BARRENDERA

Maura Leticia M. Aranda

As a child she worked as a domestic worker and local gardener. "I used to fix trees," she tells us, "loosen the soil, cut the grass, before I was hired as a permanent street sweeper." At five in the morning she sets out for the storage shed, where she takes her wheelbarrow, her broom, and her "marinas," two enormous lobster-shell-like sheets with which she gathers the dust that doesn't cling to the broom. She has swept the same stretch of street for 28 years.

We decide to replace the broom handle with a black clay flute (because the act of sweeping is like a mantra of caresses: it sets us to meditating, whistling, or whispering a song). We decorate the flutes with stalks from the hills of San Lorenzo, and so they look like paintbrushes, with which the street sweeper seems to caress the street instead of sweeping it.

From time to time she plays the flute, but the neighbors don't notice anything. They only say, "Good morning, Maura!" followed by a couple of bleary-eyed, resigned dogs.

MORILLEROS

Juan Vazquez
Antonio M. Gonzales

The morillos were the pencils of the hill. The morillero horses used them to trace the footpaths along the slopes, like veins of graphite binding the forests tightly to the city. The peasants were experts at everything: they knew how to sow, how to find the lost young of the sheep, how to build roofs with morillos, how to recognize woods and stones; they knew how to follow the tracks of animals that walk in reverse (now extinct), how to use herbs (to cure ailments or to become more fertile), how to read the stars, predict the weather, and survive lightning.

They also knew how to speak with dogs and teach children to untie knots while looking straight at the Sun. Sometimes they were even musicians, and they were the only Philosophers of the Enveloping Sky.

YERBERO

Juan Perez Rodriguez
y Guadalupe, his daughter

Doña Victoria, his grandmother — a healer with bony hands — snatched a quince-wood switch from little Juan's hands and, with it, gave him his first lesson across the backside, for having nearly destroyed an aloe plant with a wooden-sword blows. And so Juanito learned to respect plants as if they were people.

Herding sheep in the forest was a punishment in San Lorenzo, and Juanito was sent off as a shepherd for having failed in elementary school. Ironically, this became his second great school, since in his retreat as a shepherd-hermit, other ascetic sheep herders taught him everything about medicinal herbs. There he came to know the hill, its hidden corners, and its plants.

Now, at seventy, he walks with his daughter Guadalupe toward the cave of San Pablocan, and inside they play the drum-stones. With its offerings and its little chapels, San Pablocan is a proto-pyramid, or a church inside a gourd — a hollow where underground rivers and the roots of trees breathe at the same time.

ORÁCULO

Rosa Maria P. Arguelles

Her mother taught her to make tortillas the hard way, slapping her hands with an electrical cord if the griddle was left empty, since she would not tolerate "wasting my firewood, you idiot."

"My life experiences have led me to transform pain and adversity…" says Rosa María, rubbing the metallic tendons of her hands, or the marks her mother left on her heart, "…I have learned and I have forgiven. My shames have been cleansed."

The oracle is a cart-tortilla stand that carries a griddle engraved with the Oracle of the Tortillas. The oracle's powers are: "Destiny Power," "Guiding Power," "Opposing Power," and "Allied Power." Through these powers, the tortillas speak differently, depending on whether they puff up or fail to puff up on the griddle.

After her reading, the customers take their steaming tortillas with them and eat them with sea salt, or just as they are, without fossils, like tulip buds turned into buttons.