[Read] Hot Desk Extract: Ruby-Rose Pivet-Marsh - siento

As part of The Wheeler Centre’s Hot Desk Fellowship program, Ruby-Rose Pivet-Marsh worked on a collection of creative nonfiction works, centred on the experiences of Latinx girlhood and growing up in Melbourne’s inner-west. This is an excerpt from her work in progress, a triptych essay, siento (working title).

'I am Chilean. I’m awake and I’m holding up the wings of the plane mentally. I listen to the other passengers talk. Most of them are asleep but they’re talking in their sleep. They have nightmares or recurring dreams. They’re Chilean.'

Roberto Bolaño, Between Parenthesis 

I am not sure how to write about anything other than this. 

*

September holds two points of significance in the Chilean calendar, three if you count the spring equinox, which I do.

Papi has always insisted that Spring doesn’t truly start until late-September. I have yet to point out to him that this is because of the equinox, when night and day sit in perfect balance. A celestial meeting after which the sun takes his time setting on the southern hemisphere and the days become long and languid. 

I’d applied to this fellowship with the intentions of writing about family (of origin, found), art and culture – and about ill health: the inheritance of and co-existence with, thinking I was in a place where I knew what I wanted to say and precisely how I wanted to say it. I thought that spring would give me my best shot. That with it, September would bring clear skies and great clarity. I expected that after the equinox, I would simply bounce into my project with great verve and the words would flow out of me now I finally had time to tend to them. 

Instead, I found myself sifting through artefacts of memory, my own and ancestral, caught in a dizzying loop. The military coup and dictatorship my father endured; the fight for independence from Spain alongside a continued degradation of the Indigenous peoples and lands that I am connected to by blood and water and soil; the rapid violence of racism directed at Latinos globally and it’s predictable influence on anti-immigrant sentiments locally; the reason for and reality of existing here, in this place, at this time. 

My bones are rattling. I cannot get air in.

**

I feel

and also

I am sorry

***

Papi talks in his sleep. He doesn’t move much, he sleeps like a cadaver, still and in one spot for the entire night. But his mouth moves. He grinds his teeth down til the gums start to bleed. He wakes in short, sharp breaths. His breathing ceases temporarily when he is unable to get air in through his thrice broken nose. I saw this as a child, peeking around the door into my parent’s unlit bedroom when factory night shifts demanded he slept through the day. I watched it from a seat next to him as we flew over The Pacific toward Chile. Alone, together.