What the Moon Saw (12 page)

Days passed. I saw Pedro every afternoon on the mountain. He showed me how to weave
petates
out of palm. At first he’d tried to teach me how to make a hat like his, but after a few tries that turned out like sloppy birds’ nests, we realized I’d have to start small. So we worked on miniature
petates.
My fingers were clumsy, and none of the edges turned out straight. I ended up with tiny amoeba-shaped coasters—presents for Mom, I decided. Pedro laughed a lot too, like my grandparents, only he wasn’t as hyper as Abuelo. When Pedro laughed his eyes crinkled up, the way they did when he sang or listened to me talk. Watching his eyes crinkle gave me a warm, liquidy feeling. I wondered if he felt that way when he watched me laugh.

I showed him how to do origami, which I’d learned from a book Dad got me for Christmas last year. After fifteen minutes Pedro had mastered the swan and dragon and was already inventing new ones—scorpions and guitars. His fingers moved as quickly as they did plucking guitar strings or weaving hats.

Every day we followed the goats around. I called
“Chchchchchivo”
when they wandered, and they even began listening to me. Sometimes Pedro would ask me what my life was like in Maryland, and I’d try to explain how everyone had a cell phone with call-waiting and redial and caller ID, and computers and e-mail and Internet and DVDs, and how you have to remember numbers and codes and passwords for everything.

He would ask a few questions and then suddenly stop. His eyes would lose their crinkle, and the rosiness would leave his cheeks. He’d begin walking a few steps ahead of me in the middle of the trail, leaving no room for me to walk next to him. I’d straggle behind, watching his hair poke out below his hat, watching him take long strides in his old red pants and black shoes. I’d promise myself not to talk about the U.S. again. But it always came up. It was part of who I was, like it or not.

“Is Mexico how you thought it would be?” Pedro asked me one day.

I shook my head. I didn’t even have to think about that one. I was sketching a picture of him with that high rock face in the background. I’d already done the nooks and crags, the plants growing out of the cracks, the vines hanging down like a woman’s hair—that part had taken me a while. The rock face was almost a real face, with lines and wrinkles, and holes like eyes and ears. Now I was sketching in the strong arch of Pedro’s eyebrows, leading down into the shadow under his cheekbones. I could fill up my whole sketchbook with pictures of Pedro and not get tired of it.

“Don’t move your mouth so much, Pedro!” I laughed.

“Well, what did you expect Yucuyoo to be like?” he asked through his teeth, trying to keep from smiling.

“Like the Mexico in Disney World. You walk around a lake and stop in all these pretend countries. What I remember from Mexico was a bunch of ladies in ruffly white skirts and two braids and lots of lipstick. They danced around with giant white smiles. And there were burros dressed up in red and green and white blankets.”

He let out a smirk.

“Ped-
ro
!
Hold still
if you want this to turn out good!”

“Okay, okay!” he said, trying not to move his mouth. “And then you came here and saw these shacks made of metal scraps and cardboard.”

I smiled. “And no dressed-up burros!”

He did not smile back. “And you see me with this old orange shirt that says—how did you say it in English—‘Rrrrockveel Soccerrr League.’ Probably a rich boy in your country decided he didn’t like it anymore.”

I stopped drawing. My pencil hovered over the paper. His voice had turned bitter.

“And his mother gave it to a secondhand store, and somehow it made its way down here, and a mother bought it, and her first son wore it, then her second son, then her third son, then her sister’s son, and then her neighbor’s son, and that’s me, and here it is.”

His eyes were changing somehow as he talked. I erased the eyes, blew off the dust, and tried to get them right. I studied him closely. Where had those new shadows come from?

“You’re moving again, Pedro,” I said softly.

“You’re wondering how a goat-boy like me knows that, aren’t you? Well, my friends’ fathers have been to Chicago and Los Angeles and they bring back new T-shirts with the tags on that still smell like the store.”

“I wasn’t wondering that, Pedro,” I said.

“I know all about your country. My friends’ fathers send back videos of their big apartments and giant TVs. I know all about it, even though you think I’m just a goat-boy.”

“I don’t think that.” I wanted to ask him,
What about your own father? Where is he? Why doesn’t he send videos?
But I had the feeling that if I asked him this, he would snap and growl at me like a cornered dog. So I held my tongue.

I wanted that lightness to come back into his eyes. For a few minutes I sketched a line here, erased it, sketched another one there, erased it. It was strange how someone’s face could be warm one minute, and the next, cold as stone.

Finally, I decided to change the subject to something that would make him happy. He loved his guitar, so I said, in a strained voice, “Where’d you get your guitar from?”

“Marcos. My sixth-grade teacher. When he was eighteen, he taught for a year here in Yucuyoo. Everyone here loved him.”

Pedro was moving his face too much now for me to finish the drawing. But at least his eyes had more life. I set my pencil down.

“Marcos taught me to play guitar.” Pedro picked out a few notes on his guitar, and I wished he would start playing and singing and looking into my eyes. But he kept his eyes on his fingers. “When Marcos left at the end of the school year, everyone threw him a big fiesta. The women made
tamales
, and the men roasted two goats in his honor. The band played songs and he danced with even the oldest ladies and the littlest girls. When he left, people cried for days. Marcos gave me his guitar the day before he went away. Instead of crying, I played it all the time.”

“Do you think he’ll come back?”

Pedro shrugged. “Who knows,” he said flatly. “I’m used to it now. Everyone I care about leaves.” He gave me a cold look. “They go away and forget about Yucuyoo.”

His face had changed again. The shadows were back. He sighed like an old, tired man. “Did you finish the drawing?”

“No. It’s about to rain. I’ll do it later.”

But I never did. I could never draw him in a way that satisfied me. Whenever I thought I’d captured something on paper, his expression changed, and I’d think,
No, that’s not him, that’s not him at all.

“What do you know about Marcos?” I asked Abuelita. We were washing clothes by the banana tree. Well, she was washing and I was watching.

She thought about my question. She sprinkled white powder into the concrete sink, and with a gourd, added water from the giant metal barrel that collected rain.

“Marcos was a poet,” she said finally. “A poet with plans to change the world. And maybe he did, the year he was here. In his own way.”

“How?”

“He taught Pedro many things. He taught Pedro that while his roots grow deep into the darkness, his face turns to the light.” She scrubbed my jeans, which were coated with mud and turned the water brown. “Pedro’s father left when Pedro was a small child, you see. When you feel that life has treated you badly, it is easy, so easy, to let your heart fill with anger. Marcos showed Pedro how to fill his heart with music instead.”

“But then Marcos left him.”

Abuelita wrung out the jeans and set them aside, then moved on to my orange sweatshirt. “Yes, Marcos was a boy from the city, you see. How could he stay in our village his whole life? But, oh, what goodness he left behind. He told Pedro, ‘Stay in school and help me change the world.’ Three boys in Pedro’s class studied past their eighth year of school. Pedro was one of them. All the other boys stopped to help their families in the fields. During the school year, Pedro wakes up before dawn and gathers firewood for his mother. Then he takes the goats out with his books. Then he goes to school with his books. Then he takes the goats out again with his books until darkness falls.”

I thought of how much I complained to Dad about my only two chores—taking out the trash and the recycling. A little wave of shame swept over me. Abuelita wrung out my green sweater and put it on top of the pile of clothes. She took a gourdful of water and rinsed the rest of the suds down the hole in the sink. The water poured out below into a mud puddle, and little rivers trickled past the banana tree down the slope. Then she plugged up the hole with a wad of cloth and poured clear water into the sink. She added the clothes to rinse them. She did this all so fast, you could tell she’d been doing it all her life. It occurred to me that maybe I should pay attention so that I could do a load of laundry now and then.

“Your grandfather and I, we are glad for your friendship with Pedro.” She swished the clothes around in the water and squeezed out the last of the suds. “We were worried he would be hard on you.”

“Hard on me? How?”

“Oh, his life has not been easy.” She said this slowly, and I could tell she was thinking hard about what words to use.

“When people here think of your country, they think of money, of streets paved with gold, and diamonds on the trees.” She twisted out the clothes one last time and piled them in a bucket. She carried it over to the clothesline, and together, we began pinning up the clothes.

“Is that why Pedro’s father left?”

“In a way.” She unpinned the shirt I’d pinned up and turned it inside out. “Like this,
mi amor.
So the sun does not fade your lovely clothes.”

“Oh.” I felt like a two-year-old around her sometimes when she was doing chores. All I knew how to do was throw clothes into a washing machine, the hot setting for towels and sheets and T-shirts and pajamas, and the cold setting for nice clothes.

“Years ago we people of Yucuyoo sold our coffee to a company. And this company sold it around the world. Imagine. People in far-off lands drinking coffee I picked with these hands!” She stretched out her fingers, red from the cold water and harsh soap. “And then, the trade rules changed. The companies began buying coffee from other places. Our coffee prices started to fall. They fell and fell like a dying bird. Oh, it was a terrible shock. You see, it began to cost more to grow the coffee than to sell it. That is when Pedro’s father left. That is when many men started leaving. Because there is no way to feed a family with nothing.” Abuelita pinned up the last shirt, my art shirt, splattered with red and yellow paint.

“Who changed the rules? Why?”

“I will tell you a story that happened years ago. Here, in our land, by the marketplace. There was a high stone wall, and on the other side, a tree. A huge old tree, as wide as I am tall. A tree whose branches gave shade for the grandmothers to gather and talk, for the children to play. Then one day a man came to town and bought the piece of earth on the other side of the wall. Oh, he was not a bad man, but he was a man who stayed inside his walls. He did not understand that this tree gave us shade and joy. He did not understand that the roots of the tree spread out beneath us all. That the branches spread high over us all. No, all the man knew was that the tree would make a fine table and fine chairs in his house. So he had his sons chop it down. Since that day, the grandmothers and children no longer gather in the cool shade.”

Abuelita sighed. For a moment it didn’t seem like she had a powerful jaguar inside her. She looked like a small, old, tired lady. A sad feeling stayed inside me all afternoon until late that night, in my bed under the wooden rafters. Falling asleep, I saw a tall stone wall. From the other side of the wall came music, notes from Pedro’s guitar. I tried to climb over the wall. I tried to dig under it. I tried to knock it down. Finally, I gave up and sat against the wall and listened, and that’s all I remember.