Excerpt from the novella:
Soaring Above the City / Volando Sobre La Ciudad
by Aida Salazar
*All Copyrights Reserved 2015
Photo of Gloria Mestre by Hector Garcia
She loves to wake before the city and listen to the sprinkle of birdcalls the smog has not yet muffled. In the silence of the morning she seeks to move beyond the slippery stupor of herself, the roaring buildings around her, the smell of slaughtered animals from the meat processing plant that drifts, circles and catches in the linen, carpet, her clothes.
In the morning, she retreats into the small enclosure of her room, a pale addition tucked away in the back of her parent’s house. This is her sanctuary. It is a shadow-less shelter, round, lucid and expanding. She shares it with faded pictures of relatives that slide out of their frame and hang on one small nail, a growing pile of clothes that pushes its way up the walls, and a hand-me-down dresser whose first owner she doesn’t know. She turns over on her narrow bed, lets the soft globe of sound move with her body to press against the folds of gaping sheets. She listens. Forgets. She lingers here bare as water and sees past the freeways, beyond the city and follows the asphalt south for miles, across half a continent to the desert where she was born.
She remembers the grandfathers she never met. Closes her eyes and hums the boleros her father's father, Papá Rafa, played on his mandolin in the cobblestone streets of the town in which she never lived. She is his bolero resonating. Or she becomes the old mesquite tree Abuelito Chema, her mother's father, sat under in his wheelchair, a symphony of proverbs streaming from his mouth. Elegantly elevated, she blankets him with her swooshing arms, takes in the sun's beating breath for him.
These images recur often in the expanse of her imagination, these grandfathers, that country.
She recalls them longingly although these memories are not her own, as if to touch a part of herself denied her. In these memories she is for an eternal immortal moment, everything – time and pain and sky and love. Here, she is nuance and mistake, ice and flame and the color of spoiled fruit. All of it inhabits her cells, the smallest particles of her body, the atoms, the nuclei, the sage. But in an instant she is pavement again following her own roads back to find that the temple is awakening and cracking, its opening eyes demolishing its very body. The silent dome is dying, the birdcalls complicated by the collision of sounds in the sleepy streets.
Antonia loves to wake before the city.
In the morning, she retreats into the small enclosure of her room, a pale addition tucked away in the back of her parent’s house. This is her sanctuary. It is a shadow-less shelter, round, lucid and expanding. She shares it with faded pictures of relatives that slide out of their frame and hang on one small nail, a growing pile of clothes that pushes its way up the walls, and a hand-me-down dresser whose first owner she doesn’t know. She turns over on her narrow bed, lets the soft globe of sound move with her body to press against the folds of gaping sheets. She listens. Forgets. She lingers here bare as water and sees past the freeways, beyond the city and follows the asphalt south for miles, across half a continent to the desert where she was born.
She remembers the grandfathers she never met. Closes her eyes and hums the boleros her father's father, Papá Rafa, played on his mandolin in the cobblestone streets of the town in which she never lived. She is his bolero resonating. Or she becomes the old mesquite tree Abuelito Chema, her mother's father, sat under in his wheelchair, a symphony of proverbs streaming from his mouth. Elegantly elevated, she blankets him with her swooshing arms, takes in the sun's beating breath for him.
These images recur often in the expanse of her imagination, these grandfathers, that country.
She recalls them longingly although these memories are not her own, as if to touch a part of herself denied her. In these memories she is for an eternal immortal moment, everything – time and pain and sky and love. Here, she is nuance and mistake, ice and flame and the color of spoiled fruit. All of it inhabits her cells, the smallest particles of her body, the atoms, the nuclei, the sage. But in an instant she is pavement again following her own roads back to find that the temple is awakening and cracking, its opening eyes demolishing its very body. The silent dome is dying, the birdcalls complicated by the collision of sounds in the sleepy streets.
Antonia loves to wake before the city.