Duckling Ugly

He sat on a soft padded settee at the far end of the room, in the shaft of light brought in by the skylight.

  “Vengas aqui, mi hija.” When I didn’t move, he sighed, and resorted to English. “Come here, my child.”

  I approached across the black marble floor, cold beneath my bare feet.

  The old man had a glow about him that had nothing to do with the light of the sun. It was an inner radiance. He was truly old—perhaps as old as poor Miss Leticia had been—but the vitality in his eyes was like that of a man in his twenties.

  “Did you enjoy your pascua de florida? Your feast of flowers? I can still smell the blossoms on your feet.”

  “It was…uh…interesting.”

  “Forgive me,” he said. “I am a man in love with ceremony.”

  Now that I was just a few feet away, I could see that his skin was marred by deep wrinkles, but that didn’t lessen how handsome he was. Looking at his face was like looking at an ancient oak in the first days of summer—lined and wizened, and yet as gloriously green as a sapling.

  But when he looked at me, clearly he saw something different. He saw my ugliness.

  “Ah! That face, that face!” he said. “So many tears your face has drawn from you, verdad?”

  “My face is my business,” I told him.

  “This is true. But you are here, so that makes it my business as well.” Then he gestured all around him. “For you, I have covered all my mirrors.”

  So, it wasn’t artwork on the walls around us.

  He narrowed his keen eyes and took in the features of my face. “Hmm,” he said. “Qué feo. What Aaron says is true. You are very, very ugly—but do not think you are special in this. You are not the first, you are not the last. And I have seen uglier.”

  If anyone else had said that, I would have called them a liar, but there was such authority in the old man’s voice, everything he said rang true. There was a certain light to Abuelo, too. Not something I could see, but something I could feel, as irresistible as the pull of gravity, yet somehow a bit dangerous, like radiation. I’d call it graviation. G-R-A-V-I-A-T-I-O-N. Good word.

  He smiled at me as if he could read my thoughts. If he told me he could, I would have believed him. I almost wanted him to, because it was so hard to put into words all the thoughts and feelings I had had since opening my eyes to this wonderful place.

  “Why did you bring me here?” I asked.

  He waved his hand. “I did nothing. You brought yourself here. Like a salmon swimming upstream, there was an instinct in you to find this place. My letter merely reminded you.”

  I gasped. “You wrote the letter!”

  The old man smiled, showing teeth as pearly white as his suit. “I wrote it, yes. But it was Aaron who convinced me you were worth the effort.”

  “Aaron convinced you? But…I never met Aaron before.”

  The old man raised his eyebrows. “Well, Aaron knows of you, even if you do not know of him. And when you came through the mountains, it was he who was waiting with the monks for you.”

  “The monks?”

  “Not your concern. They found you, freezing to death in the rain, and they brought you here. That’s all you need to know.”

  I thought back to that rainy night. Was it yesterday? A week ago? How long had I been unconscious? “My parents are probably looking for me!”

  “Let them look,” Abuelo said. “They will not find you here. The earth itself conspires to keep this place hidden.” Then he added, “Besides…do you truly believe they will search for long?”

  I wanted to be furious at the question. I wanted to think my parents would tear the world apart trying to find me…but did I really believe that? My father, who secretly thought I was the curse that brought him a life of failure? My mother, to whom I’d been such a burden for all these years? How long would they try to find me? How much did they truly want to?

  I turned my eyes down to the black marble floor. “I don’t belong here,” I told him. “I might not belong out there, but I definitely don’t belong here.”

  “Perhaps this is true,” the old man said, “but you are welcome to linger awhile. Who knows, in time, you may see things differently, verdad?”

  I didn’t think so, but whether I belonged here or not, I couldn’t deny the sense of acceptance I felt. “Thank you,” I said. I would stay, I decided. At least until the ugularity of my face sucked away their acceptance, and poisoned them against me, as I knew it eventually would.

  13

  It’s a Beautiful Life

  I stayed in that little one-room cottage at the opposite end of the valley from Abuelo’s mansion. When I had arrived, there was nothing in it but a bed, but each day someone else brought a single gift. The daily gifts were another one of Abuelo’s rituals, I suppose. No one seemed to keep a calendar, so I marked the days by counting the things in my cottage. A table and chairs, a handblown glass oil lamp, a dresser.

  Each morning I awoke to find Aaron sitting on my porch, waiting to take me to someone else’s home for breakfast. I have to admit I liked that he was there, but all that attention from him made me self-conscious.

  “Don’t you have something better to do than babysit me?” I asked him on the third morning.

  He shrugged. “There’s plenty of time to do the things I’ve got to do,” he said. “Besides, it’s not babysitting.”

  I wondered whether it was his assigned chore to be my escort, or if he did it because he wanted to.

  Time was spent differently here than in the outside world. Some people had generators to make electricity, but they rarely used them, which meant there were no televisions, or video games, or any of the usual things people use to occupy their time. You might think that would be horrible, but it wasn’t. Or at least it wasn’t in De León. People kept busy, each in their own way—and wherever I went, people invited me to be a part of whatever they were doing.

  In Harmony’s house, for instance, some of the women would get together and weave with her. She invited me in and taught me how to do it, creating that fine fabric for the clothes they wore. They sang while they wove, and taught me the songs so I could sing along. We worked the hand looms to the rhythm of the song. It wasn’t exactly what you would call fun, but it was soothing, and satisfying in a way I can’t explain. I sat there all day and hadn’t realized that hours had passed until Harmony lit the lamps. I left that evening feeling like I’d accomplished something great.

  I quickly learned that everyone had their place in De León—or I guess I should say everyone made their place. There were Claude and Willem—two craftsmen who carved furniture with so much love, you could just about feel their embrace when you sat in one of their rocking chairs. There was Haidy, who spent her days writing poetry, and her husband, Roland, who set it to music. Maxwell, the storyteller, would come to a different house each night and entertain better than the finest film, in return for being fed.

  Even Aaron, the youngest of the men, at sixteen, had found his niche.

  I asked him about it late one afternoon. We were sitting out by the small fishing pond, watching the early twilight sky change colors.

  “What do you do all day?” I asked. “I mean, when you’re not being my personal social director. Do you go to school? I don’t see a little red schoolhouse anywhere in the valley.”

  “There is no school,” he told me. “At least not the kind you’re thinking about.”

  “Well then, this must be heaven after all.”

  “We learn from each other,” he explained. “And what we can’t teach, we can read up on in Abuelo’s library. Abuelo even gives lectures on everything from philosophy to physics—whatever his current interest is.”

  “I guess when you’ve been around as long as he has, you become an expert in just about everything,” I said. “But you still haven’t answered my question. How do you fit in here?”

  Aaron smiled. “When I’m not your social director, I’m everyone else’s,” he said. “I’m in charge of what Abuelo
calls ‘purposeful amusement.’ I create games and challenges. I set up things to do when everyone gathers in Abuelo’s mansion, or for the picnics on Sunday afternoon.”

  “So, then, you’re a”—I tried to come up with the perfect word—“a recreologist.”

  He looked at me funny, and his expression made me laugh.

  “Recreologist,” he said, mulling it over. “I like it. You’re good with words.” He held eye contact with me, and it made me uncomfortable What was it with these people? They were all gorgeous, and yet they could all stand to look at me. People simply didn’t do that. Not even Momma, who could withstand my face better than anyone, was able to hold my gaze that long.

  “Don’t look at me like that!” I said, almost angry about it, because it defied everything I knew about myself. “Look at me like a normal person does, which is not looking at all!”

  I stood up, knowing my face was getting red and blotchy. I stood at the edge of the little pond and dared to catch my reflection off the surface. I saw myself for only a few moments—my tainted, awful image—then the water defended itself as it always did, clouding over so it didn’t have to reflect the likes of me. I growled in frustration.

  “I wouldn’t worry about that,” Aaron said, seeing the sudden murkiness of the water. “It doesn’t mean anything.”

  At that moment I wanted to throw him into the pond! “How can you say it doesn’t mean anything? How many other people here fog water just by looking into it?”

  “Abuelo says once you see a person’s soul, you no longer see the outside.”

  “Abuelo’s full of it!” I told him. “I’d like you a whole lot better if you just admitted, like a normal person, that I’m ugly!”

  “Fine,” Aaron said, getting miffed for the first time since I’d met him. “You’re ugly. You’re totally, completely, and undeniably ugly. If it makes you happy, I’ll shout it to all of De León.”

  I still felt the flush in my face, but the reasons for it were changing. “It doesn’t make me happy,” I said quietly.

  “Well,” he said, offering me the slightest grin, “we’ll have to find other ways to make you happy.”

  I can’t quite say what I felt for Aaron during those first days in De León. Was it gratitude? Respect? Awe? It certainly wasn’t the same kind of hopeless longing I had felt for Gerardo, and it couldn’t quite be love, because I barely knew him. I liked his attention, though, and the way he treated me. Most of the good-looking people I knew were terminally self-centered, but Aaron didn’t seem to be that way. He was genuine, he was thoughtful, he was too good to be true—and that kept me suspicious.

  He was also very good at what he did. I got a taste of Aaron’s “recreology” that first Sunday. He organized all sorts of clever races and contests—and everyone joined in, including me.

  It was a Tom Sawyer kind of life in De León, and Abuelo was like our own Hispanic Mark Twain. I told Abuelo that, and he just laughed. “I am partial to Cervantes,” he said, and he explained that Cervantes was the Spanish author who had written Don Quixote, a famous story about an old knight who did crazy things, like attack a windmill. “He thought the windmills might be giants,” Abuelo said. “I applaud a madman who sees the fantastic in the ordinary.”

  The point is, life was frozen in De León, in a time that may never really have existed. You might be tempted to call them backward, or ignorant, but you’d be wrong. They knew and understood technology, all the conveniences of modern life, but they simply didn’t need any of it. Cars? Why have a car when the valley was only a mile long, and the walk was so refreshing? Electric lights? What was the point, when candles and hearths were so much more friendly and inviting? Telephones? Why not talk face-to-face when so much of communication is body language?

  There was simply nothing wrong in De León—and, like I said, that kind of perfection is highly suspect. And then, of course, there were the Seven Mysteries, which made me wonder about the place even more—but I’ll get to those later.

  Even with my suspicious nature, I quickly fell into the easy pace of life there, and each day I found myself thinking about my old life less and less. It’s not like I forgot about my family, or Gerardo, or even Marisol and Marshall…but when your days are packed with people who are genuinely kind and unburdened by their own lives, how can you choose to think of bad times? The thoughts did come, though. Usually at night. I would worry about Momma worrying about me. I thought about how Dad would blame himself because of that stupid deal he’d made with Marshall about the car. I thought of Miss Leticia, and mourned the fact that I hadn’t been there for her funeral. But then morning would come, Aaron would be at my door with a smile that appeared to have no ulterior motive, and those lonely night thoughts dissolved like the early-morning mist.

  Getting to know everyone in De León, and seeing how well they all fit in, made it more and more obvious to me that I didn’t. It was a constant reminder that I’d eventually have to leave. I didn’t know where I would go, only that I couldn’t go back home. I mentioned this to Aaron, and he just became uncomfortable, and shrugged. The thought of me leaving was the only thing that ever seemed to rattle him—after all, I was the only one here his age, and beggars can’t be choosers.

  Harmony was much more open when I talked to her about eventually leaving.

  “If you find your place among us,” she asked, “will you still want to leave?”

  I thought about it. “No,” I told her, and it was the truth—but I couldn’t imagine anything I could do that would be of use to anyone in De León.

  After I’d been in De León for a week, my little one-room cottage had become furnished and inviting. There was something missing, though, and I couldn’t put my finger on what it could be. It was Aaron who had the insight to see what was really missing from the place.

  It was the evening of my seventh day. He had just come over with a wooden board game he had invented and Willem had built for him. Kind of a cross between Stratego and chess. We had just started playing when he looked around the room, and said, “These are all things other people wanted to give you…but since you’ve been here, you haven’t said if there’s anything you want.”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe a radio? A laptop? A TV Guide?” But I was kidding, and he knew it. If I missed any of those things, I only missed them on the surface, because they were familiar. I thought about his question a bit more deeply. Once I did, my answer was easy. “How about a bamboo paintbrush, some ink, and some paper?”

  Aaron nodded. “I’ll see what I can do.”

  The next afternoon he came to my cottage all smiles, with a jar of ink in one hand and a brush in the other. “We didn’t have bamboo,” he said, “so Willem used his lathe to make you one out of birch wood.”

  I took the brush, holding it like something precious. The pale bristles were soft and tapered to a point, the way I liked it. I could tell it wasn’t wolf hair, or even rabbit. “What kind of hair is it?”

  Aaron blushed a bit, and scratched the side of his head, revealing a little thin patch on his scalp.

  “No!” I said. “You didn’t.”

  “I did. You’ve got yourself a genuine Aaron-hair brush.”

  “That’s just plain creepy.”

  He shrugged. “It just means there’ll be a little bit of me in everything you draw.”

  I looked at the brush again, deciding it wasn’t as creepy as it was sweet. Then I realized something was missing. “Is there any paper?”

  He smiled and gestured toward the empty white walls of the cottage. “Who needs paper?”

  I think that was the moment my feelings toward Aaron took a quantum leap beyond gratitude, respect, and awe.

  14

  The Seven Mysteries

  I once saw this documentary about a family who had adopted a young chimpanzee. They raised it as part of the family. It ate at the table, had its own room done up like any other kid’s room. The little chimp had all the love it could handle, and yet
there was a deep sadness in its eyes. It knows there’s something wrong, I remember thinking. It knows it can never be like the tall, slender creatures around it. I wondered if he was human in his dreams, only to wake up to realize it was never going to happen.

  That’s how I felt among the beautiful people of De León, and no matter how accepted they made me feel, I knew I would never be like them. I wondered how long it would take for them to realize it and send me on my way.

  I had been in paradise for three weeks when Abuelo paid a surprise visit to my cottage. What had begun as a bare room was now decorated with furniture, quilts, and other warm touches brought by the residents of De León. Everything, of course, but mirrors.

  I was doing my ink drawings—I had already filled up two whole walls and was working on a third. I stiffened when I saw Abuelo at my open front door. Abuelo never came to visit you—you always went to see him. I looked at the ink drawings on the wall and felt as if I had been caught doing something wrong.

  “Hola, mi hija,” he said as he stepped in. “I came to see how you are getting on.”

  “I’m good,” I squeaked out. Abuelo never did anything without purpose. I was convinced that this was the day he would cast me out. After all, I had yet to make myself useful here. Was my free ride over? My heart began to beat like I was running a marathon, but I tried not to let it show.

  He took a look at the walls, taking them in, saying nothing, then stepped back from the fullest wall to see it as a whole. “It looks like…writing,” he said.

  “It is…kind of,” I explained. “I use the basic strokes of Chinese writing for all my drawing.” I picked up my brush and on a blank spot of wall showed him the seven simple marks I had taught myself years ago.

  “The Chinese call these strokes the Seven Mysteries,” I told him.

  Abuelo studied the seven marks, then stepped closer to examine the individual drawings, each one no larger than a sheet of paper, since that was the size I was used to. I waited for him to turn to me, offer his apologies, and tell me I had to leave De León. But he didn’t. Instead he pointed to three of the drawings. “This one is the view from your porch,” he said. “This, I think, is Harmony’s garden. And this…this is me!” He smiled broadly. “Qué bueno!”