Departing at Dawn

10 Twenty-one Years Old

52 10 Twenty-one Years Old It hasn’t been easy for me to understand, but I have finally realized that you just can’t spend the rest of your life crying. Besides, in June I’ll be twenty-one, when I can tell the world that I am a woman and when my mother can feel she has finished her work with me, that she brought me up and gave me her best. It’s coming soon, and I’m wondering what will change, how much more will have happened between now and that day Mother has marked as some kind of fence or barrier I will have to climb over; a day that should have been happy because that was her plan, certainly happier than my fifteenth birthday that we couldn’t celebrate because my father was dying. That birthday passed unnoticed, buried in all the vomit and fever, when his body weighed almost nothing, that feather my unlucky father had become, soon to be carried away by the wind. I was trying to help my mother find and give comfort, yet I knew that relief would come only with his death. So my party consisted of my father’s death, when he “shut down,” as the neighbors put it, and the relief that it was finally over. Of course, that sense of relief caused me to feel like garbage . And garbage is my word for all the rosaries my mother 53 was praying while constantly changing his sheets that he kept soiling in his agony. And it was garbage that my little brothers had to be left with the neighbors so they wouldn’t see their father die and then cry at the wake where I was actually happy, because my papa would no longer have to suffer. I wanted him dead already. There was no way I could believe in any God that would treat anybody so shabbily, especially my father. He had not been a bad person, only a Peronist who had put his country first, followed by the “movement,” next his buddies, then his wife, then my four brothers because they were males, and finally me. My mother grieved without feeling sorry for herself, and she started to wear black even before he died and still does. My four brothers, devastated, cried until they choked, and their pain made me hate the dead man for dying and making his children suffer like that. We buried him without understanding everything we were burying with him; I felt so peaceful yet angry all at the same time. The neighbors whispered that I was stubborn as a mule, cold and selfish, that I was only concerned about being a good student and did not give two cents about anybody else. After all, a good daughter was supposed to cry, and if she didn’t it could only mean that she hadn’t really loved the one who died. That day, when our living room was full of palms, his political buddies came, though it was a time when so many people were being forced into exile. My mother was praying non-stop beside the coffin, ignoring my brothers who needed her so badly. She was totally focused on that thing lying in the luxurious 54 coffin they had gotten him, and on God, who had to be asked something a thousand times before he heard, or had to be threatened with his son’s own mother before he would intervene with a miracle. My mother, who never tired of asking him for things, gave him all her attention instead of holding onto my brother Alberto and the twins, who were scared to death. I was furious at her, with all her little religious images, and at the priests who made her feel guilty and afraid. I was sick of her dreams that told the future and then, when things did not turn out as she had predicted, the way she reinterpreted those samedreamswithevenmorecertainty;sickofherstrengthand acceptanceofwhatshecalled“God’swill,”ofherignoranceand refusal to recognize what science proved or history taught, and of the lousy education she had received and never complained about, one full of spirits, apparitions, and ghosts. What good had all that nonsense done her? It had only left her vulnerable enough to fall for the first guy who showed up and then got her pregnant, which is the same way so many other stupid people...