Fireflies

“The anthropologist Lola Romanucci-Ross, who once worked with Margaret Mead, observed that anthropological field trips echo the heroic voyages of classical literature. Not just scientific expeditions, they are ‘voyages of self-discovery’ and ‘metaphors for finding oneself…in magical flight, far from creatures of their own kind, [anthropologists]…go to other worlds and return with their versions of them.”

Quoted in: Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict: The Kinship of Women

Hilary Lapsley

University of Massachusetts Press: Amherst 1999

One time I wanted two moons

in the sky.

But I needed someone to look up and see

those two moons

because I wanted to hear him

try and convince the others in the village

of what he saw.

I knew it would be funny.

From The Wishing Bone Cycle

by Jacob Nibenegenesabe, tr. Howard Norman

Swampy Cree

Juanita is Born: circa 1864

Juanita’s mother missed first one menstrual period and then another. Her belly began to swell. She didn’t feel well. She was pregnant.

The anticipated birth was cause for daily celebrations, tea drinking, friendly gossip, and ministrations. The women of the village rubbed and oiled the body of the mother-to-be. They made certain that she was never frightened, always well fed, and never alone during the day or during the long dark nights. Of course, the women were all sleeping in a house together, so it was easy for them to fuss over the young expectant and give her special attention. They made syrupy, hot drinks to relax her. They saved the sweetest, meatiest morsels from their own stew pots to feed her. They searched their wardrobes for old laces and fine silks and with these festooned her in spite of her protestations. She looked alternatively like a wraith and a demonic bride from the middle ages.

All the women took up knitting and those who had stopped weaving started again. In their knitting and weaving they made the finest attire for this baby to be.

For a long time, Juanita’s mother couldn’t decide who should be present and attending to her at the time of her confinement. At first it seemed that Juanita’s mother would want only the midwife and her closest friends with her when she labor began. But life in a small village is more complicated than this. So she thought further.

She knew she wanted the two grandmothers to be there. But she also wanted her husband’s uncle, Joachim, and her husband’s uncle’s present wife. The wife was nice to her, and her husband’s uncle had helped raise the husband when he was a difficult, headstrong teen. Her husband often called his uncle “father.” But if the present wife was to be invited, then what about the wife who was actually in the household when the uncle was helping with the boy? She considered herself to be a grandmother too. Since Juanita’s mother didn’t want to offend anyone for fear of future complications (the ex-wife was prosperous and perhaps would not invite her to her extravagant parties or pass on wealth to them if she were excluded.), Juanita’s mother decided to invite both wives. But if these with a tenuous claim to be part of the family were to be welcomed, what about her great grandmother? She would be without doubt mortally wounded if she were excluded.

There were other considerations. Juanita’s mother’s  closest friend, Paciones, did not care for Joachim. She thought him crude and lewd. He had pinched her behind once. And he had a way of leering over his mug of beer that disgusted her. The drinking was another strike against him.

Juanita’s mother wanted Paciones by her side. Thus she would have to be cautioned to hold her tongue because Joachim was family and he would, of course, be part of the birthing party.

It grieved Juanita’s mother and to have to sort through the list of those she loved and imagine how they might all come together in peace.

When it got right down to it, there were many more whom probably ought to be invited. There were the aunties and the nieces. They could not be ignored. The list grew longer and longer. It was no longer a birth but a birthday; no longer a birth but a homecoming for those who had left the village or lived out in the canyons or had moved to a distant town. The invitations were necessarily vague. The date was unpredictable. The sex of the baby was, of course, unknown until the baby’s actual appearance. But surely a girl was expected, else why the impulse to invite all of these women? And of course, the women had, in their rubbing and anointing, managed to overwhelm nature with their own desires for a new female. They were determined to have their way.

All of the women were naturally delighted to have been invited. They burned with anticipatory pleasure as time passed. When the day predicted by the midwife approached, the women coming from a distance arrived in the village. There was not enough room for all of them in the large sleeping room, so some  set up a rough temporary camp in the plaza where they huddled close to each other after sunset. They watched all the comings and goings of villagers, donkeys, dogs, and lovers   as they built small fires and cooked beans and patted tortillas and lay about on their blankets telling each other stories and looking at the stars by night.

Juanita’s mother had not meant to cause such trouble for everyone and began skulking in and out of her own house by day. She tried her best to avoid the crowd, for the women peppered her with questions whenever she appeared in her doorway or was seen going out to feed a cow or pick a flower. She took to throwing a shawl over her dark hair and bringing it around her face in order not to be instantly recognizable. She fitted pillows all around her body under her dress so that she might appear to be just a fat stranger instead of the pregnant one.  Juanita’s mother’s efforts to elude them were not successful. The women were ever vigilant. In fact, there was some hawk eye charged with keeping a watch out for her and did so. The hawk eye might be involved in listening to a story or filing the hard calluses on her old feet, but one eye was always scanning the plaza and the doorway to Juanita’s house. She was always spotted no matter how early the hour she crept about or how carefully she disguised herself. It is not easy to disguise oneself in a small village.

The hawk eye would call out the first question: “How are you today? Is it time? Have you started?” Juanita always was stunned and stood stalk still. Then the whole chorus of women called out: “Is the baby moving? Has your water broken?”

The questions were sometimes inappropriate because a few of these younger, unmarried women had never given birth themselves. But more than that, quite a number of the married women had no children either. For reasons they did not understand, the birth rate in Solución was quite low. In fact, the villagers so seldom successfully reproduced themselves that it was feared that the whole town might simply vanish in a few generations.

Because many of the women had not given birth, they didn’t know what to ask Juanitia’s mother when they saw her. They weren’t certain what to expect or when to expect it. Only the veteran mothers knew what they were talking about when they discussed such things among themselves or with Juanita’s mother. Some questions from the uninitiated were so outlandish that Juanita’s mother’s mother announced that she would conduct a series of talks on childbirth. Juanita’s mother’s mother had been sent to a boarding school in Santa Fe when she was a young girl. One of the priests who came to the village had noted that she was a girl of exceptional intelligence and managed to convince her parents to let her attend the very fine mission school with which his order was affiliated. As a result, she was an educated woman and followed all the latest developments in women’s issues, including reproductive health, with interest.

Juanita’s mother’s mother assembled the women in an area of the plaza unencumbered by tents and fire pits, near the twin graves and under the shade of a large apple tree.  First, Juanita’s mother’s mother held forth with all the latest information on pregnancy that she had gleaned from books and magazines. Elizabeth Blackwell’s New York clinic for women had recently opened and had gained certain notoriety in the press and Juanita’s mother’s mother received books and manuals from the clinic. She was prepared for any query. The women, however, were shy and reluctant to even look at the charts and diagrams pinned to the apple tree.

So Juanita’s mother’s mother decided practical applied knowledge would be of more use to these women. The women were told to sort themselves out on their rugs and blankets to practice breathing. They worked in pairs and coached one another. They were instructed on the best food for babies, shown how to prepare it, and told when it should be introduced. They were given watermelons to diaper and dress and carry about in order that they might be of some actual help to Juanita’s mother after the baby was born.

Meanwhile, Juanita’s mother, realizing that she would have a crowd in the birthing room, had all the furniture removed except for a bed with a birthing drawer, something you will hear more about later. She asked her young husband if he could remodel the room, just a little, for the big day. A wall was removed and the room thereby enlarged by half, though the living room walls sagged a bit forever after. She designed an easel for him to build and had it brought into the room. On it she rested a large chalk board and wrote instructions for all the observers. For example, no one was to chew food or tobacco or talk after the head had crowned. Excessive outbursts were discouraged. Falling to one’s knees in prayer was allowed if done quietly. Anyone feeling faint was to leave the room rather than draw attention to themselves.

Finally, many extravagantly stewed chickens and rice dinners later, Juanita’s mother went into labor. The call went round the campsites in and around the plaza in front of Juanita’s mother’s and father’s house. In all, forty-seven women of many shapes and sizes politely entered the birthing room, nearly smothering the few men in the room with their bosoms and gowns. The women had been, graciously instructed not to wear scents and to avoid tight clothing. As a result, shapes never before seen in public were bulging and flouncing all about the plaza before and after the birth and in the birthing room itself, Uncle Joachim and Pasiones, though stuck standing next to each other, her uncorsetted breasts squeezed close in against his muscled back, remained polite throughout the day. It must be said that Joachin helped matters by keeping his roving eyes in his head, his hands to himself, and refraining from liquor.

The women were, fortunately, advised not to lock their knees. Isabella’s father knelt near her mother and, as they breathed together, the whole room began to rise and fall with the sound of forty-seven extra pairs of lungs. The women, some of whom had not known each other until this journey together, hugged each other and tears filled their eyes. The breathing, the breathing, the breathing continued until finally there was a brave little cry and Juanita came into the room to join them all.

Juanita entered life to the cooing and crowing of all the females in the village and a few fortunate fellows. She was born, at last, content, healthy, and amidst great happiness.

Juanita looked around the room and knew what this family was all about. She took charge from that day on.

This is the next chapter of my novel. All previous chapters may be found on this blog site. The book was largely written in the early 2000s and has been subsequently rewritten and revised. This is the latest revision. I work on it, chapter by chapter, with the hopes that I will have a final new revision sometime in the coming months. Enjoy.  Comments @dedanaan (twitter)

The Romance of the Village of Solución 

Tales Collected by Henrietta Pouissiere

The Anthropologist as Hero Part II

September 27, 1999

You must excuse an old woman. It is because I do not have my notes that I am prone to tell stories from which I leave out some of the most important details. You may wonder, for example, how long ago all this happened. Well, I can tell you that I did not begin my field work until the late nineteen-forties and these origin stories were set in a mythic time long before I came to the village. The world of these stories described seemed distant and incredible even when I first heard the people reminiscing about it. Well, it was another world. Even when I first began my fieldwork, it was another world.  All of these stories were from a time long before the legendary Tijerina raided the courthouse at Amarilla and reclaimed the land and vowed to drive the scoundrels from the cities and usurpers from the land. Surely you remember Tijerina? Surely you at least remember as far back as the nineteen-sixties? What a hero! And the Chicanos and Chicanas and the founding of MECHA. What exciting times? No? You don’t remember? Well, then, you must simply trust me that Solución was founded a very long time ago.

It was long before stock options and capital gains and letters of intent. It was before the Korean War and Vietnam. Even Vietnam is ancient history today. My own fieldwork began before the Hubble telescope and before anyone talked about multinational corporations, world trade agreements, or the far left and the radical right. Terrorism had a different meaning then. It was a time you may have difficulty imagining. And if you can’t imagine how it was when I began my field work, think how much more difficulty I had in comprehending, much less visualizing the remote world of legends in which the village of Solución reveled.

I cannot be certain these old stories are true. I strongly suspect that they are in large part. Stories like these don’t survive unless they have some foundation in truth and unless there is something about the stories that helps people make sense of their collective lives.

Plus there is independent verification, evidence of the truth of them. I have actually seen flying eggs and other strange things including fireballs in the plaza. So some of these stories are surely true. But because I’ve only been coming here since the late nineteen forties, I just take the old stories on faith and try to collect multiple versions of them from as many people as possible so that I have some corroboration.

Just to be clear, I was not witness to the priest who built the tower and hollered at people to kneel and pray. That was long before my time. But I was around during what the people called the “scourge of the curanderos” when a group of fraudulent healers came to town claiming to have the cure for cancer. That period was bad enough in its own ways. I also witnessed a particularly odd summer when people thought that they must bathe in lime leaves and scatter flower petals at their doors to ward off evil. Someone’s cousin visiting from Argentina suggested that if only the villagers would take to this custom, they would be finally free of the ills that seemed to plague every generation, including the peculiar inability of many of the women of the village to conceive. I hastened to point out to those who became his disciples that Argentina did not seem to be a country that was particularly plague free. The cousin, in his hideously tight pants and shirt open to the navel, confronted me in front of the whole village. He pointed out that I was supposed to be an anthropologist and should not meddle. Quite right.

A Further Note on Field Work

Sometimes it was just so hard not to comment. It’s a weakness of mine, the tendency to comment. People often don’t take it well. One year, sometime in the late nineteen forties or early fifties, shortly after I had begun my field studies, for example, a woman named Matilda, about whom I knew very little at the time, got everyone to drink Mogan David wine with weekly highly ritualized communal breakfasts of scrambled eggs and chorizo sausage. She was convinced that these village wide repasts and the ghastly toasts that accompanied them would somehow help the people rise above their common fates. Matilda pointed to a different person at each week’s breakfast and it was that person’s job to raise his or her glass of the thick, sweet wine and call out some hope for health and prosperity. “May you be dead a half hour before the devil hears about it,” a man called out one week. I traced this toast to the Irish. Another time a woman suggested that everyone should “stick your heads in the ground and grow like onions.” This was clearly a Yiddish oath. I compiled a list of the toasts with a note on their origins. Nobody wanted to hear that they were coming up with nothing original in their efforts to address the complaints of generations. I was, again, told to keep out of it.

Aside from these couple of unprofessional intrusions into village life, I usually simply recorded what I saw or was told. The stories I am writing here are a result of  disciplined inquiry, I assure you. Of course, things that happened after 1949 are things that I personally witnessed and can vouch for.

My fieldwork was a chore but I had to do more than I had done if I was to maintain and build a reputation. It wasn’t easy succeeding in academics. Even in the late forties the men dominated department politics. They were still wary of sending women to the field, even though Margaret and others, including me, had long since proven their mettle. But that was part of the problem. Margaret and Ruth and the others were so bright and pushy in their own ways that the more ordinary others of us coming along had quite a job to do to even be noticed.

The men would not work with us in the field for fear of being distracted by sex. Women who went to the field alone were often gossiped about and accused of having wild orgies with “native” men.

It was clear to the men, and we accepted it, that all we could possibly do was to work with women and on women’s issues in the field. We couldn’t study the really important things, the men said, like political and economic systems. We could not explore much with men informants, and certainly we must stay away from conversations about relationships and sexuality. This, we were warned in our departments, would be seen as a sign of looseness. Invading men’s social and cultural space was an invitation to be labeled a slut. This was not entirely a fabrication by our American colleagues. One ill advised young woman, a Columbia graduate student, was actually murdered for trespassing in these areas.

Sending women to do fieldwork when I first went to Moa Nui was just as controversial as sending girls to do battle was in later years.

My mentor in London fought for my right to go to the field. It took a lot of arguing and politicking to make my journey possible.

Even in the late 1940s, with years of work under my belt, it was still not easy. Of course Mead and group were right behind me. There were no funds available to support my research. I had to live frugally during the year and save enough from my salary at McArthur during the year to support myself summers.

I set out on that first trip to Solución with such bright eagerness. I had a 1947 Plymouth convertible coupe with wood grain interior. I had saved and saved for it. It was bright red. My, how I loved that car! I loaded the new car with my typewriter, cut sheets for field notes, notebooks, a large medicine chest, gifts, tinned food, and a footlocker full of toilet paper, books, and clothing.

When I drove into the plaza that first day, children ran out to touch the Plymouth. Old men came from their benches and rubbed their buttocks and calves against the shiny fenders as if they were Aladdin’s lamps. Some women came forward and asked me to have some lemonade with them. I loved everyone instantly even though the village seemed exceedingly dry and there were dead apple trees in the plaza and four or five wrecks of vehicles nudged lifelessly up against an eastern wall, part of the structure that enclosed the plaza.

One woman, a very large woman, whom I judged to be in her early sixties, stepped up with an extra tall glass of water. There were beads of condensation as big as pearls dripping from its ice-cold sides.  She  spoke to me with a rich, full, booming voice. “You’ll need a place to stay. Come with me. We have a perfect room in our new house. My son Hermes stays now in our old house on the plaza, so, you see, we have the extra room we had planned for him. And we will feed you well.” It was a woman named Ramona looking out for the welfare of her little family. She knew I would be a paying guest and the money would help. It was soon settled. She offered the room and then instantly produced some small boys to carry my things.

The little room was ideal, more than I could have hoped for. It was in the back section of Ramona and her daughter, Epiphany’s prefab home and was located just off the plaza. Though the house had almost no character, it worked out well for me to live with Ramona and the family because the women still tended to go off to the big house to sleep at night. (More on that later.) With the women out of the house most nights, I could work on my notes all through the evening in relative quiet and seclusion. But, oh the days. I had a terrible time that first trip getting used to the lack of privacy. I had a door but it was not appropriate to close it if I were to be accepted in village life and culture. And there was always something going on out there in the other part of the house that I could learn from. Still, it was hard for me.

As a consequence of my “forced” open door policy, I was never alone. People seemed to be constantly talking, laughing, or shrieking about something or other. People dropped in on Ramona and Epiphany every few minutes throughout the day and the guests spilled into my room to ask questions about my work and my life, flip through my journals, read my letters, and finger my clothing. Sophia, Ramona’s mother, who lived in another of the rooms in the house, sat chatting with someone or me most all day long unless she had a birth or medical emergency to attend to. This was good for my work if I could keep her telling stories about the history of the village. She was not bothered by my note taking and questions. But often as not, she talked about things she’d read in magazines or current gossip she’d picked up from some visitor. Also, food was constantly being cooked and served to someone. I felt obliged to help out in any way I could. So I really did need the late night hours to record what I’d heard and seen. There was no way to do it during the day.

I was exhausted from making an effort to listen, engage, “participate” and “observe” at the same time. And I was exhausted from the need to be affable all day long for weeks on end. I am not by nature that affable. So I was “managing” their impression of me by trying hard to be a nice, pleasant person. No one likes a cranky anthropologist.

Going back to Columbia was a relief after that first field trip. All my misery was poured out in a post-doc seminar I was lucky enough to have with Ruth. Her wartime research duties for the government still kept her out of the classroom most of the time so getting into this seminar was a real boon. Although I had felt dismissed by her in the  (since she was partially deaf, I may have misread her responses to me) and was so intimidated by her that my hands sweated profusely in her presence, she seemed to warm a bit to me after I’d actually been in the field again. She said I was one of those high minded, restrained, logical Apollonian types trying to make sense of a quite Dionysian culture. I was unaccustomed to the passion and excitement that seemed to permeate Solución and the lives of my hosts. Moa Nui culture produced quite a different character, much more akin to my own. Though there were moments of passion.

I wrote the stories I collected on my little half-slips of paper (copied from my journals) just as I was taught, and dutifully sent one set to my home where I placed them in a bank safe deposit box upon return from my summer of field work. There were some notes I kept quite separate from the ones upon which I thought I might use as the basis for publications. These were the notes that included systematic inquiries on village kinship systems, economic exchange, and political organization.[i]

These more fantastic story notes were notes I knew I had to keep away from other anthropologists and didn’t dare do anything with publicly. I placed these in a bank deposit box all by themselves. A few weeks ago while I was preparing to come here I finally opened the box where I’d secured them. There was nothing but a pile of dust to be found. I can’t think what must have happened. It was as if they had been cremated! But surely, a fire in a safe deposit box would have set off some kind of alarm. And how would such a fire have started? It is a mystery to me. I had other sets of these notes but I think they must have been left in my friend Rose’s mother’s trailer house. I can’t find them. I think I left them there the last time I visited. I must have been planning to come back and work the next summer and I thought they’d be safer in the trailer than with Mildred or in any of the other houses where I had occasionally stayed in recent years. They are gone, apparently, with the fire in the village. Certainly Rose’s mother’s trailer is gone.[ii]

So I’m writing the stories in this volume largely from my  journals and from memory. There is no good in continuing to search my mind as to whether there is yet another set of notes somewhere. It will just frustrate me and I have to write now, not later. I do have letters, personal journals, tapes, and the memories.[iii] I’ve brought all that I could find with me. The tapes should be useful. There are dozens of taped interviews. The information is recorded on old reel-to-reel tapes. That means I had to find and bring along with me a really heavy old reel-to-reel recorder so I can listen to them. This machine is nothing like the equipment you can get these days. Well, at least I was using a tape recorder in the late forties and fifties, not the wax cylinders my teachers at Columbia had used in the 1920s. The tapes, however, have deteriorated and  with the passing of time. They were made under difficult conditions and I must listen to them over and over to really hear and notate the texts and to understand all the nuances of the tales told.

Sections of the old tapes are stretched by all this playing and so the audio quality is not the best. Also some sections of the interviews are hard to hear above ambient sounds. For example, sometimes people go in and out of houses, slamming doors, while my informant is discussing some important point. Often a radio or a ticking clock can be heard in the background. Sometimes the clock seems to be in the foreground and I can hear a voice only occasionally behind the loud tick tock. Sometimes whole segments of the tape are blank as if someone has intentionally erased a story. Sometimes my informant interrupts herself or himself to cook or bathe a child or scream at a dog.

Difficult as it is to work with this material, at least Mildred has electricity now. If not, I’d be running to town to charge the battery packs my old recorder uses if not.

And who can complain? The tapes have survived while the notes are gone. And I logged all of the tapes years ago when I had a small grant to work on organizing my field notes and tapes. So it is easy to find stories or parts of stories by referring to the log. Except of course, the big blank sections where whole interviews have disappeared. The grant was large enough to allow me to have transcripts made of most of the tapes, but even these are missing a significant number of pages.

By the way, the transcripts and logs and tapes were not kept in that safe deposit box with the notes. They were locked in lovely old oak cabinets with brass fittings and kept in the dusty attic of my house up north. The cabinets moved with me when I moved to a small apartment. There was a storage area in the basement of the apartment building where they were locked until I came down here in August. It turns out the attic and the basement of the apartment building were safer places for archiving than the safe deposit box in my bank! I’ve heard of some anthropologist keeping field notes in the freezer compartment of their refrigerators. That seems to be a safe place, too. Never mind, I have everything left and usable with me now and I won’t let them get away.

It is for this reason, the loss of notes and the loss of the chronologies, that I may tend to ramble or stick things into the narrative when I think of them. It is a truth of age that one must say or write things down as they occur to you because those things, those memories, are fleeting and surprising and may never occur to you again. I hope you have some patience with me. I hope you will allow me to remind you occasionally that though I am old, you do have good reason to trust what I tell you. I know the stories well and I will tell them as truthfully as I can. I will ask Mildred and Crow when and if I falter. I will not omit the bad things, either, merely to save your sensibilities. Though in today’s world, even the bad things I have to tell will seem mild.

By the way, the villagers were still telling stories right up to the end. They were always making new histories for themselves, finding ways to commemorate their time on earth. So, even though these stories of the little priest and the first ghosts and the twin are from a mythic hard-to-date era the people of Solución were circulating quite recent tales that served to mark moments of significance. People in small villages always do seize upon out of the ordinary events to tell and retell. They use them to denote, in short hand, whole eras or specific occasions that signify a turning point for their collective lives.

For example the villagers in Solución would say, “Remember the day Jose’s teeth dropped out after he spent an afternoon in the chicken coop with Margarita?” The villager’s loved to tell that one. Apparently Margarita, a woman most villagers living in the late nineteen forties had actually known as a very good weaver, had a sideline. She built a bed sized “chicken coop,” put a mattress and some blankets inside, and lined the walls with pictures of naked women. Into this coop, men were invited for a small fee. The men were happy with the arrangement since time with their wives was quite limited. Margarita was happy for she made a little money on the side and being unmarried and living alone could use the help. The other women didn’t care one way or the other. Margarita was always welcome in the common bedroom at night no matter whose husband she was rumored to have solicited that day.

Margarita’s house was just outside the plaza, a hundred yards to the east and adjacent to the main irrigation ditch. This respectable distance gave her and her patrons a modicum of privacy. And though her patrons were drawn from every household in the village, the commissioners who were in charge of the ditch found the most excuses to visit. They had, after all, to examine the ditch for the sake of the other villagers and the crops. “Someone has reported that a child has been bathing in the ditch out to the east,” one of the four officials would announce. This was strictly forbidden. The news was, in reality, a signal. Each commissioner would run to his houses for a clean shirt, brush his hair, and pick the lint off his hat. Then off he and the others would trot.

Margarita often stood waiting for customers in the holly hocks near the latched, wrought iron gate of the little fence that enclosed her flower garden. Margarita put down her rake when she heard the footfalls. She took off her apron, squirted herself with a sweet cologne that she carried in the pocket of her dress, and took her position. The men would pretend to be inspecting the ditch for erosion or leaves or brush. “Hallo you good looking fellows,” she called to them from deep in the towering, fluted blossoms. “You must be very hot,” she’d say and offer them a cold drink or a shot of whiskey. The men happily joined her on her shady porch and one at a time went with her to the chicken coop out back.

But one day, Jose, a kindly old man, wandered away from the plaza quite by accident. Margarita was especially nice to him for he was a bit feeble and faltering. He had two whiskeys and devoured a plate of tea cakes. When he and Margarita went to the coop it was only around eleven in the morning. Around noon, he stumbled home, more dizzy and exhausted than ever. And he was full of shame and fear for what he had done. When he awoke the next morning, his mouth was full of something that felt very like stones. He got up and spit into a wash basin. What came out of his mouth, one by one, were his teeth, every one of them.

All the villagers knew this story and each was able to remember approximately when it happened. If someone said “chicken coop” everyone would snicker and remember Jose’s gums. No men ventured near Margarita after that. Jose, even after he was fitted for dentures, dared not ever smile again lest someone point at his mouth and cluck and tsk at him. In fact, that event marked a temporary rise in the moral temperature of the men in the village. They did, after all, believe in original sin and thought the sin of going into Margarita’s chicken coop was about as original as one could get.

Or, more recently, they would say to each other, “Oh, remember the day that the helicopters skittered suddenly out of the sky and hovered above the village.” That was a day that everyone over about age five did indeed remember. The helicopters came and a couple of dark, armored vans arrived at just about the same time. Men in flak jackets leaped from the vans and stormed the crack house where Lucinda and her baby lived. They took her away. A woman from child protective services snatched the baby from her arms and sat with it in the back of a big, light blue Buick bearing official state license plates. Lucinda eventually went to federal prison. The baby was never heard about again. That was a reference day for the villagers that entered the repertoire of stories after about nineteen ninety-five. They all knew what dropping helicopters into a conversation meant and what it portended.

Until the day the village was destroyed, if someone saw a helicopter over head, he or she would run to neighbors and say, “Oh they are coming again. Come look. There is one over head now.”

And someone else would inevitably say, “Well, it happened once, it can happen again.”

And someone else would say, “I’ve heard those kids staying down in one of Pureza’s old trailers have set up a meth lab. I’ll bet they are after them.”

And soon, the whole story of Lucinda and the big Buick would be told again for the benefit of the aged who were losing their memories and the very young who had not been witness. It was a story of warning to all.

The villagers all referred, too, to the fire that took out Ignacio’s computer. That wasn’t so awfully long ago either. The computer ignited and burned down to a wheezing lump. There seemed no real reason for the fire. But there was the undeniable consequence of it: a slag of plastic, wires, and plugs. This was the computer that Ignacio wrote upon everyday and listened to every night.

When the first messages began, he was still working on a government computer at Los Alamos where he held a very good job as an engineer. He had a degree from University of New Mexico. He was the first from the village to complete such an impressive course of study. Everyone was proud of him.

During his workday, he began to receive odd messages, messages that he could not understand. He could not determine the source of these messages. As the messages were regular and frequent, he began to save them and print them out trying to make sense of them. He used his computer to locate and study theoretical papers on the search for extraterrestrial artifacts. He stayed up, sometimes all night, reading and searching and waiting for new messages. He found out who in the lab had access to data from space probes or latest reports from The Very Large Array radio observatory down near Socorro. He found ways to hack into his colleagues’ computer data bases, printed whole books of analyses, and continued to read round the clock. Though his searches were thorough,  he could find no communications had been reported that came close to what he had encountered. In fact, he could find absolutely no verified reports of any communications with beings beyond the earth.  He decided that he had somehow been chosen as a channel for alien fiction. He was convinced that the strange e-mail was actually the work of a writer who lived far outside of the Milky Way.

From all he had read, he decided that his messages emanated from a system of planets that were attached to the star 55 Cancri in the constellation of Cancer. He began to go out each night and stare up into the western sky, watching for 55, He took a little flash light with him and blinked the only Morse Code he knew: S. O. S. Ignacio, up all night reading and flashing, forgoing dinners, getting little sleep, began to look horrible.

Poor Ignacio. One day he announced his theory about the messages to his co-workers, waving a sheaf of printed pages in his hand. “Look,” he said. “I have proof of the existence of sentient extraterrestrial’s beings. Here, in this lab, I have been receiving, a chapter at a time, the words of a novelist who lives in some far away galaxy.”

This announcement did not sit well with his superiors, whom his office mates notified immediately. The bosses wondered what would happen to the reputation of the lab if this lunatic story somehow got out. It would be, given the secrecy of the place, unlikely to get out. Nevertheless, they proceeded cautiously. The bosses collected his papers. They might have been persuaded to investigate further or forgive Ignacio altogether had the novel been any good. It was, for their taste, quite bad. Characters were poorly developed. The plot line was dull. The writer seemed to tell, not show. Alien or not, the lab did not want to be associated with Ignacio’s work and somebody’s third rate fiction.

Ignacio lost his job within the week, sold his split-level house on the butte, and returned to Solución. He ate very little, drank Coca Cola by the case, chain smoked Lucky Strikes, and stayed plugged in to his email account.

Ultimately, he hoped, with the aid of his computer and the outerspace novel- in- progress, to complete and publish a great and original manuscript and thereby salvage his reputation.

Then, without warning, the wiring in his house shorted, a fire broke out, and he lost everything including what remained of his mind. That was another significant day for the villagers and one only had to mention Ignacio in passing and someone would say, “The Martians.” And everyone within hearing distance would whoop with laughter.

And someone else would say, “I wonder if it was true.”

And someone else would say, “of course it was true, that’s why the CIA came and burned down his house. They didn’t want anyone else to know.” And this comment, amplified by the story of Ignacio’s subsequent disappearance, fueled the era of paranoia that characterized the beleaguered village over these past few years. Ignacio, it turned out, had simply moved to Seattle and taken a job with Microsoft. But the truth did not diminish the strength of the myth.

Other stories helped villagers fuel their resentment of the local white population for their sin of lumping the villagers indiscriminately with Mexicans. A popular story in this genre, told repeatedly in the post office and general store and when people were sitting on the plaza and bored, was the story of Alicia. Alicia found a skinned whole bear hanging by hooks in the locker room of the restaurant where she worked. She mistook it, in the dim light, for a human body. Upon that very day she became an inconsolable lunatic. Of course she lost her job too, though it was not such a good one as Ignacio’s. After nine years as a waitress, she was still making minimum wage and could not feed her family without supplemental assistance. During each trip she made to the welfare office for food stamps, she had to run a gauntlet of unemployed Anglos. They complained loudly, for her benefit, about illegal aliens coming to this country to drain the state’s coffers and take jobs that were by right theirs. Alicia’s family had, of course, been resident in the country for four hundred years. And Alicia was a hard worker. Until, of course, the day that she saw the naked bear. Anyone could have made such a mistake, the people of the village reasoned, and anyone would have found such a job intolerable. Becoming crazy is as good a way as any to register one’s complaint against an unjust life.

Knowing how important stories of the recent past were to the people of Solución, I knew the stories of long ago had been kept alive and told over and over with as much accuracy as possible through the years for a reason. You see, the stories I heard about the twins and the longing and the little priest were a core part of the folk tradition of Solución when I first came to the village.

As I said, I collected stories from as many people as possible. I found that there were several versions of these foundational stories in circulation. Some thought the little priest had come to the village before the twin had died. Some thought the priest had blessed the longing sister and listened to her confession. Some thought the roses sprang first from the mouth of the sister. Some confused the beans with the roses and thought the priest’s coat pockets were filled with various cooked legumes when he came out of his long trance. No one knew when the church had been built or by whom. No one knew much at all, you see, except about Ignacio and Lucinda because their stories were so much more recent. I had to do lots of interviews and prod and pry to understand what had happened with the little priest and the twins? What happened to the woman’s hands? It was my job to listen and sort out the commonalities among the stories and try to separate fact from fiction. And furthermore, I had to fill in the blanks: What happened between the time of the little priest and the time of Lucinda and Ignacio?

And then, after all that work of watching and listening and interviewing, I lost my notes.

It’s easy to remember, though. The constant reminders of the past are around me. The church, you see, was still right there until just a few weeks ago. I visited it every summer and studied the icons and poked around in the priests’ archives. The likeness of the first priest, the small, round, kindly pumpkin face of the little priest, still peeped out from behind bulletproof glass within the chambers of the church. It was painted in thick oils laid on with a palette knife. The painting was gilded at the edges. The roses on the lintels were still as lovely as the day they were carved.

The altarpiece inside the chapel was still as bright as when it first was built, paid for by the crops and backs of those first villagers and then restored after a grim accident in nineteen fifteen or sixteen. (More about that later.) Roses still appeared fresh in every vase each morning. I used to go early, always thinking I might see how this magic was done. But I never could penetrate the mystery.

The whole area directly between the back of the church and the wall that enclosed the village was lively until the fire I’ve been told. In recent years, there had sprung a myriad of village enterprises aimed at the tourists. A tortilla factory sold delicious flavored treats in a shop adjoining the church caretaker’s quarters. Chili powders for every purpose might be purchased from a number of competing vendors housed in shed like structures that abutted the wall. Crucifixes from distant churches that had been dismantled or fallen into disuse could be had for a song in some of these stores. Santos that had been held sacred were happily exchanged for hard cash.

Pilgrims came and some tourists, drawn to the village by billboards on the freeway. The sick and worried, the debtors, and the curious came attracted by the stories of the church, the little priest, and rumors of miracles. They all came and prayed, or tried to pray, and lit candles there. It must be said, in all honesty, the candles seemed not to stay burning very long. Gusts of wind swept through the chapel and blew them out regularly. Though parishioners patched and plastered regularly, their efforts never seemed to stop the great draughts. Parishioners and pilgrims had different goals from those of the tourists when they visited the church. They lit the candles and sniffed the roses and held them dear to themselves. And as they sniffed, they hoped. They hoped because they did not know what else to do. All of them had heard that here was magic. They could only hope. They lingered and prayed. They made the sign of the cross, knelt on their knees, and poured out their stories of grief to blank eyed statues who hadn’t cared a whit since the reformation. Vatican III dealt the final blow. Nobody apparently needed their intercessions anymore. So they just shut down.

The tourists usually did not stay long enough to see their candles extinguished. Most of them lit one then took a rose to press against their cheeks and bosoms, for as surely as a rose was taken a fresh one replaced it. After they had seen the miracle of the roses for themselves, the visitors swooped out the big wooden doors, into the plaza, to have a beer and a taco, and take a few photographs. They did not linger as did the pilgrims and the parishioners.

The tourists, however, paid good money for the candles and the roses. The candles and the roses were indeed a stable source of income for the parish.

.

“The anthropologist Lola Romanucci-Ross, who once worked with Margaret Mead, observed that anthropological field trips echo the heroic voyages of classical literature. Not just scientific expeditions, they are ‘voyages of self-discovery’ and ‘metaphors for finding oneself…in magical flight, far from creatures of their own kind, [anthropologists]…got to other worlds and return with their versions of them.”

Quoted in Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict: The Kinship of Women

Hilary Lapsley

University of Massachusetts Press: Amherst 1999

One time I wanted two moons

in the sky.

But I needed someone to look up and see

those two moons

because I wanted to hear him

try and convince the others in the village

of what he saw.

I knew it would be funny.

From The Wishing Bone Cycle

by Jacob Nibenegenesabe, tr. Howard Norman

Swampy Cree

[1]

This is the next chapter of my serialized novel The Romance of the Village of Solución : A Serialized Novel August 8, 2013. All previous chapters are available on the blog, beginning with August 8 post (link in the masthead). Subsequent chapters are individual posts. This book was begun and an entire first draft completed around 2000/2001. It is being rewritten and edited chapter by chapter and posted here.

The Little Priest

Of course, all of this, the death of the woman and the jumble of grave goods, and all the pining and suffering, took place long before the time that the little priest came to town. I was never certain how much time had passed between the founding of the village and the coming of the little priest. These stories, of course, are of mythic quality thus time is flexible and ahistorical. They are quasi-sacred texts and as such, things that happen in them transcend ordinary categories. Still, there is physical evidence that both the little priest and the founder of the village were genuine, that is to say, real people. There were, after all, until the fire, the fresh roses in the church every morning and, on one wall of the chapel, an icon representing the priest himself. And the original bean pot, though a bit chipped and cracked, was enshrined in a Plexiglas case in one corner of the sanctuary next to a painted plaster image of the Virgin Mary. People could buy little tin replicas of the bean pot at a little store near the church. It was said to improve one’s cooking if hung near the stove.

The little priest was a small man, they told me. They said he was not much of a man at all to look at him. He wore a workingman’s jacket, oily and stiff as if fresh from some sea facing town on the south of England. It was a brown streaky jacket covered with loops and brass buttons and hanging all over with knives and pots and colorfully enameled holy pictures engraved in tin. He wore dark trousers. They were dusty and frayed around the hems of the legs. Small bits of thread and torn cuffs stuck out around his brown ankles. He wore no shoes, but his feet were soft looking with clean toes and immaculate toenails. They looked as if they had been brushed and manicured each time they were in evidence. The joints of each toe were smooth and regular not gnarly or knobbed as one might suspect of a well traveled walker. Nevertheless, appearances aside, he had clearly been treading upon these feet far too long for there were dark cracks like webs of spiders around his calloused heels.

He had a round, brownish orange face with a smile so gentle that he looked a bit like a grinning pumpkin. No, this was not a menacing pumpkin look. There was nothing alarming or mean about the man. His very dark hair was slightly wavy but thinning on the top and he had a pronounced widow’s peak. His hairline was clearly receding though he was not yet thirty. His eyebrows nearly met in the middle of his forehead, but he never seemed to frown or bring them all the way together. Never were these eyebrows, as the expression goes, knitted. His face gave the impression that he was a blank but kind man, easy to be sitting near, and happy to be comforted by. The skin on his cheeks was smooth and fine but dimly scarred as if he had escaped disaster as a youth.  He talked quietly and slowly and moved his hands with grace and ease to touch a child or lick a spoon of custard or lift a sweet tart to his mouth. The smallest finger on his right hand crooked just slightly when he held a fork or took a bite of flakey pastry. He laughed easily, quickly, and sincerely. To see him sitting in the plaza brought to mind  sunlit hills of dried prairie grass or moonlit sand.

When he arrived in the village, he noticed, of course, the plaza full of crosses and the twin’s grave and the sister’s grave and lay down on his back just beside these graves. He pulled a blanket from his pack. It was a woolen, mostly red blanket, Navajo by the looks, with broad angular colored bands that depicted difficult journeys. Tales of twin heroes were woven along the edges. Bits of yucca fiber stuck out from the woof here and there. Someone’s hair and someone’s father’s tooth were visible, inserted by the weaver in the warp. It seemed a bit odd for a priest to have such a blanket. But people let this thought go, there was so much more about him to provoke their curiosity.

He placed the red blanket over all his body and his head, having arranged a gourd and some pieces of frankincense and lumps of copal and a tin bowl full of water near him. He lay there murmuring words in Latin or some other lost archaic language.

Of course after all these generations, what he said has been through the equivalent of the telephone game. Some told me that what he said was:

“Jesus Christ commands me to come to you with a message of hope.”

Others say that he said:

“Jesus Christ is not the messenger for whom you hoped.”

Obviously, the difference in these two utterances was the subject of long discussions in the village plaza. The men were most particularly interested in arguing about what the man really said, and were still doing so in the late nineteen forties when I came to do my fieldwork. Women seemed content to simply accept the fact that either way, the village itself was perpetually in grave trouble.

Everyone did agree in the retelling of the story that no one present at the time during which the little priest actually spoke claimed to understand him or dared to translate. It was only much later that some said they had followed his meaning and these few passed on their apocryphal translations to their own family members. These highly idiosyncratic reports, given forth long after the event, account for the vast differences in the tales people relayed to me. In fact, it is from this early period and as a result of these various understandings of what the little priest said, that I came to divide the villagers into three recognizable camps so far as their belief systems might be categorized at all. There were those villagers who could be said to have hope, those with no hope at all, and those who simply asked many questions and really believed very little about anything including the very idea of hope. Matilda, as you will see later, was one who fueled the perspective of the latter group. Rose, as you will come to understand, was clearly from the branch of villagers who had an abundance of hope.

In any case, the little priest lay there for days under the red blanket all the while murmuring in his strange, largely untranslatable tongue. Birds came down and sat upon his chest, led, it seemed, by a blue Mexican Jay. Dogs came and drank the water in the tin basin by his side. Villagers came and sat beside him listening and praying, for it was still in their memory, the passing of the bean-cooking woman. It was still fresh to them, their inexplicable, but ever present, sense of loss. They wanted something to fix it all. Perhaps, they thought, this little priest has been sent to do that.

As they became accustomed to his presence, and the odd became normal, they slept and ate by him.

Indeed, they brought their dinners in grand hampers. They brought their snacks. “Pass the chicken,” some said to others. Or, “give me some more salsa.” Or, “I’d like an ear of that good, sweet corn you have.”

Someone began to sell parched corn in little parcels wrapped in cones made of yellowed paper which had come to them from travelers or been found in old trunks, wrapped around glassware from the old country. Other vendors sold tortillas and tamales. More food was cooked in giant cauldrons as the crowd grew. Pit latrines were dug outside the plaza walls near the cornfield. Wash stations were established. And still the small priest lay and muttered on and on and on.

They sat, no longer silent, and gossiped by him. Children ran in circles on the graves of the twins. Some children screamed into the priest’s ears to see if he would awaken or move. “Get up, get up,” they called out. Or, “There, over there, is a large devil come to get you.” Or, they would simply jump onto his chest to see if anything could move the man.

Then, on the third day, a small band with elegant dancers on a tour came from Chihuahua. The troupe played and danced gaily on the plaza and entertained with stories and with jokes. Money was thrown at them.

While they danced, the little priest began to mutter but more loudly than before. His voice was more fervent, his tone more impassioned. People fell silent. Dancers stood frozen, mid step. Food was taken out of chewing mouths and placed on plates as people bent forward, trying to hear. Children were shushed.

“Oh, ayyyyah, oh, ayyah, credo, quia absurdum[1],” or “omnia mea mecum porto[2]” he said, if you are to believe the gibberish that has been passed down by the people.

It seems to me highly unlikely that a priest in trance would call out such ridiculous aphorisms. Nevertheless, I report what I was told.

A woman, one of the graying, bent doñas from the canyon, came and moved her hands across his body. Her hands began to shake. Harder and harder they shook; like two fluttering doves they shook. That was on the fourth day. And, now, he muttered again

“Oh,ayyah, oh omnia vinceat amor[3],” he called out in one of the more convincing statements attributed to him.

On the fifth and sixth days, the woman’s hands still fluttered and the priest muttered on. But now even the muttering was common place. More bands came and played, and children screamed as they charged at each other and gave chase to skinny dogs and frightened cats. Someone sold religious medals from a makeshift shop. Someone grilled sausages over an apple wood fire. Ah, the air smelled of maple and saged meat and the scent of spring blossoms. In fact, the stories about the little priest are as much about the smells of food prepared while he lay seemingly comatose as about his actual miracles.

People made love in their best picnic clothes. “Oh my darling Rosa, how I love you,” a young man would say, inexplicably caught up in a feeling he could not resist and all the while nibbling an ear of corn. “Oh my sweet Jose,” a young woman would say, “how beautiful you are to me” while dipping into a bowl of beans. And that would be that. Clothing was spoiled, reputations made and broken, and all while the little priest muttered on.

Then, without notice, on the seventh day, the little priest gave up muttering and stirred slightly. The blanket became animated. The priest threw it aside. He was glowing like a comet tail and the smell of roses filled the plaza. “Ah, roses,” Jose said as he plunged into the neckline of Rosa’s dress. “Ah roses, Rosa said,” as she played with the belt on Jose’s trousers.

On that seventh day, the woman’s hands fluttered once more then flew away and were never seen again. Other women patted her tortillas and dressed her hair from that day on and an image of her with stumpy wrists was painted and placed in the church where it could be seen until recently. At the base of the image were two delicately hammered tin images of hands. Fresh roses appeared before her image every day and pilgrims often spotted tears running down the face of the icon from her sad, weary eyes. Every year, from then on, around the time that the miracle of the flying hands had happened, women made tortillas cut into the shape of hands and delivered them to the sick and needy. But that was later after the venerated woman had died. What happened at the time was much more compelling.

You see, the little priest rose up just as the hands flew over him. He himself seemed to float, his feet not actually touching the ground, as he moved among the people dragging his blanket behind him. There was a soft rattle as he moved, a gentle clanging of knives and pots and of the holy pictures hanging from his clothing. The people all stopped of an instant what they had come to do here on that day. Sausages burned for no one moved to turn them over or remove them from the grills, children stood stalk still without being told to, and all gossip ceased mid-sentence. Lovers let each other go and stared at what seemed to be very like a ghost hovering, yet moving slowly in great circles round the plaza.

The little priest moved about and eyed each one present that day with love. He gave each one a rose from the bundle that appeared mysteriously from his garments. Many villagers brought out family bibles and showed me the rose an ancestor had received pressed and preserved inside the leaves of the book. These roses the little priest gave out had grown, in those seven days, out of the pockets of his oily jacket. They were perfect roses all in perfect bloom. They were red and pink and yellow. They smelled of heaven, ash, and sage. The smell of the sage was that sweet smell of desert sage after a hot rain.

The bands and dancers sighed and all went home that day feeling blessed and ready for a much more settled life across the border in Mexico. The vendors and the children and all the people of the village built a church for the little priest. They carved delicate roses into altar screens and onto bearing posts and on the vigas and the doors. The petals of the wooden roses were so carefully done that light the color of caramel shown through them. They created an extravagant altar and gave up life savings to gild everything with gold foil.

Solución in the time of the twin and the little priest was a Solución I’d have given anything to have experienced. There was, apparently, still something that resembled a spirit or a soul then, at least among a third of the villagers.

From what the villagers had been told and what they subsequently told me, things became more and more difficult for everyone quickly. Hard as the little priest had tried, lovingly as his church was built, the village did not thrive. When he died, crops began to fail, babies were not born and eggs began to fly through windows of the village houses and even those of the church itself. Walls of the houses became quickly black and had to be white washed two or three times a year.

But while the priest lived, before the twin sister died, nothing really horrible had happened. Yes, there was sorrow and doubt, but none of the really inexplicable tragedies had occurred. I mean, no one had, for Christ’s sake, died of ant bites in bed, the way Lucia did in the late eighteen hundreds. There had not been flu pandemics. The brutal winds from the north, the winds that would not stop for six months, had not hit the village. People had not suffered the invasion of the stinging flies that would not die.

So I will continue. It was all so long ago.

Next: The Ghosts Come

This is the next chapter of my serialized novel:

                                                The Romance of the Village of Solución   

ORIGIN STORIES

As I said, being a woman, I spent most of my time with other women. Each time I queried one of them about their knowledge of the history of the village, I was rewarded by eagerly recited stories of their hallowed founder. After a time I realized I didn’t have to ask at all. The women talked about her as they ground corn and as they rocked their babies in their cradles. They talked about her as they white washed their adobe walls and as they cleaned clogged or eroded irrigation ditches. I heard about her so often and from so many women, that I began to think I had known her myself. I think she must have been memorable in everyway, for the village women talked about her as if she were someone they knew intimately. “Ah, the twin,” they’d say. “The lovely twin.” And a passionate tale would proceed. Indeed, she must have been remarkable for such a strong impression to be sustained over four hundred years.

She moved ceaselessly, they said. She moved bitterly, the roundness of her firm buttocks giving a pleasant shape to the fine fabric of her variegated woolen skirts. She moved with a bitterness that caused the shawls that were layered and bundled on and around her to seem sharp and mean.  So bundled was she, even on the hottest of days, they said, that she offered to viewers only the slightest figurative cues as to the true shape and size of herself above the waist.

“My mother says she gave off a kind of radiance when she walked about,” one woman told me. It seems that the colors of the fabrics of her clothing, indigo and cochineal red, made from the bodies of dead female insects, shimmered and glowed around her.

And she was seldom still. “She was always moving, always doing something my grandmother said,” another woman related. The restless energy of the little sacrificial creatures’ incomplete lives would not allow her to stand still. She felt a longing in her body: a deep, resentful longing that stemmed, unbeknownst to her, from the unfulfilled lives of the insects. Everyone who saw her moving, enveloped by the shimmering bug bodies in her cloaks and driving her tiny humble burro across the ditches with the jugs of water splashing at its boney ribs, shared that longing–felt it stabbing at their lungs and cracked lips. She felt a longing and it came out in her toffee-tousled hair and made it stand nearly on end sometimes. It came out through her teeth into her crooked smile. It sprang from her fragrant, seductive neck. It showed itself in how she punched her dough and braised her pork. It was evident when she laid her hot hands, palms out, on the cool white wash of her adobe walls. Her perfect hands could not be soothed in this way: the walls could never satisfy.

Another longing, a longing for her lost twin, never left her the people said. “She was always sad, you know. She missed her sister,” someone said.

Though the twin had never been seen nor touched once they had both left the womb, the twin was more real to her than anyone around her. The longing enveloped her with messages of her own, inexplicable guilt in the matter, and urges to do penance, to crawl a mile upon her knees, or seek forgiveness from her priest, or shave her head. She knew, more than felt, it was her doing, the death of this twin. It was not a sensible thing she felt and a newborn could hardly be held responsible for another’s death. Yet, she tortured herself with questions: If she had been born second or not taken so long getting out.

“She thought it was her fault,” more than one villager told me.

The twin lived on within her and, symbolically, around her and she built a village on the twin’s small grave. She carried crocheted dolls and lemon drops and bundles of verbena and lavender and sorrel to the grave to comfort the dead twin. And most nights she made her bed beside the twin’s deep earthy resting place, underneath the stars.

One night, while staring at Castor and Pollux, she saw to the right the smoke of Orion’s nebula hissing and steaming in the sky. She prayed a kettle of beans to cook upon it with which to feed this long gone twin. Her dark, soft, tear-stained eyes, studded with chips of amber and jade, a universe unto themselves, reflected the far away fire. These eyes gave the fire a place to kindle and flame. Her kitchen provided a ceramic pot. She greased it inside and out and fired it again to make it leak proof. She placed the beans in the pot and the pot on a three legged iron ring and let the fragrant vessel sit over the fire until the beans were cooked, a bit of lard plopped in to make them easier to digest.

“We still do that today,” a woman said. “We learned to do that from her. All of we women know to do that.”

When the beans were finished cooking, she fed the twin’s ghost and invited all the sisters and mothers and grandmothers and secret aunts and wooden matrons and doñas from around the country side to feast. The doñas were delighted for they lived on isolated rancheros and their recipes were lost and bean pots were broken or leaky. They were hungry and weak.

“Those women, lots of them, were widows and they didn’t have nothing out on those little ranches, ” someone said.

They were too tired to hire help or repair their pumps or clean out their irrigation ditches. They rode sidesaddle across the desert, trampling the chollo cactus, dressed always in black and lace, looking for a sign, a virgin with a rose, a Mary or a Martha. But the signs hadn’t appeared. Not until now. They came, all of them, sisters and mothers and aunts and doñas alike, with woolly sheep dogs. They were served generous portions from the big pot. They were all happy that night, women and dogs, dripping and licking perfectly cooked pinto beans from quaintly cobbled wooden bowls. They were happy scooping the beans to their mouths with the softest of tortillas while they praised each others’ delicate hems and fine laces. Together they celebrated twins and death.

The village grew and grew around the grave and the bean pot. Crosses filled the plaza where the dead twin sister lay. Strangely carved and painted crosses appeared overnight so that the plaza took on the air of circus or of mystery play or of a Punch and Judy show or carousel. The next day more crosses, in many sizes, arrived. Their makers gave them, prayerfully, in exchange for bowls of beans from the seemingly bottomless pot. Every cross that anyone had was given in exchange for the beans from heaven. Yes, crosses were made to honor the gift of miracles and healing beans. And as the twin made more wonderful foods, mystery breads and delicate sweet pork meat, more crosses were brought and raised in the plaza in her honor.

“See, she made it seem that everything was possible. People had food and came together. There were miracles in those days,” I was told.

The sister no longer had time for merely idle longing. Her suffering now required a committed full-time passion. She strung her chilies heavily across her windows and her doors, made significant signs above her lintel, scratched rows of indecipherable symbols in the adobe bricks that framed her windows, and placed herself before her house upon a polished stool made of ponderosa. She hung a mirror just above her head to deflect whatever evil might be about. She sat beneath the mirror and sang and cried and longed quite publicly. And she sold her beans. She made tortillas in the sun upon a tiny brazier, singing and weeping as she patted, grilled, and folded. She sold the beans, and all the while the village grew around her.

One uncle came and planted apple trees.

“That was my great great great great grandfather,” a woman told me proudly. “He planted the first apple tree. That started all the planting.”

Another planted fields of corn. Some melons and some squash were interspersed with beans and flourished in the sun. The burros multiplied and prospered. The sheep were strong and rugged and ruminated in the rabbit brush and bitter brush and dug for bunch grasses and small green peas.

The twin built stores and banks

Still she was caught up in a longing bred of her empty heart and bed of sorrow. She lived alone, rich, beloved, but desolate. She lived alone inside her small adobe with its old, polished vigas, the elegant peeled logs that formed the beams for her roof support. The house had a smooth, tamped earth floor, and white washed walls. She lived alone and thrived, in some ways, as did the village and the sheep. She prospered, gambled, won, and always sold the beans. She sat at hand-carved tables, dined in candlelight, and lounged on chairs so fine a queen might envy them. And yet, still, she slept beneath the stars beside the twin and she smelled, always, of lavender.

“She had a pet, you know,” a woman said. “It was one of those talkative kind of birds.” Yes, a single bird befriended her. It was a Mexican Jay, joyful and blue amidst the darkness of her life. It perched upon her cochineal colored garments, plucked at chokecherries, and teased coyote. Yet it remained, untouchable by any beast, secure on the safety of her shoulder as the woman moved beyond the orchards and the fields.

The often-cantankerous jay warned of snakes and noisily cocked it wings and pointed archly to sacred pools and healing earth. It guided the woman to caverns and to caves that the ancient inhabitants had revered. The jay was coy. It promised gold and jewels. And, most of all, the bird tried its very best to cheer the woman. But she would not be moved beyond her wailing and her tears.

Even with the bird as fast friend, she walked and snagged her gowns and tore her shawls and wept and then returned to cook her beans.

The village grew beyond her sorrow and took on suffering of its own.

“It seems funny. They had so much. But I guess the twin’s sorrow was contagious. They all got it. We’ve still all got it.”

It grew deeper and darker and lonelier in the hills and near the mountains. Ceremonies grew more elaborate and pain became a ritual necessity. The flesh of the villagers was mortified and no longer only seasonally as was the tradition. Nails were pounded through their hands and backs were whipped raw just for sport and at least monthly. On it went until one day the twin died.

She died alone beside her twin amidst the lavender and sorrel. Her burro and her bird were close at hand. Her beans were cooking near her door. Her chilies gleamed a brilliant red and all her shawls and gowns were indigo and bloody from the dye and from her heart that had finally burst.

Villagers and uncles came and women from their ranches and all the day they keened and ate and thought about her life with them.

“They couldn’t believe she was gone. They couldn’t imagine what they’d do without her is what I heard. I heard that they couldn’t do much of anything for a year.”

They slowly emerged from their disbelief that she was gone from them. They took her benches and her pots and hats and laid them all upon her body with her rosaries. They looked one last time upon her dark face and hands, so recently hot and smooth, now waxlike. They mourned the loss of her longing and how it had instructed them to live in this land. They whipped each others’ backs and crawled on hands and knees to the church. This they did daily until the next full moon following her death. Then they mounted a high hill near the village and carried three large crosses there. These were dug into the earth, their bases strengthened with piles of rock. The longing was not gone but now was theirs alone. They felt a sorrow they could not express and a loss the origin of which they did not comprehend. Whatever its source, it all was theirs now, this sorrow.

Then they began to occupy her banks and stores.

This is the next chapter of my novel :

The Romance of the Village of Solución  

Tales Collected by Henrietta Pouissiere

Click on the link in the masthead to find the first entry. Previous posts have prior chapters.

A reminder: this novel was written during 2001-2002. It is being rewritten, chapter by chapter, and serialized in this page. Comments welcome on my Facebook message or at ldedanaan2@hotmail.com

September 11, 2013

The Anthropologist as Hero: Part I

I suppose you might want to know how I come to believe that I have the authority to write the story of Solución. I know some of you will think I don’t have any business to speak about a culture so alien to my own. You’ll think someone from the village should come forth and tell its history. I wish there were someone who could or would. It seems this task has fallen to me by default.

So I’ll tell you the short version of my story which is my justification. It is a justification for, perhaps, my whole life, I will lay out my credentials. I studied in London in the 1920s. I was fortunate enough to be enrolled at the London School of Economics and worked with Bronislaw Malinowski, Radcliffe-Brown, Rivers and even met E.B. Tylor. Boas and his gang were at Columbia and though we were on very different paths, we shared notes and letters when we could. We were with the founders of our field, those of us who were students then. We knew we were privileged and drank deeply. Nobody even considered skipping a lecture or a seminar.

Malinowski had provided the model for process-oriented fieldwork. He’d been stuck in the Trobriands during the war and thus was born the notion that social anthropological fieldwork ought to require long-term immersion in a culture. Radcliffe-Brown and Rivers were no slouches. These fellows abandoned the niceties of their European homes and lives in order to understand more fully what it is to be human. I learned to think the way they did about my discipline.  It was probably Malinowski who put it into my head that I should go to the South Pacific. I left London in 1928 ready for at least a two-year stay.  It turned into more like ten years. I went back, reluctantly, to London and wrote a dissertation in order to complete my Ph.D. But my heart wasn’t in it. I did a few pieces that were publishable as short monographs. They were enough to get me some attention in the academy…and a job.

Before the job and Solución, I did some work at Columbia as a post doc student. I met and had coffee with Margaret Mead and her stable of women go-fers, including, of course, the lovely Ruth Benedict. I worked with Fredericka De Laguna one memorable summer in Alaska. I was a teaching assistant to Cora DuBois one semester. I gossiped with other anthropologists whose names you would find in the Who’s Who. You could find us any day tucked shoulder-to-shoulder and nose-to-nose in the library carrels or bent over our hefty Royal typewriters. We chatted our way through personal scandals, secret affairs, international wars, and professional trials of all kinds. We spent hours challenging the work of distant wrong-minded colleagues in long well researched letters to the journal, the American Anthropologist. We defended each other, of course, in equally detailed missives. This was our sport, our joy.

Before I went to the field, I was taught to take field notes very seriously. This was drilled into me in London and was a regular topic at post doc and faculty seminars at Columbia. This was, of course, long before computers^[1] we could take to the field like my current favorite, an Epson HX-20.  No. Our practice then was to cut reams of paper into half sheets and staple three of these sheets into pen-ready sets. In these even pre-Xerox days, we placed carbon between each sheet in order to have an original and two copies.

We needed these three sets of notes. One set of notes was filed by topic. For example, if a page of notes mentioned “witchcraft,” that became the topic category. The term was underlined with a red pencil and the page was shuffled into our witchcraft folder. Of course, we always had a witchcraft folder. Witchcraft was something we always managed to find no matter where we worked because we were taught to look for it. We anthropologists believed in it even if no one else did.

Magic was another popular topic. We searched it out in all its manifestations. We learned about its function in what we called, wrong headedly, “primitive societies.”

So, the first set of notes was filed by a topic like “witchcraft.” Another set of notes was to be kept in chronological order. The third set of notes, the originals, we were to mail home for safekeeping. We did that because we feared that all of our notes might accidentally be destroyed. One heard such stories: young anthropologists woke in the night with cold sweats at the thought of a year or more of work going up in flames. Stories circulated of planes crashing, thatched field quarters incinerated by a careless cigarette, or long boats capsizing on Southeast Asian rivers. We never worried, when we heard these stories, about loss of life. Rather, we mourned for the loss of field notes: all of one’s doctoral materials gone forever—an entire culture’s legacy, perhaps, wiped out. Now with one language disappearing from the earth every 13 or so days, losses like these are no laughing matter. We wondered if such losses of years of work happen sometimes without being reported? Was the work of our colleagues often pure fiction, an entire culture recreated on paper from memory and dreams?

I never cheated like that. Certainly not!  But you see that’s why I’ve had to be so closed mouth. People really would think I was making things up if, earlier in my career, I’d published any of the stories I’m writing now. My published works are not precisely lies. They simply do not contain much by the way of essential truths. My professors and colleagues would not have believed what I had really heard. My career would have been ruined. Anyway, anthropologists would not have been much interested in the stories I collected. Folklorists, maybe. But I was an anthropologist, not a folklorist.

So, while I didn’t lie, I edited and self censored.
Do no harm. That’s the mantra.

Still, I didn’t publish anything that would have shamed my informants or me. There is nothing wrong in making the choice to hold back. The consequences of shame are grim and to be avoided. I’ve been the object of someone’s secret shame-based grievance in the past: dead lizards with peculiar marks on their backs arrived at my doorstep every morning for three months during a particularly difficult period of drought in the region. Another time, in Moa Nui, an innocent seeming fish trap on my rented bedroom wall flew across the room and nearly impaled me on the doorframe as I got up in the night headed for the bathroom. I was never sure what boundary I had crossed, but I’d surely done something wrong. I was terrified.

Today there is no one to complain or be shamed or to do me harm. My career is long over. Times have changed dramatically. Everyone will, I am sure, be delighted to have it all out at last. Most of all me. Maybe Mildred too.

Yes, in the old days, I was more concerned about my reputation (and to some degree, the privacy of informants) than being strictly truthful. That was true about my professional life as well as my personal. Well, actually, I never was sure where the line between the two was. In the public arena of my professional life I have attempted to cloak my life in unassailable propriety, in decorum, in a professionally suitable language, and have left the truth til the last. I hope I have time to provide a corrective. Time is shrinking at about the same rate as my height.

Don’t get the idea I’m upset about losing height or even getting old. I’m thinking about more important things than my stature. For example, I wonder how electronic media has changed the way students are taught to keep field notes today? I am sitting this early morning in what is left of Solución’s outskirts using a local friend’s IBM pc. She’s still packing. Even though her house wasn’t destroyed, being almost a mile from the plaza, she doesn’t want to stay. No one does. So I can come over here for the next week or two and take a rest and do some writing as I roam the old village site and recall the past. I’m plugged in to her phone line and her printer. I’m making hard copies of my notes and saving files to myself at two e-mail addresses. I’m sending another set of notes to another friend’s e-mail just to be on the safe side. Then I burn a disk a disk on my Epson at Mildred’s, the one I brought down with me. As soon as we gets a phone line in and the power, I can download the disks I burn when I’m over here working. Then I can go back into these files, add and edit, and save them to a new disk and to a hard drive. I can word search, organize and even index without losing a moment’s sleep over what I may lose. And I can type a lot faster than I can write. How much thicker will be my thick description? How much more generous will be my reflection? Will my memory be enhanced? My observations meatier? Will more imaginative questions find their way into my narrative with the luxury I have to elaborate? Ha. I expect so. Surely richer manuscripts can be expected from the current crop of field workers with all these aides.

After breakfast with Mildred yesterday, and before I came into the village to write, I took a walk. I started wondering what it means to me to be an anthropologist today. Mildred says I’m wasting time thinking about that. But this new work that I see as a kind of obligation to the people I knew is making me question all I’ve done and am doing in the profession. I haven’t been highly regarded (or even remembered, much less cited) by anyone in the academy since, maybe, 1969. The whole discipline these days is awash in studies of tourist culture, hip hop, urban cults, and highly politicized “ethnographies” of marginalized people caught up in wishful but doomed struggles with their oppressors. “Multinationalism” and “Economic Migration” are big topics.  Dissertations are more likely to be exercises in polemics than any real contribution to our understanding of human culture. Many of them are full of just awful stuff. Really, I have no time for it. Structuralism, the new anthropology. The Europeans ditched diffusionism, thank the lord, and their study of quaint folkways, and now wonder about ethnicity and national identity. At least they have common goals and issues. Americans say, “If an anthropologist does it, it is anthropology.” Balderdash.

I have not made the transition into this world of shabby scholarship. Good lord. So many of these younger people seem to think that doing anthropology is a great excuse for taking exotic drugs and writing specials for the Discovery Channel, or, God forbid, embedding themselves with troops. Better they should be embedded with truth.

I will say a little about getting old. Being an anthropologist when you get up there in age is hard. To keep working means leaving home. It means leaving comforts and local landscapes and the rhythm, safety, and relative predictability of daily life. I’m serious. When you get old, you like to know where the stairs and the handholds are. You like to have a set path to the grocery store and the doctor’s office, one that allows you to avoid being run down by skateboarders or approached by panhandlers. And you like to have the food and drink that keep you “regular.” Fieldwork means having drip Folgers with amaretto Coffee Mate instead of lattes with soy milk. Field work means  being obliged to eat whatever is offered by the host family.

And when you are old, sleep is precious. You like to be in bed when it’s dark and up at dawn. Fieldwork means staying up to watch if something is going on and sleeping in a strange bed on an inferior or lumpy mattress. All that is fine when one is young.

Fieldwork means being surrounded non-stop by someone else’s aesthetic, sense of order, and idea of tidiness. And to do your job well, you have to haul around notebooks and recording devices and cameras and lots of extra film and a typewriter or word processor. The equipment gets heavy and these old shoulders just can’t take the strain of it.

The inconvenience of it all has made fieldwork difficult for me the last few years. That’s really why I stopped coming down here to Solución. It was just plain inconvenient. In the early days when I was just getting started, I’d come in a borrowed van loaded with my own quilts and vases, a few framed pictures, and a rug or two. Upon arrival, I’d sweep a little rented room in Serena’s casa and make it mine. But still, it was hard. And I just couldn’t do it anymore. That’s what I told myself. But it was true that all the good people had passed on. These new people who didn’t care about their past were strangers to me. And I didn’t feel safe anymore. No one did.

Thank God I’m with Mildred now. Thank God we can afford our own espresso machine. I think I’m going to really like finally settling in. If I really settle in, the bed will no longer be strange and I’ll have a fine mattress.

Still, I’m conscious of the difference between Mildred’s sensibilities and mine. I see it in every piece of fabric, the arrangement of stuffed animals upon the bed, and that there are stuffed animals at all. I think I’ll need to add on a room that feels more like me. We can do that.

Strangely, though Mildred’s home is so different from the one I’ve left up North, I see a photograph of myself taken sometime in the late 1940s. It is in a frame I would not have picked. But there it is, greeting me each morning. Roberto, Mildred’s nephew, in his wedding tux next to his pale Anglo bride Susan, smiles from across the room. That day, one on which they seemed happy, is captured forever and held mercilessly in sculpted white metal frame flecked with gold. The frame is completely at home in a room that features cream and white lacy pillow cases, off-white embroidered curtains, and an appliquéd bedspread upon which graze stuffed woolly lambs. Roberto and Susan look at at home here, more than they would in my own understated apartment in the north

Aside from Mildred and a few friends at the university, Solución has been my life. Solución is the village where I have spent endless summers, breaks between semesters, and, once or twice, a full year. This is the village in which I’ve interviewed generations of dwellers and carefully copied down their often-unbelievable tales.

Yet I’ve never published any of the work I’ve done here. I’ve written the definitive ethnography of the area. I’ve drafted countless monographs based upon this work. I’ve analyzed carefully collected kinship charts and family histories.[i] I’ve watched villagers give birth, die, and groan and moan for forty years! God help me. Their lives have filled mine. I don’t know about much else.

I don’t know about much else, and, I warn you, reader, I don’t know everything there is to know about Solución. For example, I am a woman. Most of my time in Solución was spent with women. That’s just how it goes. When you do the kind of work I do and you are female, you will find that you have access to the lives, the secrets, and the memory of women. Men don’t know quite what to do with you, so they usually stay out of the way. They certainly won’t gossip with you. In any case, Solución, like so many circum-Mediterranean derivative cultures, really contains two worlds: the world of women and the world of men. If a man were to have studied Solución as thoroughly as I did, he’d have a very different story to tell.

So let me sum up my situation: I’m an old woman. Most of my friends are long out of the university life and live scattered about the country in retirement homes, nursing homes, or with patient children. There were few who actually have children. The village where I’ve spent my life working has burned down. What I have is left is Mildred, and my sweet Mildred has retired from enchantment and entered a life dedicated to flower gardens, gambling and quilting. She is determined to pull me along kicking and screaming into that life with her. Really. She seems happy with it all.

With or without Mildred, I’ve got only a few years left.  The stories I haven’t told have to be told while there is time.

By the way, you might want to know that I blame Crow for any problems with my work. Crow is a stickler for truth. If I don’t get something right, Crow will catch it. I met Crow in the canyon the very first time I met Mildred. Crow has become a friend and ally. I’ve known her for, let’s see, going on forty years. Amazing. She’s watched over everything I’ve ever written about Solución. And she keeps me honest. She has, however, come to accept mere oversights or omissions in my work. There were plenty of omissions over the years.

But there have been no out right lies. No, Crow would never allow outright lies. Not in my work. I wish she’d had more control over the rest of my life. I think I might have been a lot more daring and probably would have had more fun.

You’d like her if you could see her. Except, of course, when she is doing her coarse imitations of me. I only saw her as she really is once. That was a long time ago. Now she appears to me in the guise of a regular old crow, large, big black bill and feet, a plumage so blue black it sometimes glints metallic in the sun. Her wings show off that brilliant sheen. When they flap, they brandish a hint of violet. You can see those wings shine when the sun hits her full on and she is in flight. She has a big, fan shaped tail and carries a rattle with her that seems to be lodged somewhere deep in her throat.

That common crow uniform is a nifty cover for her. But in truth, she’s nothing even close to a common crow. For one thing, a regular bird wouldn’t live more than about four or five years out here in the wild. She’s a shape shifter. In her other being, a very human looking one, she has the feathers of other kinds of birds, including an albino crow, in both of her hands. They are arranged in the shape of fans so that she can dance with them and cool herself when she becomes overheated. She wears a winged mask that covers her face. Her leggings are knee high and her buckskin dress is trimmed in red and black porcupine quills and turquoise. Crow gets around. She isn’t exclusively mine or Mildred’s even though she seems to be here everyday. She is a universal kibitzer. She comments on the work of playground supervisors. She stands watch over the birth of future Dalai Lamas and critiques the selection process of popes. She menaces cats and dogs. She dive bombs presidential candidates.

When she is with me, she often gets in close and flutters around and over the keyboard. Crow is my editor, proofreader, and thesaurus. Sometimes she irritates the hell out of me. But, her golden tongue and wordy heart keep me going. She doesn’t allow me much rest these days because she wants the story out as much as I do.

I’ve got to take a little walk now. My legs are stiff and my hands are cramped. My eighty-year-old eyes and hands can no longer keep up with my mind. I’ll review this entry tonight.

How They Came to Be Here

The first Solución outsiders came in long columns. They were not very neat columns. They were jagged columns punctuated by rakes and oxen, loom parts, sacks of provisions, flour, castanets, carpeting, and window frames. That was about 1598 A.D. The people who formed and marched in these columns had arrived by boat in Mexico and then took the marginally hopeful road due north.

They brought with them the contents of damn near their whole houses on those boats from Spain. They carried hoes and plows and drove churro sheep, thousands of sheep, ahead of them. The sheep lost long tufts of wool along the way and thus left a bright notice of their passing. The off-white strands caught on cactus as the sheep missed the path or shied witlessly away from the deep rattling of some coiled snake or sniffed the odor of coyote spoor. And the sheep suffered from the journey every bit as much as did the people. Fleeces can be deceptive. A sheep unshorn may appear to be fluffy and fit. Thus, the woebegone creatures sheep looked healthy at the start of the trek. But after a few days of travel, they were actually quite withered about the flanks and ribs.

The people, unlike the sheep, came protected by Christian warriors and were hapless inheritors of a crusader mentality. The people, a fifth of them women, came dressed in handspun cloth and carrying crosses, lots of crosses, following the padres and the Christian soldiers. Sheep, priests, soldiers, ordinary men and women, pretty much in that order. It was a motley spectacle. As some dropped out, dead tired or dead, the people made cots of poles and blankets or simple wooden coffins for them. The still living were abjured for their weakness and pilloried for lack of faith. They were invited to follow as soon as possible, but only if they committed to praying without cease.

The others kept moving, plodding their way over Puebloan ancestral lands, desecrating kivas, ignoring sacred mountains and streams and dishonoring the places where spider woman lived, winds originated, and the sun set and rose. They stole adobe bricks from Puebloan homes and with them made unstable churches to mark their way and announce that their claim to the land was a Christian claim.

Somehow, their religion made them feel superior to others.

As they trudged along to the north, some made careless love amidst the prickles and the sand of night stops. Some walked miserably, remembering home and sweet grape wine and grandmothers of summer. Many were kind and good-willed but determined to make a new life, though not necessarily better, no matter at whose expense. They remained steadfastly ignorant of whose ground they’d stepped on and how it would all play out.

Some of what they carried with them was insidious, even invisible. They carried blood, mucous, the contents of their own intestines, and the saliva in their own mouths. In these they harbored parasites and pestilence that spread to the original inhabitants. Their animals devoured native plants and trampled garden plots.

And they brought something more. It was a mentality from which they never freed themselves. They never freed themselves because it was so much a part of them that they did not know it existed. It was, this mindset, a medieval attachment to order, mystery, miracle, and authority. When these people left their part of Europe, their villages were still in the dark ages. The new ones would be no different. The inhabitants of these isolated lands had learned, for centuries, to submit. Life, whether it might end today or tomorrow, was capricious. But order of the universe was stable and certain. They had learned over the centuries to know their place in that order. They had learned that you either have money or you don’t, you either have what you need to survive or you don’t. You don’t transform yourself or the world. You don’t make money. You can’t better your situation, at least not substantially. But your situation can get worse. When bad luck strikes, and it is always luck, it is not in consequence of one’s own shortcomings. One is forever guilty, but there is nothing to do about it. There is no point in self-examination. There is nothing to do but pray harder or beat oneself more frequently.

These were people who surrounded themselves with images and icons that held power, and they called upon that power for whatever little benefit they might imagine it could bring to themselves. Magic, they had come to believe, is as powerful as faith. Faith was perhaps useful, but there were so many other ways to get to heaven: interminable prayers; debasing oneself by accepting guilt for absolutely everything wrong in the world; crawling for miles to the sites of rumored miracles, usually the appearance of some apparition or another; scourging oneself with studded whips or cattails; leaving some money for masses in one’s honor. Besides, faith alone could so easily be seeded with doubt. Best not to count on it.

These were people for whom, it must be said, the renaissance did not happen. They, ensconced in the ravaged country side of Spain and then later in the high, isolated hills of New Mexico, did not hear of or see the humanizing messages that had sprouted in Florence and Venice and created Gods that had flesh and angels that had real emotion: Marys who could cry and Christs who could forgive. They had never heard of Da Vinci or seen the trembling giants carved by Michelangelo, titans caught by him, in the purest marble, midway in their struggle to escape from the stones of prejudice and superstition. They did not learn, ever, to question, to appreciate, to reckon, to inquire, or even to love very well.

And so with all their burdens and limitations, the newcomers pushed forward.

They ate all the corn the old original people had. Sometimes, they gave to the dispossessed beads in return. This could not compensate for the starvation, the violations, and the depredations done in the name of Christianity.

Not one of these travelers from Europe, not one, saw the faces lurking in the bosques. Those were the faces of the people who had fled from their homes to the mountains as the onslaughts continued. They abandoned their pueblos, fearing these invaders, believing them to be, as rumors and news of their imminent arrival preceded them, thieves and rogues.

No one even saw the signs in poplar trees and along the empty riverbanks, for those who had fled left signs everywhere hoping to warn the invaders away, at least, from their most sacred spots. No one imagined the terror that crept beside them night after night and stalked them on leather feet, for those who had fled left an invisible army to keep an eye on these newcomers and try to make them behave properly if they insisted on staying. These were the watchers. And they had patient faces that would both rail and laugh at the entrada and wait and wait, for centuries, if necessary, to make a point. Those of the invaders who settled on sacred land were in for a lot of trouble and they were never, ever, alone. The watchers never let them out of their sights.

With the original inhabitants of the land either routed, starved out, killed or simply missing from their abandoned villages, it was easy for the intruders to imagine that the land was not ever really populated, was raw and waiting for them to take possession of it. A fiction was developed as the old inhabitants became literally and figuratively more invisible to the newcomers. This fiction was that the land of North America was truly empty and largely unpopulated before the coming of the Europeans. This fiction, boldly stated, suggested that even if there were people, they were heathen wanderers who had no real right to the land, never really used it. This fiction was restated for literally hundreds of years so that even as late as the early nineteenth century maps were still in circulation that had little indication of the native people who lived or had lived west of the Mississippi. Those maps were copied and recopied, and fueled huge demographic shifts: Americans and Europeans in pursuit of all that free and open land. Maps and journals and letters written to the folks back home perpetuated the notion that no one of consequence lived in this land before the surveyors came and plotted it, the homesteaders claimed their bits, and the trains came bringing more and more people to fill in this “wasted” space.

That fictional landscape might seem an ideal setting for a story to the casual, uncritical reader. If the landscape were really empty, one could, after all, fill it with any creatures and beings that suited a writer’s fancy. But my story is not fiction. I’m an anthropologist. I don’t write fiction.

Where is Solución and what has all this to do with it? Anthropologists are trained to protect the identity of the places we study as well as that of our informants. We change the names of towns and the names of our informants. And we don’t give away precise geographical information. So I can’t tell you exactly where Solución is or, rather, was. I can tell you that Solución is somewhere in the American southwest and it had its beginnings long ago, shortly after the people in the long columns with the sheep and soldiers began to establish small farming villages.

But I can and must tell you that the place where Solución was built by the invaders was, of course, decidedly not empty land. It was a populated area with abundant gardens and a multitude of hills and caves and underwater springs that were considered quite sacred by its native inhabitants. This is perhaps the most critical thing you should understand because the founders of Solución got this wrong. It was their biggest mistake. Yes, the land where Solución was established had been fully occupied by mothers and sons, fathers and daughters, houses and crops, and languages and histories. The Puebloan ancestors lived well for thousands of years before the Spanish weavers and their sheep came. And, as in other places where they were displaced, there were watchers, always watchers, who stood by looking at the villagers, causing them to close their shutters and look over their shoulders, and who came out gleefully at night to knock on doors and call out like night owls and cause gates to creak and dogs to bark for generations and generations after the weavers arrived. The watchers regularly placed misery in chili fields and mistakes in rugs. They pulled up root crops and caused spots on apples. They broke weft strings over and over and left the backs of weavers aching and permanently bent. They made corn meal wormy. Tamales spoiled too quickly in coolers bound for sale in super market parking lots. Boxes of potatoes from Colorado, traded for beans and meant to last the long, cold mountain winters, sprouted too early at the bidding of these wraiths. Crab spiders dropped from the lintels of kitchen doors and bit long suffering housewives hard on their cheeks causing ferocious welts. These people, these ancients, didn’t forget easily, and they laughed among themselves and made everyone in Solución cranky by the end of the day with all their irritating tricks interferences.

They did little needling things and some bigger really nasty things. For example, they sawed off Oñate’s right foot. Well, not the real Oñate’s real foot. It was the foot of a bigger than life-size bronze-on-horseback of the cruel conquistador who claimed New Mexico for Spain and cut off the right feet of two dozen young men of Acoma whom he forced into servitude. Sawing off the statues foot was a clear message that nobody missed.

Solución, you should know, was a place with wonderful, musical names sprinkled over it like powdered sugar on sweet cakes of the anunciación: Ortegas, Vigils, and Sanchez. These names are due honor and remembering. They are the names of good, hard working people. Their histories go back to the heart of Spain and the heartache of the fanaticism of Cardinal Guzman’s Holy Inquisition. They are people who were brave and who in spite of all their cultural and historical baggage earnestly wanted better lives for themselves and their children. They under took frightening but hopeful journeys to the New World in ships laden with those looms and sheep I’ve described. They were people who trekked, with their owners, up the Rio Grande along the dry riverbed and across the sun bright deserts and along the Camino Real to claim their land grants and escape their own inevitable persecution in Europe. As if their lives could be worse. They came to plant those often ill fated fields of chilies and their beans and corn, all crops that they learned about quickly upon their arrival. They came to dig irrigation ditches and labor until they were bent and old and all for very little return. There is no fault here. They just didn’t understand their sins and they didn’t know that the land was not free after all. They paid for it over and over for centuries.

They paid in odd ways. And the stories people told me about what happened to them over the centuries were simply incredible. Believe me, it wasn’t always so easy for me to accept what I’ve got to tell you. I was trained to look at the world of phenomena objectively. I was trained not to value one thing over another. I was trained to watch and report. I was trained to keep my distance. I was trained to be a really good anthropologist. So I listened and watched and did not, at first, judge. And, as I was taught, I kept my distance. But I was not prepared to simply observe and dispassionately keep my distance from some of the more bizarre things I was told about and saw with my own eyes. At first, I laid it all to coincidence, tricks, and to the highly developed imaginations of culturally insulated people who just had a lot of bad luck. I am a logical person. But I have been convinced that what I have seen and experienced in this village is real. I believe in logic and the rational, observable world. I believe that everything has a reasonable explanation. But I’ve learned in my work here that there are some things that just don’t fit the categories I grew up with and can’t be explained by scientific theoretical frameworks.

By the way, I suppose you could call me a kind of watcher too. It’s just that I was a very visible watcher with a Ph.D. and with an agenda quite different from that of the other watchers. Now, at the end of my career, my role has changed from watcher to initiated witness with a responsibility, ultimately, to speak of what I was told, what I saw and what I knew during all the years I’ve been coming to the southwest