliked Duchamp’s sarcasm, I sensed freedom in how he treated virtuosity as a stepping-stone to something less rigid.
Tucked within the Duchamps, Room 182 was hidden in the back, the farthest gallery from the museum’s front entrance. Last stop, folks. Nothing left to see. It had the footprint of a coat closet and, without windows or lightbulbs, was unlit. Empty as a shoebox. No art on the walls or placard. You might miss the thing altogether. But if you stepped inside long enough, your eyes would adjust to see a wooden door at the end. Primitive, hewn of wide-planked hardwood. A barn door, perhaps. Or a portal to a torture chamber. Hard to tell. Two peepholes glowed, beckoning. I pressed my nose to the wood. A sliver of life-size diorama came into view. A pastoral scene, lifelike, of a nude white woman on the ground, legs akimbo. Her hairless labia were asymmetrical, possibly deformed. One visible breast sagged like a small pouch of rice. The other breast, along with her face, was out of view. I angled and contorted, tiptoeing, pressing one eye then the other, trying to glimpse her face. No luck. This nude woman—whether resting after sex, or death-pale after murder—lay atop a bed of twigs like some X-rated Jesus in the manger. The oil lamp she clutched had a still-lit flame, so whatever had befallen her was recent. If she was dead, how was she still holding the lamp? If she was alive, why did she splay like that, so prone?
Étant donnés was nostalgic tableau, crime scene, rape fantasy, dime-store kitsch, and postcoital ciggy, all in one half-glimpse. Denying her face was the work’s grotesque thesis. Her warped vagina, front and center, was the only identity the artist imbued on her. I stared and raged and fumed and fantasized. I glanced behind me to see if anyone was waiting. Then I looked some more. It wasn’t just the vagina that drew me. The Perez women strolled around butt naked all the time. Cellulite, saggy tits, bushes—old hat to me. What really shocked about Étant donnés was that the cunt was all she got. Not a face, name, or story. It was a complete and effective violence, this omission of personhood. I knew Duchamp had staged, with precision, my warring impulse to see and turn away. It was the same game I now played with my own life: peeking further for clues, thrilling at some answers, cowering before others. I looked some more.
Lukumí Thrones
After repeated visits, Duchamp was another language I could decode. The autumnal palette that made the landscape serene, the pastoral motifs that normalized a predatory gaze, the total control over the viewer’s experience, including the illusion of having discovered the unmarked room. Also, how Duchamp harnessed innuendo, injecting perversion into the viewer’s brain. Duchamp made the gross thoughts your fault, not his. My burgeoning multilingualism felt pretty satisfying. I knew English, halting Spanish, and advanced conversational Duchamp. Plus more. On that sweet upright from Pop, I gained facility with Bach inventions, Chopin nocturnes, Mozart sonatas. Wrong notes, train-wreck fingerings, and botched dynamics were de rigueur at first but diminished with each practice, until mistakes grew infrequent. With enough repetition, I wasn’t playing single notes at all, but phrases, then movements, and finally forms. At Central, I memorized sixteen lines of The Canterbury Tales five minutes before the oral exam. Nailed it. My emergent superpower, an increasing fluency in Western Canon, brought exhilaration and comfort because if you’re fluent in a language, there’s a place you belong.
But I hungered to decode my own home, to make it my center of belonging. To understand mom’s many tongues and therefore close the distance between myself and the people I loved and the people I was losing—most of all my mother. I wanted to arm myself against Western Art’s easy idiom, to master a more complex language, one that richly described my world. There was installation art in my living room but the Western Canon didn’t provide vocab for all that. And while mom had many gifts, explaining stuff was not one. In fact, she seemed generally suspicious of explanations—like intuiting life’s shit on your own was the only path to understanding. Her silent industry implied that, to her, explanations were surface whereas observation promised revelation.
During latchkey evenings, if homework was complete and Mozart was practiced and mom and Pop were out rallying with Philly’s Latino leadership, I would stand before mom’s altars. Study them. Memorize the items. Notice the air pressure in the room. Even touch the stuff. Once I ate a piece of the Ibeyi’s candy (it was stale). Once I lifted the lid from Olokun’s blue jar (inside was something dark and moist). Once I reached into Ogun’s tiny cauldron and touched a bone. Once
I dragged chair to cabinet and reached for Osun’s silver chalice, tapping a pendulum bell. The altars changed frequently. Different Orisha were fed throughout the year, and on mom’s Ocha birthday—her anniversary of consecration—they all came out at once. Repeat visits were rewarded, new discoveries awaited. Some altars were small—a few doodads tucked in a corner. Like Eleguá in the entrance foyer. Our front door never fully opened because he nestled just inside the hinges. His was a diminutive, primitive altar. A cement-filled conch shell for a head. His cowry eyes squinted, his cowry lips pursed. Eleguá sat on a clay dish, the kind meant for a houseplant. There were some pennies and pinwheel mints. A shot of espresso. Perhaps a candle. Eleguá tended the pathways, guarded the crossroads, gave permission for the ceremony to begin. Small yet mighty, Eleguá was the trickster. I was certain his cowry eyes penetrated my soul, and I observed him sideways or from behind to avoid his gaze. A few steps beyond, by the living room sideboard, lived los Egun, the ancestors. Mama Francisca was a hand-sewn doll with jet-black skin. She was mom’s spirit guide, and fresh pompom flowers filled her vase.
Farther back, unseen from the main living space, the sunroom altar stretched floor to ceiling. A portal to a universe. Sheaths of fabric created backdrops, canopy valances draped from the ceiling, and its sheer scale was a marvel to behold. Clear valises of water refracted the light, candles rested on the floor. Rattles, bells, and cascarilla chalk sat alongside one another. Abundant fruit piled on straw mats. Pomegranates, plantains, cantaloupes. There were coconuts caked in thick powdered eggshell and oranges oozing with honey and cinnamon. El trono. The throne. It was an apt and accurate name for the place the Orisha sat. Each deity had impressive beaded mazos and embroidered paños in their specific color. Changó’s warrior lightning was assertive red. Yemayá’s ocean was motherly blue. Oshun’s sensual river radiated gold and amber. Each had a dedicated urn housing its secrets, fed and nourished in hush-hush ceremonies. Together, the Orisha appeared totemic and diverse.