Can't Make a Tortilla if My Life Depended on it

This might be difficult to believe, but making tortillas requires more than skill. It is an art form. Like any art, each step of the tortilla making process requires individual attention. It calls for concentration, patience, the ability to control one’s physical strength, and most importantly, one cannot be so hungry that one loses focus of the immediate process by thinking about the ultimate product. That kind of distracting energy causes one to hasten through the steps… to be careless.. This is why I could never make a tortilla if my life depended on it.

I sat at the edge of the sidewalk under the scorching summer sun, feeling whatever hydration was left in my body escape through my pores; soaking my cheap, yellow polyester dress. Polyester is not the best material for El Salvadoran heat, regardless of how popular and inexpensive the material happens to be in a poverty and war stricken land. The Mercado “boutiques” were stocked to the rafters with affordable polyester clothing. Popular fashions were duplicated in exaggerated replicas, creating clownish final products. This particular couture specimen was bright yellow, with yellow and white, candy striped, over-sized lapels and disco ready skirt. Someone forgot to mention to the seamstress that lace edging on already ginormous lapels was a bad, bad call. I hated that dress, but like the rest of my wardrobe, it wasn’t a matter of taste which led to the decision of its purchase. That decision was entirely driven by economics. I needed clothes; Mother needed matching accessories the day the yellow monstrosity was brought into my life. My other clothing options were Mother’s stained hand-me-downs and clothes I received from my cousins in the United States. I was blessed with Spaniard genetics (thank you Father), which meant that at the age of Eleven, I was already as tall as Mother; and much to my detriment, towered over my cohorts. El Salvadorans are generally small people. A five-foot, three-inch girl was considered a giant, an obese giant, to boot. I wasn’t obese, I just wasn’t gangly. I was thin, but an eleven-year-old who fit into her Mother’s clothes was opinionated to have been fat, even if malnourished.

So, there I sat, baking in my bright yellow, clownish dress, starving and wishing I could have one of the tortillas Niña Perla was deftly slapping onto the comal. Niña Perla was not a big-sized woman, but her presence commanded attention. One could hear her high-pitched orders to her children from blocks away. Always ready with a toothy smile, made brighter by the gold-trimmed front tooth she flashed often when she wasn’t playing with her bottom dentures, which she liked to suck up and down. With Mother being gone almost two weeks, filling my empty belly with the smell of fresh tortillas is all I could afford. I had come to sit at the curve across from her every day this week. Every day, I would inch closer trying to gather my courage to barter for a tortilla with some menial task. On Friday morning, as if she had read my thoughts, she waved me over to her and asked me to help her make tortillas. I was elated! I would get one tortilla for every fifteen I made. Without giving any consideration to the fact that I’d never even tried to make a tortilla in my life, I agreed. She pointed to a corner of her hut with her lips and after some confusion, I concluded that she wanted me to put on an apron and wash my hands on the dishwater bucket. I gathered all the memories collected throughout the week of watching her at the task as I tied the pink apron strings around my thin waist, took a deep breath, and tried to portray an air of confidence. Father used to tell me that the best way to garner people’s confidence in one’s abilities was to present confidence. “Ability is 10% of the equation.” He used to say. “It is more important to look competent than to actually be competent.” As I turned around, with clean hands and outfitted with Niña Perla’s homemade apron covering my sweat stained, clown dress, my façade of competency must have not fooled her. “Mira,” she instructed. “You make a little ball about this big, roll it around between your palms like this.” I nodded expertly. “Then you wet your hands and flatten it by gently squeezing with your thumb and fingers as you rotate it. See how I put my index finger on the edge to help shape it?” I nodded confidently. “When it’s about the right size you wet your hand and start to ‘slap’ it with one hand as you rotate it against the other. See? Like this.” She slowly demonstrated the ball-making-flattening-slapping process. Again, I nodded as I heard my stomach growl. It seemed simple enough. I was more worried about flipping the tortilla on the comal with my bare hand to cook the other side.

I grabbed a handful of masa and was just about to roll my first bolita when she yelled, “¡no, that’s too much, la mitad!” I jumped, dropped the masa on the dirty floor. Tears welling as I stared at the lump. She let out her belly laugh and said, “No chilles, niña, make another.” I grabbed another chunk of masa, smaller this time, and showed it to her before I started. She nodded approvingly, and I began rolling my future first tortilla. It proved to be much, much more difficult than I had imagined. I couldn’t get the masa from getting stuck on my hands and Niña Perla reminded me to get them wet. This seemed to help, but I couldn’t get the little masa wheel to be round. I gave up on that and started slapping it, only to have it crack. I tried rubbing my finger on it to cover the crack and that didn’t help at all. It must have taken me half an hour to make that first kidney-shaped tortilla. By the end of the morning, I’d only managed to make ten, with two of them close to being burnt because I couldn’t get the damned things to stick to my hand and came dangerously close to cooking the skin of my thumb trying to flip them. This was not enough to earn me even one tortilla. I struggled the entire five hours to not cry or faint from hunger and heat exhaustion. The heat of the day was exacerbated by the heat of the wood-burning elevated pit the comal rested on. I noticed that she had pulled all my tortillas aside and not sold them. She said those would be for her and her family’s dinner. As I hung up the apron and washed the dry masa off my fingers, I heard her tell me, “these two are for you. Come a little earlier tomorrow morning, Saturday is my busy day.” I didn’t turn around to look at her eyes. I hated to see people’s pity for me. I thanked her and without raising my head took my prize and went home with my kidney-shaped, almost-burnt tortillas. Miss Lulu awaited me patiently by the front door, her little tail waggling as her eyes brightened with happiness to see me. I ran to her and she jumped into my arms lapping up the sweat off my face. We went inside and boiled some of the rain water from the barrel on the propane stove after I had picked out the tadpoles. “We don’t want baby frogs in our belly, do we Miss Lulu?” She jumped around me with excitement. “I know, I know. I’m thirsty too… we have to let it cool down first though or we’ll get a tummy ache. It’s too hot to drink hot water.” I didn’t know if it was true or not, but I wasn’t about to take a chance. After waiting for a lifetime, we sat on the couch and ate our tortillas and clean water in silence. “I’m not very good at making tortillas, Miss Lulu.” I cried to her as she lapped up my tears. “This is all I could bring home today. Maybe tomorrow I’ll be better.” She snuggled on my lap and with neither of us caring that it made us both hotter. I petted her little head and rubbed my hand down her skinny dash-hound mix frame. It broke my heart that I could count the ribs on her little body. I have to get better at making tortillas! I said out loud, startling her out of her sleep.

                                   ******

No recuerdo qué pasó entre una cosa y otra. Solo sé que de ahí mi memoria salta, como siempre.

                                   ******

The sisters came home sometime before midnight. My mother, in her efforts to create a stable influx of funds decided to rent my room to “friends” of one of her lovers. Elsa and Maribel were tall, svelte, and stunningly beautiful women in their early thirties. They were also prostitutes. One day my friends took me to the “Zona Rosa” to prove to me that they were not lying to me about my roommates’ chosen profession. They even paid my bus fare, so adamant they were for me to believe them. I wasn’t confident that we would make it back before dark. It was a significant risk for us to go far late in the day, considering that martial law had been invoked and we risked being picked up by the descalza if we got caught after dark. But we went anyway. After walking down the avenue of putas, as Kike called it, I spotted one of them. Maribel was sitting at a barred, tall window, scantily dressed in a striped red and white tube top and shorts that looked painted on her round hips. With exaggerated make-up that made her look clownish, she sat there, filing her long red nails. Her beautiful brown wavy hair was hidden under a red crochet beret. She was staring forward, staring blankly. Our eyes locked and I froze. She wasn’t looking at me. I was just in the path of her dead brown eyes as she hid away from her surroundings.

“Ya ves!” exclaimed Kike, proud of being right.

I turned around and ran. I ran until I was out of breath and couldn’t run any more. I ran from the fear that I was looking at my future.

Later that night, I pretended to be asleep when Elsa came home with one of her gross “friends.” When they reached the top of the stairs, I could see them; they were half crawling, half walking up the stairs and he stopped to push himself against her from behind and started slobbering on her neck. I cursed in my head for forgetting to close my door when I went to bed. I didn’t dare do it now. I closed my eyes tight and hoped they didn’t notice me.

My house was built on a hope and a prayer budget. It was part of a “project” in 1975 to provide housing for people living in champas. Mother managed to get herself on the list and we moved in a year after arriving in El Salvador from Spain. The houses were cheaply made. A wall made out of corrugated wood separated the two bedrooms upstairs. I fell asleep imagining what their sexual activities looked like by the sounds of their sloppy, loud noises.

The hollow, nauseating belly ache of hunger woke me. Miss Lulu had curled herself around my feet. Pain from hunger is torturous and debilitating. You lose perspective, hope, and decency. You do things that are unimaginable. Just to survive. At first, the humiliation and shame felt overwhelming. With time, I learned to leave my body so that when a boy rubbing against me put his hand in that place, I was repeatedly told to not let anyone touch. Sometimes, after these make-out sessions, they’d share a meal with me. I just had to make sure to not be obvious about it. Sometimes, I’d go “visit” Mr. Rosales. He would let me play with his daughters’ dolls while I pretended that I didn’t notice his hands pushing their way up my thin, malnourished legs and taking off my underwear. “Deja que te dé ese besito rico que te gusta.” I hated going to his house. He always made me assure him that I liked what he was doing to me. Like that made it all less insidious. He would give me that “special kiss” until I orgasmed. I hated him for it. I hated my body for liking what he did to me. I hated when he stopped and pushed down to his mouth begging to not stop and he would laugh and make me tell him that I liked it when he gave me that “besito rico.” I couldn’t pretend I wasn’t there. I had to be in the room with him, present and disgusted, embarrada en shame. Afterwards, he would feed me, give me un par de colones, and a bolis. He was one of the few people in the colonia who could afford a refrigerator and it was always full. I would stuff myself so that I wouldn’t have to go back too soon. One day, I stole a bag of uncooked beans. That was a glorious day! I had food to eat every day for a week! As I think back to that time, I wonder what Mother thought I did for food when she was gone. Did she really believe that the pot of beans and few tortillas she left would sustain me for the weeks she was gone? I remember the shame I felt when she came back, like she knew what I had let others do to me to eat. There would be a heavy silence in the house when she came back. She didn’t look at me or acknowledge me, except when she needed me to do something. After my brothers were sent back to Father in Spain, I seem to have disappeared for her too. I wasn’t there. Sometimes, I would purposely do something that made her mad just so that she would see me. She didn’t care that I hadn’t gone to school in months, that I was hungry and scared. I was invisible. In those moments, she would take the leather belt that Tete left behind, dip it in the barrel full of water, bend me over and beat me with it. Sometimes, if she hit me right, she would leave a couple of words from the “El Salvador” edged on the leather on my skin. The day I saw that she’d turned the belt so that the buckle was menacingly swaying at the end of the strap, I ran. I ran until I couldn’t run anymore and stayed gone for days.

But that didn’t matter now… I had found a way to secure food without having to do gross things for it! Not only that, but Niña Perla was very nice to me. I loved her carefree laughter. I could feel it reverberating through me when she threw her head back and laughed loudly making her body shake with the joy of it. I could feel happiness in those moments… like life could be good. She never got angry with me. She was patient, even when I ruined my little balde con masa that she had given me to practice amasar la masa because I couldn’t even do that simple task… tortilla making was simply not for me. I don’t know what gene I was deprived of that left me incapable of doing anything edible from masa.

I slipped and slid down the barranco de basura in a craze. The tears and mocos helping me to not smell the stench of rotting garbage. Kike and Carolina were screaming at me to come back up from the edge I had just climbed down from. It was at least 300 feet down. This ravine was used as the colonia’s garbage dump. I didn’t care that I was filthy and that I was going to reek when I came back up. I had to find her. She had to be alive. Mario had to be lying. He did that sometimes. Mario, Carolina, and Kike were siblings. Mario was the oldest and he was cruel. He liked to say hurtful things sometimes, just to make me cry, not that it was difficult to make me cry. I’ve always been “sensible” as mother liked to say. So, when I came back from my first successful day at tortilla making, mostly because la Niña Perla gave up on me learning to make tortillas, I was not prepared.

“no toques la masa niña,” she said to me when I walked in ready to try again.

Instead of making tortillas or trying to help her prepare by amasando el maíz, she told me to grab the balde full of maize and take it to Don Pedro at the mill.

“No lo toques, ni metas la mano” —the fear that I’d get my hand crunched off was implied.

This was now my job! I could do that without wasting her masa, tortillas, or time! After getting the maize turned to masa at the mill, I was put to work washing dishes, sweeping, and helping her very gently pack the tortillas for her customers. Finally! I was useful. My unofficial salary was four tortillas and two squares of queso duro. I was so happy. I would have access to food and Niña Perla seemed to like me. I already felt less lonely from the three days of botched efforts at making tortillas.

So, I was skipping home full of joy looking forward to giving Miss Lulu her tortillas — she would get more than I did mostly because I didn’t know if cheese would make her sick — I was surprised to not see her waiting for me at the front door like she usually did. I put the tortillas and cheese away and went looking for her. After calling her name down the passages for almost an hour, Mario came out and laughingly told me that the soldiers had taken her over by the barranco and were playing with her. They wrapped a rope around her neck and were holding her over the edge betting how long before she died. When it started to take too long, they started swinging her. Mario said that she had slipped off the rope and dropped down the ravine. I felt all the air leave my body, like a punch to my stomach. I doubled over and screamed at him that he was mean and it wasn’t funny. En serio, I’m not joking. It really happened. I turned and started running in the direction of the barranco.

Once there, I couldn’t see the bottom. There was so much garbage, but I didn’t care. I had to find her and started my trek down. I kept yelling at him to tell me where the soldiers had her and Mario started guiding me. That’s when Carolina and Kike arrived and began to plead with me to come back up. I ignored them and kept going.

Halfway down, I slid on something slippery and wet and fell on my back on top of it while I was trying to wave off what felt like millions of big fat flies. I screamed at the sight of a bloated, decomposing body. I didn’t want to know who it was. I didn’t want to know who it was. I didn’t. I didn’t have time for that information then. I couldn’t let fear and disgust stop me. I had to find her.

                              ****

Not too long after I tripped on the body, I found her. Her little neck bent at an odd angle. Her eyes were open wide and tongue sticking out, almost comically. I picked her up from the pile of rotting garbage and wept as I hugged her to my chest. I wept for what seemed hours. Miss Lulu was the last bit of hope I had left. She was the last bit of joy in a hopeless, hungry existence that for the life of me I couldn’t understand why I kept living. When I ran out of tears, I crawled back up the ravine, avoiding the bloated body this time using my skirt as a bag to hold her as I struggled.

Mario, Kike, and Carolina helped me bury her by a pretty tree. I had no tears left so I just stood there in a trance as I buried what was left of my hope with her broken little body under a pretty tree. I felt such shame eating her tortillas later that day. It felt wrong but I ate them as my tears ran down my face mixing with every bite I took.