Las Christmas (12 page)

Judy Vásquez

We discovered this poem by Judy Vásquez in a Christmas issue of the newsletter
El Boricua.
The poem commemorates the passing on of the tradition of Christmas
pasteles;
the title refers
to
jíbaros
,
the rural dwellers who have become a symbol
of Puerto Rican culture. Ms. Vásquez is a poet and writer and the founder/director
of Kikiriki, a Puerto Rican folk-dance group. Her autobiographical poem reminds us
to be thankful for little miracles, like snow in El Paso—the city where she now lives.

JÍBARISMOS

Gioconda Belli

Gioconda Belli is a Nicaraguan writer living in the United States. She is the author
of three novels and five books of poetry. Her work has been translated into eleven
languages. Two of her works,
the novel
The Inhabited Woman
(Warner Books),
and
From Eve's Rib
(Curbstone Press), a collection of poetry, are available in
English. She is currently at work on a memoir to be published by Alfred A. Knopf.

A CHRISTMAS LIKE NO OTHER

IT HAD BEEN a strange day. Christmas shopping in the heat. God, it was hot. The store was crowded. People yelling and screaming, bumping into each other. There were only a few good stores in Managua, so I didn't have much choice but to stay where I was until I had selected all the toys for my four-year-old daughter. Christmas shopping is always bad, especially for a person who leaves everything for the last minute, but that day was even worse. Maybe I was getting sick. I felt feverish.

At the cash register, Don Jorge must have sensed my claustrophobia. “Leave the presents with me,” he said. “I'll have them wrapped for you. You won't have to wait in line.” I didn't think twice. I accepted his offer. He owned the store. He'd known me since I was a child. Impeccably dressed in beige linen, he extended his hand to take my bag. It was a Christmas miracle. One of the Three Wise Men had come to my rescue disguised as Don Jorge.

As I stepped out of the store, the sun was setting. In Nicaragua, the sun-sets are always spectacular. It must be a thing of the tropics: thick clouds sprouting in the skies like gigantic pink spirals of cotton candy. The magentas. I walked to my car wiping the sweat from my forehead. Such heat in December was not normal. At the end of the rainy season, the weather is usually moderate. Strong trade winds cool the air. But on that December 23, the air was still. Too still.

I walked down the shop-lined street. Every store window was sprinkled with artificial snow. Winter scenes were everywhere: reindeer, miniature snow-covered villages, Santa Claus sliding down a cardboard chimney— Christmas symbols of another culture and a different climate. But it didn't matter. Even in the tropics, snow was a requisite for a dignified Christmas. Even if it had to be make-believe snow.

At home, I threw myself on the bed. I didn't even feel like playing with my daughter. It was too hot. I turned the air-conditioner on full blast. Maryam climbed on top of me, trying to catch my attention. My head ached. My body ached. I was restless. It didn't feel like Christmas. It felt as if it were going to rain, the way it feels before a tropical storm when the wind dies and the air turns dense, heavy, oppressive. Something bad was going to happen. I knew it. I didn't want to think about it very much, but I knew it. I can sense things.

I got up and called Alicia, the maid, to come and help me move Maryam's crib into my bedroom.

“It's too hot,” I said. “She'll sleep better with air-conditioning.”

“So very still,” Alicia said. “Do you think it might rain? Have you ever heard of rain at Christmas time?”

Together, we gave Maryam her bath, her dinner.

“Santa is coming tomorrow, Mummy. Isn't he?”

“That's right, Baby. When you wake up it will be Christmas Eve. At midnight, Baby Jesus will bring your presents. When you wake up, you'll have many presents right next to your bed. Sleep tight now. Tomorrow is a big day.”

She had just gone to sleep when my husband, Mariano, arrived. While we had dinner, he poked fun at the potted palm I had decorated as a Christmas tree. I had to admit that it looked a bit sad and dismayed, unaccustomed to its costume of lights and glass balls. But I had refused to put up a plastic pine tree. I wasn't going to join the collective madness.

At ten o'clock, I heard a rumble. I was standing next to Maryam's crib, patting her back to quiet her light sleep. I expected to feel the earth move, but nothing happened. Just the sound. The rumble deep inside the earth, under my feet. A quake without a quake. Just the rumble.

I came out of the room, alarmed, scared. My husband was watching TV in the living room.

“Did you hear that?”

“What?” He gestured for me not to disturb him. He didn't like to be disturbed while he was watching TV.

“Something bad is going to happen,” I said. “We'd better leave the keys next to the door when we go to sleep. I don't want to have to look for them in the dark.”

“Don't get all worked up. You know how you are.”

Yes. I have a flair for vividly imagining catastrophes. Once the idea gets into my head, my mind becomes a flowing stream, alive with tragic visions, detailed pictures in which I am always the one to be buried under the rubble, the one who has to jump from the balcony of the hotel in flames. When I am on an airplane, I struggle with my mind, forbidding it to conjure images of the plane crashing. Not only can I envision the crash, but I go as far as making up the newspaper headlines that will appear the following day, imagining the row of photos of dead crew members on the front page, just under the big picture of the wreckage.

“This time I'm right,” I said. “I know it.”

I went around the house removing my favorite vases from the tables and putting them on the floor. I placed the house keys next to the door after double locking it, just as we did every night.

I could have been wrapping Maryam's presents, I thought. It would have helped to distract me. It had been a mistake to leave them at the store. I missed the ritual of sitting on the living room floor late at night, wrapping gifts. Now there were no presents to hide in the trunk of the car.

At eleven o'clock everything was quiet. Maybe I was wrong, after all. Maybe it was just the heat, the stillness, that had made me nervous.

I left my handbag and the flashlight next to my bed.

The next thing I knew, I was on my knees hanging on to the bars of my daughter's crib. I had been thrown from the bed in my sleep.

IT'S PITCH DARK. There's no electricity and the earth is shaking so hard I can barely get on my feet without falling. The noise is deafening. The earth is rumbling, growling like a furious beast. Mariano appears next to me. I'm trying to get Maryam out of the crib, but I can't keep my balance.

“Get her out! You get her out! Let's get out of here!” I hear myself screaming. He finally manages to hold on to her. We run for the front door. The walls of the house are creaking, the whole world is creaking, being jolted, rocked with incredible force. The plants hanging in the interior garden are crashing against one another, spilling soil and shards of pottery. Broken glass from the windows is scattered over the floor. We run across the dirt, mud, glass.

Wrapped in a towel, Alicia is running out too, shouting God Almighty, the Holy Trinity, Holy Mary, Mother of God. Thank God the keys are next to the door. I turn the key in the lock, but the door won't open. The earth keeps shaking and we can't get out. I curse my husband's obsession with security. Every window in our house—even the glass walls of the interior garden—has steel bars. We are locked inside a prison. My hands are trembling. I scream that I can't open the door. Mariano puts our sleepy child in my arms and starts kicking it. The frame has been shaken out of line and it's stuck. He kicks harder and finally, as he pulls the handle with all his desperate might, the door opens a crack, just wide enough for us to escape. As we rush out to the sidewalk, a wall comes crashing down across the street. Everyone who lives on our block is outside. Some of them are screaming. Some are holding on to one another. The pavement is waving, undulating like an ominous black snake.

AND THEN, as suddenly as it had started, the shaking stopped.

All of us out on the street began to move in slow motion, as if we were unsure how to gauge the size of the blow we had been dealt. As I turned to look around, clutching my daughter, clinging to my husband, I saw the sky. A cloud of dust floated over the horizon above the roofs. The shimmering sky was brown-red, lit like a second sunset, eerie, apocalyptic, as if the sun had dropped right in the center of the city. The full moon, enormous, glowed red, too. This is the end, I thought. It's the end of the world. Judgment Day. Soon the trumpets will sound, summoning us to God's presence.

Someone shouted, “Managua is on fire!”

The neighbors were milling around. “Are you all right? Is everyone in your house all right?” Everybody on our block was accounted for. I was still carrying Maryam. My arm was numb, but I didn't want to put her down. She clutched me silently. My legs ached. I couldn't trust the ground I was standing on. It was a terrifying feeling, as if we were all standing on the back of a crazed creature that was trying to shake us off.

THE SOUND STARTS again. Somewhere deep in the earth, monsters are demolishing their enormous castle. It's sheer panic this time. We are wide awake. We are already out of doors. We have nowhere to run, nothing to distract us from the horrifying crescendo of the earthquake's rumble. We can see our houses jump as if they are weightless. The utility poles sway like palm trees in a hurricane. Power lines swing back and forth over our heads. Glass breaks. It's pandemonium. Sirens scream in the distance. The whole city rocks like a ship in a storm. I hold my daughter. I bury her head in my chest. I cover her ears. I pray for it to stop. My husband starts screaming, “Let's go! Let's go!” But there is nowhere to go. No other solid ground to stand on. Nowhere to be safe.

THE SECOND EARTHQUAKE didn't last as long as the first. When it stopped, it was after midnight. Alicia left to look for her family. An hour or two passed. Aftershocks kept rocking the ground. People began to set up camp on the sidewalk, pulling out mattresses, blankets. We decided to spend the rest of the night inside the car. I had read somewhere that a car is the safest place to wait out an earthquake. We parked a block away from our house, next to an empty lot.

Suddenly, the weather changed. A cool wind began to blow. I wrapped Maryam in the crocheted cloth I had pulled from our dining table in our rush to get out of the house. My teeth were chattering. My husband looked dazed, absent, behind the wheel. We tried listening to the car radio, but there was nothing. Just static. I prayed for the night to end. Was this only happening in Nicaragua or was the whole world breaking apart, shattering to pieces? I wanted to know. I longed for the dawn. It would be Christmas Eve, and there would be no presents for my daughter.

AT DAYBREAK we drove to my parents' house. My brother had come by during the night to check on us and to tell us they were safe. As we arrived, we saw one of my mother's uniformed maids coming out of the house with a silver breakfast tray, neatly laid out with a lace cloth. She headed for the empty lot next door where my mother sat, quite composed, on an aluminum beach chair. She was even wearing lipstick. It was a scene worthy of Fellini.

My father was gone. As soon as it had become light enough to see, he had set off to find out what was left of his business. My mother hadn't been able to stop him.

Friends and neighbors stopped by my mother's improvised living room, everyone anxious to tell where they had been when the quake hit, what they had done, what they had thought. It was like a horror story competition. But there was humor in the telling. Humor is always present in Nicaraguan tragedies. Maybe that explains why we have been so resilient, surviving a history worthy of Sisyphus.

A recently married friend lamented with dramatic gestures the loss of a beautiful Mexican dinnerware set, a favorite wedding present. “There's nothing left of it,” he whined. “Not a saucer, not a cup. Nothing! Nothing!” Under different circumstances, I would have laughed, but now, I found his story endearing. Listening to so many tales of loss, I understood that it was not a matter of money. There were tears for an old rocking chair that had been in the family for generations, for pre-Columbian vases, a record collection, a book. There was the story of a man who had died in the second quake because he had gone back into his house to recover his toupee.