Prayers for the Stolen

by Jennifer Clement

José Rosa discussed the way we had our light wired in, which was actually illegal since we took it from the light posts down on the highway, and threaded the wires up along the paths and through the trees. He could not understand why we ate beef so often and so few fruits and vegetables. He went on and on. José Rosa even said that the large toads near the school were the ugliest things he’d ever seen. He could not stand the enormous black ants that had taken over his small house and, of course, the heat was unbearable.

  My now blond mother listened to all this as she drank one beer after another. Her makeup seemed to slip off her face from the sweat and melt down onto her neck. By the time her lipstick had stained the opening of five beer bottles and José Rosa expressed that he had to wear socks even in this heat since, after all, he’d been raised to wear socks, she was upset.

  And then he said it.

  He said, How can you all live like this, in a world without any men? How?

  My mother took in a breath. It seemed that even the ants on the ground stopped moving. José Rosa’s question stood in the hot wet air, as if spoken words could be suspended. I could reach out and touch the letters H and O and W.

  Do you ever watch television, Mr. Rosa? my mother asked in that too-slow tone of hers that she’d get into when she was angry.

  She placed her empty beer bottle on the ground beside her.

  I counted six empty beer bottles on the ground beside her. Big black ants were already going in and out of some of the bottles.

  You men don’t get it, yet, do you? she said. This is a land of women. Mexico belongs to women. If you’ve watched any television then you’ve seen that show about the Amazon.

  The river? José Rosa asked.

  She told him about the female warriors and how the word Amazon means without breast.

  My mother had television-knowledge. That’s what she called it.

  No, no, I don’t know this story, José Rosa said.

  You have to watch the History Channel, Mr. Teacher. We always watch the History Channel, right, Ladydi?

  José Rosa did not want to talk about the Greeks or to let it be known that he did not know anything about the Amazons.

  Yes, that’s interesting, but where are the men? he asked. Do you know where they all are exactly?

  Oh yes, we know. They’re not here.

  My mother stood up and walked into our two-room house. She didn’t really walk but slithered with her feet slipping too far forward in her plastic flip-flops so that her toes curled over the front of the sandals like talons.

  Wait here, don’t move, she said and disappeared into the black shade of our hot, raw cement home.

  This was the first time that José Rosa and I were alone. He looked at me kindly and asked in his city-voice, which always sounded exotic to me. Does she always drink so much?

  I knew my mother had gone inside and passed out from the beer and heat. I could tell from her walk that her blond frizzy mass of hair was now pressed down into the pillow on a small cot in a corner and that she would not wake up until late that night.

  Come with me, I said. I want to show you something.

  We both stood and my teacher followed me around the small house to the back.

  There, I said, look. This is the beer-bottle cemetery.

  José Rosa stood still and breathless at the sight of my mother’s mound of hundreds and hundreds of brown-glass bottles dumped in piles and lying under swarms of bees.

  To the right of the beer cemetery was our laundry line that was tied between two papaya trees. My mother had cleaned the house but she’d forgotten to take the clothes off the line. José Rosa looked at our yellow and pink underwear hanging limp in the windless air. These panties were filled with holes and the crotch on some was brown and worn thin from my mother over-scrubbing her menstrual bloodstains.

  How old are you exactly? José Rosa asked me as we turned and walked back around the house. He used words such as exactly and quite, and they seemed like well-mannered, proper city words.

  I’d better go now, he said.

  Everyone wanted to leave once my mother had had too much to drink. I was used to it.

  Yes. She’s asleep now. I’ll walk you down to the highway.

  He was relieved to have me walk with him. I knew that city people were frightened by the jungle and he seemed more frightened than most.

  Why did you come here? I asked as we walked down our steep hill toward the highway. He lived in a small room above Ruth’s beauty parlor.

  I watched him as he moved trying to avoid stepping on the big red ants in his black leather lace-up city shoes. He looked down at his feet and up to the trees, back and forth. As the day turned to dusk dozens of mosquitoes lit on his neck and arms. He tried to wave them away. The jungle knew this city man was among us.

  At the highway I told him I was not allowed to cross and had to go back home.

  You know not to go out at night, right? I said. Someone did tell you this?

  The night belongs to the drug traffickers, the army, and the police just like it belongs to the scorpions, I said.

  José Rosa nodded his head.

  No matter what, you don’t leave your house, not even if you hear the sound of gunfire or someone screaming for help, okay?

  Thank you, he said as he took my hand and leaned over and kissed my cheek.

  No one in the jungle holds anyone’s hand or kisses anyone’s cheek. This is a city custom, or a custom that can only exist in a cool climate. In our hot land touching is just more heat.

  When I returned to my house my mother was still passed out. It took me a few seconds to recognize her form in the bed. I’d forgotten that she’d bleached her hair. The blond mop covered her small pillow.

  My mother’s hands were lying across her stomach. As I approached I could see she was holding something shiny gripped between her fingers.

  The next morning my mother seemed upset. She would not even look at me.

  So when did José Rosa leave? I didn’t notice when he left, she said.

  You just passed out, Mother. What were you thinking? He’s my teacher!

  My mother paced and pulled at her bleached blond hair. I didn’t know if she was angry or sad.

  Finally she said, I was just turning inside out, turning inside out so that my bones were on the outside and my heart was hanging here in the middle of my chest like a medallion. It was just too much and so I had to lie down. Ladydi, I knew that man could see my liver and my spleen. He could’ve just leaned over and plucked my eye off of my face like a grape.

  What are you doing with a gun, Mama?

  My mother sat and was quiet for a moment.

  What gun?

  What are you doing with a gun, Mama?

  Some men need killing, my mother answered.

  I sat down beside her and began to rub her back gently.

  I have to go to school now, Mama, or I’m going to be late, I said.

  Why the hell can’t this place have a bar full of men so that you can get drunk and get yourself kissed?

  I’m going to school by myself. I have to go, Mama.

  I left her there on the floor and walked out of the house.

  As I moved down the hill an army of ants was marching in several lines down the mountain toward the highway. Lizards were moving in the same direction, moving very quickly. The birds above me were also disturbed and flying away.

  That morning everything on the mountain seemed to be pushing down toward the black asphalt river.

  And then I knew why.

  Way off, far off, I heard a helicopter.

  I ran toward the school as fast as I could.

  At the schoolroom everyone was already inside and the small door was closed.

  Let me in, I cried.

  José Rosa opened the door. I pushed past him and ran over to Maria and Estefani who stood at the window looking up.

  Where’s Paula? I asked.

  My friends shook their heads.

  José Rosa was conf
used and bewildered. Maria explained that the helicopter meant the army was coming to dump Paraquat on the poppy fields.

  Everyone is running for cover, she explained. You never know where the herbicide might be sprayed.

  We could hear the helicopter getting closer until it finally passed over our little one-room school and moved away.

  Do you smell anything? Estefani asked.

  I don’t, Maria said. No.

  José Rosa sat down and took out a small box of white chalk from his leather briefcase and walked toward the blackboard. He wrote out four columns with the subject headings History, Geography, Mathematics, and Spanish Language.

  We took out our copybooks and pencils from our school satchels and began to copy down what José Rosa had written.

  As I wrote the word History I could smell it. By the time I’d written the words Spanish Language there was no doubt in my mind that I was smelling Paraquat.

  The three of us knew it. José Rosa did not.

  We also felt the absence of Paula.

  As the scent grew stronger we could sense the poison creep in under the schoolroom door.

  At the moment when Maria squirmed and was about to stand and insist that we had to get out of that room, Paula pushed open the door and entered panting and crying.

  She was drenched in the poison.

  Paula was crying with her eyes closed and her lips pressed firmly together.

  We all knew that if you got any Paraquat in your mouth you could die.

  In her race to outrun the helicopter she’d lost her flip-flops and her satchel. Her dress was drenched and her hair dripped with the stinging liquid. Paula kept her eyes firmly shut. The herbicide can blind you too. It burns everything.

  Maria was the first to jump up out of her chair.

  In order not to touch her, Maria guided her by pushing Paula with her notebook into the small bathroom built at the back.

  Estefani and I followed them. In the bathroom Paula tore off her dress. We tried to clean her off with tap water, but it came out much too slowly, so we also scooped water out from the toilet bowl. We washed her eyes and mouth over and over again.

  I could taste the poison. Where some had rubbed onto my skin, I could feel the burning, which could turn a radiant poppy into a piece of tar the size of a raisin.

  José Rosa watched in silence. He peered into the room from outside, and covered his mouth and nose with his arm, holding the white cotton shirtsleeve against his face.

  We washed off the poison, but we knew much of it was inside her already. Paula did not speak or cry, as she stood naked and trembling in the small bathroom.

  It was Estefani who had the idea of wrapping her up in the frayed cloth curtain that hung in the schoolroom.

  We walked her through the jungle, down to the highway, and back up to her house. Even though we offered her our own plastic flip-flops, Paula said no and limped on her bare feet. She was afraid there might be Paraquat in the grass along the path to her house and we would be burned by it.

  We handed Paula over to her mother who could only say, It was only a matter of time.

  We knew she would not be able to reach a sponge into Paula’s body, as if she were a bottle, and wash the poison out.

  At home my mother was sitting on the ground at the back of the house overlooking the beer cemetery. Her hair stood up in the air like a yellow halo. The brown-glass bottles and silver cans gleamed and shone under the late-morning sun.

  I sat down beside her.

  She turned and looked at me and then looked up at the sun and said, What are you doing here so early, huh?

  I was still shivering.

  Oh my, Ladydi, she said. What happened?

  She leaned toward me and placed her arm around me. I told her the whole story.

  Daughter, my child, this is, of course, an omen. We have been distinguished. The worm will turn, she said.

  She was right. Later, when Paula was stolen, I knew this day had been an omen. She was the first to be chosen.

  That night Estefani, Maria, Paula, and I menstruated for the first time. My mother said it was because of the full moon. Estefani’s mother said it was because of the poison triggering something bad inside of us.

  But we knew what had really happened.

  José Rosa had seen Paula naked. He saw her dark skin and her breasts with their large, brown areolae and soft, black-red nipples and the black hair between her legs. He saw her young, teenage beauty. At that moment, we became one woman and it was as if he’d seen us all.

  I promised my mother that I would never tell Maria that she was my half-sister.

  I don’t want to shake the leaves out of the trees, my mother said.

  I won’t tell her.

  As Maria grew and the scar from her harelip faded, she looked exactly like my father. If he’d seen her, he would have thought he was looking in a mirror.

  My mother noticed it too. She would stare at Maria in a quiet way, studying her face. She was struggling between wanting to take Maria into her arms and kiss her and wanting to slap her hard across the face.

  I loved Maria. Out of everyone in that godforsaken-godforgotten-hottest-hell-on-earth place, as my mother liked to call our mountain, she was the kindest person of all. She would walk around a big red fire ant before she’d step on one.

  The year that José Rosa was our teacher I remember as a series of events.

  The first event was the day of his arrival, combined with the visit at my house when I showed him our beer cemetery. The second event that stands out is the day that Paula was rained on with herbicide.

  That year was also measured by watching my mother’s blond hair grow out. By the time the school year was over, her black roots reached almost to her ears. She never dyed it over black, touched it up blond again, or even trimmed it, because Ruth’s beauty salon had closed. And this, the closing of Ruth’s salon, was the third event of that year.

  No one saw a thing. No one heard a thing. Nothing was left behind.

  We never heard from Ruth again.

  Estefani’s grandmother, Sofia, who ran the OXXO convenience store down the block from Ruth’s salon, had risen earlier than usual to go and open her place. It was December tenth. Sofia was expecting the swarms of pilgrims that would pass by her store, and march down all of Mexico’s dirt roads and highways, to get to Mexico City for the Virgin of Guadalupe’s day, on December twelfth.

  Sofia walked past the beauty salon as she did every day. The door made of corrugated transparent green plastic was swinging wide open into the street. She peered inside and called Ruth’s name, but there was no answer.

  Later she would explain that she could never tell if those bright red spots on the floor were blood or drops of red nail polish.

  Nobody did anything as stupid as calling the police. Instead we waited.

  When we walked past the beauty parlor that still had its sign The Illusion over the front door, we’d peer in and hope to still see her there. Instead, we only saw two standing hairdryers that our mothers used to sit under and the two empty sinks where Ruth used to wash our hair. The menorah on the windowsill was still there in front of the window that was starred with bullet holes.

  We all knew she was stolen.

  There are so many dead people out there we’re never going to find them alive, my mother said.

  José Rosa was so disturbed by the disappearance of Ruth that he spent two months trying to get someone to come from Mexico City to investigate.

  There was only one place on that mountain where our cell phones could get a signal from a tower that was twelve kilometers away. This was in a small clearing on the way to school. There was always someone there either talking on their phone or waiting to get a call from a relative in the United States. The clearing was our link to the world. It was here that good news and bad news reached us. My mother named the place Delphi, after a documentary she’d seen on Greek history.

  The sounds of the jungle mixed with the noise from th
e cell phones. The sound of beeps, rings, songs, and bells that filled the humid air were accompanied by the high-pitch timbre of women’s voices.

  At this clearing there were always women waiting to hear from their husbands and male children. Some sat there for days that became weeks, months, and years, and their cell phones never rang.

  Once my mother was talking to my father, before he left us for good, and I heard her say, I could swallow this telephone I want you so badly.

  It was strange to have a man hanging out there. The presence of José Rosa made everyone a little shy. We listened with fascination as he spoke to lawyers, policemen, and judges, and tried to get someone to come and investigate the disappearance of Ruth.

  One afternoon, in order to comfort him, Estefani’s grandmother, Sofia, placed her hands on his shoulders.

  A missing woman is just another leaf that goes down the gutter in a rainstorm, she said.

  No one cares about Ruth, my mother added. She was stolen like a car.

  The fourth event that defined those twelve months occurred in the last week of the school year, in July. It happened on the day before José Rosa left us to go back to Mexico City.

  I was at the schoolroom to help José Rosa clean up and take down the posters he’d placed on the wall during the year. He was getting the room ready for the new teacher who would be arriving in the middle of August.

  The poster of the world had been put away. Where I once looked at the shapes of Africa and Australia and stared at the deep blue of the seas and oceans there was now an empty brick wall.

  The curtain we’d used to wrap Paula’s naked body had never been replaced.

  I leaned against the wall that was once covered with a poster of a rainbow and diagrams of light entering and exiting raindrops.

  I’m also sad, José Rosa said and walked toward me.

  He smelled like black tea with milk and sugar.

  He placed his hands on my shoulders and his lips on my lips.

  José Rosa tasted like glass windows, cement, and elevators to the moon. His twenty-three-year-old hands held my thirteen-year-old face and he kissed me again. The skyscraper-kiss was mine.

  Run and hide in the hole.

  What did you say, Mama?