Blue, Without Sorrow
Lover, where are you? Fish. Flesh. Flame. I am waiting for you.
Do you remember, Roderigo, the game we played? On the floor of Mama’s closet, we chanted patience patience patience. We sat in silence, waiting, the softness of Mama’s dresses against our faces, the acrid, animal scent of her shoes in the air. Light seeped under the closet door. You did not see it, Roderigo, but it surrounded you all the same.
You burst from the closet first and I followed, having won. I chased you to the barn, running circles around the stored peanuts, Daddy’s new crop. We rolled over the burlap bags stamped, MEXICO: CACAHUETES, up and up the piles of nuts till we reached the summit and sank into the heap.
When we washed our hands before dinner, our fingers met in the gush of pump water and I remembered the closet, the shoes, dim and specklike, pushed back by the feel of my body rolling over peanuts, shucking the red-brown skins, the splinter and crunch interrupted by Mama’s call to food.
Come for me, collect me, why do you torment me?
I was ten years old the day Roderigo and I snuck away from Daddy to throw stones in the pond. We squatted on our haunches, picking out pebbles and arcing them into the water. A large red, green, and gold fish, as big as our goat, leaped out of the pond, water fanning around it like wings. The fish was not really coming toward us both. Roderigo’s sloped nose descended in fear; he knew it only wanted me, only want me, no one else. You. You touched me on the chin with your red flopping mouth then recoiled, backward, entering the pond tail-first. No splash, no ripple, as if you had never existed.
At home, Roderigo told Daddy about the fish, about You. The feeling of your wet mouth on my chin, the curve of your glorious, book-sized scales, like a rush of cold water over me. I felt Daddy turn to question me, but I could not see, speak, move. He and Roderigo, I felt them faintly, but the wind of you blowing around me was strong. They carried me to a bed where I lay flattened by the weight of you: rapt. I remained that way for three months. Later, Roderigo told me that Daddy built my coffin in the barn among the peanuts. By the pond, near the gopher holes, he and the boys dug my grave and called the Padre in for Last Rites. I remember the idea of death beating around me, winged, and then I died, and I do not remember anything but the cracking and the crunching, the sound of a thousand peanuts, shelled. Roderigo said they wept over my small body when they heard my breathing stop. They wept for no one knows how long and then I opened my eyes and said, “It is true, the only way to see Him is to die.” Then I began to scream, and the sound of my screams made the pigs scream in sympathy, it sounded so much like the slaughter of one of their brothers. When Daddy asked me what was the matter, I called out words: “Sick. Home. Homesick.” I do not remember anything but the crunching and the cracking.
After that day, my family claimed there was no difference between my sounds of death and happiness. If I laughed, the pigs formed a circle, tails in, snouts out. My family feared the strength of my resolve and bragged to the Padre that I had willed myself dead. Daddy spent less time in the fields and more time praying.
The story reached Daddy by way of a newspaper that covered his lap as he sat in the barn, chickens pecking at his brown shoelaces. He read well enough to decipher the headline: Virgin Mary Miracle. “Teresa,” he called. Roderigo and I were cleaning the stable; I leaned my rake against the door. “Teresa,” he called again, “Come and practice your reading.”
As I climbed onto his lap, he lifted the newspaper. Pointing under the headline, he said, “Start here,” then spread the paper over me, a blanket. I liked the weight of it, and I read the first paragraph aloud: During a mass at St. George’s Church in Madaba, Jordan, an icon of the Virgin Mary suddenly grew a third, blue hand.
“Stop there,” Daddy said “I’m thinking.”
He folded the paper; my knees were blackened from the print. “Back to the stable,” he said, and I went.
That night, he and the Padre opened Mama’s box of teaching supplies. They took out her globe and spun it-oceans scrolled by, Mexico, yellow and pink—until they found the tiny country of Jordan. Through a series of calculations performed with an almanac and the feather of our one black chicken, they determined that the appearance of the blue hand coincided with the moment of my death. They promised me to God in a pact that took place over warm bottles of beer. I, Teresa, was the child who would join the church. I was not consulted.
It was the tenth child, born dead, who killed our mother. I knew then I would not marry; she had been beautiful; we made her old, brittle. Digging for peanuts hardened my hands, digging in the wizened ground. I was happy with only the gophers for company.
I do not remember when I changed, but I am sure you do, Roderigo. I wore Mama’s printed dresses, carried with her when she came to Mexico from New Orleans as a young teacher. I spent hours examining myself in her gilt mirror, smoothing makeup over my face. I felt I should be beautiful and wore the dresses and cosmetics to dig in the peanut fields; I asked Him to come see me. Tirelessly, I searched for him, throwing sand and clay, layers of the earth’s lining behind me. My baskets overflowed with peanuts but still I could not find him. How he mocked me, left me, alone on the ground, surrounded by peanuts.
When I had used the last of Mama’s makeup I could bear my loneliness and shame no longer. He would not come, no matter how I begged or groveled, no matter how beautiful I made myself. I felt he loved another; I felt his love faithless, and I ate a basket’s worth of peanuts, ripping up the earth, crushing clods of dirt between my fingers and stuffing the nuts, some with shells, some skinless, into my mouth. With my hard hands, I dug a hole and stuck my head into it, smelling for peanuts, for Him, but still he did not save me from my degradation, Mama’s dress blowing up to my shoulders, dirt filling my mouth. He would not come to me. I felt him nowhere.
I forgot him and found Manuel. I went back to escuela and found Manuel, an ugly, crooked boy, eight years my senior and still in school. One day he followed me home and told a story he thought would shock me, though it did not.
He said when he was born, his sister, Rosa, refused to look at him. His parents thought it was jealousy. After weeks of ignoring Manuel, Rosa finally said she would talk to the baby, but only if she could see him alone. The parents were reluctant—perhaps she wanted to harm her brother? They had heard of such things happening with cats. But they lay the baby on their bed and left the room. When Rosa shut the door, they leaned against the outside of it and listened. They heard her feet smacking against the floor, and her slight weight forcing a sigh from the bed as she sat. They heard baby Manuel squeak, and then they heard nothing and became afraid. Just as they were about to open the door, they heard Rosa say, soft and pleading, “Tell me about God; I am forgetting.”
When we graduated, Manuel took me to the city on the back of his motorbike. The people exhausted me, the great ache drifting over them. They longed for something larger than themselves; I recognized the familiar scent.
Manuel and I stayed in the city for six months living in a small room across from the Palacio Nacional, rented to us by a muscular woman who wound bright, American stockings around her head. I sold postcards to tourists and believed in Manuel with a fervent devotion. But he, too, left me and refused to come when I called, busy with the landlady and the Mexican stockings on her legs. He said I made him feel false because he knew he did not deserve my ardor.
I took his motorbike. I found a dead dove on the steps of St. Francis, severed its head, and left it on the landlady’s doormat. With my peanut-hardened hands, I wove a crown of thorns and tucked it under the sheets of Manuel’s and my bed to prick their ugly feet when they slipped in together. Then I drove home to my family and drowned the motorbike in the pond. Purple thistles covered the mound of my old grave. The gopher holes were filled with rows of corn. Your sloped nose, Roderigo, no longer afraid, only sad. All but one of our brothers gone to America. Daddy was dead. And Rodergio, with bent back, worked to save our land and business. I, too, decided to go to America. Roderigo approved once our brothers returned, disgusted, saying it was a country for women.
I contacted my mother’s family in Arizona; I would live with them and go to college. Before leaving, I knelt at Daddy’s grave and vowed to honor his promise to God. A scrub jay watched me from the pepper tree. I said that one day I would join the church. As I said the words, I did not mean them, for in those days I had no love for God, but I thought it was what Daddy wanted to hear.
Then, you came. Uncalled, you. A reunion.
In my uncle’s home, on Christmas Eve, I dreamed of a man with blue skin, the color of toothpaste, wearing a golden crown stabbed with peacock feathers. He took me from my bed and led me to the bathroom. He stopped up the sink and placed my hands under the running faucet. Red, green, and gold fish, small and bright as pennies, swam in the stream. When the water lapped the edges of the sink, the man took my face in his hands—his palms smelled of peanuts, his palms the soft blue of morning, his knuckles, navy and smooth. His eyes glittered like sequins, tender scales. When he pressed his mouth against my chin, I did not feel his lips, burning at the same temperature as my own.
I awakened in the bathroom, my hands pressed flat on the bottom of the dry sink, a ring shining red, gold, and green on my fourth finger. After the dream, for almost a year, I was sick every morning. I suffered from not seeing Him. Sometimes, if I slept in the afternoon, I dreamt of the blue man, shirtless and eating a fish. He tipped back his head, the inside of his mouth, turquoise, his tongue, bright red. Tail-first, the fish disappeared down his lapis throat. I knew then I would fulfill Daddy’s promise.
You courted me and I will have no other. You are mine, all mine. I am blue enough.
During college, I looked after the daughter of one of my professor’s. All the money I earned was sent home to Roderigo. Our family land was cracking from drought, the peanuts shriveling in their hourglass coffins.
The professor and her husband worked late Monday through Wednesday. I read to their little girl and taught her to count to one hundred in Spanish. With our eyes closed, we played hide-and-seek on the open desert. Noventa y ocho, noventa y nueve, cien. The house was filled with books: Woman the Hunter, The Golden Ass, The Demon King and the Virgin. They were not kept on bookshelves but piled functionally, serving as tables, coat racks, hassocks. After I tucked the girl in to sleep, I had time for myself.
One Tuesday, I settled on the couch with an orange book. A book for children, consoling to me. It smelled of aching cities and was entitled: Bride of God. In disbelief, I read:
There was a woman named Mira and her faith was with God. Krishna, he is blue, he is God, he dances and wears peacock feathers in his crown.
I took out the sandwich my uncle had made for my dinner and reread the words:
peacock feathers in his crown.
As I unwrapped the sandwich, I saw a wrinkled face in the channels of the tinfoil, unrecognizable except for the color, blue. I understood how He hears us—not with the noise of words, but with the noise of longing. I read on:
Mira was a Rajput princess. As a child, she asked her mother, who will I marry? Her mother gave her a statue of Krishna, playing his flute. She said, “This is your husband.” Mira washed her Lord’s feet every night and kissed his neck when the sun rose.
When she turned sixteen, her father told her she was to marry to a Rajput prince. In her heart, Mira grieved; in her heart, she was already wed. But she married the prince, and they were happy together.
The prince’s family worshipped the goddess Durga. They felt it inauspicious of Mira to praise Krishna. In an effort to be rid of the girl, they told the prince she was unfaithful. They said if he followed Mira, he would catch her with her lover.
The prince followed her from the palace to a small temple. He heard her voice: “When can we be together, why do you leave me alone to weep without your sweet face, I can think of nothing but you.”
Drawing his sword, the prince entered the temple. There sat Mira holding her beloved statue of Krishna, feathers from his crown strewn wildly about her. The prince laughed and took her home, she clutching her idol, the prince clutching her hand. He told his sister, “My wife is pure. She is mad, but pure.”
Then the prince died. Mira mourned him, and turned with more fervor to Krishna. Her mother- and sister-in-law could not bear the insult. Who was this girl who refused to burn herself on her husband’s funeral pyre, who neglected their goddess, who sang and fawned over the foolish, blue Krishna?
They called on the brother to poison Mira. But he was afraid of her, so he sent a servant to her room with a glass of mango juice. The juice was so filled with poison, the smell of it killed the cook who made it. Mira held the glass to her lips and drank. In her mouth, the poison turned to nectar.
The next day, when Mira went to the temple, her brotherin-law replaced her mattress with a board of poison-tipped nails. When Mira returned from worship, she lay down to think of her Lord. The smell of roses filled the room. The nails had turned to petals and Mira slept, dreaming of her Lord.
Finally, the brother, sister, and mother expelled Mira from the household. They told her she must kill herself or be disgraced. She ran to the river, cradling the statue of Krishna in her arms, and jumped in.
She awoke on dry land, warm, living, blue arms around her waist, blue lips in her hair, the smell of roses, and her Lord, her Lord. He picked her up and set her on her feet, and Mira danced across the land singing of her Lord and their Love.
She died, an old woman. Krishna himsel entered her room, playing his flute. He picked up the lifeless Mira and carried her away in his blue arms.
Again, I am dying. In a hospital bed in Arizona. I remember the shadow of my wimple, so much like a black wing. I remember sitting down, folding my hands in my lap. I closed my eyes; I waited.
There is the voice of Roderigo, my brother, come from Mexico to see me. I hear a woman say, “Take her things: a robe, a pair of black shoes, a rosary, a wimple, a page with ripped corners, torn from a book about a man named Heathcliff.”
Roderigo says, “I remember her and Mama reading that. They hid it from Daddy (he did not approve of romances). She is younger than all of us boys, but always, she controlled us, especially after Mama died when Teresa was eight and I, eleven. You know, she did this to most of her books, tore bits from the pages she liked, and swallowed them. To be closer to the words, she said.”
I am dying, and am not afraid, but impatient. The woman says, “Only thirty-one, such a tragedy.” Roderigo says, “Again, she has done it again; it is what she wants.”
How well he knows me.
Through the hospital blind a shroud of blue desert night crunches and cracks over my head. Hands, like fish, swim up my body. Patience, patience, Roderigo. I cannot wait any longer.
