Cristina Otero

María de la Cruz

Dark, dumpy, and dimpled, she was nevertheless the lightest-skinned of the five de la Cruz siblings—Clara Inés, fathered by a Honduran mestizo with a distinct African strain in his family line. That man had lit out early before she was born; the Guatemalan her stepfather had stuck around until Clara Inés’ mother, Concepción, met his pregnant girlfriend and kicked up such a fuss he was effectually kicked out of the house. Concepción, with her wide mouth pursed perpetually in either displeasure or exhaustion, kept an arts-and-crafts business. She was helped by her spinster sister Mercedes and their abuelita, who had nursed and raised Concepción and her mother, and who had been alive for so long her legal name was lost in the mists of time. They kept up the store and a little side business selling horchatas to thirsty passersby. 

For Clara Inés, her father had always held an air of mystique and fascination. Ever since she had found out he came from a good family, the possibility of his returning like a blue-veined prince of a fairy tale had taken hold of her like a root. In the telenovelas especially the heroine from the slums would gain the protection of a rich kind-hearted benefactor and catch the eye of his handsome son. In the end she’d find out her true, blue-blooded origins so she could be worthy of marrying the heir of estate. (More realistically, it wouldn’t even matter if she would have to tolerate a stepmother and kids—fathers heading two families, one secret, the other public, was nothing new). They’d have more money with the extra income; she’d have a quiet place to study for once. 

In between these sweet delusions, Clara Inés obeyed her mother and worked at the store, walking her brothers and sisters to the primary school fourteen blocks away. All of them attended the Escuela Preparatoria de San Martín, a religious private school more or less secularized except for the tradition of Latin prayers in the morning and communion rites in the weekend. It was a good school, and by far the family’s biggest expense, and Concepción did not hesitate in reminding Clara Inés of the grand sacrifice they were making. The maras, it was known, had control of the public schools, or at least intimidated them so they did whatever they pleased, roaming around the football fields and playground parks, fighting territory wars with rival gangs. In the evenings when she heard the shots in the distance, she thanked God for their living in a calm neighborhood and to open her heart more to her mother, who did so much for them. 

Clara Inés had a year left to go for primary; afterwards it was either a three-year high school or helping Mamá at the store. Concepción, in her usual seesaw attitude towards education, insisted on her working at the shop almost as much as she insisted on her going to high school and then university. She had married Clara Inés’ father before she ever went to university and lost her chance to earn a degree in business. After that good-for-nothing left her, a well-to-do cousin stepped in and gave her a loan for the store, and ever after was welcome to their home, afforded a nigh kingly status. Clara Inés disliked this cousin beyond words, how he used to look around at the house and the store—and eventually her in a leer as her curves developed—as if they were his own rightful property. 

“How can you even think to criticize, after everything he has done for us?” Concepción would harangue every time she expressed doubts. “I would you were wise! I would you learned respect!” 

The cousin lived with his wife at one of the gated communities of Cúrtiz-Resin just two streets away from her home. 

#

But San Martín, strict and punishing though it was, was also a place of promise. It was, after all, where she found love for the first and only time.

His name was Juan Manuel Rosas, on the same year, the most beautiful boy she had ever seen. So powerful was his mystique it cast a strange spell over people, who assumed he must be an exemplary student without any proof of it. Girls swooned at the sight of him and boys sneered at him and called him maricón behind his back. When he first walked into her literature class, impeccably shiny as a newly minted coin, a trace of rose water lingering sweetly in the air, she felt the warm rush of adoration swell in her chest, the premonition of the most enchanting fate. They met again in study hall, and like a miracle Juan Manuel sat down at her table; he was struggling with the literature for this term—Like Water For Chocolate specifically. 

Hope, like most things, was something Clara Inés knew she could never afford. Still, as Juan Manuel casually reached over one afternoon to grasp her hand, and then in another a hard, quick brush of the lips, blushing even in the daring, she felt that it was quite possible to die from too much happiness, from too much goodness. 

With regards to boys, her mother was unequivocal and uncompromising—they weren’t allowed, at least not until high school. Or ever, preferably. Love could wait; education deferred was irretrievable, a dream vanishing into the ether. Men were unreliable and could not be trusted.

But as the real and tangible takes precedence over the ethereal and unrealized, so were Clara Inés’ priorities reshuffled and the monstrous injustice of her mother’s interdict galled. He was a good boy from a good family—no Fulanito of any kind. Why, then, this subterfuge, this secrecy? Would her love be buried, festering within her, like Tita’s for Pedro? 

“Mamá,” she finally managed one afternoon as they washed the dishes. “I’ve been invited to a party at the Cázares’.”

“Eh?” Concepción squinted at her, wearily; then, as if finally attending her words, her eyes narrowed further in scrutiny. “A party?”

“A friend invited me.”

“Who?”

“Monserrat Saavedra.” Lie. It was Juan Manuel.

“Is it a school night?” She suddenly fixed her with her evil eye. “Will there be boys?” 

She cringed. “There will be other adults, chaperones. I’ll be back early. Please, Mamá.” 

After what seemed like hours of back and forth, Concepción finally acquiesced, a miracle Clara Inés regarded on par with the loaves and the fishes. She suspected her mother had remembered her own youth, for out of the blue she had casually offered to teach Clara Inés how to apply makeup. For a moment she felt she was living a scene from one of those American movies with montages about young girls trying out dresses and putting on makeup. 

The Cázares’ house was an airy, earthy post-colonial, a paradox that delighted the eye with its variety. They ventured into the courtyard beneath a purple twilight and festival lights; there were trays of pupusas, tureens of sweet plantain. She and Juan Manuel danced to a cha-cha version of “Perfidia” and everything was love. 

And then her broken phone with the cracked screen glared the time at her: 9:00. 

“No later, you hear?” Concepción had warned, or rather threatened, pointing a spatula at her. “Or else I’ll never let you out of my sight again.” 

Gallant that he was, Juan Manuel saw her home, and not even the shame of letting him see her neighborhood, a dump compared to his, could dim her glowing mood, not the least because Juan Manuel had taken hold of her hand, and the contact made swirls of butterflies erupt in her stomach. They passed by some of the uglier tenements inhabited by immigrants, dingy and ragged with sharp angles and graffitied fronts. She balked.

“What is it?”

“That is the witch’s house.” She had completely forgotten. “The kids call her that. It’s bad luck to pass by.”

“Why?”

“The witch curses you. Isn’t it cursi?” She was putting on a brave show; the truth was she never went down this street out of fear. “And, I don’t know, haunt you forever.”

“Like La Llorona?” He mimed grabbing her around—evil eye, begone!—and they laughed giddily. Then he sobered, and held her by the arms.

“I’ll protect you,” he said. “Nothing will happen to us.”

But only when they passed by the two-story tenement, unevenly painted and weathered, did she fully relax. At the last possible moment, she chanced to look back. Some of the curtains might have flickered, but that could have been her imagination.

#

Warm air gave way to light rains and gray, bitter winds; a similar change, too, came over Juan Manuel. It was midterms, but already he began talking about high school admissions and counselors, and even university advertisements, scholarships, and grants. Clara Inés wondered at this newfound intensity that caused his eyebrows to furrow themselves inward, withdraw from the world. She wasn’t sure she liked it; it gave an unexpectedly heaviness to his light beauty. 

And then her friend Daniela brought her rumors that he had fooled around with Lizbeth Saavedra during the winter holidays. The pig!  

It didn’t matter how her girlfriends abused him in her name, or how much she expelled tears, or how Concepción assured her that this love wouldn’t be the last, that she would find some other boy worthy of her (she would be wrong in retrospect). She spent the weekend in bed and only went to school through concentrated, superhuman effort (and Concepción’s threatening grasp on her shoe). She didn’t want to see him, but she still did: They shared a class together, after all. 

The world had ended—the lovers’ cottage had burned, blood spilled in the crypt. Yet life went on, teachers expected work, exams were not postponed. How could that be? 

It hadn’t all been just a trifling youthful affair. She did not trifle, girls like her didn’t trifle. She had given the very best of her to him, her most sacred and precious, and all that was left of that was sickness, melancholy, and Mamá spouting old wives’ saws and telling her to mind Yasmín and the twins. And then the missed period, her first since she was eleven.

What little she knew of biological sex came from one frightening experience of her first cycle, waking up to dark burgundy stains. She had panicked, washed herself vigorously and hid the sheets, but the bleeding did not stem. She would have to go to the hospital and she knew they wouldn’t be able to afford the bills. Perhaps it was best just to let the bleeding run its course; she didn’t feel much pain from it other than a stomach-clenching discomfort.

But then Aunt Mercedes found the stained sheets. She broke down in front of Concepción, who laughed—not cruelly, but the type of laugh that instantly told her she was making much ado about nothing. 

“Women bleed once a month to expel the eggs,” she told her, with unusual patience. “Once the egg has been fertilized, it takes root in the womb and in nine months conceive a child.” 

“But how?”

“When you let a man lie with you.” 

“…But how?” 

“When you sin, that’s how,” she snapped. “Now no more questions.” 

Health class was no help either, most of which concerned itself with personal hygiene and the difference between boys and girls, and how having sex before marriage was a venial sin requiring at least one Our Father. Well, it wasn’t put in so many words, garbed as it was in botanical metaphor. They gave them free toothbrushes and toothpaste and Clara Inés was left with the vague impression that one could choose not to get pregnant if one so wished. The causation was not very firmly established. 

So it was that nearly two months into their romance, Juan Manuel caressed her breasts behind some trees in the school courtyard and asked her if they could make love. She refused and he insisted and this rondo continued until one special night when her mother was working late. It was spontaneous, unplanned—one thing led to another—and she decided to give Juan Manuel all her flower. And that was that—he would approach her mother, they would get married, not now, but in some years’ time, and everything would be as it should. Until the bastard decided to go for that slut Lizbeth and ruin everything. 

But the truest fear was not the pregnancy, which was barely a reality yet: It was the prospect of telling Mamá. There were only two ways such a meeting would go: Pure chancla-and-flying-frying-pan rage, harangue, and guilt-tripping before acceptance and practical preparation. Or perhaps even worse: Eyes shuttering in flat, unsurprised disappointment. 

“Where five eat, six can,” she’d finally say and stir the bean pot. 

And she would rock her like the old tenders of childhood and infancy. But both scenarios she could see herself sobbing on her shoulder, shaking her head with a “No, no, no.”

#

She waited until her family had retired for the evening, which was quite late; when Mamá finally locked the store at nine, she took her chance and quietly slipped out. 

A great many things were illegal in San Salvador, shrouded as they were in perpetual mystery and tacitly not talked about even in private conversation. So naturally, most everyone knew about them. During her lucid period Abuelita would teach her the name of herbs in Mayan and Spanish, as her mother taught her, as did the Indian doctors of local renown with equally encyclopedic knowledge of flora and fauna. There were immigrants with skills, desperate to eke out a living, forming a web of connections and protections on the fringes of civilized society. 

In that way she had heard the word abortion even before she had known about sex. At school it was not so much whispered as floated about, permeating the air with its miasma of sin. This miasma had followed a classmate she knew, who dropped out and was never heard from again. 

So Clara Inés knew about this so-called witch’s trade. The younger kids even called her a killer of babies, the carcasses of which she’d boil in her stew like a cartoon witch. Even if that were in the least bit true, Clara Inés had faced worse before. Against the real-life humiliation of poverty, the worst of black magic could hold no true threat to her. 

She saw lights inside the tenement and went in. Inside was a chaos of homemade crafts and paste jewelry, a colorful potpourri of dollar-store junk and boxes. The young man at the counter didn’t even bother lifting his head up at the sound of the wind chimes. 

“We’re closed for the night, come back in the morning.” When no response and no wind chimes were forthcoming, he paused and looked up. “Can I help you, miss?” He had a Honduran accent.

What courage she had managed spark up failed her then. She shook like a falling leaf, swallowed, and said nothing. A long moment passed. A slow understanding came upon him, like dawn’s breaking light. Or suspicion. 

“Ma,” he called. “There’s a chica here to see you.”

#

The witch in question called herself Consuelo, and Clara Inés was shocked at how young and pretty she looked. Like a real-life Snow White, with ebony hair pulled sharp and severely from her scalp into a bun. She made some weak tea for her in a very small, cramped parlor.

“We’ll do nothing tonight,” she said, no-nonsense. “Have you any money in cash?”

“Yes.” She hadn’t been sure if it was enough; suddenly she doubted it was. 

“Good. No, don’t pay me now. Keep it, store it. Does your mami know you’re here?” When she shook her head, Consuelo nodded, unsurprised. “All right, then. Now I don’t come cheap, mija, I can tell you that, but I make exceptions for girls. Have you told anyone of your condition?”

“No.” Then, not taking it anymore, she blurted: “I don’t think I have enough to pay you, my allowance—”

“Your allowance! Mother of God, mija, forget the money. We’ll figure something out. Do you think I do this to get rich?” She made a sweeping gesture around the shop, as if it were the best evidence for her case. “Please! Back in San Pedro Sula, people used to pay me in food and livestock, like an Aztec god! The clinics were too far, the people too humble. Forget the damned money. I do it because if I don’t, you’ll find someone else or even do it yourself. I’ve had girls younger than yourself in the family way by some boyfriend, some relative—the uncle, the stepfather or even the father itself. No more. You make your own peace with God.” 

At last, she seemed to come out of her rant somewhat; she stared at her a little blankly, as if she had forgotten what she was doing there. 

“How far along are you?”

“Six weeks.” She had thankfully caught on to her late period early. 

“All right. Come back in a week or when you can. Tell absolutely no one.” She stood abruptly. “What a world is this! Eusebio, the key.” 

#

At first Clara Inés would not come, would not bring herself to come. What if it hurt? What if she felt a deadness inside as the child died? Then God would never forgive her. Her soul would be lost to perdition. What if she were caught? She would go to jail and then what would Mamá and her brothers and sisters do? Wallow in abject shame and poverty most likely, after years of toil and sacrifice. Oh, the rich had it good, she thought bitterly. Even their tears were of better quality, of greater value and worth. She had tried to come to Juan Manuel’s home in Cúrtiz-Resin, but lost courage and fled when the maid opened the door. Her buggy phone had swallowed up his number (she forgot that in a pique of anger, at the height of her emotional betrayal, she had deleted it). It was just too much to ask; and despite it all, she had her pride. She would not be a beggar. Her only hope lay in nothing except this operation…

Her dread was complete. She envisioned hours in a dimly lit studio, in a private, separate room. A large backed black chair in shadow, like a barber’s or dentist’s chair, and tiny, silver-sharp instruments laid out in a row. She imagined Consuelo picking up one of those instruments, a large clamp-like one, and telling her to spread her legs as she did for Juan Manuel… 

So it was a source of great confusion to her, after she dropped her siblings off first and gave her mother a plausible line about a sick friend, to discover the bare second floor room. Consuelo took out a locked chest from within a cabinet and withdrawing medicine vials marked with single letters. 

“All right, mija, I will say this once and only once because if something goes wrong or if you don’t follow my instructions to the letter, I will be in no position to help you out without endangering my livelihood. Murderers get treated with more dignity here than pregnant, desperate women, much less curanderas like myself. Are you listening?”

She started. “Yes, ma’am.”

“Good.” Consuelo held up one of the vials. “This one is mifepristone. You take it alone, where Mami doesn’t see you. Do you understand? The second one, here—” She held up the second vial even closer “—that’s misoprostol, which you take a whole day after the first. Understand? A whole day. Maybe more. After taking the second one, you will bleed as if you’re on your period. Very heavy.” She paused. “Are you all right?” 

This was not what she had expected. “I just thought—an operation—”

“An operation? No, no, no. Silly girl, do I look like I have the equipment for that here? I had it in Honduras, but no, not here, they revoked my license. You’re not that far along, anyway, so it’s unnecessary. You’re lucky, in a way. The others that are too far along I refer to them to a good friend of mine downtown.” She toyed with the misoprostol. “I had better hang on to the miso. You might confuse the two, it has happened. Here is the mife. What?”

Clara Inés finally managed to speak. “M-my mother—”

“Need never know, if you prefer,” said Consuelo. “Plenty of women have done so before and no one save God has known. And even if He does, it’s most likely He doesn’t care. What,” she said amusedly as Clara Inés flinched, “I have known women who would give their own lives for the privilege of carrying a baby to term, but their little ones kept on dying, either in the womb or in partition. Who killed them? God! And then there were mothers who wanted the child, but it would have turned out marred and defective, or dead at the moment of partition, and their lives would have been endangered. Who would have killed those innocents and the mother? God! He takes everybody, everything, from the smallest ant to kings and presidents. It’s the ultimate democracy and as we are formed in His likeness, we do as He does. I wouldn’t even be surprised if your mother had one at some point.”

“No!” 

“Oh yes,” she said relentlessly, even callously, “what else, when contraceptives sometimes fail and nature takes its course? The Mayans, the Indians have known how before the pill, before everything, before that nonsense of ‘where four eat, five will.’ Where four eat, five starve! It’s peasant logic, the language of poverty and ignorance.” She finally noticed Clara Inés had blanched. “Don’t be frightened. The bleeding empties out the uterus, just like your period. You can get this medicine over the counter in México, you know. That’s what infuriates me. Like most everything nowadays.”

Consuelo rubbed her hands absentmindedly, as if washing them. Blue-white veins throbbed beneath her skin rivulets overlapping the bone. They looked very meet, like hands that dealt in matters of life and death.

#

Outside Clara Inés’ silent womb, the air rang with despair and desperation. In homes, orphanages, street corners, prisons, children squall and cry at their mother’s breast, in their cribs, on the ground, beneath stony fists. They grow stick-backed into the streets as high-pitched vendors, fumbling pick pockets, wise guys, pimps, traffickers in human life and everything in between. They grow into pocket knives, machetes, and guns with unpronounceable English trademarks, manufactured in the States and sold to Central America like the maras, like much else. They grow into those maras, conducting warfare concertos in the broken streets, violent in their frustrated love. They grow into fleeing droves, climbing on top of trains bound for Guatemala, Honduras, Uruguay, Mexico, the United States, anywhere. 

Rain pounds, forming pools in the depression where the pavement breaks. Tectonic plates grind and tear apart buildings; hurricanes bring winds battering in their fury, waters that threaten to drown the country, the world in water. In similar times people would appease their choleric gods with sacrifices. Nature’s patience can be boundless, but so can her anger. 

Shots are fires in the depths of the urban slums, drawing open curtains and half-curious, half-fearful faces. The collateral damage today were two young boys, lying near the gutters. The neighbors knew them by name: Martín and José. There was their mother, her deranged scream passing into wrenching, disconsolate sobs, her kin gathering like water droplets. 

This was history, written not in ink but in flesh and blood, a history of kisses and caresses, in laughter and jests and scoldings and toil, in the lively absurdity of everyday life. All of that was gone now, dashed through. All that these boys were, could have been, and ever would be—their toys and jests, qualities and talents, their love and hates, their cruelty and graces—was wiped away. 

A master pool of burgundy bloomed outward, dripping into the watery waste of the sewage below, into darkness and out of sight. 

#

The weeks after Clara Inés’ abortion brought a flurry of renewed violence in the streets of San Salvador. Along with the maras and children exodus came concerns over drug smuggling at the border, which were then used to sell to Mexico and then the States. Sánchez-Celén, pricked on by the opposition who claimed he was too soft on crime, launched a full-throated investigation that led to the arrests of not only witch doctors and street apothecaries, but licensed physicians who provided abortion services and sold abortifacients and contraceptives to women.

Reports came pouring in of illegal practices, a three-week media circus of exposés and interviews. It was within the wake of these that the arrests of Luz Elena Córdoba, alias Consuelo Velázquez, her son Eusebio, and her associates were publicized, their property confiscated, their surroundings searched, and their account books and records pored over. They contained the initials and addresses of several customers—among them, it was found, María Clara Inés de la Cruz. Beside the carcasses already discovered, it was estimated that as many as two hundred “lives” had been lost in the slaughter. 

Clara Inés was put in a local jail cell before transferring to the state penitentiary for women to await trial, and due to the severity of the crime, was refused bail. Outside the prison protestors raged in chants and bellowed insults, demanding either the immediate release of Córdoba and her customers or to enforce the ultimate penalty on them. Inside her dim cell the shouts blended into one, indistinguishable from each other.

The court-appointed lawyer of the de la Cruzes did not mince words to her aged mother and aunt: Acquittal was a pipe dream. They could, however, reduce the sentence by proving that the homicide of the fetus was not premeditated, that a miscarriage had occurred. Under Salvadoran law, miscarriage was still a crime, but Clara Inés would receive a lesser sentence—life, or near life, instead of death.

What choice did they have, what choice was there? The de la Cruz women wept and already wore deep mourning black. The prosecutor presented the bloody sheets obtained by the police in the crime scene and even discovered Clara Inés’ father, plucked by obscurity to serve as a character witness, his wife sitting stiffly in the courthouse. The Rosas briefly showed up with the intent of strong-arming the court, but it wasn’t necessary; Juan Manuel’s name was not even mentioned in all the proceedings.

The court-appointed lawyer, then, had no choice. He rested the entirety of their defense on the “float test” of the discovered child. The lungs would be weighed in water; if it floated, it meant the child had breathed in air and therefore was stillborn. If it didn’t, it was aborted in the womb or miscarried. Since the child had been too young to have developed lungs, they had the body tested instead. The test results came in an envelope to the court and the prospection and defense; for good measure, they brought in a scientist, one of the testers.

That was how, amid all this technical scientific jargon, a miracle occurred to the de la Cruzes: The corpse had floated. The sentence was pronounced: Twenty years short of life imprisonment.

The family had no more money nor strength of will to continue for an appeal, which their attorney, already stuffing the de la Cruz papers away amid the thousands related to other clients, advised against anyway. What’s more, compounding tragedy upon tragedy, Abuelita had closed her eyes and departed from this world; they had to reserve money for the funeral. Financial ruin seemed most imminent, and it seemed to their neighbors and all who knew them that the stamp of ignominy seemed imprinted in the name of de la Cruz. A stench of death emanated from the store in the corner. Business slowed, then stopped altogether. Concepción had to sell the shop to whoever would buy. They managed to visit their fallen one for one last time in prison before they moved, tentatively, to the United States for substantial work; they had relatives in Texas whose resources and generosity they may be able to rely on. 

By that time almost two years had passed. Clara Inés was fifteen and unable to cry anymore. All present and future tears had been spent, and there was none she could cavalierly spill. She had been sick for some time of an unknown disease that went disregarded by the prison administration, gaunt and pale like a ghost before her time. The other inmates, hardened and weathered criminals, or else innocents like herself, or else merely unlucky, created superstitions around Cell 13, whose moans and shrieks were still heard even after its source had quit her cell and this world, released into this storm drain of a world and fallen out of sight: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”