The Gift

The village called it a gift.

Nobody asked me. That is the part people leave out of a story like this one. Somebody decides what you are, the whole valley agrees, and by the time you are old enough to have an opinion about it the word has been sitting on you for nine years and has taken your shape, the way a shoe takes the shape of a foot and then tells you it was always that shape. I will not argue with them now. I would only like it on the record that I was not consulted.

When Doña Amparo’s hip went, mine went. Not a sympathetic twinge. Not the idea of a hip, or the memory of one, or the sort of ache you invent because you feel you ought to have one. Hers. In me. At exactly the volume she had it, and I was six, una cipota with no words for any of it, so I sat down in the road and screamed until my mother came running and decided I had been bitten by something.

That is the whole of it, and it never got more complicated than that. Only worse. Whatever you are carrying, I get it at full weight. I get the full edition, every page, at the volume you get it, because the part of me that would know the difference is the part that never developed.

People hear that and assume it makes me kind. What it makes me is a window, and a window is a thing that does not stop light.

Mi Abuela worked it out before anybody else did, because she had spent forty years with her hands on dying people and she knew exactly what it looks like when somebody feels the wrong thing in the wrong place. She was a curandera. Her hands smelled of copal, always, the resin smoke worked so far into the skin that you could find her in a dark room by holding your breath and turning slowly until the air changed. She taught me which leaves. Which words, and in what order, because the order matters more than the words do. How long to hold on, which is longer than you think and always longer than you want. Mirá, she would say, and move my hands to where hers had been, and wait.

She never told me it was a gift. Este es el trabajo, she said, and some of us are born already holding the tools.

She also never told me how to put it down.

I have turned that over for years. Whether she did not know. Whether she knew and decided I would work it out myself, which would be very like her. Whether there is no way to do it at all and she saw no point in saying so out loud to a child who was going to find out anyway. I get a different answer on different nights, and I have noticed that which answer I get depends less on the evidence than on how the night is going.

Forty years of dying people under her hands, and it never came up once. I have chosen to file that as an oversight. The other option is that she looked at a six year old and did the arithmetic.

Word went around, the way it does. Every village keeps one person it needs and is frightened of, and it is never the same person twice, and it is always the same tone of voice. Ours was a girl who sat in the road and cried about somebody else’s hip.

The old women watched me pass with an expression I could not read then and can read perfectly now. The healers up the mountain said I had been marked, which is the word people reach for when they want to say useful and unlucky in one breath and their language has not got round to a single term for it. The devout crossed themselves. For me, they would have said, as opposed to against. I could feel the difference, and there was not much of one.

The children came, though, and that was the good part, and I am not skipping it to get to the rest of this.

A cipote would turn up at the door with his hand wrapped in his shirt and his face doing the thing faces do when they have decided in advance not to cry, and I would sit down with him and take the worst of the fear off him, and then he would run off and forget my name entirely before he reached the road. Which was correct. That was the arrangement, and I am not complaining about it. You do not thank a road for going somewhere. You do not write to the road afterward.

And then there was my brother.

Chepe thought I was boring.

To the whole valley I was marked by spirits. To my brother I was how you found out whether Mamá was actually angry or only doing the voice, the one that starts at the far end of the house and arrives before she does. He would send me into the kitchen ahead of him the way a man tests a bridge with a rock, wait for the report, and make an informed decision about whether it was worth confessing to whatever he had done. He never said thank you. He never once, in nine years, acknowledged that I was doing anything at all. In our house that was the highest compliment available, and I knew it at the time, and I have not had a better one since.

I was very good at it.

That is the part I want you to have. Not the smoke. Not the spirits. Not the old women in the road with their hands already moving before I was close enough to hear them.

Just the boy who found me useful and ordinary, and who is the only person who ever managed both at the same time.

Hold onto him for me. I have to let him go before the end of this, and I would rather he went somewhere.