What the Moon Saw (15 page)

Maybe this was a nightmare. I closed my eyes.
Helena,
I told myself,
when you open your eyes you will wake up in your village. You will wake up on your
petate,
next to María laughing in her sleep.
But when I opened my eyes we were standing in front of a door. A thick wooden door with bars set in a small window.

“You’ll have a cell mate,” the guard said. Out of a pouch at his side he pulled a large ring of keys. “We call her doña Three Teeth. She doesn’t talk.” He placed a key in the lock and turned it. The door creaked open. He nudged me inside. My legs shook like a scared goat’s.

The cell door shut behind me. Slowly my eyes grew accustomed to the dim light. There, in the corner, was the skeletal form of a woman. A woman with skin like dried leaves draped over bones. She sat with her feet tucked under her and her
huipil
untucked, spread around her, faded and filthy. Who knew where her
huipil
ended and the dirt floor began? Her hair hung in two long, thin braids. Like little brooms, they brushed the packed dirt. The only color in the room came from the orange ribbons woven into her braids.

How long until I’d turn into her? A stale old skeleton, barely alive?

“I’m Helena,” I whispered in Spanish.

Silent, she watched me from the shadows.

“What’s your name?” I ventured. I hid my hands behind my back so that she wouldn’t see them shaking.

No answer.

I took a step closer. And another. And another. Now I was close enough to see the design on her
huipil.
Small rows of zigzags. It was familiar.

It was almost the same pattern as mine! She must be from a nearby village.

Now I tried in Mixteco.
“Na ka’an no’o ñuu savi?”
Do you speak Mixteco?

A slow smile spread across her face, a smile that unveiled three crooked teeth. Speaking Mixteco, she replied, in a rusted voice, “You’re the girl who passes me tortillas through the bars.”

Yes. Her hands. I recognized them. Her hands had always stood out from the other hands stretched between the bars. The others were clutching, grasping, desperate. But her hands were graceful. Always, they had taken the tortillas with dignity.

I took a step closer. I reached out and placed my right hand against hers. Lightly, our hands touched, as is our custom.

You know, you can learn much from touching a person’s hand, if only you pay attention. As our hands touched, I heard a faint echo of music. I saw trails of sparks from nights of dancing. I felt a pulse of passion buried deep. And in her eyes I sensed a trace of playfulness. “I am pleased to finally meet you,” I said.

“Are you a healer?” she asked.

“Yes!” I said, surprised. “How did you know?”

“From the way you look into me. Not
at
me, but
into
me. You see who I used to be, not just who I am now. Don’t you?”

I sat down next to her and leaned against the cold wall. “I hope so.” I paused and looked at her closely. Old laugh lines ran like riverbeds over the hills and valleys of her face. “You don’t belong here,” I said. “No more than I do. Why are you here?”

Doña Three Teeth’s story lasted from noon until nightfall. The words that she had kept inside her for so long flowed out. They drifted around the room like spirals of incense smoke. As she spoke, the square of light from the window grew orange with the sunset. Then the cool purple of dusk. And finally, darkness. I closed my eyes and let her words wrap around me.

As a child, she said, she had been like a firework, always on the brink of exploding with joy. She threw herself into everything she did: embroidering otherworldly animals on
huipiles,
climbing up guava trees like a squirrel, searching for healing herbs with her grandmother. One night at a village fiesta, she fell in love with a man named Pedro Victor, a violinist who played music from his soul, music so rich it brought tears to your eyes. No one was surprised that she let his music carry her away on bird wings. No one was surprised at how sudden and deep her love for him ran. But no one was surprised, either, that her parents refused to let her marry him. In her parents’ eyes he was just a poor wandering musician from a far-off village, a stranger who was not to be trusted.

So she ran off with him. She ran off with him even though her parents warned she would never again be welcome in their house. She and Pedro Victor moved to the Mixteco neighborhood of Oaxaca City, and there they thrived. “Oh, Helena!” she said. “We loved everyone! We loved everything! And everyone loved us! Everything loved us!” How good that they loved so much, so deeply, because it did not last long. Seven years. They lived seven years of a poor but enchanted life, with three healthy children and one in the belly. And then, one day, a runaway horse galloped down the street and crashed into Pedro Victor. His head hit a rock and he died at once.

“At that moment, Helena, at that very moment, all the joy inside me left. All the music. All the sparks.” She miscarried her baby from grief. Still, she had to feed her other children—a one-year-old, a three-year-old, and a six-year-old. A friend found her a job as a maid for an elderly woman. She washed clothes and mopped floors with her baby playing at her side. Her two older children wandered around the market, scrounging for food like dogs. There by the fruit stands they ate black bananas and half-rotten mangoes that had fallen on the ground. Imagine how much it hurt her heart to know that her children were eating like dogs. She could count every rib on their tiny bodies.

That winter her youngest child fell ill. He could keep no milk or food down. “Oh, Helena! If only I’d been in my village! So many herbs growing wild in the hills. So many herbs that could have cured my son!” Her child grew weaker and weaker. She could not ask her friends for money; no, they barely scraped together enough for their own children. Finally, she asked her employer for a loan of five pesos to bring the child to a doctor. But even after she showed the
señora
how pale and thin the boy had become, the
señora
said no. “If I give you five pesos,” the old woman snapped, “soon every beggar in this neighborhood will be at my door.”

The next morning the child never woke up. That was when doña Three Teeth decided to lower her head and take her other two children back to her village. She would have to ask her parents for help. But first, she needed money for the passage back. As she was dusting the old lady’s bedroom one afternoon, she opened a shiny silver jewelry box and took a pair of earrings.

“Listen, Helena,” she told me, her face dark with shame.

“You must understand this. I had no other hope! I imagined all the people I loved dying. One by one. And nothing, I tell you, nothing is worse than seeing your child die.”

But the old lady was sharper than she had thought. Eyes sharp as a hawk’s. She noticed the missing jewelry the next morning. Soon, the police were pounding on the door of doña Three Teeth’s shack. They found the earrings hidden underneath her straw pillow and carted her off to jail. The big green stones in the earrings were emeralds, worth far more than she’d thought. The crime was much graver. And so was the punishment.

The worst of it was, her children were sent to an orphanage. “One tiny moment they gave me to kiss my children goodbye. How could I know that might be the last time I’d hold them? The last time ever?” She thought of her children with every breath she took. All she could do was pray that people were treating them well. She prayed that the oldest remembered the name of their village. Then maybe they could leave the orphanage and live with their relatives.

“Ahhh, Helena, they say they will free me next month. Can you believe it? After ten years! But you know something? My stomach is full of fear. I fear going back to my village. I fear that my children will be there…and feel shame for me. And at the same time, I fear that they won’t be there…that never again will I see them.”

In silence we sat until the guard’s footsteps sounded in the hall. He opened the door, coughing, and handed a heavy jar of water to us. We drank in gulps, doña Three Teeth and I, passing the pitcher back and forth. Then he set down a clay plate with a few tortillas and a bowl of black beans. The tortillas were stale and the beans cold, but that didn’t matter. We shared the food, nibbling like rabbits, trying to make it last longer. Of course, my cell mate had only three teeth, so she had no choice but to chew slowly.

I left the last tortilla for her, and the last bit of beans. But she refused. “No, love, you take it.”

“No, please, you.”

“No, you!”

So we tore it in half, and in half again, and again, until the tortilla pieces were the size of my little fingernail. And when we tried to part it further, we fell into a fit of laughter. Oh, such a fit that the guard’s face appeared at the door’s window to see about our uproar. Who knows what he thought when he saw us rolling on the floor? Rolling and laughing so hard that tears rolled down our cheeks.

Once he left we caught our breaths and our laughter faded into sighs. Night fell, and we lay on the dirt floor with our braids overlapping. Above us, a fly buzzed through the air. This close to doña Three Teeth, I caught a whiff of her real smell. It pierced through the stench of old sweat and mouse droppings. Her smell made me think of a fresh lime. A lime just sliced open, tart and sweet in a fine spray.

I told her about Ta’nu and Loro and Aunt and María, the beings I loved in this world. When I imitated Loro shrieking
“¡Ánimo!”
she giggled like a young girl. After a moment, I said, “Tell me more about your village. About when you were a child. When everything was good.”

She talked and talked. As her words poured out, she seemed lighter. Her voice turned warm and soothing as lemongrass tea.

I closed my eyes and let her paint pictures of the green fields around her village. Of the mossy springs where they collected water. Of the secrets in the mountain forests. I listened to the
shhhhhhh shhhhhhh
sound her voice made when she talked of the spirit waterfall. A waterfall that you could hear but not see. The sound of moving water had sung her to sleep as a child. And it sang me to sleep there in our cell. It made me forget about the floor beneath me, cold and hard. It made me forget about the rats scuttling in the corner and the cockroaches crawling over my ankles.

In peace, I slept.

Clara

N
ight after night I lay under my scratchy blanket, staring at the wooden beams in the ceiling. It took hours to fall asleep, and even when I slept it was only halfway. During the days since the fight with Pedro, I hadn’t been walking in the mountains. Instead, I stayed in the yard by the shacks, watching the chickens fight over bits of old tortillas. Sometimes I helped my grandparents work, but mostly I sat alone on a wooden chair, feeling bored and sorry for myself, wishing for a TV. Some part of my mind was always thinking about Pedro, replaying every conversation we’d had, regretting some things I’d said, wishing I’d said others.

Jewels had no soul. They were only mirrors, brilliant colors.
I thought about the song’s words from all angles, like a puzzle. What they made me think of was the fake miniature neighborhood at the spring fair and the feeling that my life in Walnut Hill was reflections on the surface of water. Flat, like Abuelita’s life before her first soul flight.

One night, about a week after the fight with Pedro, no matter how many times I changed positions, sleep would not come. Had I forgotten how to sleep? Was it a skill that you could just forget? I sat up, threw my pillow against the wall, and stepped out of bed onto the cold wooden floor.

Outside, the night held tiny water droplets. They hung in the air and pressed on my skin. There was a fuzzy halo around the half-moon, and only a few stars flickered. Most of them were hidden behind clouds. The air smelled musty, like a forgotten corner of an attic. Clothes on the line moved in slow waves, and beyond that, mist drifted over the mountains. The air was so thick that flying seemed almost possible—swimming through the night.

A voice called out, “Clara.”

It was Abuelita, walking toward me.

“What are you doing up, Abuelita?” I asked, surprised.

“I’m going to give you a
limpia, mi amor.
”

“A
limpia
?”

“
Limpia
means clean. Clean inside, in your spirit. We will blow away the clouds, lift up the fog.”

In the moonlight, we collected
ruda
and basil and white flowers from the garden, in a basket. In her curing room, Abuelita lit candles on the altar and began chanting in Mixteco in a low, soft voice. I stood still while she brushed the wet herbs over my head and neck. Little droplets of water trickled down my forehead, tickled my face, ran over my shoulders, down my arms. I giggled, then shivered, and then my breathing fell into the rhythm of her chanting.

Through half-closed eyes, I saw her take a mouthful of
mezcal.
Then, in a burst like Coke exploding from a just-opened bottle, she sprayed it all over me.

The shock of cold wetness.

Tingling skin.

Every inch of my body woke up, as though I’d just leaped into a swimming pool.

Then the tears came, warm, out of my eyes, down my face, and I heard myself sobbing, for so many things—for rolling my eyes at Dad’s stories, for yelling at Pedro, for all the people who’d crossed the desert, their abandoned villages, the families they’d left behind. Wave after wave of cold
mezcal
soaked me until I was drenched.

Finally Abuelita stopped, wrapped a blanket around my shoulders, and chanted again softly. She made crosses in the air with her hands over my head, chest, and stomach. Then she gathered up the wet herbs in the basket and led me along the edge of the cornfield, up through the wild grasses, and into the woods at the base of the mountain. When we reached the stream, we stopped.

The water ran fast, with little flecks of white foam spotting the blackness. She handed the limp herbs to me and whispered, “These have passed over your body, over your spirit. They have taken out all the
mal aire
—all the bad things. Now the
mal aire
is in these plants. Throw them in the running water,
mi amor,
and watch the current carry them away.”

I tossed the herbs into the water. The stream swallowed them up. Above us, in the branches, something moved. There, on a twisted tree limb, stood a large white bird, watching us. A heron, it looked like. It had a long neck and long legs and a peaceful air. It gazed at me with fondness, like an old friend who could guess my thoughts. I was about to point it out to Abuelita, but before I could open my mouth, the bird spread its great wings, rose up, and disappeared into the trees.

That was when I knew it, as though the heron had somehow flown inside me and spoken to me.
You are like your grandmother. You are a person who looks deeply, into the insides of things.

I whispered “Thank you” to the heron.
My spirit animal,
I thought with a shiver of pride. An animal who could fly across borders and over walls, who could see forests and deserts and fields spread out below.

Abuelita and I walked back, and with every step, I grew lighter and lighter. It wouldn’t have surprised me if with the next step I’d floated right up into the air. By the time we reached the field, the clouds had broken up. The half-moon was as clear as a paper cutout.
Luna clara.
Clear moon. More and more stars came out from the mist until pinpoints of light spotted the entire sky.

The next morning, I sketched another picture for Dad. The background dissolved into shadows, purple-blue night air with wisps of trees, a glimmer of light off the stream. At the center, under a glowing moon, the heron rising. Underneath I wrote, with confident strokes,
Your Daughter, Clara.

After the
limpia,
other things became clearer—unexpected things. Things I’d never thought much about before. I started to appreciate washing dishes outside, how the sunlight shone through droplets of water and made starry reflections on the sink and turned the bubbles into heaps of rainbows. I began helping Abuelita more with other chores too—making tortillas, carrying big containers of water from the spring, walking to neighbors’ houses with a sack strapped to my forehead, full of dried beans, bananas, and tomatoes to trade. She showed me how to string the herbs up to dry, and we tied them to the kitchen rafters, where they dangled just below Loro.

In my notebook, I sketched the herbs, their leaves laced with networks of veins. Some leaves’ edges were smooth arcs, others jagged like the teeth of a saw. Leaves of all sizes, fuzzy and silver, or slick and green, nearly black. I labeled them with their names and healing benefits. I felt thirsty for everything Abuelita knew. Her knowledge was a cool stream that I could dip a cup into and drink up.

During the day I focused on working and learning, but at night Pedro started taking over my thoughts. I saw my feelings for him more clearly now. They were like an obsidian butterfly, fragile and solid and glittering, impossible to ignore. I sketched a picture of an obsidian butterfly for Dad and labeled it
Pedro and Me
.

In the mornings I started helping Abuelo gather firewood and pile it onto the burro’s back, and chop down weeds along the path to the cornfield using a long machete. Who knows what Mom would have said if she’d seen me strutting down the path swinging a knife as long as my arm? She always worried that I’d cut off a finger from something as simple as chopping carrots or slicing a bagel. A few mornings after the
limpia,
I came outside and found Abuelo standing behind a thick log set on its end, as high as his waist. He held a big wooden club with both hands and moved it up and down in the hollowed-out tree trunk. I came closer and saw that it was smooth inside, and half full of coffee beans.

“Try it, Clara,” he said. He held the club out to me and sat down on a little wooden chair, sweat dripping down the sides of his face even though it was still morning. Lifting up his hat, he smoothed back his hair and wiped the moisture off his face with a faded red bandanna.

“What does this do to the beans?” I asked. The club was heavier than I’d thought. It threw me off balance at first, like when you pick up a bowling ball.

“It takes the skins off,” Abuelo said. “Next we’ll separate the skins and beans, then roast them, then grind them. Part of it we’ll sell at the market, and the rest we’ll use in our own coffee.”

How could someone so old do this work for hours? At first I felt as clumsy as a dog trying to use a pencil. But eventually I fell into a rhythm, pounding slowly and listening to Abuelo’s rough, comfortable voice.

“This work is nicer when you have someone to talk with,” he said. “Your father used to help me. We had two of these logs. Side by side, we used to work.”

“What happened to the other one?”

“Oh, when I realized he wasn’t coming back, I sold it in town.”

I wiped the sweat from my face, pulled off my sweater, and tossed it onto a cardboard box. How could Dad have left his father alone? How could he stand to never hear Abuelo’s hyper little laugh? It didn’t make sense. “Abuelo,” I said. “Why do you think my dad left here and never came back?”

Abuelo looked at me for a minute from under the brim of his hat. “Ay,
m’hija
! I was hoping you would tell me.”

“He doesn’t talk about it,” I said. I gripped the club to begin pounding again.

Abuelo stood up now, took a handful of coffee beans, and sifted the skins through his fingers. His palms and fingers were solid calluses from years of hard work. I’d always figured that Dad’s calluses had come from the landscaping business. But those calluses must have started here, in Yucuyoo. The bottom layer of tough skin on his palms had grown thick right here, while he pounded coffee beans next to his father.

“Now comes the part that your father always loved best,” Abuelo said. “Separating the beans from the skin. And see? What luck! There is just the right amount of wind for this today.”

We spread
petates
out over the area between the kitchen and the outhouse, a flat stretch of dirt where the chickens usually scurried around. Then, using a gourd, Abuelo scooped out the beans from the tree trunk and threw them up into the air. The wind caught the lighter bits—the dried wispy skins—and carried them off toward the banana trees. The beans were heavier, and they fell onto the mat. They were the part we needed.

Abuelo handed me another gourd. “You can use this one,
m’hija.
” I took it and noticed words carved on the bottom.
Enrique Hector Luna Estrada, Yucuyoo, 1980.
It had been Dad’s.

Abuelo saw me running my fingers over the letters. “Enrique was your age when he carved that.”

I tossed a gourdful up into the air, imagining I was Dad, before he had any idea he’d be moving to the U.S. and marrying an American and having a daughter. The wind caught the beans and held them in the air, hanging there by sunlight, as if the beans and skins were deciding:
Stay or go?
And the heavy beans fell, while the skins flew off in waves, rising and falling and making small circles in their flight toward the trees.

Abuelo threw another gourdful into the air and squinted into the sun, watching the skins disappear. “The day after Enrique left was a little windy like today. I got up early to pound the beans before breakfast. I waited for him to come out and help. I waited and waited. He never came.”

“He didn’t tell you he was leaving?” I couldn’t believe it—Dad would get mad at me if I rode my bike down the block without telling him first!

“No. Perhaps he wouldn’t have been able to bear seeing our faces when he said goodbye. He knew he would be leaving us all alone. He was the only child we were able to have. He slipped away in the middle of the night.”

“How old was he?” I asked.

“Sixteen, nearly seventeen. He was restless, you see. I think he saw his life here stretching out forever, harvesting coffee and barely making enough money for food. A few months before he left, he told us something in a serious voice. ‘A friend of mine is going to Arizona to work,’ he said.

‘And I’m thinking about going too.’”

Abuelo was sitting down now on the mat, surrounded by shiny beans. I threw the last gourdful into the air and watched the skins fly away. I sat down next to him, cross-legged, and felt the sun warm on my face.