Kubota writes to Vallejo about hope.
Chances are your photo floats on a gaseous light in my memory,
a black and white I saw one day in an old newspaper
wrapped around some canned beef from Paraguay
that came to my store when I was a free man in 1938.
The article said you died in Paris on a rainy day
as you had predicted.
And that you had cried out for Spain and its freedom
from your deathbed.
I cried too, Cesar.
For your chin and your right hand.
For your high forehead cresting to the thick,
dark hair combed straight back.
For your eyes squinting in worry.
For the furrows of your brow.
Although handsome, dressed in a Spanish suit,
no doubt brought from Madrid when it was the only thing
you owned.
You look metaphysical.
I would say, peacefully anxious.
Perhaps about to speak of hope.
How its shadow has no dark.
How its bold front has no face to thank with kisses.
If I bring you to my dark cell, Cesar, to this bleak plateau,
you have sworn to me you would give off no light.
And if I were to bring you out into the sun with me,
when guards allow us to exercise with the ball in the desert
or play jump rope like schoolgirls,
you have said you will cast no shadow at sunrise or either
late in the day.
What is pain that is so deep in you
it never had a cause, Cesar.
What if your hunger walk somewhere so far from pain,
one blade of grass at least would sprout from your grave?
I understand, of course, that we do not
suffer as Catholics or Mohammedans or as atheists.
That if you were not Vallejo, you would still feel it.
That if you were not a man, you would feel it.
If you were not Catholic, or an atheist, or a Muhammadan,
you would still feel it.
I too am in pain.
It comes from deeper down.
My pain comes from my scholar of a father who
stained his white hands with wet earth and burdock root,
rubbing the juice and mud over his hands
at the House of thousands.
This is a name from one of the detention centers.
So he would be taken for a sturdy farmer
and granted his ticket to step from Sand Island
into the kingdom of heaven.
A frail man, he was so sick he'd only eaten water on the way.
Detained in the harbor, he slept in a muddy grass house
eating taro and fish for days.
Weeping when he saw the sunrise.
Sobbing when a barefoot woman passed
by his hut hauling a load of grain in a bundle on her
back as if it were a baby.
My pain comes from the day the Hawaiian king arrived
and ordered them all into a double line
so he could pass between them, stretch out
both his hands to touch fingers and palms with each Japanese,
welcoming the Imin to do the work of cane.
To earn the wages of sugar, the white stone.
I am in pain from this further down.
I am in pain.
I see your pain, too, while at work, keeping
accounts on the estate in Peru when
workers arrived by thousands in the courtyard
below your balcony.
You tallied with the black stone the profit
of each one who worked the sugarcane.
From the fistful of rice they took home, you felt it.
And from the pennies they ate, they were in pain.
There are in life such hard blows.
We don't know.
Blows from Black messengers who hit
us hard with a stick and heart, also, with the end of a rope.
And when we turn our eyes around,
when a patting falls upon our shoulder, we know nothing.
And they take us to the North wind and to the South wind
and return to us pain that has not a cause.
That is a thing so important it never had
a cause, born all on its own.
We don't know.
The witnesses are Thursdays and the bones of our arms.
We do not feel the suffering together, Cesar, but alone,
along dark roads.
A black stone lying on a white stone.
Not as Kubota am I in pain.
Today, I am simply in pain.