Woman Hollering Creek (16 page)

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
fault, 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.

It’s only now when they murmur
bruja, nagual
, behind my back, just as they hurled those words at my mother, that I realize how alike my mother and I are. How words can hold their own magic. How a word can charm, and how a word can kill. This I’ve understood.

Mujeriego
. I dislike the word. Why not
hombreriega?
Why not? The word loses its luster.
Hombreriega
. Is that what I am? My mother? But in the mouth of men, the word is flint-edged and heavy, makes a drum of the body, something to maim and bruise, and sometimes kill.

What is it I am to you? Sometime wife? Lover? Whore? Which? To be one is not so terrible as being all.

I’ve needed to hear it from you. To verify what I’ve always thought I knew. You’ll say I’ve grown crazy from living on dried grass and corn silk. But I swear I’ve never seen more clearly than these days.

Ay, Miliano, don’t you see? The wars begin here, in our hearts and in our beds. You have a daughter. How do you want her treated? Like you treated me?

All I’ve wanted was words, that magic to soothe me a little, what you could not give me.

The months I disappeared, I don’t think you understood my reasons. I assumed I made no difference to you. Only Nicolás mattered. And that’s when you took him from me.

When Nicolás lost his last milk tooth, you sent for him, left him in your sister’s care. He’s lived like deer in the mountains, sometimes following you, sometimes meeting you ahead of your campaigns, always within reach. I know. I let him go. I agreed, yes, because a boy should be with his father, I said. But the truth is I wanted a part of me always hovering near you. How hard it must
be for you to keep letting Nicolás go. And yet, he is always yours. Always.