And my happiest memory? The night I came to live with you, of course. I remember how your skin smelled sweet as the rind of a watermelon, like the fields after it has rained. I wanted my life to begin there, at that moment when I balanced that thin boy’s body of yours on mine, as if you were made of balsa, as if you were boat and I river. The days to come, I thought, erasing the bitter sting of my father’s good-bye.
There’s been too much suffering, too much of our hearts hardening and drying like corpses. We’ve survived, eaten grass and corn cobs and rotten vegetables. And the epidemics have been as dangerous as the federales, the deserters, the bandits. Nine years.
In Cuautla it stank from so many dead. Nicolás would go out to play with the bullet shells he’d collected, or to watch the dead being buried in trenches. Once five federal corpses were piled up in the zócalo. We went through their pockets for money, jewelry, anything we could sell. When they burned the bodies, the fat ran off them in streams, and they jumped and wiggled as if they were trying to sit up. Nicolás had terrible dreams after that. I was too ashamed to tell him I did, too.
At first we couldn’t bear to look at the bodies hanging in the trees. But after many months, you get used to them, curling and drying into leather in the sun day after day, dangling like earrings, so that they no longer terrify, they no longer mean anything. Perhaps that is worst of all.
Your sister tells me Nicolás takes after you these days, nervous and quick with words, like a sudden dust storm or shower of sparks. When you were away with the Seventh Cavalry, Tía Chucha and I would put smoke in Nicolás’s mouth, so he would learn to talk early. All the other babies his age babbling like monkeys, but Nicolás always silent, always following us with those eyes all your kin have. Those are not Alfaro eyes, I remember my father saying.
The year you came back from the cavalry, you sent for us, me and the boy, and we lived in the house of stone and adobe. From your silences, I understood I was not to question our marriage. It was what it was. Nothing more. Wondering where you were the weeks I didn’t see you, and why it was you arrived only for a few slender nights, always after nightfall and leaving before dawn. Our lives ran along as they had before. What good is it to have a husband and not have him? I thought.
When you began involving yourself with the Patricio Leyva campaign, we didn’t see you for months at a time. Sometimes the boy and I would return to my father’s house where I felt less alone. Just for a few nights, I said, unrolling a petate in my old corner against the cane-rush wall in the kitchen. Until my husband returns. But a few nights grew into weeks, and the weeks into months, until I spent more time under my father’s thatch roof than in our house with the roof of tiles.
That’s how the weeks and months passed. Your election to the town council. Your work defending the land titles. Then the parceling of the land when your name began to run all along the villages, up and down the Cuautla River. Zapata this and Zapata that. I couldn’t go anywhere without hearing it. And each time, a kind of fear entered my heart like a cloud crossing the sun.
I spent the days chewing on this poison as I was grinding the corn, pretending to ignore what the other women washing at the river said. That you had several pastimes. That there was a certain María Josefa in Villa de Ayala. Then they would just laugh. It was worse for me those nights you did arrive and lay asleep next to me. I lay awake watching and watching you.
In the day, I could support the grief, wake up before dawn to prepare the day’s tortillas, busy myself with the chores, the turkey hens, the planting and collecting of herbs. The boy already wearing his first pair of trousers and getting into all kinds of trouble when he wasn’t being watched. There was enough to distract me in the day. But at night, you can’t imagine.
Tía Chucha made me drink heart-flower tea—yoloxochitl, flower from the magnolia tree—petals soft and seamless as a tongue. Yoloxochitl, flor de corazón, with its breath of vanilla and honey. She prepared a tonic with the dried blossoms and applied a salve, mixed with the white of an egg, to the tender skin above my heart.
It was the season of rain. Plum … plum plum. All night I listened to that broken string of pearls, bead upon bead upon bead rolling across the waxy leaves of my heart.
I lived with that heartsickness inside me, Miliano, as if the days to come did not exist. And when it seemed the grief would not let me go, I wrapped one of your handkerchiefs around a dried hummingbird, went to the river, whispered, Virgencita, ayúdame, kissed it, then tossed the bundle into the waters where it disappeared for a moment before floating downstream in a dizzy swirl of foam.
That night, my heart circled and fluttered against my chest, and something beneath my eyelids palpitated so furiously, it wouldn’t let me sleep. When I felt myself whirling against the beams of the house, I opened my eyes. I could see perfectly in the darkness. Beneath me—all of us asleep. Myself, there, in my petate against the kitchen wall, the boy asleep beside me. My father and my Tía Chucha sleeping in their corner of the house. Then I felt the room circle once, twice, until I found myself under the stars flying above the little avocado tree, above the house and the corral.
I passed the night in a delirious circle of sadness, of joy, reeling round and round above our roof of dried sugarcane leaves, the world as clear as if the noon sun shone. And when dawn arrived I flew back to my body that waited patiently for me where I’d left it, on the petate beside our Nicolás.
Each evening I flew a wider circle. And in the day, I withdrew further and further into myself, living only for those night flights. My father whispered to my Tía Chucha, Ojos que no ven, corazón que no siente. But my eyes did see and my heart suffered.
One night over milpas and beyond the tlacolol, over barrancas and thorny scrub forests, past the thatch roofs of the jacales and the stream where the women do the wash, beyond bright bougainvillea, high above canyons and across fields of rice and corn, I flew. The gawky stalks of banana trees swayed beneath me. I saw rivers of cold water and a river of water so bitter they say it flows from the sea. I didn’t stop until I reached a grove of high laurels rustling in the center of a town square where all the whitewashed houses shone blue as abalone under the full moon. And I remember my wings were blue and soundless as the wings of a tecolote.
And when I alighted on the branch of a tamarind tree outside a window, I saw you asleep next to that woman from Villa de Ayala, that woman who is your wife sleeping beside you. And her skin shone blue in the moonlight and you were blue as well.
She wasn’t at all like I’d imagined. I came up close and studied her hair. Nothing but an ordinary woman with her ordinary woman smell. She opened her mouth and gave a moan. And you pulled her close to you, Miliano. Then I felt a terrible grief inside me. The two of you asleep like that, your leg warm against hers, your foot inside the hollow of her foot.
They say I am the one who caused her children to die. From jealousy, from envy. What do you say? Her boy and girl both dead before they stopped sucking teat. She won’t bear you any more children. But my boy, my girl are alive.
When a customer walks away after you’ve named your price, and then he comes back, that’s when you raise your price. When you know you have what he wants. Something I learned from your horse-trading years.
You married her, that woman from Villa de Ayala, true. But see, you came back to me. You always come back. In between and beyond the others. That’s my magic. You come back to me.
You visited me again Thursday last. I yanked you from the bed of that other one. I dreamt you, and when I awoke I was sure your spirit had just fluttered from the room. I have yanked you from your sleep before into the dream I was dreaming. Twisted you like a spiral of hair around a finger. Love, you arrived with your heart full of birds. And when you would not do my bidding and come when I commanded, I turned into the soul of a tecolote and kept vigil in the branches of a purple jacaranda outside your door to make sure no one would do my Miliano harm while he slept.
You sent a letter by
messenger how many months afterward? On paper thin and crinkled as if it had been made with tears.
I burned copal in a clay bowl. Inhaled the smoke. Said a prayer in mexicano to the old gods, an Ave María in Spanish to La Virgen, and gave thanks. You were on your way home to us. The house of stone and adobe aired and swept clean, the night sweet with the scent of candles that had been burning continually since I saw you in the dream. Sometime after Nicolás had fallen asleep, the hoofbeats.
A silence between us like a language. When I held you, you trembled, a tree in rain. Ay, Miliano, I remember that, and it helps the days pass without bitterness.
What did you tell her about me? That was before I knew you, Josefa. That chapter of my life with Inés Alfaro is finished. But I’m a story that never ends. Pull one string and the whole cloth unravels.
Just before you came for Nicolás, he fell ill with the symptoms of the jealousy sickness, big boy that he was. But it was true, I was with child again. Malena was born without making a sound, because she remembered how she had been conceived—nights tangled around each other like smoke.
You and Villa were marching triumphantly down the streets of Mexico City, your hat filled with flowers the pretty girls tossed at you. The brim sagging under the weight like a basket.
I named our daughter after my mother. María Elena. Against my father’s wishes.
You have your pastimes. That’s how it’s said, no? Your many pastimes. I know you take to your bed women half my age. Women the age of our Nicolás. You’ve left many mothers crying, as they say.
They say you have three women in Jojutla, all under one roof. And that your women treat each other with a most extraordinary harmony, sisters in a cause who believe in the greater good of the revolution. I say they can all go to hell, those newspaper journalists and the mothers who bore them. Did they ever ask me?
These stupid country girls, how can they resist you? The magnificent Zapata in his elegant charro costume, riding a splendid horse. Your wide sombrero a halo around your face. You’re not a man for them; you’re a legend, a myth, a god. But you are as well my husband. Albeit only sometimes.
How can a woman be happy in love? To love like this, to love as strong as we hate. That is how we are, the women of my family. We never forget a wrong. We know how to love and we know how to hate.
I’ve seen your other children in the dreams. María Luisa from that Gregoria Zúñiga in Quilamula after her twin sister Luz died on you childless. Diego born in Tlatizapán of that woman who calls herself Missus Jorge Piñeiro. Ana María in Cuautla from that she-goat Petra Torres. Mateo, son of that nobody, Jesusa Pérez of Temilpa. All your children born with those eyes of Zapata.
I know what I know. How you sleep cradled in my arms, how you love me with a pleasure close to sobbing, how I still the trembling in your chest and hold you, hold you, until those eyes look into mine.
Your eyes. Ay! Your eyes. Eyes with teeth. Terrible as obsidian. The days to come in those eyes, el porvenir, the days gone by. And beneath that fierceness, something ancient and tender as rain.
Miliano, Milianito. And I sing you that song I sang Nicolás and Malenita when they were little and would not sleep.
Seasons of war, a little half-peace now and then, and then war and war again. Running up to the hills when the federales come, coming back down when they’ve gone.
Before the war, it was the caciques who were after the young girls and the married women. They had their hands on everything it seems—the land, law, women. Remember when they found that desgraciado Policarpo Cisneros in the arms of the Quintero girl? ¡Virgen purísima! She was only a little thing of twelve years. And he, what? At least eighty, I imagine.
Desgraciados. All members of one army against us, no? The federales, the caciques, one as bad as the other, stealing our hens, stealing the women at night. What long sharp howls the women would let go when they carried them off. The next morning the women would be back, and we would say Buenos días, as if nothing had happened.
Since the war began, we’ve gotten used to sleeping in the corral. Or in the hills, in trees, in caves with the spiders and scorpions. We hide ourselves as best we can when the federales arrive, behind rocks or in barrancas, or in the pine and tall grass when there is nothing else to hide behind. Sometimes I build a shelter for us with cane branches in the mountains. Sometimes the people of the cold lands give us boiled water sweetened with cane sugar, and we stay until we can gather a little strength, until the sun has warmed our bones and it is safe to come back down.
Before the war, when Tía Chucha was alive, we passed the days selling at all the town markets—chickens, turkey hens, cloth, coffee, the herbs we collected in the hills or grew in the garden. That’s how our weeks and months came and went.
I sold bread and candles. I planted corn and beans back then and harvested coffee at times too. I’ve sold all kinds of things. I even know how to buy and resell animals. And now I know how to work the tlacolol, which is the worst of all—your hands and feet split and swollen from the machete and hoe.
Sometimes I find sweet potatoes in the abandoned fields, or squash, or corn. And this we eat raw, too tired, too hungry to cook anything. We’ve eaten like the birds, what we could pluck from the trees—guava, mango, tamarind, almond when in season. We’ve gone without corn for the tortillas, made do when there were no kernels to be had, eaten the cobs as well as the flower.
My metate, my good shawl, my fancy huipil, my filigree earrings, anything I could sell, I’ve sold. The corn sells for one peso and a half a cuartillo when one can find a handful. I soak and boil and grind it without even letting it cool, a few tortillas to feed Malenita, who is always hungry, and if there is anything left, I feed myself.
Tía Chucha caught the sickness of the wind in the hot country. I used all her remedies and my own, guacamaya feathers, eggs, cocoa beans, chamomile oil, rosemary, but there was no help for her. I thought I would finish myself crying, all my mother’s people gone from me, but there was the girl to think about. Nothing to do but go on, aguantar, until I could let go that grief. Ay, how terrible those times.
I go on surviving, hiding, searching if only for Malenita’s sake. Our little plantings, that’s how we get along. The government run off with the maíz, the chickens, my prize turkey hens and rabbits. Everyone has had his turn to do us harm.
Now I’m going to tell you about when they burned the house, the one you bought for us. I was sick with the fever. Headache and a terrible pain in the back of my calves. Fleas, babies crying, gunshots in the distance, someone crying out el gobierno, a gallop of horses in my head, and the shouting of those going off to join troops and of those staying. I could barely manage to drag myself up the hills. Malenita was suffering one of her corajes and refused to walk, sucking the collar of her blouse and crying. I had to carry her on my back with her little feet kicking me all the way until I gave her half of a hard tortilla to eat and she forgot about her anger and fell asleep. By the time the sun was strong and we were far away enough to feel safe, I was weak. I slept without dreaming, holding Malenita’s cool body against my burning. When I woke the world was filled with stars, and the stars carried me back to the village and showed me.
It was like this. The village did not look like our village. The trees, the mountains against the sky, the land, yes, that was still as we remembered it, but the village was no longer a village. Everything pocked and in ruins. Our house with its roof tiles gone. The walls blistered and black. Pots, pans, jugs, dishes axed into shards, our shawls and blankets torn and trampled. The seed we had left, what we’d saved and stored that year, scattered, the birds enjoying it.
Hens, cows, pigs, goats, rabbits, all slaughtered. Not even the dogs were spared and were strung from the trees. The Carrancistas destroyed everything, because, as they say, Even the stones here are Zapatistas. And what was not destroyed was carried off by their women, who descended behind them like a plague of vultures to pick us clean.
It’s her f
ault, the villagers said when they returned. Nagual. Bruja. Then I understood how alone I was.
Miliano, what I’m about to say to you now, only to you do I tell it, to no one else have I confessed it. It’s necessary I say it; I won’t rest until I undo it from my heart.
They say when I was a child I caused a hailstorm that ruined the new corn. When I was so young I don’t even remember. In Tetelcingo that’s what they say.
That’s why the years the harvest was bad and the times especially hard, they wanted to burn me with green wood. It was my mother they killed instead, but not with green wood. When they delivered her to our door, I cried until I finished myself crying. I was sick, sick, for several days, and they say I vomited worms, but I don’t remember that. Only the terrible dreams I suffered during the fever.
My Tía Chucha cured me with branches from the pepper tree and with the broom. And for a long time afterward, my legs felt as if they were stuffed with rags, and I kept seeing little purple stars winking and whirling just out of reach.
It wasn’t until I was well enough to go outside again that I noticed the crosses of pressed pericón flowers on all the village doorways and in the milpa too. From then on the villagers avoided me, as if they meant to punish me by not talking, just as they’d punished my mother with those words that thumped and thudded like the hail that killed the corn.
That’s why we had to move the seven kilometers from Tetelcingo to Cuautla, as if we were from that village and not the other, and that’s how it was we came to live with my Tía Chucha, little by little taking my mother’s place as my teacher, and later as my father’s wife.
My Tía Chucha, she was the one who taught me to use my sight, just as her mother had taught her. The women in my family, we’ve always had the power to see with more than our eyes. My mother, my Tía Chucha, me. Our Malenita as well.