Celestial Stones
A boy in need of a miracle
“La piedra? The rock? Isn’t roca the word for rock? We should have paid more attention in high school Spanish.” Harry suspected it was a waste of time to try to get help from his wife, but in his frustration he had to try.
“Piedra could be feet in Spanish. Pie is foot. I remember that. So piedra must be feet.” The tone of Nannette’s voice told him she was guessing. She was never at a loss for words. “Make the boy tell you what he wants in English. He’s in America now.”
“Yeah, like he’s going to speak English overnight. I didn’t hear you speak Spanish in Guatemala.”
“It takes more than three days in a foreign country to learn a language.” Nannette raised an imaginary glass, “Salud! That’s one word I learned.”
“So, you expect Diego to do it?”
“I really don’t expect the kid to do anything but make my life more difficult than it is.”
“You agreed to this.”
“I didn’t have a choice. And I thought he was…never mind.”
“He was what?”
“Bigger. Broader. Browner. A real Mayan kid. He looks more like one of the scared-ass sissies in my third grade class.”
“So you wanted a souvenir Indian. What you got was a child that could have been our own if….”
“I didn’t realize what we were getting into,” she admitted. “I will live with it.”
It was no use arguing with her, especially when she was right. The organization asked them to simply escort the boy it was sponsoring to the States. Then they asked them to take him in as a foster child. Nanette wasn’t happy about it, but they could use the money. He hadn’t considered the language problem and if he had, it wouldn’t have mattered, no one they knew spoke Spanish.
Diego lay in his new bed, exhausted by his journey. During the long trip he had surrendered to sleep sandwiched between his escorts in the narrow seats of the airplanes, hypnotized by their unintelligible voices. He liked the way the man watched over him, even taking his hand when people shoved him in crowds. He liked how the man chose the clothing he was to wear on the journey. He wondered about the woman. She walked ahead of them, not like the women in Antigua who always followed behind their men. And she didn’t look at him.
The nuns told him God had sent the americanos — that he would learn to understand them and to talk like them. He knew it could happen. He had learned Yucatec Maya and some Itzaj words at the home. English! It is like the braying of a burro, he thought, and smiled.
But he knew if he could find the stone that is hurled to earth by the brilliant light from heaven, the piedra mágica would make him understand and be understood, would make the strange woman like him, would make the man stand tall, and would make him, Diego, like everyone else.
The boys at the home told him that in America the skies were always draped in mourning. They said it was a place where stars were afraid to shine, where spirits hid behind dark clouds grumbling and murmuring and shredding curtains of light. More terrible, they said, were the blistering bright bolts of light hurled from the heavens that exploded louder than all the fireworks at the Fiestas Patronales.
But he wasn’t frightened. He had seen tropical storms all of his short life, had often danced in the rain as spiders of light singed the jungle while he searched for the stone — until the nuns found out and locked him in.
…
“Piedra? Rock? What rock, Diego?” Harry tried to understand what the boy was asking. The thunderstorm made it hard to hear him and even if he could, his lack of Spanish doomed him.
“La del cielo,” the boy whispered. “La de la luz.” He sat up in his bed, surrounded by unfamiliar things that appeared and disappeared in the light that flashed behind the curtain.
I don’t know what he is saying, but at least he’s talking, Harry thought. Nannette should have stayed up with him instead of leaving him to me.
“Good night, Diego,” Harry said holding his two hands together next to his cheek in what he hoped was the universal sign for sleep. The boy was clearly agitated. Perhaps piedra was some kind of monster-under-the-bed or monster-in the-closet kind of thing in his country, he thought, and he is frightened.
“There’s no piedra,” Harry insisted. “I’ll leave the light on. You are safe here. Good night, son.” He wished he could hug the boy and considered kissing him on the forehead, but thought better of it. Nannette would not approve.
Diego listened to the noises of the night. Even the sound of the rain and wind outside did not hide the solitude of the house: no breathing of sleeping boys in the dormitories of his old home in Antigua, no footsteps in the hall, no rustle of the nuns’ habits. And it was as if the man and woman had vanished in the depths of this strange house.
The door was not locked, he was free, and in a moment he was dancing through the trees as if he were back in Antigua slipping through stands of bananas and cacao toward the familiar flashes of light that heaven heaved to earth.
In the blackness of the alien forest he felt at home. Once again he enjoyed warm rain soaking his shift, smelled gunpowder on the wind, welcomed the blow and boom of the thunder. He cried out for the gift of great light, a sign hurled from heaven. He had heard the Maya tales of celestial stones that were brought by the lightning. He had tried and tried but failed time and time again to find one.
The boys never let him forget that he was not like them: They were Maya; he was not. Their ancestors arrived on the wings of a great bird. They said they were the children of mother sky and father earth. He was flotsam from the sea, they taunted him. They tousled his sand-colored hair and called him el marinero. He knew what they really meant. Maybe that is why the nuns sent him away.
The soil in this strange land was as black as the cinders of Pacaya; but not warm like lava, nor red like the rabid river of melted rock that carried away the village and with it Mamah, the Maya women who had snatched him from the sea and delivered him to the nuns; Mamah: now stone on the mountain.
Am I always to wander through storms, be tossed across oceans and shot through skies. Am I to search for and never find the celestial stone that will make me be something, be someone, understand the babel around me, speak a language of my own? Will I ever belong? Will I always be different?
The summer storm was abating. Its cries became sighs. Diego could discern distant mountains in the tremulous light. Fugitive stars were appearing in the purple sky.
This is not the one, not my storm, he realized. It, too, has moved on, leaving me behind. He curled up on a bed of redolant pine needles in the comforting crotch of a fallen tree.
…
After hours of frantic searching, Harry found Diego. He covered the wet child with a sweater, watched as he fitfully slept, then kissed him gently on the forehead. He finally woke him and asked, “La piedra?”
“No piedra,” Diego whispered.
“Ready to go home?” Harry asked, taking the boy’s hand.
“Sí, home.” Diego answered.
“We will find it together,” Harry said, certain that one day they would understand each other.
