LA MORENITA, Chapter 29

It was about this time that a boy named Ignacio kept dominating Araceli’s thoughts. He had such a strong presence that Araceli had begun to write sentences about him. This befuddled her because Ignacio’s story had begun to fill spaces in the story she wrote about her parents, the urge to record her thoughts about Ignacio were too strong to ignore.
One night while sleeping, she dreamt she was down by the river, sitting on a park bench when the raven flew in behind her and landed on her shoulder. “What are you doing here?” she asked. “I thought I would never see you again.”
“I told you the right person would be here to help,” the raven replied. “So why do you think you need me?”
“This boy comes out of nowhere and lands in my thoughts.”
“This boy?”
“Ignacio, or Nacho, or something like that. I know he was born about thirty years ago in Piedras Negras, Mexico, and his family worked in the fields in Texas. So why he is in my mind, I don’t know.”
“Do you think that is strange?”
Araceli could see, in her mind’s eye, this Ignacio as an infant, bright as a copper penny with hair the color of a midnight sky and inquisitive brown eyes. She observed him as a toddler, learning in an easy, intuitive way the languages of two cultures, surrounded by a large family that she had no sense of except for vague shapes and sizes. She saw him sitting attentively in mission school classes as the priests taught him lessons beyond his natural years. Yet somehow, Araceli sensed something was awry with him. She wondered how this total stranger thirty years her senior–especially one that lived in a campesino’s hut with a dirt floor more than 2,000 miles away–could possibly impact her future. She nodded.
“You need to find out about this boy, because his life affects yours.”
“How?”
“You need to keep writing to find out.”
“But why?” asked Araceli. She turned around, but the bird was gone.