It’s dark in my hotel room and when I lock the window and close the curtains I hear sobbing from the other front room and, when I go to inspect it, I find a woman who looks as if she’s stayed up all night, sitting on the floor, legs spread apart, blood all over her nightgown around her vagina, hair all messed up, wedding photos and letters scattered everywhere on the floor, the air thick with cigarette smoke, a glass of Seagram’s next to an ashtray stuffed with Pall Mall cigarette butts. She doesn’t look up, she just stares at the papers.
The hallucinations must cease. I don’t know what to do. I get in bed and stare into the dark, hoping the room stops spinning, hoping the wooden floor stops shaking, I can feel it all over my body, hoping the footsteps I hear in the main room stop, and in bed I gaze to my right at the glistening frost on the window and see how the moon refracts in a million shards and thorns.
And then I remember: days and nights in close quarters and everywhere — floor, table, on the dirt outside, on the sink counter and stove, in the tub; clammy and sticky, sheets tousled, pillows on the floor, my parents’ parents’ clothes strewn over the house, her flesh constantly touching his, hair and juices and bones and teeth and tongues in his and over hers, cigarette smoke and gin and wine and the cool night air, the dense, earthy smelling, claustrophobic humidity, the howl of barking dogs in the foothills, a quick and violent flapping of owl wings — all of this around me as I feel a connection to this place, this hotel room, merging with it.
It’s my first time hearing my mother and I can’t explain any of it — as if my heart is a seashell and the roar inside is her voice, the sole sane element in my otherwise crazy life, and it grounds me as she rocks me back and forth in her arms, affirming my belief that there is hope beyond the Santa Fe streets, beyond the prairie that surrounds us, beyond the windmills and forest; there’s the possibility of another existence out there, and it strikes me with such clarity and space and truth: this used to be St. Vincent Hospital, and this is the room in which I was born.
Divina: In Which Is Related a Goddess Made Flesh
by Ana Castillo
La Fonda on the Plaza Hotel
That evening at La Fonda Hotel, the two weary and wary housemates (one from a long day of court and dealing with clients, the other from just dealing with life) were enjoying appetizers and cocktails. In the case of one, it was a virgin Bloody Mary with a decidedly impoverished stalk of celery leaning against the inside of the glass. The other was having his usual end-of-the-day destresser martini made with both sweet and dry vermouth and garnished with two olives. They were about to order dinner when a young woman of no small stature approached the table.
“Eleven o’clock,” Gordo muttered, his way of giving his cowboy housemate Hawk a signal as to which direction to look. “It’s Project Runway,” he whispered.
As she quickly approached they tried to take in the girl all at once. She was striking at the extremes of imagination — hair like an Olympic torch, piercings, brilliant gaze, and most striking, an outfit that seemed to come out of the wardrobe department for a remake of 20,000 Leagues under the Sea. The black hair (as black as Hawk’s had once been) was streaked with electric red and cobalt blue, and held at the base by a silk ribbon. The ponytail stood straight up about eight inches high in a swirl (surely by the use of an epoxy-like gel). A copper nose ring and a silver one on her left eyebrow indicated, to Gordo’s mind, a person of certain daring. The lobeless ears were virtual swirls of mother-of-pearl seashells punctuated with various gems. Because of her heritage and her mother’s well-known devotion to the Virgin of Guadalupe, they might have expected a medal hanging from a chain around her delicate neck. Instead, there was a small tattoo of a black dove right above the jugular.
Hawk gulped. “My God,” he mumbled, standing up to greet the tall girl, “it’s the... g-goddess of death.”
“Whoa,” Gordo said. His housemate — Mr. Cool himself — was stuttering? “No, man,” he whispered from the corner of his mouth, “that’s none other than your long-lost daughter.”
Hawk felt far from cool. He was aware of who the girl was, although he had not expected to see her there. He’d just received a letter from a relative in Mexico informing him of the child who’d been born two decades before. Hawk unglued his gaze and swigged down the martini on the table.
“Hey,” his partner-in-crime protested, not wanting to be responsible for Hawk falling off the wagon.
The lucidity that came from not drinking anymore seemed to have accelerated a latent gift in Hawk, the don of clairvoyance. And right then, in fact, he was seeing something that was either there — or it wasn’t. Behind the girl he beheld the presence of four million warriors — men and women. The number came right to his head. That was how he saw things and got messages, with a certain inexplicable precision.
As a medium, he had learned, you might see something that also spoke to you or was without sound (like now). Sometimes you received audio messages only. A curandera once told him that bad spirits misled people. They spoke to you in your left ear. Good spirits approached your right. Hawk, left-handed and politically left, if anything, objected to the left being associated with evil. He didn’t pay attention to either ear. Instead, he checked with his third eye. (Someone might call it a gut feeling.) The third eye in his gut said the four million Indians were souls waiting for justice for the Conquest.
Another explanation for the vision, Hawk thought, might be what some folks called genetic memory. As an Indian, a Native American, he’d inherited the legacy: the arrival of white people five hundred years before and the travesties they committed remained traumatic. Something about Divina made him believe she related to that history too — not just because of her Mexican heritage vis-à-vis her mamá or even through him. She’d brought those four million souls with her. Had she come to reconnect him to his ancestry?
“Hello, Mr. Whitman,” the girl said, offering a tentative smile. Her red lips seemed to be lacquered porcelain.
Gordo, having been responsible for uniting the pair and keeping the plan to himself, clapped his hands lightly. Then he and the girl gave each other a quick, almost bashful hug. They had only met before by text.
“Hawk will do,” the other said. He was her father but the reality was seeping in very slowly. It hardly seemed appropriate for the strange girl to call him Dad.
“Fine,” she said, “Hawk it is.” She pulled out a chair to sit down and he quickly put up a hand to stop her: “Don’t, please.” Hawk could hardly look at the girl, afraid his eyes would give away what else was present. The four million souls behind her were very still; they seemed to be waiting to see what would transpire between the two.
Gordo, who was unaware of the reason for Hawk’s hesitation, was confused by his friend’s reaction to meeting his long-lost daughter. His morose companion was about to foul up what should have been by anyone’s estimation a gladsome meeting.
“Don’t?” Divina repeated in a melodic voice befitting her beauty. With a deep sigh and with a simple hand gesture, Hawk gave in and invited the girl to join them. Almost instantly, the souls faded. He dared to look at the girl directly for the first time. There she was — María — a near clone of her mother, the love of his life. More unsettling, however, there he was in her too.
Divina turned to Gordo and smiled.
“Ah! Miss Divina!” He kissed her caramel-hued hand. “Goddess of death — pshaw, Hawk,” he said to his friend. “That was just mean to refer to this gorgeous creature so morbidly.”