Goulet.pdf

Janferie Stone

the animal, which was now human, uttered words. The pieces of her
body kept moving, moving, trying to come back together. In the morn-
ing, her father and brother came, and her husband, furious, protested,
“How was I to know? You did not tell me she was like this! You should
have told me she had this problem!” They gathered up her body and
returned to the house of her father, where she finally died.

Part II: Dreaming with the Wife in the Green House

Her grandfather had need of a wife; after all, who would make his
tortillas? As no family in his town would allow him to court their
daughters, he thought and thought. What was he to do? One night
he dreamed that he needed to travel to the next town where he would
find the good woman in a green house. When he did so, he was an-
noyed to find that this woman was already married and had children.
He thought to himself, “Well, this is bad, but after all, I too have been
married.” That night he dreamed and traveled into the dreams of the
sleeping woman to talk with her. He said that when she awoke she
should tell her husband that a man had come to her in her dreams.
Her husband would become enraged, suspecting her of infidelity. He
would threaten her and when he did, the house would shake; she
should leave with her children and return to her father’s house where
he, the dreamer, would come to claim her. And it all fell out according
to what he said. The grandfather came down the road in the morn-
ing to present his case to her father. He had found the woman with
whom he could make his house, to continue his bloodline, to pass on
his power and knowledge. The family that came from this union in-
cluded the granddaughter who was telling the tale.

The Work of the Tale

Thus we returned to the present, where the tale reverberated as we
continued to talk. When I pressed Vera to relate how the civil conflict
in Guatemala had affected her life, her answers grew elusive and dis-
jointed. The hour late, the flow was spent.
I left our meeting stunned, thinking that I had experienced begin-
ner’s luck. I had caught complex, magical tales on my tape; I had them