“You’re in luck,” she said escorting me upstairs.
“Mother is out with her friends and we have all day to talk. First thing I’m going to give you is a glass of wine, and then we’ll have lunch so you have something in your stomach.”
“I couldn’t eat a thing, Rose,” I said, nauseated at the mention of food.
“Well, you’re going to,” she said firmly. “You have to keep up your energy.”
The wine relaxed me and I forced myself to eat the grilled cheese sandwich she made me. We went outside to her terrace, and as we saw the traffic of the expressway roaring down below, I shared with her the terrible contents of the letter.
“Listen, it’s not over till it’s over,” she said looking at me intently. “I deal with this all the time, everybody is different when it comes to this horrendous illness, some people make it and others don’t, but it’s not a death sentence for everyone anymore.”
But I felt that it was, and couldn’t stop crying. We talked for hours and she poured me another glass of wine and let me cry, then she took me to the couch and let me sleep undisturbed for hours. The sound of the soft, classical music coming from her bedroom woke me up and I went to see her, somewhat restored.
“I feel better Rose, I think I’m going home now,” I told her, deeply grateful for her support.
“I wish you wouldn’t,” she said. “But if you insist, I’ll get you a cab.”
~~~
In an effort to make more money to send home, I get myself a job as a babysitter in Manhattan on the weekends. It is fun, easy work and it keeps me from dwelling on the terrible sadness I feel. I take care of two six year old twins, we play games, sing songs, wrestle on the floor, and they become quite attached to me in a short time. Their parents are very rich and occupy an entire floor on Central Park West, which consists of five bedrooms, two living rooms, a wall fireplace and an enormous kitchen and terrace with a magnificent view of the park. I sit with the twins for a few hours while their parents attend engagements and they very generously pay me for the whole day.
I’m fine while I’m working, but at home, in the stillness of my room, images of the pain and suffering mother is experiencing make sleep almost impossible. I toss and turn all night and when I finally fall asleep, I get nightmares. Mother wrote that she’d had the ghastly operation which left her chest deformed and her arm swollen to twice its normal size due to edema. She said she couldn’t knit anymore and the only knitting in the house was now done by Oscar.
She wrote that the doctor refused to tell her what he found when he opened her up; and that she had to beg my aunt, who with her usual bluntness told her the illness was terminal and that she only had a few months to live because the cancer had already metastasized. Mother fainted from the shock and was told the scene at the doctor’s office was terrifying because she wouldn’t come to, even when they administered mouth to mouth resuscitation.
Her desperate, rambling letters keep urging me to come home quickly now that she doesn’t have long to live. Overwhelmed by guilt and grief, I urge her to keep on fighting, not to give up, citing lots of cases of patients who had prevailed, but she doesn’t believe me. Her cancer has now gone to her womb and she requires a complete hysterectomy.
I shared the details of the illness with Rose who told me to prepare myself for the inevitable because they had caught the illness too late. Mother had developed a lump in her breast eight months ago, and too afraid to go to the doctor had waited till the lump began to hurt. I felt angry at life and angry at her. How could she have done something so stupid, she of all people, who knew so much about cancer?
My aunt wrote me angry letters saying mother “Lo esta cerrando con un broche de oro.” [“She’s being true to form to the end”]. “You don’t know how lucky you are to be so far away,” she wrote. “If you had to see what I’m seeing, you would go crazy, your brother and her are like the blind man and his dog.” Only I didn’t feel lucky, I felt wretched, unable to go, unable to help, unable to forget. I spent weeks wondering if the steady grief, the slow, agonizing ache inside of me, could wound end up killing me too.
As the implacable illness progressed, her letters became more urgent. “Come for a few days,” she begged. “You can always go back afterwards.”
“Tell her the truth,” said Rose firmly. “Tell her you won’t be able to go because you’re not willing to throw your life away.”
But I couldn’t do it, not in the shape mother was in. I had to keep on deceiving her, giving her a glimmer of hope. I kept praying for a miracle, but time became my enemy and it moved horribly fast. Thinking of Oscar my anguish knew no limits, and I wondered what was worse, to be near her at a time like this, or to be far away, because either way you didn’t escaped unscathed.
Mother wrote another letter saying they had found metastasis in her spine and she had begged my aunt to take care of her children, but my aunt had refused and she was fearful Angel and Daisy would end up with their father.
“I don’t think your aunt wants to take Oscar either,” she wrote pathetically. “So he may have to go with his father as well. And as for you, since you’ve obviously decided not to come, may God illuminate the path of your life filling you with happiness. Before the final hour, one can expect everything, right?”
It was a goodbye letter, cruel and bitter as her life. She had tired of my lies and knew I wasn’t going to make the ultimate sacrifice for her. I read and re-read her letter feeling her condemnation in every line. I imagined her sick and broken in hospital, devoid of hope and love and wondered what I would have done in her place.
I hated my aunt for not lying to her, for not giving her the peace of mind she so desperately needed. Why did she have to be so merciless? I hated her for not taking her in, for allowing her to remain alone and helpless in the hands of a child like my brother in that cold, miserable house in El Alto. I knew their aunts had taken Angel and Daisy till she got well, and that meant that Oscar had all the burdens of her illness by himself, a young boy who had been forced to be a man since he was six years old.
~~~
Anticipating the horrible end, I felt the urge to move. I couldn’t bear to be alone in my room when I heard the news. I needed noise, distraction. Ana had been urging me to move in with her and her two roommates, and desperate to elude myself, I accepted. She came to collect me on a hot, stifling day in June and we took a cab to her apartment, located on the first floor of a building in Forest Hills.
Ana, who had loved mother since she was a child, was greatly saddened by the news and tried to help me as best she could but it was my own private pain and hell. She couldn’t understand my decision not to go back because she said nothing would have stopped her from saying goodbye to her mother if she had been given the chance. Because her other two roommates were flight attendants, Ana and I basically had the apartment to ourselves.
After living alone for almost a year, living with Ana proved to be a temporary oasis in my life. She was loving and kind and gave me lots of affection when I most needed it. Her weight problem was an ongoing issue but she dealt with it by ignoring it. She ate whatever she wanted and never went to the beach or pool saying that she didn’t like the sea or sand, and was a lot happier staying home or going to the movies with her friends. It was at this time too, that she took up with a married man and settled for the few hours of affection he gave her whenever he could get away.
I went through the motions of living a normal life but inside I was in torment. Mother had stopped writing to me since her last letter, and my aunt had stopped visiting her, so I received no news.
“What’s the use?” said Aunt Sonia in one of her letters. “I’m depressed for days afterwards and there is nothing I can do to change her life. The situation is so sad that even your Aunt Eli cried in front her.”
Unable to bear what laid ahead for all of us, I began to pray for the end to come quickly.
“When it’s all over I’ll feel a sense of relief,” I told Rose, smoking in her t
errace, a habit I had taken up recently to help me cope. “At least her suffering will have come to an end, then.”
“For her, yes, but you don’t know about yourself,” said Rose softly. “Sometimes the pain is worse.”
But I couldn’t image anything worse than the agony I was already experiencing. I wanted mother to leave this earth, to go to a better world. I wanted this awful despair, this inner pain that wouldn’t go away to finally come to an end. It was at this time too that I realized that in my haste to get out of my room I had left my passport behind. I took the subway there and knocked on the landlady’s door hoping against hope that she didn’t throw it in the garbage. Velinka opened the door and quickly ushered me in.
“Where have you been,” she hissed, with her arms up in the air dramatically. “What you put me through, oh, what you put me through.”
“What happened?”
“What didn’t happen,” she said touching her forehead. “Two immigration officers came to look for you, they didn’t believe you left so I had to take them to your room and luckily for you I had already cleaned the room and taken your passport so they didn’t find anything, but they were mad, boy, they were mad; and I was shaking because I have a lot of illegal immigrants living here. I thought we were going to have a raid or something. I wanted to call you and warn you but you got out of here like a bat out of hell without even leaving your phone number or anything so I had no way to get in touch with you.”
“Wait a minute,” I asked, with my head spinning. I left on a Monday, when did they come?”
“They showed up on Tuesday, at eight o’clock in the morning to be exact, the very next day you left. Had you delayed your move by a few hours you would have run smack into them.”
“Oh, my God, I don’t believe this.”
“Oh, my God is right, how did they find you? Someone must have reported you.”
I was too ashamed to tell her that it was me, and that I was incredibly naïve and stupid thinking they would actually be merciful. I thanked her and left in a hurry. What a close call, Sandy and her stupid ideas. They came to haul me away like a criminal, not to grant me the visa, how could I have been so trusting?
~~~
Two weeks later I opened a letter from my aunt which started with “there were a lot of people at your mother’s funeral…” A scream rose inside of me and I fell to my knees praying. There was nobody at the apartment and I began crying, screaming, and pounding the walls with my fists. I felt maimed, amputated, as though I had lost a vital part of myself that could never be replaced, such as an arm or a leg. Where was the relief I had anticipated? Never had I imaged the pain would be so lacerating. This was the biggest loss in my life and I began howling like a wounded animal. I crouched on the floor and scratched the tiles with my nails till they bled. Hoarse, animal sounds kept coming out of my lips as I collapsed in a heap of misery. I wanted to die, to inflict pain upon myself for not going. Drowning in an ocean of guilt, self pity and remorse, I forced myself to finish reading the letter.
“You must cry, darling” wrote my aunt. “You must mourn but not for long, it is better this way, and at least she is not suffering anymore. As I said before, nothing would have changed her life. You must accept it and move on.”
Angrily I scrunched her letter and threw it into a corner. She had always given me permission to do everything in life, and now was giving me permission to mourn my own mother? How dared she? Who did she think she was? Mother’s short, tormented life flashed before my eyes and for the first time I understood her valiant struggle, her magnificent soul. Since we were born, she had fought for us like a lioness fights for her cubs. She had endured loneliness, hardship, hunger and deprivation in order to raise us all alone, and she had never given up on us. She had held life sacred from the time of conception and had firmly believed that children belonged with their parents. She had sacrificed herself for my own good by letting me go, but I had never been out of her thoughts. She had loved us fiercely, passionately, and for that she had endured decades of condemnation.
We had been poor in the material comforts of life but we had been rich and privileged in a million other ways. She had sparked our imagination with her wonderful stories and our souls had soared in that cold, lonely corner of the world. We had grown up with poets, great writers, famous composers, and we had learned the beauty, power and magic of art since we were little.
Her self diagnosis of dying young just like her beloved brother, Mario, had come to pass. She was only thirty six years old, nothing but half a life, as she had herself said about Laura Gianni. I rose from the floor and took some of Ana’s sleeping pills. I felt lost, exhausted, and needed to sleep, just sleep for a very long time. I had hoped for her death, prayed for it, but now that it happened found that I was totally unequipped to handle it emotionally. I don’t know how long I slept but I woke up to the sound of Ana’s voice shaking me violently. I opened my eyes and saw her concerned, tearful face.
“You looked pale as a ghost and I couldn’t wake you no matter how hard I tried,” she said extending her hand. “I read the letter and thought you did something crazy. I was getting ready to call 911.”
I rose like an automaton and she hugged me, crying. “I loved her too; you know that, don’t you? I called Ramiro and told him the tragic news, and he was so upset, he cried on the phone to me. You know he never shows his emotions but he was overcome, she was his favorite person in the world, the angel of his childhood.”
She was already talking in the past but I wasn’t ready to accept it, I felt edgy, crazy. The mention of Ramiro’s name brought back long buried memories of anger and jealousy, and as in a movie I saw myself hiding in a corner of the room watching them talking, laughing, mother patting his head, consoling him. And now she had ceased to exist, she was a memory, only something fierce and stubborn in me refused to face it, to accept it.
As weeks went by I found myself in a different kind of hell, the hell of denial, impotence, unmitigated grief and guilt. Outwardly I continued to function very well. I worked, I saw Rose and Sandy, but inwardly I was falling apart. The fact that I was never able to say goodbye properly, haunted me. I couldn’t hold her in my arms for the last time and tell her how much I loved her, how proud I have always been of her, and that made the depression greater. She had died mad at me and that was the most devastating blow of all. My friends rallied around me but nothing brought any relief, nothing assuaged the horrendous guilt engulfing me.
I started going out every weekend, something wild, manic and masochistic was driving me from bar to bar and from man to man. I smoked, danced and made love with abandon. Now that I was flirtatious again, I was picking up men all over the place and through the haze of gloom that enveloped me, I was barely aware that I was having sex with impunity like a man. There was something lost and desperate in my new sexuality, but it stopped me from feeling, remembering and regretting, and it provided me with much needed adulation, distracting me from my demons. I had dinner in fancy restaurants and went to many Broadway shows, here life was gay, charming; basking in the attentions of sophisticated men who wanted to do things for me, I felt empowered, delighting in my new role, like an actress playing a great part, indulging for the first time in precious unconsciousness, frivolity and false gaiety.
It felt great to explore, to let myself drift in a new direction. I was able to pick, choose and discard men without guilt, qualms or pity. Whereas I had once guarded my virginity zealously, even with poor Nick Valente who had truly loved me, now I gave myself freely, delighting in what had once been forbidden.
Seeing me disappear every weekend with a different man, Ana was horrified, but I told her to mind her own business and kept defiantly flaunting my conquests. She said I was destroying myself but I told her she was crazy, that I was having lots of fun and she was jealous. But I wasn’t sure, most of the time everything felt forced, unreal, laughing too hard, drinking too much, waking up in different hotels and not even remembering how I got t
here. Something had fractured and died inside of me, and I wanted to inflict pain upon myself, but these temporary distractions were no longer helping.
My job performance at work suffered and I was unceremoniously fired. They had been very lenient through my ordeal but I had taken too many sick days and exhausted all their sympathies. I didn’t care, nothing mattered to me anymore. I started sleeping late and going out nightly. Tonight I was going to see a man I really liked, he was particularly handsome with a broad forehead, deep, intelligent eyes and full, sensuous lips. He was tall and strong and I came up to his chest. He took me to a cozy restaurant with a marvelous view of Manhattan and the Hudson River. As we walked in, the pianist was playing romantic melodies and some couples were dancing. I wanted to order wine but he stopped me, suggesting we order champagne instead.
“This place, this special occasion calls for champagne, don’t you think?” I complied and he lifted his glass in a toast to me, and to a marvelous evening. We had a few drinks and he ordered steak and lobster, which he said was the specialty of the house. We ate and he proceeded to guide me to the dance floor where I let myself float in his arms contemplating the bewitching view of the city with its twinkling lights, as in a dream.
We danced for a long time and he took me outside to the terrace where we kissed and said hello to Manhattan, bowing foolishly. I tossed my long hair and laughed, feeling light and airy as the balmy night, when I suddenly saw myself in all my absurdity and the searing pain I had been keeping at bay, let loose like a water dam and flooded over.
“You look like you’ve seen a ghost,” He said noticing my pallor, but physically ill and unable to speak, I buried my face in his chest crying. Understanding the magnitude of my grief, he summoned the waiter and paid the bill quickly. We hailed a cab and I cried all the way home with violent, convulsing sobs while he held me in a respectful silence. He escorted me to my apartment and after knocking for a while, Ana opened the door in her pajamas, indignantly. It was then that I realized it was two o’clock in the morning, the key was in my purse all along but in the condition I was in, I couldn’t find it. I went in and ran to the bathroom to throw up, never had I felt so spiritually and physically drained. I crawled into bed and slept for days, a heavy, guilt ridden sleep that did nothing to restore me.
Beyond the Snows of the Andes Page 42