Dolphin Bellies

I started to write this a year ago when I was in Calen, Chiloé. I had a chance to go back and visit this past week, this time with my younger sister, Laurie. It was wonderful to catch up with old friends and also to somehow gain perspective on an experience past. My good friend Jeanette gave birth to her daughter Rossana while I was there, and last Sunday we attended a festival on Caguach, island of devotion, off the western coast of Chiloé with new and old friends.
This post is about my dear friend Ruthie.



Ruthie sits by the window and waits for rain. Her eyebrows are two horizons. Her arms are crossed as she sits. Listening.

The kitchen is quiet, but not an empty quiet. This is a silence that hums. Water hisses from the pot, a motor growls from the beach below, and somewhere in the bay giant seals argue on a styrofoam platform. Doña Nena arrives through a backdoor in the kitchen, bearing a giant repollo, silvery green. She’s bent forward at an angle and her thin hands are dirty in the creases between her veins.

“Va a llover,” Ruthie says, glancing over and back to the glass without changing her expression. A cold wind from the cordillera parts the two pines that stand outside, licking the half moon slice through the center pane. The sky is bright white. It presses on the house.

In the mornings when we walk to town she tells me her dreams. She’s dressed in her vestido de novia, and her mama has made her a tremenda torta. She stretches out her hands to show me the size of her cake and flicks her fingers to taste the cream icing. Other days she dreams of races, on the Diá de Calen. La Abuelita. Or of great long knives. She can’t remember how they finish.

Some nights when the sky is licked clean by the cold, the water is glass and the wind gathers and pulls at our throats, we think about the stars. Nena has sent us for a kilo of flour at la Marisol. Lights from the village blink ahead of us as our whispering feet carry us over the beach.

They come from above and below, the stars. We are walking a sandbar, suspended in the great orb. Not one wave disturbs our peace. Together we think about them. We let them wash over us in name and legend (me Orion, Ruthie las Tres Marias), sinking into the great highway of constellations that send hushing ripples to our shores. We hold them in our hands until the inky blackness in between draws sleep to our eyes and blood from our fingers. Up there’s Dioscito and los angeles. Come, she says, let’s go to the cemetery and remember the dead.

Ruthie cannot write her name. She cannot read or dress alone or leave Calen by herself. But she recites recipes as she walks and peels potatoes until they glow like moons. She has a laugh that seeps through cold mornings and rouses the trees. She taught me to build fires, to chop wood. She also taught me:

When the rock shaped like a seal emerges clean from the water, the tide is good to cross over.
There are 2 roscas for every 1 egg
When dolphins parade along the shoreline, bellies white like the snow of the cordillera, the weather will shift.
If the fire cracks, someone who gossips or tells tall tales is due to visit.
After the rain, tiny white flies swarm the camino like dust unsettled.
If you squish a horsefly slow and easylike between your fingers, his brothers won't come back.
Serpents carved the islands.
A bird enters, and someone who has never visited will arrive in the house.
Needles in a cross tacked to the door frame ward off witches.
Seals were humans once, we must treat them like we treat our fathers.
If it rains on the night of the festival of San Juan, the apple crop will be plentiful the coming year.
Romero, rosemary, is to drown the pain of first loves.
Many a man dies of the drink.
Balsamo stops bleeding and soothes dog bites

When Ruthie sits by the window, she waits for rain.