When a Woman Rises

by Christine Eber

  When a

  WOMAN RISES

  When a

  WOMAN RISES

  CHRISTINE EBER

  When a Woman Rises. Copyright © 2018 by Christine Engla Eber. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written consent from the publisher, except for brief quotations for reviews. For further information, write Cinco Puntos Press, 701 Texas Avenue, El Paso, TX 79901; or call 1-915-838-1625.

  FIRST EDITION

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Eber, Christine Engla, author.

  Title: When a woman rises / by Christine Engla Eber.

  Description: First edition. | El Paso, Texas : Cinco Puntos Press, [2018]

  Identifiers: LCCN 2018008855| ISBN 9781941026779 (hardback : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781941026847 (paperback : alk. paper)

  Subjects: LCSH: Tzotzil women—Mexico—Chenalho—Social conditions—Fiction. Chenalho (Mexico)—Social conditions—Fiction. | LCGFT: Novels.

  Classification: LCC PS3605.B463 W47 2018 | DDC 813/.6--dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018008855

  Lucia’s prayer beginning on page 143 borrows from portions of a prayer against envy spoken by Manuel Cura, a well-respected j’ilol in Chenalhó. The prayer was recorded by Christine Eber over several hours on the night of August 25, 1987.

  Book and cover design by Paco Casas and Edgar Amaya of Blue Panda Design Studio

  May we all rise in celebration!

  WHEN A WOMAN RISES, NO MAN IS LEFT BEHIND

  WHY WOULD AN anthropologist decide to write a novel? Because Christine Eber is always pushing herself to help the rest of us understand the modern Tsotsil Maya people, people she has been learning from for over thirty years. What she describes in When A Woman Rises is not a static world of traditional people untouched by outside forces, but a community of men and women actively struggling to make their way in the world we all share, to live decent lives not only according to their interpretation of the lessons passed down to them but in response to the new challenges they must face each day. How can they promote peace and justice where so much inequality and violence exist? How can they survive economically when they don’t have access to necessary land or education? How can they do things differently without provoking the envy or hatred of neighbors? How can a woman rise in a way that helps men rise with her?

  Christine Eber has practiced ‘love’ in the Mayan sense of the word, which means—according to the book’s narrator Magdalena—listening deeply, not giving up on each other, helping each other, respecting each other, and feeling each other’s pain. This Mayan word for love is ‘our heart hurts,’ k’ux ko’onton, a deep love that leads to two-way understanding.

  —DIANE RUS

  author of Mujeres de tierra fria: conversaciones con las coletas

  TO GABRIEL & KRISHNA

  Map by Christine Eber

  WE BEGIN

  IT’S BEEN ELEVEN YEARS since Lucia disappeared. Every day I’ve waited, hoping to hear her voice from the half open doorway calling, “Are you there? I’ve come.” But she never came, and the days passed, and it was as if she no longer existed.

  I tried to convince her not to go, to stay here. “You’ve got to stay on the land, you’ve got to keep struggling with us,” I told her. But Lucia couldn’t take it anymore, and she left one rainy November day.

  This year on Feast of the Souls—or Day of the Dead, as the mestizos call it—I decided to do something different, to break with tradition a little. So, when we were placing the wooden chairs in front of our home altar to welcome back the souls of our dead relatives, I put a chair there for Lucia. We’d welcome her soul from wherever it was to come back to us this day, to share our tamales and beef soup, the bounty of our labors here in this place of her ancestors.

  And so we did, and none of my family scolded me. My husband Victorio just looked deeply into the fire when I told him who the chair was for.

  That day I couldn’t stop thinking about Lucia. Each time I put more food on the table in front of her chair, I remembered that she would always bring a gift of food to us: three or four eggs wrapped in corn husks or a kettle of cooked squash—my favorite treat in harvest season. Then she would sit down by the fire in our kitchen and pull a blouse out of her string bag to embroider while we talked.

  I remember how she looked sitting on that very chair talking to me. She was too thin to be really pretty, but the smile in her eyes made her face comfortable and easy to look at. When I said something that she found funny, she would bend over so her head was on top of her knees, and her whole body would shake with laughter. Her loosely braided hair would fall around her shoulders and down her shawl.

  My daughter Verónica was just six years old when we last saw Lucia, the same age I was when Lucia and I first met. My daughter loved it when Lucia came to visit us. While we talked and laughed, she would listen to us and pretend to weave with my discarded threads.

  Now Verónica is a woman, all grown up. On this Day of the Dead, she started to talk to me about Lucia. She wanted to know all about her life, but I was too busy serving food to visitors to answer her questions.

  If only I could have stayed busy forever! But I had no good excuse not to talk about Lucia when Verónica came to ask again. She actually had a very good reason.

  A few weeks before Day of the Dead, she had gotten her first parttime job collecting the stories of women in our township. Telling Our Stories, the organization that hired her, said they would make a book of the best stories that were gathered.

  They gave her a tape recorder and taught her how to record the women’s voices. Little by little my daughter learned to use the machine. First she recorded her own voice, then she asked me to talk into the machine so she could practice asking questions.

  I was embarrassed to hear my voice. I sounded like someone else! But I told myself that if I had to suffer a little, it was worth it because my daughter was earning a bit of money.

  I didn’t see it coming: one day we stopped practicing. She asked me if she could record me for the book, if I would tell my story. She used our tradition of giving a bottle of soda or pox, our homemade rum, to ask for a favor. Since we don’t drink, she brought me an orange-flavored Fanta from the little store that Victorio built next to our house. I accepted the soda so as not to disrespect the gift, but I told her, “Daughter, I can’t do this. I’m too busy for experiments. And my life isn’t that interesting.”

  “But, Mother,” she protested, “that’s not true. And you can talk while you’re weaving or making tortillas, or when we’re tending our store together. I promise not to interrupt your work that much.”

  I didn’t want to disappoint my daughter, so finally I agreed. But I told her that I wouldn’t tell my own story. No. I would tell the story of my comadre, Lucia. After all, she wanted to know more about Lucia. And Lucia’s life was worth telling.

  One afternoon not long after Feast of the Souls when we were waiting in our store for customers, Verónica put the tape recorder on a little table and pulled up two plastic chairs. After we sat down, she took a pen and wrote very carefully in her notebook, “Lucia Pérez López’ story, as told by Magdalena to her daughter, Verónica, on November 12th, 2007.”

  Once I began to talk, Lucia’s story flowed out of me like water from a swollen stream. I was surprised that so much of Lucia was stored up inside me, wanting to come out! I started with my first memories of her, when we were little girls playing after church on Sundays. Verónica touched the red button on her tape recorder. I wrapped my shawl tightly around my chest and began.

  FRIENDS

  WHEN WE WERE LITTLE it w
asn’t common to spend time with friends outside of church or school. Did you ever wonder why our language doesn’t have a word for “friends”? Perhaps the Maya ancestors didn’t think we needed one, because our lives are filled with relatives. Mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters, cousins, aunts, uncles, grandparents, godmothers, godfathers. You know how it is. Relatives constantly help one another. They bring tortillas when there’s sickness, help at births, take care of nieces and nephews. We visit when there’s a reason. Or sometimes, when we miss someone, we make up a reason.

  Lucia and I lived on opposite sides of Lokan, but we saw a lot of each other even so. Before we started going to school, we would see each other on Sundays at the old chapel in Lokan. Back then it stood at the top of a little hill in a grove of oak trees. From the outside it looked just like one of our houses, but inside it was a sacred space.

  It had an altar that held a statue of the Virgin Mary, candles, and an incense burner. Whenever I entered, there was always a little scent of copal in the air because healers often came there to light incense and pray. In front of the altar were rows of benches.

  Just like today, the women sat on one side and the men on the other.

  The chapel had a thatch roof. During mass Lucia and I watched for rats to come out from their hiding places in the roof instead of listening to the preacher. We had to stifle our giggles when we saw one.

  While we were acting like little girls, my parents and Lucia’s mother were listening with their whole hearts to the word of God. They were Believers. Now, when people ask us what our religion is, we say we’re Catholic, or Pueblo Creyente, or that we’re in the Word of God, but during that time we were just Believers.

  I wonder what made my parents want to believe. Maybe it was because they learned that God didn’t like it that the rich commanded the poor. It must have made them very excited to think that they could change that. But I wonder why they opened their hearts to listen to the word of God in the beginning.

  After mass Lucia and I would play outside with the other children while our parents talked. We made a game of tying the ends of our shawls together and then taking an end and running around the church yard, trying to make the other one fall.

  Back then, all of us girls wore traditional shawls, skirts, and blouses, but they were very simple compared to the ones we wear today. We didn’t have many colored threads to choose from then or much money or time to spend on decorating our clothes. So our clothes only had a few designs.

  We were lucky if we had two skirts and two blouses: one for church and school and one to change into after school. I remember I felt bad for Lucia because she only had one skirt and a blouse. They were made of the sacks that they used to put flour in. Her blouse had only two or three designs because her mother didn’t know how to weave, just embroider.

  Lucia was different from the other girls. She didn’t seem ashamed of her blouse made from a flour sack or her mended skirt—or anything for that matter. When we were learning castellano in school, she would be the first to raise her hand and blurt out the word to the teacher. She didn’t pronounce it correctly, but she was close enough for the teacher to understand.

  While the other girls hid behind their shawls when the teacher asked questions, I started to copy Lucia and raise my hand too. We passed messages between us written on the palms of our hands. We wrote them in bats’i k’op even though we didn’t know how to write correctly in our language. We just wrote how the words sounded, the way the teacher taught us to do in castellano. Lucia figured it out, and then I watched how she did it.

  We also wrote Spanish words in our hands, especially ones that ended in “ita.” We liked how they looked and sounded when we whispered them. Like when a mestiza mother says, “mi hijita” to show she is fond of her daughter. But we liked the endings of words in bats’i k’op the best, like when something is plural. We would put “etike” on the end of all the words we could think of, like antsetike for more than one woman or vinikitike for more than one man.

  We had fun talking in plural all the time. It was like making the trees burst into bloom all around us.

  Maestro Moreno didn’t know how to teach well. Even when he made sense, I didn’t hear him because I couldn’t stop thinking about his crooked nose. He must have broken it, and when it healed, it didn’t line up straight. I kept wanting to straighten Maestro Moreno’s nose!

  The worst days were when Maestro Moreno came to school drunk. Then his nose would be swollen and red, as well as crooked. His eyes would be yellow, but most of the time we couldn’t see them because he kept them half-closed as he talked. Most days he spoke in a mixture of castellano and tsotsil, but when he was drunk he only spoke in castellano, and we could barely understand him.

  We children were afraid of drunks because you never know what they’ll do. Some would just talk a lot, sing songs, or cry. But others might get really angry and hit you if you got in their way. Maestro Moreno had done all of those things at one time or another. So we would sit very still on our benches and watch him closely.

  One day he was really drunk. He stood up to teach, but made no sense. He mumbled and tipped back and forth on his feet. I was scared he would fall! Luckily, before he did, he pulled a chair toward him, managed to sit down in it, and passed out. Just like that!

  One minute he was talking and the next he was slumped over like a dead man. We looked at each other not sure what to do. We sat still as stones. It was so quiet in the room you could hear the sound of leaves outside the window rustling in the breeze.

  Finally, my cousin Fernando stood up on the boys’ side of the room and asked, “Is he dead?”

  Lucia and I sat in the first row of the girls’ side. Before I knew it, Lucia was standing next to the teacher with her little fingers fanned out in front of his mouth to see if there was any air coming out. “He’s breathing!” she announced. But she wasn’t content just to make that discovery.

  Next thing I knew she was tapping Maestro Moreno on his shoulder. She tapped and tapped, but nothing happened. He didn’t wake up. Finally, she turned around and faced us as if she were a teacher making an important announcement.

  “Maestro Moreno is passed out, and he probably won’t wake up for a long time.” We gathered up our pencils and notebooks and ran out of the classroom, scattering like feathery seeds that the wind carries away.

  For the rest of the day, Lucia and I played hide and seek among the banana trees until it was time to go home.

  Home. We spent so much time there when we were little. My mother often kept me home from school so I could take care of my younger sister while she wove or went up the hill to wash clothes. I knew she needed to weave to make money to buy the food we couldn’t grow ourselves, but I was angry because I wanted to be in school with Lucia and the other children.

  I didn’t stay angry with my mother very long. I thought she was the most beautiful person in the world. Her black hair had a little red in it, and she had freckles on her face and arms, just like you, Verónica.

  Now her hair is grey, and she has those white patches on her skin. But people take note of her and what she says, at least people in our community.

  I don’t think Lucia had missed a day of school during our first years. Her mother wanted her to go to school because Lucia was intelligent, and she thought she could go far in school and get a job like the mestizos. Lucia’s mother only had a little land. To get food, Lucia and her mother worked in other people’s fields and were paid with corn, beans, and squash at harvest time. They raised chickens too and sometimes bartered eggs for salt, sugar, blankets, and other things they needed.

  Back then, we didn’t know a lot about raising chickens, and they often died of cholera. So we couldn’t always count on eating eggs or making money from selling them. Sometimes I’d wake up in the morning, and it would be so quiet. No roosters would be crowing like we were accustomed to in the morning.

  Once when we had the most chickens we’d ever had, one by one they all got ch
olera and died. I remember the morning the last chick died. Mother yelled out in desperation, “Why couldn’t cholera have come when I only had a few chickens, instead of now when I have the most chickens I’ve ever had?” But after the chickens died there was more corn for us.

  Everyone was poor back then, but Lucia and her mother were extra poor. Nobody had many possessions, but Lucia’s mother’s kitchen only had the most basic utensils. A hand grinder for corn stood on top of a wood stand in one corner. The only other pieces of furniture were two small tables for eating, a few wood blocks for sitting, and one little wooden chair for her grandfather who lived with them.

  The walls didn’t have many things stacked against them. Only a few net bags hung from the rafters.

  Lucia’s mother had one small clay griddle, while my mother had a huge griddle to make all the tortillas for our family of five. We had a lot of clay pots of different sizes and several enamel pots and ladles all stacked against the wall or on a big table my father built for us. Lucia’s mother only owned a few clay pots and her ladles were made of wood.

  In her house everything came from the earth: the clay bowls, the gourds for drinking, net bags made from agave fiber, the little chairs and tables of pine. The walls of Lucia’s house were also made of earth, like ours. But the walls in Lucia’s kitchen were full of cracks that looked like giant spider webs. Once a big hole opened up in the wall of the kitchen, and, before they could repair it, a dog entered in the night and ate the pieces of beef that Lucia received from the mother of a boy she had prayed for.

  But I’m getting ahead of myself.

  When I was a girl I loved to be in Lucia’s kitchen with just her and her mother and her grandfather, Hilario. He was a very respected healer. Sometimes he sat by the fire with us and made bags of agave fiber that he sold to make a little money.