Patria

(I wish I'd chained him to this seapine I'm leaning against.) Yet again I had to just sit and watch him go. He headed toward the Camp. Now, in the dark, the steel mesh fence of the navy base (and of the secret but known prison Camp for dissidents) is invisible. Any time Machi leaves my sight I am afraid he won't come back. Men disappear. Ori disappeared. Machi disappeared for a year and now he's back. Or maybe he's gone again.

I was happy when we were still on the ferry coming here, just a few hours days ago, and he was sealocked with me.
“He got me to come with him to Isla Caiman, convinced me Ori, his Father and my husband, is here on this Island, renditioned to the prison Camp. He got me to believe Ori didn't just walk out on me that afternoon he left the house and never came back.” I caught myself saying all that out loud to one of the Senoras de los Frijoles who came over with a cup of cafe con leche. I couldn't believe she'd gotten ahold of milk. She sat herself by the fire. I didn't feel invaded for very long. Patria. She got me talking. Turns out she's Lagarto's mother and has an older son in the Camp (or so she believes.) Lagarto sent her to me. She said he'd said I was “Buena Gente.” She said there's a lawyers' group in Coral that has lists of who's in there, although they're not complete. “Things are more porous than you'd think, between the Camp and us. They have official ways, mass habeas corpus petitions...There's a wall outside the lawyers' place. Put his picture there. You never know what Guardia will recognize him and let them know inside.”
She gets me talking about how I got here and I find myself telling her more than she probably needs to hear. But she listens with a look of rapt attention and just enough of a smile to make me feel my story doesn't need to be a secret. (I didn't even know before we talked I always feel the world isn't ready for my story. I am always the listener, but it seems, with Patria I am the speaker. She came right out and asked me, “Machi's father is inside?” I poked the fire. I wanted to not talk about Ori but then there I was telling her everything, wanting to tell her everything.

03 21 11
“Tell you the truth, Machi had to convince me Ori didn't just leave me. He walked out one Saturday afternoon in the middle of a fight. He did that, got pissed and walked out even though if I did the same he was enraged and accused me of doing to him what his Mother did. He always came home and always say going was the only way to not kill me. Except this time. He walked out and I followed him to the stoop and watched. As he was heading down the stoop stairs he was stopped by Senor Reinaldo, the neighbor, usually quiet, younger than we are but seeming an elder, always to be called Senor. He screamed at Ori from his stoop. “Enough, this has got to stop.” That was when I saw why Senor Reinaldo was screaming. Machi's friend David was careening a stolen car at high speed in reverse down our street, screeching it into the hydrant by our house. Ori was already pissed at me. He was on the stoop in the first place getting away from me, already pissed because I was trying to make him bring upstairs a couch I'd found on the street. (This was before the bedbugs came in droves and made it impossible to scavenge street furniture). He looked at Senor Reinaldo, shrugged and kept walking. He walked out the way he often did when he got pissed, except this time he didn't come back. Machi kept after me, convinced me that afternoon wasn't just the day Ori finally got sick of me,.” I stopped. Patria was listening to me with full attention, not interrupting me to tell me her story, just making room for me to find my thoughts, so here came a thought I never told anyone, a thought I didn't like to tell myself, the thought formed and came out of my mouth. “Ori had reason not to trust me, if you know what I mean.” Patria gave me a small smile, enough that I could tell she wasn't judging me. “It just happened that minutes before Ori came home one of my coworkers had shown up at the house and Ori crossed paths with him on the stairs and maybe thought I was involved with the guy. I'd left Ori once before, left Ori and Machi both. So I wasn't sure if Ori had just gotten sick of not trusting me. How often did he wonder if I would stray again?) So even now, I'm not sure I do believe what Machi believes, that Ori didn't disappear from me,that he was disappeared, that he's in the Camp, renditioned here.”
Patria took my hand. “It's not so easy to disappear oneself,” she said. “It's much more likely he was disappeared by the State.” She pressed my hand. Her touch made me want to tell her more, show her everything, to not be alone with my secrets.
“Now it's Machi who's left me alone and homeless at night.” I laughed and Patria laughed with me. “I didn't grow up to be that woman I'd imagined I'd be as a girl, who'd show up my Mother, the woman men wouldn't leave the way my Father was always leaving her.”
Patria said, “Why would the Mercuries want him?” I told her about Ori and me and the Partido de la Felicidad. Here I held back. The need for and habit of secrecy was too engrained. She didn't press and I loved her more. (I was already loving Patria!)
“Odds are he is here. Tomorrow I'll take you to the legal place. They found my Juvenal is inside. He's just 30 but he's an old style nationalist. He got drafted by the City Force when we were living in the City and fought in the First Island War, deployed twice not far from here. He said they made him be a techie of death. He met some other guys who dealt with all that by becoming obsessed with reclaiming their indigenous Taino heritage. Juvenal changed his name to Guarionex after a Cacique. His mind just could not hold what had been done to the Tainos and that now he was being made to continue the killing. He went a little nuts when he came home, he and his veteran friends. The third time he was to be redeployed he didn't report and it wasn't too long after that he was picked up in one of the sweeps by the Mercuries. After he was awol he'd come home a few nights. He told me some, but not everything he and his Bauba Taino group did. Bauba means thunder. I'm proud they're fighting to reclaim the language, get back something of what the colonizers tried to kill off. He didn't want me to know, thought that kept both of us safer. I know what he would tell me when he had managed to fall asleep. Most nights he stayed up, sitting in the dark in a chair in his room. But when he did sleep usually he woke up screaming and I came to him, and listened. When he disappeared I tracked down one of his vet friends and he told me they were pretty sure he was in the Camp. Elpidio, you know him by Lagarto, was just 15, we've been living here two years.” She paused then and shook her head. “Hard to believe...”

I asked Patria what she left behind and she laughed. “All that seems so far away. I worked for years as a nurse, and believe me, it's useful here. I even make a kind of living being one of the local healers, although most of the time what I get is more like barter, a pineapple just today. Come tomorrow to our place when I will cut it. We're living in one of the casitas up the hill. It wasn't hard to leave my work. We'd been downsized and there'd been a speed up and the hospital was like hell, really. Elpidio kept telling me there would always be a job for a nurse. He doesn't know about retirement packages and all of that shit I would be forfeiting. And then my boss, who's an alpha bitch, yelled at me on the last hour of a 12 hour day and I said, fuck her and fuck this. Sometimes I panic. Will I be able to pick up that life after we are out of here? Most times I forget to think about being out of here.” She dropped her voice. “Elpidio sees the look on my face and tells me not to worry, we'll make the revolution and the money you would have saved won't even still be money, we'll change their money and make it worthess, and after the revolution you won't need money anyway.”

There was a lull in the congas playing in the darkness. “Is the music coming from the beach, or the hills?” She poked the coals. “Tonight, the hills.” We were quiet for a bit. “In the silence I can hear the secret percussion, the pulse of the surf.” She nodded. “Sometimes at night in the rare quiet moments I can feel that the earth sea is a creature, alive, benign.” I turned to face her fully. “I feel that. Sometimes I can tell I am inside the creature, unsafe. Unkillable.” She looked up from the fire. “It's a glimpse of the creature we might be in a rational world. It's clear in those moments that terror is the chiild of exploitation, not nature's but man made.” Patria! I had a new friend! She said she'd help me find Ori. She knew how to keep a son. She seemed to know that life was good, even here, or maybe especially here.

I looked up. “The sky is blueblack, not like the City's dishwater gray night sky.” Patria's gaze followed mine. “What a joy to look up!” I nodded. “In the City you forget stars. Here stars fill the sky and rise up forever like my childhood nightsky in Ventura. I'd forgotten how I loved that nightsky.” She nodded. “When I look up I can feel myself having to decide whether to be reassured or terrified,” Patria said. I recognized myself in her. “I know,” I said. “Hard to decide whether to notice beauty, our beautiful Island, this place where one way or another so many of us are taking a stand. or give in to terror. Just a few yards away inside that camp our warriors are being tortured.” We hold hands and I can feel both of us tremble. For a minute, with Patria, I let terror rise up. I couldn't top the avalanche of thoughts. I heard myself say out loud,
“I look around sometimes Patria, and I think, what am I doing on a beach alone at night surrounded by thousands of strangers, no husband, no son, no home, no job. All of my life I've had a job. I don't know another life. I am a lifer of job prison, used to wage enslavement. The job had been there and would always be there like a Saramago burocracy.” She interrupted me for the first time. “Rows of files and cubicles for paper pushing. The absurdity of administering irrationality. I love him. He was a communist, you know.” She knew my hero writer! She fixed her gaze on me and I went on. “It was dizzying how quickly it came undone. There were lay-offs and Solly, my boss who used to be my friend before I worked there and so she knew about my life, persuaded me, because I am old enough to actually retire, to just do it. “What if you take a humanitarian layoff? That's what she said.” Patria shook her head. “Humanitarian to whom?” I laughed. “Humanitarian to the two young teachers who could be kept on if I was gone. And at last here was the moment I had longed for, two weeks notice to wage emancipation.” Telling Patria about all this let me contain the panic.

“And then, like you with the screaming alpha boss making the decision clear, a strange synchronicity happened the morning after my wage emancipation that made it impossible not to decide to come here.”

In the moonlight, looking rapt at me, I saw Patria's beauty, the beauty of intelligence. I wanted to tell her everything, be unburdened. “I stepped outside the house thinking I would only be doing this commute for two more weeks, and saw wanted posters on the trees. Machi, my boy, had been gone for almost a year and I ran downstairs thinking it would be him. But when I looked up close it wasn't Machi but his best friend David.”
Patria whispered, “The one who drove the stolen car in reverse down the street.” I nodded. This woman was truly listening to me. Had I ever felt somebody's mind the way I felt hers, right there with mine? Maybe, sometimes, Ori's mind.
“That's right. David. An old photo of his long face and big grin was wrapped around my sidewalk tree and all the trees and light posts up and down the block. Strange irony, those posters for David at last led me to find my son Maceo. All those years of nothing happening and now too much was happening too fast.”

Patria was falling asleep. Just before she left she whispered,“There is great disorder under the sky...the situation is excellent.” She laughed. I recognized Mao. Patria hugged and kissed me. “Go to sleep. They'll be home. They will have been in the hills. Night time is their time. The world makes less room for them in the daytime.”