Blue Manifesto Letter from the Editor
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Not Full Enough
Henri Bergson on Possibility and Creation
Gray Cloud on San Jacinto Plaza
Dagoberto Gilb
It wasn’t a Sunday. We didn’t always go to Mass, but mom told me we were good Catholics, and I took her word for it especially on the good part. All three of us kids were baptized at Guadalupe Church on Alabama. Mom and Dad did get married in a church—b&w photographic evidence, my dad in a dark suit and my mom, all pretty, in a white dress with a veil—but I never wondered or asked where or who was there. I say that day in '77 or '78 was a Saturday. My parents said it might have been a weekday because sometimes my dad went on unemployment back then. It was a happy day though, because I remember well how my sisters were. And me, to me, I’m always me, but I was not unhappy for sure. We were at the edge of San Jacinto Plaza. At the northwest corner to be exact. That I remember exactly. San Jacinto was where most of the downtown city buses came and went. I especially loved them when I was younger. I also liked the plaza fountain because they said there used to be alligators in it and there was a chance they were going to put them back in there again. Pretty thrilling past and future to me. Though I don’t remember how we got there or how we got home, it wasn’t by bus. None of us has any memory of why we were there right then or of any practical thing we did right after, like going home. That day, that Saturday or whatever, began what was like another time frame.
The gray cloud came silently. Or it sucked all sound into its quiet, or made it detour. Turn off. Not a bird chirp, a tire squeal, a bus engine blast, a baby whimper, a dog yap, not a footstep. It wasn’t hotter or colder. It didn’t seem to be driven by any wind. It came toward us from where it could be Texas or Mexico or New Mexico, from that desert. The closer it got, the more it seemed we were moving toward it. From a distance, while it approached, it looked like a huge ball. But it was just gray air or gas or dust, a cloud, a cloud that blocked seeing anything in it or beyond it. Once we were all caught inside it, I felt like I had no breath. Or it was just that I was holding my breath. I couldn’t see my mom or dad or sisters or anyone. I still think dad must have said no se muevan but I could have imagined that or even heard someone else say it. But I didn’t move, as the voice I heard, or didn’t really, warned me. I don’t know how long this lasted. It couldn’t have been many minutes. It had to be a lot of seconds because I couldn’t hold my breath long enough. I remember trying not to breathe deep when I had to. And then it was over, like a light switch turned on. An off-on blink. We were at the northwest corner of the San Jacinto Plaza, exactly. Where the buses never stopped, but had. There was color again. Red and blue, yellow and green. Startling, like they’d been cleaned. My sisters were still in their pink dresses holding mom. I cannot remember if they were sobbing or not. I think that’s something that matters, but the truth is I just don’t remember.
My dad, later, pronounced that it was from Asarco, the copper smelter that was in the direction of where the gray cloud came from, to the plaza and us. To me, Asarco was a giant red pipe stuck in the ground in the desert. My dad was told there was an article in the newspaper. I didn’t know then that he didn’t read. I mean I never saw him read anything ever, and I never thought to ask if he didn’t or couldn’t. Though my mom liked celebrity gossip magazines in English and Spanish, we didn’t get the morning or afternoon paper. Some more days later my tía gave my mom a section of a paper that had a small box about the gray cloud that passed through the center of the city. I was excited to see it because it was something from my life that made it into a newspaper. There wasn’t much. A very small box that could fit in a wallet, in one of the folded sides. It said nobody knew what it was, and there were no reports of harm done, and Asarco said it wasn’t anything caused by them.
It didn’t matter what the newspaper said, it was a big deal in our house. We talked about it a lot. What it was like coming. What it was like inside it. What it was like after. What damage it could or might do was in our rooms a long while. Any cough or upset stomach could be because of it. Bad sleep. A bad poop. My pops finally didn’t like my mom bringing it up all the time after a while, but he couldn’t stop her. Not that he tried very hard. He didn’t. More like, ya con eso, but not loud, not demanding. No exclamation marks. He didn’t say anything, to me or us or out loud anyway, but I saw him listening whenever it came up, and I heard her get softer, shorter about it. He got that from her, she went on less for him. Me, I felt pretty much the same about it, bad or nothing but done, ya. It happened, I’m here, whatever. My sisters seemed the most affected. They’d get to babbling. Like, Mami, do you think that it might…anything…might make our hair gray like buelita’s but too early, like before we get to middle school? That happened to a boy at Crockett, where I was going, like them. The boy had nothing to do with the gray cloud. Except his hair change was some months after it, and so maybe. The cana grew on a side of his head. Or like, was the reason why the zancudos didn’t bite them, like they did all over to their best friend Julie next door, was that because of…the cloud? It went like this in our house for many, many months. Probably because of my mom. She dwelled on it the most. I think, or it seemed like it. Because even me, who I’d say didn’t, kind of did. Maybe because of my mom, but I can’t say for sure. It wasn’t talked about the same way after a while. But it was there without words, without having to bring it up. It was always at the front of my mom’s mind. We each heard it in her, saw it in moments that were supposed to be normal and usual and would have been if she wasn’t…I don’t know…un poco loca? We worried.
One day in the bathroom I came out of the shower. I was beginning to dry myself off. Outside the window was what I always saw: a blue sky over everything, so close it shouldn’t be called sky above, while below, where on the TV shows all of us in El Paso watched, was supposed to be green lawn, shady trees, bushy hedges, delicate flowers, was the dry brown dirt where we lived. The neighbors across the street—that was asphalt like any TV street—lived just like us except, here and there, they might have patches of grass barely growing or dying out, waiting on desert rain. My mom kept our yard free of stray grass and weeds. We had some cactuses and sage a few feet from our house in the front and visible side that didn’t take any watering usually. Our only hose was in the backyard, where an almond tree still dropped nuts, grass beneath its shade and sharing its water. But this morning my mom, a bucket of water beside her, was soaking a patch in the center of our bare front yard. She took a shovel and began digging a widening hole. I thought it had to be a grave, a burial site for a dog or a cat, both which often found meals or water near our back door, left by my mom. But the middle of the front yard? Instead it was for a strange looking plant—the leaves thick, dull, oval-shaped and long—that she dragged down the front steps. Big, as plants go, it was not a baby tree. Still, not what went in a center of a yard that was all dirt—or even a grass one. The dusty earth, wet now, did look a richer brown. Like me at the bathroom window, my dad silently watched her from the side of his truck—he was changing the oil. Like me, I could tell he thought it was a little off too. I was there at the window so long I dried without a towel. When my pops and I were in the living room, and my mom too, he let me know to be careful about what I might say. What she told us was that it was called a flor del cielo. A señora at the YWCA, where they had a bake sale once a month, gave it to her. It was very healthy, she claimed, for all of us, for our home.
One night, some more months later, even a year, at maybe 3 a.m, those hours for sleep, I’d been having a long dream I couldn’t shake. I was with some people I didn’t recognize, but who I kept thinking I did. And I was supposed to drive. I didn’t drive when I wasn’t dreaming, even if I pretended to in my dad’s truck. I was scared of getting in trouble and maybe dying in a bad wreck or killing someone else. So I forced myself awake. I must have made a noise. My mom had come. While I was dreaming she was there. She wanted to know if I was okay. She was carrying a glass of water. I was thirsty and it really tasted especially good. Of course I was okay, I assured her. It was a dumb dream. I didn’t like the dream. It had nothing to do with that gray cloud, which to her…and I remember saying to her, or only to myself, Mom, it wasn’t the gray cloud, but she wouldn’t have believed me, but she wouldn’t have said she didn’t believe me. I was happy she was there, happy for the water, but as good as all that was…the gray cloud happened, and it lived with us. I woke up happy I had my mom. I had some friends who didn’t, or some who didn’t really.
Hard for me to believe too, it—that gray cloud—was all the time really. Years and years. I mean, since that day, holy or unholy, both or neither, never ending. A little this, and not so small that.
Lily and Rosy, always goofy little girls, grew bigger and cuter screaming and laughing too loud about whatever—normal—but enough was all sort of off, too. For instance, they collected rocks. Not really difficult to do in El Paso since they were as all around us as cactus—actually, there were a lot more rocks in the city. This interest might have been easily explained by my pops’ work as a stone mason. But that’s not where it came from, and they never talked to him about the rocks he worked with, and they never showed him the ones they collected either. There was no talk of them or the collection to anyone. That might have been because there was absolutely nothing unique or pretty or impressive about any one of them that any one of us, or anybody anywhere, could see. No one would have any comment to make about any one of them or about the whole of what became their collection. So we shut up. As in, at least it wasn’t a sick old dog that smelled. Or snakes. But there were no words that might sound positive or like wow, so cool. They weren’t even about being pretty. They would, in fact, even be called ugly rocks. The girls didn’t collect them for their size either. They ranged from small, a few smaller than a marble, and went up to various hand sizes, and a few almost big enough to be for a stone wall…though not an El Paso wall. The girls seemed to avoid those. The upper limit of size was entirely about what they could carry to their bedroom, and of course sizes increased as they got older and stronger. I offered to carry one once. Whoa, did I get an extreme no. Worse, it was like I disrupted their private play, or whatever you’d call it. For like a week I swore they avoided me. No, they never had dolls. I mean, of course a little stuffed rabbit, monkey, tiger, doggie. It’s true I didn’t know what girls were supposed to collect. I knew about boys, even if only a few friends. But ugly rocks? Not even boys. And the girls talked to them. Whispered between themselves and maybe to the rocks. No idea what or why. If they answered. I asked my mom and she told me to leave them alone. My dad, he was just tired, drinking a beer, falling asleep. I never asked him about his or their rocks from one day to the next.
My mom cared for her plant in the middle of the dirt front yard. She even added one more. It was kind of like an altar she’d made. She might take two buckets of water. The little circle of fertile soil in the dirt was itself a thing to stare at. In the beginning, the plants didn’t seem to be dying, but it didn’t seem like they were bursting with growth either. A little red popped out of the first one. A tiny tail of yellow. Mom would worry if she might miss a day tending to it, to them. She had to be home every day. In the winter and fall, it wasn’t about the water but the cold. She found blankets. She went to them daily, looked in at night, checked in the morning. I wouldn’t say always at the exact same hour, but it was close.
My dad was often too tired according to my mom. He told her he worked hard, that it was hard work every day even when it was an easy day. I knew that was true because every once in a while—every other year or so—I’d go out with him to a job. Younger I couldn’t do a thing really. Get string for lines. In my teens I tried the chisels and hammers. The big rocks were heavy to carry and move, but what bothered me even more was how my hands got like sandpaper, wet or dry. Too much for me! That dirt and mud he showered off, but tired and sore in his muscles was his explanation for drinking beer when he got home (and there at work too, I saw that). At least a six pack after work. More when the summer was scorching hot—months—and the crew tried to start at 5:30 a.m. He told Mom that his working was why we lived well in our nice home. My mom would just look at him like she could. She didn’t accept what he said. We were all in that cloud together. And she’d tell him he had to be more careful. I thought he was tired because he really was from his work. But she finally made him go to the doctor, and went with him. The doctor told them that my dad had to stop drinking so much, his liver wasn’t going to able to take it, and definitely he couldn’t take the amount of Tylenol and Excedrin he was. There were all these numbers as proof. He had to eat better, more vegetables. More numbers from graphs. My mom told us that the doctor didn’t think any of it was because of…she didn’t say because of what happened because my dad had told her, demanded, that she stop it, he couldn’t take it. It’d been years already that she hadn’t—at least to me and dad. Still, what she told me and my sisters right then, when dad had stepped away from the family table, is that a doctor didn’t know why he was the way he was. He couldn’t. He was a doctor, but he couldn’t see what he can’t recognize. Like what happened. How could he know? And dad started getting too tired right after, she insisted. I saw my dad standing not that far from us, out of the bathroom. He heard what she said. He listened with the same wonder we had, if she was right, if she was okay.
We stopped eating flour tortillas. My dad loved them, I loved them. Thick, fluffy, hot, soft ones were the best to me. But mom wouldn’t buy them now. She bought nixtamal, two tortilla presses, a comal for the stove, and we ate fresh corn tortillas. Like they did en México, she told us. My sisters, teenagers, loved this, and their loud giggling came back to the house—maybe the rock era ended right then too—and together they patted and pressed and cooked the tortillas for every dinner. And our dinner changed. We couldn’t eat carne, sirloin steak that Dad demanded every day! We ate more tacos con vegetables—chayote, pimientas of every color, calabaza, onions, cabbage. We still got chunks of pork and chicken and steak too, and we all thought our new food was good. My sisters especially. Now they were in another secret society that only our family—our grandma lived two houses away and ate with us some days too—knew about. Like they, and we, were living in a real México, not El Paso. Sometimes I swore they would dress like we were from an old Mexican movie, in long colored skirts and white cotton blouses. Not that my dad was all in, didn’t want more the way it was. On a few Sundays he’d invite work buddies over, mom’s sister and brother the priest and cousins, and he’d fire up the grill and it was all sirloin and burgers, charred corn and jalapeños. Or after a long Saturday job bring home pollos asados. He and I ate like mad dogs and my mom, she didn’t stop the meat, only the twelve packs of beer, not battling a six pack, some fun.
I thought things seemed pretty good for a while there, that the gray cloud was getting past us. But no. My mom wasn’t satisfied enough with her flor del cielo altar in the middle of the front yard. By then it had even become way loud—hot-rod red, yellow, and purple, light-bulb blue and Christmas green, its muscular leaves, stiff like cactus—while everything around was limp, dull fuzz, fading brown & white. A good Anglo teacher of one of the girls said it was twice the color and size of a bird of paradise, as brilliant and exotic as parrots—macaws he said—from Guatemalan jungles, where he’d been. It was as if things might be making sense, that somehow, she had seen ahead, she did something way different, changed us, battled against…whatever I mean, it made us better, or different in a good way.
Until she started telling my sisters and me that the trees in our neighborhood were struggling and she wasn’t sure yet what to do about it. It reminded me of my sisters’ rocks. She began walking across the street with buckets of water for the agaves that were in a neighbor’s yard. It was a house no one lived in for years by then. My dad told her that cactuses have always survived in the desert without her, but she said there just wasn’t enough rain, and that house was aching because its plants were dying of thirst. In the alley she found a dog dying with two broken legs, a cat barely moving that had lost an ear in a no win fight. She didn’t think anyone was caring what happened to anything. And there was more, but by then I wasn’t always there in the house. The years had passed. My sisters were still there. My sisters always, always felt the same, helped like mom’s thinking was their religion, something to be listened to carefully. I never went to Guadalupe Church now. My dad did on holidays, my sisters and mom every Sunday, even though mom might say that the Church didn’t know enough anymore.
She’d started saying things. Like, stepping out onto our porch to look straight ahead into the night sky that rose from the horizon. The moon above might be full or less, or not visible at all. I’d say it was nice, but it was just nighttime. She’d tell me and my sisters—dad was almost always asleep, the TV on though he never even watched a thing really—that we had to see it closer. Like a step closer? I’d ask. At the color, she said. I would tell her it was black. She, and of course my sisters, must have been two steps closer. They seemed to see more than color.
One night I really did love being at home, goofy and kooky as all my family was. I didn’t live there anymore, only came once every week or two, usually to at least say hi to Mom. I don’t know why this night was so perfect from the first moment. It was a delicious dinner. By this time I really appreciated the homemade and fresh tortillas the most, and our healthy food—almost vegetarian—seemed not only cool but way ahead of its time. Maybe my special happiness was because I had met a girl at UTEP. She was from Mexico. Real México, not like our house’s version. I hadn’t told anyone about her. I couldn’t believe I could keep her, that she would want me around. I didn’t even let myself hear my feelings. My dad had gone to sit by the TV for his pre-bedtime sleep. My sisters were washing the dishes. They’d told Mom to go be with me because I was going to have to leave. We sat on the front porch. It was dusk, the sun almost gone, a breeze that anyone anywhere would love to feel. My mom’s huge flor del cielo patch was in our view, rocks from the old collection now circling the altar, and we could see the lights twinkling over on the other side of the border. And then she told me to listen. I half smiled because I was trying to think of something teasy, smartass to say but couldn’t. There was no sound. No cars, no train or whistle, no motorcycles, not kids playing or cussing, no radio too loud, not a door opening or closing. There were a few small birds singing, and a grackle. The breeze in the desert dinged a chime in somebody’s yard. I’d never heard it before. We could barely hear the TV keeping my tired dad asleep. Then mom told me that silence was God’s voice. I laughed. I thought of dad’s snoring ignoring God. She said that when it was this quiet, we could hear and see God. I couldn’t think of anything sarcastic to say to that. It seemed impossible to talk at all. Then Lily came out the door, Rosy right behind. The dishes were all done.
Let me say that it wasn’t just them. I was not so…rockless after the gray cloud. Where I was bothered, when, why, how, well I will just say it was after the gray cloud that it seemed to begin. My dad got tired all the time, anytime. My sisters got secretive, cultish, wary of others. My mom…call it what you will. Me, what I did was live in my bedroom like an ascetic monk. Or a weirdo freak. I had a bed, a blanket, two pillows. The blankets and pillows were like my girlfriends. I loved them truly. I didn’t even like my mom messing with them for normal purposes. Although clean pillowcases and a clean fitted sheet were fine, good even. No bed spread, no top sheet. I made no bed ever. I had a desk, which once in a while had a book on it, but never more than two. From the library or a textbook. I didn’t do all my homework. I’d pick and choose. No chair. Work was while laying on my stomach on my bed. I had a lamp. I had nothing on the walls. Nothing. No Jesus or bizarro rocker or hot fantasy babe. I did listen to music. At the Fox pulga, way back when, my mom got me a boombox. It didn’t boom, and I didn’t have cassettes, I just kept it on KLAQ pretty low a lot. So only I could hear. It was on the table, which was also near the lamp and my bed. I’d eventually started playing sports and I made friends. They could never come over because I would never invite them. I was good at track (the mile) and baseball (second base, batted second) and basketball, though I never started even as a senior. Nobody heard about the gray cloud and its consequences from me.
I studied Spanish not because we lived in the México of my mom’s creation, but because I lived in El Paso, Texas. I liked learning to be good in Spanish. We’d grown up with it around and in my mom and dad, but it wasn’t like it was necessary to speak Spanish except around our buelita. It is only coincidental that I decided to make it my career when she died. And that had nothing to do with any gray cloud.
Lily didn’t want to go to college and she met a boy. It was true love. Everyone wanted the works. A way expensive white gown. He would wear a charro suit. It would be at Our Lady of Guadalupe Church. The priest would be my uncle, my mother’s brother, Guillermo Cordero. The reception would have 200 (his side mostly) invited, and my mom would do all the cooking except the dessert and a fabulous tiered wedding cake. An open bar but with lots of aguas frescas—my mom would make her horchata. Flowers were to be in excess, especially lilies and roses too. There were mariachis hired. There was a DJ hired. There was a limousine hired. A pro photographer and videographer. It was so exciting that my dad didn’t seem too tired. And Lily’s fiancé’s family was well off, and they wanted to pay for it all.
Lily died ten days before the ceremony. There were no warning symptoms. Her heart stopped in the middle of the night, early morning. Nothing diagnostically wrong, it just quit beating. My mom collapsed in tears for a week. My dad tried to stay awake more but he still worked on rock walls six days a week—he was a foreman then. Rosy went between rolling sobs and blank stares for months. My mom mourned for six months. She would go to the church on Sunday but sometimes she would turn around and go home and water her flowers from heaven, sit there. She didn’t notice people who’d be a few feet from her. Or she would react quickly to people who said anything to her but not be able to talk. With us it was more like you know.
It was not eight months later that my dad died. He was asleep in his chair, that TV on. He was too young too. Not even sixty yet. They said it was heart disease, liver damage, lung damage, all damage that explained his exhaustion. But he wasn’t fat. He was even lean, ripped in no-gym workout ways, from hard work, from years of eating Mom’s good food and not drinking so much beer. He looked a decade younger than all the men his age, and he could outwork the youngest stone mason.
And not two weeks later my mom died. Rosy and I didn’t even know she was older than dad because she’d lied to us…you could take her for a woman in her early thirties from a distance. Rosy found her with her head on the family table. Like she’d been crying.
Rosy thought that mom had been right all along. Rosy felt bitter. I said it could be lots of things too. Rosy said we had to be strong. I said we were strong. She said we had to be stronger. I said we could make sure we were happy. That she had to be happy. She didn’t think she knew how to now. I told her she could. I meant someone, something, besides Lily and besides mom. To think how dad and mom loved each other, that was pretty great. Rosy and I really hadn’t talked much all these years. And I’m not saying we talked very well or clearly to each other this first night after so much.
Only a few years later I was married to Valentina, the mexicana I fell so in love with. I was translating, both directions, for government and lawyers and business people. We didn’t have to live in El Paso. We bought a house in Mexico City, in Coyoacán, on Calle Xicoténcatl. It had five bedrooms and bathrooms, a roofless Jardin in the center of the structure. I had so much work, we did—Valentina did this work too—that one day a week I could write letters for ordinary people to a distant mother or father, son or daughter, all kinds. It was my favorite work of all, and I didn’t charge much, only enough for them to feel I was professional. Valentina, pregnant, had plants everywhere—we couldn’t find flores del cielo, but many birds of paradise. She hung paintings, art, on every wall, even in our bedroom where she was better than any pillow or blanket. And that was when Rosy came to live with us. Now she and I giggled and, though these weren’t secrets, we were alien citizens, and we’d come from a world far away and long ago, and as often as possible we listened to the silence.
Dagoberto Gilb is the author of the recently-published story collection New Testaments and a new book of essays, A Passing West. Other titles by him include The Magic of Blood, Woodcuts of Women, Gritos, and others. He lives in Austin, Tejas and Mexico City.