When a Woman Rises

by Christine Eber

  “Because we humans are not pure, like God or Mother Earth. Our bodies smell. We spill blood, urine, and feces on Mother Earth. We ask God to forgive us our humanness. We might not need to, but we do it anyway. Now, let me finish telling you what Lucia did after her first prayer and at the next two prayers.”

  After Lucia finished praying, she took the bottle of pox and sprinkled it over the floor in front of the candles. Of course, she didn’t drink any of the pox because she had stopped, and the Believers don’t drink. She gave the sodas to Edgar and Javier who began to measure out cups for everyone present. They served your father and me first because we were the ones who had asked Lucia to pray. Before we left the chapel, she prayed a few more words.

  When we got up to leave, Ceiba, one of our compañeros’ daughters, was giggling because her father was asleep on his knees. Javier nudged him to get up, and we all laughed as he opened his eyes and realized what had happened.

  We made our way carefully down the trail from the chapel to the church in the center of the lum. We only had a couple pitch pine torches to light our way, but no one fell and soon we arrived at the church.

  It was about 4 a.m when Lucia started her second prayer inside the church. I don’t need to give it to you because it was like the one I just prayed. The only difference between the first and second prayers was that Lucia didn’t use pox in the church because the padre didn’t allow it inside.

  Too bad he didn’t ban it inside the rectory! He was quite a drinker, the padre.

  Even if he didn’t understand why we were against pox, the madres did, and they supported us in our campaign to help people stop drinking.

  By the time we had returned to the co-op store in Lokan for the final and third prayer, everyone was really tired, even Lucia. But you would never know it. She prayed with her whole heart for at least another hour.

  When she was done, she announced “I’m finished,” but only a few people heard her because almost everyone was asleep, sprawled out on petates and pieces of plastic covering the cold cement. Only Edgar, Javier, and your father and I heard. Your father and I had taken turns dozing off while Lucia prayed. We made the effort to stay awake because it had been our idea to ask her to pray, and we wanted to support her as much as we could.

  Edgar and Javier were in charge of getting breakfast for Lucia. When they thought her prayer was almost over, they went to their homes to collect the breakfast for Lucia that their wives had made. We didn’t want Lucia to wait too long to eat because she had really sacrificed for us. Seeing her slumped over in a chair trying to keep from falling asleep, I thanked God for helping Lucia find the strength to make it through the night so our little group could struggle for a better life.

  Our compañeros came back with a special breakfast for Lucia—fried eggs in chicken broth, shrimp, refried beans, and tortillas. While Lucia ate, she said that she could do more prayers if necessary in a cave near Lokan, the one where Mol Miguel had prayed for her and where it was said that Earth gave the ancestors the first corn and beans.

  We thanked her for the offer, but most of us thought that it wouldn’t be necessary. And it turned out that it wasn’t. After Lucia prayed, the people who opposed us stopped spreading rumors about the store. Little by little their envy and anger got carried away by the wind, just as Lucia prayed it would.

  THE MOON VIRGIN COMES AGAIN

  FIVE MONTHS HAD PASSED since I started to tell Lucia’s story. Verónica’s tape recorder had thousands, maybe millions of words on it. Words that I had given her. Some were even holy, like the words of Lucia’s prayers. Each time we sat down together, Verónica seemed more interested in our work. She even showed me a different kind of respect, not the kind people receive just because they’re your parents, but the kind that people earn by how they act and treat other people. We still joked with each other, and sometimes I had to correct misunderstandings, but I felt something growing between us that hadn’t existed before.

  Even so, sometimes I didn’t feel I deserved my daughter’s respect in the way she was showing it to me. One day, I was feeling unsure about what I was doing telling Lucia’s story into a tape recorder. Perhaps that was why I touched the buttons on the machine, something I’d never done before.

  Verónica had her back to me and was surprised when she heard a clicking sound. She turned around right away. When she saw my hand on the tape recorder, she yelled, “Don’t touch anything! That’s my job!” I pulled my hand back quickly, like a child caught in the act of doing something forbidden. I reached for a blouse on the back of my chair and soon the needle and thread were in my hands, and I was embroidering.

  “I’m sorry, Mother,” she said. “I shouldn’t have spoken to you that way. I was just afraid you would erase your words, all our hard work.”

  I laid the blouse in my lap and sat still, not saying anything.

  “What’s the matter? Can’t you forgive me?” she asked me.

  When I finally spoke, my words came from the bottom of a deep well. My faint voice and the way I twisted my face as I spoke must have made Verónica feel that she needed to listen to me with her whole heart because I never saw her pay so much attention to me.

  “I’m just a woman of the mountains, a woman of the hills. Even after all the changes that came to Lokan, I still don’t know anything. All I know how to do is weave and take care of the house. If the madres and the Zapatistas hadn’t come to Lokan, I would never have known how ignorant I am.

  “Doing this project, I see all the things you know how to do, and I feel my ignorance even more. How I wanted to go to school when I was young! Why did I give up without a fight? Then after you met Rodrigo, I did the same thing to you that my mother did to me. I didn’t let you stay in school. I made you choose between school and Rodrigo.

  “Now, here you are living with us without a husband, when the other girls your age are married and having babies. For months I’ve been talking to you about Lucia, who tried so hard to be different, to be free to be herself, but all the time I’m thinking about how I’m not free, and I haven’t helped you be free.

  “And who knows whether Lucia’s living the life she wanted or maybe she’s not even alive! Why didn’t we try harder to find out what happened to her? Why didn’t I send your father to the farm where she went to work to ask if anyone had seen her? Why didn’t I go there myself? I have many regrets, many regrets about what I didn’t do, about what I didn’t learn to do.”

  I began to weep. Tears pooled on my chin and dripped onto my shawl. Verónica knelt beside me and put her arms around me. My chest was moving up and down from crying. In that moment, I felt like giving up our experiment. I think that Verónica was worried I might give up because she held me tight and wouldn’t let me go.

  I let her hold me for awhile after I stopped crying. Then I pulled myself up straight and gently removed her arm from around my shoulders. I smiled to let her know I was better. “Daughter, listen to me because I’m going to tell you something I never told you before. I’m going to tell you about how bad things were for me, your father, and Lucia the year you were born. And something I almost did because I was really afraid.”

  “Alright, Mother,” Verónica said. “But first I want to tell you that you aren’t just a woman of the mountains. You know a lot. You know how to tell a person’s life story so we can understand how they felt, why they did what they did. When Lucia’s story is done, you and I will be authors. Just think! Your words will be in a book! You’ll be famous!”

  I chuckled. “You know that books don’t matter to me. But I’m glad that I can help you and I won’t abandon our experiment. Sometimes I just have to tell you how all this talking makes me feel. Now, let me talk again!

  We both laughed. “Alright, Mother, I’m listening!”

  Well, the year you were born was a good year for Lucia because she wasn’t drinking anymore, and many people asked her to pray for them. Word had gotten around about how the co-op store was doing well after she prayed for
it. People even came all the way from Chamula to ask her to pray, but she didn’t want to leave her mother so she only prayed in Lokan and nearby communities.

  Your father and I took our turn at the store along with the other co-op members. It was a sacrifice because we had to leave your brothers at home by themselves. But Abolino and Sebastian were in school by then, and when they came home in the afternoon they knew how to help themselves to tortillas and beans. I hated for them to eat alone, but it was what we had to do.

  I said there were beans, but in truth during those years we usually ran out of beans many months before the next harvest. When we didn’t have money to buy beans, we just ate tortillas and greens with a little salt. I know that greens are good for you, but in those years when we had only greens to put inside our tortillas we felt no better than cows.

  Around this time, we started to plant coffee because we heard that we could sell it at a good price and with that money buy the beans we couldn’t produce ourselves. I also started to sell my weavings through a co-op that wasn’t part of the government. From that day until today selling coffee and weavings has been the only way we’ve been able to survive.

  For a long time before you were born, your father went away for months at a time to make money to buy what we couldn’t grow. He built roads. He cut sugar cane and took care of cattle on a ranch one year. He never left Chiapas, but little by little they stopped building roads and other things. Your father and other men from Lokan didn’t have any way to make money. We still had land to plant milpa, but not enough to grow all the food we needed. Now that your brothers have their inheritance there’s even less, and they can barely feed their families. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

  The year before you were born, when the coffee harvest came in, we could only get a few pesos for it. The price had dropped so much that we wondered why we had bothered to plant it. With the few pesos we earned from selling our coffee, we could only buy beans for a couple months. Your father talked about going to find work in Veracruz or Cancún. But he had a cargo in the Word of God, and we depended on him to do his turn at the co-op store.

  Not long after your father talked about going away to work, I found out that I was pregnant. I felt desperate because I didn’t think we could feed another mouth. When we ran out of corn, I ground up a root and made a dough like masa to make tortillas.

  The night that I told your father I was pregnant, I didn’t know what he would say. I didn’t know if he would be happy and say we didn’t need to worry, or if he would be sad like me.

  He was worried, and so we talked about what we could do. We talked about getting an abortion, even though the padres and madres didn’t approve of it. Since they weren’t married and didn’t have children, we didn’t take their words about having babies into our hearts.

  We made a plan to go to a clinic where a promotora who spoke tsotsil did abortions. I didn’t know if it was the right thing to do. For many nights before the day we were to go, I couldn’t sleep. I kept wondering if the Virgin Mary would be angry with me for not having my baby. I prayed to her to forgive me. But I also wondered what kind of a child my baby would be, would it be a girl or a boy, would it look like me or your father? If it was a girl, would she want me to teach her to weave when she got bigger?

  I woke up extra early the morning we were to go to the clinic and went into the kitchen to make tortillas. When your father came in, he found me crying while I was turning the last of the tortillas on the comal.

  He sat down by the fire and put his head in his hands. I was still crying when I said, “I’ve been thinking that we don’t have as many children as most families and we only have boys. You know what the ancestors say, that mothers are guardians of their sons’ souls and fathers of their daughters’ souls. I have two sons’ souls to care for, but you don’t have even one daughter’s. I think we need to have our child, in case it’s a girl. Even if it’s not, we’ll have another son to help you in the fields and to bring more happiness into our home.

  Your father kept his head in his hands while I talked and didn’t look up for a long time, or at least it seemed so. Finally, he said, “You’re right. Our family isn’t that big. We can feed this baby. God will help us. I’ve always wanted a daughter and even if we don’t have one, another son will be good too.”

  So it was settled, and we went on as if we’d never thought of not having you. Your birth was easier than when I had your two brothers. When I first saw you and then during the six days we rested together on our separate bed near the fire, I felt sure that I had done the right thing. You were a very pretty baby. You had the same long eyelashes you have now and the same reddish color in your hair when the sun hits it. I felt content that now your father had a child’s soul to care for, and I had a daughter to teach how to weave.

  And look at you now! You’re a good weaver, and you’re learning how to write people’s stories.”

  Verónica didn’t look pleased at my compliment. She turned off the tape recorder and seemed to be searching for words. Finally she said, “I’m trying to imagine not being wanted or not even being alive! I need some time to think about how I almost didn’t come to be.”

  I felt sorry for Verónica and wanted to help her accept what I’d told her, so I said, “Remember how it was the year you lived with Rodrigo? You wouldn’t have wanted a baby with him. You were so poor. Rodrigo hardly brought you any corn or beans, and he was cruel to you. How could you have had a baby when you couldn’t even feed yourself? That’s how your father and I felt.”

  “It’s true, I’m glad I didn’t have a baby when I lived with Rodrigo. Some day I would like to have one though. But for now my job is keeping me busy.”

  Verónica was quiet. I didn’t know what to say, so I told her I wanted to continue telling about the problems and conflicts in Chenalhó at that time. She nodded and turned on the tape recorder.

  The same year you were born, a group of Catholics in the northern part of Chenalhó got together and started the Civil Society of the Bees, which we just called the Bees. They never use arms to protest. Instead they used words and marches to sting the government like bees to make it listen to injustices.

  We had a lot of tensions during those years between the religious ones and the different political parties. When the Bees first got together, there were disagreements about who owned a gravel pit. Some people died during that time. Now we know that the bad government was trying to manipulate people by giving them money so they’d stay quiet and helping men arm themselves and form paramilitary groups to crush the people who want justice.

  Lucia and I found out about the Bees when we went to the courses in Yabteclum and after your father came back from meetings of the Believers where there were many Bees. Your father’s sisters married men who were Bees. Your aunt Ernestina married a Bee too. That’s why none of them are Zapatistas. But we support one another, our organizations are united.

  During this time I was mostly thinking about my family and my weavings, not much about the troubles going on. Lucia was thinking about prayers and healing plants and also trying to keep herself and her mother fed by working in others’ fields. But she was always a little sad.

  I missed her smile and hearty laugh. We still visited back and forth. Lucia always brought us lemongrass because none grew near our house. Your brothers loved lemongrass tea, and you giggled with joy when Lucia came to visit. She’d bounce you up and down on her lap and carry you around in her shawl, just like you were her own child.

  Then one night, one cold night in 1993—I know the year because it was in December just before the struggle began—Lucia had a dream. She was always dreaming and telling me about her dreams, but this dream was different. It was another cargo dream, like the one she had when she was a little girl. But we didn’t know it at the time. We just knew that Lucia had to pay attention to it and wait to find out what it meant.

  Your father had gone to get firewood, you and your brothers were still sleeping, and I was mak
ing tortillas like I am right now when Lucia came running down the path. She paused outside the door, just long enough to ask if I was home.

  Then she rushed in, which wasn’t like her, and sat abruptly on the chair beside me. I could see that she had something urgent to say,

  “What is it, Comadre? Did something happen?”

  She took a deep breath and said, “Yes, something happened. Do you remember the dream I had when I was little? Well, the Moon Virgin came to me again.”

  “She did?” I was surprised and a little envious.

  “Yes, she did. She did. In my dream I was still sleeping, but I woke up when a bright light filled the space around my bed. The Moon Virgin stood inside the light, holding out her arms to me. Then she started to talk to me.

  ‘She said, ‘Daughter, I’ve seen that you’re not drinking. My heart is happy that you gave up pox and that you’re doing good work on Earth. But I can see that you’re still sad. I don’t want you to be sad. I believe in you. You’re my daughter. That’s why I’ve come to tell you that your work has just begun. I’ve come to call you to do new work for me and for all the Believers on Earth. Don’t be afraid. I’ll take care of you. I’ll give you strength because you’re my chosen child. Just be patient and pray. Talk to me. Soon your work will be revealed to you.’”

  THE TIME OF STRUGGLE

  I HAD JUST FINISHED TELLING VERÓNICA about Lucia’s dream when we heard Victorio unloading firewood. I could see that Verónica didn’t want to stop our work, but I always stopped what I was doing when Victorio came home from chopping wood or working in the fields. I respected how hard he worked and didn’t want to take him for granted. So I gave him his food and matz and sat down and talked with him.

  “Let’s continue later today,” I told Verónica. “I need to finish the ceremonial blouse I’ve been working on.”