The Hummingbird's Daughter_ A Novel - Luis Alberto Urrea [57]
“You are not a curandera, child.”
“Medicine women!”
Huila laughed.
“Women,” she said. “You’re just a sprout. And when you are a woman, you won’t read that book!”
“Why not?”
“Ay, niña! Women are not priests. Now stop this silliness.”
Teresita just sat there, staring.
“Do you read?”
“Are you crazy, child? Why would I read?”
“But —”
“Reading,” Huila said, “is for men. Like babies are for women, books are for men.”
“White men,” Don Teófano said. “I don’t read.”
“Rich men,” Huila corrected. “Lauro Aguirre isn’t any whiter than you are!”
“Doña Loreto?” Teresita asked. “Does she read?”
Huila shook her head.
“The patrón reads for her. He reads to her from books, or he reads to her from the newspaper when he thinks she can understand it.”
Teresita laughed out loud. That was just stupid.
“You are learning what you need to know,” said Huila. “Who needs books? Who needs to learn Yori foolishness?”
“I do.”
“Why?” The old one laughed. “Do you hope to become president of the republic?”
“Why not?” Teresita insisted. “I could.”
“God in Heaven,” Huila sighed.
After all this talk about God, all this struggle to learn sacred secrets, here was a book God had written for them to study, and they didn’t think she would read it? She stared at Huila, the most perfect old woman she had ever known. Huila, of the cigars, of the shotgun, of the terrible black sack of men’s balls in her apron. Huila, the source of power. Yet imperfect after all, made stupid by the rules of some Yori man—Teresita imagined him, whoever he was, riding one of those phantom trains they talked about, making rules and reading newspapers. She looked Huila in the eye, turned, and spit over the edge of the wagon.
“Girl!” the old woman said, but Teresita had already hopped down off the wagon.
She shuffled along beside it and untied her burro. She mounted him, saying, “You want me to be as stupid as little Panfilo!” The burro waggled his ears upon hearing his name and trotted off to the side, steered by Teresita between wagons, walkers, riders, cows, toward the edge of the great cattle drive, where she could flank the slowest cows and make believe she was a vaquero.
“I will read,” she said out loud.
She kicked her burro in the ribs: he bucked up his heels once and charged ahead, long ears laid back along his blocky skull. “Go, Panfilo!” she ordered.
Soon she found Segundo. Her head was about as high as his boot as she trotted along beside him. He looked down and was startled to see her staring up at him.
“What,” he said.
“What is in books?”
He scratched his head. Shrugged.
“Stories, I guess. Poems? Things like that.”
“I want to read!” she shouted.
He laughed.
“You’re a girl,” he said. “Besides, I don’t even know how to read. Reading isn’t for people like us.”
“Hmm.” And she galloped away.
Books, Segundo thought. What’s next?
When Teresita found Buenaventura, she told him, too, that she wanted to read. He said: “You’re just an Indian. Indians don’t read! If they don’t teach white girls to read, what makes you think they’re going to teach a little Indian anything?”
He waved her off with one hand.
She fell away from the crowd, letting her little Panfilo slow down and wander off to the side again. She let his rope reins fall loose, and he stood there confused for a moment. When he realized she wasn’t prodding him along anymore, he was more than happy to drop his head into the grass and weeds beside the path. He let out a long contented sigh and ripped up mouthfuls of dandelions.
Teresita sat on his back and watched them go. Huila’s big wagon was already around the bend. The carts and horses and wagons rattled along. She wasn’t going to cry. She would just wait there and starve, die all alone and let the buzzards take her apart. Nobody would know what had happened to her.
Or maybe a warrior would come along.
Yes, a warrior from one of these ferocious northern tribes. She could probably join them, forget she’d ever learned Spanish. Learn to hunt. Marry a young man of the tribe. Disappear. Nobody cared anyway.
She sat on Panfilo until the entire