THE EARTH

In time my aunts realized that they would not be able to get another man. My mother also understood, perhaps even before my aunts did, that her lover would never return. They all became more pious, turned into mediums, and went once a week to the temple of Arcadio Reyes, where they ended up being possessed and shaken by violent spirits. Even my grandfather’s house became a sort of branch of Arcadio Reyes’s spiritualist temple. People from every nearby neighborhood, and from some remote ones, would come to be cleansed of evil spirits by my aunts. All my aunts would gather around the person to be exorcised. Often people would be freed of their ills after one visit, but at times their problems were so terrible that they had to come again and again and submit to a number of exorcisms.

Once, while one of those spiritual séances was taking place, my cousin Dulce María and I took a handful of dirt and threw it against the wall; immediately one of my aunts came down in a trance. My grandmother’s parents had recently died and the heirs were having a feud over the distribution of the land. To my aunt, in her trance, that handful of dirt was surely a message from a spirit requesting that the land be distributed fairly among the heirs, or otherwise terrible disasters would come to plague the family. At the time, my cousin and I laughed at those predictions; however, many misfortunes certainly did occur later and the land was lost. Perhaps our hands had been tools of some prophetic and prankish spirit. In any case, back to the earth: One of the first things I ever did in life was to eat dirt. My first crib was a hole in the dirt, dug by my grandmother. In that hole, which was waist-deep, I learned to stand up. My grandmother had used the same technique with all her children; stuck in that hole, I would crawl around on the dirt floor. Later I would throw dirt against the walls, and one of my solitary diversions was to build mud castles. I would mix dirt with water that I had fetched from the distant well. A favorite game for me and my cousins was to throw dirt at one another. To dig out the earth was to discover unusual treasures like pieces of colored glass, snail shells, and shards of pottery. To water the earth and see how it absorbs the water we provide is also a unique experience. To walk on the earth after a rainstorm is to be in touch with absolute fulfillment: the earth, satisfied, floods us with its well-being, while its many aromas saturate the air and fill us with life-creating impulses.

When we were born, the local midwife who cut the umbilical cord would rub dirt into it. Many children died of infection, but no doubt those who survived had accepted the earth and were ready to bear almost any future calamity. In the country we were attached to the earth in an ancestral way; we could not do without it. The earth was there when we were born, in our games, in our work, and of course, at the moment of our death. The corpse, in a wooden box, would be returned directly to the earth. The coffin would soon rot and the body had the privilege of dissolving in that earth and becoming a vital, enriching part of it. The body would be reborn as a tree, as a flower, or as a plant that one day, perhaps, someone like my grandmother would smell and be able to divine its medicinal properties.