CHAPTER FOUR
Patria
1946
From the beginning, I felt it, snug inside my
heart, the pearl of great price. No one had to tell me to believe
in God or to love everything that lives. I did it automatically
like a shoot inching its way towards the light.
Even being born, I was coming out, hands first, as
if reaching up for something. Thank goodness, the midwife checked
Mamá at the last minute and lowered my arms the way you fold in a
captive bird’s wings so it doesn’t hurt itself trying to fly.
So you could say I was born, but I wasn’t really
here. One of those spirit babies, alelá, as the country
people say. My mind, my heart, my soul in the clouds.
It took some doing and undoing to bring me down to
earth.
From the beginning, I was so good, Mamá said she’d
forget I was there. I slept through the night, entertaining myself
if I woke up and no one was around. Within the year, Dedé was born,
and then a year later Minerva came along, three babies in diapers!
The little house was packed tight as a box with things that break.
Papa hadn’t finished the new bedroom yet, so Mama put me and Dedé
in a little cot in the hallway. One morning, she found me changing
Dedé’s wet diaper, but what was funny was that I hadn’t wanted to
disturb Mama for a clean one, so I had taken off mine to put on my
baby sister.
“You’d give anything away, your clothes, your food,
your toys. Word got around, and while I was out, the country people
would send their kids over to ask you for a cup of rice or a jar of
cooking oil. You had no sense of holding on to things.
“I was afraid,” she confessed, “that you wouldn’t
live long, that you were already the way we were here to
become.”
Padre Ignacio finally calmed her fears. He said
that maybe I had a calling for the religious life that was
manifesting itself early on. He said, with his usual savvy and
humor, “Give her time, Dona Chea, give her time. I’ve seen many a
little angel mature into a fallen one.”
His suggestion was what got the ball rolling. I was
called, even I thought so. When we played make-believe, I’d put a
sheet over my shoulders and pretend I was walking down long
corridors, saying my beads, in my starched vestments.
I’d write out my religious name in all kinds of
script—Sor Mercedes—the way other girls were trying out
their given names with the surnames of cute boys. I’d see those
boys and think, Ah yes, they will come to Sor Mercedes in times of
trouble and lay their curly heads in my lap so I can comfort them.
My immortal soul wants to take the whole blessed world in! But, of
course, it was my body, hungering, biding its time against the
tyranny of my spirit.
At fourteen, I went away to Inmaculada Concepción,
and all the country people around here thought I was entering the
convent. “What a pity,” they said, “such a pretty girl.”
That’s when I started looking in the mirror. I was
astonished to find, not the child I had been, but a young lady with
high firm breasts and a sweet oval face. She smiled, dimpling
prettily, but the dark, humid eyes were full of yearning. I put my
hands up against the glass to remind her that she, too, must reach
up for the things she didn’t understand.
At school the nuns watched me. They saw the pains
I took keeping my back straight during early mass, my hands
steepled and held up of my own volition, not perched on the back of
a pew as if petition were conversation. During Lent, they noted no
meat passed my lips, not even a steaming broth when a bad catarrh
confined me to the infirmary.
I was not yet sixteen that February when Sor
Asunción summoned me to her office. The flamboyants,.I remember,
were in full bloom. Entering that sombre study, I could see just
outside the window the brilliant red flames lit in every tree, and
beyond, some threatening thunderclouds.
“Patria Mercedes,” Sor Asunción said, rising and
coming forward from behind her desk. I knelt for her blessing and
kissed the crucifix she held to my lips. I was overcome and felt
the heart’s tears brimming in my eyes. Lent had just begun, and I
was always in a state during those forty days of the passion of
Christ.
“Come, come, come”—she helped me up—“we have much
to speak of.” She led me, not to the stiff chair set up,
interrogative style, in front of her desk, but to the plush crimson
cushion of her window seat.
We sat one at each end. Even in the dimming light I
could see her pale gray eyes flecked with knowing. I smelled her
wafer smell and I knew I was in the presence of the holy. My heart
beat fast, scared and deeply excited.
“Patria Mercedes, have you given much thought to
the future?” she asked me in a whispery voice.
Surely it would be pride to claim a calling at my
young age! I shook my head, blushing, and looked down at my palms,
marked, the country people say, with a map of the future.
“You must pray to the Virgencita for guidance,” she
said.
I could feel the tenderness of her gaze, and I
looked up. Beyond her, I saw the first zigzag of lightning, and
heard, far off, the rumble of thunder. “I do, Sister, I pray at all
times to know His will so it can be done.”
She nodded. “We have noticed from the first how
seriously you take your religious obligations. Now you must listen
deeply in case He is calling. We would welcome you as one of us if
that is His Will.”
I felt the sweet release of tears. My face was wet
with them. “Now, now,” she said, patting my knees. “Let’s not be
sad.”
“I’m not sad, Sister,” I said when I had regained
some composure. “These are tears of joy and hope that He will make
His will known to me.”
“He will,” she assured me. “Listen at all times. In
wakefulness, in sleep, as you work and as you play.”
I nodded and then she added, “Now let us pray
together that soon, soon, you will know.” And I prayed with her, a
Hail Mary and an Our Father, and I tried hard but I could not keep
my eyes from straying to the flame trees, their blossoms tumbling
in the wind of the coming storm.
There was a struggle, but no one could tell. It
came in the dark in the evil hours when the hands wake with a life
of their own. They rambled over my growing body, they touched the
plumping of my chest, the mound of my belly, and on down. I tried
reining them in, but they broke loose, night after night.
For Three Kings, I asked for a crucifix for above
my bed. Nights, I laid it beside me so that my hands, waking, could
touch his suffering flesh instead and be tamed from their shameful
wanderings. The ruse worked, the hands slept again, but other parts
of my body began to wake.
My mouth, for instance, craved sweets, figs in
their heavy syrup, coconut candy, soft golden flans. When those
young men whose surnames had been appropriated for years by my
mooning girlfriends came to the store and drummed their big hands
on the counter, I wanted to take each finger in my mouth and feel
their calluses with my tongue.
My shoulders, my elbows, my knees ached to be
touched. Not to mention my back and the hard cap of my skull.
“Here’s a peseta,” I’d say to Minerva. “Play with my hair.” She’d
laugh, and combing her fingers through it, she’d ask, “Do you
really believe what the gospel says? He knows how many strands of
hair are on your head?”
“Come, come, little sister,” I’d admonish her.
“Don’t play with the word of God.”
“I’m going to count them,” she’d say. “I want to
see how hard His work is.”
She’d start in as if it were not an impossible
task, “Uno, dos, tres ...” Soon her gratifying fingering and
her lilting voice would lull me to sleep again.
It was after my conference with Sor Asunción, once
I had begun praying to know my calling, that suddenly, like a lull
in a storm, the cravings stopped. All was quiet. I slept obediently
through the night. The struggle was over, but I was not sure who
had won.
I thought this was a sign. Sor Asunción had
mentioned that the calling could come in all sorts of ways, dreams,
visitations, a crisis. Soon after our conference, school was out
for Holy Week. The nuns closed themselves up in their convent for
their yearly mortifications in honor of the crucifixion of their
bridegroom and Lord, Jesus Christ.
I went home to do likewise, sure in my bones that I
would hear His calling now. I joined in Padre Ignacio’s Holy Week
activities, going to the nightly novenas and daily mass. On Holy
Thursday, I brought my pan and towels along with the other
penitents for washing the feet of the parishioners at the door of
the church.
The lines were long that night. One after another,
I washed pairs of feet, not bothering to look up, entranced in my
prayerful listening. Then, of a sudden, I noticed a pale young foot
luxuriant with dark hair in my fresh pan of water, and my legs went
soft beneath me.
I washed that foot thoroughly, lifting it by the
ankle to soap the underside as one does a baby’s legs in cleaning
its bottom. Then, I started in on the other one. I worked
diligently, oblivious to the long lines stretching away in the
dark. When I was done, I could not help looking up.
A young man was staring down at me, his face
alluring in the same animal way as his feet. The cheeks were
swarthy with a permanent shadow, his thick brows joined in the
center. Underneath his thin guayabera, I could see the muscles of
his broad shoulders shifting as he reached down and gave me a wad
of bills to put in the poor box as his donation.
Later, he would say that I gave him a beatific
smile. Why not? I had seen the next best thing to Jesus, my earthly
groom. The struggle was over, and I had my answer, though it was
not the one I had assumed I would get. For Easter mass, I dressed
in glorious yellow with a flamboyant blossom in my hair. I arrived
early to prepare for singing Alleluia with the other girls, and
there he was waiting for me by the choir stairs.
Sixteen, and it was settled, though we had not
spoken a word to each other. When I returned to school, Sor
Asunción greeted me at the gate. Her eyes searched my face, but I
would not let it give her an answer. “Have you heard?” she asked,
taking both my hands in her hands.
“No, Sister, I have not,” I lied.
April passed, then came May, the month of Mary.
Mid-May a letter arrived for me, just my name and Inmaculada
Concepción in a gruff hand on the envelope. Sor Asunción called me
to her office to deliver it, an unusual precaution since the
sisters limited themselves to monitoring our correspondence by
asking us what news we had gotten from home. She eyed me as I took
the envelope. I felt the gravity of the young man’s foot in my
hand. I smelled the sweat and soil and soap on the tender skin. I
blushed deeply.
“Well?” Sor Asunción said, as if she had asked a
question and I was tarrying in my answer. “Have you heard, Patria
Mercedes?” Her voice had grown stem.
I cleared my throat, but I could not speak. I was
so sorry to disappoint her, and yet I felt there was nothing to
apologize for. At last, my spirit was descending into flesh, and
there was more, not less, of me to praise God. It tingled in my
feet, warmed my hands and legs, flared in my gut. “Yes,” I
confessed at last, “I have heard.”
I did not go back to Inmaculada in the fall with
Dedé and Minerva. I stayed and helped Papa with minding the store
and sewed frocks for Maria Teresa, all the while waiting for him to
come around.
His name was Pedrito González, the son of an old
farming family from the next town over. He had been working his
father’s land since he was a boy, so he had not had much formal
schooling. But he could count to high numbers, launching himself
first with his ten fingers. He read books, slowly, mouthing words,
holding them reverently like an altar boy the missal for the
officiating priest. He was born to the soil, and there was
something about his strong body, his thick hands, his shapely mouth
that seemed akin to the roundness of the hills and the rich,
rolling valley of El Cibao.
And why, you might ask, was the otherworldly,
deeply religious Patria attracted to such a creature? I’ll tell
you. I felt the same excitement as when I’d been able to coax a
wild bird or stray cat to eat out of my hand.
We courted decorously, not like Dedé and Jaimito,
two little puppies you constantly have to watch over so they don’t
get into trouble—Mamá has been telling me the stories. He’d come
over after a day in the fields, all washed up, the comb marks still
in his wet hair, looking uncomfortable in his good
guayabera. Is pity always a part of love? It was all I could
do to keep from touching him.
Once only did I almost let go, that Christmas. The
wedding was planned for February 24th, three days before my
seventeenth birthday. Papa had said we must wait until I was
seventeen, but he consented to giving me those three days of
dispensation. Otherwise, we would be upon the Lenten season, when
really it’s not right to be marrying.
We were walking to our parish church for the Mass
of the Rooster, Mama, Papa, my sisters. Pedrito and I lagged behind
the others, talking softly. He was making his simple declarations,
and I was teasing him into having to declare them over and over
again. He could not love me very much, I protested, because all he
said was that he loved me. According to Minerva, those truly in
love spoke poetry to their beloved.
He stopped, and took me by the shoulders. I could
barely see his face that moonless night. “You’re not getting a
fancy, high-talking man in Pedrito González,” he said rather
fiercely. “But you are getting a man who adores you like he does
this rich soil we’re standing on.”
He reached down and took a handful of dirt and
poured it in my hand. And then, he began kissing me, my face, my
neck, my breasts. I had to, I had to stop him! It would not be
right, not on this night in which the word was still so newly
fleshed, the porcelain baby just being laid by Padre Ignacio—as we
hurried down the path—in His crèche.
You’d think there was nothing else but the private
debates of my flesh and spirit going on, the way I’ve left out the
rest of my life. Don’t believe it! Ask anyone around here who was
the easiest, friendliest, simplest of the Mirabal girls, and they’d
tell you, Patria Mercedes. The day I married, the whole population
of Ojo de Agua turned out to wish me well. I burst out crying,
already homesick for my village even though I was only moving
fifteen minutes away.
It was hard at first living in San José de Conuco
away from my family, but I got used to it. Pedrito came in from the
fields at noon hungry for his dinner. Afterwards we had siesta, and
his other hunger had to be satisfied, too. The days started to
fill, Nelson was bom, and two years later, Noris, and soon I had a
third belly growing larger each day. They say around here that
bellies stir up certain cravings or aversions. Well, the first two
bellies were simple, all I craved were certain foods, but this
belly had me worrying all the time about my sister Minerva.
It was dangerous the way she was speaking out
against the government. Even in public, she’d throw a jab at our
president or at the church for supporting him. One time, the
salesman who was trying to sell Papá a car brought out an expensive
Buick. Extolling its many virtues, the salesman noted that this was
El Jefe’s favorite car. Right out, Minerva told Papa, “Another
reason not to buy it.” The whole family walked around in fear for a
while.
I couldn’t understand why Minerva was getting so
worked up. El Jefe was no saint, everyone knew that, but among the
bandidos that had been in the National Palace, this one at
least was building churches and schools, paying off our debts.
Every week his picture was in the papers next to Monsignor Pittini,
overseeing some good deed.
But I couldn’t reason with reason herself. I tried
a different tack. “It’s a dirty business, you’re right. That’s why
we women shouldn’t get involved.”
Minerva listened with that look on her face of just
waiting for me to finish. “I don’t agree with you, Patria,” she
said, and then in her usual, thorough fashion, she argued that
women had to come out of the dark ages.
She got so she wouldn’t go to church unless Mamá
made a scene. She argued that she was more connected to God reading
her Rousseau than when she was at mass listening to Padre Ignacio
intoning the Nicene Creed. “He sounds like he’s gargling with
words,” she made fun.
“I worry that you’re losing your faith,” I told
her. “That’s our pearl of great price; you know, without it, we’re
nothing.”
“You should worry more about your beloved church.
Even Padre Ignacio admits some priests are on double
payroll.”
“Ay, Minerva,” was all I could manage. I stroked my
aching belly. For days, I’d been feeling a heaviness inside me. And
I admit it, Minerva’s talk had begun affecting me. I started noting
the deadness in Padre Ignacio’s voice, the tedium between the
gospel and communion, the dry papery feel of the host in my mouth.
My faith was shifting, and I was afraid.
“Sit back,” Minerva said, kindly, seeing the lines
of weariness on my face. “Let me finish counting those
hairs.”
And suddenly, I was crying in her arms, because I
could feel the waters breaking, the pearl of great price slipping
out, and I realized I was giving birth to something dead I had been
carrying inside me.
After I lost the baby, I felt a strange vacancy. I
was an empty house with a sign in front, Se Vende, For Sale.
Any vagrant thought could take me.
I woke up in a panic in the middle of the night,
sure that some brujo had put a spell on me and that’s why
the baby had died. This from Patria Mercedes, who had always kept
herself from such low superstitions.
I fell asleep and dreamed the Yanquis were back,
but it wasn’t my grandmother’s house they were burning—it was
Pedrito’s and mine. My babies, all three of them, were going up in
flames. I leapt from the bed crying, “Fire! Fire!”
I wondered if the dead child were not a punishment
for my having turned my back on my religious calling? I went over
and over my life to this point, complicating the threads with my
fingers, knotting everything.
We moved in with Mama until I could get my strength
back. She kept trying to comfort me. “That poor child, who knows
what it was spared!”
“It is the Lord’s will,” I agreed, but the words
sounded hollow to my ear.
Minerva could tell. One day, we were lying side by
side on the hammock strung just inside the galería. She must
have caught me gazing at our picture of the Good Shepherd, talking
to his lambs. Beside him hung the required portrait of El Jefe,
touched up to make him look better than he was. “They’re a pair,
aren’t they?” she noted.
That moment, I understood her hatred. My family had
not been personally hurt by Trujillo, just as before losing my
baby, Jesus had not taken anything away from me. But others had
been suffering great losses. There were the Perozos, not a man left
in that family. And Martinez Reyna and his wife murdered in their
bed, and thousands of Haitians massacred at the border, making the
river, they say, still run red—iAy, Dios santo!
I had heard, but I had not believed. Snug in my
heart, fondling my pearl, I had ignored their cries of desolation.
How could our loving, all-powerful Father allow us to suffer so? I
looked up, challenging Him. And the two faces had merged!
I moved back home with the children in early
August, resuming my duties, putting a good face over a sore heart,
hiding the sun—as the people around here say—with a finger. And
slowly, I began coming back from the dead. What brought me back? It
wasn’t God, no señor. It was Pedrito, his grief so silent and
animal-like. I put aside my own grief to rescue him from his.
Every night I gave him my milk as if he were my
lost child, and afterwards I let him do things I never would have
before. “Come here, mi amor,” I’d whisper to guide him
through the dark bedroom when he showed up after having been out
late in the fields. Then I was the one on horseback, riding him
hard and fast until I’d gotten somewhere far away from my aching
heart.
His grief hung on. He never spoke of it, but I
could tell. One night, a few weeks after the baby was buried, I
felt him leaving our bed ever so quietly. My heart sank. He was
seeking other consolations in one of the thatched huts around our
rancho. I wanted to know the full extent of my losses, so I said
nothing and followed him outside.
It was one of those big, bright nights of August
when the moon has that luminous color of something ready for
harvest. Pedrito came out of the shed with a spade and a small box.
He walked guardedly, looking over his shoulder. At last, he stopped
at a secluded spot and began to dig a little grave.
I could see now that his grief was dark and odd. I
would have to be gentle in coaxing him back. I crouched behind a
big ceiba, my fist in my mouth, listening to the thud of soil
hitting the box.
After he was gone to the yucca fields the next day,
I searched and searched, but I could not find the spot again.
Ay, Dios, how I worried that he had taken our baby from
consecrated ground. The poor innocent would be stuck in limbo all
eternity! I decided to check first before insisting Pedrito dig him
back up.
So I went to the graveyard and enlisted a couple of
campesinos with the excuse that I’d forgotten the baby’s
Virgencita medallion. After several feet of digging, their shovels
struck the small coffin.
“Open it,” I said.
“Let us put in the medal ourselves, Dona Patria,”
they offered, reluctant to pry open the lid. “It’s not right for
you to see.”
“I want to see,” I said.
I should have desisted, I should not have seen what
I saw. My child, a bundle of swarming ants! My child, decomposing
like any animal! I fell to my knees, overcome by the horrid
stench.
“Close him up,” I said, having seen enough.
“What of the medal, Doña Patria?” they reminded
me.
It won’t do him any good, I thought, but I slipped
it in. I bowed my head, and if this was prayer, then you could say
I prayed. I said the names of my sisters, my children, my husband,
Mama, Papa. I was deciding right then and there to spare all those
I love.
And so it was that Patria Mercedes Mirabal de
González was known all around San Jose de Conuco as well as Ojo de
Agua as a model Catholic wife and mother. I fooled them all! Yes,
for a long time after losing my faith, I went on, making
believe.
It wasn’t my idea to go on the pilgrimage to
Higüey. That was Mamá’s brainstorm. There had been sightings of the
Virgencita. She had appeared one early morning to an old
campesino coming into town with his donkey loaded down with
garlic. Then a little girl had seen the Virgencita swinging on the
bucket that was kept decoratively dangling above the now dry well
where she had once appeared back in the 1600s. It was too whimsical
a sighting for the archbishop to pronounce as authentic, but still.
Even El Jefe had attributed the failure of the invasion from Cayo
Confites to our patron saint.
“If she’s helping him—” was all Minerva got out.
Mama silenced her with a look that was the grownup equivalent of
the old slipper on our butts.
“We women in the family need the Virgencita’s
help,” Mamá reminded her.
She was right, too. Everyone knew my public sorrow,
the lost baby, but none my private one, my loss of faith. Then
there was Minerva with her restless mind and her rebellious spirit.
Settle her down, Mama prayed. Mate’s asthma was worse than ever and
Mama had transferred her to a closer school in San Francisco. Only
Dedé was doing well, but she had some big decisions ahead of her
and she wanted the Virgencita’s help.
So, the five of us made our plans. I decided not to
take the children, so I could give myself over to the pilgrimage.
“You sure you women are going on a pilgrimage?” Pedrito teased us.
He was happy again, his hands fresh with my body, a quickness in
his face. “Five good-looking women visiting the Virgin, I don’t
believe it!”
My sisters all looked towards me, expecting I would
chide my husband for making light of sacred things. But I had lost
my old strictness about sanctity. God, who had played the biggest
joke on us, could stand a little teasing.
I rolled my eyes flirtatiously “Ay, sí,” I said,
“those roosters of Higüey!”
A cloud passed over Pedrito’s face. He was not a
jealous man. I’ll say it plain: he was not a man of imagination, so
he wasn’t afflicted by suspicions and worries. But if he saw or
heard something he didn’t like, even if he had said it himself, the
color would rise in his face and his nostrils flare like a spirited
stallion’s.
“Let them crow all they want,” I went on, “I’ve got
my handsome rooster in San José de Conuco. And my two little
chicks,” I added. Nelson and Noris looked up, alerted by the play
in my voice.
We set out in the new car, a used Ford Papa had
bought for the store, so he said. But we all knew who it was really
for—the only person who knew how to drive it besides Papa. He had
hoped that this consolation prize would settle Minerva happily in
Ojo de Agua. But every day she was on the road, to Santiago, to San
Francisco, to Moca—on store business, she said. Dedé, left alone to
mind the store, complained there were more deliveries than sales
being made.
Maria Teresa was home from school for the long
holiday weekend in honor of El Jefe’s birthday, so she came along.
We joked about all the commemorative marches and boring speeches we
had been spared by leaving this particular weekend. We could talk
freely in the car, since there was no one to overhear us.
“Poor Papá,” María Teresa said. “He’ll have to go
all by himself.” “Papá will take very good care of himself, I’m
sure, ” Mama said in a sharp voice. We all looked at her surprised.
I began to wonder why Mama had suggested this pilgrimage. Mama, who
hated even day trips. Something big was troubling her enough to
stir her far from home.
It took us a while to get to Higüey, since first we
hit traffic going to the capital for the festivities, and then we
had to head east on poor roads crossing a dry flat plain. I
couldn’t remember sitting for five hours straight in years. But the
time flew by. We sang, told stories, reminisced about this or
that.
At one point, Minerva suggested we just take off
into the mountains like the gavilleros had done. We had heard the
stories of the bands of campesinos who took to the hills to
fight the Yanqui invaders. Mamá had been a young woman, eighteen,
when the Yanquis came.
“Did you sympathize with the gavilleros,
Mamá?” Minerva wanted to know, looking in the rearview mirror and
narrowly missing a man in an ox cart going too slow. We all cried
out. “He was at least a kilometer away,” Minerva defended
herself.
“Since when is ten feet a kilometer!” Dedé snapped.
She had a knack for numbers, that one, even in an emergency.
Mamá intervened before those two could get into one
of their fights. “Of course, I sympathized with our patriots. But
what could we do against the Yanquis? They killed anyone who stood
in their way. They burned our house down and called it a mistake.
They weren’t in their own country so they didn’t have to answer to
anyone.”
“The way we Dominicans do, eh?” Minerva said with
sarcasm in her voice.
Mama was silent a moment, but we could all sense
she had more to say. At last, she added, “You’re right, they’re all
scoundrels—Dominicans, Yanquis, every last man.”
“Not every one,” I said. After all, I had to defend
my husband.
María Teresa agreed, “Not Papá.”
Mama looked out the window a moment, her face
struggling with some emotion. Then, she said quietly, “Yes, your
father, too.”
We protested, but Mamá would not budge—either in
taking back or going further with what she had said.
Now I knew why she had come on her
pilgrimage.
The town was jammed with eager pilgrims, and
though we tried at all the decent boarding houses, we could not
find a single room. Finally we called on some distant relations,
who scolded us profusely for not having come to them in the first
place. By then, it was dark, but from their windows as we ate the
late supper they fixed us, we could see the lights of the chapel
where pilgrims were keeping their vigil. I felt a tremor of
excitement, as if I were about to meet an estranged friend with
whom I longed to be reconciled.
Later, lying in the bed we were sharing, I joined
Mamá in her goodnight rosary to the Virgencita. Her voice in the
dark was full of need. At the first Sorrowful Mystery, she said
Papá’s full name, as if she were calling him to account, not
praying for him.
“What’s wrong, Mamá?” I whispered to her when we
were finished.
She would not tell me, but when I guessed, “Another
woman?” she sighed, and then said, “Ay, Virgencita, why have
you forsaken me?”
I closed my eyes and felt her question join mine.
Yes, why? I thought. Out loud, I said, “I’m here, Mamá.” It was all
the comfort I had.
The next morning we woke early and set out for the
chapel, telling our hosts that we were fasting so as not to give
them any further bother. “We’re starting our pilgrimage with lies,”
Minerva laughed. We breakfasted on water breads and the celebrated
little cheeses of Higüey, watching the pilgrims through the door of
the cafeteria. Even at this early hour, the streets were full of
them.
The square in front of the small chapel was also
packed. We joined the line, filing past the beggars who shook their
tin cups or waved their crude crutches and canes at us. Inside, the
small, stuffy chapel was lit by hundreds of votive candles. I felt
woozy in a familiar girlhood way. I used the edge of my mantilla to
wipe the sweat on my face as I followed behind Maria Teresa and
Minerva, Mamá and Dedé close behind me.
The line moved slowly down the center aisle to the
altar, then up a set of stairs to a landing in front of the
Virgencita’s picture. María Teresa and Minerva and I managed to
squeeze up on the landing together. I peered into the locked case
smudged with fingerprints from pilgrims touching the glass.
All I saw at first was a silver frame studded with
emeralds and agates and pearls. The whole thing looked gaudy and
insincere. Then I made out a sweet, pale girl tending a trough of
straw on which lay a tiny baby. A man stood behind her in his red
robes, his hands touching his heart. If they hadn’t been wearing
halos, they could have been a young couple up near Constanza where
the campesinos are reputed to be very white.
“Hail Mary,” Maria Teresa began, “full of grace
...”
I turned around and saw the packed pews, hundreds
of weary, upturned faces, and it was as if I’d been facing the
wrong way all my life. My faith stirred. It kicked and somersaulted
in my belly, coming alive. I turned back and touched my hand to the
dirty glass.
“Holy Mary, Mother of God,” I joined in.
I stared at her pale, pretty face and challenged
her. Here I am, Virgencita. Where are you?
And I heard her answer me with the coughs and cries
and whispers of the crowd: Here, Patria Mercedes, Fm
here, all around you. I’ve already more than appeared.