Ben Wilensky
1
The news of Martín DeSelva's tragedy reached the Miahuatlan Mountains in January. His friends and campesinos were mortified. DeSelva was the most honorable of men, and for a man of honor to be thrown onto the Periferico Highway with two hundred chickens shitting in his face was an insult impossible to bear
Furthermore, his beautiful wife, Rosa Salanueva, was taken from him, as well as two fine boys, Erriberto and Eduardo, maimed and crushed with deliberate wantonness.
The oldest man in all the Miahuatlan villages, Adelaido Golpe, claimed that on the night of the accident, a pillar of black clouds rose in the sky to choke the moon. Shepherd boys rounding up goats on the curve of the mountain face sickened when they smelled green gas fouling the air.
Miahuatlanos are keen trackers, with uncanny abilities to hunt by smell. They can sniff the spoors of a puma long after the puma's climbed into the rocks and disappeared. They can tell you where the puma's heading, when it will get there, if it wants to be alone and slk, or circle back, and kill for the sport of killing. In the cities below, white skinned Gachupino Catholics consider this a magic, a witchcraft, but in the mountains, it is merely a skill, a practicality. Zapotecan peoples cock their fingers in the form of a jest, and claim they can smell a bezaloo lurking in the shadows.
"Don Martín DeSelva," Miahuatlanos would say to him when he was growing up to be the leader they wanted him to be, "the bezaloo belongs to all of us."
Admired from one end of the Sierras to the Istmo of Tehuantepac, far away Tehuanos sold him oil and machines, and in return, bought his grain, goats, and fruits, on a handshake alone. If Martín DeSelva gave you his word, it was as good as money in the bank, and gold in the ground. In a land where most rich folk were hard as flint, with hearts inured to poor people's sufferings, here was a hacendado who loaned you money when you could not pay your bills, sent your children to fancy schools, and paid their upkeep. Don Martín DeSelva treated you like an equal. Many said it was more like a brother. On his hacienda it was known that the poorest, blackest Indio swallowed the wafer side by side the richest, whitest Gachupino Catholic. This was a rarity in Mexico. But then he was a rare man. When the news of the tragedy reached the people of the Miahuatlan, they fell to their knees in consternation and prayed. "What crimes have we committed? What sin must we repent?"
They pried into their hearts but all they could dredge up from the past were the sweetest images of an honorable life. Martín DeSelva and Rosa Salanueva were married in the Dominican chapel in central Oaxaco. It is true they could have chosen the great cathedral there, with spiraling vaults and massive ceilings, but they picked the adobe chapel for its simplicity. It was a simple time, then, a much more simple time, when people were content with their lives. It was remembered that God's light steamed across the adobe walls, showering people with a gentle radiance.
All the villagers were invited to the wedding feast. In the traditional way of the Zapotecas, the wedding party began as the sun was descending, and stars were rising in the sky. The bride and groom were seated on palm mats, and Daria Obregon, the great curandera of the mountains, tied their shirts together. It was she who raised DeSelva when he was orphaned as a boy, and now this old, old lady brought them copas of tepache and bade them drink. She prayed, loudly, and proudly, and "Bless all here," and then she kissed Martín's hands and wept tears of happiness. She kissed Rosa's hands, and without embarrassment, embraced her as a daughter. Church bells rang in celebration. Friends and campesinos remembered how the night was clear, and that a breeze swept the mountains clean.
Miahuatlanos are cynical people. They rarely sing of happiness, or concern themselves with lasting enjoyment; their vision of the world plays out within a series of miseries, replete with betrayal. They expect bad things to happen, and that is ordinary fate; but they will not abide insulting kinds of death, for the difference between ordinary good and ordinary evil, is the insult.
The accident occurred December 23rd, 1949, just as the century was reaching the middle of its life, the moment when Zapotecan prophecies predicted explosive evil. Of course, prophecies are used and abused, and mocked at, throughout the Miahuatlan.
The Salanueva DeSelvas were on a holiday in the market town of Cholula, celebrating the Noche de Rabanes, the Night of the Radishes, a time for Mardi Gras, for gallows humor mocking customs and Mother Church. Evil and Death were costumed as silly puppets, puffed up with pride, dancing on a string, to be kicked at and punched by giggling children.
Cholula was crowded and alive with thrumming music. People danced in the streets. A host of Mariachi bands trumpeted corridas and love songs. The zocalo was decorated with skulls and bones made from papier maché and cotton candy. The streets were illuminated with candles and flaming torches.
In preparation for the main event, Cholula farmers "played" with their radishes for a full year, stretching them and pulling at their fibers until the radishes reached gigantic shapes and sizes. At a prearranged signal, Mariachi bands blew their trumpets and beat their drums. "Stunted children," as the farmers called the freak radishes, marched through the center of the town as if they were warriors. Firecrackers exploded, and black powder bombs fizzled in the night with a wheezing and a sobbing until great pillars of smoke billowed through the air and the zocalo looked like a war zone.
"Poppa," Erriberto whispered, "look! They're crying out. They're moving."
Martín had to hold the boy in his arms and reassure him. The radishes were as twisted and bizarre as any demon, with roots and veins bursting with blood.
"Unnatural," Eduardo whispered. "This is sacrilege."
"No, no," Rosa said, calming her children, "merely fun and games. It happens once a year, like a puff of smoke, and goes away. So learn to live with it. Forgive it."
"I can't momma...this is....an infamia..."
"An infamia?...as much as that?"
"It's unnatural, momma...and seriously wrong."
"I'd like you to listen to me," Rosa said to her children. "Does it grow in the ground?", she argued politely.
"Yes, it grows in the ground?"
"Does God make the ground?"
"Yes, God makes the ground."
"Is God all around us?"
"God is everywhere."
"Then wouldn't you say that what comes from the ground is God's order?"
"But this is evil."
"Why is it evil?"
"Because it doesn't look right."
"Sometimes you don't look right. Are you evil?"
"Momma," Eduardo smiled at his mother, "evil is evil."
"Does God create vile people?"
"Ah ha, he has you there," Martín crowed, enjoying his son's acuity.
"Are you saying God creates bad things?" Rosa replied, proud of Eduardo's jousting.
"I know these radishes are vile...and they sicken me."
"Behave yourself," Rosa admonished, "God will hear you."
"Gentlemen," Martîn addressed his two sons, "your mother is a Jesuit."
"Oh no, momma is not a Jesuit. She is a Tejacoqui!" Erriberto said, proclaiming for all the world to hear that Rosa Salanueva was a Zapotecan princess, and that when you come from the Tejacoqui, claro, you are sharp, and clever. You ask the kind of questions and you deal with the kind of answers that Gachupino Catholics are afraid to uncover.
"Truly, momma," Eduardo continued, "I think it's most disturbing."
"Most disturbing," DeSelva said, gently mocking his oldest son. "Eduardo, you sound like an Englishman."
"These radishes...smell of death....I don't understand the fun of it...or why people do it..."
"It is an unfortunate truth, my son, that dying takes the fun out of life. Truly!"
Eduardo stared at his father, and then he laughed, as he had been taught to laugh, at the madness, himself, the hysterical music exploding in his ears. As the parade of stunted children swirled by his side, pummeling him with blows to the head, and as the music thrummed and bombs went off in the air, Erriberto embraced his father.
"Am I an old maid, then," Rosa said, "to be left in the cold?"
"Erriberto is right," Eduardo said, holding his mother up to the light, as if he were a grown man. "You are a princess!"
Jaws broken, body mummified in plaster, Martín DeSelva murmured these snatches of dialogue...far away memories...to his brother-in-law, Antonio Salanueva, sitting by his side. So many deaths? So many horrors? All those fucking chickens on the highway, squawking in blood? Madre de Deus, God in heaven, for the life of him, Antonio Salanueva could not understand what he was hearing, where was he, for God's sake? He lifted his head, trying to suck in a breath of fresh air, as if he, too, were being crushed by a drunken chicken farmer from Cholula.
For the longest time, Antonio crouched by Martín's side, sick to his stomach, rocking backwards and forwards, unable to swallow. He dripped spittle onto the hospital floor and continued to spit, hour after hour, until a rivulet circled his feet.
Antonio was Rosa's brother and protector. A humorless man, Rosa's smile made him feel life was viable. She would never smile again. And poor Erriberto, Eduardo, he was their compadre, a true compadre in the old mountain way; he loved them more than he did his own children, for they were something special, like their father.
Antonio and Martín were lifelong friends and business partners. They trusted each other, implicitly. In a world that expected betrayal and broken trust, theirs was a friendship that was sung about in the ballad songs of the Miahuatlan. Although physically and spiritually dissimilar, they had learned to fit into each other's skin and work within each other's boundaries.
Salanueva was a massive man, with a thick head mounted on a muscular body. His hands were shaped like hammers, and behind his back, the smaller Miahuatlanos called him "Ox." He paid his campesinos good wages, excellent wages, but when they got drunk, or they wasted their time on the "lying dice," (for Miahutlanos practice lying and cheating even in their games of chance) Antonio offered them little patience. He showed them his horns. There was nothing subtle about his personality. He was as direct as a blow to the head. Ox suited him, for in the Miahuatlan, the ox is a most admired animal.
Salanueva sat, stood up again, paced the room, spitting and shaking, overwhelmed by the news, and now he looked down at his brother-in-law and friend, this frail, courtly man, wrapped in a body cast, mouth wired, barely able to speak, plumes of blood and saliva seeping between his lips, lying in this hell of pain and death, murmuring about radishes and evil and what is natural and what is not natural until Antonio Salanueva actually smelled stench in the room, as if he himself understood the meaning of this rot. "My poor friend," he said, smelling the bezaloo, "oh, my poor friend...we have killing to do."
DeSelva's right hip bone was shattered. His right thigh, knee cap, and tibia suffered deep lacerations. There was massive internal hemorrahaging. The midshaft of the ulna and radius was fractured. When that chicken farmer fromCholula hurtled through space and time like an exploding bomb, smashing into the DeSelva family, Martín had thrown his arms up in front of his face to save himself...and so he deserved the pain. He deserved it. And as a curse for his cowardice, forevermore, he would see the mouth of that farmer, screaming insanities, and that would be his future, year after year of insult.
When he was young, DeSelva studied with anthropologists from the Oaxacan Valley. Skeletons of human beings were uncovered near the hills of his hacienda. Some were old, some not so old. Experts agreed the earth where all the bones lay hidden was not a burial ground in the normal sense of the meaning, but a dumping place for executed hostages. There were so many fractures of the right ulna and radius, anthropologists called them "parry fractures," as if the hostages were trying to ward off blows of a machete, or the strikes of a bezaloo.
Not for one instant did his friend and campesinos believe the accident an ordinary blow of fate. Claro, these deaths were malevolent. Some vile thing had "calculated" them. If the good Martín DeSelva could no longer raise his arm and fight back in noble revenge, his people would do it for him, in the method and style of the Miahuatlan Mountains; they would wait until the time was right, be it a moment, a year, or a decade, but Madre de Deus, they would execute that bezaloo, and the insult would be repaid a thousand times over.
All life, Miahuatlanos reasoned, is fraught with treachery. Alliances molder. Morals corrupt. Even one's great love diminishes. This is commonplace, work of the laughing gods. This is to be expected, routinely expected, but when the mocking spirits expand and grow into something vile, when the insults metastasize into something monstrous, claro, one cannot fight this evil alone. It is folly to fight evil alone. Collectively, then, with the will of the people, you must spit into the bezaloo's face and show it you are worthy. That is the way it's always been done, and so it was that the people of the Miahuatlan came down from the mountains to visit Don Martín as he lay dying in the hospital.
For many days and nights they journeyed to Mexico City to hold his hand and bring him presents. They brought him what they could, for they were plain people, who held their hats in their hands and lowered their eyes when they spoke to you. Unsophisticated and alarmed by the noises of Mexico City, they were bedeviled by engines belching smoke into the air. Everywhere they turned, there were stinks, and vile smells.
Their jorney was an arduous probe into unfamiliar ground, and expensive. Antonio Salanueva could have paid for their fare, he was rich enough, but this would have been insulting to the campesinos, who believed that everyone had to pay whatever they could, and in this way, their united passion would save a good man.
On the first day of the week, Monday, usually reserved for market, Miahuatlano visitors brought Don Martín packages of acorns and almonds. On Tuesdays, there were tejocate apples, the kind he loved to eat when he was a boy. He'd slice them into little pieces, fill his cheeks as if he were a squirrel, then suck out the juices. On Wednesday, his visitors brought him fruits from his own zapote trees, as if the trees, and man who had planted them thirty years ago, would go on living forever. Even then, in the Miahuatlan, the zapote tree was a dying breed, but incredibly, as a source of wonder and a sign to his campesinos, his zapote trees were flowering. Especially now were they flowering. Thursdays, his friends brought good things to eat, tamales wrapped in banana leaves, sweet breads made with cornmeal and a dozen eggs; also there were rejuvenative soups, filled with meat and chicken. The smells were from his faraway childhood, when he played in the kitchen of his cook, Daria Obregon, learning the culinary arts of Oaxaca, for not only was she the overseer of all his campesinos, she was the most noted chef in the Miahuatlan.
On Fridays, Daria Obregon sent the patient mountain gourds stuffed with marigolds and dried crocuses. On Saturdays, there were wattled baskets filled with orange blossoms, spikenard, and quince. On Sundays, his hospital room blazed with the flowery reds, whites, and greens of the Miahuatlan Mountains. This was the day, too, when visitors brought Daria's famous tangerine drinks, the ones she mixed with secret spices. The visitors would not leave his bedside until they had seen him swallow these sacred elixirs. Then they would return to the mountains and tell Daria Obregon, in the minutest of details, how the patient had been a good boy and drunk everything to the last drop. And as they spoke, described what they had observed, the old woman wept, and scratched her skin.
Daria Obregon raised Martín DeSelva when most of his relatives perished in the Revolution; it was she who held his cheeks between her hands and called him "Mijo," my son. In most parts of Mexico, when a servant called her master "my son," she would've been beaten on the spot, kicked like a common cur. The shock! Perhaps it was due to the fact Zapotecas ate wheat breads more often than corn, and lived in the high places, or that Daria Obregon, herself, was descended from the Tijacoqui. In the Miahuatlan, a great curandera succeeds on merit alone, on the number of animals cured and patients healed, not on some fancy reputation, or Gachupino shingle. Almost seventy years of healing had given her a formidable will, and the eye of a prophet. Not many people would stand in her way. It's true she was shriveled and bent over, and only one eye worked, but that eye, Madre de Deus, flashed with lightning. When she opened her toothless jaw to speak, out snaked the tongue of a lizard, ready to strike your face if you showed her disrespect.
Martín DeSelva lingered between life and death for three months. In his ever present morphia dreams, he whispered nightly to his wife, "Rosa...I want to die...I'm ready...come for me." His campesinos would not listen to these prayers or let him slide away so easily.
Miahuatlanos slash at death; they swing their machetes; they jab and hook their knives until death grows weary and tries to flee; or once and for all, reaches out and grips you by the throat and drags you off to his cave. In the mountains, claro, one does not give up. It is not proper to give up. Life is taken from you.
The great Gringo War was over, and news of its bestialities were reaching the Miahuatlan Mountains. It was as if the Zapotecan prophesies were coming to fruition. It was clear to the people of the mountains an uncommon evil was sweeping the far away world, yes, there, taking over the outside world, but here in the Miahuatlan? never! Never here! For when people are clever, and considerate, and apologize for mistakes, evil journeys elsewhere.
Towards the beginning of April, when nights and days were unusually hot, the old curandera awoke with a start and discovered she had fallen out of bed. A layer of sweat drenched her body. Blood pounded through her head. A stink was in the room, the incredible stench of a bezaloo, trapped by four walls closing in on it, and now it was squealing, crazed by its impotence to flee, to escape through the windows, to slip under the cracks of the door and escape into the night. Daria Obregon could feel her heart jabbing her chest. She sat on the edge of her bed and called on all the forces of her life to help her battle the stench. Placing a pinch of tobacco between her lips and gums, she waited for the mixture to salivate so she could spit. Sometimes, answers to problems are right in front of your own nose. Sometimes these answers are so simple to achieve, it's hard to believe they come without a struggle. And because the vision of it came to her quickly, it took her breath away, and she did not trust it. But the more she deliberated, and the more she spat at the bezaloo, crawling and groveling in the corner, the more she grew accustomed to its evil. Daria Obregon would create a giant feast, a grand guzon. She dreamed it, and at the same time, she created it, and made it live. She would overwhelm the bezaloo with human kindness and largess; she would stuff its hunger and its madness with as much food as it could eat, until the beast was so swollen with the fruits of nature it would barely be able to move, or belch. So disgraced, it would try to escape, with its tail tucked between its legs. Then, at the height of its fear and self-contempt, DeSelva's friends and campesinos would piss on it, condemn it, and drive it away with the combined strength of human righteousness.
So it was that with the help of Antonio the Ox, horse and rider were dispatched to the highest places of the Miahuatlan, announcing the news of a great guzon. Broadsheets were printed, and all were invited to attend. Father Tommasso would sing midnight mass; old folks would chant the hymns of Teonactle; younger choristers would praise the Blessed Virgin.
Miahuatlanos would then form a candle-lit procession, and starting from the base of DeSelva's hacienda, move into the mountains, climbing higher and higher until the people could go no further, then turning around, descend into the towns below, through all the secret passageways known to the Zapotecan tribes, illuminating darkness, the night, for a friend who needed prayers.
Daria Obregon had never married. She was childless. She did, however, have three fine nieces, who were fond of her and she of them, and the curandera made sure the secrets of the old Zapotecan ways would not perish when she was carried away by death. It was part of her life's work to teach her nieces everything she knew, and they obeyed her, and listened, for it was an honor to be instructed by one so wise. It was announced, as a symbolic gesture, that she and the three fine nieces would pay for this guzon with their own funds. Furthermore, they would only make the foods DeSelva himself loved to eat. However, if people felt the urge to help in the undertaking, naturally they could "give to the kettle."
In the beginning of their days together, it was her duty to introduce DeSelva to the intricacies of her kitchen. She taught him how to pluck feathers and scramble eggs. She taught him the power of a sharp knife, and how to quiet squealing pigs. Her job was to teach him the ways of the world, and O Teonactle, there is much to learn, and most men are stupid. In time, this four-year-old boy, scampering through her kitchen and banging her pots and pans, would be a wise person, a leader.
The first course she dreamed, then served at the great guzon, was a might beef quizado, and the very first dish DeSelva had learned to master. He was taught how to pound the meat, grill it swiftly with a little oil, place it into the stew pot, add tomatoes, chilies, sugar and salt, then throw in the fiery peppers and spices of the mountains. The stew was simmered ntil it was shiny as the sea, and redolent with the great smells and memories of fresh earth.
Next came two kinds of pozoles, one shredded with pork and marinated in hominy and spices, and the other, a cubed pork, made drunken with herbs and glistening corn. Pozoles were the specialties of the Miahuatlan; Daria made hers with wild mountain pig. A domestic pig was not good enough. Adelaido Golpe led young Martín up into the secret places so he could learn about the wily animall, what it ate, what it drank, where and when it disappeared into the ground. It was hard to hunt and harder to kill, but once it was dressed and popped into the pot, Madre de Deus, O Teonactle, the taste was sublime.
Next on her dream list came another Oaxacan specialty, guzanos de maguey, white maggots that wriggled on the cactus plants. In the beginning of his lessons, Martín ran around the cookhouse floor swearing he would never eat those stinking things of merda, they were disgusting, completely unnatural. They were slimy, and vile, but when Daria fried them up a golden brown, they tasted just like bacon. And when the guzanos were served on tortillas made of wheat, with an interior bed of crisp lettuce, God in heaven, what a treat!
In the mountains of Oaxaca, it is a well-known fact that wheat eaters are a different breed of people altogether, claro. Wheat eaters, unlike corn eaters, do not bow, or scrape, nor do they ever forget an insult. That is why their dreams are always stimulating, and why they are not allowed to die, whimpering in bed, accepting infamias.
"Skin the nopal," Daria commanded, teaching Martín the intracacies of the cactus dish. "Pay attention! Do not look away. Chop its heart into little pieces. Do not make fun of it. Sing songs of admiration so the heart smiles at you and gives you its love, its respect. Now mix it with diced potatoes. Add these flecks of rosemary, these strings of garlic. Throw in the dried shrimps from the Gulf Coast. Cover this beautiful, sleeping princess with a blanket of beaten eggs. Bake her! Believe in her! Thus, we will create when the dish is done, the finest marriage in our kitchen."
One more cactus dish was dreamed and served by Daria and her three nieces, nopales navigantes, an ancient food of the gods considered muy antigas, and ceremonially important to the Zapotecas. "If I were to die," Daria Obregon told her nieces, "you will live on after me to cook the old ways. If you die, then Martín DeSelva will make these navigantes, but if I die, and you die, and he passes, then it will be over for the mountain peoples and all our secrets will disappear."
It was hard work skinning the cactus, scraping the insides, chopping the nopales into small pieces, placing the meat into large ceramic bowls to ferment in the sun; then the mixture was dropped ever so carefully into boiling vats of tomato broth, along with chopped chilies, followed by cilantro, lemon juice, salt, and secret spices. The dried chilies burned Martín's skin when he crushed them between his palms. He had to use all of his strength to make them yield their mysteries. The odor and the mist of the chilies made his eyes weep, until the three nieces laughed at him with a sweet delight, and consoled his crying in the kitchen by saying, "Learning is never important unless it burns!"
There came a time when Adelaido Golpe dispatched the young hunter into the hills all by himself to hide, watch, and spring into action, returning with the rarest piece of meat in all the world, the cachicamo. The mountain armadillo spends most of its life hidden under ground. Its taste is so prized, it's been hunted to the point of extinction. Tonight, the night of the great guzon, in memory of old times and old friends, cachicamo was served side by side the fillets of the broiled caguamo turtle from the southern Istmo. Gray flesh and green meat symbolized unity.
Surrounding the cachicamo were pieces of toasted pinoles, kernels of corn that were popped into the fire and dipped in salt. Many a night the orphaned Martín slept with a hoard of pinoles wrapped tightly in his fist, trying to remember what his mother looked like, for she, too, loved pinoles. She'd chew them slowly and politely, and with a loving smile, offer him a taste.
When the body bloats from rich food, Miahuatlanos revive themselves with drinks famous to the mountains. So it was that Daria Obregon served her fine tejate, a mixture of cacao, flowers, and water, marinated for three days and nights. Once, Martín ran circles around the tejate, stomping his feet and crying out, "Is it done? It must be done. This is done!" On the second day of the marinading, he ran into the kitchen howling, "Why isn't it done? It must be done! I want to taste it." But on the third day, chastened, and wary, he sat by the tejate mixture and eyed it ever so carefully, determined to master his impatience. When Daria said at last, "Drink. Now it's done!" he said, "Oh, no. It needs more time!" How the nieces loved that story. They repeated it many times during the great guzon.
Chilacayota is made from pumpkins, and it is a drink that spreads through the body with narcotic sweetness. It is not wise to gorge on Chilacayota, for it makes you defenseless in the presence of evil. To revive the senses, you taste from the simplest of all foods in the Miahuatlan, a pot of black beans, simmered with ipazote herbs. It is so wonderful a dish, it is said that even the gods prefer these beans to blood.
There came a time at the end of the great guzon when man, woman, child, beast, could no longer eat another mouthful. Tequila anejo and fine mescal were poured into clay cups, and the cups were raised in the air. Antonio Salanueva and Daria Obregon stepped forward, orchestrating a mass salute to the guest of honor, lying far away in his hospital bed. People toasted and drank, then hurled their cups against the ground until the cups shattered. The shards were driven into the earth and buried under foot. "This...is in your honor...my Beppie...," the old woman whispered to the skies, calling him by a name she used for a four-year-old scoundrel running around the tejate. It was a name he loved to hear. No one else ever called him by this name, saved this withered old crone with one good eye. How magical a name can be...O Teonactle...God in heaven...how magical is the eye that looked after me. Madre de Deus, bless her.
He was in morphia, and he could not move. Of course, the pain was excruciating, and of course, he had cried out, shamefully. Exhausted now, he lay in his dream state, visualizing disintegration. Surely no one could blame him for giving up the ghost. It was time. The sap was oozing from the tree. He was slipping into the stillness of pure, white light, letting go of breath, floating away on a journey of death, when he smelled the beans, with ipazote herbs.
A lamb was bleating, tied to a short rope. Then he saw the puma, circling his bed, "captured" by the gurgling of the lamb's sacrifice, enraged with hunger. O Teonactle, Martín cried out in his dream, my lamb is ready to die. So be it. It is time!
Never! Never!
The craggy face of the curandera pushed on through the caul of the hospital light. Her trembling hands, covered with liver spots, tore a hole in his burial shroud. He could hear the pawing and the scratching coming closer; he felt hot breath against his skin, and he knew she was as real as life, her paws rough as a cachicamo's hide. "Mijo," she hissed..."your soul is wandering." The right side of the curandero's mouth dripped with spittle, as if she were taken, and abused, with stroke. It was she who whispered magic words into his ear: "Revenge yourself!"
When he was home from his hospital bed, healing, among his old friends, he was sitting with them around a camp fire, drinking aged tequila and fine mescal when he spoke to them, haltingly, about his dreams, dreams brighter than any reality he had ever experienced. He described to them how an ordinary pot of beans, a common pot of beans with ipazote herbs smelled and tasted richer than any food he had ever eaten. He even described to his friends how an old crone came flying through the air to hold him in her cachicamo paws.
Dreams are ever mysterious things in the Miahuatlan, at once, guardedly personal, yet connected to all in the community. There are many people who say that dreams are silly things, and nothing but the detritus of the brain. Others say there is wisdom and merit to be found in them. His old friends respected dreams, feared them, but now they showed not the slightest bit of discomfort. They spat into the fire, and crossed themselves, humorously, as if they were conspirators in a comedic plot. They slapped themselves on the back, cocked their fingers at DeSelva, and for Miahuatlanos, their behavior was postively boisterous. "Old friend," Antonio Salanueva said, rising to his feet, a sly grin on his face, "we have stories of our own to tell thee."
It seems that all the people who had ever been cured, nursed, or fed, by the curandera Daria Obregon were assembled in the courtyard of the hacienda. They brought her many pesos and garlands of peonies. They brought her ribbons, and pieces of embroidery, which they sewed to her dress. A band played all the old songs, with xylophones and trumpets, and twelve-stringed guitars.
The old lady was then escorted to a caleche taxi cab parked in front of the hacienda. The taxi was newly painted, festooned with orange blossoms and spikenard, plaited with leaves of the wild mountain laurel.
Antonio the Ox was there; he lifted the curandera into his arms as if she were a handful of feathers. Then he placed her, ever so gingerly, inside the caleche. He did the same for the three plump nieces, with their pots and pans and bulging baskets of marvelous food. The crowd applauded. This caleche was a magic coach, and it would take the old lady and her three nieces hurtling through space, and time, across the vast colonias of Mexico City to visit her son, and to bring him home.
Daria Obregon had never been to Mexico City. In fact, she had never been anywhere outside of these mountains, so when the caleche taxi cab pitched forward with a squealing burst of speed, the curandera gripped her pot of beans with dear life. Friends cheered. The band played. Children danced alongside the caleche and showered the old lady with garlands of flowers. Touched to the quick, she closed her eyes, and in the old way, and in the new way, she prayed for a journey of life. That was a great day for all of us, when we killed the bezaloo.