Translated by Marvin Najarro
The rain started around four in the afternoon and it has not stopped since. Fausta put herself in the hands of god, lit a candle to El Señor de Esquipulas and tucks her six pollitos, children, into bed with the poncho she bought in installments from a vendor who comes every Thursday from Momostenango, ajenando, hawking, pillowcases, sheets, ponchos, blankets, and traditional tablecloths. He always comes with his teenage son, and they travel around the town and villages with their wares a mecapal.
Fausta let them to warm their tortillas over the embers under the comal. They carried their tortillas in a morral, which theyslung across their backs before putting the load of wares a mecapal. Seeing them carry such heavy loads made her feel sorry for them. But favors are mutual, Fausta thinks, because while she makes pishtones (thick tortilla made of corn flour), they keep her company. She always welcomes them with café de maíz or café de tortilla, boiling in a batidor, a pot of frijoles espesos, and a quarter of cheese or requesón (cottage cheese). They enjoy the food to which they always add chile chiltepe (small round hot pepper) that they carry in their morrales. On hot days, she welcomes them with fresco de masa and, when she is inspired, with a glass of chicha made from yellow corn.
In exchange for the food, they help her split firewood, which they stack against the backwall of the kitchen. They also bring her semitas, blue corn and coffee from their own harvest. Fausta helps them to find buyers vouching for them so they can get goods on credit because they pay on time. Buying on credit is the only way they can purchase goods as their husbands work as laborers on farms in Chiquimula and Zacapa. They return to Escuinapa every three months, and stay there for a weekend, after that, they leave again. In the meantime, these women are left to fend for themselves with whatever they can find.
Fausta makes rice quesadillas, marquesote, cheese and requesón. She buys the milk from Tío Tibe, who always sells it to her on credit. It hurts her when she has to sacrifice her chickens. She quarters them and puts the pieces in a plastic basin, and then she goes to town to sell them. It does not take her long to sell them all, although sometimes she has to sell them on credit. She sells the cuts of poultry faster than the whole bird. Some women buy two wings, while others buy the feet and giblets. Some always ask for the necks because they don’t have enough money to buy a breast or legs. Nía Margarita, the school principal, always buys the rumps.
She helps Nía Margarita by washing clothes, ironing, and cleaning the house. With the lenes, money, she earns from helping Nía Margarita, she can buy the things she needs the most: salt, sugar, cooking oil, and Royal (baking powder), and whatever else she needs to keep selling her quesadillas and marquesotes. When the business gets slow, she walks farther out to the town’s outskirts, where she always goes with her two pollitos―the youngest, barely four months old, swaddled in a blanket tied across her back, and the two-year-old seated astride her waist.
She leaves two others under the care of Nía Romelia, while the two oldest ones are at school. At the town entrance there is a grain store, where she manually pounds dried bean pods, removes kernels from the ears of corn and makes bundles of husks. The days when she is menstruating are hard for her. Pounding is hard work, and she would rather stay on bed. But she folds a piece of cloth that she uses as a sanitary towel, drinks a cup of oregano tea, and starts walking without a second thought.
The kind of work available for both men and women depend on the season. However, domestic work continues to be solely for women. For that reason, Fausta has decided to raise her six pollitos differently. Just like women they have hands too. She will teach them how to wash their own clothes, cook and clean. She will also teach them how to tortear, make tortillas, and to respect women, in contrast to her husband who spends his salary at the bar and on top of that when he gets home beats her. Her sons won’t be like that, or she will renounce her name! She swears.
It’s raining so heavily that she feels as if the sky is going to crumble onto the tiled roof. The thunder will wake the pollitos, and she doesn’t have any hot beverages for them to drink and calm their fears. She remembers that there is a container of whey in the kitchen that she planned to use to feed the coches, pigs, in the morning, but she will make poleada with it instead.
She puts on her rubber boots, unbars the door that leads to the patio, wraps a towel around herself and runs to the kitchen. She brings the whey to a boil, adds a few pieces of cinnamon, crumbles the masa,corn dough, and drops it into the mixture, and then with a paddle begins to stirs it. Her knees hurt from spending the day in the bushes looking for olives to make soap. The kitchen begins to be filled with the aroma of atol de poleada, typical of Comapa and its villages.
She adds sugar and few grains of salt, it was a recipe from Mamá Bartola, her bisabuela, who said that Mamá Toribia, her bisabuela, taught her. At nightfall, she would tell the story, that it was how they tricked the hunger in the cerros, hills, where the only sound they would hear was the lechuza singing at night when she alighted on the plumajillo trees.
If you share this text in another website and/or social media, please cite the original source and URL: https://cronicasdeunainquilina.com
Ilka Oliva-Corado.
