Red Glass (13 page)

After much agonizing, she told the man to leave without her, since she couldn’t go against the wishes of her parents. But he begged her to come, and said he couldn’t live without her. She finally lied, trying to make it easier on him, and claimed she was in love with a man from her village. Her relatives convinced her there were many other good men, that she would easily fall in love with another and forget all about this
gitano.

The day after he left, she suddenly regretted her decision. She realized she would never meet another like him. She considered chasing after him, taking a horse and galloping to the next village where they were headed. But her parents told her, “Daughter, wait until next year when he comes back. Then, if he has been faithful to you, you can marry him.” Secretly, they thought she would forget about him and find a local boy to marry. A month later, she still thought of nothing but him.

Then she discovered she was pregnant with his child. Eight months later she had the baby. She hoped and prayed he would come back. This time she would go with him, she promised herself. The baby was three months old when the
gitanos
returned. She watched for her lover and didn’t see him. Finally, she asked the other
gitanos
about him. They shook their heads sorrowfully and said he was so heartbroken he had left for America to try to forget her.

Eighty years passed. She never married. Her son had children who gave her great-grandchildren and great-great-grandchildren. And not a day went by that she didn’t think of her
gitano
lover and regret letting him go.

When Abuelita stopped speaking, Dika clucked, “Poor, poor Ñola.”

I didn’t say anything. The story seemed terribly sad to me. I let my hair fall over my eyes to hide my tears.

Was that what Ñola was whispering as she dreamed? Regret for a risk she didn’t take?

Mr. Lorenzo and Ángel were planning to leave on Monday. Only three more evenings with Ángel. Three more chances to take a step toward him. One step, maybe that was all it would take.

The Box

The next morning, the village was crawling with teenagers. During the week they rented rooms in Huajuapan, where the nearest high school was. On weekends they traveled two hours to visit their families in the village. They came in the back of a pickup truck on Friday evening, and by Saturday morning the basketball court was full of them. Everyone stared at me and Ángel. Everyone wanted to talk to us, wanted to know where we were from, what we were doing here. I stayed quiet. Being the center of attention always made me blush and stumble over my words.

“Joo espeak Eenglish?” a girl asked, giggling. She was about my age. She wore a red tank top and her cheeks were rosy.

I nodded. I searched for something friendly to say, but my mind froze up.

“Joo like play basket?”

I shook my head, embarrassed, and looked over their heads at the mountains. Why did everyone but me instinctively know how to make meaningless small talk? And how much eye contact to make? And what to do with their hands?

Ángel talked with everyone, including the girls. He called to me a few times. “Lime-girl, shoot some hoops with us!”

“No thanks.” I watched them play and envied the girls’ coordination, how comfortable they felt with their legs exposed, pounding the pavement, unconcerned whether they were too fat or too skinny. During breaks, they bent over, hands on their knees, breathing hard. Then they threw their heads back and squirted water over their faces, their necks, their lips until they glistened. I sat on the sidelines with Pablo, eating guavas.

The girl in red was rooting wildly for Ángel. When he took a rest, she sprayed him with her water bottle, and then offered him some, giggling. As he gulped down the water, she patted his sweaty back. How could it be so easy for her to touch him after just a few hours?

“Looks like Ángel’s got a new friend,” I said to Pablo.

He nodded. “You’re more prettier,” he said loyally.

I kissed him on the nose. “Don’t leave us, Pablito.”

We ate lunch around four o’clock; then I helped strip corncobs, feed the chickens, and sort beans. When it got dark, Ángel said, “I’m going to the court. Everyone hangs out there on weekend nights. Want to come?”

I didn’t want to go, but I didn’t want to stay home either, so I shrugged. “I guess.”

Pablo begged us to take him, too. I was glad to have his hand to hold. While we walked to the court, Pablo talked about how good Ángel was at basketball and how when he grew up he wanted to be just like Ángel.

A few times, Ángel let his arm touch mine, but I stepped away. This wasn’t going to work. I knew it. Ángel was going to stay in Guatemala and make tons of friends there. How did I ever think I could make him stay?

The court was lit up. A crowd was gathered, including the girls who had been playing. They had miraculously transformed. They were showered, their hair shiny with gel and spray, comb lines visible, earrings dangling, thin gold chains nestled between their pushed-up breasts. Tight pants, high heels, shirts not quite reaching their waists, showing off a little mound of belly. Lips outlined in red and colored in pink beneath a thick coat of gloss.

Ángel was shaking hands with some guys standing in a clump under a tree. The girl who’d been squirting him now wore a sparkly red spaghetti-strap shirt and hoop earrings. She moved away from the group of girls and came over to me. “Goo’ nigh’,” she said in English, and then leaned closer. “Ángel. He joo boyfrien’?”

Inside, part of me shouted Yes! But a bigger part of me said—with scorn—Don’t be stupid, Sophie. I shook my head. “No.
No hay nada
.” There is nothing. I’d had my time in his spotlight and now he was moving on.

The girl strutted over to Ángel and planted herself possessively at his side.

I stared at them, feeling the same sick feeling I’d had in Huajuapan after the parade stomped through the streets and left sad heaps of colored sawdust.

I walked quickly over to Pablo. “Okay, Pablito,” I said. “Time for you to go to bed.”

“
Pero
, Sophie, we just got here!”

I grabbed his arm. “Let’s go.”

“No, I’m staying.” He squirmed out of my grasp and ran to Ángel.

I walked back to the house in the dark. I was Sophie the amoeba after all. Sophie the weak. A few streetlamps glowed and flickered and illuminated swarms of moths high in the air. Back at the house, Dika and Abuelita and the aunts and cousins sat inside the yellow glow of the smoky kitchen, sipping lemongrass tea and eating pastries.

I tried to sneak past them, but they saw me. Dika patted a wooden chair. “Sophie, come sit down.”

“I’m tired. I’m going to bed,” I said.

“Come, Sophie! Two minutes. We have plan.”

I sat down, wary.

“Now, Sophie,” she said. She spoke in Spanish so that Abuelita could understand. “My
comadre
and I, we were talking, and we have decided to do a
limpia
.”

“A
limpia
?”

“To clean our spirits. You and me and Pablo. And what luck! My
comadre
knows how to do it!” She raised her teacup in the air, and Abuelita followed, and their cups clinked in a toast. Then Abuelita ladled a cup of lemony tea from the blackened pot over the coals, and placed the plastic bag of pastries in front of me. “Eat,
m’hija
,” she commanded. “Eat.”

I took a dry bite. “
Gracias
, Abuelita. Why do we need our spirits cleaned?”

Dika rolled her eyes and muttered in English, “You are kidding, no, Sophie? You must to look at yourself. And you must to look at Pablo, this poor boy. He watches his parents die the last year. Do you not think he must to have
limpia
?”

Abuelita nodded and smiled at me, as if she knew something I didn’t. “I think the
limpia
will be good for you, Sophie. At dawn we will do it.”

Later, at the cistern, I splashed water on my face and thought about what Pablo had said about his grandmother curing me. Was this what he meant? Was it possible to clean up a spirit, to soap it up and wring it out and make it gleam? I dried my face on a rough towel, imagining washing away the gunk weighing down my spirit, scrubbing off the black stains from years of worries.

Inside the house, I settled on the mattress next to Ñola. Soon, with the corners of my lips turned up in a smile, I slid into dreams.

I was so excited about the
limpia
, I woke up before anyone else. At the sink outside, I splashed water on my face. The air was a magical shade of purple. I watched the sky, the shadows, the shapes of things slowly gathering light. Little by little, gaining color, losing their blue.

Soon Abuelita emerged in a dress and apron, followed by Dika in her pink quilted robe. Dika plodded over and kissed my cheek. Pablo trailed behind her, rubbing his eyes, looking around dazed. After trips to the outhouse and cistern, we gathered inside. Abuelita set up a small table with a white cloth and a clay pot with three feet and triangular holes in the side, filled with pieces of wood. She lit it and blew, fanning the flames, making smoke rise up and fill the room. Light snoring came from behind the sheet curtain, where Mr. Lorenzo and Ángel slept.

Abuelita arranged the chairs around the table. Pablo seemed to know what she was doing and helped her set things up. From a cabinet in the corner of the room, he took out a small tin that he carried carefully with both hands. He sat down, and Dika and I followed his lead. Abuelita settled into her chair by the clay dish. The fire had gone out now, leaving hot glowing coals. She opened the tin and took out a bag of what looked like little amber and white stones.

“What’s that?” I whispered to Pablo.

“Copal. It smells good. It comes from inside a tree.”

Abuelita picked out pieces and set them on the table in front of her. For a long time she chanted and prayed in Mixteco. I didn’t understand her words, only the hypnotizing rhythms, rising and falling, wave after wave of words. I found myself watching things in the room, taking in their essences: the smoke, the hot coals, Dika, Abuelita.

Abuelita motioned for Pablo to sit down beside her. She moved a piece of copal over his legs, arms, stomach, chest, neck, head. Then she dropped the copal onto the coals and watched the pattern of the smoke. It swirled up, curving this way and that around the room. She spoke to Pablito in Spanish. “Look at those rays of light.”

Sunlight was shining through the smoke, making the air look solid.

“Your
mamá
and
papá
are with us, in that light. Do you feel the sun on your face, Pablito?”

He nodded.

“That is your mother kissing you.”

His pink birthmark did look like the soft imprint of lips.

Abuelita continued. “It is your father touching your cheek.”

The light shone right in his eyes now, but he didn’t blink. A smile spread over his face, a big, natural smile with neat white rows of teeth and two lopsided dimples. There was a small light around his thin body, a strength I’d never noticed. A hint of who he was before, maybe, who he would become. I saw not just Pablo the six-year-old boy, but Pablo the baby, the man, even the old man, all at once. I looked at my hands, folded in my lap, and saw a child’s hands, shaping Play-Doh, and a woman’s hands, touching her lover’s waist, and a mother’s hands, stroking a baby’s head, and an old lady’s hands, veined and wrinkled and calm.

Dika took Pablo’s place in the chair. Abuelita moved the copal over her, which took a while since there was so much body to cover. We watched the smoke snaking upward in spirals.

“You get headaches sometimes,
comadre
, don’t you?”

Dika nodded.

Abuelita held Dika’s head between her hands, buried her fingers under the gray roots, and squeezed. Then she shook out her hands as though they were wet.

“That light you see through the glass,
comadre.
That light is with you always. Remember this when your head aches.”

She took Dika’s arm, the one with the three scars. She squeezed it hard, then shook her hand out, and again, and again. “Now these scars are light.”

Dika nodded.

It was my turn now. I sat in the chair and Abuelita moved the copal over me. “Oh, Sophie,
m’hija
, you are accustomed to hiding things. Don’t keep everything inside for no one to see. Take a breath and let them flow into the light.”

I took a breath and blew out. And another, another. Abuelita massaged my head, my shoulders, my neck, loosening up what was inside. She took off my sweater. I wore only a tank top underneath.

“Breathe,” she said, massaging my arms. “Look at all this! Do you feel this?”

I did. Things were flying out of my mouth and drifting around the room like dandelion puffs: the smell of rain, colored sawdust, ribbons of music, tiny white sparks. Silky moss and curled petals and lime zest. I felt lighter and lighter, as though I could float right up with them all.

Later that morning, I helped the women get ready for a goodbye party in honor of Mr. Lorenzo and Ángel, who planned to leave the next day. We sat at a long wooden table outside the kitchen, with the ingredients for tamales spread out before us. My job was to scoop a spoonful of corn mush into a dried husk. Next, Abuelita dropped in a few chicken pieces, then Dika topped it with a dollop of green tomatillo salsa; then one aunt folded it up and the other put it in the steamer of a giant pot. We were each a link in the chain.

After the first dozen tamales, I started getting the hang of it, and my hands moved on automatic pilot. I chatted and laughed at the aunts’ jokes about their lazy husbands drinking Coronas in the shade. Meanwhile, Mr. Lorenzo and Ángel wandered with Pablo and the cousins in the
monte
, chasing lizards and playing tag and splashing around in the stream.

After a hundred tamales, we cooked a giant vat of pozole thick with corn kernels, swirled with dried red chiles that we’d roasted and ground and fried in oil. The entire head of a bewildered-looking pig poked out the top of the soup. Next we boiled a cauldron of coffee and threw in a handful of cinnamon sticks and a gourdful of sugar. Earthy, rich smells of boiling corn and oregano and roasting chile and cinnamon filled the kitchen and seeped out the door.

Once the work was done, I went inside to change my clothes. My shirt was spotted with a mosaic of dried corn mush and salsa and coffee stains. I pulled out a silky black tank top, smoothed out the wrinkles, and reached for a cardigan to cover up my bony elbows. Then I stopped. I remembered the
limpia
, how the air, so crisp, had made my bare skin tingle. How new it made me feel. Quickly, I stuffed the sweater back into the bag and put on my coconut jewelry and took a deep breath and walked outside.

Over the thatched kitchen roof, the sun was dripping like beeswax into golden pools between the peaks. Ángel and Mr. Lorenzo and the cousins had gotten back. They were devouring oranges and setting things up for the party. “Come help us, lime-girl!” Ángel called. Together, we set up wooden chairs in a circle between the kitchen and the bedrooms. He put the stereo speakers by the window and blasted music,
cumbia
and salsa and merengue.