The man who could move c.., p.23
The Man Who Could Move Clouds, page 23
* * *
—
In 2011, as can happen with recovery, Ximena got better, then worse. She was released from the inpatient center, then readmitted. Everything hinged on her honesty—her ability to tell us whether she was eating or not, and whether she was lying about eating or not. Mami doubted her own ability to heal her, but Ximena was not cooperating. If she dies, we said to each other, then stopped.
That December, we spent the holidays in Minnesota, eating the same things Ximena ate, so as not to trigger her into a bout of restriction. We followed the strict dietary plan her nutritionist and psychologist had designed for her. Mami and I felt stuffed all the time, but we didn’t let on. Every meal had a dessert, more sweets than we were used to.
It might have been right after our second daily slice of chocolate cake that Ximena announced, I think I want a baby.
I remember that I lunged for her, hugged her, that we raised a glass to celebrate how she was taking a step toward her own life. My happiness lasted an hour, until I realized that if Ximena got pregnant she would have to witness her own stomach grow. What if her dysmorphia got worse? If it did, she could begin to starve herself and therefore also the baby. I kept this horrific worry to myself until nighttime, when I shared it with Mami. Mami was angry and impatient with me. Pay attention, she said. This is the new story.
Papi and I had to work, so we went back to our respective homes. We kept filing for extensions for Mami’s visa. We needed someone to care for Ximena. Mami and Ximena lived together, and did not get along. Mami called me every day to tell me about how she was fine-tuning her prayer, just as she had once done for Papi after he lost his job and became depressed. She prepared water for Ximena to cast out illusion, then to cast out the so-called Eating Disorder Ghost. Ximena struggled to stay on her dietary plan. Mami kept trying to slip her exorcism water, but Ximena always figured it out. One called me to complain about the other.
Just give the water to your plants, I told Ximena.
Just give the water to the dog, I told Mami.
Ximena called a few days later, spooked. I don’t know how to explain this—but, like. A shadow came out of my dog.
I was quiet, processing what she’d said, but Ximena continued: Like, a real black shadow came out of my dog, and then the dog yelped—like he had also experienced a shadow coming out of him—and now the dog is hiding in his crate.
So…
All I’m going to say is that it was strange.
So. Well. Okay. I told Mami to give your dog exorcism water.
Ximena sighed. Now, why would you do that?
I don’t know. I scratched at nonexistent stains on my pants. I’m always in the middle.
When Mami’s visa ran out, we worried about what would happen. We had done all we could. Ximena had to choose to live.
* * *
—
We cried when we got news of the pregnancy. Mami was back in Mexico City with Papi, and I was still in California. We were happy for four months; then another call. The doctors had done an ultrasound, and there was no heartbeat. I was charged with telling Papi and Mami, but Mami scoffed at me over the phone. The baby is fine.
No, Mami, you don’t understand. And then like an idiot, I explained to my mother what an ultrasound scan was, as if she had not gotten multiple scans when she was pregnant with us.
I don’t care what the doctors say. Mami repeated: The baby is fine.
Ximena had the option of going to the hospital, where they would vacuum the dead tissue out of her, or of waiting until her own body expelled it. Over the phone, we talked about the advantages of the operation, the advantages of waiting. It seemed we had just hung up when Ximena called me again, crying: Why is our mom being so crazy? The baby is dead—doesn’t she know how much it hurts me to hear her say that it is not?
I am so sorry, I am so sorry, I said, then dialed Mami again. You have to stop telling Ximena you think her baby is alive.
But it is! she protested.
Well, but stop telling her!
Of course, Mami did not listen. Like many before me, I found that, once she had made up her mind, there was absolutely no way for me to get her to do as I wished. Nothing I said to Mami had any effect: What if you’re wrong? What if you make her relapse? Leave her alone, she’s just lost a baby. I begged Ximena too: Don’t answer her calls. Just, please, block her number.
Mami continued to call Ximena to warn her not to have the operation, telling her that if she went through with it, it would kill the baby the doctors were sure was dead but which Mami knew to be alive. Ximena continued to pick up. I sat by my phone in turn, hour by hour, expecting the worst. In the end, Ximena decided to wait—but not because of Mami. She just couldn’t bring herself to get dressed and drive to the hospital. I exhaled, then slept for many hours. I checked in often with Ximena, but days became nights, and Ximena still had not bled, as her doctors said she would.
After a checkup appointment, she called: So…the baby is alive.
What? I remember I was boiling water for tea, and immediately turned off the stove and sat down on the black tiles of my kitchen floor.
The baby is alive, she repeated.
Wait—you mean Mami was right?
Technically, she was half right, Ximena said. They think there were twins and one of them died and the other lived.
So…your baby inside your belly has a ghost sibling?
Worse. The living fetus absorbed the dead fetus.
What—in the actual fuck.
I know, Ximena said, an excess of joy in her voice. I could hear her starting her car. Life is weird.
As she pulled out of the hospital parking lot, and Ximena told me with excitement that her baby had been the size of a poppy seed, a peppercorn, a pomegranate seed, and soon it would be a peach, a mango, and, last, a watermelon, I remembered that Ximena had always been this way, unfazed by strangeness.
I kept expecting that it would be hard for Ximena to witness the changes in her body, but if it was, she never let on. Instead, she had a new respect for it, couldn’t recount to me without wonder the fact that she consumed food and her body turned it into bone, milk, tissue.
See? Mami asked me continually, in a way that was annoying, each time Ximena’s recovery came up. I told you she needed a new story.
Mami couldn’t forgive that, when it mattered, I had believed the doctors over her. I don’t know why everyone in this family always doubts me—after all the things I’ve done, what more proof could you need?
• 20 •
memory
All stories begin and end with memory. Personal memory that goes with the crack of a skull on rock, on pavement. Cultural memory oppressed and re-dressed in the foreign clothes of Catholicism. Ancestral memory hidden for centuries from occupying powers—and in secrecy becoming something new, a bifurcated thing.
One function of amnesia is survival.
The Spanish called the brutal invasion and overtaking of the continent and her people The Conquest. In the aftermath of genocide, many mestizos focused on becoming as white as it is possible to disappear. In others, memory was resilient. Under the cover of secrecy, after generations of war and against the erosion of time, we passed down our stories and medicine knowledge, and these were our own map for who we were and where we came from. The stories we loved made us indigestible to the pressures of assimilation and erasure.
When Mami and I lost our memories in our accidents, the function of amnesia was patterning. By losing our past and watching it reassemble, we found a way of belonging to each other and ourselves and a larger story. In my family, destiny is a force that chooses, that passes over some and not others, and stories seem to repeat across generations, diverging only in their particulars. After Nono made love to Nona in a dream the night he died, she woke up and saw clumps of earth on her sheets. The morning Papi sought a kiss from Mami’s apparition, he found out it was like kissing the air. There was the dark circumference of the bottom of the well in which Mami lay unconscious, and the black skirt of the gown I rearranged around myself when I was all oblivion.
Ximena and I learned that forgetting was a path to subsistence. We are engineered this way, made to abandon what is too heavy to hold. But the body is a document. It keeps a memory of its own. We are made of loops and loops of time.
For example: When I walk around in the street and become afraid, clenching my jaw, my vagina clenches too. I am told this is common in women who have been assaulted. The body makes its own associations.
The gift of amnesia was bewilderment. After my accident, in the throes of memory loss, I was a person to whom nothing had yet occurred. I was a process constantly bridging to a cusp. I belonged to the perpetual second. And the perpetual second was an unknowable, deep delight.
The gift of remembering was the anger that allowed me to parse how I was made. The things passed down to me had made me into a battleground. Our Indigenousness was mocked, and our assimilation to whiteness praised. As I received the knowledge about these pieces of myself and dreamt of the seafloor that the departed ocean revealed, as I climbed down the crisp, hardened mounds of what had once been lava, running my hands along the black wrinkles in the rock, I knew that here was a second chance at becoming.
There is a difference between keeping secrets, the things I am not allowed to say and will never tell, and keeping life a secret. We are not meant to live in halves.
The pliable texture of memory has its use. It leaves breathing room for the ghosts.
Mami and I claim our memory, as we do our hunger, as we do our ghosts.
And still. If we are honest, we must admit we liked our lives best when we were more there than here, when we were more ghosts than flesh.
From time to time, Mami and I call each other to ask, Remember what it was like to not remember anything?
Yes, we say, with the wistfulness of a lover. Yes.
• 21 •
records
Some stories return, and it’s almost like they’re half told by ghosts. Just before Mami and I flew from Cúcuta to Bucaramanga to disinter Nono, we went to Ocaña. I had told Mami it was essential that we go, so I could dig up genealogical records and gather facts. She rolled her eyes at the word “facts,” and in the back seat of the cab of Mami’s cousin José, great-tía Carmen’s son, whose help Mami had enlisted to get us to Ocaña, she pointed at me and said: Can you believe the girl is going to Ocaña to look for facts? To Ocaña! In a family like ours? With the quality of our stories?
José, broad-chested and dark, leaned forward and grinned at our private bickering in his rearview mirror, lightly touching his tongue to the back of his teeth. You don’t say.
The seats were crushed velvet and yellow, and our windows were open. Fuzzy white dice hung from the rearview mirror, tumbling in the foreground of the foggy mountain we were driving through so early in the morning. I began to say that facts made stories flesh and blood, but Mami interrupted. Do you remember the skull? The one the dentist gave Nono for ambience?
A short laugh escaped my lips. I was unsure why she was bringing the skull up at this precise moment. Why?
Tell her, José—once, it rode in this cab, and right here, where we are sitting.
* * *
—
The skull had disappeared during Nono’s wake, but after tío Ariel’s death it reemerged. Mariana discovered it in her late husband’s curandero office, on the floor by a cabinet, where he must have set it down while reorganizing his consulting room just before dying. Mariana wrapped it in a white bedsheet and left her house, then rode a bus for four hours to Ocaña with it on her lap. She wanted to be rid of the endless drama of our family, with our skulls and curanderos and secrets and gifts, and now that Ariel was dead, even more so.
When Mariana reached Cristo Rey, great-tía Carmen welcomed her into the kitchen, where the family was having breakfast, offered her coffee and a chair, and asked if she had slept well the night before, as though Mariana lived around the corner and was in the habit of dropping by all the time. Without taking either chair or coffee, Mariana set down the white bundle in the center of the table. She peeled back each corner of the sheet, letting it shroud the plates full of arepas, the bowls of fruit and cheese, and the cups of coffee the family had been about to enjoy. Here, Mariana said, exposing the skull, is Papá Luciano. Great-tía Carmen braced herself against the wall.
After Nono died, tío Ariel had pilfered the skull. Apparently, tío Ariel had been under the impression that the skull on Nono’s altar had belonged to Nona’s father, whom the family called Papá Luciano. Evidently, Nono had started this rumor himself. No one can imagine why, except maybe for the chance to posthumously direct a Shakespearean comedy and mess with tío Ariel and Nona from beyond the grave.
To begin with, Papá Luciano was not a curandero, was not even supernaturally inclined; he sold shoes that he carefully crafted from foraged car tires. Still, tío Ariel had confided in his wife, Mariana, telling her the skull was Papá Luciano’s, and that this was the real source of Nono’s powers, and once he had it in his own possession, tío Ariel’s powers would equal Nono’s. He built his own altar in a close imitation of Nono’s. But, unlike Nono, he asked the skull in earnest for answers to the problems his clients brought.
At great-tía Carmen’s, when Mariana set the skull down on the table, José remained immobile, staring into its hollowed eyes. Mariana was saying that Nono and tío Ariel had used Papá Luciano’s skull as a bridge to the world of the dead, and now that they were both gone, the skull had been tormenting her, not letting her sleep a wink, and she couldn’t bear to be in its presence any longer. With that, she left.
Great-tía Carmen put the skull in a corner of the kitchen, started to recite a long rosary, and sent word to Nona, asking what she wanted done with the skull of her father, now returned. Nona was outraged. She had known Nono to be a callous man, but so cruel as to steal her own father’s skull? And, Nono was dead—how could he still be hurting her? She called our house and left an outraged message on our answering machine: the skull of her father had turned up alone, without the rest of its skeleton, in Ocaña—what did Mami know about such blatant and utter disrespect?
Mami laughed hysterically for half an hour when she found out what Nono had told Ariel. She had to go into another room so we wouldn’t make her laugh as she called tía Carmen’s—where they were in the process of lifting the tiles in their patio to give the skull a resting place—to urge them to stop. The skull was not Papá Luciano’s; it belonged to some anonymous person who had been bequeathed to Nono by a dentist many years ago for the sake of ambience.
Quickly, whatever remorse, heartbreak, and trepidation had weighed on tía Carmen’s family as they looked at the skull now morphed into the singular desire of being rid of it. Guille, José’s father, had run through many scenarios in which he walked into the cemetery and explained to the groundskeeper that the skull was an ancestor who had been aiding the curanderos in the family, and now that they were dead, he was returning the holy skull to rest—but all the scenarios ended with the groundskeeper suspecting him of murder and calling the police.
So, instead, at midnight, Guille and José hopped into José’s cab. The skull, wrapped in the same white sheet Mariana had brought, sat alone in the back seat. José and Guille feared being found by the authorities in possession of the skull, but they also feared offending the stranger to whom the skull belonged, provoking his haunting. For this reason, even if it was suspicious, they drove slowly in circles around the cemetery, trying to figure out the best way to creep inside.
Let’s leave the skull at the gate, José proposed.
Are you out of your mind? Do you want to be haunted for the rest of your life?
They glanced at the skull, the white bundle in the back seat.
Guille whispered his plan to José: they could lob the skull over the graveyard wall. If we say a Padre Nuestro and pitch it as delicately as we can, and it lands, you know, on holy ground, I bet we won’t be haunted.
First José, then Guille took turns getting out and intoning the prayer, but as soon as they were ready to toss the skull, they heard someone approach. Like men on the run, they dove back into the cab and sped off. They kept circling the graveyard until about two in the morning. That’s when Guille got up enough nerve. He stomped his foot, breathed out a quick Padre Nuestro, hurled the skull, leapt into the back seat, and yelled, Go, go, go!, and all before, according to him, the skull even had occasion to land.
In the morning, José’s family dressed up to go to the cemetery. If asked, they would say that they were there to pay respects to their dearly departed. At the cemetery, they weaved in between the graves looking for the skull.
Finally, they ran into the groundskeeper.
Oh! Hello!
They asked after the groundskeeper’s health, whether he had family nearby, whether they were from Ocaña, inquired about how he had gotten into cemetery work. After they could think of nothing else to say, great-tía Carmen expressed interest in knowing whether anything strange had happened in the cemetery as of late.
Funny you should ask.
The groundskeeper told them that people left behind bones all the time, who knew why, and it had happened the night before. He pointed to a little arch carved out in the wall of the cemetery, which was piled with random bones. I put them in a corner with the rest and say a prayer. What else can I do?
You don’t say, great-tía Carmen mused. She was impassive, but only because she could discern, even from a distance, with unnerving familiarity, which one had been, for a little while, their skull.
