Stolen Brides at the Hill of the Waters

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             “So you stole her?” Gil asks, his eyes round.  I lean forward on the bench.

            “Oh, yes,” Don Faustino tells us.  “I stole her.  That’s how we do things here.  You steal the bride, and then you have the contentada with her family, to calm them down and plan the wedding.” 

            “Oooorale, Don,” says Gil, grinning.  “So then what, was the wedding right after?” 

            Don Faustino looks down at his hands, thinking; his left palm is stained red with the dye he extracted earlier from the bodies of female cochineal insects.  Bright rugs are spread at our feet, worked in the intricate Zapotec triangle and zigzag patterns.  

            “Doña!” Gil calls into the cool, dark room where Don Faustino’s wife is working on the wooden loom.  “Come sit with us for a minute!”

            She walks out onto the porch.  She’s tiny—when we shook hands, I noticed that she only came up to my chin—and has a voice as soft as a lullaby, but is so graceful and capable that despite her small size and smooth, unlined face, she doesn’t for a moment appear childlike.  She sits on a wooden chair with her ankles crossed and looks at us expectantly. 

            “The don was telling us how he stole you,” Gil informs her. 

            She laughs, murmurs something to her husband in Zapotec.  “Yes,” she says.  “We were always friends, since primary school.  And then one day we decided that he would steal me.” 

            “But after he stole you: did you have the wedding right away?” 

            “Oh, no.  First you have to have the contentada.  The family has to be contented.  Then the civil ceremony was later.  Three months later.”

            “And the church wedding?”

            “That was…what?”  Doña Ludi looks at her husband.  “Five, six years later.” 

            “Wow…and what did you feel, after six years together, getting married finally?  Did you feel the same ilusión?”

             “Even more,” Don Faustino says.

            “We just got married,” Gil tells them.  “Two months and…what, Flaca?”

            “Two months and three days,” I say.  Doña Ludi’s eyes meet mine, and we smile at each other. 

            “Muchas felicidades,” she tells us warmly.  She stands up and slips into the house. 

            When she comes back out with two bottles of beer, Don Faustino is talking about the rugs. 

            “I was talking to my parents a while back, and we figured out that I’m the thirteenth generation of my family to do this work.  Of course, when my grandfather was making rugs, he didn’t sell them to tourists.  Back then, he would pile them on his horse and go into the mountains, sell them in the villages.  People would use them to keep the floor warm.  Now they hang them on walls.  People from here don’t buy them anymore.” 

            “But you like the work?” I ask.  I know it’s not an openended question, but I just want to hear him say ‘yes.’  Up above us on the hill, four sheep with four different colors of wool are shuffling in their pen.  Marigolds and pomegranates are growing just behind us, to dye the wool yellow or pink.  In the mountains beyond grow the mosses and other plants that give other hues.  The yard is quiet, green, alive.  The rugs are so very beautiful, the entire process happens right here, without hurting anything or anyone.  Don Faustino told me that they even wash the wool with a foamy root, rather than soap; the water can go on the plants in the garden when they’re done.   

            “Yes,” he says.  “We like it.  It’s our life.” 

            He reaches down for the rug at his feet, worked in shades of yellow.  “This design takes about three weeks to complete,” he says.  “Here, we have a lot of fiestas.  In three weeks—well, there are maybe two fiestas in this rug.  And everything else that happened in those three weeks.” 

            “Like the baby fell down?” suggests Gil.  “Or it rained a lot, or the beans got burned?”  I’ve never seen Gil so animated about anything this metaphorical. 

            “Exactly,” says Don Faustino. 

            Doña Ludi nods behind him, and then says something to him in Zapotec.  It’s a language of soft, soothing sounds, and though I know it can’t be true, it sounds like it would be impossible to shout in it.  Sing, yes; shout, no.

 I know there must be hard things in their lives, but as I look at Don Faustino and Doña Ludi, the quiet affection between them, their stories told in colors and folded at their feet, I think, ‘everyone should be this lucky.’ 

          At the foot of a hill whose name means “Hill of the Waters” in Zapotec, Gil and I weave our fingers together in a pattern that spells hope.