A woman draws her story into history.
—Hélène Cixous
1.
My great-grandmother crossed the ocean from Spain to Argentina in 1920, following her husband, who had left her and their two children behind and from whom she hadn’t heard for years. In order to be able to travel without the necessary permission from her absent husband, her identity card states that she is “soltera”—“single.” Tracing the word soltera, my great-grandmother erases her husband through language, lying on paper, building a fiction.
In 1946—two years before my father was born—my great-grandmother sent to her daughter—my grandmother—a letter saying: “No te digo más porque ya me cansé la mano, porque vos sabés que yo hace mucho que no escribo, y ya perdí la costumbre.” “I won’t tell you any more because I tired my hand, because as you know I haven’t written for a long time and I’ve lost the habit.”
“Me cansé la mano”—“I tired my hand” is an off-balance phrase. She doesn’t say “I’m already tired” or “My hand is tired,” she says “Me cansé la mano”—“I tired my hand”: the hand remains there as a prosthesis to the “I tired,” it’s hanging loose, as if it had fallen asleep. I can feel the weight of that hand, her tiredness; I’ve been tired like that. Today, seventy-nine years later, I could have said it myself, I say it: I haven’t written for a long time.
2.
A woman looks at the camera. Her mouth off-balance. Her lips half smiling, half not. Her head against a white wall, a point of support. The tortoiseshell glasses tilted, one eyebrow further away from the frames than the other. It doesn’t seem to be a sunny day, but the lenses are tinted—not completely dark, but tinted: you get to see her eyes, they are not moving, not following the line of the lip that smiles. An earring hanging from her right ear is a point of light. The other earring is missing or not visible. Missing or not visible. She is my father’s mother’s mother. My great-grandmother, the one who wrote the word “soltera”—“single,” the one who would take her daughter to ballet classes behind her husband’s back after the family reunited in Argentina.
A woman looks in the direction of the woman with the off-balance mouth, her mother. She looks in her direction but not at her. Her body toward her mother, her face toward her mother, but her eyes just above. As if her eyes had set on her mother and then something in her mother had pushed them away. What pushes her away? The woman holds one hand to her lower lip in a posture for thinking and her other hand on her belly in a posture for gestating. It’s been years since she gave birth to her sons. The hand on her belly is the reflection of a time past. She is my father’s mother. My grandmother, the one who was almost a ballet dancer but was stopped by her father, the father who traced a house around her, kept her inside.
A boy looks at the camera. His tortoiseshell glasses stop his eyes from deviating. Transparent lenses. His body toward the camera, his face toward the camera. Both thumbs inside his pockets. He looks straight ahead, not deviating. A full mouth, smiling. He looks at me. He is my father, the one who carries in his body a double rhythm: a twisting rhythm and the rhythm of a slowed-down music that every so often is lost. Twist, a word whose root carries the meanings “divided in two” and “rope made of two strands.”
A woman. My father. A woman. I trace a dotted line between the three. I follow that line. I hold one of my hands to my lips. I have one eye with blurred near vision and one with blurred distance vision. I close the former. I follow that line. I close both eyes. What pushes me away?
3.
At the end of every year, I go back. I lift my father’s desk chair, drag the weight of the wood up to the room that used to be my room, I put down the chair on the floor that’s also made of wood. I shake the chair, making sure it’s firm, I step on top of it, detach my heels, step on tiptoes until I reach the top of the closet, hook my fingers onto the bronze circle of the door: I push. A sliding door that doesn’t slide easily, trips, gets jammed, demands strength. I push, push until I see.
The box I lift up is now resting on my curved arms: an instant, tiptoeing, I am a vertical in balance: wooden floor—wooden chair—me—the weight of the box on the head.
As a child I took dancing classes for years. My mother would copy the texts that my teacher’s mother would hand out to all the students’ mothers. Every mother would copy the texts by hand, then pass them to the next mother. “No movement is true unless suggesting a sequence of movements,” said Isadora Duncan. Pages and pages of text on dance interspersed with drawings of dancers. Where are those pages? Plié, demi-plié. The “original” was traced in ink on top of a text handwritten in pencil. Why that double handwriting?
Was that repetition somehow connected with my teacher’s deviating eye? A trembling of the words written in ink that followed the fixity of the words in pencil like an imperfect copy, made with tracing paper. A deviation. Perhaps a translation moving closer and further away from the “original,” a gesture toward. A mark of my teacher’s hand following her mother’s, but departing from her, exposing the double movement.
Every time I come back from my country to this other country I carry with me a transparent page protector with pictures from that box. The slow motion of moving images from one place to the other. They are always photographs: still images. This time I also found a DVD. A Super 8 transfer that my then best friend’s father had made. It documented us at six, in a dance show. Her father gave me the DVD fifteen years ago. During fifteen years I had the opportunity to look at those moving images and did not: I forgot: a leap, a pause.
On this last trip I had already begun to work on this project that revolves around stillness and movement. I remembered the film, found it inside the box, brought it with me. Once back in this country, I pushed the disc inside the computer slot: the beep of the reader that tries, trips, the disc that doesn’t slide easily, gets jammed. Black screen, only music. The Super 8 should be mute; what I hear is a melody that doesn’t fit. A trembling, a deviation. I close my eyes, stay still. Stillness and music that’s out of place.
A pause. A leap. A friend that knows about film tries, is able to see images moving. The file that I had handed out to him now comes back to me and opens up.
A deviation, a sliding that slides.
This is a screen shot of the first seconds of that Super 8 film that I did not look at for fifteen years and that was shot forty-three years ago. I’m on the right but not visible. I am behind this blurry body that passes in front of the camera for less than a second. The only adult body. Less than a second of a body that I haven’t seen for forty-three years. I play the film and rewind, rewind until I recognize her. This is my dance teacher. She moves.
______
Note: The title “What Seems Motionless Waits” is a line from the poem “Lesson” by Adélia Prado, translated by Ellen Watson, from the book The Alphabet in the Park (Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press, 1990).
