Blog 49-Mamey

Next morning
I got to La Fabrica at dawn and made myself read the first of my work journals.
Don’t feel well. Don’t ever want to go into work after a holiday. Hated going back to school as a girl. Hated going back to work.
To procrastinate reading my journals it became imperative to read over the list of all my jobs so far and what was going on in my life at the time.
Salad Helper (Trying to love Jimmy); VERDAD (loving Ori, Machi born); Justice Works (Partido falling apart, after he rescued the lost boys on the train Danny got me the job as editor of JWorks, and then got me); Centro Libre (Breaking up w Danny; running into Jimmy); InfoDes (trying to make a life for me and Machi on Isla Karaya (didn't work very well, held out just a few months, until Ori was desaparecido again in the post Presidio Assault sweeps, and I went back to the City to find him); Back in the City Soli recruited me at last to the Burocrazy (Single mother a few months; then reconciliation with Ori); Burocrazy (Machi disappeared; Ori too. This time for almost two years.. )
Now, in Palenque, I was working all the time but what was my job ? What was my job now, here on Isla Karaya, writing in La Fabrica? Being a tracker? My present occupation wasn't a job, but it was work, real work. Not slowly dying at work, but working to not die. Finding Ori. Finding out what it was to live, to be alive as a human on this planet, this Island, this Palenque. That was my work. Going through these journals, writing to think, that was my work. I understood Machi's epiphany digging out the toilets...Everywhere around here there was work that needed doing...” And this morning I'd run into Anacaona as I arrived in La Fabrica. She was on her way to the early City ferry. She asked me to take over La Fabrica's adult literacy class and the writing workshop. I told her I would think about it. But that maybe, as an elder, I wanted at last to choose my work.
I glanced at my journal. Had I liked my stasis in the bubble? Had my wage enslavement been comfortingly familiar because it mirrored the numb places that were beaten into me? The beatings prepared me for wage enslavement. Early this morning I'd watched Machi and his crew as they left. Those four young men were close, had already made a bond. Was I jealous? Did I know how to be close? Were Julia and I close? And Patria? Was I close to Ori in the days when he was the last face I saw behind closed eyes before I fell asleep and the first when I woke up?
I decided to write as much as I could of my conversation with Patria last night. (To write what I don't want to forget, or what I want to remember. Or to use writing about one to avoid writing about the other.)
Last night Patria came by with cafe con leche again and we stayed up talking by the fire. Salty breeze blew in from the shore. I'd found an orange canvas chair in the swap tienda and Patria settled herself there with her blue tin mug. I leaned against the seapine that served as our wall. Patria sipped the sweet, milky drink, with barely a drop of the precious, scarce coffee. "We have long lives and many stories. Better than a telenovela."
"I'm dizzy tired. Almost numb." She closed her eyes. "One night during the many months my mother was on her deathbed in hospice care in my front room I walked in exhausted from a double shift in the hospital where for hours I was the only nurse on my floor. I plopped into a chair just by the door, facing the hospital bed. I asked my mother how she was. Mami shrugged, and even though she didn't ask me, I said, 'I'm numb.' My dying Mother sat up in her hospice bed. “What does it mean to be numb?” I told her, it's feeling lyou don't feel anything. My mother had an epiphany. She said, ' I think I've felt that way all my life. I used to see other people laugh or cry. I used to feel bad that I couldn't do that. But then I decided to accept that this was just the way I was.” I wondered, was I the same? Were we all the same? Did childhood beatings train us to feel nothing? Had nothingness been beaten into us? Was there a chain of beating hands all the way to the hands of the Spanish colonizers? Who beat them? The King? Who beat the King? History? Society? Was it then all of us beating ourselves into submission for our mutual survival? Was it that assigning some of us to be our designated bullies, dominators (kings, dictators, armies, men) was the best way our societies as wholes had figured out to survive? Did that make our compliance to the bullies, our submission, a choice? Thank you! We're pleased to be oppressed by you!"
She paused. I wanted her to go on. "I like following your mind when you find the new thoughts we get to have by living our life a la intemperie in Palenque, free from too much civilization>"
She opened her eyes and I looked deep into them. "I think I can see your mind, Patria, I can see an immanence of energy between your brain and mine."
She closed her eyes again. "We're now at a juncture of our species' evolution when we have to stop surviving through beatings, torture, murder, war, through domination and submission. The time has come for us to figure out that we actually survive through love. To the extent we have survived it has been actually not through war but love. There has always been love. It is time for our love to prevail and our murdering to cease.”
There was a loud sound from my phone and Patria stirred. We watched hundreds of young men on the livestream. They swarmed Guardias by the Base close to the beach. Their screams and ululations brought me to tears. Patria peered at the image on the tiny screen. "We can't make out faces but we gotta assume we're watching Machi and Lagarto and their friends." Tears flowed from my eyes, and with Patria I didn't care. Our sons were so close they looked the same. Other people got close. I stayed inside the bubble, looking out, watching, writing.

I looked up from my laptop because Patria showed up just then, passing through La Fabrica on her way to Coral.
"I was writing about you and I conjured you." She grinned as she reached into her bag. She handed me a perfect, ripe mamey. “The fruit of love,” I said. Patria looked puzzled, then laughed. “Just yesterday you mentioned it was your favorite fruit from your childhood in Ventura.”
I felt joy. I could tell she felt joy. “I was writing about what you said last night, thinking maybe you were right. The time has come for us to learn to survive by loving and not by killing. “ Patria handed me a small paring knife to cut the mamey. I stared at the branch shaped coals from La Fabrica's fire pit and remembered eating mamey in the kitchen of the happy house in Los Santos.
“The first mamey I ever ate was in the kitchen in the happy house when I was about Taina's age. I called it the happy house because the family there were devoted to my happiness. I stayed there if both my parents were away. They had a huge wood burning stove made of brick, covered in red tile. I could see red branch shaped embers through square windows cut into the front of the stove under the burners. I think this is the first time I remember that house as an adult. They took care of me the few times my parents went away together. That happy family in the happy house loved me, cherished me, just as I was. Just now looking at those glowing branches of the fire, this memory came to me full blown as if I was watching it on livestream.” Patria gave me a wedge of the mamey. I bit the pink flesh and savored the sweet soft pulp, held it as long as I could on my tongue. “That mamey in the happy house was the best one until this one.”
Patria settled into the wooden armchair beside mine, looked at me with full attention. "I've never heard you remember a moment of pure childhood joy. I closed the laptop and turned toward her. “The happy house was built in levels, backwards on a hill. You came inside from street level to the living room sala and the saleta. You would never guess there was a mystery beyond those two linked rooms. But you had to climb down several steps from the living room to the first bedroom, steps down from the first bedroom to the second, steps down from that bedroom to the kitchen in the center of the long narrow house, steps down between each of two small bedrooms after that. The living room opened to the streets and to a narrow inner patio that ran the length of the house. The bedrooms opened onto the next room and onto the patio both. There was a high wall the full lengthe of the narrow patio which was the full length of the row of bedrooms, with broken glass bottles embedded into the top. Not even the stray cats could climb that fence.
“There were all those steps! Just to get from one room to the next you had to play, jumping up and down the steps, or leaping over them. I remember standing on the steps going to the kitchen, watching Matilde the matriarch cut a mamey. I had never seen the brown, oval fruit before, that beautiful shade of pink of the pulp, the shiny, black pit. I was jumping as I always did, from one step to another in the doorway between Matilde and her husband Alfonso's bedroom, and the kitchen.
“It was the most amazing thing to me because our house was completely flat, that there could be a magical house like this one, backwards on a hill. The living room was at the top, and each successive room its own surprise a few steps down from the last. The first bedroom belonged to Alida, my first grade teacher, or to Ruth, her sister who'd married her cousin and decided never to have children in case they would come out “anormales”. Which is why I got to be their substitute little girl. Or was it no one's bedroom, the one I stayed in when my parents went away for a whole week? Steps went down into another bedroom, and more steps went down to the bedroom right above the kitchen, Matilde and Alfonso's room, matriarch and patriarch of the family that loved me. Because to get from one room to 'another I had to play, I'd skip the steps or jump them backwards, or jump them several times. And the Gomez family didn't scream or scold. They marveled. They loved my zest. They called me Chispita.”
Patria gave me another wedge of mamey. I stopped to savor the fruit, wishing I could eat it slowly the way I used to but not able to.
“After that first mamey I ate many sitting on the steps of the narrow patio that ran along the house, going down in steps all the way to the patio de las gallinas behind the house. Once they discovered how much I loved it, they always had one whenever I came in mamey season. I can see myself, little Marina, standing on the red tiled steps to the kitchen looking at the adults at the table, and Matilde by the stove. I spoke and they listened. Matilde served food from huge cast iron and clay pots on the red tiled stove built into the sidewall. I studied those square holes under the burners, fascinated by the wood coal branches glowing there. I wondered if they were little windows into hell. If they were then hell was beautiful. What did that mean about the Devil? I used to watch those embers and wonder about El Diablo and El Infierno.”
“Hell. What an idea.” Patria handed me what was left of the mamey, a whole half with the black pit in it, and rose to go. “In the end it turned out the devil and hell were a bunch of rich people and their armies.” She finished her slice of mamey and threw the brown peel into the dying fire. “Maybe now that Julia found David your mind can hold on to knowing life is good and if hell is the rich and their army, then heaven is us, each other. We have David, and here's a mamey.”
“David found us, or he let himself be found. Ori's not in a position to find us. And now that Machi has David back and your son Lagarto and the other one, Robles, and that guardia Franz and who knows who else, well now he's back on the street, isn't he?”
Patria shook her head. “All of the Encampment is the street, then. Or maybe all of the world should be the street...”
“What if he goes through the looking glass, the warp, into the land of beer and weed again, that parallel world where young men who are targeted for destruction by the City live.”
“Maybe life is good there too. Maybe you can learn to see it. “
“I would need Machimbili's magic glasses, from the stories Ori and I used to tell him when he was little. All I see is oppression winning. Oppression took my baby and I don't know how to get him back. Not only did I fail to protect him, I hurt him and made him vulnerable to the seductions of oppression. By leaving my family I ruined my son's life.”
Patria's stern tone took me by surprise. “No,” she said. “You are the good thing in your son's life. You have to take that in, you're no good to yourself or to him until you learn to remember that. One lone woman can't take a boy back when oppression abducted him. Only a movement can. We are that movement. And you are the good thing in his life.”
“This lone woman already failed to make the revolution. I can 't tell you how many times Machi screamed at me, at me and Ori, 'where is the revolution you and Pa were going to make? I sure don't see it.' Those were the words he screamed at me when he left home a year ago.
“I just realized they're like the words I screamed at my Father when I left home for my first apartment when I was 20. I yelled at him, 'You left home just as I'm leaving home. But it was fine for you because you were doing it for god. Well where is god because I don't see him? What did god ever do because I don't see it?' My Father let go the steering wheel. He was driving me to my new place because even to leave him I needed his help. He swung back his right hand, the only time he ever tried to hit me. He stopped his arm in midair. He was too far to actually hit me, but the gesture was as terrifying as a blow, coming from a man who seldom even needed to raise his voice to get me to comply. She, my Mother, had been the enforcer, the batterer. I saw that was their division of labor, another of the dirty jobs she did to defend his privilege. It wasn't the dictator himself who did the torturing in Ventura...My mother was the torturer.”
Patria smiled. “You are not your Father, and Machi isn't you. For one, he had you for a Mother. You were lucky. You lived in a time of rising victorious revolution and came across good information your parents never had. This is still an open story. The end is not yet written.”
“ I am terrified of how this story might end.”
“You can't inflict your fear on your son. You have to believe you are the good thing in your son's life. You have to learn to know what is the truth and what is oppression. I had to almost lose my son to learn this. So, escarmienta en cabeza ajena.”
I was crying and saw Patria was too.
“And now my son is gone, back to the vale of beer and weed. How can I not be terrified? Should I be grateful it's not crack, or cocaine, or heroin or meth? I am. O God do not take this as a challenge...”
“You can say those things and I promise you I will remember not to believe them until you are able to stop believing them. I'll sit here with you and stand for the truth. I will say the truth over and over until your mind can retain it. I will speak louder than the voices in your head. Deep in there, you know this truth. You wouldn't be here if you didn't. Your son is doing fine, as long as he has your love, he is doing fine. You have to fight to remember you are the good thing in his life.”
I didn't know how I came to be in Patria's arms, my head nestled in her arms, talking into her shoulder. “For good measure, after Machi and David took off, Taina decided I was the one to beat up. She looked at me with what she meant to be her meanest face and she pummeled me with her little fists and god I wanted to hit her back but I managed not to, I managed to make a frame of some kind with my arms to contain her and she wrestled in there, pushed against me, until that go round of her rage was spent”
“You could do that too,” Patria held me tighter. “You could spend your rage, your terror, your despair, your discouragement. Those are the feelings oppression fills us with so that we are distracted, defused, can't think. It won't scare me to see you show all of it. It won't scare me and it won't confuse me. I'll remember for both of us, and some other time, you'll remember for me. We are the good thing in our sons' lives. They are doing well, our people are doing well. That is the revolutionary perspective. We are here, aren't we, fighting? The City hasn't killed us. We 've lived to fight another day.”
Patria held me while I cried and said, “One day you will do the same for me.” She looked at my laptop and my notebooks. “Come with me tomorrow to Coral. I've got diligencias and don't want to go alone. Now I have to run. It must be close to ten and I've got to go to my friend's.” I noticed when Patria stood that she was wearing a fuschia cotton dress that made her brown skin glow and that she had taken more care than usual with her braid, it was looser, with loose curls around her face. She wore big round filigree earrings. If Patria loved Danny there must be more to him than I found years ago.
After Patria was gone I looked at the knapsack with the notebooks on my lap. The screamer inside my head began again. She had Mami's voice. 'Stop procrastinating. Plunge into the embarrassing thoughts of your past. Plunge in and see if you come out alive. Scold yourself. Grab yourself by the hand, sit yourself down the way Mami used to sit you down.'
I obeyed. I opened the knapsack with the notebooks, the few I grabbed from among the shelves and stacks and file drawers of papers, the boxes of notebooks I put into storage when I left. Maybe one day my granddaughter would find them (when I had a granddaughter).
I resolved to read the embarrassing thoughts of my younger self. Maybe I would at last find the answer to my little girl question, was I in the horror story or the fairy tale? Was life good? Was I bad?
If I was to believe Patria that I was the good thing in my son's life, then were there other upside down stories to be found in my journals? Was all of my story built backwards on a hill? La historia feliz like la casa feliz? Even my most mistaken choice to go to work for the burocrazy?

Writing at La Fonda
Patria didn't show next morning. I forgot she was unreliable because of her general perfection. I had my mind set on Coral and I took myself to La Fonda Migajas on my own before the sun got high, while the road was still cool. I kept close to the foliage and counted six sightings of the glorious red and black plumed bird. I called the birds Partido because its red and black feathers were like the Partido de la Felicidad flag. I kept meaning to to learn its name.
As soon as I walked into La Fonda Dulce showed me to my favorite table by the door. "Tenemos wi-fi." She kissed me on the cheek. I got onto my TODOS page and was able to finish the Burocrazy section! All I did was upload the whole folder and then made a few edits. Still, I felt accomplished. I had finished something, not everything, but something. I stared out at the plaza, sunlit. On the squat, umbrella shaped branches of the tamarindo trees the leaves glowed, almost fluoresced.
I put my things into my backpack, stood at the door of La Fonda Migajas and saw the crumbling adobe church calling to me from straight across the Coral Plaza, the center of the town. I cut across the Plaza, walked around the glorieta, crossed the street, and stepped into the dark, cool church.
After my eyes got used to the darkness I recognized several of the Señoras de los Frijoles I'd seen in the procession. They sat close together on the front rows. I could see the Priest in his brown robes talking to them. I found Julia sitting close to the aisle on the second row and sat beside her. Several of the women looked at me and waved. The Priest was a good looking man dark skinned man around my age. I couldn't remember his name until I heard one of the Señoras call him Padre Ezequiel. He said the group should go as a contingent to the action on Grito Day. Julia gave me a look, grinned and squeezed my hand. “Grito Day is in our karma.”
In the dim light of the church it took me a while to notice that the dusty whitewashed adobe walls were covered with very delicate graffiti, rows and designs made up of what I at first thought were crosses but at last saw were Ts. The letter T, over and over. Soon my eyes got used to the pattern and I saw among the Ts there were numbers, zeros and ones, over and over. After seeing a mural made up of Ts and sets of zeros and ones inside the church I realized I had been seeing Ts, lone Ts all over the Encampment. And in the oddest places there were those zeros and ones. The meeting broke up, the women filled the center aisle, walked outside. All along I had been seeing Todos, eveywhere. The very Todos Anacaona had taken me to see must be the young men Elba Luz told me were concientizados by the Padre, like her own dead husband.
Julia and I stayed behind to talk with the Padre. We walked to the front of the church where the Padre was talking to two women who stood very close to him, talking quickly, moving their hands. Julia leaned into me. "He's handsome but impeccable." It was true. He had square faced, dark brown face, black wavy hair slicked back. He nodded and said very little. We waited almost ten minutes for the women to run out of words. As they stepped away I moved in on him before the two women seated beside me reached him. Julia joined us, "Mi amiga Marina," she pointed to me. The Padre and I shook hands. He was better looking up close, especially when he deployed his big smile. It must be difficult to have a square jaw, fine nose, full lips and be a priest, one who took a lot of trouble trimming his bigote. I remembered Julia saying he was one of those charming Padres who suffered celibacy. "Women are always on him." I couldn't (or maybe he couldn't) tell whether he was being warm and loving because I'm human, or flirting and soliciting because I'm woman. I thought, he can help me find Ori, that's the main thing. but it was clear that I was the one he was flirting with. I was to meet him tomorrow in the Church office with any documents I had so he could get Ori onto the canje list. Danny had said, we had to throw anything and everything.
Wade In
Anacaona decided we should do small practice Wade-ins every morning to wear the Guardias down, lower their guard. This morning's Wade-in, like all the others this week, we felt our power, even if for only a few minutes before Guardias bore down with hoses on top of the sea water. IT was a kind of dance, we waded, they hosed, we left, one more small Wade-in, leading up to the big world convergence Wade-in on Grito Day. Wade-ins made my hungry and I raced back to El Comedor de las Señoras. Guille came up beside me, whispered into my ear, "You won't believe what I just heard! DigitalTodos detoured shipments of air to ground weapons from the base into the Territorio. And the Todos muchachos are planning a dismantling fest. They have this idea they can convert the rockets into high powered hurricane shelter bores..." I must have looked confused. "You don't know about the Zero Ones? Digital Todos? Zero stands for Operation, one for Liberation...They're the reason we have wifi. They've been breaching the camp's encrypted email and chats for years now.." He left me and walked up to where Tanama and Seño Rosa from La Escuelita, were walking arm in arm. He bent toward them, told them his news and moved on.