Jennifer Clement - Prayers for the Stolen

The birds continued to soar above us as we reached our house.

Once inside my mother walked to the kitchen and took out four little bottles of nail polish from inside her sleeve. She placed a red bottle and three pink bottles on the kitchen table.

You stole nail polish from Ruth?

I didn’t know why I was surprised. Anytime we went anywhere my mother stole something. I just could not believe that she would steal from Ruth.

Shut up and go and do your homework, my mother said.

I don’t have any homework.

Then just shut up, my mother said. Go and wash your hands so you can get them dirty again.

My mother walked over to the window and looked up at the sky.

It’s a dog, she said. Those are just too many damn vultures for it to be a dead mouse.

We lived off my mother’s wages as a cleaning lady. Every Friday after school my mother and I walked down to the highway and waited for a bus to take us an hour’s drive to the port. She had no one to leave me with at home. Everywhere she went I had to go too.

Before the Reyes family arrived from Mexico City, my mother had to mop the house, make the beds, and put insecticide everywhere in order to kill ants, spiders, and especially scorpions.

When I was a child, she let me be in charge of the insecticide, which came in a spray bottle. As my mother cleaned, I sprayed the insecticide in corners, under the beds, inside closets, and around the sinks in the bathrooms. It made my mouth taste strange for days, as if I’d sucked on a piece of copper wire.

We had a servant’s room behind the garage. My mother used to tie me to the bed with a rope. She did this so that she could get her work done and not worry that I might wander off and fall into the swimming pool. She’d tie me to the bed for hours with a loaf of white bread, a glass of milk, and some crayons and paper.

Sometimes she would bring me books to look at from the house. These books were usually architecture books on the world’s great mansions, or books on museums.

Of course my mother also stole from the Reyes family. On our way back home on Sunday night I’d see what she’d taken. As the bus hurtled over the burning asphalt toward a land of red insects and women, she’d slowly take things from her pockets and look them over.

In the darkness of the bus I watched as tweezers came out of her blouse and three long red candles were removed from her sleeve.

One night as the lights from cars coming in the opposite direction lit up the inside of the vehicle, my mother handed me a small bag of chocolate eggs.

Here, I took these for you, she said.

I ate them in the bus as I looked out the window and into the dense jungle that lined the side of the highway.

After Maria had her harelip operation everything changed. If it had not been for Maria, we might not have noticed the vultures circling above our house as we walked back from the clinic.

I’m going to go and investigate what’s dead, my mother said, moving away from the window where she was looking out at the sky.

You stay here, she said.

I waited for about an hour listening to music on my iPod, which she’d also stolen from the Reyes family, before she came back.

She looked worried and she’d been pulling at her hair on the left side of her head. It was sticking out in a great frizzy clump. I pulled the earbuds, and the sound of Daddy Yankee, out of my ears.

Ladydi, listen, she said. There’s a dead man out there and we have to bury him.

What do you mean?

There’s a damn corpse out there.

Who is it?

He’s naked.

Naked?

You’re going to have to close your eyes and help me put him in the ground. Go get some spoons, the big one, and get out of those clothes, I’m going for the spade out back.

I stood up and took off the clean clothes I’d worn to go to the clinic in the morning and changed into an old pair of jeans and a T-shirt.

My mother returned with the spade that we usually used for digging up anthills.

Okay, she said. Follow me.

I followed my mother. I counted five vultures above us. My mother made a breathless sound, like panting, as we walked. We reached the corpse in a few minutes.

This is too close to the house, I said.

This is too damn close to the house. You’re right.

Yes.

He was dumped here.

Who is he?

Does he look familiar to you?

No.

In this land one can go out for a walk and find a huge iguana, a papaya tree covered with dozens of large fruits, an enormous anthill, marijuana plants, poppies, or a corpse.

It was the body of a young boy. He looked about sixteen years old. He was lying on his back looking up into the sun.

Poor thing, my mother said.

The sun will burn his face.

Yes.

His hands had been cut off and white and blue veins threaded out from his bloody wrists into the dirt like bloated worms.

The letter P was carved into his forehead.

There was a note pinned to his shirt with a large safety pin with a pink plastic clasp. It was the kind of pin used for diapers.

Does that note say what I think it says? my mother asked as she began to dig. Does that say: Paula and two girls ?

Yes, that’s what it says.

You, get over here! Start digging. We need to hurry.

As the vultures circled above us we dug using the spade, the large spoon, and our hands.

Deeper, deeper, my mother said. We need to dig deeper or the animals will pull him out in the night.

We dug for over two hours and the ground produced transparent worms, green beetles, and pink stones.

My mother scraped at the earth and looked over her shoulder every so often in a panic. I feel eyes are on us, she whispered.

Wouldn’t it have been better to just let the jungle take care of the body? I asked. But even as I said this, I knew the answer.

The police and drug traffickers kept an eye out for vultures. My mother said that the birds were the best informants around. She did not want anyone to come snooping around, looking at her daughter.

After the hole was deep enough we pulled the body into the hole and covered it over with dirt.

I looked at my hands. The dirt had been pushed way deep under my nails and no washing was going to get it out. Not for weeks.

When we finished my mother said, I never thought you were born to bury a dead boy with me. That was not in the prediction of my life.

Once, when my mother was about twenty years old, she went to Acapulco and paid a fortune-teller to tell her about what was going to happen in her life. This was a fortune-teller who had a small space that she rented between two bars on the main street in Acapulco. My mother told me that she’d been attracted to the woman’s sign, which said: You are only unfortunate if you don’t know your fortune .

My mother used to watch tourists from all over the world pay money to hear what this woman said. She knew she had to go. It took my mother years to get up the courage to go inside and pay to have her fortune told.

I was just an Indian from the countryside, my mother said. But that woman kissed my money and whispered to me, Money has no country or race. Once the money is in my pocket I don’t know who gave it to me.

My mother always brought up this experience. That fortune-teller predicted nothing. Anything that happened to my mother was always punctuated with the words: This was not a prediction in my life. As the years went by the disappointment grew deeper as my mother realized that nothing the woman said had come true.