Secrets of the Casa Rosada

by Alex Temblador

  My vision blurred until Marcela became only a dark human-like shape.

  I felt the flames lick my legs, singe my arms and wrap me in their embrace. I was burning in her anger, burning in her pain, burning in the knowledge that she was my sister.

  That was when the screaming began.

  Quince

  THE SCREAMING WOULDN’T STOP. It just kept going on and on. It was worse than the fire burning me up. So much worse.

  Through the screams I heard a faint but familiar tune: My spirit is crying for leaving.

  It was so hard to hear with all that screaming.

  In my thoughts I have seen rings of smoke through the trees.

  If the screaming could just stop, I could deal with the fire. It was a part of me now, burning everywhere. But it couldn’t be stopped.

  And the voices of those who stand looking.

  “Martha!” A man’s voice cut off the tune. “Martha! Look at me, Martha!”

  I was moving, bumping up and down. My eyes opened.

  “Martha!” Jorge yelled again. “Martha, listen to me.”

  He was driving fast, I think. I was lying next to him. We were in the truck. He touched me. The fire burned hotter, the screaming got louder. And I fell back into the flames.

  “Tell her to come now!” Was that Gloria?

  Something was coming up. A burning ball of fire up my throat. I needed . . . I needed. . . . Fire burst from my mouth.

  “She’s throwing up now! And the screaming!”

  Something slammed. Gloria turned me over onto my back. The pain was overwhelming. I was going away again.

  “They’re coming, Martha! They’re coming!”

  It was eating me, eating me alive. Pulsing. Taking over my blood. I was being exterminated. It was yellow, orange, then red, until finally it turned a bright blue and burst into a white hot flame across my body.

  A hand touched me.

  Don’t touch me. Don’t.

  Rubbing now. That was worse. It was touching my arms, spreading. It wasn’t stopping. Make it stop!

  “Gloria, please, help me,” a slow, deep voice said.

  “What do you think I’m doi . . . ” Gloria grunted.

  I had to tell them to stop. Don’t. Except . . . wait, was the fire going away? No, it was there. It was leaving the surface and burrowing deeper. It was going for my don.

  The fire cleared from my eyes and, for one moment, I saw Señor Díaz. He was crying.

  Don’t cry, I said. Or did I?

  The tears were running down his face so fast. So fast. He caught them in his hands and poured them over me. Tears to extinguish the fire.

  It’s not working, I said. Or did I? I couldn’t tell because I had . . . had to . . .

  “I’m here!” Abuela’s voice rang out.

  It won’t work, I told her.

  She was crying, too. No, that couldn’t be right.

  Gloria moved out of the way, and Abuela kneeled next to me. Her hands were over me. The fire didn’t like that. It pushed back. The screams started again.

  Abuela closed her eyes. Her face was a map of worry, fear and sweat.

  I told her not to worry. It was okay. Or I think I did.

  “Tell her to come now. Not tomorrow. Now!” Abuela yelled.

  Gloria said, “What if she won’t listen?”

  “If she dies, I’ll . . . I’ll . . . ”

  She dies. She dies. She dies.

  The fire wiped away any notion of time. It could have happened for days or weeks, for all I knew. I wasn’t fully aware of much beyond my pain. Or maybe I was, but I was no longer sure what was reality and what wasn’t anymore. The fire and the burning had become my reality.

  I heard things. The fire spoke to me. It told me of its plans to possess me, to burn me up from the inside out. I tried to look for where it hid within me. If I found it. Could I fight it off with my don? The screams persisted.

  During this time, I saw Abuela in the flames. She told me to push my don upward and out, to push it up until it touched hers. I think I tried. It helped some. Or maybe it didn’t.

  Later or earlier, who knows, Abuela told me stories about herself. She told me of her brothers and sisters. She described her mother’s cooking. She painted a picture of the small village where her father’s family was from. There was a lake. I tried to jump in. Abuela said to try. But the flames held me back.

  I almost accepted the fire, accepted that it would be there with me for the rest of my life. Then something happened. It changed. The fire wasn’t so hot anymore. That was the day my mother showed up in the flames. She didn’t say anything, just stood there looking at me. We regarded each other. The fire moved away from us and, for the first time in a while, I could breathe without my lungs crumbling to ash.

  I walked toward her, my feet burning on the hot coals of the secrets that I had just learned. Her lips spread into the Big Fake but they didn’t stop spreading out over her face and then down her body until the person who stood there was not my mother, but Marcela.

  Marcela jumped when she saw me. She did a doubletake, then beheld my fiery cell. “No! No, no, no, no,” she said.

  She turned to walk away but as she did, my mother appeared and Marcela bumped into her. Marcela stumbled back and looked up at my mother, who no longer had the Big Fake on her face. My mother was looking at Marcela. I couldn’t tell what she was thinking. Was she mad? Sad? Upset?

  “What do you want? Move out of my way!” Marcela yelled.

  I don’t think Marcela knew who she was.

  My mother turned around and grabbed something. A metal pail. She handed it to Marcela, who nearly dropped it. Water sloshed out when she caught it. When Marcela stood up again, my mother was no longer in front of her.

  “Where’d she go?” Marcela said.

  I wasn’t sure if she was asking me or just speaking aloud. I almost told Marcela that she was gone, maybe she was never there. I might have said that, if I didn’t hear my mother urging me, “Martha, wake up.” I felt the ghost of her lips on my cheek and I was suddenly hurled into a black tunnel.

  It took me a second to realize the screaming had stopped.

  Dieciséis

  I WOKE UP CHOKING AND SPUTTERING. My mouth tasted like salt. When I finally stopped, I realized that I was awake, like awake-awake. There was no fire. No burning.

  There wasn’t much time to consider how I had woken up before I realized that Gloria was yelling for Abuela.

  “María! Come, quick! She’s awake!”

  Gloria did the sign of the cross and then pushed back the hair on my forehead. “You stupid, stupid girl. ¡Gracias a Dios! You’re alive. I can see it in your eyes.”

  I wanted to ask if I had died, but instead croaked. “Water?”

  As Gloria stood up, Abuela rushed through the door. Or something that looked like Abuela. She had lost weight in her face and around her stomach. There were shades of purple beneath her eyes, and her hair seemed thinner. What happened?

  I moved to sit up, but Abuela, who had quickly come to my side, pushed me down. “No, no. Lie down. There. You’re not ready to get up yet.”

  Gloria handed Abuela a cup of water, and Abuela put it to my lips to drink. Everything in my mouth felt dry. For that matter, my whole body suddenly felt dry to me, and my skin bristled with each movement.

  “Thanks,” I said and laid my head back down, suddenly feeling very tired, so tired that I fell back to sleep.

  When I woke up again, Abuela was sitting next to me in a chair. Her head was drooped forward and her chin was on her chest, which rose and fell steadily as she slept. I took a second to look at her again. I hadn’t hallucinated before. She looked bad, bad as in old. Like really, really old.

  I must have made some kind of noise, because she woke up, cleared her throat and rubbed her hand over her eyes.

  “You’re awake,” she said.

  “You too,” I replied.

  She nodded her head slowly. “How do you feel?”

>   I hadn’t thought about it. Without thinking, I reached out with my don across my body. My body was tired but I was fine. There was no more fire.

  “It’s gone. The . . . the . . . ”

  “A curse,” Abuela finished for me.

  “No. That . . . a curse? But it burned. I . . . I felt myself burning.”

  Abuela nodded. “That is what some curses do.”

  I tried to push myself up on my elbows, but Abuela gently pushed me back down, which was probably for the best because I realized quickly that I didn’t even have the strength to get up.

  “Don’t rush it,” she said.

  “But how did I get a curse?”

  And suddenly, I remembered it all. Marcela was my sister. My mother was her mother. The fight.

  “Marcela did it. She hit me with a curse.”

  Abuela’s body stiffened. “Yes,” she managed to spit out between her clenched teeth.

  “Because she’s my sister.”

  Abuela slapped her hands together. The sound was so loud that I flinched. “She is not your sister!”

  Abuela was breathing hard and turned to look across the room at the wall.

  “What would you call her? My mother gave birth to her, so I’m pretty sure that makes her my sister. You knew about this?”

  She had to have known about Marcela. Abuela turned and pointed at me. “That is none of your business.”

  “I’d say it is, since she almost killed me.” Okay, yelling made me dizzy.

  “But she didn’t!”

  “She could have, thanks to you! If I had only known . . . ”

  “If you had only stopped asking questions. . . . You go behind my back, searching like a detective or something, asking people questions.”

  “You never told me anything!” A few black spots appeared in my vision.

  “Because you didn’t need to know,” Abuela said. “That girl has nothing to do with you. If you had only minded your own business, this would not have happened.”

  I laid down. “Why keep it a secret? What were you so ashamed of?” I said quietly, no longer having the strength to yell.

  Abuela swallowed hard, and we stared at each other for a few more seconds before she stood up and walked out the door.

  I slowly turned over onto my side and curled my legs up to my chest. I had the right to ask those questions, I knew I did, but for some reason I felt like I should feel bad about asking them. Maybe I felt guilty for yelling at her. Whatever it was, I didn’t like it.

  I had fallen asleep again. When I woke up, I was still lying on my side and somehow I knew I wasn’t alone. It was Abuela. She was behind me, but I didn’t want to turn to look at her.

  “I know you’re awake,” she said.

  I still didn’t want to turn over and look at her, so I remained facing away.

  “Fine. You don’t need to look at me, but you will listen.”

  She paused for a long time. I almost turned over to see if she was still there, when she finally spoke again.

  “I wasn’t a bad mother, but your mother wasn’t the easiest to raise. She had a future, a gift. A don like yours. But she never listened and was always talking back to me . . . And then she started dating that boy. I warned her. She had been with me when we delivered the babies of the other young girls who didn’t listen to their mothers. She knew what could happen. But she didn’t listen.

  “Ro . . . ” Abuela couldn’t even say her name. “Your mother wasn’t even going to tell me that she was pregnant. As if I couldn’t tell. I . . . I didn’t know how to bring it up, though. When we finally talked about it, it didn’t go over well.”

  She paused again, and I wondered what Abuela’s face looked like right then. Was she crying? Did she look sad?

  “She couldn’t keep the baby. Your mother wasn’t ready for that responsibility.”

  I turned over quickly to look her in the eye. “So you made her give up Marcela?”

  Abuela squirmed in her chair and glanced away for a second. “I don’t want to hear you say that name.”

  “Why? What does it matter?”

  Abuela pursed her lips. “The only sensible thing that your mother ever did was to listen to me and give up that child.”

  Her words felt like a knife through my chest. Maybe she saw my face because she suddenly realized what she had said.

  “Martha, I didn’t mean . . . Leaving you here . . . I . . . ”

  “Why would you say that? It’s like you don’t even care what you did to my mother, Marcela . . . ” Abuela started to open her mouth. “Me!”

  It was quiet. She didn’t know how to explain herself.

  “Look,” she finally said, “you may not like what happened, but I just wanted you to know that these things are more complicated than they seem and how they happened. You may not like how they happened, but I won’t apologize for my part in them.”

  “Fine,” I said and turned away from her. I wanted to argue more, but what was the point?

  I heard Abuela’s chair squeak as she stood up. She started walking to the door.

  I don’t know why I said it, but I should have kept quiet. “She came back for me.”

  “Who did?” Abuela said.

  “My mother,” I said, still looking away. “I saw . . . felt . . . her. She made the fire go away.”

  Abuela sighed. “Martha, she didn’t come back. I made the fire go away.”

  No, that wasn’t true. It couldn’t be. My mother wouldn’t have shown up in my dream for no reason. I had felt her kiss me on my cheek, just like I had felt Abuela’s hands touch me when she tried to make the fire leave. Why would she say that my mother hadn’t come back?

  “I don’t believe you,” I muttered.

  Abuela didn’t respond.

  Diecisiete

  ABUELA DIDN’T COME to my room for the next two days. Gloria did, which was worse.

  When she first came in, she said, “I swear, Martha, if you were my granddaughter . . . ”

  I almost replied, “but I’m not,” but thought better of it, because she was the one holding my food. She fed me all my meals, which mostly consisted of chicken soup and water. I didn’t care. I was ravenous.

  “Slow down. You’d think you haven’t eaten in three weeks,” she said when I slurped down each spoonful of my first meal quickly.

  “How long was I out?” I asked.

  “Two weeks.”

  During those two weeks, the news of my “illness” had spread around town. I hadn’t noticed before but the cot that I was lying on in Abuela’s workshop was surrounded by flowers and plants and a couple of homemade cards. I think they had lit candles for me too because the faint smell of smoke and incense permeated the room. The church had also gotten involved.

  “You must thank everyone. The church, too. You know how many prayers have been said for you?” Gloria tsk’d. “You need to thank everyone in person. Every single one.”

  “Fine, just give me another spoonful of soup!” I wanted to scream at her.

  Obviously, Gloria wasn’t the best company to have after suffering from a curse for two weeks.

  On the third day, I received a good surprise in the form of Señor Díaz.

  “Wake up, wake up.” He tickled my nose.

  I opened my eyes and smiled. “Hi.”

  “Good to see you, m’ija.”

  I liked when he called me that. “Good to see you, too.”

  “Feeling any better?” he asked.

  “Immensely. Thanks for helping out.”

  “You remember?”

  I sat up so that I could see him better. The wrinkles in his face seemed softer than the last time I saw him. A flash of tears streaming down his face popped into my head. “I think so.”

  He smiled. “Have you stood up yet?”

  “Just to go to the bathroom. But Gloria is usually there to help me walk.”

  “Well, let’s see if you can do it on your own now. Yes?”

  He held his hand out to me. I
pushed off the thin blanket that covered my legs and moved my feet toward the ground.

  I grabbed his long, spiny brown fingers and tried to push myself up, but my legs just felt weak. Before I could fall back onto the cot, Señor Díaz pulled me up with more strength than I thought he possessed.

  It was a little too fast though. I felt my head go woozy with the movement.

  “You all right?” he asked.

  I nodded.

  “Don’t lie to me.”

  I held onto his shoulder for support while his hands held my shoulders steady. “Just a little bit too quickly.”

  “It’ll pass,” he said.

  He was right. Even though I felt weak, I could stand now. I let go of his shoulder, righted my feet and stood on my own. “I think I’m good now.”

  Señor Díaz let go of my shoulders. “Walk around the room.”

  I did. Walking was a lot easier than it had been that first day with Gloria.

  When I returned to Señor Díaz, he clapped twice. “Good job. Now take these.” He bent down, reached into his knapsack and pulled out two jars filled with a green paste. He handed them to me. Medicine?

  “This is going to taste bad, huh?”

  He chuckled. “I would think so. It’s soap.”

  I looked at the green goo a bit closer. “Oh, thanks.”

  “Well, get going.” He cocked his head to the door. He must have seen the confused look on my face because he explained, “Martha, it’s been over ten days.”

  I blushed and moved faster than I probably should have for the door.

  After my shower, I opened the door slowly and looked down the hallway. No Abuela. I thought a lot as I had taken the shower: she was the reason my mother had left. She made her give up Marcela. She lied to me this whole time and would never have told me about my sister—that sounded weird—except that I had found out! I used to think she was mean, but this was beyond anything that I could grasp. And it left me at a loss, so much so that I washed my hair twice by accident.

  I just couldn’t figure out why she would do all of this. It wasn’t for me. It was for her.