Erased Faces by Graciela Limón

stooped from years spent toting loads to the marketplace, hands gnarled from a lifetime of toiling in the fields.
    Juana concentrated on their heads and faces, trying to clear her brain. She took in more of the women’s appearance, seeing how their hair was braided but disheveled and streaked with gray. After a few moments, she realized that from her place near the side of the hut she could make out only profiles: beaked noses, flabby jowls, hollow mouths, furrowed necks. For a time, Juana was vaguely aware that they were speaking in hushed tones. She concentrated. In a few minutesher hearing became attuned, and she could make out their whispering. It sounded like dry fronds scraping on bark.
    â€œEl niño se murió.”
    â€œNomás no puede. Pobrecita mujer.”
    Juana’s hands moved to feel her abdomen. It was empty. The child had slipped out between her legs, and it had done so soundlessly because it was dead. She felt her heart shiver. She dragged her hands to her breast and rubbed, trying to stop the trembling. Then she clasped her hands on her ears because she did not want to hear the hags pitying her, repeating over and again how she could not keep a child in her womb long enough to deliver it alive.
    More lightning flashed, filling the
palapa
with a light charged with violence, made more threatening by the explosion of thunder that followed almost immediately. Juana felt the earth under her shift; it too was filled with fear. Four years had passed since her father had sent her away with Cruz, and this was the third child she had lost. Remembering this pushed her into a pit of sadness, made intolerable to her because her grief was coated with dread.
    â€œPobre hombre.”
    â€œBuen hombre.”
    â€œDesafortunado hombre.”
    Poor man. Good man. Unfortunate man. The toothless mutterings of the midwives reached her again, this time sympathizing with Cruz Ochoa, pitying him for having a useless woman as his wife. Juana filled with desperation, wondering why they pitied him and not her. Inside of her a voice asked why did they not understand that each child had been conceived in fear and repugnance, robbing it of a reason to live. She turned her head away from the silhouettes, hoping that she would again lose consciousness, making them disappear, wishing that a bolt of lightning would strike her, erase her from that hut, erase her existence.
    In the village, Cruz Ochoa was considered a good man. He neither drank alcohol nor did he beat his wife. For these two reasons alone, the women of the tribe envied Juana, because in most
palapas
, drunkenness and battering were common. What no one knew, however, was that Cruz was a man filled with anger, with a rage that washedover Juana every time he glanced at her, every time he commanded her to open her legs. No one knew that the intoxication that possessed him was caused not by alcohol, but by fathomless bitterness. No one knew that although he did not beat her with his fists, he attacked her with eyes filled with ire.
    Days after the last miscarriage, Juana emerged to return to her tasks, grateful that Cruz had, at least for a while, disappeared into the jungle. In her heart she wished that he might be devoured by jaguars, poisoned by serpents, swallowed by a river, but her mind yanked her from these thoughts, reminding her that he would, in time, return. She braced herself, not knowing how he would vent his rage on her this time. During his absence, her mind filled with questions:
Why was Cruz so embittered? Why did he hate her, yet bury himself in her body with such abandonment? Why did he not speak to her as other men did to their wives?
The answers to these questions never came to her. She resigned herself to living with a man filled with shadows.
    One day, Juana knelt by the river, washing clothes. She was lost in thought, oblivious to the other women who chattered, exchanging gossip. The rain had stopped, but the river was still swollen,