She drove into the desert of Sonora in search of Epifano. For years, when summer came and she had finished her classes, she would load her old Jeep with supplies and drive south into Mexico.

Now she was almost eighty and, she thought, ready for death, not afraid of death. The pain of the bone-jarring journey was her reality, not thoughts of death. But that did not diminish the urgency she felt as she drove south, across the desert. She was following the north rim of el Cañon de Cobre, toward the land of the Tarahumaras. In the Indian villages, there was always a welcome and fresh water.

The battered Jeep kicked up a cloud of chalky dust, which rose into the empty and searing sky of summer. Around her, nothing moved in the heat. Dry mirages rose and shimmered, without content, without form. Her bright, clear eyes remained fixed on the rocky, rutted road in front. Around her, there was only the vast and empty space of the desert. The dry heat.

The Jeep wrenched sideways, the low gear groaning and complaining. It had broken down once, and it had cost her many days’ delay in Mexicali. The mechanic at the garage had told her not to worry. In one day the parts would be in Calexico, and she would be on her way.

But she knew the way of the Mexican, so she rented a room in a hotel nearby. Yes, she knew the Mexican. Part of her blood was Mexican, wasn’t it? Her great-grandfather Epifano had come north to Chihuahua to ranch and to mine. She knew the stories whispered about the man, how he had built a great ranch in the desert. His picture was preserved in the family album, his wife, a darkhaired woman, at his side. Around them, their sons.

The dry desert air burned her nostrils. The scent of the green ocotillo reminded her of other times, other years. She knew how to live in the sun, how to travel and how to survive, and she knew how to be alone under the stars. Night was her time in the desert. She liked to lie in her bedroll and look up at the swirling dance of the stars. In the cool of evening her pulse would quicken. The sure path of the stars was her map, drawing her south.

Sweat streaked her wrinkled skin. Sweat and dust, the scent commingling. She felt alive. “At least I’m not dry and dead,” she said aloud. Sweat and pleasure, they came together.

The Jeep worried her now. A sound somewhere in the gearbox was not right. “It has trouble,” the mechanic had said, wiping his oily hands on a dirty rag. What he meant was that he did not trust his work. It was best to return home, he suggested with a shrug. He had seen her musing over the old and tattered map, and he was concerned about the old woman going south. Alone. It was not good.

“We all have trouble,” she mumbled. We live too long, and the bones get brittle, and the blood dries up. Why can’t I taste the desert in my mouth? Have I grown so old? Epifano? How does it feel to become a spirit of the desert?

Her back and arms ached from driving; she was covered with the dust of the desert. Deep inside, in her liver or in her spleen, in one of those organs the ancients called the seat of life, there was an ache, a dull, persistent pain. In her heart there was a tightness. Would she die and never reach the land of Epifano?

She slept while she waited for the Jeep to be repaired. Slept and dreamed under the shade of the laurel in the patio of the small hotel. Around her, Mexican sounds and colors permeated her dream. What did she dream? That it was too late in her life to go once again into the desert? That she was an old woman and her life was lived, and the only evidence she would leave of her existence would be her sketches and paintings? Even now as weariness filled her, the dreams came, and she slipped in and out of past and present. In her dreams she heard the voice of the old man, Epifano.

She saw his eyes, blue and bright like hers, piercing, but soft. The eyes of a kind man. He had died. Of course he had died. He belonged to the past. But she had not forgotten him. In the family album she carried with her, his gaze was the one that looked out at her and drew her into the desert. She was the artist of the family. She had taken up painting. She heard voices. The voice of her great-grandfather. The rest of her family had forgotten the past, forgotten Mexico and the old man Epifano.

The groaning of the Jeep shattered the silence of the desert. She tasted dust in her mouth, and she yearned for a drink of water. She smiled. A thirst to be satisfied. Always there was one more desire to be satisfied. Her paintings were like that, a need from within to be satisfied, a call to do one more sketch of the desert in the molten light before night came. And always the voice of Epifano drawing her to her trek into the past.

The immense solitude of the desert swallowed her. She was only a moving shadow in the burning day. Overhead, vultures circled in the sky; the heat grew intense. She was alone on a dirt road she barely remembered, taking her bearings only by instinct, roughly following the north rim of el Cañon de Cobre, drawn by the thin line of the horizon, where the dull peaks of las montañas met the dull blue of the sky. Whirlwinds danced in her eyes; memories flooded her soul.

She had married young. She had thought she was in love; he was a man of ambition. It took her years to learn that he had little desire or passion. He could not, or would not, fulfill her. What was the fulfillment she sought? It had to do with something that lay beneath the moments of love or children carried in the womb. Of that she was sure.

She turned to painting, she took classes, she traveled alone. She came to understand that she and the man were not meant for each other.

A strange thing had happened in the chapel where the family had gathered to attend her wedding. An Indian had entered and stood at the back of the room. She had turned and looked at him. Then he was gone, and later she was not sure if the appearance had been real or imagined.

But she did not forget. She had looked into his eyes. His features were those of a Tarahumara. Was he Epifano’s messenger? Had he brought a warning? For a moment she hesitated, then she had turned and said yes to the preacher’s question. Yes to the man who could never understand her longing. She did what was expected of her there in the land of ocean and sun. She bore him a daughter and a son. But in all those years the man never understood the desire in her; he never explored her depth of passion. She turned to her dreams, and there she heard the voice of Epifano, a resonant voice imparting seductive images of the past.

Years later she left her husband, left everything, left the dream of southern California, where there was no love in the arms of the man, no sweet juices in the nights of love pretended. She left the circle of pretend. She needed a meaning; she needed desperately to understand the voices that spoke in her soul. She drove south, alone, in search of Epifano. The desert dried her by day but replenished her at night. She learned that the mystery of the stars at night was like the mystery in her soul.

She sketched, she painted, and each year in springtime, she drove farther south. On her map she marked her goal, the place where Epifano’s hacienda had once stood.

In the desert the voices were clear. She followed the road into Tarahumara country, and she dreamed of the old man Epifano. She was his blood, the only one who remembered him.

At the end of day she stood at the side of a pool of water, a small desert spring surrounded by desert trees. The smell of the air was cool, wet. At her feet, tracks of deer, a desert cat. Ocelot. She stooped to drink, like a cautious animal.

“Thank the gods for this water, which quenches our thirst,” she said, splashing the precious water on her face, knowing there is no life in the desert without the water that flows from deep within the earth. Around her, the first stars of dusk began to appear.

She had come at last to the ranch of Epifano. There, below the spring where she stood, on the flat ground, was the hacienda. Now could be seen only the outlines of the foundation and the shape of the old corrals. From here his family had spread, northwest, up into Mexicali, and finally into southern California. Seeds. Desert seeds seeking precious water. The water of desire. And only she had returned.

She sat and gazed at the desert, the peaceful quiet, the mauve of the setting sun. She felt a deep sadness within. An old woman, sitting alone in the wide desert, her dream done. A noise caused her to turn, perhaps an animal come to drink at the spring, the same spring where Epifano had once wet his lips. She waited, and in the shadows of the palo verde and the desert willows, she saw the Indian appear. She smiled.

She was dressed in white, the color of desire not consummated. Shadows moved around her. She had come home, home to the arms of Epifano. The Indian was a tall, splendid man. Silent. He wore paint, as they had in the old days when they ran the game of the pelota up and down las montañas of el Cañon de Cobre.

“Epifano,” she said. “I came in search of Epifano.” He understood the name. Epifano. He held his hand to his chest. His eyes were bright and blue, not Tarahumara eyes, but the eyes of Epifano. He had known she would come. Around her, other shadows moved, the women. Indian women of the desert. They moved silently around her, a circle of women, an old ceremony about to begin.

The sadness left her. She struggled to rise, and in the dying light of the sun, a blinding flash filled her body. Like desire, or like an arrow from the bow of the Indian, the light filled her and she quivered.

The moan of love is like the moan of life. She was dressed in white.