Roberto Rodriguez-Estrada
On Friday she decided to risk the blessing of her mother’s beating. Left the washing on the clothesline out back despite the rain. She knew well what was coming, her retribution: her mother’s handprint on her cheek, bruises stamped round her throat, welts branded on her thighs. Never mind her chores. Never mind her mother’s rage. Tomorrow was the eve of her brother’s funeral and by Sunday she’d be out of time. Even the dog appeared hollowed out by grief. Took to sleeping beneath the kitchen table, moved only to kick and peddle his legs like he was fleeing death.
She grabbed a bucket beneath the lavandero, its cement surface damp and downy like moss. Dumped its contents into a head of spitting weeds and snapped the pocketknife to her waist. She had heard the stories in town, whispers clipped in passing. Couldn’t jostle them out of her thinking: mothers and widows sculpting effigies in mourning. Bargains made with the devil. Sons and husbands returned as children made of clay.
The downpour smacked a beat on the metal roof, tree limbs scratching at the windows. She had hardly laced up her boots and made it to the door before the dog was whining at her heels, leash dangling at the corners of his maw. He nipped at the hem of her raincoat, bore his teeth like he knew what she was thinking, what she was about to do. Stared up at her with the tacit understanding of an accomplice, without a blink. The act was as good as done.
She had readied herself, even before she stopped receiving her brother’s letters, stopped seeing him in her dreams. Before the Madonna Mestiza, to whom her mother supplicated nightly, began to leak red tears down her cheeks, to flinch when the girl pressed the tip of her finger into the sculpted tear ducts, wood easing into flesh. Before she shook the colonel’s hand the previous morning, her brother’s body covered in black tarp, and her mother began to dry retch right there. Los vecinos metiches prodding their eyes through the louvered windows. Pigeons flocking away from the scene. Before all of that, back to the evening he confessed to her that he had enlisted with the Sandinistas and would be gone by morning. Cradled her until she sobbed herself asleep, pleated her hair as he’d done since they were small, a thick fish tail. Back to the instant she watched him climb into his camo, his hair buzzed close to his scalp. His pensive eyes in the mirror, a smile hatching when he caught her staring. Fears and doubts buried deep.
She knew how he’d return, did not need to examine it to know the body had belonged to him. Looked because that was her duty as his twin, because she had never wanted to be separate, her own entity. He’d always said that if they cut themselves, flayed the skin to look, the flesh beneath would not be raw or red or stringy. Beneath, he believed, would be the beginning of the other half, the fold between them.
The colonel peeled the tarp, inch by inch, down the length of the corpse, his eyes trained on the ground.
But what was there to identify? The face was gutted and disfigured beyond recognition, the chest splintering like a cankered tree. Bile seared through her throat, burned the walls of her mouth. There was nothing left of him.
They had arranged the burial for Sunday, though even the most modest casket—complained her mother—would leave them penniless. What with her husband vanished con su puta querida, to whom he siphoned nearly everything they were worth
(el jodido-de-la-mierda, que queme en el lago ardiente del infierno),
and her maldito arthritis, which knotted her wrists and precluded even her most earnest attempts to sew or stitch or embroider, and her daughter—well, what did she have to say about her daughter? The girl who had failed to earn passing marks at school or to show interest in anything at all. Without friends or talent. Without initiative. The girl the nuns humiliated with lip-sucking gusto, her public beatings as certain and routine as Monday morning rosary prayers. The girl who couldn’t scrub a pile of dishes without dropping and shattering a piece of her tatara-tatara abuela’s heirloom china in the sink
(¿pero he creado una burra?)
the girl whose face was a softened, milkier version of her father’s. And though they shared the same striped malachite eyes—the girl and her mother—those eyes: they’d always shocked her. Terrified her. The way all her failures glared back, reflected in the eyes of her daughter. Mocking her. There was never a ceasefire to it, their mutual disdain; they’d always despised each other the same.
So there it was. The good-for-nothing girl could not stay. She could harvest cacao beans in Matagalpa if she wanted and learn the way that hard labor twists and bends the body out of shape. If she wanted, she could tie a black bandana around her face, join the Sandinistas like her brother. If she wanted, she could cripple the brute hands del hijo-de-su-puta-madre Contra soldier who went trigger manic on her brother. Slowly, slowly peeling off the fingernails to start; then, pulverizing all those little bones and ligaments beneath the steel of her combat boots. And then, to finish the job –
she nodded. There was nothing for her there. Not in that house, reeking of her mother’s perfume, the smell of fruit moldering at the altar. Her chores queueing up. Not in that torpid, doleful town, bereft now of all its men.
Her leaving was the first agreement they’d ever settled on together. She even agreed to work harder at her chores, in exchange for a bed to sleep in, a roof to cover her from the rain, a place for the dog. It was a temporary situation, dry shelter until she decided where to go, what she would do. So, it was decided. It was finished with. If she had to look back, she would do so only to kneel at the verdure skirting the town and to consecrate herself with fistfuls of volcanic earth: the red dirt of home, wet and dense enough to energize dead matter with new life.
They barreled down the gravel backroads, soaked to the bones. The dog leashed to her wrist. The girl sprinting just to keep up with it. Passing the whitewashed adobe church and its crooked belfry. Passing rows of tombstones and crucifixes lodged in the earth, mossed with bird droppings and dark algae, sinking into chokes of mud.
She liked how the earth sucked and savored her feet, how her boots squelched and popped out the mud. Petrichor saturated the forest air, thick enough she could smell the riverbank from miles away, clay nourished with all the minerals the rain was giving it. The summer ablution granting its own form of miracle.
She knew the path to the river like she knew which scars to look for when the moment came to identify her brother’s body. She could get there blindfolded and spun around a thousand times, hands bound behind her back, stranded alone in the woods. She concentrated on the earth, its message pulsing beneath her feet. In the distance, the river churned violently enough she could have heard it in her dreams, the way it used to lure them through the woods while they were asleep, reeling them toward the water as if by an invisible line. She felt the memories leap in her stomach, a brackish taste filling her mouth. Night after night of waking mid-drop, shattering through the surface, water cold enough to scald the skin. She remembered the vast dark of the river, its surface receding as her hands reached up to touch it, pressure wadding up her brain. Remembered the supernova explosion of her brother diving after her, his wave-like undulation in the water, his fingers wrapping round her wrists. She had forgotten how rough the river had been with them when they were younger, like an infant playing with rag dolls. The undercurrent dragging their tiny bodies across its jagged bed, clean lines cut across their faces. Greedy as it was, the river would have devoured them if it had not grown so fond of how they tasted in morsels
(so rich for spirits, you know: kin blood, twin blood)
if its hunger had not festered into an ache that is common among divine and mortal bodies both: a hunger for what cannot be kept or incorporated in the body, an ache originating from lack. A devotion that carries you, wingless and heavier for it, across mountains and cities and seas.
But no. For reasons only God could comprehend, rivers being capricious and temperamental as they are, it decided to spare them; so long as they visited often, bathed in it willingly, allowed it to lick the places where they were cut or scraped or wounded. Savored them with the tenderness of a leopard grooming her cubs. Two children who were not at all of this earth and still entirely of it; as much land and river as flesh.
The clouds wrung out their last drops and thinned to gossamer, allowed for light to fissure across the sky. The river’s surge had slowed to a gentle flow, debris bobbing idly along the stream, water placid enough she could have sculled to the opposite side of the bank without the risk of going under.
She fisted the earth with her bare hands, worked it with her fingers. Mud spongy like innards, like some primordial substance groped purposefully by a god. She scooped it up in ovules
(red like a flycatcher’s breast, red like the earth had cut itself bloody),
chucked the gobs into her bucket until it was full. She quickly had to stop. Her hands had gone numb and white, white, as though the clay had drawn all the blood through the tips of her fingers. As though the earth already knew what she wanted, what she was demanding of it. For blood is the most convincing kind of currency, when bargaining with deities who hold dominion over life and death.
The clay began to burble out the bucket, bubbles bursting and spitting off the surface, active like something grown and living was trapped in the mud, gasping for air. The dog growled at the sound of it, his muzzle laced with ribbons of slaver, and he jawed up towards something she could also feel before either of them could see it. Some forest creature maybe, sidling down its quiet path, loping through the fragrant thicket of ocote chino trees. Or else—
(what?)
a clamor of mockingbirds sheared the air like scissor blades, as if his husky barking had taken the soaring shape of a raptor, tearing into the wet forest canopy and mobbing their nests. She had never seen him seethe like that: his eyes were bloodshot with mange, the pupils dilated, the whites drained. His tail made a whipping sound, slapped against the dense and swampy dampness in the air. His hind legs kicking bullets of mud behind him. His eyeballs: black and red and alien to her.
He bucked, struggled to bust her grip on the leash. Knocked her backwards onto her rump, her arms embraced around the heavy bucket for support, her hind drenched, dripping as she drafted herself up. She didn’t need to think twice on it to be sure: she’d be sleeping in the courtyard again. If her mother didn’t kill her first.
She chided the dog like it understood her words, not just their frosted register but their meaning too, anger spuming from the corners of her mouth. Leashed him to a tall guapinol tree that stood plum at the edge of the bank, its roots flexing towards the riverbed, limbed down to the water. Drew the pocketknife from her waist, stripped off layer by soiled layer until she was bare, squeezed the blade into her palm. Behind her the dog was digging holes in the ground, wet mud bubbling up before it was flung again. She greeted the river, head first.
—❉—
On Saturday she knocked on the door until her knuckles throbbed. Begged her mother to let her in, let her in. Heard the bottoms of her sandals smacking the floor, the weight of her pounding closer, hesitating at the doorknob before finally she turned the lock, the door creaking open. On her bed she found a single straw-woven bag which leaked when she tried picking it up, stuffed as it was with all the clothes and sheets and linens she had abandoned in the rain. On the stovetop there was enough coffee brewed to fill a mug by a quarter. An archipelago of crusted beans on the skillet, a shriveled plantain sliver flopped to the side. The last bun in the cupboard was stiff, crumbled when she wedged her thumbs into the crust and tried prizing it open. No good. There was nothing else on the shelves, not even a bag of Maggi. Broken eggshells filling the carton on the counter. Time was up. She needed two days to do as the river had instructed, and then leave for good.
The kitchen table that morning. Her mother hunched studiously over her notepad, scratching at it. Her eyes warped and magnified behind the thick screen of her lenses. She was tight-lipped, stolid, like a sculpture that renders the impression of a face but nothing more. It didn’t surprise her a bit that the woman had shrugged off her theatrics of grief, as easily as a hen ruffles her feathers after a downpour.
Te vas mañana, her mother said beneath her breath, her voice frosty and crisp. Te vas con tu tio Manuel. As soon as the burial is over.
She felt her throat dry up, constricting. Felt her fingernails cutting into her palms, fists clenched at her sides. Her stomach moaned, somersaulting.
She had hoped to make the decision alone: when she would leave, where she would go, how she would get there. No chance you could get her in the same car with tio Manuel. Tio Manuel, who brought her corn husk dolls at Christmas, a rosary of coffee beans for her first communion, promised her a goat for her quince años. Tio Manuel who reeked permanently of field and manure and cigars, spat missiles when he spoke. Tio Manuel whose teeth were the color of sandstone, rotten at their roots; his breath rancid and hot. And then there were his children: three little girls, all below the age of ten, who came all the way from Esteli with their faces ruddy and smeared with dirt, their teeth capped silver, hay in their hair. More than that they were vicious girls, feral. Of course her mother loved them, invited them for holidays, offered them her daughter’s bed. Excused them when they pinched her own doughy arms or threatened her with scissors, dragging trails of mud wherever they went. Excused them when they stole the matches off the stovetop and tried to light the dog by his tail. When they kicked his stomach, sent him skidding across the tiled floor and crashing into the posts of the kitchen table. Her mother had always sniggered it off. Called them her kind of girls.
She dug the spades of her eyes into her mother. It didn’t matter. Here was a woman who was capable of erasing her only daughter out of existence, bleaching out the stubborn, insolent stain of her the same way she concealed the freckles that had multiplied on her skin and darkened with age, stippling her face and neck and arms. Beneath powders of moon-dust hues. Beneath fervent poinsettia rouges. Here was a woman who defied her meager physique. A woman capable of beating her daughter senseless for abandoning her chores half-finished or overwatering her azaleas. A woman capable of defying the town curfew of seven o’clock, locking her only daughter out of the house in the pitch black of night, without her supper, without a pallet or a pillow or even sheets, with no option but to scale the vined stucco courtyard walls and to sleep on the wet grass, the dog her cushion and warmth. Arguing with her was as good as fighting a lioness, armed with nothing but fists and teeth and wits. Her word reigned sovereign.
She responded without hesitation. Said, Bueno—meant it. Massaged the ache piercing her jaw. Her scalp throbbed where her mother had yanked out fistfuls of her hair the previous evening, claw marks tender on her cheek. Her mouth creased playfully into a rictus. Puta de su madre. Perra sin verguenza.
¿Te voy a extrañar, sabes mami?
She clasped her hands behind her back and pecked her mother on the cheek, the skin stretched thin and taut enough the hard grooves of her mother’s teeth clacked, hard as dice, against her own. But her gesture did not faze the woman like she’d hoped it would. The woman only grimaced and snorted ruefully. Jerked her head with exaggerated repulsion, as if she’d heard an insect droning in her ear. She did not look up to acknowledge that she had been spoken to. Did not even nod. Only chewed the flat end of her pen, figuring up the fees for tomorrow’s entierro and the amount she would need her wealthier siblings to loan her.
She waited for the slide of the bolt, the click of the lock, her mother heading to the mortuary; for a silence softer than yarn unspooling.
She recited the river’s instructions, memorizing the steps; traced her tongue down the scab: the signature of her blood offering. Licked circles where the river had planted its seeds.
The seeds had grown smooth and firm as pebbles overnight, nudging out the center of her palm. She dug her thumbnail down the length of the scar, her chest inflated with air, swallowing the pain. Then she peeled apart flaps of lacerated skin, pinched down. When she shined them clean of blood and held them up to the light, the seeds swelled larger still, fissures racing down their husks. Their roots were growing within. On the verge of shooting. Wanting to be planted.
She dropped the seeds in a jar of river water and spritzed it with her blood, watched them writhe and leap towards the black unfurling blooms. Lidded the jar.
Midnight. She locked the dog in the courtyard, remembering how the clay had provoked him. Mouthed the prayer the river had lipped into her ear, soundless so not even God could perceive her intentions. Mud leaked through the slats of her fingers, too supple and wet to form a shape that would keep. She pleaded with it, pounded flat clods against the cutting board like she was making masa, forced them firm and condensed until she had a half-formed leg, a pair of oar-shaped feet.
She shaped the torso, rounded the shoulders with her palms, slapped limbs and appendages into place; uncertain what she was making would be human. Water eked beneath the stooped figure and yawned across the kitchen table and she had to hold it with both hands so all the parts would stay. Fingers drooping off the lumps of their hands. Neck receding into spine.
She was careful with the face, even as she began to run out of time. Dawn had stirred its first light into the sky, like milk splashed in dark tea. Her mother would be awake as soon as she heard the first burst of crowing gallos. As soon as the dairy man rattled by on his cart, street vendors caterwauling at an ear-splitting pitch. The curtains ballooned with cold air, deflated, billowing. A burred shiver climbed up and down the rungs of her spine. She kept on. Stretched the nose wide like her brother’s, sculpted a heavy ridge for the brow, slit its lips with the edge of her pocketknife. The eyes two thumb-sized depressions.
The face looked nothing like her brother’s but there wasn’t much more she could do. She couldn’t believe what she was attempting, squeezing the rooting seeds through the navel, but she could feel in that moment the expanding breath of it in her hands. Held it up for la Madonna Mestiza to regard and anoint with her tears
(her eyes red, red with grief; her palms bleeding carnations)
and repeated the prayers the river had taught her.
Outside, the roosters began to crow competitively, tireless in the deadlock of their perennial mating season. A passing truck caused the house and, for just an instant, everything inside of it to clink and rattle and stagger inches forward.
The child lurched in her arms. Burped. Shuttered its eyes.
—❉—
Of all his scars, there was one the river had not formed. It arced across his right temple and clipped a trench through his brow, prevented new hairs from sprouting.
One day, soon after they had just begun secundaria, a group of boys had ambushed him after school, wielding scissors and paring shears and pocketknives in their fists, their knuckles a chapped and hateful white. Her brother had always worn his hair down to his waist. Their mother would not let him cut it short, relished the reflection her son provided for her, their faces almost identical, as if the mother herself had molded him that way and for that purpose. The others, boys and girls both, had always taunted him for it.
That afternoon they locked him down, arms behind his back, a boot crushing his face against grit and cobblestones, his ankles a tied bouquet. Took turns hacking off his hair, shredding it close to his scalp. Carved the words PUTO MARICON across the nape of his neck. Prized his stubborn mouth apart and jammed black wreathes of his hair down his gullet.
After that he spat out bloody coils of it for weeks, heaved in the middle of lessons, at dinner, during extemporaneous futbol tournaments on the street. And after that they never bothered him again. He had been initiated. He became one of them. That was the first time she had lost him. The first time she accepted that he would never be hers alone, forgetting all along that he’d always belong to their mother, the river, their country. This town.
She raked the hair off her scalp, buried it in the trash. Toed into a pair of baggy blue jeans in her brother’s closet, cinched the waist with the belt she had used to keep her school skirts from slipping, sprinting to catch the morning bell. Laced up her boots and leashed the dog before he could whine or bark or lunge at the hunched bundle she had set on the kitchen table to dry. The roots spreading within the baby made a ruffled sound as she slung him to her chest and watched his lips part, his mouth spoked with threads of spit.
The baby began to paddle his arms and legs, plumed the air with the thick dust of him. His breath was as arid and dusty as the smothering gusts of Semana Santa, when you couldn’t leave the house without the wind searing your eyes, dust coating you like a second skin. His chest pulsed sluggishly, as if a heart the size of a plum seed was growing inside of him. The mud was cracked and peeled, revealed plots of pink flesh, his features identical to her own. The same breadth of the nose. The same leaf curl of the lips.
He had neither cried nor blinked since he awoke. Just ogled like there was nothing and no one else to look at but her. Trapped her reflection in the bright globes of his eyes, his eyes glinting a new kind of green: soft, soft like river glass, rubbed down by sand and water and time.
The girl. The dog. The baby. They stole through the backroads, passing the schoolyard where the boys had sheared her brother bloody
(two of them drilling her into the ground, forcing her to watch)
passing trails which fed down to the riverbank, flanked by thorny bushes. With what she had nipped from her mother’s busting purse, which, in a careless lapse of her character, she would often leave around the house—on the kitchen table, on the cracked vinyl sofa, beneath the altar—they could catch a combi to one of the busier towns. Granada. Rivas. Managua. They could even ride as far as Leon, where, according to her mother—who had heard it from Doña Marta after church, who had heard it from her father’s mistress’ cuñada, who happened to be Doña Marta’s niece—her father had bought a house and started a second family. Six years since she saw him last and her memory of him was peppered with holes, a disassembled jigsaw puzzle. What she remembered best, thinking on it, were the sounds he made: the way his voice rose from his belly, the inflated sound of his laughter. The way he sputtered and grunted in his sleep. She imagined the sound of him through the phone, what she would say to him. She imagined them talking at his kitchen table, her father sharing that he would have never left had it not been for her mother. That it nearly destroyed him all those years ago, abandoning his children the way he had. She imagined his face crumpling, sobbing heavily, learning what had happened to his son. She imagined the bedroom he would offer her until she had her bearings collected, a plan forged. But from there?
asked the driver, eyeing her through the blotted rearview with an expression that might have been pity, though she knew he thought her loca from the moment he laid eyes on her, her head shaved bare as a convict. The moment he saw the mud crumbling off her arms, her eyes puffed and pink, practically dripping out their sockets. The moment he saw the baby at her breast, though she was too young, muy niña, to have mothered it. Her face so round, so dimpled, so supple: like fresh bread soaked in café con leche.
Outside, the braiding river chanted her name. Each syllable washed in through the open windows, splashed her alert to what she was doing. By then her mother would have noticed her leaving. The hearse would be carrying her brother’s body to his grave. Her tio would have asked for her whereabouts and her mother would have shrugged or changed the conversation in response, with no intention of going off to look for her. The dust swept towns they crossed appeared desolate, abandoned: no one waiting at the bus lots, no one walking along the street. It was early enough, she supposed, that mass had not let out; she was still the morning’s only passenger.
The baby began to weigh lighter in her arms, melting into her lap. She had only the chance to see his eyes lolling off their axes, now halfway down his face, now marbles rolling off her knees, before his lips slid and avalanched down his chin. Made a sound like bulbs choking in a flooded field. She sensed a cold trickle down the small of her back, the taste of salt in her mouth, her seams splitting. Her skin was flaking away. The dog growled balefully at her, as if he’d never seen her a day in his life.
The driver scolded her.
¿Pero no puedes callar tu jodidito perro, niña? And if the baby spits up on the seats, les voy a –
he craned his neck—about to smack the dog— and saw mud burbling on her lap, the babe gone. Watched in disbelief as the girl came apart, like a doll made of rags and straw and thread, her mouth dropped agog. The dog dug his snout into her side, his whining close to a hot-kettle whistle.
The driver had hardly turned around to control the steering before the tires screeched, grating against the gravel, and the bus crunched through the rail at the road shoulder, pummeling toward the river.
Roberto Rodriguez-Estrada was born in 1990. They are a graduate of Hampshire College, where they studied literature and intellectual history. Their writing has appeared in Fairy Tale Review, and is forthcoming in other publications. They are writing a novel, Naturaleza Muerta, and Effigies, a collection of stories. They write poetry, fiction and lyric essays in Oakland.
