Mother Tongue Read Online Free PDF Page A

indicated. Bring yourself up to date on all tax and insurance matters. Overseas investments look more promising. Useful information comes from someone who works behind the scenes.
    CANCER: Catch up on routine tasks. A long-distance telephone call will save you time and money. Continue to lay the groundwork for important moves you want to make in the near future.
    August 5, 1982
    Dear Mary
,
    Mijita, if you must lose your head over that boy, at least apply yourself and use the experience to shore up your Spanish. How do you think I learned English? Remember that good-for-nothing first husband I once told you about? Well, we were young and in love and what he said when we were together needed no translation. Falling in love with a man whospeaks another language, you develop a third ear. First, you struggle to understand what he says. Then you begin to hear what he means. Then the relationship falls apart. But you’re the better for it
.
    Me, I learned English because I had to. It was not fun (until I met the good-for-nothing). When I came up from Mexico I gathered words like dung to fertilize life in this alien land. And over time I fell in love with English. Men? They came and went. But the language is mine forever and ever. Remember that
.
    I write this by the bluish light of my mother’s TV screen. My favorite Spanish preacher is on, beamed in from Nogales. Outside, there’s a wild storm and a bad feeling is in the air. Tonight when I opened my Bible, my eyes landed on the passage from Daniel: “And they that lead the many to justice shall be like the stars forever.” I know I shouldn’t read the Bible like tea leaves but stars forever sounded like death to me. Not
five minutes later, I got a call from my contact in Nogales. He said, “Archbishop Grande needs new vestments
.”
    To make a long story short, the sheriff, who owes me one, brought over a bulletproof vest (I think they’re called flak jackets nowadays) and pleaded with me not to tell him what I was up to. I told him the Lord would bless him, if not in this life then in the next one. To make a long story shorter still, my Nogales contact will take the vest to the Archbishop when he goes to San Salvador with a delegation next week. They say there may have been a massacre at the village of El Cordero and that the Archbishop is trying to get an investigation going. Which means he’s in
deep
you-know-what
.
    Well, all this is neither here nor there. I’m so happy you and José Luis are getting along. It’s good that between the volunteers and household chores and your “hanging out” together, he is developing a routine. Structure does wonders for people. (Thank him for
taking over my vegetable garden.) All I ask is that when he’s not looking, sprinkle his shoes with holy water. I’ve been worried ever since you told me he told you his pair belonged to a compañero the treasury police gunned down. The water will bless the footsteps of the living
and
the dead. Write soon—in Spanish. If you don’t know a word, make it up
.
    Love & Prayers
,
Soledad

    It wasn’t long after we met that he began introducing me to his favorite poets, copying in his notebook passages that meant something to him by writers like Pablo Neruda and Roque Dalton. It became obvious to me that poetry was his life. In the throes of apparently meaningless suffering, he lit it and smoked it and passed the sacred pipe to his friends until a new vision came to them about their earthly mission. Of course, this is clearer to me in hindsight. Because whenever he let me seewhat he had copied down, all I could conclude was that his heart, in advance of his mind, was trying to make contact with me. Trying to say I love you through the subversive valentines of great poets. We taped his jottings on the refrigerator where Soledad posted recipes, to-do lists, and prayers. I would not understand the sentiments actually expressed in those words until much later when I understood love could not be