Translated by Marvin Najarro
While looking for coffee and vanilla ice cream in the frozen food section, Baudilia discovered a Nacimiento (nativity scene), it was like finding her favorite cinco (marble), her tira (marble shooter), after looking for it in the pigsty, under the tapesco de las gallinas (chicken coop), in the corner where the goats sleep, in the nest of feathers of thecoquechas (guinea fowls), and even under the two meters of gravel left over from the construction of the house’s tapial (mudwall). It was her favorite tira that always brought her luck in winning at playing triangle, holes, and turtle.
When she saw the bag of frozen flores de pito, she felt like she had recovered the mona (wooden spinning top) she lost playing calazos (pecks). The mona she had gotten on credit at the market, which she decorated with nail polish; the mona that was a festival of colors, a rainbow buzzing when it entered the circle to spin.
Because of her breathing problems, she took a deep breath. She felt as if she were high up on the San Pedro de la Laguna volcano, on top of Uncle Tibo’s matasano tree, on the piedrona in the stream’s pond, at the highest point of her swing in the hammock. But she couldn’t stay there, with her hand stuck on to the freezer.
She rubbed her bleary eyes and opened the refrigerator door at the supermarket. Before grabbing the bag of frozen flores de pito, she felt it first, rubbing it con gran choya (very slowly), without any urgency. She sighed and carefully placed the bag in her basket as if it were contraband. There they were: soft and starting to turn red, the flores de pito of her beloved Jutiapa. She bought two bags. Together, the two bags maybe weighed half a pound, for which she paid the equivalent of one week’s worth of gasoline for her car. She had grown accustomed to the fact that luxuries were expensive.
The lunch was going to be a feast, so she bought corn flour because those flores de pito deserved some pishtones (thick tortillas). She also bought half a pound of Greek cheese, the closest thing to the fresh cheese from eastern Guatemala. She felt her heart skip a beat when she saw the color pitaya pods of camagua beans hanging from a hanger.
She felt dizzy, felt that she was going feet first. She thought that the emotions were too much for just one day, emotions she had not experienced in years. Why all at once? Her heart could not take so much happiness; it was too much fire, that incandescent glow was going to turn her to ashes. She had a flashback to when she fell off a bicycle for the first time. She saw herself falling from the highest branch of the jocote de pitarrillo tree in the yard of María del Tomatal.
She saw her maternal grandmother’s hands patting the pishtones, and teaching her how to tortear (make tortillas). She saw herself crying when a chaye de culo de botella (the broken bottom of a bottle) got lodged in the sole of ones of her feet while she played pelota (soccer) on the grassy field. She saw the snot running down her chin on cold November days. She saw her aunt removing the lice from her hair. She felt the pain in the back of her neck when combing her hair for school. She felt the pain when her baby teeth were pulled out with a string. She relived the shock of her first menstruation, she touched her belly and grabbed the shelves, the camagua beans brought her back to her senses, and with the utmost effort and taking a breath of fresh air, filled a three-pound bag and left.
When she arrived home, she brought the beans to a boil, and when the delicacy was ready she added the flores de pito, cooked the pishtones on an aluminum comal (hot plate) and let herself be embraced by the aroma of the woods, of the drying milpa with air dried corncobs filled with new corn kernels, of the smell of earth, of the ripened ayotes (pumpkins), and of the flores de muerto (marigolds) on the slopes of the ravines.
She laid out an embroidered tablecloth made by nía Chefina, the artist from the village Las Crucitas. She took out thebucul, a handcrafted bowl used to keep tortillas warm that was sent to her from the village El Coco, in Jalpatagua, and then her nest was filled with a feeling recognized by the memory. The sensation of the familiar enveloped her; she poured coffee into her jícara and durmió la mona (slept off) as never before. She rested in a haven of peace induced by the flor de pito and the camagua beans.
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Ilka Oliva-Corado.
