Caramelo

  What she saw next to her husband’s boot was this. A dark shadow of flowered calico. The hem of a skirt! ¡Virgen Purísima! A long thin pin in her heart.

  When she came to, there was a crowd of busybodies pressing around her screaming, —Give her water! Give her air! Put her feet up. Someone pull down her skirt! And there was mixed in as well the angry shouts of the watchmaker, who was more concerned about his jeweler’s glass than the welfare of Soledad.

  But how can one live like that, with a pin in one’s heart? How? Tell me.

  Soledad sought out the only person she could confide in, the anciana who sold atole and tamales on a wooden table outside the church. Inside, the priest was hearing confession and sending out the guilty with a long list of useless prayers as penance. But outside, the tamal vendor gave out only sound advice, which was so sensible as to be mistaken for foolishness.

  —Help me, I’m suffering, Soledad said after explaining her story.

  —Ah, poor little creature. What wife hasn’t had your troubles? It’s just jealousy. Believe me, it’s not going to kill you, though you’ll feel like you’re dying.

  —But how much longer will I feel like this?

  —It depends.

  —On what?

  —On how hard you love.

  —Holy Mother of God!

  Soledad started to cry. People often mistake women’s tears for defeat, for weakness. Hers were not tears of surrender, but tears for the injustice of the world.

  —There, there, my sweetness! That’s enough. Don’t even think terrible things. It’s not good for the child in your belly. He’ll remember later when he’s born and keep you up nights with his crying.

  —It’s just that … So much … Soledad managed to hiccup, —So much misery in the world.

  —Sí, tanta miseria, but also so much humanity to make up for the cruelty.

  —Enough, but not too much.

  —Not too much, but just enough, the old woman said.

  She sent Soledad home with hierba buena tea and instructions to drink a cup in the morning, a cup at night, and to bathe herself in it as often as she felt sad.

  —Patience. Have a little faith in la Divina Providencia, why don’t you. The fearful are those who don’t trust God’s plans. There is, after all, one cure for jealousy, you do know that, right?

  —And what would that be?

  —Oh, it’s very easy. Fall in love again. Like they say, one nail drives out another.

  —Yes, and the second bullet dulls the pain of the first. Thank you. I must be going.

  When one is young and just beginning one’s marriage, how can one believe the wisdom of someone as dried up and ugly as a roasted chile poblano?

  —God closes doors so that another may open, the woman shouted. —When you least expect it, love will arrive with its Gabriel’s trumpet. Then you’ll forget all this sorrow. You’ll see. Ánimo, ánimo.

  But by now Soledad was scuttling across the cobbled churchyard toward the wings of filigreed gates, pushing her way past resilient beggars and insistent rosary vendors, beyond the hobbled bundles of humanity seated placidly on the cool stone steps still and solid as gray river stones, hurrying without pause past a chorus of chirping voices calling out to her to take a taste of their cool drinks and hot meals, shoving through the throng of the faithful and faithless clumsily tumbling in front of her to complicate her route to her room.

  Ánimo, ánimo. Soledad saw nothing, no one in that rush to regain her solitude. She was lost in her own thoughts, which were not thoughts of ánimo at all but of its opposite. That ugly squashed hat—despair.

  40.

  I Ask la Virgen to Guide Me Because I Don’t Know What to Do

  Lies, lies. Nothing but lies from beginning to end. I don’t know why I trusted you with my beautiful story. You’ve never been able to tell the truth to save your life. Never! I must’ve been out of my mind …

  Grandmother! You’re the one who was after me to tell this story, remember? You don’t realize what a tangled mess you’ve given me. I’m doing the best I can with what little you’ve told me.

  But do you have to lie?

  They’re not lies, they’re healthy lies. So as to fill in the gaps. You’re just going to have to trust me. It will turn out pretty in the end, I promise. Now, please be quiet, or I’m going to lose my train of thought. So where were we? And then …

  And then, each time Narciso returned to Oaxaca, he found Soledad suffering from a sadness without a name. Which is why he dreaded returning and avoided her when he did. She had gained so much weight her face was puffy, her neck thick and pink, and her chin had doubled. She had changed from a woman to a fat child dressed in baggy dresses with white embroidered baby collars. She had also done something strange to her hair, cut her bangs across the forehead so she looked like an overgrown toddler. Why did pregnant women do this? he wondered.

  This is how Narciso found his wife, weepy, bloated, and barefoot because she said her shoes no longer fit. Since her husband’s departure, Soledad swore her feet had grown a size bigger. In private, she took to walking about barefoot, but this made her husband angry. —You look like an Indian, he’d scold. —Don’t insult me by being seen like that; as if I didn’t have money to buy my wife shoes.

  —Are you hungry?

  —No, I’m not hungry. Would you stop that!

  —What?

  How could he explain?

  How could she? His body was her body now. She worried whether he was tired, was he hungry, did he need to sleep any more, a sweater to keep him warm. It was as if her body extended itself to encompass his, another body with all its needs. Because this is the way women love. How could she explain even if she knew herself?

  But men love in a different way. They don’t understand. They don’t set out a glass of water for their lover when they themselves are thirsty. They don’t hold a spoon to the lover’s mouth, and say, —Taste! —so close you can’t see what’s in it. They don’t. Unless they fall in love with their own child, as is often the case. —Who loves you?

  It seemed to Soledad her husband forgot she was there. He walked in front of her lately, as if she wasn’t with him. What would’ve made her mad before drove her to tears now. Didn’t a man know? Did he have any idea how important it is to hold a woman’s hand when walking down the street with her? Did he realize when holding a woman’s hand his body was saying, —World, this is my querida, the woman I love, I am proud to be walking beside her, my hand in hers the flag of our love.

  If only he would whisper a cariñito in my ear, she thought, a sugary sweet, a word made holy by his warm breath on her neck. A kind word made the skin shiver. Did he know this, her Narciso? She didn’t know to tell him. He didn’t know to ask.

  The final nightmare was her body. Holy Mother of God! A body that didn’t look as if it belonged to her. She was a disaster of buttocks and hips, as wide and heavy as the stone goddess Coatlicue. When she looked at herself in the mirror, it gave her a little shudder.

  How to begin? Soledad could not explain without overexplaining. Her spine hurt, her ribs hurt, she was tired all the time, she couldn’t go out without always constantly feeling as if she had to pee, and:

  —Did I tell you about my problems sleeping? I can’t rest, I can’t rest.

  She would moan all night and then have to get up in the middle of the night and sit down to catch her breath. She tried sleeping on her side, because when she slept on her back she felt she was choking. She was so big she could not sleep. She was frightened of childbirth, she confessed to the housekeeper:

  —It’s because I don’t know what to expect.

  But the housekeeper who had given birth eighteen times said, —Believe me, it’s worse when you do.

  Her husband said, —You’ll be all right once you have the baby. Everyone said motherhood was sacred, but all the everyones who said it were men. Soledad did not feel sacred. She felt more human than ever. She prayed the baby would hurry and be born so that s
he could have her body back. To this end, Soledad tried the women’s remedies, hot baths or walking all day through the town. Scrubbing floors on one’s hands and knees was also guaranteed to induce labor, but since it was the lazy girl who cleaned the rooms who suggested this, Soledad ignored the advice.

  What was it? Lately when she entered a room Soledad found herself frantically searching the ceiling beams, always staring upward like the church paintings of the Madonna ascending into heaven. —What are you looking at? —Oh, nothing, nothing. She didn’t know when she began this habit, but it was something she did now automatically, as if she was looking for … What was she looking for? As if somewhere in those rafters and cobwebbed corners was an answer, a secret, an angel, a vision, that might descend from heaven and rescue her from herself.

  It seemed as if her sense of smell was never as acute as during this period when she was waiting for the unborn Inocencio. In the mornings, when the street cleaners arrived with their branch brooms, there was such a coolness as day broke, a stillness just for a moment, when Soledad would be fanning herself on the balcony and just as suddenly drop to sleep there in her chair. The night that smelled of night, a velvety moistness that would give way to light and gradually the perfume of the laurel trees, and with this a terrible pain behind the bridge of her nose like the throbbing of a tooth, that wouldn’t go away until siesta. But any scent, the smoke from a cigar, the oatmeal boiling for breakfast, the damp-dog smell of the back streets, church incense so sweet it stank like urine, the steamy cooked-corn aroma of the corn-on-the cob man, all these left her dizzy. Once in the market while bending down to pick up a coin, she even fainted at a stall of cilantro, green onions, and poblano peppers.

  Besides the heartburn, the taste for Manila mangos, the gagging phlegm in her throat, the cramps in her legs, feet, toes, hands, added to all this calamity were the crying spells.

  —¡Ay, caray! said Narciso. —Not again. How could she explain to her husband it was more than a loss of control of her body, but also, her life.

  In the dark coolness of the church of la Soledad, Soledad Reyes prayed daily to the wooden statue of the Virgin of Solitude draped in velvet and gilt edged robes housed in a glass case behind the main altar. Soledad was so big now she could hardly genuflect, and had to content herself with a half-squatting, half-sitting position in lieu of kneeling. She looked at the Santo Niño de Atocha housed in his own little glass case along the side, the Santo Niño with his shepherd’s staff and funny hat trimmed in fur, his lace dress embroidered with gold thread, the seed pearls that had no doubt dimmed a nun’s eyes blind. If her baby was a boy, Soledad vowed she would love him like la Virgen and name him Inocencio. She could not name him Jesús, unfortunately, because Jesús was the name of the lecherous man at la farmacia who wiggled his middle finger indecently in your palm when he gave you back your change. No, Inocencio was what she would name her baby if he was a boy, and she would love him with a mother’s pure love like la Santísima Virgen de la Soledad mumbling and grieving all alone while Joseph, well, where the hell was he when she needed him? Dependably undependable, like all husbands.

  And when the pains began and the midwife was sent for, there it was, that feeling, that search in the rafters for, —Oh, my God, I don’t know. She did not call out to her husband, nor to God, la Virgen, or a saint.

  When the labor began she felt her body lurch forward of its own accord like a piece of machinery, like a chariot, like a wild horse and she dangling from a stirrup. There was no going backward and no changing your mind. And your life a little flag fluttering in the wind. Your life nothing but a ragged bit of cloth. —Muh. Like all orphans and prisoners condemned to death, she heard a voice she recognized as her own call out from someplace she didn’t remember. —Muh, muh, muh, with every breath like a dagger. —Ma, she heard herself say, and it was as if she were all the women in history who had ever given birth, a cry, a chorus, the one and only, never-ending alpha and omega yowl of history, guttural and strange and frightening and powerful all at once. —Ma, ma, ma … Ma-má!

  41.

  The Shameless Shamaness, the Wise Witch Woman María Sabina

  All women have a bit of the witch in them. Sometimes they use it for ill, and sometimes they use it for good. One who used it shamelessly for good was the woman called María Sabina,* and though she was still young at the time of this story, already she had gained a reputation as a shamaness. So it was that Narciso Reyes working on the roads of Oaxaca came to hear of this woman with her great powers, and finally, because he could not bear his sleepless nights, twisting and turning in the net of his dreams and waking tangled in his hammock like a sad caught fish, was ripe to listen to what he would not have heard otherwise.

  —Oh, it’s that you’re embrujado, that’s what it is. Bewitched, that’s all.

  —Ah, is that it. He wanted to laugh but did not, because the village mayor was telling him this. The mayor was very, very old and said to be knowledgeable in these things.

  —And what does one do about such bewitchings in these parts?

  —You’ll have to seek out the witch woman María Sabina. Up in the cold lands, in Huautla de Jiménez, where the clouds catch in the crags of the mountains, up there you’ll find her. María Sabina Magdalena García is her name. I can’t help you.

  Narciso Reyes set out on a mule in search of this María, a journey that took him higher and higher into the wildest parts of Oaxaca, furiously beautiful but furiously poor country. He pushed his way past violent thickets and streams with water so clear and cold it hurt his teeth to take a drink. He scrambled up trails that tottered on the lips of precipices and through tropical forests tangled in knots of greedy vines. He rode past the laughing, ruffled leaves of banana groves and over brittle cow pastures, beyond lemon and orange trees and clearings of coffee plantations. The air was hot and moist, then cool, then hot again as it rose and rained, and the light, a lazy green color, alternately dimmed and brightened as he traveled under canopies of vegetation so thick the leaves let loose a soft talc of dust as he brushed past.

  Along parts of the way Narciso followed the Río Santo Domingo upstream, swollen and rowdy from the downpours. Now and again at the clearings he saw black butterflies as big as bats fluttering in sleepy figure eights above blue flowers. Hot and steamy air made him cross at times, and then all at once an intense rain would begin so suddenly it gave him no time to seek shelter. Narciso sliced off gigantic heart-shaped leaves from the path without even getting off his mule, and these served as rain poncho and umbrella as well as a hat.

  When the rain lifted into a fine drizzle and then stopped altogether, and the earth turned this into steam, hummingbirds darted nervously over dripping blossoms and then flickered off. The world smelled of mud, mule shit, flowers, rotten fruit, and far away of wood smoke, nixtamal, and refried beans. Wind from across the ravines, from across water, from across hot flatland, across tropical forests, across endless rows of sugarcane, through the ruffled banana trees, across all of Oaxaca, mixed itself with the sweet stink of Narciso’s own skin.

  There in the mountains in a lopsided hut of crumbling clay with an uneven floor also made of earth, in a dark that stank of pig manure and smoke, he found his witch woman. The house was empty except for a pitiful table that served as an altar and a bunch of naked children running about chasing the chickens.

  She was dressed in rags. A skinny woman not much older than himself, her belly big with child.

  —God is an immense cloth that contains the universe, she whispered.

  This girl is crazy, Narciso thought and almost turned around to leave, but the trip up the mountain had taken eight days, by foot and by mule. He was filled with despair and doubt, until she began again.

  —I’ll tell you what it is you’ve come for, you, Narciso Reyes. You want a love medicine. Is that right?

  —Yes, that’s how it is.

  —So that the woman who wears the crown of iguanas will come back and love only you, no?
r />   —How did you know?

  —You want her to fall under your spell?

  —With all my heart I desire it.

  —Well, then, it’s obvious what you have to do. Forget her.

  —Forget her!

  —Yes, forget her. Abandon her. The more you let someone go, the more they fly back to you. The more you cage them, the more they try to escape. The worse you treat them, the crazier in love they are with you. Isn’t that so? That’s all. That’s my love medicine for you today.

  Of course, Narciso could not forget Exaltación. He was too much of a man. And because he would not forgive her preference for Pánfila over him, this only caused him to remember Exaltación even more. The pain overwhelmed him, caused him to say, —I hate you, Exaltación Henestrosa, which could only mean he loved her very much, otherwise, why bother. Because failures are much more memorable than successes, she was constantly in his thoughts. Forget Exaltación Henestrosa? No. That he could not do. And because he could not forget, she was lost to him, he was lost to her.

  A person of independence, who does not need nor want us, inspires our admiration, and admiration is a love potion. A person who needs us too much, who is weak with neediness, inspires pity. And pity, the other side of admiration, is the antidote to love.

  Remembering is the hand of God. I remember you, therefore I make you immortal. Recuerdo. I remember. Un recuerdo. A memory. A memento.

  Years later, driving behind a truck full of brooms on the periférico, the memory of Exaltación Henestrosa would arrive, and with it, all the love Narciso had hoarded in a lifetime flooding the heart valves and heart chambers like a zandunga, and causing him great pain. ¡Ay, mamá, por Dios!

  In hand-painted pink letters, the bumper of the truck in front of him boasted this truth:

  PODRÁS DEJARME, PERO OLVIDARME—¡NUNCA!

  YOU MIGHT LEAVE ME, BUT FORGET ME?—NEVER!