What the Moon Saw (24 page)

“Pedro, come on. We have to get you to Abuelita.”

His voice was slurred. “I can’t walk now.”

“Then I’ll get help.”

He grabbed my hand. “No! Stay with me!”

“But—”

“Please, Clara.”

I looked at him closely. Color was coming back to his face.

“Listen,” he creaked. “They say that with scorpion stings, if you survive the first fifteen minutes, you won’t die. I’ll be all right. Just sit with me.”

That was exactly what I wanted to do. Just sit with him. I sat against the wall and put his head in my lap. I smoothed out the furrow between his eyebrows and moved my hands lightly over his body and tried to raise us out of the waves of throbbing and stinging and aching.

His breathing grew calm and deep and regular. I let my hand fall on his forehead. As he slept, I watched his eyelids flutter, his chest move up and down. The thunder and wind faded, leaving only a hard, steady downpour. We rested, safe and warm, under the giant wing of a white heron.

Drifting in and out of dreams, I remembered the next piece of Abuelita’s life. It seemed like ages ago that she’d told it, although it had only been the night before. The furious storm she’d faced. Her scratches and bruises. Death so close she could feel its breath. Between raindrops, her words came back to me, with more meaning now that I had been there too.

Helena

W
INTER
1939–S
UMMER
1940

A
t the beginning of my fourteenth year, Clara, I was blooming like a lily during rainy season. Aunt Teresa told me, “Helena, you look like a bird these days, just about to leap into flight.” Word was spreading about my curing powers. Every time I found a patient’s soul, or eased a child’s bellyache, or cured someone’s
mal aire,
word spread. People told their aunts and uncles and in-laws and cousins and neighbors. Soon people from far-off villages were coming by foot and by burro, looking for cures. Oh, it tired me, but it made me feel more alive, too. Just as Ta’nu had said it would.
Through healing, you will learn what it means to be truly alive.

Sometimes I stayed up all night, for nights in a row. My spirit journeyed far. It flew to thick forests and stark deserts. It flew to oceans, skimming the sparkling waves. And it swam deep beneath the sea’s surface, inside the murky green.

In the mornings, of course, I couldn’t rest. Too much work to do. That was another thing Ta’nu was right about. The life of a woman was work, work, work. Making tortillas, washing, grinding corn, cooking. But I did these chores with a glow around me, a glow that lit up the people and plants and animals nearby. A glow that let me see into them, see things I hadn’t noticed before.

Aunt’s baby, Lupita, staggered around the kitchen as we worked. How she loved it when I cured people! With her big eyes she watched me give
limpias.
María would say, “Lupita, show us how your cousin Helena cures.” With a devilish smile, Lupita would take a deep breath, puff out her cheeks, and shower us with sprays of saliva. We’d back away, laughing.

It was the rainy season of that year when my first monthly blood came. That very day, as we were patting out tortillas in the dark kitchen, Aunt said to me, “You are a little woman now, Helena. You must start thinking of marriage.”

Outside in the sunshine, María and Lupita were squealing and laughing, tossing grains of corn to the chickens. I felt a dull pain in my belly, a heavy ache in my thighs.

Sunlight came through the bamboo slats. Light sliced through the smoke and painted Aunt’s
huipil
with stripes. Her face was in darkness, her hands in the light. Her hands patted out a tortilla and laid it carefully on the clay plate, just as they’d done thousands of times before. The hands flipped another tortilla and grabbed a new handful of dough.

“Aunt Teresa.” I lowered my voice. “I will
not
marry.”

“Well, I didn’t want to marry either,” she said.

“Why did you?”

“I will tell you. You’re old enough to know. I was about your age, at the stream one day. I was filling a pot with water, crouching down to scoop the first gourdful of water into the pot. And that’s when a young man walked up with his burro. He looked at me long and hard, as though I were a food he hungered for. He frightened me, so I stood up quickly and started walking back. When I heard him following me, I started to run. My pot fell and clanked against a rock. I left it behind, but I could not run fast enough.”

Aunt’s voice was shaking. She took a long breath and let it out slowly. “When I finally returned home, my mother saw my torn
huipil.
She saw the mud smeared all over my legs. She saw the handprint bruises on my arm, the dirt in my teeth, the tears on my face. ‘Who was it?’ she asked. I told her. ‘The brother of the healer Ramón.’ I didn’t even know his name. Without another word, my mother marched straight to their house. She demanded to his father—to Ta’nu—that the young man marry me. And that is how I married your uncle José.”

A shiver swept over me. I’d known Aunt had no love for Uncle, but I’d never imagined reasons so dark. “How can you stand it, Aunt?”

She wiped her eyes and shrugged. “That’s how life is.”

We patted out more tortillas in silence. My fury was growing.

Finally she said, “Helena, you must marry. What would you do as an old lady, without children to care for you? And until then, you need a man to protect you, to provide for you.”

I laughed, a bitter laugh. Bitter as green fruit. How could Aunt say that? So many men we knew squandered their money. They spent it on liquor. They gambled. They bought any useless thing they stumbled over. And what man protects his woman? We knew how wives and children suffered when the men came home drunk. Men frustrated at their poor lives, angry at the world. Men who let their rage fly out at their families.

Oh, it was easy for Aunt to guess my thoughts, the way I was pounding my tortilla dough down on the
metate.
She smiled sadly. “But, Helena…what will people say if you don’t marry?”

“That doesn’t matter, Aunt. I cannot marry. It’s forbidden to have relations with a man while I’m learning to cure. And who knows if my husband would let me cure at all.”

People in my village told a story about a woman who had a calling to heal. This happened years ago, before I was born. Her husband was jealous of her powers. Jealous, too, of the men who came to her for cures. One day he forbade her to cure. He made her do only washing and tortilla-making with the other women. She warned him, “If I refuse my calling, I will die.” That night she slipped out of the house. The next morning, at the foot of a cliff, they found her dead body.

“Women have no choice, Helena.” Aunt’s hands, sunlit, placed the tortilla on the clay plate. Flipped the other one. Grabbed more dough. I thought:
That’s all she is, just a pair of hands for making tortillas, washing clothes, grinding corn.

“Aunt, haven’t you ever felt there was anything you
had
to do, even if people didn’t want you to?”

“Perhaps, Helena. Perhaps when I was a little girl. But now, when I look in my mirror, you know what I see? A mixture of my mother’s face and my daughters’ faces. That is what I am. That is enough for me.”

Oh, I must have had a terrible look on my own face because she patted my arm and said kindly, “Well, maybe you won’t have to marry for a few years yet.”

But it turned out to be soon, very soon. Two months later, our village had a weeklong fiesta for San Juan, our patron saint. Everyone was in the main square, eating
tamales
and drinking
mezcal.
Everyone except for me.

I was working in the kitchen, by the fire. I hung up some herbs to dry in the rafters and took down the ones that were already dried. I began grinding fresh
hierba amarga
—bitter herb—in
mezcal.
A tincture for stomachaches. In peace I worked, in near silence. No sounds but the fire sparking once in a while, the song of frogs outside. Loro moved softly above me in the rafters. There was no one else nearby except the pigs and chickens and goats sleeping in the yard.

Suddenly, the chickens let out a flurry of squawks, as if someone had kicked them out of the way. I jumped. Some
mezcal
spilled to the floor. I spun my head around.

There, blocking the door to the kitchen, was don Norberto. Don Norberto, the man who spent every evening sprawled under a tree in a drunken stupor. Whenever I walked by, he’d watch me with his small, half-closed eyes. There he would slouch, clutching a
mezcal
bottle. Slobbering on his filthy shirt. He was as old as Uncle José. His hair was turning silver, faster now, from loneliness, since his wife had died last year in childbirth. Oh, I remembered his wife well, poor thing. A frail woman, her skin always marked with bruises and scrapes. Wounds that appeared after don Norberto’s angry drunken fits.

Swaying slightly, he moved closer to me in the kitchen. “I was looking for you at the fiesta,” he said. His words slurred together.

“Leave this kitchen now,” I told him.

An oily smile spread over his face. He took a step closer.

I took a few steps back and looked around. What could I defend myself with? I spotted the heavy grindstone to my right. Maybe I could aim that at his head.

Closer he wobbled. Now I could smell the liquor on his breath. A patch of dried vomit stained the front of his shirt.

Just when I was thinking that he was too drunk to see straight, he lunged at me. He grabbed my shoulders with force. Surprising force.

A moment of shock hung there, like a leaf held by a breeze. We looked at each other, our faces nearly touching.

Then a screech shot out of my mouth. A strange animal sound so loud it scared us both. My face felt like a jaguar’s, my teeth sharp and ferocious. He loosened his grip and nearly fell backward.

I grasped the nearest thing I could reach. A piece of firewood, one end in flames. I held it there, out to my side. Now I was moving toward him as he was backing out. I heard myself screech again. That same wild scream. It wasn’t a cry of fear. No, it was one of rage. And he knew that.

He stumbled toward the door, but another figure stopped him. Uncle José.

“Put down the firewood, girl,” Uncle commanded.

I laid the wood back on the hearth.

“Norberto, what are you doing here with my niece?” Uncle José was drunk too, I realized. A mean, red-faced drunk. He staggered toward don Norberto and shoved him against the wall.

“I was going to ask the girl…” Don Norberto paused. He glanced at me with a yellow-toothed grin “…to marry me.”

Uncle took a step back from don Norberto and looked at me.

I held my breath.

He looked back at don Norberto. Uncle’s face broke into a smile. He gave don Norberto a friendly slap on the shoulder.

“Girl, go to sleep now,” Uncle barked.

I left the kitchen, bewildered. Outside the hut I lingered, listening to their talk. They discovered the bottle of
mezcal
that I’d been using to make medicines. The two drank it together. They drank and drank until they passed out. When all was silent, I peeked into the kitchen and saw my uncle cradling the empty bottle like a baby. Don Norberto’s head rested in my basket of dried herbs. A thin line of drool stretched from his mouth to the dirt floor. It glinted like a spiderweb in the firelight.

The following morning I found out I was engaged. The wedding date was set for a month later. No one had asked me if I wanted to marry don Norberto. For a week I tried to talk to Uncle José, to tell him I wanted no husband. Especially not a husband like don Norberto. I wanted to talk to Uncle when he was not drunk. But, you see, this was not easy during fiesta week.

One morning, when the men had just returned from collecting firewood, I decided to talk to Uncle. The men were sitting under the trees sharpening their machetes, waiting for the women to serve them food. I went up to Uncle José with his tortillas and beans.

“Uncle, I must talk to you,” I whispered.

The two men next to Uncle laughed. Women never talked to men as they were serving food. They placed the steaming bowls down silently and scurried off as fast as they could.

Uncle scowled and set down his bowl. He stood up and grabbed my arm roughly. Then he led me a few steps away from the men. “What do you want?”

He was angry, yes, but at least he wasn’t drunk.