Read Mother Tongue for Free Online Page A

said, We’re married, no?, to la revolución. Yes, why not, he said as a smile swept across his face, dusting off the traces of fear that marked him. I knew at that moment that José Luis was seeingand wanting all that would come between us. I remember this now, as I stroke the ring, remember how he opened the door.

    The Sandia Mountains, true to their name, ripened at daybreak, the color of watermelon. Here is a postcard of the Sandias, this is how they looked one early morning when José Luis and I were loading up Soledad’s brown station wagon. Two friends of hers were borrowing it for a fishing trip. Roped to the top of the car, a canoe extended over the windshield like the beak of an eagle. Fishing rods poked out of windows like antennae. One of Soledad’s friends—they did not tell us their names—adhered a Reagan-Bush sticker to the car’s back bumper. In those days, the Border Patrol did not stop cars with Reagan-Bush or Right-to-Life stickers on them. Nor did the Patrol stop and question white men. In my memory, one of Soledad’s friends that morning had blond hair and wore horn-rimmed glasses.Back then, when “fishing trip” meant transporting refugees north, a white man was an asset. Millions of years of genetic coding culminated in a kind of liturgy each time a Border Patrol agent waved him past the checkpoint outside El Paso.
    I’m trying to remember how it is that, after Soledad’s friends drove away, José Luis kissed me for the first time. It is like trying to take snapshots twenty years too late. At least I recall the smell—the sage we burned in a seashell for Soledad, who had called to say she had forgotten to bless the house before she left. If only I could follow the wisp of sage back in time to the moment.… The truth is, some of our tenderest moments are the ones I am least likely to remember. It has to do with what I said about sleep, how women like me sometimes flee, letting loving words or glances melt on the hot pavement of some nameless fear.
    So forgive me if I embellish; even a conjured memory is better than no memory at all if you would dare to give your life what the world did not, a myth, a plot. Besides, I never intended toreconstruct him from memory, just from love, which may be the only way anyone can ever hope to get at the whole truth. So let me say what might-have-been and maybe the facts will break through.
    We are sitting cross-legged on Soledad’s paisley couch facing one another and drinking coffee out of the blue mugs. I see a man who is not the same one I met weeks earlier at the airport. He is talking about rumors he picked up from the other dishwashers, about how easy it is to cross into Canada and to ask for a lawyer, to apply for political asylum. He says several of his coworkers invited him to join their soccer team, the best in the city, made up of Guatemalans and Salvadorans. It was amazing to me, how José Luis had salvaged the makings of a life out of fate’s refuge heap. Earning money, teaching me Spanish, helping Soledad’s friends translate human rights alerts: His activities gave him the confidence of a man who pokes a bonfire with a stick, dignified by the skill of generating light and heat.
    He asks, have you ever kissed a man whose name you did not know?
    I say, I knew the name but not the man.
    I am trying to escape into abstractions, to speak with an authority all out of proportion to what I am actually saying. To dazzle him so he won’t hear my heart galloping. I am about to get what I want and a rope of panic is stretched out before me as I run toward desire. I’m all stutters and sweat and clashing colors: purple pants, a green Lady of Guadalupe T-shirt. I’m afraid, after sitting cross-legged for so long, that my big toe will curl up in a cramp, my body an unruly cowlick. Then, he thanks me, yes, this really happened. He thanked me for sharing my sleeping pills with him, for making up a social security number based on numerology. Acts of