Lenguaje

by A.J. Rodriguez

Pops entered this world tongue-tied. While in the womb, too much tissue had formed between the bottom of dude’s tongue and the floor of his mouth, gluing the two together, restricting the control and freedom of his voice. On the day of his birth, he came out all pink and crying like any normal pequeño, but when the wails left his lips, they sloshed and gurgled as if something was caught in his throat. The doctor, banking on routine, assumed Pops was clearing leftover fluid in his lungs and placed him on Abuelita’s chest. No longer one with his madre—separated by a wall of skin—he continued to scream and squirm on top of her, feeling the first sensations of life, discovering how he could and couldn’t move his body. With sweat and exhaustion rimming her eyes, Abuelita looked up towards el cielo and thanked god for another healthy niño. She ran her hands over the silk of Pops’s black hair and cooed the same opening words she gave all newborns in our family, myself included. Bienvenido m’ijo, this is your new home now.

He had trouble breastfeeding—that’s how Abuelita discovered Pops’s lengua problem. The abnormal membrane, which ran like a curtain from the back of his tongue to the tip, tethered the muscle so that the vato couldn’t contour his mouth to get enough milk. Hunger forced Pops to chew at Abuelita with desperation, to slam into the wall of his physical limitations. Later in life, he would tell me he considered this his first lesson in survival; that to live, he would have to adapt to the confines of his body, struggle with whatever he had to work with. The consequence was that both mother and son damaged each other: he draining her of all she could offer, inflaming and sanding down her flesh—she unable to nourish him, failing to provide for the one she’d welcomed into the world.

Abuelita had always been weary of Yanqui doctors. In her experience, they were all gabachos who, despite her perfect English, never seemed to listen or understand her. So, she decided it better to bring her starved baby to the varrio curandero. Upon inspecting his mouth, the vato not only noticed Pops’s curtain, but how it made the shape of his tongue resemble a pair of wings. He determined this formation represented a spiritual blockage—that something within this chamaquito’s soul was all leashed and caged, unable to fly away. The curandero asked Abuelita if Pops’s had been baptized, cleansed of his original sin, and she confirmed, stating that her ’ijo belonged to una familia piadosa, faithful and devoted to their religious duties. With this fact in mind, the curandero diagnosed Pops with la vergüenza, which meant his tongue had been woven to the floor of his mouth by shame. Abuelita questioned how this could happen to a baby, and he answered by explaining that when one is disgraced and remains silent—refuses to speak—humiliation accumulates in the stomach, where babies are built. The curandero concluded that as Pops had grown within her, Abuelita’s bottled-up shame had seeped into him. The vato reassured her it was possible to treat this disease by praying to her son out loud and having him drink a tonic of ground garlic mixed with sacred water. Abuelita accepted his prescriptions thankfully and on the way home, thought of all the times she had held her tongue. She remembered the gabacho boss at the bank in San Antonio who told her to wear tighter skirts, the elementary school teacher in Del Rio who beat her for speaking too much Spanish, the sucios on her girlhood block who whistled and grabbed their vergas as she walked by their stoops. ¡Oye mamacita, ven aca! Lemme inside that cuerpazo!

Abuelo learned of his son’s trip to the curandero after smelling the ajo macho on his breath. Abuelita had kept it private, knowing that if her husband found out, he would start bugging and take Pops’s ass straight to a normal doctor, which is exactly what he did. That brujería shit, as he called it, wouldn’t fix a damn thing. Abuelo always considered himself a rational man, a sensible católico who accepted communion on Sundays but knew better than to trust locos using magical plants to cure fake-ass illnesses like sadness or fright. It was this kind of logic that compelled the  vato to think of the judgement his moreno son would face if he grew up in Texas with speech difficulties. That thought reminded him of why he joined the military at eighteen—why he insisted to Abuelita that their ’ijos needed to focus on learning English instead of Spanish—why he felt embarrassed of his crooked teeth and resented his superstitious, migrante padre for never taking him to an American dentist.

After Abuelo returned from a consultation at the medical facility on base, he exclaimed to his wife that Pops could have his curtain removed with a simple surgical procedure. The news twisted a mix of relief and dismay within Abuelita, prompting her to recall a moment during her first childbirth when the gabacho doctor told her that he could end the 24-hour labor with a C-section. She knew this operation could make her son’s life easier, but something felt wrong about letting a stranger change the body god gave him—the body she’d constructed inside her. Plus, she asked herself, would this doctor, with his metal knives and sanitized needles, be able to cure la vergüenza? Following the surgery, Pops no longer needed the curandero’s potion, his tongue now released from its tether, but Abuelita continued to whisper prayers into his ear in Spanish, never quite forgiving herself for what she had passed on to him.

Pops still hides behind the curtain of a closed mouth from time to time. Whenever an emotional subject floats into our conversation—loved ones getting sick, the government separating familias at the border, my frustration with not being able to speak Spanish like his parents—I see the vato tighten his face, and it’s like I’m watching a key turn in a lock. When he talks in these situations, his words are short, and he doesn’t meet my stare, lets his gaze fall to the floor. Behind those sealed lips, I imagine Pops’s tongue receding, curling back into the darkness of his throat. It makes me want to hug his sorry looking ass.

But every now and then, my father will tell me a story from his life—like how he was born tongue-tied. As the vato narrates, he’ll remember something funny or remarkable and laugh out loud without a hand shielding his mouth. In the span of a heartbeat, his whole body moves as one, and the sound of his voice bursts into the air, as if some buried part of him has finally taken flight.

Born and mostly raised in Albuquerque, New Mexico, A.J. Rodriguez resides in Eugene, Oregon, where he is an MFA candidate at the University of Oregon. He is the winner of Fractured Lit’s Anthology Prize and the Gival Press Short Story Award. His work has also placed as a finalist in New Ohio Review’s Fiction Contest, CRAFT’s  Short Fiction Prize, and shortlisted for The Masters’ Review Short Story Award for New Writers.