Until I went back to the place I was born and came back here, helpless, full of signs, symbols, and meaning.
I returned thinking I had killed the part of me that contained a soul; I wandered dangerously, I watched the rain wet the sidewalks without falling. That is, the streets were wet, the sky was gray, and the leaves were blown about by the wind carrying water in its wake. Rain water. People walked among wet ivy and wrought iron gates, the fumes of buses, and the impending moisture in the air. I thought, how like the country of my birth. I ached to go inside. I had been looking for a place like this. Simple. Steeped in the meaning of memories, but I resisted. In the bushes, beyond the ivy, dark red berries shivered, weighted down by the rain, I could not withstand the feeling that pulled me away from myself.
When we first arrived, so many years ago, my father said, start now, start working now, because you don’t want to end up like that old guy on the Staten Island ferry calling out, “shine?” to all the passengers. I worked very hard, my father was right. I see the guy now, it is another guy but he says the same thing, “shine?” even if you’re wearing suede, sandals, he doesn’t care. He says, shine, that’s his job. So you have to understand. I’ve reduced my whole life to one moment; it’s what I am fated to do, being South American. A million jobs and a million questions, but it doesn’t matter what country I am from, to you they’re all the same. Uruguay, I tell you, and you light up and say, oh, yeah, my cousin, he has a dentist, and his wife is from Brasil!
So many jobs I had. I cleaned, I dug holes, I taught Math, I drove a bus. And all is reduced to the moment when I walked in, shutting the rain outside, the wind whistling in behind me. I blended with the darkness that isn’t dark, that is soft light coming from somewhere, caressing my face, luring me gently with the smells of the place. Smells that are old and not mine, but mine all the same, known to my skin, and the silence that is balm in my heart as the murmuring goes on. And on, it never stops. Yet it is quiet in here.
I worked very hard, for many years, to give my voice another sound, my body another shape, but here I am, my whole life in this one moment when my body slides right through these doors, blends in the dark, fits like leather along these worn benches– all except the kneeling. I won’t kneel, but I will succumb to the sound, let it take my soul if it has to, and it comes like waves: Dios te salve María llena eres de gracia__ Santa María Madre de Dios (Holy Mary full of Grace__ Holy Mary Mother of God.) It is not religion I am after, understand. Who am I? One of the old men huddled in the back, the guy on the ferry even, offering shoeshines or one of the old women dressed in brown, kneeling up front, chanting the same song forever.
But I did return and I have seen that other face that awaited me there. Asunción, I might say to you. San Carlos or Bariloche. Cuzco, Cochabamba, or Quintay, a little fishing village.
And, oh, you will reply, I know! My brother–in-law, he was in the Peace Corps!
Now I’ve seen the other face and I know who I would have been. My moods swing wildly and the features of my character seem deeper, the more I look. I could be anyone, the old man, the old woman, Santa María Madre de Dios__ Shoeshine! The rain that falls without falling, the silence that calms without speaking. I never knew I searched for something so simple, that reflection from the window; slide on the bench but I don’t kneel. There’s no need except, depth is silence, depth is water, water like glass, glass like a mirror. The more I look I become one with my eyes. This is what I see. My features. Glass. Mirror. Eyes.
The more I look.
The darker they become.
(1996)
Dream of Something Lost
Marisa
Every city must have a river, a river like this, with cemented banks and bridges aglow by the street lights… dirty brown waters that don’t look so brown when the city is in full bloom. But, look! Now it’s a live Stieglitz in the rain. People with umbrellas walking on the sidewalks. In the Spring the scene is a Van Gogh, craft fairs, art exhibits, flowers, balloons, bright colors sliding from one brush stroke to the other… look down, now. See the waifs, the hoodlums. La clocharde de Cortázar inhabits the banks wrapped in newspapers, an eternal picnic, sordid little fires, heating tea in a can…
Marisa shook her head, shook her visions off, shook the water off that had pillowed in her hair as she stood by the river in the rain. She walked toward the diminutive cafe that looked steamy and warm in the late afternoon. Inside, she used her scarf to soak up the rest of the water from her hair. She placed her hands on the cold surface of the marble. With a still damp finger she traced the green swirls on the little table, looking up as if in a dream to the face of the older woman, to ask, “té con leche, por favor, y unos mantecados.”
She felt frail since being released from the jail that wasn’t a jail, from the arrest that was never an arrest, and surviving the experience she must never mention again. Miraculous. Her release was miraculous, owing to friends she didn’t know she had, her survival and everything that surrounded her now, like new life in a new body, although vulnerable, and unused to the new curtness of people under curfew. The woman returned with a generous cup of steaming tea and a plate with three round mantecados, freshly baked.
Marisa always put a whole one in her mouth. The thick shortbread pastry dusted in powdered sugar filled her mouth, and it was a test each time to conquer its sweet dryness without letting on that it might be too big a mouthful. It was a childhood habit of taking that deliberate walk to the mysterious shop near the school to buy one mantecado. It meant squeezing through the wrought iron gates of the school with the younger girls, the steady formations of little girls in white dusters over their uniforms, with only a few extra minutes to buy the pastry, to run back to the bus, meeting the girls from her own grade, and to sit, triumphantly, with a mouthful bursting with powdered sugar, reaching for the crumpled hankie in her pocket, catching the inevitable cloud of laughter and sugar.
Marisa reached for the paper napkin and wiped her mouth. Outside, the rain had stopped and the steady stream of umbrellas began to close their inverted petals, revealing their pedestrian stems. Marisa allowed one more reverie. She stood at the gates of the school on a rainy afternoon. Sixty fourth graders surrounded her in neat files of five abreast. The gates opened and Marisa gasped. Around the stone steps, the parents had gathered in the most colorful array of open umbrellas, a semi–circle of flowers, striped and swirled patterns, enhanced by the rain on them. The girls swarmed around Marisa who awoke from her dream and took one last sip of tea.
On a plate by her cup remained two mantecados. There was something upsetting about eating more than one, more than one gobbled–up–one on the bus, on the way home from school when you’re nine–years–old.
Raquel
Raquel rose late on Sunday. Having slept badly, she received the repetitive winter morning with resentful, tired eyes. At work at the embassy’s kitchen the day before, she’d found out Marisa was alive. For eight months, she had mourned Marisa, based on the rumors around the embassy that the piano teacher had been arrested, tortured, and found floating in the river. At first, retaining in her mind the image of her unlikely friend, the piano teacher, with a whisper of a voice as she sang the scales with her pupils, the spoiled children of the consul, Raquel had refused to believe it. Until one day, like all the other disappearances in her neighborhood where people grew to accept them, Raquel accepted that Marisa was gone. No mourning anymore. Merely empty space in her gut.
When she saw the small Marisa, her dark hair in a braid draped over her shoulder, Raquel knew it was one of those things one keeps quiet, that this is how it’s done in one’s small, remote country. One does not react. She was sitting alone on the piano bench, then rising to kiss her good night
