The earth was so fertile that the rain made everything grow. We only had to stretch to grab a piece of fruit, picking it when it was the right time, keeping what we needed for our households, and walking over to the highway to sell the leftovers. This is how our lives passed without a worry in the world, here just a little outside our doorsteps.
We thought that childhood was just a few hours of school, lots of horsing around in the fields or on the compact dirt in front of our houses. Being young was getting lost somewhere with your girlfriend or boyfriend, in the hills that were so full of trees you couldn’t even see the horizon. When the men ended up dead or the women smothered in vomit in bed, we knew it was time to replace them—have our own children growing up in the hammocks, which we rocked, while we sipped jiggers of moonshine, and our husbands celebrated in cantinas. That’s how our lives passed and how death arrived in the middle of loud, brassy tunes or heartbreaking love songs flowing from radios near the window. It embraced all of us who fell into silence with glazed eyes or collapsed on tables covered with pine needles or on the sawdust-covered cantina floors.
I was fifteen when they came. My husband had just turned eighteen and both our fathers had died in a tousle of in-laws where one stabbed the other in the neck and the injured man was able to stab back with an accurate blow to the leg. Later they embraced, asked for forgiveness, and walked, leaning on each other, trying to reach their homes, dreaming that they’d sleep soundly with their wives, knowing that the next day they’d go back to the old jukebox. They promised not to fight over which song was better, but my old man insisted that “El trompo” was a better song than “La tierra madura,” and they went back to fighting. The neighbors thought they weren’t sober enough to make it home and that the river beckoned, where they fought again on the shore.
The night swallowed them up and the following morning we found them hugging each other, downriver, drained of blood. My mother had died a few days earlier, celebrating the birth of my first child, her seventh grandchild. She didn’t want to be put on her side so we found her lying, with her guts in her mouth and her eyes open wide, smiling and staring at the ribbed sky.
I was sitting by the door, watching the baby sleep in his hammock, drinking my moonshine quietly, waiting to become glassy-eyed so I’d find everything funny. That’s when the gringo and the gringa came, though it was raining buckets. They eyed me with their long, serious smiles, pressed under small, straight noses. I gestured for them to sit. They sat down, sitting in silence for a long time. They watched me rock the baby in the hammock as I sipped a bit more of my moonshine.
They didn’t say a word. It was as if they knew that everyone would notice their presence—little by little our neighbors came out of their houses, staggered over from the cantinas, and stood around them. And that’s how it happened, under the rain. My neighbors murmured good afternoon and, bit by bit, they surrounded us. When the whole village was there, standing around my shack, the tall bony guy with green eyes pulled out his little book and began to read.
He told us about paradise, a place very much like ours, with lands that flourished almost on their own. He spoke about sin.
Everyone listened. It had been a long time since anyone had spoken to us in this way, and, gradually, everyone lay down wherever, while the man kept talking and the woman softly sang a prayer for forgiveness. Their voices lulled us to sleep and that night, the whole village slept together just outside my shack.
Days of storytelling followed, full of gentle scolding, shame that slowly got into our flesh, and sips of moonshine behind closed doors. They told us that the devil lived in the forest that used to block the horizon, and that his spirit floated over our fields in the fruits we harvested to make moonshine. They talked about living long lives, not having glazed eyes; they said that death didn’t come solely from knife fights, from pushing and shoving, or from the vomit that filled our dreams. They spoke about how evil it was to live unproductive lives, simply reaping what the earth produced.
They taught us that drinking was a sin, that committing adultery in the fields was another sin, that sex distracted us from labor, and only by working could we exalt God. God put us on earth to work, to transform the land, so that we would have electricity and all the comforts we now had.
The gringa stayed with us and told us stories about God. She chanted prayers while the gringo went off to consult with God about a few things. He came back days later, driving a truck full of farm tools and seeds. He said that God wanted us to cut down the trees that had blocked the horizon and to rebuild our village. We had to destroy our fields, dig up all the evil roots growing in them. He told us not to be afraid or have any doubts, that God would send us plenty of rice and huge yellow ears of corn. He brought sacks filled with what we needed to change things; death would not get us as he had our parents.
We burned everything, chopped down all the trees, hunted for Satan’s last seed. We came back to life in the Glory of God who blessed us with fruits and vegetables larger than any growing around us. The earth changed, the gringo said, once we had removed everything that had been there. The devil was angry but God, finally, had brought His land back to us although He would continue to test us. That’s why we had to put these fertilizers into the soil; our crops needed insecticides to protect them from the devil’s bugs. The gringa said that proof of God’s love was that the seeds of our new, huge, perfect fruits and vegetables couldn’t be reused, that only the seeds of the devil, the heretics and the false worshippers—what we were before—would allow us to reuse them.
God’s rules have changed us. Our village now obeys them. Life doesn’t take place in the wild: we dress and behave according to His commandments. God’s seeds produce huge fruits and brightly colored vegetables that we sell to the gringo Saviors who have installed themselves in a huge house that now dwarfs the fields. Our wages are low, but we were saved from sin and they take part of our salary for the Church that grows bigger and better where our cantinas used to be; the church always needs bigger loudspeakers, stronger lights, newer windows, sturdier benches.
With our leftover money, we buy the seeds, the fertilizer, and the insecticides that we need. We are told that when God finally trusts us, things will change—poverty is the punishment for years of drunkenness. We need to pay for the sins of our fathers and grandfathers who worshipped the seeds of the devil.
