Erased Faces (37 page)

She walked up the steps elevating the square from the street, and ambled from stall to stall, looking, touching, listening, smelling. She admired blouses, shawls, tablecloths, intricately laced doilies—all handmade, all for sale. She stopped to gaze at women sitting on their haunches in front of small heaps of peppers, lemons, seeds, bunches of herbs, tempting cooks in search of ingredients for the day's meal.

Adriana concentrated on the faces of those women: oval shapes with skin the color of cocoa beans, eyes shaped like almonds, braided hair the color of onyx. She was struck by the thought that although separated by hundreds of kilometers, these were the same people that inhabited the Lacandona Jungle, the highlands and canyons of Chiapas.

She looked up beyond the tops of the trees shading the square and slowly pivoted her body, studying the architecture of the stately buildings, once mansions, now mostly banks, offices and small restaurants. When she turned to look at a child sitting on the curb, Adriana's attention was suddenly jerked away from him. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Juana slipping behind one of the stalls. She caught only a glimpse of her rounded body, and the long black braid that twisted with the sway of her unmistakable way of walking.

Positive that it was Juana, Adriana felt her breath catch in her throat, and without thinking, she lunged toward the place where Juana had disappeared, moving so abruptly that she knocked over a small table piled high with lemons. She made an attempt to fix things but she could not waste time. Adriana sprinted over mounds of sarapes, heaps of shoes, bunches of bananas, until she reached the rear of the last stall.

Adriana turned the corner with such haste that two young women, sitting there snapping green beans, were so startled that one of them spilled the vegetables she had gathered on her lap. They stared at her face, which had the expression of having seen someone gone from this world, and they became frightened. For her part, Adriana realized at once that she had made a mistake. Although one of the women did resemble Juana, it was clearly not her.

“¡Mil disculpas! ¡Perdónenme, por favor!”

Adriana helped gather the vegetables as she mumbled apologies. She was embarrassed, but remained convinced that it had been Juana whom she had seen. She must have gone somewhere else. The women, once recuperated from the initial fright, smiled, saying that everything was fine.

Adriana walked away toward the opposite edge of the plaza and stood there for a while. She felt lightheaded, and her thoughts were unclear. Finally, she remembered she had not eaten for hours. Perhaps her empty stomach had caused Juana's image to appear. Adriana was not really hungry, but she understood that she needed to eat something. She bought a cone filled with fruit from a vendor and sat on the street's curb.

As she munched on chunks of mango, papaya and watermelon, Adriana began to stabilize; her mind was clearing. She was still shaken by Juana's apparition, but she was profoundly happy as well, taking pleasure in the memory of that fast-moving figure that must have been Juana. Adriana stopped chewing for a moment, closed her eyes, and prayed that she would never stop seeing her beloved
compañera
, if only for fleeting seconds at a time.

Adriana looked at her watch. She still had a few minutes to wait and so she concentrated on the structures facing her. Her eyes focused on the largest, obviously the grandest of the mansions. She scanned the carvings over the main entrance, where, chiseled deeply into the façade, she made out helmeted, armored Spanish conquistadores, lances in hand, their feet crushing the heads of indigenous men, who were depicted with stiffened tongues crying out in anguish. Behind the Spanish masters, in miniature contour, were ravenous dogs, menacing horses, other war-like figures intertwined with vines, classical sculptures, even some cherubs.

She rose to her feet, stretched, and walked to a plaque on the wall, that explained the origins of the mansion.
Casa de Montejo, primer conquistador del Yucatán
. She tried to read more description but gave up; the script was too ornate, too intricate, and too old.

She stood in front of the building, pondering why so little had changed for the people of that land. Although there were no longer conquistadores, there were mestizos. Now, instead of lances, there were machine guns, and in place of horses and dogs, there were armored vehicles. The anguish, too, was the same.

It was time. Adriana looked one last time toward the stall where she had seen Juana, then she turned her back on the Casa de Montejo and headed for the photo lab, where she found her package processed and ready. She paid the bill, made her way to the hotel, and went directly to her room. She took a few minutes to take off her clothes that had become sweaty again, and she took another shower. In a bathrobe and with her hair still dripping wet, Adriana sat down on the bed, propped herself up on a pillow against the metal headboard, and opened the large envelope. Inside she found two smaller ones.

She ripped open one and emptied the pictures onto her lap, verifying that the photos were still good, although somewhat marred because the film had aged. She looked at those pictures and saw that her camera had captured faces concentrated on weaving, on sewing. She held one showing a woman with sticky
masa
smeared on her hands and arms up to the elbows as she smiled broadly at the camera. Adriana looked at another photo showing a pregnant girl whose face was sad.

Studying the glossies carefully, Adriana realized how her work and she had matured. No longer doubtful of her skills, she compared those early pictures to her later work taken during the war and its aftermath. She was reflecting on the weaknesses of her earlier endeavors when she was forced to interrupt her train of thought by the next photo. It was of the young mother with the child at her breast. Adriana became transfixed, even elated by the image. The luminous eyes of the young woman captivated her, as did the child's mouth sucking her breast, its eyes closed, its tiny hand limp and relaxed. Adriana realized that, unlike the others, this take was not shallow. It was deep, mature; it had captured the spirit of the moment, of the woman, of the child.

Adriana, with some hesitation, next turned to the pictures in the other envelope; they were the last taken at Acteal. Children's faces looked out at her from the prints, some smiling, others bewildered. She became saddened by the certainty that they had perished in the massacre. She moved on to those of Juana's welcome to the camp on that same day, remembering how the people had converged on her, hugging and patting her back, touching her face.

Adriana felt the tears pushing at her eyes, pressing to be freed from the prison of her heart. She looked at one, two, three, four shots of Juana, some close-up, others taken at more of a distance. A few of the photos showed her profile, her face turned first to one side, then to the other, smiling, looking at her. Other shots pictured her, arms lifted, giving out blankets, a package, food. Juana became alive, eternal in the photographs taken by Adriana.

Wiping tears from her face with the palms of her hands, Adriana closed her eyes and leaned back on the pillow, where she fell into a deep sleep that lasted through the night. She awoke startled from a very real dream, but she shook it off seconds later, remembering that she needed to be at the airport by ten to make her flight. When she focused her eyes on the clock by the bed, she was relieved; she still had time.

In flight. Merida/Los Angeles, January 2, 1998.

The execution of Orlando Flores four years ago was an act of pure hatred. He was not murdered only because he was a rebel, or because he brought Rufino Mayorga to justice, despite what they claimed. Orlando was assassinated for one reason only: He was a Lacandón
, un indio
who happened to be captured, and he was put to death only because the mestizos fear and hate his kind
.

The massacre at Acteal was about hatred for women, for
mujeres indias
who had proven themselves as leaders, activists and movers of their people. Those killings were committed in revenge for the embarrassment those
mujeres
brought down on the heads of the wealthy, the powerful
, los patrones,
and their lackeys in the military and politics. Acteal was nothing but payback for Comandante Insurgente Ramona, the Tzotzil woman, and the way she and a hundred other women under her command took San Cristóbal de las Casas back in 1994. And there were the other cities, also taken by women in command. Acteal was a hateful response to a woman insurgent being the one to break the army's cordon around the Lacandona Jungle in 1996. Those slayings were filled with loathing because
la gente,
the natives of that land, had dared to say ¡Basta! Enough! Acteal was about pure hatred
.

Juana's murder was caused by hatred, but it was even more than loathing because dangling from it, like poisonous snakes, was the repugnance and disgust for women like us. Her love for me was discovered; word had got around and Palomón Cisneros' evil snout had picked up the scent of those rumors. She was erased because she had been strong, because she had been a leader, because she was
una india,
but most of all because she had committed the forbidden act: She had been in love with another woman
.

Moved and deeply shaken by her own words, Adriana stopped writing and put the pen down beside the journal propped on the
vibrating table. She leaned her head on the headrest of the seat, then she stretched to look out of the cabin window. Her eyes were inflamed and swollen from sleeplessness and crying, but she made out the cloud cover below; land was now beyond her vision. She craned her neck to look back toward the south, where Chiapas lay under its pall of hatred and fear, but all she saw was a milky void. The engines of the craft hummed now that its intended altitude had been reached. The flight was less than half-filled, so passengers settled in for the long trip to Los Angeles.

She picked up the pen to go on with her latest entry. This would be the end of her writing, now that she was leaving Mexico. She took time to read what she had written and noticed how much Spanish had taken over her thoughts and expression. It had been five years since she made her way to Mexico, a time when she had been nervous about speaking the language she had left behind with her childhood. Now she rarely spoke English. She still wrote it, but it was an English sprinkled with words and inflections from her ancestor's tongue. She thought of correcting what she had written, but decided to let it go.

December 22 was the day when those rabid dogs attacked Acteal. They were armed men, some of them not much than children, dressed in civilian clothes, faces covered by bandannas so that we could see only their eyes, yellow with hatred, as they came at us. They held weapons that spit fire, and they did their evil deed knowing that the
inocentes
they targeted were mostly
mujeres
and
niños
who were defenseless. And they murdered Juana Galván
.

Adriana's fingers cramped, she had been holding the pen so tightly that they ached. She loosened her grip and stared at her hand, the pen dangling between her fingers inertly. Her chest was hurting, as it did when she suffered asthma attacks, but she knew that it was the pain of trapped sorrow that was now pressing her heart against her ribs.

I felt that a limb had been torn from me. She was part of me. I felt that I couldn't breathe, that my lungs were collapsing. I had found what I had searched for only to lose it again
.

After writing those words, Adriana reclined her head against the back of the seat and did not resist the tears she felt wetting her face; she did not even make an effort to dry them. She sat inertly, reliving
the excruciating pain of having lost the woman she had loved with her total being, with her heart and her mind. Adriana let the tears flow, emanating from the sea of torment that was flooding her inwardly. If she did not cry and let them spill out, her heart would rupture.

It had been only ten days since that dreadful moment, and the sensations, sounds, smells were still with Adriana. She stopped writing for a while, waiting for the surge of grief to pass. She closed her eyes, hoping to get some sleep, but it was impossible. She had not truly slept since the Acteal massacre. Her eyes could not stop looking at the mangled bodies of the victims. Her vision burned with the vile face of the murderer. Her mind's eye finally settled on the forest and on Juana's body lying inertly in her arms. This parade of grim images played and replayed itself behind her closed eyelids.

Juana and the other women were on the frontlines of the war, leading talks in the cathedral and meetings with journalists and photographers from all over the world. Those
mujeres
not only inspired other women, but men as well, and this was what ate at those other
cabrones. Esas mujeres
were brave, bringing themselves together in congresses and dialogues, writing up documents that challenged all the laws that had oppressed them for centuries. They met time after time—hundreds, thousands of
mujeres—
their faces erased by masks so that their sisters might find faces of their own
.

When Major Ramona traveled to Mexico City in 1996, her body already half eaten by cancer, thousands of men and women were waiting for her; multitudes listened to her. But the snake eyes of
los patrones
were watching her, Juana and all the other
mujeres
who, in the eyes of those vipers, were worse than the male insurgents simply because they were women
.

The battles for the cities and prisons ended within ten days, but the war
, la guerra,
did not go away
. La gente,
uprooted and dislocated, shifted from one side of the land to the other. Roads were clogged with lost people, begging for a tortilla to give their
niñitos,
taking refuge from rain and fog anywhere they could. And
los patrones
never stopped hounding them. They unleashed their rabid dogs, the paramilitaries, to prowl the land, looting, raping, and burning
palapa
s and
whatever shelters could be found. And their special targets were
mujeres,
because they were the ones who recognized those dogs even after they disguised themselves like laborers, like
campesinos.