Memorias of inmigrant by Cristina Bernazzani
Two Poems |
First Photograph of My Father, My Brothers and Sisters, and Me, with Migrants from Central America
My father is the man on the far left, at the top.
He peeks out between the sombrero of Nicolás,
a Honduran, and my sister Cisteil.
Nicolás was a good-natured, hard-working man
with a sharp-edged smile that could crack anyone open,
no matter how rough or tough. At the top, too,
right in the middle, holding my sister Exa,
is another Honduran, Orlando, an evangelical
with the peace and calm of cattle on the way to slaughter.
He stayed at our house longer than the rest.
On the right-hand side, Carlos, Honduran too:
From his head seems to grow that twisted nanche tree
whose elbow touches the exact centre of the Calle Central,
the street my father would come down at night
toward home, drunk on laughter from talking
with his friends in the park; a mild-mannered,
soft-voiced, light-skinned Black man, Carlos was no doubt
the most cheerful of the migrants,
my brother Canek’s favourite,
carrying the boy around whenever he could—
Canek’s the kid with the biggest smile,
a wide-mouthed smile he’s kept to this day.
Between Orlando and Carlos’s right arm,
which rests on the man’s left shoulder and gives him horns,
a fourth Honduran, whose name I’ve lost among
the hallmarks of that year, and I doubt that my brothers
or sisters remember it, maybe because he went around quiet
as a shadow. In front of him, my brother Aldo
gives a friendly wave to my mother taking the photo.
Between Orlando and Carlos’s right arm,
which rests on the man’s left shoulder and gives him horns,
a fourth Honduran, whose name I’ve lost among
the hallmarks of that year, and I doubt that my brothers
or sisters remember it, maybe because he went around quiet
as a shadow. In front of him, my brother Aldo
gives a friendly wave to my mother taking the photo.
At the bottom, crouched down almost in the middle
below this hazy handful of faces, two Guatemalans,
the letters of whose names are like birds
of forgetfulness now.
They came later than Nicolás, Carlos, and Orlando,
but they all left together, all but Orlando,
who hopped the train a month later,
my father giving him an old sombrero and backpack
and teaching him, for the journey north,
how to pass as a campesino from the coast.
He made it past all the checkpoints,
the coyotes and smugglers, and a few months later,
having weathered thousands of miles of hate,
he wrote us a letter from Canada, where he’d arrived
to write himself a future on pages of snow.
I appear crouched down at the far left of the photo,
displaying a nervous tic I’ve still got, making a pincer
with my right index finger against my left, and barefoot
like my brothers. None of us live in that town anymore;
we all became migrants, trying to shake ourselves loose
from the claws of that violent god of poverty.
If we could step into the photo after thirty years
and walk back up that street on the right-hand side,
we’d come upon my father on the railway platform—
here’d be no mistaking him, a curly-haired barefoot boy,
tanned to leather by the sun, selling popcorn
or carrying itinerant salesmen’s bags,
or leaping over stains of burnt oil
on the railroad ties, or hanging onto
a train car headed off in the direction of memory,
a faint murmur shattered by the howl
of a train crossing the land of fog.
Second Photograph of My Father, My Brothers, and Me, with Migrants from Central America
We were beating rounded stones against each other
so that a limestone racket of sparks
burst out from the spontaneous kissing of rocks
like a voice, stunning fish underwater
that floated to the surface without flapping,
anaesthetized divers in wetsuits of silver scales
They came up hypnotized by the punching
of the water and the lightning bolts of stone,
and gave themselves like sleeping children
into our hands.
Our way of fishing was a Neolithic dream,
a memory of Cro-Magnon ancestors with vegetal hearts,
no other tools but the force of rocks
beating in our hands; little children lighting
bonfires of water at the bends of rivers,
collecting sardines as sweet currency
to kill our hunger, fish like coins made of sun
that would sizzle in my mother’s pan
and be eaten fried in lard
when we came home tired, our eyes filled
with dreams and fallen leaves: Paso de Lima
and Zapaluta, two rivers joined in a capital Y,
awaiting the eternal mingling of my ashes.
Río Despoblado, Deserted River: There are two
dead men in the photo. The first is Ervin, Little Iguana:
He played soccer with the Comalchis, our childhood team;
skillful, extra gruff, reptilian, the best goalie
for blocking the paucities of this world.
He was dark as the polish he rubbed on the shoes
he shined every day, relieving feet of their dust
on concrete benches in the park,
stowing all the tools of his trade
in a little shoeshine box. He was murdered
in cowardly fashion just before he turned fifteen
by Martín Cochero, the Driver, a killer who buried
his blade in the left side of Ervin’s chest.
The Driver got mad when Little Iguana changed
the endlessly repeating song on the cantina’s jukebox
to one that Martín didn’t like. Still, Little Iguana’s song
kept spinning for a minute that lasted centuries
in Tomboy’s palapa and stopped just as Ervin
polished the cantina floor with his blood.
The other dead man in the photo is my father,
although he’s standing up straight
behind the camera. I never knew why,
but from an early age he was a friend
to Central Americans, whom he treated and helped
like a strong big brother. When he met
my mother, first of July, 1972, in Mexico City,
he was chatting in a Metro car
with a Costa Rican friend, and the happy
Central American tone of the two men
caught my mother’s and her friend’s attention.
The four exchanged words in Pino Suárez station
and agreed to go out that weekend; the tico
and my mother’s friend only saw each other
one more time, but my father and mother
had a date that lasted thirty-six years until he died,
some three hundred Central Americans later, and after
dozens of them, dear brothers and friends,
had shared coffee and tortillas at the cedar table
of our house in Chiapas, from 1981 to 1987.
Plenty of Central Americans, it’s true, lived
at our house in that town: Isaac, a Salvadoran,
who taught us to make little aluminum hats
from the bendable mouths of toothpaste tubes
and painted the tiny hats with skill, some of them
lost now in the family’s boxes and drawers
among yellowing papers scented with cedar.
And Dina and Rubi, Honduran girls, who always told us,
“Take a bath, you smell like rotten coconuts.”
The two of them baked delicious banana bread;
my mother took them by train, a two-and-a-half-day
nightmare, to Mexico City, where they stayed
with my Uncle Manuel until they crossed the border
to cook their banana and coconut wonders
in the U.S.A. Donald, Guatemalan, a born
mythmaker, with more hustle than desire
to get to the other side; he displayed
his pyromaniac gifts one December night
as we watched blue fire burst from his hands,
fed by tall alcohol flames; he said he missed
the daily pudding his mother left him on the table
for dessert, and he cried like a child at night.
St. Martín de Porres, as my father dubbed him,
a Black kid from San Pedro Sula, Honduras,
just fourteen but with more than twenty years
of work and hunger in his past; more cautious
than anyone I’d ever met, his body stored up
an infinite fear of the agents of the migra;
one afternoon, as he caught the fresh air
on a bench at our house, some practical joker from town
yelled, Here comes la migra! and St. Martín de Porres
ran under my parents’ bed, his eyes and heart
filled with terror, with uncontainable horror (now
I understand him, now I know that he was right).
I’ll never forget José, a Salvadoran ex-soldier
who taught us acrobatics and martial arts,
like the famous shark move—first
the plank position, chest to the ground,
then a backward thrust of your arms
and a hard clap on your back—
and his jungle survival techniques.
At night he was troubled by terrible dreams
and hardly slept; he confessed he’d killed
some children of guerrillas by accident,
which is why he took off for Guatemala and Mexico.
He stayed in our town for years and started a scout group
for us and the other boys, to assuage his wartime sins,
no doubt; as we explored the woods or the riverbanks,
he had us sing that song of his out loud,
there you go, little goat, little goat,
run away, get out of this place . . .
For New Year’s parties he made giant piñatas
from clay pots covered in endless layers
of newsprint and curls of tissue paper
and sealed with a mess of wire and cement;
they were unbreakable, all of the kids
taking two or three rounds beating away
at the coloured globes until we almost
broke our hands, not to mention two or three
sticks; José would just give his big-hearted laugh,
finally taking a very stout log and breaking
in a single blow the piñata packed with candies,
fruit, and memory, and the flour that masked our faces
and erased, perhaps, the faces of those children
shot down by his hand. I’ve forgotten the names
and faces of many more Central Americans;
some are ghosts or apparitions in this head of mine
that’s full of roots and branches and fallen leaves
from the rivers of my town, thick with the fig trees’
tangled shade, covered in the hard clear water
that baptized our bodies but never even wet
that wiry head of hair on Oscar, the Honduran
who laughed with a whole marimba
of white teeth, and whose silence spoke.
The echo of voices of those Central Americans
from my youth resounds from the walls of these pages,
and in the letters they sent from Estados Unidos
and Canada promising to visit again someday,
thanking us for the blessing of our friendship.
Which of them rest now in common graves,
which of them died of hunger and thirst
in the desert along the way, which ones were
murdered by coyotes, or cheated by evil
smugglers, cops, or migras, which ones
were maimed and torn by the train?
A host of migrant tongues whispers in my ear:
Like the shade of trees that search for their trunks
in the blazing heat of wood where lips and hands burn,
there are shades who wander the rest of the road
seeking their limbs, the remains of their bodies
or at least their discoloured clothing rotting in pits,
at the bottom of ravines and chasms,
nomad ghosts and apparitions who seek their centre,
the keys to their house, sinking at last
into the fog like birds flying without a flock
on an afternoon of blackened sun among the clouds:
The smoke of the trains rises to the sky,
a forest of syllables whose leaves reach all the way
to autumn and death; The Beast breathes deep
as its cyclopean eye looks down the line,
honing the parallel guillotine blades that slice
the neck of fate.
I come back to the photograph: at the top, from left to right,
Orlando, Rafael?, Nicolás wearing horns, and Carlos,
Hondurans all four. Below, from right hand to left,
Ervin the Iguana putting horns on my brother Aldo,
and I appear just under Nicolás’s beard,
holding my brother Canek, who raises crossed arms
to his chest like a departed angel.
The Silba pool and the other mirrors of water
in that town are gone now, like the backwaters
and the fish of the Deserted River. Some years back,
Hurricane Stan carried them away, just as the train
carried off all the migrants, on an afternoon of headless sun,
years before anyone called it The Beast.
But the rivers still follow their path to the sea,
across estuaries and meanders where swollen
bodies rest, the partial trunks of corpses,
stray cattle, migrants, undocumented sons
of countries without birds who travel with their dreams
in cages, and are thrown into common graves,
and die nameless, without an echo,
like another shovelful of earth sealing their fate,
silencing the word love,
which none will be able to write again
or speak with their lips.
BALAM RODRIGO is an ex–soccer player and studied biology. He is the author of over fifty books of poetry and essays. In the last decade, his poetic work has focused on the defence of the human rights of migrants and victims of forced disappearance.
DAN BELLM has published five books of poems, including Counting, Deep Well, and Practice. Recent translations from Spanish and French include Central American Book of the Dead by Balam Rodrigo, Speaking in Song by Pura López Colomé, and The Song of the Dead by Pierre Reverdy. He lives in Berkeley, California.
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