The Hummingbird's Daughter_ A Novel - Luis Alberto Urrea [37]
“What happened?”
Huila puffed her pipe. It was good. It was very, very good.
“It was before. Before you, and before me.”
Teresita was astonished by this revelation: there had been a time before Huila.
“The Mother of God appeared to a group of warriors who were out in the desert, hunting. And they looked up, and there she was, descending from the sky.”
Teresita gasped.
“She was, I imagine, all in purple. The Mother of God likes purple! So she came down to them from Heaven, and they were stunned and shaking with fear.”
“What did they do?”
“They ran away and hid behind bushes.”
“What did she do?”
“Well, she had an accident.”
“What happened?”
“She landed on top of a cactus.”
“Oh no!”
“Oh yes. The Mother of God was stuck on top of a huge cactus, and the warriors started throwing rocks at her and shooting arrows at her, but they could not hit her. You see, they had never seen a Yori before, and they had never seen a flying Yori, or a magnificent creature like her! So they tried to kill her. Pendejos, los hombres!”
Teresita put her hands over her face.
“And then what?” she cried.
“Then the Mother of God spoke to the warriors from atop her cactus.”
“What did she say? What did she say?”
“She said—‘Get me a ladder!’”
Teresita said, “What!”
“Get me a ladder, that’s what she said. Holy be her name.”
Teresita burst out laughing. So did Huila.
“It’s true,” Huila said.
They walked on.
“What did they do?” Teresita asked.
“I imagine they fetched her a ladder!”
The sun was coming up.
“You see,” Huila explained, “this is how Heaven works. They’re practical. We are always looking for rays of light. For lightning bolts or burning bushes. But God is a worker, like us. He made the world—He didn’t hire poor Indios to build it for him! God has worker’s hands. Just remember—angels carry no harps. Angels carry hammers.”
Teresita sat on a rock in the morning light and watched Huila go from plant to plant, muttering to them. She actually said “Good morning” to a miserable little quince tree. Teresita giggled. Huila shot her a stern glance before turning back to the tree. “May I borrow your fruit? I promise to eat it with gratitude, and then the child and I will scatter your seeds for you over by the creek bank. Your children will live long after you!” She unfolded her knife and cut off a plump quince and sliced it and handed Teresita some of the fruit. “Me gusta el membrillo,” she said as she ate the pungent fruit and it puckered her lips. “Save the seeds. I reached an agreement—we have to honor it.” This very well might have been theater on Huila’s part, but it worked.
“Do the plants talk back?” Teresita asked.
Huila stretched her back, grimaced. The orange sun was igniting the hilltops with thin etchings of hot copper. Quail rushed through the brush, leading lines of babies that looked like beads on a rosary.
“Everything,” Huila said, “talks.”
“I never heard it.”
“You never listened.”
Huila pointed around herself with her pipe.
“Life. Life. Life,” she said. She was pointing at everything: tree, hill, rock.
“Life in rocks?” Teresita said.
“All is light, child. Rocks are made of light. Angels pass through rocks the way your hand passes through water.”
Teresita wondered if angels were passing through the rock on which she sat.
“Every rock comes from God, and God is in every rock if you look for Him.”
This was pretty strange talk, in Teresita’s opinion.
“In a rock.”
“Yes.”
“In a . . . in a bee?”
“Certainly.”
“In a taco?”
“You think you’re funny.”
Huila was irked. A tortilla, made of holy corn, corn made of rain and soil and sun, that tortilla, round as the sun itself! Was God not in the rain? Did the corn not come from God? What of the sun? Was the sun simply some meaningless accident in the sky? Some ball of light meaning nothing, signifying nothing? No! Only a heretic would fail to see God in the sun!
And the meat of the goat, and the flowers the goat ate, and the chiles in the salsa, and the guacamole, and the hands of the fine woman who slapped the tortilla into shape