A cry across time

Reading Of Women and Salt, a debut novel by Gabriela Garcia (3/29/21) is like watching a string of videos, or slides, different moments captured in the sun seen from the eyes of a photographer, each clip a different point in time with different people but aspects linking them together, the camera a silent observer of each vignette, the reader another. Images strung together so beautifully with words, spare yet evocative and rich with emotion. “Memory as static history.”

Salt is in the book, in the ocean, on the skin of a child at the beach; Miami smells of salt, a taste of brine in the air.

Several engaging stories weave through the book, different generations of women and girls at critical moments in their lives, in Cuba, Mexico, and Miami from 1866 to the 21st century, connected by a common thread of immigration in its varied forms, as seen through their eyes. Danger, crimes, death, loss, struggle, hope, beauty, and the potential for healing, all play roles in this narrative. What follows are passages from the book that moved me.

“Jeanette has wondered whether loss unspoken becomes an inherited trait.”

“...even the best mothers in the world can’t always save their daughters.”

“...sponsor told her once that the only love she knows what to do with is the kind of love that breaks a person over and over again.”

“Homer or Aristotle or Greek philosophers or Roman naturalists or all of them, I don’t remember which, believed migrating birds were warriors. They believed migrating birds were off to do battle at the end of the earth. I imagine them whirling in a spiral toward the sky, millions of them, millions of wings, one force pulsing, beating. Powerful enough to explode into fire, that beating bird heart, to break any wall.”

“Ana is my daughter’s name. I fear I, too, am losing my mind. I don’t know why I am here and I am alone and I am praying to a god I’m not sure exists but if she exists she is surely a bird, surely a migrating bird doing battle, surely she will break these walls.”

“Dear Ana, I am sorry. I tried to save you. Dear Ana, I am sorry. I thought I could give you a better chance. Dear Ana, I do not know if I made your life worse. I do not write any of this.”

“Birds fly even if it kills them.”

“Usually it scared her a little, men’s comments. She’d walk down Kendall Drive by Sasha’s house, a street that felt more like a congested highway, and men would honk at her, would follow them, would stop to gawk and shout. She liked it. She hated it. Thought it was a fact of life, like waiting for the light to change or taking an umbrella just in case.”

“Johnson laughed. He looked around. He was the kind of guy who couldn’t stop looking around as if his next words were on cue cards scattered in the distance.”

“Excitement rippled through her, and fear. Two emotions too similar to tell apart most days. Fear was her father drunk. But this didn’t feel like that. This felt like growing up.”

“When you first got there, to the detention center, I was afraid you would forget: the feel of bathwater (that feeling of calming suspension, like in a womb!), the way Miami smells of salt, what it feels like to run for miles and never hit a wall or fence. I was afraid captivity would shape you into something new and unrecognizable. I was afraid I would bear witness to a turning point, look back and think, That was the moment that shaped your life into disaster, or worse, I was the one who caused disaster.”

“But you were resilient,”

“...the feeling is more about my own survival than yours.”

“I guess the time has come to tell you about my pregnancy, though I have avoided it all these years. I don’t know his name, Ana. I don’t even know his face. I remember, most, his hands, cracked and dry. How his nails were long and underlined with muck. How he tasted of stale smoke, smelled of grass. I knew he was a marero because of the 13 on his forearm.”

“I am sorry I had nothing else to offer, Ana. That there are no real rules that govern why some are born in turmoil and others never know a single day in which the next seems an ill-considered bet. It’s all lottery, Ana, all chance. It’s the flick of a coin, and we are born.”

“I want, again, to tell her about my father, but I won’t even tell myself about my father. I think about this often, about whether the past is real if we don’t bring it into the present. Tree falling in the forest and all that. I’m okay, I say. I don’t know if I am the tree or the no one who doesn’t hear it.”

“I know I have failed you in some way, she says. And I just wish I knew how. I just wish I knew how to fix whatever is broken between us. I can’t look up. I can’t look up from my coffee, from the foam dissolving into the tiny cup. Tell her, I think, tell her. But what would it do other than widen the gulf? We are already two continents; impossible to imagine a bridge could even exist. I wish to dissolve into my cup, I wish to dissolve on the tongue, to be sugar and not this bitter, watery substance in the shape of Girl. It is easier to go further back, to deflect past with past. I ask about Cuba again. My mother sighs.”

“Jeanette had added her own words, We are more than we think we are. And though Ana had no idea why Jeanette had written those words, she chose to believe the sentence, the scribble, was a cry across time. Women? Certain women? We are more than we think we are. There was always more. She had no idea what else life would ask of her, force out of her, but right then, there was cake and candles and this, a gift. She thought that she, too, might give away the book someday, though she had no idea to whom. Someone who reminded her of herself maybe.”