The Witches of El Paso

Chapter 3

3

At Nena’s house, the air reeks of charred food and melted plastic. Black soot coats the wall behind the stove. The pot that caught fire sits in the sink, its handle twisted into a bubbled clump. A big box fan blows burnt hot air around the kitchen. Marta looks out at the dry backyard, at the line of yuccas against the back fence. She sets her bag down on the chipped Formica table, slides off her suit jacket, and drapes it on the back of the vinyl chair. Her headache has only gotten worse since she left the office, the buzzing now impossible to ignore.

“I left the rice on for too long and the pot caught fire,” Nena says. She’s wearing bright red lipstick. Jeans bought from the Walmart boys’ department. Fluorescent running shoes. Her eyes are brown, bright, like she’s excited. Even now, as frustrated and worried as Marta is, she can’t help but feel a rush of affection for Nena.

“Nena, you could have burned the house down,” Marta says, not meaning to scold, but Nena’s cheerful expression worries her. Nena doesn’t seem aware of the danger she’s put herself in.

“I know it looks bad. There was a lot of smoke, but the fire was out by the time the firemen came. Not that I minded having them here. So handsome.”

“Where’s your bucket?” Marta asks.

“Under the sink. Don’t bother with cleaning up. I can still climb a step stool and use a sponge. I’m not like those other viejitas who put on an organ recital every chance they get.”

“Organ recital?” Marta asks.

“You know, blah blah my bladder, ay chihuahua my heart. The medication I have to take, dios mío, it makes me pee at night, my hips, my colon and my caca, my eyes, my liver. That’s the worst thing about old people, you know, the complaining?”

Nena isn’t a complainer. Ninety-something and still living on her own. No children, no grandchildren. Friends, dead. Olga and Luna, her sisters, both gone.

When Olga was on her deathbed, she made Marta promise to take care of Nena. Marta agreed immediately, not wanting Olga to be anxious about Nena in her last moments, but a promise wasn’t necessary. Marta and Nena are the only two family members left in El Paso, great-aunt and grandniece, a funny connection that for most people means very little, but for Marta it matters a lot. Nena is like no one else in Marta’s family—in fact, like no one else she knows. Nena has never been afraid to be outrageous, and Marta loves her for it.

Marta fills the plastic bucket with warm water, then squirts in dish soap. She rolls up her sleeves and carries the bucket closer to the wall, then uses the rough green side of a sponge to scrub the soot off the yellow wall. Underneath the soot, a crack runs from the ceiling to the floor. The house is in terrible shape, the linoleum in the kitchen peeling, the front yard overgrown. It’s been clear for a long time that Nena shouldn’t be living alone, and Marta regrets not forcing a decision earlier, though Nena hasn’t made it easy, refusing to talk about health aides or retirement homes. Nena will stay with Marta for the time being, and then they’ll find her a decent place to live, like Los Pi?ones, where Luna spent her last years.

“I’m going to make you una tisana. Chamomile?” Nena asks, turning on the tap to fill the teakettle.

“You can’t use the stove. The firemen shut off the gas,” Marta says. “Anyway, it’s too hot for tea.”

Marta doesn’t have time to sit and chat, as much as she’d like to. Nena’s always good for an interesting conversation, but Marta’s on a schedule. She needs to finish cleaning up the mess, and then get Nena packed. The boys have to be picked up from science camp, and after that, Marta will swing by the grocery store, fix dinner, and get the boys ready for bed. Once they’re asleep, she’ll put in a couple more hours of work. Soto hasn’t yet sat for a deposition, his lawyers throwing up every roadblock possible, and Marta is preparing another filing this week to make him talk.

“Luna really liked living in Los Pi?ones,” Marta says. “She made her casita so cute.”

“Do you remember when you used to help me with my clients?” Nena asks.

“Didn’t you sometimes go to the line dancing class with Luna?”

“You were always such a good assistant.”

“There was no always , Nena, it was once, only once that I helped you,” Marta says, scrubbing the wall. She recalls what actually happened, even if Nena can’t, or won’t.

One summer when Marta was eight and visiting Grandma Olga in El Paso, Nena asked her if she wanted to help with a reading. Marta said yes, long, delicious shivers of excitement running up and down her arms. She and her brother Juan had just been dropped off at Nena’s for the afternoon. Marta knew without being told that Grandma Olga wasn’t to know about the reading.

At the office, Marta corrected Jerome’s use of the word “witch” because Nena has always been particular about what she calls herself. She doesn’t use any of the usual Spanish words either, not bruja, not curandera, not hechicera, not claravidente. Instead, she says she’s a guía, a guide, and she believes she can help the living speak to the dead. When Marta was eight, she believed it, too.

Before the client came, Nena showed Marta how to melt piedra blanca on the comal, the white crystals of the rock spreading to the edges of the round pan. Sliding her glasses on, Nena pointed at the melted salt, tracing in the air what she called dibujos, drawings that Marta couldn’t see herself.

Nena said that the pictures told a story about Marta’s future: when she grew up, she would live in El Paso, in a house with a pool, she would be a lawyer, her husband would be a doctor, and she would have three children. Back then, Marta found Nena’s prediction peculiar, not least because Marta intended to be a doctor, like her parents, in California, where she lived. But when Nena’s prediction mostly came true, down to the pool, Marta quietly wondered whether Nena wasn’t as crazy as her sisters made her seem.

When Se?ora Hurtado arrived, she sat down on the couch in Nena’s tiny living room, clutching her purse and looking around, twitching her nose like she smelled something bad. The room looked pretty much as it does now, cluttered, with piles of old newspapers in a corner, mismatched garage-sale dishes stacked in the glass-fronted cabinets. Bundles of herbs hung from the rungs of an old ladder propped against the wall. A giant brass bowl on the floor held fist-sized chunks of piedra blanca.

Se?ora Hurtado wore a navy skirt suit and a white blouse with a bow at the throat. Her maroon hair had been blown into a fluff so wispy that Marta could see through to her scalp. Se?ora Hurtado said she needed to reach her husband.

Nena eased herself down on a pillow on the floor, closing her eyes. She muttered and swayed, and then she started to hum, the sound rising from deep within her body. In those days, she had dyed black hair and a powdered face, one dark mole on her left cheek, right in the center, sprouting a short hair that Marta had the urge to pluck with tweezers. Marta’s job once Nena went into her trance was to hold a shallow bowl under her mouth, catching any saliva that dripped down. Because he was so young, Juan’s assignment was to stay in the kitchen and arrange cookies on a plate.

Nena’s humming grew louder, accompanied by a terrifying whistling sound from her nose. Her eyelids cracked open, showing the whites of her eyes, her irises flicking up and down. Marta positioned the bowl under Nena’s chin. Nena exhaled three breaths out, like hoo hoo hoo, but loud, and then she called out in a language that wasn’t English or Spanish. Something crashed in the kitchen.

“Felipe!” Se?ora Hurtado screamed. “Please forgive me!”

Nena’s eyes flew open, and she scrambled up off the pillow, fast for someone so old. Marta and Se?ora Hurtado followed her into the kitchen. Juan was on his hands and knees on the floor next to the stove, shoving an Oreo in his mouth with one hand while trying to pick up the yellow shards of a broken plate with the other. He was crying so hard he couldn’t quite get a breath, fat teardrops flying out of the corners of his eyes. Marta considered giving him a slap to calm him down, but Nena scooped him up, helping him to his feet. Marta looked over at Mrs. Hurtado, wondering why she had asked her husband for forgiveness, but the terror on her face had faded, and now she had the same sour expression she’d come in with.

“Aren’t you going to finish my reading?” Se?ora Hurtado asked.

“There’s a child crying. Right in front of you.”

“And?”

“You can leave us now,” Nena said quietly, kissing the top of Juan’s head. Se?ora Hurtado glared at Nena, huffing her way out of the kitchen, slamming the front door, shaking the house. Nena blended a disk of Ibarra with scalded milk, making the hot chocolate frothy and richer than anyone else made it. She served it in little teacups from one of the glass-fronted cabinets, with saucers, like Marta was a grown-up. Juan soon forgot that he was upset, and he started to show off for Nena, pulling up the hems of his shorts to show her the mosquito bites on his thighs. Disgusted, Marta discreetly scratched her own bites, mad that Juan had ruined her chance to see a ghost. For months after she returned to California, Marta said hoo hoo hoo, trying to make a ghost appear, but none ever did.

That time with Se?ora Hurtado was the only occasion Marta saw firsthand what Nena was up to in her work. The adult Marta understands that the only ghost around that day was Juan. But Marta gets why Nena would gravitate toward witchy stuff. The same reason that Sofia believes in it. Magic, or the idea of it, is a way for the powerless to imagine they can become powerful.

Marta knows where real power lives in this world, in money and blood. That’s what the law concerns itself with. The system of law is arranged like a kind of game with high stakes that can be won, and Marta likes to win, forcing the other side to do her will. This is true power. She just wishes she were winning right now.

“You’ll come home with me tonight and stay at the house for as long as you’d like. But we really do need to decide where you want to be longer term,” Marta says.

“Cecilia Fonseca told me that at Los Pi?ones they put extra wax on the floor. When you fall and break your hip, they move you to the building with twenty-four-hour care, where they tie you to a wheelchair, and you can’t do anything for yourself.”

“That doesn’t sound fun. What can we do to make sure you’re safe and happy?”

“Safe?” Nena asks. “There is no such thing as safe. And sometimes I’m happy, sometimes I’m not. I’m always free inside my head. I could live in a jail cell if I had to,” Nena says, her voice rising louder and higher pitched.

“Nobody’s sending you to jail,” Marta says, surprised at the intensity of Nena’s response.

“No, if you’re in prison at least you can get parole.”

This is morbidly funny, and Nena has a point. Once she goes into a place like Los Pi?ones, she won’t come out until she’s dead.

Poor Nena. Ay, pobrecita Nena , Luna and Olga were always saying.

Marta remembers being a kid, sitting in Luna’s restaurant, La Sirena, after the lunch rush, reading a library book, sipping from a glass of Coke kept full by the waitress, Luna and Olga talking about Nena’s latest antics in tones alternately worried, amused, judgmental. Marta was taught to feel sorry for Nena, taught to think that what Nena spent her life doing was reckless and without value, that Nena’s spirituality wasn’t the right kind of seeking, but something self-indulgent, private, shameful. But the judgment of Nena’s older sisters made Marta pay attention to Nena more, curious about how she’d gottten to be who she was.

Nena reeked of patchouli oil, she laughed too loud, she was insistent on peering into Marta’s eyes and asking her questions like if she’d had her period yet, or, when Marta was older, if Alejandro was the kind of man who knew how to pleasure a woman with his mouth. Leave her alone , Olga would beg Nena. Not that it helped. It must be hard to be so tall , Nena would say when Marta was young, as if Marta didn’t already know that about herself. The rest of us in the family are such chiquititos. By the time she was ten, Marta was taller than Nena, taller than anyone in her class, and she kept growing. She didn’t like having Nena call attention to her height, but she appreciated that Nena always saw her as a real person, worthy of being asked provocative questions and of discussing things that mattered, even things that hurt. Nena’s right about happiness, how it comes and goes. But safety is something else. You can put your finger on it sometimes, like now. It’s not safe for Nena to live in this house.

Insects whir and click out in the yard. Marta’s done cleaning the wall, though a lot of good it’s done. Even with all the scrubbing, the wall still looks dirty. No, that’s not quite right. The soot is there, as black and furry as though she didn’t clean at all.

And then, in the next moment, it’s gone, the scrubbed wall exposed.

Marta closes her eyes, sure that she’s imagining things. But when she opens her eyes again, the wall continues to blink, soot there, soot gone. With her fingertip, Marta pushes the black stuff around, making a path through it. She lifts her finger off the wall, examining its tip. There’s nothing there. The air thickens, raising the volume of the hum in her ears, the buzzing deep inside her brain. Marta feels dizzy, weak. A flutter of nausea starts in her belly. She tastes salt in her mouth. Marta runs to the bathroom, making it just in time.

Heave, dry heave, heave, her forehead blazes. She spits and flushes the toilet, hoping she’s done. There’s nothing like throwing up to make you aware that all you are is a body.

Marta eases herself onto the edge of the tub, the porcelain cool against the backs of her legs. She breathes in the bracing smell of Comet. This is a very clean bathroom, even if the house is falling apart. The bathroom is pink—pink tiles, the toilet and sink pink. The room gives Marta the feeling like she’s inside someone else’s stomach. Another wave of nausea washes over her, but there’s nothing left to get out.

Marta turns on the tap and splashes cold water on her face. She’s not sure what she saw happening with the wall. She imagined it. Or maybe she’s having little strokes. Those can make you nauseated.

Nena knocks on the door to the bathroom, pushing her way in before Marta has a chance to say anything.

“Pobrecita,” Nena says, pulling a package out of the medicine cabinet and handing it to Marta. “Fresh toothbrush.”

Marta rips the package open, squeezes toothpaste on the brush, scours her teeth and tongue. She examines herself in the mirror. When she was a kid, she spent so much time in the sun, she was always a nice reddish brown, several shades darker than she is now. She has lines around her mouth that weren’t there two years before, and there is a certain sagging to the flesh under her jaw. Her hair is cut into a bob, meant to be easy to deal with. Today it’s wild, flying in every direction around her face, except for a few wet strands plastered to her cheeks. Marta picks these off her skin, tucking them behind her ear.

“Let’s get you packed up,” she says to Nena.

“You saw it, didn’t you?” Nena asks. “The door?”

“What door, Nena? Where’s your suitcase?”

“Under my bed. The door in the wall, I mean. You saw something you didn’t expect to see, didn’t you?”

“I saw soot that was there from the fire,” Marta says.

“Yes, but you were seeing it with La Vista. Everyone in the world is born with a little bit of it, but some of us have more, a lot more, and in the right circumstances it can be awakened into something that changes how you live in the world. I’ve lost a lot of what I once had. I use what’s left to help my clients.”

“Hoo hoo hoo,” Marta says, mostly to herself.

“You do remember,” Nena says, and Marta does. She remembers wishing she could be a person who saw things that no one else could, but to what end? Marta doesn’t need to be special in that way anymore. She hasn’t for a long time. Marta’s life and work are in the world that can be seen, where she has a to-do list a mile long.

“Can we please go home?” Marta asks.

“Yes, bonita. We’ll talk again tomorrow. The changes have begun, and you may have some questions for me.”