The Hummingbird's Daughter (34 page)

Book
IV

THE CATASTROPHE
OF HOLINESS

An Indian woman was brought to me to be cured. One leg
was paralyzed and she had not walked for a year. I placed
my hands on the paralyzed part and told her to walk. Poor
woman! She was afraid to try. She cowered and cried, but
I insisted. She took one step tremblingly, then another and
another. When she found she could walk, she ran back,
raised her hands to heaven and cried “Santa Teresa!”
It was thus that I was named.

—T
ERESITA,
New York Journal

Thirty-six

THE WORLD ROLLED FORWARD, for People and patrón, Indian and Yori, dizzy in the night and about to change forever.

The cavalry of Mexico chased a small army of Mayos loyal to Moroyoqui that had united with a larger group of Yaquis inspired by the teachings of Cajemé. The hunt took the mounted forces through the hills around Navojoa, and the plains around Cabora. Dark riders thundered through the ranch late in the night, and the army sent spies to see if Tomás was aiding the enemy. He was observed feeding bands of Indians, but it was never proven that Moroyoqui’s raiders had visited Cabora.

The People passed on rumors. The cavalry had caught seven riders and had tortured them mercilessly on the llano. Buckaroos told terrible stories of the riders held down by soldiers, and the soldiers using their great knives to cut off the Indians’ feet and then forcing them to walk for miles on the stumps until they fell. Mercifully, the soldiers shot them when they could walk no more.

In this cloud of dread and legends, Teresita recuperated. After Buenaventura left the ranch, she busied herself with her studies. After her prayers and offerings in Huila’s sacred site, she spent mornings visiting the sick. She took a light lunch in the early afternoon, at which time she bantered with Tomás and Gaby. She did not seem morose or withdrawn. She did not always even seem particularly serious to them. Still, they noted that she no longer went on wild horse rides, and she never touched her guitar with blue flowers painted on it. After lunch, she retreated to her high room to take a siesta.

No one knew her thoughts in her white room. No one saw her stare in her mirror at her face—a face she regretted. At her hair—hair she wished she could trade for Gaby’s waterfalls of curls. No one saw her pluck dried blossoms and leaves off her hanging herbs and crush them between her fingers, eyes closed, going into the scent.

She had never been kissed.

She lay on her bed in the crushing temperatures and tried to still her heart, her body, tried to let the roller of heat pass over her without flattening her. She locked her door and lay naked on the bed, with wet towels on her belly and chest. She fanned herself and tried to dream. But the afternoon naps didn’t come. When her month blossomed, she felt deep knots of pain in her belly, and she folded cloths and hid lavender among the folds, but this did not help the pain. She looked away from herself during those days. Her eyes were sore and tired on many days. The light tormented her, and she took to placing a wet towel over them, too—folded to keep out the sun. When her headaches came, she could see strange webs of light. Sounds set off waves of color in her head. She sometimes smelled strange scents, and if she moved, the headache clamped over her skull and made her sick to her stomach and made her tired eyes feel as if they were going to pop out of her head and weep down her cheeks.

Teresita had never seen a train. But she had now delivered 107 children. She had never seen a city outside of her dreams, but she had buried five mothers and three stillborn infants. She had never seen a black man, or a Chinese man, though she heard that they existed, and she had once seen a photogravure of an African in one of Tomás’s American magazines, the
Overland Monthly.
She had still never seen the sea.

Teresita had never stepped on a paved street. Even the streets of Ocoroni had been cobbles or dirt. She had never heard any music except for corridos and folk ballads and once, from a distance, a brass band playing in the old ranch house. She delighted Tomás one day by showing a little spark and proposing that a mariachi band play for the hacienda. He thought it was a joyous request, but for her it was a scientific exploration. El Mariachi Gavilán gathered in its finery on the veranda and commenced an unbelievably loud caterwaul that brought the People and mestizos from many acres away. The musicians’ pants were embroidered down their legs, and their vast sombreros were the greatest hats anyone had ever seen. Teresita smiled and laughed and even lifted her skirt and clomped a two-step with her father.

Tomás muttered to Segundo, “See? She’s all right.”

Teresita had never tasted pancakes, blueberries, ice cream, chewing gum. She could not imagine root beer or spaghetti. She had never seen a hot-air balloon. She had never looked through a telescope. She had never heard of such things as zoos, museums, the North Pole. She had never seen a major bridge. She had never been in the mountains, though she had looked at them her whole life.

She had never seen a ship, except in her night flights that now seemed years ago and nearly forgotten. She had never met a doctor. Had never been cold. Had never seen a building taller than two stories.

If she knew so little, had seen next to nothing, then why, in her dreams, were the People calling her Queen of the World?

On Friday nights, no matter how sore or bent from work they were, the People and the vaqueros began to drink and fuss. Segundo set up a small cantina on the porch of the bunkhouse. Men bought bottles from Cantúa’s old roadside inn (long forgotten as a beanery, it was now under the management of El Güero Astengo, and it was a cantina, La Pulquería Alma de Mi Gente) and the occasional hogshead barrel of beer. Segundo resold the beer at a small profit. The idea was the fiesta, not the money. But money didn’t hurt, and it was better to lose an extra ten centavos on a drink than to lose your scalp to the head-hunting gringo demon mercenary on his blooded horse, or to be bushwhacked by bandits, or the Rurales. Who knew what could happen in the world? Cabora was big enough for them all, and even a dull workplace could look new by firelight, fresh when painted by tequila and beer.

Dances broke out on Friday nights behind the corrals. Tomás often took Gabriela’s arm and strolled down to watch the People raise clouds of dust. When he was in a good mood, he paid for musicians to play. On many Fridays, he sent for a calf to be barbecued. Tortilla makers formed lines in the shadows, their incessantly patting hands seeming to keep the beat of the music.

These transplanted Sinaloans missed their green homeland. They missed tobacco fields and marijuana fields, tomato farms and hectares of vibrant red and yellow chiles on their fluttering green bushes. They missed rain. They missed romance—in Sonora there was nothing compared to the indelible dance of love one found in Sinaloa.

And Millán, the former miner from Rosario, perhaps the most romantic village in all of Mexico, missed these things most of all. Millán found that the women of Sonora smelled different. He often stole their clothes from shacks to smell, and they smelled bad, like cattle. Perhaps it was the food or the water that made them stink. Certainly, there was nothing as pure as the tides of the Baluarte River, river of his boyhood, green as it sped by the foot of the mighty mountain, El Yauco. Millán grew nostalgic when he drank. He filled a bag with round stones and hung it from his waist. When the others were dancing, he went out in the dark to kill dogs and cats with a rawhide sling. After he had cracked six or seven skulls, he felt calmer, more relaxed. If he drank enough after that, he could sleep.

It was Segundo who first approached Tomás with a proposition.

“Boss, we need a plazuela.”

“You need a what?”

“We need a plazuela!”

“For what!”

“Love!”

He had to say no more to Tomás. In Sinaloa, each small town had a plazuela with a gazebo and some whitewashed trees. Each town square had a walkway around its perimeter, and along this were white benches. Old men often took to the benches to enjoy the gradual fall of night, the chiming of the church bells, and the appearance of the bats that gorged on the many flying insects that were drawn to the flickering gas lamps of the plazuelas. These plazuelas were what was sorely missing in the Sonoran desert. How could the grand ritual begin, if there was nowhere for it to go?

“Get to work!” Tomás barked.

Segundo, Teófano, three boys from Culiacán, and the limping Buenaventura (who had begun a cautious reconnoitering of his old homestead) pulled down the rails of the new burro and mule corral, the site where Lauro Aguirre had once slept. As soon as the People saw them whitewashing the trunks of the old trees, and setting out whitewashed rocks in a vast wobbly trapezoid, they knew immediately what was happening. “Una plazuela!” they cried. Tired men and women rushed to the corrals and swept, pulled weeds, shoveled sand over the ancient piss bogs in the ground. They raised planters using broken wheels from wagons and filled them with coffee grounds and eggshells and dirt and cow shit and they planted roses and geraniums there. It was soon clear that a gazebo of some sort was needed. Tomás pulled men off cow duty, pulled dormant woodworkers who had finished framing all the rooms and additions of the house. They immediately staked out a gazebo foundation, using strings the way Aguirre had taught them.

The Engineer could not enjoy their work. As the gazebo came together, two Rurales stopped at the gate of the courtyard in front of the main house and called for Don Tomás. Aguirre, in the middle of a delectable chorizo-egg-cheese burrito, rose and followed Tomás to see what they wanted. For a reason he would never determine, he paused just as Tomás threw open the door. He hid in the hallway, sensing something dire in the air.

The Rural in charge said, “Do you know a Lauro Aguirre, sir?”

Tomás stood in the morning sun and lied: “Lauro Aguirre? Let me think. I entertain so many guests!”

Aguirre flattened himself against the wall.

The rider cleared his throat and said, “We were simply curious if the engineer Aguirre might be here now.”

Tomás cried, “Here? Now? This Aguirre? I don’t think so, my dear officer!”

Aguirre peered out the small crack behind the door.

“Where might he be?” the Rural asked.

“I’m sure I don’t know, sir,” said Tomás. “I believe there is an Aguirre who frequents Alamos. An engineer. Hmm. I am sure you would find men of his ilk in a city, not here on a humble cattle ranch! If you need steaks, I have steaks! One thousand head of cattle, but not a single engineer.”

They had sat on their mounts looking down at Tomás. They didn’t believe him. But they couldn’t merely raid his house, either.

“All right,” the rider finally said. “Bueno. If you see him, please send out someone to inform the Rurales. We would like to . . . speak . . . with him.”

The Rurales saluted loosely. They turned their horses.

“Good day.”

Tomás exulted, “Good day! Y Viva México!”

Inside the house, he gripped Aguirre’s arms in his fists and said, “Ya te chingaron, paisano!”

They packed Aguirre’s bags and dressed him in an absurd buckaroo outfit with a great spangled sombrero, and Tomás gave him a clutch of outriders to cover him, and they set out after dark for the Arizona border. Once there, Don Lauro Aguirre changed into human clothes and boarded a stagecoach for the unfortunate journey to El Paso, perhaps the most uncomfortable three days of his life.

He immediately began a newspaper.

The gazebo was only a box with a sad little roof on it held up by four posts, but once it, too, was painted white, it was enough. Appearing like migrating flamingos in a tidewater slough, one afternoon the girls arrived, floating out of their huts at dusk. Girls from the Félix ranch a mile down the Alamos highway somehow joined them. The old men on the benches were delighted to see the end of their day enlivened by young ladies dressed in their finest clothes. Segundo’s boys lit torches all around the plaza. The girls giggled and held hands and fanned themselves. They came in pale skirts, like dandelion tufts. They were accompanied by mothers and aunts, all of them, too, giddy with the stroll.

“Adios!” the men called to women they had seen fifteen minutes before, as if they had not seen each other in a week.

“Good evening.” The aunties nodded. “Don Porfirio. Don Chentito. Don Teófano.”

“Is that your niece?” the old-timers would squawk.

“It is, it is. My Alma!”

“She is my little Emilita!”

“Es mi sobrina, la bella Iris Violeta!”

“Wonders will never cease!” the old-timers bellowed.