The Queen of Water (8 page)

chapter 13

“WHAT ARE YOU SMILING ABOUT?”
the Doctorita asks, suspicious.

We’re taking an evening walk along the fields and orchards with Niño Carlitos and the boys. The school year has just ended, and on my top-secret final exams I scored the second highest in social studies and the highest in science, out of the entire eighth grade.

“Oh, nothing.” I try to make my face solemn, but the sky is too pink, the clouds too silver, the light too golden. And the crickets and frogs are too enthusiastic, chirping and cheering for my success. Jaimito is running ahead, kicking up dust. Andrecito’s pudgy hand clutches mine, and the other hand clutches his father’s. Every few steps, we swing Andrecito in the air and he squeals with delight.

“You don’t have a boyfriend, do you,
m’hija
?” Niño Carlitos asks quietly.

“No!” I blush. Of course, I still have a lingering crush on MacGyver. Not on Roberto the MacGyver look-alike—he’s engaged to be married to another teacher—but the original MacGyver, the one on TV. Marlenny and Marina know all about my devotion to him, but I’d never admit it to Niño Carlitos or the Doctorita.

“You’re forbidden to have a boyfriend,” the Doctorita warns.

“I don’t have a boyfriend. I’m just … happy.” I turn to Andrecito. “One, two, three, swing!” And we laugh together.

“Humph,” the Doctorita says, screwing up her face into a half frown, half laugh. “We better not find out you have a boyfriend.”

I’m in the truck, breathing in smells of sunshine on plastic and the pungent sweat pouring from my armpits. I’m nervous. We’re on our way to Yana Urku, my old village. For some reason, they’ve decided to bring me along to visit Niño Carlitos’s parents for the weekend. They were probably afraid something crazy would happen if they left me alone in the house with all my mysterious happiness.

All five of us have been squeezed on one seat for three hours, Andrecito asleep on my skinny lap and Jaimito on the Doctorita’s wide lap, and Niño Carlitos driving. Andrecito’s face is damp and smells sweet and sticks to my arm. His cheeks are rosy and his little lips parted and his chest rising and falling. Meanwhile, Jaimito is bouncing and shifting as the Doctorita tries to hold him still. He’s going through a phase where he talks and asks questions nonstop.

“What are those plants?” he asks, staring out the window at fields of tall stalks. I can’t help smiling at the way he still can’t pronounce his
s
’s.

“Cane,” Niño Carlitos answers, since the Doctorita has no patience.

“Why did they plant cane?”

“To make sugar and liquor.”

“Why?”

“For money.”

“What’s that smoke?”

“Part of the sugarcane-making process. They distill it.”

“What’s distill?”

The Doctorita rolls her eyes while Niño Carlitos explains distillation. I listen for a while, recognizing some words from
Understanding Our Universe
—evaporation, pressure, water vapor.

As the mountain Imbabura grows bigger and closer, I try to remember my mother’s and father’s faces. My sisters’ and brother’s. They are frozen in time, and fading, like old photos in an album. Do they remember my face? Do they wonder how I might look now? Would I recognize them if I passed them on the street? What did we used to talk about? Definitely not distillation and evaporation. What, then? Potatoes? Corn? What would we talk about if we saw each other again?

With a damp handkerchief, the Doctorita dabs at the sweat trickling down her face. She shifts Jaimito, who has finally quieted down and fallen asleep in her lap. Now she and Niño Carlitos are talking about their plans to move to Ibarra, a nearby city, much bigger and busier than Kunu Yaku.

“I’m sick of our backwater town,” she snorts. “I can’t wait to live in Ibarra. Civilization.”

Niño Carlitos looks straight ahead. Light pours through the window, illuminating his bald spot. “Well, if our job transfers go through, then we can move there. But for now be patient, Negra.”

A couple of years ago, when they first started talking about moving, I felt fluttery with nervous excitement. A new place filled with new people. Something different, something big. But after years of hearing about the move, I began to accept that it would never actually happen. Complaining about Kunu Yaku was just another of the Doctorita’s little fixations, I realized, like knitting Baby Jesus dresses and fretting about thieves and worrying about her boys catching germs.

“It better be soon,” the Doctorita says, just like she always says. Her chins jiggle extra hard with every bump in the road. She never lost the weight from her last pregnancy, and now she has two fleshy chins.

She wipes her forehead again and turns to me. “Virginia, I know you want to go to school. So I’ll pull some strings and get you a diploma from the elementary school, and with that you’ll be able to go to sewing school in Ibarra.”

“Really?” I say, trying not to show any emotion, reminding myself that this will probably never come to pass. I press my lips to the top of Andrecito’s head, onto his wispy hairs. The thought of getting a diploma gives me tingles; it’s the next step toward my dream. With a diploma, I’d be able to enter the
colegio
. The sewing school part, though, makes my stomach queasy. Maybe I can just take the diploma and then refuse to go to sewing school, or run away if I have to.

I blow on Andrecito’s neck, cooling him off, and wonder why the Doctorita is bringing up school now. Then I realize: she’s afraid I’ll run away to my parents. She wants to give me a reason to stay with her family. This annoys me a little, that she thinks she can manipulate me. At the same time, it touches me that she cares enough that she’s scared to lose me. It gives me a backward kind of power.

In the midafternoon, when the sun is high overhead—the earth’s equator close to the ball of burning fire, just like the diagram in
Understanding Our Universe
—we turn onto the dirt road to Yana Urku.

Nothing has changed. The giant blue sky, the fields of potatoes and corn, the white houses with red tile roofs, the rocky canyons, the mountains towering overhead. Quichua words come back to me in tiny pieces that smell like wood smoke and people sweating in fields and rain-soaked wool.
Urku
—mountain.
Api
—soup.
Kiya
—moon. The words float by, flecks of ash, seeds on the breeze, remnants of another life that hasn’t quite vanished. I try to snatch at the words, hold them in my hand and remember their textures, feel their shapes on my tongue.

Mariana, Niño Carlitos’s mother, emerges from the house to greet us and fuss over her grandchildren. Jumbled memories return—Mariana stealing the sweetest
choclos
from our cornfield, Mariana scolding indigenous workers, Mariana and Alfonso sitting with my parents and Niño Carlitos and the Doctorita the first time I met them. As Mariana hugs Andrecito, I notice the graying hair wound tightly at the back of her head, and remember what we used to call her:
misha copetona. Mestiza
with the ridiculous bun.

After she hugs the boys, she greets me with forced warmth. “Virginia! My, you’re looking beautiful. What a lovely young lady.” Her words seemed sugarcoated, hiding dark intentions, and as she ushers us inside, I feel a chill. Is she also being nice to me so that I won’t take this opportunity to run back to my parents?

A little while later I’m watching the boys play with sticks in a patch of grass at the edge of the driveway, when Mariana approaches me. “Virginia, I want you to leave Romelia and Carlitos and come to work for my daughter in Quito.” When she says the Doctorita’s name, her lip curls, as though she’s tasted something rotten. I remember that Mariana doesn’t like the Doctorita, that she’s often told her son his wife is too fat, too dark-skinned, too bossy—far from the slim, fair, gentle wife he deserves. “Well? What do you say, Virginia?”

I stare at the profile of her giant bun and shrug, thinking it best to keep my mouth shut.

She goes on. “Quito is a big, beautiful city, so much prettier than those boondocks where you live now. And my daughter needs a maid desperately. She’s an angel. She’ll treat you well.” She looks at me expectantly. When I stay silent, she says, “Think about it,” and goes inside.

Of course I won’t go. I don’t trust a word she says. Still, I can’t help considering it. Later, as I’m cleaning up after dinner with the maids I mention Mariana’s offer. They exchange looks. “Go to Quito, Virginia,” they urge. “The Doctorita beats you and treats you terribly. How could you want to stay with her?” They push and push so much I realize Mariana must have told them to convince me to go.

“I’ll think about it,” I say, and step outside into the cool dusk, thick with the scent of fresh earth and cows. I feel all mixed up, the way soil must feel after the oxen come through, plowing it, turning it inside out, getting it ready for planting. And when a seed is dropped in, it can easily germinate and take root and push its tender new leaves toward the sun and begin the marvelous process of photosynthesis. When I think about it, the seed has been inside me for years—the idea of leaving the Doctorita. Every time she yells at me or hits me or reminds me of my place as a lowly
longa
maid, she’s watering the seed. And now Mariana’s offer is like cow manure, fertilizing it, nourishing it, reminding me of my power, my options.

But Quito is not where I’ll go. I’ll go home to my family.

Sunlight shines on the green cornstalks and makes my eyes scrunch up. The corn is taller than me, a forest of leaves whispering along with the breeze. Corncobs poke out everywhere, ripe and wrapped in green, ready to be picked and opened up and grilled. It’s late Sunday morning, and everyone has gone to Otavalo except me and the other maids, who are pasturing the cows in the valley. They were supposed to keep an eye on me, but I insisted I had a headache and wanted to stay behind to rest.

I walk along the cornfield, toward my family’s house, framed by mountains. I squint into the sun, looking at the house, trying to tell if my mother or father is in the yard. No one. Strangely relieved, I walk closer and closer, my eyes glued to the house, spots from the sun swimming in my vision. Still no one. My heart’s racing now, and I slip inside a row of corn. Here in the cool shadows I feel protected, as though I’m undercover in the jungle, a secret agent, spying on my own family.

As I walk, I remember the Doctorita’s words from the last time she brought me here.
If you go back to your family, they’ll give you to another family, a family that won’t treat you as well.
And my mother’s words.
I’d be happy if one day you left forever.

I creep around the house, sticking close to the shadows of the corn. There’s my father’s
soga
hanging on the wall, his farm tools, my mother’s broom, the eucalyptus stick she smacked me with when I misbehaved. Two huge pigs are asleep in their pen, and two sheep are rooting around in the weeds by the tree where they’re tied. Chickens peck at corn kernels scattered across the dirt. No Cheetah the goat. She’s probably been eaten by now.

I take a deep breath, then run across the clearing to the house, ducking a little, as though at any moment someone could open fire. Instead of bullets, dogs skid around the corner of the house and descend on me—a whole new set of scrawny, half-starved dogs, barking and growling. From my pocket I tear my weapon—a plastic bag of stale bread I thought to bring at the last minute—and hurl pieces at the dogs like hand grenades.

After that, they follow me eagerly, wagging their tails, drooling. I make it to the wooden door and knock softly.

No answer.

I knock harder.

Still no answer. I push at the door. It’s open. I slip inside and close the door behind me.

Inside it’s quiet and heavy and dark, and my eyes take a moment to adjust. A thousand memories press on me all at once, nearly suffocating me. There’s the lingering odor of kerosene, woodsmoke, dirt, guinea pigs, wool. I wander around the room, opening drawers, poking in cardboard boxes, peering at the guinea pigs huddled in a corner, feeling the thick fabric of my mother’s
anacos,
sitting for a moment on the bed and touching the woven grass mat that serves as a mattress, patting the musty pillow stuffed with rags and hay, picking up a wooden spoon, running my hand over a blackened iron pot. I kneel at the fire pit, hold my hand over the ashes still warm from breakfast.
Nina
—fire.
Uchufa
—ash.
Chushac
—empty. My family must have been here earlier this morning. Maybe they left to spend the day in Otavalo.

My heart is pounding so hard I’m afraid it will burst through my chest. I’m praying no one will come home and find me spying. And I
am
spying. This is not my house. This is the house—no, the run-down shack—of poor people, Indian people. It’s dirty and ugly, no decorations like crocheted table runners, or framed cross-stitched roses on the walls, no red sofas or plush chairs. All gray and brown and dark and hard. Packed-dirt floors, dull wood rafters, crumbling clay walls. Filthy clothes and blankets heaped in piles on the ground. Flea-ridden guinea pigs squeaking and humping and scratching, living in the same room as the entire family.

How could I have come from this place? What was I hoping to find here? Love? Love that never even existed?

I wouldn’t have learned to read if I’d stayed here. I’d be working in the fields all day, right in the midst of so much photosynthesis, yet without any idea of what photosynthesis was. I wouldn’t have shelves of books waiting to be read. I wouldn’t speak Spanish perfectly.

I’m heading toward the door when I spot something strange.

At the foot of the bed, on a shelf, is a book. There were never books in my parents’ house before. They can’t read. I pick up the book, brush off the thin layer of dust.
The Holy Bible
is written in swirly gold lettering on black vinyl. I open it and press my nose in the pages, like I secretly do with all books. It smells new, of paper and plastic and glue, as though it’s hardly been touched.