The Lines Between Us

by Rebecca D'Harlingue

  I knew that some of my women colleagues would feel that this approach was a betrayal of Hernández’s sincere exploration of her female identity, and would say that the study of women writers was better left to women, who can more readily understand their concerns. But this seems shortsighted and restrictive. We would never tolerate our exclusion from the study of male authors. Nor will I accept the excuse of male critics and teachers who shy away from women writers, saying that they feel unempathetic to their themes.

  Having concluded my scholarly research, I could procrastinate no longer. I realized that looking for María would be even more difficult than looking into my own ancestry, and I also kept coming up against the fact that I hadn’t been able to go back any further than the second half of the nineteenth century. For this search, I would have to start with María, who I believed had been born in the early nineteenth, or even the late eighteenth, century. Would the records even exist going back that far? I would go to Santa Fe and start what I hoped wouldn’t be a fruitless search.

  When I checked out of my Albuquerque hotel, the chatty desk clerk asked where I was headed next. When I told her, she insisted that I should take 14 and go the Turquoise Trail, rather than just drive up 25, as most people did. The Turquoise Trail could take me half a day if I stopped at some of the scenic spots along the way, as she recommended, rather than just the trip of a little over an hour on the shorter route, but she assured me that I wouldn’t regret it. I decided to follow her advice and got out my New Mexico map to make sure I knew how to go.

  New Mexico’s license plates say LAND OF ENCHANTMENT, and I had always been a little cynical about that title, but even from the outskirts of Albuquerque, I found that I agreed with that moniker. At home I loved the green of the trees in summer and dreaded the gray of winter. Here, the desert colors of copper, sienna, and umber lent the landscape a dreamlike beauty. I felt like I could be two places at once, gazing into the distance, where rain moved across a mesa miles away, while I was in sunshine.

  I decided not to take the side trip to Sandia Peak. I’d heard that at well over ten thousand feet in altitude, it didn’t always provide a clear view, as the peak could be shrouded in clouds. Besides, though I had decided to take the less direct route, I did still feel some urgency now that I was getting closer to starting my search for María. As I drove on, there was a sign for a town called Madrid, and it seemed somehow more than serendipitous. As I continued along the road, nearing Santa Fe, another sign announced El Camino Real de Adentro National Park. Dolores, María’s twin, had mentioned in her letter that her parents had traveled from Mexico City to Santa Fe via El Camino Real de Adentro. I was journeying in the land traversed by Juliana’s descendants.

  After checking into a hotel in Santa Fe, I wandered along the streets of the historic plaza. I went into a T-shirt shop and bought shirts for Ned and Gabe. Perhaps I was trying to allay my guilty feelings for leaving them, for keeping them in the dark, for not missing them enough.

  The beautiful old buildings of the city exuded a sense of history and invited fantasies of being another person in another time. After dinner, I decided to attend a ghost tour that evening. The guide took us on a fascinating excursion, bringing alive those from the past whom one could never know. I didn’t really need that reminder, though—there were voices that haunted me already. I was alone with other women’s memories.

  The next morning, I made my way to the Santa Fe County Clerk’s office. When I got to the front of the line and told them what I was trying to do, I got a skeptical look and directions to the room with the microfilm. The clerk, Frank, told me that it would be a painstaking search, since the records had simply been photographed, then put on the microfilm. The records from that time were often baptismal records. There was little categorization, other than into twenty-year periods. I settled in with the first box he directed me to and started to work.

  Dolores had written her letter in 1844 and at that time already had a granddaughter who was sixteen years old. I decided to start my search for Dolores’s and María’s birth records around 1780. Of course, Dolores and her own daughter could have gotten married and had children at a very young age, so Dolores and María could have been born as late as, say, 1798. I was at first pleasantly surprised that there were, in fact, some records of births from as far back as the period I had guessed would be the appropriate time, but the tedium set in before long.

  Late that afternoon I found María Martín Luengo. Her mother was listed as Sofía Luengo de Porres, and her father as Juan Martín Morales. Dolores’s grandmother had signed her letter as Luz de Porres Yañez. This had to be my María, born July 3, 1795, baptized July 5.

  My elation began to wane as I realized that finding the record of María’s birth proved only that she existed, and I had already ceased to doubt the authenticity of the papers. What drove me now was a desire to share the reality with another woman of Juliana’s line.

  Again I was faced with the difficulty of trying to go forward in official records. I had found a record of María’s birth and baptism, which had her parents’ names, but of course there was no indication of who came after her. Would I need to search through the records for a child whose mother was listed as María?

  I went back to the clerk. Things were pretty dead in the microfilm room, and I noticed that he was reading what looked like a history book. I asked whether he was studying history, and he said that he was a grad student in history at UNM, and drove up twice a week to Santa Fe to work in the records office to make some extra money. I told him my dilemma, and he seemed glad of the diversion.

  “I’d suggest looking through the marriage licenses as the next step, although that would assume she got married. Then, once you found that and had her husband’s name, you could also look for land deed transfers, and that should tell you about children they had, too, probably just the boys, though. That could get tricky, anyway, since for this period they would initially be under Mexican rule, and some of those records are in Mexico City. After the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848, when Mexico ceded this area to the United States, the original landowners were supposed to be able to keep their land, though that didn’t always happen. I don’t know—it might be just as easy to go through looking for births with her as the mother.”

  I had known this wouldn’t be easy, but this was discouraging. I couldn’t stay there indefinitely.

  “Do you know anyone I could hire over the next few days to help me look?” I asked, doubting that would be possible.

  “Well, I could do some hours, and maybe some of the other grad students I know would be willing to help.”

  I latched on to the idea before he could change his mind. I gave him the number at my hotel, and we agreed to meet at the office the next day at nine o’clock.

  The next few days were a roller coaster of hopeful hints and devastating dead ends. But in the end, with the help of Frank and some of his friends, I found a family I believed to be the descendants of María. I didn’t know what degree of cousins they would be, and I didn’t care. I just hoped someone in the family had papers passed down from María, copies of the pages passed down to me from Dolores, papers that included a copy of Juliana’s diary.

  I felt as if somehow Juliana and all those women in between were looking down and smiling. Some of María’s descendants were living in Albuquerque.

  60

  RACHEL

  I called an Elena Ríos. I didn’t know whether she would be the right generation to have received the papers, or even the right line of the family after so many generations. The odds that she would be the correct person to know about the papers were very low, and I would be revealing the secret. Still, I had to know. After all, I was also the wrong person to have possession of the papers, and I had experienced many feelings and phases as I read through them, but even after reading Mercedes’s letter demanding secrecy, I hadn’t ever felt guilt. I assumed that I would have to make a lot of calls before I found the right person, and that I m
ight never be successful. I guess I was hoping that the people I called would tell their extended families about the crazy lady who had called, and that my story would finally ring true to someone.

  So I was astonished when Elena immediately knew what I was talking about. I had somehow managed to find the keeper of the papers on my first call! To Elena, it seemed that the most incredible part was that I had put in the effort and had been able to track them down. She invited me to come for dinner the next night and said that she would invite a few other family members, too. She didn’t seem to understand my surprise at this, but I wondered how she would explain to them who I was and how I had found them without revealing something of the secret of the papers.

  The next evening, as I followed the directions Elena had given me over the phone, I found that I was rising into the foothills on the outskirts of Albuquerque. I parked beside a beautiful home. It didn’t seem more than a couple of decades old, but it mimicked the architecture of the older Spanish buildings. I knocked.

  “I’m coming!” I heard steps approach the door and felt someone regarding me through the peephole. A short woman about my age, with a round face, dark hair, and black eyes, emerged from the shadow of the opening door.

  “Elena Ríos?”

  “Rachel?”

  As I nodded my head, she gathered me into the home. I could see from the entryway that there seemed to be a series of large, high-ceilinged rooms, all with windows on two sides, one looking out at the view of Albuquerque and the mesas in the distance, and one side opening onto a beautiful courtyard.

  “I’m so glad to meet you! I can’t tell you how excited my mama is. When I told her about the diary you found, she couldn’t believe that it could be the original of the one we have. I guess you’ve figured out that the book we have from our ancestress María is a copy of the one given to her twin, Dolores, in the 1820s. So you have the original, from the seventeenth century? I can hardly believe it! Have you brought it with you? Could we see it now? But I’m not letting you say anything.”

  I could barely follow the torrent coming from Elena, and by the time she had finished, the room was filled with women and men, girls and boys of all ages. I leaned in closer to Elena and spoke softly.

  “But isn’t this all supposed to be kept secret, passed on from grandmother to granddaughter? I must admit, though, that is not how I got the papers. I found them in my mother’s things.”

  Elena furrowed her brow. “What do you mean? Oh, you can’t be saying that your family has followed the mean-spirited directions given by Juliana’s daughter, Mercedes? Mercedes, Mercies—if ever someone was misnamed!”

  “Well, yes, my family has followed her instructions. I wouldn’t even know about them if my mother hadn’t died before I could give her a granddaughter.”

  Elena could see the stricken look on my face. “Oh, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to make light of the difficulties the women in your family must have had in keeping the secret. Maybe because María was never meant to have the papers, our family never took Mercedes’s stricture seriously. We’ve always shared the papers with all of the family, girls and boys both. Considering the way the family has grown, this crowd here is only a small part of those of us who have read the papers.”

  Elena’s family had prepared a most delicious meal, and everyone had questions for me to answer: about how I had found them here in New Mexico, how the papers had come to me, and how many of their extended family lived in Missouri. For them, there was no smothering secret, only their connection, to one another and to those who had gone before.

  Elena’s family, too, had written letters to add to Juliana’s diary, though without the missing generations of my accounts. After her extended family had left, with hugs and promises to come the next day and tell more tales about their family, Elena and I stayed up late into the night. We wondered together at what Juliana’s life was like before the rape. We imagined what it would be like to live in a convent and be besieged by doubts that would have been roundly condemned. We discussed whether Juliana’s wish that her diary would one day find itself in a more just and tolerant time and place had come to pass. We, too, would send it into the future, and hope for a more perfect world.

  We read each other’s letters, pausing now and then to make a comment or ask a question. As she bent in concentration, I studied Elena’s open face, so different from mine, yet across her nose and cheeks a sprinkling of freckles like my own. This kind woman and I would reunite our families, so long divided, now joined by Juliana.

  EPILOGUE

  RACHEL

  St. Louis, Missouri, 2014

  I am in my seventh decade, and even my discoveries are now long in the past. The original papers reside in the university library, along with a copy. My daughter, Julie, has a baby girl of her own, and Gabe a son and a daughter.

  I stumbled onto a treasure that I know belongs to all of us, even though centuries of vows made by other women would have denied us that right. When I returned from New Mexico, I shared the gift of my past with Ned and Gabe. When Julie was old enough, I told her about the papers I’d discovered before she was born. I’ve used the papers to connect my daughter and my son to their heritage, so that they may know the strength of their foremothers and take courage from their lives. When they are old enough, my grandchildren will receive this legacy, whether or not I’m here to give it.

  When I reflect on all that the letters have meant to me, I struggle to articulate their power. There is a longing to have known Juliana. How can I better imagine her life during the years-long periods of silence? How did she go from doubting novice to abbess? How could she bring herself to command her only child to leave her?

  And the others—all the others who came after her. What joys and sorrows did life hold for each of them, outside their connection to the diary, and what did it mean to them? All of these women are now a part of me, a part I never suspected, never dreamed.

  And for my mother herself: the explanations in her letter didn’t satisfy. What did the diary and letters mean to her? How did they shape her? Why did she keep her vow, a trick on Juliana herself, who would have wanted each of us in the line to know her through her diary? I’d like to think that she came close to telling me, but that’s just my wishful thinking. I’ll never know my mother’s yearnings.

  But I am thankful. Like Juliana so long ago, I am more than I had believed. She and all the others have been resurrected. I even showed the papers to Lorraine, my closest friend. And who knows? She may be related to Juliana, too, somewhere along the line. Three centuries of descendants. We are vast and myriad.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I am profoundly grateful to those who fostered in me a love of books, and who gave me the confidence to write and to put my novel out into the world. Thank you to all of you!

  The Tuesdays at Two group accepted my writing and helped me learn that given a deadline I could come up with something new every two weeks, even with a writing prompt like “fond.” I’m so glad you invited me, Vicki Stadelman.

  Michael David Lukas, you took time to meet with me when I was still writing and hadn’t begun to realize what the whole publishing journey would look like. Being taken seriously by someone who had already so successfully gone down that road gave me hope that I would make it.

  Martha Hoffman, I appreciate that you took so much time to closely read and analyze my manuscript. Your insightful suggestions made my novel better.

  Brooke Warner of She Writes Press, your initial words of encouragement carried me through the final push to finish this book. I can still repeat your words verbatim. I so admire the dedication you give to each and every book that She Writes publishes. Annie Tucker, my developmental and copy editor, not only did your suggestions greatly improve my manuscript, your enthusiasm about my work carried me through many challenging moments. I can also quote from sections of your letter by heart.

  Shannon Green, my She Writes Press project manager, you were patient with all of my newbie quest
ions, and kindly and efficiently guided me through the publishing process. Julie Metz, you and your design team came up with a cover that perfectly reflects my novel. Tabitha Bailey and the team at BookSparks, you found great ways to get my book in the public’s eye.

  She Writes Press authors, your wisdom and generosity have been a revelation to me. You so graciously share your struggles as well as your triumphs.

  For decades I have cherished the discussions of my AAUW Oakland-Piedmont book group. You have taught me that not everyone loves the same books, and that’s okay. A special thanks to Marge Slakey, who showed her faith in me as she quietly kept asking me how my book was going.

  Angela Kucherenko, I’ve loved our long discussions about what it means to be a historical fiction author.

  Diane Rawicz, the writing events we attended, and the times we obsessed together about our writing, were part of why we have become friends.

  My mother, Sybil Romano, showed me that books can be a passion that can carry one through all the stages of life. I can still hear the enthusiasm in the voice of my father, August Romano, saying, “Listen to this!” as he read a newfound favorite paragraph in the latest John Steinbeck novel he was reading.

  To my sister, Ellen Romano, it has meant so much to me that you have always, always been there for me. Thank you for all of our talks about family dynamics and secrets. Maybe you see a shadow of some of that in this story. Your writing has inspired me, from the first poem you wrote when you were six.

  Thank you to my children, Ben and Kate D’Harlingue, who took my writing project seriously, even when I abandoned it for years. Ben, you commiserated with me over the difficulty of sitting down and getting words onto the page, even as you lovingly encouraged me to keep going. Since you read mostly nonfiction, you offered a different perspective, which I treasured. Kate, you buoyed my spirits by telling me that this kind of book really could work, even giving me examples. Your reaction to my novel touched my heart.