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.”