The Sounds of Jilotzingo

Mehr-Afarin Kohan
It was somewhere in the mountains of Jilotzingo, Mexico, that my mother raised both arms to the sky and screamed. She screamed like the ravens circling above. She screamed so loud I thought the dry earth, already cracking under my sneakers, would gape open like when earthquakes hit Mexico City or Tehran—both cities built on fault lines.
It was a week into our vacation in Mexico and my father still had not acclimatized to the heat. So we left him napping in the shaded rental car, perhaps dreaming of the snow we left behind in Toronto, and started our hike along a flat, sandy road. The path turned uphill through sharp volcanic rocks interspersed with fierce gigantic cacti, then narrowed into rough trail with wilder overgrown shrubs and spiky flowers that scratched our ankles. The dry wind of Jilotzingo picked up vigor as we climbed higher, whipping my mother’s skirt into such a frenzy that it restrained both her legs. To keep herself from falling, she forced one knee out through a gap between the flaps of her skirt and leaped forward, but I still needed to anchor her arm to restore equilibrium—her skin slipping from my sweaty hands.
I had never seen my mother break down. All my life she was fine. Once we had to wait in line under the smoldering sun for hours and she kept me under her skirt for shade. She said she was fine, even when my father had to apply Vaseline that night to her burnt shoulders. Even when she dove into a lake so freezing that her kidneys ached, she said she was fine. It was October—a Canadian October—and I shrieked when my toes merely skimmed the lake’s surface. Seeing her body sink deeper into the blue, I thought she was a mermaid. Withering under the sun or shivering in icy waters, she was always fine. Unbreakable.
Until she broke.
Arms towards the sky and with all the air she had collected in forty40 years of walking on earth from Iran to Canada to Mexico, passing through deserts and lakes and mountains, she screamed. I could hear all that air exiting her lungs—the hot and cold and dry and humid air. Then she brought her palms together to pray, sinking to the ground. “God why do I deserve this?” she pleaded. “God take this bee from inside my head! I’m begging you to let it be silent again.” I’d never seen my mother, so full of disdain for religion, pray to a god she didn’t believe in before.
When her symptoms first began last year, I imagined a real bee stinging her brain, its buzz resounding inside her skull. When she banged her temples, I waited for a bee to exit from her ear. Until my father said a word to me that I needed to look up in my parents’ nursing textbooks: tinnitus.
“Your mother has been through a lot in her life,” my father had said to me. “Be a good girl to her.”
I didn’t know what he meant really. All I knew for most of my childhood was that my mother came from a small city in Iran, a country with funny-sounding town names like Ghazvin, Boomehen, Damavand. We never visited her birthplace as we did my father’s.
My father was raised by his grandparents on a First Nation’s Reserve north of Lake Superior near Wawa, another town that sounds funny in English. He drove me there to visit. Only once. You go north in Ontario, you get to these scattered cabins, moose antlers and dream catchers dangling from the doors—the kind of town accessible only by helicopter in winter. My great-grandmother had thinning gray hair and wobbled like a duck, but she gave us black tea and blueberry bannock. My father was named after an uncle who’d drowned while ice-fishing, so he feared water all his life, which made him no good for surviving next to an inland sea. He never took me there again.
“It’s no place for a kid,” he told me when I tried to tag along on his occasional solo visits. “You focus on your school.”
“Your father focused on his school, so he could make it,” my mother always said to me when I dropped my pencil too many times during homework. “His parents never made it. Do you want to end up in jail?”
“Why would I go to jail?” I said, and laughed, which made her angry.
“Stupid kids who fail school end up in jail! You’ll see… ”
I don’t know how my parents found each other on this earth. Perhaps because they both came from places that sound funny in English. Places they preferred not to or could not return to. Places that were not straightforward like the suburb I was born in—Thornhill. My mother insisted they picked Thornhill only because of the medical clinic where they both worked as nurses, but I wonder if she also chose it because of the name—because a posh place with “hill” after it got her closer to a hill she seemed to be climbing in her mind and this hill moved her away from some sort of an abyss she wanted to protect me from. For reasons I could not fully understand as a person born there.
But I could always sense this abyss. In the way my parents both woke up so early, got dressed so neatly, too neatly, and arranged the plates in the same triangular shape for every meal. In the way they yelled if I was late putting on my jacket for school, but carried my backpack for me all the way to the classroom door, nodding their faces politely towards every parent. Too politely. In the pressure of their hands every time they hesitated letting go of mine in the mornings. In how they cherished their two-story house that they were continuously de-weeding and renovating.
By the time I was old enough to locate Wawa on a map and read the thicker books in our house about my father’s people, I had come to sense that sometimes history did things to people they never recovered from. That something could be lost forever if your home was wrenched from you. But there was nothing in our household that could lead me to my mother’s past. It was as if she had lived off the grid in a mysterious land that had evaporated behind her.
When my mother broke down in the mountains of Jilotzingo, we were on a stretch of small-leaf shrubs and brittle rocks with no patch of shade in sight. She broke right there on the hot earth, like pottery cracking in a hot oven, legs tangled, hands clasped praying to a god she said was for stupid unintelligent people. She went down ungracefully. Not in the way she would have liked to crumble.
Watching her with wide eyes, I wondered if her fall had something to do with Jilotzingo. She’d said Jilotzingo reminded her of her birthplace and she didn’t only mean the smell of the leaves or the dusty breeze, but also all the garbage. Piles and piles of thrown-away household items—plastic bottles, Styrofoam packaging, broken appliances, even stained mattresses with their fluffy insides showing.
“Footprints of uneducated low-cultured poor people,” my mother said, her face exhibiting a scornful disgust that appalled me. “Lovers of cheap made-in-China crap, who don’t have the time to care about nature anymore! These pathetic souls! You promise them a fistful of hay and they follow like sheep, like cows… And they grab you on the bus if they can.”
Emancipated from my boring high school in Thornhill, I was enamored with Mexico. It was full of music and happy people and color. But my mother saw only the ragged and the ugly. “Ah, what do you know about the world anyway?” she barked at me, contempt gathering in her lips and teeth.
But what she hated the most were all the noises. Noises so loud, they were hard to hear—blasts of roadwork, roar of motorbikes, coughs of rusty bus engines, laments of street accordion players, howls of hungry dogs, shrieks of ravens tearing apart stray hatchlings. She dreaded most the woo of the wind that wailed like a crowd of anguished women and children.
It was not easy for me to see my mother on her knees in that way. God is also for desperate people, I supposed. God could be for when tired legs can no longer hold a skirt flapping violently in the wind. I never knew God, so once when I fell from my bike and my wrist was stuck in the direction it’s not supposed to ever go, I cried out for my mother, looking up to the sky as if she would descend from the clouds with her arms outstretched and eyes wild with worry.
And she did come. Not from the sky but from the end of the street, running with her knees so high, I thought she was going to turn into a horse and gallop. “I told you to be careful, stupid girl!” she barked at me. And then she gathered me in her arms, her voice immediately softening. “Oh, my little peanut. It’s going to be okay. Look what you did to your poor wrist!” She held my wrist in both hands and gasped and neighed and cuffed me lightly at the back of my head.
Now her praying to the clouds sounded stupid because I was old enough to know that nothing and no one would ever be descending. And old enough to know, something had broken in my mother’s backbone forever.
My mother’s illness appeared about a year ago when her own mother died in Iran—my grandmother, who was never more than a voice in a strange language living in the telephone. The day she died, my mother cut all the cords with scissors. “We clearly don’t need a landline anymore. It is defective anyway.”
That is all she said about her mother’s death. She refused to say more, as if not talking about it could render it untrue. She felt the same way about my dislocated wrist. She didn’t want me to tell the story of the sound it made when the doctors snapped the joint back into place. My father and I thought the story was astonishingly swell to tell. My mother covered her ears.
She covered her ears about her mother as well, rejecting all the sympathy calls and signaling my father to hang up the phone. She never shed a tear, not even on the day of her mother’s burial, which was too far away to attend. We heard her argue on the phone in the morning with a man we knew to be her brother, in a language we could not understand.
When I returned home after school that day, I saw my father standing beside their bed, my mother curled up on it. It was a sunny day but the blinds were shut and from the doorway I could barely distinguish her silhouette.
“They’re selling my mother’s house,” she whispered, sniffling. “No one’s left in the country to take care of it.”
“You never tell me anything,” my father whispered back and I listened hard, straining to make out their words.
“It had a balcony and a garden,” she whimpered. “We buried so many lizards in its soil.” My father lowered himself on the edge of the bed and rested his broad hand on her back, which made her recoil. “My mother died alone…”
Afterwards there was silence. I listened harder, stretching my ear in their direction. But the silence was so deep, it felt like years. A fault of time you could fall into, not like pebbles but like feathers, like the dust particles that floated in the sole ray of sunlight that had managed to escape through a narrow crack in the curtains.
The next day, my mother complained of a faint buzz in her right ear.
When my mother collapsed in Jilotzingo, the bee had been buzzing for a full year, growing ever more insistent. It had expanded to both ears, making her head ache all day long. Sometimes she became nauseous, missing more and more days at the hospital. My father drove her to endless specialists who dispensed pills that twisted her stomach and weird head maneuvers that twisted her in bed. But nothing helped. As it got worse, she began staying in bed in the mornings, leaving us to eat breakfast without her. I learned to speak to her in a low voice, so soft I could hardly hear it myself. My father thought a vacation would be good for her, that warm weather might calm the bee. But the buzzing did not stop and if anything got worse.
When my mother collapsed in Jilotzingo, she was too heavy for me to lift on my own without my father. So I left her there, galloping down the hill and the wind ran beside me, wooing me along. The further I went down, the more I felt something intangible sinking in my heart.
After we carried my mother to the rental car, laid her down on the backseat and gave her water—my father believed that dehydration from the hike had made the tinnitus louder—my mother said she was fine and kissed me on the forehead as though nothing had happened.
It was decades later, as she shrank on the hospital bed, skinnier than the dried trees, when she thought I was her mother, speaking to me in a language that neither my father nor I could understand, that I recalled our Mexico trip. Inflicted with the same amnesia she harbored, I had held onto the fabricated version of her that was now eroding in front of my eyes.
It was unmasking a suffering that had crystallized in her inner ears long before my grandmother’s death. Long before I was born even. Longer even than the time she fled her birthplace as a young woman, a decade into the revolution. I hesitated to ask about what the sounds of Jilotzingo had triggered in her. When I did, she stared at me with hollow eyes and babbled like she was sinking into ominous waters. It was as if she was not my mother anymore and I had not exited from her womb but from another woman I knew nothing about.
This other woman resembled a wet canary in the rain as she tried standing up on the hospital bed despite the nurses pulling her down by her floppy arms. Even when restrained by leather straps, she puffed her chest up, raised her chin and stretched her neck, like she was about to sing her loudest song ever. But no sound ever came out.