Manos de Mujer

The first group of children are already huddled by the exhibit entrance at the far end of the hall. A young guide in her sleek black dress is gently pressing them back behind the tape, using a folded museum map like a switch to shape the eager flock into tidy formation.

I am settled into my station, sitting on my knees on the floor and warming the masa up between my palms. The dough is pale and tacky, clinging and stretching as I knead and pull. It’s work my hands could do completely on their own– could do in my sleep, if I let them.

Of course, the texture isn’t quite right. My knuckles, old as they are, complain as I press the masa into the troughed basalt metate in front of me. Too tough. Add water.

It’s no good; my hands miss the corn, but we can’t bring it back.

I look around the hall at my fellow exhibitors.

Andre, in his gently swaying plastic cornfield across the corridor, struggles with the strap of his overalls. He keeps getting thinner, but the costume is an antique and fights against any attempts to adjust it. He meets my gaze and grins ruefully, shrugging his narrow shoulders.

This stupid thing.

I shrug back sympathetically. My costume is a muddle of its own. The white blouse, embroidered with bougainvillea and hummingbirds, the long, red rebozo, made of shiny polyester. The bright, blue skirt is from a Disney character, according to my granddaughter, Juliana. She had worn it first, and came back to our rooms every night complaining.

“They want me to wear the shawl all day long, but it itches. It’s too hot under those stage lights to be wrapped up all day.”

That was probably the start of the fever. When she died, the museum came to me.

“Your heritage is critical to the Ark’s mission,” the curator, another young woman in a sleek black dress, had said. “We must preserve diversity as long as we can, at least in the children’s memories.”

“Go, Ana,” Daniel had said. He was already retreating into the shroud of his grief. He had always been an active man before we entered the Ark. His small, muscled frame contained enormous energy, a drive to work that had nowhere to go underground. This life, this windowless, windless, sunless existence, he had never been able to adapt. “What else will we do but pace in these rooms?”

“Welcome, children, to the Hall of Extinct Grains,” the young guide announces now, her clear, authoritative voice carrying to the iron joists above us. “Today we will explore Corn: An American Legacy. Stay close to your study buddy and within the white lines as we proceed. You may ask questions but please remember, do not touch anything.”

I reach into the bag of flour at my side and shake a handful over my lump of dough. It’s slightly gritty like masa harina had been, but it doesn’t take to the water the same way. Powdered crickets, or mealworms. Full of protein, and some kind of compound to make it bind. It pushes back with a stubbornness masa never did.

The children gather in front of the first exhibit, where Nita stands in front of a panel of blinking red and green lights in a white labcoat and large gloves, pouring clear liquid from a beaker into small glass dishes. She lines them up carefully on a long, low table in front of the children, describing the products they represent. Syrup, ethanol, steepwater.

I take a pinch of masa and roll it between my palms. It is a firm clay texture now, as close as it can be. I line up masa balls at the edge of the metate and put my hand over the surface of the comal to test the heat. It’s a little low; I adjust the electric dial hidden below the display.

The children depart the industry exhibit restless, as usual. They push and giggle as the guide ushers them down the white taped line on the floor toward me.

“Good morning, Abuela,” the guide prompts, and the children respond in chorus.

“Good morning, Abuela!”

“Good morning, niños,” I reply, looking them over with a smile.

There are about ten or eleven boys and girls, about eight years old in black school uniforms. Their faces are pale, to my eye, even those whose skin is naturally dark. There is a wanness to their cheeks that always hurts my heart to see. No sun, no rosy cheeks, no freckles. Most of them are thin. Some have scars from the fever rash on their necks or the back of their hands. But they still have disobedient joy in their toothless smiles, in the jostling, impatient energy between them as they compete for a view.

One little girl worms her way to the front. She has a mop of curly brown hair and eager dark eyes that drop shyly when they meet mine.

“What are you making today, Abuela?” asks the guide.

“Tortillas de maíz.” I know all my lines. I try to catch the little girl’s eyes again. They are fixed on my hands now, and I can see her little fingers twitching at her sides. “Corn tortillas.”

“Don’t you want to use the press, Abuela?” asks the guide, which isn’t in the script.

I am confused for a moment, but then I realize I have shaped and flattened the first tortilla instinctively between my hands before I thought about what I was doing.

“Oh, yes,” I say with a laugh, dropping the first tortilla on the comal and picking up the little tortilla press at the side of the metate. I place it in front of me where the children can see and put the next masa ball directly onto its oiled surface. They love this part. I squeeze the handle down and make a dramatic face as I press the cast iron lid against the base. I can see the little girl tense her fingers into fists, then open and stretch them out as I pull the lid open again.

“Do you see that?” I ask. They all push forward, and the little girl in the front row braces herself on the rope divider between us to resist the pressure. The tortilla sticks to the lid of the press, almost a perfect circle. It peels off easily – unlike the corn masa used to do, unless you lined the press with sheets of plastic wrap. I drop it onto the comal.

While I press the last two, the guide takes the children through their vocabulary.

“What did we learn that Abuela’s table is called?”

“Metate, Teacher.”

“And what is it made of?”

They shout over each other, and the guide has to raise her hand to bring the volume down.

“That’s right, it’s made of stone. What do you see that’s missing?”

The children aren’t sure. They bicker and stir.

The little girl isn’t fully listening, she’s watching, so I pick up one hand and wiggle it at her to give a hint.

“The hand?” she asks, and the guide praises her.

“Yes, the mano, or the hand. Well done, Izzy. We don’t have a replica of the grinding tool, but do you remember what it looked like?”

I am watching the comal closely. I pinch a tortilla edge between a finger and thumb and flip it over quickly.

Izzy’s eyes widen.

“Doesn’t that hurt, Abuela?” she asks me softly.

The guide is still talking, so I answer in a low voice.

“No, mija, it doesn’t hurt. I have manos de mujer.”

I flip the remaining three tortillas one by one.

“Watch closely,” I tell her. “Tell me when you start to see the edges darken.”

Her dark eyes intensify their focus. Her fingers grip the rope divider tightly.

“Now?” I ask, and Izzy shakes her curly head.

“Not yet.”

I smile my approval. The guide is talking about monoculture, and landrace adaptation. I see the edges of the first tortilla dry and just start to lift from the surface of the comal. Small bubbles rise on its exposed surface. I raise my eyebrows, and Izzy bobs her head.

“Now, Abuela,” she says.

I flip again.

“Now,” I tell her sternly, “you must watch for the puff. Cuando la tortilla se infla, ya te puedes casar.”

“What does that mean?” she asks. Her face is very serious.

“It means when you know how to make a tortilla puff, you will be ready to marry.”

One of the boys overhears this, and lets out a loud, honking laugh.

“Izzy wants to get married!” he brays, and all the children begin laughing and shouting.

“Who is Izzy going to marry?”

“Izzy’s in love!”

Izzy’s face darkens in shame and she lets go of the rope, withdrawing her hands into her sweater sleeves anxiously.

“Quiet voices, quiet hands, children!” the guide commands, glaring at me over the racket.

But then, the puff happens.

First one tortilla begins to expand, then the others follow, as the steam sealed between layers of dough stretches them apart. Like small balloons, one by one, they bubble up and grow.

“What should I do, Izzy?” I ask, and she hesitates, looking around for the other children’s reaction. “No one else knows.”

She summons her courage.

“Flip them, Abuela!”

I pick up each tortilla by its edge and whisk it into a cloth laid over my lap. One, two, three, four. A warm, nutty aroma rises up into the air, and the children quiet and calm as they breathe it in.

It isn’t the earthy, mineral smell I remember from my grandmother’s kitchen, when I was waist height and surrounded by noisy aunts. Music would be blaring from someone’s phone while the women gossiped and argued and laughed. Tortillas rose up in uneven stacks at the side of the stove. I remember Daniel at that age, barefoot, hovering by the open door, waiting for an opening to ask on behalf of the men outside when dinner would be ready. Nothing could replace that smell, or the first soft, salty bite into the first tortilla off of the griddle. Before the wildfires, and the infestations, before the wheat went, and the cocoa, and the orchards, and the corn.

I wrap up the bundle and hand it to Izzy, who accepts it with a shy, pleased smile.

“When your teacher is done with her lesson, Izzy will share pieces of the tortillas with everyone.”

“Thank you, Abuela,” says the guide stiffly. She says abuela with the same melody she says children. “What do we say, children?”

They respond together. “Thank you, Abuela.”

She is angry at me, but what can she do? There is no one to take my place.

She cuts the lesson short and moves on. The children follow, two-by-two, walking along the white line toward Andre’s display. Izzy looks over her shoulder at me as she goes, giving me a gap-toothed good-bye smile.

“Que les vaya bien,” I say, more to myself. I think of how Daniel turned around, just before we entered the steep downward staircase into the Ark, and gave the sun one long, last look.

I will not see it again, I think. It will take many years for the earth to shake off its anger, and we must wait it out here. Maybe it will remember, when Izzy is my age, the way my hands remember. The proper rhythm of the seasons, the old boundaries of the tides. I don’t know.

Another group of children is gathering at the entrance of the hall. I cannot long for the past, or dream of the future. I have tortillas to make.