The Highlands

I want to start where I was warm. You have only ever known me cold, and you should know I was not always this. There was a girl before, and her name was Ixchel, and her blood still moved, and she said her prayers out loud where anyone could hear them. Let me give her to you while I still can, before the road, before the rest of it. Stay with her a little while. She does not get very long.

The highlands wake cold. I remember my breath going white in the dark before dawn, the packed dirt of the floor cold through my feet, my grandmother already up and feeding the fire so the one room filled with woodsmoke and the smell of the copal she burned for those who had gone before us. By the time the sun came over the ridge the cold burned off and the day turned warm and then hot, and I carried water with the sweat running clean down my back and my heart doing its plain work and my stomach loud for the tortillas coming off the comal. None of it shamed me. A living body is loud, and it asks for things, and it smells like itself by afternoon, and I did not yet know to thank God for any of it. You do not thank Him for a thing you have not learned you can lose.

We were poor in a way that has no bottom to it, and rich in the only things my grandmother counted. Mamá Ximena was a curandera. Her hands knew which leaf brought a fever down and which one a woman took when her milk would not come, and she taught me to know them too, and more than that she taught me to mean what I said. When she lit a candle she did not light it the way you strike a match against the dark. She lit it the way you set a place at the table for someone you are expecting. She spoke to the saints, and she spoke to the old ones from the time before the saints, and in our mountains there was no quarrel between the two: the candle and the copal burning together, the cross over the door and the smoke going up to the four corners of the world. I learned my faith the way I learned to breathe, which is to say I did not learn it at all. It was simply the air.

I prayed out loud. That is the thing I want you to hold, because it is the thing the road took the volume of first. I said grace so the whole table could hear me. I said the rosary on the path with the beads warm in my fist. When I was frightened I prayed louder, not softer, the way a child sings in a dark room to fill it. My grandmother would lay her hand on the crown of my head, the way you test whether bread has risen, and say, que Dios te bendiga, mija, and I believed all the way down that He would, because He always had.

I was a quiet child to look at, and I learned early that grown people went soft around me without my asking them to. They lowered their voices the way you do near something you do not want to startle. I thought it was a kindness in them. I did not yet understand that beauty is a thing other people decide about you, and then decide they are owed. That came later, on the road, in a man’s mouth. At home it was only my grandmother holding my face in two hands that smelled of rue and woodsmoke, telling me God had been generous, and me believing her, because why would I not.

Behind the church the marigolds grew without anyone tending them, orange going to rust, the most alive color on the whole mountain. I did not know yet what they were for. I only knew they were the brightest thing I could carry to the feet of a saint, and that they did not last, and that there were always more.

The shadow came the way weather comes in the highlands, while you are looking at something else. It was in the way the men stopped talking when certain trucks went through. It was the girl two villages over who was there, and then was a thing no one would say out loud, and the silence that closed over her name. The grown people began to speak soft about a danger now, not only about me, and the two softnesses sat too near each other for comfort. I prayed about it. Out loud, still, because I did not know yet that there are rooms where praying out loud is the most expensive thing you can do. I asked God to keep the trucks on the far road. For a while, He did.