In this excerpt from her new memoir about her “multicultural marriage,” the author writes of her son’s first trip to his father’s country of El Salvador and the death of a family patriarch.
An excerpt by Beth Kephart
Blood Lines
The summer Jeremy was born, Nora came to our house and stayed for a time while I failed—miserably —at being who she’d hoped I’d be. I failed, first of all, because Nora had wanted a granddaughter, not a grandson, and I failed, second of all, because I hoarded this boy who had been born to me—hoarded the smell and feel and weight of him, planted him in his own crib at night and sang him to sleep with my songs. American songs with American words. My mother’s passed-on lullabies wafting through his channeled ear. It was so horribly hot that summer, so horribly unrelieved, and every day my husband went to work and every day I disappointed my mother-in-law in ways that cannot be emended. I loved my Jeremy. I held him, steadfastly, in my arms. I was home, in my country, on my soil, with my son. I sang him my American songs.
But no matter how suburban and protected my baby was, no matter how Ivy League and graceful his father, no matter how influential and loving my own all-American parents, there was no denying the exotic look Jeremy had about his eyes, or the slight hint of darkness in his skin, or the blackness of his hair that wallowed, from the beginning, past his ears. There was something foreign about Jeremy from the start. There was his father’s blood that would not be negated, and the Salvadoran bibs that had arrived in plastic sleeves, and the Salvadoran linens, embroidered collars. There were the Salvadoran songs that somehow did get sung, and the endearments: bonito niño, buen niño, mucho gusto bonito niño. The slip of Spanish into a child’s ear. The electrochemical sparks of another language.
The first time we took Jeremy to El Salvador, he was four. It was February 1993, just one year into the cease-fire that had been cobbled together by an exhausted government and a depleted gang of rebels. I didn’t like the idea of going to a place still percolating with the memory of an 11-year civil war, and fought it. Aimless death squads, I cautioned. Choleric guerrillas. One percent of the population sacrificed to the fighting, their tangled, splintered, naked bones still barely hidden underground, or not hidden at all, but dumped inside mass graves. I argued that it was indecent, irresponsible to take a child to that place, that cease-fires had been marched out before in El Salvador but discontent had a mind of its own. Safety is here. The familiar is here. The things he’s grown accustomed to. All here. I argued, and of course I lost. A son should know where his father comes from. What he means when he says, Once upon a time I was a boy.
Jeremy was four. He liked cars, and he liked planes. I equipped him with a bag full of his favorite miniatures and did not let him out of sight for five protracted days. In the photographs of that trip that year, Jeremy rides the proud shoulders of his father and, sometimes, the shoulders of Rodi and Mario, Bill’s brothers. On occasion he wears the thin plastic helmet that he favored at the time, its imagined protection jammed down over his ears, its green plastic visor snapped forward over his eyes. He wears the shirts and overalls I loved dressing him in, comports himself in the chubby feathery cheeks that I’m addicted, still, to touching. I am not in any of the photographs, but Jeremy is there and, again, he is there: in the arms of his father and his father’s country.
Every marriage, my friend Sandy says, is a multicultural marriage. I think that’s true and right. My mother’s mother was Irish and her father was Italian; they learned, over a lifetime, to mix the spices. Bill’s parents were from separate places—the United States, El Salvador; they remained in separate places all their lives. Couples I know grew up one rural and the other urban, one Orthodox Jew and the other lapsed Catholic, one Canadian and the other a pure shot of Manhattan, one bothered and the other meditatively calm. There are no perfect photographs, there are only photographs, only evidence of the ways we dance, in and out, in and out, of one another. It is in the ways we love our children that they learn just how to love, and whom to love, and what family history is.
In 1993, in the wake of a depleted civil war, Jeremy saw his father’s country for the first, astonishing time. He saw the marketplace crammed with the fruits he couldn’t name and the radishes arranged like Christmas wreaths and the bulbs of scallions, fat as fists. He saw the babies on the streets in their cardboard boxes, the weathered ladies behind their mounds of dried bouquets, the men who would pose for my camera, and the woman who would not, though I snapped her picture anyway, a portrait of disdain. Jeremy rode on the shoulders of the men of Santa Tecla, and saw the place, which had become a mall, where Don Alberto’s plantation-style house had stood, saw what his father taught him to see: See the feathers of this bird? They have a story. See the pig on the street? It’s someone’s dinner. See these orange fruits? When I was a kid, when I was a boy, I’d climb the trees and eat them. Jeremy was shouldered all over Santa Tecla, and the next day he was shouldered through the port town of La Libertad, rode high among salted fish and pinkened two-day-old snapper, among buckets of octopus and platters of shark, among the merchants and their children and the vagrants on the pier that stretches out into the restless Pacific that almost swallowed Don Alberto whole.
The third day we drove to Panchimalco and found a girl hidden coyly in the trees. She wore a clean white dress and dirty feet, and she was singing to herself while she pumped into the air on a makeshift ropy swing, and then all of a sudden she was singing to her brother, who had materialized, as if out of nowhere, from behind the trees. In Panchimalco there was a boy who gave his sister a bath while her underpants bleached whiter on a line above their heads, and there was another boy, dressed in a school uniform, sitting priestly and contemplative by the cathedral’s locked-shut door. Jeremy rode high on his father’s shoulders in Panchimalco and on his uncle’s shoulders, too, as Bill and Rodi walked side by side and I walked in their shadows. I reached up. I held my child’s hand. I listened to the Spanish that was kinship between brothers.
What are you talking about?
I’ll tell you later.
What are you thinking?
How pretty it is here.
On the fourth day we went to the farm. Went up there to have a party, and everybody came. Salvadoran weather is calming in February. The coffee cherries are gone; there is something of a breeze. We ate lunch on the porch of Don Alberto’s brick house.
Afterwards the women formed a circle and they talked, trading recent cease-fire horrors for entertainment, hitting their thighs with their manicured hands as they exclaimed and sighed and goaded one another on. Adela, sitting beside me, directed the traffic of their talk, putting her hand up frequently to stop the noisy flow so that she could turn and make it English, make it make sense for me.
“They stopped me at the stop sign and then they jumped into my car,” one said.
“They put a gun up to my face and tore the gold cross from my neck,” said another.
“I was going to a party, see? They stole everything, including—hands up—the rings right off my fingers.”
“No.”
“I was afraid to leave the house.”
“It was so frightening.”
“I was afraid to drive my car.”
“As was I; I hardly drove.”
“I didn’t have a choice. I went to the bank. I got the money for my workers. But they waited until my purse was full, and they got me from behind, and then they banged me on the head. Ay, my head. Ay. Ay. My head.”
“Do you like my little country?” Adela turned at last and said. I shook my head one way and then the other. Adela laughed. The others laughed, too. Someone went to get more rum. Nora opined that it was time for a siesta.
The next day was the final day, and there was another party planned. This one would take place at Nora’s city house, and everyone had dressed the part. Rafael’s children and Chepe’s children and Jamie’s children, and the mothers and the aunts and the grandmothers: they wore their tailored clothes, their maid-pressed linens, the hair that had been coifed for the purpose of the party earlier on. They wore their best clothes, and they smashed a stick against a swinging, bruised piñata, and they divided into even teams to play a drawbridge game. The oldest of them all was Don Alberto’s widow, Tere. Still thin and still quite elegant, her white hair tending, in a certain light, toward quiet hints of blue. She wore a pearl-colored blouse with gold stitching at its collar, and it seemed to me, as I studied her, that she wore a fallen crown. Once, Bill told me. Once. They found a trunk full of letters Don Alberto wrote her. Love letters. Very romantic. Once, Bill told me. Once. My grandfather and my grandmother were very much in love. Can you tell, looking at her now, how beautiful she was?
“What do you think of my little country?” Adela came to where I was sitting and asked, her cigarette cocked away from her smile. “What do you think of our parties?”
“Bueno.”
“Sí. Ay, Beth. Listen to you.”
“What?”
“Listen to you, speaking our Spanish.”
The kids were singing a Spanished “London Bridge Is Falling Down.” They were hammering the piñata, and offering Jeremy the stick. And then all of a sudden they were singing “Happy Birthday” to my son, who was still months away from being five. He looked at me. I looked, smiling, back. Adela, pretty as a movie star, exhaled a plume of smoke and sighed.
“What do you remember about that first trip to Dad’s country?” I ask Jeremy now, when it’s just the two of us, the two of us and all these pictures on the floor.
“I remember the party best,” he says, after thinking for a while.
“Which one?”
“The party that they threw me.”
“You mean the piñata party? At Nora’s Santa Tecla house?”
“Yeah. That one. When it was me and all those second cousins and they sang me ‘Happy Birthday.’”
“What do you remember best about it?”
“Nothing really. Nothing much.”
“Then why do you think you remember it?”
“Because everyone had come.”
Departure
They came for Don Alberto’s dying, too—the entire town, Bill says, all the campesinos from the farm. This is the story that he doesn’t like to tell. This is the end, and words can’t change it. This is the sickness no one could ever cure.
“He was traveling in Europe,” Bill will tell me when I ask, a quiet voice, all gravity. The eyes turned away, toward the past, the country that still lies between us.
“Alone?” I speak as softly as I can.
“With Nora and Rodi. With Adela’s daughter, Beca.”
“When?” A whisper in his ear. A kiss.
“August. 1976.”
“What was the first sign?”
“He was tired.”
“What were the other signs?”
“He’d grown much too thin too quickly.”
“What did they do?”
“They flew him to Miami. For tests.”
“Then?”
“They flew him to New Orleans. More tests.”
“What happened afterwards?”
“They flew him to El Salvador.”
“They knew he was dying?”
“Yes.”
“It was stomach cancer?”
“Yes.”
“What did you do?”
“I stayed home.”
By which Bill means that he got on a plane and flew to the States, where he was scheduled to start his sophomore year, and withdrew from all his classes. Returned to the airport, took the next flight home, hardly left the side of the man he’d loved so fiercely his life long, loved as he loves his son today, with that much force and passion.
Those who can visit come to visit. They stream their way to the great house in Santa Tecla that was once a private club and preposterously boasted of the American South. They stream their way there and wait in the exotic orchid garden or in the rooms with the ceilings that went way up high, and they wait their turn, like so many sinners bound for confession. They wait to speak to Don Alberto, to sit in chairs behind their steaming brews of black sugar-sweetened coffee while the great man sits with them, still capable of chairs, and then, later, not capable of chairs, he reclines against the sofa and, later, does not leave the bed. The campesinos and the city folk. The old men and the young ones. The former maids and their children and their children too, and the distant relatives, and the son he fathered, yes, there was a son he fathered before Nora and Ana Ruth and Martha and Adela and Beto, before he married Tere: that son comes too. They all come, and he receives them one by one, while Bill worries, and Mario and Rodi worry, and certainly the others worry, too, that he is ebbing too quickly, letting himself go less corporeal with each hola, each rubbing touch of the hand, each memory that he makes for them and leaves to them, in passing. Maybe already he wants to be way up in the hills. Maybe already he dreams of the parakeets that slice the sky or the crop he will not see complete itself with cherries.
I can take you up to St. Anthony’s, Bill tells him. Or doesn’t tell him. That part is not remembered. I can take you up to St. Anthony’s, Bill wants to tell him. I can take you into your own silent place. Away from other people’s memories, away from all those waiting, still, to say goodbye.
But Don Alberto is sicker now and the sickness smell steals through his skin, fumes from his lungs, is persistent; he is too weak to travel. The maids palm antiseptics into every surface, spray the house with the acrid stink of Lysol, walk as quietly as they can in their rubber shoes. The maids go in and out, and the children, the grandchildren go in, rarely come out, and then there is a new knock at the door. It is Hilario Peñate, an outlaw braving the consequences to see his former friend.
So you are going to go now, Hilario Peñate says, when he is standing bedside, a big man hovering over a much too small one. I heard you were dying.
Hilario Peñate, Bill’s grandfather says, whispers maybe, extends a hand. My God. Hilario Peñate.
“Who?” I ask Bill now. “Who?”
“Wait,” Bill says, and he finds the man’s picture in the picture books—Hilario Peñate holding my husband high, July 20, 1958. In the photo, it is Bill’s first birthday and his feet are nudged up against the big man’s pistol-loaded holster, his little face, which looks like Jeremy’s face, which also looks like his grandfather’s face, just inches away from the outlaw’s jowl. “Hilario Peñate. Remember? I told you. My grandfather’s right-hand man for 20 years, maybe 30. His administrator, in charge of all of the farms. The man he trusted with the growing and the picking, with the land he owned. He was the one.”
“When you were growing up?”
“No. He was gone when I was growing up.”
“Where did he go?”
“He disappeared.”
“Why did he go?”
“Because he had a lot of enemies, and because one of his enemies tried to kill him. Somewhere up at the farm, I don’t know where, and I was too young to remember now exactly when.”
“Hilario Peñate,” I turn his name over with my tongue. “Hilario Peñate.”
“It’s a funny story,” Bill says. “A funny sad story. Because Peñate’s assassin waited for Peñate behind a ledge of dirt. Somewhere near the side of some road he crouched and waited for Peñate to ride by.”
“And then?”
“And then when Peñate finally came as the assassin knew he would, the guy stood up and shot at him, but the bullet ricocheted off of the dirt ledge. Peñate pretended to die, that was the thing. Fell down dramatically from his horse, and the guy who thought he’d shot him went to take a shit. He was busy with his business when Peñate, his horse now tied to a tree, his big feet quiet in the bushes, lifted the loaded pistol from his holster and shot the shitting assassin point-blank. The news made its way quickly to the national guard, and the guard started hunting for Peñate, and when my grandfather heard that there was a bounty on his friend’s head, he went into the hills and he found him and he warned him: You’ll be caught. You have to leave. You have to leave right now.”
“So your grandfather never heard from Peñate again?”
“No. Not until when he was dying.”
“And you never saw Peñate again?”
“Not until he came that day. No. And never after that.”
“What were you thinking, when you realized it was him?”
“I was thinking that he had the sweetest face, this really sweet and gentle face that didn’t belong with the hands of a murderer.”
So you’re going to go now.
I heard you were dying, and I came.
And then they hugged one another, the administrator and his boss, and Peñate took a chair and started to speak of life in exile. Bill left them to themselves, Bill says. He left it in a private place, these two men’s last goodbye.
Don Alberto died one month to the day that they’d discovered he was dying. He died anchored into the hands of those he loved and into the memories of others, died, but not before he’d made his peace, saying to Bill: I have confidence in you. Take care of your brothers. Don Alberto died and I imagine, because Bill imagines, that he died thinking of the farm, thinking that you could always trust the land, you could always depend on things to grow. Sit in the shade and watch blossoms give way to the green that will soon give way to cherries.
They honored him at St. Anthony’s Church, where he hadn’t gone in some 30 years. They said their prayers and lit their candles, and then drove his body north. It was a long black hearse. It was morning, early September. They were the only traffic, they were what moved through the streets as the crowds gathered around and pressed tremulously close. The people from the neighborhood who wore their Sunday suits. The people from the hills who had heard the news and started out at dawn to walk the miles, their shoes hung about their necks to save them for the procession. In the streets of Santa Tecla, they stood together, undivided, while the long black hearse pulled through, and above, beyond, in the towering distance, parakeets threw themselves against the sky and trees took their morning sips of sun. And then it was men, my husband among them, who conveyed Don Alberto’s casket to its grave in the heart of the city. Who planted the man in the hollowed ground as a farmer plants a seed.
Excerpted from Still Love in Strange Places by Beth Kephart, copyright ©2002 by Beth Kephart, with permission of the publisher, W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.
