I'll start.
The old woman's name is difficult for me to pronounce with the proper accent. It's spelled Anna Maria Hernanda de la luz Vasquez, but I definitely couldn't say it the same way she said it to me. The little girl is her granddaughter Gabriela. They live in a tiny shack in the outskirts of Tijuana.
Anna Maria Hernanda is a widow, her husband having left her for a younger woman when she was 36 and pregnant for the fifth time. He wasn't much of a husband, but at least her financial situation wasn't too desperate until after he left. She raised four boys and one girl almost entirely on her own, working no less than three jobs at a time for a 30-year period. Her boys grew up and scattered across the world. There was nothing for them there. She was never worried about them, despite the trouble they each got into while growing up. It was her daughter that gave her white hair. It's always the daughter.
Rosa was her name. She grew up a pretty child, almost too pretty for her own good. Like her brothers, she ran off to find her way in the world, but unlike her brothers Rosa never kept in touch with her mother. Anna Maria Hernanda had no idea whether Rosa was alive or dead for several years until, one night five years earlier, when Rosa showed up on her doorstep. This is the way she told it to me. This is the way it happened.
***
"Who is it?" Anna Maria Hernanda shouted. If it wasn't important, she wasn't getting up. And that was that. Besides, she was too busy watching her favourite program, and the reception on her TV set was unusually good that night.
"Mama," the voice cried weakly through the door, "it's me, mama. It's Rosa."
Anna Maria Hernanda made the sign of the cross and rushed out of her seat, which wasn't easy, considering the weight she was carrying. To think that, before all her pregnancies, she had been the prettiest girl in her village. Within moments she was at the door.
"Rosa!" she cried, tears already falling down her cheeks as she embraced her youngest child and only daughter. "Come in, come in."
"I...I can't, mama," Rosa said in a voice that was little more than a whisper. "I've got to go."
Anna Maria Hernanda repeated, "You've got to go? But--"
"Here," Rosa said, pulling at her right hand. She led a toddler-aged little girl into the ramshackle house. "This is your granddaughter, mama. Gabriela."
"Are you married, Rosa? Where is your ring?"
Rosa glanced behind her a moment before responding, "I'm not married, mama. And I am sorry, but I've got to leave. Please take..." Rosa broke into an uncontrollable burst of sobs. Finally, she continued, "Please take care of Gabriela."
Stepping back, out of her mother's reach, Rosa said, "Goodbye."
"Rosa!" Anna Maria Hernanda shouted as much out of anger as of fear. "If you leave this house I'm afraid I will never look upon you again."
"I've got to go, mama," Rosa cried, stepping further out into the darkness of the night.
Gabriela watched as her mother left. She never cried then. She's never cried ever since then.
***
I met Gabriela after meeting a lumber salesman on behalf of a housing project happening there. It's something I do every summer for a few weeks. Gabriela was selling small trinkets on the side of the road. I don't normally buy souvenirs from the locals, but for some reason that day I decided to pick up something.
"How much for just the chess-set?" I asked.
"Twenty dollars," Gabriela said with the perfect grin of a salesgirl. "Thirty, and you also get a blanket."
"I think I'll stick with the chess set."
A yelping noise behind me caught Gabriela's attention and then my own. I looked to see a small child being chased by a large, mangy-looking dog. It wasn't at all playful. It was on the hunt. Out of desperation, I suppose. It looked hungry.
Before I had a chance to react to what I saw, Gabriela cried something in Spanish and bent down to grab something. I jumped back suddenly as she pulled out a small handgun and pointed it just past me at the child. No, at the dog.
She let off two shots. One hit the dog in the head, the other in the chest. She fired a third at the dog's rearend for good measure.
My mouth was agape for a good long while. How she managed such accuracy with a small handgun on a distance of three city blocks is beyond me. I didn't think one of those shots was humanly possible, let alone three, and fired at a moving object.
After I got over the initial shock of it, I caught up to Gabriela as she ran over to comfort the sobbing child.
I inspected the dog. The shots were completely accurate, as accurate as any point-blank shots would've been. One in the head, just behind the eyes. One in the chest, right through the heart. One right through the pelvic bone and hip bones. Any one of those shots would've killed or critically wounded the dog.
"How did you...?"
"Come meet my grandmother," the little girl said, grinning. "I'll make you some food."
"A-all right," I said, shrugging and completely forgetting about anything else I had to do that day.
Anna Maria Hernanda greeted me courteously enough for a complete stranger. From the look on her face when she saw me, I gathered that I wasn't the first stray that Gabriela had brought home for her to meet. The old woman spent most of her time in an easy chair on the front porch of her little shack, just staring off into the distance. After she told me about Rosa I speculated that she lived with the constant hope that Rosa would arrive unexpectedly at her door once more, this time to stay.
Gabriela set to work in the kitchen as I took a seat on the front steps next to Anna Maria Hernanda. I couldn't help but to notice all the cowboy paraphernalia and mentioned it.
"Gabriela likes cowboys," the old woman explained. "She wants to be one."
"She wants to be a cowboy?" I said with a grin, thinking she was making a jest.
"She will be one someday, senor," the old woman stated with a tone that brook no discussion. After remembering her display with that small handgun of hers, I had to agree.
I didn't want to seem like a snitch, so I hadn't mentioned the gun at all until now, but I realized that Gabriela had it with her on a constant basis and carried it proudly even around her grandmother. So I broached the subject.
"Where'd she get the gun?" I asked.
"It was--" the old lady spoke haltingly, "--it was her mother's. She left it in Gabriela's things when she left her here."
A few more probing questions got the full story out of her as I've already related. Anna Maria Hernanda still didn't know what had happened to Rosa, though, or who Gabriela's father was. There was speculation in the neighbourhood that her father was a gringo Texan, though I never found out the reason for such speculation.
I left the old woman and her granddaughter after a short meal of beans and chick peas. Before I left I asked permission to snap a photograph.
It's been about a decade since my visit. I've often wondered what kind of young woman Gabriela has grown into, and whether she kept up her interest in guns and cowboys. Ever since her impressive, almost impossible, display of marksmanship I've also given a lot of thought to talents and skills. Are skills merely taught, or are we born with them? Are some people naturally predisposed through genetics to have terrific marksmanship? I never had a chance to confirm my theory, but I've often thought about Rosa's and Gabriela's story and wondered what Gabriela's father must have been like. Was he the reason Gabriela has such great aim and skill with a gun? Was he the same, and if so, are skills genetic. And what about Rosa? Why was she on the run? What happened to the man who got her pregnant? Was she on the run from him, or was she on the run from people who had killed him?
It's all speculation. Some stories just don't have a proper ending. All I can do is wonder.
As for me, I sustained a bad knee-injury the year I met Gabriela and Anna Maria Hernanda, and I haven't been back to Tijuana since.
I'm going back there this summer, though. Gabriela should be just about 18 years old by now, by my estimates. And as beautiful as any cowgirl could be. Maybe I'll finally find an ending to the story.
