Prayers for the Stolen Read online

  Nobody trusted anyone.

  My mother said that every person was a drug dealer including the police, of course, the mayor, guaranteed, and even the damn president of the country was a narco.

  My mother did not need to be asked questions, she asked them herself.

  How do I know the president is a drug trafficker? she asked. He lets all the guns come in from the United States. Why doesn’t he put the army on the border and stop the guns, huh? And, anyway, what is a worse thing to hold in your hand: a plant, a marijuana plant, a poppy, or a gun? God made the plants but man made the guns.

  My school friends were the friends I’ve always had. There were only nine of us in first grade. My closest friends were Paula, Estefani, and Maria. We went to school with our hair cut short and in boys’ clothes. All of us except for Maria.

  Maria was born with a harelip and so her parents were not worried that she would be stolen.

  When my mother talked about Maria she said, The harelip rabbit on the moon came down from the moon to our mountain.

  Maria was also the only one of us who had a brother. His name was Miguel, but we called him Mike. He was four years older than Maria and everyone spoiled him because he was the only boy on our mountain.

  Paula, as we all said, looked like Jennifer Lopez, but more beautiful.

  Estefani had the blackest skin ever. In the state of Guerrero we are all very dark but she was like a piece of the night or a rare black iguana. Estefani was also tall and skinny and, since no one in Guerrero was tall, she stood out like the tallest tree in a wood. She saw things I never could see; even far-off things like cars coming down the highway. Once she saw a little black-red-and-white striped snake curled up in a tree. It turned out that it was a coral snake. These are snakes that want to drink the breast milk of sleeping mothers.

  When you grow up in Guerrero you learn that anything that is red is dangerous and so we knew that snake was bad. Estefani said the snake had looked at her straight in the eye. She only told this to Paula, Maria, and me, just the three of us (her three best friends) because she knew it meant she was cursed. And she was, of course, as cursed as if the snake had been the evil fairy godmother with a wand who said your dreams will never come true.

  When Maria was born with the harelip everyone was shocked. Her mother, Luz, kept her daughter inside the house and her father walked out the front door and never came back.

  My mother liked to tell everyone what they should do. She did not mind her own business. So, she walked over to Maria’s house to take a good look at the baby. I only know this story because my mother told it to me many times over. She looked at little Maria lying in Luz’s arms covered by a white veil of gauze. She lifted the cloth and looked down at the baby.

  She was born inside out, like an inside-out sweater. You just need to get her turned back around, Mother said. I’ll go and register her at the clinic.

  My mother turned and walked down the mountain and took a bus to the clinic in Chilpancingo and registered the birth of Maria. This was done so that the local clinics would know which children in the rural area needed these kinds of operations. Doctors came from Mexico City every few years to operate for free but the patients had to be registered at birth.

  It took eight years before a group of doctors came to Chilpancingo. A convoy of soldiers escorted them so that they would be protected from the drug traffickers’ violent confrontations. Of course, by this time, we were all used to Maria’s face. Because of this, some of her friends did not want her to have the operation. We wanted her to be happy and normal but her inside-out face made us fear the gods, made us aware of terrible punishments, made us think that something had gone wrong in our magic circle of people. She had become mythical like a drought or a flood. Maria was used as an example of God’s wrath. Could a doctor fix that wrath? we wondered. Maria inhabited her myth and even began to look as if she was made of stone.

  We thought Maria was powerful. My mother never thought it was power.

  She’s looking for an accident and she’s going to find one, Mother said.

  Estefani, Paula, and I felt that the worst had already happened to Maria and so she was not afraid of anything, like the snake Estefani saw in the tree. It was Maria who picked up a long stick and poked at it until the snake fell to the ground. Estefani, Paula, and I shrieked and moved away, but Maria leaned over, picked it up, and held it between her thumb and index finger.

  She looked at the snake and said, So you think you have an ugly face, well, look at my face!

  Stop it, stop it, Paula said. It’s going to bite you!

  Idiot, that’s what I want, Maria said and dropped the snake on the ground.

  She called everyone an idiot. It was her favorite word.

  One day when I was seven years old Maria and I were walking home together from school. Usually we all left school together and would meet our mothers down on the highway and then branch out toward our different houses. This time, I can’t remember why, Maria and I were alone. The school year was almost over and we were sad because the teacher who had come from Mexico City for a year was leaving and a new volunteer would be coming in September. In the countryside the people depended on volunteers from the city. We had volunteer teachers, social workers, doctors and nurses. They came as part of their required social work training. After a while we learned not to get too attached to these people who, as my mother said, come and go like salespeople with nothing to sell except the words you must.

  I don’t like people who come from far-away, she said. They have no idea of who we are, telling us you must do this and you must do that and you must do this and you must do that. Do I go to the city and tell them the place stinks and ask them, Hey, where’s the grass and since when is the sky yellow? It’s all just like the damn Roman Empire.

  I didn’t know what she meant by this, but I did know she’d been watching a documentary on the history of Rome.

  I had that walk alone with Maria in the month of July. I remember the heat and the sadness of losing our teacher. It was very humid and my body wilted as we moved forward. It was so moist spiders could weave their webs in the very air and we had to walk wiping the webs and long, loose threads from our faces and hope no spider had fallen into our hair or down our blouses. It was the kind of humidity that made iguanas and lizards sleep with their eyes at half mast and even the insects were asleep. It was also the kind of heat that drove stray dogs down to the highways in search of water and their bloody carcasses marked the black asphalt from our mountain all the way to Acapulco.

  It was so hot that at one point Maria and I sat down on some stones, after checking to see there was no scorpion or snake there, and rested for a minute.

  A boy is never going to want to love me and that’s that. I don’t care, she said. I don’t want anyone messing with my face. My mother said no boy will want to kiss me.

  I tried to imagine the kiss, lips against her torn lips, a tongue inside of her torn mouth. I asked her if that meant she’d never have any children and she said her mother told her she would never get married or have children because no man would ever love her.

  I don’t want to be loved, Maria said, so who cares?

  Maria, I don’t want to be loved either. Who wants that? I think kissing sounds disgusting.

  She turned and looked at me fiercely and I thought that she was going to spit on me or punch me but, at that moment, she fell in love with me.

  Maria looked at me fiercely because everyone around here is fierce. In fact, all over Mexico it is known that the people who come from the state of Guerrero are full of anger and as dangerous as a white, transparent scorpion that’s hidden in bed, under a pillow.

  In Guerrero the heat, iguanas, spiders, and scorpions ruled. Life was not worth anything.

  My mother used to say that all the time, Life is not worth anything. She also quoted the old famous song as if it were a prayer, If you’re going to kill me tomorrow you might as well kill me today.

  This
was translated into all kinds of new versions of the same thing. I heard her tell my father once, If you’re going to leave me tomorrow, you might as well leave me today.

  I knew he would not come back. It was just as well because then she really would have done it. She would have cooked up a stew of fingernails, spit, and shredded hair. She would have mixed it with her menstrual blood and green chilies and chicken. She gave me the recipe. Not on a piece of paper, but she once told me about how to do it.

  Always be the cook, she said. Never let anyone cook for you.

  That stew of fingernails, spit, menstrual blood, and shredded hair would have tasted delicious. She was a good cook. It was for the best that he did not come back. She kept her machete sharp.

  My mother said that she believed in revenge. It was a threat over my head, but it was also a lesson. I knew she was not going to forgive me for anything, but it also taught me not to forgive. She said that this was why she no longer went to church, even though she did have saints she loved, but she did not like all the forgiving business. I knew that much of her day was spent thinking about what she’d do to my father if he ever came back.

  I watched my mother cut the tall grasses with her machete, or kill an iguana by breaking its head with a large stone, or scrape the thorns off a maguey pad, or kill a chicken by twisting its neck in her hands, and it was as if all the objects around her were my father’s body. When she cut up a tomato I knew it was his heart she was slicing into thin wheels.

  Once she leaned against the front door, pressed her body against the wood, and even that door became my father’s back. The chairs were his lap. The spoons and forks were his hands.

  One day Maria came running over to my house. We lived only a twenty-minute walk from each other by crossing land overgrown with rubber plants and short palm trees where large brown and green iguanas lay in the sun on flat rocks. They could swivel quickly and bite especially if you were an eight-year-old girl running and skipping past in red plastic flip-flops. She came alone, as she was the only girl allowed out because of her harelip. We all knew that no one would want her, not even if she was given away for nothing. People instantly recoiled when they looked at her. When I saw her at my front door, I knew something important had happened.

  Ladydi, she cried, Ladydi!

  My mother had gone to the market in Chilpancingo. At that young age our mothers still let us stay home alone if we promised not to go wandering off. As soon as the smallest bumps showed up on our chest, that was it. From that moment on, if we were to go out, steps were taken so that we did not look pretty.

  Maria walked toward me with her arms splayed open at her sides and hugged me. It was strange to see her like that since she always had one hand covering her mouth. Maria moved with her left hand over half of her face, cupped across her mouth as if she was holding in a secret or about to spit out something.

  What is it?

  She stopped, out of breath and panting a little. She sat down beside me on the floor where I had been cutting out images from a magazine to paste in a copybook. This was one of my favorite pastimes.

  The doctors are coming!

  I didn’t have to ask her anything. After eight years of waiting the famous doctors, the important expensive doctors from a hospital in Mexico City, they were coming to Chilpancingo to operate for free on children with deformities. Maria explained that the nurse from the clinic had appeared at their house about an hour after Maria had come home from school. She had drawn a sample of Maria’s blood and taken her blood pressure to make sure she would be ready for the operation. They had to be at the clinic on Saturday at six in the morning.

  That’s in two days! I can’t wait to tell Paula.

  It occurred to me that Maria might think that after the operation she could be as beautiful as Paula. Even when I cut up old magazines, filled with the faces of movie stars and famous models, I knew none of them would stand a chance against Paula. Even though Paula’s mother kept her hair short and even rubbed Paula’s skin with chili powder so it would have a permanent red rash, Paula’s beauty shone through anyway.

  On Saturday morning my mother and I went down to the clinic to keep Maria’s mother company. Estefani and her mother had also come down from their house.

  Maria’s brother, Mike, was there too. I realized I had not seen him for a while. He spent most of his time in Acapulco. At twelve he seemed grown-up to me. He wore leather cuffs, like bracelets, on his wrists, which I’d never seen before, and he’d shaved his hair off.

  Three army trucks were parked outside the clinic and twelve soldiers stood watch. These soldiers wore ski masks over their faces. They were also wearing aviator sunglasses over the eye openings in the wool. The backs of their necks glistened with sweat. The soldiers’ machine guns were held ready as they surrounded the small rural health clinic.

  On one of the trucks someone had tacked a sign that said: Here doctors are operating on children.

  These measures were taken so that the drug traffickers wouldn’t sweep down and kidnap the doctors and take them off. The drug traffickers kidnapped doctors for two reasons. Either they needed to have one of their own operated on, usually for bullet wounds, or they’d steal the Mexico City doctors for ransom. We knew that doctors would not come to our mountain unless they had protection.

  We tried to get past the soldiers but they would not let us in the clinic so we had to wait at Ruth’s beauty salon on the corner. We knew there was only one other child having an operation and this was a two-year-old boy who was born with an extra thumb. For two years this extra thumb was an important thing to talk about. Everyone had an opinion about it.

  The truth was we knew the cause behind the deformities on our mountain. Everyone knew that the spraying of poisons to kill the crops of marijuana and poppies was harming our people.

  In a fit of anger, the day before the operations, my mother said, Maria should just stay the way she is. And, thinking about that thumb boy, why don’t they just cut his hand off too! Maybe then he’ll stick around here when he grows up.

  As we were standing outside the beauty salon we heard a far-off noise that was like a cattle stampede or an airplane flying too close to the ground. It only took a second for us to recognize that it was a convoy of SUVs.

  The soldiers who guarded the clinic moved quickly and took cover behind their trucks.

  We ran inside the salon and rushed to the back of the room as far from the windows as we could get. I dove under a sink.

  Then the world was quiet and still. It seemed that even the dogs, birds, and insects stopped breathing.

  No one said hush, hush, hush.

  We expected bullets to start flying.

  Every wall, window, and doorway on the main street, which was also the highway that ran through the town, was filled with holes. In our pockmarked world no one bothered filling up bullet holes or painting walls.

  Twelve black SUVs drove past going at a great speed, way too fast, as if they were having a race. The windows were tinted black and the headlights were turned on even though it was daytime.

  We could feel the whiz of speed and the ground shook around us. The large machines left a wake of dust and exhaust fumes behind and stirred up our minds with only one thought: Don’t stop here.

  Once the last SUV had passed there was a moment of silence, of listening, before Ruth said, Okay, they’re gone. So, who needs to get their hair done?

  Ruth smiled and said she’d do everyone’s nails for free while we waited to hear the outcome of the operations.

  Ruth was a garbage baby. She must have been born from a big mistake. Why would someone throw their baby in the garbage like a banana peel or a rotten egg?

  What’s the damned difference between killing your baby and throwing it into the garbage, huh? my mother said.

  I wondered if this question was a test.

  There’s a big difference, my mother said, answering her own question. At least a killing can be merciful.

  Ruth w
as one of Mrs. Silberstein’s garbage babies. Mrs. Silberstein was a Jewish woman from Los Angeles who had moved to Acapulco fifty years ago. When she’d heard the rumors about babies being thrown away in the trash, she spread the word out to all the garbage collectors in Acapulco, and let them know she would be willing to take care of the babies. In the past thirty years she’d raised at least forty children. One of these babies was Ruth.

  Ruth was born from a black plastic garbage bag that was filled with dirty diapers, rotten orange peels, three empty beer bottles, a can of Coke, and a dead parrot wrapped in newspapers. Someone at the garbage dump heard cries coming out of the bag.

  Ruth painted our nails and fed us potato chips right into our mouths so that the nail polish could dry without being smudged. She had trimmed my hair many times, but this was the first time I’d ever had my nails painted. It was the first act in my life that defined me as a girl.

  Ruth held my hand gently in her hand as she painted the red enamel over each one of my oval, infant nails. When she painted my thumb, I thought of the boy who was only one block away having his thumb removed.

  Ruth blew on my hands to dry the polish.

  You blow on them too, she said, so that they dry, and don’t touch anything.

  She swiveled away from me and took my mother’s hand in hers.

  What color, Rita?

  The reddest color you have.

  My hands were miraculously beautiful to me. I held them up to my face in the mirror.

  What a world, my mother said. It’s a nasty life.

  Out the window, through glass shattered from bullets, we could watch the masked soldiers guarding the clinic. They were patting the dust off of their uniforms. The SUVs had created a small dust storm. I imagined what lay beyond the clinic’s front door and had a vision of Maria lying on a white sheet, under a strong light bulb, surrounded by doctors and with her face cut in two pieces.