I prayed a manda, you know? Before the necklace, before everything. I asked la Virgencita for help with Abuelito’s land, and I offered to act as her in the Via Crucis procession. But I got to be Jesus. Kinda.
That day Mamá didn’t wanna leave me alone with the company’s trocas roaming town. Not after the threat. She thought of calling her boss at the maquila and asking for a couple days off, but she went in the end. “I’ll be fine, Mami, don’t worry,” I told her at the bus stop, pale sunrise above us. We kissed each other goodbye like any other day. No idea we’d never meet again. At least not in person, because next Sunday she didn’t come back. They asked her to work extra over the weekend. She returned after it was all over.
I drank a couple cups of coffee for breakfast. I needed them. The trucks rattled over the dirt track around the house all night long. They did that on purpose, to snatch away our sleep. To wear us down so we’d sell them Abuelito’s land. But we wouldn’t. Soon they left anyway, so I put on your Cruz Azul hoodie and got to work. I’d used it since you left. It reminded me you were in el norte, looking after us. It smelled of you at first, but that soon faded off. Still, I wore it to feel you close, and that day I needed you with me.
I cleaned Abuelito’s room, and that’s when I found it. I’d put it off for weeks because I always wept as soon as I walked in. Couldn’t take he was gone. But you were about to come back to help us with the lawsuit, and where would you and Norma and Juanito sleep? So I cleaned the mess up and swept and mopped, flooded in tears. Every sway chlorinated my heart, washed away my grief. I took his things one by one, caressed them. And I found it, below a pile of crumbing pics: Abuela Tonantzin’s necklace, a small Tree of Life shaped out of clay. You must remember it: She wears it in every photo, around her neck. I held it, palm open. Its weight was like a mountain. It kinda felt alive in my hand, like I held a lizard or something. Took a pic of it and texted Ma: “Look what sprung up!” I expected a voicemail, an old anecdote for an answer, but you know . . . . They don’t want her on the phone while at work. She texted back next day: “Mamá Tona’s necklace . . . . It’s an amulet, mija. Keep it. It will protect you.” And I did. Everything else we gave away to the parish.
I went back to church after school. The parish managed to get a drama teacher to come from the city in the afternoons, to help the youth group mount the Via Crucis’ procession. I’d signed up, so I walked through the atrium, past the teocotes’ dancing shade, all the way to the utility room in the back. I could see them through the window warming up already, so I hurried.
The teacher set a new challenge: to improvise a scene with stuff we had in our pocket. No dialogue, no partner, just me and whatever I carried. And all I had was the necklace. So when my turn came I stepped forward. The teacher applauded: my time was on. I held the Tree of Life in my hands as if it was a wounded bird. She clapped again, and the drama crew too. The bird became a baby—your son Juanito, my little nephew. I cuddled him, took him to my breast and sang a lullaby. Another round of applause. I found myself swaying abuelito’s ashes, eyes wet. They cheered one last time. His ashes became a ceiba seed. I kneeled and planted it on the ground. I watered it with with my tears. Then I rose with closed eyes, unfolding my arms towards the ceiling, and pictured in my mind a tree rushing out of the seed.
And it did. The ceiba snapped into the room. Like a dream, only it wasn’t. The teacher and the drama crew saw it too. The world stilled, a silence. Then flickers of awe. A few went to their knees and prayed. Word spread right away.
All night I looked for an explanation. I even went back next morning before school, to see if all that about a tree sprouting out my imagination was real. Guess what? It was still there, tiles broken by the roots, branches so high they reached the ceiling, surrounded by a crowd of rezanderas who murmured and counted beads in their rosaries. It was fully grown, bark like a lizard’s skin roughed and thorned, branches hanging low like arms extended towards the praying women. And hung in one of the lower branches, as if the ceiba rose it from the ground, Abuela Tonantzin’s necklace. With all the rush, I’d left it behind the day before. I wonder how no one else found it. Anyway I took it back.
“Cipactli, what are your thoughts on this?”
It was the Social Studies teacher, the same one you took class with. You know him: Che Guevara shirts every single day, zapatista cap he never takes off. I snapped out of my daydream.
“Que qué teacher?”
“What do you think about the ejidos expropriation in 1990? San Miguel Ototipac lost half its common land so the state government could build the capital’s beltway. I was just talking about it.”
The teacher always liked talking politics with tangled words. And I knew the kind of answers he liked to hear. You know I was always good with words. Always the one asked to recite poems on Mother’s Day, to pledge allegiance to the flag out loud for the whole school to follow. But that morning I couldn’t deliver. My tongue knit into a hank and all I could do was stare out the window, beyond the soccer court and the cornfields, towards Abuelo Juan’s plot.
The teacher waited.
I spat out:
“That it sucked.”
I don’t know why I then took my hand to abuela Tonantzin’s necklace and knew what to do.
I went straight to don Ramiro’s wasteland when class was over. It was dry from years of chemical fertilizers. It was the perfect place to try. I set the necklace on the ground, closed my eyes, and imagined a garden growing. When I opened them it was like one of those documentaries the biology teacher used to play, remember? Like one of those scenes where you can see months go by in few seconds. A grove sprouted in the dead land. And when I picked the necklace up, it didn’t vanish either.
Don Ramiro went crazy. He went to church to thank la Virgencita for the miracle, he even turned down his land’s sale. The company even sent its ‘security personnel’ after him, to ‘negotiate.’ But by then the ceiba was the hottest news, and when the news broke about his wasteland turned to grove overnight, the whole town went crazy too. So everyone was at the church, even people from nearby towns. The padre came from the city even though it wasn’t Sunday, just to see if what he’d heard on the phone was true. There was such a big crowd in town that nobody feared the company’s thugs, despite them showing off their guns. Rumor went around about building a chapel at don Ramiro’s and asking the bishop to come declare it holy ground. The miracles of the ceiba and don Ramiro’s land were all you could hear.
But in the meanwhile, there was something else going on at Abuelo Juan’s: they’d finished the wall and raised a signboard saying, “Gaia’s Grove: Your Own Ecological Paradise.” They’d already flattened it to build. So I went there that very night. Had to dodge the trucks, but in the end I snuck in.
You would’ve cried too. Remember the cazahuite tree in the corner, where the swallows nested? And the medlar we climbed as kids? Gone. All of it was. El tecorral where the lizards sunbathed, the knoll the mushrooms crawled over after it rained, the shack where the cacomixtles hid . . . all gone. An eerie extent of flattened sand was all their ghastly lamps displayed. And the concrete wall, all around. Abuelo Juan’s beloved terreno split up into lots, ready to be built upon.
I looked towards the guard’s cabin: the window flashed blue. He had the TV on. I walked to the middle of the plot, put the necklace on the ground, and let my imagination fly.
Saplings came out of the ground.
We didn’t meet Abuelita Tonantzin, you and I. We just had family pics to know her by. So I always asked Abuelo Juan about her. “Abuelito, how was she like?”
“She was a very wise woman, mijita, very good with plants,” he’d say first, and then carry on about her life. That’s how I know who she was, what she did. She helped pretty much everyone in town when in childbirth. She healed those in need. Just for the sake of helping them, never a charge, all with herbs, stones and prayer, like una curandera from legend.
Abuelito really missed her. I felt it in his voice every time he talked about her. But he never got sad, al revés: joy sprang in him. One day I asked him why. “Es que she’s still right here, with me, with us, mija. She never leaves.” We were in his terreno, foraging mushrooms, and I thought he meant it as a metaphor or something. Pero no.
The real estate company brought back the machines to clear the copse of trees grown overnight. Meanwhile, people crowded outside the wall; it was the third ‘miracle’ in less than a week. The night guard swore he’d seen it all: vegetation grew out of nowhere, trees reached heights of decades in seconds, long gone herbs from the time of our abuelas sprouted por montones, buds exploded into flowers like fireworks made of petals. He told it all, then resigned and left for Juquila in pilgrimage. I still don’t know how he didn’t see me standing there in the middle of everything. But only the guys from drama knew who did the magic, the miracle or whatever. Oh, some of them talked all right. About the girl with the Tree of Life amulet. But nobody heard them. I guess people chose to believe in la Virgencita.
Didn’t matter at first. The company flattened it all again. They were eager to build, because that proved they owned our land already despite the lawsuit. But I would use the necklace again. I’d perform its magic, because the land was our abuelitos’ and they were trying to take it from us. Like they’d done before with other families, and even with the community ejidos on the slopes of the hill. Back then, not long ago really, they leveraged our poverty and misunderstandings and took advantage of the government’s corrupción to change the land use permit. Then they crammed our town with armed men in trocas and also harnessed our fear. And now Abuelo Juan was gone, and they tried to steal his land from us. Su tierra which he cared for all his life. But I wouldn’t let them.
So I went back that night. People were camped outside the plot’s main gate already, Guadalupanos trying to witness the miracle. I went around them and followed the wall, looking for a spot dark enough to jump out of sight. And I found it, right in a corner. An ahuehuete grew tall next to the creek, and its shade made the wall pitch black. It was like they read my mind, the guys from drama: they were there, waiting for me in the dark. With their help, everything was easier, and soon we were inside. The new guard must’ve been in the toilet or something, because he was nowhere around. So I set the necklace on the land once again, in the middle of the plot, and I imagined something vaster than before.
And a thick wood emerged.
I was late for school the next day. One of the real estate company’s trocas camped outside our home after sunrise. I thought they wouldn’t dare to break in, not with the whole town roused by the miracles. Still, I waited long after they were gone. When I went out, I saw the message scratched over the gate, saying they would fuck me up if I didn’t stop. I tried to calm myself down. “They won’t do it, Cipactli, they wouldn’t,” I kept telling myself. But my body shook all the way to school, and any rattle of a wheel over the dirt made me jump out of the road and hide.
I went back anyway. That night and the next and the next. Their threats didn’t stop, pero neither did I. I couldn’t stop and leave our abuelito’s land for them to snatch. And they already knew it was me, así que I just slept over at the parish for safety. It stood open now twenty four hours, as pilgrims arrived from neighboring towns for a chance to watch the miracle. The real estate company brought more and more men and guns to keep the crowd outside the wall. Jumping over it got harder, but the drama crew kept showing up, and every time we managed to get in unseen. Each dawn, thick woods covered the plot. And by night it was chopped down again.
I started falling asleep in class. I wouldn’t last much longer, but I thought the company had to give up soon, because the bishop declared Abuelo’s terreno holy ground a couple days after it all began. Some parishioners were even at the capital, lobbying for the realtor to give it back to the community. They wanted to build a sanctuary for la Virgencita there. But there was also the money: how much had the company spent already? They couldn’t rent all those dozers and steamrollers much longer. They had to step back, someday. Those were my thoughts that last time, as I climbed over the wall with the help of a couple guys from drama.
I jumped over and looked at the guard’s cabin. He was nowhere to be seen. Outside the wall, no prayers were sung, no murmurs sounded like the nights before. Somehow I didn’t find that odd. I walked towards the center of the plot, under the ghastly light of the lamps. I put the necklace on the ground, then heard the shouts from my companions. Warnings. All too late: something pierced my back.
I didn’t know where I was. I felt neither cold nor hot. All was dark. Something pressed on me from everywhere, and I couldn’t move. Or rather, I had no body to move. It went on like that for who knows how long. Then the whispers came. Like rustling sounds, like the hissing of a snake, they called me: “Cipactli . . . Ci . . . pac . . . tli . . . ” And somehow, I recognized them. The whispered voices belonged to the medlar, the cazahuite, the teocotes torn apart by the dozers. They were the mushrooms’ underground nerves no longer growing, the gophers and worms and lizards buried alive in their furrows by the steamrollers. “Ci . . . pac . . . tli,” they whispered in entangled voices. After a while I recognized the human ones among them: nuestras ancestras, elder women, called me. “Cipactli . . . Ci . . . pac . . . tli.”
The other guys from drama managed to escape. Me, they left right here in the ditch. The necklace broke in my fist, but I no longer needed it. The voices and I raised the forest night after night. Every morning, there it was: enorme, frondoso. The men running the real estate company chopped it down every time, until we won. They never could never understand what happened. Just like they couldn’t explain what my remains were doing in the plot.
The drama crew told the convenient version of the story, made it true by repetition: we broke into the plot to watch the miracle. The armed men were there. They grabbed the guys, molested me. I defended myself and got beaten down. My friends struggled to protect me. Shots got fired. They managed to escape; I didn’t. And no one saw me again. The company couldn’t prove its innocence. What were they gonna say? That a bruja grew a forest over their stolen plot every night?
El pueblo went mad. The whole town camped around the terreno and painted slogans on the wall. They occupied the city hall and closed down the highways. They marched to the capital and took over the real estate company CEO’s office. It all reached national news, and the federal government had to step in. That’s how they found what was left of my human body. But you already saw that, hermano. You were back, and you saw how the company left for good.
The only thing I regret is leaving like that, without saying adiós to Mamá. Identifying my corpse broke her heart. I wish I could tell her I’m not really gone, que estoy aquí. I wish you could hear me whenever you come here, to abuelo Juan’s land. But I know you feel my love in the flowers’ scent, in the embracing moisture of the ground and the cool shade of the trees. It is all for you. I like it when you play above me with Juanito, mi sobrinito. I like to hear you all laugh. Still, I wish you could hear me, hermano, like you did when we were kids and I told you bedtime stories. I wish I had my voice again, to speak with human words, to whisper in your ear, “Oye, I’m not gone, they didn’t kill me, hermanito, not really.” To tell you I live in every patch of this land Abuelo Juan tilled with so much love. To tell you that, like Abuela Tonantzin and the women before her, I became one with the ground.
The Spanish version of “One with the Ground” was edited by Laura Martínez-Lara.
