The Face Read online

  The Face

  Jimmy Santiago Baca

  Restless Books | Brooklyn, New York

  Table of Contents

  The Face

  About the Author

  Colophon

  The Face

  Ever since my infancy, when my biological mother and father abandoned me, I’ve felt that my face was the end product of cosmic parenting. As a child, when I stood in a field chilled with morning mist, looked up at the moon reflected on blackbirds in the cottonwoods, and thought the loneliness in my heart to be too overbearing for me to go on living another day, the vast wholeness of life made my face feel it was being gazed down upon by attentive galactic spirits.

  I imagine my face as a hike into the forest, where in early March the winter snow melts and glistens down the black-leaf path, where my boot prints carve themselves deep into the moist soil next to wild turkey prints and, here and there, mountain lion and deer prints.

  I see a resemblance to my face in the pink and red cliffs, the dark granite bluffs and smooth open mesas and basins where bears snuggle in caves and sleep during the winter. In almost every aspect of nature, I see parts of my face. My lips in the creek. Forehead on the high peaks. Brown eyes in the sunlight that spreads evenly and softly over the treetops and fields. My graying temples in the patches of lingering snow on the north-facing slopes of pine-forested mountains.

  You might not see this image as I pass you on the street, but your eyes would deceive you, my friend. If you want to see my true face, go for this hike yourself.

  Stand in a field as I did as a child and watch the sunrise crest the nearby peaks. Watch it grow wider and more brilliant as rays shoot into every cranny and gulley and window, illuminating the land and announcing another splendid morning. It creates light in those it greets; it instills hope and grace; it is my smile.

  ❖

  Quite honestly I’d like to place my face down

  in the ground and pack black mulch over it

  and come later to the forest and be amazed

  by dozens of small faces sprouting

  eyes like marijuana buds looking about

  from delicate spines of limbs;

  my ears would whorl in on themselves,

  lilies, tinged red abut the edge,

  picking up news of universe,

  pollinated by hummingbirds

  and my nose and lips would be

  poison ivy

  touch me and you burn.

  A novitiate of the sun,

  an adoring pilgrim in my fifth karmic life

  ultimately

  black mulched face, composted face,

  feeding life to roots,

  on the path to becoming light

  that distributes warmth to all living forms

  evenly

  back to its original face

  of endless space.

  ❖

  Since childhood, I have sensed another face lurking just beneath my body’s face, a conscionable entity constantly present, host to every breath, appraising every minute of my existence with benevolent paternalism.

  While my flesh face is more Olmec brown and handsome, my companion’s face is that of a reclusive curandero. As benign as a bunny, he declares himself the guardian of Jimmy Santiago Baca’s personal sphere.

  This face turns and waves and converses with me. It bends around my wrists like bracelets and accompanies me like a happy dog into the forest, tail wagging, romping into the glistening water and shaking it off in a trillion specks of glittering light.

  This other interior face, the eternal face, hears and sees and smells with spectral sensitivity. It is endowed with sonar ears that can discern bat frequencies, eyes that peer beneath the physical surface of things, a nose that goes to the root material.

  I suspect this face is intricately woven into the stars and sun, made of solar cells, unfettered by space and time. It is a spiritual visage, with its birth-home in the cosmos, source shaped and reshaped from cosmic compost, from the fiery origins of our galaxy.

  How do I know all this? Because of the first time I became aware of the face’s presence as a boy.

  ❖

  When Emilio and I were cutting trees in the forest

  he had the flu and couldn’t hear very well. Stuffy nose and all,

  and he picked this massive pine for me to cut

  and he went down the hill to cut another tree.

  I chainsawed a wedge and cut the other side

  but it fell

  the wrong way

  I yelled Emilio! Emilio! Muevete!

  He couldn’t hear and it crushed him to death.

  Later his bereaved wife came to my house and gave me a shoe box filled with

  his calf-skin work gloves—

  encrusted with dirty sawdust, black leaf muck, ragged and shredded with holes.

  He would have liked for you to have them, she said.

  And I knew what she meant.

  When I look at them, I am reminded of books

  I’ve read and worn down with margin notes and comments,

  books that line my bookcase, mangy and dog eared—the

  work gloves of poets

  passed down to me by the world.

  See my face in any crowd,

  it’s the one that looks like a pair of work gloves.

  ❖

  Back then, my world was a playground on which I played without a care, not worried about my body or the perimeters of galactic realms; I ran, leapt, flipped, intruded, invoked, rushed in, and whirled about and around in sublime ecstasy. Even in the heavy religious atmosphere of a Franciscan orphanage, there was no controlling the waterfall of happiness showering over me, under me, around me.

  I felt protected by something, although I didn’t know by what. It certainly wasn’t Christ, whose divine face stared at me from crosses on classroom and dormitory walls and punctuated my festive mood with an awful sorrow. It was another face, not yet revealed to me, that made me feel safe enough to surge forward.

  Every atom of every aspect of reality drummed with an awakening spark to the spirit, and I had to be held back. I was nagged—quit running, don’t jump, don’t yell when you sing in the choir, quit playing with the altar boy uniform, no drinking the wine, stop tapping your friends’ necks when the priests is giving out communion, stop talking and pray the rosary. But of course, I couldn’t be stopped.

  Brimming with intolerable rapture, I almost killed myself many, many times. I wasn’t trying to; my love for life just kept spilling me over boundaries into places from which some people don’t come back. Hardly restricted by social convention, I hurt myself by being so rambunctious and romantic—breaking bones leaping out of cars; getting my foot caught in the chain of a motorcycle; going 60 mph and crashing my motorcycle, skidding into lamp posts, cars, street curbs.

  I can remember the time of this particular accident with clarity. I was six or seven. One moment I was with my tag football team, dashing for a pass at the Zoo Park in Albuquerque, and the next I was looking down at myself on a gurney in post-op.

  With bemused curiosity, my hovering spirit face gazed upon my unconscious flesh face and watched the concerned faces of nuns and doctors watch me. I was swaddled in bandages; they ran under my chin and over my head so that only my eyes, nose, and part of my forehead were showing; I looked like a gauzed-up mummy.

  This was the first time I really saw my face. No house of mirrors here. No distortions or anything like that. My spirit eyes could see right through the gauze to my innocent and buoyant countenance. Just a beautiful radiant and glowing visage of a six-year-old boy in love with life.

  Afterward, my flesh face could blend into my airy face. At night, as I lay in my dorm cot, looking out the windows into the sky, I co
uld feel my flesh face leave me in soft, successive waves. Soon, my spirit face did all my observing for me. It served as a lens that could focus on the deeper essence of life forces. Instead of the corn, it could see the roots of the corn. Instead of the mountain, it could see the cataclysmic carnage that created the mountain. Instead of a human being’s flesh and youth, it saw their bones. Through the spirit face, I could discard death like an orange peel and bite into the succulent other-world.

  It was my pristine, beyond-life face. When it touched my soiled, present-life face with its gaze, I felt its eyes had traveled thousands of miles.

  Although I could see my face for myself after the accident, I could have easily settled on the observations of others. I could have seen only a criminal face, a face spent doing twenty-five years in and out of secure institutions, a face pushed up hard against a barred window, gazing out into the streets, studying the sunrise or sunset. Or the face of a five-year-old child weeping on a dark third floor after his mother left him. The face I settle on most is a face lit up with joy among herds of roving homeless kids, curious about every living form. In the alleys, street corners, and neighborhood parks, that face became skilled at baring fangs and growling like a wolf and cooing like a pigeon.

  After my early years at the Boy’s Home and through my adolescence on las calles de Burque, I was caught in a bizarre but enchanting state, a surrealist circus. People were as different and varied as they are at the county fair with its clowns and big-tent performers. I saw my face in the collage of a tragic and naïve crowd. I was innocent and dreamy, intoxicated by cotton candy and candy apple aromas, blinded by millions of blinking bulbs, deafened by the cries of hawkers convincing me that I was the luckiest kid in the world. My cheeks and forehead and every orifice of my face filled with the sureness of flame to the wax candle.

  My accident had made all things seem possible. Maybe I could fly. Maybe I could go to Morocco. Maybe I could become a sailor. I could imagine my life embraced by all life’s goodies—new cars, nice clothes, girlfriends, money. I could dance and shout and roam about the world indulging my senses.

  But dreams burn down and night surrounds the dreamer as it did me. The vast wholeness my face had felt part of was reduced to the faded imprint of a face on a coin in a pirate’s pocket.

  As soon as my face went from an expression of sorrow to one of joy, I began posing in line-ups. In my eagerness to thrust forth and excel in life, I found fame in all the wrong places. I hooked up with Vatos Locos and Pachucos and leapt into the frontlines of La Vida Loca. After getting caught smuggling drugs at the border and escaping, I entered the post office and saw my mug shot on a wanted poster. It accused me of being a dangerous fugitive who had attempted to murder a DEA agent in Yuma, Arizona. I stared at it and almost didn’t recognize myself. I studied my bat-wing eyebrows, my voluptuous lips, my strong nose with vigorous nostrils. The sense of my masculinity almost kept me from exhaling. The unending, deepening orbs of my brown eyes and the well-bottom tunnels of my pupils led me on an escape to the moon.

  I wanted to take the poster and fold it and stuff it in my pocket and keep it to show my friends. I’d give anything to have that poster now, to hand it to my kids and say, with pride in my voice, “See, that’s me. I stood for something.”

  The paradox is that in many countries even outlaws are rewarded with a little redemption for their social depravity: people accept them (especially cyberspace outlaws) like modern-day Robin Hoods on an adventurous journey. And they do this because they hate their local politicians. Governments in general behave so badly that the public, with a good deal of arrogance, often ridicule anyone foolish enough to hold office. To be a politician is to be cursed with the bloodline of jackals.

  The irony of the photo was that it showed such a striking face but not the bruises under my cheekbones. My face was a crime scene with the evidence well hidden. But eventually concern carved grim lines across my brow and down my cheeks, providing definite proof of my residence in the inferno called the penitentiary.

  ❖

  The news came rich and frothing and foaming

  breaking barriers and perimeters,

  when I arrived home I found my lawn chairs and patio table

  four blocks down the street.

  When I came to the usual traffic light, I saw it laying

  in the K-Mart parking lot. Well, after checking on things

  I drove north two hours and coming into the canyon

  I noticed long ribbons of sand and stones

  in fields where there was once sheer grass.

  Further down I saw boulders against fences, huge river rocks

  tossed like basketballs all the the ditches,

  deep gouges in the mountain side where the rains

  crushed all it way.

  It was wonderful.

  This elegant mayhem, this mad composition

  of land and rock and cuts and ravines

  where there never was

  reminded me

  of my face when after a strenuous four hour trek

  in the hills—I feel my face, the skin as flushed red and taut

  as the salmon skin flashing water sprays in sunlight.

  Though the damage was heavy, it wasn’t impervious to correction.

  Already farmers and ranchers

  were out there on tractors and bobcats

  shifting the dirt, budging the boulders back,

  smoothing out accordion ribbed dirt roads,

  leveling where the rain ate away the banks,

  leveling where the rain gouged and gnarled

  trees and gates and fencing into a rubber ball

  of rubber bands.

  So, so sweet.

  How else could I find the inner workings of love,

  how else could I enjoy and engage in the euphoria of dissolution,

  how else allow myself to spin and turn into dizzying state

  losing control to something much larger than me

  and be redeemed in my belief that my face

  is not the only thing that changes into this self-inward turmoil

  that reaffirms all the powers about me.

  ❖

  To the system, I was faceless, known only by the number 32581. Over the years, I was visited again and again by squads of guards wielding batons. With each pounding, my disobedience intensified and developed into a fiercer and more unyielding stance.

  My face came to display a thorny, perplexed ravage—a look I felt happy with. No, it wasn’t the look of a model that might make the fairer sex succumb and swoon; observers cringed when they saw the broken teeth, broken jaw, welts and bruises, puffy eyes. Over all of it, a smug defiance said, “I’m not giving in to your rules. You’ll have to kill me before I budge an inch. And I ain’t dead yet.”

  So it went for a while, until one day, while reading and writing, I felt a presence in the cell with me, an old familiar fiction. This presence, which I felt in the air like a plume of smoke or a black bird across my field of vision, was back hovering above me, and I knew why.

  During my adolescent years, in a rash desire to lose my innocence, I cut myself from its benign guidance. Paradoxically, I got so caught up in trying to be significant that I became insignificant, another face in the crowd. Once I had accepted my nothingness, my aerial face reappeared in order to acknowledge the beauty of my flesh face. It pardoned me, pleased that I was my old alley mutt, pussy-sniffing self again and pliable enough to be repurposed for its design.

  Those first few weeks after the aerial face returned, I kept thinking someone or something was watching me, tracking my every gesture and breath. Whenever I took a step, I felt a ripple in the air. I stood at the barred window and felt it just above my right shoulder. I reclined on the cot, and it hovered beneath my eyelids, rubbing its cricket wings in the dark and giving off eerie violin music.

  Well, I tried to ignore it and do what I had always done when something happened to me: I said, “Fuck it. I got my brains r
attled a bit, sure, but soon enough I’ll go back to my usual nonchalance and think as I used to.”

  In the meantime, I grew accustomed to rubbing my jaw and cheeks in a sort of soothing manner, trying to convalesce from the system’s abuse. For a mirror, I had a piece of polished tin that never reflected a sharp image but offered enough of a reflection for me to distinguish my blurry face from my hair and my nose from my eyebrows and lips. It was like looking into the concave basin of a silver spoon, as if the metal I was peering into had scooped my face out from the rest of me. As I looked into this mirror and felt my face, I made startling discoveries: here was a chipped or cracked bone, there some torn cartilage. Touching my face made me know it on an intimate level—so much that I would talk to my face as if I were talking to a friend. I would coo that it was going to be all right, that I would soon be able to inhale and exhale without fear of pain.

  During this time, I starved myself. I never thought twice about the amount of food I was eating, and my portions each meal amounted to no more than a handful of grain, meat, or vegetables. I could train myself, I was sure, to survive by eating air. Who needed real food? I could subsist on a few spoonfuls of prison grub a day and excel with the angels who devour poetry.

  I took enormous pleasure in losing all the fatty tissues in my face and watching it become cavernous and angular and gaunt. Before, I had a cherub face—plump-cheeked, almost jowled, and festive, with ample double chin and skin hung over my flesh in a football player, meat-and-potatoes way. But with time, my face became as cut and sharp as a boxer’s or Roman gladiator’s. Deprived of mountains of drugs and rivers of tequila, I had become ascetic and saintly, and my face glowed with health. Having ridden hell’s fury, my erotic lips healed well enough for a lucky woman one day to succulently nibble them without any questions about their worrisome travails. What are a few scars when one is divinely blessed with such a winning smile?

  While I enjoyed my new look, it drew the concern of those who looked at me. When I carried myself into the sunshine during exercise time, other prisoners would stop me and ask if I was okay. When I smiled my fresh-lily smile at them and replied “Never better,” it made them even more worried about my general frame of mind.