DEVELOPMENTS IN EL SALVADOR,
THERE WILL BE A
DEMONSTRATION AT THE
FEDERAL BUILDING DOWNTOWN,
242 WASHINGTON S.E., AT NOON.
IF YOU WOULD LIKE TO HELP
MAKE SIGNS, JOIN US AT THE
JUSTICE CENTER TWO HOURS
PRIOR TO THE DEMONSTRATION.
OTHERWISE, BRING YOUR OWN
SIGNS. KEEP THE MESSAGE CLEAR
AND SIMPLE, SUCH AS U.S. OUT OF
EL SALVADOR, BREAD NOT
BOMBS, TAX DOLLARS ARE
KILLING CHILDREN, ETC. WE WILL
ALSO BRING WHITE CROSSES
INSCRIBED WITH THE NAMES OF
SALVADORANS WHO HAVE BEEN
KILLED AND DISAPPEARED IN THE
LAST FEW MONTHS. WHEN WE
GATHER AT NOON, JOSÉ LUIS
ROMERO WILL OFFER AN
INVOCATION WITH RABBI ANNE
WEISEN. WE WILL THEN LINE UP
ALONG WASHINGTON. WE
ENCOURAGE PARTICIPANTS TO
WEAR SUITS, TIES, DRESSES, ETC.
RELIGIOUS LEADERS SHOULD
WEAR HABITS, COLLARS, AND SO
FORTH. THE MEDIA HAS MANAGED
TO PEG US AS THE RADICAL
FRINGE, AND WE NEED TO
COUNTER THIS STEREOTYPE IN
ORDER TO GET OUR MESSAGE
ACROSS.
THOSE WHO PLAN TO COMMIT
CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE (ONLY THOSE
WITH EXPERIENCE, PLEASE)
SHOULD MEET AT THE JUSTICE
CENTER AN HOUR BEFORE THE
DEMONSTRATION TO GO OVER
INSTRUCTIONS. WE PLAN TO
OCCUPY SENATOR MARCIANDO’S
OFFICE UNTIL HIS PEOPLE CALL
THE POLICE. WE WILL PROBABLY
BE BOOKED AND RELEASED ON
OUR OWN RECOGNIZANCE SO
PLAN FOR A LONG EVENING.
SOLEDAD SANCHEZ IS
ORGANIZING A CIVIL
DISOBEDIENCE SUPPORT GROUP,
WHICH WILL HOLD A PRAYER
VIGIL OUTSIDE THE BUILDING
UNTIL EVERYONE IS RELEASED
FROM THE POLICE STATION
ACROSS THE STREET. CALL HER
OR THE JUSTICE CENTER IF YOU
HAVE ANY QUESTIONS. PEACE.
VIGIL PROGRAM, P. 2
AFTER THE INVOCATION, PLEASE
TURN AND FACE THE FEDERAL
BUILDING AND TOGETHER READ
THE LITANY OF NAMES. THESE
ARE PEOPLE WHO HAVE
DISAPPEARED IN THE PAST
MONTH:
CARLOS RAMOS GRANDE
EUGENIA MÁRQUEZ NÚÑEZ
RUTILIO LÓPEZ MONTES
OSCAR DONOVAN MARTÍNEZ
REGINALDO DE JESÚS ROMERO
ELBA VELÁSQUEZ TAMAYO …
August 20
I pray that María forgives me for getting angry with her the other day. I acted as if it were her fault that the sisters were killed. I suspect the real reason for my anger is that I have no idea what to say to make her understand that my world is falling apart around me. And I am too proud to say, María, there are reasons why I get cold whenever I hear helicopters or sirens. There are reasons why I had to fight off vomiting last week when we drove to Old Town and saw a dead, bloody dog on the side of the road. The problem is we’re not seeing or hearing the same things. Even church bells mean something different to us. She hears them and sets her watch. I hear them and remember the endless funerals in the villages outside the capital.
But what right do I have to be angry with her? It is not her fault that her culture has made her who she is. And there are times when she steps out, when she sees things. Yesterday she drove me to an appointment with a counselor. I let her talk me into it because the man is a Chicano who speaks Spanish and who understands the situation of refugees. As we were walking toward the office, I spotted life-size chalk drawings of human figures on the pavement. I began to panic and I turned around and went back to the truck. I couldn’t stop myself. Thank God María did not think I was changing my mind about going to the counselor. She understood what was happening. She had read in some newsletter about how the Salvadoran police outline in chalk the bodies that they find, documenting the “mysterious” deaths they themselves plan and carry out. María understood, and she sat with me in the truck until I stopped shaking. The counselor was upset when I told him what happened. He said some children had made them as part of “art therapy” with another counselor and that he would have them removed.
I have not done well since hearing the news of the sisters’ deaths. I had often visited the literacy projects with Father Gustavo. Sleep has been difficult, and I find myself taking extra sleeping pills from María’s purse without telling her. But I know she knows I’ve been drinking way too much. I feel that a bomb is ticking inside me, and I don’t know how or when it will go off. It takes so little to push me off the edge. The other day, María took me to the Rio Grande for a walk. Green-gold gourds were growing wild among trees she said were Russian Olives. Just for fun, María started kicking a little gourd. After a while, for no reason at all, she smashed it with her foot. Only my pride kept me from crying. Then I was angry at her for doing what she did. In a world of violence you would think she had something better to do than to smash a baby gourd.
Then I hated myself for being angry. To make reparations, I plucked a new gourd and tossed it in the Rio Grande, the great jeweled snake of a river that I have come to love. I didn’t know what else to do. It made no sense to apologize to María so I apologized to God.
—JL ROMERO
August 22
I am working on a collection of poetry for María, to keep my mind clear and to give her something to remember me by if I leave. It is tempting to save them until that day comes, if it comes. If I give them to her now, she will take it to mean I am in love with her. And I do love her. But she might miss the larger meaning, that I never know where I will be tomorrow. I want to give her what I can now, but not foster hopes of a future. In truth, the situation is not fair. I talk with her about the importance of hope while praying she will not dare dream.
#3 FOR MARÍA
how your eyes hold me,
eyes where relief and fear
reside as in a cease-fire.
my rib throbs beneath
your palm, the rib
they fractured with
a rifle, the rib
that if taken into
the body of america
might make it new,
a country where mercy
and nobility reside,
where the shattered
bones of my people
teach your people
about strength.
—JL ROMERO
One day he told me about the strange markings on his hands and his back. Sitting on the end of the bed, he sucked on a cigarette and flicked ashes in a beer can that he held between his thighs. He said, guards snuffed out their cigarettes on my body, one by one. It says so in the affidavit, thirty-three burn marks, not birthmarks like I told you the first time we made love. As he spoke his face melted into a trail of waxy tears, but because he believed men should never cry, I looked the other way. Not only cigarettes, he said, but electric wires on my genitals. Then, as if I were a stranger whom he had run out of things to say to at a party, he turned away, tapped his finger on the beer can. He felt ashamed. Not because he survived while others died but because the intimacy was too much, a window thrown open too wide. To tell another person about what was done to your body in the name of politics is a frightful act of intimacy, risky beyond sex, because a man can make love for years and not reveal much of himself at all.
I took the almond oil, offered to rub his back, his shoulder blades that tensed like birds’ wings before flight. Beneath my hands was a constellation of markings that in any other lifetime might have been a momentary flushing of skin in the fire of passion, marks left by a woman’
s fingernails. And as I so often did in those days, I refused to believe my own eyes. I refused to believe that what I was seeing was a pattern of scars, the legend to the map of his life—1982, someone had branded those numbers into his back. You had to really look to see, as if searching heaven for the big dipper on a cloudy night. Nineteen eighty-two was the year he was tortured, that thousands were tortured. In a country the size of Massachusetts. In a country named after Christ.
Later, as I massaged his temples, his eyes turned to glass—rearview mirrors that let him look back many miles, many months, at a woman I sensed had touched him just as I was doing. A woman I feared had met the same fate as the nuns, their bodies not merely “mutilated” as the newspapers reported, but their hands cut off as a warning to all who would dare try nursing a nation back to health.
A few weeks after the nuns’ deaths, I found a poem in Spanish folded in José Luis’s Bible. I put it back after reading it, pretended it was not there, told myself I hadn’t seen it, and so assured that its shape would be preserved in my memory forever, like autumn leaves ironed between sheets of waxed paper.
LAMENTATION
When at last my man
gets out
to become a new man
in North America,
when he finds a woman
to take the war out of him,
she will make love to a man
and a monster,
she will rise
from her bed,
grenades
ticking in her.
The poem was signed, “Ana.”
Three
My son, José Luis, is nineteen years old. On his breaks from college in New York City he always comes home—to a brown mushroom of a house that seems to have sprung from the fertile mud of the Valley, the house that Soledad coated with mud and straw before her death, before she signed it over to me. After meeting José Luis yesterday at the America West gate, I helped lug his knapsacks and other bundles, embarrassed at my secret joy in knowing he still brings jeans and sweatshirts home to be washed. It is all part of the myth we share, the pact—he lets me do his laundry and indulge in some semblance of mothering, some illusion of authority. Like all children, he had to have sensed his mother’s grief over the nature of things: that a child, sprouted like a plant from a clipping of one’s own flesh, grows up and away, becomes a person unto himself. Feeling my loss when he went away to college, he hit upon the ritual of the unwashed clothes; he also lets me call him mijito, my little boy. And in return I try to refrain from telling him what to do with his life, his world.
Oftentimes, after supper, when I would rather we go on a walk, José Luis descends to the basement where, years ago, we set up his first computer. Messages flash like lightning on the screen and he answers, communicating for hours at a sitting with students in Brazil, biologists in China—wherever wetlands or highlands or any other land is in danger of disappearing, of becoming something it is not due to man-made chemicals that have infiltrated once pristine places. My son doesn’t hear me or see me when he is clacking away at the computer. This reminds me of how he used to sit at Soledad’s piano for hours and pluck out “songs.” As a boy, he was drawn to the minor chords. And even now, on vacation, he prefers to be present, if only by way of computer, at a catastrophe.
How different his universe is from the one Soledad knew. José Luis and his friends cast bottles upon oceans of computer screens, and, in an instant, their messages wash up as far away as Africa. Before history happens—a land takeover, a nuclear waste accident, the death of another species—José Luis knows about it. His is a generation of psychics, not because they can peer into the future but because the sins of earlier generations have forced them to look deeply into the here and now and thereby alter fate. It is a frightful balancing act, attending to the moment in order to create the future. His basement walls are papered with maps of frayed ozone layer, dying forests, dust bowls where crops once thrived. The maps tell the real story of how the world has changed since Soledad was his age. José Luis is caught up in a struggle larger than that of an individual nation. He and his friends talk about saving the planet. I wish I could say they were exaggerating.
During his vacations we indulge in other rituals besides joking about his unwashed clothes. My favorite is where I say, mijito, how’s your Spanish coming along? Just fifteen minutes a day reading the Juárez newspapers and you’ll have it down, or better yet, go to the Spanish mass.… Then, with a grin, he asks me if I kept my part of the bargain, if I have learned to at least pronounce names of chemicals he is studying in his environmental biology class. Chemicals that my son, the budding topsoil expert, says act on the earth like cancer—cells that don’t know what they are in relation to the whole.
That he and I can go back and forth this way is a sign of healing. When José Luis was in high school, I made an error I feared was fatal. I told him that if he passed his Spanish class, I would send him to El Salvador for a summer, to volunteer in one of the new communities, Ciudad Grande. No sooner had the thought escaped from my mouth when a terrible storm gathered in that Olmec Indian face of his, wide and round and brown as cinnamon. He thundered: Ma, I don’t wanna go there, I don’t wanna major in Spanish. How come you never say anything about how good I’m doing in science? How come you never ask about my project for the Science Fair?
My son, as all children must do, indicted me on charges of conspiring to control him. He presented the evidence. And he grew up. Right there, one terrible afternoon, my baby grew up and became himself: Olmec with a warrior’s helmet, raging against me and the powers that had laid waste his Earth.
When José Luis slipped into the world three months too soon, he had a fig for a face, a body no longer than a woman’s size eight shoe. I had no idea how to hold a thing that small without breaking it, but it didn’t matter. Nurses washed the muds off him and whisked him away to an incubator where he meowed under harsh lights, tubes, and antennae. They kept him there until his lungs showed signs of inflating, sails strong enough to catch the wind and propel him through life.
For what seemed an eternity that hospital was my home—the university hospital serving the uninsured, where a Jewish friend of Soledad’s treated refugees, afterwards walking them through underground hallways and out a back door, bypassing official forms and sliding fee scales. It was there, in a room of glass mangers, that Soledad brought me food and headlines from the outside world. In the early evenings we dipped corn tortillas in thermoses filled with black beans and then went to a waiting room to listen to news from Central America on the shortwave radio. It bothered her that the doctors would not allow the radio in the “preemie” ward. Soledad wanted José Luis from the very start to breathe the atmosphere of El Salvador, its tropical airs that she said must have had something to do with the people’s ability to live for so long on so little. After the news I usually fell asleep on a rocker next to José Luis’s incubator. One night as I was sleeping, Soledad taped holy cards to José Luis’s glass cocoon. Mary, Joseph, St. Jude, Rafael the Archangel, a kind of ad hoc committee of divine intervention. Another night she draped an oxygen tent with rosaries blessed in Lourdes. In a crisis, Soledad had a hard time not turning blank surfaces into altars. She was all for hedging her bets, or, at the very least, somehow sanctifying the most hopeless of situations, the fruits of which she promised would be visible “if not in this life, then in the next one.”
It was there, at the hospital, that I learned to proofread. I scrutinized every line on my child’s face, certain that at any moment he might be a comma or period away from oblivion. A glovelike device fastened to the incubator allowed me to slip my hand in and gently poke him; the smallest stirrings restored me to peace. His eyes were shut as tightly as a new kitten’s. He was all animal, a bundle of hungers. He was still in the garden and my face was a passing cloud in his sky. The news from El Salvador was a babbling brook. Looking at him, I wondered, what will I do if he leaves me, how will I live if he dies? I hated my
helplessness. After months of eating the right foods and reading the right books on pregnancy and parenting, there was now not a thing I could do—except keep watch at this mystery.
Years before, Soledad told me that her great-aunt, who was of Nahuatl Indian descent, believed that it took five years for a child’s body and spirit to decide whether or not to remain together. Remembering her words, I asked myself, who am I to demand that my son’s flesh and breath stay together for my sake? José Luis’s father taught me love could not be used like a cage to make a man stay. What if the universe now was telling me that it might take even greater love to let someone go? But I was not capable of detachment. The dream that my child would live was a rope I tied around my waist to keep me from slipping into a pit of despair. In my desperation I pleaded with God, cried out in the hope that one day He would hear the echo: let José Luis live and I will tell him the story of how he came into this world.
One night, sensing that the darkness had become too much for me, Soledad said very gently, Offer it up, mija. Offer up your pain for the mothers whose children are disappeared. There were times when I had hated Soledad’s fatalism, her “si Dios quiere,” her God-willings, the way, in the name of realism, she could suddenly dismantle her expectations rather than reinforce them, come what may. I did not yet understand that by accepting things as they were, Soledad found energy to try and change the world, or at least her portion of it. But that particular night, too exhausted to revert to logic and having nothing better to do, I did as she said; I offered up my helplessness, all that was small and weak and frightened inside me, on behalf of those who were worse off. And somehow, Soledad’s mandate became an umbilical cord through which I received nutrients of meaning. These kept me going until doctors declared that José Luis’s lungs had grown strong enough to contain his cries so that we could take him home. Since that time I have tried to interpret “offering it up” for my friends. “Empathy” does not quite embody its spirit. No, the word I think comes closest is “solidarity,” and it is that word that resonates the most with my friends and my son, the nonbelievers.
Mother Tongue Page 7