In This World

 I save my worst contempt for my mother. My father who has never played any kind of role in my life, who has never tried to contact me and who practically flinches every time he sees me, this man I have absolutely no feelings about. It’s my mom, the parent who in her own way tried, for whom I have all the anger and resentment.

 

I met my mom when I was almost 8. Like many Salvadoran parents she had left me with relatives when I was still a baby and went to the U.S. in search of opportunity. When she brought me to this country and away from everyone I had ever known it seemed good for a while. She made me food when I came home from school. She served it on a TV tray, and I sat in front of the TV watching cartoons in English. This lasted a few weeks. Then she disappeared into all kinds of jobs. By the time I was 10, I often made myself dinner and tried not think too much about the different men in my mom’s life.

 

Something happened in June of 1986 while I was in El Salvador. When I came back my mom and her husband where living somewhere new. A year or so later she tried to kill herself. I woke to her being wheeled out of our apartment. I visited her in the psych ward. While I was still in high school, she moved back to El Salvador, and I had to figure out life for myself from that point on.

 

A decade ago, she lived with me for a year because of some mistake she made, which is not worth going into here. At one point, she asked me how I got to be such a good cook, and I told her that since she wasn’t around a lot when I was a kid, I had to learn to cook things for myself. She said—and I swear that this was not a joke—” You’re welcome. Without me, who knows how you would have turned out.” I exploded. It’s one thing to never have gotten any kind of apology for abandoning me and leaving me an unprotected child twice. I accepted that she was no different than a lot of Salvadoran parents, as Óscar Martínez points out, for whom those kinds of choices are obvious and don’t need explanations, let alone apologies. But it was another thing to have her take credit for all the things that I did through my own grit and a lot of luck. I screamed at her, and we didn’t speak for a couple of days.

 

But if I think hard about it, it’s difficult to picture becoming who I have become in El Salvador, regardless of my grit and all the luck in the world. She brought me to this country, and everything else that happened after is the consequence of that action. My mom must feel all that contempt. And for doing the thing she thought was right, which was undoubtedly the right thing to do. I imagine how my children might feel about me some day and I wince. “In this world/it’s just us.” Well, it is, and it isn’t.

All Too Well

Went to dinner with an old friend tonight and we talked about memory. She lived in London for several months this year and left her wife for a few weeks to go to Paris by herself. She wanted to visit Paris and to think of her mother, who died recently. Paris was her mother’s favorite city and they had spent a lot of time there together. So this time she wandered through the city thinking about her mother, remembering her, speaking with her. She told me: “Casi caminé por toda la ciudad.” It was a lovely image, using space and memory to feel close to someone who is gone. I told her that I don’t know how I will feel about my mother when she dies. All my recollections of her, which are after all just afterimages of my experiences with her, are conflicted, ambivalent, and often bitter. But who knows? The future turns us all into fools.

 

Taylor Swift has created a flowering garden of songs about love, memory, and loss. She’s amazing. Her sincerity, in this insincere age, is always moving. In “All Too Well” she revisits the images of a relationship that has ended. And it’s the specificity of it which gives the song its pathos. The glasses, the twin sized bed, the tee ball team; these details ground the song. But at the same time the generality of it­— not the stuff that sounds cinematic (driving in a convertible in the falling autumn leaves) and so feels a little artificial— the generality of the pain of memory itself: “I remember it all too well.” It’s painful because it is so beautiful. All the things that had meant so much turned meaningless by the end of the relationship. It’s a curse to remember things like that.

 

Which is different from what Modest Mouse says about the desire to forget: “I’ve done some things I want to forget but I can’t.” This speaks so much to me. All the things I’ve done that I’m too embarrassed or ashamed to talk about. That, because I can’t undo them, I wish I could not remember them. This is another kind of curse. To carry with you your shame in a place where no one can see it but that you can never forget is there.

 

In Yo, El Supremo a character says: “El hombre de buena memoria no recuerda nada porque no olvida nada” (A man who has a good memory doesn’t remember anything because he doesn’t forget anything.) The characters in this novel are extraordinarily smart but also full of shit and given to speaking in sophistries so I don’t really know how seriously the reader is supposed to take this statement. But I have thought a lot about it in the last couple of weeks. I’m given to saying that I have a memory like a steel trap. I say that because it’s a cliché that makes me laugh and because I sort of believe it. My head is full of memories. But maybe this isn’t remembering at all. Maybe it’s because all the things I like to recall, and all the memories I don’t like thinking about, and all the things I can’t forget are always just there.