Finding Miracles (15 page)

“They say each one is a soul,” Dulce observed in a dreamy voice. “No wonder so many can be seen above Los Luceros! Our dead are watching us.”

Looking up, I couldn’t help thinking of the long list of names that had been read out at the burial this afternoon. So many had been lost in these mountains. Suddenly, there was only one thing I could think to wish for: peace on earth.

We drove into Los Luceros in silence, watched by those stars.

That night, I ended up in a room with Esperanza and her girl cousins at her aunt’s house. Dulce slept next door at her mother’s, where Pablo was also invited to stay. But he insisted on bedding down in the back of the van. Later, Pablo told me that the room offered to him had been that of Dulce’s brother, who had been killed in one of the massacres. He didn’t have to explain to me why he wouldn’t want to sleep among ghosts.

I myself didn’t sleep a wink, thinking of mine. What had happened to my birth parents? Why had they given me up? All night, vague faces kept approaching—my birth parents, looking sometimes like Dulce, sometimes like Mr. and Mrs. Bolívar or Mom and Dad. I would sit up to take a closer look, but the faces dissolved before my eyes. It was like one of those sketch pads I used to love as a kid where you’d lift the plastic sheet to erase your doodles. Sometimes I’d draw a face I’d think of as my birth mother’s. Then I’d lift the sheet and watch her slowly disappear.

Finally, light began seeping in through the cracks in the wall. I couldn’t bear another minute of lying there. I slipped out of bed, dressed quickly, and found my way through the quiet house to the front door. My plan was to sit on the porch until Pablo came by. Maybe we’d get a chance to take a walk through town before the others woke up.

The front door was a creaker. Poor Esperanza if she moved here, I thought. This was a perfect alarm system to alert parents if you got in after curfew. Then I remembered where I was. Esperanza wasn’t allowed out in the capital, forget here. And even if the old rules started changing with the new democracy, there weren’t any guys around to date. On the drive over, Dulce had said that hardly any males over ten and under sixty were left in Los Luceros.

From the porch, I could see the small central square straight ahead. A tall, shady tree spread out over most of it, making a second night underneath its branches. There was no sign of the van on the narrow streets. Pablo had probably parked in the back alleyway so as not to block traffic. Not that there were any cars around. Pablo had told me how in the mountain villages people mostly rode donkeys or motorbikes or used “God’s wheels,” their own two feet.

Small wooden houses lined the square—side by side as if huddling together for protection. Some were missing pieces of tin from their roofs, slats from their windows. Some seemed abandoned, all boarded up. Most of them could have used a fresh coat of paint. At the corner, the family store was undergoing repairs. The sign had been taken down and the paint scraped off, but you could still make out the shadow letters, EL ENCANTO. Dulce had mentioned that the family wanted to change the name. They hadn’t yet decided to what.

On the far side of the square stood a small adobe church, postcard pretty except for a creepy detail. It had been guillotined—no kidding, that was what it looked like. The bell tower ended abruptly in a charred crater, as if the church had been bombed or shot at from the air. Next to the church was a graveyard with a newly painted white picket fence over which hung bunches of yellow roses. It looked like the most tended spot in the whole village. I decided to go over and explore.

The little cemetery was as crowded as the nursery at the orphanage. The light was still dim, so I had to get up close to see the names written on the stones. Almost all the deaths were recent, within my lifetime anyway. And so many of the dead were young! It was almost a relief to find a real old-timer—I mean what would be considered an old-timer here, sixty or over. Some markers seemed crude rush jobs: two pieces of wood bound with twine, the name roughly sketched with a knife. A few had elaborately carved crosses. There were flowers everywhere. The air smelled like a florist shop.

“Are you looking for someone, Milly?” It was Dulce, kneeling beside one of the stones. She looked like she’d been crying.

I must have jumped as if I’d seen a ghost. “Pardon me for startling you,” Dulce said. “Come over here.” She patted a space beside her.

I walked over and sat on the other side of the stone that she introduced as “my brother.” EFRAÍN SANTOS VARGAS.

Embedded in the stone was a plastic bubble with a photo inside. Condensation had clouded the plastic and the face was a blur. But I sensed those telltale Los Luceros eyes looking out at me.

“Angelita tells me your American parents adopted you from our country?”

I nodded. “From the capital.”

Dulce shook her head. “You might have been adopted from
la capital,
but your eyes tell me you are from here.”

“Everyone keeps saying that.” Absently, I had started picking at the stray leaves and few weeds around me. There wasn’t much to groom. This cemetery, like the one yesterday at Abuelita’s village, was obviously well tended.

Dulce was studying me, like she was trying to remember someone in the village I might look like. After about a minute, she gave up.

“I left this place many years ago,” she explained. “My father had some friends in the capital, an older couple, who were childless. They needed someone to help them. Times were hard, and Papá had girls to spare. We were six daughters, and the one son. Our Efraín,” she added, caressing the grass in front of his stone. “I don’t know how it was decided that I should go. The couple were very kind and treated me like a daughter. They insisted I attend the university. That’s where I met Daniel. He was my professor. I am much younger,” she added, as if she could tell I was doing the math in my head.

“So, you see, I have not lived in Los Luceros for many years,” she went on. “I was not here during the worst massacres sixteen years ago. Angelita tells me that is your age?”

“More or less,” I explained. “Sor Arabia, she worked at my orphanage, La Cuna. You’ve heard of it?” Dulce nodded. “According to Sor Arabia, I looked about four months old when I was left there in August. But she couldn’t be sure. There was no birth certificate, nothing.”

“Those eyes
are
your birth certificate,” Dulce said fiercely. “And this is your
pueblo
.” She struck the ground with the palm of her hand. She seemed proud to claim me.

Suddenly, I wanted to tell her everything I knew. “There was a box left with me. My dad, my adopted dad, I mean, he’s my real dad, anyhow, he’s a carpenter, so he knows his woods. He said that the box was made of mahogany. In this travel book I’m reading, it says that mahogany is native to this country.”

“Caoba.”
Dulce pointed to a beautifully carved cross several plots away from her brother’s. Then, turning, she indicated the tall, shade tree in the square.

“Inside the box, there was a coin.” I described the two sides.

“That is the old
peso
with a likeness of our national founder, Salvador Estrella, who was born in Los Luceros.” Dulce was shaking her head at the wonder of it all. “The truth will come to light.”

I tried to remember what other things had been in the box. “There were two locks of hair, black hair and brown hair, very light like yours, intertwined. . . . And really, that’s it. Except for a little paper pinned to my gown that said Milagros.”

“Was that your name?”

“It’s what they called me at the orphanage. It got . . . changed in the States.” I felt ashamed to admit how I used to hate my middle name. “My parents named me Mildred, Milly, after my mom’s mom. My adopted mom, I mean, my real mom.” Here we go again, I thought.

“Milagros,” Dulce pronounced it slowly. “Milagros. Is it okay if I call you that?”

I nodded. And I wasn’t B.S.-ing her. It felt like that should be my name in this place. “Do you think...” I hesitated, not sure exactly what I wanted to ask. “Maybe someone here might know about my birth parents?”

She looked thoughtful. “Only one person in this town knows all the stories. Doña Gloria. She must be very old now.” Dulce pointed to a side street across the square that climbed out of the little village. “If my memory is not wrong, she lives up that road.”

I rose quickly to my feet. “Can we go?”

Dulce pulled herself up to stand facing me. She pushed my hair back gently from my face. “We will need transportation.”

Just then, we both heard the car door. Beyond Dulce’s shoulder in the growing light of day, I made out the van parked under the huge shade tree. Pablo had just stepped out of the back. Dulce turned, following my gaze.

“God always sends an angel when a soul is in need,” she murmured. Again, I had to agree with her.

“We must leave the vehicle here,” Dulce explained to Pablo.

We had reached the end of the dirt road. Up ahead, the mountain dropped away sharply into the valley below. A few doll-size houses were visible through the mist rising up from the river. It was like the view from an airplane.

Dulce pointed up the steep mountainside. “It is at the end of that path.”

I had to crane my neck to see the stony outcrop at the top. “How do we get there?”

“God’s wheels,” Pablo and Dulce said at the same time, laughing. (I should have known!) “It is not far,” Dulce reassured me.

We began climbing. Here and there, goats grazed on the rocky pasture, their curled horns snug against their heads. They looked like they were wearing protective helmets in case they slipped and fell down the slopes. “What I want to know,” I gasped, “is how an old woman can make it up this steep path?”

“People come to her.” Dulce had stopped to catch her breath. “She has our history in her head. Thank God she was spared, or we would have lost so much of our past. Those
criminales
stopped at nothing. Look at what they did to God’s own house. Lord have mercy on them.”

We resumed our climb in silence, too out of breath to talk. Finally, under a tall pine, I made out a small stone house built right up against the mountainside. Its walls were made of what looked like boulders from this very spot, so it blended right in with the stony outcrop. No wonder it had escaped sighting by the military helicopters and so been spared the fate of the church steeple. “I can see why the rebels hid up here,” Pablo noted, surveying the rocky, desolate place.

At the top of the path, a young girl appeared. Like Dulce and almost everyone else I had met since we’d arrived, she was dressed in black. She stood still as a statue, watching us. Even after Dulce called up, introducing herself, the girl said nothing. When we were almost level with the house, she turned on her heels and slipped inside.

“That must be Doña Gloria’s great-granddaughter,” Dulce guessed. “What a shy little bumpkin!”

At the door, Dulce again announced herself, calling into the dark interior. She gave what seemed like a whole family tree of local relations. She had come, Dulce explained, to give her greetings to Doña Gloria. She had brought her nephew and a special visitor. Would Doña Gloria receive us?

Up to this point, we had not seen or heard a peep from Doña Gloria. But after a moment, an old, croaky voice answered.
“¡Pasen, pasen!”
Come in, come in.

Inside the dark hut, my eyes took a moment to adjust. At the center, in a rocking chair, sat the oldest old woman I’d ever seen. Her bony arms reached out in the direction of our voices.

“Come, come,” she quarreled with our slowness. “Come closer.” When we did, she grabbed us, saying hello by feeling our hands and faces.

It was then that it hit me, Doña Gloria was blind! If she could not see my face, how could she guess who I might resemble? Again, I felt that lost-Gretel feeling of the trail disappearing behind me.

“
La bendición,
Doña Gloria,” Dulce began. Pablo and I echoed the greeting.

“Sit, sit,” Doña Gloria commanded.

The girl had brought over three chairs.
“Gracias,”
I said smiling, then asked for her name. The girl hid her face in her hands, as if ashamed.

“La muda,”
her grandmother answered. The Mute was her name!

I was shocked by what seemed a common practice here: people named after some handicap or sensitive detail you’d never mention in the States. At the orphanage, a fat little girl had been called
la gordita
.
El cojo
was the boy with the club foot. As for the very dark boy who loved to steal cake, he was
el negrito
!

“Muda?”
Even Dulce was looking surprised. She didn’t know Doña Gloria’s great-granddaughter was mute?

Doña Gloria gave a curt nod as if to cut off any further questions. Perhaps this was too painful a subject to discuss, especially with her great-granddaughter standing right in front of us.

For a while, Dulce and Doña Gloria chatted about the village. It turned out Doña Gloria already knew about Daniel, the memorial Mass at the national cathedral, yesterday’s service at the graveside. How had this news traveled so fast up to this remote spot? The burial had happened only yesterday, and late in the day at that!

“People come by all the time,” Doña Gloria explained. “They want to tell me things. They know I will remember. But I am getting old. You see the blindness has set in.”

Of course we had noticed. But I wondered if anyone in Los Luceros would dare call Doña Gloria
la ciega,
the blind one.

“I am tired, the body can resist no more.” Doña Gloria sighed wearily. “But how can I die, tell me? Who will remember then?” Her voice was filled with a sadness I’d never heard before. It was sadness for all the suffering down the generations. I wondered how she could bear that heavy load.

“I was raising this one’s mother to remember the stories,” Doña Gloria went on, rocking back and forth, the rocker keeping rhythm with her voice. “That was after I lost my daughter to the bombing in Los Luceros. My granddaughter had become my hope and my future memory. But that was not to be. That Friday...”