Children · fiction
How to be an immigrant father
A story about a Bolivian father in Brazil, the night his daughter is born in a country not yet wholly his, and the reckoning every immigrant father makes.
bairogonzalez.com team, drawing on Bairo's story · Published
A vision — a short story.
His daughter was born at seventeen minutes past four in the morning, and he didn't know in which language to welcome her.
He was in the corridor of the public maternity hospital, sitting on an orange plastic chair, and had been for nine hours. He had come from Bolivia six years before. He spoke the Portuguese of work, of building sites, of the bus, of the market. But he didn't know the Portuguese of big things. When the nurse came out and said "it's a girl, everything's fine", he answered in Spanish, without meaning to, and then in Aymara, his grandmother's language, which he hadn't spoken since he was a child.
The nurse smiled like someone who had heard every language in that corridor.
He went in. His wife was pale and happy. The baby, wrapped in a white cloth stamped with the hospital's name, had her eyes closed and her hands closed too, like someone holding something very small and important.
He took her in his arms and, at that moment, he did the reckoning.
Every immigrant father makes this reckoning, in silence, when he first holds his child. She'll be from here. She'll speak without an accent. She'll have a document he took years to get. She'll grow up in this country, with these songs, these foods, these saints. And he, the father, will always be a little bit from there. The reckoning has only one result: now, coming here has to be worth it.
While the baby breathed against his chest, he saw.
He saw his own father, on the altiplano, holding him as a newborn in a stone house with no window, with the wind howling outside. He saw that his father had made a reckoning too, a different one: this boy will have to leave to have any chance. And he saw his father crying on the day he left, saying nothing, only squeezing his hand with the hard hand of someone who had worked the land all his life.
Then he saw his daughter, grown. She was talking to someone in a place he didn't know. Speaking Portuguese, perfectly, and suddenly, in the middle of a sentence, she said a word in Aymara. Her great-grandmother's word. She said it without knowing very well where it came from, but she said it, and people asked what it meant, and she explained, proud.
The word was jallalla. It's used to celebrate, to give thanks, to wish that life may flourish.
He came back to the room. The baby had opened her eyes. Dark, enormous, looking without seeing.
"Jallalla," he said, softly.
And then he said it in Spanish. And then in Portuguese. Welcome three times, in three languages, because she would need all three to know who she was.
That morning, he didn't go to work. He stayed at the hospital until his wife fell asleep, then went out to buy bread and, at the bakery, told the man behind the counter that he had become a father. The man, whom he had seen every day for six years and with whom he had never exchanged more than good morning, shook his hand and gave him an extra roll, free.
It was there, without warning, that he felt that country was a little bit his too.
The reckoning was still there. Coming here had to be worth it. But, leaving the bakery with the warm bread under his arm, he understood he wouldn't pay that debt alone, nor all at once. He would pay it one day at a time, one word at a time, teaching his daughter the three languages she was made of.
In Bairo's story, the same reckoning appears when his daughter is born, in a country that wasn't yet wholly his. Read: The sun is for everyone.
The way forward
Your child can be from here and from there at the same time, and that's richness, not division. Teach the language, the food and the history of where you came from, even in small pieces. And let the new place take care of you too: accept the extra roll.