la huesera, or, flesh to bone

My tongue runs along the stretch of her tendons. I hold her foot delicately in my hand. Feel the spasming bunch of red muscle in my mouth. Her bones clinking against my teeth. This is the way it must be. With my hands feeling out the hurt, the places where bone was ripped from its place. Hold the flesh with my mouth. And with hands larger than my hands, I twist her frame, thrusting the bone into the hollows, anxious to embrace them. Tiny thunders sound along her body. Calling the spirit along the skin. Tears slip from my eyes without sobbing. With hands smaller than my hands, I bind flesh to flesh with tears. Whispering to the spirit.

The spirit has been hiding. The spirit wants to stay hidden. The spirit must be called.

Prayer with my breath. Inhaling. Prayer on my breath. Exhaling. Prayer in my breath. My hands flickering with measured curls of heat. My feet shifting until they rest, both solid and light, against the ground. Palms of my hands on her shoulders. Breath. Circles gradually increasing in pressure. Warm animal scent rising up, my nostrils flaring, my lungs filling, until I feel my pores exuding our commingled scents.

It doesn’t matter that it’s night. Dark. That the wind is cool. That there are no stars. No sounds. The stillness is its own echo. It doesn’t matter that I don’t know her name. Where she came from. How she came to be here. It only matters that I found her. Only matters that when I touched her I felt warmth still stirring inside her bones. So much blood darkening the earth around her. Violence a darker stain around her. But her spirit had not flown. Her spirit answered when I called.

My name is Maite Hernandez Ayala. I was sixteen years old when I came here to work. I brought my sister Raquel with me. She was fifteen. People said we looked like twins. Both of us with long black hair, slightly tilted black eyes, too light to be morenas, too dark to be blancas. Amá said we had cuerpos de limosneras, so thin we could wear anything.

People said we were pretty, that we looked like dolls. La suerte de la fea, la bonita lo desea, my mother would say, and tell us that looks weren’t as important as working hard, being honest, or having faith.

Amá prayed all the time. Before she got out of bed, as she was making the tortillas, before we ate, while she was washing dishes, while she fed the animals and weeded the garden. Each meal, each time she sat down, lay down, got up. The constant low murmuring of her prayers eased me into sleep, made me feel safe, followed me everywhere I went.

Then she took sick. She didn’t complain of any pain, but she was always tired. She grew thinner. Her eyes had too much light coming out of them. We made her go to the doctor in the next town. He gave her something for the pain.

One morning, she couldn’t get out of bed.

Shattered bone does not mend, they said. Crushed pelvises cannot be remade. They also said the screams were long gone. That spilled blood couldn’t speak. But I can hear them. I hear them all the time. So many names: Maria, Elena, Veronica, Rosa, Cecilia, Sarita, Isabel. So many women, each name has a hundred different faces. I hear all their voices. They keep me from sleeping. They paint my dreams in the wrong colors. Too many hands. The taste of brutal men. The sound of flesh being torn. Bones breaking and speaking. The whispers of blood as it touches the earth and spirals out. Death and violence soaking into the earth. Death and violence on the wind. And the scorpions raise their tails. The small insects go still. The coyotes howl and the whirlwinds whisper despair. The ocotillo and the nopal shudder, hiding their blooms, extending their spines.

We sold all our animals. Sold the rest of our land. Finally, we had to sell our little house.

For many years, Amá had been a partera and a sobadora. She’ d delivered many of children we’ d gone to school with, and people would often knock on our door at all times, needing Amá’s healing touch. She massaged out all kinds of pains and aches, stretching and twisting limbs and torsos. In all those years, she’ d only taken donations. And so the people of our town helped us for a long time, bringing food and watching after Amá.

Eventually, though, there was nothing left. We moved in with my mother’s prima, Altagracia. Amá had delivered all of her children, and helped her youngest, Gilberto, to walk again when the doctors had given up.

But Altagracia’s house was too small. Her three sons were in one bedroom, her two daughters in another, and she and her husband had the last bedroom. There was a tiny room that she had used as a nursery that she set up for Amá. There wasn’t even enough room for me and Raquel to sleep on the floor.

Amá had one sister who lived up North. We called our Tía Dorinda, and she said we could live with her. She would find us work.

So we left Amá with la prima Altagracia. She didn’t cry when we said goodbye, but she held us so tight she shook. Raquel and I kneeled by her bedside. She gave us la bendición, hands on our foreheads. Raquel and I couldn’t stop crying. I kissed her soft cheek, I touched her hair lying on the pillow, I held her hand to my face. I was so afraid we were never going to see her again.

There was no one else. No one to weave bone to flesh to blood, breath to life to blood. No one who could see what I saw, the streams and currents of golden light arcing inside their flesh, their bone. No hands but mine that could pull out the rewoven skeins of their fragile spirits. I gather their dry bones together, breathe the flesh back until everything is illuminated.

Heal the spiritflesh, and set the spirit free.

There was no one else. I had to wake myself, walk the spaces between time to return for myself. I have always been, but the desert is where I began. A broken girl rising whole, my body wavering between woman and wolf. My four-legged self has never been hunted. My paws have never touched the dust of time. The beating of my animal heartbeats echoing in all the places where the worlds are unseamed.

There was no one else.

Tía Dorinda welcomed us to her tiny house. To the place on the floor where we would sleep and struggle to keep our eyes closed, kicking away cockroaches. The days were all the same. We woke up at 5am. Ate cold corn tortillas and coffee without milk. Worked at the factory, sorting and twisting the colored wire inside televisions. Back to the tiny house, more tortillas and beans. To work at the restaurant, washing dishes and linens, the rats watching us behind the shelves.

We sent three-fourths of the money we made to Altagracia, then handed the rest over to Tía Dorinda. Kept hardly anything for ourselves.

Sunday afternoons were the only time we had free. Raquel and I liked to go to the Mercado, buy taquitos and a coke, watch the red-faced tourists, look at all the things people were selling: zarapes, t-shirts, sandals, boots, toys, wooden figurines, jewelry, roasted corn, crucifixes, plaques of la Virgen, plastic flowers.

After a while, we’ d walk away from the noise, head to the little church Amá had taken us to when we were little.

We wrote her letters every week. Had only been able to talk to her over the telephone once. Altagracia didn’t have a phone in her home. Amá had to be taken in a wheelchair to the payphone in the center of our little town.

One Sunday afternoon, I met a boy. Lázaro with the curly black hair and green eyes, who sold elotes when he didn’t work in his uncle’s shop, who didn’t mind that Raquel came everywhere with us. Lázaro, who tasted of Coca-Cola and sunshine when he kissed me. Lázaro, who bought me a bracelet with my name on it and fastened it around my wrist the last time I saw him.

It was dark where I was. Dark but I heard the wind. And that was all I needed to hear. When I rose, my hands were burning with heat. My hands were a molten gold in the dark. Tiny sparks falling from them as I raised them to my face. The deep lines on my hands disappeared. I breathed and felt the golden sparks falling inside me.

It was difficult to speak. I reached to touch my throat and touched a gaping wound. It closed so quickly my fingertips almost stayed inside. I made a sound that wasn’t a word. And then words I could not recognize. Newborn prayers fell from my lips in an unknown language, and I rose, my hips legs feet moving brokenly. But my gait became smoother with every step. I reached to touch my face and touched nothing I remembered. So swollen. No nose. One eye I thought was swollen shut, but when I touched the inside of my head, I realized my eye was gone. I touched the broken places in the back of my head. My long hair matted with blood. My other arm, hanging loosely from my shoulder. Skin and flesh stretched with the weight of my limb.

What were these words I kept saying? Easier and easier to breathe. I touched my face and felt the soft curves of flaring nostrils which hadn’t been there a moment before. I closed my eye and opened two. The world was wider. The desert stretched further in front of me. The horizon longer. I could see both hands, fierce embers leaving trails of light in their wake. The wind shrieked and tossed my hair across my face. Untangled, unbloodied. I pulled it away from my face, and tucked it behind my remade ears. Cupped the solid roundness of my skull.

I kept walking until my feet were solid, until each bone rested in its socket, until the flesh had knitted itself together. And then I fell to my hands and knees, mottled blood rushing from between my legs until it ran bright red, dark streams of vomit running from my mouth until my stomach stopped cramping. Tears poured from my eyes.

I fell on my side. Fell on my side, breathed, and felt the pain recede.

Amá died two months after we left her.

The money we had sent was barely enough to bury her. We didn’t have enough to buy bus tickets to go home for the funeral. We went to work that day, and worked as if it were any other day. It was later than usual when we left the restaurant.

I was so tired. I just wanted to go to sleep. I made my mind blank. Otherwise, I would have dissolved into tears.

“You don’t even care that she’s dead,” Raquel screamed at me. “She died all alone because you said we needed to come here to work.”

“We would have starved, Raquel, and Amá would have died sooner without the money we sent her. Died and we would have had to sell ourselves to bury her.”

“Liar,” she yelled, “You’re a liar, Maite.”

I was so tired. And my eyes hurt from trying not to cry. I turned and walked away from her.

Impossible to sleep without dreaming the desert. Impossible to wake without tasting its ghosts of midday heat on the tip of my tongue. I left all maps behind and followed the scent on the wind. Four-legged and long-tailed, I left all roads and stalked the wisping night shadows. No need for light. Running through the darkness. Easily avoiding the prickly pear cactus and the creosote, the shadows of mesquites falling across my face. Every stretch of my body made the moon brighter, pushing and falling away from the earth. The earth falling away from me. Undoing the seams of the world until I was running on the sky, until the roots of the mesquites twined around the stars, until the sounds of the cicadas seem to emerge from my throat, until the wind twisted like a river, solid and viscous, until bone and spirit exchanged places, until ash burned and the line between living and dying faded away. We only came to work, all their spirits say. Their bodies lay broken, their families are weeping. But here, where the world is undone, and their bodies are remade, their spirits rise in star-flecked spirals. The pooling blood runs backwards, their splintered hearts come together.

I know all their names. I will call them, and they will come.

I was so tired, I didn’t see them.

Too late when I noticed the gathering shadows. Too late when I started to run. A waste of breath when I screamed. No one came to help me. Too late when I picked up the metal pipe I saw in the alley.

Too late. Too late. Too late.

I would have kept on screaming, but they broke my jaw and shoved a dirty rag in my mouth. They took me to a dark place. Odor of rank sweat and grease. Beer and my own vomit. I lost the ability to count. Hours. Days.

I kept breathing until everything went black.

I can hear them weeping. I keep running through the world without seams, testing the fragmented wind for the scent of pain. Time keeps folding, forwards, backwards, in on itself. I hear a slight keening, a whispering that runs along my bones and makes them ache. I’m coming, I whisper, and the earth carries the words. I will bring what healing I can bring. Mend what cannot be mended. Restore the spiraling light. I know all their names. Mine doesn’t matter. I only came to do what must be done.

I wasn’t alone in the dark. I was so afraid it was Raquel crying. But there was no way to call out her name.

No way to know if she was one of the ones they brought in screaming. I’d prayed at first, but pain took all the words away. I never ate. Never drank. But neither hunger nor thirst mattered. I smelled them. The sweat and semen of men. I smelled myself. Blood and sweat and fear spilling from me. The other women lost in the dark. I cried until I forget what it was not to cry. No hope for us here. No one would come for us. So many had already died. Died the way we would die.

But still I kept on praying. Because I was my mother’s daughter. Because the constant murmur of prayers in my head made Amá’s face, Amá’s eyes, emerge out of the darkness. I didn’t feel so alone.

But I prayed that wherever she was, she couldn’t see me.

The truth is that this is all I can do. Heal their spirits. Their flesh is beyond me. And all of my weeping, all of my praying, all of my running in the night can’t change what has already happened—I can’t reverse time, can’t keep them safe and whole, can’t unscar, unwound, inviolate. I can’t stop the men who wounded them. I can’t punish them. I can’t make it so that they can’t hurt anyone else. The living can’t hear the names I would scream.

If I could touch them, I would eviscerate them. Let their entrails spill out. I would claw out their organs. Break their bones and laugh. Pierce their flesh a thousand times. I would take fire to their insides while they still lived. Eat their eyes while they screamed. I would have them know pain.

I would unmake them.

I saw her in the darkness. Just as Amá had described. The woman running in the desert, her body sometimes wolf, sometimes woman, bringing the bones together, speaking life back into them. I saw her running towards me.

I died screaming. They cut out my tongue and still I kept on screaming. They cut my throat and then the screaming ended. The screaming that could be heard.

I went to the desert and died. It didn’t matter that it was a desert of concrete and neon palm trees, a desert of factory lines and whirring machinery, a desert of fumes and smog. It was a desert and I died. I died and I awoke.

Blood in my ears. Blood from my eyes and my nose. Blood without pain. What I hear and see and smell on the wind. Running on the stars threaded through the dark earth. Broken lightning arcing around me. Shivers shaking through me. Finally, the cry I had known I would hear. The cry I had known I would have to answer.

She seemed so small, bleeding and broken. Crumpled on the earth like refuse. Matted dark hair. I couldn’t see her face. My hands were hot like embers. Tasted ash on my tongue. Felt my own heart beating in my hands.

Come back, come back. I knelt, and turned her ragged face up to mine. Held my cheek close to her lips, her nose, and felt no breath. Breathe, please breathe.

Maite, Maite, Maite, I whispered, calling the spirit back.

Calling myself back.

Flesh to bone to blood to spirit to power.

Beyond counting, the number of spirits I’ve rewoven, like the stars tossed in the sky, but this is where I began. Healing myself. Creating myself.

—for the women of Juarez, for women everywhere