What the Moon Saw (26 page)

But wait. Doña Three Teeth’s voice grew clearer and stronger, until it became too close to be only a dream. Her fingers held my wrist, felt my pulse. Her hands rested on my forehead, cool and dry. They gently lifted my head and dribbled water into my mouth.

I coughed and sputtered. When I opened my eyes, I saw her three rotten teeth, her worried eyes.

Soon there was woodsmoke. She’d built a fire. She disappeared and came back with armfuls of herbs. I watched her brew them in bubbling water, watched her blow on the tea to cool it. Sip by sip, I felt the pungent tea go down my throat. Little by little it began to fill the emptiness inside.

Was this a ghost? No, it couldn’t be, because at night I felt her bony body. She pressed against me under a thick blanket, sharing her warmth. She sang to me. Thin wandering melodies she sang. Melodies that a mother might sing to her child. Little by little her voice pulled me out of my dark hole. She pulled me back out into the sunshine.

Then one morning—after she fed me milk with cinnamon and honey—the rusty words finally creaked out of my mouth.
“Nku ta’a vini.”
Thank you.

Her face lit up at my voice. “You’ll live!” she chirped. She leaped up and danced. Around in the air she flailed her bird legs and twig arms.

Loro screeched and whistled along with her. “Helena Helena!” The first smile in ages came to my face. A few days later I was well enough to hear her story.

“Oh, Helena!” she said. “When the day came for me to leave prison, I was terrified. Terrified! I walked outside and oh, I thought my knees would buckle under. And the sunshine! It was so bright I thought I’d go blind. All the colors, the noise, the people! And you know what I did? I ran straight back inside to the door of my cell. Ha! But the guard wouldn’t let me back in! Imagine, locked
outside
my cell.” She laughed, little squirrel noises. “I had nowhere to go. Of course, I couldn’t face going back to my village. So I decided to drown myself in a river.

“Ah, but then I remembered the thirty pesos. The money you gave me, Helena! Well, what a waste to drown myself in the river without spending it first. Don’t you think? After all, you were kind enough to give it to me. So I walked on my wobbly legs to the market. And here’s what I did.” She leaned closer. “I bought myself a chicken. And a pot to cook it in. And chiles and chocolate and nuts and tomatoes and sesame seeds and raisins and spices. And a little grindstone. You can guess my plan—to make chocolate-chile sauce for my chicken! Then I bought cherry pastries—a bag of them! One after one I ate them, leaving the city, leaving a trail of crumbs behind me. I walked until I found a forest with a stream where I could cook and eat in peace. My final meal.

“And you know, Helena, as I was cooking, I remembered things. I remembered how much I loved the feel of the grindstone under my hands. And the smell of roasting garlic. And oh, Helena, when I ate that chocolate-chile chicken, tears came to my eyes. Partly from the spiciness, yes, but partly from memories of village fiestas. Everyone would come to those fiestas and fill their bellies and dance and dance. Such fun! So you know what I did? Instead of throwing myself in the river, I danced. I danced and sang, and made a new decision. I told myself,
All right, Three Teeth, you can live as long as you can find food.
And I walked. Just walked. For two years I’ve been walking. I find fruit and nuts from trees. Sometimes people give me tortillas when they pass me on the road. Because, yes, there are still good people in this world, people who know we all eat from the same tortilla.

“And the odd thing is, Helena, that last week I found myself dreaming of you. Hearing your voice in the wind and the rain and the water.
Oh,
I told myself,
Three Teeth, you’ve finally gone crazy.
But I let your voice lead me here. A few days ago I was fetching water a little way up the stream. And all of a sudden that beautiful green bird of yours walked right up to me. ‘Helena Helena!’ he yelled. I knew it was Loro. I followed him downstream, and he brought me to you, love. You, lying here, a few breaths away from death.”

Little by little my strength came back. I was a withered plant, slowly growing greener, growing stronger. Soaking up sunshine. Drinking up water. Feeling the rich soil beneath me and the blue sky above.

Once I gained back enough strength, I told doña Three Teeth my own story. I spoke of my curing, Aunt Teresa’s
baños de temazcal,
my adorable baby cousin. But when I came to the part about the wedding, my voice turned bitter. “So, I am married now,” I told her.

“Ha!” she laughed. She dipped a cloth into a pot of cool water steeped with herbs. “Of course you’re not!” She squeezed the cloth and placed it gently on my foot. It felt refreshing and tingly.

“But I am,” I insisted. “We had a ceremony in the church. We had the fiesta afterward. Everything.”

“You didn’t sign the government papers yet, did you?” she asked. Her voice was confident. She pressed the wet cloth against the sole of my other foot.

“Well, no,” I said. You see, an official from the city came once a year to our village. He brought papers for that year’s weddings, and all the new couples signed at the same time.

“No, the man with the papers hadn’t come yet.”

“So you’re not married,” she said with a wink. She dabbed the cloth over my ankles, over the scabs and swollen scratches.

“But the ceremony—” I began.

“That means nothing!” she cried. “Nothing!” She threw the cloth into the pot. Water splashed over the sides. “Your uncle forced you! I tell you,
you are not married, Helena
!”

“You think?” I asked, a smile spreading across my face. I felt lighter, as though I’d just shrugged a heavy bundle of firewood off my shoulders.

“Ha! I am certain! I married for love, Helena. And you will too someday.”

“You sound like Ta’nu.” I laughed.

Doña Three Teeth asked me to call her Nana. In Mixteco this means “mother.” I called her Nana gladly. Sometimes, when we were cleaning dishes or fetching water, I would feel that in some way Nana
was
my mother.

One night we sat on a stone by the river. She combed my hair with her fingers. Softly, she sang the song about the rabbit in the moon. “Nana,” I told her after the song had ended, “you are my mother because you gave me life.”

She unwound the orange ribbon from her braids and carefully wove it into mine. She fastened the ends together.

When I woke up the next morning, there was Nana, standing over me. Watching me. Waiting for my eyes to open. Oh, she was full of joy. Joy, spilling out all around her.

“Helena, you’re well enough to travel now. Let’s go!”

“Go where?” I mumbled. I was sleepy, yes, but already her joy had started seeping into me.

“To the village where I grew up!” she said. Her eyes blazed. “Together we’ll find my children. Together we’ll live by the sound of the waterfall. I dreamed this last night!”

“How will we live?” I asked. I sat up and stretched. “How will we eat?”

“Curing! We’ll be the village’s healers!”

I thought about this. She had learned to heal from her grandmother. And oh, how I longed to start curing again. Yes, we could do this together. We didn’t need husbands. But what about Aunt, and María, and Lupita? Thinking about them made my chest tighten up. No, it was too late to go back to that path. My path now was leading me elsewhere, pulling me along like a river’s current. Pulling me over the edge, like a waterfall. Over the edge to a new place, a different life. Oh, I would not live with my aunt and cousins again, but sparks from their souls flickered inside mine. And perhaps someday I would go back to see them.

“How far is your village?” I asked. I felt a flutter in my stomach, like the wings of a hummingbird.

“Oh, about three days’ walk over those mountains.” Nana pointed west. “It’s called Yucuyoo.”

Yucuyoo. The Hill of the Moon.

For three days we walked along paths, steep and rocky. We slipped and slid on the mud from afternoon rains. But the walking was good for me. Nana said that I was still too thin, but my cheeks were pink like rose petals. That my face glowed like a full moon. That my hair looked thick and shiny as a jaguar’s fur.

And you know, Nana looked beautiful now too. How can a person be beautiful with three rotten teeth, you wonder. But she was! The fine structure of her face, strong like the old stone sculptures of gods that we came across in the cornfields. And I felt a warmth, a big light, that came from her little bird body. Oh, she was beautiful.

At the top of a tall mountain, late in the morning on the fourth day, we peered into the valley below. Smoke rose from houses. The women were making tortillas. How my stomach rumbled! We hadn’t eaten tortillas for ages.

“We’re home!” Nana yelled. She did a little dance, singing, “We’re home, we’re home….”

Together we skipped, stumbled, tripped down the path. Of course, at the bottom we slowed down, because we couldn’t have people in the village thinking we were crazy. No, they would need to trust us before they came to us for cures. In front of us, a young man led his burro, carrying bundles of firewood. We fell into step next to him.

“Good morning,” he said in Mixteco.

“Good morning,” we said. We were still breathless and smiling.

He was eating a quesadilla as he walked. He must have seen us staring at the food and breathing in the smell of melted cheese, because he offered us some. I chewed the quesadilla and savored every bite. As I ate, I looked sideways at the man. He walked with a limp, wincing at every step.

“How did you hurt your leg,
señor
?” I asked.

“Pulled a muscle last week hoeing the cornfields,” he said.

Oh, I couldn’t resist. “I can cure it with a
baño de temazcal.
To thank you for the food.”

“Are you a healer?” he asked, surprised. “You’re so young. You’re not even my age.”

“Helena’s been curing since she was a little girl,” Nana said proudly. “She’s famous. People have come from far-off places to be cured by her….”

Blushing, I squeezed Nana’s arm to make her stop.

“Yes,” he said, smiling. He tilted his hat up to see me more clearly. “I would be honored to be cured by you, señorita Helena.”

And that’s when I noticed the kindness in his eyes. One green and one brown.

Clara

W
hen the storm ended, rays of orange evening light peeked out from behind the mountains. Even though broken branches and fallen trees dotted the mountainside, everything seemed fresh and sparkling—the shiny rocks, the leaves with water droplets clinging like diamonds. I ran my hands lightly over my bruises and scrapes. My skin had become a mosaic of purple and blue.

The goats began to stir. I looked down at Pedro. He lay perfectly still, his head in my lap, only the breeze moving his hair slightly. For a terrifying second I thought he might be dead.

“Pedro.” I brushed my fingers over his forehead.

He smiled faintly.

“C’mon,” I whispered, and picked up my backpack.

I helped him stand up and held my arm around him as we walked a few steps downhill.

“Wait,” he mumbled. “My guitar.”

“It’s over here.” I led him toward the crack in the rock where I’d stowed it. When I pulled it out, he gave me a relieved smile. I slung it over my back and let it rest against my backpack. Leaning on each other for support, we squished down the mountain. What I remember most about our walk were the butterflies dancing in the air above the uprooted trees, as though it were a day just like any other.

After dusk, we sat by the kitchen fire—my grandparents and Pedro and his mother and me, all drinking cinnamon coffee with lots of sugar. A couple of hours earlier, Abuelita and Abuelo had met Pedro and me at the base of the mountain and helped us walk home. Once we were back in the kitchen, Abuelita had placed cool cloths on my raw hands and made Pedro an herb tea for his scorpion stings. When his mother showed up, she hugged him over and over and settled her thin arm protectively around him.

“Ayyy, Pedro Victor!” she murmured, smoothing his hair.

“Aren’t you lucky Clara was with you!”

“Pedro
Victor
?” I asked. Where had I heard that name before?

“Victor’s my middle name.” Pedro took a sip of tea. “I was named after my great-grandfather.”

“Pedro Victor, the romantic musician,” Abuelo told me with a wink.

Slowly, the pieces were coming together. “Doña Three Teeth’s husband?” I asked.

Abuelita nodded. “Nana lived long enough to see her great-grandson born,” she said, motioning to Pedro.

Pedro’s mother smiled. “She said he looked just like his great-grandfather.”

The fire flickered in a way that lit up a perfectly formed spider’s web in the corner. Thin, silvery threads stretched from a rafter to a basket of dried chiles to the wall. The threads joined with more threads and spiraled inward, meeting in the center. Only when the light was just right, only if you were paying attention, could you begin to see the connections. It occurred to me that hidden strands linked us all, through decades, over thousands of miles, across borders.

I glanced at Pedro and saw that he had followed my gaze to the spider’s web. After a moment he looked back at me and smiled, and for some reason I felt sure he was thinking the same thing I was.

“Now,” said Abuelo, “when will we hear about the spirit waterfall?”

Abuelita raised her eyebrow, curious.

“Yes, tell us!” Pedro’s mother said, stroking his hand.

Pedro and I looked at each other. How to begin?

First we tried to explain the feeling that it was another world down there, how on the surface there’s nothing more than a soft rushing sound, but once you go below you see its wild power. You know that it’s always there, immense, existing right under the surface—whether you’re sleeping or eating or working. You can ignore it, forget about it, until you let yourself really listen. And you get the feeling that everyone has a waterfall inside themselves, inside their deepest caves. Maybe we each have to make this trip inside to really know who we are.

Pedro and I tried to tell them this, but the only words we found were “It’s really big” and “It’s really loud” and “The water was flowing really fast.” Words felt too flimsy to explain that power.

The next day, I walked along the cornfield to Pedro’s house for the first time. It looked a lot like my grandparents’ place, a small cluster of shacks, only more run-down. Loose planks dangled by nails, shutters hung lopsided, and chunks of cement had fallen off the sink basin. His mother was washing clothes under a lime tree when she glanced up and smiled at me—the same wide smile as Pedro’s, identical except for her two blackened teeth.

She wiped her hands on her apron and greeted me with a light handshake. “Ah, Clara! Pedro will be so happy to see you!” She motioned to the biggest shack. “Go in, Clara. Make yourself at home.”

A sheet hung over the doorway. “Hi,” I said, and pushed aside the sheet.

It was dark and cool inside.

“Welcome to my mansion, Clara.” Pedro grinned. He was sitting propped on a narrow bed covered in a fuzzy beige blanket with a giant peacock design. Above the headboard was one small square window with clear plastic taped around the edges. The floor was made of packed dirt and the walls of logs. Sheets hanging from the ceiling divided the house into rooms. In the dining room were two dented folding chairs and a metal card table and not much else. In the other room, a bare mattress sat next to a wooden crate of folded flowered dresses and checked aprons—his mother’s room, I guessed.

I moved close to his bed. “How do you feel?”

“Better now that you’re here. All night and all morning half of my body felt strange. Like hundreds of little men were inside it, stabbing me with tiny swords.”

“And now?”

“Now it just feels like ants crawling around in there.”

“Good.” I felt shy suddenly. I was used to spending time with him in the woods, not inside four walls.

“Have a seat.” He motioned to two chairs in the room—wooden ones with green paint chipping off.

“Can I just sit next to you?” I asked.

He started scooting over to give me room.

“You don’t have to move over,” I said. I took off my sandals and sat down next to him, leaning my back against the headboard. The bed was creakier than the one I slept in, and even lumpier.

“I want to play you a song, Clara, but I need you to strum.” He held up his right hand, which seemed a little swollen. “See? This hand is useless for a few days.”

I rested the guitar on our laps. He moved his fingers over the guitar’s neck while I strummed. It was the song about me coming out of the shadows in the middle of the night.

…I give you a song when you appear,

The mystery of love…

After the last note faded, I said, “Let’s play another.”

“How about a protest song?” he asked, smiling.

“Yes,” I said, and I meant it. “A protest song.” Over the past few days he’d explained the words of some protest songs to me, and it seemed to me that they weren’t too different from love songs. True, the songs talked about big life things like being poor and leaving home to find work and getting hurt by unfair government rules. But don’t these things have a lot to do with love between two people? The thread of love between Dad and his parents was nearly broken because he left his village to make money. Same with the connection between Pedro’s father and Pedro and his mother. Pedro and I had promised each other, after we’d made up from our fight, that our thread would stay strong no matter what.

A single framed picture hung on the wall across from the bed. It was a faded picture of three people in front of tall green cornstalks. The woman, a younger version of Pedro’s mother, was holding hands with a little boy in a palm hat. On the other side, the boy held the hand of a man in a matching palm hat. The adults weren’t smiling, but they had proud expressions. They looked hard at the camera, furrowing their eyebrows and pressing their lips together in concentration, as though they were trying to look into the future. The little boy had a huge white smile and was looking up and off to the side, toward the mountains. A single crack ran down the middle of the glass like a lightning bolt.

After we finished the protest song, I asked, “Is that your father?”

Pedro nodded and laid the guitar down at the side of the bed. “A few years ago I ripped that picture off the nail and threw it at the wall. Then I hid it in a box and refused to tell my mother where it was. ‘I don’t have a father,’ I told her. Just this morning, I hung it back up.”

“Why?”

“I wanted you to see me together with him.” He ran his fingers along the satin edge of the peacock blanket. “In the cave, when it looked like I might die, I thought of my father. I thought that I wanted to know him. I wanted him to know me.”

I pushed my bangs behind my ears so I could take in every detail of Pedro’s face as he talked, even though I knew his face pretty well already from sketching it so much. At least half of my sketchbook was filled with his different expressions, but no single one that captured who he was. He didn’t look much like his father as far as I could tell, except for his strong cheekbones.

“Are you going to try to find him?” I asked.

“I’m thinking about it,” he said. “What if he wants to see me but he’s ashamed to? Maybe I need to make the first move.”

“I could look up his phone number on the Internet and you could call him,” I offered.

“Maybe,” he said, and looked thoughtfully at the picture. He leaned over and picked up the guitar. We started playing another song, a song that was part love song and part protest song, woven together like a palm hat.

“Do you have any pictures of Marcos?” I asked.

He shook his head. “All that’s left of Marcos is his music.”

“And his ideas,” I said.

I knew that back in Walnut Hill, I would hear Pedro’s music, and it would remind me to search past the way things look on the outside to find their inside. His songs would make me think of all the threads of love in the world, and the ways they’re all interconnected, like spiderwebs. Maybe that’s what Abuelita meant about Marcos changing the world by changing Pedro. And through Pedro, changing me.

On the day Pedro could finally limp over to our house, we sat in the kitchen as Abuelita and I patted out tortillas and laid them on the clay
comal
over the fire. Abuelo took a deep breath and said quietly, “
M’hija,
you know what day tomorrow is.”