by Laura Resau
After my walk, when I slip back inside the house an hour later, my heart beating fast, Niño Carlitos and the Doctorita are still in their bedroom and the boys’ eyes are still glued to the TV. My body vibrates with the rhythms of the cumbias, as though my blood and bones have absorbed the music and my insides are dancing.
One bright afternoon, while I’m walking down the street to our house, swinging a bag of sugar and dried lentils, I see MacGyver.
In the flesh.
He’s talking to some teachers from the colegio. The breeze whips through his hair—the same caramel-candy brown as MacGyver’s, a little feathered and longer in the back. His shoulders stretch broad and muscular beneath his shirt.
The closer I walk, the more convinced I am. He has MacGyver’s eyes, piercing and intelligent, and the same strong jaw and gentle lips. Even his fingers, twirling a key chain, are precise and nimble, ready to defuse a bomb or pick a lock at a moment’s notice.
What is MacGyver doing in Kunu Yaku? My knees grow weak. Very slowly, I walk by him, staring and glancing back over my shoulder.
Later, while making dinner with the Doctorita, I muster up a casual voice. “So, I saw a new señor in town today. He was talking to some teachers from the colegio.”
“Oh, the new teacher.” She moves her head closer to mine so Niño Carlitos can’t hear. “A handsome young man?”
I nod. “What’s his name?”
“Roberto, I think.”
Roberto. Maybe that’s MacGyver’s code name. Maybe he’s scoping out our town to see if they should shoot an episode here. Of course he’d be using a fake name and job so he wouldn’t be bombarded by fans. This way he’ll fit better into small-town life in rural Ecuador. Maybe the episode is about some evil people plotting to blow up Kunu Yaku, and his assignment is to find the bomb and save us all. He’ll need a helper for the mission, someone who knows the town inside and out, who knows all the people, their habits and personalities. Someone fast and smart and good at looking innocent. I wonder if they’ve found an actress to play that part yet.
On Saturday the Doctorita and Niño Carlitos invite some teachers over to our house. I answer the door and greet them, one by one, and lead them to the living room. At the third knock, I answer the door, and there he is, twirling his key chain.
“Good afternoon,” he says, glancing around with intense brown eyes, as though he’s surveying the room in case he needs materials to build a last-minute booby trap.
“I’m Roberto,” he says to me.
I nod and smile, too nervous to talk. Don’t worry, my eyes say silently, I won’t blow your cover. I lead him to the red velvet sofa.
“Bring us some juice, Virginia,” the Doctorita says.
I take the pitcher of sugary cantaloupe water from the refrigerator and pour five foaming glasses. I bring out MacGyver’s first. My hands are shaking and I worry I might spill some, or worse, trip on the walk across the living room. My cheeks hot, I hand him the glass. Our fingers brush as he takes it.
“Thank you,” he says.
I try to make my mouth move to say you’re welcome, but it stays shut, so I give a little smile.
I hover at the edge of the living room, listening and watching.
“I can’t believe you haven’t heard los Kjarkas,” MacGyver is telling the teachers as he pulls out a cassette from his jacket pocket. He sticks the tape in the stereo and turns the volume loud, the way I like it. Then he sits down on the red velvet sofa and leans his head back and closes his eyes and listens.
The music is different from anything I’ve ever heard. First there’s guitar music strumming fast and passionate, then flute music trilling and waving and rising and falling like the mountains and rivers.
I imagine MacGyver and me dancing at the end of the episode. He spins me and dips me and runs his fingers through my long, loose hair. And then, like a gust of wind, the music picks us up and we are flying in hang gliders like birds over the mountains, swooping in valleys and rising over peaks. Over rich earth and sun-warmed stone and sparkling, sunlit streams.
After the song ends, he turns down the volume a little. “Well, what do you think?”
Niño Carlitos and the Doctorita and the other teachers nod politely. “Oh, very nice.” But I can tell that it hasn’t reached in and grabbed their souls the way it has for me and MacGyver.
“Where’s this group from?” Niño Carlitos asks.
“An Indian village in the Andes,” MacGyver says. “It’s indígena music.”
Indigenous music.
And just like that, the music turns dirty. Ugly and cheap and coated with mud. Barefoot and ridden with lice and fleas. Something you want to hide in a cardboard box, something to stamp out of your mind.
MacGyver passes around the tape case, and I catch a peek of it over Niño Carlitos’s shoulder. There are three men with long hair in braids, wearing wool ponchos and hats, the same as the men from my village. The same as my father. A sick feeling spreads through my insides. The music fills the room, something haunting now, like a ghost that echoes and rattles in my bones. I look at the tile floor and wish the music would stop.
After one more song, MacGyver tucks the tape back into his shirt pocket. They chat a little more, and then the Doctorita gives little bags of guavas to MacGyver and the other teachers and says goodbye.
I run upstairs to the balcony to spy on them leaving. Below, the door opens and MacGyver emerges, chewing on his guava, shaking hands with the other teachers. Then he spits the skin onto the ground and heads down the street. After he disappears around the corner, I race downstairs and out of the house and snatch up the guava skin.
Back in my room, I sit on my bed and brush the sticky skin on my cheek, touch it to my lips. His mouth touched this skin, and now it’s touching mine, and it’s almost as if he’s kissing me. And I don’t care if he’s really just a regular man, a normal teacher instead of a TV star or secret agent; still I hear him say, Oh, Virginia, my beautiful spy, come with me on my next mission, far from the Andes, north, to America.
That night I sleep with the guava skin beside me on my pillow. As I drift off, I hear that indigenous music and try to make it stop, but it scoops me up like the winds of the Andes and makes me fly. And again, I struggle against it, but in the end it is too strong, and it carries me away.
chapter 11
I’M WALKING BESIDE THE COW on the colegio’s grounds in a gray drizzle. I like the cow’s company. She moves slowly and munches on the grass and looks at me once in a while with her gigantic eyes. Now that Jaimito is in kindergarten and Andrecito is in preschool, I’m alone more during the day. The house feels strange with no little boy babbling or laughing or whining or crying or shouting or tugging on my skirt or reaching his arms up to me. More and more, I find myself hovering at the edge of the schoolyard, always with an excuse, like picking avocadoes from the trees by the fence, or pasturing the cow.
The Doctorita’s science class is about to start, but she hasn’t arrived yet. The clouds hang heavy over the low, flat roof of the colegio, hiding the mountains, giving everything a dull metallic sheen. A bunch of seventh and eighth graders in wine-colored uniforms are crowded outside the building, beneath the overhang, trying to stay dry. They’re holding their books open and talking with animated gestures. They seem wound up about something—maybe the rain, maybe an exam, maybe a dance coming up.
If I were in school, I’d probably be in eighth grade now. I imagine that I’m huddled over there with them, wearing a burgundy skirt that grazes my knees and white socks pulled up my calves and an ironed white shirt and neat vest and sparkly barrettes.
Voices break into my daydreaming; a couple of boys are calling me over. “Virginia! Come out of the rain!”
The boys are friends of Marina and Marlenny who always greet me and chat politely whenever they see me. One is tall and pimply-faced and the other short and baby-faced, and they’re both smiling and gesturing at me. I tie the cow to an avocado tree and walk over, sha
king the water droplets from my hair. A few other kids say hi and smile and then go back to studying. The tall boy, Leo, says, “Hey, will you help us study, Virginia?” Before I can refuse, he hands me his book.
I hold it awkwardly in the crooks of my elbows. It’s heavier than a sack of flour.
“Quiz us. Ask us the practice questions.”
I look at the page and beg my eyes to see whatever it is their eyes see.
“Come on, Virginia. Please?” Leo points to the bottom of the page. “Right there. The questions on page one twenty-seven. Right next to the photosynthesis diagram. Ask away.”
There’s a column of tiny black circles and lines that mean nothing to me. Next to the letters is a picture of clouds, rain, sun, plants, roots, and soil, with red arrows pointing from one thing to another, like symbols on a treasure map. I stare at the letters until my vision grows watery. Something must be wrong with my eyes.
“Sorry,” I say finally. “I just don’t feel like reading now.” I thrust the book back into his hands, and half running, lead the cow away in the rain. The fields shine green and wet, and tree leaves drip, and I can almost see, hovering in the air, those mysterious red arrows and black letters hiding a world from me.
That’s it. I wipe the salt water and rain from my face, determined. I’m fixing my eyes.
Later in the afternoon, before the Doctorita gets home from school, I sneak a book off the shelf and stare at the words, waiting to see what other people see, waiting for some meaning to pop out from the ink, rubbing my eyes and blinking and moving them in and out of focus. What do everyone else’s eyes have that mine don’t? Frustrated, I slam the book shut and stash it back in the bookcase, glaring at the shelves of books like locked boxes holding secrets.
After dinner, as I’m clearing dishes and the Doctorita is grading papers at the table, I say, “Doctorita, I want to go to school.”
She glances up and makes a laughing sound that’s more like a snort or a bark. “What for?”
“I want to learn to read.”
She shakes her head and goes back to grading the exams, red checks or Xs next to each question. “Remember,” she says in an I-told-you-so voice, “I asked you years ago if you wanted to go to school and you said no.”
“But now I want to.”
“Well, you missed your chance.” She’s checking and X-ing an exam, her eyebrows furrowed. “There’s too much work for you to do around here now. No time for school. You’re too old, anyway. It’s too late.”
I feel like hurling the dishes at the wall, one by one. Bam. Bam. Bam. I clench my fists around the plate rims. “But I want to go to school and college and have a real career when I grow up.”
She chuckles and shuffles to a fresh exam. “You’re going to work for us your whole life. You’re a longa. You don’t need to read to clean and cook, now, do you?”
I glare, too furious to form words.
Without looking up, she says, “There’s a pile of dishes waiting to be washed. Get to it.”
In bed I toss and turn and watch the dark shadows of the broom and mop looming in the corner like monsters. I’m awake, but my thoughts are nightmarish. I see myself as an old lady, about fifty years old. Marlenny and Marina and all the students from the colegio have finished university and gotten jobs—as doctors and lawyers and teachers—and here I am, hunched-over and gray-haired, washing dishes for the Doctorita and Niño Carlitos and their children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren. The kids tell me, Viejita—old lady—help us study. And the Doctorita—ancient, nearly blind, and wrinkled like a raisin—laughs. Hehehe! Virginia is a longa, she creaks. Virginia can’t read. She’ll die here, washing dishes, washing the diapers of my great-great-great-grandchildren. Hehehe!
* * *
The next day I stare at the Doctorita across the living room, my face fixed hard and determined as stone. “I want to read.”
“You’re a longa. Longas don’t need to read.”
The next day, I say again: “I want to read.”
She ignores me.
And the next day: “I want to read.” I plan to tell her over and over, until one day, at a weak moment, she will say yes.
And sure enough, finally, one night she slams down her pen and says, “Stop bothering me! Ask Carlos to teach you if you want to read so badly. I don’t have time for this.”
So I ask Niño Carlitos, who’s out front playing ball with the boys in the street. “Will you teach me to read?”
“Of course, m’hijita. I’ll teach you sometime.” And he rolls the ball to Andrecito.
Days pass and he doesn’t say anything more about it. Every trip I make to the store is pure torture now. Everywhere I look, letters are taunting me, letters on signs and in ads and newspapers and magazines, and still my eyes can’t see the secrets.
A few days later, I ask in a quivering voice, “Niño Carlitos, when will you teach me to read?”
He looks at me for a long moment. “This is important to you, isn’t it, m’hija?”
I bite my lip and nod.
“How about tonight?” he asks, resting his hand on my shoulder.
“Yes! Thank you!”
After I race through washing the dinner dishes, Niño Carlitos and I sit down at the dining room table with a small notebook and pencil. The pages smell woody and fresh and magical, treasure maps waiting to be made. He writes the letters of the alphabet and says their names and has me repeat. Under each letter he draws a funny picture. For a, he draws a chicken’s wing. “A,” he says. “Ala de pollo.” Wing of a chicken. And I repeat. First a, e, i, o, u, and then the other letters, all the way to z. If I dig deep into my mind, way back into my past, I see flashes of these letters from my six weeks of school in Yana Urku. It’s as if those letters stayed there on purpose, knowing they’d come in handy someday.
Soon it’s late and the TV is quiet and the Doctorita is putting the boys to bed. But I’m not tired at all. I’m humming like a bee’s wings, never more awake, more alive. I copy the letters, one by one. My circles are shaky and my lines not as straight as Niño Carlitos’s, but he says, “Good, m’hija,” and touches my shoulder. “You’re vivísima, Virginia. Really bright.”
I feel bright, glowing like the sun, bursting with light and sparks and fire.
Then Niño Carlitos shows me how to combine letters. Ba, bi, be, bo, bu. And I repeat and copy the letters. By the time we get to za, zi, ze, zo, zu, it’s very late. Outside the window, the night sleeps in silence, not a car sound, not a voice, not a note of music. It’s as though we’re in a secret middle-of-the-night hideout, deciphering a top-secret code. He writes some short words and has me sound them out. M-A-M-A. Ma. Ma. Mamá! And I do it, as easy as that.
Finally, when Niño Carlitos is yawning and his eyes are starting to close, he says, “That’s enough for tonight, m’hija.” He hands me the notebook and gives me a hug.
I run upstairs and lie in bed, embracing my notebook, breathing in the new paper smell, feeling the smooth cardboard cover against my cheek, seeing the letters in my head, moving my lips with the sounds. Ma-má. Pa-pá. Be-bé. I lie awake all night, waiting for tomorrow, when I will see the world with brand-new eyes.
I read slowly at first, very slowly, sound by sound, my finger crawling along the page like a potato bug. It takes me a whole morning to finish a single paragraph. After many weeks, I make it through two entire chapters of the science textbook Understanding Our Universe. And during these weeks, the world transforms into a different place, a pulsing, breathing ball, swirled with blue and green and revolving around the fiery sun that is really a star. Plants aren’t just clusters of green leaves; they’re living beings that started as seeds in the ground, then broke open and reached through the soil toward the light. And their roots stretch out and drink water that moves up through the stems and leaves, and the plants breathe in carbon dioxide and breathe out oxygen and soak up sunlight for energy to grow.
Pho-to-syn-the-sis, I sound out, my finger moving
from letter to letter. My new favorite word. I have to ask Niño Carlitos for help with that one, but most of the others I eventually figure out on my own.
When I pasture the cow, passing fruit trees and vegetable fields, I stop to peer into flowers, at their stamens and pistils. I watch how bees crawl between petals and drink nectar and become coated with pollen that they bring to another flower. While the flowers are happy they’re being fertilized, the bees are happy they’re eating sweet nectar. The world shimmers, as if everything is coated with magical golden pollen.
I don’t read around the Doctorita, fearful she’ll punish me, because longas are supposed to spend their time sweeping and mopping and cooking and serving, not reading. She doesn’t know that when she’s at school, I race to finish the housework so I can dive into her science book, copying beautiful new words into my notebook. Respiration. Chlorophyll. Pollination. When her key scrapes in the lock, I quickly slide my notebook under the refrigerator, where no one will find it, and grab a broom and pretend to sweep.
chapter 12
I’M SITTING AT THE TABLE, eating my favorite dinner—fried potatoes and rice topped with an egg and lentils—on a forbidden ceramic plate with a forbidden silver spoon whose vines twirl up the handle. I am all alone. The Doctorita and Niño Carlitos and the boys have gone to visit relatives for the weekend. Niño Carlitos, as always, seemed a little guilty leaving me, asking me over and over if I was sure I’d be all right by myself. Now that I’m a teenager, he has this idea that every boy in the neighborhood will be crawling through the windows to find me. But I’m thrilled to be alone—two days of watching TV and reading and dancing around the house.
After dinner, I watch MacGyver. It’s a good episode. A tiny airplane drops him off in a jungle thick with green leaves and palm and banana trees—what I imagine the Ecuadorian rain forest must look like. He meets the local villagers and discovers that an evil man with a machine gun has enslaved them, forcing them to grow poppy flowers that he turns into drugs. So MacGyver makes booby traps using pulleys and levers that drop coconuts on the evil man’s head.