The Witches of El Paso

Chapter 25

25

The door opens, bright sun penetrating the restaurant, two women silhouetted against the light. One of the women is wearing a nun’s habit, the other a long dress with a high collar. They are both old.

The woman in the dress runs toward Nena, throwing her arms around her in a rough embrace. Nena hugs this woman back just as fiercely.

“Mamá,” the woman says.

Marta watches this, humbled and amazed at this reunion. Looking at this very old mother and her slightly less old daughter, Marta feels La Vista all around her, soupy, moving in eddies and swirls, smelling of cinnamon and cumin, mesquite fires burnt ashy, the west winds, heavy with rain.

Nena and Rosa keep their arms around each other, their heads close, talking quietly, their voices buzzing, too quiet for Marta to make out the words.

Marta can’t imagine what this must be like for Nena, what she must feel. Happiness. Pain at the loss of the years she and her daughter have spent apart, separated by a thousand borders. Rosa’s thoughts must be just as mixed, love for this mother she never knew, the object of longing, blame, and hurt. But what does Marta know? They’re both smiling, big face-stretching grins, and Marta holds the knot of their relationship in her throat.

Marta shivers, suddenly cold to the bone, and she turns to see Sister Benedicta, who is giving her the kind of look Marta hates, a sweeping up-and-down rake that takes in and dismisses everything it sees. Marta may not like being given the once-over, but it’s been a long time since she has been intimidated by a look like that. She puts her shoulders back.

“Don’t ever go near Pablo again,” Marta says.

“I only came to him because I couldn’t get through to you. You were using La Vista for your own purposes, blocking us out. Rosa insisted we do something to hurry you and Elena up. She’s a very willful child.”

“Child?” Marta asks, peering back at Nena and Rosa.

“Don’t pay attention to how she appears to you for now. She’s only twelve years old.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Even if it looks like we’re here in the bodies and minds we had when we died, it’s Rosa at age twelve who brought us here. Carmela has been telling her stories about Elena since she was born. This was contrary to my wishes, you understand. I didn’t think there was any reason to tell Rosa about a mother she could never know, a mother who brought so much pain to the convent and the aquelarre. I prayed that Rosa wouldn’t be cursed with La Vista, but God didn’t hear my prayers.

“One day a few months ago, all on her own, Rosa found an encanto in the kitchen. Before that, no one told her about encantos, no one told her she shouldn’t sing a wild one. I blame myself. Rabbits were being prepared for dinner that night. The carcasses lay on the worktable, cleaned and dressed, ready to be put on the spits. When Rosa sang the encanto, the rabbits stood up on their hind legs and performed a dance. The servants were so terrified they sent a representative to tell me what they’d witnessed. To keep worse things from happening, I decided to have Rosa enter the aquelarre. Once she joined, all she wanted was to find her mamá, and she was the one who found the encanto I sent to you.”

Rosa and Nena are sitting next to each other on the pew closest to the cigarette vending machine. They’ve shed decades, Rosa now a tween, Nena a very young woman. Rosa is curled up against Nena. Nena strokes her hair with hands that are no longer knobby with arthritis.

“Why couldn’t Nena stay with Rosa? Why did you send her away?”

“I don’t know what Elena told you, but that had nothing to do with me. They can’t exist in the same time. Rosa is your grandmother’s mother’s mother’s mother, all the way back. Look closer,” Sister Benedicta says.

The edges of Marta’s brain and body go fuzzy, and before she can be truly alarmed, La Vista is showing her everything. Now she’s the one hugging Nena, smelling Nena’s baby powder scent and the slight sourness of her breath. She feels safe in Nena’s arms.

She’s Rosa, and she’s telling Nena about her childhood, passing on these memories in a wordless way, a seamless flow of images and sensations. She’s sitting in the kitchen with Carmela, eating lágrimas de obispo, bishop’s tears, pine nut candy that she shoves in her mouth before they’re cooled, burning her tongue.

Paloma and Francisca teach her how to read Spanish, and Latin, Greek, and French and English. She opens the page of a book, the Greek letters legible, familiar.

Often when she’s growing up, she wakes in the middle of the night, hearing the nuns of the aquelarre creeping along passages, and she imagines her mother doing the same.

She pricks her finger when she’s being taught by Eugenia how to embroider, quickly wiping away the blood so that it doesn’t stain the fabric. Eugenia is the vicaria, in charge of discipline, and not known for her patience.

“But she’s not cruel to you, mija, is she?” Nena asks out loud.

“She never hits me.”

“She’d better not,” Nena says. “Tell me more. Tell me what happens to you.”

Rosa is herself, the twelve-year-old, but she can remember the rest of her long life, since this is before and after it happens. She’s a young mother, married with three children, receiving the news of the revolution. They hear of the Grito de Dolores, celebrating the freedom of Mexico from Spanish rule. Guns are fired in the air, a goat roasted in the courtyard. In her middle age, Rosa gives her granddaughter and her husband a blessing, making the sign of the cross on their foreheads before they leave for the Do?a Ana Bend grant colony in the wilds of New Mexico up the Mesilla Valley. This granddaughter becomes a citizen of the United States after the Gadsden Purchase. She was an estadounidense like you , Rosa says to Nena in her mind. Now it’s your turn: Tell me what happened to you when you left El Paso del Norte.

And now Marta is Nena, her hair grown out, running down her back.

When she’s returned to her El Paso, the streets are full of convoys going to and from Fort Bliss. An army truck full of men passes her, the soldiers whistling and hooting. She walks faster, hunching her shoulders to try to make herself invisible.

A civilian car, a Ford, stops right next to her. Se?or Obregon from the corner store honks, reaching across the passenger seat to throw open the door. He tells her to get in before anyone sees her, and when they get to the house, he walks her up to the front door, where Luna is standing. She’s wearing a smart navy suit, a hat with a black mesh veil, and white gloves, a little pocketbook tucked under her arm. When she sees Nena, she looks incensed. “Where have you been? Where did you go this morning?” Then she looks down at Nena’s clothes, her crude homespun dress, her bare feet. “What happened to you?”

Luna draws a bath, helping Nena take her clothes off, easing her into the tub. The water turns pink. Luna washes her hair, and when she gets out of the bath, Luna applies Mercurochrome to the scratches on her feet. Luna puts her to bed, pulls a cool sheet over her, turning on the fan and pointing it at her.

Her breasts leak milk.

“Es una loca,” Luna says when Olga comes home from the hotel that night, but Luna doesn’t say it like she usually does. She says it like she’s worried Nena is crazy for real. The babies lie on the bed next to Nena, tucked into either side of her, Chuy sleeping, and Valentina gnawing her fist.

Marta remembers who she is. The baby Valentina is her own mother. Marta tries to point her thoughts into this baby’s head. What was her mother thinking then? But Marta has no access to the baby’s brain, and Marta returns to Nena’s exhausted body, her battered mind. The comfort of this real mattress taunts Nena. She’d much rather be lying on the unforgiving planks of the narrow convent beds, holding Rosa.

“Tell us what happened,” Olga says to Nena. Luna stands in the corner of the room, smoking a cigarette.

Nena tells her sisters about the convent, about Emiliano, about becoming pregnant and having Rosa. When she’s done talking, she closes her eyes, tired beyond tired, the insides of her eyelids gritty with lack of sleep.

She hears Olga and Luna whispering about her. They argue for what seems like hours.

That night, they take her to the El Paso Home for the Insane. She begs them not to leave her, holding their hands, squeezing tight. The orderlies grab her, put a shot in her arm, drag her away. In the hospital, she wishes bad things would happen to her sisters, punishment for their betrayal. If they suffered like she has, then maybe they’d understand, maybe they’d believe her, they’d decide she’d been there long enough, they’d tell her they were sorry and bring her home.

When she’s finally allowed out of the hospital, she’s been scraped clean. Everything she thought was hers is gone. There’s no one she can talk to about El Paso del Norte. If she says anything, she’ll have to go back to the hospital. It’d be easier if she could convince herself that she dreamed being in that other time. Or if she could accept that she is crazy like everyone says. But she has stretch marks to prove what happened, her breasts heavy and aching, her history written on her body. She remembers everything.

That’s enough , Marta says to La Vista. I don’t want to see any more of this. Let me come back to myself.

But where is that?

Where’s her body?

In her kitchen, passed out on the floor? Marta doesn’t want to be stuck in this place where time and energy have collapsed in on themselves. Marta’s edges are fuzzy in this in-between place, so fuzzy that they don’t really exist. How much time has passed in this place? Hundreds of years? She can’t control anything here because there’s no her to do it. Maybe there’s never been a her, the borders she thought defined her only imagined, a story meant to create and protect the self that doesn’t really exist.

Back at the house on Overland Street, after being freed from the home, she takes care of the babies. She hides indoors, not wanting to see anyone from the neighborhood. One day, she hears a knock on the door. She sits afraid, unable to answer, waiting for Luna to come from her room and open the door.

A man in uniform stands on the porch, and Nena’s first thought is that Beto has come home from the war. She blinks, and Beto’s gone, replaced by a Western Union deliveryman, thin and mustachioed. Luna receives the telegram from the man with a trembling hand.

When Olga’s husband comes back from the war, he returns to his job as a mechanic at Montoya Brothers. Olga quits her job, staying at home to tend to the babies, and Olga arranges for Nena to work at the hotel. Everyone smokes in the hotel offices, even in the morning, thick clouds of smoke filling the rooms, ashtrays overflowing with butts. She hates everything about the office, the smell, the way that the secretaries look at her, with pity or something worse, judging her because of her hair, because of her ill-fitting clothes, because she finds it difficult to walk in heels. But she doesn’t want to disappoint Luna or Olga, and to keep from being sent back to the home, she knows she must keep her grief as buried as Luna keeps hers. Any reckoning with God and fate and La Vista has to happen in private.

She doesn’t even make it through a whole week at the hotel. It’s the presence of the spirits there that does it. The bald man in the corner of the ballroom who laughs into his cupped hands. The woman dressed like one of the ladies from the Mansion House. She faces the wall, never turning around, never moving, the back of her skull missing.

Not sure what else to do, Nena goes to see Do?a Hilaria, hoping she can receive some sort of advice about how to live her life. But when Nena arrives at the correct address, the tangled mesquite bushes are gone, the house razed, the lot bare, and she understands that there is no help for her anywhere.

She starts going to bars, crossing the bridge into Juárez, to meet men. One time, she catches sight of herself in the mirror behind a bar on Avenida Benito Juárez. She’s sturdy, boyish almost, dark-eyed and quick. She’s able to drink a lot, and she likes a joke. She’s willing to go home with almost anyone—skinny men, fat men, tall men, bookies, cabdrivers, doctors, men who have wives. She doesn’t do it for the money, but if someone gives her cash, she doesn’t give it back. She would keep the baby if she got pregnant again. She’s offered marriage more than once, mostly in jest, one time seriously. She refuses every time.

She hates to sleep because when she sleeps, she dreams. She dreams about a baby she’s forgotten to feed. She dreams about a girl with an extra nose. She dreams of a child who whispers curses at her, Damn you to hell, you witch .

Not that she needs a dream to tell her she’s damned.

The years pass, and there comes a time when Nena starts to think that maybe she’s been lost long enough that she can start to find her way back home.

There has always been one thing she’s known about herself.

She’s not like everyone else. She’s like a bird in the air, untroubled by rivers or fences, able to fly to the other side and come back. She’ll become a nun in an aquelarre of one, helping people in the only way she knows how. If someone comes to her with questions for the other side, she’ll tell them what they may not want to hear. La Vista never lies. Comfort is not its aim. Security and safety have nothing to do with La Vista. La Vista is life itself, and to engage with it is to be awake.

Marta pulls herself back to her being. She understands a bit more how this fiction of La Sirena works. The walls aren’t solid, and neither is anything else. She is a bubble in a bubble, floating in nothingness, moving in the sine wave of story, a rotary motion that comes back around to itself. This is how time travel worked for Nena, she jumped from one iteration of the story to the other. For her it was like a kid doing a cartwheel, a task best done without thinking, since thinking makes actions like that impossible.

It’s too bad that all Marta does is think. She’s never been able to do a cartwheel.

How are they going to get home?

“Am I going to be here forever?” Marta asks Sister Benedicta.

“No. When it is time, we will sing you home. But before you go, I want you to listen to me very carefully,” Sister Benedicta says, clamping her hand on Marta’s arm. “Pablo was never in danger from me, but you were right to be afraid.”

Marta is surprised by her sudden urgency, by how tightly she grips her arm.

“I have seen what La Vista can do to a person. Madre Inocenta lost herself to her greed, to her desire to control things, to live in that power forever,” Sister Benedicta says, her eyes searching Marta’s. “But La Vista does not bend to our desires. Do you understand what I’m telling you?” Marta’s suddenly a schoolgirl again. She can see how Sister Benedicta inspired such fear in Nena. Marta nods yes, so that Sister Benedicta will stop looking at her with such focus, but she doesn’t really understand what Sister Benedicta is warning her about. Marta’s not Madre Inocenta. Her use of La Vista has been for a greater good, not for her own benefit.

Sister Benedicta turns briskly as Nena and Rosa get up off the pew and walk over to where Marta and Sister Benedicta stand.

Nena has a fierce look, mirrored by Rosa’s. “We’ve decided that I’ll go back with you to the convent.”

“You know you can’t do that,” Sister Benedicta says.

“Then we’ll stay here.”

“Here is nowhere. It will be gone in the next breath. Rosa has her whole life in front of her. You don’t exist if she doesn’t live to give birth to the rest of the line. The baby won’t be born if you stay here. You know that. There are rules that must be followed.”

“Why? Why are there rules that only apply to me?” Nena asks.

“You never understood that all I’ve ever wanted is to protect my girls.”

“Not me. You didn’t want to protect me.”

“I didn’t know you were mine until it was too late,” Sister Benedicta says.

Rosa is looking down at her hands, young hands. She’s a twelve-year-old, upset, overwhelmed. Nena reaches over and tucks a stray piece of hair behind Rosa’s ear.

“I’ll take good care of your mother,” Marta says to Rosa, deciding that Nena is not going to Los Pi?ones or anywhere else unless there’s no other choice.

Sister Benedicta puts her arm around Rosa, and she starts singing the song of the aquelarre. First Rosa and then Nena joins in. Marta sings, too, and when they come to the end, Sister Benedicta and Rosa are gone, Nena and Marta left alone in the darkness. They crawl next to each other, pushing forward through mud.