The Queen of Water (7 page)

MacGyver passes around the tape case, and I catch a peek of it over Niño Carlitos’s shoulder. There are three men with long hair in braids, wearing wool ponchos and hats, the same as the men from my village. The same as my father. A sick feeling spreads through my insides. The music fills the room, something haunting now, like a ghost that echoes and rattles in my bones. I look at the tile floor and wish the music would stop.

After one more song, MacGyver tucks the tape back into his shirt pocket. They chat a little more, and then the Doctorita gives little bags of guavas to MacGyver and the other teachers and says goodbye.

I run upstairs to the balcony to spy on them leaving. Below, the door opens and MacGyver emerges, chewing on his guava, shaking hands with the other teachers. Then he spits the skin onto the ground and heads down the street. After he disappears around the corner, I race downstairs and out of the house and snatch up the guava skin.

Back in my room, I sit on my bed and brush the sticky skin on my cheek, touch it to my lips. His mouth touched this skin, and now it’s touching mine, and it’s almost as if he’s kissing me. And I don’t care if he’s really just a regular man, a normal teacher instead of a TV star or secret agent; still I hear him say,
Oh, Virginia, my beautiful spy, come with me on my next mission, far from the Andes, north, to America.

That night I sleep with the guava skin beside me on my pillow. As I drift off, I hear that indigenous music and try to make it stop, but it scoops me up like the winds of the Andes and makes me fly. And again, I struggle against it, but in the end it is too strong, and it carries me away.

chapter 11

I
’M WALKING BESIDE
THE COW
on the
colegio
’s grounds in a gray drizzle. I like the cow’s company. She moves slowly and munches on the grass and looks at me once in a while with her gigantic eyes. Now that Jaimito is in kindergarten and Andrecito is in preschool, I’m alone more during the day. The house feels strange with no little boy babbling or laughing or whining or crying or shouting or tugging on my skirt or reaching his arms up to me. More and more, I find myself hovering at the edge of the schoolyard, always with an excuse, like picking avocadoes from the trees by the fence, or pasturing the cow.

The Doctorita’s science class is about to start, but she hasn’t arrived yet. The clouds hang heavy over the low, flat roof of the
colegio,
hiding the mountains, giving everything a dull metallic sheen. A bunch of seventh and eighth graders in wine-colored uniforms are crowded outside the building, beneath the overhang, trying to stay dry. They’re holding their books open and talking with animated gestures. They seem wound up about something—maybe the rain, maybe an exam, maybe a dance coming up.

If I were in school, I’d probably be in eighth grade now. I imagine that I’m huddled over there with them, wearing a burgundy skirt that grazes my knees and white socks pulled up my calves and an ironed white shirt and neat vest and sparkly barrettes.

Voices break into my daydreaming; a couple of boys are calling me over. “Virginia! Come out of the rain!”

The boys are friends of Marina and Marlenny who always greet me and chat politely whenever they see me. One is tall and pimply-faced and the other short and baby-faced, and they’re both smiling and gesturing at me. I tie the cow to an avocado tree and walk over, shaking the water droplets from my hair. A few other kids say hi and smile and then go back to studying. The tall boy, Leo, says, “Hey, will you help us study, Virginia?” Before I can refuse, he hands me his book.

I hold it awkwardly in the crooks of my elbows. It’s heavier than a sack of flour.

“Quiz us. Ask us the practice questions.”

I look at the page and beg my eyes to see whatever it is their eyes see.

“Come on, Virginia. Please?” Leo points to the bottom of the page. “Right there. The questions on page one twenty-seven. Right next to the photosynthesis diagram. Ask away.”

There’s a column of tiny black circles and lines that mean nothing to me. Next to the letters is a picture of clouds, rain, sun, plants, roots, and soil, with red arrows pointing from one thing to another, like symbols on a treasure map. I stare at the letters until my vision grows watery. Something must be wrong with my eyes.

“Sorry,” I say finally. “I just don’t feel like reading now.” I thrust the book back into his hands, and half running, lead the cow away in the rain. The fields shine green and wet, and tree leaves drip, and I can almost see, hovering in the air, those mysterious red arrows and black letters hiding a world from me.

That’s it.
I wipe the salt water and rain from my face, determined.
I’m fixing my eyes.

Later in the afternoon, before the Doctorita gets home from school, I sneak a book off the shelf and stare at the words, waiting to see what other people see, waiting for some meaning to pop out from the ink, rubbing my eyes and blinking and moving them in and out of focus. What do everyone else’s eyes have that mine don’t? Frustrated, I slam the book shut and stash it back in the bookcase, glaring at the shelves of books like locked boxes holding secrets.

After dinner, as I’m clearing dishes and the Doctorita is grading papers at the table, I say, “Doctorita, I want to go to school.”

She glances up and makes a laughing sound that’s more like a snort or a bark. “What for?”

“I want to learn to read.”

She shakes her head and goes back to grading the exams, red checks or Xs next to each question. “Remember,” she says in an I-told-you-so voice, “I asked you years ago if you wanted to go to school and you said no.”

“But now I want to.”

“Well, you missed your chance.” She’s checking and X-ing an exam, her eyebrows furrowed. “There’s too much work for you to do around here now. No time for school. You’re too old, anyway. It’s too late.”

I feel like hurling the dishes at the wall, one by one.
Bam. Bam. Bam.
I clench my fists around the plate rims. “But I want to go to school and college and have a real career when I grow up.”

She chuckles and shuffles to a fresh exam. “You’re going to work for us your whole life. You’re a
longa.
You don’t need to read to clean and cook, now, do you?”

I glare, too furious to form words.

Without looking up, she says, “There’s a pile of dishes waiting to be washed. Get to it.”

In bed I toss and turn and watch the dark shadows of the broom and mop looming in the corner like monsters. I’m awake, but my thoughts are nightmarish. I see myself as an old lady, about fifty years old. Marlenny and Marina and all the students from the
colegio
have finished university and gotten jobs—as doctors and lawyers and teachers—and here I am, hunched-over and gray-haired, washing dishes for the Doctorita and Niño Carlitos and their children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren. The kids tell me, Viejita—
old lady—help us study
. And the Doctorita—ancient, nearly blind, and wrinkled like a raisin—laughs.
Hehehe! Virginia is a
longa, she creaks.
Virginia can’t read. She’ll die here, washing dishes, washing the diapers of my great-great-great-grandchildren. Hehehe!

*  *  *

The next day I stare at the Doctorita across the living room, my face fixed hard and determined as stone. “I want to read.”

“You’re a
longa. Longas
don’t need to read.”

The next day, I say again: “I want to read.”

She ignores me.

And the next day: “I want to read.” I plan to tell her over and over, until one day, at a weak moment, she will say yes.

And sure enough, finally, one night she slams down her pen and says, “Stop bothering me! Ask Carlos to teach you if you want to read so badly. I don’t have time for this.”

So I ask Niño Carlitos, who’s out front playing ball with the boys in the street. “Will you teach me to read?”

“Of course,
m’hijita.
I’ll teach you sometime.” And he rolls the ball to Andrecito.

Days pass and he doesn’t say anything more about it. Every trip I make to the store is pure torture now. Everywhere I look, letters are taunting me, letters on signs and in ads and newspapers and magazines, and still my eyes can’t see the secrets.

A few days later, I ask in a quivering voice, “Niño Carlitos, when will you teach me to read?”

He looks at me for a long moment. “This is important to you, isn’t it,
m’hija
?”

I bite my lip and nod.

“How about tonight?” he asks, resting his hand on my shoulder.

“Yes! Thank you!”

After I race through washing the dinner dishes, Niño Carlitos and I sit down at the dining room table with a small notebook and pencil. The pages smell woody and fresh and magical, treasure maps waiting to be made. He writes the letters of the alphabet and says their names and has me repeat. Under each letter he draws a funny picture. For
a
, he draws a chicken’s wing. “
A,
” he says.
“Ala de pollo.”
Wing of a chicken. And I repeat. First
a
,
e
,
i
,
o
,
u
, and then the other letters, all the way to
z
. If I dig deep into my mind, way back into my past, I see flashes of these letters from my six weeks of school in Yana Urku. It’s as if those letters stayed there on purpose, knowing they’d come in handy someday.

Soon it’s late and the TV is quiet and the Doctorita is putting the boys to bed. But I’m not tired at all. I’m humming like a bee’s wings, never more awake, more alive. I copy the letters, one by one. My circles are shaky and my lines not as straight as Niño Carlitos’s, but he says, “Good,
m’hija,
” and touches my shoulder. “You’re
vivísima,
Virginia. Really bright.”

I
feel
bright, glowing like the sun, bursting with light and sparks and fire.

Then Niño Carlitos shows me how to combine letters.
Ba, bi, be, bo, bu.
And I repeat and copy the letters. By the time we get to
za, zi, ze, zo, zu,
it’s very late. Outside the window, the night sleeps in silence, not a car sound, not a voice, not a note of music. It’s as though we’re in a secret middle-of-the-night hideout, deciphering a top-secret code. He writes some short words and has me sound them out.
M-A-M-A. Ma. Ma. Mamá!
And I do it, as easy as that.

Finally, when Niño Carlitos is yawning and his eyes are starting to close, he says, “That’s enough for tonight,
m’hija.
” He hands me the notebook and gives me a hug.

I run upstairs and lie in bed, embracing my notebook, breathing in the new paper smell, feeling the smooth cardboard cover against my cheek, seeing the letters in my head, moving my lips with the sounds.
Ma-má. Pa-pá. Be-bé.
I lie awake all night, waiting for tomorrow, when I will see the world with brand-new eyes.

I read slowly at first, very slowly, sound by sound, my finger crawling along the page like a potato bug. It takes me a whole morning to finish a single paragraph. After many weeks, I make it through two entire chapters of the science textbook
Understanding Our Universe.
And during these weeks, the world transforms into a different place, a pulsing, breathing ball, swirled with blue and green and revolving around the fiery sun that is really a star. Plants aren’t just clusters of green leaves; they’re living beings that started as seeds in the ground, then broke open and reached through the soil toward the light. And their roots stretch out and drink water that moves up through the stems and leaves, and the plants breathe in carbon dioxide and breathe out oxygen and soak up sunlight for energy to grow.

Pho-to-syn-the-sis,
I sound out, my finger moving from letter to letter. My new favorite word. I have to ask Niño Carlitos for help with that one, but most of the others I eventually figure out on my own.

When I pasture the cow, passing fruit trees and vegetable fields, I stop to peer into flowers, at their stamens and pistils. I watch how bees crawl between petals and drink nectar and become coated with pollen that they bring to another flower. While the flowers are happy they’re being fertilized, the bees are happy they’re eating sweet nectar. The world shimmers, as if everything is coated with magical golden pollen.

I don’t read around the Doctorita, fearful she’ll punish me, because
longas
are supposed to spend their time sweeping and mopping and cooking and serving, not reading. She doesn’t know that when she’s at school, I race to finish the housework so I can dive into her science book, copying beautiful new words into my notebook.
Respiration. Chlorophyll. Pollination.
When her key scrapes in the lock, I quickly slide my notebook under the refrigerator, where no one will find it, and grab a broom and pretend to sweep.

chapter 12

I
’M SITTING AT THE TABLE
, eating my favorite dinner—fried potatoes and rice topped with an egg and lentils—on a forbidden ceramic plate with a forbidden silver spoon whose vines twirl up the handle. I am all alone. The Doctorita and Niño Carlitos and the boys have gone to visit relatives for the weekend. Niño Carlitos, as always, seemed a little guilty leaving me, asking me over and over if I was sure I’d be all right by myself. Now that I’m a teenager, he has this idea that every boy in the neighborhood will be crawling through the windows to find me. But I’m thrilled to be alone—two days of watching TV and reading and dancing around the house.

After dinner, I watch
MacGyver.
It’s a good episode. A tiny airplane drops him off in a jungle thick with green leaves and palm and banana trees—what I imagine the Ecuadorian rain forest must look like. He meets the local villagers and discovers that an evil man with a machine gun has enslaved them, forcing them to grow poppy flowers that he turns into drugs. So MacGyver makes booby traps using pulleys and levers that drop coconuts on the evil man’s head.

Once the evil man is knocked out, MacGyver smiles and my heart turns to honey. He proclaims to the slaves, “You’re free now!”

The slaves stare at him, motionless, in front of their bamboo huts. It’s not that they don’t understand Spanish. Anywhere in the world MacGyver goes, everyone speaks Spanish with a little accent, although their words don’t exactly match the movements of their lips, I’ve noticed. These slaves understand his words, but still they stand and stare.

“Go! Do what you want now!” MacGyver says, motioning with his hands. “You’re free!”

They keep staring until one man says, “There are more bad men above him. Now they will be angry and get us. We will always be enslaved.”

Then creepy music plays and a commercial for cornflakes comes on. A blue-eyed family is crunching cereal together and smiling. The mother’s voice sounds as smooth and soft as her creamy curtains and her skin glows as white as the milk she pours into the cereal. She finishes the last spoonful, grabs her briefcase, and laughing, kisses her children and husband on the nose one by one, then clicks out the door on her high heels.

I can see the life I want: to go to school and be a professional and have money and my own family and a house and a briefcase. Just like the lady in the commercial. But how do I get there? What would happen if one day I were free? Would I stand there and stare?

After a commercial for gum and another for laundry soap, MacGyver comes back on and makes a plan with all the villagers to defeat the higher-up bad guys. They use an inflatable raft and a Jeep and a rope and more coconuts and some special chemicals. One by one, all the bad guys get bashed on the head by coconuts and knocked out. The villagers cheer. They realize that saving themselves is as easy as using basic scientific principles to build lots of booby traps.

Now they are free. For real this time. With their new confidence, they start making plans, and my chest swells with pride for them.

Later that night, after I turn off the TV, I notice music—loud
cumbia
rhythms—coming from outside. It’s pounding, shaking the walls. The
colegio
students must be having a dance tonight. I consider sneaking out and watching from the shadows. But the Doctorita often warns me that the whole neighborhood is watching me when she and Niño Carlitos leave. “I have eyes and ears everywhere,” she likes to remind me. It’s true, gossip travels swiftly in Kunu Yaku. If even one person saw me and told the Doctorita, I’d be dead.

MacGyver would find a way to watch the dance. My eyes scan the room, eagle eyes, narrowed and focused.

I find a board left over from one of Niño Carlitos’s projects and carry it out the window and onto the roof. The night is cool, with a sweet, light breeze. I lay the board across the gap between houses, to the roof of our neighbors’ apartment, where I’ll have a perfect view of the dance. I wait, peering at the two stories of darkness below, gathering up the nerve to crawl across.

Once, in Yana Urku, when I was about five years old, my sister Matilde was playing with her friend in the green canyon as I tagged along. They jumped across an irrigation ditch with their long, nine-year-old legs. I stopped in front of the water, afraid to cross. “Matilde!” I whined. “Help me across.” But she and her friend were absorbed in a game and didn’t pay attention. “Matilde, Matilde!” I shrieked, eyeing the deep, murky water. “Help me across.”

She rolled her eyes. “Cross it yourself if you want to so badly.” And she went back to her game. No one was going to help me. I’d have to do it myself. I wiped my tears and got a running start and leapt across the water to the other side, landing safely in the squishy mud. I grinned, stunned, and glanced toward Matilde. That’s when I saw the flash of relief in her face. She’d been watching me out of the corner of her eye the whole time, ready to save me if I fell.

Now Matilde is a faint, faraway memory, so faint I can barely recall the features of her face. But remembering her watching me gives me courage. With my heart pounding, my body shaking, the rough board scraping my bare knees, I begin to cross. Halfway there, I look down, into the blackness stretching below, and I am paralyzed. I take a deep breath and feel the music vibrate my bones and focus on the roof just an arm’s length in front of me. I move toward my destination, centimeter by centimeter.

Once I reach the clay tiles, I lean back on my elbows, light-headed and reveling at my small feat. The dance spreads out below in a circle of spotlights; beyond it, the shadows of fields and mountains melt into darkness. A group of boys huddle on one side of the basketball court, near the giant speakers, and the girls on the other. As the night goes on, the boys grow braver, daring to approach the girls and ask them to dance. Soon almost everyone is dancing, spinning. Skirts swirl, hips sway. When the slow, romantic songs come on, the girls nestle their heads on the boys’ shoulders and my heart skips along with theirs.

For a long time I sit, watching them and staring at the sky, full of zillions of stars. In
Understanding Our Universe
I read that stars are really distant suns. Each star is the center of its own solar system, planets encircling it, and moons encircling each planet. This makes my problems on Earth seem small. Maybe far across the universe, on another planet, the
indígenas
are the powerful ones, the ones who go to school in burgundy uniforms. Maybe the
mestizos
are their servants.

Why was I born on this planet? Why was I born to people who don’t love me? Why, out of all the zillions of possibilities, have I ended up a servant? I try to let the secondhand music and the distant blazing suns and the far-off happiness fill me, but it is not enough.

Something else begins to fill me, though, an energy like the flaming heat of the sun—all 5,600 degrees Celsius of it—and I make a pact with myself. One day, when I am free, I will not stand and stare. I will take the leap. And in the meantime, I’ll get a running start.

I become a secret-agent student.

Every day after Niño Carlitos and the Doctorita leave for work, I race through my chores in a whirlwind, then plop down at the dining room table to study exactly what the Doctorita’s and Niño Carlitos’s eighth-grade students are studying. I shuffle through their stacks of ungraded homework and make myself do the same assignments in my little notebook. When a fresh batch of blank exams sits piled on the table, I steal a copy for myself and slip it under the refrigerator. The next day I take the test and then check my answers with the key.

When I pasture the cow near the
colegio,
I time it so I can talk to the students, like an infiltrating spy, to pump them for information.

“Hi!” I say to Leo, the tall guy who asked me to read months earlier.

“Hi, Virginia,” he says, almost shyly. I’ve noticed lately that when I’m around boys my age, they tend to get nervous, with flickery eyes and dry mouths.

“Want some help studying?” I ask. “I can quiz you.”

“Sure.” He hands me the book, and this time it feels light and comfortable in my hands, as though it belongs there.

And as the words roll off my tongue, I discover what the students are studying. Static electricity. Ions and electrons and nuclei. The chemical elements.

“So,” I ask casually, “what lab experiments have you been doing lately?”

“This one on page two fifty-six.” His face is turning pink, which makes his pimples redder. He seems flustered by my attention. “That one was fun,” he said. “Rubbing a balloon on your hair and making it stick to the wall.” His voice cracks and he swallows hard. “Oh, and this one on page two seventy-five. It was so exciting, everyone was screaming. The Doctorita got mad.”

“What was the experiment?”

“Building a volcano.”

Building a volcano!

The next day, Saturday, the Doctorita and Niño Carlitos plan to go with the boys to Ibarra to shop all day. Now that they’re out of debt, they’ve been wiser with their investments and have even saved extra money to spend on clothes and toys for the children. They want me to come, but I say, “I’m not feeling well. I think I’ll stay here.”

Niño Carlitos eyes me suspiciously. “No boys in the house, Virginia.”

“Of course not!” I say, indignant. Niño Carlitos’s worries about boys have been getting out of hand lately. Even the Doctorita rolls her eyes at him.

“Maybe we should lock her in,” Niño Carlitos says quietly to the Doctorita, thinking I can’t hear him.

I hold my breath. They haven’t locked me in for at least a year now. That would completely ruin my plan.

“Oh, come on, Carlos,” she says. “Don’t be ridiculous.”

While the Doctorita is gathering a bag of food for the trip, I take the key to the science lab off her key chain.

Once their truck has disappeared, I walk nonchalantly down the road toward the school. If anyone catches me, I’ll say that the Doctorita forgot some important things in the lab and asked me to get them. Still, if she finds out, I’ll be beaten for sure. I glance around. No one in sight. I open the door, slip inside, and click the lock behind me. Quickly, I close the blinds. It’s dark, but little lines of light creep around the windows’ edges.

I imagine I’m a world-famous scientist who was brutally kidnapped but managed to use her brilliance to escape to perform this vital experiment. If I can complete the volcano without anyone catching me, I will be free and the world will be saved.

In the dim light, I open
Understanding Our Universe
to page two seventy-five and squint at the diagram, then search the cabinets for the ingredients. Perfect. They’re all in a single cabinet, neatly arranged and labeled in the Doctorita’s tiny, cramped handwriting.

My pulse racing, I mix the flour and salt and oil and water to make the dough, kneading it with my hands like bread. Then I put a plastic Inca Kola bottle in a pan and shape the dough around it, just like in the picture. Only I make mine more realistic, so it really looks like a mountain, with crags and nooks and rock outcroppings. If I had more time, I would shape little goats from the dough, and children and cows and houses and potato fields. But I stick to the instructions, and fill the bottle with warm water and some drops of food dye and detergent and baking soda to make the lava.

And then, the final step. The book warns to jump back from the volcano after this step. I can almost hear the suspenseful music playing, just like in a
MacGyver
episode right before something explodes. What if I blow up the whole lab?

I pour in the vinegar and jump back.

Slowly, it starts rising—the vinegar reacting with the baking soda and making carbon dioxide—and now bloodred lava is bubbling over the sides of the volcano, spilling down the slopes. I move closer and sink onto a plastic chair, a little disappointed there’s no explosion, but mostly amazed that you can mix together simple, innocent kitchen ingredients and come up with a frothing volcano.

How will it feel when, one day, I am free? A giant explosion? Or a slow, bubbling transformation? I watch the oozing lava and wish that other students were crowded around me oohing and ahhing and giggling. I put the materials back into the cabinet, wipe off the table, raise the blinds, stuff my soggy volcano in a garbage bag, and go home to scrub the floors.