What You Have Heard Is True

by Carolyn Forche

  “Tell me about the grandmother.”

  He didn’t say your grandmother, but I would become used to this quirk of his speech. He rarely used possessive pronouns in English. What did he want? I wondered. Why was he interested in me? No one in the world beyond my childhood had ever seemed this curious about my life. Leonel was asking about my own past, my own family. So I talked to him for a while about Anna, about the rosaries prayed before the plaster madonna on Chalfonte Street in Detroit, the women gathered in the small living room for the joyful and sorrowful mysteries, Anna among them when she wasn’t disappearing for weeks at a time, driving her Ford Mercury through Pennsylvania and Ohio, staying with relatives and the friends she had made, Slovaks and Mennonites, Hungarians, Native Americans, some of whom, long after her death, would show up on the doorsteps of her descendants, stopping to see her again as they passed through, even after no one passed any longer through the neighborhood in Detroit where her eldest daughter still lived. Anna’s friends usually arrived with gifts, and expressions of gratitude for some kind of help she had given, but the Anna they spoke of did not have many traits in common with our Anna, about whom most people in the family had mixed feelings, believing that she had the Gypsy spirit in her as they would say then, that she couldn’t somehow settle down, that she was headstrong and did whatever she pleased, and when I was a girl, I told Leonel, my mother warned me that I was in danger of being like her, “and I will not have this,” my mother had said, “I will get Anna out of you if it’s the last thing I do.”

  “And are you like her?” Leonel asked. “Because that would be helpful.”

  “I don’t know. I can’t seem to stay in one place— But helpful? For what?”

  “Oh, nothing. I’m getting a bit ahead of myself.”

  And so as not to get ahead, he reached back and took up where he had left off, with the ships on the butcher paper, sailing from Spain through the Caribbean to the isthmus, going into some detail about how such ships were rigged and supplied, with what weaponry and provisions, and for the next hours he bent over the Spanish galleons and caravels crossing their sea of paper.

  * * *

  —

  That night, in the growing darkness, having not thought of my grandmother in some time, I saw Anna’s face in her casket: her waxen skin, her lips sealed, a black rosary wound around her hands. Anna’s not here, I had told myself then, leaning to kiss this wax Anna on its cheek. The replica wore Anna’s dress, with a broach pinned to the bodice, and gold wire-rimmed glasses, although the eyes were closed behind them. The corpse was asleep with its glasses on. If this had been Anna, I would have reached in and removed her glasses and set them on a night table beside the water glass holding her teeth, the prayer book and crochet hook, and the photograph of herself with my grandfather and one of their infant children that she kept on the bedside table, even throughout her second marriage.

  When he asked about Anna again, it was night, the second night, and I was tiring of history lessons.

  “I don’t know what to tell you,” I said. “I don’t know what you want to know.”

  “You said that she prayed while she planted seeds. The descendants of the Mayans also pray, not only when they plant, but when they till, when they harvest, even when they catch birds, they pray. To whom, I don’t know. They can tell one parrot’s voice apart from another’s, and they know how old are the jaguar tracks in the mud, how long a time has passed since the jaguar made the tracks, and how long it has been since the jaguar clawed the bark from the fruit trees. They know which special leaf can be boiled to cure fever. That would be the leaf from the cinchona tree, by the way.”

  I was lying on the carpet now in the path of the rearing calliope horse, as if I were about to be trampled. Leonel was pacing the room.

  “From your book, I learned that you spent time with Native Americans. In several of your poems, I read—”

  “Yes. I lived for a short winter with an elderly Pueblo Indian couple in New Mexico when I was twenty-three years old. I had been planning to hike in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains because I was trying to get over something, and they invited me to stay with them instead of hiking.”

  He looked at me quizzically.

  “A death. I was trying to get over the death of a close friend.”

  “Get over? You don’t get over these things,” he said gently.

  I didn’t want to say more, but found myself telling him the story of how I had accepted a writing residency in Taos, but had felt uneasy in the house assigned to me, so I decided instead to hike into the mountains and camp there, leaving the house to its ghosts. I was buying supplies in the plaza when I met the man I now called Grandpa Goodmorning. He saw that I was wearing a backpack and started a conversation, asking where I was going. When I told him that I planned to go hiking in the mountains, he suggested I speak first with his wife.

  Teles Goodmorning wore his hair in two long silver-dark braids and held a blanket around his shoulders, as did the other Tewa elders who gathered in the plaza most afternoons. He pointed to his truck and said he could take me to her. The truck had once belonged to the postal service, so the steering wheel was on the vehicle’s right side. He’d bought it used, he’d said, and later, when I knew him better, he enjoyed joking that he was an Englishman because he drove on the other side of the front seat.

  I wanted to meet a woman elder and he seemed kind, so I went with him to his house: a small adobe to the left of the entrance to the pueblo, but outside the pueblo wall. His wife, Ya-Kwana, listened to my plan and asked me why I wanted to hike by myself. I told her the truth: that a boyfriend of mine had committed suicide a few months earlier in Denver, that I’d met his other friends at the funeral, and joined them for the summer at their house in Seattle. There, I hiked in the Olympic Peninsula and the north Cascades, through high snows and dark, sun-wanded rain forest, where I had slowly begun to emerge from the haze of mourning. I’d come now to New Mexico on a writing fellowship, and thought hiking through the Sangre de Cristos would afford the same relief.

  “Maybe you don’t want to do this hike,” Ya-Kwana said. “It is dangerous—not because of animals but because of men.”

  Instead, she suggested that I should stay with them for a while. They had a spare bed. I could help them with drawing water from the well and bringing in firewood. And because we were outside the pueblo wall, it was all right for me to stay there, even though I was Anglo. She did ask that I keep this arrangement to myself, and especially not speak with anyone outside the pueblo about it, particularly the anthropologist who showed up there regularly. So I stayed with them, but went back sometimes during the day to the writer’s residency, pretending still to live there but never again staying the night.

  “Well, that’s it,” I said. “I was with them until spring, and I even learned a little of their language. In Tewa, the same object might be known by different names, depending on circumstances. For example, the word for wood changes if the wood is growing, as in a tree, or burning, as in a fire.”

  After a time, he asked if I had been given a name in their language.

  “Yes.”

  “What name?”

  I thought it might be all right to tell him.

  “Well, Grandpa Goodmorning was Tiem-goo, ‘Good Morning’ in Tewa, I think, and so he called me Tiem-papu, or ‘Morning Flower,’ but mostly they shortened it to Papu. I think Ya-Kwana came up with that.”

  She had also taught me to bake bread in the horno and to cook a pozole with chilies and pork. She reminded me a lot of Anna. She kneaded her dough the same way, and she had the same hands. She used to bring blankets to me at night, as Anna had done. I’d feel them land on me. As it got colder, more blankets, until by morning I was under a pile of them. I remember how stiff they were, how icy the air, and I was always grateful that they woke before me and got the fire started in the fogón.

  Leonel seem
ed more interested in this story than in anything else I had told him, so I went upstairs to get one of the few things I had in my room in those days: a photograph of me with Grandpa Goodmorning. I’m wearing one of those embroidered Afghan sheepskin coats, with a pink-and-green babushka on my head. Grandpa is wearing one of his western string ties. We’re both smiling.

  “Do you ever see them now?”

  “I drive back to New Mexico when I can, and I’m planning to bring Grandpa here for a powwow soon. The Native American Studies program at our university is sponsoring a ceremony, and they want him to be its ceremonial chief. He accepted because he wants to see the ocean and get some cowrie shells from the beach, which he needs because there has been no rain in New Mexico, and he also wants me to take him to the zoo.”

  “The zoo?”

  “He would like to see animals from other continents and offer prayers for them.”

  I didn’t tell Leonel that night about the ritual of burning cedar on live coals, the eagle feather that carries the smoke, the blessing of cedar smoke from head to toe before embarking on a journey, and I didn’t tell him about the deerskin dress or the jimson berries or the morning they buried an elder below the bright snow. Later I might tell him. Maybe.

  “What else would you like to know?” I asked instead.

  “That’s good, that you stayed with them. You’re lucky. They gave you a rare gift.”

  “They saved me from falling into a mountain crevasse.”

  “Not only that,” he said. “You ask me what else I want to know? I want to know who you are,” he said matter-of-factly, as if wondering about the contents of a package, as he stretched out on the carpet and closed his eyes.

  “But we can talk tomorrow. I have to get some sleep. Go to bed.”

  “Leonel? Why don’t you use the daybed?”

  “No, thank you. I prefer the floor.”

  * * *

  He lit his pipe and picked up a drawing pen. His hair was now wet, slicked back, and he offered that he had washed it in the kitchen sink. There was no gray in it then, and he wasn’t yet more than a little overweight. I thought he was much older, but that was because I was young and the distance between ages twenty-seven and thirty-seven seemed great. His black horn-rimmed glasses made him look studious, as did the pipe he usually held with his right hand. I didn’t know this then, but he had dressed himself to visit a professor in a university, which is what he had been told I was.

  “Okay. El Salvador is 160 miles long from east to west and 60 miles wide.”

  He drew a compass with arrow tips east to west, north to south.

  “It is the most densely populated country in the isthmus and among the poorest in the hemisphere. They call it the Tom Thumb of the Americas, who, as you know, was a character from the very first fairy tale printed in English. Tom Thumb was this tiny man, no bigger than his father’s thumb. One of Tom Thumb’s escapades involved being swallowed by a cow, but never mind. We’ll get to the subject of cows later. In this Tom Thumb—the country—one in five children die before the age of five, and eighty percent of people have no running water, electricity, or sanitation. What does this mean?”

  He had drawn a stick figure trapped inside a cow.

  “For many, there is only a trench in the ground with a board over the trench. The chief cause of death is amoebic dysentery and the second, among children, is measles: entirely preventable, entirely curable, but most rural people have never seen a doctor. And what else? Ninety percent of people in the rural areas are malnourished. Ninety percent. They live on beans and tortillas. Whatever else they manage to grow, they sell. In the countryside, seventy percent cannot read or write, and of the rest, the command is very basic. They make their living harvesting coffee and cotton and cutting cane, moving from harvest to harvest. On average, they are paid a dollar a day. To give you the idea: A Coke is fifty cents. Okay? How did it come to this?”

  In ink on paper and with both Spanish and English painted in the air between us, he brought us back before the conquest, before Alvarado and his flaming hair, to the time when the lands were held in common by the Lenca and Pipil.

  “Very little is known about them, but it is my belief that they abandoned their ancient cities in a time of crisis to settle in smaller villages and carry on the art of the milpa. Some academics think they were closer to Olmecs and to Aztec culture. I have no opinion about that. I only know what I think.”

  He was searching through the bag with a pouncing jaguar on both sides.

  “Here,” he said, “I brought these books for you, and some monographs. Take a look. Maybe you, as a poet, can imagine what life in that time might have been like. I am not a poet, but the more I study the culture of the Mayans, the more I am in awe. Papu?”—calling me that for the first time, which I wasn’t sure was right to do—“I am asking you to imagine it.”

  Only the Goodmornings had ever called me Papu. It was their name for me in their language. It was private. A secret. I wanted to tell him not to use this name for me, but I thought doing so might hurt his feelings, so I didn’t, and instead tried to do as he asked.

  * * *

  —

  Considering winter at the pueblo, life at that time would have been quiet at night, the stars like crushed glass and in that darkness, the Milky Way would have almost appeared to spin, a silver platter tipped into the heavens, sending its outer stars into empty space. The moons would be named for seasons and planting. Many of the plants would be known, along with their properties, including what would heal what, and the Earth itself was considered a being, sleeping in winter because she was pregnant during the cold season. The elders didn’t have to talk much. Conversation floated silently among them, and what was heard was the crackling of the fire.

  It wasn’t possible to think about this without dreaming back to Grandpa Goodmorning getting up from his stool at night to take a coal from the fogón, a burning coal rimmed with light, and lift it with a small shovel, dropping a handful of dried cedar onto it until smoke rose up, and then he’d ask me to stand, and with a feather he brushed the smoke up along my body to my head. And if Ya-Kwana or anyone else was there he also did this for her, and then he carried the smoking shovel around the room, to the entranceways, smoke rising in the kitchen where the unplugged refrigerator was, where Ya-Kwana kept her flour and other dried goods to preserve them from pests. He carried the smoke to the beds and walked around them, whispering in Tewa. The house was blessed in this manner almost every night, as was the well outside, and especially the front door. Ya-Kwana’s hands became Anna’s hands, the scarves they wore were the same and also their eyes, with light always in them, almost like candle flames. If I cupped my hands over my ears, Tewa sounded like Slovak. I sometimes made believe it was. Anna prayed too, every night, but her prayers were whispered into a book she held, or while rosary beads ran through her fingers, and sometimes she also listened to a radio station that broadcast prayers in Polish, Slovak, Hungarian, or Czech. The radio was covered in brown leather, with tubes visible inside it like a miniature city glowing with orange lights, and as she turned the dial, the voices changed, and because they were in different languages, and I was a child, I imagined that the radio was a city of voices from all over the world.

  A short while after this request for imagining, Leonel said he wanted to tell me a story about a Catholic priest.

  “You are a Catholic, aren’t you?”

  No one had asked me this question for a long time, and I wasn’t sure of the answer.

  * * *

  —

  The girl I once was, who had been a Catholic, woke for the bells of the Angelus at six in the morning. Angelus Domini, I sang to myself as I walked to morning Mass under a canopy of maples, through a wetland of swamp cabbage and red-winged blackbirds, the quiet, low Mass where it was possible to pray in peace, with the Latin liturgy a murmur in the air. The neighbor boy Joseph
also attended this Mass daily before school and I was always aware of him, of where he knelt in relation to me. When he turned twelve, he left to study in a seminary, and I decided that if he was going to become a priest, I would be a nun in his parish.

  Six years later, Joseph went to Vietnam, and later returned as a different Joseph, one who would move back and forth between monastic life and the streets. I would not become a nun, although I considered that vocation. As a child, I had even imagined that I saw the Blessed Mother in the clouds above the roof of my house one summer night after dark. If she was real, this was what the nuns of Our Lady of Sorrows called a vision, so I must not have seen her. Brighter than the moon with her arms open. I still have my satin First Communion purse, the Sunday Missal with its pearl cover, and rosary beads of aurora borealis crystals my mother strung for me, all wrapped in a foiled box not unlike the silver Christmas box where my mother kept the poems she had written in her own girlhood.

  I felt at peace in the church, on the padded kneeler near the stained-glass windows depicting the seven sorrows along the west wall, the seven joys along the east. These windows had been made in Chartres, France, and brought to our parish by ship. As a child, I had imagined the slabs of glass crossing the sea, rising and falling in the breaking waves. The nuns told us that there were precious jewels hidden in these windows. When I knelt beside them, the floor, the pews, and my own body were quilted in colored light.

  “I was born Catholic, yes,” I said. “I attended Catholic school for twelve years. But those of us who no longer attend Mass are called fallen or fallen away. I’m fallen.”

  * * *

  —

  My school was run by the Sisters of St. Dominic, Order of Preachers, in the parish of Our Lady of Sorrows, in a church shepherded by an old Irish monsignor who, for some reason, was an admirer of a man he called Generalissimo Franco of Spain, and Franco, we were told as children, led the forces of the Church faithful to victory over the enemies of God in the Spanish Civil War. He was the leader by the grace of God, we were taught.