This Is the Place

by Margot Kahn

  Danielle Geller is an essayist and MFA candidate in creative writing at the University of Arizona. She is also a grateful recipient of the 2016 Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Awards, and her work has appeared in Silk Road Review and Brevity. When she is not writing, she is birding in cemeteries or playing video games.

  The Stars Remain

  Claudia Castro Luna

  Before

  1970. Everything I know about the church, God, the devil and the spirit world comes from my Abuelita. She gives me instructions to insure that my alma, my soul, finds its way back into my body after its nightly excursions, teaches me what blessing goes with each occasion, shows me an altar’s essential components: water, a candle, incense, and whenever possible, a clump of rue. All of this knowledge she passes down to me hand over hand, word over word, the way she learned from her own Abuela.

  As soon as I’m old enough she teaches me how to cross myself. “Por la señal de la Santa Cruz…” she says and I quickly stumble after her. The words are matched step by step by a repeated pattern of hand gestures making the sign of the cross. She places my thumb over my index finger and guides me, pausing first over my forehead, then over my cheeks, then to navel and shoulders finishing on my lips. At each pause we draw the sign of the cross. “Kiss the cross,” she says when we get to my lips. And I do. I kiss it and say a reverent “Amen.”

  Abuelita takes her time with me even though patience is not her virtue. By necessity she is a woman of swift action. Widowed in her early twenties, determination, grit, and an irascible temper exemplify the breadth of her emotional repertoire. In a fraction of a second she can go from laughing heartily to reaching perilous levels of anger. One of her searing and creatively strung list of insults can shake down all the leaves of a mango tree leaving bare branches with birds cowering at her words.

  Lucky for me my Abuelita loves me, her oldest grandchild, and so she works hard to share with me the array of amulets, prayers, and rituals known to her so that I may live a long and fruitful life under the winning patronage of all the saints and angels in Heaven.

  1971. Again and again Papá declares that things of the church are “Puras babosadas.” Religion is the opium of the masses, Papá says, and says it without any hint at pretention or cynicism. Mami is not as strident in her opposition to church and spiritual things, but her silence lends a tacit agreement to Papa’s more active opinions. In a 99 percent Catholic country, I belong to the 1 percent of families that reject any type of organized religion and deplore penchants of the spiritual kind. Everyone I know has one, two, or more of the following religious artifacts proudly displayed in their homes: the Holy Cross, a depiction of the Last Supper, the Sacred Heart of Jesus, a depiction of the Virgin Mary. By contrast, religious iconography is strictly forbidden in my house. Prayers, if any should cross one’s mind, are to remain unuttered, trapped in the accordion-like bellows of the soul. And traditional spiritual ways, labeled superstitions, are swept away like crumbs from the rice cookies we call salpores that often accompany the afternoon coffee.

  My parents are young teachers, raising two young daughters and working in the small town of Atiquizaya near the border with Guatemala. As members of the country’s teachers’ union they focus their energy on fighting for better salaries and improving the squalid living conditions of the students they teach. To them, understanding the social and political conditions under which we live, and doing something to change them, is all the religion we need.

  1975. In fifth grade I wish nothing more than to make my Holy Communion. I want to have the experience everyone I know has had, including my parents. I long to have a picture of myself in a long white dress, a diadem of sparkling glass beads on my head, gloved hands and a white candle made elegant by a white bow. But I know that my wish is many rallies and marches away from becoming a reality.

  When the heat of the day lies languid in the crowns of the tallest trees, Abuelita takes me down the length of our long cobblestone street to the town’s square to hear late evening Mass. We return in darkness and find Papá pacing back and forth enrobed in the dim light cast by the lamppost in front of our house.

  “Dónde estaban?” he demands in a rough voice. “Las busqué por todos lados!”

  “En la iglesia” answers Abuelita, unconcerned.

  “Què, què?!!!” Papá can’t hide his annoyance.

  “Que fuimos a la iglesia, hombre, solo por un ratito…” Man, Abuela says, we were at church just for a little bit.

  “Pues, no quiero que la este llevando a la iglesia. Entiende?” Papá snaps and his eyebrows meet smack in the middle of his forehead.

  If he were an animal he would have growled and snarled, but given that Abuelita is his mother, he offers a warning instead: don’t take her to church again!

  Abuelita looks back at him with heraldic bearing, the long striped shawl around her shoulders dignifying her stance. Without saying a word, she lets him know that if she wants to she will take me to Mass any day of the week she damn well pleases.

  1976. One day while sitting on my bed reading a book, my Papá appears in the doorway, just out of the shower, a towel draped around his waist, water trickling from his wet hair.

  “Qué esta haciendo esa mierda allí?” He demands.

  I look up at the “shit” he’s pointing to. A small bust of the Virgin Mary hangs from the wall, her face tilted downward. An identical figure rests over my sister’s bed. The Virgins have been hanging for weeks, but Papá, who rarely comes into our room, has failed to notice them. I grow cold. When my sister and I decided to put them up, we knew we risked a confrontation that could end up settled with a belt, welts, and tears. But the little busts were too beautiful to keep in their newspaper wrapping under our beds and they matched perfectly and Tia Vicky said they would prevent evil spirits lurking at night from snatching our souls and Camila and I don’t want our souls snatched.

  I stare at Papá staring at me. I have been on the receiving end of his searing belt enough times to know that tears don’t make welts go away. I glance at my sister, playing with her dolls on the floor between our beds, but she pretends not to hear anything.

  I dredge up courage, “Nos las dió Tía Vicky la última vez que visitamos. Abuelita las comprò en el Mercado.”

  He flicks water off his forehead and I wonder if the fact that his mother bought them for us will soften his response, but his face remains intractable.

  “Son para velar los sueños,” I inject by way of an explanation before he offers a response. From the floor Camila chimes in agreement, “Para los sueños” she repeats.

  Safe dreams or not, Papá stands under the door’s frame; his jaw locked, his mouth considering something. A grunt escapes him. The doll’s hair winds around and around Camila’s fingers. I wish that whatever is running through his mind, please, be not about hitting me. I feel like I’m always the one getting hit. My sister is pretty and cute, everyone says so, and three years younger. I’m convinced that rules in her favor.

  “Quiere que las quitemos?” I ask ready to spring up and take them down.

  “Solo son babosadas ustedes!” he says, spins around, disappears down the hall.

  Nonsense he calls it, our gesture to hang the Virgins.

  “Nos salvamos!” says Camila and the suggestion of a smile registers on her face. We are saved. Though I cannot see it, I know, a smile also registers on mine.

  1977. Presidential elections. General Carlos Humberto Romero from the PCN (Partido de Conciliacion Nacional) is declared the winner. There are widespread accusations of voter intimidation and mismanagement of ballots. The outgoing President, Coronel Arturo Armando Molina, himself from the PCN and declared winner in 1972 through egregious electoral fraud, denies any wrongdoing. Eight days after the election a group gathers in San Salvador to protest the results and national security forces open fire killing hundreds—between two hundred and fifteen hundred—no official figures are ever released. The massacre galvanizes into action all sectors o
f society: from labor to rural workers, from students to professionals. Many political organizations, some with military arms, are formed at this time. The ruthlessness perpetrated at this event marks the country for the next fifteen years.

  1978. Señor C, another of my parents’ friends and a fellow teacher, is killed while reading the afternoon newspaper. The killers leave a hand imprint on the wall outside his front door. I hear that teachers are killed because they plant seeds of insurrection in the young people they teach. Despite the intimidation, Papá and Mami continue teaching and Papá continues to occupy a leadership position in the National Teacher’s Union. The level of violence and terror erodes Papá’s objections against my religious inclinations. One day Mami tells him that I attended an Evangelical service with a neighbor. He stares at me and laughs.

  1979. Since our move to San Salvador the sound of gunfire is as familiar as the sound of roosters breaking dawn was in Atiquizaya. Tanks crush asphalt and helicopter blades burst through clouds. My legs twitch every time a convoy, teeming with heavily armed soldiers, crawls along as I wait after school for my bus to arrive and take me home. I dread getting hit by a bullet. But what scares me even more is that Papá could disappear and never return home. We all know that to disappear equals the cruelest fate. Some of the disappeared are left on the side of roads dismembered and tortured. Others are tortured but kept alive as political prisoners and others are never found.

  1980 is a terrible year. Terror and silence are the baseline of our everyday. These are the words that bind our existence: armed encounters, assassinated, bullet riddled, clandestine jails, communiqué, curfews, death squads, demonstrations, disappearances, kidnappings, massacres, military, MS-16, national police, political prisoners, ransoms, revolution, state of siege, strikes, tanks, torture.

  I pick up and paste together scraps of information: what I hear on the radio, slogans I read on walls, books I find in the house. I scavenge for drifts of overheard conversation in buses or when adults visit our house and talk. No one ever considers sitting with us children to tell us what is going on. Like a blind person whose information gathering is deprived of eyesight, I feel my way through the viral terror that has spread over our lives. Few dare talk about it. Silence becomes an acknowledgement of fear. Fear an indication that death roams hungry day and night. One day running errands with Mami we pass by a church and in a move completely out of the ordinary she goes inside. Votives flicker in semi-darkness. I relish Mami’s kneeling body next to mine, her bowed head and her lips moving in prayer. To kneel and pray with one of my parents has always resided solely in the province of my desires. Now, “La situación,” the situation, as we call the unofficial war we live in, makes my dear wish come true.

  “En nombre de Dios, en nombre de este sufrido pueblo… les suplico, les ruego, les ordeno, que cesen la represión.”

  —Monseñor Romero, Bishop of San Salvador

  The war makes people do the unthinkable. Papá has taken to tuning his transistor radio each Sunday to hear Mass. Mami, Papá, Uncle Ivan, Camila and I, and even the dog, Monina, huddle on the stairs leading up to the second floor to hear Monseñor Romero deliver Sunday’s homily from the National Cathedral.

  Monseñor Romero’s voice rises and falls, filling the air with urgency and hope, and we cling to his every word. At thirteen I understand that to call out the injustice and repression, to speak against the military, is to risk your life and it is clear Monseñor risks his a lot. I believe Monseñor has to do with Papá’s new attitude toward the church, but also something larger is at play, something I cannot grasp, and won’t understand until decades later.

  On March 26th, Monseñor Romero is murdered while officiating Mass.

  On December 2nd three American nuns and a lay missionary are killed on their way from the national airport in the outskirts of San Salvador.

  No one is spared. Everyone is suspect: the old for being old, the young for their youth, students and teachers for their knowledge, women for accomplices, and children because they get in the way.

  The silver lining in this otherwise terrifying year is that the petition for US Resident Status that Mami submitted two years earlier is finally approved. To leave means survival. Since the news of our departure, hope crawls back into our lives. I skip more than walk. Only Papá drags his feet. I’ve heard him talking with aunts and uncles about leaving: how to survive in an unfriendly place without speaking English, how hard it will be to leave everything. “Everything” is code for the political movement he believes in and risks his life for.

  At night the stars dispense their astral brilliance the way they always have and Papá stands in the back door’s threshold looking up as if waiting for them to spell out a message just for him. I know the look. I myself have chased long-tailed stars in the hope of discerning a personal dispatch from them to me. Their flickering lights appear for us night after night. I know they would still be there if Papá disappeared. They would remain whether we left or stayed. I take in Papá’s narrow shoulders, his hands clasped behind his back, and glimpse into the choice he needs to make: to abandon his comrades and convictions or to protect his family; to take a step off a ledge or to walk straight into darkness.

  After

  1982. Life in the U.S. is safe, yes, but also small. We are each other’s only reference points in the absence of our large extended family and my parent’s network of friends and work colleagues. Our world dulls in stark contrast to the tropical sun that suffuses everything in El Salvador. Concerns are of a different kind: finding jobs and schools, learning English. My parents struggle to make ends meet. Mami cleans houses and works an assembly line checking transistor parts. Papá washes dishes, mops floors, and mows lawns. They struggle with their marriage. They struggle to give us as much comfort as their pockets can afford and as much warmth as they can find in their wounded hearts.

  Little by little Camila and I swap Spanish for English. At first, we practice single words with each other.

  “Battery,” I say in my thick accent.

  “Battery,” she repeats in her nascent American one.

  School, The Brady Bunch, Happy Days, and other TV shows propel us into fluency. We go from words to phrases to sentences, and soon the day arrives when Spanish is no longer necessary, or wanted, between us.

  With a university degree in English from El Salvador, Mami reaches fluency. Papá struggles. Washing dishes, doing janitorial work, and gardening require minimal English skills. He spirals downward: the less he is able to communicate in English the worse he feels about himself, the bigger the gap between him and Mami. English fills our world the way a cotton ball inside a narrow glass absorbs water. There is less and less space for him.

  1985. With time the Spanish words that contain our experience and that might help us make sense of our exile get covered with thick dust, idling messages inside glass bottles bobbing at sea. We drift apart. Language differences, work exhaustion, the pain of remembering, all get in the way of communicating with each other. We retreat into ourselves and let sorrow, loss, fears, guilt navigate unresolved and unchecked in the tunnels of our subconscious. Silence layers upon silence. The silence of fear on top of the silence of forgetting. Layer upon layer until the communication between each other hardens, becomes impenetrable like rock.

  1990. One morning, after twenty-four years of marriage, Mami leaves for work and never comes back. My sister is away at college. The two of us, Papá and I, and our shared sadness, are left in the apartment. I go to bed and leave Papá, sitting on the floor, his back against his bed frame, knees to chest. I wake up to find him in the same position, frozen in place.

  1991. As a university student I travel abroad to study in Europe. Years later, back in the United States, I reconnect with a young German doctor I met while visiting exiled relatives in Holland. On a visit and somewhere along the coast between LA and San Francisco he proposes. Eager to move on, to have a home again, a family, I say yes.

  1993. My marriage lasts
almost three years. When I decide to leave my husband, I call Papá from Germany and ask if I can move in with him. Mami is remarried and living in Costa Rica. Papa lives with Tía Sonia, her two sons, and Abuelita, who came to the U.S. to support Tía Sonia while Tía works long days to establish her fledging Salvadoran restaurant. Papá and I share a room and the single bed in it, and since we have similar habits quickly fall into a routine: we read in bed and when each is satisfied with the night’s reading we turn the light off, give our backs to each other, and fall asleep.

  The best part about my return is reconnecting with my Abuelita. She is older and weaker but has lost none of her luster. She still laughs her full belly laugh and uses the same irreverent language. “Chimado! Venga para aca!” “Hijoeputa!” “Que mierdas son estas?” She sprinkles her days, and ours, with shits, whores, asses, and worse. After all the years she has not lost her spiritual compass. She still wears a scapular doused in holy water around her neck, still leaves a glass of water by her bed to insure that her soul never thirsts during the night. On Sundays I take her to Our Lady of Guadalupe Church in El Monte to hear Spanish Mass. For an hour we enter a borderless space. The brown faces and the Spanish spoken all around us exude a beloved familiarity. For that hour, next to Abuelita, I’m home. The rest of the time I’m dislocated: my body in California, my mind in Germany, and my heart, torn, somewhere in between.

  My birthday arrives. Tucked in bed, Papá recounts, with as much detail as he can recall, the day I was born. After all the violence, the material lack, the loss of country, the weight of silence, the failure of his marriage, the failure of mine, the demise of family members, friends, and colleagues, after all this, he finds the memory folded tenderly, like a perfumed handkerchief at the back of a linen drawer. Papá is not a warm man. Warmth is Mami’s territory. As a young child I yearned for his physical affection but the belt got in the way. That night, his words bloom in the devastated terrain we share. I am loved, his words say, always have been.