The Swimming Tear Baby

The Swimming Tear Baby
"Do we take the time to make the revolution, or do we leap across history and lead it?" Tomasa Monte

Close to the horizon, beyond the bank of clouds floating across it, was the sun. Adela closed her eyes against it and let a diffuse red light form behind her eyelids. She lay half asleep in the late afternoon sun, on a towel, at the beach. A tear sized fetus swam her. She was his blood red sea. She knew he was a boy. Seconds after they were done making love, Noel had sat up beside her on the bed and said, "You're pregnant." Through the barred window she had seen the white glow of the full moon. "Brujo." She'd laughed, but she believed him. She'd been almost asleep when Noel crawled into bed, still smelling of turpentine. When he got close her mind didn't get in the way of the feelings rising from her feet, a slow tide bringing in this water drop boy. She was pregnant with a boy. By now, Noel would be cleaning out his brushes with turpentine and washing them with soap. Within minutes he'd be sliding into his green volkswagen and heading for the beach.
She let the thick volume of the Biography of Tomasa Monte slide off her still flat belly. She knew she was pregnant. Noel knew. But not her sister Nati sunning beside her, nor her nephew Guille calling out, Adela, Adela, from the sea.
She rose slowly and walked barefoot on the warm sand through the rising breeze to the edge of the water. When Noel arrived from la Capital she'd ask him what La Heroina, Tomasa Monte meant when she said at the famous discurso on Grito day that there was a difference between making a revolution and leading one. "Titi Adela. Titi Adela." La Heroina had never had children. Guille saw her. He was kneeling in the shallow water, crawling his arms, pretending to swim. Adela sat beside him and let the warm water lap her legs. She smiled into her nephew's sunlit eyes and stroked his wet sunbleached brown hair. He tugged her hand. " You're the only Tia who'll get into the water."
She let herself be pulled up. She let him lead her until the water reached her thighs, his chest. Nati ran in, jumping her knees in and out of the surf. Adela lay down to float on her back on the turquoise sea. Guille grabbed her heels and spun her. This had been their game the last time she'd come see them on the Coast three months ago. But then it had been Guille who was spun. And now he was beside her, face down, knifing his arms and propelling himself with short, fast kicks. She stood close beside her sister. "Guille nadando. Guille nadando." Adela and Nati clapped hard. "Que viva Guille. Que viva Guille." They stood waist deep and watched him swim facing the setting sun toward the low crest of foaming waves."

“ Our revolution is failing because we’ve put in the center of our movement those who are really on its fringe, who are revolutionary one day, reactionary the next…Tomasa Monte

“Si Adelita se fuera con otro la seguiria por tierra y por mar, si por mar en un buque de vela, si por tierra en un tren militar…” Noel liked to sing that song to Adela who lay half asleep on the sandy towel with her head on his lap. Her Mother had sung that song to Adela. She’d sat curled on her Mother’s lap, her knees up into her Mother’s breasts, listening to her Mother sing, ‘Si Adelita se fuera con otro,’ and longing for the day when she would leave her Mother’s lap to find a Man’s. And she had. The sun’s red glow through her eyelids erased most of her mind. She lay sunstunned loving Noel. From the lives of her friends she knew how rare it was to find a good man. What grace had guided her? She was certain the tear fetus was a boy. Men’s lives were hell and this made men strangers. She shuddered. Terror, addiction, rage. No privilege made up for the price men paid.
“You snagged Noel.” Sofia shook her head as she kissed Adela goodbye. Sofia’s summer party, where Adela had just met Noel, was breaking up. It was the big school end party the summer after their first year at La Uni. Adela sat at the white iron table under the flamboyan wondering how she would survive two more hours of trying to notice other people. Her right eye was already throbbing from the effort of watching the others while holding up her own face. “I like that dress.” Noel had sat beside her, knee to knee. “Did you make it yourself?” She explained that it only looked that way because she’d cut out the neck and wasn’t very good at edging it. He’d liked the flower print on the faded denim. Adela did too. She’d bought it at a bargain store. “I was afraid lots of people would have it so I changed the neck.” He made his little boy smile. Later she learned he was almost 30, ten years older than she was. She had taken him for a boy her age. Within moments they were talking fast, face to face, of God, exile, loneliness…Later, they danced on Sofia’s tiny patio, under the stars, She felt him get hard against her belly. It was just as Adela, and two others, got into Noel’s green Volkswagen for a ride home, that Sofia whispered into Adela’s ear ‘you snagged Noel’, kissed her goodbye, and shook her head. Adela didn’t dare hope Sofia was right as she lay awake all night thinking of Noel. the artist she’d imagined she would one day meet, to fill her life with transcendence and free her from the prison of time she saw the rest of the mortals were penned in. But Sofia was right. Noel had chosen to love her, was still loving her now almost ten years later, as she lay on the warm sand, with her head on his lap, and his tear baby swimming inside her.
She looked up into his eyes.
“I wonder if Tomasa Monte was talking about people like us?”
She showed Noel the lines she had underlined from La Heroina’s famous speech on Grito Day, four decades ago precisely today.
…” at the center those who belong on the fringe…”
“We didn’t go to the Grito Day rally because you’re pregnant and needed to sleep.” Noel stroked her hair. “And we’re not at the center, are we?”
She closed her eyes. She let the red light fill her.
“If I lay very still I feel him.”

“Thinking is vital to revolution, thinking is labor. The opposition is not between intellectuals and activists, but between those whose intellectual labor aims to change this intolerable world, and those intellectuals who labor to sustain it.” Tomasa Monte

Through the branches of the enormous mango trees of Nati’s yard, came the wailing longing of a woman singing boleros in the yard to the left. The sound threaded into the ache winding around Adela’s windpipe. She’d come away from the sun and left the others on the beach. She lay on an old woven vinyl lawn chair gazing at the trees. How did they manage to draw water out of the beach desert? Tomasa Monte’s angular, dark, long face stared at her from the cover of the biography (Heroina del Pueblo). She had been an organizer of sugar cane workers, a communist, and a poet. She too had been a cultural worker. She had worn pants, practiced free love, and written many very long poems. Adela rubbed her belly, lay as still as she could, aching to feel her Tear Baby. Tomasa Monte had fiercely believed that life is good. This is where Adela’s nerve forever failed. Tomasa had been a revolutionary because she wanted that goodness equally shared. Adela could hardly imagine such vibrancy and zest. She could barely muster the courage to crawl out of her bed each morning. And now she no longer wanted to write long poems. Before, Adela had been content to be among the watchers. But now she longed to be smack in it. At long last she was. Nothing was more smack in it than being pregnant. Her body and mind surrendered completely to this minuscule being, this Pulgarcito.
“Don’t do that.” This screaming woman’s voice from the yard to the right blended with the singer’s voice just now warbling on a long, high note. “I tell you not to do it and you keep doing what I tell you not to do.” The singer’s voice wound around Adela’s longing to come alive; the scolder’s voice around her terror that she was born to die. (It was given to few to be immortal like Tomasa).
She closed her eyes and let the wind move the soft tree shadows across her face. Half asleep she sensed that Noel had joined her. She felt him sit on the edge of the lawn chair beside her. She heard him pull out his sketchbook from his leather shoulder bag. Between the wails and scoldings she heard the soft familiar scratching of his fat black drawing pen on the sketchbook page. She surrendered to the larger womb of Noel’s love. His love cocooned her. Her body cocooned Pulgarcito. For an instant she was as brave as Tomasa, as certain of the goodness of life, utterly free of fear. She fell completely asleep.
The screaming Mother yelled “Basta” and her shriek slapped Adela awake. The sky was black. Noel was gone. An infant cried. She knew it was the older boy the Mother liked to scold. He was always silent. She smelled the approaching rainstorm just as she heard the first slam of thunder. Noel was calling her from Nati’s kitchen window now lit bright. “Get inside before it storms.”