Sin Vientre
Her mother tells her she was born smooth, hairless, like a doll, except for a little tuft of baby hair that lay upright at the top of her head, and that she stayed hairless because she was a pretty girl, not like her older sisters, who were peludas, who grew up to be covered in thick, dark hair that exploded from their armpits and their cucas, like strange, wild, unwomanly beasts. Her mother tells her this in the bathtub while scrubbing her back with a hot wet rag. She doesn’t tell her mother that sometimes she scrubs too hard, leaving her with red splotches all over her body. She is twelve years old, but her mother still insists on bathing her, as well as untangling her dark, long hair with a stiff comb afterward, over and over again until her scalp feels raw and her hair falls straight and silken.
*
By fifteen, X has yet to get her period. Her mother does not question the strange magic of her youngest daughter’s body. She thinks the reason why the blood never came is because her daughter’s thoughts are pure and sinless. X’s sisters look at her with envy during their time of the month, but so does she, wondering why it is that she does not receive what seems to be a natural part of growing up, of womanhood. She never does get her period, so she lives free of this burden and accepts her mother’s declaration with uncertainty, since she is not sure that her thoughts are as pure or as sinless as her mother believes. The boys have taken notice of her beauty at school. They make obscene gestures toward her when she is facing away. At first, she is filled with horror, confusion, but when the other girls in her class stare with envy too, she begins to take pleasure in their gestures. They confirm something strange inside of her, something like worth.
*
When a recruiter comes to her high school to scout for young women to audition for Miss El Paso Teen USA, X is caught between classes. A woman wearing heavy makeup takes her by the arm and brings her swiftly to the recruiting table. She fawns over X, telling her what a beauty she is and that she should sign up to participate in the pageant. She brings a pamphlet home to her mother. At first, her mother is against it, saying that the pageant is one step away from being a puta and a desgraciada, but when X mentions that the church they go to is a local sponsor of the pageant and that the high school will provide the materials for the competition, her mother finally yields.
The day before the pageant, another girl competing invites X to go to the salon with her and her mother to get ready for the beauty competition. They take her to a place near San Jacinto Plaza, where she is led by an older woman to a dark, humid room that smells of incense. The woman asks if this is the first time she has ever been waxed, and X nods her head shyly. The woman asks her to remove her pants and underwear and to step underneath the towel set on the waxing bed. X does as she is told and waits nervously for the woman to finish preparing the melt. When the woman lifts the towel, she lets out a loud gasp and laughs.
“Ay, mija, casi ningun pelo. ¡Que suertuda!”
*
When she meets Horacio, or Lacho, as he liked to be called, at the age of twenty-four, she knows that she is the most beautiful woman he has ever seen. She is Miss El Paso Teen USA, Miss West Texas, Miss TX Teen, and Miss Alamo, bee-lining toward becoming Miss Texas, then Miss USA. She tells her mother she is seeing someone, a nice man, a pastor at a small Christian church near the lower valley. She doesn’t tell her that it began at Romeo’s bar with her friends from the pageants, with Lacho, a stranger, pressing a cold beer against the small of her back, whispering in her ear if she’d like a drink, a dance.
The first time he looks at her naked, he is astonished. He has never seen a woman so smooth and so varnished, almost porcelain. She is otherworldly. He lifts her onto the bed, telling her to spread her legs, and notices that she is lighter than other women, airy and hollow, like an eggshell. He hovers over X and kisses her mound softly, rewardingly, as though she has surpassed any and all of his expectations. She begins to feel happy. Happy to be admired, happy to be loved.
*
When Lacho asks her for children, she agrees almost immediately. She stands before the mirror alone, staring at her flat belly, imagining herself pregnant, round, and motherly. The pageants would have to be put on pause, perhaps indefinitely, but she didn’t mind. The notion of a life growing inside of her was both new and enticing. She had never known womanly pain. Her mother described a burning, a cracking open at the hips, a long, drawn-out ache radiating from her back to her abdomen that came and left in waves, but all of it seemed foreign to her; there was nothing to compare it to, so she dedicates herself to the idea blindly, only imagining the good from it, the fulfillment of womanhood she was denied in her own adolescence.
For the first few months of their marriage, they try on their own. Her mother suggests horny goat weed for her husband, hot nettle teas and chamomile for herself, and a sobada, to warm the womb. She asks her sisters how they procured their children, and they tell her to make love to her husband one week after the last day of blood, but because her blood never comes, to do it one week after the full moon, and to pray to the virgen beforehand. She does each of these things faithfully, but every month, there is nothing, not a roundness or a tenderness or a swelling of the breasts. She feels flat and empty. It isn’t until a year passes that her husband suggests they see a doctor.
The notion of medical intervention concerned X. Her mother had instilled in her an irrational fear of allopathic medicine, leaving doctors out of the question. The only time she remembered going to a doctor with her mother was when she had contracted a terrible cough as a child, but first, her mother solicited the help of a curandera who claimed she could ease her breathing and fever by rubbing a tincture of herbs and blessed honey, las lágrimas de la Guadalupe, on her chest and forehead. When that failed, her mother took her to a clinic in Juarez, where she was diagnosed with whooping cough. Although the doctors there had saved her life, a general distrust of the medical world that she had inherited from her mother still remained.
Several more weeks pass, and still, she is not with child, so she reluctantly agrees to arrange an appointment with a fertility specialist on the West Side.
*
When the doctor walks into the room, she is more nervous than ever. She was given an ultrasound by a technician to begin with, but after having some trouble, the technician calls in the doctor early.
“If you don’t mind, Mrs. X. I would like to take a look.”
He reapplies the cold gel and begins to scan her belly. His eyebrows furrow.
“Hm.”
He turns to the technician in the corner and mumbles, “I see what you mean. Take images of these and put them on her file.” He then turns to X. “X, I just want to confirm something. Would it be alright with you if I performed a vaginal exam?”
Her whole body tenses. The words float in the air like a handful of needles hovering over her head, waiting to drop, but the doctor waits and watches for X’s reaction. X reluctantly nods her head.
The doctor asks that she lift her legs onto a set of stirrups, to spread her legs open and relax.
“I’m going to use this device to see inside, X. On the count of three.”
She feels something cold and hard enter her. She has never been touched in this way. She has felt the harsh touch of her mother, the fervid touch of her husband, but never this. An impersonal, neutral touch that leaves her feeling empty.
“X, I’d like to run some more tests before I make an official diagnosis, but it seems that you have something called a blind-ending vagina.”
“Blind-ending?”
“Yes. That means there is nothing that the vaginal tunnel leads to. No cervix, no uterus, no womb.”
The doctor begins to take off his gloves, and the hard slap of the rubber startles X. “I was having trouble seeing quite a few things in your ultrasound, but both your pelvic exam and the scan tell me that you are missing your womb altogether.”
“Missing?”
“We’ll schedule some more tests to be sure, and an MRI, but I’m afraid so.”
*
When she gets on the bus to return from the doctor’s office, she decides to stop first at her mother’s house to explain what she was told by the doctor. She does not feel that she can tell Lacho yet. Not until the final tests come back, although something inside of her affirms that everything the doctor has said is true.
At first, her mother sits in her rocking chair and is quiet. X kneels at her mother’s feet and her mother takes X’s face into her hands. X buries herself in them, wiping her tears on her mother’s rough palms. When she looks up, her mother’s expression has become hard and determined.
“Sin vientre.”
Her mother slaps her hard on the left side of her face, which is still wet.
I don’t know what you’ve done to deserve this, X, her mother says, but your husband can never find out, do you understand?
X nods her head in horror and agreement. It had never occurred to her that she was responsible for her own infertility, that she could have done something to deserve such a punishment. She thought back to her time at the pageants. Could this be her penance? For what, for vanity?
“What do I do?” she whispers. “I haven’t done anything.” She feels like a child, small and powerless before her mother. “I don’t know what to do. Please, mamí, tell me what to do.” She grasps the cloth of her mother’s skirt to steady herself.
Her mother tells her of a curandera in Southern Juarez who also gives miracles. She says she can go to her and ask for a womb. X writes down the directions to her home with shaky hands, kisses the side of her mother’s face, and leaves.
*
When she enters the small house near the outskirts of Juarez, she smells yerba buena, rose water, and talcum.
Enter, a voice from the back calls.
X walks toward the sound, which leads her to a small room in the far corner of the house. There is a twin bed placed upon a thin wooden frame. An older woman is lying down, nearly sunken into the mattress. The woman looks wrinkly and frail, but most of all, ordinary, almost incapable of performing a miracle. X doesn’t notice anything strange until she sees the woman’s hands. Her fingers are twisted and contractured, as though in disagreement with one another.
Don’t be afraid, it’s a sickness, she says, holding up her hands, of the hands, only.
X nods her head slowly.
My children come to massage my hands at night, for the pain. Come sit, the old woman says, and motions with her head to a chair next to her bed.
X takes a seat. The woman holds out one twisted hand as if motioning for X to hold onto it.
“Sobame, niña,” she says. Massage my hands and tell me why you’ve come.
*
When X comes home from her visit with the curandera, she tells her husband of the tests her doctor has scheduled but does not mention his diagnosis. When they shut off the lamp to go to bed, X replays the conversation that she had with the doctor, her mother, and finally, the curandera.
You are an empty woman. Sometimes children are born that way, she had told X. The empty women are born the most beautiful. Not only are they empty of their womb, but they are empty of all things: heart, lungs, kidneys, tissue, and blood. They are born hairless, except for the hair that grows long from their head, their lashes, and their eyebrows. They are women painted on porcelain bodies, impersonating the human condition; their bruising, their illness, and their rose-colored youth, an illusion. No one knows why they are born into this world, but they exist, rare and fleeting.
When X hears this, she begins to feel a combination of horror and confirmation.
“Hay halgo que puedes hacer,” said the woman. There was something X could do to remedy her condition. The woman described to her the business of her children; taking parts from one person to sell to the next. Juarez was a city of parts, of taking, of blood. The people her children took and sold made no significant contribution to the people who were already being killed by the narcos. “Muchos matan y desperdicien,” she said. So many murders only to waste. Her children didn’t. They killed and took everything: skin, hair, even the nails, still painted with chipped glitter, from their victims. By the magic of their mother, it was all put to use.
“Tráeles una chica,” she said. Bring a girl to her sons, a young one. The more beautiful, the better. The sons would harvest and leave the womb for X. She need not be there to see it. She needed only to trick the girl into falling into their trap, return home, and in the following morning, she would have a womb.
“Cuidado, niña,” she said. If you fail me, you lose everything you ever wanted.
She remembers the feeling of the old woman’s fingers in her hands, how delicate and loose the skin felt against the hard bone. She could have taken one and broken it in half if she wanted to, they were so fragile. They felt like an ordinary woman’s hands, only the fingers had been smashed together, twisted and distorted from what X assumed was a severe case of arthritis. She remembers thinking she could not go home to the disappointment of her mother, but worse yet, to such an emptiness, her body a cavern that echoed inside of herself, so she configured her own hand so that they were nestled between the old woman’s contorted fingers, grasping the palm of the old woman’s hand tightly.
I’ll do it.
*
After her husband leaves in the morning, she heads to Juarez again, taking the bus to San Jacinto Plaza, then crossing into the border by foot. When she arrives, it is the early afternoon. She takes another bus to Mariscal, the red light district, which is quiet during the daytime. The streets are almost empty, but the sun shines bright on the colorful murals that are painted on the walls of the dilapidated concrete.
There are people here, they are hiding from me, she thinks to herself, like insects in the daylight. She feels shameful, predatory, for this thought. She walks and turns a corner until she sees an orange-brick building with no sign, seemingly vacant, but she knows that there is more than what meets the eye. She stares at it from a distance. Her husband described it to her once, the interior of it, a bar called Pink Ladies, where the men in Juarez could buy women a drink, and if they were invited upstairs, could pay for more. She considers walking through the back entrance and beginning a conversation with one of the girls, but she knows that none of them are foolish enough to come with her, nor would the owner allow it.
Just as she begins to cross over to the other side of the street, she hears a racket from behind the iron-barred door. X sees the door open, and a woman is pushed from the entrance and onto the concrete. She is skinny and frail, her dress pulled halfway down, revealing her small breasts. She is disoriented, blood dripping from her nose as the man who pushed her onto the sidewalk looks at her from the doorway.
“Vete de aqui,” he says. Leave here. “O te van a comer los perros.” Or the dogs will eat you.
He slams the door shut. The woman lifts her head from the concrete and spits at the door, spewing blood into the porch.
“¡Jodete!” She screams, but the man is gone, and she is alone. The scream makes X shudder. She watches from the corner of the street as the woman picks herself up from the concrete, fixing her dress, covering herself. She spots X.
“Y tu que? Que mires?” What are you looking at, the woman yells, using her wrist to wipe away the blood dripping from her nose and into her mouth.
X stays quiet. She is deciding. The owner who threw the woman out on the street might as well have killed her. The evening was only a few hours away. It was possible that the woman would be dead by morning if the wrong people found her.
“Dejame te ayudo,” X says, let me help you,and begins to walk toward her.
“No necesito tu ayuda,” the woman says, I don’t need your help, and begins to turn in the other direction.
“Please,” X says, perhaps too quickly. She is afraid that the desperation in her voice has revealed something sinister, but the woman slows her walk. “Please,” X says again. “I’m from El Paso. Soy Americana. Please. Dejame te ayudo.”
*
“You look American,” the woman says to X on the bus. “I can always tell.”
“Oh, really. What gave it away?”
The woman considers her answer. “Your eyes. The Americans always look rested. They can sleep well at night.” She is using the napkins that X had in her bag to stop the bleeding from her nose.
“It’s not broken?” X says.
“No,” she says, dabbing the napkin on her nose and lips. “Where is your grandmother’s house?”
They were traveling south. The curandera had told her where to take the girl, a place slightly removed from the city where the curandera’s children did their business, not too far from where the curandera lived. It was an apartment building, X knew from the address. It would take about an hour to get there by bus. She had told the woman that her grandmother lived there, that her grandmother could help her until she oriented herself.
“Near the airport,” X said. The woman nodded her head knowingly. They sat together in silence as the bus drove them through the neighborhoods of Juarez.
“Where did you learn English?” X said, unable to control herself. She knew it was best not to ask too many questions, but the silence was too awful, too filled with her own thoughts.
The woman looks away from X, as though her question were senseless. “Los Americanos. I try to talk with them. They give more money, but I also like to listen. It’s interesting.”
“What is?”
“Their lives, how they live there. Don’t you think so?”
X thought about this. She had been ambitious, once. She knew not many people lived off of pageantry. But she also knew that the reason she had done it was because she’d always felt a hunger to be loved, to be adored by others. The pageants had given her this. But if filing papers for the governor had given her this, or shelving books at a library had given her this, she would have done so and been equally as fulfilled. She didn’t care to be the most beautiful, or whether or not her life seemed interesting to others. She only wanted what her beauty got her. Everything up until now had been a means to an end.
“I’m not sure.”
“What do you do?” The woman asked.
X hesitates, almost embarrassed to answer. It had never embarrassed her before.
“I’m a beauty queen. I enter myself into pageants, for money.”
The woman smiles and then begins to laugh. She begins to laugh so hard that she has to hold her nose with a napkin again, to stop the bleeding.
“¿Se te hace chistoso?” Do you find that funny?
The woman stops and begins to compose herself.
“No. Nomas que tu y yo no somos tan diferentes, tú sabes?”
X does not smile. “More different than maybe you’d think.”
*
During the ride, X begins to consider the young woman in the way she had been taught by her pageant directors. The woman is petite with dark hair and an oblong face. She has dark, slanted eyes that some might find attractive. What X notices most is that she is unshaven, her arms and legs covered in short, thin hair. This would not please the directors, and yet, X recognizes that there is a beauty to all of her features combined. She notices the woman has a strong cupid’s bow, that when the woman puckers her lips, the bow becomes deeper, sharper.
“You know, when I was a little girl, I wanted to be like you,” the woman says, noticing X’s gaze.
“A beauty queen?” X says. She is counting the stops. They are nearly there.
“Si, beauty queen. I would watch them on TV, ” the woman says, turning to face the window.
“Why didn’t you? Become one, I mean.”
The woman is quiet for a while.
“My mother has a saying. Lo que es pa’ ti, aunque te quites. There was no other way, I don’t think. My mother was very sick when the drug war started, and we needed the money. I was seventeen when Gerardo hired me. When my mother died, I stayed.”
“I’m very sorry,” X says, and although she is sincere, she cannot fathom such a loss. “Is Gerardo the man who kicked you out?”
“Yes.” The woman looks down at the palms of her hands, and then to X. “But he didn’t give me this.” She points to her swollen nose.
“After my mother died,” she continues, “there was something inside of me that couldn’t take the men anymore. Sometimes, when I was with them, I would get so angry, I couldn’t stand it. I would fight with them. You can imagine their reaction.”
“So it was a customer,” X says.
“Yes. Gerardo is tired of me, I think. But I’m tired too.”
They are four stops away. X remembers this route from the last time she came. In two stops, they will approach the neighborhood of the curandera.
“What would you do with the money?” X says.
“What money?” The woman says, not understanding.
“The pageant money. If you were a beauty queen.”
“Oh, yes,” she says, and relaxes. “I would cross. Find somewhere to live in El Paso. I would finish school. Get a good job. And I would have children.”
“Why not do that here?”
“Maybe school, yes. I had a little money saved up, but all of that is with Gerardo now. If I finished school, then could get a job and save more money. But I would only want the child if I lived there. It’s harder to have one here, when there’s so much going on. So much death everywhere, all the time.” The woman turns to a north-facing window and looks into the darkening sky. X turns too. If it had been daylight, she could have probably seen the city from her seat.
“If I lived in El Paso, it would just be easier,” the woman says.
“Why do you say that?”
“I don’t know. I guess because you’re not always having to think about how you will keep the child alive.”
Three more stops. The street lights are beginning to turn on.
“I can’t have children,” X says to the woman.
The woman looks back at X with surprise. “I’m sorry,” she says.
“I thought perhaps one day I might, but I think it’s time for me to accept that maybe that day might never come.”
The bus comes to a halt, and the door opens for the passengers. They are at the stop for the curandera’s house.
X motions for them to get up and exit. She allows the woman to leave the bus first, then stops at the door, blocking the way for the woman to reenter.
“Que te pasa?” The woman says from the sidewalk.
“Listen to me. Go to the house at the end of the street and knock on the door,” X says, the words falling out of her mouth before she can even think them through. “A sick woman lives there, in the back room. Go to her and she will help you. Don’t tell her that you know me. Tell her your mother sent you.”
“My mother? My mother is dead.”
“Yes, I know. It doesn’t matter if it’s a lie. Mothers send their daughters to her all the time. For all you know, maybe it’s true. Maybe your mother did send you here. You can ask the woman for anything. To be a beauty queen. To be in the United States. Anything.”
“What about your grandmother’s house?”
The bus driver begins to honk the horn. “No tengo todo el dia.” I don’t have all day.
“Listen to me. She’ll ask you for something in return. You won’t like it, but tell her you’ll send it to her tonight anyway.”
“How?”
“It doesn’t matter. Let me take care of that. Just say yes, and then leave. Leave and forget about it. You’ll have what you want by the morning.” The driver honks the horn of the bus and begins to shut the doors.
“Vete, andale,” X says as the doors close and the bus wheezes back to life. X watches from the window as the woman becomes smaller, her face confused and hurt at X’s sudden abandonment.
*
When X enters the apartment of the curandera’s children, she notices it looks ordinary, too, like their mother’s house. The man who opens the door invites her in kindly, expectant. There is another man in the room when she turns into the walkway leading into the living room.
“Quien eres?” Who are you, the man who opened the door asks, although he does not sound concerned.
My friend sent me to your apartment, X says.
The man takes a seat next to what X could only imagine to be his brother on a gray, weathered couch.
And who is your friend? the man says.
We work together, X says, at the Pink Lady.
“O si?” says the man.
“Si,” X says. She told me there was work for me here, too.
“Si,” the man says. Of course, there is work for you here. Come, sit with me.
X walks over to the couch and sits in between the two brothers. She tries to find a resemblance to the curandera in either of the men’s faces, but she can’t find much. When the first man wraps his hand around her neck, she can hear something crackle, like the sound of a shell being broken.
*
In the aftermath, there is darkness. She waits like this for days, unsure if her eyes are open or closed. Then there is pain. She feels a tear across her abdomen, a cracking open, the fierce burning that her mother once described. She knows there is nothing there for them to take, nothing for them to harvest. There is just a porcelain casing, a miraculous body that has already been excavated. She can feel the empty space in her abdomen becoming larger, then needier, pulling from everything around it, dissolving the pain, the darkness, the two brothers, the gray weathered couch, and the apartment complex; then, eventually, the neighborhood that surrounds it, the curandera’s house, those horrible twisted fingers, all becoming powder in her belly; she consumes until everything has been devoured by her body, until she is satisfied. She is not sure if it is in this world or the next, but she laughs.
Natalia Martinez was born and raised in El Paso, TX. As a graduate student in the Creative Writing MFA program at Florida International University, her work largely focuses on the borderlands of El Paso and Ciudad Juarez, as well as the symbolic and metaphorical borders encountered in everyday life. She currently resides in Miami, Florida.
