“Wait, so my grandmother is a doctor?”
Gloria had begun to lean back in her chair when she abruptly popped forward at my question. “What? Your mother didn’t tell you?” She turned her head, studying me with one open eye while the other squinted.
“Tell me what?”
“¡Ay, Dios mío!” She put her hand to her forehead and pushed her hair back. “M’ija, tu abuela, she’s a curandera.” Her voice changed as she said curandera. It dripped in awe of the word and whatever it meant.
“Tee-yuh,” I pronounced each syllable, “what is a cur-cur-dra?”
“¡Curandera!” Her lips and tongue pronounced the word with such intensity and purpose that I flinched. “A curandera is a healer. They are better than doctors. They can cure anything with the power of God. Your abuela, mi hermana,” she thumped her chest for effect, “is the best of them all! Not like these charlatanes con their stores on Saunders and McPherson.”
“Are charla—ta—, whatever you just said, is different than what my grandmother is?”
Gloria slapped her forehead. “Ay, n’ombre. You know nothing. No, charlatanes, you know, charlatans in inglés? They are people around town claiming they have the gift to heal, opening stores in Laredo, selling fake charms, doing healings, all the while stealing good people’s money! Giving my sister a bad name.” She began to shake her head back and forth in anger.
Thousands of questions hit me at once, and I couldn’t choose which one to ask first. Gloria stood up and began rummaging in one of the cabinets, looking for something, as if the news she had just laid on me should be accepted so easily.
“So what is she doing with that stuff she made? Making him drink it, or what?”
“How would I know? Do I look like a curandera to you?”
I had to bite my tongue from saying that I didn’t understand what a curandera was, much less what they looked like.
Gloria pulled a small, ten-inch, yellow television from a cabinet, placed it on the counter and plugged the cord into a socket on the wall. She moved the antennae around a bit and then opened a drawer and pulled out a brown remote.
“How do you know it’s the Devil hurting the boy? What if he just has an infection?”
Gloria pressed a button and the television sprang to life. Of course, the station was all in Spanish.
“You ask too many questions. Now, silencio, las novelas are on.”
I leaned back in my chair and let out a huge huff. Gloria’s attention focused solely on the whispered dialog of what looked like a soap opera.
For the next half hour my mind reeled. Gloria, too involved with her TV show, never gave me a second look. What did my grandmother do in the back room? Did the weird lemon thing she made me do that morning have to do with being a healer? Was my grandmother some voodoo witch or crazy, religious exorcist? After a while, I debated whether or not to go to the bathroom to spy on my grandmother, but as soon as I thought it, a door creaked open in the back.
I sat up, waiting for them to enter the kitchen. Gloria muttered something under her breath. She grabbed the remote and turned off the television, then looked down the hallway. Doña Lorena entered the kitchen with a small smile on her lips. She had to turn sideways so her wide hips could fit through the doorway. My grandmother followed, and finally the boy walked in. He limped but not as severely as before. His face didn’t strain as much and he didn’t bite his lips. Off-white bandages had been wrapped around his feet, and the lingering scent of the awful-smelling potion filled the room when he entered.
He smiled at me before dropping his head in shyness. I returned the smile. My grandmother must have helped him in some way. He looked better. Gloria spoke to his mother as my grandmother went to the trash bag that Doña Lorena had left in the kitchen earlier. She hauled it up and reached in, moving the contents around the bag until finally she pulled out something blue. It looked like a dress that could fit my grandmother.
Doña Lorena excused herself from Gloria and asked my grandmother something. My grandmother nodded and pointed toward me. Doña Lorena studied me from top to bottom and responded back. What was that about?
She grabbed my grandmother’s hands once my grandmother had set the bag down, all the while speaking in Spanish. Doña Lorena turned and spoke to her son, who in turn spoke to my grandmother. His voice barely rose above a whisper, as if he couldn’t help being shy. My grandmother’s face softened and she kissed the top of his head.
I envied the boy right then: kindness from a stranger, my own grandmother; he had a mother who loved him, who would never leave him behind at a relative’s house; a mother who kept him safe, who wanted him to be healed.
I felt a burn in my throat, but I choked it down.
Moments later, the mother and son left, and we were alone again in the house. My grandmother ignored Gloria and me and returned to the back room.
“Gloria, can I go to my room?”
“No, stay right there.”
“Why?”
“Because your abuela said so.”
For the next two hours, I sat in the kitchen as more visitors came to call: old men, young women, young couples, large women, ugly men, beautiful women and even a very old lady who wore an orange hat. The only thing that they had in common was the brown color of their skin and the language they spoke. Sometimes they would go to the back with my grandmother, but mostly she would come to the kitchen and give them a small pouch or object. They’d hold it close to their breast as if to hide it from my prying eyes.
Some of the guests brought things, like Doña Lorena had. One old man brought a bowl of tan eggs. A young girl, probably only a few years older than me, handed my grandmother hand-painted plates of Jesus and Mary—as if she didn’t have a billion already. Most of the time my grandmother would hand the gift back and shake her head no, but everyone pushed their gifts back into her hands and wouldn’t take no for an answer.
And they all looked at me, wondering who I was and why I stared at them. The bold ones asked Gloria or my grandmother who I was by nodding toward me or motioning with their hand. Most just acknowledged me with a nod or a smile when they discovered that I didn’t understand them. Luckily, no one attacked me with kisses, although one wrinkled man considered it, leaving me instead with a creepy wink and the smacking sound of toothless gums.
I was bored the entire morning. When Gloria finished watching her television shows, she turned a radio on to a Mexican music station. After a bit, I asked her if we could change it.
“To what?” she said.
“Something that plays rock. You know, Nirvana, AC/DC, Pearl Jam?”
She crossed herself. “Rock music? ¡Mierda! Don’t bring that devil music in here.”
So I was subjected to long hours of music that I didn’t understand and didn’t like.
Finally, I was able to convince Gloria to let me run to my room and grab an old journal with some empty pages and a pencil. I passed most of the time drawing the kitchen and the little boy from that morning. Gloria watched me suspiciously and every once in a while she leaned over and looked at my drawings. She never made a comment, only said, “Hmm,” which was probably the only bit of praise that I would ever get from her.
After a long morning, my grandmother came to the kitchen and prepared us lunch—tortillas and some of the rice stuff from the night before. After a few moments of staring at it, smelling it, examining it from every angle, and after the pointed stares from my grandmother and Gloria, I finally took a bite. Rather bland, it could have used some salt. But the tortillas were warm and the chicken didn’t taste half bad. I wasn’t all that hungry, though, so I left quite a bit on my plate. That was until Gloria told me to eat it all, that little children across the river were starving. I didn’t know what she was talking about, but my grandmother held a butter knife in her hand and it looked like she considered using it on me if I didn’t eat. I forced the rest down.
Not even a full day and I had already been threatened twice with knives. Wel
come to Laredo.
After lunch, Gloria left and my grandmother and I were alone together in a house that shrunk with every breath. Once she had washed the dishes, my grandmother pointed at my feet and then to her shoes. It didn’t take a rocket scientist to understand that she wanted me to put some shoes on. I trudged down the hall and grabbed my sandals. I wanted to try one of the doors to see what my grandmother had been doing with all her “patients,” but I feared she’d hear the creaking hinges. When I returned, she looked at the sandals I wore and chuckled.
“What?”
She went to my room and pointed to a pair of tennis shoes in my suitcase.
I shook my head no and pointed to my sandals. I’m not sure why. I just didn’t like this woman telling me to do things. My mother never told me to do anything. And anyway, who did she think she was, dictating what kind of shoes I wore?
She shrugged and walked past me, grinning, into the hallway.
We left the house only to be bombarded by the sweltering heat wave of the summer. My grandmother walked the street towards the gold car, but instead of getting in, she turned right and walked past it. I hesitated and then followed her, disappointed that we weren’t going to drive the car to our destination. And then a worse thought hit me: we were actually going to walk through the neighborhood. I kept close to her, not that it would have helped. My grandmother had to be seventy or eighty. What could she do to those scary Mexican guys I had seen the day before?
We walked on the right side of the street, since there weren’t any sidewalks. My sandals slapped against the pavement and echoed through the hollow neighborhood. There weren’t that many people out at the moment. Perhaps they were at work? A few old people sat on their porches staring at us when we walked by. We also passed a few ladies who chatted vigorously with one another. They called out to my grandmother in Spanish and waved. She just smiled and nodded.
The houses blurred as we walked by. I focused only on the back of my grandmother’s head as I walked behind her. I stopped focusing on everything around us and began to notice something else. My sandals had become unbearably hot, and they were becoming hotter by the minute. My feet started burning as if I had placed them over a blazing bonfire.
“Holy crap!” I ran to one of the yards, unfortunately without any grass, and pulled my sandals off, but as soon as my feet touched the dirt lawn, they began to burn again. The lawn wasn’t as hot as the street, but it still seared the soles of my feet. If the street was a bonfire, the dirt ground was an oven set on high. Through the scorching pain on the bottoms of my feet and the incessant ouches and ows that burst from my mouth, I heard my grandmother laughing. I looked up as I hopped from foot to foot.
My grandmother was bent at the waist with her hands on her knees laughing. She stood up and said, “Ajá, tonta.” She pointed at me and chuckled a few times, ignoring my pain. Between laughs she said something else I didn’t understand. Finally, her laughter died down and she said, “Okay, vamos, tonta.” She motioned with her head for me to follow her.
I made a frustrated noise in my throat. “You knew this would happen! You let me come out here with sandals on and you knew this would happen!”
She flipped her hand and wrist backward, and said, “Vamos, tonta.”
I put my sandals back on my feet. What else could I do? My grandmother began to walk, expecting me to follow, but I would not walk behind her like a poodle on a leash. For the next three miles, I trudged through the yellow and brown yards, making my way into the street whenever a chained dog barked or someone sat out on their front lawn.
By the time we reached our destination, my feet were beyond repair. The straps had rubbed the skin raw on the top of my feet, creating a sea of blisters. The skin on the bottom of my feet had been stripped away so that I suffered a non-stop scalding sensation with every step I took. I walked on the inner arches of my feet like a pigeon-toed dog with thorns in its paws. I gritted my teeth and forced the hisses and moans down my throat. I would not give my grandmother the satisfaction of hearing my pain.
I’d have walked a thousand more miles until my feet broke off at the ankles, if only our destination had turned out differently. When I spied the red brick building splayed across a mile of deadened yellow grass, the star spangled banner waving high on a flag pole, and the large sign that said, “Go Conquistadors!” in peeling letters, the pain in my feet let up some as panic swept throughout my body.
I stopped in my tracks. “You’re enrolling me in this school?”
My grandmother’s steps didn’t falter as she trudged up the path toward the front doors.
Her laughter floated on the air, wrapping me in its mockery.
Tres
AS SOON AS MY GRANDMOTHER and the principal exited his office, I knew she had been successful in enrolling me in school. The principal’s face was pale, the color of the white apron my grandmother wore to cook in. I fumed the entire way back to the house.
How did my grandmother do it? I couldn’t imagine that my mother left my important paperwork behind before she hopped out of the window and sped off in her car. It had to be against the law to let someone into school without the proper documents, right? Perhaps my grandmother used some voodoo witch power of hers to convince him? Or a threat! He did look frightened when we left. And there hadn’t been anyone else in the office to save me or the principal from this cursed enrollment. Had she called him to meet us there? And when?
When we arrived at the house, I limped to my bedroom, fully understanding the pain of the boy with the disease in his feet. I had just fallen onto the bed when I heard my grandmother shuffle into the room. She grabbed my foot. I almost cried out in pain, but she began to massage something soothing onto my foot, and the pain faded away.
I sat up. She had pulled a stool up to the bed and was rubbing a brown paste from a jar onto my right foot. Her hands moved along the contours, kneading the paste into the blisters and sores. For a moment, the word “infection” crossed my mind, but the thought vanished quickly. The pain in my foot eased away with each press of her finger. After a few seconds, the pain was mostly gone. How could it disappear so quickly? When she finished with my right foot, she worked on the left.
Minutes later, she screwed the lid back on the jar before placing it on the table next to the candles.
I murmured, “Thank you,” when she stood up.
She looked down at me and gave a slight nod. We had crossed an invisible line, and neither one of us knew what to do about it. My grandmother made the next move. She went to my suitcase and pulled out a ratty pair of tennis shoes that was covered in layers of brown dirt. She spoke, pointing at the shoes.
“We’re leaving again? Can I just stay here, please?”
She tossed the shoes at me. They almost hit me in the face. So much for that invisible line.
For two hours that Saturday, we walked from house to house through the labyrinth of neighborhoods. Most of the time, we handed whoever answered the door a jar or pouch from her large bag. My grandmother spoke with them and then we left. Sometimes we went into the houses, where my grandmother disappeared down the halls, and I waited in a living room or kitchen alone or with someone until she finished. I never spoke to anyone, and no one spoke to me. I assumed my grandmother told them that I didn’t speak Spanish.
After two grueling hours, we walked down a street where the houses thinned out until finally only businesses lined both sides. At the end, we rounded a corner into a bustling market area. Carts, booths and stores lined the streets, and men, women and children walked between them. I smelled a mixture of things: cooking meat, sweet pastries and the sweat from a crowd of people baking in the hot air.
We walked through the market, looking at this booth and that. Everyone knew my grandmother. We hadn’t even made it to our first booth, when a man ran up to us with two large Dixie cups filled with a red juice that had oranges and other colorful fruit floating in it. I gulped it down as he and my grandmother spoke. Others came up to us from
time to time with smiles and handshakes and even a few hugs for my grandmother. My grandmother got items from many booths, but I never saw her exchange money with anyone. The owners scrambled to give her their tortillas, their drinks, their oranges, their bags of sugar—all for free.
The day passed by in a whirlwind. If the whirlwind had a sound, it would have been the rapid tones of Spanish blowing me off balance with each syllable. But strangely enough, by the end of the day, I did have a sense of Spanish. I could tell when someone pleaded or showered my grandmother in thanks. Most of all, I knew when someone spoke about me. Perhaps I only picked up on their body language or the tone of the language, but that’s more than I had been able to do the day before, and it surprised me.
By the time we made it to a clothing shop, the last stop of the day, my arms ached with the weight of our buys and my feet ached within my tennis shoes. Doña Lorena greeted us at the door with a long plastic bag, from which peeked a few hangers. The two talked and then my grandmother took the bag and draped it over her arm. We left soon and made the long trip back to her house.
That night we had something called mole. I wasn’t even hungry after a full day of walking. The bed called to my aching, tired body, but my grandmother refused to allow me to sleep without eating. Mole ended up being lumps of chicken meat under a spicy, yet somewhat sweet, chocolate-tasting sauce. I could only stomach a few pieces on my own, but I force-fed myself the rest because my grandmother would not stop repeating, “¡Come! ¡Come!” every few minutes. After dinner, I went straight to my room and fell into a deep sleep.
The next day, God slapped me in the face.
I woke up to my grandmother speaking Spanish to me. She bustled about grabbing the clothes I had left on the floor. When I wiped the sleep from my eyes and pushed myself up onto my elbow, she pointed at me and then at the plastic bag we had picked up from Doña Lorena that hung on the door.
“Okay, okay,” I said, anything to shut her up. I’d look at whatever she wanted me to look at after I showered.
Secrets of the Casa Rosada Page 4
