Yo!

by Julia Alvarez

  And Yo sees that one hand waving when she looks into my eyes. So that I am blessed—and sometimes cursed—with a child who understands my secret heart. I should not say child anymore, for she is a grown woman who is already preparing herself. When she looks at me these days, she can see that fresh-dug hole in the mountain cemetery near the town where I was born, the flash of the river between the trees.

  She writes me one, two letters a week. Sometimes she includes an old black-and-white photo with those scalloped edges as if all memories deserve a little lace doily to lay on. A young handsome man sits with a young lady in a crowded booth in a bar sixty years ago. With those pasting papers which were invented for her because she always has to put her two cents on everything, she writes, Where was this taken? Who is the girl beside you? Were you really in love? She strikes right for the secret heart of that young man!

  Most of the things she asks I tell her. I run the past through a sieve of judgment in my head, and if there is no harm, I give her the full cup of my life to drink from. Some little things catch in that fine net, and I leave them out or I make a broad statement. But then the next letter arrives full of interrogation: Papi, you say you had to escape the island because you were in a revolution in 1939 and I can’t find any mention of it in the book. You say that you were in a log-cabin hospital at Lac Abitibi near the Laurentians and I look on the map and Lac Abitibi is nowhere near the Laurentians. Are these just lapses of memory or did you make the whole thing up and if so why?

  And then I have to explain, sieving everything over again. Until the next letter arrives, and I explain some more, and after a while, I lose that quality control. Before I know it, I’ve told her the whole story I did not want her and the others to know.

  Is that really so? I ask myself. Don’t I want to be known before I go? And perhaps Yo sees that secret desire, stronger than all the other secrets in my heart, and that is why she keeps asking.

  Suddenly, the letters stop. At first, I think she is very busy with her writing and teaching and the new husband who is a very nice man. Then two, three weeks go by, and still no letters with the impossible questions I love. I ask my wife, who is now talking to Yo after forgiving her for writing the last book, I ask her how is our Yoyo doing. My wife is the one always calling the girls even to ask them did they finally get the stuck window closed, how long do they stir their rice pudding. Usually my wife puts me on at the end to say, “Well, your mother has already told you everything so I will just say goodbye.” But with Yo, because of our many letters, I always shake my head when my wife offers me the phone.

  “Doug says she is sad,” my wife says. “I guess she went to a lecture at the college and this famous critic said that those baby boomers who never had children are committing genetic suicide.”

  “Why go to a lecture like that?” I ask. Sometimes I think my children never use their brains to figure out what is good for them, only to be smart.

  “Papi, she didn’t know what the man was going to say ahead of time. Anyhow, Doug says she is depressed. Maybe Sandi’s new baby stirred things up. She’s been telling Doug that women in the Bible who never had babies were said to have a curse on them.”

  “That is an exaggeration.” I shake my head, which is a safe thing to say when anyone tries to prove something with the Bible. But then I start to think that perhaps if I were a woman, I would feel the same way. Perhaps if I had all the equipment and I never used it, there would be a sadness, like letting part of myself go to waste.

  So I write her. I say, my daughter, your father is so proud of you. You have created books for the future generations.

  I do not mention that I know anything of her feelings. I try to say my praise so that she sees that her books are her babies, and for me, they are my grandbabies.

  In the middle of the afternoon at the oficina where I still go for a couple of hours, she calls me. “Ay, Papi, I just got your letter.” She sounds a little weepy, so I go and close the door. For a moment, I worry that maybe the nice man is not so nice. Over the years with my girls, I have had to brace myself for bad news.

  “It meant a lot what you said,” she is saying. “I’m sorry I haven’t been so good about writing lately. I’ve been kind of down.” And then she is crying and telling me about the Bible and the famous critic—everything all mixed up so that if my wife hadn’t already told me I would think the critic was someone famous in the Bible. I try to calm her down by offering the old-country solution of going and breaking the man’s knees. But that just gets her more upset. “Ay, Papi, come on. It’s not his fault. I’ve just started to wonder, you know, did I go down the wrong road? Did I make a big mistake?”

  “We all have our destiny,” I tell her. And suddenly she is very quiet for she can hear it in my voice—the way we can with people when they are talking from deep inside what they know. “Look at your father in 1939 having to run away to New York with no money in his pocket.”

  “I thought you ran away to Canada? I thought you had two hundred and fifty dollars saved up?”

  “The important thing is I never thought I would get to be a doctor again. All my education lost. But that was mi destino. And even though everything went under in those years, that is what finally came up.

  “And you, my daughter,” I add while she is listening so close, “your destino has been to tell stories. It is a blessing to be able to live out your destino.”

  “But many people are writers and mothers too.”

  I say what we always say to our children. “You are not many people.”

  “But how can I be sure this is my destino? It’s easy for you because now you can see you were right about yourself. But people often fool themselves, you know.” The buts of depression, hitting their little horns against everything we set up to make ourselves feel better.

  There is nothing to do when those buts get going—as my old professor well knew—but offer a magical solution that can’t be knocked over. So, I tell Yo I am going to give her my blessing when we see each other for the Thanksgiving. “That is in the Bible, too,” I remind her. “The father giving his blessing. That is what makes the curse of doubt go away.”

  “You’re going to give me your blessing?” She sounds excited. This is the daughter who would prefer getting the blessing in the will over and above the house in Santiago. The shares in Coca-Cola.

  So I remind her, “All my girls will get my blessing. But I am going to give you a particular one.”

  “You mean like with your hands on my head.” The fun is coming back in her voice. “Are the heavens going to open and a voice say, This is my beloved Yo in whom I well pleased?”

  “Something like that,” I tell her.

  After I hang up, I rehearse in my head how the blessing will go. It has to be in story form for Yo to believe in it. And so I will tell her the story of when I first realized her destino was to tell stories. She was five years old. It is a story I have kept secret because it is also a story of my shame which I cannot disentangle from it. We were living in terror, and I reacted with terror. I beat her. I told her that she must never ever tell stories again. And so maybe that is why she has never believed in her destiny, why I have to go back to that past and let go the belt and put my hands on her head instead. I have to tell her I was wrong. I have to lift the old injunction.

  I had already been living ten years in exile in the States when I met the girls’ mother. This, too, was my destino. A cousin of mine invited me to a party a friend of his was throwing at the Waldorf Astoria. At first, I did not want to go. I was a political exile and a gathering in a grand hotel like the Waldorf was bound to be filled with rich Dominicans in New York City on shopping trips. But I went. Ten years so far from home, and I was aching for the sound of our creole Spanish, the taste of ron punch or To-Die-Dreaming, the look of our pretty women. Maybe my principles had dulled on the hard edge of loneliness. Anyhow I went, and sitting out all the dances was a lovely señorita sneezing into a borrowed handkerchief—an oasis! fo
r I had not one but two medical degrees. Not that I needed either one to diagnose that she was sick with a head cold. We spent the evening talking about her symptoms, I taking the liberty, under the guise of collecting her medical history, of finding out everything I could about her.

  I have to stop here. My wife, she does not want me to tell about her. She says the minute I put the story out there, Yo will write it down. So I am not going to say about all the little notes back and forth; how the romance grew; how I called her mon petit chou because that is what the French name their sweethearts; how my wife’s mother did not approve of me because I didn’t come from a fine family; how her father approved of me because I was a fine man which was pedigree enough for him; how my future wife went back to the Dominican Republic when her extended shopping trip was over; how we were both heartsick with the separation; how her mother finally relented and agreed on the marriage; how we married and I returned to the island to live under the wing of her powerful family; how we had the four girls.

  And now that the story is caught up to where my wife has had the four girls, she can slip out of the story into her anonymity. From time to time I have to bring her in to say her lines but I will keep that to a minimum so as to respect her feelings. I’ve tried talking my wife into a different point of view, telling her what Yo has told me in letter after letter: “What is the point of shrouding yourself in silence? The grave will do that for you for all eternity.”

  But that always starts a fight between us. My wife accuses me of siding with Yo. She says all she wants is three things on her tombstone, her name, her date of birth and death, and this summary of her life: She had four girls. Enough said. She claims she wants that enough said engraved on the tombstone, which I think does not become a deceased person. It is the wrong tone altogether. But my wife only insists on this particular eulogy when we are arguing about Yo and her stories. So I think when the time comes, she can be talked into something a bit more flattering to herself and others.

  Adored Wife, Beloved Mother, Treasured Grandmother, Friend to One and All.

  Not long after we were living on the island I became involved again in the underground. Although there had been a supposed liberalizing of the regime, which is why I had been granted a pardon, nothing had really changed. If anything, things had gotten worse. A secret police system called the SIM had been established, and people were disappearing left and right for the most minor things. One of our neighbors was overheard to say that the maldito hike in the price of beans had to stop. Next thing we knew, he was found, his mouth stuffed with rags, his feet tied to a concrete block at the bottom of the Rio Ozama.

  Sometimes I get confused as to what exactly happened. I don’t think it is only because I am now an old man. It’s also because I have read the story of those years over and over as Yo has written it, and I know I’ve substituted her fiction for my facts here and there. Many times I don’t even realize I’ve done so until I get together with my old cronies from the underground. I’ll say to one of them, “Maximo, hombre, do you remember that secret closet you helped me build in the new house?” And Maximo will look at me funny and say, “Carlos, you better get that cholesterol checked.”

  The undoctored truth is that I joined the underground. That I got some of my wife’s family involved. That in my own small way I committed subversive acts. But I was being extremely careful. As a pardoned exile, I knew I was being watched. I did not volunteer for the big things. But when someone who was working his way west to the border had to be hidden for a night, I offered my house. When pamphlets from the exile groups had to be distributed, I did so from the different clinics where I worked. Regularly, I met with my cronies at a barra on the Malecín, planning our strategy for when we would strike. And I kept an illegal gun. But to tell the truth: I was not hiding that gun to blow the dictator’s head off. No. I used to love to go hunting for guinea hens up in the mountains near Jarabacoa. The campesinos I treated for free in the rural clinics were always paying me back by showing me the best places. But the BB guns the regime allowed took the whole pleasure and precision out of the hunt. So I kept my .22 oiled and ready and hidden under a loose floorboard on my side of the walk-in closet.

  I say my side as this closet opened onto our bedroom on one side and my study on the other. It was a safe place to store anything because no one was allowed into my study, not even the maids. My wife cleaned that room herself, with the excuse that Don Carlos was picky about his things. It was where, if there was a family problem, we went to talk. I could not keep track of the whole house, but I had scoured this room aplenty, and I was certain it was free of bugs.

  Into this room would wander my little Yo. Often I found her under the desk with one of my medical books. She loved turning the see-through pages, undressing the naked man of his skin, then his veins, then his muscles, and finally when she had only the skeleton left, going into reverse and fleshing the man to life again. She was intrigued by the photos of rare diseases, seeing all the things that could go wrong in the world, and knowing that her papi could fix them. “My papi can do anything!” she would brag to her cousins. “He can put in eyeballs. He can make babies come out of the stomach.” It was sweet and simple worship, a very endearing trait of our children, before they turn into adolescents who need to destroy us in order to grow up into young men and women.

  One time I asked her why she was interested in the sick people. “A pretty little girl like you should be out having fun with your cousins.”

  She looked at me, and even back then I felt she could see right through to the bottom of my heart. “This is fun,” she asserted with a serious nod of her head.

  “But what are you saying?” I had noticed her lips moving, an endless mumble going on as she turned the pages.

  “I am telling the sick people stories to make them feel better.”

  My face lit up with pleasure at knowing that one of my children had inherited that sense of magic I had learned from my old professor. “What stories might those be you are telling Papi’s patients?”

  “The ones in the storybook.”

  My wife’s sister had brought the girls back a book from New York which she read out loud to them from time to time. It was all about a young lady with a little cap and a sequined bra and long baggy pants who was trapped in a sultan’s bedroom and who told him stories to keep herself alive. I knew what was going to happen before her head was cut off, and so I didn’t think the book was appropriate for my girls. But when I complained to my wife, she said this book was famous literature and no one had ever come to harm getting a little education. I could have cited two or three dozen people of our acquaintance who had disappeared because they knew more than they should, but my wife was already riled up enough those years. Until we emigrated to this country five years later, she slept at night only if she took two or three sleeping pills.

  Every time we caught Yoyo in my study, my wife wanted to punish her for disobeying orders, but I stepped in as I rarely did. I argued that maybe it was our child’s destino to be a medical doctor, and we should encourage this. So we allowed her to go into my study and look at one book at a time after showing it first to me. The sexual diseases volume I put on a high shelf she could not reach even standing on tiptoe on the desk.

  But as usually happens when you permit the forbidden, Yo lost interest in her forays into my library. One reason was the new attraction that had arrived down the block at the general’s house, a small black-and-white television. I had seen one years ago at the World’s Fair in New York before we had moved back to the island. Now they were being sold commercially. Or I should say, about a hundred sets had been allowed to enter the country, and those close to those in power were permitted to purchase them.

  We didn’t have one, and even my wife’s family, who could have afforded one, didn’t have one. It would have been a silly luxury for the programming was very limited: the one television station was state-owned and state-controlled. Every day there was an hour of news from the
national palace, mostly speeches by El Jefe, or so I heard. I only saw the box once when I went to pick up the girls at the general’s house. The general and his wife were very cordial, older people who had never had their own children and so doted on my four girls. But I knew from my compañeros in the underground what General Molino was capable of, and so when he gave me his arm in an abrazo, I could feel the hair on the back of my neck rising like a dog’s hackles.

  What my girls most loved to watch were the American cowboy movies which were dubbed by a deaf person, I think. Years later, when I saw an episode of Rin-Tin-Tin in Spanish, I spent most of the half hour laughing. The lips and the words just didn’t go. Barks would sound a few seconds after Rin-Tin-Tin barked. Same with the gunshots, so that the villain would be clutching his bloody side and falling in a cloud of dust before you heard the bang-bang-bang of the gun. But my girls loved their cowboys, and so every Saturday, they went over to the general’s house to watch those silly movies.

  The particulars of what happened over there one Saturday afternoon have all become jumbled together in my head. As I said, this memory has been my shameful secret, and when you do not tell the story, everything mixes with everything else. So, sometimes when I reach down for a fact what I get is my wife’s red organdy cocktail dress that she was wearing that Saturday evening when Milagros, the girls’ nanny, came back with the girls from the general’s house. But other times what comes up are the arrests and denunciations that began to intensify that year when the regime gave free license to the SIM. And sometimes what I remember is how those floorboards had been disturbed one Saturday morning when I went into the study to clean my illegal gun and get ready for a Sunday of guinea hunting.