Memorial (2001)
(In 1987 I was felled by a debilitating, but not life-threatening, illness. During that time I talked myself to sleep by recalling in every possible detail a trip I’d made through Oaxaca in the late 1970s. I always fell asleep before arriving at San José del Pacifico, the Mexican state’s highest town (in more ways than one: it was known for the magic mushrooms). What follows is the resulting “piece,” originally intended to be spoken by two similar voices: mine, and --- though I never mentioned this idea to them --- either my sister’s or my daughter’s. Even if done as a solo, this is meant to be spoken in two tones that suggest recall and imagination. My original idea was to have visuals --- still images or film --- shown behind the speaker(s). I have never performed “Memorial” and just uncovered it while cleaning out my old studio files.)
Shall I say what I know of dying, that what they say is true?
They say...
(you’ve heard them say it)
--- that our lives will flash before our eyes, fast falling through space or sinking, floating on swells of slow-motion memory. They say, some say that we each make our own heaven and - have you heard this, too?- that we have already found it.
(Do they say, hushed now, that it is slower still, with old eyes and crooked fingers searching the aging warp and weft for a
thread of such beauty that only you can know?)
Mine takes a path to San José del Pacifico, a heaven of nature’s making and my recall.
It exists, it must, if memories are true. There it is, a gray dot hours out of Oaxaca Town on a thin black line that slices up through the dense mountains to the summit, then beyond and curving down through the jungles of bananas to the shore.
The buses stopped there at a widening in the road, and the local boys handed plastic cups of red-powdered fruit up to the stoic campesinos, and cool Pepsis to the dusty tourists aiming for the beach.
(It is a hard trip, even in the mind.)
The overnight train to Oaxaca was crowded that time, with no empty berths. I half-slept on the seat, shifting and apologizing under a shared blanket. There remains a hint, a shadow-image of the train floor --- did I finally lie there? --- and a worry over rats. There was the smell of dirt, and loud talking, laughing, music all night.
And then, in the capital, off the zocalo, a hotel where cars drove into a central courtyard so that my room opened up to exhaust fumes and an overheard exchange, understood, in English: “You like this, don’t you,” seductive, female, and a man’s harsh voice answering, “Don’t talk.”
(Memory is how I make my paradise, and when it is made, it will be home.)
The southbound bus approached with San José on the left, up a steep slope. That day a young man helped me with my bag, the same one who took my peso bills for a ticket and wrapped them fanlike around his fingers. Stretching up beside the bus, it was not a town at all, but a winding skein of simple houses built on natural balconies, up and up. No pharmacy, no hotel, perhaps still no post office or telephone, San José was not the stuff of glossy poster tours.
(No, my heaven is for the strong and simple.)
The little office across the highway housed the army, young men bored and confused with this remote duty, without a nightclub or bar. The roadhouse cafe is a kilometer away.
(They will not notice me, these uniformed boys as I pass by them with my notebook and paints and a dreamy smile,
shimmering and dissolving before their eyes.)
My house was a hike up the hill, less than halfway to the unseen cabin where they said the other norteAmericanos lived, making flutes. There was only a single room with a sleeping shelf on saw-horses.
(I will sweep the packed dirt floor each morning and make a fire of the fragrant kindling when the afternoons get cool.)
It was November, the month of winds, that I remember.
(Their howling will drive me across the compound into the landlady’s house, her name lost to time.)
She was my age ---
(and shall be still)
- - - a seamstress to whom I brought tiny stork-shaped scissors from the frontier. We talked shyly then, my Spanish hesitant and modest.
(In my kingdom come, we will share a common tongue and speak easily of men and babies, the weather and food. We will
relax into quiet and laugh over silly childish things, and be friends.)
It is the morning I remember best, waking in the still cold, the night’s fire black in the corner. There was a drawing on the cabin’s inner door, a psychedelic journal left by some seeker of magic. A European backpacker, I imagined, or a middle-aged guru from the Northwest, seeking the mushroom’s magic secrets.
I washed my face at the pump outside, walking about with a cup of icy water as I cleaned my teeth. Sweet memory, the runaway matron thrilling to spray watery foam out and over the ridge at the edge of the yard, the aging debutant pissing in a chicken coop. And from this view, years past, I still see as much as hear a song spiraling up from the wooden box far below, a woman in the town shower sweetly singing a private aria.
There is another image, later in the day, of Susanna’s house across the road where the bus stopped, overlooking the mountains to the end of reality. She sat in her dark interior and worked before the fire. How odd: Susannah had no legs, and no husband or children, but contentedly cooked with her skirt in a perfect wide circle around her on the floor. She took a thick round of masa and slapped it into shape, putting it on the hot comal. A sierra, she called it, for the peaked edges which held an egg simmering in blood red sauce. Afterwards she made coffee and served it in a bowl without a handle, so big that I held it, childlike, with both hands to drink.
(In my dreams I will learn to like its sugary blackness.)
Outside, Susanna’s mother, blind since birth, walked secure in her private darkness, tapping her cane along the cliff that sharply ended San José and her known world.
(And this is where I finally go, invisible, timeless, and selfless, looking out over the infinite mountains of rounded blue-
green.)
I stood there, breathing in wonder, while the voice inside asked again and again, “Where am I?... Where are you?...” wanting never to leave the place, the moment.
(It asks it still, just before I sleep. The wind gusts around me, and I hear the children laughing in the distance as they play
their games.)
Shall I say what I know of dying, that what they say is true?
They say...
(you’ve heard them say it)
--- that our lives will flash before our eyes, fast falling through space or sinking, floating on swells of slow-motion memory. They say, some say that we each make our own heaven and - have you heard this, too?- that we have already found it.
(Do they say, hushed now, that it is slower still, with old eyes and crooked fingers searching the aging warp and weft for a
thread of such beauty that only you can know?)
Mine takes a path to San José del Pacifico, a heaven of nature’s making and my recall.
It exists, it must, if memories are true. There it is, a gray dot hours out of Oaxaca Town on a thin black line that slices up through the dense mountains to the summit, then beyond and curving down through the jungles of bananas to the shore.
The buses stopped there at a widening in the road, and the local boys handed plastic cups of red-powdered fruit up to the stoic campesinos, and cool Pepsis to the dusty tourists aiming for the beach.
(It is a hard trip, even in the mind.)
The overnight train to Oaxaca was crowded that time, with no empty berths. I half-slept on the seat, shifting and apologizing under a shared blanket. There remains a hint, a shadow-image of the train floor --- did I finally lie there? --- and a worry over rats. There was the smell of dirt, and loud talking, laughing, music all night.
And then, in the capital, off the zocalo, a hotel where cars drove into a central courtyard so that my room opened up to exhaust fumes and an overheard exchange, understood, in English: “You like this, don’t you,” seductive, female, and a man’s harsh voice answering, “Don’t talk.”
(Memory is how I make my paradise, and when it is made, it will be home.)
The southbound bus approached with San José on the left, up a steep slope. That day a young man helped me with my bag, the same one who took my peso bills for a ticket and wrapped them fanlike around his fingers. Stretching up beside the bus, it was not a town at all, but a winding skein of simple houses built on natural balconies, up and up. No pharmacy, no hotel, perhaps still no post office or telephone, San José was not the stuff of glossy poster tours.
(No, my heaven is for the strong and simple.)
The little office across the highway housed the army, young men bored and confused with this remote duty, without a nightclub or bar. The roadhouse cafe is a kilometer away.
(They will not notice me, these uniformed boys as I pass by them with my notebook and paints and a dreamy smile,
shimmering and dissolving before their eyes.)
My house was a hike up the hill, less than halfway to the unseen cabin where they said the other norteAmericanos lived, making flutes. There was only a single room with a sleeping shelf on saw-horses.
(I will sweep the packed dirt floor each morning and make a fire of the fragrant kindling when the afternoons get cool.)
It was November, the month of winds, that I remember.
(Their howling will drive me across the compound into the landlady’s house, her name lost to time.)
She was my age ---
(and shall be still)
- - - a seamstress to whom I brought tiny stork-shaped scissors from the frontier. We talked shyly then, my Spanish hesitant and modest.
(In my kingdom come, we will share a common tongue and speak easily of men and babies, the weather and food. We will
relax into quiet and laugh over silly childish things, and be friends.)
It is the morning I remember best, waking in the still cold, the night’s fire black in the corner. There was a drawing on the cabin’s inner door, a psychedelic journal left by some seeker of magic. A European backpacker, I imagined, or a middle-aged guru from the Northwest, seeking the mushroom’s magic secrets.
I washed my face at the pump outside, walking about with a cup of icy water as I cleaned my teeth. Sweet memory, the runaway matron thrilling to spray watery foam out and over the ridge at the edge of the yard, the aging debutant pissing in a chicken coop. And from this view, years past, I still see as much as hear a song spiraling up from the wooden box far below, a woman in the town shower sweetly singing a private aria.
There is another image, later in the day, of Susanna’s house across the road where the bus stopped, overlooking the mountains to the end of reality. She sat in her dark interior and worked before the fire. How odd: Susannah had no legs, and no husband or children, but contentedly cooked with her skirt in a perfect wide circle around her on the floor. She took a thick round of masa and slapped it into shape, putting it on the hot comal. A sierra, she called it, for the peaked edges which held an egg simmering in blood red sauce. Afterwards she made coffee and served it in a bowl without a handle, so big that I held it, childlike, with both hands to drink.
(In my dreams I will learn to like its sugary blackness.)
Outside, Susanna’s mother, blind since birth, walked secure in her private darkness, tapping her cane along the cliff that sharply ended San José and her known world.
(And this is where I finally go, invisible, timeless, and selfless, looking out over the infinite mountains of rounded blue-
green.)
I stood there, breathing in wonder, while the voice inside asked again and again, “Where am I?... Where are you?...” wanting never to leave the place, the moment.
(It asks it still, just before I sleep. The wind gusts around me, and I hear the children laughing in the distance as they play
their games.)
