Guadalupe dancing in the snow.”
Two
GUADALUPE GARCÍA WAS CRAZY and even Flavio, who was nine years old, could see that. Worse, she was crazy and old. Flavio wished that he and his friend, Felix, were anywhere else than in her kitchen eating stale tortillas that went down his throat like dirt.
“Sometimes,” his mother had told him not so long ago, “there are people and places that are not what they seem. While it’s true, hijo, that the García house is no more than mud and sticks like ours, it’s also true that the spirits of her whole family are seeped into the walls, and not one of them was ever in their right mind.” His mother had been lying in bed, a pillow propped behind her head. She had reached over and taken his arm in her hand. “If some of the children in this village want to throw rocks through the windows of that house, that’s their business. You, Flavio, are never to go near there. Do you understand?”
“Yes, Mama,” Flavio had answered, without a second thought. He was a boy who knew instinctively that there was an easy way to go through this life, and disobeying either of his parents, or anyone else for that matter, was not a thought that occurred to him. Besides, even looking at the García house from a safe distance made him feel as if he were standing in shadows.
The house Guadalupe García lived in was the same house in which her great-great-great-grandfather, Cristóbal García, had once lived. It was built, as Flavio’s mother had said, of mud and sticks and sat on the hill not far from the church. The roof was dirt and—if there was enough rain in the spring—weeds and grasses and even small apricot trees would grow atop the house. Although the walls were thick and the corners of the house were buttressed to the earth, with its small canted doorway and few windows and the way it leaned with the ground, it often seemed to Flavio as if the house was not only on the verge of falling over, but was secretly thinking about leaving the valley.
The house was not only the oldest in the village but also the largest. It sprawled over what seemed to be an entire acre. Rooms branched everywhere off the original structure as if not one of Cristóbal’s numerous descendants ever wished to leave home, but just built their own rooms, attaching them haphazardly wherever they liked. There was no semblance of order to the place, and to Flavio it looked as though it had been built by children with whom he would not have had one thing in common.
“There are rooms in this house that I have forgotten,” Guadalupe said, looking at Flavio. “If you come back, I’ll show you. I’ll show you the room where my great-grandmother, Percides García, was kept. When she died in her small bed, the priest left this house and never came back.”
Flavio lowered his head and looked down at the table. The surface was built of heavy wood and it was rough and scarred and, in places, burned black. The floor it stood on was hard-packed adobe, and Flavio could see the shape of large rocks beneath it. After so many years of sweeping, the earth itself was being uncovered. He glanced back up at Guadalupe. She was sitting across from him and Felix, and again Flavio thought that he was in the house of a crazy woman. If his mother could have known that, he would have been beaten. It wouldn’t have mattered if it had been his Grandmother Rosa who had sent them here.
“Take this, hijo,” Rosa had said, handing Flavio a burlap bag of halva beans. “I want you and Felix to go to Guadalupe García’s house and give these to her.”
Flavio’s eyes had widened. “But …”
“I know what you are going to say, hijo. That your mother would not have wished this.” Flavio’s mother had died gently in her sleep the previous winter, and now he and his little brother, José, spent much of their time with Rosa while their father worked.
“Don’t worry yourself, hijo,” Rosa had said. “Your mother would have understood.”
“But Guadalupe García is crazy.”
“So?” Rosa had said, and then she had gone back to the dishes in her sink. “Now go.”
Guadalupe was sitting with both her hands on the top of the table, smiling in a way that made Flavio feel uncomfortable. Her hair fell far down her shoulders and was white—not gray like Flavio’s grandmother’s, but white, the color of snow, the color of clean paper. But her face was clear and smooth and her eyes were too wide, as if she were an old woman and a young girl at the same time. She was wearing a nightgown that fell to her knees and her arms were bare. There seemed to be so much of this woman that Flavio wished he were outside with grass and sky around him.
Guadalupe moved a strand of hair away from the side of her face. Then she leaned back in her chair and folded her hands in her lap. “I can tell you boys something that no one else knows,” she said.
“What?” Felix asked. He was sitting close beside Flavio and staring at Guadalupe, his mouth full of tortilla. His foot kicked against one leg of his chair.
“It’s a long story,” she said, staring over the boys’ heads and out the open door. “Have you the time to listen?”
“We’re not doing nothing, are we, Flavio?” Felix said, and Flavio, who knew that what Guadalupe had asked was more than a question, lowered his head and half closed his eyes. Deep scratches were etched on the table, and with his eyes squinted he thought they looked like rivers that ran everywhere and nowhere.
“My great-great-great-grandfather was Cristóbal García,” Guadalupe said. “He was the first man to ever set foot in this valley. And with him came Hipolito Trujillo and Francisco Ramírez.”
HIPOLITO TRUJILLO STOOD AMONG THE LOOSE ROCK and dwarf piñon on the slope of a foothill that overlooked the valley below. Standing beside him was his first cousin, Francisco Ramírez, and behind the two of them, his arms wrapped around his stomach, his shoulders slumped, was Cristóbal García. All three were thin and unshaven. Their hair was long and matted. They wore wide-brimmed hats pulled low on their foreheads, and their clothes were stained with dirt and sweat and the fat of small animals they had killed and butchered. Their raw and blistered feet were wrapped in cloth and strips of leather.
“All we could ever wish for is here,” Hipolito said. He looked at his cousin and the two men smiled. Then they lowered themselves to their knees and bowed their heads, their arms hanging slack. “By the blessed virgin,” Hipolito went on as his eyes filled with water, “this will be our home.”
Cristóbal García looked over their heads. Although the valley below was bathed in a soft light from the setting sun and the air was still and warm, he felt chilled, as if the world had turned to ice. We have come too far from where we belong, he thought, and this place does not want us here.
They had set out from the village of Las Sombras twenty-eight days before in search of a place where they and their families could begin a new life. They had left on foot with Francisco’s burro to carry their supplies: flour and dried meat, blankets, and a few tools. The burro, which had never been named, was small and so old it slept lying down and had to be hit with sticks each morning to stand. And, as it had gone blind years before, it was led by a thin rope.
At first, they had traveled slowly along the base of the mountains, thinking that surely in a land so empty it would not be difficult to find what they were looking for. “After all,” Hipolito had told Francisco and Cristóbal just before leaving Las Sombras, “beyond each ridge lies a valley untouched and waiting for us.”
They had stopped in each place they thought held the possibilities of enough water and shelter and pasture. But each time one thing or another was lacking. The creeks, running full in the mountains, suddenly disappeared beneath the ground or became dry, dusty arroyos, or the foothills lay flat and bare, offering no protection from the cold and wind. In one small valley, they had found markings that the Indians had left behind, pots full of colored powder, the hides of deer and bear stretched between trees, and circles of stone with strange clay figures propped up in the center with sticks. Though there had been no sign of life there, they had left quietly and quickly, leaving no trail behind them.
After ten days, they began to wander aimlessly. They would find themselves walking through