Of Women and Salt, Gabriela Garcia [100 best novels of all time .txt] 📗

to be a swimmer, in Key Biscayne, where the wealthy Salvadorans live, where the beach is uglier than Miami Beach but where fewer people venture so I can sink beneath the green-gray water and watch the clouds blur and no one asks anything of me. Sometimes I want to be a fighter, as when I consider attacking the men who stand guard over me. What about not caring about the consequences? Throw me in prison, beat me with your batons. Give me up to the television, another headline. Some moments I want my daughter returned to me, but God forgive me, others I want a different life for her, away from me. It is ugly to admit. But don’t believe the mothers who tell you motherhood is vocation or sacrifice or beauty or anything on a greeting card. Motherhood: question mark, a constant calculation of what-if. What if we just gave up?

There’s no bedtime, technically, but we can’t roam after ten o’clock. It’s not jail. That’s what the guards say constantly: It’s not jail, be glad it’s not jail. Most of us go to sleep early because the children have school the next day plus we have nothing better to do. My room has five bunk beds lining the walls with identical blue plastic mattresses. Below the bunks are plastic bins in which to store our things. Most of us don’t have things. There is one plastic table painted over with a checkerboard and backgammon. We don’t play. There are no pieces to play with, plus none of us know the rules. There is a door that does not lock and Plexiglas windows with chicken wire. Sometimes a child cries at night but is not allowed to sleep with the mother; the guards will come in the middle of the night and break it up. There are too many people here. That’s another thing the guards tell us. They complain that there are too many people and not enough guards and they’re building another place like this not far from here but it is taking too long. The guards complain about it together but we hear it and we tell one another: There are too many people here. We tell each other: This must mean they’ll let us out sooner. Because it seems logical that they’ll let us out sooner if there are too many people. Some of us even beg, Just deport me already.

I don’t say this. At least we are safer here. I fled the person who killed my brother. Simmering violence. A government whose response was to militarize the streets. Of course with US help. Of course they don’t talk about this on the news. I’m afraid of the conditions that create violence. I’m afraid of the police. I’m afraid of the army. I’m afraid of how I survive in a country where the official currency is the US dollar and farmers can barely afford the abono for the milpas but the rich hire private security firms. I’m afraid every moment of every day, thinking about my life here, thinking about my life if it’s not here, thinking about Ana, thinking about my people, my beautiful people, so many young people dying in the streets. Parents sending their children off into the unknown, thinking maybe they won’t make it to the United States but maybe they will. Maybe they will and if they stay here maybe they won’t. I know all this because the women who get letters or make calls ask about my town for me, women who have sisters or uncles or cousins from all over Sonsonate. Most of the women crossed not long ago. Border Patrol holding cells where they crank the AC, from the hielera to here. If they force me back, we will have to find a new place that is safer, Ana and I. But where, with what, how? I turn on the sticky, sweaty mattress to face the wall and think, What kind of fear is credible? There are so many kinds of fear. I don’t like that the rooms won’t lock.

Some mornings, I wake up really early. I wake up at six and head to the common room before anyone else gets there. I like to put in the National Geographic DVD another woman gave me. I’ve watched it so many times. It is in English but I can make out some of what the deep-voiced narrator says. I can enjoy the bursts of feather and branch and leaf and sky. I watch it all the way through until my favorite part. The camera zooms in and I see them: the hoatzin chicks.

Hoatzin chicks differ from their parents. When young, hoatzins have two claws on each wing. The claws go away once the chicks mature into adults, but as children they can climb trees with their wing claws, jump into water and claw themselves out, fight predators if they need to. They are beautiful birds, the hoatzin, my favorite of all the birds. They have bloodred irises crowned by sea-blue plumage. They have red crests that rise up like crowns. This is how I picture my daughter, flying through these gates to me, shedding handcuffs and perplexing Immigration officers as she expands her wings and flaps them viciously, as she rises past the walls, past the chicken wire, past the guard booth. This is how I see her coming to me, arms spread, sun in her belly, royalty made of delicate bone and feather and laughter. My daughter, knowing she is royalty and ready to spread her killer claws.

4HARDER GIRL

Jeanette

Miami, 2002

Johnson’s lips were rubber clams. His breath was stale and hot, though the sand pricked cold against Jeanette’s back. She turned her head when he tried to kiss her again, as if by looking away, nothing was happening, nothing but the ocean at her side. It’s never really dark in Miami Beach, even on a moonless night. Ocean Drive dripped its neon across a dying street,