Sight Unseen

Rosario did not live long into our digital age and certainly never saw or

dreamed screens in every hand, much less flooding every head. Already

it was bad enough, she said, that telenovelas in her beloved México

had displaced both Homer and Scheherazade, not to mention the days

when people gathered simply to listen to fire. A neighbor brings the last

of his garden’s kale, which I take to a ninety-eight-year-old friend

whose eyes well up at the thought of strong kale soup and how very kind

most people are. A woman who sets the example of at least one mitzvah

every day, what she calls the absolute minimum for anyone human.

My neighbor, the one with the kale, is the son of a double immigrant.

His father was a Catalán who decamped to France—guess when—

and later northern California. I’ve wondered if this man was among

the huge crowds that survivors of the Abe Lincoln Brigade

attracted in Berkeley well into the late nineties. Delmer Berg,

last of the twenty-eight hundred Lincolns, died in San Francisco,

February 2016, one-hundred-and-one years old. Today a gardener

raises index and middle finger in front of his eyes, a sign for “Let’s

look at it.” We are both speaking Spanish, but his thinking is it never

hurts to repeat, whatever the case. See what I’m saying?

The Mexican women in my family see beyond the usual senses.

Always have done. My Yucatán Maya-Spanish grandma asking ¿Qué te pasa?

when clearly she already knew. Whatever it was. This year on her birthday,

thirty-five years after her death, a calla dormant in my garden for seven years

sends up a tiny bud that blooms days later on her elder daughter’s birthday.

That daughter, my mother. The calla, my mother’s favorite. Last year we

buried Mami in a basket under dozens of callas tied with hand-woven Mexican

belts. See what I’m saying? I don’t know if the Greek women in my family

have second sight because I don’t know them. But I do know a second cousin

I’ve never met searched the internet for kin of her grandmother Amirza’s

little brother who left their island for America at fourteen, never to be seen

by his family again. This cousin found me via a TV documentary where I

recount the confusions of a mixed-blood descendant of the Mexican revolution.

María Zouni Tsimourtos was born on Imbros, but the family left when

the Turkish government took the last Greek farms in 1964. Our great-

grandmother, mother of Amirza and my grandpa, was named Sultana,

commonly a Turkish name. And here am I, a mestiza’s mestiza who wept

only one of the many times I’ve been called half-breed. I know irony like a

second skin, haphazard skein of blood weaving a cloak of many stories

and tongues. My neighbor, the one who grows kale, spoke French as a

first language, not Spanish. Because his father was raised speaking Catalán,

not Spanish, then wisely favored French safety just across the border

and later put his son in San Francisco’s French American Bilingual School.

Oh, do see this world chasing its million and one tales, sight unseen,

all language common mistranslation yet most precious lost and found.