Knitting the Fog

by Claudia D. Hernández

  “Who knows how he’s going to react when he hears the news about Victoria,” said one. Papá was in the capital, working or getting drunk.

  “She had to get away from Raul,” said another.

  “He was not a good husband,” said a random man.

  “But Raul loves his daughters!” said a neighbor.

  “Last time he drank, he threatened to kill her,” said cousin Celia.

  Everyone was talking at the same time. I didn’t know who was saying what, or why, but all the chisme made me sick. I didn’t know what to feel anymore; I didn’t feel like crying. I felt a pain in my chest. Like some invisible hands were wringing my insides.

  Papá wants to kill Mamá? Is that why Mamá left for El Norte?

  I wanted things back to normal. I wanted Mamá there with me.

  I didn’t want to go to bed without Mamá caressing my face. The day was quickly vanishing. How far away was this infamous Norte everyone was talking about? I couldn’t wait to be there with Mamá. She’d promised to come back for the three of us and take us there, to the Promised Land.

  Cierta vez caminamos

  Junpech xojb’ehik

  En lo mas alto del templo de La Danta

  Mi gente canta en Poqomchi’

  Su flor y canto se origina de las

  Montañas más antiguas de Nakbé

  Sus proverbios nos alientan

  A brotar como

  Orquídeas palpitantes;

  Luna llena bajo un sexto sol.

  Once, we walked

  Junpech xojb’ehik

  At the peak of La Danta Temple

  My people sing in Poqomchi’

  Their flower and song come

  From the oldest mountains of

  Nakbé. Their sacred proverbs

  Enlighten us to sprout like

  Pulsating orchids—a full moon

  Under the sixth sun.

  Mayuelas versus Tactic

  After Mamá went to El Norte, my sisters and I were left under the care of Tía Soila and Mamatoya. Tía Soila had always lived in Mayuelas, and Mamatoya had begun her new life in Tactic, at the age of twenty-two, without Mamá. Tía Soila and Mamatoya were like the towns Mayuelas and Tactic—night and day. They were two sisters that didn’t look anything alike; their actions, thoughts, and desires resembled the moon and the sun.

  My mother grew up in Mayuelas. It’s always hot and humid there. The summers seem to never end. When it rains, the smell of the wet earth blooms with the humidity. This only attracts more mosquitoes. For the most part, the soil is arid and the dryness becomes even duller, like a ghost left behind by a light rain.

  The town of Mayuelas grows old with its people’s souls. El río is the only thing that keeps Mayuelas alive. It flows, but it doesn’t go anywhere. People are not hungry for education or culture. They barely survive with what they have. Things have not changed much after all these years. Some people have left, and the ones who have stayed behind are still living their lives under the same scorching sun.

  Tactic is the complete opposite. It’s a small village hidden in the wintry Chama Mountains of Guatemala. It has emerged as a town full of colors, songs, and culture. The fog covers it every morning and evening. The constant rain preserves the evergreen of the mountains and fields, and the rich smell of pine trees fills the air.

  Summer feels like it only lasts two weeks in Tactic. The rain mists throughout the day, and at nighttime people fall asleep with the sounds of raindrops exploding on their tin roofs. It is a truly magical place to live. People there speak in beautiful songs, in Poqomchi’, the native language of the town’s indígenas. They dress in handmade cortes and embroidered huipiles. Their multicolored attire tells our stories—our people’s history.

  On special occasions, the Moors parade the streets mocking the Spanish conquistadores with their deer dances. This is a special pre-Hispanic dance where men dress up as tigers, lions, monkeys, and deer. They dance on the streets pretending to hunt the deer. The conquistadores’ dance represents their victory over the Mayan people and how they converted them to Christianity. But during these dances, the conquistadores are teased and laughed at. They are not taken seriously in Tactic.

  In Tactic, even the dead depart content. The street funeral processions are filled with pain, music, incense, and laughter as they make their way to the town’s vibrant cemetery. The tombs are painted in different shades of turquoise, lavender, orange, blue, and yellow.

  I have always preferred Tactic to Mayuelas, but I prefer Tía Soila to Mamatoya. I lived in both towns the three years Mamá was away in El Norte. We spent a few months in Tactic and a few months in Mayuelas—back and forth. When Mamá’s dollars ran out in Tactic, or simply disappeared like magic, we’d take a guagua to Mayuelas, four hours away.

  In Mayuelas, Tía Soila never complained about there not being enough money to feed us. She’d always find a way to make the tortillas with salt and limón last longer and taste better. But Mayuelas’s heat was intolerable. I embraced the cold weather of Tactic; I even learned to tolerate the coldness of Mamatoya’s home. This is where I learned the true meaning of hunger, and not just the literal one.

  Mayuelas, on the other hand, will always be Mamá’s home. This is where she wants to be buried. Even though I prefer Tía Soila to Mamatoya, I already know that I want to be buried in Tactic.

  Nuestro fruto

  Ella se encaramó

  En las ramas más altas

  Del árbol de tamarindo.

  Lo hamaqueó con todo

  Su ser hasta hacerlo

  Llover flores—

  Flores tiernas

  Que nos dieron

  De comer.

  Tía Soila

  She elevated herself

  On the tallest branches

  Of the tamarindo tree.

  She rocked it with all

  Her being until it

  Rained flowers—

  Tender flowers,

  Raining down—

  On us.

  For Tía Soila

  I remember Tía Soila being dark and thin. I can still picture her hiding a pack of cigarettes in one of her hollow apron pockets. Her hair was white. I have this image of her in my head: she’s resting on a rock by the river, piles and piles of people’s dirty clothes sit in front of her while she calmly combs her long, straight, raven-black hair, parted down the middle. Now it looks like soft snow melting on her shoulders.

  When I was little, living in Mayuelas, I remember Tía Soila rocking the tamarindo trees to sell the fruit in the mercado. She was thin, but strong. She never married. At a young age, she birthed two sons by different fathers. She raised both of them by herself. Danilo and Osvaldo live in the US now.

  I once heard Mamá say that Tía Soila went through menopause in her early thirties. She has always been alone ever since I can remember, but she has never complained or been afraid. Tía Soila is a vibrant, special being.

  She also used to be a sholca; she had lost most of her teeth due to gum disease at the age of twenty-five. The few teeth she had left bothered her to the point where she yanked them out by herself, one by one.

  Her toothlessness never stopped her from smiling or talking to anyone who crossed her path. She was a sholca until her late forties when Osvaldo, her eldest son, bought her a set of brand-new teeth. She refused to wear her dentures for the first couple of years, until she finally gave in. Got used to them, I suppose.

  I remember how she would struggle chewing meat. She’d take forever to swallow. I remember asking her when I was eight, “Tía Soila, would you like me to chew the food for you so that you can swallow it more easily?”

  Everyone at the dinner table almost choked laughing. She laughed uncontrollably, her thin body shaking. Tía Soila was a proud woman, regardless of her missing teeth. She walked on the arid streets of Mayuelas triumphantly, with an erect, thin back and the sweetest smile—the size of a plantain.

  She had always been thin like a toothp
ick, smoked three to five cigarettes a day, drank Gallo beer with her meals, played poker with her male friends, and sold números—the pueblo’s weekly lottery.

  Even though Tía Soila was illiterate, she was self-sufficient. She sold lottery tickets on the street. She taught herself how to read and write numbers one to one hundred. She memorized these numbers—the way they looked, the way they sounded.

  Every Sunday night, she listened to a radio station that announced the winning number for the week. She prayed that no one had bought the winning number, so she could keep all profits. Sometimes she had to borrow money from neighbors and friends to pay the winner when she didn’t sell all hundred numbers, or when her sons forgot to send her money from the US.

  Before learning how to sign her name with a pen, Tía Soila signed with her left thumb. In time, she learned how to print the five letters of her name: S-O-I-L-A. When I enunciate her name slowly, it sounds like soy la—“I am the.” Or sometimes if I say it too fast, it sounds like sola—“alone.”

  La Siguanaba

  Tía Soila’s ranchito was a one-room hut with an adobe wall in the middle. This wall divided the room into two: the bedroom and the kitchen. The kitchen was made of adobe walls and the room of cement blocks. The dining room was outdoors next to the patio and was covered with a tin roof. The floor was made of soil. There was no bathroom, only an outhouse a few yards away, up on a hill, next to the tallest tamarindo tree.

  I loved eating the tamarindo’s fruit, breaking the crisp auburn shell to get to its soft and stringy sour meat. Tía Soila prepared a sweet drink with the fruit to cool us off on hot summer days. We call it fresco de tamarindo.

  I was brave enough to use the outhouse during the day, but never at nighttime. The flying cockroaches hiding on the dark walls around the cement toilet bowl were bigger than my head.

  During the day, I forced Tía Soila to go with me and scare them away. At nighttime, I learned to hold it, most of the time. Tía Soila couldn’t stand the smell of a bacinilla under the bed. So if I ever had an emergency at night, I was forced to pee on the patio while Tía Soila held the flashlight in her hand to scare the spiders and toads away.

  But there were other things in my mind that Tía Soila couldn’t scare away. With the light of the moon, Tía Soila stood out in the shadows of the mango and tamarindo trees wearing her long white camisón. I didn’t like looking at her because she reminded me of la Siguanaba, with her long hair and white nightgown.

  I grew up hearing two versions of la Siguanaba. According to Mamatoya, la Siguanaba was a beautiful woman who wandered the streets in the middle of the night. She lured men with her beauty. But when they approached her, she revealed her skull face and drove them insane. She was a spirit, a madwoman.

  Tía Soila told us another version of la Siguanaba. Her version was the one that scared me the most when I was little, especially at two or three in the morning when the patio was pitch-black.

  According to Tía Soila, la Siguanaba also appeared to children. She would tell us her scary stories at nighttime, whenever she would hear strange noises coming from the toma, the water canal that surrounds her house. This was her way of keeping us off the streets at night. It also kept Sindy away from the canal, where her admirers would visit her.

  “La Siguanaba had children of her own, but she drowned them and abandoned them in the river,” Tía Soila would say to us while we lay in bed in the darkness.

  Every night I slept in a different bed. Sometimes I slept with Consuelo, other nights with Tía Soila. Sindy slept with Consuelo whenever I slept with Tía Soila, and Consuelo slept with Tía Soila whenever I slept with Sindy. It was like playing musical beds.

  “She usually takes the appearance of the child’s mother in order to charm them and take them away,” she continued.

  “What does she want with them, with us?” I wanted to know, holding on to Consuelo’s hand. Our hands were clammy, but I wouldn’t let go.

  “She leaves them stranded in the woods near the river,” responded Tía Soila.

  I always wondered if la Siguanaba knew that Mamá had immigrated to the US and if she would ever pretend to be her. How would I tell them apart?

  Tía Soila would take only a flashlight with her every time I had to use the bathroom at night. I was too embarrassed to ask her to bring along her machete, the one she used for chopping firewood.

  Tía Soila told me that one way to scare la Siguanaba away is to bite the blade of the machete. I don’t think I could ever find the courage to bite Tía Soila’s dirty machete. I usually go limp when I get scared. I never believed that making the sign of the cross upon la Siguanaba would do the trick to scare her spirit away. That was Mamatoya’s way of getting rid of her.

  Finally, one night, I couldn’t take it anymore and bravely told Tía Soila to either wear another camisón or put her hair up because she reminded me of la Siguanaba. She exploded with laughter as we went back inside the house. Her laughter confused me even more, but she never wore her white camisón again.

  En el olvido

  Cántaro rojizo de barro vivo,

  Llegaste a la vejes quebrantado

  De tanto olvido.

  En tu cintura

  Yacieron flores grabadas

  De matices tiernos—

  En tu boca abundó:

  Agua oscura, agua sagrada, agua

  Que todos sorbimos sin piedad.

  Forgotten

  Red cántaro, of vibrant clay,

  You have arrived at an old age,

  broken, from so much neglect.

  At your waist, etched flowers

  Were born of soft shades—

  In your mouth, dark water,

  Sacred water, flourished;

  Water which we all drank

  Without empathy.

  Mayuelas’s Mill

  That afternoon, like every afternoon at the mill, we formed a line to recount the latest rumors and scandals of the entire town. Everyone went to the mill with their bowls filled with grains of tender, freshly cooked maíz. At five p.m., this was the place to be.

  The mill had the loudest engine in town and the power to grind all the people’s cooked corn into fresh masa.

  As I waited in line, I would toss a handful of cooked kernels into my mouth like buttery popcorn and watch the live soap opera unfold before my eyes. The stinging cal, the powdered lime, had not fully drained from the grains of the maíz in my bowl. But this was how I enjoyed eating them in order to savor their salt.

  The noise from the mill’s motor was piercing. It forced us to yell at the top of our lungs—as if people didn’t have any other place to get together and relate their sorrows or condemn the latest Fulanita who had given birth to a lovechild.

  Every day, some type of drama occurred at the infamous mill. A possessive mother dragged her daughter by the hair for taking more than the allotted time to run an errand. A lesbian, or a marimacha as Tía Soila called them, slyly grazed her unsuspecting love interest’s forearm while waiting in line. And poor Doña Dolores, after yet another deportation from El Norte, once again took her place at the end of the line.

  “Dolores, you’re back!” the mill conductor greeted her.

  “Not for long, Ricardo,” she replied.

  “Make sure to say goodbye the next time you leave us again,” he smiled.

  At exactly five o’clock, the mill magically converted the maíz into smooth, fresh, freckled dough. Later in the evening, Tía Soila would prepare the tortillas by hand so that my sisters and I could eat them with salt and a little bit of limón.

  Eating tortillas with salt and lime was truly a privilege for us when there were no more beans and sour cream. This was the case whenever Mamá’s dólares ran out, but Tía Soila never complained or treated us badly. This was the difference between Tía Soila and Mamatoya.

  I was almost ten years old and very much aware of my surroundings and the struggles of the people in Mayuelas, but what worried me the most at the mill was the fiv
e seconds allotted to us by the operator for us to scrape the trapped dough from the mouth of the grinder.

  This monster, the mill, was powered by electricity. It was made of steel and had two mouths. One sat on top of the motor, patiently waiting to be fed grains of corn. The operator’s job was to add water to the top mouth so that the sharp plates, or its teeth, would grind the corn and turn it into soft dough. The dough would come out at the bottom of the other mouth, where it would sometimes get trapped.

  Scraping the trapped dough from the mouth of the grinder was my worst nightmare.

  I was afraid that my fingers would get cut off if I took too long to scrape out the leftover dough. It had happened to too many girls before.

  I was afraid that my broken bowl wouldn’t be full because of the dough I might leave behind.

  I was afraid that the town’s people would notice how this monster, the mill, intimidated me even though I always pretended to be brave.

  My legs trembled every time my turn approached.

  Full of anxiety, we placed our fingers inside the mouth of the grinder with a pressing need to scrape the dough from the blades of the motor.

  Although the concealed dough was often not even ours, we would quickly gather it and force it into our broken bowls.

  Dalia, the girl in front of me, thought she was quick and agile in scraping her dough out. But in my eyes, she did not fully utilize the five seconds that the operator allowed.

  Better for me, I thought.

  The last thing I wanted to do was steal someone else’s bloodstained dough. I did not have the heart to combine the dough and pretend that nothing had happened that afternoon just to withstand the force of hunger later that evening.

  But, unfortunately, I did not have the option to waste those precious seconds. I had to take advantage of my time and even scavenge what Dalia had left behind. I left a little bit of me behind in the blades of the mill, but no one noticed.