But your people seemed to grasp it! I said. The damnedest thing. I never felt I truly had the hang of it, even after all those years. But you all seemed perfectly willing to believe I'd brought the Truth, to kneel and accept the wafer, to go along.
What could we do, Senor? The Mundo everywhere are facing extinction. If there is no one studying us, we are not seen as valuable to the world. The ladinos come and capture us, force us to work in the forests and the mines. Rape our daughters and sisters and mothers. Even when we live in caves, high up in the mountains, they have found us.
I think the hollowness, the emptiness in me is what killed my wife, I said.
She was a woman of much life, said Manuelito. Magdalena was like her in that way.
I think she kept looking deep into me, as deep as she could peer, down beyond my "handsomeness," down beyond my sex appeal. Down beyond my begging and clinging. And one day, as she looked, I believe she saw it was as she had feared. That inside I was abyss.
You are weeping, Senor, said Manuelito softly. This is not a necessary activity for the dead.
And then, I said, sniffling, the cancer that swallowed her saw its chance. It pounced. No one could protect her from what she knew. She had spent her life with a man without a center, without belief.
No, no, said Manuelito. A man distracted from his belief. His belief in woman. In the woman he made love to, the woman-to-be who was his own child.
Magdalena was always singing, I said. We were now watching workmen remove the doorframe from her door and wheel in a large cart. Several large men nudged and prodded and pushed her body toward the edge of the bed.
Where do you suppose she'll meet her mother? I asked Manuelito.
By the river, he answered promptly. The Mundo believe that is where all children, when they die, meet their mothers.
The River
She was sitting on a flat stone in the shade of a red boulder. There was a riverbed, but it was dry.
I have been waiting for you, Magdalena, she said quietly. I want to cross this thing, but the song I need is missing from my notes.
Your notebook itself is missing, I said to her.
She laughed. It is quite a surprise to find yourself so completely without the old props, she said. I sit here hour after hour, as I did in the old days, going over my notes, just as I did then. Except they don't exist. Any more than I do.
It dawned on me then what my task was: it was to teach her the song of vado, crossing over. That meant my other task would no doubt involve my father, and, I hoped, Manuelito.
I stopped myself in mid-thought. Did the dead have hope?
My life was ruined, I said to my mother, because you did not stand up for me.
Oh, darling, she said, how can you say that?
I can say it because it is true, I said. But don't worry, I will teach you the Mundo initiation song. In spite of everything, I said, looking at the dry riverbed, I want you to cross.
I don't know, she said, frowning, and peering across the river. There doesn't seem to be anything in particular on the other side.
No, I said, there's not.
Then why cross? she asked.
The Mundo would say "because."
Because?
Yes, because you have reached the edge of this side. What else is there to do but to cross?
But one side is like another.
That is true.
It doesn't make a great deal of sense, if you ask me.
Still, you would like to cross, would you not?
Yes, I would.
Why?
My mother thought for a long time. She was a pretty, shadowy woman, her eyebrows very dark in her pale, wasted face. I watched light begin to dawn.
Oh, she said.
Yes? I queried.
Crossing is the point, she said. Crossing is life. Being on one side or the other of the river is beside the point.
That is what it means to accept being alive, yes, I said. That is what the Mundo believe.
Your father loved me with all the heart that he had, said my mother.
It was not large, I said.
It was a frightened heart, she said. His people were enslaved people who in fact became slaves. You do not become free again by wishing it.
Why didn't you leave him? I asked. If you had left him there is a chance his heart might have grown.
I was too used to him, she said. It was really very good between us, Maggie, especially before you and your sister were born. We bonded on so many levels! However, taking the church's money under false pretexts, well, it was the one big lie that, as the Mundo would say, definitely unraveled our world!
I laughed. My mother seemed almost merry. A sign of the genuinely loved, no matter how small the heart loving them. I died eating chocolate cake and hating you, I said. I was eager to die. I thought that if I died I could at least have it out with you. Now, I said, none of that seems to matter.
If it doesn't matter, she said pertly, give us a kiss.
A kiss between the dead is a breeze. Umm, my mother said, a gentle dust devil, embracing me.
Anyone Can See
That the Sky Is Naked
VADO
Anyone can see that the sky is naked
and if the sky is naked
the earth must be
naked too.
While we were waiting for Magdalena, Manuelito, who never referred to her as June, began to teach me the Mundo initiation song. As I practiced singing, I could see he was sometimes amused by my efforts.
What is wrong? I asked. Am I not doing it right?
There is no right or wrong way to sing, Senor. To be really human is to fully understand this. However, the way that you sneak up on the words and attempt to capture them reminds me of the way ladinos sing. They like to perfect things, even singing! Once perfected, of course, singing loses its thrill.
What does it mean to say:
From far across the water your destiny
comes swimming to your soul
and in the branches of the nearest tree
lives the first cousin of your hair.
Ah, said Manuelito, this is a question I also asked the elders. It is a verse that I loved but at the same time it was difficult for me to grasp.
It is about the way you are always moving toward your fate, in life. Like a fish that leaves home a free being and ends up that same day fastened on the end of a line. Someone's tasty dinner in spite of its dreams. As for the rest, the Mundo believe the trees are close relatives, and that the wind itself is a relative and is always caressing its kin, as it were.
Anyone can see that woman is the mother
of the oldest man on earth
is it not then a prayer
to bow before her?
Anyone can see that man is the father
of the oldest woman on earth
is it not then a prayer
to bow before him?
But Manuelito, I said, there are some who believe in parthenogenesis. That woman originally did not need man in order to give birth. That she could create life within herself without his help. And furthermore, there are those who believe that for a million years or so this is what she did.
We did not know her at that time, said Manuelito. If we had, our Story would tell us about her. We know woman and man as equals. Differently beautiful, as the elders would say.
And this stanza, I said:
Entering this life one is kissed
in all five of the places
that let in the light.
Leaving one is also
kissed.
It is simple, Senor, he said. When a child is born it is kissed by both its parents in five places: its ears are kissed, its eyes, its nose, its mouth and the place where life begins. When someone dies, those who intimately love her or him will also kiss these same places.
When one prepares to make love
for the first time
mother arrives singing
fathe
r is there
sweetgrass and
feathers are brought
eggs are eaten
one is kissed in all five
places
the sweet breasts
are thanked
one is sent to the loved one
blessed.
I was beginning to get the tune. Slow and dreamy. Tremulous. There seemed to be a vibration in the body this song stirred up. As I sang I felt myself quite moved.
It is this stanza that gave us the most trouble with the priests, said Manuelito.
But it is very beautiful, I said, like all the others.
Yes, he said, but have you really listened to what it is telling you? We explained to them that at the ceremony of joining lovers together we burned sweetgrass to cleanse ourselves and our surroundings. That we used feathers to spread the smoke all around. That eggs were eaten in the hope that the union would be fertile, not just in children, but in ideas, creativity, bountifulness for the tribe. All these things they said they understood. However, they did not appreciate the idea of a mother and father touching the breasts and kissing the vulva and phallus of their grown children, even to bless them. We explained that the kissing was respectful, the lightest touch. But they did not care. Because we practiced this, they raided our villages, hacked off our heads with machetes, enslaved us to work in the gold and silver mines. Burned our children alive.
For some reason this struck me as comically vile.
Why do you smile, Senor? asked Manuelito.
Because it is so stupid. In our culture you can watch men and women sucking on each other all day long on television.
But it was out of this tradition of hypocrisy that you came to us, Senor.
My thoughts turned to my daughter Susannah. When she was little, it was always difficult to know what things frightened her; she was composed, unflappable, even as a child. Stolid in her aura of calm, if thoughtful, repose. However, what frightened her more than anything else that I knew of during her childhood was the discovery one day that the Nuer people, in the unmapped wilds of southwest Ethiopia, forced the women to wear disks the size of dinner plates in their bottom lips. Langley had visited this tribe and brought back photographs.
But, Mommy, Susannah had said, wide-eyed, how can the women talk with those things in their lips? How can they eat?
Langley explained that the women only had to wear them in the presence of the men, and that yes, eating was a problem. From the men's perspective, however, the women's condition assured that the women could barely speak in the men's presence, so heavy was the ceramic disk, and this ensured their silence; also, the women could not eat as fast as the men. Which meant the men ate most of the food.
Susannah had had nightmares for weeks after seeing the photographs. She would stand in front of the mirror stretching her own bottom lip.
What are you doing? I asked her one day.
Pulling on her lip she said: But I can only stretch it this far. If I stretch it further, it hurts.
Lips are like rubber bands, I said. She gave me a look of horror. That is what the dentist once said to me, I added hastily. But actually, the way it is done is simple: first a small disk is put into the hole that has been cut in the lip, then a bit later, a larger one, then a larger and larger one, until you get to the dinner-plate size.
And you call that simple, she had said, with a look of grown-up dismay. She was equally disturbed by the sight of women who were forced to wear heavy iron collars around their necks with what appeared to be an iron penis sticking out in front.
How much does that thing weigh? she asked Langley.
Ten pounds or so, said her mother. About as much as this bag of rice.
Susannah looked stricken.
Why don't the women revolt? asked Magdalena.
By now they are the enforcers, said Langley, sighing. They have no memory or record of a time when they did not wear disks and did not wear iron collars with penises on them.
God, I said, it's pretty damn blatant.
All three of my girls turned to look coolly at me.
Yes, said my wife. While I was there I stayed with missionaries who deplored everything about the tribe. Except these practices. They thought that since the women were the enforcers they had originally dreamed them up and were not oppressed by them. Besides, they said it was these symbols of tribal culture--the disks, the iron collar--that made the tribe unique. I said, But the lips and the necks of the women are raw and infected. And because the collars can never be taken off, their necks are never washed. They shrugged and said they passed out cotton swabs, and gallons of alcohol. The men, as I understood it, frequently attempted to drink the alcohol, with horrific results.
It was wonderful being married to my wife. I had the feeling that nothing of importance ever escaped her interest; that she was as open as a sea anemone to the prickling realities of the world. She was alive in her thoughts and her passions in a way that I had ceased to be.
How do you keep believing in your own thoughts? I asked her. How do you continue to have faith in your own beliefs?
She had been building a fire in the corner fireplace of our dusty adobe dwelling. Shrugging her sexy shoulders, she said: I believe my own senses, she said. I feel others because I feel myself. Nobody would freely choose to slit her own lip. Nobody would freely choose a neck rubbed permanently raw and chewed on by flies. I had to force myself to stay under the same roof with the missionaries, she said. I couldn't join the Nuer because I would have had to classify myself as male to receive any respect, from the men or the women.
Ah, my love, I had said, suggestively, while opening wide my arms, how regally you manage to sit on the horns of any dilemma. I have a small dilemma here that I believe you could help me with. But this was one of the few times my wife absolutely refused to make love. Instead, rising from the hearth, with a weariness in her movements she almost never showed, she gave me what I'd come to classify as simply "the look."
We have heard, said Manuelito, that there are people who, just before the young are to be married, cut them there. In the place where the Mundo kiss.
This is true, I said. Parts of the body are cut off and, with a curse, thrown away.
Manuelito's face was a study in disbelief.
Even our dead do not know this, Senor, he said.
Anthropologists, like the priests and the missionaries, have known about this for a long time. Without protest, I added.
How hard life is to understand! said Manuelito. Death should be much easier, don't you think, Senor?
Crossing
I had never dreamed I would one day have to go to Magdalena's apartment and pack up her things. That she would be dead, and I would be left, the last one of our family, alive. Daunted by the huge pieces of heavy furniture and by the tall piles of gross, unwashed clothes I encountered everywhere, I started by cleaning out the refrigerator, on the front of which was taped a snapshot of me. Typed above my head were the words "Suffering Makes You Thin."
I stared at the photograph in a trance. The woman in it looked out at me smiling. It was true that she was thin; I noted the bones that showed above the neckline of her black dress. The finger she was pointing at the camera was a bony one. The photo appeared to have been taken at a party; I was clowning. It must have been taken by one of Magdalena's students the week I stayed with her and attempted to help get her deteriorating body in shape. We'd gone to Weight Watchers, to the gym, to a spa. Nothing had made much of an impression on her.
She had simply kept singing. Sometimes audibly, sometimes under her breath. Sometimes humming the melody of the song she had learned in her youth. The song Manuelito taught her.
One day, weighing her, we noticed she had lost two whole pounds. I'd clapped my hands and said merrily, thoughtlessly, stupidly: You see, suffering makes you thin!
She had looked at me as if she didn't care if she ever saw me again.
In the end, I hired movers to clear out Magdalena's stuff. I
gave her clothes and furnishings to charities. I gave her papers to the university where she had taught. I kept the copies of our parents' anthropological articles that they'd published in the Fifties.
It saddened me that Magdalena had died alone. Was she singing? I wondered. Which was all she seemed at the end to hope for. I asked this question of the men who were first on the scene; men in white coats, distracted and brusque. They did not want to tell me at first how she was found. A can of beer locked in one hand, a hunk of chocolate cake squashed in the other. The sweet and the sour, commingling forever in her mouth. No, if she was stuffing her face, she couldn't have been singing, they finally said.
Closing the apartment for the last time, removing her galoshes and umbrella from beside the door, tossing them into the trash as I walked down the street, I felt an emptiness, a lightness actually, that was not unpleasant. I could not pretend I would miss a sister I never really had. Ours had been a sistership that was fatally blighted one sultry afternoon in the mountains of Mexico. I would have loved having a sister; but Magdalena wasn't the sister I would have loved having.
A few days after her death I received a package, addressed in Magdalena's loping, rather sloppy hand. Inside there was a photograph of a very cute, young Manuelito riding Vado, and a beautiful if crudely made black leather belt decorated with small, oxidized silver disks. There was a letter that began with the stanza of a song:
At the crossing
it is the right way
to release those who
have taken comfort
from our torment.
It is the right way
to leave this place
with a heart
softer than stone.
At the crossing
it is the right
way
to forgive.
It is the right way to release
all hostility toward those
who wound us
by their hapless presence
alone.
It is in forgetting
the trespass
of others
that the vado
at last
becomes home.
Dear Susannah, she wrote, imagine! If the Mundo are right there will be no reason for us to see each other ever again, even after we are dead. Our relationship, ostensibly as sisters, was in fact a relationship of strangers. I successfully killed all sisterly feeling in myself toward you, in any case. Perhaps if people do reincarnate, as some believe, we will find ourselves once again in each other's lives. I will be your butler or you will be my father-in-law.