Little Maria

Below is the tenth segment of a new short story, Little Maria. While the story is new, it is based on a chapter from my novel, Unidentified Woman, a literary crime about rape, revenge and redemption. I believe it stands alone as is, and will reward you handsomely when you read it.

Spring:

Nothing matters. Nothing but surviving another day without suffering even more pain. Night is my only friend here, my only time alone with myself. And with you, Adela. Tell you this: I wanted to die out there in the coca field but God didn’t listen to me. Maybe he has better plans for me. Don’t believe so. He didn’t kill the man who raped me. Now I know what rape is. And I know that there is no God, only Big Mamá. She saved me—don’t know why. She sees something in me that makes her want to save me. Hard as she treats me sometimes, she takes care of me almost as if I’m her own daughter. Now I’m her little helper too. Dumb Little Maria.
All the sisters are away at the factory on the outskirts of that ugly border town, Ciudad Juárez. Or out in the fields being raped. Either you are slaving at the factory, Adela, or you are being raped at the coca field. Or sometimes even both. If you die during the rape, or after, they toss you out of cars into the desert like piles of garbage. For the hyenas and birds of prey to eat.
Not me. Five times I was raped this way in the coca field but came out alive. Don’t know how. Don’t know why. That almost never happened, Big Mamá told me. Maybe that’s why she saved me at the end, after what the chief of the farm did to me. His name is El Meya, because if he catches you he’ll eat you alive like a spider crab. Big Mamá says he knows everything about farming and agriculture, and that he experiments with growing the coca plants here on the hills. It’s not their natural place to grow, she says.
As if I care. It’s not my natural place to grow, is it? He was so cruel to me, Adela, you can’t even imagine what kind of savage he was. You won’t find someone like him in any of the adventure and pirates books we used to read. He beat me up so hard first, then stripped me naked and tied me to a big tree. He did it to me from behind so I won’t see his face. But I know he was chewing a coca leaf while he was doing it to me. He was just having fun, you see, while I was crying in pain.
The other four, like the first one, were all Gringos from north of the border. Don’t understand why they need to come here and do it to us Mexican girls. Don’t they have rape farms in America? Big Mamá says they have everything there. That’s the name I gave it myself, Adela: rape farm. Because that’s what it is.
Now everybody thinks I’m deaf and dumb because I don’t speak anymore. Decided not to. No reason for me to talk. And I will never sing again, the way you and I used to sing. Remember that silly song we sang on the morning I was kidnapped? Always thought you were the prettiest one. Guess these evil gardeners decided that I was the one. So they picked me up from our garden. Yes they did. And used me: now I no longer pretty and my smell of innocent is all gone. Don’t understand why they didn’t kill me too.