Storylines

Last week in Soto's Monday night class, we were asked to come up with three unique movement qualities while attaching "text" to each one. First quality was a slow sustained movement, the next quality was something of our own invention to contrast with that movement, and finally we were to choose a part of the body to lead the third movement and tell a story about an injury we sustained as a child. I was fascinated with the text some of the participants came up. Feeling on the spot, my narratives, apart from the story of the injury were abstract, about a sleeping octopus and "la luz que se separó del cielo". But after the class, my mind began to race to all kinds of vignettes or storylines or "text", if you like, from different times in my life. I put some of them down in writing... the following are a few:


I was just learning to ride my brand new green bicycle. My father held on the back to give me stability and pushed me along very slowly. Just as I was finding my balance and we were going very smoothly, he gave the bicycle a little push. I held tightly to the handle bars, careening out of control, wobbling as I went, but heading directly and inexorably for an "oncoming" tree at the side of the road. I hit the tree head on and fell to ground sustaining scrapes and bruises and feeling very shaken by the heretofore unrecognized magnetic power of trees.

***

For a week I was offered no water, only pulque. I lived in a tarpaper shack, the walls carefully papered with the colored pages of newpapers and magazines and held in place with nails hammered through bottle caps. Outside this shack, this home, I remember tall maguey cactuses. Tengo sed, tengo sed, ¡quiero agua! Por favor quiero agua, I pled. Only to be told, Ten, esto es agua, but I knew it wasn’t. It was pulque.

***

My mother told me stories of ravens, of seals, of mountain lions, and of the sea, and of the wind and of the trees. These were her favorite stories. She told me about the time a raven guided her out of the thickest dense fog on some rural highway in Mexico. She told me about the seal who, as she walked along the water’s edge, swam along with her just off shore. She told me about the tree whose life she saved by touching it and talking it daily. I think they saved each other again and again.

***

And I went to Ceci’s house. Ceci, ¿dónde está mi muñeca? ¿Cómo que no sabes? ¿Dónde la tienes? Dámela. Seguro que la tienes. I had never been to Ceci’s house. It was dark, it felt damp. The floors were scattered with toys and clothes. Somewhere in a pile de cosas revueltas, I found my doll without her head.

***

I am not from any place. I am not from here, and not from there. I am not Mexican; I am from any place in the United States. I can never be from anyplace because I never had a home. I didn’t even have a family. I come from the road, from some interstate highway between the East Coast and the West Coast, between the Southwest and the South, between Mexico and the United States, between Mexico and Guatemala, from some highway on isthmus of Tehuantepec, some highway in the highlands of Guatemala, I come from some highway I can barely remember or was I left on some highway I can barely remember, lost there in the hours of monotony.

***

Mano, oye mano, vamos a nadar, ¿sabes nadar?, ¿sabes cómo se hace?, se mueve las patas así, sí así, y los brazos, oye mano, a ver si sabe nadar Fred. Fred, Fred, [chiflando], ven Fred. She dove in. She kept her head above the water, paddling her way to the side with the most miserable, worried and betrayed expression in her eyes. From then on my dog Fred was terrified of the water. To this day, when I recall her eyes at that moment when she hit the water and could not touch bottom, I feel the weight of having betrayed her trust.

***

When he offered me the seat beside him, with a gesture of his hand, it opened up like the most inviting, like the safest place, like a place I could be and be safe and cared for, a place from with to greet the world. I thought it meant that I could trust him. I thought it meant that I could relax. I thought it meant so many things.