Mother Tongue Read Free Page B

stopped to get gas. And for some reason the smell of gasoline brought back memories of springs past. On KALB they were playing every bad but beautiful ’70s love song you could imagine. Before I knew what was happening I got back in the truck and drove to Kmart on Candelaria. I had maybe five dollars in my jeanspocket, but I couldn’t stop myself—I bought a black bra. The man hasn’t even kissed me yet. It was on sale. The blue light special. The store siren went off and I and all the other nuts pushing shopping carts attacked boxes full of bras that flapped around like crows as we grabbed them and held them up for size. I even bought nail polish (Aztec Red, 69 cents)—and this notebook.
    Peace. Joy. Openness to the future. How else can I describe what I’m feeling except for the big “L” word, which I don’t dare say out loud. Because it’s like yelling fire in a theater. Men flee and my girlfriends say to me, you fool.
    Postcard of Old Town, Albuquerque: eighteenth-century adobe plaza, shops with red chile ristras on doorposts like Passover blood, Native Americans selling jewelry under the portal in front of the cantina. The picture must have been taken after rain. The stucco surfaces of SanRafael Catholic Church are the color of a bruised peach. The church is formidable, a battleship of adobe buttresses, dense walls and beams jutting around the top like cannons. A century ago an ancestor, Bernadina de Salas y Trujillo, helped make a soup of straw and mud to coat the church’s outer walls. This fact seemed important to remember whenever I began to fall in love. When the spinning began and desperation set in, I reminded myself I am the descendant of women who did something useful with their hands, who knew what really mattered was to help shape something that would outlast their lives and their loves.
    I rented a 100-year-old house with mud walls dark as a wasp’s nest. It was across from the church, a few doors down from the cantina. Its walls were thick; I could sit in the low window frames of the living room or bedroom and watch the throngs of tourists. They were always taking pictures, an activity that reminded me of people who steal rocks from Indian ruins. I wondered if I would wake up one day and discover that OldTown had disappeared. Before José Luis arrived, I often spent afternoons reading the Upanishads or the Tao Te Ching at the cantina, where a friendly bartender added wine to my orange juice at no extra cost. Like a homeopathic remedy, the dose acted on me in a way that was all out of proportion to its size. In a gesture of rebellion I mistook for dissent, I declared to myself that God could be found not just in a church but in a bar. I was nineteen, young enough to believe I had outgrown the walls of San Rafael Church. North American to the core, a consumer, I saw religion as a bazaar from which I could pick and choose. At the same time, I envied the women I watched leave morning and evening Mass, their faces wrinkled as ancient decrees. I wanted their faith, a massive doorway to stand under during life’s earthquakes.

    San Rafael’s bells pecking away the shell of night. Tourists wielding cameras, machetes to tame theirnew wilderness. Shopkeepers hanging signs and drinking coffee in doorways from paper cups. Very often, when I try to remember those days, everything comes to mind except for memories of myself: what I looked like or said or felt. This is where it gets painful. You see, memory does not always serve me. It seeks images and feelings to hook on to, but at times encounters only voids. The facts are easy enough to recite. I quit college in southern New Mexico during my freshman year when my mother died. I returned to Albuquerque, held down a job at an escrow agency, then quit. During the years of my mother’s illness, or maybe years before, I fled the world, went inside, ceased to feel. You could say I fell asleep. There was no mystery to it. Quite simply, it was easier to sleep and