The boy liked to lie with his ear pressed against the cool shaded stone of the patio. Zita, the maid, might be hanging clothes on a line. There was a stone tub in the garden where she did some of her washing. There was green slippery slime on the edge of the stone that the boy liked to touch. For a big wash, Zita would go to the nearby stream, where other women went also to wash their clothes. Sometimes the boy went there with her. He would lie in the grass reading books or just dreaming, listening to the women's talk and to the sound of the stream. Those two sounds flowed together so that sometimes it seemed that the water was talking and laughing and the women were part of the gurgling and sloshing of the stream. But he also liked to lie on the cool stone patio, feeling its coolness against his face and listening. His mother asked him once what he was doing. He said he was listening. Listening to what, she asked. To the stone. Really, she said, what does it say? It doesn't say anything, he said, laughing: Stones don't speak! Then what do you hear? I don't know, he said. I just like to listen to it. She didn't ask any further. His mother was a musician. She played the violin every day. She was practicing, she said. Why do you practice, the boy asked. So that I can play better, she said. But you play good already, he said. Play well, she said. Yes, I play well, but I still can play better, and that's why I practice. Later, when my playing is perfect, I'll play for other people to hear it. That's called a performance. I'm practicing so I can give a good performance. A perfect performance, he said. Maybe, she said, smiling. Zita pronounced the boy's name like a Spanish word, "Pira." Other Mexicans and even some American children who spoke Spanish called him that too. Some called him Pedro. Otherwise, his name was Peter. He liked the sound of his name the way Mexicans pronounced it. That made him feel Mexican, more Mexican even than Pedro did. Playing in the street with Mexican children, he didn't like it when his mother and father called him by his American name. Americans were gringos, so Peter was a gringo name. It wasn't good being a gringo. Sometimes the other boys used that word. Always they were talking about someone who wasn't there, or even about all the gringos in the world, and always the word sounded mean. He knew that he could be called a gringo because he was American and his mother for sure was a gringa even in the way she spoke Spanish. His father was German, but that didn't make Pira less of a gringo. And yet nobody ever called him that. Once a boy cheated at marbles and Pira called him a cabrón, which he knew was a bad word, and the boy, instead of calling him "gringo," said "chinga tu madre," which was one of the really bad expressions that he was told never ever to use. That proved how bad a word "gringo" really was. Sometimes Pira prayed to be allowed to be Mexican. * Pira's last name was Vogelsang. That was a name he liked even though it wasn't Mexican at all. It was his German father's name, and it meant birdsong. His father was a writer. When he went into his room to write, he said he had to work. The room where he worked was always full of smoke, and he always looked worried when he wrote. That room was his office. On one wall near his desk was a bright red picture of a man's arm making a fist above some German words. On another wall was a picture of the house of a famous writer from long ago, with pretty trees around it. There was a bookcase full of books, and on top of the bookcase stood ten or fifteen ídolos, green ones and brown ones, tall and little. Pira wasn't allowed to play with them. Zita worked too. She swept and mopped the floors, she made the beds, she went shopping, she did the laundry. That was Zita's work. Sometimes his mother helped Zita make meals, but otherwise she didn't work. She practiced. Maybe that was work too. She said it was. But she was also playing. Soon Pira would be in first grade and there would be homework. He looked forward to that. But now it was summer and all he did was play. He played with the children in the street, and also with two special friends: Chris, an American boy who had no mother and whose father was rich, and Arón, who had no father and whose mother was poor. Chris lived in a big white house that had a machine gun in the garden. A chauffeur drove him around in a car. Arón lived nearby in a dark apartment full of crucifixes. He had only one toy, a skeleton that waved its arms and legs when you pulled on a string. Once Pira gave Arón a toy car to take home. The same day, Arón brought the car back, crying. His mother had whipped him with a strap, he said, for taking something that wasn't his, even though it was his because Pira had given it to him. Pira's mother talked to Arón's mother. "Your son suffers a lot, Señora," she said. "Please don't beat him. We all love him." "I will beat him as much as he deserves," Arón's mother said. Chris was beaten too, but not as often. He once showed Pira a welt on his behind that his father had raised by spanking him with a hairbrush. Every once in a while, the three boys played together. But on many days Pira played alone, and he liked that. He liked to ride his scooter on the patio. He liked to race on the scooter with a floating silk cloth tied around his neck and pretend he was superman. He liked to play with his metal soldiers and Indians. He liked to listen to Paco, the parrot, chattering in the banana tree behind the house. He liked to throw a stick for Tristan, the dog, which Tristan loved. And he had recently discovered how to read, and that was fun too. That discovery happened all by itself. His parents were always reading to him from books and he would watch their fingers moving along the line, and suddenly he realized he could read. Often, he would climb the big zapote tree in the garden. He used to need his father to help him get up on a big branch, but now there was a ladder leaning against the tree so he could climb up by himself. Standing on the branch and holding on to another branch above it, he could imagine he was a sailor in the rigging of a sailing ship, especially when the wind was blowing. He could sit on the big branch too, hugging the tree's trunk for support. From there he could look across the valley all the way to the snow-topped volcanoes, Popocatepetl and Iztaccihuatl. Zita had told him a story about them. Popocatepetl was a great Aztec warrior. Iztaccihuatl was a Princess. Popocatepetl loved Iztaccihuatl and asked her father for permission to marry her. Her father said he would first have to fight against a bad king who lived far away. Popocatepetl set out for that faraway kingdom and fought against the bad king and killed him. But it took him a long time to come home. Another man who also loved Iztaccihuatl told everyone that Popocatepetl was dead. So her father said the other man could marry her. Iztaccihuatl didn't want to marry the other man, but her father said that she had to. Then Iztaccihuatl became so sad that she died. No sooner had she died than Popocatepetl returned. Everyone had to cry. It was the saddest day. Popocatepetl said he would take Iztaccihuatl away and never come back. He carried her body high up into the mountains and laid her down there and stood looking at her day and night and never moved. Then it snowed and snowed until Popocatepetl's head and Iztaccihuatl's head, chest, knees, and feet were covered with snow, and there they stayed forever. Pira no longer asked Zita to tell him that story. It was there in his memory and in the mountains themselves, Popocatepetl standing tall with his head slightly bowed, Iztaccihuatl lying on her back before him. And instead of Zita's low, slow-talking voice, he heard the birds and the vendors' cries in the street. * One of his favorite books was the Just So Stories . Every once in a while, the person telling the stories said "Best Beloved" or "O Best Beloved," and at those moments Pira always felt a special pleasure, as if he personally was being addressed in the most kind and respectful way imaginable. The way the words were capitalized made them look even grander than they sounded. The "O," when it came, was like the bow you make before a king: "O best beloved!" Another thing the person telling the story said from time to time was "Listen and attend." He said it in different ways: "Now listen and attend!" "Now attend and listen!" "Hear and attend and listen!" "Now attend all over again and listen!" Sometimes when Pira lay on the patio doing nothing, those words came in his thoughts and reminded him that he could listen. * It was Zita who taught him how to pray. "You can pray to God, or to la Virgen de Guadalupe, or to el Señor Jesús," she said. "El Señor Jesús is the god of love. Fold your hands like this and ask him to help all the people and all the animals. Then you can pray for yourself and the people you love." When Zita spoke of God and la Virgen de Guadalupe and el Señor Jesús, she used special words that weren't used in ordinary speech. Poderoso, for instance. It meant "powerful" but the Spanish word sounded that way: poderoso. Another word she used was gracia: that was something the Virgin gave you if you prayed to her--gracia y cariño. Pira knew that cariño meant kindness, but he didn't know what gracia meant, and when he asked Zita, she didn't know how to explain it. So he asked his mother: "What does gracia mean?" "It means thank you." "No, not gracias--gracia." "Who taught you that word?" "Zita. She said she couldn't explain it." "It's hard to explain. It means grace in English. Grace is similar to beauty, but it's not the same. Ballerinas are graceful--the way they move, the way they stand on tiptoe. A ballerina may be beautiful, but if she's not graceful . . ."--she made a dancer's movement with her hands--"like this . . . then she's not a really good dancer. Grace is a special kind of beauty." He nodded. "There's grace in music too," she said. "I'll show you." She took her violin case from the drawer where she kept it, took out the violin and the bow, tucked the violin under her chin, and with the bow drew a single long, clear note. "That's beauty," she said. He understood. "And now: here's the same beauty but with a grace note." And again she drew the long swelling sound, but with two fingers she produced a delicate, dancing quaver near the end. "That's grace," Pira said, making little waves with his fingers to imitate grace. His mother agreed. She put the violin and the bow back into the case and the case back into the drawer and closed the drawer. "Actually," she said then, "Zita has grace. She's beautiful too, but she's graceful as well." "Like a ballerina?" "Kind of. The way she holds her head when she walks, the way she stands, the way she sits." "How does she sit?" "You know . . . very straight. Very dignified." "What's dignified?" "Graceful!" she said, and they both laughed. "It comes from balancing things on her head," she said. Pira pictured the way Zita walked beside or ahead of him on the way to the stream and back, carrying the laundry in a basket that was balanced on her head. Sometimes she supported the basket with one hand, and sometimes she walked with both arms by her sides and the basket never fell. "Zita says she gets grace from la Virgen de Guadalupe," he said. Now his mother looked surprised. "Oh," she said. "That's a different kind of grace. The same word, but it means something different." She thought about it. Pira waited. "It's a little bit like luck. When religious people are lucky, they believe it comes from God, or a goddess. So they pray for grace. And sometimes they get it, but it's not because there's a god." Pira was no longer curious about grace. It seemed to be something for women, and he was going to be a man. If he prayed, he would pray to El Señor Jesús, the god of love, who was muy poderoso. But after a while, when he thought about Jesus, it was hard to imagine him being poderoso, because he was nailed to a cross. How could he help anybody? He needed help himself. So when Pira prayed, which he did once in a while, he prayed to God. God was the father of El Señor Jesús. He knew everything and could do anything, so it made sense to pray to him. Excerpted from The Stone World by Joel Agee All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
