the neatly bound volume of trivia and revelations you thought was your history. He was right to leave his notebook with me. It has not betrayed his identity. But it is betraying mine, handing it over to be tried before a court in which I am the jury and judge.
I said earlier that I have forgiven myself; it is not true. I look back and see a woman who was naive and sad, who looked to a refugee to save her from fear—the kind of fear that destroys, cell by cell, because it rampages undetected, unnamed. No, I haven’t forgiven myself for being disappeared from myself any more than I have forgiven him. You see, there’s more to the story than I have let on, more than I ever intended to let on. All these years I have told myself that he returned to El Salvador, that the authorities found him andkilled him; this was what happened to most Salvadorans who got deported. But the truth is, I don’t know what happened to him.
And all these years I have avoided calling José Luis by his true name, desaparecido, disappeared one. My altar should have a photograph of him, the date of his birth, and a question mark for the date of his death inscribed below his face. But I’m a coward. I couldn’t bring myself to draw a question mark much less live with it day in and day out. But God was wiser. He carved that question mark into my heart and kept watch over it until I could wake up and cry out. José Luis disappeared. He defied the ordinary scheme of things in which one is either dead or alive and I cannot forgive him for this. And I cannot forgive myself for loving him now, twenty years too late, in ways I could not love him when I looked to him to swim out in the dark waters of my life and save me.
I have not laid hands on this story for six days, have not gotten near the paper. It has taken methis long to move beyond the resentment I feel at having told you the part of the story I had intended to keep to myself. Resentment, because in telling you—whoever you are—I opened the wound. I told myself the part of the story I had hoped to keep from myself, the disappeared part. But the unspoken words were turning into hooks, they were caught in my throat. Once a story is begun the whole thing must be told or it kills. If the teller does not let it out, the tale will seize her, and she will live it over and over without end, all the while believing she is doing something new. The Great Circle will come to represent not life but stagnation, repetition; she will die on a catherine wheel of her own making.
Things began to happen. There were times he didn’t call, times he didn’t say I love you, nonevents that hurt in little ways, like paper cuts, but that added up. It could be these nonevents had happened all along, the normal ups and downs of relationships. But at a certain point, I began to perceive that he was pulling away from me andthinking about other things. And fear ate at my heart like battery acid. But it’s very likely that I only imagined him pulling away, imagined the whole thing. You see, the fear I am best at is always based upon a myth. It could be that the whole time José Luis was growing closer to me. He used to clip flowers from Soledad’s garden and give them to me, stems wrapped in foil, one of hundreds of small ways he showed he cared. But all these acts took place against a backdrop of flight—the assumption that to survive one sometimes must flee all that is loved. This is what terrified me. His body was branded with the equation,
love equals flight
.
Sometimes we made love in my Old Town house, the mud house that the sun baked and cracked. The thick sheets of plastic I taped over my windows for winter insulation were down and the lace tablecloth I had pinned to a curtain rod could not thwart the gaze of tourists who occasionally mistook my house for a shop. So before we made love, I took a length of goldencloth that was seared with red Farsi characters and tacked it to the wood frame above the window. I
I said earlier that I have forgiven myself; it is not true. I look back and see a woman who was naive and sad, who looked to a refugee to save her from fear—the kind of fear that destroys, cell by cell, because it rampages undetected, unnamed. No, I haven’t forgiven myself for being disappeared from myself any more than I have forgiven him. You see, there’s more to the story than I have let on, more than I ever intended to let on. All these years I have told myself that he returned to El Salvador, that the authorities found him andkilled him; this was what happened to most Salvadorans who got deported. But the truth is, I don’t know what happened to him.
And all these years I have avoided calling José Luis by his true name, desaparecido, disappeared one. My altar should have a photograph of him, the date of his birth, and a question mark for the date of his death inscribed below his face. But I’m a coward. I couldn’t bring myself to draw a question mark much less live with it day in and day out. But God was wiser. He carved that question mark into my heart and kept watch over it until I could wake up and cry out. José Luis disappeared. He defied the ordinary scheme of things in which one is either dead or alive and I cannot forgive him for this. And I cannot forgive myself for loving him now, twenty years too late, in ways I could not love him when I looked to him to swim out in the dark waters of my life and save me.
I have not laid hands on this story for six days, have not gotten near the paper. It has taken methis long to move beyond the resentment I feel at having told you the part of the story I had intended to keep to myself. Resentment, because in telling you—whoever you are—I opened the wound. I told myself the part of the story I had hoped to keep from myself, the disappeared part. But the unspoken words were turning into hooks, they were caught in my throat. Once a story is begun the whole thing must be told or it kills. If the teller does not let it out, the tale will seize her, and she will live it over and over without end, all the while believing she is doing something new. The Great Circle will come to represent not life but stagnation, repetition; she will die on a catherine wheel of her own making.
Things began to happen. There were times he didn’t call, times he didn’t say I love you, nonevents that hurt in little ways, like paper cuts, but that added up. It could be these nonevents had happened all along, the normal ups and downs of relationships. But at a certain point, I began to perceive that he was pulling away from me andthinking about other things. And fear ate at my heart like battery acid. But it’s very likely that I only imagined him pulling away, imagined the whole thing. You see, the fear I am best at is always based upon a myth. It could be that the whole time José Luis was growing closer to me. He used to clip flowers from Soledad’s garden and give them to me, stems wrapped in foil, one of hundreds of small ways he showed he cared. But all these acts took place against a backdrop of flight—the assumption that to survive one sometimes must flee all that is loved. This is what terrified me. His body was branded with the equation,
love equals flight
.
Sometimes we made love in my Old Town house, the mud house that the sun baked and cracked. The thick sheets of plastic I taped over my windows for winter insulation were down and the lace tablecloth I had pinned to a curtain rod could not thwart the gaze of tourists who occasionally mistook my house for a shop. So before we made love, I took a length of goldencloth that was seared with red Farsi characters and tacked it to the wood frame above the window. I
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