Translated by Marvin Najarro
Tanita always craved a fruit smoothie, which was an unattainable dream during her childhood. The blenders were those things they talked about in the radio commercials when people tuned in to Porfirio Cadenas, “El Ojo de Vidrio”. Tanita remembers how exciting it was to listen to the rain falling on the radio, the thunders shaking the tin roof of the house, and the sound of the horse’s hooves walking on the cobblestones, clip-clop, clip-clop, clip….
She imagined that all that happened in a remote village, and her mind wandered among the main roads, the red guava trees and the grasslands. She wondered if the houses were also lit by kerosene lamps like in her own, and if the girls had also to carry water from the stream like she did. Did the people there had a battery-power Philips radio like the one her grandfather had? Did they also mend the clothes and make salted mamasos when making tortillas. She wondered if the men slept in one bed and the women in another, as they did in her house and in her neighbors’ houses in the village.
She wondered if they had hammocks hanging from the beams in the corridors of their houses and if their villages had water springs. Did they buy salt, cooking oil and raw cane sugar on credit and pay for them with loads of firewood, bunches of ocote and izote flowers, as they did in her village? Did the girls in Porfirio Cadenas’s village also want to go to school, and could women choose not to have children? Was there any place in the world where women could choose not to have children? She wondered if they brushed their teeth with salt and ash and if they made olive soap.
At lunchtime, her father tuned in to Mosaico en Madera, the radio show that introduced her to the beautiful melody of the marimba. Tears welled in her eyes as the notes slid slowly like vines among the branches of the matasano and the jocote de corona trees. High from above she observed the pigsty where she used to feed the pigs with corn kernels cut off the cob. She felt a sort of dizziness, a stifled sigh in her throat. It was something so deep and harmonious, like the sound of cicadas caressing her soul at noon, or like the darkness of the night being courted by the fireflies’ light.
What could the marimba be? What do they call Tierra Fría, and El Altiplano guatemalteco? Everything she knew was there. The farthest her eyes had seen was Ahuachapán, El Salvador. When she climbed up the piedrona in the patio, she could see, a cluster of tiled roofs amid the trees in the distance. The Río Paz was her sea. And a narrow and serpentine trail cushioned by the barks of encino rojo, conacaste and chaparron trees was the border between Guatemala and El Salvador.
She always had questions trapped in her throat that she never dared to ask: Why don’t girls go to school like the boys do? Why don’t the men in the house wash the dishes? Why can only men cook chicharrones? Why are women forbidden to climb trees? What does argeñar mean? Why do adults say that if someone is very happy and smiling, something bad will happen later so it’s better not to be so happy and avoid misfortune? Why is it forbidden to be happy if, in reality, misfortune is to have amoebas in the belly and to be infested with lice? Why do children eat their boogers? And the fundamental question of her life: Why do the zompopos de mayo bring so much happiness?
Tanita was still a teenager when she immigrated to the capital city. After receiving her first salary as a maid, she went to el mercado de la Terminal and bought a fruit smoothie to quench her long-lasting thirst. But it tasted so insipid that it was like drinking atol shuco made of white corn.
Feeling betrayed by what she saw as the progress in the capital, she realized that the great advances people talked about―cement and urbanization―were no enough to allow the maids’ daughters to attend school.
Sorely disappointed, in the famous Pueblón she met the sisters of many musicians who played the marimba. On Sundays they gathered at Guatemala Musical. They were girls and teenagers like her, destined to be domestic workers, while the men of the family were respected artists.
It was then that she realized that a blender was a luxury, that a fruit smoothie was not unaffordable, and imagination was sweeter, cozier and more humane than reality. So, she started her own revolution; she began learning to write the alphabet.
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Ilka Oliva-Corado @ilkaolivacorado