“Yo me hablo por lo mismo y traigo tambien la palabra de todos los muertos que se murieron muy callados. Por ellos hablo, en mi palabra hablan los muertos todos, los callados de siempre.”
It was at dusk that I sat under the auburn skies of late November watching the leaves from the oak limbs above me pirouette and fall. They reminded me of us, these leaves; struggling against the wind, struggling to regain their limbs, the source of their life, before the winter came. But the wind roared in my ears and those leaves just swirled and fell. Sometimes I would reach up and snatch one out of the wind, only to stomp it to the concrete sidewalk which bled cold into my bones. “Sometimes it is better when the struggle ends soon” I thought as I held those leaves to the ground to keep them from blowing off, down the road towards Texas and beyond.
“Down that road lies this my friends” I muttered to the leaves as I patted my coat pocket which held my tattered red notebook, pencil and knife. “And this”, I said, as I rubbed the coarse fabric of my clothes. These clothes which had left the quiet streets of Tulsa as jeans, jacket and sweater, but which I had called bed, blanket and home in the dry rolling hills and dark plains of the Mexican llano.
Across the asphalt and curb, I watched as the shadows gathered in the details of the red-brick house and stored them in the blackened shapes of night. I watched as the ever-green magnolia, in front of my boyhood home, became a darkened giant swaying to the rhythm of the wind, and the fall-bleached grass became an ash-gray carpet rolled out for the night. And I watched, and waited for the night to swallow whole, the two years that had passed.
The two years of leaves that had fallen, the two years of grass that had been cut, and the two years of life that had continued in this house while I had been away. But more than that I waited for the words to come back. Those twenty words which even the 3,000 miles couldn’t erase. Those twenty words which had haunted me in the moment before sleep, to dwell in my dreams, and greet me when I would wake. I waited for those words, and for the guilt and the sorrow that would come with them. Because for now there was nothing, not even a numbness, but rather a chasm, a great abyss where once a mighty continent of grief and guilt had lain.
Three days had passed since I awoke to that cavernous shell, that great absence within. Gloria had told me what it was, what it had to be.
“Alexander, you must return.” She had whispered. “It is the only way… for reconciliation. Go now, mi amor, mi vida.”
And it was the way the she spoke in my native tongue which had moved me, moved me to an understanding which I pondered as I sat outside beneath the oak tree on Eldridge street watching the light appear in the bay window of the house.
It was from this contemplation that I heard words once more. Not the twenty words of before, different words; words which rushed in to fill the void and to clamor about inside me, screaming for release.
Gloria claims that to name the dead is to bring them back…into you. I disagree, the dead are always in us. I know, now, what two years couldn’t teach me. I know now what it is like to speak the words of the dead, to never escape the past; because the past lives in you. I had thought for two years how horrible it must be to be a part of a culture where each individual is bound forever to their family, both living and dead, and to never have the ability to escape their hold. Yet now I know that the dead are inside us. They give us life and live through us long after their bodies have returned to the earth and all but their dust is forgotten.
Those are their words. These words which now rage through me like a phoenix igniting.
“Yo me hablo por lo mismo y traigo tambien la palabra de todos los muertos que se murieron muy callados. Por ellos hablo, en mi palabra hablan los muertos todos, los callados de siempre.”
“I speak for myself, and I also carry the word of all our silent dead. I speak for them, through my words speak all the dead, the silent ones forever.”
And so I arose, a single silhouette in the coal-black night. And stood for a minute listening to the wind hammer in my ears, with the cold of autumn on my face. Then I struck out across the asphalt and curb, to the opposite shore in this sea of darkness, to walk through the door and into the light. Two years had passed. Two years were gone. But I no longer traveled alone. My father walked with me.