by Reyna Grande
Suddenly, Carlos pushed Tío Mario and put himself in between them. “Don’t kill Tío Crece!” he yelled.
Tío Crece’s machete hovered in the air. Mago yelled at Carlos to move out of the way. Tío Mario’s knife pointed at Tío Crece. Abuelita Chinta shoved Carlos aside and stood there with her outstretched arms looking like La Virgen de Guadalupe herself. “Kill me, kill me, but not my son!” Abuelita Chinta yelled.
They’re going to kill my grandmother! They’re going to kill my brother! Mago and I rushed to Abuelita’s and Carlos’s side. Finally, Tío Crece seemed to wake up from his drunken hallucination. He dropped his machete to the ground and stumbled away, back to the house.
Carlos rushed after Tío Crece. When we went inside, Tío Crece was passed out in his hammock and Carlos was sitting by his side, looking like a dutiful son.
“Don’t ever do that again!” Mago told Carlos and smacked him hard on the head. “Why would you risk your life for him? Are you going crazy, too?”
When we woke up the next morning, Tío Mario was gone. Abuelita Chinta no longer allowed Carlos to go look for work with Tío Crece. Instead, she made him go to school with us. As we were crossing the bridge, Carlos turned around and waved bye to Tío Crece, who was making his way down the dirt road alone, with only his black dog at his side.
14
Abuelita Chinta
IT WAS JUNE of 1983, the end of the school year and the beginning of the rainy season. Mago, Carlos, and I rushed home after school just as the clouds burst and the raindrops started to splash down. The thirsty earth soaked up every drop of rain. Abuelita Chinta greeted us with a cup of hot chocolate, which, though made with water and not milk, was delicious because she was there at home, waiting for us, asking us about our last day of school, about what we learned, smiling at us with her gap-toothed smile that looked just like my own. I breathed in the scent of hot chocolate and wet dirt, the smell of Abuelita’s almond oil and epazote, and all those scents swirled together with the melted wax and withering flowers on her altar. I took another deep breath and became dizzy with all the smells of home.
She left us drinking our hot chocolate and went out into the rain to visit my aunt, Tía Güera, whose baby girl, Lupita, was ill with the evil eye. Mago, Carlos, Betty, and I sat at the table listening to the rain.
“It sounds as if God is throwing pesos on our roof all the way from Heaven,” I said.
“And what if each raindrop was a coin? What if trees did have money for leaves?” Mago asked. “Papi would still be here with us.”
I imagined him sitting at the table, sipping hot chocolate, sitting so close I could easily reach out and touch his hand.
Carlos turned to Mago and said, “Tell us something about Papi that made you happy. Anything.”
Mago blew into her clay cup and sipped her chocolate. “Well, there’s that one time when we were living at Don Rubén’s house …” she said. She closed her eyes and stayed quiet for a while, as if she was remembering it all and was enjoying the memory, wanting to keep it for herself for just a little bit longer before sharing it with us. “It was the day before the Day of the Three Wise Men. I remember he came home that night looking suspicious. Mami had put us to bed earlier than usual, and of course we had protested. But she insisted that we must be good kids if we wanted Los Reyes Magos to bring us presents. So we jumped into bed and you two fell asleep. But I did not. I pretended to, but I kept my eyes slightly open and waited for Papi. When he came home, he grabbed Mami and took her outside to the backyard. The next day Mami woke us up and took us outside. Papi said that somewhere under the bushes, we would find what the Wise Men had brought us.
“To you, Carlos, they brought a red truck, and to you, Nena, a baby doll that could wink its eyes.”
“And what did they bring you?” Carlos asked.
“To me they brought colored pencils and a drawing pad.”
“And me? What did they bring me?” Betty asked.
“You weren’t born yet,” Mago said. “But maybe on the next Day of the Three Wise Men they will bring you a doll, a beautiful Barbie made in the U.S., just like you.”
Carlos said he imagined Papi driving a big white van all the way from El Otro Lado, and heading back to live with us. “The van would be full of boxes and boxes,” Carlos said. “With lots of clothes, and toys, and a brand-new bicycle for me.”
“What about us?” Mago asked.
“Well, he would bring you dolls and a toy kitchen set.”
Mago waved her arm. “Forget that, I want a bike, too.”
“And I want skates,” I said. I didn’t care if I wouldn’t be able to skate on the dirt roads.
“I want a tricycle,” Betty said.
We were quiet after that. Mago glanced at the Man Behind the Glass and sighed. “He will come back for us. I know he will.”
I clung to Mago’s words. With Mami gone again, our father was the only hope we had, however small that hope was. Despite what had happened between them, we were still his children, weren’t we? He wouldn’t forsake us, would he? We needed to believe in something, for what would happen once we lost our faith in both our parents and had nothing left to hope for?
Abuelita Chinta came back soaking wet, her legs covered in mud. She held her sandals in her hands and told us she had to walk barefoot all the way from the main road because everything had turned to mud, and she didn’t want her sandals getting ruined. Carlos grabbed one of the pots we put under a leak in the roof. It had been raining so hard that the pot was already full of water, perfect for Abuelita Chinta to wash her muddy legs with.
She took some pieces of dried cow dung Tío Crece kept in a sack and lit them on the ground so that the smoke would keep the mosquitoes away. Soon, the house smelled of burnt grass. “They’re going to eat us alive!” she said. We’d been so busy talking we hadn’t even noticed all the mosquitoes in the house. Abuelita Chinta sat at the dining table, and Mago heated up the rest of the hot chocolate for her so that she could warm herself up. Mago turned on the radio just in time to catch another episode of our favorite radio-novela, Porfirio Cadenas: El Ojo de Vidrio.
“¿Por qué se hizo criminal el Ojo de Vidrio? La borrascosa juventud de Porfirio Cadenas, cómo perdió uno de sus ojos, y por qué tuvo que seguir la vida criminal, perseguido por sus poderosos enemigos …” We sat there and listened to the radio. But halfway into the story the power went off and we all groaned. Now the only light we had came from the candles on Abuelita’s altar. And the only thing we could listen to was the harsh sound of the never-ending rain.
I asked Abuelita to tell me a story about Mami. What was she like when she was a child, I wanted to know.
“Your mother was a tough girl,” Abuelita Chinta said. “Tough but also very impulsive. I guess that’s the way she still is.” She laughed at a memory that came to her, and I begged her to share it with us. My grandmother said that there had once been a donkey in the neighborhood that had no owner and was so wild nobody would go near it. My mother, who was twelve at the time, had gotten it into her head that she would tame the donkey, then she would set up her own business delivering water from the community well, as she’d seen other donkey owners do. She and Abuelita Chinta could ride the donkey to the fields to deliver lunch to Abuelito Gertrudis, and so she would spare her poor mother the long walk. They could also use the donkey to carry wood from the hills, and they could sell its dung to the brickmakers or dry them and burn them to keep the mosquitoes away at night. All this she was imagining would happen if she could just tame that donkey.
So as she was walking home from school with her friends one day, she spotted the donkey near her house. It was too busy munching on wild grass to notice her. “I’m going to ride that donkey,” she declared. Her friends laughed and said she couldn’t do it. Many of the boys had tried and hadn’t been able to even get close enough to the donkey, let alone ride it. No girl had ever tried. But my mother had it in her head that she would do it and good things would come
of it. And so she did. She rode the donkey for thirty glorious seconds. Thirty seconds of triumph before the donkey reared on its hind legs and sent her flying up into the air. She was still dreaming about the water delivery business she was going to start, so she didn’t feel the pain of the impact as she landed on the ground, her arm twisted at an odd angle.
From then on, her friends teased her about the donkey. Her broken arm took a long time to mend, but even after it had, they wouldn’t let her forget that she had failed. She wished they would remember those thirty seconds of triumph.
“Your mother thinks she has failed again,” Abuelita Chinta said as she finished her story. “And she thinks everyone else thinks so, too.”
The rainy season brought more mosquitoes than usual. They swarmed around us, biting us. Abuelita Chinta had a mosquito net hanging around our bed, but it was old and peppered with holes, so the mosquitoes could get in and bite us all night long. Luckily, the rains also brought an explosion of frogs, hundreds of them hopping from place to place, croaking and eating the mosquitoes swarming around. We chased the frogs and tried to push them back to the canal, where they wouldn’t bother anyone with their constant croaking that echoed throughout the neighborhood. In the evenings, the fireflies came out, and we caught them and put them in a jar. We brought them into the house and set them on the table to light up the house. Dragonflies swirled around us, and Carlos and his friends chased them around with their slingshots and had a competition going for the one who could kill the most dragonflies. I hated them for that. Dragonflies are beautiful, and I didn’t want to look at Carlos’s outstretched hand, proudly displaying a dead dragonfly on his palm, the still wings shining in the sun like stained glass.
I loved the summer rains. I loved it when the rains were gentle, and I could smell the sweet scent of wet earth. Everything was green around me, wildflowers grew along the train tracks, and the clouds gathered at the peaks of the mountains like soft, cushy pillows. But halfway through the summer, the heavens burst wide open.
For days and days the rain poured on us with no end in sight. Thunder shook the bamboo sticks. We didn’t have enough pots and buckets to catch the rain dripping through the roof. Then one day it didn’t matter.
We woke up in the middle of the night to discover the shack had flooded. Soon, our bed was underwater. The only one who didn’t get wet was Tío Crece, who slept on a hammock hanging from the rafters. He slept there all night long, while Carlos, Mago, Betty, Abuelita Chinta, and I sat on the small dining table and waited for morning. Mago held Betty in her arms and kept her warm while the rest of us shivered and leaned against one another as we drifted in and out of sleep.
We spent the whole morning getting the water out of the house in buckets. Our sandals got stuck to the muddy floor and sometimes we would fall into the water. We hung our clothes on top of bushes and on the rocks by the train tracks to dry. The mattresses steamed under the sun. The neighbors put a few of their belongings out to dry, too, although their houses hadn’t flooded as much. Their homes were made of concrete and brick, whereas Abuelita’s house, with its flimsy walls made from bamboo sticks, was like a sieve.
When we finally got all the water out of the house, we took our buckets to the train tracks and filled them up with gravel. We went back and forth from the train tracks to the house, throwing handfuls of gravel on the floor as if we were planting corn for next year’s crops. Finally, the dirt floor was firm enough and no longer muddy.
Throughout the week, we heard news about the damage the floods had done. The river that ran parallel to the train tracks had flooded, the water spilling onto the bridge and making it impossible for cars or people to get across to go to el mercado, the bus station, or el centro. The neighborhood next to ours was completely underwater. It was built on lower ground, and the people who lived there had to stay on the roofs of their houses. People navigated through the streets in makeshift canoes, and the corpses of their chickens, pigs, dogs, and cats floated in the water. Luckily, not many people had died, but the rainy season wasn’t yet over and you never knew what other tragedies it would bring.
Early one morning, someone knocked on our door and called out to my grandmother. “Doña Jacinta, Doña Jacinta!”
Abuelita Chinta crossed herself at her altar before opening it. I did the same, hoping it wasn’t any more bad news. Abuelita Chinta opened the door and we stood behind her, wondering what other havoc the floods had caused.
“¿Qué pasa?” Abuelita Chinta asked. It was the son of one of Tío Gary’s neighbors. He bent over to catch his breath. He was barefoot, and not only did his legs look as if they were dipped in chocolate, but his hands and arms as well. I wondered how many times he’d slipped as he ran over here. “Catalina,” he said. “The river.”
“Ave María Purísima,” Abuelita said, crossing herself.
Tío Gary lived across from the train station in a shack similar to our own. The river raged just thirty feet behind his shack. Catalina was his five-year-old daughter. When we got to Tío Gary’s house, all his neighbors were outside, whispering to one another, crossing themselves again and again. Abuelita Chinta didn’t go into the shack. She hurried to the river’s edge. The waters had receded enough to be contained within the river bank, but the current was still swift and strong, dragging with it branches, broken chairs, clothes, pieces of wood. Farther down the river I saw several men who were holding on to a rope they’d tied to a tree to keep the current from dragging them away.
“The current is still too strong,” Abuelita Chinta said.
Catalina’s mother, Tía Lupe, shuddered in pain. Her tears rolled down her cheeks nonstop, as if the river itself had gotten inside her body and was spilling out. Tía Lupe said, “There’s still hope. Catalina might have survived. She might have gotten hold of something to float on. She might have been saved by someone down the river.” No one contradicted her.
I listened to the neighbors whisper the details to every newcomer that arrived. They said my five-year-old cousin had wandered off that morning and went to play by the river. Catalina’s legs got so muddy she decided to wash them in the river, but the bank was slippery, and she fell in and was whisked away by the current. The neighbor’s child went to get help, but when help came she was nowhere to be seen. Tío Gary, who worked at the train station unloading the freight cars, came home as soon as he heard what had happened.
“They’ve been out there all day,” the neighbors said. “And so far have found nothing.”
In the evening, we made our way home. Only the four of us went. Abuelita chose to stay and lead prayers all night long.
That night Mago and I couldn’t sleep. “Tell me a story,” I said to Mago.
“Which one?” she asked.
“Whichever one you want,” I said. I just didn’t want to think about Catalina. I didn’t want to think about the river. I didn’t want to think about her mother’s tears.
“Once upon a time there were three little pigs …” Mago began.
As I listened to the story, I thought about Papi’s dream house. Maybe it wasn’t so foolish to want to live in such a house. Look at the little pigs. The ones who got eaten were the two who lived in shacks of sticks and straw. And the one who survived the big, bad wolf had a brick and concrete home, just like the one Papi wanted to build for us. Maybe that’s why Papi had wanted such a house, to protect us, to shelter us from the horrors waiting just outside our door. I fell asleep with a prayer on my lips for Papi to finish his dream house one day. Then he could finally come back, take us there, and keep us safe.
The next day, Tío Gary and his friends made their way down the river again. We stood by the bank and watched them get smaller and smaller. Inside Tío Gary’s house, all the women were back to praying. Mago, Carlos, Betty, and I stayed outside with the rest of the kids and found ways to entertain ourselves. We made mud tortillas. We wrote our names on the wet dirt with a stick. But our eyes always returned to the river.
Then the men
finally came. Their heads hung low, their backs bent over. They dragged their feet over the muddy dirt path that paralleled the river. And in Tío Gary’s arms we saw her, Catalina. Her limp arms hung at her sides. Everything became a blur. I wiped my eyes again and again, but the tears never stopped. Nobody touched Catalina except her mother and Abuelita Chinta, who pulled dried leaves and twigs out of Catalina’s wet hair. Tío Gary said she was tangled up in the branches of a fallen tree.
They hung Catalina by her feet so that the river would drain out of her. We all kneeled and prayed, and not once did I take my eyes off my cousin’s bloated body, and I shuddered at seeing her like that, hanging by her feet, like the chickens at the meat section in el mercado, just as cold and lifeless. I was gripped with a fear so great, it made my stomach churn. What if something happened to me, Mago, Carlos, or Betty? What if, by the time Papi finishes his dream house, there’s no one left for him to keep safe? Or what if he never finishes it, what if he never returns, and we are left here to face the wolf all on our own?
15
Abuelita Chinta and Betty
A WEEK AFTER the new school year started, Mago’s dream came true. She was chosen to be a flag bearer, an honor given to the sixth graders with the best cumulative grades. The only problem was that she would need a special uniform. We hardly had any money to eat, let alone to buy fabric and pay a seamstress to make a uniform.
“We have a few weeks yet,” Abuelita Chinta quickly said at seeing Mago’s crestfallen face. “We’ll come up with the money, somehow.”
Back then, Mago had loved school more than anyone I knew. Even more than I did. Sometimes at night, when everyone else was sleeping, she would tell me about her dreams of going to technical school and being a secretary one day. Being a secretary had also been my mother’s dream. Mago put her fingers in the air and pretended to type on an invisible typewriter. I closed my eyes and I pictured her dressed in a pretty silk blouse and black skirt with a slit in the back, the kind secretaries in soap operas wear. I imagined her boss, a handsome lawyer, telling her she was the best secretary he’d ever had. Then they would fall in love. “Where will I get the money to pay for technical school,” Mago wondered, “when we don’t even have money for my flag-bearer uniform?”