Another Day Told

Silvia wakes up. She's afraid to open her eyes, look around, take in her bedstand with its teetering piles of books, her dream notebook, the black good pen Ernesto gave her for her 50th birthday. She's afraid to see Cheito's high school painting on the wall emerging from the darkness. In the smoky brown self portrait his face is unendurably vulnerable. What happened? She’s all alone; she feels alone even though she’s put up on the wall group shots of her many lives that include her: Silvia in third grade in the middle of the second row; with her fifth grade class, barely distinguishable from the girls; at the long table the Partido’s secretariat met around, sitting on the side, furthest from First Secretary Manuel; dressed in white, front row, among her group of graduating yoga teachers; on the stoop, with Cheito and the boys from the living room school, children swarming the sidewalk and the street during a summer block party

Silvia wakes up in her back bedroom in the barrio Bliss to the song of a rooster an old Islander keeps two row houses uphill from hers to ward off his nostalgia. She fights consciousness. Today is the day she must go again to the Special Office to track down her husband and her son. She'd rather sleep. She's afraid to open her yes, look around, take in the teetering piles of books on her bedside table, the dream notebook, the good black pen Ernesto had given her for her 50th birthday. Most of all she doesn't want to see Cheito's high school painting on the wall emerging from the darkness. In the smoky brown self portrait his face is unendurably vulnerable. What happened? To her life? To her husband? To her son? Her little family, one of so many on this block in Bliss Park, was become a fault line of collapsing capitalism. Those tremors were running through her small small life. Cheito's dog Thug nudges her hand, wanting his walk. She swings her legs to the floor avoiding the row of photographs of her many lives, group shots she'd framed and hung to remind herself she is not alone that have the opposite result: where are her classmates who once sat alongside her in the 3rd grade group photo?, the fifth graders who surround her as their teacher her short cropped head barely distinguishable from those of the students, the militants with her around the Party Secretariat's long meeting table--as always she is sitting closed to Ernesto and as far as possible from First Secretary Manuel. And how did the photograph of herself in white surrounded by others in white, graduating as yoga teachers, fit in with the one of her son Cheito and his friends on the stoop overseeing little children swarming the street during a block party? Groups of people mocking her aloneness their photos marking her isolation jaya.