Finding Miracles

by Julia Alvarez

The National Theater, the Palace of Justice, the Congress . . . (I don’t know why people think monuments are the best way to show you their country.) Riqui even drove out of our way so I could see the Presidential Palace, which I guess had once been white and was now a creepy blood-red.

  “The people, they went crazy with joy when the dictator left,” Riqui explained. “They wanted el palacio to be the color of the Liberation Party. The people don’t say they painted it; they say they liberated it.”

  I felt I had to say something, so I said, “Well, you can’t miss it.”

  What crowds! Not just cars but mules and carts, bicycles and motorcycles and people jammed the narrow streets. The sidewalks were blocked with chairs and stands and small tables with big boom boxes blaring salsa and American rock music. People were hanging out like this was a block party, except it went on, block after block after block. “Before the liberation, people were afraid to gather together,” Riqui explained. “It was against the law. Now they have their freedom.”

  “Freedom from one tyranny,” Camilo added. He seemed a lot less gushy in his enthusiasm. “The tyranny of poverty is still with us.”

  I could see what he meant. Poor people were everywhere. I mean, it wasn’t like we didn’t have poverty in the States, but here it was right in your face. At red lights, beggars crowded around the car. Little kids in rags threw wet sponges at the windshields, hoping to earn some money wiping them clean. Every time they did so, Riqui yelled at them for messing up his car.

  I guess revolutionaries have tempers, too, I thought.

  A man with no arms was wheeled up to my back window by a young boy. The man wore a Yankees baseball cap and a ragged T-shirt with the sleeves sewn up. His face was all scarred, like maybe he’d been burned or something. I rummaged through my backpack, but I hadn’t changed any money, and the smallest I had was a twenty. “Here,” Camilo said, handing me a large, colorful bill that didn’t look like real money. “I’ll pay you back,” I said stupidly. I didn’t even know how much money it was.

  As I was rolling down my window, I panicked. The man didn’t have arms. How was I suppose to hand him the money? Before I could think what to do, the boy had put the bill of the man’s baseball cap in his mouth. As soon as I dropped the money in, the man wiggled his lips in a way that flipped the cap back on his head, like he was a monkey performing a trick. He grinned, then showered me with blessings, “Dios la bendiga.”

  God bless you, I thought, rolling up my window slowly, hoping to give the moisture in my eyes a chance to dry. It wasn’t exactly tears. Just that burning you get when you see some wrong you can’t put right.

  Pablo spoke up beside me. “It is the sad reality of our little paisito, Milly.” The look on his face said he, too, felt pained by the poverty around us.

  “It’s just that I’m not used to it,” I explained.

  From the front seat, Camilo sighed. “Don’t ever get used to it, Milly. Or the dream dies.”

  We were quiet the rest of the ride.

  “Where have you been?” Mrs. Bolívar scolded as we walked into the house. “Dulce has been waiting to serve.” Everyone had been sitting at the table in the open courtyard for the last half hour.

  “So nice to see you being your old self, Mamá!” Riqui humored her. “We were just showing Milly our beautiful capital.”

  That stopped Mrs. Bolívar’s scolding. How could she be upset with her sons when they were just being polite to her guest?

  A woman came rushing from the kitchen. She gave out a cry of joy when she spotted Pablo. “Tía Dulce—” Pablo managed to get out before she had him in a killer hug. She was an older version of Esperanza, pale and slender, with our same eyes, as I now thought of them. Like her daughter, she was dressed completely in black, but somehow the black seemed blacker on her, maybe because of the contrast with her white apron. A silver cross hung around her neck. I remembered Pablo saying that Tía Dulce was very religious.

  “Pablito, Pablito!” she sobbed, holding him at arm’s length to make sure it was him. She could not seem to stop.

  “Ya, ya, Tía Dulce,” Riqui said, patting his stomach. “We’re dying of hunger. Where’s that wonderful puerco asado we were promised?”

  Hungry people! That did it! Tía Dulce turned on her heels and disappeared to the kitchen to get la comidita, the little meal, on the table.

  Little meal?! It was a feast! I couldn’t wait to tell Mom about all the different dishes—some were ones Mom herself cooked from her Peace Corps days—or at least talked about, bemoaning the fact that she couldn’t get ingredients like plantains in Vermont. I piled my plate so high, I didn’t think anyone noticed that I hadn’t served myself pork. “Save room for dessert,” Dulce kept warning us, but she was the first to urge seconds and thirds the minute a plate was half full.

  The platters kept making their rounds back to me. Everyone seemed especially concerned that I not starve while I was in their country.

  “¡Ya! Dejen a la pobre Milly tranquila.” Pablo was trying to protect me from the full onslaught of his family’s hospitality. Let poor Milly be. But it was impossible to stop them.

  When the dinner dishes had been cleared away, Esperanza brought out the dessert: a cake with an odd, lop-sided shape, like a little kid had put it together. I was wondering whose birthday it was when everyone burst out singing the national anthem. That was when I realized the cake was a replica of the country. We were celebrating its liberation. One lone candle blazed in the center.

  Even after the singing stopped, no one seemed to want to step forward and blow it out. We watched it burn almost down to the frosting. Finally, Mr. Bolívar reached over and pinched it out between his thumb and forefinger. Everyone hugged and cried, remembering the absent ones.

  I felt sad, especially for Dulce. At one point, she slipped out to the kitchen—to get a knife to cut the cake, she said. When she came back a little while later, her hair was wet at the hairline, like she had washed her face after having a good cry all by herself.

  Servings of cake went round and round and round the table. Everyone was too stuffed to eat another bite.

  Mrs. Bolívar was full of apologies for the bad eaters. After Dulce had gone to so much trouble!

  “It will not go to waste, don’t worry,” Dulce reassured her. “I will send it to las monjitas for the children. Maybe later the boys can drive it over.”

  Las monjitas . . . The little nuns, the children . . . It was summer, so it couldn’t be a school. An orphanage? I glanced at Pablo, who nodded as if to confirm what I was thinking.

  I looked around the open courtyard like someone just waking up in a strange place, trying to figure out where on earth she is. A vine of bright red flowers tumbled down from a trellis, the blossoms as big as my dinner plate. Teensy iridescent hummingbirds plunged their bills inside the petals. A lone parrot sat on its perch, shifting from foot to foot, watching us. His beak opened as if he were about to say something, but then closed like he thought better of it. Brown and white faces surrounded me, some strange, some familiar. The daze I’d been in since leaving home finally lifted. I was really here!

  It was hours since the Bolívars had arrived at their paisito. But it was only now that I landed in my little country, too.

  7

  a cradle and a grave

  WE ACTUALLY DIDN’T MAKE it to the orphanage that same day. The visitors hung around into the evening, when appetites started waking up again. Dinner was a serving of Dulce’s cake and a sweet tea made from yerbabuena leaves.

  “This will help you sleep your first night, Milly,” Mrs. Bolívar recommended.

  “Isn’t yerbabuena what you put on my hands at the airport?”

  “Why do you think it is called ‘the good grass’?” Mrs. Bolívar boasted. “When we go back, I will take as much as I can carry.”

  Dulce, who had just finished wrapping the leftover cake, sat down heavily in her chair. “You are going back, Angelita?”

  Mrs. Bolívar looked unco
mfortable. She stared down into her steaming cup as if it might tell her what to say. “Antonio thinks it’s best for Pablo’s education,” she murmured. I knew the stay in the States was the hardest on Mrs. Bolívar. Though she loved working for her little viejita Miss Billings, Mrs. Bolívar was often homesick. She complained of the cold. Her skin was always irritated. But sacrificio had always been her lot in life, she had told me. Unlike Mr. Bolívar, whose family had lived comfortably on their own land in the mountains, Mrs. Bolívar’s family had been poor. “Pobre, pobre,” Mrs. Bolívar said, repeating the word as if to double the strength of its meaning. “This is just for a few years, Dulce,” Mrs. Bolívar added, “until Pablito is graduated.”

  “So many absences.” Dulce sighed, wiping her eyes with a corner of her apron. “Perhaps then . . . if you are not returning, I will move back to Los Luceros with Esperanza.”

  “Ay, no, Mamá,” Esperanza wailed.

  “We will see.” Dulce made the sign of the cross and then kissed the crucifix around her neck. “Nothing has to be decided tonight.”

  Later, as I was getting ready for bed in the room I was sharing with Dulce and Esperanza, Dulce prayed out loud. “Our Lord, enlighten us so that we may see and accept Your divine will, amen.” She sunk her head in her hands.

  Esperanza was kneeling opposite her mother, facing me. I didn’t know if, as a good guest, I was supposed to join them, too, but it seemed hypocritical since I wasn’t in the habit of praying on my knees. When her mom asked the Lord to guide her, Esperanza looked over at me and rolled her eyes heavenward.

  I bowed my head, struggling to suppress the giggles I knew would burst out if Esperanza and I looked at each other again.

  The next morning, Dulce shooed me out of the kitchen. No way she was going to let me help with breakfast. “¡Esta es tu casa!” she scolded sweetly. I hated to tell her, but back at my house I was expected to help with meals!

  I wandered into the courtyard where we’d gathered for dinner yesterday. At the far end, I caught sight of Pablo, his back to me. He was barefoot, dressed in jeans and a rumpled T-shirt that looked like he’d slept in it. He was gazing around slowly, taking it all in. I stood still, not wanting to intrude upon this private moment of homecoming.

  He must have sensed my presence, because he turned abruptly. His face broke into a smile when he saw me.

  “Must be nice to be home,” I said, joining him.

  “We have lived in this house since I was born,” he explained. “Everything brings a memory—that stump from the old mango tree, the big ceiba over there. This bush was planted the day my parents married.” He snapped off a stem and offered it to me to smell. Two teensy red flowers grew from the same stem.

  “And you, Milly?” Pablo wondered. “When you see things here, do they seem at all . . . familiar?”

  I shook my head. How could I expect to remember things from when I was a baby? But not remembering felt like a kind of failure. “That orphanage your aunt mentioned yesterday. You think we could go see it?” I hesitated even as I said it. Our discussion on the plane had made me wary of the truth.

  “I myself will remind Tía Dulce,” Pablo promised. His eyes lingered on my face. “I hope you are liking it here, Milly?”

  I wasn’t sure yet what I was feeling. One moment I felt totally at home. Another, I felt totally out of it. In some ways, nothing much had changed!

  “I really like your family,” I offered. “Your brothers are so funny.”

  Pablo laughed, as if recalling the scene I’d overheard last night. His brothers had been teasing him about the novia he had brought back from the States. Novia, I remembered from Señora Robles, meant both girlfriend and bride in Spanish. “I have nothing to declare!” Pablo had shot back, laughing.

  “They like you very much, Milly,” Pablo was saying now. “Everybody does.”

  Everybody? Suddenly, I couldn’t look him in the eye. He would know, he would know. I glanced down at the tiny double flower Pablo had offered me. He had said it was called tu-y-yo. You-and-me. A new memory.

  As we were finishing breakfast, Pablo reminded his aunt about the cake delivery at the orphanage.

  “Perhaps we should forget it,” Dulce debated, looking at the remains of the cake. “There is not much left and so many children there.”

  “We’ll buy some fruit at the mercado on the way,” Pablo offered.

  “What an angelito my nephew is!” Dulce threw her arms around Pablo and showered him with kisses. Pablo ducked in mock resistance, but I could tell he was loving the attention from his favorite aunt. Later, in the car, Esperanza teased Pablo about what an angel he was. “Maybe you can talk Mamá out of moving back to Los Luceros. It would be so . . . depressing,” she added, her voice breaking.

  Since Los Luceros had been a big hideout for the rebels, the army had carried out the worst massacres there. “The town is a graveyard,” Esperanza explained. She and her mother had not been back since the liberation. “Mamá said it would be too hard. Now she wants to go live there!” Dulce’s sisters and her mother, all widows, were rebuilding the family business, a little store called El Encanto that had been destroyed when the military came through.

  I felt so bad for Esperanza, not only losing her father but lots of family on her mom’s side, it sounded like. “Maybe you can come visit sometime in the States, you think?”

  Esperanza looked up, hopeful, but then shook her head. “Mamá would never let me.” She turned away, hiding her tears.

  I glanced helplessly at Pablo, hoping he would know what to say. Only with Em had I tried mental telepathy before.

  “Ay, primita, don’t be pesimista,” Pablo comforted her. “Like your mamá always says, miracles happen. We just have to find one that will work on her.”

  We came up with all kinds of miracles, including the classic voice from heaven: My Esperanza must go to Vermont and spread the True Faith to all those Protestants! Soon we were all laughing. It felt good to see Esperanza happy for a change.

  At the mercado we loaded the trunk with fruit—sacks of pineapples, oranges, small pinkish mangoes. The vendors all insisted we taste their wares, which was kind of a hook because once we ate free samples, we felt obligated to buy at least a dozen. It really was a meal to go shopping.

  At every stand, Pablo and Esperanza kept reminiscing— these mangoes reminded them of the delicious mangoes from the tree that was cut down in the backyard; those oranges, of the sweetest oranges Abuelito used to grow. . . .

  I found myself wishing Em were with me, so I’d have someone to share the surprises of being back in a native land I couldn’t remember. At the last stall, I bought her a souvenir, a necklace of red and black seeds. The old man selling them said it would bring good health and a long life. Better than eight glasses of water, I thought.

  “What about love?” Esperanza wanted to know. “Will it attract a husband?” she prodded.

  “As many husbands as you want,” the old man obliged.

  Pablo scowled. “Won’t one husband do?”

  “If he brings good health and a long life.” The old man smiled, revealing a mouth of missing teeth.

  We laughed and ended up buying four: the two I got, one for Em and one for Kate (I figured if these beads could bring husbands, health, and long lives, they could probably chill out my uptight big-sister-for-life); and two more Pablo bought, one for Esperanza and one for me. His eyes met mine as he slipped my necklace over my head. “Feliz viaje,” he wished me. A happy trip. My hand kept wandering up to my neck, touching the tiny seeds.

  The orphanage was a long, depressing building painted a military green, with bars at the windows like a prison. CENTRO DE REHABILITACIÓN INFANTIL read the sign above the door—Center for the Rehabilitation of Children. Even the name was depressing. Before leaving Vermont, I had copied all the information from my adoption papers. The name of my orphanage had been La Cuna de la Madre Dolorosa. The Cradle of the Sorrowful Mother. Pretty depressing, too. (Who names these places?
I wondered.) Pablo and I had tried looking it up in the phone book this morning, but there was no listing. Dulce had told us that all Catholic orphanages and hospitals had been closed when the dictator nationalized church properties. But since CRI was state owned, it had remained open. After the liberation, the new government had enlisted some nuns to run it.

  The woman who answered the bell started hugging us before we were even in the door. She was tall with short, silvery white hair that looked like a halo around her head. She introduced herself as Sor Arabia, though in her navy skirt and white blouse she looked more like a flight attendant. Dulce had mentioned that most nuns no longer wore habits, a protective move during the dictatorship that had now become a habit!

  “Dulce called and said you were on your way,” Sor Arabia explained. “Oh my goodness, look at all the fruit! God bless you! Sor Teresita, come see.”

  The problem with calling Sor Teresita was that she came with a kite’s tail of little kids, all wanting not just to see, but to eat what we had brought. They ranged in age from little kids to boys and girls about nine or ten—though their age was hard to determine; they all looked kind of scrawny and undersized. Their hair was cut super short, boys and girls. (Seemed like the only difference was that the girls got bangs with their buzz cuts.) In their identical aqua blue uniforms, they looked like little prisoners. Their faces, though, were lively and full of mischief. They snatched at the fruit, which the roly-poly Sor Teresita kept trying to stuff back into the sacks. They seemed, well, if not happy, like they were having an okay life—I mean, not like some of those horror stories I’ve seen on 60 Minutes.

  “Who gave you permiso to come in here? Out! Out!” Sor Arabia stamped her foot like she was scatting kittens. The children ran off with their booty, giggling. Obviously, they knew Sor Arabia’s temper was not to be taken seriously.

  Esperanza went off with Sor Teresita to serve the children the leftover cake. It turned out she came here often with her mother. Mostly, she helped out with the older children, keeping them busy with games: cards, Bingo, checkers. Jacks was real popular with the girls, pebbles intermingled with the metal jacks, which were always getting lost.