The Arrival: Take Three

[Should you wish to read "Take Two" or  "Take One," please scroll down the page.]

Far from my Cibuco river I felt home-less. The aroma of sugar cane, a memory of childhood, was now an icon of identity; and so was the old but reconstructed chimney, in the middle of the Central Carmen, with its footprints of floods, storms, and lighting, reminding me of a history that was mine too.

The plantain trees, the neighbor who had a monkey as a pet, the palm trees swaying in the warm breeze of the Cerro, the sea I visited every Friday, the neighbor who set his wife's car on fire, the one who always said hello, the one who sold us the verduras, the ice cream car with the cyclic melody, the vendor in the car bringing fresh bread and meat, milk and eggs, the neighbor who drowned, the neighbor who died, the drunk ones, the chatty ones, the one who took me to school every day when I was a child, the ones I took the school bus with, the one who bothers my father with the impossibly loud radio, the one who won the lottery and moved away, the ones who got pregnant when they were fourteen, the ones with the roosters, the one who killed pigs in his backyard, the dealer of drugs, the one that was raped, the one always singing, the one with the street parties on new year's eve, the one who played barbies with me, the one who took me to my first concert, the one with whom I fell in love, the one with loud laughter, the one who loves salsa, the ones who love rap, and even the one who litters with pride -- everything was an iconic figure now, standing for a history I was a part of, and one I was desperately trying to claim. I had not yet realized the strange texture of the limbo I was in.

By the Charles, I spent my energy paying obsessive attention to the subtle movements on people’s faces just to try to and anticipate their laughter, so nobody would notice that I didn’t really understand what they were saying, because they spoke too fast, or because I didn’t really share their sense of humor. Missing my home, still I wanted so bad to fit in.

And I felt guilty. My mother tongue kept lobbying furiously for the status quo against the language that was trying to adopt me. "Do not let it!" she yelled. "She'll take you away from me!" she cried. And I kept listening. How could I make room for this newcomer without completely giving up the voices that had shown me the world, and writing, for the first time, the voices that had made me who I (thought I) was? It was hard to think that the "new" did not have to completely displace the "old." It was inconceivable to believe the two could coexist. It was inconceivable to imagine that I belonged anywhere.

My writing was a sign of what was happening. My pen was incapable of touching the paper. When I forced it to make contact, attempting a sequence in either tongue, it was almost as if an impenetrable distance separated me from the characters that my fingers drew. As if my words were the eyes of those people who smile only with their mouth, their eyes like statues.

A little more than three years after I left, after I landed, the concatenations I attempt continue to feel awkward. They ring odd and strange. The exercise remains laborious, like wanting to understand Íslendinga Sögur without knowing much Islandic. I contemplate my hand as it mimicks the curves, the turns, the weight of the pen over the paper, but sometimes nothing happens: a linguistic insomnia of sorts.

Sometimes, when I do succeed in generating words, I can't understand what I’ve written: the meaning blurs, and a word becomes a senseless squiggle -- an object made out of parts by rules of morphologic nature I don't understand, a syntactic atom I never memorized, a crazygarabato, just like me, a walking disparate. That's when I feel as if I was wearing a heavy dress that doesn’t quite fit, or a mask over my face to cover a morphing one underneath. Those days, I almost cannot breathe.

But it isn't often than hard, and it isn't that bad anymore.

I've been returning to Puerto Rico over the holidays to hear my father mumbling to himself the events of his day and give me a thousand words of advice, and to hear my mother mumbling hers, singing off-key and feeding me until I’m about to explode; to pet my dog and yell to him to stop barking already; and to feel the burning sun outside. At night, I cannot wait to hear the roosters and the coquíes outside singing their lullabies, even if it takes me a little more time to fall asleep.

Recently, when I went home to visit, on the first night after my arrival, I dreamt that my hand had found itself reaching for my tongue relieved that it had found it where it should be. In my dream, I knew I was stuck at the house again, and it was okay.

Upon my return to Cambridge, to the cruel cold of winter, I found myself staring outside the window at the fluffy buttons of white falling tenderly over the ground, illuminating everything and dissolving all visible boundaries. Arrays of snow flakes had woven themselves onto the light rays the day had left bouncing around the city quickly turning the sky into a soft, pink dream.

Nothing will take away from my Cibuco, I know. I am part of my River, and of everything around it, no matter the tongue with which I choose to remember it. Yet, should one day I find myself migrating again where no snow falls anymore, though I'm not entirely certain I will miss it, I surely will remember it dearly.

[This is the last "take" of "the Arrival." Thank you so much for reading.]

[Note: details about people have been changed to protect people's identities.]