Prologue
I’m surrounded. Mass bells chime, horses whinny, carts roll on, and Spanish patters the streets. The scent of coriander rises from the chicken potaje. The white world calls—pray, speak, devour, be of our world—but I’m not white. And yet…
I remember my first weeks in the convent. A no juegos doctor came into my room. He had gray hair and his skin was taught, not the smallest panza giving way. My mind tried and failed. It was impossible to grasp his age. His hair was trimmed short and touched with a scented pomade. He reminded me of a young man come to court a girl. But if he was interested in me his neglect of my eyes didn’t show it. His ‘buenosss diasss’ was negotiating and carried the Castilian gust of his motherland.
I wanted to warm his formal tone with a smile but a cough tightened my throat and crumpled my lips. Esas manchas, I clutched my neck, Grandmother of the Baths help me. I lifted myself from my bed against the wall and stepped the three steps needed to reach the opposite wall. My possessions are few. My shelf holds a mere five jars of herbs next to the forests of millions. I took down one of clay and opened it to show the doctor. His medical bundle clanked over my little wooden desk, which was just big enough to support an open book, and unrolled revealing his metal tools.
“This, a concoction of avocado leaf and poppy...” I said presenting it to him.
He took it from my hands and twisted himself back to place it on the shelf again.
“Be seated,” he sighed. He took up an instrument with a tiny mirror at its end.
I held still as a child who doesn’t know to stop staring at a crippled woman. My eyes wandered his stern demeanor searching for more than the three wrinkles that accompanied his hair. The side of one of his palms was inflamed. I wondered what kind of a fit his body might be in, had he brushed past a stinging bush? Without words my looking asked him to look at me. But, when he didn’t, I did as he ordered and sat in my wooden chair.
I nodded toward my shelf, “My mother used to apply her own remedy.”
I saw his hand near my face, the skin swelled. I felt his soft fingers flit over the lumps in my throat. Doctors miss much by birding over someone like that, some don’t know it, or worse, don’t care. Puffs of air from his nose warmed my forehead as he worked. He smelled like soap and Aragon. He told me to open my mouth and looked inside with his mirror.
“Swallow,” he ordered.
He was quiet a little longer, studying me. I suspected his look was other than clinical. Was he trying to decide what kind of woman stretched beyond the borders of this veil and habit? Did he wonder whether my skin darkened beyond my face and hands, whether my hair hung to my buttocks? He’d seen me before, I remembered him. Did he recognize me? He must’ve reflected on the past circumstances with some bitterness.
Then drawing back, he spoke more than two words, “We are not contemporaries in medicine doña—”
“María,” I reminded.
“Yes—therefore I will not discuss the subject further.”
He handed me a small bottle and explained the instructions for drinking. My mouth was still open a little, but I didn’t allow the words I was thinking to spill. By then I’d understood him as a stranger to payasos person. You have to spend real time with those types if you want to unearth un payasito. I decided to let him finish talking as I thought how he still hadn’t looked into my eyes, not even once. When he rolled up his instruments a sudden jarring idea entered my mind. I felt my heart beat thicken as though my blood changed to honey and I knew something sweet was about to happen. I heard myself speak. I had something for him. He stopped his movements and looked at me, but do you know how he looked at me? Eyes closed. And when they opened do you know where he looked? Over my shoulder. He wasn’t permitted to accept payment, he explained. I tilted my head wondering whether there was a chance he was a blind man pretending to see.
He started rolling up his cloth until I spoke again, “No not payment. A gift of thanks.”
I took down a jar of Waráruwi leaves I’d collected from the canyon floor. I nodded at his pained hand and placed the plant, I sensed he wouldn’t know exactly what to do with it, but that he’d find out, on his cloth next to his mirror tool.
Then it happened. Maybe it was from irritation or surprise of my crossing into his plot, either way, what happened his gaze met mine. Instantly, I knew his sight was keen; the colored circles of our eyes and the centers within those circles aligned. I was taken by the evenness of his eyes and the clarity of the whites against their dark middles. Forget that his gray hair made him look older. Forget that his thin frame and fingers made him seem frail. His eyes opened and I plunged in before he could close the door. Close it he did. He blinked and turned his head away. The moment lasted three flicks of a snake’s tongue. But if the whole of my life were made up of just ten flicks of moments like that, those ten would be my eternal life. It was like carving something from a dream to take with you, even though forgetfulness was so gentle and inviting when you knew you were waking up. Or like realizing in the midst of a fall that you were happening to the fall as much as the fall was happening to you. Those kind of moments go on forever when you think back on them. They know how to squeeze through prison bars and trickle past thick convent doors.
When it ended he rolled up his bundle, my offering quietly inside. He wished me a good day, God willing. I nodded with the seriousness that I supposed comforted him and watched him go. He never mentioned the frenzied night we met in my kitchen, when I lived with my husband. Could he see beyond the veil, me without it as I was that night? When he left he didn’t slam the door or leave it gaping. He closed it well. It couldn’t have woken a xoloitzquintle from siesta—you’ve seen, they sleep on doorsteps and street stones, the pads of their feet twitch, their black hairless skin like a dark hole in the ground that if stepped on would only partially sink your foot and would shoot a yelp through their sporadically whiskered muzzle. They dream of guiding human companions through the afterlife, not because they have to, but to repay the generous caresses and food.
After the doctor left, I sat at my writing desk looking out the window, which was just as small. I heard a Cotinga bird singing through the town clatter; not all sounds in New Spain are from across the sea, I reminded myself. This called to mind the wild trees in the distant forests and canyons. I chewed my tongue contemplating how the trees here were trimmed, not one branch straying from place, like the doctor’s neatly fixed hair—the difference only that its landscape was gray. I turned the medicine bottle in my hands and held it up to the sunlight. I watched its liquid slide slowly. A tickle in my belly animated me to go outside.
I tucked the bottle under my black habit. I brought a knife, strips of old rags, and a cup of water and walked to the convent garden. I’d been cultivating two trees. I kneeled in the dirt and severed the young trunk of each tree. I switched them, tying each to its new host with cloth. Pride, we all have it, my thoughts wandered. I’m as proud as any doctor that comes to treat me. Although ‘doctor’ is not quite the right word to describe myself because I’m somewhere between nahualli and tepahtiani in the words of my language, which, without doubts, translates to Spanish minds as witch. Nevertheless, let me say that I am a healer.
A few nuns passed through the outside hall and Moroccan archway. They pulled gloves over their pale fingers and trimmed a leaf here and a dry rose there. Above them I saw the window of my room. When I see it from down here I realize how tiny it is. The doctor came down the hall. He nodded at the rose gardeners who returned the dip of the head and married their eyes with the soil, slightly more conscious of the roots spreading below. When he caught sight of me squatting in the Earth a flinch tugged his eyes closed. He recovered with another bow of his head, which I mirrored. I watched him pass through the garden gate. The nuns murmured with the rapid snips of their scissors, hopping over well-mannered flowers to clip away branches that strayed too far, regardless of their brilliant flowers.
Wherever there is goodness...
Nobody was watching, but then somebody is always watching, so the best way to live with that in this case was to pull my sleeve over my hand to slip the bottle out. Then, to the tree on the left I pretended to pat its dirt while pouring the liquid from the bottle over it. I repeated the same motions with the tree on the right, except I poured only water. I closed my eyes and whispered.
...wherever there is goodness, I shall adopt it.
Don’t be fooled, where you find goodness, let it please you.
I stood and brushed my skirt. I sat on a stone bench and eyed the fastened cloths on the tree trunks. Soon I saw something more. How can a person put these things in words? Traveling through memory. My husband, my son, my brothers, my lover, my mother, mi curandera…I saw the trees and pools of water in the north. The small villages and the ill ones. Now I see I’ve spent months in this less than present state, the world before me wavering. The dream wavering. Sometimes wonder. Sometimes tears.
I write to you from my modest desk. My mind recounting mirrors facing mirrors of moments inside moments. My quill writes off the edge, ink smears my paper. I have to slide my folio left before this happens or my trance is broken and my memories are replaced by trite surroundings: bed, shelf, desk, window. I see all I’ve written. All the thought like a voice now on the other side, no longer following me over the cloisters, chapels, and plots.
I used to think nothing on earth could make me feel sane. That was until I had the idea to write it. My eyes followed the clouds out my window. My blank folio stared back at me. How can a person look at the things she wants to forget? My first words were like my son’s, like a baby, bubbling nonsense, yet gushing with undertones. I wrote sounds. Sounds of pain that don’t form words, can’t be found in dictionaries, seem to lead nowhere, confuse the logical ear, pure expression that can only be understood by the language of the soul: ahonooo-nmiooo-riahhhh-mamao-mmanao, and others of the spirit that best reach yours when wept into the shirt draping your chest. But how often does that opportunity arise?
Gradually, my words took shape. I’m able to better see and pluck each thorn from my nopal existence. Finally, I was able to proceed. There were still days I threw my folio and plume to the ground. I spiraled like a vine twisting back into the dark underground. It was easy to mull over my brothers, to be worn with the paths of their pacing in me. Perhaps—I would lift my paper from the grim gray floor—if I keep my feet gummed down and breast pressed to the desk, if I just write…I’ll be still.
They confided in me. Since my brother Martín sent his first letter and since Atl and I pulled ourselves through tree branches as children. It was my donkey ears that invited them to talk. I was entranced before I could turn away. They told me the steps of their journeys, the aches in their chests. And I, in a daze, planted my spirit in their bodies so that today I feel as though I’ve lived their lives. I know it’s impossible. But as I wondered, how does one tell it? Had the doctor released the reins on his tongue, told me his life, I would’ve stayed. That’s how I am. And then, cursed manchas, the helping ideas would wiggle and dance me.
I’d been danced before. Incredibly conscious of my brothers’ characters, capable of describing their inner worlds, I knew how to sway, skirt laws and whirl with moral. And the web that made this possible, what I didn’t know about my brothers I’d learn from others, the senses of the town—builders, prison maids, guards, mango peddlers, forest dwellers—the eyes and ears of the land. One thing I know about Martín, he heats in the ears when angry. And Atl, he was easy. There was almost no emotion he had he didn’t display, but one secret is he sharpened his inner warrior by murmuring poetry, por ejemplo. I have a knack of knowing others. My son is giddy near drums, his blood tugs him and bounces him up and down like a rubber ball. I’m somewhere in the middle of nahualli and tepahtiani. As one healer said, you may think it strange for us to know people so well, but we do. We know it’s marvelously insane, you could tell us and we’d say we already know. But like this, it is.
What’s more, I’ve seen something glorious beneath the surface of us all. I tell you there is. The most precious of things. The gift the Mexica of this land know. The gift that never tires of speaking within us, that is, man’s loyal drumming heart. We are diverse, but because of in here, the skin flies off like a bird. What’s left is a blossom unseen and sensed like perfume.
And there is time, Mexico, lindo y querido, by our children—mijo, your children. My brothers. I. You. Made from scattered seeds to flower this way, wade to the shores of the earth that way. It’s a thousand prickles of the nopal that Atl’s not here to say it in his way. I can picture him gracefully speaking, making it so the king would correct his political blows, sealing the cracks spread into this land and the people of this land and me.
Atl was the cacique of flowing flower and song. Would there ever be a time his words were untrue? What would he say now?
Our children, they open their faces of many flowers, they breathe out honey. They are the fragrant bouquet of the goodness of Life Giver’s seeds…
Ah, yes. He would say it in words such as these.
