Pacazo Read Free Page B

You were already so far along, did well on the LASA panel, even landed that article in The Americas.
    I tell him that I have finally figured out what I want to do, which is precisely what I have said at each previous switch. He does not point this out. Instead he says that if I go through with it, the department won’t be able to give me any more funding, not even for the October trip I planned months ago. I say that I will fund it myself. Well okay! he says. And if it doesn’t work out, I’m sure you’ll make a terrific junior high teacher!
    I wait for him to remember that my mother has been a junior high teacher for decades. Finally he does, shrugs, apologizes, says that sooner or later I’ll have to start finishing the things I begin. Then he tells me that the dean has my letter ready, and wishes me luck, however it turns out.
    I nod, shake hands, walk to Dr. Williamson’s office. He has been less than easy on me at certain points—So you’re going to essentialize Barthes? Which one? Early Barthes? Late? Mid-early, mid-late?—but does not trouble me now. He gives me a generic letter of introduction, warns that it may not always work, says that he hopes he will see me again.
    Another nod and handshake, an hour at Financial Aid arranging deferrals, and I am freed from Irvine. Out to an old white sedan in the parking lot, my father’s car, always and ever my father’s though he died nine years ago and a taxi slows beside me. The driver honks and I glance at the license plate. It begins with C and ends with 46. He honks again, pulls closer to the sidewalk. I shake my head and now the colored wisps in the sky are more feather or tendril than flame.
    Casualidad waits at the front door, Mariángel in her arms and reaching out. I nod hello to Casualidad, take Mariángel and kiss her. Casualidad says that my dinner is waiting, that she must leave early for a meeting with her son’s teacher, that she will wash all of the dishes in the morning.
    The band of her eye patch divides her forehead perfectly in half, and she is rarely this talkative. Perhaps something good or bad has happened. I hold Mariángel out so that Casualidad can tweak her chin, then close the door and carry my daughter to the bathroom. I hold her in one arm, rinse the sweat from my face and neck. To my bedroom, set her on my bed and strip down, put on a pair of shorts.
    Now to the dining room. I put Mariángel in her high chair and work quickly through dinner, offering her a bite from each layer of the causa—mashed potato, avocado, tomato, shredded chicken. As always she spits out all but the mashed potato.
    Afterwards we traverse the house. Mariángel, eleven months old, and she is learning to walk but does not like to fall. She holds to my leg as we bisect each room, and takes things up, invents sounds to name them, Hegelian analogue or Spitzerian mimesis or Barthesian disassociated code, and I propose each in turn, then shift to the words themselves: saucepan, telephone, pillow. She repeats her own inventions. I ask when she plans to begin using words I recognize. She shakes the objects, drops or throws them. I ask her to pick the objects up and put them back in place but she is not interested in this.
    She finds my briefcase, pulls at the latch and I remember the zapote leaf. It is no longer perfect, has gone limp, but is still a beautiful green. I hold it out. She is not impressed. I agree that it is only a leaf but in ten or a hundred years someone working from photograph or chronicle will type “John picked a zapote leaf” and it will become both leaf and leaf . Mariángel frowns. Semiological apparatus and linguistic performance, I say. She does not believe me. I tell her that I would never lie about such a thing: history a meditation not on the past as alleged but on present trace and sublimation, its form a mediated portrayal, a damming of time’s destructive might, change frozen into tableaux, leaf now allegory, partisan teleology,