Finding Miracles

by Julia Alvarez

  “Ay, Lord forgive me.” Dulce was already feeling guilty about her naughtiness. “We must respect their memory because what came to pass was not funny at all. Don Gustavo had spies all around, but that summer they failed him. By the time he caught wind of what was going on in his stables, it was too late. His princesita was pregnant, and the señora was very Catholic, so there was no question of the solution rich families often take. Alicia was hurried to the capital. I was already living there with the old couple. The city was full of rumors.”

  Alicia would have been my age that summer! Once in a while girls in Ralston got pregnant, but almost all of them had abortions. I always felt so bad for them. I didn’t know what I would have done. One thing I knew: I was too young to be anyone’s mother and too old to stop a life because of my bad judgment.

  Dulce raced ahead like she wanted to be done with this sad story. “At the end of that summer, Alicia did not go back to her school in Inglaterra . The family said she was ill—some condition that required bed rest. Then one night about five months later, a doctor and a midwife were seen entering the Moregón house in the capital. They took away a little bundle with them, who knows where it went? The couple I lived with heard from a friend of the cook in the house that the baby was premature, that it could not live for very long, that the midwife kept it for a time. But only Our Señor knows the truth of what happened. The next season, Alicia was attending parties again. But in her pictures in the papers, she looked haunted. They couldn’t fix her up enough. She was not a beautiful girl, but she’d had a fresh, young face that was now a mask with a frozen smile. Her long cabellera of hair was all cut off in a modern cut. They say it was her way of mourning Manuel.”

  “What exactly happened to him?” I almost didn’t want to find out. The story was already too much like Romeo and Juliet to have a happy ending.

  “Who knows,” Dulce said, shrugging. “Do you know, Doña Gloria?”

  Doña Gloria shook her head. “God only knows. But if you go to the cemetery, you will see where his family put up a cross, a beautiful one his father made of mahogany.”

  Pablo had been kicking at the ground as the story unfolded. Maybe he identified with Manuel, who had been his age when he disappeared. I was thinking about the boxes Manuel’s father used to make. Perhaps Manuel had given one to Alicia to keep her jewelry?

  Bright sunshine was now pouring in the doorway. Dulce’s family would be wondering what was taking us so long. On our way out of town, Dulce had told el viejo del centro, the old man on the square, where we were going. According to Dulce, el viejo was like the town crier. He would spread the word. But by now, her family would be expecting us back. Pablo, Dulce, and I looked at each other—time to go.

  “I don’t know that either story belongs to you,” Doña Gloria concluded, nodding in my general direction. “But these are the only two girls born in the spring of that year.”

  Suddenly, her great-granddaughter began violently shaking the back of the rocker. She made pained sounds, like she was trying to say something she had just remembered.

  Doña Gloria reached out and seized the girl’s hand. “¿Qué? ¿Qué?” What is it? “Get the stick!” Doña Gloria ordered. “Write it for these people.”

  The girl ran and grabbed a long stick propped up in the corner by the entrance. Its end had been sharpened, as if just for this purpose. She brushed off the dirt floor in front of her with a bare foot and painfully began to draw some letters. Each twisted shape took great effort—exactly how I used to write before all my tutoring lessons!

  We waited as she scratched out the name.

  “Dolores Alba,” we read out loud when she had finished.

  “¡Ay, Dios santo!” Doña Gloria exclaimed. “This girl remembers more than I do. There was a third girl born that spring. Dolores Alba had her baby some months before they captured her.”

  “Dolores,” Doña Gloria said as she rocked forward. “Alba.” She rocked backward. “Dolores Alba. How could I forget the pride of Los Luceros!”

  Dolores Alba, Dolores Alba, the clacks of the rocker now seemed to repeat, over and over, forward, backward.

  My hands had been totally calm since I’d landed in this country. Now—it wasn’t exactly that they itched, they were tingling with excitement.

  “Dolores Alba was the first woman to join the rebels,” Dulce explained to Pablo and me. “Isn’t that so, Doña Gloria?”

  Doña Gloria rocked forward as if nodding yes. “Dolores came from a long line of freedom fighters. On both sides, she was related to Estrella, the founder of our nation.” Doña Gloria nodded a reminder in my direction. “That was why the family had the custom to carry a peso with their ancestor’s picture on it—you’ve seen those old coins?”

  My coin! It must have come from Dolores! Of course, the mahogany box could have come from Manuel and Alicia, the locks of hair braided together from Rosa and Pelo Negro. But Dolores was brave and her family were freedom fighters. I wanted her for my birth mother.

  “Like all of the Estrellas, Dolores had a fire burning inside her,” Doña Gloria went on. “I don’t know how to explain it. They all seemed to be born with an itch they couldn’t get to. Thank the Lord that our Estrellas here in Los Luceros have always used that passion for the good. But there were scattered Estrellas who joined the military, and that same fire was used in the service of you know who.”

  I wondered if, as a scattered member of the family, I would misuse that fire, too? Did I even have it in me? Maybe it had gone out when I was adopted and moved to another country? Maybe it had been reduced to the burning of a skin rash?

  “This Dolores, pobrecita, by the time of her first bleeding, she was already an orphan. Her father had been taken away for organizing the coffee pickers. Two brothers were shot by the guardia during one of their massacres. The third was smuggled out of the country but then returned and was captured. After torturing him, they dumped him from one of their helicopters. Dolores’s mother could not bear up under all this grief. One morning—who knows if it was an accident—her body was found at the bottom of a cliff, muertecita.”

  A little dead? Even in Spanish, you couldn’t make some things sound less horrible than they were.

  “But what the mother couldn’t resist, the daughter learned to bear. She had been well named, Dolores. Sorrows. But her apellido, her last name, was Alba, the dawn, the sun coming up after the dark night. In this way, too, nature teaches us to hope.”

  “Dios no nos abandona,” Dulce agreed. God does not abandon us. Just hearing about Dolores seemed to be making Dulce more hopeful.

  “The men who had not been killed joined up with the guerrilla and went away to their hidden camps in the mountains. Dolores’s cousin, Javier Estrella, among them. I don’t know how that boy lived to be a man. Since he was a little thing”—Doña Gloria motioned with her hand just above the floor—“that boy was fighting the dictatorship. One time the guardia came through Los Luceros, and from the roof of the feed store, Javier shot off the colonel’s cap with a slingshot!”

  “Ay, Dios santo, I remember that day!” Dulce exclaimed. “¡Ay, qué susto! What a fright we had! The men were lined up in the square. We thought they would all be shot. But as they stood in plain sight, a second shot came and tore off a medal from the colonel’s chest. There was the proof! The culprit could not be one of our men. Gracias a Dios, thanks be to God, they were all spared! Meanwhile, the guardia combed the town, but nada. Nothing. I don’t know how that little monkey got away!”

  Doña Gloria kept nodding as Dulce recounted the incident. “ Ése mismo, that same Javier, became a revolutionary comandante with the guerrilla. Young as he was, he had the love and trust of the people. Many in Los Luceros joined up. Dolores tried. She made several petitions, but the comandante turned her down. Back then, the guerrilla was not taking women. But the different cells needed a safe drop-off house for the whole area, so Dolores offered hers. Of course, the whole town knew. El viejo del centro—that old man
repeats everything! His ears are connected to his mouth.”

  “I hope el viejo told Mamá about our visit this morning,” Dulce worried out loud. The shaft of sunlight now cut deeper into the room, slicing the interior into brighter and darker portions. “Everyone now thinks the worst if one is late.”

  “This will not take much longer,” Doña Gloria assured her. “Lamentablemente, such tragic lives make brief stories. A lamentable thing. The next time the guardia came through Los Luceros with their tortures, the weaker ones crumbled under the rod and revolver, and they talked. The name that kept coming up was Dolores Alba. Of course, the guardia raided her house. But it was not her destino to die that day. As it happens, she was down in the valley buying supplies, delivering messages. Someone got word to her there, and she knew not to come back to the village. There was nothing for it, Dolores was obligated to go underground. The guerrilla had to accept the first woman among them.”

  “What a life for her!” Dulce was shaking her head. “A woman alone in a rebel camp with all that bombing and fighting.”

  “But even in times of war, love reserves some arrows for the heart,” Doña Gloria reminded her. “Dolores and her cousin Javier fell in love. Fire joining with fire. They were going to save the world together.”

  “Third cousins.” Dulce had worked it out. “They would not need a dispensation for marriage.”

  “Marriage? Ha!” Doña Gloria gave a decisive shake of the head. “You didn’t know those two! They would come and stay with me from time to time. A night stolen from the revolution. After I fed them, we would go out and sit under the stars, and those two would start in on their theories and ideas. One time I mentioned marriage, ay, Dios mío, why was that? Marriage was an oppressive, capitalist institution, an extension of the mentality of ownership. ¡Qué sé yo! What do I know? It gave me a headache to hear them talk. I told them, how can you win a revolution with ideas that we simple people can’t understand? ‘You know more than all of us put together!’ they laughed back.”

  “Marriage is a holy sacrament,” Dulce said, as if Javier and Dolores were there to be improved by her lecture. “Ay, Doña Gloria. You hear that kind of talk now all the time from the young people.” Dulce glanced over at Pablo, trying to look cross, but smiling in spite of herself.

  “Marriage or no marriage, Dolores was soon with child,” Doña Gloria went on. “I remember one night she appeared here by herself and said to me, ‘Compañera Gloria’—oh yes, that was what she called me; she said doña was a title that promoted the capitalist class system—‘Compañera Gloria, a child is a luxury I cannot afford right now. I need to get rid of it.’”

  My heart had been soaring with pride for my chosen, freedom-fighting birth parents. Now it plummeted with the realization that the one mother I would have wanted hadn’t wanted me to even be born!

  “I gave that girl a scolding like you would not believe.” Doña Gloria scowled, as if remembering that scene. “You see, that was the reason I didn’t remember this third birth right away. For a time, I assumed Dolores had found a way to abort that criatura. But then I heard from some of her compañeros that Dolores was fighting alongside them, wearing a man’s shirt to hide her growing belly. Sometime that spring, Dolores gave light to her little girl. When Javier went down to the capital to organize the urban guerrilla, Dolores went with him. That’s where they were captured.”

  “Do you think she really didn’t want me?” I blurted out before I even realized what I was saying. “I mean, didn’t want her child?”

  Pablo reached for my hand again. For the first time, Dulce seemed to notice another pair of young lovers right before her eyes. She blinked in surprise.

  Doña Gloria squinted into the distance like she could see something that the rest of us could not make out. “If Dolores were alive today, she would thank me for the advice I gave her. Without our children, we lose the future. We lose our stories. Our dreams die!”

  “I am sure that Dolores was very glad to be a mother in the end,” Dulce threw in. “Many times God spares us from making mistakes we will later regret.” I knew she was trying to make me feel better. But sometimes I wished she wouldn’t put her God spin on everything.

  “What finally happened to Javier and Dolores?” Pablo asked. It was as if by holding my hand, he had absorbed the question which I both dreaded but needed to ask.

  “Javier and Dolores were captured one night in the capital, delivering arms in a borrowed car. No one knows if the child was with them. But all three vanished without a trace. So many, so many”—Doña Gloria motioned with her hands in the air—“every story one tells these days marks a grave.”

  By now, the room was bright with sunlight. It shone on Doña Gloria’s old face. I wanted to put my hands on it and soak in her stories. Dolores and Javier, Alicia and Manuel, Rosa and her colonel, any of them could have been my birth parents. Maybe I could claim a part of each one, just as there was a little detail from each story that fit into the puzzle of my past.

  “Thank you for these stories, Doña Gloria,” Pablo spoke up for all of us. “We will not forget them,” he promised.

  “You must do more than that!” Doña Gloria scolded, wagging her finger blindly at the air in front of her. “You are all we have left. You must bring about the harvest of what we have planted!”

  Just hearing her say that made me feel trembly all over. Not only my hands were tingling now. It was as if Doña Gloria were lighting that Estrella flame inside me.

  Doña Gloria had stopped her chair. She reached out, flailing her arms in the air until she found what she was looking for, her great-granddaughter’s arm. Slowly, she lifted herself to her feet and walked us to the door. We stood basking in the sunlight, enjoying the warm brightness shining down on us. It felt like a blessing after the dark stories in the dark house.

  Dulce stepped up first, bowing her head for a blessing. “ La bendición, Doña Gloria.”

  “Your blessing, Doña Gloria,” Pablo echoed.

  It was my turn to say goodbye, but I couldn’t get the words out. Suddenly, I could not help myself. I threw my arms around Doña Gloria, as if she were the birth mother I’d been searching for. I could feel her taking me in with her whole being. Doña Gloria had saved my life—not only by preventing my abortion, if Dolores and Javier were indeed my birth parents, but right now by telling me stories that made me feel lucky just to be alive.

  “Gracias, Doña Gloria.” I was sobbing. I couldn’t seem to let go.

  “Milagritos,” Doña Gloria was whispering in my ear, as if to put little miracles inside me, as if to give me back my name. When I had calmed down, Doña Gloria released me. I felt ready to go.

  “La bendición,” I asked, bowing my head.

  Doña Gloria lifted her hand in blessing. Her blind eyes looked off toward the path, the van waiting below, the horizon, the whole world out there waiting for us. “I’m counting on you,” she said. It was like she was sending us out on a mission or something.

  “To do what?” Pablo wanted to know.

  “To bring more light,” Doña Gloria replied.

  10

  finding miracles

  WHEN I SAW the glint of silver in the distance, I started waving like crazy. We were waiting for Mom and Dad’s plane on the observation deck of the Aeropuerto Internacional de la Liberación del Pueblo. Liberated names seemed to go on and on. I often wondered what would happen if I ever had to say something fast in this country.

  On the way, Pablo and I had stopped first at “our” cove for a quick dip and then a climb to the memorial stone. It was a weirdness I couldn’t get used to: how really fun stuff was all mixed up with really tragic stuff. Or maybe I was just noticing it more now?

  At the airport bathroom, I looked in the mirror and wondered if my parents would even recognize me. My hair was wild and flyaway, my skin so deeply tanned that people came up to me and automatically started speaking Spanish.

  “If you are not careful, you will forget all
your English,” Pablo teased. “You will have to stay here forever.” He cocked his head, waiting for my reaction.

  “No way, José!” I was not joking. I loved this country. But I missed home. I was looking forward to going back to Ralston. First, though, I wanted to share this place, where I had found a familia of friends, with my family. “That has to be their plane!” I insisted. The glint was now a tiny jet, getting bigger as it drew closer.

  Pablo checked his watch. “I have never known the airlines to be early. But miracles happen—”

  “As Tía Dulce always tells us,” I chimed in. Now that I had adopted her as my aunt, I could tease her all I wanted. If only she would stop trying to convert me. She had actually called Sor Arabia and found out that all babies at La Cuna had been baptized. According to Tía Dulce, I was already Catholic. Wait till my Jewish grandmother got a load of that!

  Meanwhile, everyone, even Pablo, was calling me by my new nickname, Milagritos. Little miracles.

  Only a few people were out on the observation deck with us. One woman held a parasol to keep the sun from darkening her skin. I mean, what’s the point of being on an observation deck, then obstructing your view under an umbrella?! But it was midday and it was hot. Most people preferred the air-conditioned lounge downstairs in the terminal. But I was so excited. I didn’t want a thick sheet of glass between me and my first glimpse of Mom and Dad!

  I had called them the minute we got back from the mountains on Sunday night. They were so happy—actually, relieved was more like it. They had been worried, three whole days without hearing from me, no answer at the house. Dad had flipped out and bought a ticket to come down in search of me.

  “You what?” I couldn’t believe it. “But I told you guys we were leaving for the weekend!”

  “Why would we have worried if you’d told us?” Dad countered. “I called the State Department hotline, so I knew about the demonstrations.”

  “What demonstrations?” I looked over at Pablo, who shook his head. He didn’t know of any demonstrations, either. “Dad, everything’s super peaceful here. You must have punched in the wrong extension and gotten a report for another country.”