The Hummingbird's Daughter (47 page)

“I saw lights,” he said.

Tomás reeled from his stench.

“Of course you saw lights,” he snapped. “We live here.”

“I waited,” the boy said. “People say I stink too bad. They won’t let me come in the day. They won’t let me come close to her. I waited for everybody to go to sleep so I could come.”

Teresita reached out for him.

“Come in,” she said.

She took his hand.

Tomás tried to block him with one knee, but Teresita nimbly steered him clear of her father.

He stepped in shyly, his cloud of odor filling the room.

“Boy,” said Tomás, “you smell like shit.”

The boy burst into hoarse sobs.

He covered his face with his hands and wailed.

Teresita put her arms around him and held her head away from his head, where the main stink seemed to be centered. His hair was hard and shiny. The back of his neck was wet.

“What’s wrong, boy?” she said.

“I’m sorry!”

“Now, now,” said Tomás. He cleared his throat. “Crying’s for girls. We are big strong men! Somos machos!”

The boy’s collar was stiff. His reek was of rotten meat and old blood. Teresita looked at his head—it was full of infected sores. Pus formed peso-sized pools on his scalp, and the pus had drooled down his back and coagulated in his hair. Dirt stuck to the mess and made the hard spikes on his head.

Tomás bent down and wrinkled his nose.

“Damn!” he said. “What is that?”

“Sores,” she said.

Tomás suddenly remembered the old man with the infected lash marks on his back. When was that? Years ago. He could not remember the day, or the year. He wanted to tell Teresita about it, but there was no time.

She gently pulled apart the boy’s hair, and she revealed dark little creatures drowning in the pus. They wiggled their legs in the swampy wounds.

“Good God,” said Tomás. “What is
that?
”

“Lice.”

“Lice!”

“You’ve never seen lice?”

“No, Teresa, I have never seen lice! What do you think I am, a peasant?”

“Hardly, Father,” she said. “I had lice.”

“You did?”

“Everybody outside of the big house has lice.”

“No!”

She looked up at him and wondered what it felt like to be so ignorant of the world.

“Look,” she said. “They bit him so much he scratched until he tore his scalp. It got bad. All rotten.”

Tomás went to the table and took a gulp of wine. Poured himself some more.

“Poor boy!” he finally said.

The boy sniffled. Teresita sat him in a chair and pulled away his pus-shellacked jacket. She put cookies on a plate and poured him some of her clotty milk.

“When did you eat?” she asked.

“I don’t know.”

“Where are your parents?”

“Dead.”

“Who takes care of you?”

“Dogs,” he said.

Tomás made a sound in his throat.

Dogs!

He went to a drawer and brought out a piece of chocolate. He handed it to the boy.

“My own parents are dead,” he offered.

“Really?” the boy replied, looking up at him. One eye was wobbly. A louse appeared in the boy’s eyebrow. Teresita plucked it off and popped it between her thumbnails.

“Get scissors,” she instructed.

Tomás searched through the house until he found some big scissors in Huila’s old bedroom. They had left it untouched all this time. No one had the heart to clear it out.

“Good,” she said. “Now, put some water on the fire. Get some of the purple flowers from Huila’s room. They’re hanging in the middle of the room. Break off a fistful and put them in the water while I cut his hair.”

He rushed back into Huila’s room and looked through the bundles of herbs hanging there. He found the purple ones.

“Leaves too?” he called.

“Just the flowers, please.”

“Right.”

She bent to the boy’s hair and carefully snipped away the stiff locks.

“You will look a little funny,” she said, “without hair. But we will take away your lice.”

“As long as I don’t stink.”

“We will take away your stink,” she promised.

Tomás tossed the dried flowers in the water.

“Now what?” he asked.

“Come.”

He went to the chair. Teresita had snipped away most of the boy’s hair, leaving gooey bristles among which the sluggish lice could be seen.

“Pluck,” she told her father.

“Pluck what?”

“Lice.”

“You’re kidding.”

“No, I’m not kidding. Pluck them and pop them.”

“But I’ll get pus on my fingers!”

“You can wash your hands.”

“But it’s disgusting!”

“No, Father. Letting an orphan suffer is disgusting.”

“Chingado,” he said.

He gingerly pinched one of the awful little beasts and popped it between his nails. It was oddly satisfying.

“Got the bastard,” he noted.

“Good work.”

He caught another one. It was funny, but if you smelled the stink of the boy’s rotten head long enough, you stopped noticing it.

They plucked lice for so long that the boy fell asleep under their fingers. Tomás wiped so much pus on the front of his pants that they had two ugly stains. For the first time in his life, he felt—well, saintly.

Unexpectedly, Teresita disrupted his thoughts by saying: “Jesus washed dirty feet, you know.”

She went to the pot of purple water and set it on the table to cool. The boy was snoring. When the water was cool enough, Teresita soaked white cloths in the tea and began to gently dab at his wounds. He jumped, but kept snoring.

“We don’t even know his name,” Tomás said.

“Let’s hope he’s not another Urrea,” she said.

She was grinning.

“That’s not funny,” Tomás muttered.

They washed the pus off his head. She smeared a pale yellow ointment on the wounds, and she wrapped a white bandage around his head.

“What shall we do with him?” she asked.

“Why are you asking me?”

“You are the patrón,” she pointed out.

“I am not in charge here,” he said. “I have lost control of everything.”

She picked the boy up in her arms and carried him to the parlor. She laid him down on the couch and sat beside him, patting his skinny chest.

“Get me a blanket,” she said.

Tomás ran upstairs and pulled a blanket from the cedar chest in his bedroom. When he came back downstairs, Teresita had fallen asleep with her head on the boy’s chest. Tomás watched her sleep for a moment. He then took her feet and lifted them, turning her slowly so her head rested on the far end of the couch. Her feet lay next to the boy’s face, and the boy’s feet were at her armpit. Oh well, it was the best he could do. He covered them both with the blanket.

When he sat on the floor for a moment to think about his night, he fell asleep beside them, and that’s where Gabriela found them all in the morning, dreaming together in the cool orange light of dawn.

Book
V

THE OUTER DARK

Was she an illusion, this young nervous girl,
vibrant and sweet, sweet and tenacious, who carried
in her eyes a turbulent flame, as stimulating as a
ration of gunpowder and liquor, yet as benign, placid
and lulling as the smoke of opium . . .

The Saint of Cabora!

Had those eloquent eyes—whose radiance bathed
her face in a nimbus that ignited miraculous
enthusiasms in the poor pilgrims who came to her from
distant mountains—had these eyes suggested to the
villages of Sonora, Sinaloa and Chihuahua that they
should begin revolts that could only be stopped by
drowning them in fire and blood?

—H
ERIBERTO
F
RíAS
Tomóchic

Fifty-two

THE FIRST SIGNS OF REVOLT seemed mild. Excited Mexicans mixing their religion and their tequila. A rock flew through the presidente municipal of Navojoa’s window. A lone Rural was chased out of a nasty little village by a gaggle of angry grandmothers with sticks. The old bodies of two Indians that had hung in an alamo beside the road to Sal Si Puedes for two years were cut down and buried.

Soon, however, things got more interesting.

Soldiers on patrol were often greeted with cries of “Viva La Santa de Cabora!” The commanding general of the Fort Huachuca garrison outside Tucson noted the wearing of Teresita scapulars among the natives, and he put it in his report to Washington. A Prussian land-grabber not far from Cabora was burned out one night. The local People said his house had been hit by lightning, and by “the great power of God.” Rurales thought they saw charred torches in the ruins.

Father Gastélum had been riding the Chihuahua circuit now for months, having escaped the heat of Sonora and the idiocy of the “Girl Saint” and her rabble. His difficult transit carried him up the Sal Si Puedes ravine into the sierras, and over into the Papigochic region, home of the Tarahumara and the recalcitrant Tomochitecos. He preached at the Tomóchic church once every two months. He had been appalled to find a wooden carving of Teresita in their chapel. The imbeciles had lit candles to her. They had pinned silver milagros to her pathetic rebozo, some scrap they had wound around the statue. Heresy!

In Chihuahua City, he made his reports to Governor Carrillo, and he sent a telegram to Mexico City and an incendiary report of heresy to the Vatican. Father Gastélum promised himself he would stop this blasphemous movement if he had to set fire to Cabora himself.

Lauro Aguirre wanted to go home, and he wanted to see Tomás again, and he wanted to observe the transformation of Teresita firsthand. But at this point, he knew he would be stood before the first available Mexican wall, or worse, hung from the first tree a cavalryman happened to lead him to. From the relative safety of El Paso, Texas, he wrote an endless series of articles, pamphlets, editorials, and broadsheets extolling the virtues of Yaquis, of revolt, of the Saint of Cabora. He castigated and reviled Díaz, and he occasionally ducked down alleys to escape Mexican assassins and goons sent up from Ciudad Juárez to try to silence him. But he would not be silenced. He published his newspaper,
El Independiente,
in a small shop in the heart of downtown. Most of his workers were fellow refugees who had fled from the Díaz regime.

Aguirre clipped articles from gringo newspapers and magazines, most of them mad and inaccurate, steeped in bigotry and cynicism. Friends mailed him bits from the San Francisco and New York press. He regularly bought the Arizona papers and the New Mexico papers, watching for any mention of the Girl Saint. Tucson, Tombstone, Silver City. Teresita was a flame waiting to be fanned. Aguirre translated American articles and mailed them straightaway to Tomás. Perhaps the American press could convince his old comrade that the time for revolt was at hand.

Weekly, Aguirre published astounding testimonials to Teresita’s miracles. Aguirre did not believe in miracles, of course, at least not miracles that happened outside of scripture. Even those miracles, he suspected, were mythologized folktales and tall tales. Some of his own people believed the grave of Benito Juárez, or the portrait of General Santa Anna, could heal the sick or grant them fortunes and romantic conquests. Mexico was rife with “miracles” and “saints.”

But the Mexicans of the borderlands believed and that was exciting to Aguirre. Yaquis were ready to fight. The populace of the northlands of Mexico, however, would much sooner march off to revolutionary war if the Virgen de Guadalupe appeared to them. Aguirre could call for revolt until he was out of breath, and the most they would do would be to nod and say, “Yes, yes, amigo—somebody should do something about it.” But a saint! By God! A saint! Teresita was the goddess of war.

“The ‘Saint’ Calls for Freedom and Land!” he wrote.

“Yaqui Girl Saint’s Theology of Liberation!” was the headline of a Sunday column.

“God Gave Your Land to You, Cries the Sainted Girl of Cabora!—and Politicians and Oligarchs Have Stolen Your Patrimony—Insists the ‘Holy One’ of Sonora!”

His hope was never dimmed. He wrote endlessly, tirelessly, madly, spewing tract after tract, hoping to transform the very fabric of the world with his noble screeds. He wrote:

In mankind the sentiment of Justice is innate:

That sentiment that occults itself not in himself

But rather manifests itself with major intent

In his actions, meanwhile the less illumined

The less educated the individual because of a law

Unwritten of Compensation, natural and necessary

To the Law of Human Responsibility, in that the

Reason finds illustration and the Ideas and

Sentiments become educated and sentiments then

Lose their instinctive urge to be, as ideas and

Sentiments, guided by Reason!

Even Tomás, when he received these broadsides, stared at them for long minutes before saying, “What the devil is he talking about?”

Tomás called Teresita in one afternoon. He said, “Sit down.”

She sat across from him in his study, kicked off her shoes, and wiggled her toes in the carpet. He glanced at her feet and frowned.

“Bare feet,” he said.

“You should try it,” she said.

His smile was pained and false.

She said, “Let’s have chocolates.”

He grumbled and opened a tin of French chocolates and slid it to her across the low table between them.

“Who invented chocolate?” he said.

“Mexicans, Father dear.”

“Damned right. The noble Aztec invented chocolate.”

“We gave the world chocolatl. And cacahuatl.”

“The great peanut!” he intoned.

“And aguacatl and guajolotl!”

“Avocados and turkeys!”

“Corn!”

He sat back and smiled.

“Truly,” he said, “we are the chosen people.”

She bit into her bonbon and closed her eyes. Then she gobbled another one and groaned.

“That’s not very saintly behavior,” he said.

“I’m no saint.”

She licked her fingers.

“Oh,” he responded, “I know that. Look,” he said, “Lauro has sent us another article about you.”

“What does it say?”

“Madness,” he said. “Just crazy things. He wrote this one.”

He read the column to her.

“What did he say?” she asked.

“I’m not sure,” he replied.

“Ay, Don Lauro,” she said. “He’s so complicated.”

He put his reading glasses on the end of his nose and squinted. “Let’s see . . . in this other newspaper, you’re the Queen of the Yaquis. And your father is a poor old drunkard. Fat.”

“What’s wrong with that?” she said.

“Oh, you’re so funny.”

“Yaquis don’t have a queen.”

“They apparently have you.”

She bit another chocolate, but was already feeling nauseous.

“Anything else?”

“Yes. You are the Mexican Joan of Arc.”

This left her speechless.

She picked up her dark cherry bonbon and decided to eat it anyway.