Mother Tongue Read Online Free PDF Page B

with me. Everywhere, signs cropped up. And I hoarded them, rose petals I stashed between the pages of my days.
    Still another custom evolved that made me feel he was carrying me over the threshold to a life morespacious than the one I inhabited: late evenings on the couch, swirling spoons of molasses in black coffee, and talking about la revolución in Nicaragua. Don’t ask me what I said. I couldn’t have cared less about politics. I was of that generation that held to some vague theory about how hearts must change first; we had the luxury of being able to think that way, and maybe there’s some truth to it. José Luis must have found it charming. Both of us were, after all, dreamers. José Luis’s great misfortune was that he and his compañeros had tried to put flesh on their dreams, make them breathe. They counted them as blessings and paid with their lives.
    Here are more items I saved in the shoe box:
    A prayer Soledad copied from Our Lady’s Prayer Book and mailed to me with instructions to repeat it at least three times each day.
    I am anxious, dear mother, to be gainfully employed in work that will relieve my temporal
needs without in any way endangering the spiritual well-being of my soul
.
    And a grocery list—my handwriting:
    Salsa ingredients (tomatillos, onion, green chiles, serranos, cilantro)
    Pupusa ingredients (masa de maíz, 1 lb. black beans, 1 lb. mozzarella)
    French green clay masque
    Albuquerque Herald
    Cat food
    Garbage bags
    Condoms

    Soledad had a saying: Reality is a lump of clay and prayer is the potter’s wheel. I believed her, because by late July or early August, not long after she called to say she was praying for us, both José Luis and I found part-time work in Old Town. He washed dishes at the cantina where the owner had no qualms about hiring “illegals”;he paid less than minimum wage but always in cash and on time. I covered for the owner of a bead shop when she was on buying trips. I sat behind a glass counter that held miniature jade Buddhas and amethyst prayer beads from Tibet. I remember fixing my attention on these objects and inhaling to the count of two, holding my breath to the count of seven, then exhaling as I counted one, two, three. My chest rose, froze, and fell in a triangle of attention that I undoubtedly learned about in books on Eastern mysticism. But whatever in me that may have actually aspired to enlightenment, to being in the present, did not bear up for long. I began using the tantric technologies to outwit the heat rather than embrace it. And when that failed, I daydreamed about autumn. But the fantasy was impossible to sustain.
    The summer of 1982 still sounds like ice crunching between teeth, still looks like church bulletins folded into fans. The sun was red as a black widow’s hourglass, and Old Town flounderedin webs of heat. Nights were hot as cast iron; it was hard to hear anything above the cicadas. Even in the early mornings, the sky sparkled in a way that was not natural, like a vacant lot glittering with broken glass. After my shifts at the bead shop I always walked over to the coolest spot by the plaza kiosk to wait for José Luis—a cement bench under the sycamores where I watched the rites of summer. Touching stucco walls, shopkeepers gauged the heat’s advance as if feeling a child’s forehead for fever. Old women left Mass and scanned the heavens for signs of rain, shielding their eyes from the sun in a limp salute.
    As the twin steeples of San Rafael pierced the sky and more hot air leaked into the world, the old men of the area flocked to benches on the plaza, their canes feeling the turf in front of them like trunks of elephants. They wondered aloud, as they did every year, whether the heat was not a sign from God, a punishment for having sold so much land to the gringos from back East. Brilliantineheads nodded and shined. The men fanned themselves with wilted newspapers while above them the flags of Spain, Mexico, and the United