Mother Tongue by Demetria Martinez Page A

once. Her name’s Ana.… I never finished the sentence. In a frightening flash of movement, José Luis flattened his body against the wall as if someone around a corner were taking aim at him with a gun. He slid down to a squat. His eyes squinted into blades. I said, José Luis? But it was too late. He could no longer hear me with human ears.
    Ribs heaving, he came at me like a jaguar.And he let loose a terrible cry of
no
. Words surfaced on the dark waters of that
no: I’ve been looking for you. We found Ana’s body in the ravine near the airport. I saw what you did to her hands and her tongue. You hunted her down like an animal. We were going to get married. All we wanted was an ordinary life
. I sat, paralyzed on the dark bed. For a terrible, eternal instant clouds extinguished the moonlight and my face had disappeared and become the face of the soldier who killed Ana, the soldier with no heart, dismembered and dismembering. I opened my mouth to ask, who’s Ana? but nothing came out because José Luis’s hands turned into fists, one for each friend whose life had been torn like a page out of history. I thought I heard the air crack, branches breaking. I guess I lifted my hands to protect myself, surely I shouted. But I’m not sure, not sure at all. Because somehow I managed to leave my body, to float away from the basement bedroom and the hammer of fists on flesh.
    Seconds as long as a train’s whistle passed, one by one. Then everything stopped. His handwas raised to strike me again but an invisible wire held it up, a puppet’s hand. On the wall behind him his shadow stuck to peeling paint exactly like those shadows of human figures in Hiroshima, signatures left by the bomb just before flesh evaporated. His whole body had come to a halt except for his eyes. And in his eyes I could see people running and dropping, flames and plumes of smoke, processions of women holding photographs of their children, telephone poles falling, bridges flying to pieces. I’m telling you the truth, I saw all this and more in his eyes. Your father and his friends had handed their lives over to the cause of stopping the war and in the end, they could not even flee from it. All these years I have been too afraid to tell you what happened to us that night. War is a god that feasts on body parts. It deforms everything it touches, even love. It got to me, too. It cut out my tongue.

    Every story has its medicine; you must figure out what you most need from this one so you can take it and let go of the rest. Maybe you will come away from what I have told you with peace. It’s not your fault that anger sometimes splits you in pieces that crash like plates of earth. Those sounds penetrated my body the night we conceived you, and the blows figure into your destiny as surely as the positions of planets that ruled the night. I forgive you your rage, the rage of your teenage years that, aimed at an absent father, struck me instead. Now, son, forgive yourself.
    And here, perhaps, is more medicine. I worry for you when your eyes turn to blades as you watch the news or when you pound computer keys like a wartime reporter as you write term papers about toxins and topsoil. What burdens you carry trying to save the world! It is a habit of Americans to think heaven gave us a unique destiny, that we are to spread truth among nations. Luck and too much wealth allow us to imagine ourselves in this strange light, luck and wealththat have benefited both of us. We have had the luxury, unthinkable to most people, of developing talents. Use them, José Luis. Hold to the dream of saving the world. But be at peace: you are not unique. It may be God is asking nothing of you except to remember who you are—one of millions conceived in love and war, in a night that shattered like a beer bottle on a curb as a voice called out stop, stop.
    I’m tired, frightfully tired. Like snake venom, this story’s medicine had to be drawn from my own body. Maybe you won’t