Finding Miracles (16 page)

Doña Gloria gripped the armrests of her rocker as if bracing herself for the pain of the story she was about to tell. “That Friday, I went to market alone. My granddaughter was expecting a second child and was far gone, so she stayed. This one—” Doña Gloria motioned in the air to her left, where the girl stood sentinel, her hand clutching one post of the rocker. “This one was only a little thing but already babbling stories.” Doña Gloria began rocking wildly. Dulce reached out and touched the arm of the chair as if to calm her.

“The
guardia
came, and they did their business with my granddaughter, and then they cut her throat. This child was there when it happened, she saw what they did. They were merciful. They did not kill her. They cut off her tongue. So she knows the stories, but she cannot tell them.”

One hand flew to my mouth in horror, the other reached for Pablo, who had doubled over as if he’d been punched in the stomach.

The girl meanwhile had turned her face to the shadows. She was making a low, moaning sound like a wounded animal.
“Ya, ya,”
her great-grandmother soothed her, reaching blindly for her arm.

Dulce was on her knees in front of her chair, sobbing, her arms folded in prayer. “Ay, Doña Gloria, ay! Only God can forgive this.”

“Not even God, I think.” Doña Gloria’s laugh had no laughter in it. “This was many sorrows ago now,” she noted. “I am surprised you had not heard.”

“I have not been back for a while,” Dulce admitted. “And even those with tongues have been afraid to speak.”

Doña Gloria turned her head as if to let the breeze blowing in the door soothe her weary face. Every inch of it was lined. It looked like one of those scrap papers you can’t write on anymore.

“I, too, have to tell my story from time to time, you see.” Doña Gloria began rocking herself again, gently back and forth, like moms do when their babies get fussy. “But you did not come to hear of my sorrows.” She paused, waiting for us to tell her what we had come for.

How could anyone follow up her story with a request? I couldn’t even find my voice right now.

“Everyone comes here wanting to know something,” Doña Gloria prodded. “They have the beginning of a story, but not the ending. They have a valuable part, but they don’t know where to put it. I would say, Dulce, both your visitors here have questions. I don’t know that I can answer either of them.”

Any other time, I might have felt disappointed. But right this moment, all I wanted was for the past to be over, period.

Dulce, who was still on her knees, sat back down in her chair. She looked over curiously at Pablo. “You have a question, too, Pablito?”

Pablo shook his head. Like me, he was probably still in shock over the story Doña Gloria had just told us. “Not really, Tía,” he finally replied when he had control of his voice.

Doña Gloria laughed as if she knew better. “
Bueno,
bueno,”
was all she had to say about that. Well, well. “And the young lady?” She turned her face in my general direction.

When I didn’t say anything, Dulce spoke up. “The young lady is a special case. Let me explain her situation.”

Dulce went on to tell Doña Gloria my story, the little we knew. As she talked, Doña Gloria began rocking herself. Each rock seemed like a nod, as if she were saying,
Yes, yes,
I remember!

“So the question would be who might have given birth the spring of that year,” Dulce concluded. “I wouldn’t know, Doña Gloria. You see, I had already been gone from Los Luceros a year.”

Dulce fell silent. The only sound now was the clack of the rocker, backward and forward, backward and forward.

Finally, on one of the forward swings, Doña Gloria planted both feet on the floor and stopped herself. She lifted her face toward me. Her eyes were clouded with a white film, but they were the same gold eyes with brown flecks as Dulce’s and mine. They seemed to be looking right at me.

“What did you say your name was?”

I didn’t have to think about it. “Milagros,” I told her.

9

dar a luz: give to the light

DOÑA GLORIA LAID HER old hands on my face. They were rough and callused. But her touch was gentle.

“Sixteen years ago . . . after the fields were burned, the drought came. Many went hungry. It was then that your father sent you away to the capital, Dulce. He could not feed that many mouths. The couple that took you in were old friends who were childless.” Doña Gloria knew the whole story!

“The next year, the rains came,” she went on—one finger, then another lightly tapping my face. “A second flood to punish the wicked! But then, the waters stopped. Everything turned green again. The earth teaches us to be forgiving.” Doña Gloria was shuttling back and forth in time, weaving her story.

“Sixteen years ago,” she repeated, her fingers outlining the features on my face. “In the spring of that year,
¿quién
dio a luz?
” Who gave birth then? Some things I like better the way they’re said in Spanish, and this was one of them. Giving birth,
dar a luz,
to give to the light.

“Margarita’s girl came later that year. Ricardo Antonio’s
mujer,
that woman gave birth in December. And hers was a boy.” Doña Gloria was running stories through her fingers. They tapped busily on my face as she went on, murmuring names, humming details, dates. She was a river of memories, flowing.

Finally, her hands dropped to her lap. In her old, croaky voice, she began bringing to light what her fingers had found on my face.

“Those years, there were not many births. Some women stopped bleeding altogether. The body knows when it is not a good time to give to the light.” Doña Gloria paused as if to gather her strength for the stories that lay ahead.

“If a woman did have a child, she hid the fact, out of fear that it might be taken away from her. To make her speak what many times she did not even know.”

The light in the room was dim. The wooden shutters were closed. Guests had come before the morning’s chores could be done. But just inside the opened door, sunlight fell in a shaft on the floor. It swarmed with tiny dust particles like that picture in our biology textbook of thousands of sperm trying to find an egg to fertilize.

“In the spring of that year . . . in all of this area we call Los Luceros, I can remember two newborn girls. How happy we were in those times to hear of the birth of girls. They stood a chance for a better life than boys.”

The young girl made her low, moaning sound again. She was standing beside Doña Gloria, swaying with the rhythm of the rocker, as if she were helping her grandmother remember.

Doña Gloria’s hands flew up to my face again, lightly touching my cheeks, my lips. She sighed and let them drop again.

“I cannot say if you were one of those two births. Perhaps you were a third or a fourth birth I never heard about. Not all the stories reached me in those years. As Dulce says, even the people with tongues lost them for a while. Everyone was afraid to speak.”

Suddenly, I felt afraid. I remembered Pablo’s words on the plane about The Truth I argued was important to know. Did I even want to hear about those two births? What if Doña Gloria told me a story as horrible as the one that had happened to her family?

“About the two baby girls, Doña Gloria?” Dulce reminded her. Maybe because this was her hometown, Dulce, at least, was eager to learn its secrets.

“The first was the child born to Rosa Luna. You remember Rosa?”

“Rosa, la buenamoza.”
Dulce was nodding as if Doña Gloria could see that nod. Rosa, the good-looking one. It was a nicer quality to single out than her weight or a handicap.

Doña Gloria’s rocker was picking up speed. Her great-granddaughter had taken hold of one of the back posts. She seemed to be directing the pace of the rocking. “Rosa had our gold eyes and that bright hair from her mother’s family.”

I thought of the two locks of hair, light braided with dark.

“By the time Rosa had seen twenty years, she had four children, all from different fathers. You could not blame her. The men were constantly disappearing: it was wiser not to get attached to just one. Los Luceros has always been a cradle of freedom.” Doña Gloria turned her face in my direction, as if she wanted to be sure I understood this point of pride. I had not been raised in this country. I might not know these important things.

“But sometimes in this cradle, the freedom an individual wants . . .
bueno,
well, it’s for private consumption.” I could not tell if the cackle had come from Doña Gloria or from her rocker as it moved forward, backward.

“The
guardia
were always patrolling this
zona,
checking on the cradle that has always given this country its liberators. Once in a great while, the commanders would drop in to inspect the operations. This one colonel saw Rosa at the square—and that man fell like a ripe mango. He visited often, even when his own militia was moved to another area of the country. He was a great friend of Don Max’s.” Doña Gloria turned in the direction of Dulce. “They would come up for the weekends together, the colonel telling his wife he was on a secret mission. Soon enough, that mission was not so secret. Rosa’s belly began to show.”

My heart fell. My birth mother might have been a prostitute and my birth father a torturer who cheated on his wife! Pablo touched my hand as if to remind me he was there.

“That colonel bought a piece of land up here and built a love nest for himself and Rosa. But then, right after the new year began, the colonel insisted on moving Rosa to a house he had set up for her in the capital. That is how the townspeople knew the raids were coming. We evacuated to the mountains into caves and shelters we constructed out of whatever we could find. This house was built back then.”

The young girl clutched the post as if to still her grandmother’s rocker. Doña Gloria must have sensed this reining in, because she started tying up the ends of her story.

“There is not much else to tell. Rosa left her children with her mother and took off to the capital. The baby must have been born there. We never again heard from her. Some say she fled the country with the colonel when El Jefe and all his people left. Others say she became one of those women who earn their living on their backs, neglecting that poor baby until it was close to death.
¿Quién sabe?
Who knows? People criticize her,
las malas
lenguas,
the bad tongues. But I remind them, had it not been for Rosa and the advance warning of her move, the whole town would have been wiped out. We were saved by Rosa’s indiscretion.”

“You are right, Doña Gloria.” Dulce’s hands were clutched on her lap as if she were forcing them to pray. “It is not for us to judge God’s creatures. Ay, but when I think of those
criminales,
Doña Gloria! You heard their sentences were reduced to three years? My Efraín, my Daniel lost their lives and those monsters get three years! I do not want to be vengeful, God forgive me, but where is the justice here?”

Doña Gloria was silent. Even she could not answer such a question. She was rocking more slowly now. Soon, it seemed, the rocker would stop. I had something I wanted to ask before she was totally finished with this story.

“What did the colonel look like?”

Pablo glanced in my direction. I could see it dawning on him why I was curious. I had told him about the two locks of hair.

“I never saw the man,” Doña Gloria admitted. “But they called him Pelo Negro because his hair was black as night.”

You can’t base a whole life story on that, I reminded myself. Of course not. But not too far back, I had based it on a lot less: a past I never thought about, secret feelings kept from everybody, even those I loved.

Doña Gloria seemed to have dozed off; her chin was almost to her chest, her body bent over. But then the girl gave the rocker a sudden jerk, and Doña Gloria startled awake.

“What story was I telling?” she wanted to know. “I have forgotten. See how my mind is going.”

“You said there were two births in the spring of that year,” Pablo reminded her. “Rosa’s child, and then another?”

“
Ay, sí, sí.
The second birth, the second one.” Doña Gloria hummed, remembering. The girl began to rock her, gently, as if to get her going. “You must have heard of Don Gustavo Moregón? He owned the big coffee plantation on the road between here and the Bolívars’ farm?”

“We saw the ruins on the way,” Pablo told her.

“Ruins now, but that place used to be a mansion. I remember when they built it on the side of the mountain. Everything had to be carried up by workmen and mules. They say there is a small cemetery at the foot of that mountain. On the roof, Don Gustavo painted GOD BLESS EL JEFE in huge letters. He was a sly one, all right. They didn’t call him
el sabio
for nothing. Imagine! That roof was not only a show of loyalty, but it protected his house when the planes came up here on their bombing missions. After the liberation, that place was overrun. The people carried off everything. I don’t know where the roof tiles ended up, but just the other day, someone was telling me that he saw the gold-framed mirror with the naked
angelitos
in the barber shop. Elegant lamps and platters painted by the poor of some far-away country. The señora’s gowns and shoes disappeared. As for the house, the people took it apart, board by board. But no one wanted that unlucky wood to rebuild their houses. It was sold to some merchants from the capital for good money.”

Last night, at her mother’s house, Dulce had served me a
guanábana
tea in a dainty porcelain cup. When I turned it over so the drops could drain—Dulce’s mother could read the future from the stains, so she claimed—the bottom said HECHO EN FRANCIA, made in France.

“Don Gustavo had several sons, but his weakness was his only daughter,
la señorita
Alicia. During the year,
la señorita
was away at a fancy boarding school in England to learn her English. But the summers, Don Gustavo would send her and her
mami
up here, away from the heat and fevers of the capital. They would arrive with their many suitcases and
maletas
of clothes. Weekends, the sons and Don Gustavo drove up with their military friends to relax and have parties. I remember the summer
la señorita
turned fifteen. Her father threw her a big
quinceañera
party. People arrived from the capital in their big cars.
El Jefe
made an appearance, flying in on his helicopter. Señorita Alicia invited the whole countryside to come eat cake. We all went in our Sunday clothes, but the
guardia
turned us away.”

As Doña Gloria talked, the movie Ms. Morris had shown our class kept running through my head.
The Great
Gatsby
. Music in the big mansion. Lots of sad people with tons of money looking for happiness they would never find there, Ms. Morris had said. Back then, it sounded like one of Happy’s house parties.

“The summer would have been just another round of parties and outings. But Don Gustavo had hired a groom for his horses, a young man from Los Luceros. Last name of Bravo. That young man had a way with animals. And a way with women. Tall, with dark hair and our light eyes, the back straight, he looked like a flamenco dancer. He was only seventeen, but the women in town were already wild about him.”

“Manuel Bravo!” Dulce cried out. “Ay, Doña Gloria, I remember him! I was one of those girls. His father was the master
carpintero
. That man understood wood. Like your father, Pablito.” Dulce nodded at her nephew. “People with money would come up from the city to buy the beautiful things he made, hope chests for brides and cradles for babies and keepsake boxes for important papers. There was a time everyone in Los Luceros had one of those boxes. You see, now you have reminded me of this story.”

Doña Gloria sighed as if a weight had been lifted from her shoulders. “You finish it, Dulce. Go on, you know the story.”

“There is not much more to tell.” Dulce picked up the thread where Doña Gloria had left off. “Alicia, the lonely
princesita,
and Manuel, the young groom. It’s like a
telenovela
. Everyone can guess what happened.”

Doña Gloria closed her eyes and smiled as she rocked. She seemed to enjoy hearing someone else tell the story.

“Soon
la señorita
was spending a lot of time in the stables,” Dulce continued. “In no time, she learned to ride bareback, and Manuel, he mastered the English saddle right away.”

Doña Gloria and Dulce giggled like two schoolgirls. I glanced over at Pablo, who was shaking his head at these corny old-timers. Of course, I understood enough Spanish to know Dulce had made some off-color joke. But I’ve never been good at dirty jokes even in English. Back at Ralston, Em always had to explain them to me. It took the dirtiness out of them, she always complained.

“Ay, Lord forgive me.” Dulce was already feeling guilty about her naughtiness. “We must respect their memory because what came to pass was not funny at all. Don Gustavo had spies all around, but that summer they failed him. By the time he caught wind of what was going on in his stables, it was too late. His
princesita
was pregnant, and the
señora
was very Catholic, so there was no question of the solution rich families often take. Alicia was hurried to the capital. I was already living there with the old couple. The city was full of rumors.”

Alicia would have been my age that summer! Once in a while girls in Ralston got pregnant, but almost all of them had abortions. I always felt so bad for them. I didn’t know what I would have done. One thing I knew: I was too young to be anyone’s mother and too old to stop a life because of my bad judgment.

Dulce raced ahead like she wanted to be done with this sad story. “At the end of that summer, Alicia did not go back to her school in
Inglaterra
. The family said she was ill—some condition that required bed rest. Then one night about five months later, a doctor and a midwife were seen entering the Moregón house in the capital. They took away a little bundle with them, who knows where it went? The couple I lived with heard from a friend of the cook in the house that the baby was premature, that it could not live for very long, that the midwife kept it for a time. But only Our Señor knows the truth of what happened. The next season, Alicia was attending parties again. But in her pictures in the papers, she looked haunted. They couldn’t fix her up enough. She was not a beautiful girl, but she’d had a fresh, young face that was now a mask with a frozen smile. Her long
cabellera
of hair was all cut off in a modern cut. They say it was her way of mourning Manuel.”