Forests of the Heart Read Free

gentle.
    “It’s not play for me.”
    “Bettina, we grew up together. You’re not a witch.”
    “No, I’m a healer.”
    There was an immense difference between the two, as Abuela had often pointed out. A
bruja
made dark, hurtful magic. A
curandera
healed.
    “A healer,” Bettina repeated. “As was our
abuela.”
    “Was she?” Adelita asked.
    Bettina could hear the tired smile in Adelita’s voice, but she didn’t share her sister’s amusement.
    “¿Cómo?”
she said, her own voice sharper than she intended. “How can you deny it?”
    Adelita sighed. “There is no such thing as magic. Not here, in the world where we live.
La brujería
is only for stories.
For el reino de los sueños.
It lives only in dreams and make-believe.”
    “You’ve forgotten everything.”
    “No, I remember the same as you. Only I look at the stories she told us with the eyes of an adult. I know the difference between what is real and what is superstition.”
    Except it hadn’t only been stories, Bettina wanted to say.
    “I loved her, too,” Adelita went on. “It’s just… think about it. The way she took us out into the desert. It was like she was trying to raise us as wild animals. What could Mama have been thinking?”
    “That’s not it at all—”
    “I’ll tell you this. Much as I love our
mamá,
I wouldn’t let her take Janette out into the desert for hours on end the way she let Abuela take us. In the heat of the day and …how often did we go out in the middle of the night?”
    “You make it sound so wrong.”
    “Cálmate,
Bettina. I know we survived. We were children. To us it was simply fun. But think of what
could
have happened to us—two children out alone in the desert with a crazy old woman.”
    “She was
not
—”
    “Not in our eyes, no. But if we heard the story from another?”
    “It… would seem strange,” Bettina had to admit. “But what we learned—”
    “We could have learned those stories at her knee, sitting on the front stoop of our parents’ house.”
    “And if they weren’t simply stories?”
    “¡Qué boba eres!
What? Cacti spirits and talking animals? The past and future, all mixed up with the present. What did she call it?”
    “La época del mito.”
    “That’s right. Myth time. I named one of my gallery shows after it. Do you remember?”
    “I remember.”
    It had been a wonderful show. La Gata Verde had been transformed into a dreamscape that was closer to some miraculous otherwhere than it was to the dusty pavement that lay outside the gallery. Paintings, rich with primary colors, depicted
los santos
and desert spirits and the Virgin as seen by those who’d come to her from a different tradition than that put forth by the papal authority in Rome. There had been Hopi kachinas—the Storyteller, Crow Woman, clowns, deer dancers—and tiny, carved Zuni fetishes. Wall hangings rich with allegorical representations of
Indio
and Mexican folklore. And Bettina’s favorite: a collection of sculptures by the Bisbee artist, John Early—surreal figures of gray, fired clay, decorated with strips of colored cloth and hung with threaded beads and shells and spiraling braids of copper and silver filament. The sculptures twisted and bent like smoke-people frozen in their dancing, captured in mid-step as they rose up from the fire.
    She had stood in the center of the gallery the night before the opening of the show and turned slowly around, drinking it all in, pulse drumming in time to the resonance that arose from the art that surrounded her. For one who didn’t believe, Adelita had still somehow managed to gather together a show that truly seemed to represent their grandmother’s description of a moment stolen from
la época del mito.
    “Not everything in the world relates to art,” Bettina said now into the phone.
    “No. But perhaps it should. Art is what sets us apart from the animals.”
    Bettina couldn’t continue the conversation. At times like this, it was as though they