Epilogue

MEXICO, 1936

I GREW UP in a town at the bottom of a valley enclosed by rocky hills burnt yellow and brown in the summer heat. Sometimes the streets seemed deserted, with the young men gone away to find work in the cities or north of the border. The young women remained to weave rugs of dyed wool from the sheep that lived in the hills. The old women made lace. In the cobbled central plaza there was a single trickling fountain; a white colonial church that my mother and I never entered; and the Hotel La Paloma Blanca, abandoned since its proprietor went bankrupt in the Revolution. It became an ornate ruin, its broken windows cloudy with cobwebs and dust. When I was a child, I believed it was haunted—when I was young, ghosts were very real.

My mother was the town's busiest midwife. She hardly ever spoke about her past. We lived on the outskirts in a stone house surrounded by a walled garden full of pepper and bean plants, tomatoes and squash. Our front gate, door, and shutters were all painted blue, the color that the old people claimed could ward off evil. The inside of our house was as spare as the garden was lush. The front room contained the blue-painted table where we ate our meals and where my mother gave me lessons in English and Spanish, Latin and Greek, geography and mathematics. The back room held our narrow beds. Our house seemed quiet and empty compared to our neighbors' houses, bursting with children, aunts, and grandparents, pictures of husbands and fathers who had gone away to find work. There were no pictures of men in our house, no relatives who came to visit. Just the picture over the mantelpiece of the young girl holding the baby.

When my mother was off attending births, I stayed with the old woman next door, who told me stories. Once she told me the tale of a princess grieving the death of her twin sister. She set out on a long journey to find a land where neither age nor death existed, thereby abandoning her parents and breaking their hearts. The princess journeyed to the edge of the earth, leaving all living land behind, until she came to a barren place that was the Palace of the Winds. Because the winds blew and blew so constantly, they kept age and death away. So the princess decided to make this bleak outpost her home. The winds roved the globe and brought back all manner of things—birds' feathers, pages torn from books, beads from broken necklaces, strands of hair, buttons carved from bone. Everything on earth that had been lost, never to be found again, ended up in the Palace of the Winds. And the princess spent her days sifting through the pile of lost things until one day she found her father's broken signet ring and realized that far away, in the land of the living, her parents were long dead.

I never stopped dreaming of my lost father. I imagined him having red-gold hair like mine. The only thing my mother would tell me about him was that he was deceased. For the rest, it was as though he had never existed. She seemed to want me to believe that I had sprung from her alone. She wouldn't even tell me how we had come to live in this town where my strawberry-blond hair made me stand out like a dandelion. I had always known we were different, from El Norte, and that for some unspoken reason my mother could never return. She never revealed the reason for her exile but told me it was simply so. A thing we had to accept.

My mother was respected and had many friends, for she had found her place in our town with the work she did. The women loved her, swearing she was the best midwife in the entire valley. They said that no matter how much a woman screamed or cursed in her labor, my mother stayed calm, never raising her voice. She mopped her patient's forehead, wiped her tears, lifted her shoulders, and urged her to hang on and keep pushing. They called my mother La Piedra, the stone, because she never lost control of herself.

La Piedra. What could be more solid—and more silent—than a stone?

 

When I was very young, I imagined that the Palace of the Winds was just beyond the hills that enclosed our valley. If I could only make my way to that place, I would find that heap of lost things and sift through them until I found my father's photograph. Some memento of him. A key that would unlock the door to the past and unravel my mother's secrets. The talisman that would show me where we came from and who we really were.

I knew she was hiding something from me, a secret too awful to speak of. It was common knowledge that criminals from El Norte found refuge south of the border. They lived among us, pretending to be innocent when in fact they were outlaws. Sometimes when I looked at her out of the corner of my eye, I wondered what she had done. Was she a murderer, a bank robber? No one in our town could imagine living so cut off from their relatives and home. Even the people who went away to work came home to visit. They sent money and photographs, and were remembered in their families' prayers.

Yet as wild as my imagination sometimes was, it was hard to cast my mother, the careworn midwife, as a villainess. This was my mama, who hardly ever raised her voice to me no matter how I sometimes tried her, who taught me to love Shakespeare and Beethoven. Besides, in the movies, gangster women were always glamorous and had perfectly coifed hair and cigarettes hanging out of their lipsticked mouths. My mother never wore lipstick or rouge, never painted her nails. She wore her shoulder-length hair tied back under a bright orange scarf that one of her patients had given her as payment. She never did anything to make herself look fancy.

Sometimes I thought she had been framed. That happened to good people in the movies. Whenever a gringo came to town, which didn't happen very often, I stood warily at attention, fearing it would be someone from my mother's past who had come to settle an ancient score. She seemed to have this scenario at the back of her head, too. When I was ten years old, she taught me to shoot her Winchester rifle so I wouldn't be defenseless if a bad person came. No one in our town dared to give my mother any grief. She had an aura about her, a way of fixing people with her eyes that said she meant business. She had the power to make even rough men look away.

My mother had admirers, too. When I was six, a young schoolteacher courted her. He brought her candied fruits and white gardenias. In the cool evenings, after she had put me to bed, she sat with him in the garden. Sometimes I spied on them through a crack in the shutters and saw them kissing. I prayed that they would get married so I would finally have a father. When he presented my mother with a ring, however, she told him no, it could never be. She couldn't give up her midwifery for marriage; the women needed her too much. In addition, she was older than her suitor. She told him he was too young to settle down. The young man's parents had their own reservations about my mother, competent midwife though she was. How could they welcome her into the family when they didn't know anything about her past? Obviously my mother was concealing something scandalous.

After my mother declined his proposal, the young man moved away. If he could not have the woman he loved, then he would see the world. Now and then a letter from him arrived. Once he sent us a postcard from New Orleans. Meanwhile the rumor went around that my mother had refused him because she had a husband still living. There he was again, my father's ghost. How that invisible man haunted me.

I was worldly enough to know that not all fathers were good. I'd seen wives and children with bruises they tried to hide. In our town there were fathers who drank, and worse. I don't know which possibility was more chilling—that I had lost a good father or that I was descended from a bad father whose bad blood ran in my veins.

My mother's silence made it even worse. I loved her more than anything and knew it hurt her when I asked about her past. She never cried, just covered her face and looked so sad that I learned to leave the subject alone. Images of what might have been filled the silent void as I tried to guess what unspeakable thing in her former life had closed up her throat. I sensed that she planned to tell me one day when she decided I was old enough, yet with each passing year she grew more reluctant to speak of what was past. My questions burned inside me until I thought that they would make me burst into flame.

 

In July 1936, I had just turned thirteen. It was a hot day, the arid hills lost in a haze of dust. The winter rains were long past, forgotten as a dream. I had gone to feed the hens and gather eggs when I heard someone knocking at our back gate. Eggs still warm in my loose pockets, I stuck my head over the stone wall and saw a stranger standing there, a woman in trousers. One glance was enough to tell me that she wasn't from anywhere around here. She addressed me in shaky, hesitant Spanish, asking if my mother was home. And she looked at me in the most curious way. All the hairs on my body pricked up at once. My eyes traveled to the bolt on the gate, then traced the path to the back door. It would take only a matter of seconds to run in and get the rifle.

"My mother's out," I lied. "She won't be back for the rest of the day." In truth, Mama was fast asleep, having come home at seven in the morning after attending a difficult breech birth.

The stranger's face wrinkled in confusion as I addressed her rapidly in our local dialect. Although it was becoming clear that this woman was a gringa, I refused to speak English. If she had come here to make trouble for my mother, I wasn't going to make it any easier for her. "Go away, why don't you?" Obviously this stranger was not a pregnant woman in need of my mother's services. Being rude to her would do no particular harm.

I turned my back, about to return to the house and lock all the windows and doors, when she started pleading with me in broken words like a child, asking if she could wait in the garden until my mother returned. She said she had come a long way in the heat and that she was very thirsty. Looking at her again, I noticed for the first time that she had a leather rucksack strapped to her back. Her face was beaded with sweat. I let out a long breath. What if she had come for no good reason? How would I be able to tell? But it was so hot. If I let her wander until she collapsed of heat stroke, the neighbors would never let me hear the end of it. Her face and mouth were so pale. I was half afraid she was going to faint right there.

So I opened the gate for her. Her trouser legs were powdery with dust, making me wonder if she had walked all the way from the train station in the next town. But I didn't ask. Even a tourist from a cooler climate should know better than to walk so far in the midday heat.

"Sit," I told the stranger, addressing her like a dog and pointing to the stone ledge against the wall. So she took a seat there in the shade, easing her rucksack from her shoulders. The back of her white cotton shirt was dark with perspiration. Meeting my eyes, she repeated her request for a glass of water. I kept an eye on her as I worked the iron pump that brayed like a donkey until the water ran clear. As I filled the iron bucket, I watched her shake out her sweat-laced hair. Then she took something from her backpack and turned it over in her hands. It was an object too small for me to see.

My bucket overflowed, cool water gushing over my sandaled feet. I found the tin cup on the garden table, rinsed it out, and dipped it into the water. "Here." I slapped it down next to her on the stone ledge.

She didn't pick up the cup, didn't drink, just stared at me. Then she said my name. "Phoebe."

My throat closed. I had to fight to get out the words. "How do you know my name?"

She opened her palm and showed me a carved wooden bird with its wings outstretched. And then she gave me a look that made me think she was a bruja, a witch. Her eyes said that she had known me from the beginning of time. I took a step backward and called out in a loud shrill voice for my mother.

When she flew out the door, my mother's face was as pale as her wrinkled nightgown. I shouted at her in warning, but she didn't seem to hear. The stranger spoke instead, drowning me out. She said my mother's name. My mother began to blink rapidly and said something in a voice too low for me to hear. The stranger rose from the bench and went to her. For a moment they just looked at each other. I had never seen my mother at such a loss. And then they embraced, my mother weeping in the stranger's arms. My mother, La Piedra. It was the first time I had ever seen her cry.

They were oblivious of me, though I kept gawking, bewildered and fearful of this foreigner who knew my name and had such power over my mother. Cramming my fists in my pockets, I crushed the eggs, and the yolks burst from the broken shells, staining my skirt a sticky gold.

"Phoebe." Tears in her eyes, my mother held out her hand to me. "This is her, darling. This is her."

Now I understood. That sweet-faced girl whose picture hung over our mantelpiece, that girl with her braid pinned around her head, holding a baby in her arms. She had found her way back to us, our angel.

Our guest, who was no longer a girl but a woman with a face as grave and life-worn as my mother's, drew me into her arms. When I looked into her eyes, I saw the same tenderness that was in the old photograph.

 

Penelope was the key. She took me to the place where all the lost things were gathered. She showed me the photographs, the pictures of Minerva. The faded newspaper clipping of my mother as a lovely young lady in a white flowing dress. Penelope told me the story that my mother hadn't been able to put into words. She revealed as much of it as she thought my thirteen-year-old ears could bear. That she loved us and had never forgotten us. That she had become a doctor, one of three women in her graduating class. That she had been searching for us all along. One summer she had worked at a charity hospital near Tijuana and spent her free hours combing the surrounding villages, asking people if they knew of a gringa with striking green eyes who was raising a girl on her own. Finally, in a hospital in Los Banos, California, she had treated a man from our town who had told her where she could find us.

Over the years, when she returned to visit us each summer, I learned the whole story. She told me about my father and then about the shooting, confessed that it was her finger on the trigger, not my mother's. She opened herself to my reprisals. After my shock died down, I at last came to understand the mystery behind my mother's silence. Penelope proved to me that I was my mother's daughter, not his. I was my mother's child, sprung from her body, her fierce longing and love. It was on account of Penelope that I learned who I was and where I came from.

 

In that summer of 1936, I watched Penelope and my mother playing chess in our garden. The intense sunlight streamed through the dancing eucalyptus and olive branches and shone on the orange nasturtium and blazing red hibiscus. The sun poured down on my mother's chestnut hair and on the garden table, painted deep turquoise. I watched their hands move the kings and queens across the board. Penelope, the real outlaw, who had lived her life disguised as an innocent. My mother, the innocent, who had taken on the guise of an outlaw, choosing a life of exile in order to protect her friend. Looking through Penelope's eyes, I learned to see my mother as beautiful and courageous, a woman who could not remain earthbound but who had sprouted wings and flown farther than anyone had thought possible. Sometimes the Gods disguise themselves as mortals and walk among us, at least for a time, before they disappear.