Dianita’s Spiderweb
BY CRISTINA FRÍES
Her Mother
Two weeks ago, I woke up to the morning darkness thinking of my daughters. It was 5 a.m., too early for them to be awake. I stepped outside and stared at the cows blanketed by fog in the fields. They turned to me and all at once they brayed, their cries the sound of my own suffering. To my east and 15 kilometers away, Herrera’s lights freckled the early dawn – my children living alone beneath their glow. I comforted myself with my sight, which allowed me to be in two places at once: while spanking the haunches of a cow with a stick to lead her to the milking stalls, I glanced, also, into Dianita’s life.
From above, I could see the downturned curve of her nose, the smooth skin on her arms, her opened, drooling mouth pressed into the pillow beside her older sister, Clara. I felt weightless, as if I were hovering just above her head. Then I turned my attention back to work, to the wiry hairs growing from the cow’s udders, the hot milk steaming in the metal bucket below. After the morning sun grew brighter and the fog had almost cleared, I stopped milking for a moment to watch my girls again, who would be waking up soon.
This was my routine, and this was theirs. Groans of protest against the daylight, which promised homework and chores. When Dianita stood up, I could see the rest of the house – the large bed they share, the tiny kitchen with a view of the street. The house was a mess: clothes on the floor, dirty dishes in the sink. What to expect from two girls living alone? I had to move out when I started this job in the campo three years ago. From here, I mail them money so they can live in town and go to school. As milk filled the bucket between my knees, Clara made breakfast and handed Dianita an arepa, who wiped her greasy hands on the bed sheets.
“Stop greasing up the sheets!” Clara said, and threw Dianita’s half-eaten arepa in the garbage. Although I am always astonished at the incessant push of their growing bones, I am even more surprised when I find newly sprouted attitudes branching out of their personalities like limbs threatening to tip them over.
After a wistful glance at the garbage, Dianita washed her hands. No protest, not even an impulse to say, “Hey!” She’d learned over the years that her older sister would always yell louder, push harder, knock her down if ever she were to fight back, but her submission to Clara’s short fuse worried me. I kept watching them get ready for school, wanting to see what thorn had pierced through them both. I am their mother. I deserve to know.
The cow kicked at the dirt. There was no more milk left to squeeze. I spanked the next cow into her stall, and by the time I looked again at my daughters, they’d already run off to school. Clara had left Dianita many paces behind, not wanting to be seen with an embarrassment—or a burden—of a sister wearing pigtails.
I’ve felt that abandonment too, Dianita. I felt it not so long ago when your sister shut me out entirely.
Dianita
Our mayor installed PA speakers all around Herrera years before I was born, I was told, the way old people always say that sort of thing to make you feel young and stupid. But no matter how people tried to make me feel, I understood the world just fine. My whole life, the mayor’s voice on the PA speakers was like God. Each morning, he’d tell us about the day’s events to come. Go to the plaza at 8 pm for a lechona roast! Or, Get your carrots in the mercado today! Or, Bingo tonight outside the Iglesia del santísimo dios. If I was in a bad mood, I wanted him to shut up about those bingo nights, which we already knew would happen every Thursday night. But most of the time, I liked the way his voice floated in through the clay walls of the house I share with Clara, a voice like a friend or a pet that fills an empty space you forgot was there.
But two weeks ago, the mayor’s voice was replaced by a stranger’s hiss. That day, Clara and I were doing homework after school with Gwen, her friend with hair so blonde it hurts to look at in the sunlight. I liked Gwen because she was nice to me when Clara wasn’t. She braided my hair when Clara was grumpy and overwhelmed with the problems she seemed to be facing in her brain, probably thinking about the dishes in the sink, the cooking and cleaning to be done, the homework, or the state of the world. Now, our papers were scattered all over the floor, a delicious sight to trample over. But I contained the urge. She would have killed me, and I didn’t want to die yet because it was almost nightfall, our favorite time of day, the time of day when we go looking for spiderwebs.
Sometimes, when I’d wait for Clara and Gwen to run into the hills for our webs, I understood why time in this town moved so slowly. The mayor’s announcements, predictable as always, caused the people living here to long for some excitement, all of us forcing time itself into a slow stupor of our collective anticipation for the future. I flicked a pencil at Clara, even though she couldn’t force the sun to go down on her own.
“Do your homework, or leave!” she said.
“As you wish,” I said, so I went outside, which would be more interesting than watching them do math anyway. Still, my chest felt tight when I took one last glance inside and she did not look up from her work to say goodbye, be good, be safe.
At any minute of any day, I could walk outside and find all the same people in the same places they’d always been: the drugstore lady on the corner tuned in to some radio talk show, the arepa man in the plaza who always chanted the words arepa arepa arepa a million times, as though repeating those words could stir in someone a sudden pang of hunger. Even the dogs seemed always to gather on the same street corners to bask in the sun.
I sat on a bench in the plaza, watching the vallenato man perform on the church steps. He always smiled shamelessly when he sang about cheesy romance stories, as if he had lived that love himself. His smile, his song, were proof of his truth. His song made me swoon, like he was singing about some faraway destination I could not picture, but could feel: breezy, glamorous, hard to find. My heart was stuck on another planet for the rest of the afternoon. I even bought an arepa from the arepa man, who usually annoyed me with his chant. But as I took the steaming mouthful in my hands, he winked and thanked me, saying, “A la orden, señorita,” like he’d made this meal especially for me. While I ate, I kicked at some pigeons, watched them fly away. I pet some dogs curled on the sidewalk that were probably covered in fleas, as Clara always said, but I laughed when they blinked and sneezed, revealing their missing teeth.
As soon as the sun began to set, I ran home. Even if Clara was mean during the day, she’d be unable to resist the temptation to go into the hills at night to gather spiderwebs. The webs are sticky and glow at night like something forbidden, and we make things beautiful out of them. We discovered the spiderwebs last year when Gwen cut her shin on a branch. I didn’t know how to help, so I panicked and covered her bloody leg with webs, and although she shooed me off, she came running back the next day: the cut was gone, no trace of a scratch. We discovered that when we put them on our dry skin, we became moisturized, and when we wove them between our fingers, we became artists, our drawings more elaborate and beautiful than any of the things we thought existed in our brains. When I put webs in my hair, my hair grows thicker, shinier, even shinier than Gwen’s, which always swayed hypnotically when she’d walk ahead of me on our hikes up those steep hills to go searching for more.
When I arrived, Clara was lying on the bed reading from a magazine. Our house was clean, and Gwen was gone. In my head I promised to help next time, even though she never asked. I sat next to Clara and tried reading over her shoulder. She didn’t tell me to stop bothering her. I inched closer.
“Can we go now?” I asked into her neck.
“Fine,” she said, closing the magazine.
Clara is my favorite person in the world. As she put her sneakers on, my heart returned from its faraway planet. I felt I could hug her then, tell her about the vallenato singer’s song, and the dogs with missing teeth, forgive her before she could even say, I’m sorry I was mean. I could almost hear those words as her face broke into a smile that she could not reign in. That was enough for me. We put on our sweaters. But before we could open the door, the PA speakers invaded our home with its loud static.
It was not the mayor telling us that tomorrow there would be another bingo night at the church. Instead, it was the voice of a man who yelled into the microphone as if he had no idea how to use the PA. I could barely understand him, he was talking so fast. Right away, I could tell that he didn’t know who he was talking to, but he was pretending that he did. He called people to report themselves to the mayor’s office, Roberto Jimenez, Jaime Garcia, Mauricio Ortiz, Enrique Piemonte… And then, slowly and clearly, he said to the rest of us: No one will be allowed out of their homes past nightfall.
Her Mother
I used to think Clara shut me out because she knew I could see her, but I have never told either of them that the moment they were old enough to walk out of my sight, a new sight came into view just above their bouncing little heads. I didn’t watch them all the time, and I knew when to turn away, but sometimes I’d think I’d miss something, even if it was just a parrot in a tree that Clara stopped to stare at for minutes at a time on her walk home, or the surprise of lying in bed one second and dancing to reggaeton the next. And so I’d return, again and again, to my girls, the vibrancy of their lives, the messiness of it, to make my life in the field just a little more bearable.
But the world became stranger than it already was from the vantage of a 12-year-old when the guerrilla unit took over. I thought my girls would know better than to leave that night – their teachers had taught them about the FARC. But when they did, I knew I could never look away.
Dianita
We ignored the voice’s command and went out to the hills anyway. It was more fun this time because we thought that someone might see us, and what would happen then? We ran, the nerves burning away. At one intersection, Clara stopped us, pointing ahead. One block down was a soldier, booted and armed. At first, I thought he was from the government’s military—groups of them came sometimes to eat lechona on the pink plastic chairs beneath the shade of the giant trees in the plaza. But I knew it wasn’t them because they never came out at night like this, as though to keep watch over us. Not as protectors, but as guards.
She motioned us back the way we came and we took another street that was completely clear. This was the backway to the hills. We shooed aside some chickens and kept going, running over the bridge where the river loud beneath us shielded our laughter, until we made it to the clay path that led up to the mouth of the ravine.
Spiderwebs lived here. In the darkness so thick it could coat us like black paint, we stood motionless, waiting for our eyes to adjust. In this forest, I’d seen spiders as big as my hand, so the webs were often quite huge, but they were so thin and fragile that if we weren’t careful we’d walk straight into one, or else we’d think we’d see one, but grab at nothing but leaves. When the darkness thinned, we gathered twigs from the ground and poked the webs in the middle, twisting, and gathered them in a plastic cup to store for later to treat our scrapes and thicken our hair.
Before heading home, we’d always stand at the edge of the ravine. Here we’d scream our most ridiculous dreams into its echoing hole so that we could hear them bounce back as voices not as loud as our own, but as faint evidence that anything we said could come true.
“I want to be a jaguar,” I shouted, “or a movie star!”
“I want to start a rock band!” Gwen said.
But instead of the brave or funny things Clara used to say, like, I want to save our rainforests! or, I want to tickle a baby monkey! she shouted: “I want to marry Santiago!”
And it felt like a betrayal.
Her Mother
I’ve remained locked out of Clara’s view since I last visited the girls a month ago. The foreman, Miguel, whose schedule was his own, whose favors were dictated by convenience, had finally given me a ride into town. The girls and I hiked the hills, and after, we ate lunch in the plaza. Clara had brought containers of lentil soup, and I bought us all some arepas from the man who sells them. Dianita talked endlessly about school, about the spiders on the walls in the house that she caught with her bare hands. I’d seen her live out most of these stories, but it fascinated me to hear her describe them, because even though I could see them happen from afar I could not know how she experienced them in her mind. In Dianita’s world, sitting in a chair could mean she was inventing a theme park for beetles, and I’d never know it staring at her from above.
But Clara, who seemed intent on saying as little as possible, made no effort to answer my questions about school or her friends. She was a quiet person, even as a little girl. It seemed to me that beneath the layers of her silence she was always contemplating the problems of the world, calculating her way towards a solution, only to find that the solution was impossible. And so she’d say nothing, swallowing the disappointment for the rest of us who still dared to hope for better days.
But this time, her silence was not a contemplative act; it was teenage brooding. I couldn’t stand it, not on my visiting day. I had been alone for a month, staring the cows in the eyes. Those slick black surfaces were all I could use to remember the feel of companionship. I snatched the arepa out of her hand just to get her to look at me.
“Clara, your thoughts can’t be so special that you can’t tell them to your mother,” I said.
“She’s probably thinking about her boyfriend,” Dianita said, chewing loudly.
Clara shot her a mean look. Then she looked at me. My static life among the cows had muted the reality of my daughter’s moods for so long that I’d forgotten what it felt like to be on the receiving end of her anger. Her face looked older, crueler. Maybe I’d looked away long enough to miss something important in the narrative of her life, a series of moments she would not reconstruct with words. I would never understand her, she meant to say. Pinned down for a moment by her horrible gaze, I was breathless, because maybe she was right.
I ate her arepa in a few short breaths. The vallenato singer filled the quiet between us with his accordion and that high-pitched yell of a voice. We walked home in silence. The clock on the wall said I was almost out of time, Miguel would come soon, and I could not leave without Clara giving me something of hers for me to know.
“What’s your boyfriend’s name? Is he nice?”
I’m only 33, not so old that I can’t remember being her age. I’d seen her talking to boys, but whenever she did, I’d restrain myself from watching for more than a few minutes each time, only to find myself suddenly on the back of a boy’s motorcycle, speeding through forested roads. I wanted her to tell me how it felt for her. I wanted her to smile in excitement and say something like, I feel so free.
Clara unwrapped three Chiclets and stuffed them into her mouth, as if to say, You’re leaving again, so I don’t have to tell you anything.
Miguel honked his horn outside.
Dianita gave me a hug. Then I reached for Clara. After a moment, she submitted, softening at my touch. I began to feel the shape of her sadness, not about the state of the world, but about her own life. And I could feel for the first time the weight of an adult’s responsibility in her teenager’s body.
Thank you, I should have said, but she pulled away before I could.
The ride back was quiet. Miguel was a young man, not much older than me, but instead of exuding the youthful energy I could see coiled up in his muscled arms, it seemed like he’d lost interest in the world, and without interest in the world you have nothing to say to anyone living in it. He seemed content to live in isolation in his house in his field of his own. We kept the windows open, and I listened to the sounds of the town fade as we drove away from the parties blasting rancheras, the pizza shop that always played heavy metal, shouts of laughter disembodied in the air, the way sound travels like water splashing you unexpectedly, then drips away. And then all I could hear were the chirping of those wretched cicadas, the cucarrones. The smell of cow manure made me nauseous. Miguel dropped me off at my little house in the field of cows and drove away, leaving me alone in my miserable island of nowhere.
I lay down on my bed. I closed my eyes, then opened them.
Dianita was trying to brush her teeth and comb her hair at the same time in front of the bathroom mirror. But where was Clara?
No, this couldn’t be right. I tried to imagine Clara back into my vision, willing myself to miss her even more than I did, but soon it became clear that it was impossible. She’d closed me off. Looking for her was like groping in the dark: touching the furniture in your home draped over with cloth, hoping that you will find the curves and corners of something familiar.
This is life: you become a mother before you can even care for yourself, and then the father of your children leaves you, and all that’s left are your children, who will someday writhe and teem with desire, battle with unfamiliar thoughts, only to give way to them, and disappear.
Dianita
I put the spiderwebs in my hair as soon as we got home. They felt like the tickle of a ghost. No string ever has an end in sight.
I slid into bed beside Clara and closed my eyes, but I couldn’t sleep. Clara hadn’t even put the strings in her hair, which was dull and frayed at the ends. I turned on my side, facing away from her, and tried and tried to fall asleep, but it was impossible. In the middle of the night, between half-sleep and dream, I heard an explosion. The sound came from not so far away. I covered my head with my pillow, but that only muffled the second explosion, and the third, or else I imagined them in my fear that more would come. Nighttime, my favorite time of day, suddenly felt like a time not meant for me, as if I were eavesdropping on conversations I didn’t want to listen to. I must have fallen asleep eventually, because in the morning, Clara woke me up by setting the ringing alarm clock on top of my chest.
School again, normal life. Clara was making breakfast. Taken in by the familiar smell of grease, I began to think that nothing had exploded after all, and it had been Clara’s weight beside me that kept me tossing all night. I lay in bed a while longer, hoping my silence would prompt her to ask me, as she did most mornings, How did you sleep? But after listening to the pan sizzle for a long time, I finally said: “The ravine is not a place where you can say you want to marry some boy.” There, I said it. Clara looked up from the stove, her face searching me like a flashlight.
The truth is I was scared. I had never considered the possibility of Clara leaving me one day. I knew I was being stupid. The future was so far away.
“Fine, I’ll say something else next time,” she said, and scooped eggs onto a plate. This was not a great answer, but at least there would be a next time.
Her Mother
What Clara doesn’t understand is I cannot go back to town so easily. The farm does not get on without me. Every day, I get up before sunrise, and I do what the world requires of me. That’s what everyone does in Herrera: we endure life. And so to endure the stench of fresh milk, I’d watch Dianita live. I’d watch her scratch the street dogs and chat with the woman from the drugstore, gaze out the window during math class and doodle on her forearm. And whenever Clara was near, I’d hear her tell Dianita to focus on her homework, or to let her read in peace, as though she were always waiting to be released of her responsibilities, and to leave, maybe, with her boyfriend, whose memory even from Dianita’s vantage I could see made Clara smile in secret moments – while cooking, looking down at her nails, combing her hair in the mirror. Eventually, I would look away. I had to return to my world, to my cows, my quotas, but when I’d look back, Clara would look older, and her smile would become harder for Dianita to provoke into being, and she was growing farther away from Dianita, too, which was strange and new for us both.
Dianita
We didn’t go back to the ravine. The teacher said a guerrilla unit was in charge of our town for a little while, but they’d go away soon. The following day, I saw some of them hanging around the plaza holding rifles and making whooping noises at women, who walked by quickly with their heads turned down. The day after, I saw a single soldier laughing alone on a street corner, looking up at the sky. Three other men were talking to the drugstore lady, leaning over the counter, and behind it, the lady looked like she just wanted to get back to her radio program.
The next day, they were all gone.
After three more days, I thought maybe they’d left for good. Not even the voice on the PA came on. But they came back not long after. Juan Emilio Varrera, Esteban Reyes, Jaime Mendoza… said the voice again one night, and I groaned.
I was growing sick of those men’s names, lists of them coming in through our walls, names of people I didn’t know. One night, I recognized the name of the math teacher from school, and one was the father of a boy in my class. The older brother of a girl from school, Lorena, was called that week too, and I had not seen her or her family ever since. On our walk home, Clara and I looked inside her house – they were gone, but their furniture was still there, among a mess of clothes on the floor and open closets and drawers.
Clara decided it was best not to linger too long outside anymore, even before curfew. The FARC were not doing a good job with our town. I wondered if she just wanted to avoid seeing all the trash that had started appearing on the sidewalks now that the garbage cans on the street corners were rarely emptied. Maybe milk cartons and potato chip wrappers blocking the gutters were too offensive for her secretly sensitive soul to bear. When I asked, she said we couldn’t stay out because the guerrilleros on every street corner would look at us. That’s how she put it: They’ll look at us.
But yesterday as we walked home, I looked at one of them myself. I’d seen him before. He was the arepa man.
Her Mother
It’s been a month since I’ve seen my girls, and two weeks since the guerrilleros first began occupying the streets, and I am still here, waiting for Miguel to offer to give me a ride to town. Today I milked another cow while I watched Dianita eating lunch at school. The lunch room was almost empty now. In the past two weeks some families had started fleeing to Bogotá where they could get lost in a metropolis. Had we missed our chance to do the same? Just as Dianita took a bite of her cookie, my own stomach churned with hunger, the sun reflected in the metal bucket bright in my face, and the screams of children laughing near Dianita’s table suddenly mixed with the pouring wet sounds of fresh milk, offensive and formless, and my view of the scene became confused. A long-haired woman appeared in the cafeteria. She had a face like a howl. She was saying something. She was calling out for her boy, Ignacio, Ignacio, ¿dónde estás? ¡Ven que nos tenemos que ir!
I began to think that my connection with Dianita was fading, or had grown flawed. Or else I was confusing my nightmares with hers. Before learning whether I was right, or if the woman had found her son, I heard a truck pull in through the mud behind me. I turned my attention back to the field, the dirt on my hands, and the sight of Miguel in his boots stepping out of his truck.
Dianita
When we got home from school yesterday, there was nothing to do but homework. An unexciting way to live. Clara finished quickly and started making pasta. Although we had been shut inside for days and days, the smell of starch and sauce made me imagine our routine could have been something close to normal.
Then the voice started speaking again. Juan Emilio Reyes, Jaime Mendoza… Juan José Beltrán, Armando Dávila…
By the time Clara and I sat down to eat, I didn’t feel hungry. I missed the mayor, and the possibility of the lechona roasts, the bingo for old people by the church, the arepa man singing to me instead of standing on the street with a gun. Where was that old feeling? That feeling of time drawing out so deliciously in this town, with the promise of something exciting to look forward to. It was somewhere just out of reach, I knew. So I did what I could: After dinner, I put spiderwebs on my fingers, and I drew myself as a movie star with a pet jaguar. I drew my mother dancing on a tropical island. I drew Clara building an airplane. But when I looked up at the real Clara, she was changing into her tightest jeans and putting on eyeliner, which made her look like a raccoon. Someone knocked on the door, and Clara ran to open it.
“Thanks, Dianita,” she said, throwing me a wink. She was always doing that, like she was letting me in on a secret. I looked into her eyes, which were covered in black eyeliner too, and for a moment I thought I could hear the secret like the voice coming in through the PA – but before I could make out the words, she spoke again.
“Ready?” Gwen said. But now she wasn’t looking at me.
Clara grabbed her bag and walked to the door. “Don’t play with the oven and don’t break anything,” she said.
“What? Where are you going?” I asked, but they were already closing the door.
I waited for them to come home. I watched the walls grow darker. The empty space my sister left behind encased me, froze me inside. And as I sat there, I realized that this was it, this was the outcome of her screaming that stupid dream into the ravine a month ago.
Her Mother
When it’s been days or weeks since I’ve seen Miguel, I sometimes find myself talking to the cows. I whisper into their big faces the details I learn about the world through Dianita, her fascination with spiderwebs, with the bats that come flying at sunset, as if her fascination were my own. Sometimes I forget that it’s not. When I find myself like that, looking the cows in the eyes, black like slick stones, I become lost between two worlds, trying to hold onto both.
How to live like this? Sometimes I shut off my vision and try to see this life in the narrow stretch of fields not as a prison, but an oasis of my own. For hours at a time I must return to myself, pull my hands away from the cows. And when my loneliness bubbles in my chest and makes me breathless, I press my hands onto my own body, feel the soft push of fat around my belly, my hips, my breasts. Sometimes I remember that it’s a shame that I lie alone in my bed each night. It is a shame that the only man who visits is a man I would never touch. But with his ritual of arriving unannounced and leaving suddenly, he often appears again in my dreams, not as a dull and thoughtless man, but as a man with warm lips pressing against my cheek.
And now here he is, less dream than real, walking towards me. My chest formed a sharp cavity. Anything he said would fall inside. I needed his help, but Miguel was not one to offer it up for free. I met him at the gate, led him to the house, and I warmed up some food, because he would not deliver my wages without at least a meal to thank him for his hand delivery.
While the potatoes rolled around in hot water, anything could be happening back in town.
“So,” he said. “How are things going here?”
He meant the milk, so I told him things were going fine.
“Did we reach our quota?”
I told him we did. I thought I could hear the screaming woman as if she were in my bedroom next door, muffled by plaster. I plated our food and set it down before us at the table. I leaned into the wood, pressed my chest close to the plate, glanced at him and smiled, bringing him into my warmth, hoping he might thaw.
“How is your wife?” I asked, lamely.
“She’s doing fine,” he said. I stood up and hoped he would notice the curve of my hips in these jeans while I took his plate away and washed it.
“Won’t she need anything from town today?”
“We have what we need.”
“I see.”
I excused myself to the bathroom, and when I came back, my hair had been let out of its braid, my top button was undone, and I sat beside him at the table while he drank his coffee. The cavity in my chest lay open. I felt stupid for attempting seduction, but I didn’t care, and I had nothing else to offer. He was young enough to be asked to join the guerrilla, to be pestered by them even if he said no.
“Take me,” I said, all pretense gone.
He looked at me with his dark rimmed eyes like the cows’, which glanced instinctively to my chest. For a moment, I thought he would cave. For a moment, I thought he would be brave, that would believe in his own goodness, even if the dream of sex is what got him there.
“I have to work. Maybe next week,” he said, draining his mug. He stood up to leave.
“Please. My girls. Our town has become dangerous for them.”
“Too risky,” he said. “I’m sorry. Take care,” he said, and left.
Dianita
By the time Clara got home, it was late and she seemed too tired to tell me what they had been doing for so many hours. “Nothing,” she said when I asked. “Why aren’t you asleep?”
Once we crawled into bed, I took out the last of the spiderwebs. I showered the strings on her hair, trying to lure her back to me. But she wiped them off with a quick flick of a hand and turned off the bedside lamp. In the darkness, she finally spoke.
“They’re not magic, Dianita,” she said in an irritable croak. “Stop destroying the homes of spiders.” Then she turned her back to me and pulled in all the covers for herself.
Her Mother
After Miguel left, I looked back into Dianita’s world. What had I missed? Where was Clara? While Dianita glanced around the room, at the dark walls, the shapes of furniture, the pasta dish on the counter, I did the same. In my house and in hers, we were both unmoving shadows in the dark.
Finally, Clara came home, and I could breathe. It was late, and I would have to rise in only a couple hours to tend to the cows, so I went to sleep.
Not long after, however, my eyes slid open. Dianita was moving. She was only a shape in the dark, but I could hear her get up and pad her way to the door. Was she sleepwalking? In the languor of her limbs on the cobbled streets I could see her refusal to abide by the stiff rules of this world. She slunk in the shadows, approaching the outskirts of town. As if nobody could think to care where she was going, Dianita walked out of town with ease. I wanted her to keep going. I wanted to tell her she should never stop. But in the silence of my bedroom, I said aloud, “No!” thinking of landmines, the explosions in the hills that had begun to wake me up at night. Taking the clay path we always took together, she walked along the ravine until she reached a mossy boulder. She climbed onto it and sat perfectly still. Nothing exploded around her. She reached her arms out, cupping something in her hands, but in the dark I couldn’t see what, if anything, had landed in them.
Dianita
This morning, we went to school, and after, we walked straight home. As usual, we did our homework until it was time to make dinner. Fat red beans boiled on the stove. We ate in silence. Clara still hadn’t told me what she’d done last night, but she seemed pleased with herself, humming a tune I didn’t recognize. I was trying to ignore her, make her feel my bad mood herself, but she just set the food in front of me without noticing that I didn’t say thank you. The voice started talking. I was barely paying attention to the names anymore, but then I looked up at Clara, because I noticed something was different.
Inez Suarez, Luz María Garcia, Anita López, the voice said, coming in through the open window. The names of her friends. We both put our forks down.
Clara Montoya, he said.
We looked at each other then, with a look of two people who have suddenly been touched by a force that has always pressed itself onto your life, like gravity or the shine of spiderwebs in the mountains, but does not touch you until you fall, or until you wake up with the hair of women on magazine covers, transformed. The voice spoke to Clara now, and she would have to respond.
At 7:45, Clara braided her hair, which gleamed a shinier brown than usual. I knew it was because of the spiderwebs I’d showered onto her, but she’d never admit it now.
“Why are they calling you?” I asked.
“No idea,” she said. It didn’t sound like she was lying, but I could almost see her thoughts pushing her yellow eyes from side to side. You would think that knowing someone your whole life would be enough to help you know what they are thinking.
“Wait for me to get back,” she said in a serious voice.
Her Mother
Today, I calmed myself by milking the cows. Dianita had made it home, and the morning light brought me some comfort. The girls would keep hiding at home and be safe. By the time the sun had lowered itself against the hills, and the cows had all forgotten the touch of my hands as they grazed solemnly in the golden light. I checked on Dianita then. She was sitting at the dinner table with Clara, and everything was fine. But then I heard him list off the names of girls. I heard Clara’s name.
Frozen in the field, I watched her get ready and leave the house through Dianita, who stood at the window, staring now at an empty street.
Dianita
I watched her walk down the street from the kitchen window. She would go to the mayor’s office like all those men who ended up returning as guerrilleros patrolling the streets, transformed into people who make other people uncomfortable and scared. She, too, would come back transformed and strange, like she had last night. What kind of things happen in the dark of night that change a person so fully that they join a world much sadder and more terrible than the one they left? I needed to know. I needed to stop it. I would not let my sister disappear from me for good. I put on my shoes, tied my hair in a ponytail, and put on one of Clara’s jean jackets. All it took was a turn of the doorknob, and I was outside.
Her Mother
Now she hides in the dark, crouched behind the garbage bins across the street from the mayor’s office where Clara and the twenty other teenage girls are gathered at the entrance. The lights in the surrounding buildings have been turned off, but the moon is almost full, and Dianita will be seen. The soldiers see everything, even girls. Dianita is 12 years old, and her shadow even in the moonlight would be hard to pass over unnoticed. I’m 15 kilometers away, and even from way out here I can see Dianita, because she is still a child, and I am her mother.
I can see her devilish grin, excited as she is to be let in on a secret. Her brown eyes peek from behind the metal bins, her fingers pinch her nose from the stench, her leg thumps with impatience. Listen, I want to tell her, go home. Do not follow your sister and the other girls into the guerrilla headquarters, which was once the mayor’s office, who is probably dead and rotting out of sight beneath some jacaranda trees.
Now the door to the mayor’s office has opened. The girls are filing into the building, and Dianita leaps out from behind the garbage bins, pretending to have just arrived with the rest of the girls, and I know I need to get to Herrera.
I will run the 15 kilometers. I am putting on my boots and searching for my jacket. I grab my saved money and slide it into my pocket. The cows are scattered across the field, lying asleep in the grass, and I try not to step on their tails as I make my way to the dirt road that I might never return to. Although there are no lights coming from the town, I can sense that it’s over there, over there, and somehow I will get there.
Dianita
The door to the mayor’s office opens. I rush over to the group of girls gathered at the entrance. We are twenty or so girls walking into a room filled with plastic chairs, all of us in jeans, with chipped nail polish and messy ponytails. I am one of them. There are windows along one side of the room, and in the darkness I see little yellow streetlights like they’re part of a whole other world. Behind us, the soldiers stand along the wall. Some are so young, around Clara’s age, and others are older, like the arepa man and some of the fathers from school. They are almost unrecognizable in their green army suits.
I sit near the back where my sister won’t see me, and though no one is talking, I hear their nervous energy like a hum of voices. A man stands near the front of the room.
“Niñas,” the man says once we’ve gone quiet. “We have called you tonight to discuss a serious matter. One that concerns all of you.” I can’t see him behind all those heads of girls, swirls of frizz in the fluorescent light, but the PA voice sounds clearer than ever, the way spiderwebs become easier to see when your eyes adjust to the darkness that surrounds them.
“I must say, we are disappointed in each of you. Surely you must know what you have done.”
Around the room falls the hush of guilt over our unspoken actions. I wonder, What could that man know about us? Everyone around me is thinking, I can feel their thoughts, yes, their real thoughts, which are too loud to contain anymore. I am filled, suddenly, with their voices:
That time I cheated in math, or when I lost my virginity, or when I made my best friend cry.
Once, I used my mother’s money to buy Aguardiente instead of eggs.
While I shower, I sometimes think about what it would be like to kiss another girl.
Does hating my face count? Does popping my zits? Does stealing gum from the store?
I visited my boyfriend late at night, slept with him in an empty garage.
I have dreamed about my future, somewhere far away from here, please, somewhere glamorous.
Her Mother
In the dark so dark I can barely see the glimmer of the puddles, Dianita’s world is more visible than my own. I run anyway. The voice from the PA speaks again:
“We know each of your names,” the leader says. “Gwen Martinez,” he says, motioning for her to stand. She stands, and I can see her long blonde hair from Dianita’s vantage in the back of the room. “Clara Montoya,” he says, and Clara stands somewhere near the front of the crowd. The rest of the girls are called and they rise as though a spell has been cast upon them, and Dianita, though she remains uncalled, rises with them.
The last day I could see the world from Clara’s view, the parrots cried in the trees around us while we took the clay trail up the side of the ravine. We watched them together until she moved on, acting bored, not wanting to share her love of these creatures with me. And so we walked on, toward the top, where we’d be able to see the mountains rise like the spines of great mammals with heads and legs just out of sight beneath the earth: this is what I used to think when I was Clara’s age, before I had her. At the top, we’d see the view of this place, the endless mountain range that would eventually carve its way all the way down the entire continent, and I’d tell her how I saw the world, the beauty of it, the magic of it. I’d show her the capacity of my mind, and I’d show her the capacity of hers.
Just ahead of us, three men appeared on the path. With their jeans covered in dirt, they had the look of campesinos coming back to Herrera after working the hillside coffee fields. They were walking towards us, but the path was so narrow we would run into them if someone didn’t move to one side. Still, the three men walked side-by-side with no intention of making way for us. Beside me, I felt Clara getting nervous. She began to inch toward the ravine instead of the wall of clay and roots where it was safer to let them pass. When the men had come within a few meters of us, Clara inched closer to the edge of the path where the gaping space of the ravine opened itself to its wild ferns and puddles of brown water. Clara panicked and jumped into the ravine.
The men passed us and disappeared behind a bend.
The ravine was shallower than I thought. Clara climbed her way back up, and wiped the dirt off her jeans.
“Clara, what’s the matter with you?” I yelled. I had not raised my girls to be skittish. Dianita looked confused. Why was her sister so afraid? They were just people going for a walk. I searched Clara’s face for an answer, but she looked away, too embarrassed to explain. “You’re not using your head,” I said.
The rest of the day, she ignored me, and the rest of the day, I resented her for it. But now I know what I should have said instead: Who has inflicted that fear on you? Who has broken your trust in the world?
I think Dianita can sense that same threat that Clara had sensed on the hike. The threat of strange men, of what it means to be looked at for a little too long. Now the threat is real, not imagined. Dianita would not have stood up if she didn’t understand what it meant to be singled out by a group of men.
Dianita
Hearing their thoughts, I feel left out. These are not things I have ever done. But I am here, aren’t I? Maybe one day I will do everything the other girls have done, and I will be caught for it. But I don’t want to feel ashamed as they do — I can hear their hearts break, the loud drop of the stomach with nowhere to crash. Couldn’t the vallenato singer sing to us now, take us away to his planet of love, where it could feel so safe and free to do as we please?
The man doesn’t call my name, but I stand anyway. Finally, I can see the voice from the PA, the guerrilla troop commander, who looks like a normal man, short with a wide chest and a shadow of a beard.
“You are here because each of you has a boyfriend in the military,”
And like a song arising from a distant stereo, I can hear the girls thinking about their boyfriends, Santiago, Carlitos, Juan Pablo, Daniel, Fernando, José, dreaming of me, missing me, planning how he will visit me. I swoon, momentarily, with jealousy, until I hear the man speak again:
“After all they have done to ruin this country, why should they receive pleasure from teenage sluts?”
The girls around me gasp and stand still. He circles the room, looking at each girl as he passes by us, until he stops and looks me in the eye.
His are dark brown, almost blue, like a second pair of eyes live behind his irises. If only I could shut my eyes, if only I could sleep. When I sleep, I can feel myself walk unhindered by anyone, and I take myself to places I most want to be, like the hills. From there I can see my home from far away. Seeing things from far away is often easier on the eye than up close, like this man’s wrinkles on his forehead, his eyebrows that crinkle inward. On the hillside, I sit on a boulder and cup the entire town in my outstretched hands, its tiny lights the size of the glow-in-the-dark inchworms that crawl on the leaves, my arms, my face. It is so much easier to hold the entirety of my world when it’s small and glistening and beautiful.
He knows that I snuck in here. One look at the undeveloped lumps of me and anyone would know. I need him to say, Leave, little girl, because that’s what I am, and I don’t want to be anything else – not yet. He finally moves away, and looks at the next girl, and the next. All of us are held by his accusation for an instant. But when he’s gone, I can move my arms again, and I know he holds nothing, just air.
Her Mother
I can feel our distance closing, the world coming to some sort of organized space between us. Now I am in the plaza, turning a corner, and the mayor’s office is just there. My face is against the glass. I look inside and see the men step toward the group of you.
One of the men sees me from across the room. He is the vallenato singer. He looks afraid, like he regrets joining all those men. The vallenato singer opens his mouth preparing to speak, but he closes it again, his lips forming a line across his face that means he will tell no one I’m out here.
There you are, Clara, near the front. Turn this way. If you see me, know that tomorrow I’ll take you both to Bogotá by bus, to a place filled with people and thousands of brick buildings, a place where we are not woken up by landmines but by honking cars. When you’re there, you can live the way you want to. There are solutions, Clara, to the world’s problems, even your own. But I can help you find them, if you let me. All you need to do is look away from those men for just a moment. Look at the window and see me, trying for you.
Dianita
The man from the PA speaks again: “You are never to see those boys again. You must end all contact with them.” The man motions for the men on the edge of the room to step toward us, as if to say, Look at what we could do to you. Look at how we have you so easily surrounded.
“We will let you go, but one of you will make amends for the whole.”
The leader of the group breaks the rank and reaches toward the crowd of us, and he grabs Gwen by the arm. We get angry because she is ours. Let go of her, the girls’ voices say loud in my head. Gwen pulls herself away, but he wrenches her back and pulls her by the ponytail. She is making a sound that I’ve never heard before, like two sounds fighting each other, one trying to get out, one trying to contain the other. My scalp hurts just looking at Gwen, but look how strong she is against his pull. Those men don’t know spiderwebs make our hair grow strong and thick. It is hair that cannot be ripped out.
I search for Clara’s eyes, but she is distracted by something out the window, looking away from Gwen and the rest of us. From behind so many tall girls, I can’t see what she’s staring at. She is staring and thinking, Mamá, get us out, as though wishing would be enough to make the glass break, or for our mother to appear. But sometimes wishing is enough, Clara! Look at how I can hear you now, after wishing for so long.
I don’t know if Clara ever wishes to hear my thoughts, but if she does, I’d tell her this: I’m growing up, just like you wanted, and I’m learning how the world works. I’ve learned that life never stays the same, people change or go away, like our mom, and they do what they need for the future we wish for to happen. Those men in their army suits were sold on a future, too. But the voice on the PA called the girls in to punish them for wanting the future they dreamed of, because a girl’s dream can be a dangerous thing. Maybe they know what we are capable of – of what we are willing to do for our dreams. And so they want to scare us away from the future we want. They want us to look at Gwen and think, That could be me, that will be me. But these men don’t know what I know. I can hear the sound of our anticipation for tomorrow, which hasn’t changed – no, our will is only growing stronger. Some of us are already thinking, In the morning, we will get on a bus or even walk through the hills full of landmines if we have to. In this crowd of voices, I can hear Clara thinking, Help me, and it’s the first time she’s said it in a long time. Gwen is screaming those words, too, because they are taking her into a room now and closing the door. They are telling the rest of us to leave. They are pushing us out of the office and onto the plaza. But tomorrow, we’ll help Gwen. We’ll find a way to bring her back from this pain. The solutions to our problems are not on another planet, but they’re here, can’t you see, Clara? They’ve always been here, even if they’re hard to see, and we’ll keep finding them. We will sneak out to the hills tomorrow night, and after we gather our spiderwebs for Gwen, for all of us. And just before we crest the hill on our way out of this place that was once our home, I’ll yell into the ravine: My name is Dianita, and my name will never be called.
