Ana Garza G'z
Interpreting
I own a headset, and I have a job
I don't like. Jobs are scarce. I'm an ingrate.
Some of my reasons make sense, low pay, high stress, static,
and conversations that are hard to hear.
I'm an interpreter who works over the phone.
I understand the reasons that don't make sense only after
I read the table of contents of a literary review.
The names are all foreign: Crenshaw, Harris, Talbot.
One or two writers have names like mine, but they're surrounded
By other names, linking me with their past,
Not their present. No, I'm not thundering on
a pulpit with conspiracies about exclusion.
Editors just don't get my prejudices,
and I don't get theirs. Still,
the list of contributors is there, and I am here
invisible. When I'm a voice on the phone, reality is there—
like a plastic jewel box that snaps
around a pregnant woman grunting beyond instructions
in an operating room, an old man frowning
over a social workers desk when thirty years of minimum shrinks
to three hundred dollars a month till death, an attorney
at a prison speaker asking about the knife
and the hand that held it, a husband steadying
his voice after the eviction notice crackles
from the cell phone in a sheriff officer's hand—
and I am here
at a desk, with a headset and a telephone,
and I can't be there.
I understood this for the first time in Barcelona,
in the room where Columbus laid the new world open
at the monarchs' feet, two continents in pieces taken
out of wooden chests, cages, bodies
with honey colored skin. I would not have been there,
the mixed breed daughter of that other world, a thing
pregnant women would have banished
with eyelids to shield their unborn children.
And now, when the world is full
of half breeds like me, I'm as different
from them, as foreign, as the names
on that table of contents, as frightening as the thing
the pregnant women refused to see.
We're back to prejudices, theirs and mine,
and the problem of employment, of gratitude, of people
like me. I do my best work over the phone.
The genetics counselors are where I shine,
with their sonograms and their meticulous descriptions
of earlobes, nuchal folds, fingers, spines. "The fetus has
a one in one hundred seventy-four chance of developing ...
That's a terrible life for the child. Imagine
a waiting room with one hundred seventy-four women.
Each one is holding a baby. One of those babies is …
That's an awfully high risk."
The numbers vary:
one out of one hundred seventy-four,
one out of two hundred fourteen,
one out of four hundred eighty-seven.
Such strange precision.
I hear the hollow distortion of speaker phone as I repeat,
the echo in my empty house, all of the inner walls knocked out,
my voice muffling as the figures file in:
one woman, then another, then twelve more,
then forty in a mob of sweat pants and hair
pulled back, then another bigger group
with pageboys and barrettes, then more, and more
in designer jeans and business suits, women with babes
in arms with diaper bags from Wal-Mart and Coach packed
shoulder to shoulder, breasts to back, elbows
jabbing other mothers' ribs with each kick
or wave of an infant's limbs, some women on the stoop,
some near the washer and drier beyond
the back door, eyes shifting away from
the first, the one in her tiny bubble of space.
She is crying.
Mothers always cry when they have children like me.
Mine did, when I became myself at the age of seven.
People stopped us on the street. They held her
for a moment. Her body shook, and I stood at her side waiting
thirty years for her grief to fold away like winter blankets
in plastic boxes under beds until circumstances
call. On the phone again, the maternity floor
this time, a doctor slides a pair of earphones
over the new mother's head. The new father sits
beside her, no headset, just his wife's face
and the doctor's syllables, which sound like nothing, of course.
"When the baby was twelve hours old, we tested for ...
We tested again when he was twenty-four hours old.
He did not respond to either test. Your baby is profoundly …."
She stops my recital of the next phase while the mother cries,
while the sheets crinkle, while the father reaches,
while the mother moves away, the father's whispered question:
"Honey, what? Honey, what?"–both a plea and a wish to comfort.
"Do you know any people who are…?" the doctor asks.
The headset pops with the force of the mother's motion:
"We don't know any of those people," the last two words hard
as a pointing finger. "None of those people are in our families,
not his or mine."
On site, my work is suspect.
A real interpreter is called for, someone who can,
but no one is available, so they're stuck with me
at the psychiatric lockdown. A lone woman sobs,
pregnant, no meds (bad for the fetus), a husband,
no other family. She sits beside me, clings
to my arm sometimes, clings to the therapist's. The baby …
there is something wrong. She had an ultrasound, met
with the counselor. The husband thinks an abortion … but
She can submit to the will of God, bear
her cross, try to love
the thing growing in her body, pushing
at the walls of her uterus, at her marriage, at her faith.
The thing will be broken like me,
me in a future incarnation. The therapist calls
for a different interpreter. I go
home, and they wait. That night
the woman hangs herself, tears
her clothes into strips outside
the angle of a security camera, timing
it between staff check-ins.
Someone mentions it the next time
I'm there, an outline, no details,
but when I'm here, I know she must have tied the dead
end to a door knob or the back of a chair.
Nothing else makes sense
just as my kind don't make sense,
just as I don't make sense—
my body in a room full of bodies,
myself in a book full of selves.
I'm only a hum of air
over the phone. I find the perfect
words for other prejudices, carefully repeat
for thirty cents a minute, who I am—there:
never a gift to be swaddled in pastels, to be celebrated
with cigars, to be anticipated. I am loss.
I am a bubble of space. I am otherness
so profound I am unknown. I am the will of God
to be born naked with a noose, with thirty years of waiting.
But I am here, and I am waiting too
for someone to fold into
me like a blanket in winter.
* * *
ENCOUNTER
We pull into the drive and my mother shrieks.
The iron gate to the backyard stands beside
the lawn beyond it, and my dog, a red
Chihuahua mutt, is sitting there, plump, small
jeweled, pensive between the two supports, her head
tipped up, a slender paw scratching slowly
behind an ear, then drifting back and down.
She waits and watches us as if we'd trekked
for miles and days and epics to return
to milk and cookies at her table, talk,
a blanket and a fluffy couch for rest.
I climb out of the backseat, suddenly
aware in calves and spine that I need rest,
and she comes to me, standing still behind
me through the fumbling mess of grocery bags,
car door, and mother frantic with her keys.
Still, she waits, her body poised to sit or stand
or run, in silence tracking with her chin.
when I start to walk, she walks beside,
and when the door is near, she steps ahead,
and when my mother opens it, she jogs
into the house before us—like God.
* * *
RESUMEN
De la vida se pide
poco: café, la cobija
del sueño, la begonia
que se asoma desde una maseta
redonda de cristales
También redondos, como una explosión contenida
o como la flor misma a punto de estallar.
Por desgracia, la flor es color crepúsculo,
color fatiga como los rayos que tibian
los pies. Lo único que se pide es que éstos estén
delante de un sillón, levantados al cerrar
el día que tanto los hizo andar
para ahora dedicarse a la nada
y deshacerse de ese cuerpo, desajustado
por tanto año de esconder un esqueleto
vestido en piel extranjera por un país y otro.
Tras tantos inviernos y tantas primaveras de enterrar
las yemas de los dedos en la guía, haciendo
de la sangre púrpura de uva, cansancios a veces
rojos, a veces verdes, a veces
tan esféricos o amorfos que incumben la muerte
de un sol—lo que Antes era
cuerpo ahora es viña.
Sí, solamente eso se pide:
un atardecer para olvidar
esa tierra nueva y la vid,
el frío del alambre mojado, el polvo,
el azufre, el insoportable calor
de un suelo sin las begonias de la tierra natal,
sin plazoletas, sin el hábito del ángelus que se extiende
como el humo de ese recuerdo
o las hojas redondas y ásperas
de una simple flor. Solamente eso
se desea: el descanso
de una silla sin conciencia
para los pies, elevándose
con fin de evitar un peso más.
Ana Garza G'z has an M. F. A. from California State University, Fresno. Forty-five of her
poems have appeared in various journals and anthologies with one forthcoming in Out of Sequence: the Sonnets
Remixed, a collection of responses to Shakespeare's sonnets. She has been blind from the age of seven,
and works as a community interpreter and translator.
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