Now we have a television and I want to say to him, marry it. Marry it, hire a maid and let me be la otra. Call me on the weekend to go dancing.
He believes it all: Hercules, Dr. Quinn and the novelas tras novelas.
Nobody on tv watches tv, do you see?
Their lives are more real than our own.
A story that is a poem that ends in a prayer
The storm has passed but I take an umbrella because lightning and thunder are everywhere. Fat drops fall from forest leaves onto my tin roof as I close the door and walk down the path to the street. My feet mumble over white stones which do not hurt me. It is easier to walk barefoot on the cool mud than in slippery sandals and I do not bother with boots.
I am walking down the soft cool road in the gleaming, dripping night. In the tall weeds and wildflowers beside me frogs are wildly rejoicing and a chorus of rain-beaten mosquitoes rises. My feet whisper. I hum. Drops plop from high leaves, dampening my hair. I walk toward the streetlight on the corner, watching the ground for sharp stones or slick snakes.
Suddenly the night snaps to black. Pitch black. The black of the night when God created the world. Black so close your breath is suddenly in your ears. Black without a star, without a moon, without a lamp or a flame. The black of closed eyes when they are wide.
I stop in my tracks. The way ahead, the way back, the sides of the road – all are erased. Now I cannot walk. I could wander into the wet weeds or put my bare foot on a silent snake.
My eyes widen and find the dripping forest flickers with fireflies: the world before time, the world right now. Night has been resurrected by a fallen electric line somewhere. I stand still, listening to the music of night creatures, watching firefly constellations flicker.
Then ahead there is a flash in the sky. Billowing thunderclouds are revealed by the light in their bellies and the road ahead of me appears like a momentary black and white photograph, with puddles shining bright. A long rumble shakes the air.
I take two steps forward in the blackness and then stop. I wait, the night pressed against my skin.
When a flickering in the southern sky starts again, I step quickly forward, as many steps as I can, until the rumble sounds and blackness closes over my head.
I am a little night animal walking on my path at the bottom of the forest. The world is gone and I am alone under the enormous black sky among trees. In my bones I feel my grandmothers who were not strangers to the dark. Their instincts softly stir.
And then I hear it. I hear the road. I hold my breath and there it is, clear as noon in the opaque night of closed eyes. It is the quiet place around me, the empty space in forest frog songs and chirping shrills. It is the space with no raindrops tapping on leaves. It is a pause in the rainy jungle night-music stretching before me and behind.
I step slowly forward into blackness without waiting for lightning, hearing the road between the trees. My toes slide forward, looking for stones and I step calmly into the quiet dark space.
Break the lines and let me keep this dark.
Do not lift the spell of night.
Let me walk along this road, trying to hear the way.
(A poem about a dream about my little dog who never lived to be a big dog.)
In the dream he isn’t my dog,
he’s my sister’s but I would
know him anywhere –
silky black fur smooth as an
otter, soft ears of a lop-eared
bunny.
In the dream it’s his neck
that snaps, not his pelvis and
I do it myself out of carelessness
not Doña Daisy in her rattling
red truck as she sees him
run toward me and she doesn’t break
even a little.
Either way it was an accident.
I frantically flip through the phone book
searching for vets and they
take him away to be examined and
then peacefully put down.
Not brought home whimpering
in the car where he lays in
shit for two days refusing to eat
refusing to drink and
finally my husband gives up
glaring at me and calls Angulo to
come over with his shotgun and
do it while we cower inside
covering our ears, all waiting for mercy.
Part I: How To Catch It
Women don’t hunt for armadillos. Armadillo hunting is a man’s job involving dogs, shovels and being out in the hills and fields after dark when women are inside. But if you are a foreigner, you have by nature thrown the rules into question anyway. And if you are married, and if you pester your husband with your ceaseless curiosity, maybe he will invite you.
If he invites you to come along with him and Renan and Santos and Grevin:
Part II: How To Cook It
Your husband will peel the armadillo from its shell, skin it and gut it. This is also a man’s job, one that does not interest you because it involves blood and a very sharp knife.
She is not afraid by the sea in the house with no windows or doors.
The enormous blackness outside pours in like water through open spaces.
She can feel the faint breath of stars on her skin.
The rising tide rocks her in her bed and frogs sing her songs in the language of secrets.
Time evaporates like mist and she has been here forever; a thousand years by the ancient sea, asleep between sand and stars.
She will never leave.
She will always be here where her body lies sleeping in the warm black night, salt in her hair, a girl/animal curled in new moon dreams.
(The same poem first in English, then in Spanish because I try to pick my favorite one and I can only pick both)
i remember the night you
borrowed flavio’s blue car
the bottom halves of trees i
could see through the
window where
we stopped along the
dusty road
what did we say to
each other
that night i
remember it all but
the words
* * * * *
recuerdo la noche en que
prestaste el coche azul de flavio
los troncos de los árboles que
veía por la
ventana donde
paramos en el
camino polvoroso
qué nos dijimos
esa noche yo lo
recuerdo todo menos
las palabras
(from Tell Me About The Telaraña, 2012)
Daniel hates to work. Every day he throws back his head and laughs, says he’s celebrating El Día de San Pepino. El santo de los perezosos, he says.
A woman will kill him someday. His first wife didn’t succeed but sooner or later a less frightened one will; his first wife was a child. Daniel awakened to find 14-year-old Susana holding a butcher knife to his throat, but she was too afraid to push it in. He laughs about the wild times he had while she waited for him at home. That was back when he’d won the lottery and for two years he had it all—money, a motorcycle, a young wife.
Daniel always laughs. He lives with his mamá and he shrugs. Things didn’t work out.
Daniel, él que dice que se casa el treinta de febrero. Daniel, who can win and lose and never notice the game.
January 31, 1998
(Guanacaste, Costa Rica)
We went, on Friday night, to visit Tia Flor in El Silencio. It made my heart ache inside its cage because the blessed silence was there that once lay over the world before everybody had televisions. All was silent and crisply cool in the moonlight. Through the open-air window a star hung over the mountain and ranas and solococos sang their hymns. Tia Flor gave us coffee and fresh hot bread.
I love my pretty house with its windows and floors and I know I am living a relatively simple life compared to some people in the world, but when I stood in El Silencio I felt the same hunger for simplicity that I felt in the USA, ironically, living here.
November 15, 1999
(Washington State, USA)
I am haunted by Tia Flor. She is what stands between me and any ability to become contented with a “normal” life. She has what I do not.
I thought about her on Saturday night as we were driving out of the Tri Cities on 395 North. It was dark and the cars driving with us and toward us made up a great high-speed pulse. The night was lit up by giant bulbs surrounding shopping malls, over gas stations and on road signs. The earth in all directions: asphalt, concrete.
And here comes the unreasonably agonizing understanding that all of this is artificial. Superficial. Fake. Unnatural. Contrived. Illusory. Night isn’t yellow. Night is black. People can’t travel at 70 miles per hour. People walk. The ground isn’t hard and black. The ground is soft and has many colors. Everything that is the common agreed-upon reality of the moment is bullshit.
I cannot stand it.
Tia Flor appears to me. She is everything a “beautiful”, “successful” person is not. She is old. She is fat. She is poor. Her clothes are out of fashion and her hair smells of smoke. She wears big glasses, cheap flip-flops and her shins are full of lumps. In Tia Flor’s house, there are mice. She has a cat to catch them, to keep them out of the tortilla corn. There are spiders and spider webs connecting the rafters of the house with one bare bulb in each room.
She gave me the most delicious scandalously sweet coffee I have ever tasted that she made on her woodstove and warm bread she just baked over the coals. I sat on a sunken chair too sorry, even, to throw away and looked out her window open to the sky. The moon lit up every leaf on the mango tree and outlined their movements, like dancers, when the breeze ruffled. The rooster crowed from his perch. Frogs giggled and hooted in the quebrada. An owl said it name.
It will drive me mad. These are not pictures of affluence and poverty. They are pictures of illusion and truth. Dementia and sanity. Quebrantamientos and wholeness. It causes me pain to look out the window, to look in the window, and not see black sky, a moonlit mango, a wood stove, a pile of corn. Even now that I know of the hardships suffered by a person like Tia Flor. Even so, she has what I do not.
I know Ana too well. We are like sisters, now. We each know when the other is lying.
Sometimes I can’t digest my lunch I the same room with her because in her silence, she is saying to me, you don’t think I know what you did and in my silence she knows I am lying. I have to go lie on the bed in front of the fan.
We’re all we have, as if we were born with the same last names, but I sometimes sit outside at night so I won’t hear her screaming at me as she quietly watches tv.
-Estás enojada conmigo?- I ask her.
-Ni quiera Dios,- she says to me. -No.-
(From A Map Of The River, an unpublished short novel/prose poem)
…..
Washing clothes by hand in the pila is nothing new for me.
In Los Rios I have left behind a small white washer, but before I had it I washed in the way of our Grandmothers.
I know how to do this.
It is an important thing a woman must know.
The little girls on the block come to stare.
They have never seen a white woman wash.
They don’t suppose we know how.
They ask me “Sabe usted lavar?”
I answer them,”Sí” and still they stand in disbelief to watch.
Consuelo wet the clothes in the stone sink, sprinkled them with soap and scrubbed, deftly rolling and unrolling them against the rough surface. I watched her rinse them with scoops of fresh water from a gourd dish, then a hard wring with her muscled brown arms. She came to our house every morning to wash for Guadalupe, her four grown sons and her young boy. With her came Nanci, her five year old animal-child who grunted and screamed, scratched and stole, who learned the unintelligible speech of her mother. She is the one on whom the poor take pity because her poverty is complete.
Consuelo and her animal-daughter Nanci came to wash and I learned to understand their grunted language. The payment for Consuelo’s work were the plates of rice and beans which she and Nanci ate at midday. I watched them. They watched me. Consuelo offered to wash my clothes for small fee and I said no. She had no way of understanding my desire to learn so she thought I was stingy and mean. She watched me without pretending not to as I struggled to wash my own clothes, a clumsy imitation of her efficiency. Guadalupe’s sons watched me wash. Neighbors who stopped by watched me wash. All of my life, people have stopped to watch me wash. A gringa washing clothes by hand: who knew it was possible?
Later, in our rented house in Santa Cruz, before we had money to buy the small plastic washer, I washed everything by hand on Saturday mornings. Towels, bedding, the clay-encrusted work clothes of a potter went into the sink on the porch. I sweated out the penance for my sins one by one. Penance for selfishness were the shirts, penance for untruths were the stained socks to be whitened but not stretched. Penance for leaving my home and my traditions were jeans ground in the mud. Bed sheets were the penance for the iniquities of the unwed. Towels were the penance for having been born rich enough never to have hand-washed towels. When I finished, I was spent; drenched in suds and sweat, knuckles raw, wrists limp, back splitting, dizzy with exhaustion and the relief that comes only from cleaning your conscience along with your clothes.
…..
“Get down from there,” he says to me on my perch in the tamarindo tree, “or you’ll turn into a bad monkey woman.”
I think he is joking, so I throw my head back and laugh my best carefree laugh.
He is teasing me as if I were his little girl. In my country they tell children they’ll break their necks. Monkey woman! Ha ha.
“Get down from there.” He says it again. “It’s bad to climb trees in Semana Santa. You’ll grow a tail like a monkey.”
“Me?” I ask.
Is he serious? This man honestly thinks climbing a tree this week could turn me into a monkey? Oh my.
I smile my most reassuring smile.
“Yes. Get down from there. Now.”
Suddenly I can’t move.
He is serious. Holy God.
“Come on,” he says.
His eyes are shifting and they won’t look at me. His voice has gone cold and his face is turning dark as night. Everyone has grown quiet. Everyone is looking away. Only the radio continues to blurt out tinny salsa music.
Suddenly I sense the fear.
I try to swallow my disgust as I swing down out of the tamarindo, embarrassed.
How in God’s name was I supposed to know that climbing a tree in Semana Santa puts you in danger of becoming a monkey? How?
And don’t tell me they really think that.
“Let’s go back to the house,” he says and it isn’t a suggestion, it is a command. We start back to the house. His face dark and fearful.
Tears of humiliation begin to prick my eyes and nose like pins. I am being taken home like a disobedient child.
I didn’t know. Geez. I’m sorry.
“You can’t climb trees in Semana Santa,” he explains. “It’s bad. You can turn into a bad monkey woman.”
“I’m sorry,” I say, my lip quivering uncontrollably like the child I feel I am being treated as. “I didn’t know that.”
“I know,” he says. “Don’t cry.” He pats me on the arm and laughs nervously. “Don’t cry.”
“Ok,” I say, wiping my nose with the back of my hand and feeling the start of a flood. I want to turn into a bug and crawl away.
When we get to the house, I go into my room and quietly cry out my humiliation and frustration. I don’t want to be a bad monkey woman. I want to be happy and good. On one hand, his believing I could turn into a monkey and my crying about it are equally ridiculous. But he can’t help it and neither can I.
Thinking about how funny it is makes me cry harder.
(Guaitil, Cost Rica.)
I have seen and known the generous heart of the Earth and I keep praying to God to give me a generous heart. I find that, at least comparatively, my culture is not one of generosity, but of stinginess and fear. Stinginess and generosity are fear and love dressed in other clothes. And perfect love drives out fear, they say. If I keep more than what I can use, it is because I fear I may need it later.
Today I went to Santa Cruz and when I finished my mandados, I started walking home. I got almost to the Cooperativa when the same guy who picked me up the last time picked me up again. He risked a 20,000 colone fine for taking me on his motorcycle without a helmet. As we flew back I thought about Generosity – him taking me and even risking a fine. And in this country, you can count on Generosity.
I thought about the generosity of the Earth that we barely see in North America. Here, the lemons and oranges and papayas fall from the trees. Cows give their milk and one tiny kernel of corn gives 2 or 3 elotes. It requires work, but work to gather what is being freely given. The 20th century thinks that milk, corn, wood, water, fruits have to be extracted from the earth, and extract them we do. In quantities immeasurable. We don’t receive them; we demand them.
But the truth is that the mango tree, if you leave it alone, has a generous heart and the hen and the cow, too. The mango will make you more mangos than you can eat and the hen will leave you eggs whether you ask her to or not. The calf will share the milk of the cow. Irma will bring choreadas and Maria Elena will give arroz con pollo when there is extra and the river always gives Renan fish to bring home for us to fry. The nature of Earth, when it is left untormented, is Generosity. I guess the orange tree doesn’t worry about the other 10 months when it has nothing to offer but shade – it gives what it can.
Slowly, I am reading the gospel of Luke and, I think, understanding some things. Jesus wanted to be a teacher, but he had the same generous heart and couldn’t turn people away. That’s what got him. That’s why the Pharisees became interested in him and felt threatened by him – he couldn’t turn the sick away.
I have thriftiness ground into my being so deeply that generosity is hard for me. The open-hearted generosity of Martina who bought me fried chicken when her money was running out is not in my culture or my habits. I would not have done that. She called me over and invited me. She could have just as easily let me walk right by. That is the ridiculous generosity that amazes and shames me and demonstrates to me a life that is truly without fear.
I guess believing in the generosity of others helps to eliminate fear. Hmm. I came home from Santa Cruz and cleaned the entire house. Generosity in favors is part of my culture, even if generosity with money is hard for me.
Talking to Myself 