 © Steve Grace
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The Fall Click to read Click to |
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© Steve Grace
|
The Fall Click to read Click to |
The Fall
My older brother Miguel Angel has the long twisted toes that run on my mother’s
side of the family. He is better looking than me. Mother’s friends remind me of this
when they come to visit. Mom loves him more. "Flaco horroroso!" she calls me.
The horrible skinny one. That’s me.
When will I be as big as Miguel? He eats two peanut butter and jelly sandwiches every day when he comes back home from school. Is that the secret?
I’m going to run away to another family as soon we get back from Disneyland this spring. I’ll stay with my friend Robbie who has cable and HBO. His mother lets him stay up as long as he wants. She has only hit him once in his whole life.
I am the middle child of three. Each of us is two years apart. It’s hard to say how old I was when I realized that my mother didn’t love me. Was it at age nine? Was I in the third grade? When the wooden spoon came down on my wrist, when she pulled my ear for some now forgotten reason, then I was sure. I might have deserved it at the time, but I can’t remember that too clearly. A child’s choices are simple—fear or rage. For me, fear was always something more difficult to deal with. Rage came easily and still does—but now, after twenty years, for different reasons.
As a child, Miguel Angel wanted to be a pilot. He had model airplanes, and even without them he could imagine flight by holding a pencil in his hand and watching it move through the air in front of his face. Sometimes, if he took too long in the bathroom, I would barge in and find him playing with a pencil, watching it fly as he sat on the toilet.
I was born in May under the sign of Taurus; I’m the bull in temper and disposition. So my brother was the Angel and I was the Bull.
My mother never hesitated to tell me how stubborn I was and that I could argue over anything. "Vas a ser abogado," she would say. I did not become a lawyer. She was wrong about that.
Newark, California is on the southeast side of the San Francisco Bay. Here, my brother and I would walk together in the morning to H.A. Snow Elementary School. As soon as we were around the first corner I would cross the street—we would continue the rest of the trek on different sides. I would speed up, then slow down, trying to provoke Miguel Angel into a race. Who would get to school first? This was all that mattered in the morning on the way to school when I was nine.
Sometimes, we would begin to walk rapidly, neither actually wanting to run; we waddled like ducks, eyeing each other regularly, moving with determined and rigid bodies, our paper bag lunches swinging in hand. He would smile. I was completely serious.
This waddling was enough most mornings. One cold day in January, however, when Miguel Angel turned his head and smiled, I moved faster, he answered, and soon we broke into a gallop: the race was on. I crossed the street as soon as I could to be on his side, the school side, the side where the race would end. Running ahead of me, Miguel Angel glanced back for a moment. He smiled happy. He was free.
The houses blur. Miguel Angel is laughing, moving to some rhythm in space. Time slows with speed. I’m behind, watching his back bounce in front of me. He is close. Just a little more and I can win. Cold morning touches our ears. Penny change for the nickel milk carton rattles in our pockets. The wind moves through our hair, past our bodies, now changing, evolving, streaking through the frozen landscape. His form is long, his bell bottoms move like flags in the wind. Houses, trees, telephone poles stand still.
I ran faster, and he slowed slightly. His heels were right in front of me. Was he teasing me, giving me a chance to pass him, to win? I did not wait to find out. I pushed myself to within a few inches of his heels, kicked out my foot and hooked his ankle, knocking his two large feet together and sending twisted toes atangle. I tripped him in a simple act. "Eres malo, siempre has sido malo." Mom was right. I was bad.
The flight was over. Miguel Angel had fallen. The ground received him with no love. He fell, dropping his lunch bag, hands lowered instinctively to save his face. His elbows bent as his full weight came onto his hands and knees. His body slid a few inches on the pavement. Miguel Angel had lost a shoe and his toes poked out of a torn sock.
I’m the bull waiting impatiently, circling slowly. My breath rises in the winter air. I can feel my heart. It races cold. I stop to watch the changes in Miguel Angel’s body. What color is the soul before pain arrives? His face is flushed and confused. Then I see the butterflies approach. They come delicate and sure from a place deep underground. Pain always lives in darkness. They enter the soles of Miguel Angel’s feet, flying rapidly through his body. In a position of prayer, head lowered, shoulders sunken, Miguel Angel rises from the ground. He raises his head and opens his mouth to release the winged creatures. They exit in a steady flow toward heaven.
I see red. The color of my ears when I’m angry. The color on my face now from running. It’s the color of Christmas, Valentine’s Day. The color of my heart. I know blood. I know anger. This color appears, and I’m not afraid.
I faced Miguel Angel. His knees were bleeding through the holes in his pants. He examined his hands. The Angel’s face was deformed, twisted like a tree on the beach rejected by the sea. I felt no pity.
Miguel Angel looked down at his palms and began to pick gravel from the wounds, lips turned down. His sobbing grew, then he looked up. "You fell," I said. He gathered his shoe and lunch bag, then turned and walked. Memory and time forge a place of redemption. I look back on my race with Miguel Angel, and I want to be the one who tumbles, or to remember it as an accident. Neither Bull nor Angel was ever meant to fall to the earth.
Profile
In 1995 I’d lost contact with José and moved to Los Angeles. Later I discovered that José—after having returned from a trip to Europe—was headed to Los Angeles to begin graduate work at the University of Southern California Film school. Now we’re neighbors in Hollywood, and he’s foster parent to my cat, Angelina.
We began cooking plantains, beans and rice, eggplant bartha, and other vegetarian delicacies together back in our days as shuttle mates. José has become a special confidant over many shared meals. I think he likes home cooking too much to really devote his life to the film industry. Still, I’m wishing him the best as a writer and filmmaker, and hoping that he’ll always have time to cook and chat with me—and to feed Angelina.
—Amy Thornberry
Bio
José Casarez
Place of residence: Hollywood.
Birthplace: Fremont, California.
Day jobs: Filmmaker. Third and fourth grade elementary school teacher.
Education: B.A. in Sociology, UC Davis. M.F.A. candidate at USC School of Cinema
and Television.
Current projects: Director of photography on Inchallaa (from Arabic inshallah,
God willing), a USC student film. Short stories and screenplays.
Favorite book: House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros.
Cravings: Strawberries, Indian food, having my hair shampooed, avocados, homemade
flour tortillas.
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