Letters
Jasmin Salas
I couldn’t sleep the night my mother passed away. My sisters and I laid in our shared bed, covering our entire bodies with the expanse of blanket that our Ama had made, and now left to us. I pretended there were valleys and hills made from the multiple strands of fading brown yarn, my fingers tracing them gently, a giantess in an empty, open land. The heavy blanket felt so intrinsically woven together, it seemed as if the patterns of brown, red, and yellow would never come undone from one another. The silent air hung over me like a deadly weight, my breaths becoming laborious and shallow as I felt my face become hot with tears again. We were now miles and miles from our home, an old stucco house where we shared a wall with our neighbors, and where our family was last together. The ranch was all we had now. Sprawling and vast was this land around us; a rich field of beans, cabbage, and chili peppers that kept us fed, with a flock of bleating sheep and skinny dogs, now our only other company besides one another. I could hear my grandmother snoring from her room past the narrow hallway, cold and cracked mosaic tiles between us, her cross from palm Sunday adorning the creaky wooden door. My best friend and favorite sister, Alexis, was in a deep sleep, her emanating warmth comforting me far more than anyone’s empty words that night. How could she sleep in a moment like this? I thought. I understood, too, we had all been exhausted from Mama’s sickness. Each in our own regretful way.
Turning over indignantly, I nestled closer to Ana, who laid on the opposite side. The eldest of the girls, I felt safest around Ana. She had our mother’s long black hair that she had taught her to keep in the same simple braid she twisted and tied every morning, and her dark skin that did not resemble mine. But she did not have that natural, calming fragrance of my mother and she could not hold me with the warmth of a mother, little did she truly want any of that. I was disappointed to find that she slept silently, too, she was far too preoccupied with anxieties of her impending marriage to feel the permanence of Mama’s death. Perhaps she even felt a sense of relief, I wondered with suspicion, since now she was free from her born-duty of a bedside nurse to our mother. She had told me and Alexis of Ama’s death late that afternoon, clearly and without emotion, just as she had kept us informed of the sickness, too. Always, we prayed at night and at church for our Mama to heal, to the virgin saint. Despite our efforts, Ama’s health only became overwhelming, the foul smell of decay leaking into every distant conversation with her. I don’t think I slept that night. I must have fainted. My eyes and cheeks were tender, burning from the ceaseless sobbing, far after our candles wore down, nothing left but dull, melty nubs of burnt wax that would light no longer.
El Rancho La Estrella was only a few hours walk from the paved streets and decorated cathedrals of Aguascalientes, although we rarely left the perimeter of the farm’s prickly barbed-wire fences that kept us pinned inside. It was Summer and we had been tasked with the busy work of the land. What else did we have? When we were not working to collect water, cook the meals, or clear the animals’ messes, we were resting or gossiping about Ana’s pretendientes. Our grandmother called us at once from the corral, our warm, damp bodies squeezing into the tiny kitchen. Together, we continued as one, breathing, sleeping, cooking, and grieving. I pummeled chili peppers, lime, onion, and avocado with the molcajete while Alexis helped Abuelita at the comal, the place I burned myself over and over again, until Abuelita sent me away from it forever. Ana prepared the large kitchen table with clay dishes for the evening meal as the rest of us set down hot round dishes and pans, emitting tiny clouds of steam each time we would dip our spoons in for a serving. Our grandfather was not yet back from his work in the fields off the ranch, and we patiently waited to begin.
It had only been one week since our Ama’s death, when we had made the long trip to the cemetery, miles and miles away, where we laid her to rest. There was not the ceremony of a grand procession, because Ama had no brothers or cousins to carry her. Hours after the cemetery workers finally laid her casket in the ground, they returned to carry me away from that mound I had planted myself on. Grief had seized my body and mind, I could only lay upon that earth and wish to crumble into the soil to be with my Ama. It seemed like a lie that I would be apart from her from that moment on, it was a dream that would not end. When they were finally able to peel my body from the dirt, I hung limply, the sadness had taken from me everything that I had.
My abuela took me in her arms, hushing me like an infant.
“You must pray, Celeste,” she whispered to me like she was revealing a secret, but one I didn’t want to hear. “Your Mama is with God.” I shut my eyes, allowing her to rock me as she recited her prayers, not saying what was spilling from my heart. He had taken my mother, and I could not bring myself to reckon Him, for there was no purpose or blessing in this absence. I could not pray, so I wept.
Once my sisters were asleep, even Alexis, I pulled the small bundle of letters from our sparse trove of belongings. I flipped through them mindlessly, seeing his curving letters that meant nothing to me. The last letter, dated 10 August, 1962, was two years ago, and was the shortest of them all. It had no more information than the last time I had inspected it, but even so, I closely analyzed each letter, each false word of promise. I thought of my father who had written these letters long ago, who once sold pan dulce on the side street of our little village, the rich, passing visitors who would ask his name before departing in a buggy that outranked the most valuable of what few luxuries there were in Villa Hidalgo. While he shaved ice for the children, pouring colorful juice that he pressed from his own fruits and vegetables, I would challenge them in their starched, stuffy dresses to a race along the rain gutter that lined the cobblestone path in front of his store. My leather sandals would be scuffed and filthy, but I would always win, my father handing me a raspado covered in grape juice, my favorite, he knew.
“We will live in a castle someday,” he said to us, stirring our imaginations, dressing us in lace and ribbons with polished, expensive shoes in his ethereal fairy tales, unlike any of the dull patterns and burlap clothes that our Ama would scrounge up or sew back together for us. “You will see, just be patient.” Ana, believing she had outgrown these stories, would laugh at us, but still eyed our father when he would begin in his dramatic voice with the grand, illuminative hand gestures. Our mother would listen, too, shaking her head to hide her faint smile as she worked on a piece of clothing with her needle. She knew how often he thought of taking her and their family to the United States, for you could see on his face the desire for more, the hunger of one that was not satiated. He envied the travelers passing through their little town, the tall, mestizo men with pocket-watches and cleanly tailored suits. When he spoke of them, she heard the admiration in his voice and wondered about this devotion so deeply etched within his being.
“They tell me there are jobs there,” He argued with Ama, “We could have our own home, instead of living under someone else’s thumb!”
“But this is our home,” my Ama resisted him with her gentle voice. “We could not all leave at once.” In my childhood, I had never seen my Mama challenge my Papa - his word was absolute, we did not think of going against the grain, much less did we want the burns and wounds of his fury. We had seen the sad and poor women that left their homes with bruises, a worn rebozo to cover the purple shadows covering their elbows and the softest, fleshy parts of their arms. We did not see Mama as one of them, nor as one of the desolate and abandoned widows praying and clutching their rosaries together. They had no one to love them, unlike our Ama. It was not until long after his departure that I recalled those horrid nightmares, where my father would take the shape of a belligerent and hateful beast. After the rampages, we tended to the litter of our belongings and household items scattered and broken on the floor. He would suddenly transform the next day, regarding Ama as if she were made of glass, speaking softly to her with his bewitching words of promise. My sisters and I huddled closely in our bed, fearing our Papa and praying for our Ama, but mostly afraid for our love for our Papa.
When we first received the wax-stamped letters, my sisters and I would happily shout and bunch up like a flower bud, Ana reading the neat, wide lines aloud to us carefully as our Mama listened in. Our Papa would tell us more stories about his trip, how his brother’s friends had property in California and we would soon live in a rich and opportunistic land, where we could marry and settle down with our own wealthy husbands and keep our own homes. Ama would frown when we demanded Ana to read it again, urging us to settle down because our loud voices were giving her a headache. We continued like this, hanging upon each of the letters with false hope that it would only be another month until we could see our Papa again.
“Mama would scold us if she could,” Alexis spoke quietly as we were lying awake late one night, many days’ worth of neglected work awaiting us at dawn, but I could not sleep. “She would chastise us for wasting so many linens upon her deathbed. What are these for? I’m in heaven!” Alexis raised her tone slightly to imitate Ama, her attempt to draw me out of my stupor.
“She has not left my mind once,” I admitted truthfully, her death and Papa had been plaguing my thoughts. Every morning we faced her death again, the hollow of her sudden absence widening. “We have the letters from Apa, and I know that he is gone. But Ama…” I covered my eyes from Alexis as a sob escaped my throat.
“She is still here, Celeste,” Alexis comforted me, moving rogue strands of hair from my eyes as I sniffed and tried to halt my tears. I said nothing. There was a silence for a very long moment, until I thought my sister had fallen asleep and I began to drift off.
“Celeste,” she whispered again, rousing me from my near-sleep. “I have been having dreams about Mama.” I tried to make out the details of her face, our father’s wide nose we shared and the birthmark-scar on her eyebrow, but it was far too dark in our windowless room.
“What happens in them?” The dreams I was having of our mother, too, had been blotted from my mind, my heart too heavy to draw them out. A pang struck me as memories came back in bursts. She had felt so alive and so within my reach, her gentle, fragile fingers catching the little knots in my hair. I could not take it for her to be ripped away, again. So I shut the door in my mind. But my love for my Ama swelled and consumed me, larger than the grief that I came to embody, the lingering, thin memories of that dreamscape traipsing back in slowly, and then all at once.
“I can’t ever see her face,” she said. I saw my mother’s braids swaying. “But she tells me she loves me and wants to see me again.” I felt my face warm, imagining my mother with her needle and a square of fabric. Our sick Ama, laying on her deathbed, helpless. “Remember what she would say to us before we would sleep? To pray to God for Apa?” I could no longer pretend to guard my tears. They flowed freely.
“When I pray, I hear her and I can feel her near me,” my sister explained. “She can hear me.” I said nothing. “You should try it.”
Alexis grasped at my hand under the blanket, resting a wooden, beaded cross on my palm. I felt immediately that it was our mother’s rosario, as my sister had taken a hold over it since our mother’s death. Truthfully, I did not want to hear her advice of prayer, nor understand what God’s purpose was. How could He? And how could my sister? I wanted to angrily refuse and to tell my sister off for her silly oraciones. But I began to hear my Mama’s voice, the soothing, melodic words that she whispered at Sunday Mass, urging me, pray for your brothers and sisters. Pray for your father.
Dear Papa,
It has been many years since we have seen your face, yet I can’t find any longing for ending this separation. I know, wherever you are now, we are better off without you.
When I was still your child, you told us that our family would live happily one day, and it made me happy. I imagined that someday you would not hurt us the way that you always have, that Ama would kiss you and see love in your eyes again. This was all a lie.
What you love, I found, is not our family. Ama was wrong, too, it seems. She thought you were in love with riches, seeing coins where rocks were. Do you remember, just before you left, when I asked you about God and what he had in store for me? You said, it was not for God to tell me, but a secret I had to find for myself. Is that what you are doing now, Papa?
It has been over two years since your last letter, your absence speaking more truth than any of your bedtime stories. I wish, Papa, you could see how strong Mama has made us. How strong she was, until the very end.
Goodbye Papa,
Celeste
-V-
Works Cited
Folan, William J., and Phil C. Weigand. "Fictive Widowhood In Rural And Urban Mexico".
Anthropologica, vol 10, no. 1, 1968, p. 119. JSTOR, doi:10.2307/25604762.
Kelly, Patricia Fernandez. "Death In Mexican Folk Culture". American Quarterly, vol 26, no. 5,
1974, p. 516. JSTOR, doi:10.2307/2711888.
Paz, Octavio. The Labyrinth Of Solitude. Grove Press, 1961.
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