News of the madre plants began spreading that winter, shortly after the earthquake, when many of us in La Barranca were still living in tents. There was so much illness then: parasites that started in the belly and moved to the brain or the eyes if you were unlucky, diarrhea that could kill a child in a few hours, lesions that became infected and never dried out. Much of the city’s waste had always ended up in La Barranca, which sits at the lowest point of the city; as everyone knows, shit runs downhill. But the earthquake made it worse, because the city’s infrastructure—such as it was—had crumbled along with the buildings that ringed the outer barrios, buildings we had once aspired to live in. Then unseasonal rains had come, turning our footpaths into rivers of shit and mud. The smell was unbearable, even for us who had grown up accustomed to the scent of raw sewage. We no longer had doors to shut against it.
In some ways we recovered from the earthquake faster than others. Nothing in La Barranca was rebuilt, of course; aside from the tents and a few deliveries of water, we received no help from the government. Our homes—shacks of cinder block with corrugated tin roofs—remained in ruins, impossible to repair, and the stairs fastened to the steep side of the ravine connecting La Barranca to the city now held on by just a few pins. Yet we continued to climb the stairs, for we had no choice, and when the risk of tremors subsided, those of us who could move back into our ruined homes did. What I am trying to say is that while the rest of the city was still walking around with stunned expressions, we in La Barranca got on with it.
I worked as a gardener on the estate of Don Eugenio ‘El Diablo’ Garza Garcia. The job paid almost nothing, but it was better than breathing poisonous dust in the cement factory, or searching for work on a crew every morning and returning home empty handed every evening. My boss’ garden was an oasis surrounded by high walls, and I was left more or less alone. Within three days of the earthquake, I was picking shards of glass out of the bougainvillea and wiping away the thick layer of grit the tremor had shaken from the walls and deposited on the spiny, sword-like leaves of the agave. The power, of course, had been out across the city since the earthquake, yet the generators on my boss’s estate ran day and night. Among other things, Don Eugenio had been the mayor of the city, the governor of the state, and, after failing to be anointed heir to the president, the secretary of the environment. His family still owns the world’s biggest cement firm, including the local factory. Maybe it is the second biggest. The point is, he had connections.
On my second or third day back, my boss left his iPad open on the little iron table under the jacaranda where he took his morning coffee. I paused to glance at the home page of El Sol—the casualty reports, the estimated trillions of pesos in damage, the opposition party’s criticism of the government’s relief efforts—and a small article caught my eye. A farmer had discovered some strange plants growing outside of Santa Rosa, near the epicentre of the earthquake. The accompanying photo showed a plant that at first resembled a saguaro, but on closer inspection was different in several ways. The color—green—was too lurid and shiny, and instead of vertical ribs and needles, the plant was covered in knob-like nipples from which transparent tubes hung. A botanist quoted in the article said the plants were of “unknown origin.”
The plants interested me because I am a gardener. They interested my boss too, because the following day, from his spot under the jacaranda, he said, “Hey Juan, what do you make of this?” and showed me a headline on his iPad: Strange Plants Breathe Through Tubes. The article had the same picture from the day before. Now I was able to look at it more closely.
“All plants breathe,” I said. Still, I was perturbed.
That night I told your mother about the plants. When she heard what I had to say, she touched the medal of the Virgin she wears around her neck and said, “Maybe it is a sign.”
“Of what?” I asked.
But your mother just smiled.
No official name was given to the plants because, according to my boss, who sought me out for conversation more frequently in the days after the earthquake, scientists could not agree to what class or even to what phylum they belonged. El Sol referred to them as Los Cardones Santa Rosa, or as Santa Rositas, but when one of the tabloids—I think it was ¡Alarma!—published an article claiming one had given birth through a vagina-like gash in its side, many, including my boss, started referring to them as panochas, a vulgar word I do not like to say.
“Impossible,” I said to your mother. “Plants do not give birth like mammals.”
“The tabloids make things up,” your mother agreed. “But maybe they are not making this up.”
My boss had two bodyguards, a driver, and a boy who took care of the pool. Two women from La Barranca, Lety and Carmen, did the shopping, cooking, and cleaning, and sometimes your mother helped them on laundry day. My boss’ family—his blond, serious wife and his two adult children—lived mostly in Texas and hadn’t been present for the earthquake. It seemed unlikely they would return now. But my boss seldom left the estate. “He’s afraid of being arrested,” Lety whispered. “He’s afraid of being assassinated,” Carmen replied. Both seemed possible. One did not earn the nickname El Diablo without making enemies.
After a week or so, El Sol stopped publishing articles about the plants. I thought it must have been a hoax until my boss summoned me one morning as I was cutting back the oleanders. “Juanito,” he said, calling me by the diminutive of my name even though I am over fifty, “Come look at this.”
He showed me a video on his iPad. In it, a man wearing white coveralls and a face shield approached one of the plants. I had never seen one so clearly before and I watched with interest. The plant’s skin was so glossy it might have been plastic, like one of those fake cactuses outside of the El Taco Feliz on Hidalgo. But this was no plastic decoration. Its skin rippled like it was shivering, and it coiled and uncoiled its many tubes as if it were clenching them into fists. There was a protuberance on the plant’s side beneath one of its arms. As I watched, the protuberance grew and split open into a long abscess that glistened pink and yellow against the shiny green of the plant’s skin. A noise began coming from the tubes, a sort of whistling, like air sucked through teeth. The man in the video—an army medic, maybe—began to massage the abscess.
I understood immediately what was happening, for when your mother gave birth to our Angel, Doña Tonantzin kneaded your mother’s perineum with cooking oil to make it pliant and to help the baby come. I thought, That is what this medic is doing. The abscess widened, and the whistling of the tubes intensified. Now I could see something pushing out of the abscess, pale, green, and gelatinous.
The medic reached his gloved hand into the abscess and pulled out a slippery, comma-shaped creature, about the size of a small watermelon. He dropped it into a clear plastic box on the ground nearby and closed the lid. The camera zoomed in. The baby wriggled like a hooked fish. I could see the plant—the mother, I remember thinking—in the corner of the frame. The gash on its side, once taut, was wrinkled, and a milky substance dripped from it. Somehow, I felt certain it was dead.
“Well?” my boss said once the video ended. “What do you think?”
“I have never seen anything like it,” I replied.
Of course, I told Carmen and Lety about the video, and in the evening, I told your mother. It was then, I think, that she began calling the plants madres, and soon this is what others in La Barranca called them too.
That night, after a few sleepless hours tossing and turning, I wandered down to the waterfall to think. It was a clear night with a full, luminous moon, but even if it had been pitch black, I could have navigated the treacherous footpath easily, for I went to the waterfall often when I was troubled. I couldn’t stop thinking about the madre; its thin, anguished cries echoed in my head. Maybe I hoped the rushing water would drown them out.
Not many people know there is a waterfall in La Barranca. When I was a child, it was a magical place, surrounded by jacaranda, plum, and primavera trees. I used to swim in its pool with my cousins; we played Tarzan and Cheetah, taking turns being the bad guy—as if we knew what a bad guy was! But 25 years ago, the cement factory began dumping wastewater into the river and it was no longer safe to swim there. Then the site filled up with garbage: old furniture, smashed-up electronics, even dead dogs. Finally, someone put a fence around the pool and padlocked it shut. Many years ago, I cut the padlock and replaced it with my own. I was a little drunk and I’m not sure what I was thinking. Maybe that I’d try to clean it up. But there was so much garbage, and the water smelled so bad, that I never bothered. That night, I sat on my broken plastic chair, closed my eyes, and replayed the video in my head. I felt the madre had suffered and I felt sorry for it. Then my thoughts turned to Angel, to the day he was born and to the day he died. I wanted to get drunk, but I didn’t have anything to drink, so I just sat there thinking sad thoughts.
Anyway, I don’t know how my boss got that video but, like I said, he had connections. For a few days I could think of little else. Gradually, however, I was able to put the video to the back of my mind. I assumed that once the government finished studying the plants, they would share their findings and it would all make sense. But in the meantime, life went on. Carmen’s young niece caught dengue fever and died. My boss prepared to go on a trip.
Before leaving, he asked me if I knew how the baby madres—he called them panochitas—grew into adults.
“No, Don Eugenio,” I said politely.
“The panochita feeds on the corpse of its mother,” he said, grinning beneath his bushy mustache. “Then it picks a spot and burrows underground. A few hours later, presto! A new panocha emerges.”
At the vigil for Carmen’s niece—it was Martes de Carnival, and the vigil was held at Lety’s because no one in the Ramirez family had a house that still stood—Carmen grabbed my arm and said, “The madres could have saved her!”
“What are you talking about?” I said.
“Don’t you know?” Carmen’s face was streaked with tears. “There is a place, like a special club, where the madres are kept. The fresas go there and breath oxygen from the plant’s tubes, and it makes them healthy and strong.”
I pictured a facility, like a fancy private hospital in a telenovela. A room full of gurneys, and on the gurneys, bodies. Bodies of fresas: rich white people, some sleek, some fat, each connected to a madre by its tubes. Tubes in their mouths and up their nostrils. Tubes inserted under their skin. Pumping in magic oxygen, making them young and healthy.
Except everyone knew that plants grow in the ground, in soil, and I could not picture soil in a hospital. “Rumors,” I said. But I could tell that Carmen didn’t believe me; nor did your mother, because as she listened, she touched her medal and her face assumed the same distant expression she wore whenever the subject of the madres came up.
That spring, the President announced he was cancer-free, even though the newspapers had prepared obituaries for him months earlier. My boss went on more and more trips. Each time he returned home, he seemed younger and more vigorous. He lost weight, and the little container of diabetes medication disappeared from his breakfast table. Even his hair grew back. I swear it! The bald spot on the back of his head closed in on itself until it disappeared. “Don Eugenio,” I would say, griping my pruning shears. “You look well!” “I feel well, Juanito!” he would cry, and clap me on my back. Once or twice he even brought women into the estate. At least, this is what Carmen and Lety told me.
In June, rumors began to circulate that there was a trade in the madres. That Carlos Slim had one, and so did Vladimir Putin, and Elon Musk.
In July, the ground in La Barranca finally dried out; the rain that should have fallen during those weeks never came. We could have started to rebuild. But most of my neighbors were too sick to lift a shovel. Besides, there was so much rubble and garbage in the ravine; where would we start? As we climbed the stairs together one morning, me to go to work, and he to wait for a job on a crew, Lety’s son Horacio said, “I wish the ravine would close shut like a wound, and never open up again.” This made me sad, for Horacio was a good boy with his whole life ahead of him. He was the same age Angel would have been. I tried not to think about Angel at work, but sometimes I pictured him trembling on his cot, his blood poisoned with mercury, and later, in his little coffin, and my head would fill with black thoughts. The doctors never said so, but everybody knew the mercury came from the cement factory.
Not long after that conversation—a few days, maybe—I arrived at work to find my boss waiting for me.
“Juanito,” he said. “I’m receiving a very special delivery at the end of the week. I need you to prepare the garden. Take out everything. It must be just soil, which you must amend so it has this precise balance.” He handed me a piece of paper. On it was written a formula specifying so much acid, so much alkaline.
“Must everything be removed?” I said, for the thought of destroying the garden I had labored over so tenderly filled me with horror.
“Yes,” my boss said. “Every part of the ground must be suitable.”
Carmen, who reads ¡Alarma! from cover to cover every week, had told me a few days earlier that once a baby madre chooses a spot and takes root, it cannot be moved. I had taken this claim with a grain of salt, as I took everything from the tabloids. Many of the stories they reported about the madres were shocking and horrific. One story claimed that the Sinaloa Cartel kept a stable of madres in a soccer arena, and they fed their enemies to the babies alive. The babies were said to grow into monstrous madres with a taste for human blood. I now know that this claim is false—at least regarding the victims being alive, as the baby madres have no taste for living flesh. Nevertheless, these stories lingered in my mind as I undertook the grim task assigned to me.
I recruited a crew of six men from La Barranca, including my friend Miguel, who was Carmen’s husband, and Horacio. We ripped out the giant poinsettias, the bougainvillea hedge, the hibiscus bushes, and the stands of oleander; the yucca, the agave, and the other desert plants; a rare Wood’s cycad my boss had told me cost over 100,000 American dollars; the kitchen garden, which I had planted that winter with tomatoes, cucumbers, chilies, and herbs. We chopped down an avocado tree, two mango trees, four guavas, and the flowering jacaranda where my boss took his morning coffee, and we dug out their roots. I put more than two dozen orchids, many of which I had propagated from pups, into the garbage myself. None of the men questioned why we had to do such a terrible thing; although we did not talk about it, I think they understood. On the fifth day we mixed sulfur, peat moss, and sand into seven truckloads of topsoil and spread it over the wasteland we had created. By the time we finished, it was dark.
My boss told me to stay behind and to choose one other to stay with me. I wanted Miguel, for he was always joking around and would lighten the mood. But I chose Horacio instead. I thought if he did a good job, my boss might hire him as my apprentice. Don Eugenio paid the other men and said his driver would take them to the bottom of the ravine the long way, by the road, so they wouldn’t have to descend the stairs in the dark. I must have been distracted, because I didn’t notice the bodyguards getting into the van with them.
Horacio and I waited at the gate with a forklift, smoking and bouncing on the balls of our feet because of the cold and maybe our nerves. At some point Horacio mentioned seeing the bodyguards getting into the van with Miguel and the others, and a new layer of dread fell over me. “They are in their beds,” I said, not quite believing it myself.
After a long time, a truck approached, its headlights unlit. I unlocked the gate and watched as a man jumped down from the cab and slid open the back of the truck.
The first things that struck me was the smell: a sweet and meaty aroma that both turned my stomach and caused me to salivate. Then I heard the thin, whistling cries that were familiar to me from the video, except that these sounded strangulated, as if coming from crushed straws. I went to the back of the truck and looked.
The madre was about two meters tall and grossly pregnant. Its skin was gray, and I do not think the dim light was the only reason for it. Someone had secured its tubes to its body with surgical tape; that was why its cries sounded so strange. The protuberance hadn’t yet developed into an abscess, but it was very large, and it was clear the madre was about to give birth.
“Do I have to sign?” I asked.
“No,” the driver said. He was a young man—barely out of his teens. I remember he would not look at me.
I drove the forklift to the back of the truck, stuck its blades into the pallet on which the madre sat in a large pot, and backed up. The driver didn’t wait around; he left without even closing the back of the truck.
Horacio stared at me, pale in the forklift’s headlight.
“Is it sick?” he said.
This madre did seem sick, at least compared to the one in the video. Stunted, too. Perhaps because it had been forced to grow inside a pot instead of in the earth, or perhaps because its tubes were taped down and it couldn’t breathe properly. But regardless of whether it was healthy or unhealthy, I knew it did not have long to live.
“It is dying,” I said. “But first it must give birth. And we must help it.”
I drove the forklift into the garden. My boss was waiting for us, wearing a silk robe and drinking something from a crystal goblet. Maybe it was champagne.
“My panocha,” he cried. “Isn’t it beautiful?”
I lowered the pallet to the ground. Horacio started to pull the tape off the madre’s tubes.
“Don’t bother,” Don Eugenio said. He drained the glass and tossed it to the ground, where it landed with a soft thud. “It will soon be dead.”
“It is in pain,” I said, answering before Horacio could, because I could tell he was upset and I didn’t want him to say something that would endanger his chances of being hired. Isn’t it funny I worried about this? I still did not understand that our lives were balanced on the edge of a knife.
Don Eugenio’s smile didn’t falter. “Yes,” he said. “I feel it too!” He grabbed one of the tubes Horacio had freed and shoved it into his mouth. I watched, horrified, as Don Eugenio sucked on it, and my horror only intensified when I looked down and saw his erection poking against the silk of his robe. I put a calming hand on Horacio’s arm, trying, in truth, to calm myself.
Then things started to happen very quickly. The protuberance in the madre’s side bulged and split into the pink and yellow abscess I had seen in the video. The sweet, meaty aroma intensified and the madre’s whistling grew high-pitched and anguished.
“What do we do, Jefe?” Horacio said, addressing me, not my boss.
“We help it.” I began to massage the slick abscess, and my thoughts travelled back to the evening my Angel was born. I could feel the baby beneath my hands, struggling to free itself. “Shhh,” I remember saying, “It will be okay. This time I will protect you.”
I do not know if I was speaking to the baby madre or to Angel.
In the meantime, Don Eugenio was stroking his erection, growing more and more excited. “Yes!” he groaned, his words distorted by the tube in his mouth. “Split it apart! Split the panocha apart!”
It was disgusting. A sacrilege.
One of the madre’s tubes wrapped around my forearm and began to squeeze it the way your mother squeezed my hand on the day of Angel’s birth, and on the day of your birth, too. The baby was so close now. The abscess split wider, and I could see it, as pale and fresh as a globule of frog jelly. I reached inside and pulled it out, feeling the madre spasm and tremble from inside.
“Oh God!’ Don Eugenio cried out in ecstasy. He collapsed to the ground, the tube falling from his lips.
The tube that had wrapped itself around my arm and squeezed now hung lifeless. The madre was dead. I held its warm and writhing baby in my hands.
A baby I had sworn to protect.
Bracing myself against the forklift, I swung my leg and kicked Don Eugenio in the head.
Horacio looked stunned, but he is a smart boy and he followed suit, kicking Don Eugenio in the ribs and the balls. If anyone heard Don Eugenio’s cries, nobody came, and after a few more kicks, he stopped yelling.
I considered finishing him off. But seeing him defenseless, curled into a ball and whimpering like a beaten dog, quelled my bloodlust. Nor is Horacio much of a killer, although he is prepared, of course, to make necessary sacrifices, just as we all are.
“Come,” I said to Horacio. “We must bring the little madre home.”
In the delirium that followed—the panic over what to do with the baby, the people’s need to see and touch it, the rising anxiety over the men and why they hadn’t returned, and the chaos when Don Eugenio found us—your mother was the one with the cool head.
But I am getting ahead of myself.
I was surprised Don Eugenio didn’t send his bodyguards after us, although now I know they were busy executing my crew and hiding their bodies. Still, Don Eugenio could have brought the police, or even the military; he had that power. Maybe he didn’t want the authorities to know about the madre, or maybe he was just crazy. Whatever the reason, he came by himself, armed of course. He must have taken the stairs, for had he come by the road it would have taken a long time. Several of us—me, your mother, Horacio, Carmen, and some other family members of the missing men—had crowded into Lety’s house. The electricity, even more sporadic since the earthquake, was out, and the house was lit with candles. Almost the entire community was gathered outside, waiting to see what would happen. We must have been easy to find.
Don Eugenio announced his arrival by firing off a burst into the air.
“Where is Juan?” He cried. He sounded like a wild dog.
I looked at Horacio and some of the other men—Carmen’s cousin Victor, and my cousin Raul—hoping they would understand the only thing that mattered was protecting the little madre. We had put it into a plastic basin, the kind we wash dishes in. Its skin, which had been as fresh as a new leaf half an hour before, was now wrinkled and gray, and it seemed lethargic, too, less wiggly than it had been when I carried it in my arms down the long and treacherous stairs.
“I am in here, Don Eugenio,” I called. “And I have the baby. If you want it, come inside and get it.” I had no intention of giving him the baby, of course, but I wanted to lure him into the house where his rifle would be of little use.
The crowd shifted to make way for Don Eugenio. He was still wearing his robe: it was burgundy with yellow paisleys, very expensive looking, but now torn and dirty from the beating Horacio and I had given him. As he stepped inside, the crowd of people behind him surged forward, and those of us in front pressed forward too, like a tide going in opposite directions, and Don Eugenio was trapped between us. People began to shout: Where is my son, Oscar Lopez? Where is my husband, Fernando Ortiz? Don Eugenio fired his rifle—pop, pop, pop—but it was angled down, and in the crush of bodies he could not lift it. People screamed and one or two people were even shot in the foot, but nobody ran. We just kept crushing Don Eugenio, demanding that he answer for the missing men, which he did not do. Horacio and Gustavo Reyes got the rifle off him, and someone else tied his hands. After a moment, when we tired of his threats, we gagged him, and maybe we beat him a little too. But finally, Don Eugenio was subdued. Then I looked to your mother, unsure of what to do next.
“We must bring the little madre to the waterfall,” she said.
Then she pointed at Don Eugenio.
“And we must bring him, too.”
It must have looked like Día de la Candelaria, for we walked in procession holding candles. But instead of bringing dolls of the baby Jesus to the cathedral to be blessed, we brought the little madre to the stinking, polluted heart of the ravine. And we dragged El Diablo with us.
I remember feeling sure I wouldn’t find the key when we reached the gate, even though I always kept it in the front right pocket of my jeans. But when Horacio took the basin and I slid my hand into my pocket, there it was. I fitted it into the lock, swung open the gate, and everyone crowded through.
There were about fifty of us: old and young, friends and enemies, people I’d known for my entire life, or for theirs. We spread out along the bank of the pool so there would be room for everyone, stepping carefully over the garbage and wrinkling our noses against the smell of shit and gasoline.
Victor Lopez and Raul Ortiz held Don Eugenio between them. I’d never much cared for either of these men because they drank too much and fought with their wives in public. But I had recruited their boys to work on my crew, so I felt they were entitled to play a role in whatever was to come. Once everyone had found their place and the chattering of the crowd quieted to a murmur, Victor yanked down Don Eugenio’s gag and said, “Where is my son, cabrón?”
“Let me go!” Don Eugenio moaned. His face shone with blood. “I will give everyone here a suitcase of money.”
Then we knew for certain that the missing men were dead.
Did you know that I dream of these men every night—of Miguel, Rogelio, Oscar, Fernando, and Gabriel? In my dream, they are kneeling before a pit with their hands on their heads, their faces white with terror. I run back and forth, saying, Get up, Miguel! Run, Gabriel! But I am like a ghost; they can neither see nor hear me.
Victor and Raul began to beat Don Eugenio again, knocking him to the ground and kicking him. I think they would have killed him, but Horacio and Gustavo stopped them. Maybe they were afraid of Don Eugenio, or maybe they knew your mother had something else in mind. I couldn’t do anything, neither help beat Don Eugenio nor help save him, for I was holding the little madre. Plus—I am not ashamed to admit it—I was crying. Many of us were. Horacio and Gustavo pulled Don Eugenio to his feet, and Horacio replaced the gag over his bloody mouth. Don Eugenio was punch drunk, barely clinging to consciousness. Then it was quiet. Everyone was waiting to see what would happen.
“Husband,” your mother said. “Put the little madre on the ground.”
I set the basin down and the baby slid over its side. A gray blob. It crawled toward the edge of the water. Mist from the waterfall glazed its skin; I wonder if it felt cool and good. Still, it moved slowly, and I could tell it was suffering.
“There is something wrong with it,” I said.
“No,” your mother said. “It only needs to eat.”
Then, finally, I understood.
I took the pruning shears from my belt.
Some part of me wanted to use them, to repay Don Eugenio for what he did to the men and for what he did to my Angel, for everyone knew the mercury came from the cement factory. But it was as if I had turned to stone. Now I think it was good I could not move, for my act would have been one of vengeance, not devotion.
Your mother made the sign of the cross and touched her medal of the Virgin. Then she stepped forward and took the shears. Her expression was serene.
Only then was I released from my paralysis. I was released from my hatred for Don Eugenio, too. It was like I had had a fever, but now it was broken. I went behind Don Eugenio, took his lolling head in my hands, tilted it back, and bared his throat. He could have been anyone—but still, I am glad it was him.
Your mother drew back her arm and plunged the shears into Don Eugenio’s neck.
At first it seemed like she hadn’t done it hard enough. Don Eugenio still struggled feebly, and his eyes were wide above his gag. But then a dark stream spurted from his neck, and he buckled to his knees.
“Collect the blood,” your mother said.
It only took a few moments for Don Eugenio to die. Carmen and Lety stripped the body, and Victor, Raul, Horacio, and Gustavo dragged it to the side of the pool near the baby. I had the idea of planting Don Eugenio upright in the ground so he would resemble its mother, but we had no shovel. We had rope, though, so we tied Don Eugenio’s body to a primavera tree, one that had not blossomed in many years. As we knotted the ropes, I pictured its branches heavy with yellow flowers. We put the basin of blood beside the tree, withdrew, and waited.
The night was chilly. I put my arm around your mother, thinking she might be cold or upset by what happened—but she was calm, and warmth radiated from her like a blanket. After twenty minutes or so, the baby began inching toward the tree. It climbed up the body of Don Eugenio and began to feed.
A great cheer went up. The little madre had accepted our sacrifice! Everyone hugged and kissed, and many people wept tears of joy.
But although we were ecstatic, it had been a very long night. One by one people began returning to their homes until only your mother and I remained. Finally I fell asleep. When your mother woke me, it was dawn.
“Look, Juan,” she said.
The rope lay coiled on the ground, and the basin that had held Don Eugenio’s blood was empty. There was no trace of the body. The little madre had eaten well.
But where was it? I rose to my feet in a panic, thinking someone had taken it. Then your mother pointed to a nub pushing out of the ground a few meters from the tree. It looked shiny and healthy.
We expected the police to come that day—if not the police, then Don Eugenio’s bodyguards. We put a lookout at the top of the stairs, and Gustavo, who could shoot, kept Don Eugenio’s rifle at the ready. We were, of course, prepared to defend our Madre to the death. But no one ever came—not that day, nor in the days that followed. As I said, Don Eugenio had many enemies, and it is possible that more people celebrated his disappearance than lamented it. But I think it is more than that. La Barranca has always been mostly invisible to those on the outside, like a stain one has grown accustomed to ignoring.
In the weeks after our sacrifice, groups of us returned to the waterfall and took away the garbage. Some of the women decorated the earth around our Madre with votives and wreaths of flowers, and I planted ferns and calla lilies on the banks. Soon our Madre was the size of a child, with many fresh and glistening tubes. When you were born, shortly after the second anniversary of the earthquake, people said it was a miracle. Your mother was 54—not as old as Sarah when she bore Isaac, but still very old to have a child. Yet many miraculous things have happened since we devoted our community to our Madre. It still astonishes me to see vegetables growing right here, on the banks of a river once so polluted that drinking from it could be fatal.
Of course, there are those who find their way into La Barranca. Perhaps they have heard rumors of a hidden shrine where the sick can be healed, or perhaps they are just unlucky. And yet, it is an honor to take part in our Madre’s rebirth, so maybe they aren’t so unlucky after all. Maybe they live on, contributing part of their essence to each new Madre. I am grateful to all of them, even to Don Eugenio.
One day, Angelita, when your mother has grown too old to fulfill her sacred duties, you will be called upon to step into her role. Each of us must play our part in ensuring that our Madre is fed. But for now, my darling, splash and play with your friends in the pool beside the waterfall, safe beneath the jacaranda and the blossoming primavera.
Jennifer DeLeskie (she/her/they) is a writer based in Tiohtià:ke (Montréal), on the traditional and unceded land of the Kanien?kehá people. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in publications such as Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Exile Quarterly, Prairie Fire, The Dalhousie Review, Marrow Magazine, and Pensive Journal. Jennifer is the recipient of the 2025 Imagination Unbound Fellowship, which supports an English language writer in attending Sheree Renée Thomas’s master class, “Writing the Imagination,” at the Under the Volcano residency in Tepoztlan, Mexico.