Jailbreak of Sparrows

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My grandmother caught cousin Gisela on the couch with the plastic
slipcovers that would squeak whenever anybody sat down, leafing
through the socialist newspaper called Claridad smuggled into the house,
worse than a wisp of marijuana smoke or a boy slipping his hands
into forbidden places. Tata’s battle cry of Ay bendito sprayed the air.

I remember that couch, folded out so I could sleep in the living room,
before the family and the couch flew from the Bronx back to Puerto Rico.
I remember my uncle Paul, late at night, perched on the corner of the couch,
rocking like a man with a bolero ticking deep inside, tilting a bottle of beer
into his mouth, talking to me. Do you know what that is? he said, pointing
to the fan in the window, flapping in the heat: Puerto Rican air-conditioning.

Now, his daughter scanned the pages of Claridad for the socialistic words
colonialism and independence, empire and political prisoner, for news
of the festival where singers would sing the words a poet wrote in his cell
years ago to praise his beloved at the jailhouse door, as the crowd would sing
the verses that flew like a jailbreak of sparrows from the poet’s hands.
Now, my grandmother, an informer trembling to burst with the intelligence
of a subversive plot, called her brother Roberto to say: Gisela’s reading Claridad.

I remember my granduncle Roberto, a man blinded by his own glasses,
speeding through mountain roads and beeping his horn at every curve,
who never saw the crosses by the side of the road, who never stopped
talking as he punched the horn. Roberto sped to Tata’s couch to preach
the Word of the Partido Popular Democrático and the Free Associated
State, bequeathed by the hand of Muñoz Marín, governor and friend of JFK;
the party of Pan, Tierra, Libertad, the silhouette of the peasant in the straw hat
on flags and buttons who would eat the Bread, till the Land, vote for Freedom;
the party of the jingle bouncing on the car radio, Jalda arriba, up the hill.
That day Roberto would not stop talking, beeping his horn at my cousin Gisela.

As he fumed the way a man fumes at a truck stalled out on a mountain road,
Roberto never spoke of La Ley de la Mordaza, the Law of the Muzzle years ago,
confiscating the ink of presses that stamped the page with the words colonialism
and independence, empire and political prisoner, clapping handcuffs on anyone
who sang verses that flew like a jailbreak of sparrows. The flag of Puerto Rico,
fanning a grave in the heat or asleep in a closet between the sheets, would
now become the prosecutor’s proof, good for ten years in a room of stone.

My granduncle Roberto said nothing to Gisela about the 30th of October,
1950: rifles bristled like cane stalks on the plantation, clattering from hand
to hand in towns with names that fly: Jayuya, Arecibo, Naranjito, Utuado.
The rebels rose in the darkness of morning; the informers rose too, names
of subversives pinned, wings still fluttering, in page after page of FBI files.

In Utuado, the town of my grandmother’s birth, the town of my father’s birth,
police snipers on rooftops waited with the patience of snipers. The cloudburst
of bullets soaked rebel bodies in red, and so they turned back to sanctuary
in the last house that would open a door, firing rusty rifles from the balcony.
Then came the rumble of the convoy, the National Guard encircling them,
countless thousands of bullets splintering the wooden walls, buckling
the roof, staircase collapsing like the spine of a man thrown from the sky.

The prisoners straggled out the door, squinting into spotlights. They marched
at the bayonet’s edge through town, stripped of belts and shoes, pebbles stinging
the red-striped soles of their feet, captors hooting in their ears. A machine gun
anticipated their arrival, waiting for them at the corner of a street named
for the liberator Washington and a street named for the liberator Betances.
Afterwards, a man pressed his hand into leaking entrails and looped the word
asesinos on the sidewalk, as if anyone would read it, as if a soldier would not leave
his boot print in the red letters, as if the witnesses needed the word murderers
spelled out for them in blood, watching and listening from every window.

The next day in my grandmother’s Utuado, in my father’s Utuado, Thunderbolt
fighter planes flung the seeds of bombs from mountain to mountain, smoke boiling
in the air strange as snow, interrogating the living who might testify with words
or the dead who might testify with their bodies. Soon the church in the plaza fell
silent, forgetting the chants in Latin, forgetting my grandmother’s marriage
and my father’s baptism, forgetting the demons in the sky. The shacks in the hills
fell silent, the men in straw hats staring at their feet, machetes only good for cane.

In towns with names that fly, Jayuya, Arecibo, Naranjito, Utuado, they lined up
against the walls, fingers woven behind their heads, bayonets sniffing their ribs,
taken by trucks to jails with names that stop the tongue: La Princesa in a land
where the princess waves from a float, Oso Blanco in a land without white bears.
The poet who knew the room of stone returned with a face of stone. The poet new
to the room of stone scribbled on stone whatever the voices bellowed in his ear.

In the year 1950, far away in Nueva York, my grandmother hovered over the steam
of rice and beans as they bubbled on the stove, swirling her cigarette in the air
to orchestrate the telling of another joke at the kitchen table. My father would soon
meet my mother, who begged him to teach her a greeting in Puerto Rican Spanish.
Tell my sister: Eres una cerda gorda, said my father. You are a fat sow, my mother said
to the mirror for a week, then to my father’s sister in a kitchen far from Puerto Rico.
My mother would stop crying, leave the bathroom, forgive my father, marry him,
and move to Bedford Avenue in Brooklyn, where they would rush in Dodger caps
to see the ballgame whenever they heard the crowd’s delirium a block away.

Years later, I heard all Tata’s stories in the kitchen, a fat boy swooning over rice
and beans. I heard the saga of my father’s grinning Spanish lesson till I could see
the flush of my mother’s face. I heard the talk of the Brooklyn Dodgers, the Latin
chant I memorized, inherited the newspaper clippings of the World Series in 1955.

No one spoke of the ammunition belts feeding the machine gun, the men bled
like hogs for the family table, La Masacre de Utuado. No one spoke of the bombs
unthinkable as snow in a squint-blue Caribbean sky. My uncle Paul, tapping
out the beat of a bolero with his fork on a bottle, said nothing. Grandmother
Tata, who would return to Puerto Rico and spread her hands through the bars
of her balcony when she saw us in the street below, said nothing. My father, who
snarled when the Air Force called him back, the mechanic blasted by the roar
of engines till his ears crackled, said nothing. There was silence like the silence
in my father’s world at the end of his life, a conspiracy of words washed away,
blood hosed off the sidewalk spelling out the word in Spanish for murderers.

Walking through Utuado in the year 1967, my father saw a shack abandoned
somewhere between the river and a great cave, the door’s face withered
by rain and sun, the cinderblock and chicken wire gate keeping no one out,
slats collapsing in the window without eyes to see. The eyes in the poster
nailed to the shack stared back at him: governor Muñoz Marín, friend of JFK
and the FBI, the Free Associated State and the Law of the Muzzle, the Jalda
arriba jingle on the radio and the Thunderbolt in the sky. Puerto Rico counts
on you, the poster said, to continue progress up the hill. Vote on the mountain!
Beneath the glower and jowls of the governor, the red silhouette of the peasant
in the straw hat promised, in words orbiting his head: Bread, Land, Freedom.

My father cast his ballot, cradling the Nikon in his ballplayer’s hands with a click.
At the end of his life, weeks before the VA cut a check at last to pay for the wires
that sizzled in the stereo of my father’s ears, he mailed me a photograph.
On the back, he wrote Utuado, 1967, the words on the poster, and my name.
The poet walked through the jailhouse door. There was a jailbreak of sparrows.

______________________________

From Jailbreak of Sparrows by Martín Espada. Reprinted by permission of Knopf, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. Copyright © 2025 by Martín Espada.