ENSUEÑOS A/SOMBRA DE AGUA // REVERIES IN THE SHADOW/AWE OF WATER

Rolando André López Torres

Author’s Note: I would not have been able to write this story had it not been for the loving encouragement, friendship and editorial guidance of Natalia A. Lassalle and Sofía Gallisá-Muriente. They were the compassionate midwives that this text needed, from its conception to the final draft. Gracias infinitas, amigas. My gratitude to you is boundless.

A four-way screen projects fragments of life in Florida: a rocket launches from the Kennedy Space Center while tall grasses in quiet marshes move to dry wind; Disney rides, Puerto Rican bars and karaoke nights, dances and birthday cakes—elements of life, split up, while intermittent subtitles give us fragments of witnesses. “Post-María, you could see all the stars from Puerto Rico,” one person says, while we see the rocket now, in outer space. Later, as we walk in the darkness of a forest at night, hearing frogs and staring at a warm, red light, another subtitle appears with a devastating line: “We still don’t know, at least not yet, how to move freely.”1

The film’s title is Foreign in a Domestic Sense. An architecture of differences reveals itself in the film’s form and co-authorship. On the one hand, it manifests many voices; the four screens give us sounds, images and testimonies from various environments and perspectives. Yet a resonance reverberates and synchronicity is created at a slant, one moment flowing in four pulsating filaments. This itself is a fifth experience, a sense that fills the gaps between visual and sonic images in the mind; this image in the mind itself is “lucifluid,” like a dream.

Carried away by the impression, I enter a state of reverie. Time undulates in space. The metaphysical atoms of these moments in Florida flow across one another through the four screens. It is as if this way of filmmaking is attuned to the forces of quantum physics. I take many screenshots and sometimes I transcribe in the notebook a sketch of how the image appears in the montage, dividing the page into four squares, writing an ekphrastic description in each. Based on this experience, I create a creative writing prompt that I present in workshops across the East and West of the US:

There are four screens, each telling a different story.

It is a narrative divided into four quarters. Voices speak in the text on screen.

As the film proceeds, watch and immerse yourself in the images and voices.

Every essay is a rehearsal, and every rehearsal stages a dream. So let me call this text a dream. It meanders.

Pues, like water, it is slippery with language & time.

I met Natalia Lasalle in March of 2008 and Sofía Gallisá-Muriente in June of 2020, when both of them approached me to collaborate on a project they were calling Foreign in a Domestic Sense. An experimental film and installation, it would center around the lives of Puerto Ricans living in Central Florida.

In the house where they’re staying in Orlando, they interviewed me. I told them about life in Florida for me—my grandparents, my uncles and aunts, and the frequent trips to Florida that have characterized my life since I was a child, turning it into a second home. Afterward, we went out for drinks at a Puerto Rican bar they wanted to scope out. Sofía and I bonded over passion fruit sangrías and reggaetón. She identified as an atheist but showed curiosity about my faith. And smiled when I started talking about Esu-Legba. Natalia walked around the place, photographing the faces of patrons and objects that captured her imagination. A little girl gazed at Natalia who pointed the lens at the girl’s eyes; filmmaker and child gazed at each other, the child dumbstruck, the filmmaker focused. By the time Sofía and I clinked our glasses together, Natalia snapped a shot of us, too. And together they invited me to lend my voice to a constellated choir—an act that, in any setting, is spiritual work.

I agreed without hesitation.

I tell this story to show that, in the way it gathered scattered peoples to form new bonds and begin old ones anew, Foreign in a Domestic Sense was—from concept to conception—in every fractal layer of its improvised composition, a labor of the heart. We—artist and subject—sought each other’s complicity to unearth a story.

Two days before I met up with Natalia and Sofía, on June 10, the film In the Heights, a

Hollywood musical about a community of Diasporicans in New York City, premiered to dismal box office numbers. I watched it at the house with Abuelita, who was recovering from eye surgery. She loved the “Carnaval de Barrio” number. Directed by Jon M. Chu, the film is based on Lin Manuel Miranda’s 2005 Broadway musical of the same name. As a Boricua family steeped in American entertainment, we have followed Miranda’s output all the way from then to Disney’s Encanto.

As we watch the film, Abuelita’s walker is propped up against the hollow, wallpapered wall by the sofa, where she sits covered with a soft blue blanket and wearing a red FSU jacket. She says that Benny is the best singer in the ensemble. He is played by Corey Hawkins, an American black actor. My uncle says “Yeah, but that kid always disappears during the salsa dance numbers. He can’t dance! He’s un Americano!”

My phone lights up with notifications from the news about power outages across Puerto Rico. This coincidence is also magic, I suppose. In the musical I just saw with Abuelita, the Boricua community in NYC also experiences a classic citywide apagón. But, true to the Hollywood formula, the film crafts a happy ending for its characters, one in which energy and justice are restored at the end.

Now, in January 2023, as I write this, it’s been near to six years since María passed over Puerto Rico, and the nation continues to struggle with power outages, mass exoduses, a failing infrastructure that has been helped by neither private nor public industry, and the perverse ecosystem of colonialism, one in which any President, of any party, of any color, can play their imperial role.

Driving in the streets of Puerto Rico at night means submitting to the darkness. If it is empty, and your car’s lights are the only lights on in the Caguas stretch of the Luis A. Ferré highway, then the surrounding mountains bordering the lanes appear darker than the night sky itself. The road crackles under the wheels and the stars above remind you that you are still on earth. People sleep in esos mundos apagados.

Ii

Through a process of research and reflection that began long before the weeks they spent in Florida, Natalia and Sofía beaded different fragments from these interviews and images into a singular experience of their own, which they called “a constellation of testimonies and imaginaries,” a complete aesthetic submersion into a multiplexed narrative of estrangement and belonging.

The film’s title is from a legal document, referring to an oxymoronic phrase employed by the United States Supreme Court in 1901, in Natalia and Sofia’s words, “as part of the ruling that gave legal sanction to the US colonization of foreign territories, identifying Puerto Rico as an unincorporated possession and speaking to a uniquely strange relationship to belonging.”

Uniquely strange. How, by calling me “domestic,” the American assumes similitude with me. How, by calling me “foreign,” the same American bites to subjugate my difference. Stranger still, how by taking possession of the phrase “foreign in a domestic sense,” we blow up its contradictions to seek, confront, and reckon with its colonial legacy.2 By reckoning’s end, that American is a no-lugar, a no-place, a white Capitol crumbled by the uprising of white supremacy, a fiction more foreign to me than any Boricua reality. And the Boricua reality is everywhere alongside State Road I4 that connects all of Central Florida and has been the epicenter of the fastest-growing Puerto Rican community outside the archipelago.

*

The subject that unites the interviews and images in Sofía and Natalia’s project is a memory of displacement. From Edi, Sofía, and Lizbeth, three of the Diasporic Boricuas interviewed:

Edi:

Vivir María desde allá fue horrible.

Living María from there was horrible.

Yo sabía que no iba a volver a pisar la misma isla que dejé.

I knew I wwasn’t going to step foot on the same island I left.

La mayoría se fue a Florida. Most people went to Florida.

Sofía: Todo el mundo tiene una historia. Everybody has a story.

Lizbeth: Miren pa’l frente, y no miren pa atrás. Look forward and don’t look back.

I linger on Edi’s words: “Living María from there was horrible.”

I was not in Puerto Rico when the hurricane passed, nor was I with my family in Florida. I was in Boston, where I was a high school teacher at the time.

Haruki Murakami wrote a book of short stories titled after the quake. Every story in the book relates to the 1995 earthquake in Kobe, Japan. In the stories, as in my Boston life postMaría, disaster is a peripheral reality that nonetheless swallows the characters’ minds. A woman spends five days in front of the television without saying a word. As the number of dead rises, the pile-on of media attention results in numbness, as for her husband: “Each article reported some new tragedy, but to [him] the details seemed oddly lacking in depth. All sounds reached him as far-off, monotonous echos.” This distance, the experience of absorbing the disaster in displacement, the ensuing dissociation that suffuses one’s stillness with inner turmoil, is one of the central themes of the book. Disaster devastates reality and divides it into a point of “before” and “after.”

I got all my news about María from Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. It was the ultimate “doom scroll.” If I were to reproduce this experience as a four-way screen, it would look like this:

Image 1

The screen of a phone as a call is being made to “Mama.” No answer. Then the phone makes another call, to “Papa:” no answer. Then to “Ricardo,” to “Patricia;” no answer.

Image 2

Flash floods, landslides, videos of old folks stuck in houses because the flooding has removed all mountain bridges…

Image 3

I am in my classroom. After class, Y, a high school freshman, approaches me and tells me she has not heard from her family in the archipiélago in four days. I tell her I’m sorry and we embrace.

Image 4

Complete darkness. Sound of rain. The chirp of a coquí.

Four images, one text, two languages. You are not commanded to look first at any given image. Rather than presenting a linear reality, the four-way screen formulates an open, cyclical narrative. Sofía says, “Disney is a monster.” A plastic yellow boat floats along a placid river that never floods. Around the boat artificial beacons light up a simulated city, una maqueta dulce: the Ferris wheel, air balloon, and fantasy-island skyscrapers illuminate your horizon. The ceiling is painted as a night sky, and your world is made smaller. In this world, it never rains. “It’s a small world,” the dolls around you joyfully sing. A doll is a performance, an object shaped into the semblance of a smile. On the top left corner of the screen, the still of a home movie shows a blurry purple object. Maybe because Disney signifies a site of grief for me, maybe because I am thinking of Sofía’s monster, the blurry image looks to me like a purple skull with two shining pink eyes. Maybe every doll in Disney hides a skull underneath. All of us are made of bones.

During my childhood, Florida meant the Magic Kingdom, MGM studios, and that Magnificent White Ball that crowned EPCOT, where the cultures of the world and American progressivism were celebrated in simulated small-world models. My uncle Pablito worked there as a cook in one of the folkloric restaurants. Pablito was, without a doubt, a man with a perennial smile.

He told me, with serious laughter and a mischievous glance:

“Rolandito, my boss is Mickey Mouse. That’s why I’m always laughing. Here you live happily.”

He always waited for us at the entrance of EPCOT wearing his dirty apron and the same humble jíbaro smile. Admission to the park was free for the family, just as it was for him.

Short, squat and bald, with a round face and a flat nose, big eyes, and wide taíno-like features, my uncle’s face radiated sweetness and joy like a bright red apple. It was utterly natural for him. Therefore, the logic went, Mickey was just as natural. Pablito channeled Mickey. If a person goes out of their way for you, they live in the caricature they adopt, which invariably comes to resemble them.

As rough as the Floridian terrain can be, here something is passed from person to person, from glance to glance. Love is cultivated between hollow walls, generic franchises, and hallways crammed with lines of people. Pablo and his wife Jenny, after living in New Jersey in the sixties, moved to Florida in the seventies. He lived his happily ever after there with his two bosses, Mickey and Jenny, until the end.

Late in his life, he developed cancer, and while terminally ill, traveled to Puerto Rico against his doctor’s wishes. He was not good at talking about pain, though he bore it with the same cheerfulness that he bore the rest of his life.

Reasons of the heart trumped the logic of science. Pablito needed to see his Lydia. Lydia is my grandmother. She raised him, just as she did my brothers, my cousins and myself. Technically, he was her younger brother. Affectively, the bond between them was one of mother and son. He needed to see his Lydia urgently. This was last year.

At that time, my grandmother Lydia started to develop dementia. She couldn’t walk or get up by herself. She forgot things and words dissolved on her tongue. Pablito also showed his own indelible signs of deterioration. The cancer made him bony, despite the fact that his eyes and countenance radiated the same jovial glow, hardly unchanged in the face of approaching mortality.

Seeing Lydia unable to move or speak stunned him into thinking that she would not recognize him and that his visit had been in vain. But she did recognize him and beamed at him. Still, she could not speak. The words stuck in her throat, and maybe there weren’t any. Overcome, he hugged her and burst into tears. She did the same. At the end of the visit, Pablito told my mother: “Now that I have seen my Lydia, I am at peace. I needed to see her one more time.” He died a week later in Florida.

Pablito left us a legacy, a lesson in the tears that the man with a perennial smile does not allow for himself. These words are mere shadows. Today he lives like a flame in the wind, smiling in the recesses of memory, inside the oral history that my family guards like a treasure.

“Ensueños a/Sombra de Agua // Reveries in the Shadow/Awe of Water.”

This essay is an exercise in memoir and also an experiment in the pedagogy of creative writing, and all the ways in which Foreign in a Domestic Sense has contributed to my teaching practice. The title is inspired by The Poetics of Reverie: Childhood, Language, and the Cosmos, by French philosopher Gaston Bachelard; and by the fragment from Nancy above, where she communicates that rainwater, destructive as it is, carries the future’s seed between water and darkness. Water is mundane, intrinsic to the functionality of our bodies, and also a key in many sacred acts across religion, such as baptism. “Reverie sacralizes its object,” Bachelard writes, and I can’t help but think of Nancy’s yearning as coming from the depths of spiritual reverie.

“Our entire book must emerge from our reveries,” Bachelard writes, and so with this essay, and with Foreign in a Domestic Sense. Beneath the memory of displacement, at its core, the film is a story of reveries.

Futurity inheres within the poetic reverie. “The poetic image, in its newness,” Bachelard writes, “opens a future to language;” like the rain in Nancy’s personal imaginary, the poetic image is a seed. And from that seed, “a world takes form in our reverie, and this world is ours.”

What is most deeply speculated in Foreign in a Domestic Sense is, precisely, this “ours.” Who is the community, the “we,” that speaks through the voices of Nancy, Sofía, Lizbeth, and Edi, through Natalia Lassalle and Sofía Gallisá-Muriente? There is not yet a language for the post-diaspora community that Foreign in a Domestic Sense speculates. Poet Édouard Glissant speaks of “departure” as the “moment when one consents not to be a single being and attempts to be many beings at the same time… every diaspora is the passage from unity to multiplicity.” la lluvia me persigue los pasos. ¡amo tanto a la lluvia! resume el golpe súbito y profundo de lo increíblemente inesperado y me deja a su vez la plenitud suprema de la esperanza sembrada en una nube tan repentinamente conquistada. hoy me llueve ante ti. la arena me salpica pequeña y penetrante, tan deliciosamente doliéndome en los pies. estos pies míos, mar, que antes solo querían dormir siempre arropados sin más mundo ni nada, soñando verse solos con la yerba. hoy están tan cansados de verse pisar siempre tantas calles podridas. hoy me duele tu gris que me parece mío, sin voz del sol, callado como un niño olvidado de llorar de tanto haber llorado hondo y sereno en su dolor constante y alargado desde el grito más nuevo. tu gris me duele en todas mis más remotas voces porque lo siento mío, más mío, mucho más que mis pies.

A torrent channels this abundant multiplicity to us, somewhere in the interstices between sound, text, and image, and water is no longer a mere metaphor. It is the transversal surface where both departure and return trace their liquid paths. Tangible and fierce, it binds us all together. In awe of its shadow, I praise the dream of water in reverie. And in that praise, I find myself facing the negativity, the difference, of others whose waters mingle along with mine, this in the hybrid space where dream becomes reality, where the water does not tire of chasing us.

— Anjelamaría Dávila & José María Lima “la lluvia me persigue los pasos” the rain chases my steps. I so love the rain! it sums up the deep and sudden blow of the unbelievably unexpected and leaves me in turn the supreme plenitude of hope sown in a cloud so suddenly conquered. Today rains on me before you. the sand splashes me small and penetrating, so deliciously aching in my feet. these feet of mine, sea, that before only wanted to sleep always tucked in no more world or anything, dreaming of seeing themselves alone with the grass. today they are so tired of seeing each other always step on so many rotten streets. today your gray hurts me what to me seems mine, without the voice of the sun, silent like a child of crying forgotten from crying so much deep and serene in their constant pain and elongated from the newest cry. your gray hurts me everywhere in my most remote voices because I feel it mine, more mine, much more than my feet.

— Anjelamaria Dávila & José María Lima “The rain chases my steps”