• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

“Can I touch it?” I said, and stepped forward with one hand out.

He hesitated, then smiled and shrugged.

I lay my hand on the soft head and rested it there a moment, before it leapt and I jumped back and giggled, my hands to my face.

“Bueno,” he said, more soberly now, and tucked himself away.

“Now, look at me!” I sang, and with three brisk moves, pulled down my underpants, sat down, and yanked up my cotton dress.

He looked at the place between my legs, then at my face, and smiled.

“Ya, ya, gordita. Ya.”

“See it? See my thing?” I asked him, looking down at myself. “It’s a hueco.” A hole.

“And here is another one,” he said, pointing at my navel.

“Sí. But it’s not the same. It doesn’t do anything,” I said authoritatively, my legs waving about.

“No, mamita, that’s not true,” he said. “Put the other one away and I’ll tell you about this one.” I scrambled to my feet and pulled up my drawers.

“That,” he said, pointing to my midriff, “is the center of your being. The middle of your universe.”

“Let me see yours,” I said, and he pulled up his shirt and obliged. It was pushed deep, and the folds were brownish black. I raised my hand slowly, putting two fingers to its lip. The skin flinched. Then, I slid my forefinger into the orifice. He yelped and caved in, laughing.

“What’s inside?” I asked.

“Mi alma,” he said. My soul.

He squatted down and looked at me, eye level. “This is your qosqo, Marisi.” His fingers tapped my belly lightly. “Your core. If you learn to see and feel with it, you will know the life force. This is where your power is, your energy. It is the greatest leyenda I can teach you. Learn to open your qosqo and feed on the world around you. Learn to eat the earthquakes. Learn to take in the chaos. Learn to pull it in to your barrigita. Then cast all the poisons out.”

“The poisons?”

“The black light. The power of destruction.”

“How do I cast them out?”

“First you bring them in. Open your qosqo. Let everything rush in, the bad with the good alike. If you walk through life afraid of the bad, you will walk hunched over, broken, defensive. Stand with your qosqo to the world. Straight. Proud. Open up. Open wide. Face the black light de frente and take it in. And then, when you are filled with the storm of life, let the poison pour away. Away. Away. Into the heart of a stone.”

“And my other hueco?” I asked him provocatively, knowing that like the witch and the leyendas, that nether region of my self was important and forbidden.

“There is nothing wrong with it. It is fine. It is good. The body works from there. And it plays. Someday a man will teach you to play that game. But learn this much from me: It is your qosqo from which your life will flow.”

He dusted off the back of my dress and we walked together into the garden.

I PRACTICED USING my qosqo after that. I pointed it up at the dark when nightmares startled me out of sleep. I stood at the window and aimed it down into the garden to stop vines from taking root. I scanned trees with it, on the chance that pishtacos were lurking there, waiting to spring.

Antonio’s lesson worked; I became less worried about the loco and the bruja, and, for the time being at least, all the bad forces in the world seemed manageable, the chaos devoured, the black light spit away.

Four decades later, as I look back on that seminal lesson, I still wonder what concatenation of history and conscience predisposed me to be sure I was there to learn it. And to be drawn as I was to Antonio. These things cannot be attributed to chance.

Divine chance, perhaps. As in the story of my friend, Eddie, a “Blackamerican,” as he likes to call himself, who set out a few years ago to find out who his ancestors were. Family lore had it that his great-grandfather had been a slave and had been manumitted in the courthouse of a little town in Virginia. Eddie made his way there cross-country on a motorcycle, filled with a wronged man’s fury, determined to see the proof for himself. What he found took him by surprise. It was true that his great-grandfather had been a slave