Honor

Honor

            The wind had shifted to the north during the night.  Juanita was clean; the water was cold; vultures and smells drifted above.  She crossed the open field.  Her skirt hugged her legs.  Her hair was like black spiders on her face.  Juana was happy, rosy-cheeked and squinting into the wind.  The trees ran beside her.  In the meadow the wind gusted around her.  Juanita filled her cup with joy and covered it with a shout; then she ran and ran, twirling in her own laughter.  The dog ran barking beside her, chasing the dry leaves that flew like birds.

            The spring was deep in a ravine, shaded by palms and philodendrons.  Further down, hidden by stands of huiscoyoles and iscanales, blue pools slept, pools like pieces of sky, long and fragrant.  Shadows had fallen on the rock walls and limestone pebbles rolled in the thin, fragile stream.

            Juanita sat down to rest.  She was breathing hard and deep to calm her heaving breasts; her taut blouse barely contained them.  The spring watched her intently, while the dog greedily lapped the water, her four paws planted in the virgin sand.  Downriver, branches bathed in the cool water.  Beside her, the rocky ground was green and damp. 

            Juanita took out a mirror the size of a coin and looked at herself carefully.  She arranged her curls; she wiped her forehead with her apron; and, as she like to do when she was alone, she kissed herself on the lips, glancing around to be sure no one was looking.  Tucking the mirror inside her blouse, she got up from the rock and began gathering the round seeds of the tempisque tree to play cinquito.

            The dog began to bark.  A man on horseback appeared.  The sun was behind him and his horse's gait broke the glass of the spring into a thousand pieces.  When Juanita saw him, she felt her heart in her throat.  There was no time to run away; without knowing why, she waited for him, clenching a leaf in her fist like a knife.  The horseman, young and handsome, cantered up to her, radiant with his advantage.  He ignored the barking and took her at a gallop, like the north wind that was blowing.  There was feeble resistance with trembling nos and frail pushing away; then cries of pain, then . . . the spring stared straight ahead, unblinking.  With her arm over her eyes, Juana lay in the shadows.

*

            Tacho, Juana's brother, was nine years old.  He was dark-skinned, with a head like a huizayote squash.  One day he saw that his grandpa was furious.  Juana had said something to him, who knows what, and papa had given her a good beating.

            "Stupid fool!" he had heard him say.  "You've gone and lost your honor, the only thing you brought into this world!  If I'd known you were going to lose your honor at the spring that day, I'd never have let you go, stupid fool!"

            Tacho cried, because he loved Juana as if she were his mother.  Innocently, without telling anyone, he went to the spring and searched everywhere for Juana's honor.  He had no idea what his sister's honor might look like, but judging from his grandpa's anger, it was probably something that would be easy to recognize. Tacho pictured her honor round and smooth, maybe shiny, maybe like a coin, or a cross.  He kept his eyes peeled on the sand, upstream and down, but he saw only stones and weeds, weeds and rocks and he couldn't find her honor.  He looked in the water, in the bushes, in the hollows of trees, he even searched in the sand around the spring, but nothing!

            "From the beating papa gave her, I guess Juana's honor must be something big and important," he thought.

            Finally, under some chaparral, among the leaves dappled with sun and shade, he saw a strange, shiny object.  Tacho felt happiness rising in his body like bubbles that tickled him.

            "I found it!" he yelled.  He picked up the shiny object and looked at it with surprise.

            "Wow!" he said, I didn't know an honor looked like this . . .

            He ran with all the strength of his happiness.  When he got home, his grandpa was sitting on a hollowed-out log, lost in his thoughts.  The furrow between his brows was dark and deep.

            "Papa!" shouted Tacho, panting.  "I went to the spring and I found Juana's honor, now don't beat her anymore, here . . . ."

            And he put a thin dagger with a mother-of-pearl handle in his grandpa's hand.

            The Indian took the dagger, waved Tacho away and sat staring at the sharp blade, with vengeance in his eyes.

            "Yes, you have," he murmured.

            Night fell.