by Reyna Grande
“Hurry and eat this before it melts,” he said, handing us the ice cream. “Go on. I’ll come back again another day to see you. Keep an eye out for me when you’re up there climbing trees.”
He ruffled our hair and left us to eat our ice cream, but just as we were about to eat it, Abuela Evila snuck up from behind us. She picked up a branch off the ground and beat us with it. “This is for disobeying me,” she said. “Give that to me.” Mago reluctantly gave her the bucket. “Now you will sit on the ground and learn never to disobey me again.”
Because we didn’t want another beating, we did as we were told. Abuela Evila put the ice cream a few feet away from us and forbade us to touch it. We sat there for a long time, watching the ice cream melt under the hot sun. When it was completely melted, my grandmother finally left and went back to her chores. We looked at one another, not knowing what to do.
Then Mago said, “Forget her, I’m still going to eat it anyway.”
We plunged our hands into the golden goo and started scooping it up with our cupped hands, and soon there was nothing left of our magic feast but our sticky hands and our bellies full of vanilla warmth.
With the taste of vanilla in my mouth, I stood before my father’s dream house, which was built twenty-five feet from my grandmother’s adobe house.
It was this little three-room house that had started it all.
My father had gone to the U.S. to pursue his dream of building us a real house made of brick and concrete, a far cry from the shack in which I was born. That dream somewhat came true—it took him eight years, but he managed to have this house built. Then, my siblings and I left for the U.S. to live with him and never lived in the house. Not long after, my father’s sister, Tía Emperatriz, had the deed of my grandmother’s property transferred to her name and stole the house from him.
I stood in the shadow of my father’s house and thought of how much this house had cost us—spending our childhood without our parents so that they could earn the money to build it. And all for what? So that my aunt, her husband, and daughter could now enjoy it? This house was built on the foundation of my family’s pain and loss. I hated it. My aunt could keep it for all I cared.
I knocked on my grandmother’s door, and Tía Emperatriz opened it. When I was a child, she had seemed so tall. Now I was at eye level with her, and I realized that my days of looking up to her were over. Before, her thin figure had looked elegant in pencil skirts with a slit in the back. Now she was fat, and the stylish skirt had been replaced with a shapeless flowery dress. When we had lived here, my aunt had been the only nice person in this household, but when she stole my father’s house, our relationship with her was ruined. Seeing her now I felt joy and anger all at once. I loved her and hated her at the same time.
“How’s life in El Otro Lado?” she asked as she ushered me in.
“Fine,” I said.
She waited for me to say more. In her eyes I could see the desire often seen in the people around here—they want to know everything about the mysterious land across the border. They want to know if it’s truly as close to paradise as you can possibly get. But I wasn’t about to satisfy her curiosity, so I said nothing. Instead, I turned around and headed to the living room.
Abuela Evila was eighty-six years old, but she was the size of an eight-year-old child. Osteoporosis had shrunk her. She was a wisp of a woman, completely unrecognizable from the grandmother in my nightmares. The grandmother that I had feared as a child, the one who bullied us and beat us, the one who made us feel unwanted and unloved, had been turned into a helpless old woman who was shriveling before my very eyes.
“Abuela, it’s Reyna,” I said as I approached her. But she sat there in the living room, sinking into the couch, looking at me as if she couldn’t see me, as if I weren’t there. She looked past me, at something behind me that only she could see.
“Abuela, don’t you know me?” I asked. Her eyes fell on me and she smiled in a way she had never done before. Was she really this happy to see me?
“Vámonos,” she said in a weak, raspy voice, so different from the sharp, loud voice I remembered. “It’s late. Apá is waiting for his lunch. Come on, where’s the donkey?”
“What donkey?” I asked.
“She thinks you’re her sister,” my aunt said from behind me.
“What do you mean?”
“She’s become a child again, tu abuela. She thinks everyone around her is her sister, or mother, or father. We don’t exist to her anymore.” My aunt sighed and left the room.
“Vámonos,” my grandmother said again. “Apá is waiting.”
I sat there, swimming in my anger and disappointment. All these years longing for an apology from this woman and this is all I would get? She didn’t deserve to end life like this—free from all the hurt and pain she had caused. Memory loss for her was a blessing, one that she didn’t deserve.
“Come now,” she said. “Let’s go.”
But I allowed my imagination to take me to my grandmother’s childhood, and I could see her and her sister getting on the donkey, making their way to the sugarcane fields with lunch for their father. What would they have brought him? Handmade tortillas with beans, maybe chicharrón or a chunk of cheese. Or maybe, if money had been good, a chicken thigh or a pork chop. Meat here was a luxury.
I shook my head and tried to erase the image of my grandmother as a young girl. I wanted to hold on to my anger. I wanted her to come back to the present so I could ask her why she’d been so cruel to me and my siblings. I wanted her to be here and to see me so I could tell her about Santa Cruz, not the way I had told Abuelita Chinta but in a different way—to punish her. I have found my paradise. I am finally happy, despite what you did. I have found a beautiful home that you will never see, even when you die. Because those kinds of places are not for the wicked, even in the afterlife.
Then my grandmother started plucking at her left arm. Slowly, the fingers of her right hand would come down and pinch the wrinkled skin of her left arm as if removing a piece of lint.
“Abuela, what are you doing?” I asked. I turned to see if Tía Emperatriz was back, but she wasn’t. No one was in the room except me and this skeleton of a woman.
“The maggots,” she said, pinching her arm. “The maggots are eating me.”
“What maggots?” I asked. I looked at her arm, where she kept pinching, but there was nothing there but wrinkled, saggy skin. Did she think she was already dead and buried, decomposing and returning to the soil?
“The maggots are eating me,” she said again.
I jumped to my feet and ran out of the room, my heart pounding in my chest. I looked for my aunt and found her in the patio.
“I’m leaving,” I said. And then, because I couldn’t hold it inside of me I said, “She thinks maggots are eating her already. She thinks she’s dead!”
My aunt laughed. “She doesn’t think she’s dead. I told you, she thinks she’s a child again.”
Seeing my perplexed look, she told me the story of a little girl who was born during the Mexican Revolution, who struggled to survive even though everyone around her was dying. Over a million people died, but she had lived. “When she was a little girl, your grandmother got measles,” my aunt said. “The sores festered and her parents didn’t have money for the doctor. Your grandmother had to pull maggots out of the open sores.”
I said goodbye to my aunt and left. I didn’t say goodbye to my grandmother because there was no point. She was already gone. I decided to think instead about that little girl who had to pull maggots out of her own flesh and, despite all odds, had found the will to live.
I didn’t know that would be the last time I’d see my grandmother alive. In three months she would leave this world and join the father she had so longed for. The legacy that she would leave me was the realization that there was something I had inherited from her. For years now, I had been plucking at the invisible sores in my heart. The wounds of my childhood had festered and would n
ot heal.
But, just like my grandmother, I had found the strength to survive.
Abuela Evila and Reyna
9
Abuelita Chinta and Reyna
THE NEXT DAY, my last in Iguala, as Abuelita Chinta and I were shopping by el zócalo, we passed by the beautiful Parroquia de San Francisco de Asís, which was built in 1850. Every year, the church put on a nine-day pilgrimage around Iguala, with stops in small towns like Pueblo Viejo, Huixtac, Paintla, Taxco el Viejo, El Naranjo. Now that she was seventy-five, my grandmother no longer participated in the pilgrimage, but she still went to church almost every day.
“We should go in and pray for your safe trip back,” Abuelita Chinta said. So I followed my grandmother inside the church, but I didn’t have the courage to tell her I wasn’t much of a Catholic anymore. Abuelita Chinta didn’t know I had lost my religion, that La Virgen de Guadalupe and the saints hadn’t crossed the border with me to El Otro Lado.
What would she say if I told her that I rejected any religion that made me feel devalued as a woman, or which pressed upon me the belief that being poor was a good thing, or that all the misery in my life was God’s will and I should shut up and not complain?
Yet being in my grandmother’s presence reminded me that I had once wanted to believe there was a God watching over me, protecting me, even though for most of my life I hadn’t felt protected at all.
As we knelt at one of the pews, I thought about the first time I went on a pilgrimage with my grandmother. At eight years old, I was the youngest in a group of a hundred. Most of the pilgrims were old ladies like my grandmother, but there were also some men, a handful of teenagers, and the three of us: me at eight; Carlos, ten; and Mago, twelve. In the early hours of the morning, we gathered in the courtyard of the church just as the sky was turning pink and yellow, like the flowers of a plumeria. Everyone here had come for one of two reasons—to have their prayers answered or to atone for a sin. Abuelita Chinta went on the pilgrimage every year to ask God to take away Tío Crece’s illness. My uncle suffered from what I now suspect was schizophrenia. In my psychology class at PCC, I gained a different understanding of my uncle’s erratic and violent behavior, but according to my family in Mexico, my uncle suffered from witchcraft. When he turned eighteen, a woman had given him a love potion made from menstrual blood and jimson weed, but instead of falling in love with her, he went crazy.
Regardless of what he had, my grandmother had prayed to God to make my uncle well again. But after many pilgrimages, her prayers had still not been answered. Would God answer my prayer to have my mother back?
We lined up in the courtyard of the church, and at sunrise, the procession exited the black metal gates. We were handed an orange, and Abuelita Chinta told us to put it in our bag for later. We carried a water gourd on a strap over our shoulders, and a straw hat hung from each of our necks. This land was known for its heat, and we would be walking for nine days straight under the scorching Guerrero sun. The women—including Mago and me—wore long skirts down to our ankles. She and I wore leather sandals, but Carlos had a pair of old tennis shoes given to him by the people who brought donations to our neighborhood after the floods. He was spared the blisters Mago and I got from our huaraches.
We walked in a double line toward the highway, then past the sugarcane fields, the mango groves, and the cemetery. By the time we got to the outskirts and were making our way to Pueblo Viejo, I was already out of breath and my feet hurt. Once we crossed the last neighborhood, we veered left by a dairy farm and walked along the canal into the fields, leaving the city behind. I didn’t know how I would last for nine days walking from town to town. But if I wanted my mother back, I knew I had to endure.
The church leaders led us in prayer and songs.
Desde el cielo una hermosa mañana,
La Guadalupana, La Guadalupana, La Guadalupana
Bajó al Tepeyac.
Flocks of birds flew above us. Wildflowers grew along the trail on which we walked. I wanted to pick flowers, sit under the shade of a guamúchil tree and take a nap, but we were hours from our destination, and Abuelita Chinta said we wouldn’t be taking a break yet.
“Focus on your prayers, mi niña,” Abuelita Chinta said as she held my hand. So I thought about Mami and the wrestler she had run off with to Acapulco, and I prayed for her to realize she should love her children more than any man that came into her life, that it wasn’t our fault Papi left her for another woman, and she shouldn’t punish us for his betrayal. I knew I should also pray for Papi to return, but I thought that if I prayed for too many things, God might not listen. Mago said she was coming to the pilgrimage for Papi. She said she didn’t care whether or not Mami returned, but she still hadn’t given up on our father. Carlos said he didn’t care which one of our parents came back as long as one of them did, so that we could finally have a home. I wanted him to pray for Mami. I wanted both of them to pray for Mami because I was afraid my little prayer wouldn’t be enough.
When my stomach started rumbling, and we still had another hour to walk before we rested, Abuelita Chinta told us to eat our oranges. Mago, Carlos, and I devoured ours in a minute, and we were still hungry. The old lady in front of us turned around and handed me her orange.
“Toma, tortolita,” she said.
I reached for it and said thank you to the old lady.
“She called me sparrow,” I said to Abuelita Chinta.
My grandmother smiled. “That’s because you’re the youngest here, a little sparrow among us old crows.”
The old lady laughed with my grandmother. She looked at me and said, “And why is the tortolita coming along on this journey?”
“Because I want my mami back,” I said.
The old lady sighed. “Then I will dedicate my prayers to you. Little sparrows need their mothers, at least until they learn to fly.”
When we arrived at the first town, the procession headed straight to the church. By this point I was too exhausted to continue walking, and Abuelita Chinta practically had to drag me along. My prayer, for the past hour, had been for the day to be over.
At the gate, all the pilgrims knelt on the ground and prepared to make the thirty-foot journey from the gate to the church on their knees. Abuelita Chinta said that children didn’t have to go down on their knees, that we could walk on our feet.
“Let’s not take any chances. What if God thinks we’re cheating?” Mago said to us.
“But it hurts,” I said, wincing in pain as the pebbles on the dirt path dug into my knees.
“Do you or do you not want our parents back?” Mago said. Of the three of us, Mago had always been better at overcoming her pain. So Carlos and I followed her lead and remained on our knees. With one knee in front of the other, with each pebble digging into my flesh, I thought of my mother, of the home I wanted to have, and I pushed away the pain. Please God, bring her back to me.
Now, thirteen years later, as I sat in the Parroquia de San Francisco de Asís with my grandmother and bowed my head before Jesus, I realized that my prayers had never been answered. My mother hadn’t returned to me, at least not in the way I had prayed for all those years ago. Emotionally, she was still so far from me, from us all. She had become the kind of mother I would no longer pray for. She was a mother whose own child was terrified of living with her.
I didn’t blame Betty for not wanting to go back. After all the abuse she had endured at my mother’s house, how could I make her? But how could I let her stay here? Iguala was a place where dreams died.
Betty needed a home as much as I did. What if I could provide that home for her? For us? Little sparrows need their mothers, at least until they learn to fly, the old lady had said. I could be the mother Betty needed, and I wouldn’t be so lonely anymore if I had her with me.
As my grandmother and I walked out of the church, back into the blinding light of that December day, I finally knew what I had to do.
10
Reyna and Betty, December 1996
I USED PART OF my tuition money to buy Betty a plane ticket to California. She needed Santa Cruz as much as I did, and she willingly followed me north to live in the place I told her could help her heal, allow her to dream, and be the kind of home we’d always wanted to have. “One day,” I said to her, “we can both be college graduates, accomplished career women capable of taking care of our own needs and fulfilling our own desires.”
“I could start over again,” she said. “I could stop being Betty, the troublemaker, and become Elizabeth—someone different from the girl I used to be.”
“You’ll always be my Betty,” I said. “But using your full name does make you sound sophisticated. Elizabeth sounds elegant and mature.”
She giggled at that. My mother had named her Elizabeth to make sure everyone knew that her youngest daughter had been born in the U.S., with all the rights and privileges of an American citizen. Perhaps by becoming Elizabeth, my little sister could finally honor the good fortune she had had by being born on the “right” side of the border.
I smuggled her into my apartment without permission from the Campus Housing Office. I gave my roommates no warning, but no one said she couldn’t stay. I was afraid of getting kicked off campus for having my little sister with me, but it was a risk I was willing to take.
I enrolled her at Santa Cruz High School as a tenth grader and took full responsibility for her. When her old school faxed over her transcripts, and I saw the row of fails scrolling down the sheet of paper, I wondered what I was getting myself into. I was a twenty-one-year-old university student, struggling to figure things out in my own life, and now I was taking in this teenage girl who took no pride in her grades and was rebellious to the core. But Diana had taken me in when I had most needed her, so what kind of person would I be if I didn’t take in my own sister and help her reinvent herself?
