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| Illustration by Xochitl Cristina Gil-Higuchi |
A Fragile Hope
Excerpt from The Cost of Our Lives, a memoir
By Linda González
Chapter 17
I arrived in Los Angeles to give my sister Susan a mini-reprieve from caring for Mom, as the Alzheimer’s was slowly leeching her mind. It was two days before my flight to meet my Mexican sisters for the first time. As I drove her home, Susan casually mentioned she had met our older sisters several years ago, between the time our father confirmed their existence and his death.
“I worked for Mexicana Airlines at the time, so I saw Rosita on my business trips. It hit me when she introduced me to Tere—I think she’s my sister, too. It was really nice. I met Tere’s two children very quickly and they showed me pictures—it was like our honeymoon period. It felt good.”
Meeting my sisters was such a big deal for me, held so much meaning, and she was telling me she had already met them. If I wasn’t going, would she have ever told me?
In childhood, Susan and I had lived in our own separate worlds, even if my mom dressed us like twins. As young girls we watched TV and chose different characters as fantasy marriage mates. On Star Trek, I chose Captain Kirk AND the doctor, ‘Bones’. Susan chose Spock. She identified with his logical approach, eschewing feelings in favor of what was measurable and provable. We shared the same bedrooms with matching bedspreads for sixteen years, but rarely shared our secrets and never talked about our dad’s secrets.
After I graduated from college and moved back to LA for five years, we cautiously circled closer to our own and each other’s corazones. I encouraged her through her first pregnancy, including being present at the home birth, and she supported my decision to join a social justice community on Skid Row, buoying each other up each time our parents shook their heads in disapproval.
The slight variation in skin tone between us, she a cappuccino to my café latte, shaped her experiences in profoundly life altering ways. She told me how excited she felt when another brown Latina joined her class in second grade so she wasn’t the only one. Feeling not fully comfortable in our home or outside cultures, she chose Latinos and I fled to white people for approval.
By the time our father died, we were speaking openly of our daily quandaries. She and Fred were now contemplating divorce and I had ended my 11-year relationship. We were like moths that had been touched roughly by life’s hands, unable to fly because we had lost too many of our precious dust scales.
Like the mom who now drove us loca with worry with her Alzheimer’s and depression, we burrowed into tasks instead of what we needed—a good, long cry—several, in fact. Susan translated her need for care into manicures and pedicures, I with occasional massages and long, hot showers after soccer games. It wasn’t nearly enough. She was way too skinny and the manchas on my face way too dark and pronounced. Susan couldn’t muster any excitement about my trip. She was focused on managing mom’s “housemate,” our provisional solution to mom’s mental and emotional surrender.
“Frances called to say Mom yelled at her.”
“Big deal.”
Frances required as much care as Mom, but the thought of searching for another caregiver made us both cringe.
“There’s more. She went out to the backyard to calm down and Mom left the house.”
“Incredible. Did she find her?”
“No, she was on the phone with me when a car pulled up and Mom got out. Apparently she walked to her bank five blocks away and asked a stranger for a ride home.”
“What is the matter with these people?” I asked.
“I know.”
We arrived at Susan’s apartment. She rummaged through her desk when we entered and pulled out a photo.
“This is Arieti, Tere’s daughter. She must be about twenty years old now.”
I looked at the school portrait of a lovely brown-haired child of about eight, her resemblance to my daughter Gina striking, the sparkling dark eyes, the strong cheekbones, and full lips.
She sighed.
“Give them saludos de mi and call me when you get back.”
I hugged her goodbye.
÷÷÷
My Mexican brother Miguel and I settled into our airplane seats for the three and a half hour flight to México City. I had known him for many years even though he didn’t talk about the two sisters he left behind until the last year. I took out my journal and drew a Mexican family tree, opening up chambers that had long been buried. The circles identifying the females and the squares signaling the males grew on the page as he walked me through our sisters’ marriages, their children and grandchildren, his uncle’s two families, Rosita’s divorce and la familia’s living arrangements.
“And Tere’s son is Toño.”
We continued with the tree as we crossed the many miles to his birthplace, and I looked for changes in tone or facial expression to ask questions. He grimaced and waved his broad hands in front of his face when he spoke of his uncle Abilio and how he had taken his mother’s inheritance. He retold the story he had shared with me when his mother had died a year and a half earlier, almost word for word. There was something underneath his surface anger, the grief of being rejected by the two men who should have taken him under their wing—our father and Abilio.
Miguel, Rosita, and Tere only stayed in touch with Abilio’s “second” family. Their own experience contributed to this, even though they were my father’s first family chronologically and legally.
“So why go now?” Miguel asked.
“I am trying to understand how the man who raised me abandoned you, thinking I’d never know why he did that now that he is gone. And then I realized that our sisters are not gone.”
“Pues asi es. They are excited for your visit.”
One of my son Teo’s favorite stories over the last year had been that of Mulan, the Chinese girl who, disguised as a man, goes to war instead of her father. The Disney movie had been played many times over the last six months because when Teo loved a movie, we watched it until we knew all the songs. I was like Mulan, doing my father’s work. My father was never able to bring his two families together, but maybe I could.
÷÷÷
As Miguel and I walked out of Customs my right eye twitched. Each step toward the frosted glass doors felt like the slow climb up the first hill on a roller coaster as I gripped the safety bar and asked: Why, oh, why, am I doing this?
Miguel’s familia ran to embrace him affectionately. He was the tawny center of a sunflower, they the golden petals that surrounded him. Standing awkwardly, words from a Sesame Street song came into my head about one thing not belonging here, one thing not being the same. The outsider designation descended on me like it did on Miguel in Los Angeles. The hugs that came my way were sincere, but less so, the smiles welcoming, but cautious.
They asked after Susan and Eddy. Rosita expressed her wish that one day all six of our father’s children could be together. I smiled, right with her in that dream. My new oldest sister was fifty-five, with short blonde hair and dark roots. Her face was as round as mine was narrow and tapered.
Tere, only three and a half years older than me, also showed the remnants of a dye job, the dark orange waves cascading to just below her shoulders. Her face was round as well and smaller than my big cabezota.
I wished for some undeniable feature that, if substituted from one body to another, would fit perfectly, corroborating without a doubt we shared the same father, but it wasn’t there.
We squeezed into two cars. Victor, Tere’s husband of twenty-three years, arranged our luggage in the trunk of his Ford, his sturdy frame bristling with energy. I slid into the back seat between Arieti, Tere’s daughter, and Joanna, Rosita’s daughter. My nieces easily called me Tía, and that little word was like the soft kisses I gave my six-year old twins before I left.
“Now I practice English!” Arieti smiled, her dark brown hair pulled back in a clip, a contrast to her peach skin.
“Yes!” replied Joanna. She had a darker olive tone and a short sporty coif.
“No, no, no!” I insisted. “¡Quiero hablar español!”
“You can each speak the other language,” Tere responded in her lilting voice.
It was late and we agreed to get a good night’s sleep. We would meet the following day to visit Chapultepec Park. I collapsed into Rosita’s bed, feeling bad that she insisted on sleeping in the den before quickly falling into a deep sleep.
In the morning my stomach grumbled, and knowing their schedule might mean I didn’t eat a meal until close to noon, I found a few crackers and wandered into the living room, sitting gingerly on the cream-colored couch next to a large glass vase full of life-like lilies.
About ten o’clock Rosita descended the spiral metal staircase, her short robe displaying firm, full legs and red toenails. Speaking about our father with cariño, she lit a cigarette and recounted her numerous trips to Los Angeles. She had flown in to shop once a month for three years. She had even brought her three kids up a few times to meet their abuelo.
She put out her cigarette.
“I spoke with nuestro papá three days before he died.”
It was the same day I spoke with Rositaas I created my altar. Not having my premonition that he was more ill than we wanted to admit, she thought he was fine.
“I felt the loss,” she said. “I was too sick to go to the funeral.”
Her loss was profound, much more than the death of her distant father. It marked the death of his return, of his confession, and of any absolution she may have wanted to give him. She dabbed at her eyes. My mind wandered back to the funeral again. What would have happened if she, the first born, had exerted her right to bury her father? And what would have been my mother’s reaction? Or mine? We would not have been able to continue with the script, the one that kept her and Tere hidden like I used to hide my stained underwear, an embarrassment I didn’t know what to do with.
The phone rang and Rosita spoke briefly with Tere, where Miguel was staying. After hanging up, we climbed up the stairs to shower and change. When we reached the top, she turned to me.
“Era un lobo.”
I nodded. Her description of our father as a wolf, a ‘loner’ was true. He traveled across the border and kept any indecision or pain inside himself, his actions rarely explained or challenged. His children were now left as the older generation to decide which of his footprints they wanted to step in and which they would sidestep.
Joanna chauffeured us to Chapultepec Park to celebrate Miguel’s fifty-first birthday. We had the restaurant almost to ourselves, and while the day was overcast, the curved glass walls of the restaurant created a light feel to our initial meal together.
At one point Tere told me she knew a lot about “tu cultura,” placing me in the gringa box. Her Spanish became higher and sharper.
“The Americans think they can come and do whatever they want. But they forget we are the descendants of nobility—the Aztecs who survived longest and whose blood is in us were the ones who were the fiercest, the wisest, the proudest.”
Tere was a professor at one of the universities and loved sharing her in-depth knowledge. I was invading their hard earned sense of familia, slowly recovered after my father left them for good. Miguel must have been feeding them information for years about me and I wondered what picture he had painted of the family that kept him at a distance until recently. Who I was to them now was colliding with the stories they had had of me for thirty years, even longer for Rosita who had met us briefly as children who did not understand the importance of her visit. I had a clean slate as Miguel had only spoken about them with Eddy and I had not been in LA when Rosita had traveled for business and had seen Susan.
The waiter arrived just then with a candle in Miguel’s dessert and graciously took our picture. Miguel, a big grin on his face, was surrounded by his hermanas and sobrina, our hands resting on his red and black Nike sweat suit jacket. To the few other diners we looked as if we had been together our whole lives.
÷÷÷
I had attempted to take a short nap when we returned from our meal, but I was too anxious to do much other than move from one position to another on Rosita’s bed. When I heard the doorbell, I wrapped a shawl around me and descended the curved staircase. I was met with the smiling faces and abrazos of Arieti and Victor joining us for a light supper around Rosita’s dining table.
After dinner, we all settled into the living room. Miguel’s brow wrinkled and he rested his large hands on the edge of a sofa, telling me how his mother worked for thirty years in a tortillerafrom four a.m. to four p.m., making masa, having to stand the whole time. A quiet wave erased the lie written on the sand of my mind that her parents had coddled her.
“That’s because your querido padre left her,” Tere said.
I gazed up, but she was looking at Miguel.
“She was too tired to give us much attention when she was home,” Miguel said, shaking his head.
“She never saw anyone else?” I asked.
“No.” said Rosita, her throaty voice cutting through the smoke of her cigarette.
“When our father left for good,” continued Miguel, his speech slower, “my mother’s parents came, saying they needed to raise the girls and I needed to take care of my mother.”
“For good?”
“Yes,” Rosita replied. “Nuestro papá had begun going to the states several years before he left and never came back. I was nine and Teresita was one year old.”
“How old were you?” I asked Miguel.
“I was five.”
His face crumpled and tears streamed down his cheeks. The little boy peeked out of his face, the one who cried when separated from his hermanas. Tears rolled down my face and Rosita and Tere were both sniffling. They had lost their mother as well as their father.
Miguel leaned forward, his fingers interlaced, his forearms resting on his knees.
“In my early teens I was sent to work with my Tio and supervised one hundred workers at the molino, where they ground the corn for tortillas. Can you imagine me doing that at that age?”
I shook my head.
“And then?”
“Then they sent me to a military school.”
Tere looked at me.
“Would it have been better if we had told a different story?”
“I didn’t come to hear more lies, I came to understand my—our father’s secrets.”
Their words pushed over another cart full of sweet connections I had shared with my father, especially over the last ten years before he died, tumbling glassware, lounge chairs, and TVs into the mud, laying waste to my birth and my childhood losses. My mother worked, but she did not work ten-hour days, did not have a brother who pushed her around and kept the best for himself. Any punishment she felt was mostly self-inflicted as she slowly got to know the man she had picked, the man she chose to stay with again and again as his secrets revealed themselves. The man who did not marry her until their firstborn was four months old and never directly told her she had married a married man.
“When yourfather died I felt nothing,” Tere responded. “My abuelo was my father. He was the one who raised me.”
We had fallen back, one by one, into our seat cushions. Victor looked at his watch; it was midnight.
We gave the goodnight abrazos and besos that I cherished, and the cumbersomeness of the tangle we were loosening lay between us, so much still to be unraveled.
As I slowly entered sleep after writing in my journal, I could almost hear my father’s voice. It pleaded for me to imagine him in México, a poor man who married the young daughter of a man of some stature, believing he could prove his mettle. But she adored her father and brother and they let him know everyday he was not good enough for her. He was working ten-hour days, making babies, and straining at the bit in his mouth. When his friend Arturo invited him to go to el norte, he went. At first he believed his wife would join him across the border with their growing family, but she was traditional and refused to leave. His pride compelled him to act decisively, thinking it was his only chance to live his own life.
But at what cost? I wanted to yell. You knew how badly Abilio behaved toward you. You had to see he treated others with disregard, driven by greed. You probably knew about his second family. Yet you convinced yourself that your family would be safe without you, that Teresita’s parents would step in a different way than they did, would not punish her for choosing you. Forgot the way parents, women, and children forgive men too soon, too often, and too much.
I slept in with the rest of the household, my nighttime dream still simmering. How much was really what happened to my father and how much was me continuing the legacy of lies?
My goals for the day were simple: Parcel out the gifts I brought, don’t get too hungry since their meals were less predictable than mine, and visit Frida Kahlo’s house. Joanna drove las treshermanas to the historic Blue House. Rosita looked at her paintings and wrinkled her nose. Tere was more conciliatory, acknowledging, “Frida suffered a lot.”
That evening, we again gathered at Rosita’s home, this time with almost all the grown children and their uncle Abilio’s “illegitimate” second family. I met la mamá, a short, very serious, religious woman, and two of my siblings’ cousins. Miguel’s relatives here called him “Mike.”
Near the end of the gathering, one of their cousins asked me if I had known about my father’s Mexican family. His eyes darted around and he rubbed his hands together, admitting how hard it was to be the family with no rights and no acknowledgment.
“I can see why you are close,” I responded, “especially since Abilio was as neglectful of you as he was of my hermanos.”
Tere admitted that her two children didn’t know about our father having two families – my coming forced her to tell them. This did not match up with Susan saying she had met them, and I wondered whether Tere had kept the whole story from them as had been done to us, each person diluting or deleting facts to protect themselves and others.
Tere’s voice rose as she told the story of first meeting our father.
“I was eighteen when I came to Los Angeles. Mike went to hug Rosendo, who put out his arm to stop him, his own son. I saw the hurt in my brother’s face and rejected him as my father.”
This was news to me, as I had thought Miguel had come alone.
“Ay, Mami,” said Arieti, stroking her mother’s hair gently.
As Arieti continued to comfort Tere, I went to the bathroom, closed the door, lowered the lid on the toilet, and sat down. Bowing my head, I reached back with my hands and dug my fingers into my rock-hard shoulder muscles, breathing deeply. Extricating ourselves from this meant ripping open all the floorboards and airing out the dank lies of almost fifty years. Washing and drying my hands slowly, I returned and sat down next to Tere, leaning into the family circle.
“What about your last name, Miguel? Why is it Durand?”
“It’s my mother’s family name. Our father’s last name was Manrique. When mi papá told me to change my first name, I also dropped his family name.”
My last name was yet another sign of betrayal, of a father deleting his past by dropping his father’s name and keeping his mother’s. My last name should have been Manrique.
“Enough of the sad stories. What should we do on your last day?”
Tere’s voice was soft and sweet. We agreed to drive to Teotihuacan and visit the pirámides. I fell into the goodbye besos, and Arieti gave me a long hug and expressed her regret she could not join us tomorrow because she had to work.
Alone in my room, I wrote down stories to share with Susan, since they had not talked about this with her. Turning back to the family tree, I added the three children of Rosita’s oldest son and corrected a few ages. I then went to the top and added an empty square for my father’s papá and a circle for his mamá. Inside her circle I wrote “Concepción.” Inside my abuelo’s square I wrote “¿? Manrique.”
Another pleasant and inviting morning welcomed me after a restless night. An hour drive took us away from the congestion of the city and into the open savannah that used to be a series of lakes surrounded by the southern stretch of the Sierra Nevada ranges. After parking, Tere, Joanna and I climbed up to the top of the Templo del Sol. The many steep steps and Mexican altitude sucked the air out of my lungs. Rosita rested down below, and we waved at each other from across the distance.
As we walked across the Street of the Dead to the Pirámide de la Luna, Tere was in her glory, the yellow flowers on her outfit blossoming like the facts she shared as la profesora. She described the tunnel-like cave, ending in a cloverleaf-shaped set of chambers, below the Pirámide del Sol. This cave may have been a “place of emergence,” the “womb” from which the first humans came into the world. I locked arms with my hermanas and Joanna snapped a picture.
÷÷÷
The next morning came too soon and we entered the hustle of the airport. After checking in, we sat in the café near my gate and drank a final cafecito together. Arieti commented on my last name, González, thinking it strange that Americanos use their maternal family’s name.
“I think mi papá dropped Manrique when he left México and his family in an attempt to cover his tracks, so his niños couldn’t find him,” I said.
Reaching out, I put my hand on hers.
“I am glad his plan didn’t work.”
Soon my flight was announced. I gathered my backpack and started toward the gate. Arieti handed me a piece of paper. We hugged and I turned to hug my hermanas, flooded with the grief of what we had missed, of the wounds that were still tender to the touch. Of those yet unexposed because trust takes time and courage.
On the plane, I fished around in my backpack for my journal and tissue as tears came. I was glad the next generation wouldn’t carry our secrets. My fingers touched the squares and circles that were real people now. There were my three nephews who I barely saw and the two nieces who welcomed me from the beginning. Manrique was my shadow name, the name that carried my father’s secret.
I opened Arieti’s card:
Auntie,
I hope you’ve been as happy as I was with you here. I want to thank you for your love and tenderness to us. We want you to know how much we love you and miss you. I want you to leave with a big smile and with many wishes to come back. Please send our love to the family there and tell them that we are expecting them and above all this thank you for your help.
I hope the love grows fast and lasts forever. We love you all a lot and hope you come back soon. Remember to tell Teo and Gina how much we love them.
Arieti
That was a promise I could keep. Closing my eyes, I sat in a fragile hope that enveloped me like a silk rebozo so fine it could slide through a wedding band.
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Linda Gonzalez, a San Francisco Bay Area resident, is a life coach and writer with a focus on supporting women and people of color step more deeply into their authentic leadership and purpose-filled lives. She has an MFA in Creative Writing from Goddard College and has been featured in literary fundraisers for Mujeres Unidas y Activas (MUA) and WAGES. Born in Los Angeles and raised by immigrant parents, her father from México and her mother from Colombia, Linda offers this excerpt from her memoir, The Cost of Our Lives, which is in search of a publisher. You can read more about her writing and coaching services at lindagonzalez.net or email her directly: linda@lindagonzalez.net.
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Xóchitl Cristina Gil-Higuchi, born in Nogales, Sonora, Mexico, and raised in Arizona, a graduate of the University of Arizona, is part of a new generation of Chicana/o artists shifting and expanding the traditional themes found in Chicana/o art. She has participated in over 30 exhibitions including the Jose Luis Cuevas Museum in Mexico City. Publications include the Chicana/o Contemporary Art Anthology (Bilingual Press, 2003), the complimentary DVD-ROM “Triumph of Our Communities: Artists and Arts Organizations” (2007), and the Encyclopedia of Latino Popular Culture (Greenwood Press, 2004). In 2010, she was awarded a Contemporary Forum Award from the Phoenix Museum of Art. She currently lives in New York City. She may be contacted at: xochitl@artexochitl.comor 917-588-8023.
Juan Carlos Valadez, a graduate in English from UC Los Angeles in 2007, resides in Los Angeles, California. His poems have been included in “Bandana Republic: A Literary Anthology by Gang Members and Their Affiliates” (2008); “City Works” Literary Journal (2008), and “Statement” Literary Journal (2008). He is working on a memoir and a collection of his poems.
