Jennifer Clement - Prayers for the Stolen

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.