There was a camera on the interviewer and two cameras were on Doña Althea: bright, hot lights everywhere. A crew member dabbed the interviewer’s nose and forehead with a powder puff, eyed the Doña once, and backed off. The interviewer introduced himself as Malcolm Hunt. He seemed young and wore an outfit that suggested designer-label big-game hunting or possibly Central American revolutions. He probably meant well. He carefully explained to Doña Althea that they would edit the tape later, using only the best parts. If she wanted to go back and repeat anything, she could do that. He suggested that she ignore the cameras and just speak naturally to him. Norma Galvez translated all this. The Doña squinted at the lights, fixed her scornful gaze on a point just above the kitchen door, and shouted all her answers in that direction. Cecil took it personally and slinked around behind the steam table.
Mr. Hunt began. “Doña Althea, how long have you lived in this canyon?”
“Desde antes que tú cagabas en tus pañales!”
Norma Galvez shifted a little in her chair and said, “Ah, since before your mother was changing your diapers.” The Doña scowled at Norma briefly, and one of the Altheas laughed from the kitchen.
Mr. Hunt smiled and looked concerned. “When did your family come to this country?”
The Doña said something to the effect that her family had been on this land before the Gringos took over and started calling it America. The prospectors came and mined out the damn gold, and the Black Mountain company mined out the damn copper, and then they fired all the men and sent them home to plant trees, and now, naturally, they were pissing in the river and poisoning the orchards.
Mrs. Galvez paused. “A long time ago,” she said.
Mr. Hunt lost his composure for the first time. He made an odd, guttural noise and looked at Mrs. Galvez, who spread her hands.
“You want an exact translation?”
“Please.”
She gave it to him.
It wasn’t the afternoon anybody had expected. Malcolm Hunt kept adjusting his posture and his eyebrows and appearing to start the whole interview over, framing new questions that sounded like opening lines.
“The Black Mountain Mining Company is polluting-and now actually diverting-the river that has been the lifeblood of this town for centuries. Why is this happening?”
“Because they’re a greedy bunch of goat fuckers” (Mrs. Galvez said “so-and-sos”) “and they got what they wanted from this canyon and now they have to squeeze it by the balls before they let go.”
“They’re actually damming the river to avoid paying fines to the Environmental Protection Agency, isn’t that right? Because the river is so polluted with acid?”
The Doña waited for Norma’s translation, then nodded sharply.
“What do you think could stop the dam from being built, at this point?”
“Dinamita.”
Mr. Hunt appeared reluctant to follow this line of questioning to its conclusion. “In a desperate attempt to save your town,” he said, trying another new tack, “you and the other ladies of Grace have made hundreds of piñatas. Do you really think a piñata can stop a multinational corporation?”
“Probably not.”
“Then why go to all the trouble?”
“What do you think we should do?”
She had him there; Malcolm Hunt looked stumped. He looked from Norma to the Doña and back to Norma. “Well,” he said, “most people write their congressmen.”
“No sé. We don’t write such good letters. I don’t think we have any congressman out here anyway, do we? We have a mayor, Jimmy Soltovedas. But I don’t think we have any congressman.” She pronounced the word in English, making it stand out from the rest of her speech like a curse or a totally new concept. “Si hay,” she went on, “If we do, I haven’t seen him. Probably he doesn’t give a shit. And also we don’t know how to use dynamite. What we know how to do is make nice things out of paper. Flowers, piñatas, cascarones. And we sew things. That’s what we ladies here do.”
I smiled, thinking of Jack following old habits, turning around three times on the kitchen floor and lying down to dream of a nest in the grass.
“But why peacocks, what’s the history?” Malcolm persisted, after hearing the fully translated explanation. “Tell me about the peacocks.”
“What do you want to know about peacocks?” the Doña asked, giving him a blank look. The full Spanish name for peacock is pavo real, “royal turkey,” but Mrs. Galvez let that one slip by.
“How did they get here?”
Doña Althea lifted her head, adjusted her shawl, leaned back and put her hands on her knees, which were spread wide apart under her black skirt. “Hace cien años,” she began. “More than one hundred years ago, my mother and her eight sisters came to this valley from Spain to bring light and happiness to the poor miners, who had no wives. They were the nine Gracela sisters: Althea, Renata, Hilaria, Carina, Julietta, Ursolina, Violetta, Camila, and Estrella.”
She pronounced the names musically and slowly, drawing out the syllables and rolling the r’s. They were the names of fairy princesses, but the story, in her high, sustained voice, was Biblical. It was the Genesis of Grace. And of Hallie and me. Our father’s own grandmother-mother of Homero Nolina up in the graveyard-was one of those princesses: the red-haired, feisty one. I could picture her barefoot, her hair curly like Hallie’s and coming loose from its knot. I saw her standing in the open front door of her house, shaking a soup spoon at her sisters’ arrogant children who came to tease her own. Perhaps she was Ursolina, the little bear.
When Hallie and I were little I used to make up endless stories of where we came from, to lull her to sleep. She would steal into my bed after Doc Homer was asleep, and I would hold her, trying to protect her from the wind that blows on the heads of orphans and isolates them from the living, shouting children who have inherited the earth. “We came from Zanzibar,” I would whisper with my mouth against her hair. “We came from Ireland. Our mother was a queen. The Queen of Potatoes.”
I could never know the truth of my mother, but there was another story now. Another side. I closed my eyes and listened to Doña Althea with the joy of a child. I don’t know what they heard on the CBS news. I heard a bedtime story thirty years late.
22 Endangered Places
It rained and rained in Gracela Canyon. February passed behind a mask of clouds. It seemed like either the end of the world or the beginning.
The orchards, whose black branch tips had been inspected throughout the winter for latent signs of life, suddenly bloomed, all at once: pears, plums, apples, quince, their normal staggered cycle compressed by the odd weather into a single nuptial burst. Through my classroom window I watched drenched blossoms falling like wet snow.
Water, in Grace, is an all-or-nothing proposition, like happiness. When you have rain you have more than enough, just as when you’re happy and in love and content with your life you can’t remember how you ever could have felt cheated by fate. And vice versa. I knew, abstractly, that I’d been happy, but now that I was in pain again, that happiness was untouchable. It was a garish color picture of a place I had not been. Memory runs along deep, fixed channels in the brain, like electricity along its conduits; only a cataclysm can make the electrons rear up in shock and slide over into another channel. The human mind seems doomed to believe, as simply as a rooster believes, that where we are now is the only possibility.