The Book of Unknown Americans(60)

Ynez was not as happy about it. She supported me, but she was worried. We never had children. We knew from the outset and in a terribly selfish way that our interest lay only in each other. So when she was home during my deployments, she was there alone, and the weight of the solitude depressed her, I think, and gave her wide-open plains upon which her mind would wander, allowing her too much time and space to think about what might be happening to me as well as whether and when I would return.

When I came back from Vietnam, she wept at my feet. I saw clearly the toll it had taken on her. But I wasn’t ready to leave the navy. I had witnessed the sort of atrocities during the war that threaten to steal a man’s soul. I saw that humans are no better than any animal or brute, and in many cases might be infinitely worse. But often in the span of the same day, I would be restored, too, by the courage of men. And I had come to understand my father’s perspective about the gratification of feeling useful, of being in the world under the most demanding circumstances, and learning that I could not only survive but thrive, and that my body, the physical presence of me, could have import.

So eight years later, I left again, but this time while I was away, I wrote Ynez letters. If she heard from me with enough regularity, I thought, it would ease her worry. Over the years, over the subsequent deployments, I sent her hundreds of letters. I wrote two or three a day sometimes. They began as a way to save her, but they saved me also. They helped me to make sense of the things I saw, and from that, I began to make sense of the world and my place within it.

I read a lot of poetry in those days. I took small chapbooks overseas with me, chapbooks bound by staples with covers that were little more than construction paper. I copied the poems down sometimes and included them in my letters. Ynez used to tell me I should write my own poetry, but just because you have the requisite admiration and even ambition to do something doesn’t mean you’re up to the task of performing it yourself, which was the case for me. I am good at being a reader of poetry, but not at much beyond that.

My eyes have turned against me now, so I am resigned to listening to books on CD. Sometimes Ynez reads poetry aloud to me. I no longer have any of those chapbooks that used to keep me company in so many far-flung places. I usually burned them after I finished them, just to lighten my load. But Ynez borrows books from the library and we sit on the couch and she covers me with an afghan and draws her slender feet up onto the cushions and I close my eyes while she reads.

There’s an American poet named Marvin Bell who emerged in the late sixties, during the height of the Vietnam War. He has a beautiful poem called “Poem After Carlos Drummond de Andrade,” which is a reference to the great Brazilian poet. I love the part that goes:

And it’s life, just life, that makes you breathe deeply, in the air that is filled with wood smoke and the dust of the factory, because you hurried, and now your lungs heave and fall with the nervous excitement of a leaf in spring breezes, though it is winter and you are swallowing the dirt of the town.



And then this portion at the end, which means everything to me:

Life got its tentacles around you, its hooks into your heart, and suddenly you come awake as if for the first time, and you are standing in a part of the town where the air is sweet—your face flushed, your chest thumping, your stomach a planet, your heart a planet, your every organ a separate planet, all of it of a piece though the pieces turn separately, O silent indications of the inevitable, as among the natural restraints of winter and good sense, life blows you apart in her arms.





Alma


After we told her that she couldn’t see Mayor anymore, Maribel grew moody and sullen. I had witnessed a hint of the same thing ever since Mayor had been grounded, but now it was worse. She hardly spoke. She nodded or shook her head. She held out her hand to indicate that she wanted something. She sat on the ledge at the front window and stared across the parking lot with her chin planted on her knees.

Once, nearly two years ago, Maribel had insisted on painting her fingernails black. She and her friend Abelina hid away in her room and painted each other’s nails, and when Maribel came to the dinner table that night, we saw it.

“What did you do to your hands?” Arturo asked.

“I painted my nails,” Maribel said, grinning and holding her fingers out like a fan.

“Is it permanent?” Arturo asked.

“It’s just nail polish, Papi.”

Arturo looked at me as if to ask, Is this something we should be worried about?

I had learned by then that Maribel liked to think of herself as a rebel. And yet she managed only small insurrections. She stayed out too late with her friends. She walked through the middle of the boys’ soccer games in the street, impervious to their shouts for her to get out of the way. She painted her fingernails black. And she did it all playfully, good-naturedly, in a way that made it impossible to be angry at her.

At the dinner table, she wiggled her fingers in the air and said, “I think it looks cool.”

Arturo glanced at me again. This time, Maribel saw him.

“What?” she said. “It’s okay to be different.”

“Of course it is,” I said.

With a depth of feeling that was lost on her, Arturo said, “We would love you no matter what. Because you’re ours.”

Maribel tucked a bite of her cuernillo relleno inside her cheek until it bulged. She chewed loudly, smacking her tongue against the roof of her mouth. “Would you love me if I ate like this all the time?” she asked.