Blog 19-Come see where we keep the goats and chickens

"We are going to pull an all nighter!" I said as I tried to wring one last drop of cafe con leche from my cup. "I haven't done this on purpose since my old days pasting up Verdad's city edition in the days when we had to send our copy to a typesetter. There were plenty of involuntary ones when Machi had colic as an infant, and then later, when he began to stay out all night on the street. And the year he was gone I barely slept." Patria drained the last drops from her cup and laughed. "We break night in Palenque all the time." She pulled herself away from the tree we were leaning against, rose, and offered me her hand. “Ven.” I hesitated and she said, “Your friend Julia is here. Machi won't be coming home to nobody.” I let her pull me up. "So this is home now." We walked away arm in arm. "No way we're falling asleep now after all that cafe con leche." She guided us through the maze of lean-tos and tents and shacks of scrap wood. “How do you even see a path? Will I ever find my way back?” She pointed. “There's the Karaya Navy Base fence. You can see it almost anywhere you are. Our hell landmark. And you can ask almost anybody. We're familia here.” I didn't mention the rapists.
She pointed to a row of small wooden houses on low stilts with small porches. “That red one on the far left is my casita, where you must come for pineapple tomorrow, or I should say, later today. It's past midnight.” We walked behind the houses and she pointed to a chicken wire enclosure surrounded by a dome of barbed wire. Three goats slept curled on top of a chicken coop. “The nanny goats and the hens we keep, most of the billy goats and the roosters we eat.” She took my hand. “Are you hungry?” “We'll cut the pineapple now and I'll show you my casita.” I smiled. “I'm relieved you didn't offer to kill a goat.”
We sat in the middle of her kitchen at a small weathered table los muchachos must have dragged in from outside. We faced an old, narrow refrigerator and a small gas stove. I seized the electricity and plugged in my phone to charge. Patria sliced the pineapple the long way and gave me a wedge. “My father taught me to never cut piña in rings because then just one person gets the sweetest fruit at the bottom. This way everyone gets sweet and sour.” I started eating at the top. “This one is perfect, sweet and then sweeter.” She dished some yogurt into bowls. “De chivo." I savored the cream layer on top. “More perfection. Yogurt de chivo y piña de Karaya.”
Patria opened the small laptop on her kitchen table. “Seeing as the last wireless code Elpidio got from a guata still works, we're starting to track your husband right now. Let me see him." I hadn't stopped to think how she was getting online in Palenque. I found the Verdad webpage and showed her the photo that went on top of Ori's column. "This is Ori giving a speech at a decolonization rally many years ago. I brought several prints of this photo, enlarged." I searched for the most recent video on the webpage with Ori in it. "This one is already two years old. Video from the memorial for Paco, his closest political collaborator who died in prison, supposedly from his own hunger strike." I knew from having watched the video many times that just after the eulogy by Elvira, the Propaganda Secretary for the Party's City branch, there was a pan of the hundreds of people packing the church. The camera stopped for an instant on Ori sitting next to a big stained glass window in our local theology of liberation catholic church which we jokingly called, Nuestra Señora del Terror. There was enough light filtering through the pink skinned Christ as shepherd and his white lamb that you could see Ori fairly clearly in the dim light, seated beside me. I paused the video. Ori had his long black hair pulled back from his face. His big, black framed glasses slipped down on his curved Taino nose, his lips were downturned in their boundlessly sad expression. Beside him I stared straight ahead.
"This is my kind of intake. When did you last see him?"
“He just walked out one afternoon and never came back." I paused so I wouldn't cry, took a deep breath. "Machi had to convince me Ori didn't just leave me that Saturday afternoon he walked out in the middle of a fight with me. It was like him to walk out when he got pissed even though he considered it unforgivable if I did, accused me of doing to him what his Mother did when he was a child, withdraw, sulk, abandon. But then he always came back. He said walking out was the only way to not kill me. This time he walked out and I followed him to the stoop trying to hold him back.
“As he was heading down the stoop stairs he was stopped by Señor Conde, our neighbor, usually quiet, younger than us but seeming an elder, always to be called Señor. He screamed at Ori from his stoop, 'Enough, this has got to stop.' He was screaming because Machi's friend David was just that minute careening a stolen car at high speed the wrong way, down our street, screeching it into the hydrant by our house. Ori was already pissed at me. He was on the stoop getting away from me, already angry because I'd tried to make him bring upstairs a couch my friend Soli had given to me. (She'd given it to me months before but I hadn't gotten around to getting it and now she was moving and it had to be done. In our many years of living together we almost never actually bought any furniture.) Ori ignored the neighbor, just looked at him, shrugged, and kept walking. He'd had it with everything, me, the neighbor's incessant complaining about Machi and his friends too, and of course, with Machi and his friends”
Patria was listening to me with full attention, not interrupting me to tell me her own story, her opinion, her advice, just making room for me to find my thoughts, so here came a thought I'd 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.” Patria gave me a small smile, enough that I could believe she wasn't judging me. “It just happened that minutes before Ori came home one of my old coworkers who was also friends with my new boss Soli from when we all worked together teaching adults to read, had shown up at the house with the couch in the back of his van. Ori crossed paths with us on the stairs just as my friend Reinaldo was walking out leaving the job half done and the couch in the airy.
“I asked Ori to help me finish moving the couch and he said no, so I followed him up the stairs. He was sulking and I thought maybe he thought I was involved with the guy.”
I couldn't believe the pleasure of telling Patria things I never talked about. “If he thought something was going on with me and that guy Reinaldo he was half right. As it happens Reinaldo had tried to kiss me in the hall and I'd pushed him away and he'd walked out leaving the couch on the stoop. As you know I'd left Ori once before. That was when I met you. Not long after I left Ori I gave living in Karaya a try. Because I moved out of our shared home to Machi it looked like I left him and not his father. Even though we got back together I couldn't believe either Ori or Machi would ever come to fully trust me. ” I studied her face. No judgment. I went on. “I couldn't be sure if Ori hadn't just gotten sick of not trusting me and taken off."
Patria said, “Why would the god forsaken Mercuries want to rendition Ori?” This time I didn't bother with need to know. Or did I redefine need to know? If I was going to be close to Patria maybe she needed to know everything about me. 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 ingrained. She didn't press and I loved her more. (I was already loving Patria!)
“Odds are he's in the Camp. Or we have to track based on that theory because it's the best one we've got. Tomorrow I'll take you to the legal place. They can only do so much but they do something.
I had to ask her. "Tell me this, if you haven't found your own son in two years, why would you be able to find Ori?"
She shook her head. "En casa del herrero cuchillo de palo, is what you're thinking." She laughed. "We believe that there's a Camp, within the Camp where they keep Bauba Taino desertors. Justice Works say that's why they haven't confirmed my Tomas is inside. Elpidio and I are working on the theory he's in there until we have a better theory. We know if he were in the Territorio he would have gotten word to us by now. It would be the honorable thing to do. Although he's just 30 he's embraced the morals and the politics of an old man, an old style nationalist. Here was a boy who didn't even have to be drafted, he volunteered for the City Force! Hard to imagine that after living on the street he actually thought he'd follow in his Father's footsteps and make a military career!
“It took the City Force to finally radicalize him, and he's not the only one. After his second deployment in the Territorio Libre not too far from here he came home saying he refused to be a techie of death. He found friends in the Force who dealt with all that by becoming devoted to reclaiming their indigenous Taino heritage. Tomas changed his name to Guarionex after a Cacique who fought the Spanish colonizers. His mind just could not hold what had been done to the Tainos during la Primera Colonia. He'd rant about cut off noses, entire families setting themselves on fire, or hanging themselves in trees, mothers drowning their own babies, hundreds shipped to Spain as slaves... He'd scream, 'I refuse to continue the killing.' He went a little off when he came home, he and his veteran friends.”
I pulled my chair closer to Patria's. “Or maybe he went a little sane in a world where we've all come to accept insanity.” I didn't dare ask her if she ever considered the third, unspeakable possibility if Tomas was neither in the Camp nor in the Territorio.
“The third time he was to be redeployed he didn't report and it wasn't too long after that he went missing. I assume he was picked up in one of the sweeps by the Mercuries. Before that but after he was awol he slept at home a few nights. He told me some, but not everything he and his Veteranos 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. “They did not genocide us,” he said, making fists and pounding the arms of his chair. “The dead are living in our chromosomes. We are all the Tainos.” He looked at me with terror and he said, “I wake up because I'm hearing my chromosomes screaming.
“He didn't want me to know much of what the Baubas did. He thought that kept both of us safer. Three nights he was home he mostly stayed up, sitting in the dark in a chair in his room. But when he did sleep he woke up screaming and I came to him, and listened. When he disappeared I tracked one of his vet friends and he told me they were pretty sure he was in the Camp. Elpidio, Lagarto, was just 15. We've been living here two years.” She paused then and shook her head. “Hard to believe...Every once in a while the absurdity hits me...”
My reality was flipping and I caught my breath.