...He had arrived in Albuquerque to start life over, or at least sidestep death, on this husk of red earth, this Nuevo Mejico. His was the face I'd seen in a dream. A face with no borders: Tibetan eyelids, Spanish hazel irises, Mayan cheekbones dovetailing delicately as matchsticks. I don't know why I expected Olmec: African features and a warrior's helmet as in those sculped basalt heads, big as boulders, strewn on their cheeks in Mesoamerican jungles. No, he had no warrior's face. Because the war was still inside him. Time had not yet leached its poisons to his surfaces. And I was one of those women who fate it to take a war out of a man, or at least imagine she is doing so, like prositutes once upon a time who gave themselves in temples to returning soldiers. Before he appeared at the airport gate, I had no clue such a place existed inside of me. But then it opened up like an unexpected courtyard that teases dreamers with sunlight, bougainvillea, terra-cotta pots blooming marigolds.
It was Independence Day, 1982. Last off the plane, he wore jeans, shirt, and tie, the first of many disguises. The church people in Mexico must have told him to look for a woman with a bracelet made of turquoise stones because he walked toward me. And as we shook hands, I saw everything - all that was meant to be or never meant to be, but that I would make happen by taking reality in my hands and bending it like a willow branch. I saw myself whispering his fake name by the flame of my Guadalupe candle, the two of us in a whorl of India bedspread, Salvation Army mattresses heaped on floorboards, adobe walls painted Juarez blue. Before his arrival the chaos of my life had no axis about which to spin. Now I had a center. A center so far from God that I asked in advance, remembering words I'd read somewhere, words from the mouth of Ishtar: a prostitute compassionate am I.
July 3, 1982
Dear Mary,
I've got a lot to pack, so I have to type quickly. My El Paso contact arranged for our guest to fly out on AmeriAir. He should be arriving around 4pm tomorrow. As I told you last week, don't forget to take the Yale sweatshirt I gave you just in case his clothing is too suspicious looking. Send him to the nearest bathroom if this is the case...Anyway, when he comes off the plane, speak to him in English. Tell him all about how the "relatives" are doing. When you are safely out of earshot of anyone remind him that if anyone asks, he should say he's from Juarez. If he should be deported, we want immigration to have no question he is from Mexico. It'll be easier to fetch him from there than from a Salvadoran graveyard...God willing, the affidavit from the San Salvador archdiocese doctor will be dropped off at the house...
As I told you earlier, our guest is a classic political asylum case, assuming he decides to apply. Complete with toruture. Although even then he has only a two percent chance of being accepted by the United States....
Love & prayers, Soledad
P.S.: Take it from one who survived the '60s. Assume the phone is tapped until proved otherwise.
P.S. #2: And don't go falling in love.
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