Departing at Dawn

4 This is My Family

13 4 This is My Family It is March 24. My mother’s name is Amalia del Valle Riera,andmyfatherwasManualRojasdelPino,sonofAlfonso the writer. I have four younger brothers: Carlos Alberto, Sergio Daniel, and the twins Juan José and Juan María. I was born in San Miguel de Tucumán on June 20, 1955, and they named me Berta Cristina; Berta for my father’s godmother, and Cristina because that is what my mother chose. I am a medical student and have passed all the courses in the third year. I am leaving Tucumán because it’s better for me to go away, because I had a lover and he died, because I am in great pain, because I need to work, because I have to help my mother who can barely support my brothers with her various jobs. My father left us when he was old. He became very sick, dying in my mother’s arms as he received the last rites from the religion he never believed in but did respect, because he respected my mother and did not want to cross her, a devout Catholic. They finally got married after his first wife died, and then he gave us his last name, but he had always provided for us and never abandoned my mother, whom he treated as his real wife all along. 14 I have no connection with the Rojas del Pino family, as they have not wanted to have anything to do with us; my grandmother, Doña Lucinda, made sure while she was alive and healthy and my father, too, that we never set foot in her house, for we were children of sin, her son’s bastard offspring. Well, my mother refused to accept that kind of treatment and thus did not take us to see her, not even the night when Doña Lucinda sent for us, to meet us, request our forgiveness, and give us a grandmother’s blessing. She was dying and did not want to take with her to the next world the sin of ungodliness and lack of compassion that the priest rubbed her nose in during her last confession when he told her in no uncertain terms to settle all of that before she died. He was a new priest; the regular one had never considered it urgent. This priest was one of those who did not wear a cassock and went around saying that if Christ were to return today he would undoubtedly settle in a poor neighborhood, possibly even in Tucumán, or with the woodcutters of a factory, because those are his sheep, his brothers and sisters, the poorest of the poor and the most afflicted. Doña Lucinda’s employees came by car to summon us, in a hurry, saying that she was dying and that we should go immediately because that was what she had ordered. All of us children were waiting in the black convertible, all shiny under the streetlight, when my mother, furious and bristling like a lioness, without her glasses or shoes, hair uncombed, with her robe barely on, made us climb out of the car, shouting for us to get back into the house, and yelled at the driver at the top of her lungs so that all the neighbors could hear: 15 “Tell that old lady who threw me out of her house with my baby fifteen years ago, screaming at her son to ‘get that garbage out of here,’ to just take her sin with her and pay for it, just as I will take my own, and that I do not forgive her and that I curse her, and that we will meet again in hell, and may the Host burn in her mouth before I give, show, or take her my children. May she die a hundred times and give me the pleasure of spitting on her grave . . . bah . . . I shit on her and on the mother that bore her.” I was fifteen then and when I heard that, I understood things no one had ever told me. My father had died only a few months earlier, after suffering all kinds of indignities that completely undermined him. We were living in the Villa, where my mother worked taking care of sick people at night, giving them shots, checking on those in the neighborhood with high blood pressure, as well as preparing...