Preciosa

Mi preciosa, my Abuelita says, gripping my shoulders, tan querida. She looks so far into my eyes I wonder if she’s searching for freckles on the back of my pupils. There are dark curtains around us in her Mexico City apartment, and outside it’s a thick fog of pollution kind of day. I wish some daylight could get in to the stuffy room, but we are blockaded – outside is smog, and inside close and dark, dusty lamps pointed down, lighting pools on the carpet.

 Mi preciosa, she says to me, her hand at the back of my neck. I wish I could relax in the touch but I squirm away from it. I am twenty-two, and always I visit her here on the 12^th floor in Polanco, among these mushy-soft couches and picture frames that have sat in the same spot for thirty years. Her grip is tight at my shoulder now, her pianist fingers arthritic but still strong.

*

My father the translator holds words roundly in his mouth, sounding them out, knowing the definitions of English words better than most native English speakers. I don’t dare use a word in front of him if I don’t know the definition, if I’m not ready to go to bat for it.

I check for the definitions of the word preciosa/o, and the first translation is usually “pretty,” or “lovely,” but the examples that follow imply something tighter, as in:

Es un día precioso. ¿Por qué no damos un paseo en el parque? It’s a lovely day. Why don’t we go for a walk in the park?

The urgency comes in there, the sense that the day is precious, not to be wasted, may not come again – the supplies of un día precioso are limited.

In another definition:

1. (of value)

2. precious

No quiero un anillo con una piedra preciosa a menos que sea libre de conflicto. I don’t want a ring with a precious stone unless it’s conflict-free.

Piedra preciosa – a precious stone – something we wrap around our fingers or hold vigilantly in our hands. Piedra preciosa is not just valuable but owned in order to retain its value.

I think of the few piedras preciosas in my family, the huge engagement ring that my Abuelita gave my father to offer my mother when they were engaged, a ring my mother has never worn but keeps locked up in a safety deposit box at the bank. Contained so we don’t forget about its value. Even though, it’s not me at all, my mother says. It’s a point of pride for her that she doesn’t favor fancy things.

*

Que tan preciosita, my second cousin says of me at the Bar Mitzvah as we hug.

I bristle, over thirty now, wanting not to be –ita, diminutive still. I want to talk about my cousin’s work in journalism, about my uncle who’s just passed away, or about the economic downturn in his home town, but instead he inspects me, holds me back from him at arms-length and looks me fully up and down. I smile big right back, my teeth showing, eyes scrunched up, chin jutted, that way I learned as a kid to smile: give them what they want to see and soon enough it will be over.

He grins and drops his arms, nods like he’s gotten what he came for. He turns to my father, his back to me.

Leorita la tan preciosita, he says to my father, summarizing, que grandita es, que bonita, the –ita s coming fast and loose, those cute suffixes in the third person so I know that I’m dismissed. All he needed was to be sure I’m intact.

*

Theorist Sarah Ruddick delineates “preservative love” as a specifically protective practice, the kind of love that is separate from that which fosters a child’s growth or trains a child for socialization. Preservative love just wants to keep the human alive.

But reading “preservative” I think first of the water-bath canning and wild fermentation I’ve learned to do with friends, the old-school style of preservation that my parents squint at, my mom laughing with her sister on the phone: I’m glad she’s home, but she’s stinking up the house making saurkraut.

I think of the way my grandmother on my mother’s side shook her head when she visited me and saw the homemade canned goods lined up along the bookshelf: why would you do so much work when these days you can just buy it at the store? Our last Thanksgiving together we had a long discussion about why I wanted to make the pie dough from scratch when there were perfectly formed pie crusts at the supermarket. My grandmother was mystified by the “extra work” I insisted upon, but eventually shrugged and sat at the breakfast nook in the kitchen, quietly watching me make a huge floury mess.

There aren’t any preservatives in this one, I smiled to her over my lumpy pie crust as I set it into what would later prove to be the wrong pan. I told her about Nourishing Traditions and Wild Fermentation, how my farmer friends had taught me about whole foods, how it’d become important to me to know the ingredients I put into my body.

Whatever you want, sweetie, she said, and shifted her early-morning robe tighter around her forever-thin waist. Later she would saw graciously through the rock-hard crust on the apple pie and remind the whole table how proud she was of my cooking, how happy she was, most of all that we could have the holiday together.

*

When I look for “precious,” in English, I see ownership everywhere; being precious to someone, being held by someone.

1. (of an object, substance, or resource) of great value; not to be wasted or treated carelessly.

“precious works of art”

synonyms: valuable, costly, expensive; invaluable, priceless, beyond price

“precious works of art”

Not to be wasted or treated carelessly. This is what I hear in my father’s cousin’s tone, my Abuelita’s or my grandmother’s tone: you are precious, so you will always be held — I must hold you close.

Surrounded by their –itas, I am preserved. Lipstick smears, too-tight hugs, they hold me, not to be wasted.

*

I will never be let go by preciosa, so I am the one to leave it. I move clear across the country to California.

But my family follows. I do not disappear to my Abuelita: she leaves me long singing birthday voicemails (Estas son las mañanitas que cantaba el Rey David) no matter how many times I forget to call her on her (80^th, 81^st, 82^nd…) birthday.

My twin cousins move up to Los Angeles from Mexico, and soon my uncle and aunt too, my generous aunt of the widest hugs I remember, my aunt who takes me in with her whole body.

We meet for brunch in a trendy neighborhood in LA, a neighborhood none of us feel comfortable in, and it’s only the third time they’re meeting my husband. I tell my uncle and aunt they can speak Spanish freely, that my husband will follow along, but for his sake my aunt keeps dipping into English, the vowels stubborn in her mouth, the slow spit to explain.

Mostly they talk, mostly we listen, and when we go to leave my aunt pulls me in. Preciosa Leorita, she says. Even though I’ve said close to nothing today she knows me, the little girl I was by the water with her in Manzanillo, kicking the table legs at a comida that went on for hours, trying to keep up with the adult conversation. I soften inside her hug, suddenly more relaxed than I remember feeling in years.

Precious without even speaking, I ask my husband on the way home, is that what makes it family?

“What is sacred in a human being is that which, far from the person, the impersonal,” writes Simon Weil, “everything that is impersonal in a human being is sacred, and that alone.”

*

I mostly learned what “precious” means in English from an impersonal object: The Ring. It was The Hobbit that taught me the teeth-sunk-in connotation of preciousssssss. I read the book in middle school and noted Gollum’s obsession with the ring — but it wasn’t really until I saw the movie in my mid 20s that it clicked, the deep creepiness of his green-brown fingers clutching the air for my precious, the non-human hissing for an object, the addicted quality of his need.

The English word, here, implies the wrongness of being someone’s preciousssssss, something someone clutches over, that can end a civilization or keep warriors tramping back and forth over endless swamps and castles of not-New-Zealand.

Creepy: a level of need we shouldn’t have or shouldn’t admit it, or should be able to control and hold back. For a moment I feel shame, hear my family’s preciosa also as creepy, addicted. But there is a key difference here, and it is present in that moment when my second cousin dismisses me and his eyes drift over to the buffet of bagels and shmear. It’s in the non-personal: He’s not trying to possess me for himself. Instead, he’s attached to what links us, my being-ness –what Weil would call impersonal– more than he is actually attached to my particular individuality.

*

I think of all the times friends complain to me: my family just doesn’t get me. Or: I don’t feel seen. But this is preciosa: a healthy desire for a person to be, and be attached to another—without ever needing to fully find or explore them. To maintain, as Lacan might say, connection via the desire itself.

In many parts of the Lord of the Rings, the Ring itself almost fades from view, and Gollum’s relation to it is more crucial to the story than the details of the object itself. The chant of precioussss towards the Ring drives Gollum forward in the narrative. It builds and then maintains many of the story’s crucial ties, which continue on despite the absence of the ring itself.

*

One of my cousins in LA comes to a reading I give there. It’s in a crowded bar and I read last after a long night of poets. I am tired and can barely feeling the audience with me, but I sense the dark block of my cousin in the back row, he who’s never known me as a writer, who admits he’s not the biggest reader himself. I push away my nervousness and read, clearly and slowly as I can in the small cast of lamplight.

Afterwards my cousin tells me he enjoyed my reading.

“It’s hard for me to understand, but you are doing something you love and I think you are good at it,” he says, his elegant second-language English. When we hug I feel taken in. How I used to be the bigger one for so many years, the older cousin meant to watch over him in the pool since I was the stronger swimmer, but now, my reading over, I’m petite, the preciosa in the hug. I welcome this with relief, especially after holding a late-night stage, making small talk about aesthetics, doing poetry gossip with the other readers I barely know – to find myself, after all that, preciosa. I grip his hand and smile as we leave the bar.

“How it feels to be the bloom in your hands,” writes Hilary Gravendyk, “how to be taken clear down to the stone—to be sweetened into bareness.” 

Later, cold and twitchy against my husband’s back on our friend’s fold-out couch in Los Feliz, I’ll whisper it: una noche tan preciosa. In the morning we’ll drive home the six hot hours through the Central Valley into the fog that starts just above Monterey, up to the city where my family doesn’t live but I do. Normally I whine or look forward to long talks on this ride, but this time I am quiet.

—

Leora Fridman is author of MY FAULT, selected by Eileen Myles for the Cleveland State University First Book Prize, among other works of poetry, prose and translation. Recent work can be found in the Millions, the New York Times, The Rumpus, and Wolfman New Life Quarterly. More at leorafridman.com.