Flamenco Hips and Red Mud Feet

Subjunctive Mood

5 | Subjunctive Mood (with excerpts from a spanish grammar book) Saint Anthony . . . why didn’t you find him? My father, of course . . . lost wandering in a private desert with no horizon point; he looked everywhere, even inside—on the top shelf and under the bottom rung— still, it stayed lost . . . Si lo hubiera perdido, hubiera dicho algo. If he had lost it, he would have said something. This type of sentence, which expresses a past unreal condition, implies that the “if” clause was not fulfilled. Every four years he threw another search party, rotated the tires like globes spun to another hollow promise | 6 of cities paved with heirloom gold— threw us into the wagon loaded with fishbowls, meat grinders, rubber thongs, hula hoops, and tines of broken forks— the invisible urn of bones piled on top. And he whistled while the rest of us watched villages shrink in the rearview mirror down to the size of a teardrop. The subjunctive mood in Spanish has four tenses: present, past, present perfect, past perfect . . . que lo halle I hope that he finds it que lo hallará I hoped he would find it que lo haya hallado que lo hubiera hallado I hoped that he had found it. 7 | Eyes on the horizon, he missed a lot—my brother sitting on the bench waiting for the score to dip so low the coach would send him in— my pink-rimmed glasses stuffed between batting and springs I dared St. Anthony to find— Mother’s glass eye probing the dark corners of indiscretions. Whereas the indicative mood expresses fact or certainty, the subjunctive mood expresses uncertainty or doubt in the mind of the speaker or writer as to the absolute truth of his statement . . . it is used to state something even contrary to fact. Now his eyes are milky— turned to the blocked light that is me entering the room, his face full of forgetting, like one | 8 who enters a room pondering what he has come to find. St. Anthony, he never invoked you, I know, but how could he, lost in his own cracked hourglass? Somewhere along the trail he lost it—but it hung on to him . . . St. Anthony, finder of lost umbrellas, spectacles, and cracked watch fobs, enter the long lost song of the train that laps the miles and disturbs his dreams; St. Anthony, bring peace to the hungry odometer of his heart. ...