My Broken Language

by Quiara Alegría Hudes

  “Cold drink! Cold drink!” That story was my video-on-demand before such a thing existed. Pop never hesitated to indulge me. “You not tired of that one yet?” Then his voice doubled in volume. His smile went goofy-wide and his hairy hands started wagging, clearing a path back to the past.

  It went like this: Pop was five the day his uncle rolled through. A Sunday, probably, after church let out. “You ever seen the city before?” Pop hadn’t. So the uncle said hop in and the pickup coughed north. Dirt switchbacks became concrete boulevards. Slouching bamboo became cast-iron streetlamps. In Barranquitas, bromeliads spidered in little nooks. In San Juan, pigeons cooed in dark corners. So many people and cars in one place. “Wow!” grown-up Pop would narrate, eyes wide, looking five all over again. And the signs on every store! Painted signs. Lit-up signs. Each one a declaration of presence. I want a sign one day, little Pop decided. His uncle found a soda counter near the plaza. “Your first Coca-Cola, enjoy!” But when Pop pulled it to his lips, he yelped and dropped the bottle. “It stung me!” Pop gripped his burning palm. “It didn’t sting you, it’s cold. That’s a refrigerated drink.” Back on the farm, the milk served with supper was warm as an udder. Agua de coco came hot, too—coconut husks were nature’s thermoses. Pop pulled the bottle from the ground. Its thick glass had survived the fall. Half the soda remained. Now he clenched it, determined, and the Coke went down in gulps. By the time he demonstrated the empty bottle, feeling very cosmopolitan, little Pop had made up his mind. Wherever that came from, I want to go there.

  Prescient yearnings. Over the next handful of years, his parents and siblings moved to North Philadelphia. A few more siblings were born until there were twelve of them—the Jíbaro Dozen. By sixteen, Pop left high school to run a grocery where he sold cold drinks and had a sign. By twenty-five, he graduated the Job Corps as a machinist. By thirty, his union paycheck was funneled directly into North Philly real estate purchases, setting up his siblings with storefronts of their own. The more run-down the spot, the better. Each ramshackle lot, a future sign. House for rent. 1 br available. Sanchez Bar & Lounge. His signs were many and varied. By the time Pop adopted me, Barranquitas was a place to visit once or twice a year. When he first showed me his hometown, the orchids and striated sky caught my attention, but he was pointing at the power lines and Burger King. “It didn’t used to be like this!” He beamed.

  * * *

  —

  Cold Drink became a play.

  The Fourth of July dance party became a play.

  My bungled Spanish, Abuela’s polite disapproval? Another play.

  The granny panties Cuca gave me for my first period? Another play.

  Once I began writing for real, as mom called it, a lifetime of eavesdropping, secret-keeping, and spying poured forth. After long hibernations in my gut, our silences burst into daylight. Twenty-four hours weren’t enough, seventy words per minute couldn’t capture them all. Memories shot from my hand like Spider-Man webs. Each line of dialogue was a zipline back to North Philly in the eighties and nineties. Three hundred miles north and decades past the memories, I felt closer to home than ever.

  Measuring rice with cupped palms? That became a play.

  A woman who can’t read the hair dye instructions? That became a play.

  Mom’s herbal baths to cure my adolescent depression? Another play.

  One afternoon, senior year of high school, I collected the mail behind the screen door. Bills, credit card offers, grocery circulars, then a thick envelope from Yale University. The letter began with one word: “Welcome.” I’d made the cut. Me. I was in. It made me jittery like a surprise party reveal. Didn’t see it coming, caught off guard, but it’s good. Mom and Pop were still at work and Abuela, whose past migration had made this future migration of mine possible, deserved the first call. My fingers fumbled over buttons. The call went through. I inhaled ceremonially.

  “Jail? Tu vas a jail? Que pasó?” Her voice was panic, a confusion of tears.

  “No, Abuela, I got into Yale!”

  “Pero que hiciste? Cual jail? No hables con la policia!”

  “Abuela! Y-A-L-E.” She’d never heard of the school.

  “Voy a la universidad,” I said. So much for my ticker-tape parade.

  You got into jail? became a play, too.

  The funerals in all their phantasmagoric horror: the pallbearers’ footsteps echoing in naves, me fake genuflecting with murky holy water, each sewn-on smile the undertaker got wrong, a shovelful-of-dirt thud as Toña screams. They became a play. Even my hollow gaze, my dry eyes, my certainty that unless I wept for Mary Lou and Tico and Guillo, I had not loved them right. My non-crying became a play.

  Mom’s spirit world filled every page. My work dripped with los santos. Yemayá entered stage left. Lights rose on Oshun. Ochoosi, the herbalist, lurked behind a garden scene. Sometimes the Orisha were main characters, front and center. Other times they went unnamed, my secret code behind the story.

  One play had mostly conventional scenes that I interrupted midway for intentionally awkward “rituals”—sensual, silent moments. In these rituals, an actor moved her body in embarrassing ways when words became insufficient. A ritual to mourn a wife lost to fire. A ritual for a boy’s first sexual arousal. Invented ceremonies, the stuff of dreams. But all mom’s cleansings and ebós and possessions lurked between the lines, gave me a physical vocabulary to put onstage.

  Magic realism, a dramaturg said. The label irked me. Your Greek and Roman gods, my classmates said. Your Romulus and Remus, your Echo and Narcissus. The comparison annoyed me. Sensual is different than magical, I thought. The Greeks were then, I thought. The Orisha are now.

  In my kindergarten days, mom’s spirits and Spanish were secrets in her own home. Then she built a living medicine wheel—the circular herb garden—where she could take off the mask and speak to me honestly, without fearing condescension or misinterpretation. When she took my hand and shared her truth, I thought spirits and Spanish were the primary lessons. In Providence, Rhode Island, I belatedly wondered if creating safe space was a teaching I’d not yet appreciated. I recalled other protected places where truths had been bared. A sunroom full of Orisha. The Taíno in caverns. Nuchi in the bathroom, my hands in her hair. The bathroom at Yale where mom prayed over the coconuts. Flor upstairs on the couch for an hour. Could I build a safe space on the page, in the theater? A place where ritual could flow, where I could connect honestly with myself, with my own story and the stories that inhabited me? A place where I could control the narrative, center myself and my loved ones? Sure, all art was destined for outside (mis)interpretation. But basic theater decorum and etiquette entreated all present to listen respectfully, to watch attentively where the light was thrown.

  Once, life had happened to me. Now, my desk became a nexus of agency. Writing is plodding work, its progress measured in lines and paragraphs. The sun arcs across the sky and little changes. Eight hours elapse and you’ve not budged from your chair. But within slow hours, rapture can unfold. Draft by draft, I unveiled the Perezes, fitted us in protagonists’ clothes, recorded the hum of our music. My Perezes were gorgeous, monstrous creatures whose flaws proved their humanity rather than obscured it. We would hide no more. To megaphone our genius when the nation denied us, to force a bearing of witness, that became my North Star.

  I thought now of all the times mom dragged me to fabric stores. Her searches for the perfect button or trimming bordered on ecstatic. If it meant driving from Delaware to New Jersey in a night, she was uncompromising—she would build the best throne Oshun had ever seen. I had not realized in those textile hunts and woozy car rides that my apprenticeship was in full swing, that I would become altar-builder, too, that I would place photos of ancestors and goblets of water at my windowsill. But my daily candle-lighting and batá prayers were warm-ups. My main practice was the plays. I was building the throne.

  P
aula told us most artists begin with a naïve phase. More voice than skill, naïve works are saturated in point of view. They are bold and startling, if imbalanced and inelegant. I lacked the craft and dexterity to match my narrative intoxication. But the son montunos and Mozart of my adolescence offered themselves anew, this time as dramaturgical structures. Fugues and batá songs had sturdy architectures. Bach gave me motivic momentum. Batá gave me slow-build suspense. One scene ended tempestuously, raucously. What next, after all that explosion, how to start anew? Schubert offered clues. There lay the answer in his A-major sonata, the one I’d recorded at Yale. After fortissimo, a note or two to test the water. After cacophony, a single solitary melodic line.

  Silence=Death (Déjà Vu All Over Again)

  Because I fled us, even to go write us, my grip on the present-tense Perez reality loosened. I was farther from home and more removed from my family than ever. Each monologue drew me closer to my cousins. Scene by scene, I loved my sister in new ways. Line by line, I unearthed Titi Ginny’s layered womanhood. But these were acts of memory and reflection.

  Reality travels fast. The present tense has a phone book and I got a call. No matter how far I traveled, how old I grew, or how loudly I voiced us, our old silences chased me down, reaffirmed their hook.

  “Did you hear about Nuchi?”

  “No.”

  “She’s not well.”

  “How so?”

  Mom sighed instead of answering.

  “What does she have?”

  “She’s skinny, Quiara. Sabes que she was always thin pero esto…Los ojos no tienen vida. Her cheeks are gone, Quiara. Nuchi used to have cheeks, verdad?”

  “Yes, Nuchi had cheeks.”

  “She dropped by the other day. She said, ‘Titi, can I show you something?’ Ay, her voice, Quiara, como una niña asustada. She unbuttoned her shorts.” Mom sighed and sighed and sighed. “There was a sore on her belly.”

  “What kind of sore?”

  “You know…”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “A purple sore.”

  “A lesion?”

  Mom sighed and sighed and sighed. Just name the fucking disease already, I thought.

  “Who knows when she was first infected, or if she was reinfected over the years? Apparently—quien sabe, I’m telling you what she told me—she was undetectable for a long time.”

  “So Nuchi’s HIV positive?”

  Mom sighed and sighed and sighed. “According to her, the tests say one thing one day, another thing the next. All I can tell you is your cousin’s sick, Quiara.”

  Mom’s silence was not about prudishness. It was a strategic non-naming, a wound that cut too close to the bone. If you stare directly into the sun, you go blind. And it had another benefit. It gave my fury an easy target, it let me blame her silence rather than my cousin or the virus or, for that matter, the world. Much time had passed since my first brushes with AIDS. Back then I had only Keith Haring and Mapplethorpe. Now I had Tony Kushner’s Angels in America, Larry Kramer’s The Normal Heart, Tom Hanks in Philadelphia. But none of those were us. The virus was superficial, the only thing we shared. Even Angel in Rent died amidst a rapturous love story and Mimi looked like an MTV superstar.

  We were nowhere.

  * * *

  —

  I next saw Nuchi at mom’s birthday. Mom’s summer parties always kept the back door open so people could come in and out with beers, burgers, and pernil. There she was, my first cousin, chillin’ on the porch swing.

  “How’s your health?” I asked, joining her. She didn’t mention AIDS. Instead she pulled off a shoe, revealing a whopper of a bunion. Unleashed unto the sun like a dinosaur bone from a dig.

  “Ain’t that nasty, Qui Qui? I wear two sizes bigger on the left foot now!” Ever the prankster. Two more of her teeth were gone, and for what implants cost, she told me, she could buy a car. Maybe not a new one, but more than a lemon. “Not that I could get a title.” She pinched my knee to emphasize the scandal. “I got a warrant on my ass for twelve years of unpaid tickets. I owe the city something like two thousand bucks. Mm-hmm.” Nuchi always pinched my leg when gossiping, especially about herself. She had a stand-up comic’s instinct for self-deprecation. Given a stage mic and Friday night crowd, she’d slay.

  “Qui Qui. Even if I paid every one a them tickets and all them bullshit fines, cuz you know they be charging interest and fees on top a the initial price tag, even if I paid all that I still couldn’t get a car.” She was reeling me in. Waiting for the ask.

  “Why not?”

  “Because I ain’t never had a license not a day in my life. They’d lock me up for unlawful driving. That’s why I can’t pay my parking tickets!”

  Yeah, Nuchi wasn’t getting dental implants or a car. And she’d need a miracle to get rid of that bunion. She had mastered a new closed-mouth smile, pursed lips that hid the dental issues. Her figure had whittled away, a wisp of her previous form. A decade prior, at that Fourth of July party, her ass and thighs were majestic. Redwoods. Now her jeans were held up by a rope. Even with so much less of her, Nuchi’s hostile beauty cast a spell. The eroded landscape of her cheekbones, her eyes sunken like water holes. There’s a reason the Badlands capture our awe—in their decay, a life cycle sings.

  By certain measures, Nuchi had weathered the storm. One daughter who’d walked the stage to get a bachelor’s. Another on the path to a nursing degree. Plus, one rap-sheet-free son training to be a prizefighter. Sure, some of her sons were doing the lockup dance, and her lawyer, Thom, was on speed dial. But Nuchi had a parcel of grandkids she’d been entrusted to babysit as their parents pursued day-job adulthoods. Success. The next gen, one step ahead of the last. Really, though, such metrics were red herrings and I knew it. I’d stuck to the “made good” script long enough, fronting like Yale’s rigor (and prestige) meant that spiritually I had done my work. All those up-and-up notions aside, it was Nuchi’s ability to land a great punchline that remained her most impressive humanity. Maybe that’s what mom had meant when whisper-urging me: It’s in your blood. The resilience. The deep memory and experience of survival. Humor like Nuchi’s.

  An intention formed as I sat beside my ill cousin. Faintest voice, this desire. No sooner had I heard it than I hushed it. Naming a goal, after all, invites the possibility of failure. One day, I hoped, I would claim and really know a resilience of my own.

  “Hey, Qui Qui, which potato salad you like more?” Nuchi asked, pursing her lips. Studying my paper plate, I pointed to one of two mayonnaise-y blobs. I chose right. “Don’t tell Flor. You know my secret? Eggs and pickles. Hey, Qui Qui, which arroz con gandules you like more?” Again I chose correctly. “Don’t tell Titi Ginny. She puts in too much oil. She be oiling the caldero like she ’bout to fry alcapurrias!”

  Sitting out back at mom’s, listening to the birdsong, squished together on the garden swing so our legs touched, asking about AIDS struck me as inappropriate and unkind. Still, for one second, Nuchi shot me sad eyes, like, “Do you know, little cuz?”

  The Book of Our Genius

  Though the Perez women wore clothes when necessary, they were butt naked, half-naked, and somewhat-exposed a lot, too. Any given day at Abuela’s, half the jeans would be unbuttoned cuz, ay comadre ya tu sabes: PMS, heatstroke, menopause, and Abuela’s exagerada servings kept us trapped in perma-bloat. After an El ride north through the desolate landscape, my matriarchs’ bodies were natural wonders. Nuchi’s eroded cheekbones were my Grand Canyon. Mom’s thigh jiggles my Niagara Falls. The tattoo on Ginny’s breast my Aurora Borealis. North Philly’s vast, vacant stretches of blight were increasingly visible from each house Abuela migrated to. The female Perez form stood out against the gray rubble, fulsome and bold. Facial moles like cacti in the sierra, front-tooth gaps like keyhole nebulae. The cellulite rippling over their asses shone with a brook’s babbling gli
mmer. The sag of each tit—big ones and small—like stalactites of varied epochal formation. Stalactitties! Upper arms of all shapes, sizes, and textures, like varied river stones. And oh (swoon) the guts! Abundant flabdomens, some inhabited by earthworm-shaped stretchmarks. Brown bellies like Philly’s own Half Dome and Black Hills.

  The nipples you see in skin flicks, dirty rags, and R movies? Bullshit. Ours were a motley combo platter of puffy, inverted, asymmetrical, enormous, dainty, bumpy, smooth, and protrusive that resembled nothing ever glimpsed in commercial media. Some of us had smaller nipples growing out of our main ones—nipples stacked up like Russian nesting dolls. By Playboy standards we were some kinda freak show, and yet the way my elders swung their milk pendulums with easy posture was twice as confident as any pinup girl.

  People use “fat” as some catch-all descriptor, but the variety of our curves revealed the slur’s downright laziness. The Perez matriarchs ballooned in my adolescence, but even in my hopscotch days, prekindergarten, I remember Ginny’s runner legs: thick firm tree trunks. In sepia eight-by-tens, mom’s teenage thighs rocket down from miniskirts, sturdy willful things. Some fatness was green-mango firm, other fatness pooled and jiggled. Gravity, that universal law, played out differently from one body to the next. Blubber might protrude horizontally and turn your belly into a shelf where you could prop your cafecito, or ripple and drape down like Victorian curtains. Skinniness was something I didn’t learn about till bloodsickness rolled into town. Skinny meant the doctor had bad news for you, the steep grade of a downhill ride.

  There was so much pubic hair. You could upholster a fucking mansion. By the time I was grown and saw the hairless pussies that had taken over porn? Poor things looked like E.T. in the plastic lab—overexposed, malnourished creatures. Save E.T.! Grow some hair!