I go back to my office, put the feather in my pencil cup and stare at it for a while. Then I dial Frank’s number.
The hangout connection is much better this time.
“Where is my sister?” Rolando says when he sees only us onscreen.
“Let me ask you something, Rolando,” I say. “So many years have passed, how can you be sure the woman sitting in front of the monitor last time we talked is really your sister?”
He looks confused for a few moments, then gives us a smile. It is so like la Marijoe’s it lands a punch to my gut.
“I could never confuse her voice for another’s,” he says finally. “I still have dreams about being buried under bodies. It was my sister’s voice that reminded me I wasn’t dead. Then and now.”
“All those years ago … was she there when you ventured out from your hiding place?”
He shakes his head. “Nobody was there. Just the burnt bodies and the vultures feasting on them. But I knew my sister would find me. I knew that she would never stop looking for me.”
He sounds just like the other survivors I treat, whose hopes — no matter how infinitesimal — cling like a burr. Just last week, when there was news that one of the Madres of the Plaza de Mayo in Argentina had been reunited with a grandson missing since the dirty war, all of my clients spoke again about their own disappeared loved ones, their own future reunification days. One spoke of that to me even though we both know her husband was pushed out of a helicopter over open sea.
“Are you sure all of the burnt bodies were dead?” I ask Rolando, picturing la Marijoe’s contracted skin as I say it.
“Yes,” Rolando says. “All of them.”
Frank clears his throat. “Last time we tried the hangout, what did you see when the video part wasn’t working?”
I translate the question into Spanish.
“What do you mean ‘what did I see?’ A dark screen. My own reflection, and la Tere, the librarian, reflected on it too. May I talk to my sister now?”
“She’s disappeared,” I say, before I can reconsider my word choice. “I don’t know where.”
“At least I know she is alive,” he says after a moment. “That big empty space her disappearance left in my life can fill up now. I imagine it is the same for her.” He starts to get up to leave.
“Wait,” I say, fishing the scrap of paper out of my pocket. I hold it as close to the computer’s camera as I can. “Do you have any idea what this number is?”
I hear him call the librarian closer to the computer, and then their quick consultation in a Zapotecan language quite different than the Tz’utijil he and la Marijoe spoke together. Not for the first time I feel dazed by the sheer number of languages in the world, the sheer number of opportunities for translation to leave out that one element that gives real meaning to what is being said.
“We don’t have any idea. But we’ll think about it some more,” Rolando says as the librarian writes down the numbers in a spiral-bound pad.
“She hid some money away,” I say then. “I figure she’d want you to have it. Tell me where we can wire it to you—”
He puts his hand up to stop me. “I don’t want it. I have what I need,” he says, then signs off so quickly I can’t argue it with him.
“That’s it, then,” Frank says. He takes the scrap out of my hand, squints at what’s written on it: b52:b122:b131:b211:b215:b501:d150:e234.
“Looks like an i-p-v-six number,” he says. When I shake my head, he adds, “Internet protocol version six, which is what currently routes all the traffic over the web. Could be what you have is a location and i.d. number tied to some service provider. Is Marijoe tech savvy?”
I snort, which prompts a smile. “Well, I hope you figure it out,” he says handing back the scrap.
I can tell he thinks it is an intellectual puzzle to be pieced together and solved, but it’s not. It is another translation calling for memory, ear and soul to complete.
8.
Will you still see me?
Those were la Marijoe’s last words to me, and I understand them differently now.
I try, I really try. She may not be who I thought she was, but she is la Marijoe, and she is someone. Someone tied — however tenuously or fantastically — to massacre victims from an ossuary that the Guatemalan Forensic Anthropology Foundation has probably already exhumed and catalogued.
So, that’s my first step. I call the tech our Center has worked with before, and read him the numbers I want him to check against their registrar’s catalogue. The quantity of pieces they’ve catalogued is huge — every bone chip, every piece of tooth — and includes not only the victims of the genocide and three decades of armed internal conflict, but the remains of the more than 6,000 migrants dead last year alone. Many of the old and the new don’t have names, but some do, and maybe hope clings to me like a burr too.
The second step I take is to get Frank to ply his government muscle and find out if the numbers are, in fact, IPv6 numbers and, if so, which provider bills them, and to whom.
Third step: After I chance upon Anabelle in the stacks of the Ramonita de Rodriguez branch of the Free Library, I enlist her help in searching through all the books under the call numbers that coincide with la Marijoe’s sequence. I pay her a bit of a stipend, so her lunch and bus fare doesn’t tip her budget into deficit, and once a week she brings me what she finds stuck between the pages. A prayer card of St. Gall; the yellowed clipping from a newspaper from 1974; an Amtrak ticket stub, round-trip to New York City; a small feather from a cedar waxwing — a bird, Anabelle further informs me — she has never seen in the city.
The objects don’t all — or any? — belong to la Marijoe, she knows it and I know it. But it is a catalogue anyway, and I treat the objects with the respect my friends at the Forensic Foundation accord their remains.
Anabelle comes to the apartment to deliver the items to me because if I went off to see another woman on a regular basis, Daiana would see red. Another homograph, by the way. In Spanish, red means net or web, and that is what is being woven every time Anabelle — kids in tow — stops by the apartment. Daiana has started baking special treats to coincide with the delivery of book findings.
The fourth step I take in trying to figure out la Marijoe and the clues she’s left me, is actually taken for me not by me. The Juchitán librarian emails me an invitation to a private hangout — no Frank, no Rolando. She sends it to my work email because that’s the one attached to my digital footprint. I’m actually not that easy to find, but she is a librarian, after all.
I don’t respond right away, and not only because the Center’s emails are automatically saved and archived for accountability and transparency. I think I know why Tere-the-librarian has contacted me privately, and it has nothing to do with my quest to find la Marijoe. I believe it is curiosity that has prompted it. The desire of a muxe in Juchitán to understand the life of a trans man in Philly; the desire to confirm that her small, indigenous community is — and always has been — less hesitant about the everydayness of trans folk than any U.S. metropolis.
I let Daiana know I’ll be staying late at work, and she’s fine with it, mostly because it’s an evening Anabelle and her brood are scheduled to stop by. Daiana is making the kids the new cake she just introduced at the bakery, flavored with dragon fruit and iced in the fruit’s distinctive dark pink hue. For the children’s sake she’s going to try baking it in shape of a flying dragon.
When the hangout window on the computer opens up, Tere looks around with interest. “So that’s what the inside of a psychiatrist’s office looks like,” she says.
“I’m a clinical psychologist,” I say, “but, yeah.”
“You need more colorful artwork.”
I smile a bit, wait.
“So I wanted to talk to you,” she says, “about the numbers. I found something that if not significant is at least interesting. Have you ever heard of the Aarne-Thompson Index?”
“No.”
&nbs
p; “It categorizes folk and fairy tale types and motifs that recur in mostly Indo-European folktales,” she says. “Though I think it has started including stories from other cultures as well. Anyway, most of them are two, three or four digit numbers preceded by an AT.”
“Well that doesn’t fit.”
She makes an exasperated noise. “But some of them are instead sub-categorized with the letters A, B, C, and so forth, to indicate that they are tales that involve mythological motifs, or animals, or tabus.”
“Okay,” I say, “cut to the chase — which do our numbers coincide with?” I don’t know if she knows that expression, but she does what I ask.
“B 52 is under the general bird-men category of tale, but is specifically about harpies, or bird-women.”
So, I’ll be honest, this seems an unlikely concordance for la Marijoe’s numbers, but that doesn’t keep me from feeling a weird sort of unease. I don’t have much of a classical education, but I kind of remember that harpies chased one of the Greek heroes to his death.
“B 122 is code for tales of birds with magic, and B 131 is all truth-telling birds,” Tere continues. “B 211 and 215 are both tied to animal languages and animals that can speak. B 501 is a category of tales where an animal gives part of its body to a human as a magical talisman.”
“Jesus,” I say. I tell her about la Marijoe then, including what we saw during the half-failed hangout, the bit about her sprouting feathers and even that she left me one of those feathers in a cigar box she could have no certainty I’d ever find. Of course I sound like a nutburger as I recount it. Tere doesn’t say anything for a while, then drops her eyes to the spiral-bound notebook open in front of her.
“So, maybe I copied one of the other numbers down wrong,” she says finally. “Is it really D 150 not D 152?”
I pull out la Marijoe’s scrap of paper. “Yeah. 150. Why?”
“Because D 150 stories are about humans transforming into birds; D 152 tales are about birds transforming into humans,” she says. “Given what all the other numbers are keyed to, I think the latter would better fit the narrative we’re piecing together.”
“You can’t really mean to tell me you think that la Marijoe is a bird turned human.”
She laughs at me. “Because a human turning into a bird is easier to accept?”
“I do deal with the most inventive forms of human denial at my job.”
The laugh is genuine this time. Then she grows serious. “You don’t think even a vulture can grow weary of the dead we leave for them to clean up? You don’t think a great mother bird might adopt another’s fledgling found living among the hundreds, the thousands of corpses?”
She sighs. “Is there a difference really? Whether one of the vultures at the massacre site took pity on Rolando and magically turned itself human for him, or his sister’s dying spirit hopped into the body of one of the birds that was already there, it was to the same end. To protect him.”
“Nice thought, bad job.”
She shrugs. “He got out of there alive.”
“Luck.”
“Magic.”
“Fairy tale magic,” I say. “Not the kind I believe in.”
She grins. “No? Me, I believe in every kind. I couldn’t be a librarian otherwise.”
When it’s clear that’s all she has for me, I thank her and sign off quickly, then sit in the quiet of the Survivors Center emptied of survivors and staff. I don’t want to go home yet, I can’t go home yet, and I’m not sure why. I wander out to the break room and let my eyes rest on the world map that takes up one full wall. There are pins color coded for each of our clients at their country of origin, and then at every country they’ve landed for a time on their journey here, to us. I find la Marijoe’s pin in Guatemala and trace the unbroken line to the one in Delaware.
Thousands of miles as the crow — or vulture — flies.
There’s another homograph for you. Miles means thousands in Spanish. I go back into my office and get back on the internet. I search for the Aarne-Thompson index and look for the last number on la Marijoe’s string, the one Tere-the-librarian had forgotten to translate for me.
Am I surprised when I read the description of the motif that ties together the E 234 tales? Not really. Nations are built on bones, so is it any wonder there are so many stories that revolve around those who return from death to avenge it?
Guatemala, Syria, Bosnia, Cambodia, Rwanda, East Timor, Angola, Kurdistan and all the other genocides I know about from the Center’s clients: there must be miles of E234 tales waiting to be found.
9.
The past is never as simple as we’ve been told it is. In some languages there is an admission of this in a verb aspect without any certainty of completion.
La Marijoe is my past imperfect.
My friend at the Forensic Foundation finds a match for the numbers I’ve given him, identifying an ossuary and the date of exhumation. It is one of several mass graves that have been tied to the massacre that left María José and Rolando orphaned and on the run, but barring further identification by the FAFG, we can never know if the specific numbers are keyed to the Manrique family members they lost.
Neither can I tell you if la Marijoe’s numbers are what Frank believes they are, or what Tere-the-librarian does, or even what Anabelle thinks them, as she collects her evidence of life in books from every library branch in the city.
Perhaps the numbers are all of these, or none.
I mail the vulture feather to Rolando care of the Juchitán library. The $1,000 from the cigar box I give to Anabelle because I know she’s hurting enough that even that little bit will seem a godsend, and hey, she’s got fledglings too, so I think la Marijoe would have approved.
And one weekend when Daiana is working a double in preparation for the Fat Tuesday before Lent, I rent a car and drive about forty-five miles out of Philadelphia, to a little town — the internet is my informant — where there are four trees that hold near as many turkey vultures as leaves.
I watch the birds for hours, riding thermals, landing and hopping from branch to branch. They watch me too, and despite the sympathetic magic I attempt in their language of whines and gutteral hisses, I get no answer.
Because there are no answers in this tiempo, this time, this present tense. It is filled with infinitives instead — absolutes and constructs; marked and unmarked; active and elliptical.
Today, Jamila, who speaks the best Arabic at the Center, finagles shelter and the promise of a job for a Middle-Eastern client so her hand can heal from its session in a meat grinder.
Today, my boss brings the staff a coconut pound cake baked by a client who has finally set up the dessert shop he dreamed about during his years at a Cambodian refugee camp. When my boss sets the cake on the break room table, he tells us we’re totally worth the two-hour drive to go get it.
Today, the DART train comes exactly three minutes late so I am able to catch it and get back to the apartment in Philly before Daiana comes home. I place some flowers in a vase so they are the first thing she sees when she opens the door.
Today, she tells me that although she is mexicana, someone assumes she’s Asian while she’s in line at Hai Street Kitchen and asks her to check the status of their order.
Today, I tell her I don’t see it, that she’ll never look like me, and we bicker about whether I’m Latino or sansei or both or none and I tell her that what I am is a trilingual homograph, and let’s leave it at that.
Today, she rolls her eyes at my verbal conceit, and we lounge on the couch eating Hai Street’s expensive sushi burritos and rub our feet together, watching reality TV neither of us can relate to because it has nothing to do with what’s real.
Today, I remember that the word relate is another homograph.
Today, I weigh credible fears, burden of proof, deportation orders, detainers and directives against several plastic baggies filled with 60,000 scraps of paper.
Today, the names are an incantation as they leav
e my lips.
Today, I feel the feathers pushing their way through the walls of my heart.
ACCURSED LINEAGE
Daína Chaviano
Born in Havana, Chaviano came to Miami in 1991 to escape the restrictive atmosphere imposed on artists. In Cuba she was a significant figure in the development of Cuban science fiction, penning a number of novels herself, including Los Mundos que Amo (1980) (The Worlds I Love) and Fábulas de una Abuela Extraterrestre (1988) (Fables of an Extraterrestrial Grandmother). Since coming to the United States, she has focused primarily on the fantasy genre. In 1998 she received the prestigious Azorín Award from Spain for her mystical-political novel El hombre, la hembra y el hambre (Man, Woman and Hunger). Her only novel so far translated into English, The Island of Eternal Love (2008) (La isla de los amores infinitos, 2006), has been translated into over 25 languages making it the most translated Cuban novel in history. In The Island of Eternal Love (which Chaviano describes as “Caribbean Gothic”) a mysterious house appears and disappears, as the meanings of family, home, and nation are in constant flux. “Accursed Lineage” follows similar lines of familial mystery.
It’s close to midnight now and the noises will soon begin. From here I can observe everything: each movement inside the house, each whisper, each secret visitor. As always, I will be in my position until sunrise. And while the neighborhood sleeps, two households will remain awake: mine and that one.
We light the house up only slightly, as they do, to not draw attention. My parents and siblings move with stealth, so no noise slips out. Every so often mama or papa put down what they’re doing to look around a bit. My siblings also leave their games to see what they can make out through the windows. Only I remain steady, not diverging one iota from what I consider to be my primary job: to discover what is happening in that house.
I don’t know why I do it. I don’t know where this obsession with perpetual surveillance comes from. It’s a reflex, almost a sickness; something that I learned from the grown-ups. Papa and mama set the example, although without much conviction. They say that it’s their obligation. Nevertheless, when my siblings ask about the origin of the vigil, no one can give a coherent answer. I don’t get worked up about those things. I limit myself to completing my duties.
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