D e s e r t E x p o s u r e
May 2010
Fifth in a series
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Ghost Flowers
Story and photos by Victoria Tester |
Editor's note: Over a decade ago, Victoria Tester began to visit and photograph the Mexican border town of Palomas, and to keep journals as a candid record of her experiences there. In this series, Tester offers us a retrospective of her journeys there.
On the night of the fifth novena the winds are stronger and loud and dust and clouds cover the sky. We can't keep our eyes open in the yard because of the flying sand, and once we're inside, we have to latch the screen door because the wind tries to bang it loudly during the rosary.
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Back at J — 's house in the evening we drag three chairs outside to enjoy the wet wind and the respite from the sun. Doña P — stands in her beautiful long Gothic nightgown, smoking her perpetual cigarette, J — in her thin blue cotton dress that comes only just past her knees, and me in my baggy green pants I keep pulling up over my knees to cool my legs.
I don't wear pajamas in Palomas — maybe, they jest, in case I ever need to wake and run with my camera.
J — urges me to put on my short shorts and I laugh, remembering the old Nair commercials. Then she confides, "Doña P — and I have really short short nighties that we wear sometimes," to make me laugh harder.
Doña P — snorts with her closed, peaceful face and scolds, "I never wear anything but this gown. How could I wear a short nightie?"
J — cries aloud in terror and delight at each brilliant stroke of lightning. I feel the first drops and begin to shiver before the two older women do. It starts to pour.
Then I see the huge waves of dazzling blue electricity flying into the wet air from the electrical poles. The water is rising against the legs of our chairs. "Oh, my God. This has to be dangerous."
They shrug.
I'm the first to drag my chair back into the house.
As soon as we're inside, J — and I run to the window. The dirt street is flowing like a river. I'm startled as rain, colored maroon by the adobe of the roof, begins to bleed down the four walls. It's like watching blood flow.
There's nothing we can do. For a while we just stand there and watch the red-flowing walls.
When you iron in Palomas, the Pope is often watching. He's a kind of company. Makes you less lonely. You do a better job.
The Pope even blesses my self-portraits. I trick him into it by using the mirror of J — 's wonderful old Deco dresser.
See there, he's blessed me.
Or at least he glares down at me while I gaze importantly at myself through my Olympus. Wow. Maybe I even look a little like Frida Kahlo. What do you think, Mr. Pope?
Nine o'clock may be the time J — 's electronic rooster softly crows when there's a loud knock on the door, and J — and I wake to the urgent, high-pitched voice of a young woman, and the rich old tones of Doña P — . Their conversation goes on and on and J — and I face each other, she in her big iron frame bed and myself on a cot, our heads on our pillows, staring at each other in the dim light, speaking without speaking our deep tiredness and our disgust.
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Finally, when the electronic rooster announces it's midnight, the whiny voices of the other women settle into quiet. Doña P — , who carries out a pillow and blankets for the young voice, returns to the big iron frame bed.
Except for J — , we wake up at seven. Doña P — is doing her old-fashioned toilette in the large cement-floored bathroom. I join the young voice in the other room, wanting a cup of coffee, grateful that J — is still resting.
I gathered from the night before that the young voice arrived from Doña P — 's village, Bravo, which is four or five hours away, looking for a way to cross the border, determined to go work in the US for the sake of her three children. Her two oldest are girls and their father, Doña P — 's no-good son, won't offer a thin dime for their support.
I'm disappointed when the young voice belongs to a harsh-looking woman with long painted nails and a cantina face. She returns my gaze with the predatory gaze of a cat. She offers me her plastic cigarette lighter to light the gas stove.
I make myself a cup of instant Nescafé and then another. After both Doña P — and J — go to church to help with the morning mass, she turns to me with the frankness of two tourists in a foreign country.
"You and I are young. We know the score. We can handle the ugly truth. Imagine," she says, "if you were born on the Mexican side of the border. In Bravo, like I was."
She's here in Palomas, she tells me, to cross the border. To go north.
My coffee grows cold as I listen to her story. Like many women's, it is a catalogue of betrayals. By a mother, a father, a stepfather, two lovers, a husband, sisters, a half-sister, friends, even a beloved child. I know this story. Isn't it my own? Isn't it the one we women often live, on both sides of the border?
But I listen, again. They say a stranger's listening is a kind of blessing.
Then, by the grace of God, somehow we hoist our burdens and we get on down the road. Or over the fence.
It's the Day of the Dead. We're hauling a giant bucket of marigolds donated from a generous friend's garden. Marigolds, the traditional flower for the Mexican holiday, are hard to get in Palomas, and the lovely old women smile when they accept them.
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The most ancient woman smiles at me and nods at my slender brown son. "This boy's father left you a long time ago."
I lie. "No, not really."
"Don't worry. Men leave us." She shrugs. "It's the law of nature. There'll be another man for you. He's coming."
Later she points to her house, a tiny black dot in the dust-clouded distance. But she knows I see it down the length of her arm and index finger. Somehow, she knows I'll see that far.
"You're a friend of that priest Father Elias, aren't you? No matter. Come visit me anyway."
She's a curandera, a healer.
Her mother worked at the cantina, and now she's dead. The cafe owner, R — , tells me the little girl's an orphan. Her name is Brenda.
Brenda looks grimly, unblinkingly, into my camera. Her little pink jacket is the only color in the dingy caf. She is staying with R — , who is already, somehow, raising three children on her own.
R — has a generous heart I will come to know later. Trying to cheer the unsmiling girl, R — says, "Maybe I'll raise her as my own daughter."
"But I want her for mine," I protest.
Brenda flashes me a brilliant smile. Then she sits, unspeaking, at the table, her sad face calm and composed, all morning long. Her only toy is a shiny water faucet she holds in her small hands, playing with the hot and cold taps. Maybe someone bought it in vain hope of replacing a leaky water system, or she found it in the garbage or the street. She plays with the faucet, as if to make blue water come out of thin air.
It's not a faucet, is it?
No, it's imagination. It's survival in this desert.
I leave Palomas slow as I can. When I come back, I plot, somehow I'll bring Brenda back with me. If she wants to come, I'll bring her with me.
As I drive up to the border inspection station, a woman, a US border guard, shouts, "Can't you read?"
I've driven a foot past the stop sign. I didn't see it. But I pay my taxes, I guess, to be asked if I'm blind, or illiterate.
The angry border guard inspects my old car from top to bottom with her tricky mirrors.
Bitch. If you're reading this, you won't find any little girl tucked away anywhere with me. Because all your military equipment will never see into my heart.
When I return to the café in Palomas to look for Brenda, I find only the charred timbers of the roof and a few blackened adobes.
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She works in the cantina to house, feed and clothe them. I look into their lovely faces. Later, my husband will look, too, into their small faces in my photographs and say, puzzling, "They look familiar."
They do.
I look at even him in suspicion. Columbus, Deming, Silver City, all over southern New Mexico, I look into strange men's faces for their father.
My black-and-white photographs are only the ghost flowers of the true beauty of some blue-eyed stranger's daughters on the Mexican side of the border.
L — is inspired. She goes to the place where the few books in the house are carefully kept next to the treasured family wedding photographs, and chooses a thick paperback whose cover hasn't survived.
"Look, this one's in English. See if you can read it," she tells a girl of maybe six.
The children have decided to perform for me. L — , who is 12 and the oldest, hugging a large plastic doll, points at the page: "Begin here."
A neighbor boy who only dreams of going to school looks on peacefully, eating a tortilla.
L — encourages the younger girl, reading slowly. "Nick shook — " She follows along obediently: "Nick shook — "
" — her softly — "