My mother is standing in the plaza. These days she looks more abuela than the mother I saw my last day on this earth. This earth is the place of my mother, father, and my brother, Cisco. Francisco, grandfather’s name, we girlified by calling him little Frannie, small-boy Cisco, and by growing out his fine blond hair, sea-washed but still tender. I forced limp pigtails on him when he was too small to fight back, too small to know that screeching down the street, tails flapping and twirling, was not the way to establish oneself as a future hombre. I dressed him in pink and lilac purple and brushed his puppy-soft cheeks with rouge. I laughed tears as he tore the block up and down and back again. Red lipstick pointed and perfect, stuck on our mirror or the back of his hand.
My blood becomes the only color in this room.
Even when my eyes have been swollen for weeks, shut against even the tiniest of shadows brought by new nights and new days, I still see the color of its oozing momentum. I slip my hand down the rough cement and catch some of its meager flow, follow it back to my split elbow. My mouth. That once soft hill where buttock meets thigh. Red, my friend and foe. Conquistador, tyrant, I no longer control where you wish to spread your advances. Instead, I slow my heart to keep the lands of my body intact.
Through the night and the fog. To the trunk and the barrel.
My mother’s back grows bent. Hunchback of this southern country, she paces the plaza. Tourists come, drawn to the beauty and the warmth, ignorant of her hands thrust into her floor length overcoat. She spins a rosary clean through fist and gnarled fingers. The deep grooves around her eyes, like hillsides exploded with heavy rain the waters purge the land of the poorest sods and unluckiest bastards. She has nowhere to go, so she circles. She glances at the men and women returning from lunch breaks and rendezvous. She is familiar with these high-heeled women. She too, had been mini-skirted, laughing, sharing looks with handsome men. Her face stayed with them, shone like a beacon in their mind’s eye, hot in the shower and aching with their lovers in the late night.
The night now does not exist.
There is only shadow and shadow-slight, and a distant memory of days changing. The slash of light across the river as night folded, cooling around the city. Then the smell of morning. Watercolor skies, the gusts of birds shaking the cold off their bodies. I’ve stopped trying to keep count. The loss, the tremendous pain of days past. They come endlessly anyway; minutes flow into hours, hours into weeks, until I wake up, groggy and stiff. Most days it feels like they’re still standing in my cell, still having the same conversation about horse races and The One That Got Away, some thoroughbred that punched through, worth his weight in gold for the winnings they split amongst themselves even, fair.
Through the night and the fog. To the room and the thrust.
My mother’s kerchief won’t stay tight. Her fingers so chilled they become arthritic, useless bones stiff like snow-weary branches.One of her plaza friends reaches out to tie the knot. Succeeds and gives a tired smile, leans to my mother’s cheek and brushes it with a kiss so faint it’s almost a whisper of hope. Have faith, is said there, in that butterfly touch. My father called her mariposabefore all of this; memory jolts her; she finds her friend’s hands and stands there, open in the street, and clutches. My father met my mother at a wedding; her laugh boomed over every forced joke told in honor of the bride and groom. The shimmer that filled the space around her allowed every quiet soul to join in, until the speechmaker laughed too, finally comfortable in the private stories coming out to air. The dancing lasted into the early morning and my father’s shyness too, until only she and the best man, drunk and unbalanced, were intercepted by my father’s desire for his future to take shape. It was either now or never, he said to me later.
Now is all I can think of.
Please stop this now. Please end my life now. Heart stop now. Now. Now. Haven’t you had enough? How does this cursed biology keep chugging on, cells replaced, blood created new, bones healed and healed again? The tunnel of my life snakes beneath my country, through the mountains, the jungles, deserts, and cities. Dare I dream of hope in the permafrost? Is there light in the ice at the top of the earth? The tunnel is the cave of humanity; I become ignorant in the dark. Shit, piss, and cramp here alone. Thoughts disjointed; I feel the searing air of the tundra; my tunnel’s exit is a hopeless waiting room of cancer.
Through the night and the fog. To the rope and the muffle.
Three months before I died, a young man came to the plaza. He had the lanky body of a student, the beard of a late-night reader, and the bird-hands of a writer. In my mother’s mind came the word: el cisne. He was both humble and fierce, this swan. He pushed an envelope into my mother’s hands, dropped with quiet humility a cardboard box of small rolls and cottage-cheese cakes, and looked each woman in the eye. Eye-to-eye, each old woman was graced with the simple words of this young man. They felt their sons and daughters come alive like colorful solid ghosts in the shape of his body. Gracias señoras, gracias. Each woman held a loaf in one hand, a small cake in the other. Each one shared in the money he had gathered. Each gave their thanks back to him, and heard his promise of another return, when he could, in a few weeks’ time. When he didn’t return, they knew. It could be no other way. He was alive in their fear, their suffering. He would have sent a messenger if he had a throat to compose the message. My mother remembers this young man’s voice clearly. It reminds her of Cisco’s pleading sounds, his stubborn childish tone as he demanded, cried out, laughed. Say thank you, Cisco. Thank you, Mama. I teased him after our mother had left the room, made him repeat the same thanks to me, Say thank you, king brother, thank you, king. He squealed in delight, turned on his heels like an errant soldier, and ran.
The thanks the men say to each other are insults hurtled on me.
When one hands the other a tool, something else to prod in my mouth, anus, or just to slap my tired limbs, they repeat the manners Cisco and I learned as kids. To make us human, to make us separate from the animals. You are my little brown monkeys, our mother had laughed. But these men are like me, I know. They are nothing but human, and they perform, between themselves, humanness with remembered dignity and respect. I don’t know what they think about me and this created more fear than even the wonder at what my physical body could stand. Two years they continue to play with this old sack, and my body strikes me more as an airless football, then something that once held Cisco in its arms. Even I know it’s easy to keep around a football for two years. Or more. Some of my most favorite objects were years old. Yet, at some point, everything wears out; eventually the battered skin is ruined, ripped, and lacking shape. And we think, Let’s get ourselves another one, this one’s done for.
Through the night and the fog. To the ramp and the wind.
At times I’ve tried to touch my mother: in the house, on the street. Across my world and into hers. I don’t want to startle, but I want her to know where I am. There is peace here. There is nothing but love. There are ancestors. There is the color the earth becomes when the sun and ocean collide. Hues of life without borders. But it’s hard. I am here now. My body only a memory; scaffolding for what I once was. How can I touch her without my hands, without skin to translate a message? I use, instead, my mind, this floating nebulous debris, to send her my love. To give her earthly peace. She needs it. She looks so old and desperately tired. But she is my mother and she suffered to have me on this earth. She will continue to erode the stones that are placed on dirt, in exchange for the faith in my life. I wish I could let her know I am gone. That it’s very human to want to remain. Tied to clayand water and will. But to embrace the letting go is not losing, but rather an agreement, between what we were and what we can be. Death from earth, I can now say, holds only life for all the love I ever grew in my heart.
There was much noise, but mostly shouting, screaming, the protest of a last foot on this earth. I can still remember the whack-whack-whack of the helicopter blades. We knew we were going to die. There was a new smell in the air. It was the pressure from each atom we were made up of, exploding. We screamed into the oceanic trenches of our brains. But they did not hear us. They were deaf. Blind. Dumb. When we travelled through the air, ripping through atmosphere like hungry bats, the erratic helicopters became the last place I would touch. Metal, fabric, plastic. It was strangely euphoric to feel something new. I never wanted to touch concrete again. I focused on that. Would have rubbed my hands raw if not shoved unceremoniously off that helicopter. Final words? Who’s to hear them. Final supper? I ate the ocean. With a violent shuddering smack, I drowned. Hands tied tight behind my back, ankles held to each other with wire. I never would have stood a chance and that wasn’t the point anyway. My last human thoughts were of Cisco. I wished him life. Good and sorrowful, I knew he was feeling it all. It made him human and made him want to stay. Stay as long as you can.
Through the night and the fog. To the light in the flame of a fire.
Gabriela Halas immigrated to Canada during the early 1980s, grew up in northern Alberta, lived in Alaska for seven years, and currently resides in B.C. She has published poetry in a variety of literary journals including The Antigonish Review, Cider Press Review, About Place Journal, Prairie Fire, december magazine, The Hopper, among others; fiction in Room Magazine, Ruminate, The Hopper, subTerrain, among others; nonfiction in Alaska Quarterly Review, The Whitefish Review, Grain, Pilgrimage, and High Country News. She won first prize for her poetry chapbook Bloodwater Tint from Backbone Press (forthcoming). She lives and writes on Ktunaxa Nation land. She holds an MFA from UBC. www.gabrielahalas.org.
