by Myriam Gurba
The fact that I’m not totally positive about the minor reminds me that both of my grandmothers died of Alzheimer’s.
In Spanish, Alzheimer’s is el Alzheimer’s.
Alzheimer’s sucks in any language.
Aguita was the last word I heard my mom’s mom say. It was the only word she could remember, I think. Adding -ita turns nouns diminutive. Abuela, abuelita. Agua, aguita. Abuelita was out of her mind, but she showed tenderness toward water.
During the last year of her life, a dentist pulled the teeth from my abuelita’s mouth. We flew to Mexico to be with her toothlessness. Mom sat at her deathbed, dunking cotton balls into water. She traced her mom’s lips with them. My abuelita stared at her ceiling fan. Its rotors spun. Its white string twitched. Death saturated the objects in the room. She presided. A framed portrait of La Virgen de Guadalupe observed the ordeal from above the headboard. Her Mona Lisa smile betrayed sadness.
Death does have a gender. She likes to flirt.
The summer I peed in a Mexican desert, I met some missionary expats.
They were Americans, a husband and wife, and both were beautiful. What is up with these modelesque missionaries? Can the ugly not serve as emissaries of the divine?
The missionaries were reformed party animals. They had a daughter, a little white girl who wore colorful dresses and barrettes in her hair. She sang to herself. Sometimes she played with Mexican girls. She bossed them around in Spanish. She told them, “Listen to me.” What an imperialist.
When I wandered back from peeing in the desert, the missionaries’ daughter was playing beneath pomegranate boughs. She suspended a doll over the dirt, making it shimmy. Its plastic hair shone. The girl’s eyelashes looked plentiful in the campfire light.
I am a gringa, and since gringos are really good at exploiting Mexico as a liminal space, a shadow rose in me and eclipsed my morality. Images of violence toward the missionaries’ daughter sped through my mind. I could smash her head with a rock, beat her with cacti, stab her with thorns, rip off her dress, destroy the world between her legs, and throw her in a stream glittering with fool’s gold. The desert is a place where people go to be tempted, but I wasn’t exactly tempted by these visions. The geography, however, did suit my spiritual revelation. The desert was behaving biblically. It was helping me to acknowledge that evil starts in the mind. Mine, Jeffrey Dahmer’s, Moses’s, John the Baptist’s, anyone’s.
Carl Jung said that it is not the light that enlightens us. The darkness does. Mexico is the place where this object lesson happened for Ambrose Bierce and me. Mexico didn’t go as easy on Bierce.
OMG
I have something to confess.
I never finished reading The Diary of Anne Frank. I sometimes used to worry about whether or not I was going to burn in hell for finding her diary boring, but when I stopped believing in god, I stopped wondering about that.
Dorm
I bought a hefty plaster Buddha from a vendor in Tijuana. I made Steve rope it to the roof of the Bronco. He didn’t want to because Buddha isn’t very Christian, but whatever. The Buddha came to Berkeley with me. So did my copy of The Collected Poems: Sylvia Plath. And my favorite stuffed animal, a plush brontosaurus named Anton. He was named after the scientist, not the Satanist.
Mom and Ofelia stayed home while Dad and Herman drove me to college. We rode along the Pacific coast in a gold station wagon. Plum trees, eucalyptus trees, almond trees, and garlic fields flanked the road in increasingly northern counties. We lunched on hamburgers. We hardly spoke. I wondered if my terror was detectable. Going to college without Ida terrified me. She was going to the University of California at Santa Cruz. (That’s where she got accidentally introduced to crack.)
Nobody warned us about move-in day pandemonium at the dorms. Families unloading sons and daughters jammed Berkeley’s one-way streets. Cars filled with mostly white families parked wherever. Everybody except for Dad was breaking at least three traffic laws. Teenagers schlepped beanbags, bookshelves, and contraband pet rats up sidewalks. Moms lugged milk crates full of toiletries. Little sisters cried. Little brothers picked their noses. Dad verged on hyperventilation. He considers traffic crimes to be crimes against humanity.
“Look at all these assholes,” he said. “Where am I supposed to park? They’re parked in the street! You can’t do that. You can’t park in the street!”
“Just keep going,” I urged. I clutched a copy of The Bell Jar. My fingers rubbed its velvety edges. “Just keep circling till something opens up.”
I looked at Dad’s face. Even his beard looked constipated. I felt his capacity for homicide. Its warmth emanated from his skin. He was capable of killing many of these people.
Dorms took up the block. Each unit rose like a mini-skyscraper. We executed a series of snail-paced right turns for half an hour till Dad craned his neck forward. His Adam’s apple bulged. He stared. A metered parking spot had opened up.
A white girl hopped off the curb. She walked to the center of the open spot. Blond braids hung to her shoulders. She wore a T-shirt, khaki shorts, and Tevas. She had probably been a Girl Scout.
(Ida had been a Girl Scout. She had tried to get me to join, but I couldn’t handle it. The pressure to sell cookies was too much.)
Dad switched on his blinker. He pushed the brake. He made eye contact with the white girl.
With haughtiness, she looked Dad in his half-white face and folded her arms across her chest. She yelled, “I’m saving this spot!” She was almost smiling. Her almost smile was what did it.
The white girl looked at something beyond us, at something we couldn’t see. Maybe the white privilege fairy.
Dad rolled down his window. He craned his bald spot out. He shouted, “THERE’S NO SAVING!”
The white girl looked at me. She stiffened. She was steadfast in her colonization.
“That girl doesn’t understand,” muttered Dad. “There’s no saving.”
I looked at Dad’s lap. His legs twitched. His foot moved toward the gas pedal.
“Dad!” I screamed. “Don’t!”
He turned to me and shouted, “Honey, I HAVE TO.” Looking at the white girl, he shouted, “THERE’S NO SAVING!”
The station wagon sped toward her. As we neared, her eyes grew to the size of hardboiled eggs. I could tell she played volleyball from how she leapt out of the parking spot. Onlookers stared at us like we were the assholes.
I shrank and prayed.
The elevator was broken, so we carried my belongings up eight flights of stairs. No one else had arrived in the triple I’d been assigned. Bunk beds were stacked against one wall. A twin bed was shoved against the other wall, in between desks. Across from the desks, closets without doors. A third desk was parked beneath a mirror bolted to the wall.
Dad and Herman stacked my boxes and bags near the single twin.
“You’re lucky,” said Dad. “You don’t have to share a bed.”
I decided the head of my bed would be the end near the window.
Fall Semester 1995
ANTHRO 3AC
ART 8
EDUC 98
ENGLISH 45C
ID
In the cafeteria, I sat on a low stool in front of a gray backdrop.
A photographer said, “Smile.”
My lips followed his instructions.
Magdaleno
Some people go to college to get a useful degree. They study hard for it. I’ve seen them. I’ve seen people carry laminated notes into the shower so they can multitask. I never showered with my homework, but I did study hard. I studied hard with the intent of becoming useless. I studied hard with the intent of becoming an artist, a revolutionary, or a saint.
Given what I knew about my family, and given my taste in books, I felt like I could really become one or all these things. I meant it when I said Marx made more sense to me than the Bible. My Mexican grandmother’s hobbies were painting and praying. My Mexican grandfather had published several poems.
&nb
sp; Some of my Mexican ancestors had rebelled against their government during the world’s first communist uprising. People often believe the first communist uprising happened in Russia. It didn’t. Mexicans tried turning red first.
One of these Mexicans was my great-great-grandfather, Magdaleno Escobar. He was a baker, a horse rancher, and a rebel. Federal troops captured him in the state of Colima and took him to the capital, also named Colima. In the plaza outside the municipal palace, a captor commanded, “Touch your nose to the wall!” My great-great-grandfather followed the instructions. Another Mexican ordered, “Fire!”
Years after his execution, his sister brought the revolutionary’s daughter to the site of her father’s last moment. The aunt told her, “Go ahead. Touch the wall.” The girl traced bullet holes with her fingers. She wondered which one was made by the bullet that killed her father.
Magdaleno’s wizened daughter gave Dad Magdaleno’s story.
Dad gave the story to me.
I wonder how much truth could fill Magdaleno’s bullet hole.
I hope none.
I hope the story is a lie or at least half a lie.
Mexicans are good at sitting on the truth. Octavio Paz knew this. He described our speech as “full of reticences, of metaphors and allusions, of unfinished phrases,” our silence as “full of tints, folds, thunderheads, sudden rainbows, indecipherable threats.”
I have a deep respect for big-time liars. They create religions. They create poems. They make art. Liars move us. Liars make us believe that Nietzsche was wrong. God can’t be killed. Only hidden.
I really did believe that I had what it took to become what I wanted. People in my family made things. People in my family made things up. People in my family were shot in the back because of Karl Marx. People in my family had been poisoned, held for ransom, and tortured. I excelled at self-mortification. So did my sister. Suffering and not eating are the hallmarks of sanctity.
I didn’t believe the anthropology, education, and English classes I’d signed up for were going to help me reach my creative or theological goals, but my art class would. It was titled Introduction to Visual Thinking.
A white man in black-rimmed glasses taught it. He lectured us in a small room down the hall from the Hearst Museum of Anthropology. Slides of Monets, Manets, and the professor’s own work glowed on a large screen behind him. He leaned against the podium, elbows bearing the weight of his mediocrity, right hand gripping a clicker. The projector spat up its next image. More impressionism. Blah. Kind of boring.
The professor described how impressionism worked. He explained the art as if he had no soul, in an accent I couldn’t place. I wanted him to devote a lecture to his accent and the reason for his sallow skin. Was he a Kennedy? He almost spoke like one but with a dash of palsy. Was he an alcoholic? His skin made me sad. He didn’t seem tragic enough to be teaching art. His clothes seemed especially artless. He wore jeans and boring sweaters. I’d been expecting Jackson Pollock.
I love Pollock’s last name. It’s partly me.
Professor not-Pollock’s lectures took place once a week. Attendance dwindled. By the second month of the semester, only freshmen were going. I, of course, was one of the faithful: in my seat by eight o’clock, spiral-bound notebook open and resting on the desk latched to my chair’s arm. My pen flew, capturing every word this white man said about how my brain should interact with this planet’s visual culture. I wrote about chromatic schemes and monocular cues. I rubbed the corn on my middle finger. I ran my fingers and the corn through my hair. It surprised me to find so little there. I kept forgetting I’d hacked it off at Supercuts in August. Short hair had seemed a humble choice. I’d become obsessed with humility since my desert epiphany. I wanted to be good. I didn’t want to be a thinker of bad thoughts. I wanted to be a thinker of good thoughts.
Humility meant purity of word, thought, deed, and body.
I stuck my pen in my mouth. I sucked it. I daydreamed about Joan of Arc.
My childhood books about the lives of saints now sat on my dorm bookshelf. I wanted those legends near me. I thought of them as reference manuals. After reading the story of Joan of Arc for the first time, I’d wanted to grab the matches off the toilet tank and set myself on fire. I wanted to interrupt the lecture to tell Professor not-Pollock that was impressionism, that Joan of Arc was a better impressionist than Manet. She looked so like what she was—a tomboy saint—in Carl Th. Dreyer’s silent film about her adventures, so heroic and fragile in the scene where a man’s hand places a crown on her head. That scene proves that to be a saint, you must have a certain kind of face. It needs to have photogenic cheekbones. Mine weren’t bad but they weren’t impressionistic yet. I planned to pile less on my cafeteria tray to make them so. I vowed to eat fewer tater tots so my bones could catch the light and reflect it in holy tomboy ways.
Introduction to Visual Thinking met in the art studio twice a week.
Most kids were taking it for the easy A; they weren’t there to become artists. The ones who were there with that goal were clearly there with that goal. You could tell by looking at them. The artists owned paintbrushes but not hairbrushes. They wore jewelry heavier than everyone else’s. They wore fashionably unfashionable footwear. A microbiology major who was taking the class for fun sat at my worktable. He was a ripped Asian who dressed normally, muscular with a very nice jawline. His name was Tim, and it surprised me that he talked to me so much. I was a troll. He was hot.
Staring at the back of an art girl’s head, he sneered and shook his. He leaned toward me and hissed, “Art hair.”
I knew what he was talking about. All this girl’s aesthetic integrity was tangled in her hair. She out-arted all of us when she created a cardboard collage honoring her low self-esteem and crumpled during our critique of it. Her collage sat on an easel, we crowded around it and made our comments, and long tears slid down her long cheeks. She bolted out the studio door, fashionably unfashionable shoes clattering down the hall. Nice girls chased her. I didn’t.
With admiration, or something like it, the grad student in charge of studio breathed, “She’s so sensitive . . .”
Tim rolled his eyes. He muttered, “That bitch needs to brush her hair.”
I suspected the grad student in charge of the art studio of lesbianism. She was a white woman and part ostrich. She wore her hair shaggy and feathered. She shared little about herself, so when someone asked her, “What kind of stuff do you like? What kind of art do you do?” we all leaned in.
“Fluxus,” she answered.
A kid who’d seen her art whispered to me, “It’s just a bunch of wood boxes.”
Considering how dull she seemed, that made sense. Dry lips, dry hair, dry art.
One of our assignments was to make art in a non-art space. For this assignment, Tim wrapped a nearby spiral staircase in pink and purple string. It became something for students to trip on while doing psychedelics. We also had to appropriate non-art objects and make them art. A thick white girl who always wore overalls to studio reclaimed an abandoned recliner from the curb outside our dorm. She dragged it to the studio, painted it, duct-taped its holes, and glued a sketch of some guy’s face to the crack between the seat and the back. She explained, “This work is about obsession.” She pointed at the face. “I’m obsessed with him.” She smiled. “He’s beautiful. He’s so beautiful.”
He totally wasn’t beautiful. The recliner was gross.
The grad student asked, “Does he know you made this?”
The artist giggled.
I thought mean things. I thought the word tacky.
Everything about the piece was tacky. It was offensively tacky. I felt sinful for thinking that. My stream of consciousness is very judgmental. My subconscious is and always will be a mean person.
For that same found-art assignment, an Asian girl added the word greed to a dollar bill as a critique of capitalism. Another Asian girl used oil pastels to recreate famed nursery rhyme scenarios. We peered at he
r sketch of Little Boy Blue. Tentacles sprouted from the ground as he napped against a mound of hay. The tentacles seemed ready to curl around him or tickle his bare feet.
One day, a racially ambiguous art girl with light-pink hair showed up at studio. I turned to Tim. “Her face is soooooo pretty,” I murmured.
“Whose?”
“Hers.” My chin pointed at the pink-haired girl.
“Thunder thighs?”
I took note of her thighs, which I hadn’t done before. They were thick. “Yes.”
For every project our professor assigned, I used photographs. For my first assignment, I recycled a slab of pine from our studio’s dumpster. I sanded away its roughness and bought acrylic paints from the art store across the street from the Hotel Durant. I painted the wood pale gray and, in what I thought looked like nineteenth-century cursive, listed the names of my family members in black. I added a white banner and wrote “we are seeds in a pomegranate somebody in hell clutches.” I love melodrama. Near these words, I painted a crude yet baroque pomegranate with its insides exposed.
I glued pictures of Mom, Dad, Herman, Ofelia, and me inside the pomegranate’s seeds. Five seeds. Saint Veronica.
During my critique, I propped this piece up on the chalkboard ledge. Artists and non-artists clustered around it. I explained, “It’s a retablo. A Mexican ex-voto. I guess I gave it pagan undertones.” My thumb pointed at the fruit. “Because of the pomegranate.” I waited for everyone to talk shit.
They did.
For my next assignment, I cut ballerinas out of a Degas print I bought from a poster shop. I pasted their bodies to a pink velvet swatch that I glued to more recycled wood. I sat at my dorm desk, flipping through the small family photo album I had brought with me. I stared at pictures of Ofelia. She’d had anorexia. Or had she? Dr. Hamilton had insisted that her illness was impossible.