When a Woman Rises

by Christine Eber

  It was so quiet in Lucia’s kitchen. No baby sister crying to be fed or picked up. No big brother—your uncle Ricardo—making me bring him his matz when he could easily take a hunk of ground corn off the grinding table and mix it in water himself. I didn’t know if he was treating me like a servant because I was little, or because I was a girl, but since it seemed like everyone expected me to do these things for him, I didn’t complain.

  I only went to Lucia’s house when my mother had some food for me to take to Lucia’s mother, Carmela. My mother looked out for Carmela because she was my brother’s godmother, and her life was hard without a husband or sons. Lucia’s father disappeared when she was about three years old. He went away with a group of men to work on a tomato farm in Sinaloa in the North of Mexico. Her mother and the other wives and families waited for the men to return in six months when they said they would, but the months stretched on to eight, then ten, and finally a year had passed. Some of the relatives went to the authorities in the town center to see if they knew where to find the men. The judge knew the enganchador, the man who contracted for the owner of the ranch where the men went. So the families had a meeting to talk about what to do.

  “We’ve got to go see if they’re still there, if they’re prisoners of the landowner, or what’s happening to them,” the wives said. Then they took up a collection of money among the families and gave it to sons of three of the men so they could go to the ranch and look for their fathers. The boys took a bus that went for many, many hours. They suffered on the trip because they were cold and hungry and worried about what they would find when they got there.

  When they arrived at the ranch it was already dark, and they began asking whoever they could find where the enganchador lived. It was late when they finally knocked on his door. No one answered. One of the boys went to the window and saw the engachador sitting at the table eating supper. The boys called to him through the window, “Please, sir, we’ve come a long way to look for our fathers. They came here to work about a year ago, and we never heard from them again. They never came back to us when they said they would, and we’re worried that something has happened to them.”

  The enganchador put his napkin down, got up from the table, and opened the door. He stood in the doorway towering over the boys who were holding their hats trying to show respect to him. The enganchador just looked puzzled when the boys handed him a piece of paper with the men’s names. Then he smiled and said, “No, sons, your fathers aren’t here. I never contracted to bring them here. You must have the wrong ranch. There are a lot of ranches in Sinaloa where men from Chiapas come to work. Or maybe they decided to go work in the United States. You’ll have to try one of the other ones. Now I have to get back to my supper.”

  The boys didn’t believe the enganchador, but what could they do after he shut the door in their faces? All they could think to do was go to the nearest town and ask the authorities if they could help them find their fathers. So they found a place to sleep in the fields. Early the next morning they began walking to the town. When they got to the town hall, the authorities didn’t want to help them. They told them that the enganchador was telling them the truth, that their fathers had probably gone to the U.S.

  “Be patient boys,” they said. “Your fathers are probably working on a farm somewhere in the United States, and when they have some money they’ll send word to you where they are and when they’ll be home. Just wait. You’ll see. Now go back home. Your mothers must be worried about you.”

  How desperate those boys must have felt to hear the mestizos talk about their fathers like stray donkeys that would make their way home in their own time.

  To this day we don’t know what happened to Lucia’s father and the other men. We think they’re dead because they wouldn’t have just gone to El Norte without letting us know they’re there and how they are. They had debts to pay and families to take care of. They only went to make some money and then come back home. Who knows how they died or if they are prisoners somewhere? Only God knows. But we don’t stop praying for them. At mass each Sunday, the prayer leaders still ask God to take care of our compañeros who left in search of work and if they are alive to bring them back to us.

  When we pray our separate prayers, I ask God to bring Lucia back.

  A DREAM LIKE NO OTHER

  A NEIGHBOR CAME into our store. Verónica quickly covered the tape recorder with a tortilla cloth. I had asked her not to talk about our project so she always covered the tape recorder when people came into the store.

  It’s been a while since we’ve covered our TV with a cloth so not to draw attention to it when visitors come. But it seems that whenever we buy something that costs a lot of money, or we start to do something different, we try to disguise it so our neighbors won’t think that we’re proud of our possessions or what we’re doing.

  It’s that old envy problem, complicating our lives . . .

  I helped our neighbor pick out some thread for a blouse she was weaving while Verónica tidied up a shelf of canned sardines.

  After our neighbor left, Verónica said, “Mother, how do people go on without knowing where their loved ones are? Lucia didn’t remember what it was like to have a father, but I couldn’t bear to think about Father disappearing. We’ve been together all my life. Sometimes when he’s gone for two or three days to attend a meeting of the Believers or the Zapatistas, I miss him. When he comes home, he tells us everything that happened.

  “When I was a little girl I would sit for hours with my face in my hands and my elbows on my knees taking in every word he said. His voice is one I carry with me in my head along with yours and Abolino’s and Sebastian’s. But if he were gone a long time, like Lucia and her father, maybe I wouldn’t hear his voice anymore.

  “Mother, do you still hear Lucia’s voice?”

  I thought for a moment. “Yes, I still hear Lucia’s voice when I talk about her. It’s a part of her that lives on and helps me tell her story. It’s as if she’s here with me when I remember the things she said. But now I need to tell you about something important that happened to Lucia when she was about ten years old.”

  Verónica took the tortilla cloth off the tape recorder. I cleared my throat and began to talk about Lucia’s grandfather who knew how to heal people.

  When he was alive, Lucia’s grandfather healed hundreds of people. If he couldn’t help them, he would tell them to go to the clinic in the lum, the center of our township, where all the government offices and workers were.

  Hilario was committed to his calling. People would come to his door in the middle of the night asking him with great humility, but much urgency, to come pray for their sick family member. He would ask what was wrong with the person. If it was something he could cure, he would go right away to the person’s house, walking with a torch, sometimes for miles on steep mountain trails.

  Lucia wanted to go with her grandfather when he went to pray for people, and he often let her. Many times Hilario came to our house to pray for someone in our family who was sick. During the healing—which would last for many hours—I would sit next to Lucia in the corner of our kitchen while one of my parents or my siblings was lying on a straw mat by the fire.

  At first, Hilario would tell Lucia to lay out the candles, pine boughs, incense, and bottles of pox at the head of the sick person. After the candles were lit, and Hilario had begun to pray, Lucia would go back to her place in the corner and pray softly under her shawl along with her grandfather.

  Lucia had a mind like your tape recorder. It was as if she hit a button in her heart—when her grandfather started to pray, she would press it and the words got engraved in her heart. Hilario and the other elders told us that thoughts and feelings start in the heart, then go to the mind, and finally come out the mouth. That’s how Lucia learned everything important in our traditions, by recording them in her heart where they spread roots and then came out in words, which had power.

  Sometimes when Lucia and I walked home from sc
hool, we would veer off into the forest where the pitch pine trees grow. There Lucia would practice praying to cure me even though I wasn’t sick.

  I would lie down among the trees and pretend I was sick while Lucia collected pine boughs and laid them out on the ground near my head. My pine needle bed was soft. We didn’t have any candles, incense, or pox, so Lucia substituted sticks for candles and pine cones for incense.

  Before she began to pray, I would look up at her face, which had smoothed out like a piece of cloth waiting for someone to embroider on it. When Lucia bowed her head and her hair fell over her face, I couldn’t see her anymore. So I closed my eyes and waited for her to start praying. Her voice was low and slow when she began, but it didn’t take long before her words got faster and hotter.

  “This is why I come,

  kneeling with my face to the ground,

  beneath your feet, my Lord,

  and under your hands, my Lord,

  under your shadow, my Lord . . .

  Holy Mother María,

  Flowery Jesus Christ, my Lord

  Look at me, my Lord,

  at your daughter.

  Send me your healing strength.

  Lower it to me.

  Come heal your daughter Magdalena for me.’”

  Sometimes I would doze off while Lucia was praying.

  One morning Lucia came to school at the last minute just when we were lining up to sing the national anthem. She slipped in the line behind me. I could hear her teeth chattering. I turned to look at her and saw that her hair wasn’t combed, and she didn’t have her shawl. The pleats in the front of her skirt were falling out of her belt. Her face reminded me of the face of a little kit fox I had surprised on the trail the day before. She had a wild look, as if she had seen things I couldn’t imagine, as if she could look further or deeper than I could. I felt as if I had lost my friend: here was another girl pretending to be Lucia, wearing her clothes and talking like her.

  When it was time for recess, Lucia took me by the hand and led me to the níspero tree behind the school. We sat down under the tree and she told me what had happened. Little by little, as Lucia told me her story, I felt that I was getting my friend back. But she had changed in ways I couldn’t completely understand.

  Lucia said to me, “I had a dream last night. It was the third time I’ve had the same dream. The first and second times I didn’t tell anybody, not even you, because I was scared and I didn’t want to know what my dream meant. But last night the dream came again, and I had to tell my grandfather about it because the Moon Virgin ordered me to. You’re the second person I’m telling my dream to. Not even my mother knows.”

  Then Lucia told me the dream that changed her life.

  “In my dream I was asleep, but I had to go to the bathroom really bad. So I went outside and the whole patio was filled with light from the Moon. Our house looked like a beautiful cathedral. The Holy Mother Moon came down to me and almost touched the ground. She had a dark brown face, just like ours, and she wore a blue shawl sprinkled with white stars. She held her hands out to me. They were dark brown too. But I was scared and jumped back.

  “Then Mother Moon talked to me. ‘Daughter, listen to me,’ she said. ‘Your heart is thinking a lot. What is it you’d like to know?’

  “I want to learn to pray,” I said.

  “‘Good. If it’s true that you want to learn to pray, then you have to pay attention. First you’re going to take a little gourd of water, a ball of ground corn, your little net bag, your candles, your incense, your pine branches, your pox.’

  “Alright. I’ll take them,” I said, because I was too afraid not to obey her.

  “‘That’s good,’ she said. ‘You’re going to take them so that you can heal with them. But you’re not ready yet. You need to learn the prayers.’

  “That’s alright. I’ll learn them.” Since I already knew a few prayers I thought I could learn the rest.

  “‘Good,’ she said. ‘Now go ask your grandfather to help you.’

  “That’s what the Moon Virgin said to me. When I woke up this morning, I could still hear her words, but my dream was covering me like an extra blanket that was so heavy I couldn’t breathe. I was afraid because I remembered my grandfather’s story of when Saint Peter came to him. My grandfather didn’t want to believe the dream the first time the apostle came, but then St. Peter came a second time and said the same thing, except with more force. Still, my grandfather didn’t accept the dream. When St. Peter came the third time, he knew he had to accept it in his heart.

  “It was still night. My mother and grandfather were snoring. I just lay in bed until my mother woke up and went to the kitchen. I had to tell my grandfather about my dream, so I went to his bed and patted him on the shoulder. He woke up and rubbed his eyes and then he asked me, ‘Why are you up so early, granddaughter?’ I told him about what the Moon Virgin told me in my dreams. My grandfather said, ‘So it is, so it is,’ many times while I was talking. When I finished, he said, ‘Grandaughter, if the dream had only come once or twice, you could ignore it, but it came three times, and that means that you must do what the Moon Virgin tells you to do. You must accept your cargo. You must learn to heal. You must learn to be an j’ilol, one who sees what illness has entered a person.’”

  Then Lucia said that she told her grandfather she was ready to accept her cargo. He said that they would have to seal the agreement with the Virgin right away. They got dressed quickly. Hilario told Lucia’s mother that Lucia had asked to go to the church to pray before school. Although she had never done this before, her mother didn’t say anything, except not to forget her shawl. But Lucia was already running to catch up with her grandfather on the trail and didn’t want to go back.

  Then Lucia went on to tell me what happened in the church.

  “At the church we knelt in front of the statue of the Virgin Mary while my grandfather prayed to the Moon Virgin, to St. Peter, to Earth, and to the Father-Mother-Ancestor-Protectors to give me strength in my legs to walk long distances and in my whole body to bear the cold, rain, and hunger. He asked the Moon to keep my heart strong and to give it courage not to give in to the one who comes behind, who wants to use our power for evil and tricks people into serving him. He asked her to forgive me for not covering my head, that I was still young and needed to learn how to serve her with respect.

  “I was shivering in the church beside my grandfather like I’m shivering now. But I’m not cold because I don’t have my shawl, I’m trembling because I’m afraid. I’m just a little girl, but the Moon Virgin wants me to heal! What will my life be like now? Can I still go to school? I want to heal and also keep learning.”

  Lucia had had a cargo dream, the special dream that calls us to serve our people as healers, midwives, or leaders of fiestas. People don’t have them that often today, but when I was growing up many people had cargo dreams. After such dreams they became different from the rest of us. Lucia’s dream gave her power to talk directly to God, the Moon Virgin, and all the spiritual beings.

  I wanted to make Lucia feel better so I said, “Maybe you can just go along with your grandfather and learn from him like you’ve been doing, and then after you graduate from primary school, you can heal anytime you’re needed because you won’t be in school. Ah, but you want to go on in school, don’t you?”

  Lucia nodded her head. She didn’t want to remind me that I wouldn’t be able to go to school past sixth grade because my parents didn’t want me to live in the city. But if she became a healer, Lucia wouldn’t have the freedom to study because she would have to stay in the community. We were just little girls, but we were already thinking about our future. And it seemed that there were big logs blocking our way.

  MY COUSIN ROSA

  AFTER LUCIA HAD HER DREAM, I would often go to her house with a gift of food, and she wouldn’t be there. I would come to the door and ask, “Are you there?” Her mother would tell me to come in, and my heart would sink a little because she was
all alone embroidering by the fire. I would just give the food to Lucia’s mother, but she wouldn’t let me leave without my own gift of food. As is our custom, she would fill two tortillas with beans and give the little package to me to eat on my way home or later when I was hungry. If she didn’t have any beans, she would fill the tortillas with cooked greens.

  When I saw Lucia again at school, she always told me where she and her grandfather had gone and what happened during the healing. I listened closely because I envied Lucia. I was always hungry for meat. We only had it on Day of the Dead or when there was a healing in our house and my mother had to feed the healer some chicken. I imagined Lucia eating chicken or beef soup at the house of the sick person. My mouth watered thinking of her slurping up the broth with toasted tortillas and tearing the meat off a chicken leg. Sometimes Lucia would bring a piece of beef wrapped in a tortilla to school the next day and share it with me. Even when our lives were becoming so different, she didn’t forget me.

  In that time, envy was a very dangerous thing. I tried not to envy Lucia, but it took all my strength. When we were little girls, it was rare for people to have meat to eat because they didn’t have money to buy bulls. So when someone in our community got money from working somewhere and bought things—like a bull, a burro, or a horse—others envied them for having something they didn’t.

  Sometimes they would just gossip about the person saying things like, “He must be working for the government. They gave him money to tell them what to do so they could come in and take our land away from us.” But at times they went as far as to ask a powerful j’ilol to pray that something really bad would happen to the person, to show them they weren’t more important than the rest of us, just because they had money.

  I never did anything like that, but I did pray to God to give me a dream like Lucia’s so I could be special like her. But if I had had a cargo dream, who could have helped me learn to heal? My grandfather drank a lot and didn’t remember what the ancestors told us, or how they used to pray, or maybe he just didn’t care about the traditions anymore. I couldn’t ask Hilario because he was already teaching Lucia. So I waited for a dream that never came, all the while knowing that even if I got it, I wouldn’t know what to do with it.