Except in the novel it will be different mothers.
So who was my father, I demanded in my dream an hour ago, storming out of the room as she began to tell me he was a Norweigian sailor. When I came back there was an envelope with a letter from his family asking about him and me -- he'd gone missing during the hunt for North Sea oil in the 1970s, but they'd heard a rumor he'd had a yankee girl in Aberdeen.
Then I saw my birth certificate showing I was born at a clinic in Tijuana. Overwhelmed with emotion I fell to my knees and begged my mother tell me true, was it true, was I really born in Mexico?
"I never thought you would feel this way about it," she said, *sighing* , laying her hand on my head like my great-great-great grandmother did in the story I wrote in college, "I never thought you would want it to be true."
I woke up.
Fantastically strange I actually read, and can still remember clearly, details from the documents I saw in my dream. Mom had drugs for pain and delivered standing up, at a clinic whose address is exactly where I am living now.
Right here. Right where I'm writing these words, at my table in my kitchen office on calle cuarta en frente del parque, Tijuana. My brain is in labor, recreating myself, reinventing myself while I sleep in these words, reading birth records, seeing certain boxes are checked on the documents, and opening the letter from my unknown ancestors in Norway....
EXCEPT everything was in English and I'm still a damn yankee gringo!!!! Awake again, I can't pretend I'm Jackson Brown, or Joaquin Moreno neither.
We were living in a house of mid-twentieth style, like the used one my parents bought before I was born in Alameda, rather like those older big ones I saw last night walking through Colonia Cacho. Beautiful houses, some of them mansions, even, where the Tijuana elite moved in the forties and fifties, streets with palm trees and front lawns and carports and driveways, mission style and modern, fancy bungalow and ranch craftsman, their front gates and wrought iron fences against the sidewalks, their ladies of the house -- amas de la casa -- talking guietly near one another's car in the evening twilight while the gringo poet came walking home from his early date, walking, walking, walking down the sidewalk, passing by on his long way home from las torres to downtown. This was real, not a dream.
But it fed the dream, I can see that now, just as I saw them when I came walking home from an early evening with mi Maria.
I like this woman more and more every day. Maria de Jesus. I walked to las torres yesterday to meet her. She invited me to a little cafe she knows on Sonora, a street that leads up into Chapultepec, where the rich have been living since the 70s and 80s. While I waited for her, in front of the new skyscraper towers on Agua Caliente Boulevard, I kept looking down the side street, Sidar, toward where the old casino used to be, years and years ago. It's now a big public school. The hotel and gambling salons were torn down. New classrooms built. All that's left from the casino is the ruined swimming pool and a huge chimney that looks like a Moslem minarette. I'm going to go see it some day.
La minarete. There it was, yesterday, piercing the sky like a Moorish needle of tile and iron. Like I said, it used to be a chimney from the power plant or incinerator or something. Maybe they used to cremate gamblers who didn't pay their debts. Heh heh heh -- don't believe everything you read HERE! But imagine that, the famous Tijuana minarette is a chimney. Instead of calling the faithful to their prayers, it released burnt gambling fumes into the atmosphere. Sometimes that's how I feel about my writing. Other times... well, the Lord knows.
Maria arrived a little after 6:30 -- half an hour late. I waited that time alone, watching women and men leave the office tower, meet their wives or husbands or friends in front, or climb into the ruta taxis that buzz along the boulevard, or cross the street to go catch the other direction -- Agua Caliente is divided there -- and I reflected that I know too much of solitude. Rafael was right the other night when he said there is too much darkness in my heart for only one lonely candle.
Yes, I know solitude far too well, its heavy hours and silent books, its endless reading and writing, its empty mirrors where someone else's face wants to look out beside mine. Perhaps it could be Maria....
And then, at last, she came....