Jamie Figueroa on finding one's identity from the bottom up.
---
When I pointed to my foot, she said pie. I heard pais. On
paper, in tight black type, mistaking the two, even for a stumbling and
fumbling Spanish speaker such as myself, seems unreasonable. But in the local
restaurant of the kitchen where she and I work, nearing the end of my
shift—having run dozens upon dozens of entrees in one noodle form or another,
explained the same specials until near dizziness, and earnestly tried to match
the novice Sake drinking with a suitable glass—it was easy to mistake the two. Pie y
pais. Foot and country.
My feet hurt. I tried saying it in Spanish. I arrived at the
word for foot, and there was no memory at that moment—despite having learned it
one hundred times before—of the matching word. The kitchen echoed with the
clanking of pans, plates and counters being struck. It was challenging to hear.
My country hurts, I thought. Then I spoke my mistake aloud. She shook her head
and laughed. Whenever my Spanish is corrected, I can’t help but think of my
mother and how her English was corrected until the Spanish she had always
spoken sunk to the bottom of her, out of sight and unused, until it became what
I imagine as sediment around her bones.
There is a certain kind of shame in a tongue that is unable
to speak correctly, regardless of the dominant language. For the US immigrant
struggling to express herself in English, the tongue can become shy. But at any
moment, depending on how far one can travel within their community, country or
globe, English may suddenly be inappropriate. The roles become reversed and the
once confident tongue lies limp in a mouth that has to eat its words instead of
speak them.
I stepped out of the kitchen and into the dining room on my
feet, my country, for the remainder of my shift. Wondering about my narrow,
high arched 8½s. Beginning to see them for what they could mistakenly be, misunderstanding
leading me to metaphor. If they were countries, then surely I could venture one
step further and see the soles as the little maps that they were—but maps of
what, exactly? A genetic sequence? An island my family ran barefoot over? Does
the outer edge of my pinkie toe and heel become the borders that must be
defended and protected? Perhaps they are a map of mixed memory, my own and my
ancestors’ combined.
Within the staff of the small restaurant alone, many
feet/countries step, some immigrants, some the children of immigrants and
others the grandchildren and great grandchildren of immigrants: China, Wales,
Ireland, Italy, Puerto Rico (which is a colony of the US but more on that
complexity another time), Mexico, Guatemala and Spain. And then there is the
one from here, whose indigenous ancestors have creation stories that come from
the very land on which the restaurant stands.
If a body’s weight is supported by its feet, what can be
interpreted from their lines and calluses, their dry river beds and hills? That
our lungs are working too hard, that our grandfather’s hips were uneven (just
like ours), that the road to the river was rocky and the bones of our feet
(over generations) adjusted, that some of us were conquerors, some conquered
and some of us have within us both? That lonely is the same in any language? In
this way, I wonder if how well we know our feet is in step with how well we
know all the many layered landscapes and territories, all the forgotten
countries of ourselves.
Santa Fe Reporter