Squinting, there’s a blurred drawing of an ample stone-sided, tile-roofed house. Deciphering faded words, reassembling insect chewed, time-weakened pages, bits of history unfurl.
It’s a task exceeding the effort it takes to put together today’s machine shredded documents. It’s often puzzling, mostly cheering. Everything’s all out of order. Time-bleached pages have to be held up to the light to make out the trail that a pencil’s graphite marked years ago. These trace – 18 – people’s lives, a weathered arch across time.
Finally there comes a clearer finding. A girl, small for the age scratched on a tiny yellowed photograph of her holding the reins of a tall horse. She’s a member of an extended foster family, though some of these “relatives” view her as la huéfana, “the orphan.” She was an infant survivor of a soaring mountainside bus wreck that destroyed her fellow passengers as debris hit the fields below.
By the time she quit the nearest pueblo school, she was 15, though already there were rumors questioning her age. Chema and Guadalupe Rosales asked for help with la chica’s reading, writing and arithmetic. After a false start, she began to read because her grandfather had fought in Mexico‘s 1910-1924 Revolution, her father in the Jalisco-centered “Cristero Rebellion” (1924-1929). They had fierce tales to tell, and I roamed through Mexican history books with her, showing official records of those battles. Once that began, her writing improved.
But mathematics was a different matter, even though the girl Concha got the hang of “why.” Basic arithmetic was essential for people of thin resources, those who lived in the campo, when dealing with pueblo store keepers and mercenary municipal officials. Pueblo storekeepers, blacksmiths, leather smiths, and especially veterinary stands that sold livestock medicines: campo folks had to be mentally quick in bargaining with such merchants, swift with numbers to avoid being short-changed. That was rough motivation to learn to count quickly. In town, Concha’s first step in that game would be to look down so merchants couldn’t see her moving her lips as she counted on her fingers.We made a visual game of it. A piece of graph paper with numbers one to ten down the left side. Laterally across the top beginning with one I wrote the numbers 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9. And beneath these scribbled the consequence of adding these numbers. From a nearby arroyo we harvested a collection of small smoothed stones and put them in the same order beneath the graph paper on an old bench in the family’s bodega. An obvious – very rural – and unbeatable way for Concha to quickly grasp the climbing accumulating sums. Soon we began to cover everything up to see how well her numerical memory was working. For Concha, whose natural comfort venue from the time she could walk was the barn/corral area, the stones made numbers familiarly obvious, and thus addition and subtraction also, which allowed her to battle rudimentary multiplication.
Often when I was at the plaza pulqueria of the nearest pueblito, some wondered what a gringo was doing in such an out-of-the-way place. “What brings you here?” the forward ones would ask. Once I mentioned the extended Rosales family, they would nod. But a gringo “visitor” always stimulated curiosity. And oddly, I thought, questions about “the girl”: How old was she, really, they wondered. Yet, Concha had already shown the cantina crowd that she was old enough to be fearless and strong. Not long before a drunk aimed a remark at Concha that she found insulting. She kicked her gelding up on to the portal and into the drunk’s table, pinning him under it. There were no words, just Concha’s hard gaze. Yet now some said Concha was too “scrawny” to be 16. Her classmates had told their parents she was demasiado tonta, too dumb for that age. In those days teachers would slip large paper burro ears on the heads of “slow” students. That kind of “burro” implies “stupid.”
I didn’t mention that to Chema, but I spoke of the age speculation.
“Chinga. Someone’s told how we took her after that choque. But nobody knew how old she was when we got her from the presidente municipal. They just wanted to get rid of her.” He shook his head. “We thought she was tiny because her mother didn’t have enough milk.”
“What do you think now?”
“Well, some here are now saying 13, 14.”
“She’s awfully strong and forward. I don’t believe 13.”
“Pos, Lupe believes the wreck made her different. You know they say the bus started coming apart when it went through the stone contrarriel. That and the long fall killed everybody. Maybe that makes her different in the head. She’s crazy, say some chismeros, gossips.”
No le hace. Whatever age she has, she’s a lot smarter than we thought. Smarter than I thought! But she’s has no confidence with school learning.”
“Yes, though she’s reading well now.”
“The stories you and your father tell help her.”
Chema squinted. “Gracias. I had thought there was nothing we could do.”
“We are beginning with numbers, now.”
“That’ll be hard for her.”
“Poco a poco. Patience and some number games. We measure everything.”
“I saw you with your cinta de medir.”
“But she hates counting vuelta, change, in front of strangers.”
“That’s when to count very carefully. With strangers, pueblo mercantes.”
“I tell her, ‘Give them your hard gaze’.”
Chema grinned “Pos, the cold empty one that makes people nervous.”
“Cold and empty gaze.” I wrote it to remember all this.
That was the day that Concha rode up on her favorite gelding, holding out a wooden bucket filled with guayabas. “We can have some fresa de guayaba Papå.” She was happy and leaned over to kiss Chema on the cheek.