LITMIR.BIZ

      Doom is never foretold. Not when you’re young, just married to a man who adores you and takes you away to a place of sun, with dust, lizards everywhere in the cracks, birds wandering lost in streets that remind you of Port-au-Prince.

      In Mexico, she heard the familiar sounds of suffering and holiness in the bodies of beggars and priests. But how bad could things be? A gold bracelet, given to her by a doting husband, encircled her wrist. She especially liked to see the statues of the Virgin that appeared miraculously on the steps of churches or on altars with candles, gold chalices, violets, and white carnations.

      In 1939, right after their marriage, my parents arrived in Mexico. My father drove his Buick Special 8 convertible from Guadalajara to Cuernavaca, stopping in Mexico City, traveling along roads Graham Greene first captured that same year with his “whisky priest” in Lawless Roads and then a year later in The Power and the Glory, but I doubt they ever read him. My father didn’t like Catholics. I do not know any details of their journey. No one ever told me stories. All that remains of the visit are photographs. They got there seven years after Hart Crane leapt off the Orizaba into the sea; just after Sergei Eisenstein began the film that would be cut and mangled in Hollywood; a year after Malcolm Lowry was deported, his life with the alluring Jan Gabrial a shambles.

      My parents began their marriage when the New York World’s Fair opened with the debut of nylon stockings, when Billie Holiday first sang and recorded “Strange Fruit,” Judy Garland sang “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” in The Wizard of Oz, and Gone With the Wind premiered at Loew’s Grand Theater in Atlanta. Franco had already conquered Madrid, ending the Spanish Civil War. They arrived in Mexico a year before Trotsky was axed to death there, at a time when over 1,000 American tourists a month visited Mexico, and artists too. But none of this, no history of persecution, no pleasures of culture high and low, no thought of politics can be gleaned from these photographs.

      The suffering of bulls, yes, and the remarkable poses of my mother, but alongside a few scenes of peasants, cacti, churches, murals, or horses, there was only a young girl chosen by an older man, and continuously reinvented in split-second exposures, caught in hundreds of ways: lying down in a two-piece bathing suit on rocks, or sitting, long legs crossed doubly graceful in the rise of the stairs underneath her, or sometimes standing in sunlight, her head rocked to the side and eyes like tinder.

      The bulls mattered, even if she didn’t know it then. My father went to bullfights. During those afternoons, what did my mother do? As I remember her broken life, I can’t stop thinking about the bulls, isolated from their kind, released into spectacle, performing their agony, the light in their eyes slowly turning into dark. The man rides the horse. He spears the bull and looks down at the stricken animal.

      Three quarters of a century later, I look at the pictures. Out of boxes and other wooden and steel containers, and buried deep under other albums, these relics of a honeymoon emerge. They were not part of anything I knew, nor did they make up any kind of beauty my parents might retrieve from a past when they might have known love or passion.

      I spent my life not knowing what it meant to love. There was no warmth in our house, no sign of a kiss, except once or twice when my father tried to peck at my mother’s lips as if he was ashamed, a moment in time preserved for me now only in her grimace.

      Lust I knew. The long afternoon phone calls when my mother rested on her bed behind a door that was not quite shut. Her legs I could not see. They were under the sheet. She laughed and sounded different than usual. Or was that love, as one hand moved up and down, and the other held the phone very close to the ear?

      I wanted these photos to tell me something about their past, something that might otherwise be lost forever. My mother’s face, caught in poses that were never off-guard or random, still does not speak to me. Sometimes she has that immaculate quality of being purified of anything living. When she looks out at my father, the hand drawn up on one side, sultry on the hip, I think of Rita Hayworth, her idol. The earliest films of this love goddess had been on my mother’s mind long before she left for Mexico with my father.

      Once there, my father said, the bellowing of bulls could be heard wherever you stood. The heat and the cruelty and the beauty and the grace were simply part of the landscape. The bullfight photos are large 8x10 prints. They touch my heart more strongly than I could have anticipated.

      What more can be known about the honeymoon that left my mother cold, my father clueless? I am somehow sure that my mother never looked at any of these photos. She never had any interest in remembering the past. Her indifference to whatever she had felt then made her the woman that I grew up watching. I admired and feared her, but most of all I longed to be close to her, enveloped in the waves of her brown and heavy hair. Just a couple of years after marriage, the soft face of a woman beguiled became impenetrable in its exacting beauty. A veneer set in over her luscious skin. Hardness took over eyes that were once inviting, and her smile remained frozen for the camera.

      That unyielding stiffness had not, though, yet set her face in stone. She was not afraid to be vulnerable, and her eyes still looked at what she thought she loved.

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      “Blood poured down the streets,” my mother used to repeat after my father died. Cryptic, she never explained who or what she meant. Did she mean the blood of bulls or the blood of men?

      She liked to hear church bells ringing. She prayed the words she learned as a child in Port-au-Prince, where the nuns at Sacré Coeur, her school in Turgeau, took away the girls’ mirrors and then gazed secretly at themselves: “Je vous salue Marie, pleine de grâce, le seigneur est avec vous.” Trying to tell me about her childhood in Port-au-Prince, never sure if she was French, Syrian, or Haitian, and light enough not to think of herself as black, she always returned to the nuns at Sacré Coeur. Her stories focused on transformation and shape-shifting identities: “They never told us about the slave trade. I never knew about that. In the beginning, the nuns told me, there were some

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