1
Blue Boy, White Boy
That early morning in October, the baby’s wails mingled with the cool wind that blew through the trees, with the birdsong, and with the night’s insects saying their farewell. The sounds floated out from the thick vegetation but faded a short distance from their source, as if halted by some magic spell while they went in search of human ears.
For years, people remarked how Don Teodosio, on his way to work on a nearby hacienda, must have passed right by the poor abandoned baby without hearing a peep, and how, in search of a love potion, Lupita, the Morales family’s washerwoman, crossed the bridge that would take her to La Petaca without noticing anything strange. And had I heard him—she said that evening to anyone who wanted to listen—I would have at least picked him up, because as horrible as he may be, I don’t know who could have abandoned a newborn baby just like that, left him there to die all alone.
That was the mystery. Who from the area had shown signs of an ill-advised pregnancy recently? To whom did this unfortunate baby belong? News of such indiscretions spread faster than measles in that town, so if someone had known, everyone would have.
Yet, in this case, nobody knew anything.
There were all kinds of theories, but what captured the collective imagination was the theory that the baby belonged to one of the witches of La Petaca, who, as everyone knew, freely gave their favors of the flesh. A witch who, having produced such a deformed and strange-looking boy—a punishment of the Almighty or of the devil, who knows?—had gone and thrown it under the bridge, to leave it to God’s mercy.
No one knew how many hours that baby spent abandoned under the bridge, naked and hungry. Nobody could explain how he survived the elements without bleeding to death from the umbilical cord left unknotted, or without being devoured by the rats, birds of prey, bears, or pumas that were plentiful in those hills.
And they all wondered how old Nana Reja had found him, covered in a living blanket of bees.
Reja had chosen to spend the rest of her days in one place, outside one of the sheds they used for storage on the Hacienda Amistad. It was a simple, windowless structure, identical to several others still in service, built behind the main house to hide it from social visitors. The only thing that distinguished this shed from the others was its overhanging roof, which enabled the old woman to remain outside whether it was winter or summer. The overhang was nothing more than a lucky coincidence. Reja hadn’t chosen the place for protection from the elements, but for the view and for the wind, which blew down to her from the hills. Just for her.
The old woman had chosen this as her resting place so long ago that no one living remembered when she had occupied the spot or how her rocking chair had appeared there.
Now, almost everyone believed she never got up from that chair, and they supposed it was because, at her age—and how old she was nobody could say—her bones no longer held her up and her muscles no longer responded. For when the sun came up, they saw her sitting there already, gently rocking, more from the wind than from any movement of her feet. Then, at night, nobody noticed her disappear, because by that time they were all busy going to sleep.
All those years on the rocking chair caused the townspeople to forget her story and her humanity: she had become part of the scenery, put roots down into the earth she rocked upon. Her flesh had become wood and her skin a hard, dark, furrowed bark.
Passing by, no one said hello to her, just as nobody would greet an old, dying tree. Some children observed her from a distance when they made the short trip from town in search of the legend; only rarely did any of them have the guts to go closer to check that it really was a living woman and not one carved from wood. They soon realized there was life under the bark when, without even needing to open her eyes, she dealt the daring adventurer a good blow with her stick.
Reja did not abide being the object of anyone’s curiosity; she preferred to pretend she was made of timber. She preferred to be ignored. At her age, she reckoned, with the things her eyes had seen, her ears had heard, her mouth spoken, her skin felt, and her heart suffered, she had been through enough to make anyone weary. She couldn’t explain why she was still alive or what she was waiting for before she departed, since she was no longer of any use to anybody and her body had dried up, so she preferred not to see or be seen, not to hear, not to speak, and not to feel.
Certain people Reja did tolerate, such as the other nana, Pola, who like Reja had seen her best days long ago. She also tolerated the boy Francisco because once, when she had still allowed herself to feel, she had loved him intensely. But she could not stand his wife, Beatriz, or their daughters. The wife because Reja had no desire to allow someone new into her life, and the children because they seemed insufferable.
There was nothing they needed from her and nothing she wanted to offer them, for old age had relieved her of her servant’s duties. She’d had no part in the running of the house for years, and that was how she had started to become part of her rocking chair. So much so that it was now hard to see where the wood ended and the person began.
Before dawn, she would walk from her bedroom to the shed, where her moving seat awaited her under the overhanging roof, then close her eyes so she wouldn’t see and her ears so she wouldn’t hear. Pola brought her breakfast, lunch, and dinner, which she barely touched because her body no longer needed much food. She got up from her chair much later, only when, through her closed eyelids, the fireflies reminded her it was night, and when the wooden rocking chair, which grew tired of the constant proximity long before she did, pressed and pinched her hip.
Sometimes she opened her eyes on her way back to bed, though she didn’t need to open them to see. Then she lay on top of the covers—she didn’t feel the cold, because her skin did not let even that through anymore. But she did not sleep. The need for sleep was something her body had given up. Whether it was because it had slept as much as a being must sleep over a lifetime or because it refused for fear of falling into eternal slumber, she did not know. She hadn’t thought about that for a long time. After a few hours on the softness of the bed, she would begin to feel the pressing and pinching that reminded her it was time to go visit her loyal friend, the rocking chair.
Nana Reja didn’t know exactly how many years she had lived. She didn’t know how she’d been born or what her full name was, if anyone had ever bothered to give her one. Although she supposed she must have had a childhood, she couldn’t remember it or her parents—if she ever had any—and if someone had told her that she had sprouted from the earth like a pecan tree, she would have believed it. Nor did she remember the face of the man who gave her the child when she was a young woman, though she did recall seeing his back as he walked off, leaving her in a hut made from wood and mud, abandoned to her fate in a strange world.
Be that as it may, she would never forget the powerful movements in her belly, the twinges in her breasts, and the sweet yellowish liquid that emerged from them even before the only child she would have was born. She wasn’t sure she remembered that boy’s face, perhaps because her imagination played tricks on her, muddling the features of all the babies—white and dark—she suckled in her youth.
She clearly remembered the day when she arrived in Linares for the first time, half-starved and freezing to death, and she could still feel her baby in her arms, pressed tightly against her chest to protect him from the icy January air. She had never been down from the sierra, so it was natural that she had never seen so many houses in one place, or walked down a street, or crossed a square; nor had she ever sat on a public bench, and that was what she did when weakness made her knees give way.