translated from the Spanish by Jessica Rainey

“Loneliness is one of the clearest, most durable and long-term effects of forced displacement. [. . .] The interruption of a child’s or teen’s earliest belongings and identifications yields a very particular type of loneliness. It is not the loneliness inherent to all human existence. No, it is deeper, denser, and at times, more devastating. Perhaps loneliness is not as apt a word as desolation.”
—Marisa González de Oleaga,Transterradas

1. SAN ANSELMO, CALIFORNIA, 1980
Three small migrants. My brother, my sister, and me. Our first separation from home. The war wrenches us away from our original belonging. We leave aside the games, the garden, the blackouts and bombs. I don’t know if loneliness sows its seeds in my brother, or whether my sister feels any anguish (why do we not talk about it?). But for me, yes. Desolation. They go to live with one aunt, and I go to live with another. It is not a good idea to separate us. I cannot revive my emotions, they’re arrested; I breathe between parentheses. (Me ahogo.) Several months go by. One night I creep out of the bed of my Californian cousin, through the shadows of the house, to find the phone. I dial the area code of the country that expels us with its goat’s breath. But for my eleven-year-old self, it is the place of love, of Mamá y Papá, of turtles, river almond trees, and the sea. “I want to come back,” I tell them in a whisper, so as not to wake my aunt and uncle, but also because it’s all I can manage. I can tell Mamá is close to tears, but she manages to say: “Yes, hija, it’s okay, come back.” Not long after, we’re together again, the whole family. Papá drives and the route from the airport to home feels like a protective arm. While away, our baby sister who stayed behind has learned to babble words and phrases. Excited, animated, because it’s like she’s meeting us for the first time, she chatters invented words, half words, adapted to her two-year-old language. She takes my hand and her tiny fingers ease my heartache.

2. SAN ANSELMO, CALIFORNIA, 1981
A year later we migrate again. This time we are six bodies transterrados. Mamá, her four children, and the baby on the way. I put my hand on her tummy and feel our brother navigating the waters. I am still navigating between parentheses too, but this time the anxiety seems manageable. Papá has stayed behind, alone in the house, in the country with goat’s breath. He is working hard to give Mamá a peaceful birth, far from martial law and curfews. In California, I discover aunts and uncles, cousins and other relatives I’ve never met. Mamá’s family migrated to San Francisco from El Salvador in the fifties and the family tree has grown more branches.

My sister and I sleep on the sofa-bed in the front room and every morning we walk to school, taking a shortcut through the woods until we reach the bus stop. Backpack, lunch bag, tennis shoes. One day some girls follow us, making fun of us because we’re speaking Spanish. But my sister and I are untouchable. We’re together. Nothing can take away our laughter or the sweet taste of plums picked from the trees. No one can crush us. Not the relatives who whisper behind Mamá’s back, or the kids who try to bully us. My older brother lets his hair grow long, in tight curls, and as he rides his bike he looks to us like the embodiment of freedom. Our youngest brother comes into the world. I’m eleven years old and I change his nappy, kiss him, cuddle him. He has owl eyes. He was born wise because he navigated beyond our mother’s waters. Bebé transterrado. He smiles surrounded by his four siblings who reach out to touch his tiny hands and feet.

After giving birth, Mamá signs up for the Gloria Marshall diet and exercise plan, although the closest center is in another city. On the first day of the plan, we go with her to take care of the baby while she does her exercises. But the session lasts longer than expected and we miss the last bus back. We don’t know how else to get back, there are no pay phones in sight, and we don’t have enough cash to get a taxi. We walk around, as it gets dark, looking for a phone booth: my grandmother, Mamá, the baby in the pram, and me (I don’t remember anyone else). A truck pulls up beside us and the driver, an African American, asks if we need any help. He tells us it’s not safe to walk alone at night. Mamá explains our situation and he offers us a lift. Initially, Mamá and Abuelita aren’t sure, but in the end they accept. I lie down in the back and gaze at a patch of starry sky through the window, listening to Mamá and our angel talk about El Salvador, social struggles, children, and life.

A year goes by and our return becomes inevitable. Mamá and Papá miss each other.

Back in El Salvador, twelve years old, sitting the entrance exam for a new school, my future classmates poke fun at me because I’m sporting an Esprit bag, brown clogs, fuchsia trousers by Gloria Vanderbilt, an emerald-green velvet blouse, and blue mascara—very 1982. I seem pretentious to them because they think I’m trying to look older than I am; they don’t know that, apart from the clogs, everything I’m wearing has been handed down from my Californian cousin. I laugh when they shout “even got a handbag,” and maybe they’re intrigued that I don’t get upset, because they come over and we make friends. Still, on the inside, I know I’m not from here anymore. I try to reconstruct belonging, but there is no way back through the crack.

3. PERUGIA, ITALY, 1987
With my best friend, I move to Perugia for four months to study at the Università per Stranieri. We get drunk on the language and its taste of freedom and, yes, we are reckless, impulsive—hardly unexpected for teenagers coming from a warzone and the prison of regional repression. We hitch everywhere, no matter what time; we go to parties in the middle of the countryside; we dance to the rhythms of Sabrina and Zucchero. We eat tortellini, buffalo mozzarella, ice cream, a lot of ice cream, too much ice cream. We travel to Rome, Venice, Milan, Florence, Assisi; we chat on trains and share bread and wine, counting our coins to finance all of this food and fun. One day we hear the story of Maria Grazia, the daughter of Gino Simonelli, art teacher and owner of our guesthouse on Via Alessio Lorenzini. Every day, at six in the morning, Maria Grazia leaves the guesthouse wearing clothes and accessories from the sixties. She goes to the train station, has an espresso, and returns home, heels click-clacking on the pavement. Maria Grazia doesn’t speak, she only smiles. Her father looks after her and is never ashamed of his daughter’s eccentric ritual. Maria Grazia’s mother ran off with Maria Grazia’s fiancé on the day of Maria Grazia’s wedding. On discovering this double betrayal, the young Maria Grazia wandered the streets for days and nights. One time, in the early hours, she was raped and beaten by a number of men. They split her head open. By some miracle, she survived. Now she has a metal plate in her skull and, to cover the scar, she sometimes wears a colorful scarf. In 1987, she still takes her early morning walk to the train station to drink her coffee. We hear her go out every morning wearing her jewelry, her bell-bottom trousers, her platform shoes. Her routine for over twenty years. Her act of resistance.

4. SAN JOSÉ, COSTA RICA, 1990–1998
A Salvadoran commando unit murders the Jesuit priests at the Universidad Centroamericana in November 1989. We are all impacted. Days later, in dismay, Papá and I visit the university and see the bullet marks in the walls. Classes are suspended for several weeks. The situation across the nation shifts to Ofensiva hasta el tope. My own life also reaches a tipping point because not long after I quit my Humanities degree and leave to study International Relations in Costa Rica. And it is there that the desolation I first experienced as a transterrada child returns, though this time something has changed: I don’t want to go back, because I know that at home and in my country I feel foreign. And if I am to be uncountried, I would rather be so completely—to fully embody my condition as migrant. Restyling myself because I cannot find my footing, not here, not there. Living in dissolution. Only feeling at ease when listening to music or on the beach. In San José, I take refuge in the university library.

I have a boyfriend. He’s attractive, corrongo; he has an upturned nose. He’s a sweet guy. One day, returning from class, I find him dressed in my swimsuit, wearing blue eyeliner and pink lipstick. He intimates to me that this is his secret. I’m twenty-one, no one has told me that this exists, I haven’t read about it anywhere. I have no one to talk to and he doesn’t want to talk. Once a month at least, he disappears for several days, he doesn’t sleep at home, he doesn’t call me, his mother worries. I focus on making collages. Cut, cut, cut. Tchtchtch, the scissors, sharp, metallic, create a carpet of cuttings that I then select and stick to huge pieces of card. I glue chairs on tree branches, eyes on shooting stars, fruit on the sides of trucks. I want to reconstruct my emotions and I dislocate the world, I make it topsy turvy because I want to understand. I spend hours and days alone. When I come out of my shell, I wear a mask of futile, fleeting, chimeric resistance. I walk the streets of Guanacaste, Pavones, Manzanillo. I smoke, drink tequila, dance. A couple of years go by and in the end I say goodbye to my boyfriend who dresses as a woman in secret and has a double life, and that isn’t the reason I leave, but because he’s unable to talk to me; he prefers smoking rock and spending time with the folk in the local bar. I understand that he endures violence and prejudice and doesn’t know how to express or want to share those marks. Corrongo, he signs up for the margins, for rootlessness. I sign up for silence.

I decide to stay in Costa Rica. I work from nine in the morning to six in the evening. I have a car, an apartment, a decent salary, I’m independent. But I’m not okay. No bachelor’s or master’s degree can help me defend myself against an abusive boyfriend gripped, as Rita Segato calls it, in the “pedagogy of cruelty.” I don’t know how to get out of this spiral of violence, these “partner problems,” as it’s called at the time; nobody intervenes and I’m too ashamed to let it be known; I feel culpable. He harms me with the force of water from a fire hose; he takes out his pistol and threatens to kill me, he calls me names, breaks my favorite things, gets annoyed when someone pays attention to me. In public, I put on armor and pretend. Transterrada and humiliated, loneliness takes on a particular hue. I hear I’m known as the “long-suffering indita.” In whitewashed Costa Rica, all other Central Americans are uneducated natives who show up to ruin the Switzerland of the region. My emotional resistance has only thin foundations. Fortunately, a perceptive friend recognizes this foundation and quietly leaves leaflets about doctoral programs in Spain on my table. Several months later, I sell my fridge, my bed, everything I can; I ask my parents for help. Then I leave to study literature.

5. BARCELONA, SPAIN, 1998–2021
I arrive in Spain depressed but hopeful I can rebuild myself. I meet Tomoe. Originally from Sapporo, Japan, she studies art at the Escola Massana where a lecturer bullies her often because she struggles to understand him: “Are you stupid or what,” he says. But we do understand each other and we chat with the help of a Spanish–Japanese dictionary. We go to double billings at the Maldá cinema to see independent films; we listen to Sakamoto, talk about avant-garde art and Japanese and Latin American literature, but mostly we talk about life. We go to bars, cafés, restaurants in the Barrio Gótico and Raval, before gentrification and the real estate bubble have taken over. When I start crying in the middle of the street, because the wounds from abuse are struggling to heal and they open up when given the chance, she sits beside me, on a bench or on the pavement, waiting patiently, in silence, until my eyes tire of releasing rivers. She doesn’t judge me. Sometimes homeless women or nonconforming couples come over and sit with us, consoling me with maxims and clichés that sound like wisdom to me. Once it’s all out, we start walking again, Tomoe and me, and find a place to eat shawarma or gyro. One day she gives me a gift: a large painting with many colors surrounding long drips just millimeters across. Above, the shoots of a plant. “What’s it called?” I ask. “Sadness,” she replies. One evening she reveals that in Sapporo she caught her boyfriend in bed with another woman. Devastated, she left to walk the cold streets of the city. It was winter and there were few people around. A man followed her, cornered her, and raped her in the snow. For five years, she kept this secret inside, a devouring maggot. That spring night in Barcelona, she tells me everything. I’m impelled to ask: “Why now? Why me?” And she replies: “Because I realized my pain doesn’t make me special.” She takes off her crown of thorns and I do the same.

While I study and write my doctoral thesis, my jobs are varied: childminder, receptionist, tobacconist, waitress, translator, tutor, English teacher, exchange student lecturer. For a short time, with some friends, we open a tortilla restaurant named La Siguanaba after the mythical enchantress; I serve coffee and beer at the bar, while they pound dough in the kitchen; two other friends wash the dishes. I also work at a tobacco kiosk on Calle Pelayo where a woman tells me: “Well done, you speak very good Spanish,” and a gentleman assures me I look like a local girl: “You don’t look Filipino.” At university, a fellow female lecturer states that studying Central American women writers holds “no interest.” At a party, a group discussion drifts to maligning migrants; I remind them that I am one and they, thinking they’re flattering me, insist: “Yes, but you’re different.” I give my boss some Salvadoran coffee as a gift and the next day she tells me: “You really make terrible coffee.” My neighbor offers me her style advice: “You shouldn’t put your hair in plaits, you look ugly, like an American Indian.” At a conference, a man gets up and declares: “I don’t know why anyone says Spain committed genocide in America, I see loads of Native Americans around here, those Peruvians playing Andean music, and all those others.” One friend never knows where to say I’m from: “This is my friend Tania, she’s from Ecuador,” “This is Tania, she’s from Colombia,” “Tania is from Mexico, or Brazil, I can never remember.”

Once I’ve defended my thesis and got my doctorate, I discover the precariousness of academic employment. I work as an associate lecturer on a monthly salary of 700 euros, minus 270 euros to pay my social security. It is not possible to live on 430 euros a month, so I supplement with other jobs: editing, translating, proofreading dissertations, managing tourist apartments. I work from Sunday to Sunday. Overwork, stress, fatigue, gastritis, migraine, heartburn, esophagitis, knee dislocation, back pain, poor diet. The neoliberal philosophy to produce, produce, and never say no. I fracture my right fibula and during recovery have the time to reflect. I travel to El Salvador to be close to my family and decide that no work should destroy my body and break down my emotional architecture. I leave my position as an associate lecturer. I move with my husband to live in the hills of Collserola, among the pine trees, pathways, wild boar, and lizards. I write, research, teach classes online as a visiting professor, venture into literary translation. I consider myself lucky, because I have the opportunity to turn my life around. But this does not remove the reality that we live in a global economic and social system that violates and undermines. Other lecturers have spent twenty years on appalling contracts, but can’t quit because they have small children, loans to pay, debts to clear, as well as the hope that one day they will get a permanent position.

COVID-19 took my father-in-law. He died alone in a hospital; they placed him in a bag and then in a coffin. He was Sicilian and in the sixties migrated with his family to northern Italy. He worked as a machinist in the Fiat factory. We, my husband and I, are following in his migrant footsteps, the same footsteps as my grandparents who migrated to California, the same as my mother who left, returned, left again, and returned a second time; the same footsteps as my siblings, who now live in the US, and the same as so many others who walk or take planes, trains, trucks. Migrating is to walk on wounds, scars, partings; it is a diverse, heterogenous experience, determined by intersecting factors, social class perhaps or gender or ethnicity. In my case, it has been a process of reformulation. Meditations on origin, place of arrival, returning. Reestablishing myself. Accepting myself with all the effects of refraction.

6. SOMEWHERE IN ITALY, 2021
In a few weeks, we’re moving to Italy. Another geographic displacement, another code. As I write these incantations, I think about the boxes I’ll fill with letters, objects, photographs that have traveled with me all these years. I think about the painting by Tomoe, my Roque Dalton record, the plants I’ve tended for over a decade, my orchid. Transterrada, I will find another forest that will let me enter. A forest that will share in the rearrangement of my language, my voice, instrument, stem, fruit, wood to carve new sounds and smells and emotions. This time, I’m not leaving hollowed out and anxious. I’m returning to the land of Maria Grazia. I promise that I will find her grave and bring her flowers. ■

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