I see now, looking at José Luis, that his face had grown too old too quickly. His face is wise but in the way that sometimes prefigures death. The lines, like those in a palm, seem to have been put there by fate, not by choice. The wonder is that his eyes, which had seen too much, are filled with laughter and forgetting. We must have just made love. The photo is proof: I could take the war out of him for a few hours, I had some power. But back then I knew nothing about the healing arts. Nobody warned me that the war left his body by way of mine, that currents of his memories were moving through me at dangerously high voltages. Look, even in this happy photograph, my eyes are hard as arrowheads. But I can’t lie, can’t say no one warned me. Soledad tried. I listened but refused to hear. What she said is lost on me to this day.
September 16
Maybe María is the one. Maybe my María is to be my wife. We could have children. I could begin again. We could get married in a Quaker ceremony. I could live with that. María has a problem with the Church not ordaining women, and I’m sure God agrees with her. We could raise our children as Quakers, get a place near the Meeting House in the Valley. My God, I’m starting to sound just like her. Claiming to be practical (to prevent my deportation), she weaves these fantasies. And it’s getting harder and harder not to be seduced by them.
Why am I fighting her? María may abhor reality but that doesn’t mean truth is not on her side. Marrying her would solve many problems. My fate would not depend entirely on a political asylum application. So far, the volunteers have worked hard to gather my documentation, sometimes even smuggling into the country taped testimony of what happened to me. But the U.S. is turning down most applications of Guatemalans and Salvadorans.
Still, the idea of marrying aside, the process of applying could buy me some time, three years maybe. With luck the authorities might misplace my file for a few more years; it has been known to happen. Meanwhile, I would have a work permit, and I could live in the light of day again. I wouldn’t have to be afraid all the time. As it is, I look in the mirror and see a map of El Salvador. María’s Harvard T-shirts can’t cover up my skin color.
But what if in the end I apply and the U.S. turns down my application? The government will deport me. If I try then to go underground, the authorities would have my face and fingerprints on record. To make matters worse, there are rumors that immigration routinely sends information about political asylum candidates back to El Salvador, which means if I were ever deported, it would be the end. Applying to Canada is an option, but I hear they may be tightening up their immigration policies. In truth, Canada might be as dangerous as Salvador. The loneliness, not to mention the cold, could kill me. At least here I am functioning like a human being.
So why then do I not go along with María’s dreams and schemes? Am I afraid that even if we were to marry, the pull might be too great? That one night I might wake up, hear the call, and go back to El Salvador? I’m not ready to commit to another country, much less a woman. But this limbo is not doing me any good either. I know it is my destiny to go back, that it is the will of God for every Salvadoran to go back home. But right now evil is more powerful than all of us. The land problem and the civil war could easily continue for another decade. I must not assume the way will open for me to return. It is not possible to assume anything, this is the problem, this is what it means to be a refugee. Sometimes I forget I’m a refugee.
—JL ROMERO
Sweat and heat: The memory of it keeps me from getting to the sad part of the story. In the summer of 1982 a steamy Rio Grande opened the pores of the city and released aromas of mesquite, pine, and cedar. The heat made it easier for me to find those places on José Luis’s body that were oblivious to the war. After we made love, I often smelled bougainvillea near the place where his heart beat like wings against the bars of a cage. And I came to understand why José Luis and others like him risked everything—even if they were too young to remember life without war, their bodies remembered; their very cells concealed the scent of a healed El Salvador. The days the temperature climbed to dizzying heights I believed in God. I believed He devised the sense of smell so that people would struggle not for abstract ideas but for memory—the scent of the land and wind before men invented war.
September 14, 1982
Mija—
Of course I’ll teach you about the old remedios. You can start by going to the co-op and buying what I’ve listed below, remedios from my childhood and from my guidebook. How times change. The gringos don’t laugh at us anymore when we boil up our little plants. They’re reading “the studies” about how good all this is for you. For once science is on our side. And now I can thank God you’re interested, if not in politics, then at least in the old ways. (My godmothering has not been in vain.) To start your medicine cabinet, go get:
Garlic and onions (eat them all the time, you should also place sliced onions on windowsills to kill cold germs)
Ajenjibre (for hangovers)
Albacar (for cramps)
Cascara Sagrada (for regularity)
Damiana (to raise your spirits) (it also acts as a stimulant in another way, but we won’t talk about that)
Jojoba oil (for beautiful skin)
Manzanilla (for insomnia)
Oshá (tastes like strong celery, causes you to break into a sweat when you chew it which gets cold and flu poisons out of you) (also said to ward off evil, in the old, superstitious days, they used to sew it into hems of skirts to scare away rattlesnakes)
Yerba buena (for all of the above)
Good supply of Laredo, Texas, miracle candles, not to practice magic but to concentrate the mind on the healing powers of Our Lord
This will be a good start. Now remember, food is the best medicine. All this depression going around—it’s because we’ve gotten too far away from the foods of our ancestors. And our cells never forget. Beans, rice, avocado, cilantro, etc. We must make every effort to eat what our elders ate, eat with the seasons, and eat what is grown nearby. All these new-fangled drugs aggravate illness but hide the symptoms. No wonder we’re all crazy.
Now I know you wear that crystal around your neck. If you ask me, some of that New Age Santa Fe stuff can be as bad as drugs. People start out trying to cure a cold and next thing you know, instead of taking garlic and lemon water, they’ve hired someone to “channel” the voice of a Visigoth. Before you go knocking on heaven’s door, it’s best to look for cures a little closer to home. Roots, seeds, bark, oils, flowers, etc. It says somewhere in the Bible that the earth is our cure, or something like that.
I confess I believe in reincarnation (purgatory isn’t a place but a coming back again and again until we learn all our lessons). But just because you believe in past lives doesn’t mean you should dabble in them. Your ancestors were Jews (before the Inquisition) in the Old World and Christians and medicine men in this one. I guess that covers your bases as good as anything. Respect your current “incarnation.” I’m off on this tangent because even here in Arizona, of all places, people are getting into “channeling.” Only here it doesn’t cost so much. If you want my opinion, I don’t see much difference between all that and what my grandma did, praying in tongues at the Spanish Assemblies of God. Except it was free and anyone could do it.
I tell you all this because you can’t study herbs without a sense of the ins and outs of the spiritual life. It all works together. You can see why I hate doctors (except our Socialist friend who helps refugees for free). And since I am your godmother, I want to keep you on the straight and narrow, what with all that New Age out there. Beware of fundamentalists, even the ones with crystals, hippie sandals, and trust funds. Now that’s not to disrespect true spiritual seekers. After all, some of those Santa Feans have Free Tibet bumper stickers on their vans. So if turning inward helps them turn outward to do something useful in this vale of tears, then maybe God works even in the New Age. But I know you’re not into politics (yet, ha ha).
Now be good. Or at least be careful.
<
br /> Love & Prayers,
Soledad
One day—was it late September or early October?—Soledad returned. And she knew by the play of shadow and light on my face and in my voice that it was done: José Luis and I were lovers. She was my godmother, my mentor. She knew better than to quell the Spirit, the spirit of light that is love and the spirit of recklessness that is something else altogether. In her life, with her husbands, divorces, her breaking the rules of the church, in all these experiences and more, Soledad had seen the two faces of God. So she was not about to tell me not to live dangerously. She might offer advice to ease the blows, but she would never say, do not love him. She was a healer precisely because she had suffered and savored the faces of God, the dark and the light. And every remedio, she said, has elements of both, of the sickness and its cure. I am thirty-nine now, eleven years younger than Soledad was the summer José Luis and I were lovers, and I am just beginning to fathom what she meant.
“Mijita, be careful, when I was your age I gave my heart away, and it took me years to find it again. Mijita, my Carlos was a good man but the war made him loco sometimes, and he would leave home for days. No, no, the only way to take the war out of a man is to end the war, all wars. What do you mean, the power of positive thought? You’ve been reading too many of those Eastern mystical books. You can’t even hear yourself think in El Salvador. I know, I’ve been there, it’s spooky as all get out. You know, the best thing you can do is to be his friend. Now I sound exactly like my mother. And you know what? I never did a damn thing she said until I was over 40.…”
I wish I had written down whatever it was that Soledad told me. All I can do now is imagine her words, but it’s not hard because I can see her: tobacco-colored hair, old jeans and a “Boycott General Electric” T-shirt, light brown skin prematurely creased because she loved life too much to care about the latest creams for peeling away wrinkles. In my memory, she is always chopping cilantro or heating corn tortillas on the blue flame of her gas stove. Before she quit smoking, her evening ritual consisted of holding a cigarette to the flame, sucking in a deep breath, then turning on the radio. She kept a shortwave on her windowsill next to a bottle of green dish soap. After a smoke she washed dishes, then listened to news of El Salvador tearing apart like bread. She never spoke much about the man she had married, then divorced, to keep him from being deported. At first even I was fooled; I thought she had married for love. And in a sense, she had. Having no children of her own, she adopted El Salvador. She knew its provinces, its disappearances. Every day she scanned Mexican and U.S. newspapers for news of deaths, crops, army movements, culling moments in history as carefully as she picked pebbles from beans before putting them to soak. One day she had me proofread a letter she was about to take to the post office. Dear Senator Marciando, My friends and relatives are being killed, she wrote, words short and fiery as fuses. By nature, Soledad tended away from anger. But she could pull it out and wave it like a knife when she heard of yet another death threat in the country she’d come to love.
Here is a recipe Soledad wrote out on a three-by-five card and taped to her refrigerator.
POSOLE
12:45 Wash corn (8 lbs.) several times
1:15 Put corn to boil
1:30 Corn begins to boil. Cook two hours. In separate pan put cut-up pork (7 lbs.) to boil plus ¾ whole onion plus 1 or 2 cloves garlic.
3:30 Put meat in with corn. If corn water is getting low, add some pork broth. Add salt & oregano. Cook about ½ to 1 hour more.
Have fun!
—————
“Mijita, your mother was right, you need to have some hobbies or sure enough, you’ll develop melancolía. You’d be amazed at how learning to cook takes your mind off men—if you do it for your own pleasure. Why do you think I’m such a good cook? I was your age once, don’t forget that. I know how it feels, to feel so in love that the sun and the moon trade places, it’s so crazy. But be careful. No, no, I’m not saying I don’t want it to work out, I do. But every woman should have a special place inside where she can think, where no man is allowed, a place that will, you know, endure. Why do you think I took up letter writing? No man is worth falling apart over. Take it from me. Now come on, let’s go take a walk.”
One day, Soledad’s heart gave out. She had given so much to everyone but herself. When I went to the mortuary to view her body, I started to grieve all over again. Someone had cleaned her hands, wiped away the film of newsprint that had always marked them. That night at San Rafael Church, I said good-bye to her one last time before the open coffin. And pretending to touch her hand in a gesture of grief, I slipped the first few paragraphs of an Associated Press article under her palm. Two days before her death, Salvadoran guerrillas and government leaders signed an accord, shook hands all around, and proclaimed “cautious optimism” to a disbelieving world. I had cut out the article and taped it to my refrigerator next to a prayer for peace. Maybe Soledad was ready to go. Maybe she knew she had succeeded in teaching me to love a broken world.
SAN SALVADOR, El Salvador, Aug. 15, (AP)—The bodies of two nuns who were reported missing earlier this week have been found 33 miles north of here near the village of Encarnación.
A group of Encarnación youth found the partially nude bodies yesterday evening while playing near a ditch. Authorities have identified the remains as those of Eve O’Connor and María Quinto of San Antonio, Texas.
Witnesses say the bodies, which were in a shallow grave, appeared to have been mutilated. The bodies were moved to an unrevealed location for autopsies.
The nuns were reported missing after they failed to return Wednesday night to their residence, Casa Justicia, in San Salvador.
U.S. Ambassador to El Salvador, Emory Newland, who oversaw the removal of the bodies, denounced the deaths and promised a full investigation by an independent commission.
“Despite major steps toward reform in El Salvador, it is clear the country still runs the danger of becoming a death-squad democracy,” Newland said.
But according to separate press releases issued early this morning by the U.S. State Department and Salvadoran President Alfredo Amérigo, “leftist guerrillas” are the key suspects in the deaths.
The differing interpretations of the cause of the nuns’ deaths is the most recent example of a growing rift between Newland and the State Department, sources said.
In recent weeks, Newland has made widely reported visits to literacy projects, which O’Connor and Quinto helped found throughout El Salvador. The nuns belong to Our Lady of the Light, an order that has worked closely with Jesuit priests in literacy and public health.
Since the assassination last year of Jesuit Father Milton Gustavo, U.S. Jesuit leaders have alleged that the State Department is concealing evidence of a campaign by the Salvadoran army to harass church workers who live among El Salvador’s poor.
Sources close to the State Department said Newland’s visits to the literacy projects have embarrassed U.S. officials.
O’Connor and Quinto were outspoken critics of the $1-million-a-day in military aid the U.S. sends to El Salvador, where civil war has resulted in the deaths of an estimated 50,000 people. The nuns have also worked closely with the Mothers of the Disappeared, a group the Salvadoran government says has strong ties to the guerrillas.
In his press release, President Amérigo said he has postponed a speech he was to give at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government in order to attend the women’s funeral mass. The date of the service will be announced soon, said a U.S. embassy spokesman.
According to a statement released by the San Salvador archdiocese, Archbishop José Grande, who has come under repeated death threats himself, will lead a three-mile funeral procession from the sisters’ residence to Our Lady of Sorrows Cathedral where he will offer a Mass of the Resurrection.
Twenty years later, the article is brittle but the memory is not. In the basement by the washing machine, I am translating the Albuquerque Hera
ld report of the nuns’ deaths for José Luis, and he hates me for what happened. See, see what is being done to us? he says. He has heard the story of slain nuns too many times so he wads up and throws his nation’s history at me like a rough draft. He says, you don’t know what it’s like to suffer. I say, José Luis, please, it will be all right. He says, you have no right to say that, you don’t know what it’s like to flee. Later in the day, he apologizes for the episode, but it is too late. Like a man who dared to look straight at the sun, he will never completely obliterate that dark light; it has scorched his vision. He saw in me an image of a gringa whose pale skin and tax dollars are putting his compatriots to death. My credentials, the fact that I am Mexican American, don’t count now; in fact, they make things worse. In his anger he looks at me and sees not a woman but a beast, a Sphinx. Earlier in the morning, he had made love to a Chicana. But after telling him the news of the nuns’ deaths, I am transfigured. For a terrible, disfigured moment, I am a yanqui, a murderess, a whore.
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IN RESPONSE TO THIS WEEK’S
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