When a Woman Rises

by Christine Eber

  “Are you sure that you don’t want to go to school?” I asked her.

  “Yes, I’m sure. Mother said it was my choice, but I can’t abandon her. If I go back to San Cristóbal, she’ll have to work all alone in the house and fields and eat and sleep alone. Her heart will be so sad. When I ran away to go to school, I didn’t think about my mother because Hilario was still alive. I also didn’t want to think about the cargo that the Moon Virgin gave me. She put it inside my heart, but I’ve kept it there without using it for more than a month. If I go back to San Cristóbal, it will just stay inside me and do no good for anyone. It might even hurt me or someone else. Please help me, Magdalena. I have to write a letter to Doña Dolores and tell her that I’m not coming back.”

  Lucia found an old notebook and tore out a piece of paper. It took us a long time to write the letter, because each word felt like a post in a corral that we were building to keep Lucia inside. When we finished, she read the letter out loud. As I remember, it said:

  Very esteemed Doña Dolores,

  I write you with very bad news for me and for you. After I returned to Lokan, my grandfather died. He was a healer and he taught me to heal too. It was his last wish that I carry on his work. So I have to stay and serve my cargo. Please pardon me for leaving you without a servant. You were very kind to me when I lived with you, and you taught me many things, like how to cook different food. I also learned many things from the books in your library. God knows that I wanted to go to school when I returned to San Cristóbal, but it wasn’t His will. May He find you another helper very soon.

  Your devoted servant for one month,

  Lucia signed her letter with her special signature that looked like a vine curling around itself sprouting blossoms here and there. We learned how to make our signatures in school. I struggled to make mine, but Lucia learned fast and enjoyed writing her signature whenever she had a chance. If I saw it again, I would recognize it right away, and Lucia’s spirit would fill me.

  My brother was going to San Cristóbal and offered to deliver the letter to Doña Dolores. When Ricardo returned from his trip, he brought a letter from Doña Dolores for Lucia. Ricardo and I took it to Lucia, and we read it together.

  Doña Dolores started her letter with, “My very dear Lucia,” and ended it, “With much affection, Dolores.” I still can’t remember her last names! Her letter was short, but it left an impression on us. We had never received a letter from a kaxlan lady.

  In her letter, Doña Dolores said that she was very sorry that Hilario had died and understood why Lucia needed to stay in Lokan. Then she told Lucia something that I’ve never forgotten because I saw Lucia struggle so hard to do what Doña Dolores wanted her to. Doña Dolores wrote that although Lucia’s plans for school didn’t come to pass, she hoped that Lucia would have the courage to stay close to the way she was made.

  Lucia and I had never thought about how we were made. We just thought that our parents had made us, and our work was to be like them and follow what the ancestors told us to do. Later when we started listening to the word of God, we learned that we were made in God’s image. That was confusing at first, because we also learned that we were God’s children, so how could we be both like God and his children? These were some of the confusions we confronted when we started listening to the word of God.

  Lucia and I began to talk about these things after we started going to courses that the madres from the diocese held in Yabteclum. The nuns had a house there where they would stay for a few days at a time, so they could gather us together, the women and girls who were learning about the word of God. Lucia and I went and when our mothers could get away from their work, they went too.

  Carmela said that it was important for Lucia to learn the Catholic prayers because Hilario always said that our people need all the help they can get. Carmela took Hilario’s words to mean that every prayer is valuable. My parents were happy that I wanted to go to the courses so I could learn the songs and prayers and make the world like God intended it to be.

  I’ve forgotten most of the courses, but I remember one well, because that day we met Madre Ester, a young nun from Mexico City who became very important to us, especially to Lucia.

  Lucia and I left for the course about 4 a.m. We took the trails that wound through the forest from Lokan to Yabteclum because it was faster than the road. We carried sticks of pitch pine to light the way. We didn’t have flashlights back then.

  I wasn’t accustomed to walking on the trails in the dark, but by that time Lucia had become familiar with most of the trails for many miles around our community through her work as a healer. It was as if her feet were her eyes. She never lost her footing on the rocky sections of the trail and caught me once when I lost mine on a slippery rock.

  When the first light fell through the tall pines we came to a place where not only the path but the whole land was pure rocks with just a little bit of soil in between. I don’t know how the people there could survive on that land. But to my amazement, the hillside was scattered with hundreds of squash plants, bigger than any squash I’d seen in the fields of Lokan. Corn grew there too. It stood tall between the rocks, and ropes of beans covered the hillside like garlands at a fiesta.

  After three hours of walking, we arrived tired and hungry at the madres’ house.

  Verónica, I want to explain why we called the nuns madres instead of sisters. We considered them to be the priests’ complements, and since we call the priests padres, we thought it only fair to call the nuns madres. At first Lucia and I wondered if the nuns and priests lived together, like husbands and wives. But later we realized that wasn’t possible, because there weren’t enough padres to go around. But we always thought it was sad that the padres and madres didn’t have partners.

  Before Madre Ester, we would often get bored listening to the madres read Bible verses and talk to us. The madres couldn’t speak our language very well, but that didn’t stop them from trying to read to us from a tsotsil translation of the Bible. While they read to us, I remember staring off into the distance and thinking about the rolls and coffee that we would have at our morning break.

  After we had suffered through a couple of courses, Lucia stood up and asked Madre Evangelina if she would like her to read the verses from the Bible. Madre Evangelina handed the Bible to Lucia with an expression of relief. From that time on, Lucia read the verses in tsotsil, and the courses were much more interesting.

  Each morning, we stopped after a couple hours to drink coffee and eat rolls that the madres brought from San Cristóbal. This morning we watched as Madre Ester ladled coffee into cups. We didn’t drink coffee back then, so we just took our rolls and sat down under an orange tree to eat them. Madre Ester poured herself a cup of coffee. Instead of joining the other madres, she came over to sit with us under the tree while we ate the last of our rolls.

  I liked how Madre Ester looked. She was small like us and had black hair too, but it was cut short and ended just below her ears. She smiled a lot. Her face opened up when she did, like a window into her heart. She wore a dark skirt like the madres, with a white blouse and a brown sweater.

  “There you are!” she said as she sat down with us. “I’m so happy that you’ve come. You’re Lucia, right? You read Samuel 2:8 so beautifully, especially where it says, ‘He raises the poor from the dust and lifts the needy from the ash heap.’”

  Then Madre Ester looked at me and asked my name. I realized that ever since she began talking to us, she had been speaking in tsotsil!

  Lucia and I looked at each other in amazement and laughed. Madre Ester must have thought we were just being silly girls. Lucia explained that we were so surprised that she spoke our language well.

  “How did you learn tsotsil?” Lucia asked.

  “When I arrived in Chiapas about a year ago, I decided that I needed to speak tsotsil if I was going to serve God here. I knew that I would never learn tsotsil unless I lived with people who speak it every day. So I asked the Mother Sup
erior if I could live with a tsotsil family. At first she told me that no madre had ever done this before, and she didn’t think it was a good idea.

  “But she prayed about it and eventually gave me permission to live with the family of a catechist in Venustiano Carranza. In exchange for my food and a place to sleep, I helped Juan’s wife and daughters with their housework, and I worked in the fields with Juan too.”

  Madre Ester explained that after two months of living in Juan’s house, she moved to a different family’s home and stayed with them for two months. She lived with a new family every two months so that no family would be too greatly envied by the others that didn’t have her help.

  The Mother Superior agreed to this plan because, as I’ve told you, envy was a big problem in the past. Madre Ester even stayed in a couple homes of Presbyterians because she wanted them to know that there is only one God, and that He wants us to love one another. I don’t think she told the Mother Superior about those visits. She only went back to San Cristóbal a few times that year. One time she was really sick and needed a doctor.

  At first it was hard for the families to see that Madre Ester was just a person like them, no more important in God’s eyes than they are. She let them call her Madre Ester, but she served her own matz each morning and helped make tortillas for the family. She also washed her own clothes at the water hole and took turns with the women collecting water. At night she would help the children with their homework and talk about the word of God with their parents.

  Little by little the neighbors got accustomed to seeing Madre Ester at the water hole. They didn’t envy the family she was living with because they had heard that Madre Ester would be going to help another family soon, and they hoped it would be their family. Each day Madre Ester spoke tsotsil from morning until night. She even started to dream in tsotsil! She admitted it was very hard at first. For example, she wasn’t accustomed to drinking matz and not being able to bathe often. But she explained that her group of madres ate and lived very simply, so it wasn’t that much different living in an indigenous home, except that she laughed a lot more than she did living with the madres.

  It was time to go back to the meeting. Madre Ester put her arms through ours as we walked to the classroom. Later when we were ready to go home, she gave us a big hug and said, “Chino riox batel. May God go with you.”

  We knew about the mestizo tradition of embracing when people say hello or goodbye, but we never did that in our community. Of course, we knew what hugs were. When we were babies everyone hugged us. When we were growing up, we would hug each other, but it was more like a natural thing that children do, not a tradition we were supposed to follow. Of course husbands and wives hugged each other, but not in public.

  When Madre Ester first hugged us it felt strange, but I became accustomed to it and started to enjoy her arms around me. Many years later when foreigners began coming to meet the Zapatistas in Chenalhó, we received many hugs. Embracing us was a way that the foreigners showed us “solidaridad,” a castellano word I learned during that time. The word didn’t teach me anything I didn’t already know, but I liked how it tumbled off my tongue when I said it.

  I didn’t need the hugs either, but I got used to them.

  A WHITE SWEATER

  IT WAS FEBRUARY. Three months had passed since Verónica started working for Telling Our Stories. It was finally time to receive her first paycheck. She was excited to have some money. She had had to wait a long time to be paid. At a meeting in January, Diana apologized to her and the other girls because the money hadn’t come in yet, and that’s why they would have to wait a little longer to be paid.

  At first I was worried. Even though Telling Our Stories isn’t a government project, what was happening with my daughter’s pay reminded me of what happened to me and the other women when we sold our weavings at the government handicraft store. We’d wait months to receive our money. Meanwhile we needed to buy things we couldn’t raise or make.

  But I told Verónica we would just have to wait and see if we could trust Diana. From what Verónica said, Diana wasn’t like some of the mestizas we know who live in the lum. She treats Verónica and the other girls with respect.

  Anyway my daughter was enjoying her work, and she was learning a lot.

  On payday, we went together to San Cristóbal to pick up Verónica’s check. Verónica went straight to the Telling Our Stories office, and I went to the co-op store to deliver some weavings to sell from my group in Lokan. We decided to meet at the bank after our errands. I arrived first and waited for Verónica. Finally I saw her running across the street to meet me. She had a big smile on her face.

  “I got it, Mother! Diana was very nice to me. She asked me about how our work together has been going. Then she said she was looking forward to reading Lucia’s story. She apologized for the delay in getting my check, and then she handed me a big white envelope with my paycheck! We can trust her, Mother!”

  “That’s good, daughter.” I was happy for Verónica to have this money for all her hard work. I told her we better get in line at the bank. It wasn’t that long. Soon we found ourselves with money stuffed inside our purses, and a day of shopping ahead of us. We tucked our purses in the folds of our wide belts. I carried half of Verónica’s money because Victorio told us to divide her paycheck between us in case someone tried to rob us.

  Ever since she started working for Telling Our Stories, Verónica had been dreaming about buying a new sweater. That’s about all she had been talking about for the past week!

  Whenever we went to the city to buy a sweater in the past, I had to make Verónica choose one from the piles of used clothes in the market. She would search for a pink or blue sweater, but she always had to settle for some other color. Often the sweater would be too big or stretched out and stained, or missing a button. I felt bad for my daughter that I couldn’t afford to buy her a new one.

  Finally, she had her own money to buy a brand new sweater—and other things too, if she wanted them.

  The air was warming up when we came out of the bank, though the city always seems colder than Lokan. We blended into the crowds of women and men, kaxlan and indigenous, walking on the narrow stone sidewalks past shops full of all kinds of things. We stopped to look in the window with shoes of many colors and styles. I knew this store, but Verónica had never seen it. She bent over to look closely at a pair of red shoes with high heels. We’ve never worn anything but plastic sandals. But this store didn’t sell cheap shoes, so we walked on.

  I made a mental note to remind Verónica to buy a pair of sandals to replace her worn-out pair.

  When we came to the plaza in front of the cathedral, we sat down by three tall crosses near two kaxlan women who seemed to be waiting for someone. After a while they waved at a woman walking toward them. Then the two got up and walked off arm and arm together with the woman. Verónica had been watching the women. “When you come to the city, do you ever wonder where all the people are going? Where do you think those women are going? Maybe to a restaurant or to work?

  “You’ve come to San Cristóbal with me enough times to know that I’m usually too busy to look at people. I just go to the stores where I need to buy things and head home when I’m done.”

  But this day we weren’t in a hurry. I got caught up with Verónica watching the people. I noticed the tourists making their way across the plaza, stopping to take photos of the cathedral.

  One couple carried backpacks and wore puffy pants tied at their ankles. The pants were made of patches of the cloth that Guatemalan vendors sell in the market near the church of Santo Domingo. One of them wore his hair in dozens of long braids. It looked like he hadn’t combed it in a long time. The couple stopped not far from me when three little girls from Chamula came running up to try to sell some woven bracelets to them. The girls held out long strings loaded with dozens of bracelets and when they reached the tourists they turned their faces upward, looked them in the eye, and said at the same time, “Buy o
ne!” The couple stopped to look at the bracelets and bought one from each of the girls.

  When the two reached the cathedral steps, another group of girls tried to sell them bracelets, but they didn’t want to buy any more and told them “No, thank you.” Actually, they told them “No, thank you” many times before the girls went away.

  Soon the little girls found a new customer and ran after him, but he wouldn’t stop. When the girls kept following him, he turned around and shooed them away, like bothersome dogs. It made me angry to see the little vendors treated this way, but I also thought about how it must feel to be a tourist trying to walk peacefully through the plaza while a little girl stops him every few feet, demanding he buy something.

  The bells filled the plaza with a beautiful sound. They were announcing the next mass. I told Verónica that we should go inside and say a prayer of thanks for her job.

  Verónica had only one thing on her mind—shopping—but she followed me inside. We entered through the huge wooden doors, crossed ourselves, and then found a place to kneel near the back. After we said our prayers and got back on our feet, I paused before leaving to let my eyes wander around the cathedral. Here and there were statues of saints and vases of lilies and other beautiful flowers. I took a deep breath and my whole body filled with the fragrance of flowers, incense, and candle smoke.

  I looked up at the ceiling, covered with thousands of little wooden squares, and saw something I’d never seen before. Just below the ceiling two men dressed in white coats were standing on a platform with paint brushes in their hands. I whispered to my daughter, “Look at the men up there!” Verónica followed my finger to the two men walking along a narrow plank like sure-footed cats. We watched as they bent over paint cans and then got back up to stroke the white beams that held up the ceiling. Their movements looked like silent prayers to God.