I lost yesterday's entry

I lost yesterday’s journal entry. Why do I even want to reconstruct the thing I wrote, yesterday? Today I’m sitting on a bench, facing this magnificent waterfall, watching Reinaldo’s students, my old students, snapping photos, close to the railing, wishing their children were the ones who were getting to see this, getting to wear the yellow raincoat and be wet by the waterfall spray. Monse, Lidia, Iliana. They took off their fancy presentation suits and are wearing jeans and t shirts in the hot sun.
I shouldn’t be trusting my laptop, issued by my job. I shouldn’t have trusted it yesterday, when I sat at the hotel breakfast table writing down yesterday’s thoughts. It swallowed the file whole. So what did I say? Why does it matter? Why do I believe that there are truths I might capture by accident on the way to fixing something I see or think I see. Truths I can revisit later, decipher later. When I first came to the City so my Father could go to University, with
my first grasping of English in second grade came a moment: I’m sitting in the center of the classroom, the boy behind me and the girl beside me are calling me a word that sounds like Mary. I know they are making fun of me, but only years later when I am already a teenager do I hear them. They are not making fun of my name Marina. The girl is saying I am going to marry the boy. Were tthey rying to be my friends?
I want to capture what I see or think I see because in some future time when I long to revisit the way I now long to revisit Ventura, Naguales, the places I can never see again, I will have these
notebooks, this personal ethnography where confused half knowings are fixed to be reconsidered when I know more, when I am more myself, when I am at last real. One day I will be real, and I will know I’m real because all the people I have hated, will be revisited and seen, except that I will love them. The measure of how real I am is how much I love.
I am loving the students now, seeing how much they enjoy this waterfall. I am loving Reinaldo seeing how much he loves the students. Solly and the B are standing beside them and I am loving seeing their burocratic rank equalized with the students’ real life rank by the magnificence of this fenomeno natural. Lucha is sitting beside me, calm for now. The waterfall is bigger and louder than what I imagine is the rush of terror inside her over her daughter Jody. An image of the terror. A glimmer of the possibility that there may be something magnificent to be discovered in what’s happening to Jody.
Yesterday when I was writing at the breakfast table at the hotel, the entry the laptop swallowed whole, the Literacy Workers’ Conference was just beginning, Reinaldo’s students (really mine, I
knew them and loved them first) hadn’t made their presentation. We were all scared with them and for them and I wasn’t loving anybody. I was irritated by Reinaldo’s proprietary herding of the students away from me, three women with whom I was very close. Irritated by his macho competitiveness and his internalized oppression that made him see me as his enemy, his competitor.
From the breakfast table I could see Lucha in the phone booth, talking to Jody’s counselor at the rehab, the emotional growth school. She has a weekly appointment with the counselor. She’s not allowed to talk to Jody directly. She told me the boundary is a huge relief. Having an ally to help her love Jody, to decypher Jody and remind her that Jody is good, and most of all that she, Lucha,
is good, is a huge relief. Yesterday Reinaldo and his students, my old students, were standing outside the phone booth waiting and Lucha waved them away and they filed into the dining room and spotted me saving us all a table. Yesterday I thought that moment was important to write down. I don’t remember why. I was hating Reinaldo at the time, and the students for sticking like glue by his side, responding to his pressure to steer away from me and maybe angry at me still because I left them when I went to be a burocrat. When they sat down to join me I saw Solly glance at us from where she was sitting at another table with the B and other administrators. I imagined she looked at us with longing. Reinaldo
made one of his nervous jokes as he and the students sat down. “La gran escritora.” (Maybe someday I will revisit his remark and realize that he wasn’t actually mocking me, just likemy second grade classmates were actually, clumsily, trying to teasingly befriend me, saying that two of us had crushes on each other.) None of the students could eat, they were too scared about their presentation. They were joking that they were making themselves eat only
because the food was free. We were all laughing. Reinaldo and his students love each other and Lucha and I were folded into all their love. I was quiet and waited until Reinaldo started to relax and the students felt safe to show they love me too. Love can get bigger, Reinaldo. There’s room for the students to love me too. Because we were loving each other we were more real than the suited administrators, although the students too were wearing fancy suits.
Later,the students presented the stories they wrote with Reinaldo,(the way I had taught them all) from the beginning of decoding an image, writing through scribes,to inventing their own spelling, and then writing on their own…the various stages of those writings…to a group that overflowed the workshop doors. Monse showed her story about the bride to be, that starts out with a
wedding fantasy and slowly begins to unravel; the bride reveals she has just discovered the groom is about to have a child out of wedlock with somebody else; the bride to be goes on a quest asking all her women elders, her cousins, her friends about their own weddings. Iliana showed her stories about each of her children’s birth; the first 48 hour labor, the second so fast she barely
made it to the hospital. Lidia showed her story about finding medicinal herbs in her City’s barrio's parks and empty lots, picking them, brewing them, wondering if indeed they are botanically the equals of the herbs from home. After the presentation, euphoric in the crush of people outside the meeting room, Reinaldo said. “Did you see them be brilliant? Monse and Lidia and Iliana? They were the only students not ashamed to be on public assistance. To understand and say they want to work, all poor people want to work and if they don’t it’s the economy and the government that need to be ashamed, not them. They prove elitism is a big fat lie. Could you tell them apart from the people with big titles and credentials?”
It turns out that Reinaldo spends half the time on political education, drawing the students stories all the way to where the oppression in the narratives points straight at exploitation. “Who profits from this oppression?” This is his favorite question. By then we’d asked each other enough code questions to identify that we are political allies. The Conference felt like a convention of refugees from the movements of the 60s and the 70s. Solly of course I knew was a community organizer out West and the B had hinted she was a big civil rights activist. Solly told me the B's son is half black. I found out Reinaldo, like me, had been a militant for Island liberation, but not with the Partido de la Felicidad. He belonged to Isla Libre. When we identified our now defunct organizations and it turned out we’d been sectarian rivals, he made some nervous jokes about that. I could see him bite his tongue not to say, ‘the partido was burocratic so no surprise that you’re a burocrat’. And I didn’t say ‘no wonder you’re coming out with tropa perdida rhetoric, about ‘delivering free labor’’. When I’m real none of these differences will matter , there will be room for both of us. These will all be fronts for struggle, even this agency, Reinaldo and I, Solly, the students, and even the B and I, will be able to tell that we are allies.
The B is herding us back to the tour bus.
Just one more word about the students. Last night Reinaldo wanted to go hang out with three other male teachers and didn’t mind Lucha and I going out with the women. We walked several blocks beyond the hotel and stumbled onto a real downtown, with small shops and an Island restaurant. This far North city has an Island community. We ate plantains and beans and rice. After dinner we sat outside in a little park where a group of Island men were playing congas and
guitars and we talked until close to midnight. We were all Mothers but we weren’t bereft of our children; just for that little while we were whole, big on our own behalfs.

Lucha story
change the names
Call the woman Marta

“Ma.”
Marta had fallen asleep on the lifetime tv program about the woman gambler who lies to her husband and maxes out their credit cards and their line of credit, on the sound of Machi and Sammy arguing in his bedroom.
“Ma.”
Machi called her again. It's his tone of voice that shook her, electric with alarm. He threw himself into Ori's armchair. “Sammy got raped.”
Marta moaned. Sammy stood behind Maceo looking at the floor. Why didn't Marta believe her? Guilt for the thought erases it. Within seconds Sammy was beside her, flung her arms around Marta's neck and began to sob. Marta forgot her doubts. Sammy got out between
deep sobs that she'd been hitchhiking after work, and two young men had picked her up. She hadn't known how to direct them and they hadn't found her address, or pretended not to find it.
Machi got up from Ori's chair and began pacing to the window and back again. “I'm going to find them.” Marta wanted to make him forget this, but how? What did she know about man culture? Why wasn't Ori here? This situation required a man. Sammy went on. “They pulled up the truck by some docks, a river, under an overpass, and first one and then the other…”
Marta didn't want Machi to hear any more. “We've got to get you to a hospital. We've got to get you helped and also get samples of the sperm in case...for when the men get caught.”
Sammy screamed, no, no, no. She grabbed her coat and bounded out of the apartment door. Machi chased after her. Marta stared straight ahead at the muted television screen. Another woman's saga had begun and a long faced mustached man was voicelessly berating her.
Marta had met Sammy's stepmother at a parents' workshop at the rehab school. She pictured the woman now, edgy and frazzled. Should she call her? Did she even know where the workshop contact sheet ended up. Was it her place to call? Where was the boundary to be drawn?
The doorbell rang. Marta wasn't ready to face a person, Jehovah's witness or whomever. She'd forgotten the exterminator was going to come. She let him into the apartment where all the walls were exposed brick and the mice had few places to nest and crawl. She stood in the hallway half expecting to see Machi coming home. She couldn't think of anyone to call to help her think. Was this to be lonely? She let the exterminator out and walked back in, no Machi yet.
She sat by the kitchen window taking small bites from an overripe persimmon. She pressed the sweet perfumed flesh against the roof of her mouth. She remembered Quique who had given her to taste the very first one. They'd been driving in the City after a snowstorm delivering the Partido newspaper. He'd pulled over by a fruit stand and said. “You've never tried this.You won't believe it.”
Just now, this moment, it came to her that Quique had been a cop, an Island agent infiltrated into the Party. How could she never have realized it before? It wasn't visible then in the dense frenetic momentum of party work and with the party's narcissitic sense of its attraction to all sorts. But why would this young man with no past ,no connections, suddenly turn up? So skilled that within weeks he'd ascended to official photographer. That night he had taken her to his apartment. It was antiseptically bare, just a bed, a table, one beer in the fridge. Props. That same night while she was with him her own apartment was broken into, no harm to her door. He would have had plenty of opportunities to
take her keys and copy them, her purse was always sitting on her desk at work, he often went through it to borrow cigarettes.
Yes. No doubt. He was a cop and not a good one. Who would choose her files? She was marginal to any knowing. Just a militante who translated for the newspaper. But shortly after the persimmon
night he was promoted yet again to Rolo's bodyguard where he must have struck a mother lode of information. That apartment was also broken into. It was then Quique produced an estranged wife suddenly recovered who wanted to volunteer at the newspaper, a wife with whom he barely had contact. She saw now that what had been odd about those two was that there had been no spousal tension between them. The fact that she was a cop must account for,
what was her name Nadia's, strange lack of jealousy over Quique and his over her. Soon Nadia was one more of Rolo's conquests. Marta, not a cop, wanted to kill Nadia over Rolo for awhile. But after the solidarity rally Quique and Nadia vanished as tracelessly as they had come and Rolo trained his predator eyes back on Marta.
If only Sammy and Machi had something like the party. Even with the sexual gaming it was full of power and hope. Who could survive being young without hope of revolution? Picturing only a shoreless sea of oppression?

Machi was waiting to be fed when she got home from work, stretched out on the couch, right forearm over his eyes. “She was lying.” He didn’t look at Lucha. He didn’t move his arm. “I thought she was all along. She lies a lot. Stuff you could almost believe. Stuff she puts herself in danger for. Stuff that almost could have happened. She did hitch a ride. They did get lost.”
“Maybe she should be a novelist and not a dancer.”
“Last night when you said go to the hospital and she ran out I knew I could get her to tell me what really had happened.. I wanted to kill her. I turned around and walked away. Fast. Or I was going to start to hit her and shake her.”
“You figure out liars fast. It takes me a long time. One time it took me four years. Just this morning, enjoying a persimmon, I figured out this man I used to know who was supposed to be a revolutionary, was actually a cop. Eighteen years after the fact.”
Machi sat up, swung his leg onto the floor. Stood beside Marta at the kitchen counter. He spread mayo on white bread. She wished he’d eat something wholesome but she said nothing. Why spoil this easeful moment with her son?
Why were there so few lately?
He layered ham and cheese. “Sammy’s lies, sometimes it seems like they’re the true way her life feels. Maybe she didn’t get raped by these two guys, but no question she’s gotten screwed. Your father both leaving you and loving you too much in the wrong way is a kind of rape. She broke my heart when she said to me, ‘My father left my
mother and they each started new families with new babies and then there was nobody for me. There was nobody to be my person.'”