by Laura Resau
The crisp breezes and sunshine are coming in through the bus window, cheering me up a little. Outside, the mountains loom high overhead. Each of the mountains has its own personality. Some beam down at you, gently, like a big-bosomed grandma. Some are sexy, slinking around in the lacy clouds. Others shoot up, jagged and fierce, with a passionate energy. Some guard magical realms, their smiles silent and secret. No wonder the locals say that the mountains are gods.
At Agua Santa, we step off the bus, breathing in the blue-green freshness. On the way up the hill, corn leaves wave alongside us, and farther below, a sea of corn stalks ripples in the valleys. This time, Wendell has the blue poncho and a jacket and umbrella in his backpack, although he doesn’t need them after all.
“I translated a letter,” I say, pulling the original and translation from the front pocket of my bag.
“Thanks.” He glances at it, cringing.
“It was sweet, Wendell. I could relate. If I was your birth mom, I’d be touched.”
“Not after you read a few more.” He switches the subject. “Help me conjugate?”
I chose the verb. Aguantar. To bear. To bear going up this long hill. I bear, you bear, he, she, it bears, we bear … Then we work on his R rolling. His accent and grammar are getting a little better. He can do basic greetings and ask questions and answer easy, slow questions.
He veers to the side to take photos of some tiny flowers growing near rocks, which involves switching to a macro lens. “My mom and dad speak Spanish,” he says, lying on his stomach, his face inches from the flowers. “Learned it in their Peace Corps years in Guatemala.” He snaps a few photos from different angles. “They were always trying to talk Spanish with me when I was younger. You know, as part of their plan to keep me in touch with my roots and all. It drove me crazy. I flat-out refused to speak Spanish. In middle school I rebelled and took French. Then, in high school, I was thinking about coming to Ecuador some day, so I switched to Spanish.”
“You should talk with your parents. Once you get home. Keep in practice.”
“My ex-girlfriend’s in AP Spanish. She might help me out.”
“Why didn’t you ask her to translate the letters?” My question sounds more like an accusation.
He shrugs, puts on the lens cap, and slings the camera over his shoulder.
We walk for another minute in silence. My throat’s getting tighter and tighter, and finally I say, “Because you’ll never see me again?”
“No.” He stops walking. “No, that’s not it at all.”
Suddenly, shrill kids’ voices break the silence: “Zeetaaa! Oooendellll!” Eva and Isabel and Odelia are running toward us, waving their arms with abandon. “Let’s go! He’s waiting for you! Taita Silvio!”
At Mamita Luz’s house, the door’s propped wide open, letting smells of fresh bread and potato soup and popcorn drift out. Mamita Luz greets us at the door, the children trailing around her.
And there, on a small stool in the kitchen, playing a hand-clapping game, is a man. He looks about Mamita Luz’s age, and wears a white button-down shirt, stained at the cuffs and collar. His tan pants and work boots are coated with mud. He’s a small man, but a man with a presence, as though an invisible spotlight’s shining on him. He turns to face us.
It’s striking, his resemblance to Wendell. High cheekbones, full lips, square chin, protruding ears. Of course, the man’s face is much more lined and weathered, his hands calloused. He stands up and steps toward us. He’s a few inches shorter than Wendell. Looking up, he reaches out his hand. “Silvio Quimbo, para servirle.” Here to serve you.
Wendell echoes, “Wendell Connelly, para servirle,” even though I doubt he knows what it means. He hands Taita Silvio the blue poncho. “Gracias.”
Taita Silvio looks at him for a while, then turns to me and introduces himself.
We all sit down with the children on low benches, and eat the potato soup and popcorn and fresh bread. The room fills with laughter and small talk, about where Wendell lives in the U. S. and what his parents do and what animals are raised and which plants grown in Colorado.
I open my notebook. “Taita Silvio, what do you do when you’re feeling sad?”
He thinks for a moment. “I remember my star friend.” When he was little, he says, he used to collect firewood with his aunt before dawn, in the shivery, shadowy woods, and he always noticed a special star that glowed brighter than any other, a star that shone red and blue and yellow. He believed that this star was his friend, coming out just to greet him. “Whenever I felt sad, wherever I was, I remembered my star friend.”
“I want a star friend!” Odelia cries.
“You can have one, my daughter,” he says. “Next time you’re out at night, pay attention to which star is asking you to be its friend.”
“And if my dad’s running after me and yelling, it will be up there, right?”
Taita Silvio picks her up, puts her in his lap. “Yes, mija. Especially then.”
Wendell watches them, his gaze intense.
For the rest of the time, Odelia keeps interrupting to ask how much longer until it’s dark, poking her head outside the door every few minutes.
Taita Silvio veers the conversation back to Wendell, asking whether he’s happy in Colorado, whether his family treats him well.
“Of course,” Wendell assures him.
Mamita Luz has to have told Silvio about Wendell’s search, but he stays silent on that topic.
Finally, Wendell says, “Ask him, Zeeta.”
At a break in the conversation, I ask, “Taita Silvio, do you know anything about Wendell’s birth parents?”
He smoothes Odelia’s hair. “Son, it sounds like your parents in Colorado love you. They treat you well. Why would you come here?”
“I need to know my birth parents.”
Taita Silvio studies Wendell’s face. Finally, he says, “Even though it could be painful … or dangerous?”
Wendell matches his stare. “Even then.”
After a pause, Taita Silvio looks down at Odelia’s hair. “Some things aren’t meant to be known, son.”
There’s something he isn’t telling us.
Chapter 12
“Silvio looks like me.” Wendell plays with the tassel on the bus curtain, lost in thought. “Doesn’t he?”
“Yes,” I admit. “Especially in the ears.”
“Thanks.” Half-smiling, he pulls some hair from his braid to fall over his ears.
“But,” I say, “he’s not exactly forthcoming with information.” After a beat, I add, “You want to keep looking here? Even after what Silvio said about danger?”
“A few more days.” Wendell looks hopeful. Or maybe desperate. “Please, Zeeta.”
“This is based on what, now? A feeling?”
“A feeling.” He gives me a wry look. “And the ears.”
Over the next few days, we spend the mornings and early afternoons in Agua Santa. A bus from Otavalo to Agua Santa passes about every fifteen minutes, so we never have to wait long. The girls are always there to greet us with so much enthusiasm you’d think it was years since they last saw us. In the mornings, they bring us around to more houses, and soon we know just about everyone in Agua Santa. Later in the afternoon, back in Otavalo, I teach English to Gaby and other vendors at the market while Wendell goes to the Internet café, presumably to send mushy e-mails to his sort-of-ex-girlfriend. I’m not making much money, and I’m a little worried about how I’ll pay for school uniforms. Apart from that, and the mushy e-mails that aren’t directed toward me, I have to admit I’m enjoying myself, quickly filling up my indigo notebook.
At night, I curl up with Wendell’s letters. With every letter, I glimpse him at a different age, all the Wendells who make up the current Wendell like nested Russian dolls. In some ways, I feel as though I’ve known him for years. In one angry letter, he wrote, “… and it’s all your fault I’ll never, ever, ever turn white, no matter how hard I try.” I remember asking Layla when
my hair would turn blond like hers and scratching at my skin, searching for whiteness underneath.
In another letter, he wrote that one day, when he was in line at the grocery store with his mom, the cashier assumed he was with the Mexican family behind them. He bit his tongue hard to hold back tears. He would forget he was different until the reactions of strangers reminded him. This I can identify with too. I’d assumed my life was typical until I grew conscious of people’s stares and bewildered questions.
Translating the letters makes me notice details about Wendell, like how enthusiastically he sings “Head, Shoulders, Knees, and Toes” with the girls, complete with gestures. They love it. Word must have spread, because soon, when any kid under twelve in Agua Santa catches sight of him, they start tapping their heads and shoulders, begging for the song. Odelia knows it by heart now and sometimes spontaneously stops to do a quick round at the roadside.
In the early afternoons, along with the girls, we help Taita Silvio and Mamita Luz with their chores: feeding the pigs and chickens and guinea pigs, clearing paths, weeding, chopping wood, washing dishes. Throughout the day, people trickle in and out of their home. Many are neighbors who come to buy bread. Others are their older “children” who come to visit, home for vacation from where they work in Spain, or Japan, or the United States. They come bearing gifts from afar: flashlights, boots, and hats for Taita Silvio, and shawls, kitchen gadgets, and jewelry for Mamita Luz. For hours they munch on bread and sip tea with dreamy eyes, reminiscing about coming to her house as children, flipping between Spanish and Quichua.
Other visitors are mysterious—small groups of three or four people who head straight for a small adobe hut with doves nesting in the corner. They take a seat on a wooden bench. They look solemn, strangely subdued. If they talk, it’s only to murmur in low tones in Quichua. After a short wait, Taita Silvio shows up and discusses something in Quichua with them, and then they disappear into a windowless room across from the waiting hut. A half hour later, they reemerge, as though they’re surfacing from a deep dive, sometimes shivering and soaking wet, but with a new spark in their eyes.
On the third morning, Wendell intercepts Mamita Luz on her way to the mystery room. She’s carrying a glass goblet of water, a pair of ancient, heavy scissors, and a bunch of roses. “What does Silvio do inside there?” he asks.
“My husband is a curandero,” she says proudly. A healer. “He tells people’s fortunes, predicts their futures, diagnoses their problems, helps them heal.” As I translate, she smiles and pushes the heavy door open, closing it behind her. I catch a glimpse of candles in the darkness.
Wendell is mesmerized. “You think he can really do all that stuff, Z? Like see the future?”
“Maybe. I’ve met healers all over the world, witnessed some amazing things. It’s kind of an obsession of Layla’s. Or was.”
His eyes grow intense. “Is it something they’re born with? Or something they learn? How does it work? How do they control it?”
“I don’t know.” I glance at the mountains beyond his head. I can’t believe I have the urge to quote Rumi, but it slips out before I can stop it. “This ancient mystical guy named Rumi said there’s another way of seeing, a backward-and-forward-at-once vision, something that’s not rationally understandable. I guess they must learn how to use the vision.”
When Taita Silvio emerges, I expect Wendell to drill him with questions, but he stays quiet. For a few minutes, I chat with Silvio and ask whether it’s all right if I ask his patients some indigo-notebook questions while they wait in the hut with the doves. “Of course, my daughter,” he says, and heads out to chop firewood as Wendell stares after him.
Over the next few days, I talk with Silvio’s patients about why they’re here, what they’re looking for, wishing for. By the light from the doorway, I jot down their answers. Many of them have come to find out if they’ll have luck getting their U.S. visas, which they need for trips to the United States to play Andean flute music or sell Ecuadorian crafts. They say that traveling and working abroad is key to making enough money for a house, an education, their children’s education. And apparently, their success in getting the visa depends mostly on whether the U.S. embassy person tending to them happens to be in a good mood or not. They tell me that having a limpieza—a spiritual cleaning—always raises your chances of getting a visa.
There are others who hope to find something else. One wants to cut emotional ties with his oppressive mother-in-law. One wants to figure out why she’s been having trouble sleeping. Some want their babies to stop screaming at night. Some want love.
From my seat on the bench, I glance up from my indigo notebook to puzzle over Wendell. He seems to find excuses to watch the people coming in and out of the curing room. He sweeps the dirt patch outside the waiting hut. He scatters corn kernels for the chickens gathered there, his gaze fixed on the closed door, waiting for patients to come outside and blink in the bright light of day. I try to pinpoint his expression. It’s an odd mix of longing, curiosity, and fear—a look nearly spilling over with questions that, for some reason, he won’t venture to ask Silvio.
“Small and quiet,” the old lady says. “With a timid smile.” I jot down her words halfheartedly. Small and quiet, with a timid smile seems to be the vague consensus description when we ask people about the woman who disappeared sixteen years ago.
I translate for Wendell, who’s taking pictures of the small, smoky kitchen with his camera balanced on his tripod. He’s getting close-ups of the utensils hanging from her walls, blackened cast iron and worn wood speckled with burns. “¿Algo más?” he asks the woman. Anything else?
“She wasn’t from here.” The woman licks her lips, which curve over her toothless gums. She has a strong Quichua accent and I have to listen closely to catch her words. We almost passed right by her house without noticing it, a small one-room shack tucked away from the road, not far from Silvio and Luz’s house.
“A name?” I ask hopelessly. Interview after interview of nothing can dampen your spirits. At this point, my stomach’s growling and I just want to finish the interview and eat some of Mamita Luz’s bread.
“I don’t remember her name.” The woman stirs a pot of potato soup with a long spoon. “She kept to herself.”
“The baby’s father?” The past ten times we’ve asked this, people have shrugged and look at the ground and mumbled, “Only God knows.”
Instead she says, “Perhaps you should talk with the healer Silvio.”
I glance up, shocked, my pen frozen in midair. “Why him, señora?”
She keeps stirring the bubbling soup. “I don’t gossip.”
When we interrogate Taita Silvio outside his house, he looks thoughtful but doesn’t volunteer any information.
“But why would the woman tell us to ask you?” I push.
“Perhaps because my wife and I are considered the parents of the community.” He stares intently at a pecking chicken.
Later, on the way to the bus stop, I say, “We’ve reached a dead end here, Wendell. It’s been five days. Time to try some other villages.”
“But I have this feeling.”
I suck in a breath. “We’re basing this whole fruitless search on a feeling?”
“Please.”
“One more day.”
That afternoon I don’t have any English tutoring lined up, so while Wendell’s at the Internet café, I wander over to Parque Bolívar. Don Celestino is sitting by the fountain in his blue chair, commenting on distant radio music and the feel of the breeze.
“Don Celestino,” I say, opening my indigo notebook. “How do you know I’m me?”
“Because of the birdsongs in your voice.”
“But you know it’s me even before you hear me.”
“There are birdsongs in your walk, too.”
“Do you ever feel lonely with people coming and going all the time?”
“No. I feel happy.”
“Do you ever feel scared not being abl
e to see?”
“No. I have my chair.”
It’s Saturday, and Jeff’s driving his black rental SUV, one hand on the steering wheel and the other wrapped around Layla’s. Observing from the backseat, part of me wants to smile at this new development, but part of me dreads that this is the beginning of the end. When a man starts holding Layla’s hand in that casual yet possessive way, she feels caged in. It’s usually a matter of time before she dumps him. The boyfriends who’ve lasted longer than a few weeks are the ones who grab her hand only to run into the ocean or through a sudden rainstorm or down a hill with childish abandon.
Jeff’s in town for the weekend, and we’re headed to the Museum of Culture, which got two lines in the Ecuador guidebook. As a kid, I always begged Layla to take me to museums. In every country we’ve been to, I’ve longingly watched the happy families of foreigners streaming in and out of museums. Layla always waved her hand and said, “You want art and culture? Walk down the street with your eyes open. Talk to people. It’s more fun. And it’s free!”
The museum is just on the edge of town, but it takes a while to get there because Jeff drives about five miles an hour as buses and taxis whiz around us. “And I thought driving in D.C. at rush hour was crazy. That’s nothing.” He glances in the rearview mirror. “You’ve got your seat belt on, right, Zeeta?”
“Yep.” I appreciate his concern for safety.
“We’ll get there when we get there,” he says. “I’m carrying precious cargo here.” What a perfect Dad thing to say. Precious cargo. He pulls a crisp white handkerchief from his pocket and pats his forehead. Layla lowers the digital temperature from sixty-eight to sixty-five, then returns her hand to his.
I haven’t seen much of Layla all week. She’s been either at class, on the phone with Jeff, or holed away in her room, up to her elbows in manila folders and crates and ESL books and papers, attempting to file her teaching materials. This is part of Jeff’s plan, an “up-front investment of time to create an efficient system of lesson planning,” so that she won’t be scrambling at the last minute to throw something together.
