claudiapena.com

Below el Rio Cauca,
Above a sole train
Plowing through uncharted morass malarias
How time changes life!
Alone or accompanied,
Above the bridge or below,
Poor or rich,
Night or day: the train won’t stop for anyone
Personal reminder

When I first met him, he had his own paint and roofing business and bragged freely of his age. “I am 57,” he said in his choppy English sweeping his whole lanky body forward. “You see all those walls? I paint them. I get up there and asi, mira, asi!” And he would pull back his sweater to show me his muscle bulging through the yellow sagging skin. I nodded my head in agreement so as not speak or I would be there all day. Plus, God forbid he saw my face of disgust and I would hurt his feelings. To this day, I never knew why he took interest in becoming our neighbor living in the backyard, but he did. I even remember the meeting in our living room where my father and he hashed out the details of the rent on a spring day. “350?” No pause and in vehement agreement he agreed, “Okay, Asi esta bien.” He took his little trailer behind our house and every day he would visit us for breakfast and dinner.

I knew there must have been some family loyalty between him and my father; my family tends to like its privacy. I knew his business was on the decline. But for a man who had a collection of silk bright colored disco shirts, I wondered if his partner had thrown him out. No one ever spoke of that. I cornered my mom one day in the kitchen while she was cooking and even though there wasn’t anyone around she whispered, finally, “Es gay, mariposa, (hand flying motion indicating a butterfly), eso no te importa!” I wondered if for that simple fact it condemned the man to living lonely in his older years, but I wasn’t allowed to say anymore.

The time passed and the days got colder and his bill higher. Each month it seemed that he would have to come beg my father, “Just a little longer, okay? It’s been difficult.” Until one week he stayed at home all the day and came in sometimes to order me for soup. He lost weight the following week and started coughing in multicolored spew into an engraved white handkerchief. My mom would rush to separate any dinner ware he touched. He couldn’t blame stress for this any more. So, now it was his lungs and a bad cold caused by the weather. No one came to visit him during the holidays and as hard as he tried to claim us as family, there was only so much a couple of months of passing by could give a person. A week later he left back to his birth land.

How did he…Who gave it to him?

My grandma called to tell us the news of his passing. In the arms of a sister he rarely spoke to, in a small hospital bed provided by the state. Alone as per his request.

My grandma tended his sister’s shock at the decomposition of his body. All the chronicles that exist are only second hand notions. Why would a man want to hide his own soul and the value of his existence? Nothing made sense to me back then or now. Didn’t he have a young partner?

“It was his lungs.” The doctors were prohibited from saying the name of this very shameful disease to the rest of the family even if everyone already knew. The canker sores were a byproduct of his declining lungs and the paint never helped.

He had a lover. Has anyone called the other person? What’s his name?

But you took that to the grave and either ways, no one would let you give it. Marino, I know someone needs to remember you. I am no one to judge. My only wish was for your death to be more respectful. So on all souls day, I give you the gift of my words and my sincere apology for not speaking all the questions my conscious pushed me for. May you find peace.

I’m keeping you.

Little heart, my soul,
Parachute with umbrellas
Down to me,
Walls of color
That sing like mad,
Through kaleidoscopes,
Full of twinkling stars,
That fall like glitter from the sky.

Give me yellow flowers
Make me blush!
Always late when needed early,
Always early when needed late,
Into my waterfall–
Inside my playground you’ll be–
Forever young in life,
Forever old in knowledge.

Little heart, contender,
Tendrán almas?
Y los misioneros después de consultarse,
En concierto decidieron que si,
Y hubo alma,
En el salvaje noble,
En mi piel morena.
En mi corazón sin alas,

In Quechua you asked me,
How does your heart feel, my daughter?
How does your heart feel?
I say my heart feels sad and heavy,
It feels black and gray,
It goes blue and red,
It breaks like a dying leaf,
In a six month eclipse,
It recoils to the sting of soap,
On my burning skin,
It drags with pain and sorrow,
Deep waters that will not move.

After that, I took you out to sea to drown,
Then changed my mind,
Fed you to the dragon instead,
Then I took you from the creature’s belly,
And all the king’s horses,
And all the church’s sweet water,
Couldn’t wash the salt away from you,
Years later,
You still taste so bittersweet.

Little heart, my story,
Full of color and light,
Skip and sing,
Always laugh, always snort,
How far away did you explode?
With what passion did you amend?
Un viaje de cuna a ataúd,
Solo para tocar tu cara,
Solo para hablar tú nombre,
Solo para descubrir tu amor.

Please check out the writer’s website at www.sandracisneros.com

Es tu personalidad predecible y misteriosa.

Es la individualidad de tus ojos,
tercia y suave cara cerca de mi.

Es tu crédula fragancia y
Arrogancia al caminar
Que fragilidad finge.

Discutiendo te digo,
Necesito a un hombre
Que tenga brazos de macho
Y entienda los ojos femeninos.

Tu dices
No necesito nada;
Nada mas te quiero a ti.

Es la manera que me quieres
y no me quieres,
Y a veces indecisamente opinas,
Agriamente monologas,
Y persistentemente afirmas
REAFIRMAS,
Esperas a los ecos que vuelvan a tu corazon.

Cuando no regresan….
Silenciosamente Tiritas…
Y con tu tipico balanceo al caminar:
Prefieres errar a mi lado,
me besas asi
me caricias asa;
Te disculpas a tu manera
Y los ecos regresan
Como tambien yo a ti.

(Last modified January of 2002. Check out the audio below:
tu-individualidad.wma)

The pen killed her. It was one of her most prized possessions through her entire life, but not the paper. That’s why her novels were pieced together from toilet paper, fast food wrappers, thick starched white napkins near the subway–her collection was endless. As long as her pen could smoothly squirt its ink on the vehicle, she was more than satisfied. The pen, however, was different. It was always black, thick and shiny. She had plenty of pens: in every pocket of her purses, in every drawer of her house, inside the trunk, the glove compartment, underneath the seat and anywhere she was sure to stop by during the week. Yes, she picked up a myriad of substandard, unsuitable, multicolor ink as spares but the loved ones were not cheap. They were the smooth dark jellies that glided rapidly through the paper like her thoughts. She would rather starve than not have her pen; there had been plenty of instances that she had. It was in this state, of dispersed underwear and broken pens, that they found her. Mainly he found her, to his great misfortune.

The only man with the key to her flat: her brother. I say unfortunately, because he was a recovered alcoholic and this was something his therapy wasn’t counting on. None the less, the neighbor had called him to please take out the garbage since there was a foul smell developing around the door. He understood the passion his sister exhausted in every word of her writings that would remove her from the ordinary world of bathing, eating or taking out the trash. As a good brother he would come in and take out the garbage whenever she needed it. After he took out the 20 or so trash bags stacked against the door, he stopped midway through the kitchen fixated on what he knew was a huge puddle of blood and grabbed his head whispering, “Oh, my God, oh my God….”

The boyfriend ran up the stairs next and walked her shaking brother over to the table. To her, the boyfriend was a saint…almost. On difficult nights when the reviews where terrible, the books didn’t sell and the writing stunk, her frustration found a soap box as dishes exploded against walls, papers flew around the apartment like a flock of frightened birds, and the furniture took cover from her fury. “Imbeciles, they all are a bunch of idiots!!” The words came out in a sound staccato of mad ranting and heated shouts. “How dare they? How many of them even write with a speck of life to them? They sound just like their damn college and then they pat themselves on the back for making mutant children among their own. Don’t they know…the time I put into this? Don’t YOU?!! It’s all my heart, all my money, all of my soul…and for what? TELL ME FOR WHAT?” She shoved the review column to his face to read, although he could pretty much guess what it said. “YOU’RE ALL A BUNCH OF IDOTsss,” And after 10-15 minutes of cursing the ignorant outside her window, she would collapse, every bit of her body shook with sobs and pained whimpers. That’s when her boyfriend would gently take her hand, sometimes carrying her into the shower, bathe her tears away, make sweet love to her, hug her and cradle her in his arms. Secretly, the temper tantrums turned him on and unleashed a whole new element into their love life, so he would often take his time in calming her down, but comfort her he did. She knew this but there was only so much she could hold against him.

“What was she writing?” he asked immediately. The journal underneath the collapsed head was bathed in humanly fluids of snot, saliva and tears, made the ink bleed but the poem was still legible. He softly caressed her head frowning at the beads of sweat on her forehead, why would a suicide victim be dripping in sweat? How long ago did it happen maybe… He placed two fingers on the side of her throat to check for a pulse but it was a long shot. It was puzzling to the both of them. Although they were very much familiar with her temper tantrums, self mutilation was not one of the vehicles she had ever chosen to injure herself…drinking, starvation, seclusion, but not this. Between the two gentlemen they removed the journal and the words of her last hour:

my soul hides in the ball of horse dung outside cathedral walls
Awaiting to dance to peals of 50 bells
to leap at the pitch clings of lesser size bells
and pirouette at base clangs of the grater size
I am no better than the dung or the priest
or the vagrant or Jesus
Even He was afraid of the black hole that swallowed him up
and ate him alive,
It didn’t care if Jesus was the son of God,
that resuscitated and fed the masses
it didn’t read or heard the words
it didn’t see the humility of his actions to men
The black hole IS deaf, mute, and blind, but hungry
And even Jesus was swallowed deep
Deep inside the black hole
I’ll stay inside the ball of dung until the black hole seizes me

The police were last on the scene, as usual. Officers frowned at the beaded sweat on her forehead, letting the medics decide if the heart beat was too faint to be felt as she was rolled into the silent ambulance. It came as a surprise when the autopsy came back as arsenic. She had essentially poisoned her own pen and let the ink squirt inside her veins to give back to it what she often let loose on paper. The funeral had an attendance of three, her two brothers and her boyfriend, and the mood was severely somber. The only consolation price they had to their own egotistical hold of wanting her back in their life was that she was in far less pain now than ever. Even in her passing she echoed deep their minds as the tombstone read:

Was it the weight of her ego, the disproportion of her vanity, the frustration with societal apathy, or the hunger of the black hole that made the pen do it? The rest is but a restful sleep.