Free by Virgil Suárez

Free

by Virgil Suarez

When we first arrived in the United States

from Franco's Spain, everything we encountered

or bought had "free" written on it.

The boxes of cereal spoke of a free mystery

surprise, the junk mail came bundled,

and somehow that word sang to us.

My father and I got wise—the word

became cheap, untrustworthy, hollow.

Having been fooled before, we knew what "free"

really meant. We learned lessons the hard way;

nothing free ever came so easily, but my mother—

who had heard stories of people throwing

out television sets, sofas, washing machines,

perfectly good chairs—believed in this land

of plenty where people discarded simply

because things were old or someone

had grown tired of them. She believed

in all that was cast to the curb. A cousin

who cruised the neighborhood streets

for these free goods told her of his finds

over the telephone. On the weekends,

she sent my father and me out to hunt,

to find these throwaways, but we always

came back empty-handed. We never

really looked. We stopped for donuts

or to watch a baseball game at the park.

Now, years later, my father dead, my mother

gets the mail, the catalogs, and she sends

it all up to me in Tallahassee, and she's circled

the word "free" and asks me what the deal is.

Most Sundays I try to convince her once

and for all that there are no deals, that nothing

is free, then there's silence over the line,

and I can hear her thinking otherwise.

She is a woman who wants to cling to something

as simple as a two-for-one deal, the extra, the much

more, lo gratis: these simple things she knows

have kept us going all these exiled years.

There is a lot going on in this poem!

Before we get to that, this poem is from Virgil Suárez's book, 90 Miles: Selected and New Poems, which was published in 2005 by the University of Pittsburgh Press.

And before we really get into it, I just want to point out stanza 12: the end words in this couplet are always and never, which is a marvelous little contrast.

In this poem, we have immigrants, people astounded by free things and those who come to understand that free is an illusion (something which is not experienced only by immigrants, but coupled with the desire for freedom which brings people here, "free" becomes a much bigger concept), and family.

Suárez sets us immediately--by telling us his family left Franco's Spain, we have a time period, a reason for immigration, and--even before he uses the title word in the poem--the weightiness for this family of freedom.

In the 4th stanza, father and son are already onto "free" and are no longer fooled. Mother, however, wants (needs?) to believe; her belief is bolstered by a cousin who apparently does find free items sitting on curbs (at least, he tells her he does).

Father and son are then tasked with finding free items on the weekends. They don't bother. Instead, they spend their free time together, doing nothing special. Reading this, you might feel a bit sad or a twinge of guilt for the mother. But eating donuts and seeing a baseball game is bonding, which is far more important than someone's cast-off chair.

Immediately after this father-son bonding, we are told (yes, it is years later) that the father is dead. Mom is still a believer, still asking her son to help her with these amazing deals. Now, though, it is over the phone. The speaker tells us he spends part of each Sunday trying to convince her that nothing is truly free and these bargains have a price.

The mother still believes and in the last couplet, we get a better sense of why.

these simple things she knows

have kept us going all these exiled years.

What are "these simple things"? Belief. Hope. The idea of freedom. The notion of something for nothing. The ability to look for positives and to find gifts.

Suárez--with just one word--reminds us that his family fled their home by using the word "exiled" here. And as it has throughout the poem, this adds gravitas to the concepts of free and freedom. There may not be perfectly good appliances on curbs and those promotions promising free things have a catch, but to live someplace where these possibilities exist is much better than living under a dictator with a Fascist bent.

General Francisco Franco was in power in Spain from 1937 to 1975. As the decades went on, his rule became more totalitarian and Fascist. Cultural diversity was suppressed and national identity became the rule of thumb. Political opponents--seperatists, communists, liberals, a number of different ethnicities, and others--were controlled, banished, exiled, imprisoned, or executed. The military was used as a police force and violence was used as a means of social control. Uprisings and protests were put down with force. Being gay was a crime. Languages other than Spanish were banned.

Virgil Suárez was born in Cuba, but his family moved to Spain when he was a child. They stayed for 4 years before moving to the United States. Besides poetry, he also writes fiction and nonfiction.