Mother Tongue Read Online Free PDF

divorced from history, that his war had to become my war.
    “Honor of the revolutionary poet: to convince his or her generation of the necessity for being revolutionary here and now, in the difficult period, the only one that has the potential to be subject of an epic.… to be so when the condition of being revolutionary is usually rewarded with death, that is truly the dignity of poetry. The poet takes then the poetry of his or her generation and gives it over to history.”
    — ROQUE DALTON
    M ORTALLY W OUNDED
    When I woke up
this morning
I knew you were
mortally wounded
that I was too
that our days were numbered
our nights
that someone had counted them
without letting us know
that more than ever
I had to love you
you had to love me.
I inhaled your fragrance
I watched you sleeping
I ran the tips of my fingers
over your skin
remembered the friends
whose quotas were filled
and are on the other side:
the one who died
a natural death
the one who fell in combat
the one they tortured
in jail
who kicked aside his death.
I brushed your warmth
with my lips:
mortally wounded
my love
perhaps tomorrow
and I loved you more than ever
and you loved me as well.
    — CLARIBEL ALEGRÍA                 
    I’ve saved these jottings in my shoe box; the lead pencil letters are dark and fresh as new stubble on the face of a lover. The word
mortally
, smaller than the others, appears to have been written in a hurry. José Luis always spoke slowly and deliberately but with the passion of a prisoner imparting final instructions before a mass escape. The words in my old notebook, by contrast, look like they were written in a giddystupor, the letters lassos with which I struggled to rope in feelings that galloped off in no clear direction. While José Luis was copying the works of revolutionaries, I was poring over Eastern mystical texts, discovering the meaning of life, for the moment at least, in gods incarnated as elephants and monkeys and many-breasted goddesses.
    Here’s a page from my notebook. No doubt I believed at the time that one or the other passage contained the sum of human wisdom.
    The clouds give of their substance
The earth receives and renews,
Within the body of the earth
new bodies take root.
Love between a woman and man
is of the same order.
Indeed, one self-forgetting act
of giving and receiving renews
the gods’ hopes for creation.
Their weeping ceases and they
wonder why they ever spoke
of bringing the world to an end.
    A Z EN T ALE
    “Is there anything I can do to make myself Enlightened?”
    “As little as you can do to make the sun rise in the morning.”
    “Then of what use are the spiritual exercises you prescribe?”
    “To make sure you are not asleep when the sun begins to rise.”
    It is difficult to recall the day-to-day exchanges that became bridges by which we transcended borders of culture, language, and history. We strolled back and forth into one another’s worlds, or at least the outskirts of those worlds, as casually as if crossing from El Paso to Juárez to buy liquor or pharmaceuticals. In exchange for my driving him around, he offered to help me with my Spanish. Almost every day we sat together at thekitchen table where we conjugated Spanish verbs with an old grammar Soledad had brought with her from Mexico. I was young, future tense came naturally to me: Iré, irás.… I will go, you will go. I have always lacked talent for living in the here and now, and back then I was easily transported into luminous, unobtainable futures. There were days I dreamed I would not only marry José Luis, but that we would buy a little house in the Valley, live on black beans and tortillas, and aid la revolución with computer bulletins to Central America. Whenever I took off on the runway of daydreams, always about José Luis, he playfully tugged at my braids and said, “Mary. Mary, can you hear me?” I remember how this little custom became another “sign” I took to mean he was falling in love