by Laura Resau
The rest of the day passed quickly—a whirlwind of dancers spinning in swirling skirts, mayonnaise-coated corn on the cob, bags of cut-up fruit sprinkled with chile, live band music blasting through giant speakers. We went to bed early, and the next morning, on the way out of town, Mr. Lorenzo and Ángel bought their bus tickets to Tapachula, the border crossing point. Juan and Mom didn’t want them driving the van to Guatemala, so the deal was they had to take the bus. They planned to go there next Monday, after a week in Pablo’s village, while we stayed on with Pablo’s family.
From the bus station, we headed into the mountains, winding up steep, narrow roads. Mr. Lorenzo drove and Dika squealed. “Ohhh!” she cried at every curve. When the rain started, she squeezed her eyes shut, clutching his arm.
For a while, we all laughed at Pablo’s purple turtle jiggling on the dashboard. Then that got old, and we looked out the windows. Pablo watched the trees and rock formations, which must have been familiar. He traced raindrops with his fingertip and his head fell against my shoulder.
Ángel pushed open the window, stuck his hand out a moment, and brought it in, dripping wet. He rubbed it on his forehead like a baptismal rite. “Want to know how we got out of the desert?”
Pablo and Dika yelled, “Yes!”
I shrugged. Part of me thought, Why does it matter?
“We ended up wandering in circles, and finally ended up back at the border.” He gave an ironic smile. “We crossed back over to Mexico.”
Dika shook her head. “You boys! Well, you must to tell us how you cross finally.”
Ángel continued. “We decided the Arizona border was too tough. So we took a bus to Chihuahua, near Texas, and we found a coyote. Around ten at night, he takes about fifteen of us on flimsy rafts across the Rio Grande. Man, did that river stink. Then he leads us through scrub brush, and whenever he calls ‘¡Suelo!’ we hit the ground like soldiers. We press our faces in the dirt and close our eyes so the migra can’t see them reflecting the spotlight. Someone must have left their eyes open, or made noise or moved, because we hear the migra running toward us, shouting. My dad takes my hand and says, ‘Run!’
“Now we’re separated from the group. We walk until morning, just me and my dad, following the north star. Once daylight hits, we worry. Our bodies remember how thirsty and hot we were last time. We take little sips of water from our bottles. By night, the water is almost gone, and we’ve eaten our tamales and fruit. Then we spot train tracks. At that moment, I feel a few fat raindrops. I tilt back my head and open my mouth to them. ‘Let’s jump on a train, son,’ my dad says. We walk along the tracks until we hear a rumble, and then we hide behind some bushes while the first car passes. It’s going pretty slow. There are people hanging on to the train, other migrants like us. My father carries me alongside the tracks and then lifts me up. I grab the ladder at the end of a car and hang on. My father runs and leaps up after me.
“Now it’s raining harder and the temperature’s dropping. I have to hold on with all my might. My hands keep sliding off, and my whole body’s shaking and shivering, and it’s all I can do to hang on.”
Ángel acted it out so convincingly, trembling and convulsing and straining his face, that I could feel the train’s vibration, the sting of rain, the cold wind.
I glanced at Mr. Lorenzo. His knuckles were white on the steering wheel, his lips pressed together. Dika had arranged the visor mirror so that she could watch Ángel. For once, she was quiet.
Ángel’s hands clutched the seat in front of him so hard the veins stood out. He unclenched them, slowly slid them off. “And when I feel my hands slipping, the woman appears, and she turns into my mother with my mother’s hands, warm and rough with calluses, and pressing mine onto the bars.”
He put his hand over mine and I felt heat, almost fiery heat, so hot it nearly burned me. I read somewhere that Tibetan monks can raise the temperature of their fingertips sixteen degrees just by meditation.
“The whole night was like this,” he said. “The whole night.”
After a long silence, Pablo said, “Mi mamá también. My mom was with me, too.”
I pulled him closer to me. “What do you mean, principito?”
He spoke in Spanish in one long rush of words. “She went up to the sky and she had on a white dress and she floated over my head until the police helped me and at night she made me warm, too, and it was just like your mom, Ángel.”
Ángel smoothed his hand over Pablo’s hair. For a long time, no one said anything. When Pablo’s eyelids fluttered closed, and his breathing grew deep and rhythmic, Ángel said softly, “Just like my mom, Pablito. Only the difference is that I never saw her body. There’s a chance she’s still alive.”
His words hung in the van like something you could snatch and stuff back into his mouth.
Dika spun around and stared at Ángel, then at Mr. Lorenzo. I could see a thousand thoughts racing through her mind, but she swallowed her words. Her chest heaved as though she were lifting something heavy, and Mr. Lorenzo put his hand over hers and then she looked out the window with glassy eyes.
Mr. Lorenzo took a deep breath and looked at Ángel in the rearview mirror. “Hijo—”
Ángel cut him off. “I know, I know, you think she’s dead. But if there’s any chance she’s alive, no matter how small…I have to know the truth. I’ve been waiting since I was Pablo’s age, waiting to find the truth.”
One runs the risk of weeping a little if one lets oneself create a bond with another.
—THE LITTLE PRINCE
Heeheeheeheehee
When we approached the village, Pablo’s eyes flickered open. Maybe his sleeping body sensed the curves of a familiar road. We passed rolling mountains spotted with low trees and cacti and cornfields; a river snaking through a valley, a ribbon of dense green; scattered outcrops of rock; sudden cliffs; dried gulches; the sky, huge and dusty blue, only a few far-off clouds.
Pablo pointed out landmarks, his Spanish fast and eager. “¡Mira! Those trees there, that’s where my mom said the forest duendes live.”
“Duendes?” I asked.
“Like little people. Spirit people. No one can cut the trees there. If they do, the duendes will make them crazy. And below that cliff, that’s where the bandolera lives.”
“Who’s that?”
“A señora who steals bad kids. She has turkey claws for feet. And la llorona lives in that river—she cries and cries because she misses her children. ‘Mis hijooooooooooooos…, she calls…. Mis hijoooooooooooooos…’ And her children miss her, too, but they can’t find her because she’s dead.”
I glanced around to see if anyone reacted to the dead mother part. No one did, as if there was a silent agreement to say no more about Ángel’s mother. To let it slip out the window into the breeze.
The village itself seemed deserted. It even smelled deserted, like old, dried wood, sunbaked stones of crumbling houses, lingering woodsmoke. A few children eyed our van curiously and ran inside to their mothers, who showed up at the doorway and watched us go by. We swerved out of the way of a woman leading a burro packed with firewood, past shacks of chipping pink and blue cement, a church with fresh white and red paint, an empty basketball court. Beyond the buildings, fields of young corn and beans made a patchwork over the hills.
“¡Mi escuela!” Pablo cried, pointing at a one-story building painted with white kids playing in a field of flowers. “I remember my first day at school. I didn’t want to let go of my mom’s hand and then she left and I cried and cried.”
We went around a curve and Pablo shouted, “Stop!” and pointed out the window to something on the roadside at the edge of a cornfield. It looked like a heap of filthy clothes. At closer look, it was a very, very old woman, lying on her back on the ground.
“Mein Gott!” Dika cried. “This lady, she is dead?”
Mr. Lorenzo screeched the van to a stop and we all jumped out and ran to the body. I tried to remember CPR from health class. Was it two breaths,
then ten pushes on the chest? Or the other way around?
Pablo looked thrilled. “Ñola!” He crouched down, put his hands over her eyes, and said, “¡Adivina!” Guess!
“Pablito?” she creaked.
And he took his hands away and grinned. She laughed, an ancient, toothless laugh—“heeheeheeheehee”—and ran her hands over his face and then over her own face and then spoke to him in a language I didn’t recognize.
“Is she okay?” I asked him.
He answered in Spanish. “Oh, she always does this. She’s Ñola. My great-great-grandmother. And sometimes she feels like lying down and so she lies down, but now she doesn’t do it in the middle of the road anymore because my mom made her promise to go to the side of the road.”
I would like to be able to lie down whenever I felt like it, I thought. When life seemed too hard, to just drop out for a little while.
Mr. Lorenzo helped her up and she looked at each of us, one by one. Ángel held out his hand to her and she laughed, as though it was a big novelty, and touched her hand to his. She turned to me last and stared hard. Her lips curled over her gums matter-of-factly. Age spots speckled her face, a shade darker than the brown. Her skin was wrinkled, like a berry dried in a hundred years of sun. She wore layers of mismatched clothes—a pink dress, blue-checked apron, red cardigan, black shawl over her head, plastic beads and fake pearls and gold chains—saints and Virgins and crosses dangling. Cataracts clouded her eyes, but that made her look at me all the more intensely. She touched my hand with her rough one. “Heeheeheeheehee!”
I wondered how it would feel to be so old but not in a nursing home, just given free rein to wander. “Buenas tardes, señora. I’m Sophie and this is Ángel.”
She nodded and laughed. “Heeheeheehee!”
“Ñola is a hundred years old,” Pablo said proudly. “She only speaks Mixteco. That’s what the old people speak.”
Ángel and I put our hands at Ñola’s back, and began walking.
Pablo pointed down the road, to a cluster of small houses around a patch of dried grass and dirt. They were shacks, really, some of wood and bamboo, some adobe, some cement. We walked, impossibly slowly, while Dika and Mr. Lorenzo drove the fifty yards.
In front of the houses, as though posed for a picture, was a horde of women and children. Two round young women in aprons, with shoulder-length hair, big cheeks, giant smiles. An older round woman in an apron, her long braids streaked with gray. Three barefoot children, around Pablo’s age, staring open-mouthed.
I slipped my hand into Pablo’s, possessively, but he pulled away and made a beeline for the older woman, his arms outstretched. “¡Abuelita!”
My stomach sank.
She picked him up, actually lifted him in the air. “¡María Santísima Purísima, m’hijito!” Her voice was deep and confident and came straight from her soul. With her hands, she made little crosses over his head, his neck, his chest, hugged him, kissed both his cheeks, again and again. She was crying now, and he was laughing and hugging her tight. “Ay, niño, how big you are! How big!” After a while she let him go, and the younger women fawned over him. “Ay, m’hijo, how handsome! How big!”
And that was when I noticed Ángel next to the van, holding his box like a baby cradled in his arm. A tear slipped out beneath the sunglasses. I was almost sure of it. Then he wiped his cheek and it was gone.
I walked over to him, my arms swinging self-consciously, my hands noticeably empty.
Ángel spoke in a raw voice. “If Pablo stayed in Tucson, he’d forget all this stuff, these people, the stories his mom told him, everything. And years later, if he came back here, maybe it would all come flooding back. And then how would he feel?”
“But we can give him a better life in Tucson. Education and medical care, and—”
“Notice how he started talking about his mom? I think she seems more real to him here. Everything here reminds him of her.”
“Yeah,” I admitted. “You know, I secretly hoped his relatives didn’t love him very much. That they already had enough other kids around that giving one away wouldn’t matter. That’s terrible, isn’t it?”
“It’s not terrible. You love him.”
We moved closer to the group. The younger women turned shy suddenly, and shook our hands softly, barely touching.
Ceremoniously, the older woman said, “We thank you for caring for our boy. You have fed him well and given him much love, much cariño.”
Did this mean they wanted him back now?
“Welcome to our humble home. It is not much, not what you are accustomed to in your country, but it is all we have and now it is your house too. You are welcome here, our house is your house….” The other women piped in and repeated the speech like a song refrain.
Pablo, meanwhile, had run over to two more children who had been hanging back behind a wooden shack. They were touching his shirt, his tennis shoes, his shorts, even his socks with a kind of awed reverence. He led the kids to the van and dug around for the books of stickers we’d brought as gifts, and they ran around sticking stickers everywhere. I wished he’d kept his hand in mine. Holding on to his hand gave me a purpose.
The women ushered us into the cool, dark house and sat us on wooden chairs and served warm Coke in small glasses. Bits of shriveled corncobs and straw poked out from the brown adobe walls. The floor was packed dirt, and the room empty of furniture except for the chairs, a homemade wooden table, and some crates piled in the corner.
The woman Pablo had run to first, the one he called Abuelita, was his grandmother, the mother of his father. She was younger than I’d expected, her face firm and glowing. She had a heavy bosom that ran into her large belly, the buttons of her dress stretched to near bursting. She wore knee-highs pulled to the top of her calves, and when she sat down, I caught a glimpse of her round, dimpled knees. She adjusted a shawl around her shoulders. She was the leader, and spoke in a rich, warm voice. I liked her. She was a good person. Buena gente.
“Thank you for taking care of our Pablito,” she said. “Thank you, you are a gift from God. He looks healthy, happy. You have cared for him well.”
Dika said in Spanish, “Pablo is a good boy. A very good boy.” And she held forth a red tin of fruitcake. “For you.”
I didn’t say anything about his sleeping with the chickens, or how he’d gone for days without talking or how his first laugh had been less than two weeks ago. All I could get past the lump in my throat was, “We love him. Even our chickens adore him.”
The first day, Dika and I helped the grandmother and aunts strip kernels off dried corncobs. We sat on small wooden chairs and woven mats in the open area between the bedroom shack and the kitchen, slowly filling buckets. The women constantly warned me, “¡Despacio, güera, despacio!” Careful, white girl! They insisted if I pushed myself too much I’d get blisters because my hands weren’t used to work.
We took a break at midday, and Abuelita—she told me to call her Grandma once she found out I’d never met my own grandmothers—handed me and Dika each a boiled sweet potato that she’d dug up earlier that day. She peeled hers with bare fingers just after she’d plucked it from the boiling water. Her finger skin was thick as leather gloves, so tough she didn’t get burned. But my potato stung my fingertips. I dropped it on my lap and waited for it to cool while my mouth watered. Abuelita laughed a belly laugh and took my hands in hers. “¡Manos tiernas!” she announced, and held my tender hands out for her daughters to see.
Abuelita peeled my potato and handed it to me. I didn’t worry about germs because I was so hungry and the potato smelled so sweet and good.
“Sí, señora,” Dika said. “We must make Sophie strong! This girl has so many allergies and rashes and sunburn, always one thing or another with her.”
“Muy delicada.” Abuelita nodded.
“¡Muy pero muy delicada!” Dika agreed.
Suddenly, I felt tired of being Sophie la Delicada, tired of making circles inside a fishbowl, watching lif
e through cloudy glass. Would I ever be Sophie la Fuerte, the strong one, a salmon swimming up waterfalls, leaping over dams? Or better yet, one of those butterflies that goes from Canada, through winds and storms, all the way to Mexico, with its velvety wings intact.
After the potatoes, we went back to the corn, and as Dika and the grandmother and aunts talked, the burlap sacks of corncobs grew emptier and the buckets of kernels grew fuller. I plunged my hands deep into the buckets, felt the kernels in my hands, hard and smooth as little pearls. Their colors filled me up, purple and orange and red and yellow, like the insides of a seashell.
Later, Abuelita boiled the kernels with water and crushed limestone until the skins came off, and then we headed to the molino—the grinding machine—down the road. We took turns carrying the two heavy buckets. The metal handle dug into my hand and my arm felt as if it might fall off. Be tough, I told myself, be fuerte, and shifted the bucket to my other hand.
We walked down the dirt road, past some other shacks where women were washing clothes. They waved and called out buenos días and looked curiously at me and Dika, a strange sight in the village. A few women ventured closer with bewildered smiles and questions.
“¿Quienes son?” they asked Abuelita, gesturing to us with their chins. Who are they?
She smiled big. “My dear sister and my darling niece.”
The women looked at one another, confused. They offered hesitant smiles.
Abuelita said briskly that we had to be going. “Vámonos, Sister, come on, Niece.” We continued on our way, lugging the buckets, and when we rounded the corner, Dika and Abuelita and the aunts burst out laughing. “¡Ay! Did you see her face when I called you Sister?” They threw their arms around each other and doubled over, gasping and howling and wiping tears from their faces.
They kept snickering down the muddy path to the village center, which was a big, square patch of weeds with a cathedral on one side, a cement-block building for the mayor’s office on the opposite side, a small store with a phone booth on the third side, and the molino in a tiny adobe house to close the square. At the molino, we dumped the boiled corn into the grinder, and moments later, a giant mound of dough plopped out. When the owner of the molino asked about me and Dika, Abuelita gave her the same story, and this time, she and Dika laughed even harder.