Pablo came forward. He kissed her hand, then bowed his head, asking for her blessing: “La bendición, Abuelita.” Pablo had told me this was the old country way of saying hello and goodbye to your elders.
“Pablito, how you have grown!” She had to crane her neck to look up at her tall grandson. The pleasure of gazing upon the young man she recalled as a boy put a momentary smile on her tragic face. She hooked her arm in his and said, “Ya, it is time. Let us go bury my Daniel.”
A crowd of mostly relatives was waiting at the village graveyard. Blood family—I could really see what that term meant here. Grandsons and nephews, granddaughters and nieces to continue the story. I wondered if, in a nearby village, a grandmother was grieving a daughter or son without the consolation of a granddaughter to carry on.
That night, by gas lamp, we ate the feast that Abuelita and several of the women in the village had prepared. We hadn’t eaten all day, so we were starved.
“Cuéntenme, cuéntenme,” Abuelita kept saying. Tell me, tell me. She was torn between wanting to know right away all about the Bolívars’ life allá, over there in the United States, and wanting them to have seconds and thirds.
While we finished eating, Abuelita started in on her own stories. Fondly she recalled the days when Abuelito was alive. Plantains, sweet potatoes bigger than the ones we were eating tonight, oranges, coffee, you name it. Everything Abuelito planted turned a profit. She laughed, twisting the gold band on her finger as if to be in touch with him. In the old face, I could see she was still in love with the man she had lost over a decade ago. What a pity that none of her sons had taken up farming! Daniel, her youngest, always so clever, went off to the university; Antonio, the hardworking oldest, became a builder; el pobre Max, poor Max, with his bad temper, joined the military. A strange silence followed the mention of this name.
Late that night, the visitors began saying farewells. I was so drained from the long trip and the sad burial ceremony that I could have fallen asleep right where I was sitting. But somewhere on the list of dos and don’ts for guests—even though Mom had not mentioned it—I knew there had to be a rule about not going to sleep while your hostess is still talking.
One thing I wondered was where we were all going to sleep. The house looked tiny. Maybe in the Bolívars’ car . . . Pablo and I in the back seat . . . our fingers intertwined . . . heads together . . .
Mrs. Bolívar must have seen my eyelids drooping. “We have to get everyone situated, Abuelita. Where are you going to put us?”
Abuelita stood up, taking charge. “I have it all arranged!” Riqui, Camilo, and Pablito were sleeping in her sons’ old room. The dignitaries were being housed by the mayor. Mr. and Mrs. Bolívar here in the front room, on a mattress she kept stored in the back. She, on that cot. Esperanza and Dulce and I could take the big bed in her room.
“No, no!” Dulce protested. How could that be! Take away her bed? “Don’t even think it.” Especially when Los Luceros was just a short distance away, and her family would be upset if we didn’t stay there.
“I’ll drive them over,” Pablo was quick to volunteer. My heart started beating so loud I was sure everyone could hear it.
“¿Tú estás loco?” Mrs. Bolívar scolded. Was he crazy? “You are not accustomed to driving in this country, no less on mountain roads!”
A discussion followed about whether or not Pablo should be the one to drive us in one of the rented vans. I thought about how everyone had opposed my taking a walk down crowded, daytime city streets. Years of fear, Pablo had mentioned, made everyone’s worst-case-scenario imagination work overtime.
Riqui finally cast the decisive vote. Good old Riqui, who had supposedly lost his knowledge of women in prison, seemed to have picked up on the milagrito everyone else had missed.
“Let this boy become a man!” he pronounced, holding up the keys to one of the vans. “He’s the safest to drive, Mamá, believe me. The rest of us have had our tragos tonight.” I had seen the rum bottle making its rounds. Pablo, I knew, did not have a taste for the liquor, which along with overly sweet sodas, cafecitos, and yerbabuena tea seemed to be the favorite beverages in this country.
“Bueno,” Mrs. Bolívar finally conceded. Okay. Pablo could drive us over, but she did not want him driving back alone tonight. “You stay there and bring everyone back in the morning.”
Pablo and I glanced at each other, both of us trying hard not to smile at this added opportunity to be together. When I looked away, I noticed Riqui winking at his brother.
And so at that late hour, with the headlights of the van and a star-studded sky and half moon to guide us, we drove the short distance to the neighboring village of Los Luceros. If I had been sleepy before, I was wide awake now. Every little house we passed, I held my breath, hoping for a voice or a silhouette in a dark doorway that would trigger some memory of my original family.
“That must be the old coffee estate.” Dulce was pointing out the window.
Two tall posts held the twisted remains of a gate; many of the bars were missing. Overhead, the iron grillwork spelled a name I couldn’t make out. The driveway led up toward what looked like the ruins of an old house.
I was about to ask about it, but just then Esperanza called out, “Look!” Hundreds, no thousands, of stars filled the night sky. There were so many, I couldn’t really say there was a “first” to wish by. I wondered if people here wished on stars the way we did in the States.
“They say each one is a soul,” Dulce observed in a dreamy voice. “No wonder so many can be seen above Los Luceros! Our dead are watching us.”
Looking up, I couldn’t help thinking of the long list of names that had been read out at the burial this afternoon. So many had been lost in these mountains. Suddenly, there was only one thing I could think to wish for: peace on earth.
We drove into Los Luceros in silence, watched by those stars.
That night, I ended up in a room with Esperanza and her girl cousins at her aunt’s house. Dulce slept next door at her mother’s, where Pablo was also invited to stay. But he insisted on bedding down in the back of the van. Later, Pablo told me that the room offered to him had been that of Dulce’s brother, who had been killed in one of the massacres. He didn’t have to explain to me why he wouldn’t want to sleep among ghosts.
I myself didn’t sleep a wink, thinking of mine. What had happened to my birth parents? Why had they given me up? All night, vague faces kept approaching—my birth parents, looking sometimes like Dulce, sometimes like Mr. and Mrs. Bolívar or Mom and Dad. I would sit up to take a closer look, but the faces dissolved before my eyes. It was like one of those sketch pads I used to love as a kid where you’d lift the plastic sheet to erase your doodles. Sometimes I’d draw a face I’d think of as my birth mother’s. Then I’d lift the sheet and watch her slowly disappear.
Finally, light began seeping in through the cracks in the wall. I couldn’t bear another minute of lying there. I slipped out of bed, dressed quickly, and found my way through the quiet house to the front door. My plan was to sit on the porch until Pablo came by. Maybe we’d get a chance to take a walk through town before the others woke up.
The front door was a creaker. Poor Esperanza if she moved here, I thought. This was a perfect alarm system to alert parents if you got in after curfew. Then I remembered where I was. Esperanza wasn’t allowed out in the capital, forget here. And even if the old rules started changing with the new democracy, there weren’t any guys around to date. On the drive over, Dulce had said that hardly any males over ten and under sixty were left in Los Luceros.
From the porch, I could see the small central square straight ahead. A tall, shady tree spread out over most of it, making a second night underneath its branches. There was no sign of the van on the narrow streets. Pablo had probably parked in the back alleyway so as not to block traffic. Not that there were any cars around. Pablo had told me how in the mountain villages people mostly rode donkeys or motorbikes or used “God’s wheels,” th
eir own two feet.
Small wooden houses lined the square—side by side as if huddling together for protection. Some were missing pieces of tin from their roofs, slats from their windows. Some seemed abandoned, all boarded up. Most of them could have used a fresh coat of paint. At the corner, the family store was undergoing repairs. The sign had been taken down and the paint scraped off, but you could still make out the shadow letters, EL ENCANTO. Dulce had mentioned that the family wanted to change the name. They hadn’t yet decided to what.
On the far side of the square stood a small adobe church, postcard pretty except for a creepy detail. It had been guillotined—no kidding, that was what it looked like. The bell tower ended abruptly in a charred crater, as if the church had been bombed or shot at from the air. Next to the church was a graveyard with a newly painted white picket fence over which hung bunches of yellow roses. It looked like the most tended spot in the whole village. I decided to go over and explore.
The little cemetery was as crowded as the nursery at the orphanage. The light was still dim, so I had to get up close to see the names written on the stones. Almost all the deaths were recent, within my lifetime anyway. And so many of the dead were young! It was almost a relief to find a real old-timer—I mean what would be considered an old-timer here, sixty or over. Some markers seemed crude rush jobs: two pieces of wood bound with twine, the name roughly sketched with a knife. A few had elaborately carved crosses. There were flowers everywhere. The air smelled like a florist shop.
“Are you looking for someone, Milly?” It was Dulce, kneeling beside one of the stones. She looked like she’d been crying.
I must have jumped as if I’d seen a ghost. “Pardon me for startling you,” Dulce said. “Come over here.” She patted a space beside her.
I walked over and sat on the other side of the stone that she introduced as “my brother.” EFRAÍN SANTOS VARGAS.
Embedded in the stone was a plastic bubble with a photo inside. Condensation had clouded the plastic and the face was a blur. But I sensed those telltale Los Luceros eyes looking out at me.
“Angelita tells me your American parents adopted you from our country?”
I nodded. “From the capital.”
Dulce shook her head. “You might have been adopted from la capital, but your eyes tell me you are from here.”
“Everyone keeps saying that.” Absently, I had started picking at the stray leaves and few weeds around me. There wasn’t much to groom. This cemetery, like the one yesterday at Abuelita’s village, was obviously well tended.
Dulce was studying me, like she was trying to remember someone in the village I might look like. After about a minute, she gave up.
“I left this place many years ago,” she explained. “My father had some friends in the capital, an older couple, who were childless. They needed someone to help them. Times were hard, and Papá had girls to spare. We were six daughters, and the one son. Our Efraín,” she added, caressing the grass in front of his stone. “I don’t know how it was decided that I should go. The couple were very kind and treated me like a daughter. They insisted I attend the university. That’s where I met Daniel. He was my professor. I am much younger,” she added, as if she could tell I was doing the math in my head.
“So, you see, I have not lived in Los Luceros for many years,” she went on. “I was not here during the worst massacres sixteen years ago. Angelita tells me that is your age?”
“More or less,” I explained. “Sor Arabia, she worked at my orphanage, La Cuna. You’ve heard of it?” Dulce nodded. “According to Sor Arabia, I looked about four months old when I was left there in August. But she couldn’t be sure. There was no birth certificate, nothing.”
“Those eyes are your birth certificate,” Dulce said fiercely. “And this is your pueblo.” She struck the ground with the palm of her hand. She seemed proud to claim me.
Suddenly, I wanted to tell her everything I knew. “There was a box left with me. My dad, my adopted dad, I mean, he’s my real dad, anyhow, he’s a carpenter, so he knows his woods. He said that the box was made of mahogany. In this travel book I’m reading, it says that mahogany is native to this country.”
“Caoba.” Dulce pointed to a beautifully carved cross several plots away from her brother’s. Then, turning, she indicated the tall, shade tree in the square.
“Inside the box, there was a coin.” I described the two sides.
“That is the old peso with a likeness of our national founder, Salvador Estrella, who was born in Los Luceros.” Dulce was shaking her head at the wonder of it all. “The truth will come to light.”
I tried to remember what other things had been in the box. “There were two locks of hair, black hair and brown hair, very light like yours, intertwined. . . . And really, that’s it. Except for a little paper pinned to my gown that said Milagros.”
“Was that your name?”
“It’s what they called me at the orphanage. It got . . . changed in the States.” I felt ashamed to admit how I used to hate my middle name. “My parents named me Mildred, Milly, after my mom’s mom. My adopted mom, I mean, my real mom.” Here we go again, I thought.
“Milagros,” Dulce pronounced it slowly. “Milagros. Is it okay if I call you that?”
I nodded. And I wasn’t B.S.-ing her. It felt like that should be my name in this place. “Do you think...” I hesitated, not sure exactly what I wanted to ask. “Maybe someone here might know about my birth parents?”
She looked thoughtful. “Only one person in this town knows all the stories. Doña Gloria. She must be very old now.” Dulce pointed to a side street across the square that climbed out of the little village. “If my memory is not wrong, she lives up that road.”
I rose quickly to my feet. “Can we go?”
Dulce pulled herself up to stand facing me. She pushed my hair back gently from my face. “We will need transportation.”
Just then, we both heard the car door. Beyond Dulce’s shoulder in the growing light of day, I made out the van parked under the huge shade tree. Pablo had just stepped out of the back. Dulce turned, following my gaze.
“God always sends an angel when a soul is in need,” she murmured. Again, I had to agree with her.
“We must leave the vehicle here,” Dulce explained to Pablo.
We had reached the end of the dirt road. Up ahead, the mountain dropped away sharply into the valley below. A few doll-size houses were visible through the mist rising up from the river. It was like the view from an airplane.
Dulce pointed up the steep mountainside. “It is at the end of that path.”
I had to crane my neck to see the stony outcrop at the top. “How do we get there?”
“God’s wheels,” Pablo and Dulce said at the same time, laughing. (I should have known!) “It is not far,” Dulce reassured me.
We began climbing. Here and there, goats grazed on the rocky pasture, their curled horns snug against their heads. They looked like they were wearing protective helmets in case they slipped and fell down the slopes. “What I want to know,” I gasped, “is how an old woman can make it up this steep path?”
“People come to her.” Dulce had stopped to catch her breath. “She has our history in her head. Thank God she was spared, or we would have lost so much of our past. Those criminales stopped at nothing. Look at what they did to God’s own house. Lord have mercy on them.”
We resumed our climb in silence, too out of breath to talk. Finally, under a tall pine, I made out a small stone house built right up against the mountainside. Its walls were made of what looked like boulders from this very spot, so it blended right in with the stony outcrop. No wonder it had escaped sighting by the military helicopters and so been spared the fate of the church steeple. “I can see why the rebels hid up here,” Pablo noted, surveying the rocky, desolate place.
At the top of the path, a young girl appeared. Like Dulce and almost everyone else I had met since we’d arrived, she was dressed in black. She stood still as
a statue, watching us. Even after Dulce called up, introducing herself, the girl said nothing. When we were almost level with the house, she turned on her heels and slipped inside.
“That must be Doña Gloria’s great-granddaughter,” Dulce guessed. “What a shy little bumpkin!”
At the door, Dulce again announced herself, calling into the dark interior. She gave what seemed like a whole family tree of local relations. She had come, Dulce explained, to give her greetings to Doña Gloria. She had brought her nephew and a special visitor. Would Doña Gloria receive us?
Up to this point, we had not seen or heard a peep from Doña Gloria. But after a moment, an old, croaky voice answered. “¡Pasen, pasen!” Come in, come in.
Inside the dark hut, my eyes took a moment to adjust. At the center, in a rocking chair, sat the oldest old woman I’d ever seen. Her bony arms reached out in the direction of our voices.
“Come, come,” she quarreled with our slowness. “Come closer.” When we did, she grabbed us, saying hello by feeling our hands and faces.
It was then that it hit me, Doña Gloria was blind! If she could not see my face, how could she guess who I might resemble? Again, I felt that lost-Gretel feeling of the trail disappearing behind me.
“La bendición, Doña Gloria,” Dulce began. Pablo and I echoed the greeting.
“Sit, sit,” Doña Gloria commanded.
The girl had brought over three chairs. “Gracias,” I said smiling, then asked for her name. The girl hid her face in her hands, as if ashamed.
“La muda,” her grandmother answered. The Mute was her name!
I was shocked by what seemed a common practice here: people named after some handicap or sensitive detail you’d never mention in the States. At the orphanage, a fat little girl had been called la gordita. El cojo was the boy with the club foot. As for the very dark boy who loved to steal cake, he was el negrito!