“Deeper?”
“The curanderas were reluctant to talk about witchcraft.”
“Por qué?”
“What they knew they only shared with each other. In other words, those beliefs and teachings had gone underground. The old people were afraid outsiders would find out and some reporter would come poking around and write half-baked stories. In the pueblos the Indians stop them at the gate. Anthropologists and reporters have written terrible things about the subject. Crazy articles. Some wrote books. They knew nothing of curanderismo, but publishers were paying for their junk.”
“So they went underground,” Sonny said.
“Yes. One of the curanderas, I think her name was doña Agapita, advised Lorenza to go to Mexico. She went to Tlaxcala, and that’s where—”
She paused.
“Go on.”
“She found the brujos, men who could fly.”
Sonny’s eyebrows knit. “You believe it?”
“Yes.”
“So she learned to—”
“Yes. They recognized her power. I guess you’re born with the power of the witch or not. They knew she had it, so they took her into their confidence. She lived in the village at the foot of the mountain with rainmakers, conjurers who can affect the weather, weathermakers who could bring rain or stop hailstorms, men who prayed to and believed in la Malintzi—”
“La Malinche?” Sonny interrupted. “The consort of Cortes?”
“No, not Malinche. Malintzi, the spirit of the mountain. Lorenza learned from hechiceros, the powerful brujos who worked white and black sorcery, those born with the gift of inner vision. They could cast spells; they could kill.”
Raven casting spells, Sonny thought, the body falling from the sky. He had seen it. Lorenza had led him to see what Raven was up to. How could he doubt?
“She learned from the people who could transform themselves into animals,” Rita finished.
Was that Lorenza’s magic? She’d taken him into the world of the naguales.
“Transform into animals? You sure that’s what she said?”
“Yes. Those sorcerers are the most powerful people in the world of brujeria. They’re dangerous, because in their animal form they acquire tremendous power.”
“She found her animal spirit.”
“It nearly killed her,” Rita said. “I saw her when she returned from Mexico. She was nearly dead, a bag of bones, thin and brown as a salt cedar. Her eyes were glazed. She had looked into another world. She touched me and I felt the electricity, and even as near death as she was, she felt my stomach, pinched hard, and drew something out. I hadn’t told her I had been having real bad stomach pains, and my doctor said he needed to operate, but whatever it was, she pulled it out, just like that. Like you would pick a rock from a stream, dripping wet. But I was cured. Then she fell into a deep sleep. It took months for her to come back.”
“Back from where?” Sonny asked.
“That other world. The world of the nagual …” Her words were barely perceptible.
“Sounds like that guy Don Juan. Yaquí magic.” He chuckled.
“Don’t laugh,” Rita cautioned. “Lorenza’s for real. And we don’t have to go to the desert of Sonora for our beliefs. They’re right here in the valley, all around us.”
Sonny looked at her and a slight shiver went down his back. He knew when Rita was serious. And much of what she said about the place were things don Eliseo told him. The Río Grande valley was a sacred place, full of ancient spirits. Full of knowledge.
“Yes, here,” he mused.
“You know the stories people used to tell. About witches who took the form of owls or coyotes. Witches transformed into large balls of fire and seen dancing in evil places.”
Sonny nodded. “I heard plenty of cuentos from my abuelos, and from my parents.”
He thought of a story his father used to tell. Two men were on their way home from selling their cattle. Late at night they found themselves on a deserted llano, and then they came to a lighted hut. The hut belonged to two old women, so the men asked permission to spend the night. The men were suspicious of the two women, so they pretended to sleep. Late in the night they watched as the two women put unguents on their bodies, danced, sang, washed themselves in a tub. They turned themselves into owls and flew up the chimney. The two men wanted to know if what they saw was witchcraft or a dream, so they rose, covered themselves with the witches’ unguents, repeated the dance they had seen, and turned into owls. They flew up the chimney to the rooftop. From there they saw a gathering of owls in the dark night, presumably a gathering of witches.
A large, black cat suddenly appeared and attacked the owls, snarling and scratching. The two men watched, and realizing they might be attacked by the cat, they flew back down the chimney and washed away the unguents in the large tub of water. They turned back to their human form. Just as they got in bed, the two women returned, blood covering their feathers. They, too, bathed in the tub. The two men watched, terrified, as the two women returned to their human forms and likewise went to bed.
As a boy, Sonny was awed by this story. He thought his father told the story to entertain him and his brother, Armando, but as he grew older, he thought more and more about it. Did his father tell the story to Sonny and his brother to teach them something?
Sonny remembered his father lowering his voice when he finished the story. “In the morning when the two women invited the men to stay for breakfast, their hands and faces bore the fresh scratch marks of a cat.”
Was the story a warning about women? Puberty had come, and like the other boys, Sonny and Armando were looking at girlie magazines some of their friends sneaked from their older brothers and wondering about the mysterious world of sex.
“Always wear your scapular,” he remembered his mother adding at the end of the story. “It will keep you safe.”
He had made his first holy communion when he was seven. The scapular became frayed, worn, and dark with body sweat. Finally, he lost it, one summer day when he went swimming in the river. He and the gang of friends had stripped and thrown their clothes on the river willows. Sonny had hung the scapular with care on the limb of an old dead cottonwood tree branch. The tree was white, like bone, its bark long ago peeled away. Perhaps it had been hit by lightning, and now it lay on the sandy bank of the river. When they came out of the water, the scapular was gone. Sonny and his friends searched, but it was gone.
Now as Sonny remembered losing the scapular, he felt chilled. He had believed that the scapular protected him, and without it he was vulnerable. The protection of the church and its saints was gone. But he had shrugged it off. What the hell, it was only a piece of string with the image of St. Christopher on one side, the Virgen de Guadalupe on the other. He had worn it a year, longer than most of the other kids in his gang, and then it was gone. So what?
“The two men?” Sonny had asked his father. “Did they have protection?”
“A pistol,” his father answered. That was the night he told Sonny that when he died Sonny would inherit the .45-caliber Colt of the Bisabuelo, Elfego Baca, their great-grandfather and one of the most famous lawmen of the turn of the century in wild New Mexico.
He showed the pistol to Sonny and Armando. “This will keep you safe,” he said.
“Why Sonny?” Armando asked, jealous.
“He’s the oldest,” the father replied.
“But we’re twins,” Armando insisted.
“He was born first,” his father said.
Firstborn, inheritor of the pistol of Elfego Baca!
Sonny’s jaw dropped. It was a moment of magic—to touch the pistol of Elfego Baca, his great-grandfather, the man known in stories as el Bisabuelo. The pistol had been in the family for years, and now their father said it would be passed down to Sonny.
“Having a gun in the house is dangerous,” Sonny’s mother protested.
“All power is dangerous,” his father answered. “This is how my grandfather kept law
and order. This is how he kept the abusive Tejanos from mistreating the Mexicanos.”
His mother shook her head. “I don’t like it.”
“The world is violent,” his father said to Sonny and Armando. “You have to protect yourselves. But never, never aim the pistol unless you are going to use it. We are not here to take anyone’s life. But you have to protect yourselves.”
“A bullet cannot stop evil,” his mother said resolutely.
“It can if it has a cross scratched on it,” his father had responded.
Why am I remembering these stories? Sonny thought. Did it have something to do with the limpieza? In spite of viewing Veronica’s body, he felt incredibly light and free of the dark thoughts that had been oppressing him. The thoughts of that scene with his father rose so clear, like a vivid dream.
Today, when Lorenza first ran the eagle feather across his stomach, he felt the same sensation as he had in June when Veronica cut a Zia sign around his navel. The cut, even though it was just skin deep, had left a scar. The round sun and the four radiating lines of the scar remained a constant irritant.
For Rita the scar was an outward sign of the ghost within. Raven and his cult had cursed him. That’s why he had finally agreed to see Lorenza.
She had put the eagle feather aside and pressed at his navel. Sonny felt an urge. He groaned, “Ahhh.”
“There is a dark bird pecking at your soul—”
A dark bird? Raven, he thought. Sonofabitching Raven was still hanging around with his hocus-pocus.
“You need to go on a journey,” she whispered.
Where? He wondered, then said, “Vamos.”
He had loved Gloria. She was more than his cousin, she was the first woman he had ever made love to. Did her spirit cling to Sonny because she wanted revenge for her murder? Or was Raven capable of manipulating Gloria’s ghost to harm Sonny?
“Tell me what you see,” Lorenza said.
Two persons in the curandera. Lorenza and someone else. Was that other entity he sensed the nagual Rita alluded to? He saw the eye of a bird. An owl from the Nile of Egypt. Which eye will heal me? Sonny wondered.
He told Lorenza his story. It happened one early June morning. He remembered the date clearly. The Dukes were playing that night, and he had planned to go to the baseball game. It was the same day don Eliseo, his octogenarian neighbor, had picked to cut down the old cottonwood in his front yard. Then the phone call came that Gloria Dominic had been murdered. Gloria’s mother, his tía Delfina, had called and he had driven her to Gloria’s house.
Everyone was there: Gloria’s husband, Frank Dominic, who was running for mayor, intent on being the political power in the city, in the state; police chief Garcia, an old friend of Dominic’s and a constant thorn in the side of the private investigators in town; Howard Powdrell, número uno forensics man with the city police crime lab, and Sonny’s compadre. Without Howard’s help Sonny couldn’t have solved the crime.
“Find my daughter’s murderer,” Tía Delfina had cried, stuffing a few crumpled dollar bills into Sonny’s hands.
But he didn’t solve the murder just for his aunt, he solved it for himself. Gloria was his cousin, a beautiful and talented woman, and once, only once, she had given herself to him.
That was it, but the memory lingered. Years later she married Frank Dominic, and together they set out to rule the city. She didn’t love Frank, but there they were, on the surface the perfect couple, wealthy, planning the great downtown renewal that would bring a canal water system to the area, making the city a Venice on the Río Grande.
But Gloria wasn’t happy, and she wasn’t well. She fell under the spell of Tamara Dubronsky, a forty-year-old widow of enticing charm, a cosmopolitan beauty who intrigued the natives. The mystical Tamara was psychic. She told people their fortunes, raised money for the city symphony, and as Sonny found out, she was the sun queen, leader of the Zia cult, the group that murdered Gloria.
Buy Rio Grande Fall Now!
Rio Grande Fall
A Sonny Baca Novel
Rudolfo Anaya
There are many ways to fly, the old people taught us. So I say to you: I fly in dreams, I fly in love, I fly in the morning when the light of the Señores y Señoras de la Luz fills my soul with clarity. I fly in beauty, the beauty of the land I love, the people, the sounds, sights, and smells of all that I am. I am beginning to find my power.
To all those people who have helped me on my path, I dedicate this book
CONTENTS
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1
Sonny felt the soft pressure of the eagle feather across his chest. The soft voice of the healer was calling him back from his vision. He smelled the sweet aroma of the burning copal in the room, and he struggled to rise out of the dark shadows where he had been running with a family of coyotes.
Thin wisps of copal smoke floated over the altar and curled upward. The traditional healers of the Río Grande burned sage or romero, common herbs growing in the New Mexican countryside, but Lorenza was burning copal, the incense of the Aztecs.
Praying to the saints, burning copal, and instructing Sonny on how to find the coyotes, his guardian spirits, were all part of the cleansing ceremony she had just performed on Sonny. The limpieza was to rid him of the ghost that had plagued him all summer.
“You have susto,” Rita had told Sonny all along. “Your soul has been inhabited by Gloria’s ghost. That’s what causes the fright. Go to Lorenza. She’s a curandera; she can help you get rid of Gloria’s ghost.”
Sonny had felt the shock of Gloria’s spirit when he entered her bedroom and Frank Dominic had pulled back the sheet that covered her body. She had been murdered that June night, and her body had been drained of its blood. Rita believed that Gloria’s spirit, still lingering in the room, had entered and taken possession of Sonny.
Her spirit had attached to his, and its needs had sapped his energy. All summer he had felt depressed and distracted. Even nights with Rita suffered. He needed to be cleansed.
So Rita had finally persuaded him to see Lorenza Villa, her good friend. A very nice-looking curandera, Sonny thought. Lorenza was about thirty-five, her body rounded but firm. Her clear, brown skin was the color of Mexican milk chocolate, and her black hair fell around her shoulders, dark and luxuriant. But it was her bright brown eyes that held those who dared look into them.
When he first met her, he thought she was cross-eyed, as each eye seemed to look at him from just a slightly different angle. Then he remembered that the face of a shaman has a pronounced right and left side, and so, he figured, a right and left eye. The right seemed to smile; the left looked deeper into his thoughts. Perhaps there were two women in her, two souls.
Which eye gazed at the lover when she was making love? Sonny wondered.
Yes, sensuous, with a smile that was reassuring and seductive at the same time. She moved with grace, self-contained, every ounce of energy a fluid movement. When she touched him, a tingle of arousal ran through him.
She clapped her hands to awaken him, and the drumming stopped. When she began the ceremony, she had put a tape in the player, and the sound of the drum helped transport him to a place where he could finally rid himself of Gloria’s spirit.
He opened his eyes and looked at her. She smiled, her full lips the color of the bright prickly pear fruit of late summer. Her long dark hair cascaded down either side of her face, creating a black shawl that fell over
her full breasts.
She moved to the small altar in a corner of the room. A statue of the Virgen de Guadalupe stood surrounded by flowers, herbs, and votive candles. The statues of other saints filled the lower tier of the altar: the Santo Niño de Atocha, St. Anne, and the black San Martín de Porres.
Also arranged on the altar were milagros, small ex-votos probably brought to her by other clients, a pearl rosary with gold crucifix, a photograph of a man on crutches, a child’s scapular, a pocketknife, a book of fairy tales.
A shaman who prays to the saints, Sonny thought. His mother believed in the saints, prayed to the saints, trusted in their power. He thought for a moment of his mother lying in her hospital bed, recovering from the heart bypass operation. He had stayed with her for three days. Her recovery had been excellent. Still, he told himself that tonight he would drop in and see her.
There was a santo for every need. For don Eliseo the saints were Lords and Ladies of the Light, men and women whose souls were filled with clarity.
Lorenza rose and placed the votive candle Sonny had brought at the feet of the virgin. She lit it, bowed in prayer for a moment, then turned to him.
“Concentrate on the smoke,” she said.
“Gloria’s gone.”
“Yes.”
“Someone fell from the sky.”
“Death,” she whispered.
The last thing he had seen in his vision was a body falling from the sky. Why did Lorenza say it was an image of death?
“Are we finished?” he asked, still feeling groggy. Was he back from the river world of the coyotes? Back from the vision?
“For today,” she said, then she went out and closed the door behind her.
Yeah, Sonny nodded. What a trip. With her help he had gone to a place he had never dreamed of. Now as he looked at the dark smoke rising from the candle, he saw it take the shape of the head of a coyote.