Mother Tongue by Demetria Martinez Read Free Book Online

got into the pickup truck, he kissed me goodnight, lips and forehead, through the rolled-down window. If he asked me for a sleeping pill I gave him half of mine, snapping apart a chalky oval no bigger than an infant’s thumbnail. I took a pill whenever emotions, good or bad, detonated, leaving a cloud of mental chatter I could not dissipate on my own. He said the pills helped him fall asleep after nightmares woke him up, causing his heart to race. It was as if our minds were satellite dishes, open to the murmurings of some dark universe. Signals bombarded us, signals we could not yet decode.
    Then one day it happened, it happened. I love you, José Luis. Te quiero, María. We opened each other up like sacred books, Spanish on one side, English on the other, truths simultaneously translated. I remember the scent of our sweat, sweet as basil as we pressed against one another on the basement bed. Lindita, mamacita, negrita: love words, the kind that defy translation. Withhis hands he searched my depths. When he found what he was looking for I moaned, felt a chill and then warmth as the seasons moved through me. Minutes later he came inside me, stiffened, sighed. Afterwards, he lit his cigarette on the flame of the Sacred Heart candle on the night table. He rubbed my feet with almond oil, talked in the dark about developments in El Salvador. We had both dreamed the night before about his country. I said, José Luis, last night I dreamed I was there, I smelled bougainvillea. He said, I dreamed I was there too, mi amor, but it was something about white phosphorus, napalm.
    He stayed awake, talked to me; I didn’t feel the doubts women sometimes feel when men fall asleep after making love, doubts delicate yet dangerous as asbestos fibers. Sometimes we held one another and listened to the shortwave radio that we had brought down from its place on the kitchen window sill. I remember a BBC commentator saying something about South Africa, and how his descriptions shattered like crystal wine glasses at the sound of a woman crying outin grief. But the sounds diminished as our bed bobbed away on the tide of sleep. Holding on to José Luis, my head pinned to his chest, I held on to the night, refused to let it slip through my hands. There were times I felt sad after making love. Intercourse often disappointed me. It could feel like a linear fitting of parts, a far cry from the creative pleasures of foreplay when we painted on the caves of one another’s flesh. Perhaps it would have been different had I wanted a baby. Maybe then the act, with its audacious committing of present to future, would have touched the flaming core of my being. But I’m deceiving myself again. Lying. For a long time after José Luis left me I continued to believe a man could touch my essence, make me whole. All that time I could have been writing, touching the fires of my being and returning to the world, purified and strong.
    You see, I was one of those women who is at her best when she wants something very badly. The mating dance, the yearning and flirting, surrenders and manipulations—I was good at that,so good at the pursuit that when I actually got what I wanted, terror appeared. Terror that wore the silly mask of disappointment.
    Here is a poem José Luis wrote, dated August 13, 1982. As part of a Spanish lesson, he had me translate it. We kept several dictionaries on the kitchen table. Dodging from word to word for hours at a sitting, we made our way across borders of language without passports or permits. I hid whatever poems he gave me in a sock drawer. The feelings his poetry engendered in me were like nothing I had experienced before. His words and those of the poets he admired made me want to sell my belongings, smuggle refugees across borders, protest government policies by chaining myself to the White House gate—romantic dreams, yes, but the kind that dwell side by side with resistance. The space we cleared on the kitchen table to do