14. El Jíbaro de Puerto Rico #5
My eyes are closed, and hot tears are streaming down my face, and I see it, too.
I look down to my white dress, and a shock rattles my body.
There is a hole in the center of my chest and blood blooming.
I turn to search for Mami, but she’s on her back, her eyes open to the sky, her mouth opening and closing like a drowning fish.
Blood squirts out of her neck. I scream for Papi and I witness a soldier hit him on the side of his head with the butt of his rifle. Papi falls to his knees.
“Please, no!” Papi shouts, begging, holding his hands in prayer.
The soldier presses the barrel of his gun to Papi’s forehead and pulls the trigger.
The back part of Papi’s head bursts open.
His body collapses to the ground. Fragments of his skull and what was in it, pink and bloodied clumps, scatter across the victims who are on the ground behind him. Many are not moving.
“Abuelo!” I cry. And I feel myself stumbling back, falling against Mami.
I raise my head and scream again and again for Abuelo.
He’s being restrained by a swarm of people.
Arms are across his chest. Others from our procession are tugging at his shoulders and arms, trying to pull him away from the scene, trying to pull him away from me.
There’s shouting, screaming, crying. I hear the spray of machine guns and the metallic pinging of bullets falling to the ground.
Abuelo continues shouting for them to let him through.
His eyes are wide and wild. Blood is smeared across his face.
He breaks an arm free from their grasp and he’s reaching it out, he’s reaching it toward me.
Dust kicks up. Mothers clutch their children. Someone yells for help. Someone else stops yelling altogether. I manage to raise an arm, and I’m reaching for him.
“Abuelo!” I scream so loud, louder than any birdcall or birdsong I’ve ever heard. “Abuelo!”
I hear him still above the roar of the gunshot blasts and the scrambling of feet.
He’s calling my name, again and again and again. “Victoria! That’s my Victoria!”
The world is all but muffled except for the sound of bullets flying and Abuelo’s voice calling my name.
I close my eyes.
Three knocks.
“Victoria, wake up.”
I open them.
“Yes, Abuelo.”
We’re all seated around the white table. Mrs. Rosario and Jonathan and me and my abuelo. I look down and I’m wearing my white dress. It’s pretty and clean.
“Victoria,” Abuelo says. “Mrs. Rosario agrees that after seeing what she saw today, Jonathan is a medium, too, like me. She now believes that the living can talk to the dead, and she wants to thank you for helping her see that.”
Mrs. Rosario is silently sobbing into Jonathan’s shoulder. He’s patting her on her back and quietly saying, “I’m fine, Mami.”
I don’t know what to say. I’m so confused.
I feel Jonathan’s hand reach out and find mine. He squeezes it, and it’s a feeling that feels not here, just so far away.
“You can visit me whenever you like, Victoria,” Jonathan says.
I open my mouth to say something, but then I turn to Abuelo. “But why would I visit with Jonathan?”
My grandfather smiles. “I’m dying, Victoria.
I’m seventy-seven years old. It’s 1950. You died in 1937 in the Ponce Massacre, with your mother and my son, your father.
You’ve been with me as a ghost since that time, and it was out there, praying under the beating sun, working in Pellejas that I found you again.
That I learned that I, too, am a medium.
I don’t know what the spirit world looks like, and I promise that after I die I will do all that I can to find you there, and your mami and papi, but I just want you to know that you also have another friend here in this house, in Jonathan.
He likes the work of the jíbaro. He wants to live here in these mountains, Mrs. Rosario said.
He’ll be attending university in Ponce to study agriculture.
After I die, Mrs. Rosario will take this land, and here she will build a house for Jonathan.
So, when I’m gone, if you want to return here and don’t find me, you at least will have someone to talk to. ”
I find myself squeezing Jonathan’s hand back, across this far distance, and I’m glad I’ve met a friend.
A stillness settles over me. Not fear. Not quite.
Just the beginning of understanding, like the hush that follows after a church bell’s final toll.
I look down at my hands, steady and pale.
I look at Abuelo. “I died,” I whisper, though it’s so quiet I don’t even know if I said it aloud. “Why did they have to kill me? Us?”
Abuelo is crying more now.
“And everything else that you’ve told me today,” I say to my grandfather, “about Don Pedro, the flag, all they want to stop? And everything else that I’ve seen.” I turn to Jonathan. “That we’ve seen together, the ships?”
“None of us forget, Victoria. People think dead means to be lost, forgotten. People believe that the dead can’t tell stories, but they can.
You can. Others. Like El Gigante Dormido, like you, like all who’ve died here, they’re not gone.
Not completely. They’re still here with us.
They may be sleeping, like our giant out there on the horizon, but one day they’ll all awaken, and we remember everything. ”