Reciting the Histories
Dear Ciela, I write to bring you news of your mother’s death, news I should have acted on long ago, but if we trace our actions far enough, we can find the distance of our deeds and the core of our deeds in the eyes of our sons and our daughters. What pride do we possess to believe that we can achieve a greatness beyond that of our fathers and mothers? But it is in this country where dreams of greatness are nurtured—calmly, reasonably, foolishly. I know those who have achieved such things. But even in this country, there are borders that cannot be crossed without sacrificing the soul.
This truth had never been clearer for Paulino in his memories. When the white men, drugs in hand, cash in hand, had finally emerged from his daughter’s room that night, he had only glimpsed beyond their girth, their power, beyond their self-satisfied expressions and into the consequences of their acts—his daughter’s bruised shoulder and bloody leg, her shredded clothing. She had lain on her side in the shadows, her back hunched toward him, her arms tucked into her chest, embracing some phantom object that he could not see. Paulino had twisted his body from his wheelchair and had risen to look into the young girl’s face, but his legs had not supported him, not to sooth the cuts and bruises, not to salve the wounds enshrouded and obscured by her hair. Soon he had given up.
His eyes flashed open, an escape from the visions. But his curse lingered in the ever-present voices —in the mournful cries, the grieving whimpers that continued to spill from beneath the locked door of his daughter’s room. The horrid shriek of fabric. The dull thud of flesh against flesh, blood against blood. His own weeping, ineffectual, unable to move the world.
Once more, as he had done season after season, he watched himself enact the simple motions of her salvation—sometimes in his dreams, sometimes in the shadows of night, in the small front room, in his own small bed, so close to touching her hand, so close to hearing her breath but always beyond reaching, beyond seeing, beyond listening. It was her mother, with life, who brought salvation that night, to the untended bruises, the untended grief. It was she, alive, who lifted Ciela from her damp sheets and carried her into the bath. It was she who dowsed her face and salved her bruises and clothed her wounds and sang to her the songs of the desert—all that he had imagined himself doing, hour after hour, as he sat helpless beside her, the wheel of his chair brushing her white sheet, his fingers nearly stroking her black hair. He spoke, softly, for only his voice could reach her, but he could not remember the sound of the words, the tone of the voice.
Dear Ciela, I write to bring you news of your mother’s death. The doctors attributed her quick passing to a cancer, hidden, undetected, unnoticeable, painless. But grief was the symptom that had risen to the surface and remained more painful than her disease in the end, in her eyes and in her voice. Whether my love for you or my love for your mother, within these spare walls, are taken from me as part of God’s judgment, I cannot say. I only hear the ghosts that exist in the desert. I have come to know them well. I do not know how they choose whom to curse and whom to cure, but I have listened to them, night after night, and into dawn’s despair.
In his gnarled fingers, he recognized the curse—of voices and the absence of voices, of language and the silence of words. He crumpled the ivory paper. He replaced it with a pure sheet. He raised his pen.
Dear Ciela was how Paulino began the letter.