An Immigrant Woman

PART ONE

Slip-pilings on the Brooklyn littoral

—the poles still tarry, flimsy; the ferry terminus

with its walledup doors wan doorshapes

on eroded sills. Downstream, the strutwork

of the Williamsburg cable tower

threw its cool shadow half a mile inland

over tarpaper seams, gantried water butts,

and splintery tenement cornices milled

with acanthus and classical grasses

of nineteenth-century dream-slum fantasy.

We could see, from our rooftops, the endspan

floating its ant-threads of traffic

to the granite salients of the anchorage,

and through its strands on the west

the Financial District’s watery silhouettes.

But it was our own foundations, crumbling

in the sandy soil, that made us protest

the drill rigs sounding for a wider bridge ramp

to funnel the airport traffic over us

into Manhattan. “Construction tremors

will weaken our buildings”: from the over-roosted

tenements clinging near the anchorage

flew manuscript lists of signatures, block-groups’

painfully Englished petitions. But City Hall

adoze, sleep-feeding, just flooded us

with chimerical figures and blueprints,

wearing us down. Our own “block-leader,” Luz,

a Guatemalan law student at NYU

where I studied classics, distracted us

more easily with her “pure language”

or anti-Puerto Rican tirades. “Call that Spanish?

Take my sitter—muy indio, still speaks some

Maya mountain-language BUT

the beautiful Spanish!” And so one evening this sitter,

Pilar, came over—forty, perhaps, with a long

fawn-tinted oval face, and read in low tones

an archaic poem to the Madonna. “My daughter

knows it in Quiché and English—” and she passed around,

wistfully, a First Communion photo—flat cheekbones

like her mother’s, long black braids, straight look.

Luz told us Pilar had lost husband

and son to the Violence; a machine-gunned

death heap in the center of their village—

“They killed all the men. But when my family

came here, she came with her girl, we helped with the

green card, and she’s a hotel maid now

near the UN ...” Much realer, this, than our own

bridge-inflicted, some-day disaster. And who knew

but our bridge might metamorphose,

as the City said (“Global cities draw capital”), into a river

of money (“We’ll all sell cuchifritos on the ramp”),

and anyway, mainly, summer

III

was running out, with its open evenings

and windows. One Saturday, turning onto my block

from the subway, I heard my name, crossed

the street where twin buildings had area-ways.

and saw you waving, the same, Pilar,

from a window below the swag-bellied area railings.

“Come have some coffee—go around in back.”

I walked down the building-side, and turned in a trash-littered

airwell by a door with multiple doorbells.

You opened from a wooden hallway, unpainted,

with padlocked doors. “See, the super’s cut up his flat

for illegals. They took out an inside wall, so our room

has a window—we all share the bath.” I entered

a lime-walled room—chairs and table, sofa-bed. Your front wall

was the building front, the three others

drywall. On the bureau, a black-shawled

prie-dieu: two photos; two candles in translucent, white-waxed sacks,

and a polychrome Madonna with meeting brows.

Through your window, car wheels, railings; and, above,

my own second-story windows. “We saw you

reading there,” you said from behind me, “when we moved in.”

You sat me on the sofa, and formally presented your daughter

(she moved her schoolbooks all to one end.) Near her, a shallow,

linoleumed-over trench and a bathroom sink. You said:

“I’m a widow from the mountains near Morache, very near

the home-town of Señora Luz. My real work is hotel maid, and I’ve got

a nice job, at a place called the Tricontinental.”

Then you paused, and I felt how clearly

you’d presented yourself, as Americans do, with your job,

your état civil, and I said: “I’m a graduate student

at NYU, where Luz studies, no, not married, no children ...”

I tried to add something else at once, to leave this less ...

definitive, but nothing came, so we ran through bridge-rumors,

and soon we were hardly listening, waiting

for our own next word, and laughing at our gabble. Pequita

told us what the priest had said

about the drilling; you spoke of Pequita’s

First Communion, and none of us could stop

finding striking things to say. Next day you came over

to see my plants, and I came back for soup-supper, looking up

at my windows, which in the easy half-yellow light

of autumn looked oddly beckoning. As we ate,

you leaned forward, with a sudden rogue’s smile,

and mockingly proposed that we three walk across the bridge,

“There’s a path up there. If the bridge

is bad, we’ll tell off the Mayor—” (In what spirit, I wondered,

had you listened to our committee?) And when I got home

I looked down, and through your sheer curtains saw you

cleaning up, and Pequita, at the table, reading.

But next week, instead of the plank stair

that zigzags up the anchorage-side, we wandered

the riverside shipping alleys. From below, we could see

overhead the under-arch of the bridge, and feel

the resonant top-thrum of westbound

subways and trucks. Then the riverside—I loved

this part. A sort of post-industrial fenworld, with tiny

terrace houses, big dredger-parts laid aside

from the drillings, and abandoned wreckers’ lots

filled with sea-floor light and trembling, long-awned

panicles of switchgrass. Its timelessness

soothed me—though ephemeral. Even that day, one freshly

tuckpointed facade, and a pair of brandnew bronze

Edwardian mermaid doorknockers. I could see

our quarter five years from now, say—the withering

discount chains, tentative boutiques,

and mother and daughter figuring, to the upscale

“pioneers,” as neighborhood indigenes, living on

with strange literalness among them, supplying

their just-permissible quantum of urban grit.

You were ahead, and Pequita trailed us, rattling weed stalks

with a stray lath. As we progressed in and out

of the endspan’s slatted shadows, you turned

and called me into a side-lot—sunken concrete, flask-

green puddles, to a broken-off building wall. It had been

interior, once—rows of soiled roomsized

plaster squares trailing sawn pipes, with one high trembling

toilet, like a pearl. In a lower square, fringed

with ailanthus and barbs of gang graffiti,

was a mural. Muy latino: the mountain

dreaming the city: a terrace cafe with palm trees

and a dancer shawled in black lace, with inward-angled

castanets. And you lifted yourself on tiptoe,

Pilar, to touch the lace, as you might have grazed

Pequita’s cheek. I felt a pang, as if I already needed you

sturdy inside your sturdy body, not this gesture

as if, exiled within, you reached out— We stepped

back, museum-wise, to contemplate, and you said:

“Luz likes to say I’m some mountain-woman, but when

my mother died, I lived with my aunt in the City—I only

went back when I married.” I told her I’d lived

in this city, with a stepmother, who’d divorced my uncle

to marry my father; and beat me. “A stepmother’s

a curse of God,” you said gently. And on the walk back,

pointed out more wall palms, beaches, until New York

seemed a dot in a belt of capitals

high on the globe: world-cities, packed

with immigrants, refugees, Gastarbeiter: a snowy

latitude suffused with tropical nostalgia.

We were a threesome. Coffee, suppers, TV,

Pequita at my computer—you’d asked me to teach her—

or sleeping on my sofa, one bad month

they moved you to night shift. Yet only that summer,

I’d worked in my window like a scholar

in a lamplit bay, the night filled with myriad noises,

like Roman Juvenal, to whose ears “came ever

the sounds of buildings collapsing.” Across, the two

tenement-faces, florid, all bucrania, meanders, dusky trails

of fire-escape bedding. And everything underlit

by the sinister, slow-stopping car lights of our street.

But now it was the dailiness of two

from another hemisphere. Through snow-fissures, winds fluting

on railings and building-flaws, Pilar in her low frame

paced with armfuls of laundry, washed

in the sink and hung to dry everywhere. The thousand

stratagems of those who simply must not spend;

and the tiny mother-decisions: though you preferred

periphery, housekeeping around her,

you’d make yourself interrupt her, to mop

behind your sweeping. And Pequita—I saw her wrap

you up on the sofa when you had flu, and bring you

orange juice, as they’d taught her in school, for she

loved you, she was the person who loved you—

I saw too, that of what I wanted the university

to be for me—a tiny model of the city

with its own rules and subsets: “Tell me

each day who I am”—you’d found your part

in Pequita; I followed the shape

of your day touching center as it funneled

into her hand and moving pencil-point.

For everything seemed natural to Pequita:

the Credo, her photocopied choir music

piled beside the tidy prie-dieu,

our neighborhood of syringe-filled gutters, drug-stoops and pimps,

her school’s turkey cutouts, metal detectors, backed-up toilets ...

Our human wilderness, half-urban, half-surreal

to her was a matter-of-fact Eden, like the picturesque ruins

and laughably rococo grottoes imagined

by the seicento as the Golden Age.

—And I, I thought her whole world, it comes back—

touching, as if her child’s paradisial will were there

for my affectionate recreation, like our still faithfully,

occasionally, typed-up and dispatched

protests from the Ramp Committee to the Mayor. Slight effects

of perspective, tiny human gestures

giving point to the city’s vast, ironic beauty.

PART TWO

VII

At a moment when no one was thinking

about her, Pequita awoke. Perhaps

she enjoyed the solitude, Pilar asleep,

me asleep across the street. She got up

and stood on the cheap oval bathroom rug

before the sink. At seven the drills started,

deeper-toned than ever before (they woke me)—

and part of your ceiling fell in; a beam

splintered, plummeting straight to the oval rug—

The person screaming over the phone

was Pilar. I thought it must be really

all right, or she’d be crying not screaming,

but when I’d called 911 and run over, Pequita

was barely alive.

Then the hospital corridors,

me trying to close my winter coat

(the buttons were off) on my nightgown, you

on a bench, staring straight ahead.

When they said Pequita was

“gone,” you were utterly silent. I brought you

to my place (though our street was a tangle

of police lights and yellow tape), terrified

of your fixed inner focus, as if you had

a plan ... Next night I had Luz stay over,

I slept at her place; the third I was back. You,

thank God (I thought), were crying, and Luz

had set up the service. She propelled us downstairs

and to a tiny brick church I must often have passed

without seeing it, two blocks inland.

Egg-blue inside, it was, with a little green

and gilt altar, dark Stations on the walls,

and the statue of the Virgin of Guadeloupe

placed oddly below the altar stairs, so that Pilar,

after the death-mass, could kneel

before her, praying straight into her face,

while I on a kneeler buried mine in my hands.

What would the mother live for now, the hotel, me, or Luz,

already writing more endless mad letters? Yet only these

had from the City real answers: they’d brace the drill site

with vibration-absorbing piers; and they wanted

her and her friend Mrs. Citrin to know

“that no one else had been more than lightly injured.”

VIII

It was the end of winter, very dark. The building

managers, nervy, had moved you to the first floor

next door, till you found a new place (I knew

you weren’t looking). Each day I saw you

arrive from work, answer my call tersely,

then pull down your blinds. A shadow showed rarely,

flattened, shapeless; you lay on your sofa a lot.

“Thanks Anne—I’m better without company,” or

“please understand.” But often, later

in the evening, you’d come down the stairs

and turn inland. Then, one morning as I was passing

with early groceries, you were leaving the parish hall

in your black winter coat, heavily scarved,

and we paused. Approvingly, you tapped one glove

on my armload—you’d told me to cook more, dictated

recipes. I asked if this had been Pequita’s

choir-practice place; the sentence wavered,

but you replied with grim joy,

“She’s not practicing now.” It took me a minute.

Pequita was singing, this moment, in the Presence.

Still what you felt most (it was in your face)

was absence, absence, but from something bitter

in your eyes, that seemed small and round with the cold, I felt

your desire to exclude me and our old collusive ironies.

What were such luxuries now, ironies, Anglo friends;

and I thought you hated my mind

that remembered the brownpapered books,

the orange juice. I reached to touch your arm—to get past

this, but no, you had to get home:

“I fasted for communion”; and your eyes

swerved away. All my laughable,

my lovely, delusional studies, that I’d seen you

sort through for Pequita, were now an affront. And yet

I felt you moving behind your own mind, as if

with something held in reserve ...

But then you stopped answering the phone, went

less often to church. What I thought

was that you were angry (certainly I was). Perhaps

I thought you needed to talk, and I’d visit you

in Manhattan. So one morning in March,

in the black coat I’d got for the funeral, I walked east

from the forty-second street Lexington stop

to the three-story, fairy-lit jungle atrium

of the Tricontinental, and went to the seventh floor,

where you started. There was a cart in the hall,

a gleaming chrome maid’s cart half-projecting

from a bedroom. On its sides were rows

of glasses with lace sani-bonnets, gold-

stamped mini-soaps and deodorants. It moved out,

and you stood in the door with a sheet-load, looking fat

in a starchy pink uniform monogrammed

PILAR. When you saw me, you dropped the sheets

and in pain, pressed both palms to your cheeks,

and looked at me looking at you. When

I started sobbing, you took my shoulder and backed me

to the elevator. Pressed the button, stepped back,

and then, to my surprise, gave me a sudden hug

before pushing me in.

It had been always this half-connected

and tenuous, our friendship. What light on my own

isolation and need, that I hadn’t known.

But you actually called me, that week, to propose

our old joke, a bridge walk—maybe Saturday?

Your voice in my ears sounded wobbly

with tension, held-backness, so I got in first:

a friend had wound up her doctorate and left me

a minute Village studio starting June ... After that

I could listen, somber, as you poured out

your need to leave, Luz’s cousin, the possible

hotel job “right in LA.” You added “Anne,” and broke off.

“Well, I’ll tell you that later. Look, it may

snow on Saturday, OK?” “I don’t care.” And before

you hung up, I’d resigned you,

given you up. We’d part, on my side

in anger, on yours in oblivion. I met you

at the foot of the anchorage stair

(not the eastern approach, with its easy grade

near the ramp site). We climbed through the snow,

slowly, pausing at landings for different

views of our old alley world. Like a museum

of disused urban functions—we noted a bricked-over

backyard privy arch, and from higher, roof-huts, inkily distinct,

of old-style tenement dumbwaiters. The whole scene

thrown out of drawing by one of those giant

NYC cable-spools, charred at the bottom

where some homeless had tried to burn it.

The moist snow was sweeping

through the cable tower when we clambered

onto the path beneath it. As we moved, hunched slightly,

onto the mainspan, the whole city abruptly

whited-out to a monochrome geometry

of vertical and stooping gray lines. I thought

how Pequita would have loved it, and caught

her mother’s eye. We went on cautiously, soon

pausing to stamp our boots and look over the rail

at the traffic lanes below us. “Anne, what

I started to say before—this is it: I’m sorry

I didn’t talk to you—you understand?” “Of course,”

I lied aimlessly. But you, glancing sideways,

“But I’m really sorry ...” “No, really ...” You shook

your head slightly, then took my arm. “Okay then—

what’s this thing?” pointing a snowy boot

at a bolt as high as our knees, with a rusted-on octagonal

nut: “It’s just a bolt.” You tapped your glove on a strut—

“strut,” I provided. And you said, pompously, in Luz’ very

intonations (in what spirit had you

listened?)—“The tolerances just aren’t there.”

Then, feeling easier, we started naming everything—

spikes, spun-wire vertical cables: English,

Spanish, and then I heard you speak Quiché (words once

for vines, for split trunks

over gorges?) But everything on the bridge was

shabby, neglected-looking; and you said

soberly: “If anyone was supposed

to look after this bridge, he’s forgot all about it.”

We didn’t link arms again, but started back, pausing

to throw a few loose snowballs

on the Manhattan traffic below us. We’d go

our separate ways—I’d go on delaying, skirting

around my burnt-out places; you’d go

where you could, forget what you could—

some Job-like relinquishment of inquiry

or thought; organisms tend to persist ... When

we got down to the massive base

of the anchorage, we managed a hug

that took in our past, at least: one embrace

of two black winter coats in the snow.

Source: The Displaced of Capital (The University of Chicago Press, 2004)

Poems on Immigration