Mother Tongue by Demetria Martinez Page B

even read this, I don’t know. Long ago I began this tale for reasons I could not yet articulate, maybe for no reason at all. I could not have guessed I would end up fulfilling my half of a bargain I struck with God when you were born, that if you lived I would tell you the story of your origins. Promesas are as dangerous as skydiving, leaps into thin air. Nothing frightens me more than an answered prayer. And nothing taxes a body more than giving something back to God. This is why I am so tired, why I have spent this day cryingin my room. This is how badly I wanted you to live.
    What happened next was almost anticlimactic, like a building caving in a few minutes after an earthquake. I was on the floor by the bed, my face wet, my body still rumbling in an endless tremor. José Luis dropped down beside me, took my hands and whispered, what have I done? I said, it’s me, María. It’s me, María. He looked into my eyes; he saw me cowering inside. Then we reached for one another, held on for dear life. We were like two airline passengers who are perfect strangers until the pilot announces an emergency landing. We held each other, we landed, but instead of rejoicing, we wept. I touched my cheekbone. It was a large, hot pulse. I could feel my heart pumping extra blood to put out the fire in my face. The room began to spin, sickness washed over my abdomen. Then, I remembered.
    A man, a neighbor, offers to stay with me while my mother goes to the hospital to see her father, who is dying. I’m seven years old. Mymother’s long brown-red hair is pulled back in a braid. She kisses me. Says, I’ll be back soon. The car crunches gravel as she drives away.
    The man, who has just come from work, wears a tie and a suit. When he smiles there isn’t really a smile there; it’s a minus sign.
    He says, your dress is crooked. What a pretty red dress. Let me straighten it out. But I hear, I’m going to straighten you out.
    Something about the hem of my pretty dress being too short. Something about hands crawling up my thighs, thumbs under panties.
    A finger in a place you hardly know exists is a knife. A knife in a place for which you have no word is the most lethal of weapons. It carves words on your inner walls to fill the void. Words like
chaos, slut, don’t tell, your fault
.
    The girl with the ponytail opens her mouth but someone has cut the wires that link thought and expression. She is receiving millions of signals, children everywhere crying out, but the speakers have broken down.
    The girl is alone in the house, alone withthe man. Within minutes she learns that bad things happen when you are alone. She learns fear of being alone long before she learns to say
abandonment
.
    The place of pleasure becomes the place of fear.
    I can only speak of this a few sentences at a time. Bear with me. I cannot recall everything. I might never recall everything. But see the blank spaces between sentences? I promise to fill them in if I do remember. For now let the blank spaces honor that in me which is too injured to remember. Bear with us, the thirty-nine-year-old woman, the seven-year-old girl. Honor.
    The man smiles his minus sign smile, canceling the girl. He gets up off his knees and turns on the TV. Time for the news. Men in baggy clothes that make them look like rocks or trees genuflect, set rifles on their knees, take aim. Helicopter blades shred the sky. Winds beat the jungle down from three dimensions to one. The men with guns have on helmets that look like turtles. They point their guns at small men withalmond eyes and matchstick cheekbones who come out of the trees with hands behind their heads. Smoke billows, breaks up into characters, a language that has yet to be invented. A village is burning. The village becomes a smoke signal that not even God can decipher.
    The man with the tie greets the girl’s mother. She has come home from the hospital; her father is not doing well. She smiles through the worry, thanks the neighbor for