On a November morning in the early 1960s, the young girl woke, listening to another of the stinging series of unseasonable mountainside storms. Daily temperatures fell, afternoon and nightly rains increased clasping the scattered adobe homes of the extended Rosales family in their grip. The many-branched clan, along with their herds, flocks, coveys and packs of livestock and poultry, accepted this soaking chill stoically. It was just a natural turn of weather.
Sixteen year-old Concha Rosales, who endured heat more easily than cold, rolled off her straw petate (sleeping mat) and into her huaraches. She had gone to bed wearing a boy’s denim shirt and pair of pants, rare at that time. They were gifts from a gringo who was teaching Concha lessons in reading Mexican history from a frayed set of encyclopedias. The morning air stung her feet and especially her hands as she stepped outside to do her necesidades. Returning, she shook off the cold and dropped to her knees as she did each morning, crossed her legs behind her and bent forward over a molcajete – a mortar chopped out of volcanic rock. With regular motion, she began preparations for the family’s morning tortillas. Soon she was warm.
Four members of the less cautious associated families were already bed-ridden with what traditionally was called the gripa. It was an umbrella term for any illness, slight or severe, that families of ill relatives hoped wouldn’t last.
The term “modern medicine” was then not widely used because it was not available to most of the population, and this north-of-the-border term smacked in government circles of gringo superiority. And Mexico’s touchy reaction to that reality shunned such a concept. Mexico’s true superiority in healing lay in folk medicine, from which other nations poached ancient remedies, tinkered, bottled and boxed them, marketing the result expensively.
The harsh November weather did not interrupt daily ranch tasks. The Rosaleses, including youngsters, continued their normal chores. But those became harder. Cold weather made animals balky. Horses and cattle particularly reacted to chill weather in obstreperous ways. Normally mild-mannered milk cows had to be tied in a stall. Milk pails went flying. Horses became hard to corral and even easy-going mounts balked at simply being bridled. Saddling became a test of quick maneuvers dodging lashing hooves. Concha’s two favorite mounts were an excitable gelding called Prieto for his color, and a mare called Alma, for her calm intelligence. In animal-annoying weather, Concha usually rode the mare.She was a youngster who bore heat well, but not cold. As an odd consequence, sometime when she was eight or nine, she interpreted being “bothered” by chill weather as a challenge. Thus, when she knew she was going to face a cold, damp morning, Concha went to bed half dressed in daytime wear. Atop of her blanketing sarape, for extra warmth, she draped a lona, an old piece of linseed painted canvas with a slit cut for her head. It was her daytime rainproof covering.
She wore it that morning when she and her “father,” Chema Rosales, went to look if the storm run-off was washing away any fencing. The man she called “Papa,” was the man who, with his wife, Guadalupe, took in an infant survivor of the flight of a home-made bus off a mountainside road. People said debris showed that the jerry-built transport began coming apart while still in air. A female infant was the only survivor. The Rosaleses called her Concha. And that November morning as she rode past Chema, spying gone-astray calves, he bent from his saddle to close the cattle-battered gate. His horse, sawed raw by sleetish rain spooked as an owl dropped from a nearby mesquite, and swooped low along the trail. The gelding’s head disappeared as he bowed his back and bucked. Chema’s right spur caught a twisted piece of the gate’s barbed wire and jerked him from his saddle.
The consequences were more than campesino ranchers normally count on. A broken arm, a shattered leg, and, a doctor later said, a “mild heart problem.” But, the family first consulted their local curandera, then their favorite bruja, before considering doctors. The long drive (painful for Chema, anxious for everyone else) to Guadalajara’s Hospital Civil was both saddening and fearful. Country folk didn’t trust dismissive nurses and college-educated, soaringly smug cirujanos (surgeons). Also, they feared the menacingly gleaming, strangely shaped “tools” hospital workers wielded.
The broken arm was set quickly, but the shattered leg called for three, spaced operations, and the “heart problem” (no one in the family understood the explanation of that) took just as long. In that era, many people remained with family members day and night during their stay in that astringent-odored, arrogant place. Country folk slept covered by a serape on a straw petate beneath the patient’s bed. Gradually, Concha took on this obligation. Other family members had pressing chores, and the fight against constant rainstorms.
The hospital was housed in a ancient-seeming, poorly maintained (inside and out) edifice, which in that era was deemed huge. On one visit to Chema’s bedside I brought along a gringa friend who had an errand to perform in Guadalajara. “This place is absolutely medieval,” she exclaimed as we approached Chema’s bed, where Concha was hesitantly reading Mariano Azuela’s novel, “Los de Abajo,” to him. But that Iowa woman was still new to most of Mexico then.
Concha was as much a puzzle to the hospital staff, as they were to her. She didn’t trust them, especially the cirujanos, with Chema’s care, and neither nurses nor doctors knew what to do about her. She seemed a risky, disobedient, unfathomable being to them. Like all campo folk, she’d brought family food for Chema, and ignored or criticized the food the hospital people ordered for her father. She threw the stuff in the toilet of what was then called the women’s WC. Concha even gave Chema aguardiente when he asked for it. It was much better than the pain pills they were trying to force him to take.
Late at night, when few lights were on, Concha leaned against the chill wall lining the empty aisle that by day was crowded with chattering staff traffic. In those late hours patients often moaned, called for help, but none came ... except Concha, roaming hallways and empty offices. If a patient’s summons seemed serious, Concha would step silently on bare feet into the room where nurses gathered to endlessly eat and gossip. Concha frightened them with her sudden appearance, a butcher knife held low, half-hidden by her skirt, rough words in her mouth. She condemned them for lazily ignoring pain-racked patients needing care. She undermined authority, threateningly reporting staff unconcern to their superiors; to surgeons she spoke of the hospital’s indolence and its loathing for its patients. And when a nurse or doctor reprimand her, she openly threatened them. They tried to get her thrown out of the hospital. But her 16-year-old concern for her father was cannily coupled with what a friend had told her of newspapers – the yellow journalism of the Alarma tabloid, the tough, researched stories of Siempre magazine. Alarma especially featured scandal of any kind. Such information coming from a campesino girl banked the surprised staff’s enthusiasm for that effort. Those in care of Chema began to speak in worried tones of what might happen if he did not get well. Gathered out of hearing, they swore at that incorrigible young girl as Chema gradually began to heal. When her was released from the Hospital Civil, Concha did not bid goodbye to her father’s caregivers.