Children of the Land

by Marcelo Hernandez Castillo

  We took our packet to the sheriff’s department. Surely they would see that, although the accident happened nearly two decades before, she was still living with a constant reminder of that day.

  *

  I was the one who opened the letter wherein they regretted to inform us that, given the significant time that had elapsed since the “incident,” they would be unable to fulfill our request to sign a certification authorizing that a violent crime had been committed.

  The decision whether to sign a certification is at the certifying agency’s discretion. Each certifying agency should exercise its discretion on a case-by-case basis.

  The lump on her wrist didn’t get there overnight. It took years to form, because she worked so soon after the accident and thereafter. The glass didn’t all come out at once; it was still making its way out. It moved too slow for them to notice.

  *

  In the course of finding the evidence, filing the papers, and (what I can only imagine) a sergeant or captain in their office looking over at pictures of Amá, her X-rays, descriptions two decades old, and schematics, Amá’s body was being examined, carefully scrutinized for signs of a specific kind of trauma, one that might always evade her. They wanted to see a spectacle, something quantifiably violent. But not everything happens like it does on TV. There isn’t always a musical accompaniment to underscore the emotional landscape of tragedies. There is pain that isn’t instantaneous, that is difficult to see, that spreads multiple generations, that doesn’t always have a clear cause, that can’t be measured but is nonetheless real. Sometimes it is more real because it is hidden, because you have to go through your life keeping it to yourself, unable to tell anyone the depths of your suffering.

  Though we were devastated, we knew we could take the same evidence to two other agencies and try again; to the presiding judge who oversaw the original trial, and to the DA’s office.

  So back through Highway 113 we drove, and again Amá sighed with heavy nostalgia. The DA’s office was across the street from the clerk’s office, but the building was midcentury modern, perhaps built even later, in the 1980s, when the new criminal justice laws under Reagan made locking up poor brown and black people a blood sport for district attorneys and public prosecutors.

  At the DA’s office we sat in yet another waiting room, with a few chairs and service windows, and walked up to the window when our names were called. A young man came to the window. After we’d made our request, told our whole story, and slid all of our documentation through a small opening, he asked us to sit down while he spoke to his boss.

  He was back in no time, which surprised me. “I’ve spoken with the DA, and they say they can only attend to incidents that happened within the last seven years because we shred all of our documents after seven years,” he said. He had on a plaid shirt with tight khakis, and a nice watch. He was handsome and blond and looked aggressively boring, as if he aspired to own a chocolate-colored Lab in the suburbs.

  “Oh, that’s okay,” I said through the window. “I have all of the documents you need right here because the court keeps them indefinitely.”

  “I’m sorry, but they need to be original documents from the DA’s office, and we shred them after seven years, so the DA can’t attend to your mother’s case.”

  “But—I—have—everything—right—here,” I said again, slowly, impatiently. He repeated the exact same thing as before. “These are signed documents from that clerk’s office right over there, from which this office received the exact same copies,” I said, a little more loudly.

  Everything was right there in my hands: the speeds of the cars, the directions they were going, the directions in which they finally stopped spinning. It was all right there, but it was as if we were holding something unclean, something he didn’t want to touch, even as I nudged them underneath the glass again. “Please,” I said, my eyes beginning to tear up. He looked sincerely sorry, and I knew it wasn’t his decision to make. I probably could have yelled and made a scene, but by that point defeat had overcome me. I dropped my shoulders and signaled to Amá that we should leave.

  We drove home, again passing the same spot where she’d lain eighteen years before, coming apart, unconscious, as the other driver tried to drive away in his car, which also was intact for the most part.

  [Fourth Movement in the Shape of a Poltergeist]

  We each took a turn looking away. I looked at the street, at my ceiling, or at my neighbor’s long black hair as he drank from the hose in the summer of 1995, in the dying town of Linda, California, which was Spanish for beautiful, ironic because it was not. Everyone had their favorite thing to look at instead of looking at Amá—a car, a girl, a boy, a tree.

  Apá didn’t like to look at her either, after he hit her and her face swelled up.

  I wanted to look, but sometimes she hid behind doors or makeup. She didn’t want us to see what Apá had done. I got home from school to find the door locked. I knocked and yelled for her. I was still looking at trees, so maybe I was in a forest, but Amá opened the door enough for me to see that I was not.

  His hands were the only thing in his life that ever really came close to her.

  She said, “Go play with your friends, mijo.” So I did. I looked at my neighbor still drinking from the hose; I looked at him walking into his house, which was always unlocked.

  If Amá, my brothers, and I each looked somewhere else at the same time that wasn’t Linda, that was away from Apá, perhaps we could convince ourselves it was possible to go there. And one day we did. Our new apartment was a secret. No one was supposed to see us.

  *

  Apá raged. He looked for us at church, at friend’s houses, even checking the house again just to make sure his eyes weren’t playing tricks on him. He looked for Amá like he had never looked for her before.

  I didn’t know what became of Apá in those months, but I knew he was around. I was always afraid of seeing him on the streets, or of him waiting for me after school. I had the feeling he was always watching, that he had cameras everywhere. But I never saw him. I wished I could be invisible when I played outside.

  Then one day the door of our secret apartment was locked again. And again she said, “Go play with your friends, mijo,” and I knew what that meant. She said he hadn’t given her much of a choice.

  *

  Between her beauty and his hands were the three of us, the children. He didn’t regret hurting her; he regretted that she hurt enough to leave. He knew the limit now. From now on he would only bury his fists as deep as that limit. Nothing more, nothing less. A calibration. A fine tuning, so that no one else would notice.

  *

  We needed to ease our way back to him, the way you wade into frigid water, slowly letting your body get numb enough from the waist down to take the dive. He spoke a few words, tousled my hair, then left, then stayed a little longer.

  Eventually we made our way back to our old house. It looked the same. He didn’t buy anything new, as if he knew she would be back, as if they both knew how it would end. She never left him again. She wasn’t able to call the police because she was afraid that it would make things worse. She always combed her hair slowly in the mirror.

  Apá kept trying to hold us but never could, as if we were ghosts, as if we were the ones knocking all of the frames off the wall, shattering in the late hours of the night. I never took my eyes off my mother again.

  7.

  Our last hope was that the presiding judge might be willing to sign the certification, even though both the sheriff and DA’s offices had refused. We couldn’t see him in person, so our lawyer mailed all of our materials instead. I accompanied our documents with a letter as well, Something I hadn’t thought was necessary the first two times.

  To whom it may concern,

  My name is Marcelo Hernandez Castillo and I am the son of Antonia Hernandez Castillo, who is petitioning for a U visa certification to recognize her as a victim of a violent crime. I write in order to clarif
y and explain the special circumstances of my mother’s case given the time that has elapsed since her incident. As is self-evident from the documents enclosed, on October of 1996, my mother was involved in a head-on collision caused by a Mr. Jose Francisco Carranza, who was heavily under the influence. My mother suffered the greatest injury of both parties involved and was airlifted to UC Davis Medical Hospital immediately thanks to an off-duty officer who witnessed the crash and was able to detain Mr. Carranza before he could attempt to flee the scene. As you can see from the documents, Mr. Carranza was charged with felony DUI with injury and was sentenced to three years. My mother was called to testify against Mr. Carranza and fully cooperated with law enforcement to help in the case against Mr. Carranza and was present during the trial.

  Beyond the empirical evidence gathered from the collision and the medical records detailing her injuries, which included extensive internal organ damage, lacerations to her neck, and the most damaging being her broken arm which required immediate and extensive surgery, it is important to highlight the effects and damages procured in the year following the accident up until the present day. The surgery to her right arm was intended to hold her bones together with metal plates and screws but the aftermath of the trauma changed her life. Over the years, a large fragment of bone and muscle tissue has begun protruding from her wrist, which has caused her to lose strength and mobility in her right arm. Being right handed, she has had to adjust and train her left hand to do most of her work.

  Given that my mother works in manual labor, which requires her to sort fruit on a conveyor belt for up to twelve hours at a time, the constant motion has caused her immense pain each and every day since the accident. She has refused to take pain medication for fear of dependency and has instead decided to bear the weight of the pain alone. . . . This accident was not something that merely happened in 1996 and was forgotten. Rather it lives with her each and every day. She has never been able to drive a car since the accident because she has developed a phobia of driving due to the psychological trauma associated with the incident, which means she must continually pay other people to give her rides to work and elsewhere. Although her life entirely revolves, either directly or indirectly, around an incident that happened many years ago, she cannot move on. Thank you for your time and understanding.

  Sincerely,

  Marcelo Hernandez Castillo

  May 8th, 2015

  8.

  What seemed like hope at first turned into almost an embarrassment. How could we be so naive as to think we could fix this?

  A few weeks later, we received a letter from the judge’s clerk. I didn’t even need to open it to know what it said.

  They wanted to keep things in the past, to cherry-pick only the things they wanted to usher into the future. To them, the accident happened nineteen years before and stayed there. To them, it never followed her. Amá was not afforded the luxury of forgetting, of thinking of the past as immobile, as static. She carried it with her, and it never aged, it always became a new pain that simply added to an old scar, a new present.

  The sheriff, the DA, and the judge applied a narrow definition of suffering onto Amá and made it impossible for her to fit the mold. But it wasn’t just them, the whole law was flawed. The U visa law told women like my mother how they should suffer and provided a checklist for correct forms of suffering.

  Amá, on the other hand, was forced to remember not by choice but for survival. Meanwhile, I was writing poems to make sense of why it was that I forgot my past, which felt nothing like a luxury, which felt like a curse in fact. And we were holding each other in order to know the difference.

  “It’s okay, mijo, we tried,” Amá said to me as I drove her to church one day.

  “Yeah, Amá, we tried,” I said, hoping that between each of our admissions, at least one of us would actually believe it was worth it.

  *

  Even though I showed them pictures and X-rays and measurements, it wasn’t spectacular enough. They wanted a show. They wanted this to have happened yesterday because then it would still be fresh. And if it was fresh, it meant it was real. But it was subtle to someone who didn’t know her well enough to notice the particular gestures she made when it stung. She carried it every day of her life like a small weight heavy enough to drown you in water.

  I almost wished that we hadn’t heard about the U visa because then we wouldn’t have gotten Amá’s hopes up. In a final exasperated attempt to do something, I dialed the number of a congresswoman running for office who was referred to us by that nice lawyer who told us about the U visa in the first place. He said she might be able to help. I explained the situation to her over a brief phone call. She agreed that it might be good for her campaign to take a look at my mother’s case. Immigration was hot. After a few emails, her assistants stopped responding. We ran out of choices, and the machinery of her departure began rolling back on track again.

  Being split open by the hood of a car was not enough; being disabled and still having to work through the pain without medication was not enough; being beaten by her husband and not being able to report it was not enough; being separated from her family was not enough. When would it ever be enough?

  To the government, it was our fault. Always our fault. I tried as hard as I could to see if I could read anything beneath the redacted lines in her report. Maybe that’s where it said what they needed to hear in order to believe us. Maybe that’s why they crossed it out.

  9.

  I still liked to spend afternoons in her bedroom, except I stopped brushing her hair. We were watching Tarantino’s classic Pulp Fiction—dubbed in Spanish, of course. The voice actors were from Spain as well, and we laughed quietly at the way they pronounced certain words, at their registers of emotion that were always two notches above or below. She told me to close the door because the draft was hurting her arm.

  The abscess on her wrist continued to grow, the glass continued to move through the pathways of her body like small stones on a trail to a murky pond, and the plates holding her bones made her hold her body close together in the winter, as if she was a doll that could come apart with one loose string.

  Samuel L. Jackson popped up in flip-flops with his 9mm Star Model B, and John Travolta was squinting at the camera, flipping his ponytail, and Uma Thurman was dancing the twist and accidentally snorted heroin. How many bullets had Samuel L. Jackson fired since the movie started?

  Everything in the movie looked like it was about to break open, but it was the moments in which they didn’t that seemed most arresting. When you knew something could happen, but it didn’t.

  Their dialogue in Spanish sounded as if they were taking their time with it, as if they were in no particular rush to their inevitable demise. It was much faster in English—maybe it was the latent signature of Tarantino’s anxiety. It felt like everyone died in the movie, even though they didn’t. Vincent died, but he didn’t really. It ended with him walking away from that diner, which was actually the beginning. I hated it.

  It was a movie that began again and again. It wasn’t going anywhere. And if someone asked, they would point and say, That, that right there, was what violence looked like, not the scene in the room, where a boy brushes his mother’s hair, mapping all the ways an object could leave her.

  [Fourth Movement as a Treatise on Love]

  I was always falling in love, even as a child. As Apá tossed Amá against the wall, I wrote letters to my fourth-grade crushes at Park Avenue Elementary. As she crouched on the floor, I listened to songs of longing, songs that said things I still had yet to understand. Amanda Miguel cooed into my ear from the radio, “Mi buen corazón / Tú eres mi perdición / Me arrastras siempre al dolor / Me matas en cada amor / Ah ah ah . . .”

  I drew hearts and the outlines of people on good white paper. As Amá flinched, I passed notes in class and waited nervously for a response. I said “I love you,” “I love you so much.” I said “Check the box, yes or no” and drew boxes.


  As Amá smiled at me, I smiled back. We were both trying to figure out why love wanted nothing to do with us.

  *

  I never told my mother that I loved her. Never said those actual words. Instead, I held her hand as she sang to me and played with my hair. What did I know of love?

  “Your father cares about us, it’s just his temper,” she would say, moving her fingers through my hair.

  *

  My father learned about love from his father, who learned it from his father’s father. He learned that love was not something that you did, but something that you made sure someone remembered, for better or worse.

  *

  In Spanish, you don’t usually say “Te amo,” “I love you,” to your mother. Because amo has other connotations of desire. Instead you say “Te quiero mucho,” “I like you a lot.” It’s more common for a mother to say “Te amo” to a son or daughter. It’s not reciprocal. Sometimes, even just saying the word amor when speaking to someone gets the point across.

  “Amor, come with me to the store.”

  “Amor, it’s nothing.”

  “Amor, tell your father the food is ready.”

  Amá knew all about the paper hearts in my room, but she didn’t care. Oh amor. The trouble was that so did Apá; and he did.

  *

  “La Tragedia de Rosita” was a song that men outside my house would drink to late into the night, a song I had heard my entire life at weddings and Christmas parties and babies’ christenings. It said a man loved a woman so much he killed her. “Tragedy and beautiful women make good company / . . . ‘Rosita, love of my life . . . / how I have waited for this day / to tell you that I love you.’ / The Rancher mocked Rosita / and threw her in the corn grinder / and the river swept her away.”