[ On the third anniversary of the El Paso Massacre of Latin
Americans, prize-winning poet Martin Espada offers a tribute to a
human rights lawyer killed by a shooter. ]
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PORTSIDE CULTURE

THE FACES WE ENVISION IN THE SCRAPBOOK OF THE DEAD  
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Martin Espada
August 3, 2022
North American Review
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_ On the third anniversary of the El Paso Massacre of Latin
Americans, prize-winning poet Martin Espada offers a tribute to a
human rights lawyer killed by a shooter. _

,

 

The Faces We Envision in the Scrapbook of the Dead

By Martin Espada

_For Camilo Pérez-Bustillo and the city of El Paso_

 

_A freak fall_,_ _you said._ A bad landing_, you said, a Colombian
from Queens

always wandering a map of unknown places. The tumble down the stairs

of the brownstone in Brooklyn ripped your knees from their moorings,

ruptured both quadriceps, and in the whirlwind of an instant you could
see

the flash between walking and not walking, breathing and not
breathing,

like a fighter wheeled away from the ring on a stretcher as everybody
prays.

 

The surgeons resplendent in white, priests hearing the god of ripped
bodies

speak only to them, screwed your knees back on, sat you in a
wheelchair

the way a ventriloquist props up the dummy, and then sent you home.

In El Paso, with braces on both legs, blood seeping through the
bandages,

the bathroom a soccer field away, you waited for the boy you
named Centli

to lift you up, his arms suddenly thick, your head suddenly on his
shoulder.

You called all your compañeros the night he was born, jolting them
from sleep,

translating the Nahuatl name, tender grain, deity of maíz in the
Valley of México.

Now, on weekends, he drove for Lyft, steering inebriated soldiers
from Fort Bliss

to the strip clubs and back, as they balled up dollar bills by the
fistful for him,

then the garters of the girls. Your girl, Lucecita, crossed the
bridge from Juárez

to join you, a waitress swerving from table to table at the diner, her
mother’s

name on the badge of her uniform. For you, she scrambled eggs with
green chiles.

 

The wheelchair gone, the braces ready to go, came the day you saw in
your sleep,

the day of muscle gripping bone like vines curling around the wrinkled
trunks

of trees, the day you could walk with a cane in each hand. At the
Walmart by

Cielo Vista, around the corner from the movie house where you would
see

Centli’s Marvel heroes and their ropes of muscle, you picked out
your canes

with ceremony, your boy and girl as witnesses, scrutinizing the
aluminum

bones, the gray rubber handles, the suction cups anchored to the
floor, those

diminutive spaceships. You paid for the tools of liberation and a
roast chicken

at the checkout counter. No one could envision the faces in the
scrapbook of the dead.

 

You would stand with the solitary man, all the way from Brooklyn, and
his sign that

said _Free Them _at the migrant adolescent internment camp in the
desert of El Paso,

and found your lawyer’s tongue as a carpenter finds the hammer,
words nailed

in the air, then evaporating in the heat for reporters who could never
write as fast

as you could talk, who said _Could you repeat that_, and so you did,
till the delegations

from Congress swept into the desert with calls to investigate. You
would stand again

at the microphone, thin as the mike stand, to tell the rally of the
militia patrolling

the desert in camouflage, to name the men who hallucinated code names
like _Viper_,

who raged of _invasion_ to the migrants shivering in the sand at
gunpoint, so you

kept talking, as if at gunpoint yourself, till the vigilantes
evaporated in the heat.

 

August 3rd, 2019: at the table with Centli and Lucecita in
the Ciudad de México,

you saw again the flash between walking and not walking, breathing and
not

breathing in the headlines from El Paso. The shooter left his job
selling

popcorn at a movie house to navigate six hundred fifty miles across
the map

of Texas, stopping only to scald his throat with coffee or stare in
the mirrors

of gas station bathrooms, the manifesto he nailed to the message board

shimmering in the mineshaft of his head: _the Hispanic invasion of
Texas,_

_open borders, free health care for illegals, cultural and ethnic
replacement_.

He meandered through the aisles of your Walmart by Cielo Vista,
another

boy who would drizzle extra butter on the popcorn, then came back

wearing headphones and safety glasses, like a mantis with eyes
swiveling

in search of prey, the AK-47 at his shoulder, the Mexicans in his
sights.

 

Later, as the scrapbook of the dead flipped across screens and
newspapers,

you saw a face you knew, a man oblivious to the headlines and captions

creeping at the edges of his snapshot like a wreath. He was a bus
driver

for the city of El Paso, marched for the Army and the Chicano
Movement,

sat a few times at the back of your class called Human Rights on the
Border

and would raise his hand. How you long for a beer in a bar with him
now.

How you wonder if your lawyer’s fireworks show of words burst in the
sky

of the boy with the rifle, why he drew a circle on the map around El
Paso.

 

In the vision you cannot swat from your eyes, you lean on your canes

at the Walmart, close to the checkout counter where the bus driver
bags

the last of his groceries, as the crowd stampedes to the back of the
store

with the gunshots popping in the parking lot, and your knees tell you

what your thudding heart already knows, that you cannot flee to dive

and roll under a table or a storage bin. Centli and Lucecita stand
with you,

refusing to run with the others, leaving their father wobbly on his
canes

in the medical supply aisle to face the bullets alone. Your boy’s
arms

are suddenly thick around you. Your head is suddenly on his shoulder.

Martin Espada has published more than 20 books as a poet, editor,
essayist and translator. His latest book of poems is
called _Floaters_, winner of the 2021 National Book Award. Other
books of poems include _Vivas to Those Who Have
Failed _(2016), _The Trouble Ball_ (2011), _The Republic of
Poetry_ (2006), _Alabanza_ (2003) and _Imagine the Angels of
Bread _(1996). He is the editor of _What Saves Us: Poems of Empathy
and Outrage in the Age of Trump_ (2019). He has received the Ruth
Lilly Poetry Prize, the Shelley Memorial Award, the Robert Creeley
Award, an Academy of American Poets Fellowship, the PEN/Revson
Fellowship, a Letras Boricuas Fellowship and a Guggenheim
Fellowship. The Republic of Poetry was a finalist for the Pulitzer
Prize. The title poem of his collection _Alabanza_, about 9/11, has
been widely anthologized and performed. His book of essays and
poems, _Zapata’s Disciple_ (1998), was banned in Tucson as part of
the Mexican-American Studies Program outlawed by the state of Arizona.
A former tenant lawyer in Greater Boston, Espada is a professor of
English at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst.

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