For the Guatemalans and Hondurans; the Salvadorans and Colombians; the Cubans and Venezuelans I work with, each originating transgressive circumstance may be as distinct as an owl is from a hummingbird. But the sin embargo falls on their head the same way, righteous as a curse.
Is your fear credible?
Do you (who got away with no more than the breath in your chest) have documentation?
And how is it, anyway, that you got away?
The First State Survivor Center is privately funded. We treat both immigrant and asylum-seeker, because immigration trauma can manifest in ways remarkably similar to survivor trauma. Also because the government’s designation of which countries produce refugees and which produce immigrants is a lesson in politics, not psychology.
Anyway. You know (or if you don’t know, you can guess) there is more than one way to translate “sin embargo” from Spanish to English. Sometimes instead of nevertheless, I go for this: the fact remains.
The fact of report; of U.N. statistics and special procedures; of federal applications, deferred action and memoranda.
There is fact of flesh, too. Here, by Istambul Protocols: thickened plantar fascia; perforated tympanic membrane; rectal tearing; keloids and hyperpigmentation; chronic lung problems. I know how to translate these flesh facts into words, even when the government claims it cannot: bastinado; teléfono; rape; necklacing; wet submarino and waterboarding.
Sin embargo, sin embargo, sin embargo — the fact remains. In Spanish, in English, in the hauntingly untranslated gulf between.
2.
Someone famous, I can’t remember who, once said that when a language dies, so does memory.
I wonder about that whenever María José Manrique comes to the center and sits across the desk from me. She doesn’t come regularly, and no longer makes the impression she once did. In the early days of her counseling, she not only wore her traditional blouse and skirt, she wound a bright, twenty-meter ribbon around her head in imitation of the sun.
The headdress is called a tocoyal in Tz’utijil, but it’s been at least a decade since she’s spoken it. And today, when I ask her why she doesn’t wear the headpiece anymore, she refers to it by the Guatemalan Spanish word for all such ornamentation — tocado — then skillfully avoids answering my question.
Tocado, in case you were wondering, also means “touched.” Touched has an odd set of meanings in English. Those seven letters convey the straightforward tactile, intangible compassion, and assumed mental illness or incompetence all at once. Survivors of torture, no matter how touching their testimony, are often written off as touched.
Last year’s genocide trial in Guatemala is a good example. The Ixil women who stood and recounted gang rapes and massacres that wiped out full villages, were discredited with arguments of hysteria, of confabulation, of the childish inability to distinguish protective action from oppressive.
María José and I watched some of the live-stream of the trial together in my office while it was happening. My client sat dry-eyed and unmoving even when one of the testimonies — recounted in a different indigenous language and translated into Spanish — was remarkably similar to her own story.
The live-stream winked in and out, and each time it did, I studied la Marijoe (as she’s come to be known after so many years in the United States).
“¿Qué buscas?” she had finally asked when she noticed my scrutiny. What are you looking for? As if that wasn’t a question to be answered in a lifetime instead of a 50-minute session.
“I guess I’m looking for a reaction,” I had said. “I want to know if this serves as proxy justice for you.”
What you’ve got to understand about la Marijoe is that she smiles a lot. A wide rictus of a smile that you can never be sure is about something good. She hadn’t answered my question that day, just smiled and smiled, and months later, after the genocide verdict was vacated and we all understood that no one was going to be serving a sentence for crimes against humanity, her only comment was that smile.
I can’t remember if I smiled on that rescinded verdict day. Maybe later, at home, as I was carving a figure from an apple I had on hand. Maybe when I bored a hole through its chest with the tip of my paring knife. Maybe every time I hear that the tough, old ex-president and military man from Guatemala has started having some trouble breathing.
3.
I’ll be having pie de pie.
Pronounce the first pie in that sentence in English, the second in Spanish.
It means I will be eating pie standing up. Although … I could be telling you I’m going to be eating foot pie.
But, I’m not. I’m going to be telling you about my girlfriend, Daiana, who is a pastry chef and makes the best pie. Never foot pie, just so-good-I-can’t-even-wait-to-sit-down-to-eat-it pie.
Right now she is flattening dough with an antique glass roller she fills with ice water. And raising her eyebrows at me. It’s not the fact I’m talking into empty space (she believes in the paranormal, as do many of her fellow immigrants from San Mateo Ozolco) it’s just this monologue-ish style that bothers her.
It sounds like I’m chiding, she tells me. Her convos with ghosts and ancestors and saints are always a back-and-forth, and as she tells me this, her words adopt the rhythm of the roller over dough, smooth but firm, perfecting everything beneath it.
After an hour, when the oven buzzer goes off, she looks at me before opening the door. Her eyes are what I first loved about her: letter Ds resting belly-up and barely containing the Abuelita-chocolate-discs of her irises.
“Magic,” she says. “Pay.” And hands me a perfect slice.
P-a-y is how we transcribe the English word “pie” so Spanish speakers know we don’t mean foot. And so we create yet another homograph, thorny and confusing for the translator. Do we mean pay or pay?
“You can’t get a loan to eat.”
When I first met Daiana this was the way she explained her decision to immigrate. Now that she has her green card and works at the top boutique bakery in Philly, she and her cohorts (“The Bank of Puebla” they call themselves) leave sunken brioches and imperfect cannoli on the loading dock where those whose credit is hunger know to seek them out.
I’m not chiding now. Consider this a benediction instead. There are many innate, unschooled magicks — love, food, compassion, solidarity. May your mouth fill with them.
4.
My grandparents were Nipo-peruanos, which is how I come to speak some Japanese, and Spanish as well as I do. Not a native speaker, by any stretch, but good enough to confuse. Before you mistake this for boasting, know that in addition to French, my colleagues at the Survivors Center collectively speak Tigrinya, Amharic, Zigula, Khmer, Nepali, Arabic, Cantonese and Kreyòl. I am clearly the underachiever of the bunch.
My boss, a chino-cubano whose years as an imprisoned dissident have left him with limited movement in his shoulders, tells me that the fact I’ve just turned thirty but look eighteen, more than makes up for my unexceptional Spanish or contextually useless Japanese language skills.
Many of the survivors I work with are older — think the first wave of Central Americans fleeing torture and civil war in the 1970s and ’80s — and the fact I look to be the same age as their grandchildren are (or would be) makes most of them warm quickly to me.
Most of them.
Today, la Marijoe comes in unscheduled, storms past the gatekeepers at registration, and upturns her handbag on my desk. A flood of scraps torn from matchbook covers, business cards, receipts and lined notebook paper streams out. No wallet, no sunglasses, nothing else.
I poke at one of the scraps, flip it over. There is a name written on it.
“What’s this?” I ask.
“Each is a child detained at the border,” she says. “The ones you want to deport.”
“You know I don’t want to repatriate them,” I say. I play with the bits of paper; they all have different names written in pencil, in pen, in something that looks like it migh
t be halfway between a crayon and brow pencil. “Anyway, how can you know their names?”
“People have names,” she says. Then she turns her back and leaves before I can say anything else.
I sweep the paper bits into plastic baggies. I count some of them at the break room as I eat the empanadas Daiana has packed for my lunch. My colleagues help me count, even without an explanation. And later, at home, Daiana does the same.
There are 60,000 scraps of name.
Magic isn’t instinctive, at least not for me. I have had to learn it as carefully as at one time I learned the alphabet and vowel sounds in Spanish. A-E-I-O-U.
And in English, A-E-I owe you.
Sale, as Daiana says.
It is slang, in Mexico, for “agreed.” In other Spanish-speaking countries it means “to leave,” and you already know its definition in English.
Which do I mean?
The translator’s dilemma.
5.
I go get la Marijoe a full two hours before our appointment, because PTSD makes survivors unreliable about keeping time. Plus, we’re taking public transit.
She comes out of her apartment wearing new plastic shoes and a fuschia-print dress. The mostly grey hair she usually pins high on her neck is loose and falls heavy past her shoulders. The smell of almond oil wafts up from it. Before almond oil hair treatments became hipster, they were old school. This I know from my own mother.
Today there is a creature riding la Marijoe’s shoulders. It is a man-bird, ungainly despite the strong, wide wings it extends. Its long toenails puncture the skin just above la Marijoe’s clavicles and sink straight through muscle to bone. The creature’s ugly pin head turns to meet my gaze.
“Vamos, pues,” la Marijoe says to me.
She knows I see the creature, have seen it from the first day she became my client. If I’ve earned any respect from her it is because I didn’t run out of the office screaming that day.
Marijoe calls it her zope — after zopilote, vernacular for the vulture from which the creature takes its shape — and these days I only see it riding her when something has pushed her beyond survival and deep into her core, where fear still lives.
It is the appointment that’s done it. The notice that perhaps they’ve located her brother living in a small town in Oaxaca these 30 plus years he’s been disappeared and she’s believed him dead. This is why I’m accompanying her. To help her through her first meeting with him, via internet hangout, at the State Department office.
That’s why her zope comes too.
The past is carrion memory, and the three of us — client, shrink, the monster given vulture shape by survivor guilt — live by picking at it.
6.
Voice comes before image.
The community library in Juchitán has broadband, but the image of the librarian leaning into the computer keeps freezing with Rolando just a shadowed bit of background pixelation, even as the sound comes through. The librarian nods at me, then tries adjusting on that end, while the State Department functionary and I make strained conversation, and la Marijoe and her brother repeat each other’s names in a circlet of syllable and breath.
Rolando’s voice through the monitor is soft and sibilant; he still sounds like the youngster orphaned, then separated from his older sister and forced to find his way out of a place of fantastic, inconceivable violence alone, first by trailing after scavenger birds, then following migratory ones as he made his way north.
The internet coughs up a perfect image. The librarian seated at the computer is a muxe dressed in the huipil of the indigenous population of the town. Standing behind her, in western wear and twisting his hands in expectation, is Rolando. He looks much older than his voice, older even than la Marijoe. It is a quick impression, really, because our screen goes to black as the feed buffers, and this time the sound cuts out too.
The zope fans its huge wings, digs its claws deeper into la Marijoe’s flesh. In fact, I see the wicked ends poking all the way through her back; dark, blackish blood caught in the tips. I wonder about the State Department guy — Frank — and whether he sees something because every time the zope moves its wings, he seems to flinch.
The computer screen in front of la Marijoe lightens again, then fills with smoke.
I can smell it. Wood smoke. Pine, resiny and hot. Frank grabs my shoulder, crushes it in his grip. The smoke on screen clears after a second, two, three … and then we stare at a stand of pinabetes — Christmasy, quick-growing trees prone to lightening strikes — rooted in a ground of charred bodies.
There is a child, maybe six, standing in front of the pile. His eyes dart from the corpses to whomever is holding the recording device from our point of view. La Marijoe puts her hand to the screen and the small one on the other side meets it. She says one word in that language she hasn’t spoken in a decade, and even though the glottals are foreign to my ear, I understand the word means hide.
The child scoots toward the bodies. He picks his way gingerly among them, drops to his knees, then to his back. He grabs an arm to pull the body closer to him. The flesh comes off the bone as if it were a glove, but the torso doesn’t budge. He drops the mass of charred skin and semi-liquid tissue, and starts inching his body closer to the body on his other side. He whimpers a bit as he pushes under it, and I wonder how long a burnt body holds the heat that killed it; and if the child, too, will be singed while hiding beneath it.
The child is completely hidden by the burnt corpses when we hear the crack of gunfire. The image shakes violently, dives, captures a minute of tilted ground then fades to black. The hangout site pops up a static image onscreen to indicate the connection has dropped.
“Rolando,” la Marijoe says one last time, then goes silent as the zope’s huge, dark wings curve forward to cover her eyes.
Frank lets go of my shoulder at the same time as the zope plunges its curved beak into the crown of la Marijoe’s head. The monstrous creature pushes its ugly head so deep inside the old woman, its beak temporarily bulges out a spot on her neck.
“Marijoe?”
She turns to me. Zope feathers are coming through the skin beneath her eyebrows and behind her ears, but it’s what’s happening on her forehead, cheeks and chin that gets my attention. Fine particles of whatever powder or foundation makeup she’s been wearing slough off from the pressure of feathers prodding at the skin from within. Under the flaking cover-up, la Marijoe’s face is hyperpigmented, shiny, and her skin is too thick for even the big vulture quills to get through.
Like my girlfriend Daiana’s wrist, where a third-degree burn from one of the bakery’s commercial ovens has healed into a bracelet of contracted skin.
By Istambul Protocols ….
“We can try this again a different day,” Frank says.
“No,” la Marijoe answers. “I see Rolando is alive. That is enough.”
Frank stops me on our way out. “I can’t begin to understand what happened here today. But if you convince her to come back and try this again, make sure the appointment is with me.”
I nod.
After a moment he adds, “Was the librarian with Rolando —” but I stop him before he can say anything else. “I’ve got to catch up with my client.”
“You’ve been telling tales,” I say to la Marijoe when we’re on the bus. “All these years in treatment, you’ve been lying to me.”
“No,” she answers. “Everything I told you happened exactly as I recounted it.”
“But not to you. Rolando’s sister was shot dead if that digital translation of memory is to be believed.”
She smiles. “You should know better than to trust a translation.”
“If you are not Rolando’s sister, who are you? Why search for him, to what purpose? And what’s your real name anyway?”
She doesn’t answer, doesn’t speak, until her stop. “So, now that you know, will you still see me?” she asks as she gets to her feet after signaling the busdriver.
“Of course,”
I answer. “I’ve got an opening Tuesday, I’ll pencil you in.”
7.
She doesn’t show that week. In fact, she doesn’t show at the First State Survivors Center ever again.
A month into her absence, I set aside my injured professional pride, and go to her apartment to talk to her. After I knock, a young woman with three children clinging to her legs opens the door. I give her my name and ask about la Marijoe and she invites me in, offers me a lemonade.
“I’ve always wondered about her,” Anabelle — that’s the new tenant — says as she mixes tap water with the drink mix, then puts the can of mix back into a cupboard that holds just it and four tins of evaporated milk. “I found something of hers jammed up behind the pipe under the sink in the kitchen when I moved in. I thought she’d come back for it. I’ll go fetch it.”
She disappears into the next room and one of the toddlers trots after her, but the other two stay and watch me with big, wary eyes. It takes Anabelle a long time — long enough for me to notice that there isn’t much furniture in the apartment, and that what is here has the look of hand-me-down or Goodwill.
She comes back with a cigar box which she hands to me. Inside is about $1,000 in crisply folded bills and a sealed envelope with my name on it. When I open it, a torn matchbook cover with the words “sin embargo” and a string of what look like library call numbers written in grease pencil flutters out, followed by the primary feather of a vulture.
“A mystery wrapped in an enigma,” Anabelle says with a shrug when I look back at her. “But that’s definitely a turkey buzzard feather.”
Never underestimate people. Never figure that the young, or the poor, or the humble don’t have something important to teach you about your own assumptions. I stay long enough to find out that the public library is Anabelle’s favorite haunt, and that she can not only paraphrase Churchill and quote chapter and verse of the Stokes’ Field Guide to North American Birds, but knows that if the numbers are Dewey call numbers, they are all over the place — from occult to salvation, psychology to philosophy.
Latin@ Rising Page 4