Prologue
Merida, Yucatan, 1906
The night in Merida was so hot and humid that all the houses had extinguished their lights, trying to avoid even that much extra heat. Only one house was awake, filled with anxious movements. A beautiful woman writhed on a bed, screaming. She was having a baby, her face reflecting uncontrolled pain as sweat ran down her forehead. But her eyes were paralyzed, fixed on a window, expressionless. A sudden thunderclap broke the night and shocked the woman back to reality, but the empty look soon returned. From her window, it was possible to see lightning, flashes of light like the sun reflecting on machetes. The lightning flashes just made her sadder. They just made her remember.
A few moments later, as the baby screamed her entrance into the world, a dense fog invaded the room, only to retreat as suddenly as it had arrived, hiding under the bed sheets and in the tile cracks, from where it would haunt the room forever.
Shortly after that, the baby found two warm and ready hands to cuddle. The difference of skin color was quite noticeable when the baby found the woman’s breast. And with her nurse’s milk, Amanda found the cinnamon love that would inhabit her body for the rest of her life.
Chapter One: Dziú’s Son
Mexico City, 1985
Chac, the rain god, noticed dry and under-nourished plants struggling to live in the weak soil of the Earth. He decided to burn the land to increase nutrients in the soil. Chac called on all birds to help him. He asked them to save all plant seeds, especially seeds of the corn that was so helpful to men.
The fire started, and all birds did their work picking up the closest seeds they found. One particularly colorful bird with brown eyes searched desperately for cornfields, but the smoke was thick and it was almost impossible to see. At last, the colorful bird found the corn. Without regard for the fire and his own safety, he swooped in to save the seeds. Unfortunately, the bird was disfigured by the fire, and lost his beauty. His eyes were turned to red.
Chac wanted to reward this hero of a bird, so the rest of the birds were told that from this time on, the hero would not need to nest or care for its young. Other birds would be foster parents. This red-eyed bird was called Dziu.
-- Mayan Legend
There are profound events that shape our lives, and there are small moments that change the way we see life. I was about to experience one of those moments, and it would bring me to see how events decades before had shaped my family. A life founded on lies creates a whirlwind of false memories, straining to escape its bottle. When it escapes, will it tear our lives apart, or pass us by, giving us only the gentle touch of an afternoon breeze?
I had moved to Chicago ten years earlier, and since then I had had many happy visits to Mexico. But this time I was flying back to Mexico City to visit my grandmother for the last time. She had been suffering from Alzheimer’s disease for several years, and her health had recently become much worse. She was holding onto life with her last bit of energy, and my family told me that she was often barely conscious.
I left my husband and children behind at O’Hare and boarded a crowded plane full of Mexican-Americans whose faces held the longing look of those ready to set foot once again in their homeland. They were mostly emigrants like me, people who had filled their bags with presents and dressed themselves in their best clothes for their reunions with cherished family. Teenagers proudly wore Chicago Cubs jackets or Bulls t-shirts. A mixture of Spanish and English flowed between the family members.
After a smooth landing, I went through immigration, picked up my bags, cleared customs, and faced an avalanche, both of people and emotions, when the exit doors opened to the airport terminal.
Outside the doors of the customs area was a raucous crowd of hundreds waiting for loved ones. I saw watery eyes of people holding large bouquets of flowers, and a hand-painted banner welcoming someone named Javier. Children tried to sneak past the security guards, who caught them and sent them back to their clustered groups of relatives and friends. A wave of shouts rose every time the doors opened to reveal another passenger. In the midst of the crowd, I focused on a familiar smile, and there was my father with one hand up high, trying to attract my attention. I rushed over to him and, in his embrace, smelled the cologne that made me feel at home.
After hurrying through the terminal to the parking garage, I snatched my father’s car keys from his hands, eager to experience once again the excitement of driving in Mexico City. As had been the case in each of my visits for the past ten years, there was road construction in the area of the airport terminals, but soon enough, we
reached the highway. I drove like a kamikaze. I had my six senses tuned to the road; in Mexico City, you need the extra one. It felt wonderful to drive without worrying about speed limits, police with radar guns, and distracted drivers using cruise control. It was a jungle, but my kind of jungle.
The lanes were so narrow and the cars so close together that I could hardly believe I was navigating them, not to mention doing so at a great speed. As we neared the Las Lomas exit, we hit “the wall,” as my father liked to call that point on the highway where traffic was always backed up, no matter what the hour. Some things never changed. The traffic in Mexico City is like a baby who never grows up, alternating without warning between great joy and great sorrow. One car was using an entrance ramp as an exit, backing up for hundreds of yards, and another was jumping the curb. This is how people drive in Mexico City.
At last, we arrived in the neighborhood where I had grown up. I smiled as we drove down streets that had the same potholes and unpainted speed bumps that I had memorized throughout my life. We drove past the Catholic elementary school I had attended. It surprised me to see that there were now iron bars on the windows. I guessed the nuns were worried that some of their prisoners might escape. A little girl crossing the street with her blue and red uniform took me back to a time when having a skirt a little too short was the worst sin in the world.
We finally drove onto my street. I imagined my various neighbors in their windows greeting me: the staunch religious family with eight children; the little girl who had
lost two fingers when a flowerpot fell and crushed them; the family who hated mine because of a rivalry over a boyfriend; the family from Monterrey who owned
furniture stores; the Spanish sculptor with the two floor-to-ceiling windows in his studio.
The ghosts were waving at me with white silk neckerchiefs, as in a bullring when the crowd wants to save the bull. I could see them clearly, even though they were all off living their own lives.
I arrived at my family’s house and rushed to my grandmother’s room. She was laying quietly on her bed with her eyes closed. Her slim body looked smaller than I remembered, her skin was almost transparent, and her nails looked like they would break with the smallest touch. There was a smile on her face.
I called her name several times but she did not answer. Before the Alzheimer’s disease, she had hearing problems, so I shouted as loudly as I could. She finally opened her eyes. She looked at me and it made me feel the same way as when I looked into the eyes of my children when they were very
young. I saw innocence and happiness. She was waiting for me to do something. She had that impatient look that was telling me, “Come on, do something,
anything.” I shouted a couple of nonsensical words. She looked back at me and repeated exactly the same words that I said, ending them with a broad smile.
I said, “I love you.”
She said, “I love you.”
This was our goodbye, and I knew that I would treasure it for the rest of my life.
I stayed with her for several more hours having a bizarre, repetitive conversation, but she said nothing more that was coherent. She died quietly the next morning, as if she had simply forgotten how to breathe.
The next days were a black cloud to me. My father, my aunt, my two sisters and I went through the endless ceremonies and visits from friends and
loved-ones, but mostly I kept to myself and thought about my grandmother, who had raised me after my mother had died as a complication of my birth. How could I say goodbye to someone so important to me, who had stepped forward and sacrificed so much of her own life to make mine better? The memories I had of my grandmother during those days after her death continue to come back to me, as a random word or smell can trigger a flood of memory and emotion.
At the end of the week, the immediate family was back together in my grandmother’s bedroom to help with the final cleaning. My aunt wanted to keep the room as my grandmother had left it.
Then Mercedes, the oldest of the three sisters, noticed the set of keys on the bedside table.
These keys were special. They were all together in a pouch that my grandmother always kept hidden inside her bra, walking around all day long with them, only putting them down on the nightstand when she was ready to sleep. These were the keys to her closet -- the big closet that held the most important things in the world: chocolates,
forbidden toys and we knew not what more. Dreams?
As children, my sisters and I made many plans and many attempts to steal those keys. We never did it right. We tried sneaking into the room in the middle of the night, only to realize that we had the keys but could not open the closet without making so much noise that we would wake her up.
We even tried once or twice while she was showering. She had a large bathroom, and her habit was to leave the keys on the sink. Unfortunately, the noise of opening the bathroom door made my grandmother scream and we would have to make up stupid explanations for the intrusion.
Now Mercedes asked, “Can we open the closet?” She said it with a sly smile.
We all agreed instantly, and gave the honor to my father, joking that he likely had the most toys in there. The closet was always the place for the toy that had been taken away as punishment.
The closet was about nine feet wide and eight feet high, with doors of solid mahogany. The lock was an old-looking, bronze, tubular relic. The door slid open with a groan to reveal my grandmother’s life.
We took turns emptying out the contents. My aunt first found an envelope with everyone’s school records, those of my father, my aunt, my two sisters and me. We laughed to see my father’s grades because he had always bragged about them, but in fact they were worse than ours were. Looking at the school pictures, we concluded that I had the “beautiful”wide nose of my father, while my middle sister Ivonne had the bulbous nose of my aunt.
“We are going to have their noses when we grow up,” I said, as if we were not already adults with bad noses.
My aunt opened a medium-sized jewelry box. Alongside the jewelry my grandmother always used for special occasions, we found two or three dozen unpaired earrings, mostly gold and silver, plus some cheap pairs from street fairs. I recognized a pearl earring that I used for years when I was a girl.
My grandmother had her favorite dresses hanging on the left side, and while we were looking through them, I remembered her at parties, with her short, bright hair that stood out and brought admiration of its fullness and whiteness.
We went through all her things little by little. She had 25 bottles of Shalimar perfume -- that is the problem with letting people know your favorite fragrance -- and 3 half-empty bottles of Lourdes water. We found an old doll in a box that Mercedes claimed as hers.
We were about to finish when at the back of the closet we found a wooden box about the size of two shoeboxes. It was surprisingly heavy, and when we opened it, we found it filled with silver coins.
“We found the treasure!” We all laughed.
We struggled to lift the heavy box out of the closet. The coins were almost black and in need of cleaning, but we all thanked my grandmother for not disappointing
us.
After sorting everything and disposing of obvious trash, we decided to put the contents back into the closet as they had been. I lifted the heavy box and while I was trying to move it, it slipped from my hands and collided with the back of the closet with a loud bump. Something strange happened. A small section of loose paneling pulled away from the wall, revealing two yellowed papers.
“This is even better than treasure!” Iexclaimed.
I removed the papers very carefully and held them high as if my team had just won the World Cup and I was hoisting the trophy. My family clapped, then began crowding around me to try to see what I had in my hands.
The first page was a photograph of my young grandmother with her sister and two men whom none of us recognized. She looked very happy leaning on a tree
trunk, and she was looking at someone or something that was out-of-frame to her right. Ivonne pointed out that there was the shadow of someone’s hands in that
part of the photo, as if they had just run out of the picture frame at the last moment. On the back of the photograph, there were just two words written in a small print: “Love, Alma.”
The second page looked like an official document in English. I read it, and to my surprise, I found that it was the birth certificate of a baby named Antonio, like my father, but with different middle and last names. The birth date of this child was four months before the day we had always celebrated as my father’s birthday.
We were all in shock. My father grasped the paper and confirmed that my grandmother, Amanda Diaz, was listed as the mother and that the father was unknown. This child had been born in Chicago, and his name was Antonio Villanueva Diaz.
This was the moment that began my days of research. The quest to uncover the mystery of my father’s birth would change our lives. It entranced and humbled us, and the outcome would haunt me. Events of decades earlier affected us as if they had happened yesterday.
To Buy the book Click Here
Merida, Yucatan, 1906
The night in Merida was so hot and humid that all the houses had extinguished their lights, trying to avoid even that much extra heat. Only one house was awake, filled with anxious movements. A beautiful woman writhed on a bed, screaming. She was having a baby, her face reflecting uncontrolled pain as sweat ran down her forehead. But her eyes were paralyzed, fixed on a window, expressionless. A sudden thunderclap broke the night and shocked the woman back to reality, but the empty look soon returned. From her window, it was possible to see lightning, flashes of light like the sun reflecting on machetes. The lightning flashes just made her sadder. They just made her remember.
A few moments later, as the baby screamed her entrance into the world, a dense fog invaded the room, only to retreat as suddenly as it had arrived, hiding under the bed sheets and in the tile cracks, from where it would haunt the room forever.
Shortly after that, the baby found two warm and ready hands to cuddle. The difference of skin color was quite noticeable when the baby found the woman’s breast. And with her nurse’s milk, Amanda found the cinnamon love that would inhabit her body for the rest of her life.
Chapter One: Dziú’s Son
Mexico City, 1985
Chac, the rain god, noticed dry and under-nourished plants struggling to live in the weak soil of the Earth. He decided to burn the land to increase nutrients in the soil. Chac called on all birds to help him. He asked them to save all plant seeds, especially seeds of the corn that was so helpful to men.
The fire started, and all birds did their work picking up the closest seeds they found. One particularly colorful bird with brown eyes searched desperately for cornfields, but the smoke was thick and it was almost impossible to see. At last, the colorful bird found the corn. Without regard for the fire and his own safety, he swooped in to save the seeds. Unfortunately, the bird was disfigured by the fire, and lost his beauty. His eyes were turned to red.
Chac wanted to reward this hero of a bird, so the rest of the birds were told that from this time on, the hero would not need to nest or care for its young. Other birds would be foster parents. This red-eyed bird was called Dziu.
-- Mayan Legend
There are profound events that shape our lives, and there are small moments that change the way we see life. I was about to experience one of those moments, and it would bring me to see how events decades before had shaped my family. A life founded on lies creates a whirlwind of false memories, straining to escape its bottle. When it escapes, will it tear our lives apart, or pass us by, giving us only the gentle touch of an afternoon breeze?
I had moved to Chicago ten years earlier, and since then I had had many happy visits to Mexico. But this time I was flying back to Mexico City to visit my grandmother for the last time. She had been suffering from Alzheimer’s disease for several years, and her health had recently become much worse. She was holding onto life with her last bit of energy, and my family told me that she was often barely conscious.
I left my husband and children behind at O’Hare and boarded a crowded plane full of Mexican-Americans whose faces held the longing look of those ready to set foot once again in their homeland. They were mostly emigrants like me, people who had filled their bags with presents and dressed themselves in their best clothes for their reunions with cherished family. Teenagers proudly wore Chicago Cubs jackets or Bulls t-shirts. A mixture of Spanish and English flowed between the family members.
After a smooth landing, I went through immigration, picked up my bags, cleared customs, and faced an avalanche, both of people and emotions, when the exit doors opened to the airport terminal.
Outside the doors of the customs area was a raucous crowd of hundreds waiting for loved ones. I saw watery eyes of people holding large bouquets of flowers, and a hand-painted banner welcoming someone named Javier. Children tried to sneak past the security guards, who caught them and sent them back to their clustered groups of relatives and friends. A wave of shouts rose every time the doors opened to reveal another passenger. In the midst of the crowd, I focused on a familiar smile, and there was my father with one hand up high, trying to attract my attention. I rushed over to him and, in his embrace, smelled the cologne that made me feel at home.
After hurrying through the terminal to the parking garage, I snatched my father’s car keys from his hands, eager to experience once again the excitement of driving in Mexico City. As had been the case in each of my visits for the past ten years, there was road construction in the area of the airport terminals, but soon enough, we
reached the highway. I drove like a kamikaze. I had my six senses tuned to the road; in Mexico City, you need the extra one. It felt wonderful to drive without worrying about speed limits, police with radar guns, and distracted drivers using cruise control. It was a jungle, but my kind of jungle.
The lanes were so narrow and the cars so close together that I could hardly believe I was navigating them, not to mention doing so at a great speed. As we neared the Las Lomas exit, we hit “the wall,” as my father liked to call that point on the highway where traffic was always backed up, no matter what the hour. Some things never changed. The traffic in Mexico City is like a baby who never grows up, alternating without warning between great joy and great sorrow. One car was using an entrance ramp as an exit, backing up for hundreds of yards, and another was jumping the curb. This is how people drive in Mexico City.
At last, we arrived in the neighborhood where I had grown up. I smiled as we drove down streets that had the same potholes and unpainted speed bumps that I had memorized throughout my life. We drove past the Catholic elementary school I had attended. It surprised me to see that there were now iron bars on the windows. I guessed the nuns were worried that some of their prisoners might escape. A little girl crossing the street with her blue and red uniform took me back to a time when having a skirt a little too short was the worst sin in the world.
We finally drove onto my street. I imagined my various neighbors in their windows greeting me: the staunch religious family with eight children; the little girl who had
lost two fingers when a flowerpot fell and crushed them; the family who hated mine because of a rivalry over a boyfriend; the family from Monterrey who owned
furniture stores; the Spanish sculptor with the two floor-to-ceiling windows in his studio.
The ghosts were waving at me with white silk neckerchiefs, as in a bullring when the crowd wants to save the bull. I could see them clearly, even though they were all off living their own lives.
I arrived at my family’s house and rushed to my grandmother’s room. She was laying quietly on her bed with her eyes closed. Her slim body looked smaller than I remembered, her skin was almost transparent, and her nails looked like they would break with the smallest touch. There was a smile on her face.
I called her name several times but she did not answer. Before the Alzheimer’s disease, she had hearing problems, so I shouted as loudly as I could. She finally opened her eyes. She looked at me and it made me feel the same way as when I looked into the eyes of my children when they were very
young. I saw innocence and happiness. She was waiting for me to do something. She had that impatient look that was telling me, “Come on, do something,
anything.” I shouted a couple of nonsensical words. She looked back at me and repeated exactly the same words that I said, ending them with a broad smile.
I said, “I love you.”
She said, “I love you.”
This was our goodbye, and I knew that I would treasure it for the rest of my life.
I stayed with her for several more hours having a bizarre, repetitive conversation, but she said nothing more that was coherent. She died quietly the next morning, as if she had simply forgotten how to breathe.
The next days were a black cloud to me. My father, my aunt, my two sisters and I went through the endless ceremonies and visits from friends and
loved-ones, but mostly I kept to myself and thought about my grandmother, who had raised me after my mother had died as a complication of my birth. How could I say goodbye to someone so important to me, who had stepped forward and sacrificed so much of her own life to make mine better? The memories I had of my grandmother during those days after her death continue to come back to me, as a random word or smell can trigger a flood of memory and emotion.
At the end of the week, the immediate family was back together in my grandmother’s bedroom to help with the final cleaning. My aunt wanted to keep the room as my grandmother had left it.
Then Mercedes, the oldest of the three sisters, noticed the set of keys on the bedside table.
These keys were special. They were all together in a pouch that my grandmother always kept hidden inside her bra, walking around all day long with them, only putting them down on the nightstand when she was ready to sleep. These were the keys to her closet -- the big closet that held the most important things in the world: chocolates,
forbidden toys and we knew not what more. Dreams?
As children, my sisters and I made many plans and many attempts to steal those keys. We never did it right. We tried sneaking into the room in the middle of the night, only to realize that we had the keys but could not open the closet without making so much noise that we would wake her up.
We even tried once or twice while she was showering. She had a large bathroom, and her habit was to leave the keys on the sink. Unfortunately, the noise of opening the bathroom door made my grandmother scream and we would have to make up stupid explanations for the intrusion.
Now Mercedes asked, “Can we open the closet?” She said it with a sly smile.
We all agreed instantly, and gave the honor to my father, joking that he likely had the most toys in there. The closet was always the place for the toy that had been taken away as punishment.
The closet was about nine feet wide and eight feet high, with doors of solid mahogany. The lock was an old-looking, bronze, tubular relic. The door slid open with a groan to reveal my grandmother’s life.
We took turns emptying out the contents. My aunt first found an envelope with everyone’s school records, those of my father, my aunt, my two sisters and me. We laughed to see my father’s grades because he had always bragged about them, but in fact they were worse than ours were. Looking at the school pictures, we concluded that I had the “beautiful”wide nose of my father, while my middle sister Ivonne had the bulbous nose of my aunt.
“We are going to have their noses when we grow up,” I said, as if we were not already adults with bad noses.
My aunt opened a medium-sized jewelry box. Alongside the jewelry my grandmother always used for special occasions, we found two or three dozen unpaired earrings, mostly gold and silver, plus some cheap pairs from street fairs. I recognized a pearl earring that I used for years when I was a girl.
My grandmother had her favorite dresses hanging on the left side, and while we were looking through them, I remembered her at parties, with her short, bright hair that stood out and brought admiration of its fullness and whiteness.
We went through all her things little by little. She had 25 bottles of Shalimar perfume -- that is the problem with letting people know your favorite fragrance -- and 3 half-empty bottles of Lourdes water. We found an old doll in a box that Mercedes claimed as hers.
We were about to finish when at the back of the closet we found a wooden box about the size of two shoeboxes. It was surprisingly heavy, and when we opened it, we found it filled with silver coins.
“We found the treasure!” We all laughed.
We struggled to lift the heavy box out of the closet. The coins were almost black and in need of cleaning, but we all thanked my grandmother for not disappointing
us.
After sorting everything and disposing of obvious trash, we decided to put the contents back into the closet as they had been. I lifted the heavy box and while I was trying to move it, it slipped from my hands and collided with the back of the closet with a loud bump. Something strange happened. A small section of loose paneling pulled away from the wall, revealing two yellowed papers.
“This is even better than treasure!” Iexclaimed.
I removed the papers very carefully and held them high as if my team had just won the World Cup and I was hoisting the trophy. My family clapped, then began crowding around me to try to see what I had in my hands.
The first page was a photograph of my young grandmother with her sister and two men whom none of us recognized. She looked very happy leaning on a tree
trunk, and she was looking at someone or something that was out-of-frame to her right. Ivonne pointed out that there was the shadow of someone’s hands in that
part of the photo, as if they had just run out of the picture frame at the last moment. On the back of the photograph, there were just two words written in a small print: “Love, Alma.”
The second page looked like an official document in English. I read it, and to my surprise, I found that it was the birth certificate of a baby named Antonio, like my father, but with different middle and last names. The birth date of this child was four months before the day we had always celebrated as my father’s birthday.
We were all in shock. My father grasped the paper and confirmed that my grandmother, Amanda Diaz, was listed as the mother and that the father was unknown. This child had been born in Chicago, and his name was Antonio Villanueva Diaz.
This was the moment that began my days of research. The quest to uncover the mystery of my father’s birth would change our lives. It entranced and humbled us, and the outcome would haunt me. Events of decades earlier affected us as if they had happened yesterday.
To Buy the book Click Here
