Thirteen Miracles and Counting
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"Abuelito Manolo died this morning," Papi finally said. I worried about Abuelita. She had just lost a part of herself. Even though only eleven, I was beginning to understand love. I had just finished reading Romeo & Juliet and felt my heart and eyes had been opened to the grand secrets of true love--the kind that was true to the bone, right to the very marrow. The very fact that it was the only school book my sister Violeta ever kept and didn’t sell back to the school bookstore, had made it all the more intriguing. Once I learned to decipher the funny words by using the footnotes and got into it, I was hooked. I could see so much of Abuelita and Abuelito in it. Even in their seventies, they had exchanged meaningful glances from across the room, danced rumbas--Abuelita’s hips clay for Abuelito to mold and guide--and more than once, I had witnessed my grandfather patting Abuelita’s generous behind and nuzzling her neck. Passion was no longer a word my sister threw around which was beyond my comprehension even when I looked it up in the dictionary. It was no longer just a word that appeared at least twice on every cover of Cosmo that Violeta bought or that made Mamá blush and change the subject. It was "a magnificent chemical reaction"-- as one magazine called it--that ignited just like what happened every time Abuelito and Abuelita saw one another. The very bond Romeo must have shared with Juliet. A complete melding of flesh and bone, spirit and soul. It was the same chemical reaction which had pushed my cousin Peter--we all called him Pepe at home--to fall head over heels in love with a woman fifteen years his senior. It turns out Pepe’s girlfriend, Raquel, was practically blind in both eyes due to a rare case of premature glaucoma. We had seen her a few times at family dinners. She was a tall, statuesque woman with long brown hair and pouty full lips that must have whispered many sweet nothings into our cousin’s ear. And suffering, himself, from a romantic case of mental glaucoma, my cousin Pepe made a large withdrawal from his modest savings account and carried it to Raquel’s house for her surgery like an altar boy carrying the wine up to the priest at mass. "The better her eyesight gets, the blinder my Pepe gets," Tía Lourdes cried to all of us one evening. "What has she done to him? He was a smart boy. Straight A’s. She’s got him bewitched!" "Like the show?" Pablito chimed in. "Yes, mi hijo," Tía sobbed. "But nobody’s laughing," my brother said confused. "Everybody always ends up laughing on ‘Bewitched’." "I don’t think that’ll happen, lindo," Tía said. "Don’t ever let some tricky woman turn your head, Pablito, because it may just keep going ‘round and ‘round." "Lourdes!" Mamá scolded our aunt. "He’s only six years old." "Six and a half," my brother corrected. "Well, it’s never too early to talk to them about women and drugs, Anita."
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About the Book
Thirteen Miracles and Counting
Thirteen Miracles and Counting is a novel with a rich mixture of characters and cultures and magical realism at its center. As Elenita herself tells us, "We Cubans are a superstitious people. There are always dangers to watch out for. Evil spirits. Voodoo worshipers working their black magic in back rooms during the owl hours of the night. Dry palms ready to burn should it thunder.
It’s hard to tell how these superstitions worked their way into our souls, but they did. Lola, a friend of the family, liked saying that it was the water in Cuba that makes us this way--one dip in the ocean and all the centuries of fear and superstitions just soak into us. My brother Pablito once asked how come it seemed to only affect Cubans even though others bathed in the same waters. She had no answer for him, except that the ocean somehow knew its people. And so with superstitions we grew, my brother and sister and I."
And perhaps it was the power of these superstitions, which made it possible for Elenita to see that miracles do happen. They happen all the time. They really do. Not always the grand ones with saintly apparitions and Vatican approval, and throngs of worshipers making pilgrimages to the holy sight, but small miracles which fill our lives and go easily unnoticed.
About the Author
Maria Ercilla, born in Havana, immigrated to the U.S. at the age of four. Her life has been rich in both Cuban and American traditions and her childhood has been a great source of inspiration for her writing. She graduated from UCLA with a B.A. in English and an M.A. in Education. She has been teaching Creative Writing and English Literature to high school students for the past fifteen years. Her stories and poetry have appeared in numerous literary journals. Her many awards include The International Hemingway Poetry Award (1997 and 1998), and the Allan Tate Memorial Award (1998). She is presently at work on her third novel, The Year of the Bad Boy. Ercilla lives in Los Angeles, California, with her family.