FOREWORD: THE STORY IS THE THING
God bless her, Lucia was a rebel and a remarkable craftswoman, and in her day she danced. I wish I could tell all the tales, like when she picked up Smokey Robinson on Central Avenue in Albuquerque, smoking a joint, as they headed to his gig at the Tiki-Kai Lounge. She got home late, a little Chanel left under the scent of sweat and smoke. We went to a sacred dance at Santo Domingo Pueblo in New Mexico on the invite of a minor elder. When a dancer fell, Lucia thought it was her fault. Unfortunately, so did the entire pueblo, us being the only outsiders. For years this was our totem for bad luck. Our whole family learned how to dance on beaches, through museums, into restaurants and clubs as if we owned the places, through detoxes and jails and award ceremonies, with junkies, pimps and princes and innocents. The thing is, if I were to tell Lucia’s story, even from my perspective (objective or not), it would be hailed as magical realism. There is no way anyone would believe this shit.
My first memory is of Lucia’s voice, reading to my brother Jeff and me. It didn’t matter what the story was because each night held a tale in her soft singsong blend of Texas and Santiago, Chile. Songs like “Red River Valley.” Cultured, but folksy—thankfully lacking her mother’s El Paso twang. I am perhaps the last person to have talked to her, and she again read to me. I don’t remember what (a book review, a bit from the hundreds of manuscripts people asked her to read, a postcard?), just her clear, loving voice, swirls of incense, wisps of sunset, both of us sitting in silence afterward staring at her bookcase. Just knowing the power and beauty of the words on those shelves. Something to savor and ponder.
Along with humor and writing, I inherited her bad back, and we would groan and laugh in unison or harmony as we reached for more Cambozola, a cracker or grape. Griping about medications and side effects. We laughed about the first precept of Buddhism: life is suffering. And the Mexican attitude that life is cheap, but it sure can be fun.
As a young mother she strolled us through the streets of New York: to museums, to meet other writers, to see a letterpress in action and painters at work, to hear jazz. And then we were suddenly in Acapulco, then Albuquerque. First stops on a life that averaged about nine months in any abode. Yet home was always her.
Living in Mexico scared her witless. Scorpions, intestinal worms, falling coconuts, corrupt police, and eager dope dealers; but as we reminisced the day before her birthday, we had somehow survived. She outlived three husbands and God knows how many lovers; doctors had told her at fourteen that she would never have children and wouldn’t live past thirty! She bore four sons, of which I’m the oldest and most trouble, and we were all hell to raise. But she did it. And well.
Much has been made of her alcoholism and she had to struggle against the shame it brought her, but in the end she lived nearly twenty years sober, producing her best work and inspiring a chunk of the new generation with her teaching. The latter no surprise, as she had taught off and on since she was twenty. There were tough times, dangerous even. Ma would wonder aloud why no one came and took us kids away when it was really bad for her. I dunno, we came out okay. We all would have withered in suburbia; we were the Berlin Bunch.
Much of our experience is unbelievable. The stories she could have told. Like the time she went skinny dipping in Oaxaca on mushrooms with a painter friend. They freaked out when they emerged from the water, green head-to-toe from copper in the stream. I can only imagine how that looked with her pink rebozo!
I won’t even try to describe the junkie recovery colony outside Albuquerque (see her story “Strays”), but imagine Buñuel and Tarantino doing a movie inside a movie involving sixty hardcore ex-cons, Angie Dickinson, Leslie Nielsen, a dozen sci-fi zombies, and the aforementioned Berlin Bunch.
My favorite memory is of a sunset in Yelapa glinting off Buddy Berlin’s saxophone, swirls of bebop and wood smoke as Ma cooked dinner on a comal, her face radiant in the coral light, flamingos fishing, legs akimbo, in the lagoon outside, the sound of surf and pinging frogs, our feet crunching on the coarse sand floor. Doing our homework by lamplight and scratchy Billie Holiday.
Ma wrote true stories; not necessarily autobiographical, but close enough for horseshoes. Our family stories and memories have been slowly reshaped, embellished, and edited to the extent that I’m not sure what really happened all the time. Lucia said this didn’t matter: the story is the thing.
Mark Berlin, Lucia’s first son, was a writer, a chef, an artist, a free spirit, a lover of animals and all things garlic. He passed away in 2005.