Knitting the Fog Read online

  PRAISE FOR KNITTING THE FOG

  “This debut gives tender and keen insight into the experience of migrating north to the US and the challenges a preteen faces integrating into the ‘Promised Land.’”

  —ANA CASTILLO,

  author of Black Dove: Mamá, Mi’jo, and Me

  “Claudia D. Hernández’s exquisite new memoir is a breathtaking read. She is a beautiful storyteller, whose raw honesty sings on the page with a kind of fiery joy and longing of what it means to be a family.”

  —KERRY MADDEN,

  author of the Appalachian Maggie Valley Trilogy

  “La Diablita, the tomboy, wrote these searingly honest, la verdad, stories of crossing to the other side from her beloved Guatemala to her now home, the USA. Poesía is also sprinkled throughout, her prayers. Listen, you’ll believe every word as La Diablita knits the fog beyond man-made borders. The fog is love.”

  —ALMA LUZ VILLANUEVA,

  author of Song of the Golden Scorpion

  “An extraordinary hybrid collection of stunning poetry and even more awe-inspiring prose, evoking the universal journey of identity that we all go through as people, immigrants, and artists.”

  —ADRIAN ERNESTO CEPEDA,

  author of Flashes &Verses … Becoming Attractions

  “This debut is so much more than an immigrant’s story. It is an ode to the resilience of the human spirit. A hymn to the power of poems and stories as agents of personal liberation and social change. In any language. Any culture. Anywhere in the world. ¡Brava, Claudia!”

  —LUCHA CORPI,

  author of Confessions of a Book Burner: Personal Essays and Stories

  “Part torch song and part excavation, this is a coming-of-age story about a young girl from Guatemala crossing the border and making a life that is hers in America. It is also a book of our times, a story of struggle and resilience, a warrior song that refuses to look or run away.”

  —MELISSA R. SIPIN,

  editor in chief, TAYO Literary Magazine

  KNITTING THE FOG

  Claudia D. Hernández

  Published in 2019 by the Feminist Press

  at the City University of New York

  The Graduate Center

  365 Fifth Avenue, Suite 5406

  New York, NY 10016

  feministpress.org

  First Feminist Press edition 2019

  Copyright © 2019 by Claudia D. Hernández

  All rights reserved.

  This book was made possible thanks to a grant from New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew M. Cuomo and the New York State Legislature.

  This book is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts.

  This book is supported in part by an award from the Shelley & Donald Rubin Foundation.

  The author would like to thank José Hernández Díaz for his English translations of “Mayuelas’s Mill,” “Tejiendo la niebla,” “Ardor de cuerpo,” and “Kim Ayu—Vení Pa’ Ca.”

  No part of this book may be reproduced, used, or stored in any information retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without prior written permission from the Feminist Press at the City University of New York, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  First printing July 2019

  Cover design by Suki Boynton

  Cover photograph by Claudia D. Hernández

  Text design by Drew Stevens

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Hernández, Claudia D., author.

  Title: Knitting the fog / Claudia D. Hernández.

  Description: [New York City : Feminist Press, 2019]

  Identifiers: LCCN 2018049649 (print) | LCCN 2018059181 (ebook) | ISBN 9781936932559 (Ebook) | ISBN 9781936932542 (pbk.)

  Subjects: LCSH: Hernández, Claudia D. | Women authors, American--21st century--Biography. | Guatemalan American authors--Biography.

  Classification: LCC PS3608.E76595 (ebook) | LCC PS3608.E76595 Z46 2019 (print) | DDC 813/.6--dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018049649

  Para mi mamá y mis hermanas.

  And to those who continue

  to cross to the other side,

  leaving their loved ones behind.

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Praise for Knitting the Fog

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  PART I: LIFE IN PARADISE, ALSO KNOWN AS HELL

  Facts on How to Be Born: Life

  Tempting Mud

  nothing ever hurt: fragmented memory

  Crying—See/Saw—Laughing

  Becoming Papel Picado

  Pollita trasquilada

  Mamá All to Myself

  Northbound

  Cierta vez caminamos / Once, we walked / Junpech xojb’ehik

  Mayuelas versus Tactic

  Nuestro fruto / Tía Soila

  For Tía Soila

  La Siguanaba

  En el olvido / Forgotten

  Mayuelas’s Mill

  La Familia

  The Persistence of a Nightmare

  Little Devil

  Tactic’s River

  Speaking of Robbery

  At Nightfall

  Mamá Returns

  PART II: OUR JOURNEY TO EL NORTE

  Tejiendo la niebla / Knitting the Fog

  Northbound Again

  Meeting the Coyote

  Tapachula

  Getting to Know Javi

  The Art of Peeing

  Sindy’s Choice

  In Conversation with a Poem Called: Detachment

  Matamoros and the Moors

  The River Never Happened to Me (i)

  The River Never Happened to Us (ii)

  My Side—Your Side

  Frontera de mi lado / Border on My Side

  Are We There Yet?

  A Flying Bus

  PART III: THE PROMISED LAND

  Amado De Jesus Montejo

  The Luggage

  K-I-S-S-I-N-G

  District Six

  We Had Our Childhood—Xqab’an cho qaha’lak’uniil

  Middle School

  Ardor de cuerpo / Ardor of the Body

  Lentils, Anyone?

  It’s Been A While Since I Heard Your Last Song

  PART IV: RETURNING TO MY MOTHERLAND

  Kim Ayu—Vení Pa’ ca / Kim Ayu—Come Over Here

  The Return

  Va callada / Quietly, she goes,

  Victoria

  As We Go

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  Previously Published Work

  About the Author

  About the Feminist Press

  Also Available from the Feminist Press

  More Narrative Nonfiction from the Feminist Press

  PART I

  LIFE IN PARADISE, ALSO KNOWN AS HELL

  Facts on How to Be Born: Life

  This is what the partera told my mother the day I was born:

  Boys are usually born facing down and girls are born facing up.

  Not you, Mamá scolded me. You came out of me, facing up, a girl.

  But midway out, you spun your body around like the head of a barn

  owl. Ghostly, pale. There were times you acted like a girl, other

  times like a varón.          Like a tomboy, I assured her.

  Tía Soila buried my umbilical cord next to the tallest tamarindo

  tree. I always wondered which one, they were all tall. Unlike

  my sisters and I, distinct in size, shape, and temperamento. No

/>   one questioned it; we assumed it had to do with our ancestors’

  genes. Two months later, after my birth, Mamá registered me

  under Claudia Denise Hernández Ramos at the civil registry of

  Guatemala. The secretary typed Penise instead of Denise. I grew

  up pretending I was never given a middle name. At the age of

  nineteen, I returned to Guatemala, alone, to change the P to a D.

  I never questioned why Mamá never did. On that trip, I discovered

  my last name should have been Rossi instead of Hernández. O mother.

  I love you dearly.  That’s all I was able to say to her over the phone.

  Tempting Mud

  Mamá was always running away from something, someone. Her present, her past, the hunger that chased her, Papá’s drunkenness and obsessiveness, her mother’s abandonment, the heat of Mayuelas or the coldness of Tactic, her beauty—her long hair.

  I remember when Mamá would bathe Consuelo and me together in the pila, a washbasin made out of cement. I was four and Consuelo was six. We didn’t have hot water; our pila was out in the patio surrounded by the shade of the tamarindo trees. The water came straight from the river, cold and fresh. Mamá never allowed us to drink it.

  “It’s stale! You’ll grow a solitaria, a tapeworm, in your tummy,” she would say.

  The washbasin was filled with water. It had one sink on each side. One sink had a ribbed surface and it was usually used for hand-washing laundry. The other sink was for doing dishes. Its surface was smooth. Mamá would sit both Consuelo and me on the ribbed sink so that we wouldn’t slip. The pila was high off the ground.

  “Sindyyyy!” Mamá would yell. “Help me rinse the girls.”

  Sindy was my oldest sister—eight years older than me. She acted like my second mother whenever she babysat me and later on when Mamá left. There were times I hated Sindy for that.

  Mamá’s fingernails were always long and sharp. She scrubbed my head furiously with the cola de caballo shampoo. The Mane ‘n Tail always burned my eyes. We hadn’t heard of baby shampoo in those days. Sindy’s job was to pour buckets of water over me. I felt like I was drowning every time the water hit the crown of my head. I somehow managed to breathe through my mouth as the see-through, soapy veil of water covered my face.

  After the bath, Mamá would dress us up in summer dresses to keep us fresh in the scalding heat of Mayuelas, where the ceiba trees and mango trees bloomed with tenacity. Mamá kept us clean. She fed us three times every day: huevitos tibios, soft-boiled eggs, and sweet bread with a cup of milk or a Coca-Cola. Sometimes she fed us Nestlé Cerelac by itself—completely dry. It was my favorite.

  I remember Mamá was always moody. I never knew why.

  “You two better not get dirty!” she’d yell after bathing us.

  I loved playing outside in the mud.

  One summer day, the mud felt especially cold and refreshing on my skin. Nobody was around to keep an eye on me. Sindy and Consuelo were inside the house with Mamá doing chores. I decided to taste the mud.

  I grew up listening to stories about how four-year-old Sindy loved to eat clumps of dirt from Tía Soila’s adobe kitchen walls. I was four, and I wanted to see for myself why Sindy loved it so much. Tía Soila was Mamá’s aunt, but we also called her Tía.

  I knew exactly what I was doing, and I knew it was wrong. Sindy got beat up many times for eating dirt. I looked around one more time before picking up a handful of mud. I was nervous. I was terrified of Mamá.

  I hid my dirty hands behind my back, and before I knew it, I found myself grinding rocks with my baby teeth. Two seconds later, I spat everything out and ran to the outhouse. No one saw me. I couldn’t get rid of the salty-chalky taste in my mouth.

  I spat and spat everywhere, in the darkness of the toilet, all over the dirt floor until my mouth felt dry. Eventually, I began to appreciate the petrichor scent trapped in my mouth. I finally understood why Sindy desired clumps of dirt in her mouth. It was a different type of hunger we both had.

  nothing ever hurt: fragmented memory

  By the time I was five, I became numb to seeing Papá passed out in the cantina,

  drunk and penniless; his pockets inside out,

  lying on the street

  naked, while Guatemala’s army baptized the

  Chuchumatán Mountains

  with rifles,  machetes.

  At home, Mamá became a see-through cup ready to explode

  from the deepest red of her chest. There were times she

  wished Ríos Montt’s regime would take him away. But

  instead, she broke things with her wings.

  Empty plumes impregnated the air.

  It was usually Tía Soila who broke up their fights.

  Mamá would gather the three of us under her arms.

  Her collar—

  adorned with purple pearls, while Papá’s eye—bleeding with

  whiskey—was

  scarred by her tacón.

  Far away, the mountains moaned

  with the Ixil people’s burning trees—

  screeching bones.

  I don’t mean to tell you how my sister Consuelo cried,

  latching to Mamá’s thigh, begging her not to look for

  him and fight him

  like a mad Quetzal. Consuelo grew emotionally thick skin

  wings.

  I don’t mean to tell you how my sister Sindy, at the age of nine,

  became my second mother. Soon, she developed a

  special gaze, the one

  where one eye can see right through you, while the other one

  lingers for imaginary horizons to

  perch on.

  What I do mean to tell you is how I felt ecstatic running from

  house to house,

  seeking shelter, hiding from Papá’s fluttering

  wrath. I distracted

  myself playing by the riverbank, creating dolls of mud and clay—bloodstained—

  from the mouth of the Río Negro/río ardiente—

  I pretended to be god.

  I never asked why we always went back. I laughed out loud and spun around,

  blurring everyone’s faces until I’d fall on the ground

  skinning

  my fragmented memory; nothing ever hurt. Now at thirty-four, I pick Mamá’s

  broken feathers,  from my throat;  while eighty-six-year-old Ríos Montt

  spreads his wings in the comfort of his golden home;

  unexpected overturned    veredicto.

  Crying—See/Saw—Laughing

  Everyone in town was afraid of Mamá; she had a permanent frown on her forehead. No one dared to mess with her. She carried herself in such a way, insinuating that she was good at everything, including cutting her own hair, my sisters’ hair, and mine.

  She always kept her hair shoulder length, wavy, 1920s flapper style until she began to eat it at an older age. She began to pluck each strand, one by one, and cry quietly in the darkness of her bedroom. Consuelo and I modeled short bob hairstyles, looking more like older women than six- and four-year-old girls. Sindy had long hair. If Mamá ever cut Sindy’s hair, it wasn’t noticeable because of her large, bouncy curls.

  Mamá had a monthly hair-cutting routine. When our bangs grew too long and started getting in our eyes, she trimmed our bobs with her twelve-inch, heavy-duty scissors—the same ones she used to cut the fabric for our homemade dresses, and the husks from corn.

  She was in a bad mood the day she decided to cut Consuelo’s hair. She yanked at Consuelo’s hair even though it was untangled—straighter than pine needles. Consuelo didn’t complain. We both knew that Papá had not come home the night before. We knew he had fallen asleep at Miriam’s bar, like the “typical drunk he was.”

  Mamá didn’t simply trim Consuelo’s hair, she chopped away at it while Consuelo sat there silently taking it all in. Sindy was at school. I hid behind the curtains and, through
the window, noticed Papá returning home, walking toward the door.

  My legs trembled watching him approach the door, stumbling around, his head drooping over, his body tilting to the left. I began to sway back and forth, just like him, realizing that I had to pee. I was terrified, but oddly excited to know that something bad was about to happen. I peed a little on myself. Letting it out felt good.

  Papá didn’t have his keys. Both his pants’ front pockets were sticking out like deflated off-white balloons. The dancers at Miriam’s bar—or the putas, as Mamá referred to them—would usually send him home two days later after they had drank all his monthly check.

  Papá knocked twice on the door, but Mamá continued with her chopping, ignoring him. I peed a little bit more on myself. He banged on the door louder, harder. Consuelo began to sob quietly and I continued to hide behind the curtains. My puddle of piss kept growing.

  We should have been used to watching them fight like professional wrestlers in front of us. Sometimes Consuelo served as their referee, getting in between them, absorbing some of the punches and scratches. If we were living in Mayuelas, Tía Soila would intervene. If we were living in Tactic, Mamatoya, my grandma, would separate them with her broom or her machete.

  I was afraid of Papá. I hated seeing blood drawn from any part of Mamá’s body. I didn’t mind so much when Mamá would scratch Papá’s face with her sharp nails, or use the pointy heel of her shoe as a hammer to attempt to hit him in the eye, like a nail. I secretly cheered for her. I was aware of Papá’s height and strength. He was twice her size.

  Papá didn’t need anyone cheering for him. Most of the time those cheers were more like cries and wails. Consuelo would always find a way to get involved in their brawl: Pulling on Papá’s arm. Tugging on his leg. Begging. Praying. But no one would listen. Sindy would usually cry quietly, too. Her body would shrink while sitting on a chair, or hiding behind a door. She was too thin and fragile to get involved. I usually hid behind something or someone’s skirt.

  Five minutes later, Consuelo was free to roam the house with an itchy back and a red naked neck. She cried when Papá broke down the living room door, but I continued to laugh, nervously, nonstop, behind the curtain.