Nearly a decade ago, poet and freelance writer Demetria Martinez was accused of smuggling Salvadorans into the United States and charged with conspiracy.
She had tagged along when a Lutheran minister was bringing two pregnant women fleeing the civil war in El Salvador across the border from Mexico into the United States.
At the crux of the case was whether she had simply been documenting the event, or had aided and abetted an illegal activity by giving the women sunglasses, hats and a few instructions.
Later acquitted, Martinez never wrote the articles she had planned for the Albuquerque Journal and the National Catholic Reporter. But she did write a poem: “Nativity: For Two Salvadoran Women, 1986-1987,” which won first place in a literary contest at the University of California, Irvine.
In 1994 — the experience still, evidently, burning on her sensibilities — she wrote a novella, “Mother Tongue,” which won another literary prize and was recently republished for a wider audience. Recorded Books has produced an unabridged audio version (3 3/4 hours; $9.50 for a 30-day rental, $26 purchase; call 800-638-1304) with Alyssa Bresnahan reading.
This is the story of two refugees. One is a Salvadoran man who had been tortured, with cigarette burns on his back as a map of his ordeal. Later, fearing he would be “disappeared” like others he knew, he escaped.
The other is an American woman, as emotionally starved as the man is physically abused. “His nation chewed him up and spat him out like a pinon shell and when he emerged from an airplane one late afternoon, I knew I would one day make love with him,” she muses.
The book is everything you’d expect from a poet — beautifully evocative images and tight writing, strongly laced with emotion and portent. Martinez has an eye for the little milestones in life, the seemingly insignificant events that become turning points.
In an age of doorstopper novels, it is blissfully short, yet totally compelling. As such, it is perfect for audio. The cost is cheaper than for some abridgments, yet listeners get the full text.
Bresnahan is just the reader for it. Her voice occasionally has a wobbly, tentative quality, suggesting a woman who is overwhelmed by emotion and fitting perfectly the precarious mental state of Mary, the main female character who is searching for meaning in her life and finds it in Jose Luis, the refugee she hopes to heal with the power of her love.
