Mother Tongue Read Free

eyes. A bay window of beveled glass framed the yard—elms, fresh stubble of Bermuda grass, roses flaring like skirts of flamenco dancers. Soledad lived in the Valley in a house made of terrones, blocks of earth cut a century before from the banks of the Rio Grande. Shadows of cottonwood leaves twitched on an adobe wall that marked off her quarter acre. The house looked like it had been cut out and assembled from pictures in architecture books Soledad piled on her coffee table—Islamic, Pueblo revival, Territorial, things made to last, solidities refugees could only dream of.
    He said, any name you pick will do. I said, it’s not my place to decide. I believe I told him astory then, a story I’d heard on the university radio station on the way to the airport. A Spanish expedition comes upon some Mayan Indians. The Spaniards ask, what is this place called? The Maya answer, uic athan, we do not understand your words. The Spaniards believe they have been told the place is Yucatán so they impose that name on the place, inflict it. Like Adam, they think God has given them the right to name a world. And the world never recovers.
    He smiled, crescent moon, then pressed his mug to his lips as if to mold them back into proper form. Maybe I’m imagining things, maybe more time passed before we smiled back and forth. But everything happened very quickly, this is the amazing thing. From day one I looked for ways to graft a piece of myself onto him, to become indispensable. My gestures were perfectly timed, touching his hand, twisting my hair, excusing myself to touch up my lipstick—ordinary actions that would reverse the tides of my life as in the theories of physicists who say the dance of a butterfly can cause volcanoes to erupt.
    Love at first sight, this is how I explained the urgency that would later shed its skin and reveal pure desperation. Some women fall in love in advance of knowing a man because it is much easier to love a mystery. And I needed a mystery—someone outside of ordinary time who could rescue me from an ordinary life, from my name, Mary, a blessing name that had become my curse. At age nineteen, I was looking for a man to tear apart the dry rind of that name so I could see what fruit fermented inside.
    This is what happened back then to women who didn’t marry or have babies, who quit going to Mass. They begged to differ. They questioned their own names.
    He picked the name José Luis.
    Twenty years later, his name is a lens that allows me to see him as if for the first time. Five feet, five inches tall. Hair black as a pueblo pot. A scar above his right eyebrow, a seam sealing some old wound. His almond eyes were welcoming as windows open to spring, no screen, white curtainfluttering. But the rest of his face, with its hard jaw and serious mouth, was boarded up like a house whose owner knows what strangers can do when they get inside. Alert and polite, he always looked for ways to be of help. Before long he would be making coffee, taping grocery lists to the refrigerator, feeding the cats. But attention to detail was also a spiritual exercise to divert demons of exhaustion, I’m sure of this now. He had the hands of a man who had picked coffee or cut sugarcane for forty years. I’m not sure when he told me he was twenty-nine years old. By then it was too late. I had already counted the tree rings around his eyes and fallen in love with a much older man.
    We must have gone down to Soledad’s basement, must have heard steps creak as our soles adjusted the lower vertebrae of the house. But it is the smell I recall most clearly, the odor of damp earth, adobe walls maybe, or else just laundry swishing in the machine or hanging from a line that drooped above us like an eyelid. Redchile ristras hung from a rib cage of pipes over the door to José Luis’s room. Dusty sunlight from an above-ground window touched down and lit up the objects in the room in a kind of still life: a bed with a blue Mexican blanket,