On Isabella’s bed, or what makes a good government

The night that Isabella’s first bed made its way into our house, I watched silently, holding vigil over her. How is it that we lose our wisdom, our freedom, our capacity to love as we grow? The damp air clung to me, my body temperature lower than normal, feeling the sickness, wander through my chest, my inner cavities, doing the dance of death, little deaths, sighing deaths, aching deaths, inside me. My obsession burned, an obsession that was stumbled upon quite accidentally. And yet, Isabella lay sleeping, her angelic limbs twisted among the sheets. How can my heart be so ravaged and at the same time so full? How can I sing in a strange land?

But the song springs forth, unabashedly rolling waves of pain and agony, alternating, beauty, joy, hilarity… The sun burns off the fog for a few hours every day and in those few hours I glimpse possibility. Isabella sleeps, trusting in the world, in the rightness of reality, in the beauty and kindness. She asks, “mommy, what makes a good gubbernment?” and I stumble to find an adequate answer. “Well,” I say, “ a good government takes into account the needs of all its people, it fairly distributes wealth, work and fortune.” Good enough answer, it seems, for a four-year-old. But she turns to me and says “Is Bush a good gubbernment?” and I am again flabbergasted by the brilliance and ingenuity, the trusting… How can I answer without being dogmatic? How do I teach this lovely child to think for herself, to not just accept what her absolutely fallible mother tells her to believe? Leap of faith, how to not terrorize my already death-obsessed child. “No, “ I calmly expound, “no, in fact Bush is not a good government…” “Why?” “Well…” I begin again, treading delicately, “a good government doesn’t kill other people in the world just because it wants more for its own self-serving machine.” “We should go tell Bush to stop killing people, mommy”. Indeed, we should, shouldn’t we?

I watch as the well-meaning student organizers ask for money, support to elect Kerry. Will Kerry be a good “gubbernment”. I wonder. Why must it always be the lesser of two evils, the man who would less frighten me in a dark alley? I will not be raped, I think, by this system. I will be an active agent. And my obsession, lingering, festering, taunting me. Want the unthinkable, self-annihilate, destroy the faith that you have in yourself, in your life. Throw it all away for a moment’s pleasure, an eternity encapsulated in the incineration of the Phoenix. And still she sleeps…

The sickness in his lungs will come later, I will be left alone and aching, for very different reasons. But to love, to awaken for a brief, quivering, shining moment… wouldn’t that be enough to justify all the pain and wreckage that proceeds? The day that the dead will visit us approaches, the millions, under our thumb and again the question of a good government haunts me. If I cannot even hold myself to some moral standard, how can I pretend to imagine a government of people that would do the same? I imagine myself at 70, Isabella and I having tea, or coffee or Jack Daniel’s (for which I will have acquired a taste). Does it really matter if our government let’s us decide to kill our unborn children, or ourselves, or if it rather forces our hand and kills someone else’s unborn children instead. And I decide to speak and act and refuse to bow my head. I do not believe in the moral majority, I do not believe in the anti-christ, I do not believe in myself. But perhaps I will, one day. As a very wise woman said, Isabella, my beautiful gift from God, Sofía, the wisest, kindest soul… “The only Bush I trust is my own” and even then sometimes I’m not so sure.

I have announced to my husband that I no longer believe in fidelity as an institution of marriage. “Why?” he asks. “You don’t love me anymore, that’s why you are telling me to have other lovers.” But truly, that is not it. I realize now that there is a line painted down the center of me, the virgin/whore dichotomy, where the virgin is feeling up the whore, her fingers probing, deliciously, devilishly… And the whore turns her head, saddened by the thought that she will have to go home once again, her money safely tucked inside her bra… the virgin wailing at her feet. Why? He has thought about it, he says, and if he will ruin my life by not letting me take other lovers, well, then so be it, he can’t watch me die. I don’t believe a word he says, though I want to, I try. I want to run to the edge of the ocean and throw myself at the mercy of the waves, at the hands of the sailors who will inevitably tear me to pieces. And he will walk, and breath, and she will sleep, and the music will pound. “You want to have other lovers because you don’t love me.” The reproach in his voice is almost unbearable, but the mean-spirited pirate-queen in me enjoys the sadistic pleasure. “No,” I think, “I want to have other lovers, so that I can love you again”. Or is it so that I can love myself again?

It seems, that a woman lover would be more acceptable, of course, offering something that he, himself, could not. Though there are a million things that he cannot offer and very little of it has to do with a penis or the lack thereof. What he cannot offer is the ephemeral, eternally unattainable challenge. The pursuit, the chase, the wind racing through my hair, legs clutching the vibrating, churning moto. Racing down back alleys, lying and laying myself in the sand, the ocean throb a dull roar in the background. And my thoughts are back with Isabella. Silently trusting me, her mother, to be good and kind and responsible. To kiss her tears away, to offer a breast for her hands to caress and pinch between her tiny, perfectly formed fingers. How can I share that breast with anyone else?

I want you to have other lovers so that I can feel less guilty about wanting to have other lovers… plain and simple. I hate a game with uneven odds, may the best man win, even though she is probably a woman. My thoughts, dangerously teetering, bouncing about the roof of my mouth, pure impulse, say it, say it. Fuck! Yes! that, alone, truly nothing to do with love at all, and yet the people that we want to fuck us need to find the secret door, seeker searching, poring over a landscape visited a million times before, to uncover the buried treasure. A dog would be useful, I think, in such a task. Single-mindedly searching, prodding, then, nose, lazily sniffing, getting bored, giving up. A cat? Might lick with its scratchy tongue, uncovering hidden erogenous zones, and then fickly turn its back and bend over for you to sniff.

Hidden, deep within, and sleeping, dormant, wanting, obsession with the ocean, the sky the wind, the tides pulling with the moon, outwards, outwards to sea, to float away, to give oneself up to the immensity. Free-fall, spinning wildly, arms flailing. And she sleeps, while my mind races, hers rests peacefully. I am grounded, bound to reality, burned in my flesh, the scars that tie me up, behind them I hide, Scheherezade of a million stories, doling them out lavishly, then in a slim trickle, then not at all. The well has dried up, the Colorado, diverted, criminal acts of deprivation, land rights, water rights, women’s rights. Border patrol, fences that fence in and fence out. The planet screams and all I can do is listen to my own body screaming louder, louder, LOUDER. Why? Why be faithful to a cause when it will inevitably fail us, scald us, maim us? Why twist ourselves into the mold that has been cut for us? Then, the beautiful, animal pain, and the joy at being alive. Yes! I want to be alive, more than anything, I will take the pain, I will savor it, I will make it my own and weave it into something beautiful, golden threads, a blanket, a hair-shirt to throw over the sleeping child in the cold night.

The words are finally spilling out, and rolling down my thighs, like the juices that I thought had long since dried up. What makes a good government? A good mother, a good earth, a good fuck, a good death, a thousand good deaths, every second, a dying, a rebirth, an anger, a fight, a shout, an arm raised in defiance. A look cast about, beyond the confines of the balcony, a breath of salt-air, a solitary walk, a race, a game, a million crawling hands and feet, a pilgrimage to the places that our souls have traveled, the discovery of god, God? Godessa, odes, the black knight and the black night and the incarcerated blacks fight and the death and the disappearance and the nihilism and the expectations of love, and the giving and the taking and the aching, wanting, breaking, smashing, playing, dodging, shrieking, laughing, hand-washing. Falling from the horse, the bike, and climbing back on for another amazing, terrifying, ecstatic journey.

Mountains, blue hills, green grass, to eat, chewing on the soft white tips, lips blowing sound into the air, lungs full and singing and I discover that I have chased away sleep, once more, happily. She sleeps while I think these things and she trusts that I will be there in the morning, and I will be, having traced the steps of my ancestors in the night, bending, wailing, lamenting. The thirst, real waiting for sweet liquid to burn out, to eviscerate me. I need him to hear me, to feel me, to want me, to need me, to father me, to be my child, for a second, a moment, an eternity. My uninvited obsession walks with me, my shadow, lurking and smirking and sorry all the same. The machine has been set in motion, the hand released, there is no turning back, the cold seeping into my lungs, the death of me, the birth of me, a dearth of reality. Climbing back up the hill to throw myself down once again, pick myself up, throw myself down.

I shall overcome, an army of one, one million, a gun. To the white house, a gun with a silver bullet, chase out the monster, feral animals run. Scatter them, hunt them, embrace them, cure them, expel the sickness from my lungs. I wander, wonder? Wander, penniless and rich, riding the surf, in heat, a bitch, in the true sense of the word, a twitch, a breeze and the dead drag their feet. Home for the favorite foods, to ask for forgiveness, to reminisce. The trek is long, and the sleeping child dreams, and I, her mother, forget to hold that tiny hand, it slips, away, Tlaloc’s watery death, paradise of children, the tree shakes and the leaves fall, and the bough breaks. But the cradle, it remains, somehow suspended in the journey, mystically, magically floating through the air. The bed creaks and her body squirms, a moan, a cough, and the winter approaches. Cold, damp air and my lover is not there. A man, a wife, a lifetime, a life, a wake for the living, awake for the dead. Bodies thrown to the sea, blown to ash, they walk among us, haunting, and beautiful, there is nothing left. But the sleeping child sleeps and the writing hand writes and the aching soul, ancient soul, broken soul weeps. My back breaks, my heart breaks and in the breaking I am reborn, trembling, quivering, shining, an arrow unsheathed. To the heart of the patriarch: die, die, die, die. My life is before me, a line tensed, a decision hanging in the balance. Walking the line, the lie, the field stretches out before me, back arched in ecstasy, receiving me, taking me, deceiving me, opening, stretching breaking me… the pieces realign and the words march angrily on, flooding the page with blood, the loss of a child, the flush of a toilet, the stench surrounds me. The door slams shut, the galloping, pounding, the line of dead, outside the door, sitting in their mass graves, skulls lined in perfect symmetry, we are the monsters, the killers and devils, the devil is within me. And the angel sleeps, awaiting me, without judgment, without the clarín. Cherubim and Serafin and the devil laughing, dancing, a gleam in his eye, a mask on his face, he’s come to take the children from the wretched, putrid space. Dancing, swirling, enticing them, the pied piper, leading them away… and the question of “who” is of little significance, a raper, a pillager, a seed-fascist capitalist, the procession of dead clamour in the darkness as she sleeps, watching over me, keeping me sane and alive and awake, keeping me in line, towing the line, pushing the status quo, tit for tat, this for that, I gag on the anger, impotence, rage.

The night Isabella’s bed first made its way into our house, the world stopped spinning for a brief moment, holding its breath, waiting, asking, is this it?