for a lifestyle of luxury, which just happened to be white. This false if stylish veneer killed her spirit and destroyed any chance for happiness.
I can reckon with her life and mine only through how far I fell away from whiteness or how close I could come to black. “Who knows what evil lurks in the heart of men? The shadow knows.” We lived, my mother and I, in a world that flickered back and forth between black and white, darkness and light. Nothing could be secure. She liked to imitate the shadow’s voice. She must have heard those words — that voice, Orson Welles, on the radio in the late ’30s. She would walk into my room and whisper, “Heath-cliff, Heath-cliff,” imitating Merle Oberon’s cry on the moors of Wuthering Heights. She became the Cathy who married the wrong man, died, and kept calling for her own true love. There were many women in our house, and all of them wanted something different. My mother became them all, only to realize that nothing remained alive inside her.
One day she pulled a magnolia off the tree in our front yard. She grabbed it in her hand like a castanet, shook it and pulled off the white leaves. “There,” she sighed, “There — look — and see the red and the rot.” I was astonished by the violence of that gesture and the softness of her voice. She was entranced by whatever had died and gone bad.
She knew that it had once lived in beauty.
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A white spider too small for me to truly make out its legs came swinging down so lightly. It hovered over these pages about my mother, then two filaments came through the sunlight, now onto the desk, then around my cup of tea, then onto other pages, and now it comes toward me. Fragile and precarious, it hovers. I’m afraid to move: I feel that it has enveloped me in its threads. As if wrung out from the innards of her being, they loop me into her beaten promise.
My mother’s past comes to me in flashes: fragments of Sinatra’s voice, the sound of her laughter or the feel of her slap across my face. Now her photos, one by one, lead me like patches of light into a world that was but is no more. Not long after I brought them into the house, I smashed my nose against the jamb of a doorway, crushed my fingers in a broken garage door, and shattered my ribs in a fall down the stairs.
We found each other again when I least expected it; and in sight of her, with her breath on my neck, I know now that whatever mattered to me — the poems I cherished, the writers I taught, and the words I wrote — were inspired by her life and raised up again more fiercely after her death.
Haiti, Mexico, and Georgia. Bulls and skulls; drums and gods; recipes, jewels, and Scotch, these words shape and give flesh to her past.
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Not long after awakening that first morning in Mexico City, she looked up at my father in what seems to be sheer wonderment. Or is it just languor in the soft light of a room sometime in midsummer at the beginning of their honeymoon. I had never seen any of these photos, all carefully numbered on their backs in pencil, and kept in two wooden boxes. Only now, with her death behind me, am I struck by expressions that I never saw in life, looks that astonish me in gentle repose.
Doom is never foretold. Not when you’re young, just married to a man who adores you and takes you away to a place of sun, with dust, lizards everywhere in the cracks, birds wandering lost in streets that remind you of Port-au-Prince.
In Mexico, she heard the familiar sounds of suffering and holiness in the bodies of beggars and priests. But how bad could things be? A gold bracelet, given to her by a doting husband, encircled her wrist. She especially liked to see the statues of the Virgin that appeared miraculously on the steps of churches or on altars with candles, gold chalices, violets, and white carnations.
In 1939, right after their marriage, my parents arrived in Mexico. My father drove his Buick Special 8 convertible from Guadalajara to Cuernavaca, stopping in Mexico City, traveling along roads Graham Greene first captured that same year with his “whisky priest” in Lawless Roads and then a year later in The Power and the Glory, but I doubt they ever read him. My father didn’t like Catholics. I do not know any details of their journey. No one ever told me stories. All that remains of the visit are photographs. They got there seven years after Hart Crane leapt off the Orizaba into the sea; just after Sergei Eisenstein began the film that would be cut and mangled in Hollywood; a year after Malcolm Lowry was deported, his life with the alluring Jan Gabrial a shambles.
My parents began their marriage when the New York World’s Fair opened with the debut of nylon stockings, when Billie Holiday first sang and recorded “Strange Fruit,” Judy Garland sang “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” in The Wizard of Oz, and Gone With the Wind premiered at Loew’s Grand Theater in Atlanta. Franco had already conquered Madrid, ending the Spanish Civil War. They arrived in Mexico a year before Trotsky was axed to death there, at a time when over 1,000 American tourists a month visited Mexico, and artists too. But none of this, no history of persecution, no pleasures of culture high and low, no thought of politics can be gleaned from these photographs.
The suffering of bulls, yes, and the remarkable poses of my mother, but alongside a few scenes of peasants, cacti, churches, murals, or horses, there was only a young girl chosen by an older man, and continuously reinvented in split-second exposures, caught in hundreds of ways: lying down in a two-piece bathing suit on rocks, or sitting, long legs crossed doubly graceful in the rise of the stairs underneath her, or sometimes standing in sunlight, her head rocked to the side and eyes like tinder.
The bulls mattered, even if she didn’t know it then. My father went to bullfights. During those afternoons, what did my mother do? As I remember her broken life, I can’t stop thinking about the bulls, isolated from their kind, released into spectacle, performing their agony, the light in their eyes slowly turning into dark. The man rides the horse. He spears the bull and looks down at the stricken animal.
Three quarters of a century later, I look at the pictures. Out of boxes and other wooden and steel containers, and buried deep under other albums, these relics of a honeymoon emerge. They were not part of anything I knew, nor did they make up any kind of beauty my parents might retrieve from a past when they might have known love or passion.
I spent my life not knowing what it meant to love. There was no warmth in our house, no sign of a kiss, except once or twice when my father tried to peck at my mother’s lips as if he was ashamed, a moment in time preserved for me now only in her grimace.
Lust I knew. The long afternoon phone calls when my mother rested on her bed behind a door that was not quite shut. Her legs I could not see. They were under the sheet. She laughed and sounded different than usual. Or was that love, as one hand moved up and down, and the other held the phone very close to the ear?
I wanted these photos to tell me something about their past, something that might otherwise be lost forever. My mother’s face, caught in poses that were never off-guard or random, still does not speak to me. Sometimes she has that immaculate quality of being purified of anything living. When she looks out at my father, the hand drawn up on one side, sultry on the hip, I think of Rita Hayworth, her idol. The earliest films of this love goddess had been on my mother’s mind long before she left for Mexico with my father.
Once there, my father said, the bellowing of bulls could be heard wherever you stood. The heat and the cruelty and the beauty and the grace were simply part of the landscape. The bullfight photos are large 8x10 prints. They touch my heart more strongly than I could have anticipated.
