Durango, Mexico City, 1910
Fire!
I didn’t ride to Mexico City in a wash basket. I walked...or maybe I didn’t. I don’t really remember. I was only about four, little more than a toddler. I do remember Tía Emi dragging me along by the wrist. “Don’t fall behind,” she snapped. “If you get lost, I won’t go looking for you.”
Tía Emi was a seamstress. Her job was to make sheets and curtains and to repair tears in the children’s clothes. A tailor came from the city to make shirts for Don Adalberto and the boys. Doña Verónica chose dresses from magazines for herself and her daughters and had her own private dressmaker sew them. I remember Tía Emi running her fingers over the soft muslin of a petticoat. It had a tear in the hem, and Tía Emi was fixing it.
“Soft as a nun’s tit,” she whispered, in some sort of momentary stupor.
I had no idea what she was talking about. I didn’t know what a nun was and couldn’t think why her tit would be softer than anyone else’s. Maybe a nun was some sort of animal with smooth, cream-colored tits? My job was to pick scraps of cloth and thread off the ground and place them in a basket so that the older girls could sort them by color. Later, when my fingers were steady enough to hold a needle, I learned to make simple stitches. Before I knew the rosary, I could make flowers on cloth. You stick in the needle and make a loop with the thread, then you bring the needle back up through the loop and tack down one end. That makes a petal. Those petals were the only beautiful things in my life.
Tía Emi said she wasn’t really my aunt, although tía means “aunt.” She said she just took care of me because my mother was dead and in the big house where we lived, it was the custom for one of the servants to raise the child of another servant who had died. According to Tía Emi, my mother named me María Amparo because she knew she was going to heaven and I was going to have to depend on the Virgin to help me. Amparo means “help” in Spanish. They called me Mara because María Amparo was too long. I had no idea who my father was. Maybe some peasant on his way to an uprising or maybe a passing fabric salesman, Tía Emi said. Nobody worried about such things at the estate. As far as I knew, none of the children who scampered around the sewing room had a father.
I was content scavenging for snippets of thread and fabric, but what I liked best was hiding under the table and listening to the women sing as they worked. I especially loved the dark ballad of Miguela Ruiz, who murdered the son of the hacienda owner.
Don Pedro amaba a Miguela
(Don Pedro loved Miguela)
La persiguió noche y día
(He pursued her night and day)
La agarró sola en la cuadra
(When he saw her alone in the stables)
La tumbó y dejó con cría
(He knocked her down and left her expecting)
Un puñal entre las faldas
(A dagger hidden in her skirts)
Se coló en sus aposentos
(She snuck into his rooms)
Lo encontró besando a otra
(She found him kissing another girl)
Y el vil pagó sus tormentos
(And the bastard paid for her suffering)
“Puta madre!” Tía Emi would exclaim, a cigarette dangling from her fingers. He got what he deserved! The fucker had it coming!
“¡Se lo merecía!” echoed the other women. “He had it coming!”
I was an orphan, that’s true. I had nothing, but I don’t remember feeling neglected. I just didn’t think about it. Up at five in the morning, prayers at five fifteen, in the workroom by five thirty. At eight, a breakfast of tortillas and beans. I didn’t crave anything else. I didn’t know there was anything else. Day after day, gathering up snippets, handing Tía Emi the right needle, and then, when I was about four, hemming rags so that I could edge towels and sheets when I got older. Before supper, the women would sit on the floor smoking and singing, and I would breathe in the scent of sweet, cheap, black tobacco and doze. “Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” were not things anyone thought about. It never occurred to us that we were supposed to be happy. We were just supposed to be. To sew. “The pursuit of happiness” was something I learned about years later, in the North.
I didn’t question my routine, but I did notice things.
For example, when Tía Emi placed her strong, chunky hand over my tiny fingers to guide the needle, I noticed that her skin was the shade of rich dark chocolate, while mine was the color of honey.
I noticed that when the women sang “The Ballad of Miguela Ruiz,” they looked sideways at me out of squinty eyes and sometimes whispered to each other in Nahuatl.
I also noticed that Tía Emi sometimes snitched things from Don Adalberto and Doña Verónica—small things, like thimbles and leftover skeins of thread, fabric fragments, ribbon, and trimmings, or a tape measure. She even stole a pair of gloves that Doña Verónica had left in a pocket. Later, she started taking foodstuffs: beans, tortillas, a small container of dried fruit. There were some tins of condensed milk in the pantry.
“What about those?” I suggested.
She considered it and even picked one up and bounced it around in her hand.
“Too heavy,” she concluded. “Anyhow, that’s the sort of thing that would be missed. Preserved food is a luxury. Doña Verónica keeps track of the cans on her shelves.”
Instead, she took a mamey from a bowl on the kitchen counter.
“That’s as heavy as a couple of cans of milk,” I said.
“But we’ll eat it,” she said. “It’s not to sell.”
She hid her loot in a burlap bag she kept in a wooden box in the corner of the maids’ dormitory. Nobody said anything. Why would they? They were all doing the same.
Every once in a while, Tía Emi would take the sack out of the box and jerk it up and down as though weighing it. Then she would sling it over her shoulder.
One night, everyone went to bed earlier than usual. Ordinarily, Tía Emi fell asleep before me. I’d doze off lying next to her on the petate, listening to her soft, uneven breathing. I’d stare at her high, hard cheekbones in the moonlight that crept through the slats of the window. She reminded me of Chalchiuhtlicue, the water goddess, whose statue stood in the corner. She had Chalchiuhtlicue’s heavy nose, square jaw, thick lips, and perpetually open mouth, her low eyebrows and broad forehead, her surprisingly long and graceful fingers. That night, though, Tía Emi never seemed to fall asleep. I could hear her squirming on the petate, whispering into the darkness, scratching on the floor, coughing a kind of artificial cough.
Suddenly, someone was shrieking. Women were running around, baying at each other in muffled voices. Sometimes they spoke Nahuatl, but mostly they spoke Spanish. I strained my ears. In the distance, I could hear screams. “¡Fuego! ¡Fuego! Fire!”
Tía Emi and the other women were already dressed and pulling the children out of bed.
“Let’s go,” Tía Emi said calmly, but firmly. “It has started.”
She grabbed me by the wrist and shoved a bundle into my arms. She’d tied some of the smaller items she’d stolen into a neat parcel small enough for me to carry.
“Don’t lose this,” she snapped. She was pushing me out of the room.
Before I knew what was happening to me, I was out on the road, swept forward in a crowd of what seemed like hundreds of people.
“Stay by my side,” ordered Tía Emi. “Don’t fall behind. If you do, I can’t be responsible for you.”
The burlap sack was fastened to her back. It must have been heavy, yet she moved at an astounding pace. I looked around. Other seamstresses walked with us, sometimes three or four abreast, each with a sack on her back.
I heard what sounded like an explosion. “Look!” someone yelled. Everyone turned toward the estate. The manor house was ablaze.
“Keep moving!” ordered Tía Emi.
The blaze engulfed the house, the stables, even the nearby fields. The flames seemed to lap at the sky, an iridescent groundswell of fire so bright that it dimmed the moon and stars.
“Stop gawking and walk!” barked Tía Emi. “I don’t have to watch over you, you know. If you get lost, I don’t give a pig’s pussy.”
It’s true, I thought. She’s not my mother. If I get lost, she won’t care. If I get trampled or die by the side of the road, no one will give...well...a pig’s pussy.
I scampered beside her for what felt like hours. We trudged and trudged along the road. My legs felt like sticks ready to snap. My ankles were swollen and filthy. My feet burned as though fire ants were gnawing my soles and under my toenails. I was hungry and sleepy and had to pee, but I tightened my crotch and pursed my lips. I couldn’t have asked to stop even if I’d dared to. My throat was too scorched to produce sound. I stumbled, righted myself, then stumbled again.
“Walk!” commanded Tía Emi. She was dragging me now.
I’m going to fall, I thought. I’m going to be left behind, and no one will come looking for me. I was... I know the word now, but then, I only knew the feeling... I was expendable. I’m going to die, I kept thinking. I didn’t know exactly what that meant, “to die.” Tía Emi had told me that my mother was dead, so maybe it wasn’t so bad. Maybe if I were dead, too, I’d get to see her.
I felt like I was sinking into the earth, and then, I was flying, flying as though invisible arms were carrying me through the air.