“Constantly, but God helps me and it passes quickly, so don’t try to seduce me, woman.”
After burying Andres alongside his brother, Concepcion rejoined her granddaughter at the clinic. Father Benito took them to a friend’s house in Solola, where they would be safe while Evelyn convalesced and he looked for a coyote he could trust to take her to the United States. Evelyn had her arm in a sling and every time she inhaled her ribs were a torture. Since Gregorio’s death she had lost a lot of weight; in recent weeks her adolescent curves had vanished. She was so skinny and frail that it seemed the slightest gust of wind could sweep her into the skies. Not only had she said nothing about what happened that fateful Easter Saturday but she had not uttered a single word since she came to on the mattress in the pickup. The only hope was that she had not seen how they slit her brother’s throat, that by then she had been unconscious. Dr. Castell ordered them not to try to ask her any questions; she was traumatized and needed peace and time to recover.
As they were leaving the clinic, Concepcion Montoya raised the possibility that her granddaughter had been made pregnant. This had happened to her when she had been raped by soldiers in her youth: Miriam was the result of that abuse. The Catalan doctor shut herself in a bathroom with the grandmother and told her in a whisper that she need not worry about that, because she had given Evelyn a pill invented by the North Americans to avoid getting pregnant. It was illegal in Guatemala, but no one would find out. “I’m telling you this so that you won’t go thinking of some homemade remedy for the girl. She’s suffered enough.”
WHEREAS BEFORE EVELYN HAD STAMMERED, after the rape she simply stopped speaking. She spent hours languishing in the house of Father Benito’s friends, showing not the slightest interest in all the novelties there: running water, electricity, two toilets, a telephone, and even a television set in her room. Concepcion intuited that this word sickness went beyond the doctors’ competence and decided to act before it became lodged in her granddaughter’s bones. As soon as Evelyn could stand properly on her feet and breathe without stabbing pains in her chest, Concepcion said goodbye to the kind people who had sheltered them and left with her granddaughter for Peten on a lengthy, bone-shaking minibus journey to visit the shaman Felicita, a healer and guardian of the traditions of the Maya. Felicita was famous: people came from the capital and from as far as Honduras and Belize to consult her on matters of health and destiny. She had been interviewed on a television program, where they estimated she was a hundred and twelve years old and must be the oldest person in the world. Felicita never denied this, but she still had most of her teeth and two thick braids hanging down her back, too many teeth and too much hair for someone so old.
It was easy for them to find the healer, because everyone they asked knew her. Felicita showed no surprise when they appeared: she was used to receiving souls, as she called her visitors, and always welcomed them warmly in her living house. She claimed that the wood of its walls, the beaten earth of its floor, and the straw of its roof were alive, breathing and thinking like all living beings. She would ask their advice for the most difficult cases, and the materials of the house would answer her in dreams. Her house was a round hut with only one room, where daily life went on alongside her ceremonies and cures. A curtain of serape blankets enclosed the small space where Felicita slept on a bed of rough boards.
The shaman greeted her new arrivals with the sign of the cross, asking them to sit on the floor, and served bitter coffee to Concepcion and mint tea to Evelyn. She accepted a fair price for her professional services and put the banknotes into a tin box without counting them. Grandmother and granddaughter drank in respectful silence and waited patiently while Felicita watered the medicinal plants in pots lined up in the shade, threw grains of corn out for the hens wandering about, and then put beans to cook on a fire in the yard. After she had completed her most urgent chores, the old woman laid a brightly colored woven cloth on the floor. On it she placed all the elements of her altar in strict order: candles, bundles of aromatic herbs, conch shells, and various Maya and Christian religious objects. She lit some sprigs of sage and cleansed the inside of her house with the smoke, walking in circles and chanting incantations to drive off the negative spirits in an ancient tongue. It was only then that she sat down opposite her visitors and asked what had brought them there. Concepcion explained the speech problem afflicting her granddaughter.