Larry Molina Barber
When I was eleven in Mexico City in 1959, when my hormones effervesced, I was looking at a long black braid tied with green ribbon. Turning—she couldn’t have been more than 19—her profile shook my breath. That skin, canela they call it, cinnamon, glowing alongside her white maid’s uniform. Cheekbones plump and high, almond eye, nose arched, full lips singing a Mexican ballad. She elevated my heart and shattered it and, sprung from Mesoamerican lore, she was my first love. Her voice echoed in that tiny courtyard to one side of my buddy Jimmy’s house where there were cleaning supplies and a concrete washbasin set into the wall. I heard running water and smelled it on the stone as she wrung a wet mop with her hands and stopped, and stopped singing, when she saw me. She wasn’t much taller than I was. I stood motionless for an unknown time before somehow finding breath for an apology and backing away. Out of sight, I dared waiting. After a moment she picked up the song, her voice coming from many points at once in that house of flowers and open spaces and hard surfaces.
Mexico City, Guatemala City, and to a lesser extent Rio de Janeiro, the people and cultures those cities contained, are greatly responsible for saving my life as a boy. My grandparents came from Guatemala, so Latin America was a natural haven for me. In the United States I was then despised and shunned for my public behavior; it was, I confess, often outrageous and at times downright insulting. I twitched and blinked, grunted and jerked. Tourette syndrome is now known but when I was five and six and seven and eight and older it couldn’t be invoked to apologize for me shouting “Fuckshit!” (I feel compelled to note that, despite common knowledge and all jokes aside, only ten percent of TS sufferers have coprolalia).The fact that folks in Latin America didn’t understand my words was helpful. But what quelled my tears of fright and humiliation was the tenderness and the understanding with which Latin America embraced me. The world there acknowledged what I was feeling and mirrored my suffering. I saw a Guatemalan peon bent forward against a tumpline and dwarfed by the bundle of firewood he carried. He wasn’t much taller than I was. Was my load any heavier? My life then was losing control of mind and body and making a spectacle. I felt lacerated. In Latin America, a recumbent Christ statue with bloody, gaping wounds manifestly represents people living with pain. Yet through this pageant of tears shines their great capacity to accept life as it comes and so to accept a young boy who was far outside normal.
My Mesoamerican love, mi indigena, wringing her mop, sang a heartbreak and it’s no wonder. The Mexican popular songbook is sheaf after sheaf of tragedy and loss. There are many with a rich-poor divide that is unbridgeable, unlike the few similar songs from the United States, where anything is possible. Ballads by bruised men might feature a bottle of tequila on a corner table; sometimes there is a gun or knife. The women’s songs are subtle and speak more honestly of hurt. In a time when transistor radios were cutting edge tech, mi indigena instead made song and the concrete walls of the house returned it, sad and with blues notes. She, as unrequited in song as I in my passion for her, unknowingly sang for me.
This is Latin America and it is as familiar as my grandmother’s wrinkled hands.