My Broken Language Read online

  Mom opened her marble notebook and let my fingertips graze the pages. The grooves etched by her cursive were deep, willful things. As usual, she had a little boom box and a few tapes. Yoruba drumming, Andean pan flutes, music played low to accompany the recitations. What would she read today? A Lakota prayer translated into Spanish? A psalm she’d adapted so god had a feminine ending? A journal entry telling of auspicious dreams? An original poem about nature?

  “Mom, what’s ‘pecho’ mean?”

  “Chest.”

  “What’s ‘tierra’ mean?”

  “Earth.”

  “What’s ‘madre’ mean?”

  “Stop interrupting and listen.”

  Our hilltop rituals were the only Spanish I had now. Back in Philly, at Abuela’s or Titi Ginny’s, Spanish was common as a can opener in a kitchen. But on the Malvern horse farm, it was an outdoor-only language, a mom-and-me secret. Whenever dad was in earshot, mom kept to English.

  I peeked in her cloth bundle. She had spent weeks drying sage and eucalyptus, then steeping the leaves in rubbing alcohol and oils. A bottle of the potion rested in her bag. Perhaps today would be a shiatsu massage. The human body, she had told me, has the same five directions as a medicine wheel. After slathering her palms in the stinky stuff, she would press her thumbs deep into my ribs to loosen my summer cough. My shoulder blades, typically made of bone, became pliant under her circling knuckles. Then, one breath later, I would wake up alone, long after she’d finished and left for the kitchen.

  But today on the hill, mom did not reach into the bundle. The notebook stayed closed and the tape deck sat unloaded.

  “When I was your age,” she began, “something scary happened. It was frightening because I didn’t understand. I want you to be prepared, Quiara, in case you have a similar experience.”

  She told five-year-old me about her own life at five, speaking in English so I’d understand every word.

  * * *

  —

  Don Genaro perched on a stool beside mom’s bed, his neck swollen as a ripe guayaba from diabetes. It was improper for a grown man to enter a girl’s room, and so mom knew his visit must be urgent. While asleep, mom had witnessed his whole journey. How he rose from his bed a few blocks away and limped along the callejón past her window, dragging one chancleta as usual. Don Genaro’s walk was unmistakable from the sound and everyone in Arecibo knew when he was coming. The entire moonlit journey, calling my mother’s name in an agonized voice. “Virginia! Virginia!” In her sleep she saw him come up the porch and into the house. Opening her eyes, mom discovered the elder standing at her bedside. “Alert everybody, inform everyone,” Don Genaro said. Mom knew it was her neighbor there, real as rain, but that it was not normal.

  Ginny, mom’s nine-year-old sister, shared the bed. She woke up to mom’s screaming and ran straight for Mami and Papi, same as she had many nights before. They asked mom the usual question. “Who’s here?” Previously, her answers were vague. “Strangers,” she would say. “People I don’t recognize.” Tonight was different. “Don Genaro is here,” mom told her parents.

  Papi’s usual scowl deepened. Juan Perez was not a religious man, though his connection to the earth ran deep. Church, for him, was his farm and the elements: sun, air, water, moon. But his daughter’s nightmares were consistent, full of uncanny details, and where could they have come from if not some legitimate experience? This was agrarian Puerto Rico in the fifties. No one had TVs. There were few books and no movies. Outside influences were minimal.

  Obdulia and Juan Perez rushed next door to wake the neighbors, who were Don Genaro’s relatives and received him frequently. That’s how my mom knew him. Don Genaro often brought a cookie for little Virginia and her sister Ginny when visiting his family next door. The tiendita on the corner sold penny treats and was perfectly situated on the way.

  The two young sisters stayed in the house as instructed. Under veil of night, Mami, Papi, and the next-door neighbors headed for Don Genaro’s home: up the callejón beneath mom’s window, turning left at the tiendita, knocking on the elder’s door. There would be no answer. Don Genaro had already passed.

  * * *

  —

  A few times that year, mom lay in bed with her sister, inhaling the fragrance of magnolia. The tree stood at the porch’s edge, right in front of the cupboard, and when its huge flowers blossomed they unleashed a nauseating perfume. Like most farm kitchens in Arecibo, theirs was an indoor-outdoor hybrid, with the cupboard mostly outside. Hand-carved in the 1930s, it was Papi’s pride, a fine piece afforded by many harvests. Gandules and batatas earned him his one antique. Some china rested on its shelves, a few nice forks and knives. All the little fine things used for the holy days. As mom drifted into sleep one night and magnolia filled her lungs, the sound began in her dreams. Glasses and china shattering against walls, utensils crashing to the floor, a deafening clatter. Then explosive footsteps coming at the house and something dragging behind them. One other sound, too: a cáscabel, ringing, ringing. Who knew its source—there was no cáscabel in the china cabinet. Decades later, as a santera in Philadelphia, mom learned the cáscabel’s ceremonial purpose: to call los Egun, to summon the ancestors. But at five she knew only the bell’s ringing assault: tákata tákata tákata.

  Though the nightmares only happened during the magnolia’s bloom, the great tree flowered multiple times a year. Too frequent for comfort, the dreams grew overwhelming. “If you hear something, say a prayer,” her mami instructed. “Shut it off.”

  At first it worked. Prayer lifted the burden, for a bit. The awful sound of the cáscabel diminished, until new dreams blossomed in the place of old ones. Now mom dreamed of people, strangers lined up along the family’s sloping street, from the top of the hill to the small valley below where the sewer pipe drained. Hundreds of people waited to cross over to another land, as if the large cement tunnel were a sort of doorway.

  Obdulia was devout, a churchgoing woman. Despite leaving school in the second grade, she read the Bible daily and with a scholar’s devotion. Her brother, mom’s uncle, was a Methodist minister and the entire extended family maintained Christian households. For a long time the family kept mom’s proclivities quiet. What girl needs that stigma? But when Don Genaro was named, word got out. The next-door neighbors had witnessed it, after all. “Tiene facultad,” folks whispered.

  * * *

  —

  Opposite the family’s wooden casita was Juan Perez’s farm. The plot of land was cooperatively parceled and worked by three men. Set back from the main road’s foot traffic, the farm was a good spot for make-believe and solitary exploration. There was a hog to avoid, rows of gandules to maze through. A bank of quicksand once swallowed a horse neck-deep and mom watched three men wrest the beast from the pit. There was a safety fence around a pond, its latticework overgrown with fruit. Picking sour parchas and pulpy guayabas was one of mom’s regular pastimes.

  One afternoon, she was surprised to discover a crowd crossing the farm toward the reflective water of the charca. In Arecibo, a crowd meant an event. Perhaps a casket procession or a Día de los Inocentes parade. At the first sign of a group, kids would come running. This crowd was different, though. Concerned men, a search party. What could they be looking for? There was nothing on Papi’s land but crops, a few animals, and the water reserve. After scouring the premises and turning up nothing, the men left the farm, crossed the road, and stepped onto Juan Perez’s porch, where Obdulia stood waiting. When mom followed the crowd to eavesdrop, Obdulia ordered her into the house. “Go get your papi and stay in the bedroom, don’t come out.” She did as told and watched from the window as Obdulia and Juan Perez lowered their voices and the search party was quietly and swiftly sent away.

  That was the end of it until a few weeks later, when a neighborhood man was found hanging in his apartment. In the suicide note, he described the cabinet wh
ere he’d hidden the girl, his victim. Despite some decay, the child’s body revealed evidence of brutality and rape. Such monstrous acts were unheard of in Arecibo. Grief and shock gripped the town. Obdulia and Juan Perez could no longer keep the truth from little Virginia, my mom. The search party had come that day having heard of a child with gifts, a child whose abilities might help them locate the missing girl. Mom’s parents had refused the request.

  For mom it was bitter news, discovering that she might’ve prevented something awful but was never given the opportunity. Then again, if her ability was real, why did she need to be asked at all? Shouldn’t the truth have come with no prompting, in her dreams? The murdered girl from the caserío had been a schoolmate. Was it mom’s fault, in some small way, that her young neighbor was no longer sitting in class?

  Mom grew sick. Light, no matter how dim, triggered headaches. Ginny, who had always spent evenings brushing her baby sister’s long hair, watched as the bristles became a thicket of fallen strands. Bald spots revealed the dome of mom’s head. Her trigueña skin turned sallow. Dr. Sandín was a kind tall man with light skin who made house calls. At his urging, Obdulia and Juan Perez closed mom in a room with no natural sunlight. Vitamin shots were prescribed, kidney problems discussed, reading glasses ordered. Mom lay in her parents’ bed, afraid of what terrors sleep might bring, shivering and delirious all waking hours.

  It was time for the tree to go. The curative properties of magnolia blossoms were widely recognized, and Obdulia suspected the tree’s powers went beyond the medicinal. Its scent might be bringing in the spirits. Plus, cutting it down would allow Juan Perez to expand the porch. He was already converting their wooden casita into a cement home. The magnolia’s removal promised real benefits.

  Once the tree was uprooted, mom’s visions faded. The visitations ended. Denying the gift became mom’s gift. At a young age, mom mastered the art of being incomplete. With self-subjugation came relief, cool as charca water.

  Mom’s hair grew in again. Her girlhood resumed.

  * * *

  —

  My mother finished the story and we sat in silence until, in the distance, gravel popped beneath tires. We heard the donkey across the road hee-haw, announcing dad’s return from a weekend carpentry job.

  “I better get started on dinner,” mom said. Lying on my back, eyes squinted tight, I tried to imagine her as a scared bald-headed child, but all I saw was a strong-jawed twenty-something beauty with a bandana trapping her curls.

  “It’s a secret?” I asked.

  “People use things they don’t understand against you,” she said.

  “Does dad know?” But my gut sensed he didn’t.

  She thumbed my chin gently. “Have you ever had dreams like that? Or received visitations?” There was something beyond tenderness in her eyes. A wish. I thought not responding would be answer enough, but mom sat waiting. Eventually, I shook my head the least amount necessary to mean no. “If you ever do, come talk to Mami. There’s nothing to be afraid of. And if you don’t, that’s okay, too. Just remember, the night I got pregnant with you, I saw the lights come into me.” She kissed my forehead, then gathered her skirt to stand. Mom’s tenderness couldn’t veil her disappointment, nor could my silence camouflage mine. Motionless on the ground, I watched her like a downed boxer sees the feet of his victor. I wasn’t sure whether the woman walking down and away was my ally or a newly met stranger.

  But she had trusted me. That mattered. Same as the woods confided in me on occasion: a still-moist snakeskin, an unearthed arrowhead. Perhaps listening was my own inward dream state. Maybe guarding the vault’s code was an honor, even if I didn’t own the treasure inside. Having attended no church except this hilltop cathedral, having read no scripture except mom’s marble notebook, I imagined god in her image—whispering Spanish, breasts and belly soft, hiding, cautious, from a misunderstanding world. Yes: my confidence offered refuge. By the time she hollered dinner from the back door, I was figuring my rung on the ladder was all right. Maybe other Sundays she’d have more secrets to tell.

  English Is for Atheism; Language of Woodworking

  Dad was sucking down a Camel unfiltered, his long hair cascading down the chairback, eyes hidden behind a sci-fi paperback. Asimov, Vonnegut, and Bradbury had overtaken his bookshelves and now created skylines all over his study’s floor. Each cracked spine testified to multiple rereads, and half-missing covers were the norm. Sometimes I’d sneak into the study when dad was away and fan through yellowed pages, savoring the smell of woodchips and weed. These books were the only evidence of dad’s past. If he had parents, they went unnamed, undescribed. If he hailed from a place, he never indicated so. It seemed to me he’d emerged from the woods a forever adolescent hoisting a hundred books over his shoulder and a bong in his back pocket.

  “Is god real?” I asked.

  “God is the opiate of the masses,” dad said, reclining in his wooden swivel. His thoughts on any given matter were often too big for sitting upright. Dad could’ve said anything in that lazy repose and I’d have taken it as inarguable fact.

  “Do you know what genocide is?” he asked.

  “No.”

  “How about slavery? The Holocaust? You’ll learn. Probably not in kindergarten. They’re terrible things people have done to each other in the name of god. Religion is the root of all evil.” He paused for a moment, double-checking that his point was complete, then returned the book to his face.

  I closed the door behind me but could hardly move in the hallway. If religion was evil, then was mom evil, too?

  All week when I saw him, I lost the courage to ask, until Friday, when I worked up the resolve. The school bus deposited me at the stop sign, a quarter mile uphill on the road that led home. Our house wasn’t visible past curves and brambles, but as I got closer I heard dad’s table saw shrieking. This would be the moment. I knew they argued hard and hateful, and always after my bedtime as if eyelids shut my ears, but if dad thought mom was actually evil, well then, case closed: he denied her special sauce, her main ingredient, her ABCs. And my toes got that tingle of stepping too close to the edge, and three woozy steps later it felt like I was crossing a bridge built of twigs.

  Closer to the house, dad’s smoking cough beckoned, a cavernous basso echoing his first cigarette at thirteen. I came into the garage, greeted by a milky way of sawdust. Specks of light hovered, suspended, slow danced. Dad glanced up and nodded hello. His focus was contagious and I fell silent as he worked. He tilted a hefty wooden slab back and forth, checking it out, a cigarette dangling from his lips. It looked like a dull, plain piece of wood, but after eyeing me to check if I was paying attention, dad cascaded rubbing alcohol over the plank. Suddenly loops and curls glistened on its surface. “Curly maple.” He spoke the words like sacrament. “Curly maple,” I repeated, a flock of one. Within minutes, the alcohol evaporated and the wood grain receded back into dullness. In the coming days, he explained, he would sand the plank, starting with rough coarseness, getting progressively finer. Then he would tung-oil it over and over, day after day, until the just-glimpsed glow reached permanently into the grain and held shine. For this project, he would use only mortise and tenon joints, enabling him to build without a single nail. “Joinery, if done right, is stronger than nails,” he said.

  “How can that be?”

  “A nail creates a disturbance, a hole. It compromises the wood.”

  Dad’s workshop was my after-school program. Sometimes I would venture a question as he worked, request an explanation. He spoke in the fewest words possible, each syllable decisive and considered. But today’s question was a boulder at my locked lips. If religion is the root of all evil, then is mom evil, too?

  The sky was striped blood-orange by the time dad checked his watch. We hurried to the pickup and chased the runaway sun around bends as green bramble darkened to silhouette. The hardware store close
d soon, and dad needed sandpaper. His unfiltered Camel crackled like a miniature campfire. He didn’t puff the cigarette so much as exorcise a demon from it. Five inhales and the thing was spent. Then he cracked open the window and in the rearview I saw it fly like a comet.

  Mom had told me one of his secrets. How in boyhood he attended survival camp each summer. Twenty-one days with a compass, knife, and no companions. The goal being to survive. Just dropped him in the wilderness. Abandoned a young boy with no way to contact home. How fucked in the head is that, mom said. I imagined little-kid dad whittling sticks beneath the stars, preludes to the hand-sharpened pencils littering our home. Then one summer, when dad was thirteen and already a confident survivalist, his session came to an abrupt, premature end. Two weeks in, a camp official emerged, hurrying through the woods. Time to go. Not a moment to spare. It had already taken a few days to locate dad. The home news was this: another heart attack caused by diabetes. Her fourth and last. Dad was choppered off the mountain to attend his mom’s funeral. Can you imagine, mom sighed. Learning about his mom’s death from a stranger? But for me, something clicked. Dad’s sadness always seemed a little bit holy. I had tried asking him about it, but he had quickly brushed past a “Yup, that was sad,” to say he could start a fire in a damp forest without a match. Survival camp was the one part of childhood he enjoyed, he had said, which was more words than he’d ever spoken on his mom.

  Now, with the sun completely fallen, dad pulled into the True Value lot and cranked the brake. Past the window posters, a cone of light beamed onto the register. Still open. Inside, we found various sandpapers and dad selected a progression of rough-to-smooth. Each one left different size scratches on my fingers. And even though the lady had unbolted the door for the day’s final customers, dad took his time talking me through each level of coarseness. He’d have paused the world from spinning just to educate me in the True Value aisles.