Jennifer Clement - Prayers for the Stolen

When she’d thought of narcos coming, she always imagined the black SUVs with tinted windows, which were supposed to be illegal but everyone had them fixed so the cops could not look inside. Those black Cadillac Escalades with four doors and black windows filled with narcos and machine guns were like the Trojan Horse, or so my mother used to say.

How did my mother know about Troy? How did a Mexican woman living all alone with one daughter in the Guerrero countryside, less than an hour from Acapulco by car and four hours by mule, know anything about Troy? It was simple. The one and only thing my father ever bought her when he came back from the United States was a small satellite dish antenna. My mother was addicted to historical documentaries and to Oprah’s talk shows. In my house there was an altar to Oprah beside the one she had for the Virgin of Guadalupe. My mother did not call her Oprah. That is a name she never figured out. My mother called her Opera. So it was Opera this and Opera that.

In addition to documentaries and Oprah, we must have watched The Sound of Music at least a hundred times. My mother was always on the lookout to see when the movie would be programmed on a movie channel.

Every time Concha would tell us what had happened to Paula, the story was different. So we never knew the truth.

The drug trafficker who went to the house before Paula was stolen, only went to get a good look at her. He went to see if the rumors were true. They were true.

It was different when Paula was stolen.

On our mountain, there were no men. It was like living where there were no trees.

It is like being a person with one arm, my mother said. No, no, no, she corrected herself. Being in a place without men is like being asleep without dreams.

Our men crossed the river to the United States. They dipped their feet in the water and waded up to their waists but they were dead when they got to the other side. In that river they shed their women and their children and walked into the great big USA cemetery. She was right. They sent money; they came back once or twice and then that was that. So on our land we were clumps of women working and trying to raise ourselves up. The only men around inhabited SUVs, rode motorcycles, and appeared from out of nowhere with an AK-47 hanging from their shoulder, a bag of cocaine in the back pocket of their jeans, and a pack of Marlboro Reds in their front shirt pocket. They wore Ray-Ban sunglasses and we had to make sure we never looked into their eyes, never saw the small black pupils that lay there and were the path inside their minds.

On the news we once heard about the kidnapping of thirty-five farmers who were picking corn in fields when some men with three large trucks drove up and stole all of them. The kidnappers pointed guns at the farmers and told them to get into the trucks. The farmers were in the trucks standing pressed together like cattle. The farmers returned to their homes after two or three weeks. They had been warned that if they talked about what had happened, they would be killed. Everyone knew they were stolen to be field hands and pick a marijuana crop.

If you were quiet about something then it never happened. Someone would write a song about it for sure. Everything you’re not supposed to know about, or talk about, eventually turned up in a song.

Some idiot is going to write a song about those kidnapped farmers and get himself killed, my mother said.

On weekends my mother and I went to Acapulco where she worked as a cleaning lady for a rich family who lived in Mexico City. The family went to the holiday resort a couple of weekends a month. For years this family used to drive, but then they bought a helicopter. It took several months to build the helipad on their property. First they had to fill in the swimming pool with dirt and cover it up and then move the new swimming pool over a few feet. They also relocated the tennis courts so that the heliport would be as far as possible from the house.

My father had also worked in Acapulco. He was a bartender at a hotel before he left for the States. He came back to Mexico a few times to visit us but then he never came back. My mother knew that it was the last time when the last time came.

This is the last time, she said.

What do you mean, Mama?

Look at him hard in the face; drink him up, because you’re never going to see your daddy again. Guaranteed. Guaranteed.

She liked to use that word.

When I asked her how she knew he was not coming back she said, You just wait, Ladydi, you just wait and you’ll see I’m right.

But how do you know? I asked again.

Let’s see if you can figure it out, she answered.

It was a test. My mother liked to give tests and finding out why my father was not coming back was a test.

I began to observe him. I watched the way he did things around our small house and garden. I followed him as if he were a stranger that could steal something from me if I looked away.

One night I knew my mother had been right. It was so hot even the moon was warming our piece of the planet. I went outside and joined my father as he smoked a cigarette.

God, this place must be one of the hottest places on earth, he said as he exhaled the tobacco smoke from his mouth and nostrils at the same time.

He placed his arm around me and his skin was even hotter than mine. We could sear into each other.

And then he said it.

You and your mama are too good for me. I don’t deserve you.

I passed the test with an A.

Son of a bitch, my mother said again and again, for years. She never said his name again. He was Son of a Bitch forever after.

Like many people on our mountain, my mother believed in hexes.

May a wind blow out the candle of his heart. May a gigantic termite grow in his navel, or an ant in his ear, she said. May his penis be eaten by a worm.

Then my father stopped sending us a monthly stipend from the USA. I guess we were also too good for his money.

Of course the USA-to-Mexico rumor road was the most powerful rumor route in the whole world. If you did not know the truth, you knew the rumor and the rumor was always a lot, lot more than the truth.

I’ll take a rumor over the truth, my mother said.

The rumor that came from a Mexican restaurant in New York to a slaughterhouse in Nebraska, to a Wendy’s restaurant in Ohio, to an orange field in Florida, to a hotel in San Diego, then crossed the river, in an act of resurrection, to a bar in Tijuana, to a marijuana field outside Morelia, to a glass-bottom boat in Acapulco, to a canteen in Chilpancingo and up our dirt road to the shade of our orange tree was that my father had another family “over there.”

“Over here” was our story, but it was also everyone’s story.

Over here we lived alone in our shack surrounded by all the objects my mother had stolen for years. We had dozens of pens and pencils, salt shakers and eyeglasses and we had one large plastic garbage bag filled with little sugar packets she had stolen from restaurants. My mother never left a bathroom without taking the roll of toilet paper hidden in her bag. She didn’t call it stealing, but my father did. When he was still with us and they used to fight, he said he lived with a thief. My mother believed that she was a borrower but I knew she never gave anything back. Her friends knew they had to hide everything. No matter where we would go, when we returned to our home the stuff was going to appear from out of her pockets, between her breasts and even from her hair. She had a knack for pushing stuff into it. I’d seen her pull small coffee spoons and spools of thread from her frizzy mane. Once she had a Snickers chocolate bar she’d stolen from Estefani’s house. She’d pushed the candy bar up under her ponytail. She even stole from her very own daughter. I gave up thinking that anything belonged to me.