Thirteen Senses by Victor Villaseñor
Lupe’s eyes were bright with excitement. “Yes,” she said, “this my mother taught us, too! That the plants, the trees, the stones, everything sings to us with the Love of God when we close our eyes and listen with Open Hearts!
“The other day I was drinking coffee on my parents’ porch with the Sun just coming up—Salvador, I swear I could hear the plants whispering to me and giving me their love, just like back in Mexico when I was a child,” she said, wiping her eyes—she was so happy.
Salvador took her hand in his. “Exactly,” he said. “The whole world is beautiful when we can feel the Heartbeat of God singing to us here inside. The hills, the flowers, the birds, the trees, all become so beautiful. This is how our mothers—God bless them—were able to get us through all that starvation and killing of the Revolution, by keeping us strong in the Beauty of the Song of God.”
They stopped their words. They just held, looking at each other in the eyes. Time stood still. All was Wonderful. All was Blessed.
“You know, Salvador,” she finally said, “my mother told us all this too, but in her own way. I don’t think that she ever made mention of us having so many senses, though.”
“Well, maybe she’d also never been told that we only had five,” he said. “My mother told me that she never realized that all our senses were in question until they came to the capital, Mexico City, with Benito Juarez’s people, and she was put in the academy of the arts, and they told her that we only had five.”
“Oh, your mother went to that grand school?” said Lupe. The whole thing was finally beginning to make sense to her. She’d never realized that Salvador’s familia had known Benito Juarez, the Greatest President of Mexico, or that they’d traveled with him to Mexico City.
“Then your mother’s father, Don Pio, didn’t just fight alongside Benito Juarez, but he knew him, too?”
“Yes, of course, they came from the same village, and were cousins, in fact.”
“I see. But it wasn’t until your mother was told that we have five senses—as they teach in school—that she realized that our thirteen were in question?” He nodded. “Well, then, tell me, what’s the ninth,” she asked, “and what does this sense do?”
“The ninth is really juicy,” he said. “You take balance again, the key, and combine it with feeling and smell and seeing—but here you close your eyes so that your Heart-eye can open, and suddenly your seventh sense of intuition explodes into the psychic sense. This one you should really talk about with my mother, because with the ninth, then you’re on your way to understanding everything, especially God,” he said excitedly. “See, God is only a mystery and not understandable when you have five senses and see the world flat.”
Salvador then asked Lupe if she ever had dreams of flying.
“Yes, of course,” she said. “Especially when we lived in Mexico and the soldiers would strike our village, then at night I’d often dream of flying away like an eagle and being all safe and good, soaring above the treetops.”
“Exactly,” said Salvador smiling. “This is the tenth sense, having the ability to leave our earth-body and travel to the Heavens and gain rest in Papito’s arms. We all do this a little bit, but the ninth and tenth are really for healers, curanderos, my mother tells me, so they can travel in their dreams and help heal people and the world.
“You know, I should have asked the Chinese doctor I smuggled if he uses more than five senses,” added Salvador. “I bet he does, because my mother has always explained to us that all healing ultimately comes from the Grace of God.
“Lupe, dozens of times I’ve seen mi mama put her hands on a sick person, close her eyes, then start feeling and smelling the person’s body, and then boom—that person’s body will start speaking to her, telling her where it’s sick and what it needs in order to get well. Then she’ll go outside, turn in each of the Four Sacred Directions, palms out, smell the air, and walk off into God’s Garden and find the exact herbs and clay to heal the person. Talk to my mother, she’ll tell you that there’s un arreglo, a deal, between all living-life to help one another within the Sacred Circle of Life. It’s only when we step out of the Sacred Circle that all of our problemas start,” he added.
Hearing this, Lupe nodded. Yes, of course, this made sense. She’d heard so much of this from her own mother and that foul-mouth old midwife from their village back home. She rubbed her forehead. She felt a little bit overwhelmed.
Salvador soothed her hand with both of his. “It’s okay if you don’t understand all this,” said Salvador, seeing her eyes go sleepy. “Mi mama always told us, ‘Does the newly hatched chick need to know why she just starts scratching the ground and searching for seeds and bugs? Does the child need to understand why she immediately starts looking for a breast to suck on when she comes into the world?’ No, the child and chicken don’t need to know any more than a human needs to know—until that Holy Sacred Circle is broken and our natural powers are taken from us. Then yes, we immediately need to examine and understand so we can reclaim our full Human Being Powers. We are Angels, Lupe. We are all Walking Stars of pure magic.”
She nodded.
He breathed deeply. “And this I truly needed to know, Lupe, because believe me, there wasn’t a day that passed that my father—a big, handsome European—didn’t hit me on the head, calling me a big-headed, stupid Indian without reason, yelling at me that my beloved mother wasn’t nothing but an ignorant. . .” He stopped. His eyes were running with tears. “. . . and yet who had the power to go on when everything got destroyed!” he added. “It was mi mama! That short little Indian woman! KNOWLEDGE is POWER, Lupe! And Knowledge with the VISION of our full Thirteen Senses is GOD! And God IS my Mother, because,” he added, “with my own two eyes I saw her perform miracles day after day—CON EL FAVOR DE DIOS!”
Salvador stopped. He could say nada, nada, nothing more.
And Lupe, she just held, looking at Salvador, at his eyes, his face, his whole being. Yes, at first, it had truly frightened her when Salvador had said that his mother was God . . . but then, well, she remembered that the same thing had happened in her home.
Her father, mostly European, had also fallen apart, when everything had gotten destroyed, and it had been her mother, a Yaqui, who’d held their familia together. But she’d never realized it until now, that this extra strength of her mother’s had come from her Indian heritage of knowing all of our Thirteen Senses.
Lupe breathed, and breathed again. Then it was true, she could now see so clearly, that all mothers who took up ground, putting their two hands on their hips, declaring the piece of Mother Earth on which they stood Sacred, did, indeed, become God—for they were then living in the Holy Grace of Creation, which was the exact meaning of the Mexican saying—con el favor de Dios!
Lupe made the sign of the cross over herself.
Oh, she loved this man, her husband, who was standing before her! They were BLESSED—gracias a Dios!
AND AT THIS VERY SAME INSTANT, Doña Margarita was going inside the stone church in Corona and making the sign of the cross over herself with holy water. She walked up the left aisle toward the front of the church. In the third pew from the front, Doña Margarita sat down by the statue of Mary.
“Good morning, my dear Lady,” she said to the Blessed Virgin. “How have You and Your Family been? Good, I hope. Because I need Your help once more. You see, last night the Devil came to me in a dream, and in no uncertain terms he let me know that if he couldn’t get one of my sons, he’d get the other. So here, in the safety of your church, where no evil can come to overhear what we are talking about, I’d like for you and me to work out a plan—woman-to-woman—so we can outmaneuver the Devil and send him back to Hell once and for all!
“Eh, what do you say, Maria?” said Doña Margarita, smiling to her good old friend who’d been guiding her all these years. “Are you ready for us to give the Devil a good chingaso a las todas!”
FIVE HUNDRED MILES to the north, Domingo, Salvador’s great big,
It was midmorning, and Domingo was with his friend Herlindo, a handsome Black Latino from Veracruz, Mexico. They were with some of the other Mexican prisoners over on their side of the prison yard. They were laughing and telling jokes, smoking a little good yerbita, and really having themselves a very smooth-happy time.
Domingo hadn’t smoked much marijuana before. Back home in Mexico, it had always been only for the old people with pains in their joints, or to help them with their appetite or bowel movements.
Laughing good-naturedly, the first big White came right up into Herlindo’s face and asked him when he was going to get tired of hanging out with these doped-up half-wit “Mex-ee-can greasers” and go be with the other “niggers” where he belonged.
Then this same tough-looking Anglo turned to Domingo, who was big and blue-eyed and red-headed, just like his father, Don Juan. He asked Domingo when he was going to smarten up and come over to their side— the White side, the right side—and bring along a little of that special medicinal weed that he was having smuggled in through his Chinese connections.
Domingo’s face almost dropped. How in the hell had these tricky bastard gringos already found out about his Chinese connection that Salvador had just gotten for him. Then it hit Domingo like a thunderbolt. They were the ones who’d knifed that Chinese guy the night before.
Seeing the surprised look on Domingo’s face, the second White guy laughed, flashing a knife in the bright sunlight. If Herlindo hadn’t leaped in front of Domingo just in time to divert the blade, it would’ve found its mark into Domingo’s belly.
HAVING WORKED OUT A PLAN with her good friend the Virgin Mary, Doña Margarita went back home feeling pretty good. She always felt good after she’d talked to the Blessed Mother of Jesus. No problema was then too big. All then seemed possible and quite workable, when you had the backing of Heaven.
At home, Doña Margarita had a little breakfast, then she went next door and told her daughter Luisa and Luisa’s children to not let anyone bother her because she was going to go back to bed and take a nap.
But Doña Margarita didn’t go to her home to take a nap. No, she went home to set a trap for the Devil, who loved to come to people as they slept.
Doña Margarita hid her rosary under her pillow and lay down to sleep. But she wasn’t sleeping; oh, no, she was ready. The Virgin Mary and she had worked out this plan. And then here it began again, just as it had been the night before; these two great big eyes were staring at her from the little fire in her wood-burning stove.
The old woman held, not moving. She knew that these two great big eyes belonged to her old friend the Devil. So Doña Margarita didn’t panic. No, she simply went slip-shifting to that soft, easy, relaxed “place” halfway between being awake and being asleep, to that state of complete availability to God.
And so the Devil continued talking, thinking that he was getting past her conscious mind and into her soul-consciousness because she wasn’t resisting.
Time passed, and more time passed, and she lay there on her little bed so still for so long that finally the Devil couldn’t tell if she was asleep or if he’d convinced her of his wicked ways and she was now his.
Not moving a muscle, the crafty old She-Fox now watched with her Heart-Eye as these two great big eyes in her little wood-burning stove got larger and larger, braver and braver, as they continued dream-talking to her, telling her inside of her mind to relax and stop acting so surprised, because it was well-written in the stars long, long ago that evil would triumph over all the whole world in the end.
This was when she got the full smell of el Diablo as he came out of the fire of her little wood-burning stove, hoping to snatch her soul.
Then here he was, the Devil, himself, ready to possess her, when Doña Margarita suddenly leaped out of her bed with the agility of a young maiden, and grabbed hold of el Diablo by his long tail and swung him around and around and threw him out of her home with such power that old Devil flew past the clouds to the stars, SCREAMING as he went!
“Vieja condenada!” he shouted. “You tricked me again!”
“Vieja yourself! You will not have either one of my sons!” she screamed! “So help me God, you come sneaking on me while I sleep again, and it’s not your tail I’ll grab! I’ll grab you by your tanates next time, and rip them out by their roots!”
“VIEJA PENDEJA!” screamed the Devil. “I thought you were too old to get hold of me anymore!”
“Old I am,” she said, “but slow I will never be in dealing with you! And I still got one good tooth to tear your heart out, too!” she added.
“Damn the day you women were created. I swear, I left Our Lord God’s side only because of you women!”
“Thank you for the compliment! Gracias por la flor! For I’m proud to know it was us, the women, who separated the likes of you from God!”
Hearing this, the Devil slapped his own mouth! “I didn’t mean that as a compliment, vieja cabrona, you tricked me again!”
She laughed. “Of course, I tricked you again. Because come on, admit it, you love me, particularly when I trick you, my sweet!”
“Mujer escandalosa, don’t call me ‘sweet’! You must fear me!”
“That’s for men who don’t know the joys of birthing!” yelled Doña Margarita, blowing kisses to the Devil to finish driving him crazy.
Instantly, he took off in a mad fit of rage!
Doña Margarita awoke laughing! She just loved tormenting her old amigo el Diablo. But also, she well knew that she could never drop her guard when dealing with this Force of Evil.
The drums were beating!
The drums were beat, Beat, BEATING!
The One Collective HEART-CORAZÓN of HUMANITY was BEAT BEATING, POUNDING CON AMOR!
IN CARLSBAD, Salvador awoke with a start.
“What is it?” asked Lupe.
“Nothing,” said Salvador, trying to catch his breath. “Just go back to sleep. It’s early yet.”
The drums were beat, BEAT, BEATING!
“Salvador,” said Lupe, “tell me what it is? I can feel it, too. Something is wrong.”
He sat up in bed, holding his forehead with both of his hands. “My mother,” he said, finally, “I can hear her; no, I mean, I can feel her very clearly. It’s a calling,” he added.
“A calling?”
“Yes, you know, when you just know that a loved one is calling you.”
Lupe breathed deeply, knowing exactly what Salvador meant. All her life, her own mother had also gotten callings, llamadas. For instance, when they’d gotten word that her older sister Sophia’s ship had gone down in the Sea of Cortez and she’d died along with all the hundreds of other people, their mother, Doña Guadalupe, had simply closed her eyes, placed both of her hands on her belly, just below her heart, and breathed deeply two or three times, then she’d opened her eyes and said, “No, Sophia lives,” just like that.
The months had passed and become years, and they’d come from their box canyon in Mexico to work in the cotton fields of Arizona, but never once had their beloved mother changed her mind. For the heart spoke a language that the mind didn’t know, and this language of the heart-corazón knew no earth-distance or barriers, for it came straight “through” God!
Lupe would never forget how everyone had given up on Sophia, feeling that she was dead for sure, and they’d thought that their mother had just gone crazy. But no, the old Yaqui Indian woman was not crazy. No, she’d just hold herself here, in her center, close her eyes, breathe in of God, then tell everyone—that no, one thousand times no, Sophia was alive and well. She could feel her “calling” from here within her womb as sure as the day she’d been born!
Their
“So what will you do?” now asked Lupe.
“Well, I’ll go,” said Salvador.
“Right now?”
“Yes, immediately.”
“Good. Then I’m going with you.”
“But, Lupe, I don’t know what this is all about. It could be, well—”
“Dangerous?” she asked.
He nodded.
“Salvador, is there something that you’re hiding from me? Are you a bootlegger?”
“My God!” he said. “Not now, Lupe.”
“Well, just say yes or no.”
“No,” he said.
“Really?” she said.
He was up and getting his boots and clothes. “Yes, really, I’m not a bootlegger.”
“Well, if you aren’t a bootlegger, then how did you end up with that pint bottle I found under the pillows?”
“Lupe,” he said, trying to be as patient as he could, but he was in a hurry “I have trucks, and well, now and then I haul things for some people. I do many things to make a living, Lupe. Find me something that needs getting done, and I’m right there to do it, especially for the right price.”
Lupe was getting her own clothes. She’d heard the men talk like this before. After their mine had closed down back in their box canyon, men had begun doing many things just to make a living. Her own godfather, who’d married Sophia, had gone down the mountain through bandit-infested barrancas to get supplies for his little grocery store.