Translated by Marvin Najarro
As she does every day, she wakes up at three in the morning, stretches her body out on the metal bed with the wobbly leg and jumps off landing on her feet on the dirt floor. She unbars the makeshift door and goes outside to brush her teeth and wash her face with cold water that received the night’s dew. She cuts a lemon in half, sprinkles a little baking soda on it, and rubs her sobacos with it.
She ties her hair into a ponytail, puts on her shoes, and grabs a sweater. She starts walking down the boulevard Los Cerezos, which is the main avenue of the suburb where she lives, and takes the first bus heading for Las Golondrinas market in the capital. The bus drivers know her well because she takes the same route every Monday. Eight-years-old Julia goes to buy fruit to make the ice cream she sells at the market.
At five o’clock sharp the bus stop at the station, she tells the driver not to live without her. Julia has forty-five minutes to buy the fruit and salir despepitada, rush, to catch the bus back, because if she mises it, she will have to wait for the eight o’clock bus. If this happens, it would ruin the day of sale, since she would not arrive in time to sell the ice cream, which would cause a significant imbalance in the family’s weekly finances.
She sees so much fresh fruit that she wants to buy it all: oranges, grapefruits, zunzas, as well as the sacks full of lemons the color of the feathers of the flock of pericos that every afternoon she sees flying toward the green bottle mountains that she contemplates from the patio of her house. She imagines a fresh lemonade as she hurries to school at noon. She walks by the cebollera, onion stall,and with great pleasure she would have bought a hundred-piece bunch of cebollas galanas, beautiful onions. She loves red onions; she and her dad eat them raw when they are cooking scramble eggs, which they accompany with frijoles parados, cooked whole black beans.
The smell of the baskets full of nances la atolondra, overwhelms her. Whatshe wouldn’t give for eating a handful of them. On one side there is a stand selling blackberries; she buys two pounds. She keeps walking, feeling the passion of Las Golodrinas vibrate in her heart. She moves a at brisk pace without stopping to see absolutely everything that captures her senses: the sacks full of spices, colorful corn kernels, and beans. The bundles of tuzas, husks, hang from de beams that support the roofs of nylon of the grain stalls, as do candles of all colors, cigar bundles, braids of garlic, and the cinnamon sticks that look like the wooden sticks that the lady that sells oak firewood on the corner of the block where Julia lives, sells for one quetzal the bag. She wants to buy everything, especially the carambolas, star fruit, to make a refreshing drink for lunchtime.
As she walks by the tomatera, tomato stall,she is impressed by the variety of tomatoes, but she always chooses the tangerine tomato because she likes its sour taste. She doesn’t have money, but if she had, she would buy a pound to make chirmol to eat it with fresh tortillas straight off the comal, which are made by the lady who sells tortillas galanas on the neighboring block. Every Monday, Julia’s trip is full of colors, aromas, voices, sounds and shapes that exist only in the market―a world in itself. A world that it is getting implanted in her memory and imagination. A world that little by little is shaping her identity and her sense of belonging. A market that becomes the root that sustains her.
She hurries up, time is running out. She loves the panelas canches, unrefined cane sugar.A piece of panela with hot tortilla it’s what she eats for lunch after returning from selling ice cream, and then gets ready in fifteen minutes to go to school in the afternoon. But this time, she does not have money to buy panela, as she always does, but that does not prevent that the lady who sells it can give her a piece so she can enjoy it. Straight across from her is the stall that sells coconuts, and once more Julia sighs when she sees the clusters aperchados, stacked up, like the ocote bundles that are sold at the next stall.
She asks for two ripe coconuts―though she would like to buy a coconut water in a plastic bag―and a roasted bean tamal, like those sold at the end of the aisle, and which are cooked on hot embers. What Julia would not give to have money to buy a cup of arroz con leche. As starving as she is, she would buy two. Finally, she buys a bag of ice cream sticks at the place where the ocote is sold and hurries away to buy two pounds of peanuts. Next week, she will buy a box of green bananas to make chocobananos, and then she will go to the sandillera, watermelon stall,to buy the pineapples to make chocopiñas.
Whenever she passes by the section where they sell flowers, she sighs in admiration at their beauty and freshness. She takes a few coins out of her pocket and ask the women who sell flowers how much she can buy with the money she has. One of the vendors takes a bunch of carnations, unties it and makes a smaller one, which she sells to Julia. She would like to buy half a dozen plantains to boil and eat with milk, but milk is a luxury she can’t afford, nor are plantains.
It is forty-five minutes past five in the morning, and the aroma of carnations envelops and lulls her to sleep in the bus back home. The illusion will last one week, until Monday when she returns to rush through the veins of the mercadón.
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Ilka Oliva-Corado.
