I contented myself with listening to Lucia’s stories about the healings that she went to with her grandfather. Sometimes I happened to be at a sick person’s house when Lucia and her grandfather came to pray.
One time I went with my mother to see my cousin Rosa who was very sick. For many weeks she had had a high fever and was sweating a lot. Her mother kept her home from school because Rosa was too tired to get out of bed. Rosa didn’t want to eat and just stayed in bed all day. The only thing she wanted to eat was eggs, so my aunt fed her eggs when the chickens were laying. Rosa was as thin as a pile of sticks. My aunt tried to take her to the mestizo doctor at the clinic, but my uncle stopped her when she was waving down a truck in the road. My uncle said that he didn’t trust doctors, they just took all your money, and then later you died anyway. Better to bring a traditional healer, he said. He would ask Hilario to come and pray for Rosa. Lucia came too. She and her grandfather arrived just before us.
My aunt was sitting beside Rosa’s bed crying into her shawl. My uncle was drinking pox in the corner. Rosa was lying on the bed, just a little bump under the blanket. Lucia and I went close to her face to tell her we had come. She was sweating a lot and smelled like sour fruit. We backed away. We couldn’t help ourselves. Later after the prayer was finished, Lucia asked her grandfather why Rosa smelled sour. He said that there is a disease that makes people smell that way and that maybe Rosa had it.
Hilario and my aunt talked a long time while Lucia and I sat and stared at Rosa. I thought about how we three girls were just beginning our lives, and yet one of us looked and smelled like a rotten apple. Is this what it’s like to be on the way to dying? I asked myself. I whispered to Lucia, “Do you think she’s going to die?”
“I don’t know,” she said. That made me think that maybe Lucia is afraid when she prays with her grandfather because she comes right up to the edge of the chasm between life and death—maybe she sees death coming, crossing the bridge and there’s nothing she can do to stop it.
Ever since I was a little girl, I’ve been afraid of death. The elders say that everyone has a candle in the sky and that their time will be up when the candle goes out, but I don’t believe that. I can’t believe that there’s a candle for children, especially girls like Rosa who make it all the way to thirteen years old. She was about to graduate from primary school! She had learned the many things a woman needs to do and had her whole life ahead of her. She had a husband to marry and babies to laugh with and teach everything she knew. All of these thoughts were running through my head as we sat and waited.
When he was ready to pray, Hilario told Lucia to put the candles in rows on the ground beside Rosa’s bed. It took a while for Lucia to drip bits of wax on the ground to fix each tall white candle in its place and then set pine boughs in front of them. Meanwhile Hilario lit the incense. Prayers need witnesses, and so Lucia, my mother, my uncle, and I took our places on each side of Hilario as he began to pray. He held Rosa’s wrist in his hands and felt her pulse. Then Hilario took a cup of pox and made the sign of the cross three times over her chest and three times on each of her sides.
Next my aunt took a white hen that she had been saving for the prayer from under the basket and gave it to Hilario. My aunt helped Rosa into a sitting position and held her while Hilario rubbed the live chicken all around her head and down her shoulders and her sides. Then he pulled the rough blanket off her skirt and rubbed the chicken along the sides of her legs and over her feet. When he was done, he handed the chicken to my aunt. The hen must have known she was going to become our dinner because she was squawking loudly.
Hilario’s prayer lasted a long time. Lucia and I got very tired and hungry. When Hilario finally announced, “My prayer is finished,” we were relieved because now we could eat. But Hilario looked worried. My aunt and my mother were getting ready to serve the bowls of chicken and broth when Hilario began to talk to my uncle.
“I can see that my prayers aren’t entering your daughter’s body. I’m sorry that I’m not able to cure her. I would take her to the clinic. If God wants it, the doctors there may be able to treat her illness. I think she may have the disease they call tuberculosis. I’ve seen people before like your daughter, and that is what the doctors said they had. Some of them got better when they took the medicine.”
Rosa’s mother was about to set a bowl of soup on the table in front of Hilario. She stood holding the bowl, her eyes red from crying and said, “I wanted to take my daughter to the clinic. I tried. I started to take her there the other day, but my husband stopped me.” Rosa’s father looked down into his glass of pox and didn’t say anything.
The next day my aunt defied my uncle and took Rosa to the clinic in the lum. The doctor examined Rosa, and Hilario was right. It was tuberculosis that was making her so sick. But Rosa’s tuberculosis was very advanced. It couldn’t be cured in the usual way. Her only hope was to go right away to the hospital in San Cristóbal where they could give her a special treatment. My aunt felt desperate at the doctor’s words because she and my uncle owed a lot of people and didn’t have any money. My uncle had told my aunt that he would kill her if he found out that Rosa had been taken to a hospital in the city where they would have to pay a lot of money to get her back or maybe they would let her die and demand money anyway. So my aunt just took Rosa home where she died about a week later.
That’s how it was back then.
GRADUATION DAY
“MOTHER, WHY DIDN’T ROSA’S MOTHER defy her husband and fight for her daughter’s life? If I had been Rosa, you wouldn’t have let me die. I’m sure of it.”
Verónica had never heard the story of Rosa. I tried to help her understand how it was when we were young.
“Daughter, I want to think that I would have taken you to the hospital even if your father told me not to. But it was different back then. People usually died when they went to the hospital, so we were afraid to take our sick family members there. Also, there weren’t any doctors who spoke bats’i k’op and many women didn’t know castellano or were embarrassed to speak it. So, when they went to the hospital, they didn’t know how to ask for help for their child or for someone to explain to them what was wrong. We felt most comfortable going to our traditional doctors, like Hilario. I know it’s hard for you to understand. I thank God that you are living now when we have a little money to take you to a doctor if you have a sickness that we can’t heal with plants or prayer.”
“I know, Mother. I’m just glad that men aren’t so stubborn about being the boss.”
“Yes, they’ve changed. But it took time. Some men still make demands on their wives and daughters that aren’t fair. Now, do you want to hear about our graduation day? I remember it as if it was yesterday.
“Yes, Mother. Please begin.”
We missed Rosa on graduation day when we lined up on the basketball court in front of our parents and godparents. She should have been standing there with Lucia and me, the three girls in our community who had managed to make it through primary school.
It was hot the day of our graduation. We had to stand a long time on the basketball court without any shade. We girls were dressed in our traditional clothes with ribbons in our hair. Behind us, in a row, stood the six boys who were graduating. The teachers made them wear mestizo clothes: dark pants and a white shirt.
Now that I think about it, those clothes showed what the teachers expected of us, that the boys would find jobs in the world of the mestizos while we girls would stay in the community, marry, and raise children.
Most girls and boys dropped out of school before sixth grade because their parents were too poor to pay their school expenses. Our parents told us that it was enough to learn to read and write a little castellano and to know our numbers so we wouldn’t get cheated by the mestizos. Our parents didn’t respect or trust the teachers because the teachers didn’t know what it was like to get callouses on their hands from working in the fields. They made money just by writing words in notebooks and
sitting back while the children copied them or drew pictures.
To our parents these things weren’t school. School was learning arithmetic and how to speak a little castellano. When our parents really got angry was when one of the teachers lured away someone’s wife. That happened a few times—most of the teachers were men with wives who stayed in the city while their husbands spent the week in the community. They would only go home on weekends. The teachers had little rooms where they slept at the school, but they were always looking for a woman to cook for them and come to their rooms at night.
The teachers taught us how to do special mestizo dances that involved the girls dancing in pairs with boys. Because there were more boys than girls some of the boys had to dance together. Back then the school dances were not at all like the dances at traditional fiestas where everyone just stands where they are, arms at their sides, bouncing back and forth from one foot to the other, as long as the music lasts. I wonder if our people always danced the same? No matter how our traditional dances used to be, we girls were embarrassed to dance both the traditional and mestizo ways.
Our parents and godparents sat around the basketball court watching us dance. The women folded their shawls and put them on top of their heads to shade their eyes from the sun. The men wore their traditional white tunics and hats with colored ribbons and passed around sodas to the people to help them cool off and also because this was a special day. Some of the graduates had mestizo godparents. They held umbrellas over their heads to shade themselves.
My godmother was my Aunt Petra and Lucia’s godmother was my mother. When it was time, my aunt, my mother, and the other godparents came onto the court bringing our presents in big wrapped boxes. They stood in a line behind each of us until it was time to escort us off the court to receive our diplomas. My present was a pink sweater. I didn’t have a sweater and was very excited to have such a pretty one.
I forgot to tell you that when we were lined up waiting for our godparents, Lucia read the graduation poem. Because she was the smartest in the class, our teacher chose her to write the poem. She had to write it in castellano, and it had to be inspiring but truthful too. She had to memorize it, which wasn’t hard for Lucia because she had already memorized many prayers.
The day before, Lucia brought her finished poem to school to show me. I read it. At first it sounded like most graduation poems because it talked about how we were leaving our childhoods behind, and now we were going to be adults. Although we were only thirteen or fourteen years old, it was true that we were now as good as adults because our teachers and parents never encouraged us to go on to middle school—except Lucia’s mother, who wanted her to go but didn’t have the money to make it happen.
If we had dreams of going on in school, our teachers didn’t want to hear them. They only knew that our parents didn’t have money to pay for books, food, and to rent a room in San Cristóbal. So how could we do it?
None of our teachers cared enough to help us find money. Or maybe there weren’t any scholarships in those days. We surely never heard of any. So, after graduation, the boys began to work full time with their fathers in the fields while we girls helped our mothers with all the work women have to do. And not long after, we married and started having babies.
But Lucia’s poem said that young people can do many things besides work in the fields or in the house and marry and have children. We can learn about the world and maybe even write books one day. We can invent machines, design big buildings, and teach children what we know so they can be even smarter and do greater things than we did. I loved Lucia’s poem, and when I was done reading it I told her so.
“You wrote what I feel,” I said, “that I can do something different from my mother. I want to be a teacher one day, but a much better one than our teachers. We’ve got to find a way to go to middle school.”
I gave Lucia her poem back and she said, “I’ve been thinking. Maybe we don’t need our parents’ permission, at least at first. Maybe it’s enough to show them how much our hearts want to go to school. They don’t know how we yearn to study. Maybe they’ll let us work in San Cristóbal to pay our school expenses if they see how determined we are. I’ve heard that there are mestizas who give girls like us a room and food in exchange for cleaning and cooking. And then, for a few hours a day, they let us go to school. We just need to find two señoras who need maids and live next door so we can see each other every day.”
So we hatched our plan that day to run away to San Cristóbal to find work. The next day after the graduation ceremony we toasted on it. While the graduates’ mothers were preparing chicken in mole for the whole community, Lucia and I ran off behind the school to a rock where Lucia had hidden a plastic container of pox.
She’d brought it from home from a healing earlier that week. Lucia never drank her portion of pox. Because she was young, it was expected that she would pour her gift of pox into a container to take home to have around in case someone had a cut that needed to be disinfected. This was how she showed her respect for traditions. Lucia had also brought one of her grandfather’s shot glasses, and we used it to offer each other little cups of pox.
First Lucia offered me my glass, “Here’s your drops from the hands and feet of God,” she said. Then I said, “I’m drinking.” I didn’t like pox because it burned as it went down my throat, but I wanted to drink it, to do something I’d never done before. The container felt lighter and lighter each time we poured another cup until it was light as a feather and no more drops came out. We laughed and rolled on the ground in pleasure.
I don’t know how much time passed before our schoolmates found us passed out behind the rock. Our parents came soon after and saw what a pitiful state we were in. One of our schoolmates told us later that when Hilario looked at Lucia sprawled out on the ground, flies licking her lips, he said, “My granddaughter forgot to say in her poem that although young people can do many things, they can also lose their souls along the way.”
OUR PATH FORKS
VERÓNICA DIDN’T LET ME forget about my drunken graduation day. She brought it up several times before we sat down to talk about Lucia again. She said things like, “How could you do that, Mother, and then act like you’re so perfect? You and Father would kill me if I got drunk, and I’m seventeen! You were only thirteen when you got drunk!”
What Verónica says is true. Her father and I are far from perfect. Although I never drank after my graduation day, Victorio was a drinker before he started listening to the word of God. He used to drink whenever he had money. But it’s been thirty years now that he hasn’t had a drop of pox, chicha, or beer. God knows we’re not without our sins, but we’ve tried to raise our children to be good people.
It was raining hard the day I took up the topic of Lucia’s life after graduation. Verónica and I stood in the doorway of our store watching the patio turn into a muddy lake. Nobody had come to the store since early morning, so we decided to go to the kitchen and warm ourselves by the fire. We covered up with pieces of plastic and raced across the patio to the kitchen. Once inside, I took off my muddy sandals while Verónica rekindled the fire and sat close to the flames to warm herself. I set a basket and some corncobs on the floor between us. While I talked, corn kernels fell from our hands into the basket like little bits of sunshine.
After we graduated, we never left our homes for very long or without a companion. Our days were spent helping our mothers. It was a lot harder back then to keep a family going. We didn’t have electric corn grinders like today. All we had were grinding stones or hand grinders to make our tortillas. It would take a few hours every morning to make tortillas and matz—corn gruel—for a large family like ours. We’d begin when it was still dark with only the fire and candles for light. While we’d be patting out our tortillas, we’d listen to the sound of our neighbors making tortillas. If we didn’t hear pat-pat, pat-pat coming from a neighbor’s house, we’d wonder if she was sick.
The only source of water was the water
hole near our house or, when that ran dry, the river. But that was a long way away so we tried not to go there. Every time it rained, we lined up pottery jugs under the roof to gather water. Later, when plastic buckets came to the stores in Chenalhó, we would buy them and line them up too. But we couldn’t gather much water that way, not like the rotoplas storage tank that collects water for us now. Thank God for the rotoplas.
I looked at the door and took a long pause. Verónica asked me what I was thinking, so I told her, even though I knew she wouldn’t like it.
“I don’t know what good it does to talk about the past. I know you want to know about Lucia, but sometimes I feel that what has passed is gone, and it serves no purpose to bring it back.”
Verónica looked worried. I didn’t want her to think that, just because I didn’t want to talk about the past at that moment, I never would talk about it again. She sat still while I looked down at my hands on top of the blouse a neighbor had commissioned me to embroider.
Finally I said, “I’m not going to talk any more about how women worked in the past. You know about it anyway since nothing much has changed except that now we have electricity and cement floors. Sometimes I miss dirt floors. They were easier to clean. We’d just sweep the dirt or pieces of food or corn husks out the door, and the floor would be clean and smooth and warm on our feet. Now we have to wear shoes on the cold cement. If a little child urinates or poops, we can’t just dig it up and throw it out the door. We have to fetch a bucket of water and mop it up, sloshing the dirty water around. I know you don’t agree, but that’s how I feel. Who knows if it was better in the past or today? My head aches thinking about these things.
When a Woman Rises Page 3