Tree Girl (13 page)

It was late that night before I collected a small loaf of bread and some hot soup handed out by an American woman in a van. I also collected a handful
of rice and enough corn flour to make a few tortillas if I could find a way to cook. I went again to the tanker truck and caught water with my mouth. Still I had no way of carrying anything, but tomorrow I would try to find a jug.

That night I slept better, but the camp woke early. By sunrise I was up trading some of my food to a woman who had a pan and made tortillas for me from the flour I had found. Then I again wandered the camp, putting every morsel of food I found into my mouth. There were no mealtimes, only constant scavenging, and I threw nothing away. I traded a pair of men’s pants I collected for a water jug that leaked. I also found a small piece of black plastic, which I wrapped around me during the next several nights. That, along with the big sweater, helped to ward off the night cold, but still I needed a shelter for the sun and rain.

Always while I scavenged, I looked for Alicia, turning at the sound of every child’s yell.

By the end of the first week, I had become like all of the rest who crowded the aid workers, my arms pushing
and reaching, my voice pleading. I, too, behaved like an animal, kicking and shoving others to capture anything thrown to us. I hated living and behaving this way. This wasn’t how my parents had raised me, but starvation was the only alternative.

Ten days after I first arrived, I approached a truck handing out supplies. Because blankets and plastic tarps were being distributed, the crowd was frenzied and pushing hard. Fights broke out as a dozen people grabbed for each item pitched randomly into the desperate crowd. I watched for a few minutes, but then realized the truck would be empty soon. I still had nothing to serve as my shelter.

I had no choice. Pushing and shoving, I squirmed my way closer to the truck. If someone bigger pushed me, I stepped on their toes as if by accident. One man slapped me. I waited until a package with a blue plastic tarp landed near me, and I dove on it and fought like a cat against a swarm of other bodies, pulling and yanking and kicking. Once I got ahold of the package, I held to it tightly. Two old ladies and a young teenage boy also refused to let go of the package, so I
shoved hard and all of them sprawled to the ground. I grabbed the tarp from them and gripped it as I turned and ran.

The refugees I pushed over gave up and turned back to the truck for their next opportunity. I retreated to an open stretch of ground to hide the tarp inside my huipil. This blue tarp was large enough to make a rough tent or lean-to. Finally I had a shelter. As I stood admiring the tarp, I glanced up and noticed the two old ladies I had pushed. Together they walked from the crowd, one limping badly and the other helping her. Both wept.

In that moment a sudden shame swept over me. Those grandmothers needed the tarp even more desperately than I did. Would they now have to sleep cold tonight? Would tomorrow find them dead in the hot sun without shade? All because of me. What had I become? Was my dignity only as deep as the dirt on my skin? Was my pride worth only as much as a plastic tarp? If so, then why should I even survive? Mamí and Papí would have been so ashamed of me at that moment.

I ran after the old women and called to them in
Spanish, “Here, this is yours.” I held out the tarp.

The women turned, and for a moment fear clouded their faces.

“Please, don’t be afraid,” I said.

“That tarp is yours,” answered the woman who had been limping. “Don’t tease us.”

I shook my head. “I’m not teasing you.” I placed the tarp in the lady’s arms. “What I did was wrong. Please take it.”

Surprised, the woman held up the package and looked at it. “What will you use?” she asked.

I shook my head. “Maybe I can find another one.”

“Do you have a family here?” demanded the other woman loudly. Her body was as thin as a skeleton.

I shook my head.

The woman reached and took the package. She pulled the plastic and spread it out on the ground. I stood watching, not sure what she was doing as she twisted the tarp this way and that. Then, as if her mind was made up, she turned to me and announced, “It’s big enough for all three of us. Go find some pieces of wood to hold it up.”

“But I don’t want to bother—”

The woman placed her skinny hand across my mouth. “Don’t talk so much. Life is hard enough. Go get some wood before I give you a spanking.”

That was how I first met Rosa and Carmen, two
Kakchikel
women. They hadn’t known each other before arriving at the camp. They should have been playing with grandchildren in a cantón somewhere, but life had decided differently.

“Do you know where you want to place the tarp?” I asked.

Rosa, the skinny one, laughed loudly. “It doesn’t matter. We can put it on the beach by the lake.” She spread her arm widely. “Or we can put it in the grass by the river. It doesn’t matter.”

Carmen shrugged. “We don’t have anyplace yet.”

“Come with me,” I said, taking Carmen’s arm to help her. “Did I hurt you?” I asked.

Carmen smiled. “Yes, you pushed hard.”

“I bite, too,” I said, which made them both laugh. Because I didn’t know any others who spoke Kakchikel, I took them to where I had slept among the
Quiché. “You two stay here. I’ll bring some wood to put up the tarp.”

Rosa and Carmen looked at me like two old mothers. “You come back quickly or you won’t get hot tamales and enchiladas for supper,” Rosa threatened.

“What about ice cream?” I asked.

“No ice cream,” Rosa said, bursting into another fit of laughter. “That’s because you pushed Carmen.”

“I’ll be back,” I promised.

Around me were many shrubs, but none large enough to hold up the front and back of the tarp like a tent. I walked quickly to the edge of the camp, looking for bigger branches and pieces of wood. On a small rise a kilometer from camp, I spotted a large machichi tree with branches that stretched out over the ground. This was the same kind of tree I had climbed in the pueblo. The branches near the ground were too big to break, but I knew it would be easy to climb the tree to find thinner branches. I was even tempted to just crawl up and escape the camp for a moment, to feel the wind and solitude of a tree once again.

I hesitated a moment and then forced myself to
turn away and hike even farther from camp, honoring my vow to never again be a Tree Girl. Tree Girl was a coward who let her family die. Tree Girl was a coward who sat in a tree and let a whole pueblo die. I would never again climb a tree. Tree Girl was gone forever.

For the next two hours I searched, paying the price for not being a Tree Girl. Finally, at dusk, I found two half-rotted and twisted lengths of wood far from camp. I carried them back to the grandmothers. Carmen waved hello to me. Rosa took the long branches from my arms. “You were gone so long, I was making arrangements for your funeral,” she said.

Using rocks to hold the edge of the plastic tarp to the hard dry ground, I dug holes and anchored the branches upright into the dry earth to form a rough tent for the grandmothers. Rosa and Carmen watched me and helped to stretch the tarp between the rocks and upright branches like a drum so rain wouldn’t pool. This would serve as a shelter for all three of us.

It was dark by the time I finished, and the old women’s hollow stares told me that hunger dug at their frail stomachs, but they refused to complain. Their
pride wouldn’t allow them to ask me for food.

“I’ll try to find you food tonight,” I told them as they thanked me again and again for the shelter.

“Maybe it isn’t safe for you to go out in the dark,” Carmen said.

“And maybe it isn’t safe to starve to death,” I replied.

CHAPTER TWELVE

W
hen I finally returned to our camp, the old Kakchikel grandmothers were already under the tarp, asleep on the hard ground. They stirred restlessly in their sleep, but I didn’t wake them. Sleep was their best escape from hunger and from the pain of memories. I had collected corn flour and rice along with some beans. I hoped that in the morning Carmen and Rosa would cook the beans and make tortillas on one of the small fires that sprang up around camp.

My own stomach was still knotted with hunger as I crawled under the tarp beside the old women to sleep. The day had left me exhausted, and quickly I fell into
my own restless sleep.

When I woke, Carmen and Rosa were already up. They had found the food I collected the night before, and somewhere they had also found a pan and some water to boil the beans and make tortillas. To start their fire, they had borrowed flames from someone else’s fire. Rosa met me as I crawled from the tent and she handed me a couple of warm tortillas. “Thank you for the food,” she said.

I nodded and gulped down the tortillas. These were the first warm tortillas I had eaten in more than two months. I thanked the grandmothers and set out to find food for our next meal. “We’ll look for food also,” Carmen called after me.

I realized that without meaning to, I had accepted a new responsibility, and it troubled me. I didn’t want anyone to depend on me, and I didn’t want to depend on anyone. I left without answering Carmen, knowing that survival now consumed every waking minute of my life and forced me to wander constantly through the camp in search of food, clothes, and blankets.

I never knew when a truck might arrive. One deadly
fact remained. There wasn’t enough food for everyone. If I found food for myself and the old women, then somewhere that night others would sleep hungry. If I survived one more day, someone else would die because I lived.

The San Miguel camp could have used ten times as much food and supplies, and the one thing we needed most of all, the trucks could not bring us: hope. Hope that the war might end soon, and hope that family would return. Many in the camp would have survived if they could have found hope, but with time, many gave up. I watched them sitting alone with vacant eyes, staring away from the camp to a place millions of miles away, a place where they would soon go. Sadly, some escaped by killing themselves. I saw their bodies, wrists cut wide open by jagged broken bottles that lay beside them on the ground.

Most of us kept to ourselves, not trusting those around us and not wanting to develop friendships that might soon be lost. We built small isolated worlds of memories, anger, and bitterness. And each refugee in camp avoided reality in a different way.

To hide their grief and fear, some parents in camp showed anger toward their children. Other refugees simply gave up and quit looking for food. My way of escaping reality was to occupy myself every waking moment of each day, leaving little time for memories or reflection. I feared that if I allowed memories into my mind, I, too, would become one of those who quit eating.

Each night the kindness of death found more of the refugees, and with the coming of morning their lifeless bodies were discovered motionless on the ground, as if caught in sleep.

Like most, I tried to ignore the dead resting on the ground around the camp. They were simply shapes, sad curiosities with a bad odor. To acknowledge the dead was to acknowledge the possibility that tomorrow I might be among them. I feared that morning when I would be too weak to search for food. That day it would be my turn to die. So each evening, when the Mexican workers came through camp wearing masks, picking up the dead with a truck, I looked away.

Some refugees in our part of camp tried to manufacture
hope by sitting around a small fire each night sharing what they knew of the United States of America. On days when I was lucky enough to have found food, I would sit and listen to them talk about the heaven they called the United States.

“I have a cousin who lives in Los Angeles,” one refugee said, gazing wistfully up at the stars as if recalling a dream. “He tells me that in the United States of America even the poor have cars and live in buildings with windows and doors.”

“They say that the poor keep their food cold in electric refrigerators,” another refugee added. “Their water runs from faucets, clean and pure, and even the poorest Americans have toilets that flush away their dung.”

The refugees would talk for hours about leaving the camp and trying to make it north through Mexico to America. “The United States border is much harder to cross than the border we crossed to enter Mexico,” one old man explained. “You need men called
coyotes
to smuggle you across. The coyotes are very dangerous men who charge much money.”

“Yes, but it’s worth it,” a woman added. “In the United States there are hospitals to care for the poor and hungry.”

One night I noticed a young man with glasses sitting and listening quietly to everyone telling stories about America. As the fire died down, the young man seemed to grow impatient. He suddenly spoke. “If it weren’t for the Americans,” he said, “the soldiers would never have attacked our cantóns.”

Everybody sat in silence. It was as if the storytellers’ dreams had been doused with cold water. “It’s getting late,” one woman complained.

“Yes, it’s late,” said another, as she stood to leave. I continued sitting there in the darkness as most of the others wandered back to their shelters. The young man with glasses remained sitting on the ground.